While scorn for hippiedom and sixties culture was always a feature of the punk movement, rarely was this disdain expressed as cleverly as in the Dead Kennedys’ 1980 song “California Über Alles.” Its deliciously outrageous premise is that Jerry Brown, who was elected California’s governor in 1974, had become president, only to rule as a kind of hipster dictator. Using his deranged vibrato to maximum effect, Jello Biafra channeled his inner “Governor Moonbeam,” declaring: “Zen fascists will control you / One-hundred percent natural / You will jog for the master race.” The single’s cover shows Brown addressing a Nuremberg-like rally, in front of banners displaying not swastikas but happy faces. “Mellow out,” Führer Brown warns, “or you will pay.” Implementing his genocide—using “organic poison gas”—Brown rounds up all the squares and normies, dispatching the “suede denim secret police” to arrest “your uncool niece.”
The Dead Kennedys’ song captures the spirit and many of the arguments of the French philosopher Michel Clouscard. Though he was always a figure on the margins of French intellectual life, his thought has undergone, since his death in 2009, a curious revival. Clouscard’s oeuvre—which consists of some dozen books published mostly between the 1970s and early 2000s—is a savage evisceration of the contemporary left, which had succumbed, in his view, to fashionable radicalism and a kind of terminal hipsterism. Though Clouscard maintained that the quest for cultural status has always defined the bourgeoisie, he claimed that this tendency had been radicalized in France by the postwar emergence of consumer society—and particularly the boost that consumerism paradoxically received thanks to the radical culture of the 1960s. Clouscard is perhaps best known for his use of the term libéral libertaire—“liberal libertarian”—to refer to the strange ideological brew that blends capitalist attitudes with progressive cultural values.
Yet lurking beneath Clouscard’s condemnation of the liberal-libertarianism is a deeper ambivalence—an ambivalence about culture itself. If Clouscard was so scathing about how modern society—and particularly the political left—had become obsessed with being cool, it was because he believed that culture had become the primary terrain on which status and power were pursued. His critique of the pursuit of cultural recognition is driven by a longing for culture with a firmer grounding in reality—and perhaps even for a reality lying beyond culture itself.
As a thinker, Clouscard was always preoccupied with how culture changes people. The title of his doctoral thesis—“Being and Code”—called attention to the problematic juncture between existence and culture and the way symbols or “codes” can steer human life away from more concrete concerns. His mother was an elementary school teacher who was so conscientious that she even flunked her son, requiring him to repeat a grade. She was also a practicing Catholic. Clouscard’s father, Jules, is a more shadowy figure. Within a few years of Michel’s birth, his parents separated, and Jules struck out on his own. In keeping with the expectations of the Catholic Church, the couple remained married until Jules’s death in 1968. On the rare occasions that Jules attempted to contact him, his son rebuffed his efforts.
As a child, Clouscard struggled with reading and writing. In the early 1940s, he joined a local sports club that was under the purview of the Vichy regime, which believed that national regeneration required physical strength rather than discerning intellect. Though Clouscard enjoyed rugby, he excelled as a runner. Specializing in 100 and 200-meter sprints, he won regional championships. As the war ended, Clouscard passed his high school baccalaureate, but his eye was on a bigger prize: the 1948 Olympics. He made it to the national athletics championship, qualifying for the final 200-meter race, whose winners would go to London (where the games were being held). He made a strong start, but was overcome by sudden pain, and he fell, coming in last.
Having failed as a sprinter, Clouscard went with plan B: academics. He moved to Toulouse, the nearest university town. He studied sociology, first as an undergraduate, then as a doctoral student. In the early 1960s, Clouscard moved to Paris. In doing so, he recapitulated an endlessly recurring theme in French social history: that of the provincial who moves to the capital—qui monte à Paris, or “climbs” to Paris. This theme was, moreover, being played out on a mass scale: France underwent a “rural exodus,” as populations abandoned the countryside for the opportunities that, thanks to the booming postwar economy, were becoming available in cities. In one of his books, he described the contemporary experience of young people making the “transition from province to Paris,” which often meant a “rupture with one’s family milieu” that “wiped the slate of values clean.” Anyone who has seen Breathless or Godard’s other early films gets some sense of Paris in the sixties: a city whose archaic charm was being transformed by fast cars, youthful fashion, avant-garde literary and intellectual scenes, and new wave film itself. These trends would soon become the focal point of Clouscard’s work—and contempt.
“May ’68 would become one of the recurring targets of Clouscard’s oeuvre.”
Though he took a job as a lowly monitor at a prominent Parisian high school (where he later became a teacher), his real focus was on writing a doctoral thesis. His supervisor was Georges Gurvitch, an influential Russian-born sociologist who helped to develop the sociology of knowledge in France—a field that would strongly influence Clouscard.
