Marcus Garvey, pan-Africanist, politician, organizer of a shipping company whose ships were supposed to bring the African-American population back to Africa, charismatic and dubious businessman, had a vision a hundred years ago: When the sevens clash, it will be one give great chaos. On 7/7 In 1977, therefore, many shops and institutions remained closed in Jamaica, where the otherwise somewhat forgotten Garvey was still very popular, especially with the Rastafarians. The group Culture then released the album “Two Sevens Clash” in 1977, one of the most influential reggae albums of all time, which also became important for the cultural convergence of reggae and punk in Great Britain. The filmmaker and musician Don Letts paid tribute to this connection a few years ago in a documentary. It is one of the very few big appearances of the year 1977 that Philipp Sarasin misses out on in his large, encyclopedic study on the effect and aftermath of this year.
John Dos Passos, Roger Martin du Gard and Alfred Döblin, the pillars of modernist prose, built novels around dates, around years such as 1914, 1918 and 1919, which historians had long since ratified as significant. The numerous essayists and scholars, on the other hand, who have been doing it for a few years to map upheavals and incisions from a single year that go far beyond this, prefer to look for eccentric incisions: 1913 (Florian Illies) or 1926 (Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht) are said to have more to tell us than the obvious dates of 1914 (beginning of the First World War) or 1929 (Great Depression). In what has been the most convincing of these yearbooks so far – “1967 – Pop, Grammatologie und Politik” by Robert Stockhammer – the author explains that more about 1968 can be found in 1967, a year that was neither “the subject of historical science” nor “myth” became, a year in which was still alive what had been straightened out and made mythifiable in the next year.
The “Talking Heads” served in their song “No Compassion” the cold rejection of the psychological and self-awareness gossip of the time
Such a method cannot have been at work at Sarasin. The decision for 1977 does not have to be defended against suspicion of being forced to be original. The year in which punk either nihilistically wanted to reject or radically outbid the culturally dominant left and its esoteric siblings in the hippie culture at all levels, and in Germany the year of Stammheim, is almost too ideal, even if you have never heard of the Marcus Garvey’s prophecy has heard, but so far only the album “Talking Heads 77” has played the soundtrack for this upheaval.
But Sarasin is not interested in making a cut. Each chapter begins with an obituary for a person who died in 1977, from Anaïs Nin to Ludwig Erhard. They each stand for areas that often already had a long life in 1977, be it sexual self-realization or capitalist economic policy. In doing so, he seems to refute the reading of the turning point of 77 himself: all of this had been around for much longer. Indeed, he makes no secret of the fact that his decision for the year was pretty much arbitrary.
It is about all possible cultural, media-technical, economic and political developments, which not only have a long duration, but also decisively shape the physiognomy of the global present. Californian hippie esotericism begins its success story at the latest with the establishment of the Esalen Institute around 1960, the Internet emerges much earlier or later than 77, depending on the situation; on the other hand, to get hip-hop to begin in 77, you have to hugely inflate an embryo from a clandestine scene. Black “identity politics” began at the latest with WEB Du Bois in the early 20th century – and so on.
Philipp Sarasin: 1977 – A Brief History of the Present. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2021. 502 pages, 32 euros.
The contingent charging of Sarasin’s search for the beginnings and forerunners of current locations through the dramatic, tension-producing narrowing of the perspective to a single year is instead justified geologically: deep drilling is intended to uncover what is happening at a given point in time. And every seam uncovered here also has dramatic moments in 1977. The Swiss historian and Foucaultian reports on these densely, enthusiastically – although you never know exactly for what, and this lack of knowledge is definitely one of the pulling forces of reading – and full of punchlines. He has the generosity to spread the material that contradicts his claims. But it also contributes a bit to a certain crumbly narrative, which on the other hand, of course, goes well with the fact that the crumbling of the well-known “great narratives” hits his overarching idea better than incision, end or fall.
One problem with these enjoyable deep drilling, however, is that the movements and displacements discovered in each case are more likely to be determined geologically than acting subjects appear who do what they do for and against something. The song “No Compassion” from the aforementioned LP “Talking Heads 77”, which is rightly highlighted as symptomatic, remains incomplete if one reads its cold rejection of psychological and self-awareness talk as serious social Darwinism and not quite specifically as an attack on a culture , which is threatening to become hegemonic and which Sarasin exposes a few pages further – the therapy and meditation world between Buddha and Bhagwan. If he were to see battles fought for manifest reasons and not just the old general drifting apart, there would not always be a closeness to cultural pessimism, which he himself is recognizably uncomfortable and which he repeatedly attacks.
The graffiti artists make themselves legible, but on their terms, not those of white French sociologists
So he speaks doubtfully Baudrillard’s graffiti theory, the Tags reads as revolts of signs against all meaning that cannot be related to real people and circumstances. With Sarasin this uprising and its incomprehensible separations and the relativization of Baudrillard’s representation stand side by side: wanted those who are perceived as bizarre Day-Entering pseudonyms on subway cars, maybe not talking about yourself and your existence in a classic way? But doesn’t one have to go much further? Baudrillard not only exaggerated and pointed, he is completely wrong.
Such graffiti writers are just not on the exodus from the general, described again and again by Sarasin, but define their reasons for joining as those who have always been excluded: First we need a new spelling. They make themselves legible, but on their terms, which cannot be the knowledge of the white French sociologist. As early as 1969, in one of the first texts ever published on graffiti, the American educational scientist Herbert Kohl told of Johnny Rodriguez, who had a hard learning curve and who could not read sentences correctly, but who deciphered hundreds of tags, graffiti pseudonyms and codes and his teacher their grammar can explain.
Fighting for participation in the general on one’s own terms is not only not the same as essentialism and a politics of the identity: it is the opposite. Sarasin carefully distinguishes between Afro-American “identity politics” and right-wing ethnopluralism, but still classifies them under the politics of difference. References to one’s own (individual or collective) experiences of exclusion or disadvantage have been the daily bread of emancipatory and thus general movements for centuries – only that they do not start from the universalist ideal, but from its characteristic failure under the concrete power relations – but around them to refer back to the ideal in double negation.
However, Sarasin never makes it easy for itself in individual cases and is always ready to accept these and other differentiations. In this all-round exciting book, no grandmothers are sold for the crispness of theses. In the background, however, more monolithic basic diagnoses rumble. For the most part, they are not so different from what was already thought in 1990 or 2002 about the post-modern era, about neoliberalism, gig economy, sub and niche cultures (the forerunners of the filter bubbles).
Problem horizons appear later, rather unconnected, which can be interpreted as more recent reactions to the right-wing takeovers of power (Bolsonaro, Duterte, Trump, Putin, Erdoğan, Orbán) and the pandemic: that the equivalence of scientific facts and (religious or conspiracy-theoretical) beliefs has now been established and that even great powers are controlled by people and institutions who live in an epistemological no man’s land. But one can no longer blame 1977 for that, because another emerging year would have to be here. Against the bad alternative of neo-traditionalism (evangelicals, Trumpists, Islamists, etc.) and neoliberal, enlightened cynicism that prevails today, the fact that decolonial thinking, which is sold under value as “identity politics”, has not turned into tribalism and ethnocentrism, but from Sylvia Wynter could help up to Saidiya Hartman a new way of thinking about the general.