HAPPENINGS
535
different from those of the students, even though, taken as a whole, the
working class doesn't understand the language of esthetic debate and is
distressed by that of ethical argument.
The Utopia of modern art, the return to the model of the natural
man, doesn't move the working class as a class. Nevertheless, the hope of
a "mutation" of modern society rests in this Utopian language. The
collective good, the end of alienation, equality and all the other human–
istic revolutionary goals won't be achieved through the acquisition of
T.V. sets or Mercedes, but only when the new stimuli of work correspond
to a new image of life. This is why the rights of language, creator
above all of new values, must be reestablished after the language of
bourgeoisified societies, or societies which are in the process of being
bourgeoisified, has been dismantled. A new constructivism in language
seems to be beginning in Germany under the guise of a neostructuralism.
(And like every new ideology, structuralism is two-faced: technocratic
on the one side, humanitarian on the other.)
The inflation of language, which on the level of the real happen–
ing, can appear to be demagogic, and on the theoretical level, puerile
or metaphysical, is in any case an essentially new and meaningful phe–
nomenon in the second half of the twentieth century. The eruption of
spectacle into real life, the dismemberment of language and its recon–
stitution according to the sociological intentions of a humanitarian
marxism, seem to be equally unimpeachable phenomena.
If
language
is, as Heidegger would have it, the "House of Being," then it would
indeed seem that the world wants to construct for itself an edifice akin in
overall plan to the Marxist model. (But at the same time, the re-crea–
tion of life according to the laws of the theater, of order-disorder which
gives meaning to "life-thinking," moves us into a further phase of
human investigation. ) At the very least, the student movement repre–
sents the rough of such a model, albeit (for the moment) a negative one.
( Translated from the French by
Stephen D onadio and Caroline Rand Herron.)
Horia Bratu