While May ’68 would become one of the recurring targets of Clouscard’s oeuvre, it did not figure in the thesis he defended in 1972. This 600-page tome is an ambitious work, as well as an unwieldy one, bordering on impenetrable. It presents nothing less than a comprehensive social theory that aspires to place orthodox Marxism-Leninism on a new philosophical footing. To this end, Clouscard presents a genealogy of the origins of social classes in France, focusing on the period between the Middle Ages and the French Revolution.
The historical and philosophical story that Clouscard tells in his thesis is in many ways a familiar one. Though human beings were, as primitive creatures, immersed in nature, they gradually became cultural—a transition in which they lost as much as they gained. In this process, being recedes as code—Clouscard’s term for culture in its broadest sense, including production as well as art and literature—expands its scope over human life. In his own account of culture, Ernst Cassirer once observed that “physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances.” Instead of “dealing with the things themselves,” cultural man is “constantly conversing with himself.” But whereas Cassirer views this development positively—as the realization of human nature—Clouscard is tortuously ambivalent.
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Clouscard’s claim is that the fate of all culture is an unending pursuit of cultural status. The term Clouscard uses is mondanité—the quality of being adept at negotiating society, in the sense of “high society” or cultured elites. The emergence of mondanité or “hipsterism” (for want of a more precise translation) is crucial to his argument about the development of the French class system. After tracing the emergence of the lord and vassal relationship amid the turmoil of the early Middle Ages, he finds that a new set of social relations set in as European society became pacified. The courts of feudal lords became centers of social interaction, and women acquired prominence: courtly love became the first form of hipsterism. Uncouth warriors learned good manners and the rules of eloquent speech to woo noble women. In Clouscard’s work, hipsterism always has ulterior sexual motives.
The key turning point in this story concerns the nobility of the robe—that is, the members of the nobility who, exploiting the French monarchy’s increasing need for revenue, bought their way into a hitherto closed caste. Clouscard dates this moment to 1604, with the establishment of the paulette, a tax that allowed royal officeholders to transmit their offices to their children, in effect granting them noble status. The rising bourgeoisie thus used its monetary power to purchase an entry ticket into the nobility and its richly coded forms of social interaction. In making this point, Clouscard modifies the Marxist concept of “superstructure,” a term used to refer to the systems of ideas and beliefs that gives legitimacy to a particular economic system and the ruling class that benefits from it. The first level of superstructure, he maintains, is when the dominant class simply uses cultural symbols to justify its economic clout. A second level of superstructure exists, however, when culture simply is the ruling class’s power. The nobility of the robe traded money for status—that is, cultural know-how and political influence—paving the way for the bourgeoisie, which would base its authority on a similar nexus of capital and culture.
The story of the development of capitalism—and hence modern society—becomes, for Clouscard, one of ontological impoverishment. People engage less and less with things. To paraphrase Nabokov, they increasingly have only words to play with. All of which explains, according to Clouscard, the strange ascent of liberal-libertarian culture. While his work considers the 19th and early 20th-century bourgeoisie, it is the postwar period—which coincided with his own life—that obsessed Clouscard; 1945, by his account, was the moment when all remaining barriers to modernity were torn down. The key event was the Marshall Plan, which, in Clouscard’s account, introduced consumerism and its nihilistic values into a society where the dominant values had remained broadly traditional. Yet Clouscard’s complaint is not primarily that consumerism introduced a love for trashy and shallow commodities into a hitherto sensible society. Rather, it is that a consumer economy creates new opportunities for pursuing cultural power—new ways, in short, to be cool.
The genesis of liberal-libertarian culture is, according to Clouscard, tied to the rise of what he calls “the new middle classes.” Their advent was long prefigured. He argues, for instance, that with Surrealism, cultural expression was reduced to nothing more than a sociology of intellectuals: In other words, rather than saying something of broader social importance, the Surrealists were really talking about themselves—the bohemian lives they lived, the values they experimented with, the literary experiments they played with. By the early 20th century, the dominant feature of bourgeois culture was the idea of transgression. The essence of cultural expression was to negate existing forms of cultural expression.
Clouscard argues that the distinct outlook associated with May ’68—which was to become contemporary society’s dominant ideology—derived from a distinct set of relations between three social types: the “professor,” the “slacker,” and the “dutiful daughter.” Clouscard imagines that the Sixties were a moment in which a new set of mutually beneficial relationships developed between academics, slackers existing on the margins of bourgeois society, and young women living on the cusp of emancipation and bourgeois convention. Between them was woven a web of relationships founded on power, sex, and opinion. The professor shows the slacker and the dutiful daughter that their lives are philosophically relevant, the slacker shows the professor and the daughter a world—nightlife, the counterculture—that had eluded them, while the daughter elicits the desire of the professor and the slacker even as she holds out for a respectable bourgeois relationship. The detritus of the bourgeoisie generates a new form of cultural competition that eventually extends its appeal to society at large.
