In contemporary historiography, the political epoch threshold of 1989/1990 has been superseded by that of the late 1970s for some time.
Authors as diverse as Lutz Raphael, Frank Bösch and Grégoire Chamayou have recently argued in widely acclaimed works that the social, political, cultural and economic upheavals in the engine room of modern societies that occurred ten years later, especially in the second half of the 1970s, took place as rapid movement in the old forms and facades of rule and legitimation of rule became visible.
Was it the economic transformation of the old industrial societies, the rise of the service and financial markets and the beginning of digitization?
Or the exhaustion of the utopian thinking of the revolutions?
Or a cultural crisis of the universal in the “singularities” that are forming, which Jean Baudrillard proclaimed in 1977 and whose society Andreas Reckwitz started at that time.
How digitized sources change the concept of history
In his new book, the Swiss historian Philipp Sarasin characterizes this epoch threshold to the present with the fact that it was all of this at the same time, without the one being systematically related to the other or being explained by the other. He uses the now popular form of the yearbook and concentrates his brilliant “Brief History of the Present” on 1977, the year in which the German autumn ended, in which the hegemony of “neoliberalism” and punk began, in which the first human in-vitro fertilization was successfully carried out and in which Donald Trump also made his first appearance as a windy business man in a dubious real estate deal with the New York State Urban Development Corporation.
And last but not least, 1977 created the long-term basis for such yearbooks with the first personal computer, the Apple II.
Only thanks to digital catalogs, extensive newspaper archives and above all thanks to Wikipedia do you even know what appeared and happened at the same time in a year, who won, flopped or died.
Last but not least, the genre demonstrates the extent to which digitized sources change the concept of history and the form of its narrative.
Moving images blurred with everyday objects
Sarasin knows this and cleverly involves its readers in the game. So he dispenses with any illustration. That's why you read his book online with the greatest profit: to understand the imagery it is about and to hear yourself through the soundtrack included in the text, which goes a long way from The Doors to Patti Smith, the Ramones, Talking Heads and The Clash tells.
Sarasin's ravishingly told and at the same time intellectually impressive story of the year has five episodes without a framework, which therefore only refer to each other;
none exclusively tells the beginning of today.
Everything had always started in classical modernism, as Sarasin demonstrates in five cleverly composed necrologists.
First there is the end of the revolution as a paradigm of politics.
Sarasin quotes Baudrillard's perplexity about a new form of strangely aimless political violence, which in the end we “no longer know how to analyze”.
The definitive psychological religion of the seventies
On the other hand, there is the political idea of human rights and the politics of difference, which especially in feminism as a radical politics pushed itself to the vacant position of the grand ideologies. A third episode is about introverted drug trips and extroverted sex, which in the midst of the politicization of psychology went from semi-criminal social practices to public expressions. At the same time, thanks to the rapid development of chip technology, the epochal step towards the private use of digital media took place. The moving images gradually began to blur with everyday objects.