“With transgression, culture hollows itself out, becoming an empty gesture.”
Clouscard is clearly critical of the way that transgression has become a fashionable cultural posture. But what worries him is less that transgression violates traditional morality than that it empties culture of any content whatsoever. Culture has always had a competitive dimension. But when Shakespeare sought to one-up Marlowe or Wordsworth aspired to become the new Milton, something more substantive was at stake. With transgression, culture hollows itself out, becoming an empty gesture. Transgression is oddly tied to what Clouscard sees as the formalism of modern culture. When culture has nothing to communicate, when it is long on signifiers and short on signifieds, transgression for its own sake becomes the only game in town. Consider the default lexicon of praise academics use when evaluating new books and research: To be any good, they must be not only “innovative,” but also “groundbreaking,” even “subversive.” For Clouscard, such gestures are characteristic of an epoch in which culture has been reduced to a position from which power and recognition can be accumulated.
Clouscard asks questions that are compelling and disturbing, especially for those who do cultural work as a living. Do we write just to be famous? Do we educate ourselves primarily to be cool? What if our investment in culture simply proves our need for attention—and little else? Writers have long questioned their vocation from within. Clouscard is one of the more potent modern thinkers in this tradition. While he is unquestionably a Marxist, his critique of liberal libertarianism transcends this stance. Marxist theories that emphasize how capitalism distorts culture—by commodifying it or transforming it into an ideological tool—still hold out the possibility of cultural forms that are less tainted by these processes. What makes Clouscard so fascinating, despite all his eccentricities, is his deep ambivalence towards culture itself: his sense that culture is always about power, always about recognition, always about the desire to be cool.
While the content of his analysis can feel dated—it is hard to muster much outrage these days about blue jeans, pinball machines, and rock music—its underlying framework holds ground remarkably well. The professional class that dominates the left seems immersed in the “hipster-cultural” (mondano-culturel) mindset that Clouscard lays bare. Despite a surface prudishness, wokeness exhibited the same interplay between power, opinion, and sex that Clouscard detected in the culture of the Sixties. Now, of course, many intellectuals seem less concerned with advertising their emancipation from moral prejudices than with discerning layers of injustice that remain invisible to the rest of society. It is precisely in this respect that wokeness defined itself as transgressive. It purported to go against structures of oppression. At its peak, wokeness was a race to see who could do this most comprehensively. Clouscard’s lesson is that when culture becomes a tool for acquiring status, trends like wokeness are never far away.
Clouscard’s hostility towards hipsterism—and his resulting ambivalence towards culture—go a long way in explaining his fascination for a thinker to whom he frequently returned: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Clouscard claims that Rousseau’s significance lies in the fact that he positioned himself simultaneously against the cultural authority of the old regime and the cultural pretensions of the rising bourgeoisie. He denounced the cultivation of dissemblance and hypocrisy promoted by the royal court while also demonstrating that the “arts and sciences” embraced by the philosophes were just as morally vacuous.
Compared to other Enlightenment thinkers, Rousseau, who liked to fashion himself as the provincial hick, also seemed too indulgent towards religion, too fond of the rural world, too “petit bourgeois.” His emotional life was, moreover, shaped by an absent father—a rolling stone all too comfortable in his freedom—and a series of mother substitutes. In his thesis, Clouscard reflected: “Nostalgia for the mother is not a return to the original pleasure (as maintained by the liberal ideology of consumption regulated by Freudianism), but the acceptance of the most basic and elementary order, a space shared by culture and nature, where political action begins, where it has yet to be corrupted by la nature mondaine”—the world of hipsterism.
When he retired, Clouscard left the big city and universities behind, returning to his rural hometown. At the end of his life, Rousseau, too, turned his back on cosmopolitan circles and retreated to rural tranquility. Both men transformed their lack of cultural prestige into a badge of cultural honor, using culture to denounce the fact that culture had become little more than a path to self-aggrandizement. Rousseau imagined a polity designed to rein in the corruption that arises from the need to be recognized by others. While Clouscard was more concerned with denouncing left-wing hipsterism than speculating about an ideal society, he clearly took the materialist dimension of Marxism seriously. A good society, he believed, must be grounded on tangible things and genuine relationships, rather than being entirely mediated by symbols and the power games they authorize—a world based on genuine equality, rather than the sterile posturing of hipsters.
At the end of his life, having burned his bridges with many of his peers, found solace in botany and long walks, in which he indulged in “reveries”—which were, of course, filled with fuming resentment and paranoid conjectures about the colleagues who, he was convinced, had wronged, defamed, and misunderstood him. As Clouscard no doubt understood, trying to beat culture at its own game is a dangerous game.
This article draws on unpublished research on Michel Clouscard undertaken by Sylvain Bourgois.