The Countermusic of the Present: Understanding the New Without Rejecting It

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A generation, according to Ernst Bloch , is that group of people who get heated up over the same issues and divide in the name of them. The key question, which summarizes all the others, is what possibilities are offered by the present and what are forbidden, now consigned to an irredeemable past. In the same era, which is always inhabited by more generations, those who live older and more distant experiences take on the thankless task of sifting through the existing to understand how and why some possibilities, once open, have closed - an activity, this, which goes under the high-sounding name of "cultural criticism". Unfortunately, however, understanding the present and therefore criticizing it is not the easiest of jobs, and those who practice it are always exposed to failure. A clear demonstration of this is the flurry of “unjust, rude and singularly unprophetic ” musical judgments collected in the delightful book by the musician and musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky, recently published in Italian with the title Invettive musicali (Adelphi 2025). These are some of the many possible examples of panning that today we can only mock: “Bruckner is the greatest living musical danger”; “Debussy’s music leads to the decay and ruin of our very being”; with his “horrible dissonances [Wagner’s Siegfried] could kill a cat and even turn rocks into scrambled eggs”. Putting together the less happy reviews, the book covers a period of a century and a half, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to around 1950, starting with the harsh criticisms of Beethoven's music, which for Slonimsky marked the beginning of the golden age of popular music criticism – that criticism which, precisely, aspired to become an enlightened interpreter of the present and to transmit definitive words to an ever wider audience of readers.

In the quick preface to the original text, published in English in 1953, the American composer and parodist Peter Schickele advanced a very interesting reason for the virulence, as well as the errantness, of the invectives collected by Slonimsky – a reason that at the same time serves as a warning to every generation: however much we may smile at those gross misunderstandings, sooner or later we readers too will fall into the same error as those so unwary critics. We too, at a certain stage in our lives, will fail to decipher the unknown and will end up censoring what seems alien to us. This insight is found, on the other hand, in a revealing and ultimately self-conscious comment by the Neapolitan playwright Pier Angelo Fiorentino on Wagnerian innovations: “I don’t know if I lack the sixth sense that, it seems, is necessary to understand and appreciate this new music, but I confess that a flurry of punches on the head could not have caused me a more unpleasant sensation.” Disorientation, together with the fear that quickly turns into gratuitous contumely, is typical of every generation that in its present is unable to glimpse traces of the future and experiences them as "a volley of punches to the head".

: None of this, however, should lead us to condemn those who wrongly condemned, if it is true that, to return to Bloch again, every time is characterized by the “contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous”. By this we mean that condition whereby different generations, while living in the same time, in fact belong to different eras. Thus, every encounter between them inevitably turns into a clash that, in Slonimsky’s formula, leads to the “rejection of the unusual” – that is, that visceral and horrified rejection that manifests itself when “custom clashes with a different way of living or a heterodox way of thinking”. And yet, despite what the Russian musicologist writes, this rejection should not be interpreted so much as a confrontation between an orthodoxy and its opposite, but rather as an only apparent synchrony: the persistence, in the present time, of a past world, inhabited by the older generations, which is inaccessible to the younger generations. And then Slonimsky's judgment is too merciless when he accuses critics of obscurantist conservatism. Their inability to read the new is not so much the result of stubbornness or of pastism, as belonging to a previous language: whoever speaks that ancient language cannot but understand the nascent language as a sort of deliberate and shameless stammering.

In spite of this, this gap between eras seems to be overshadowed in our time. It is as if the communicative asynchrony between generations, in the current era, were really due to something more than a false contemporaneity. As if a much more radical and profound mutation had intervened to introduce other and more complicated involutive phenomena. In fact, the theme of mutation is one of the focal lines of Guido Mazzoni's book, Senza soccorso . Sei tentati di leggere il presente (Laterza 2025), which already from the title takes on the ungenerous burden of saying which (few) possibilities, today, remain open and which, instead, have closed forever. The mutation therefore indicates a fracture in recent history, which occurred between the 1980s and 1990s of the last century, capable of triggering a metamorphosis from which there seems to be no return. One of the key theses of Senza soccorso is related precisely to something that happened in the second half of the twentieth century and which can only be read in terms of a radical gap. In the 1960s, there still existed that thing that could be called “History,” in which strong ideas were mobilized and people polarized around the great ideologies that had woven the constitutional fabric of the post-World War II period . Between the 1970s and 1980s, however, something happened that is still mysterious and that Mazzoni, in reference to Jean Baudrillard, defines as a “strike of events”: “The disappearance of the great ideological conflicts of the twentieth century after the victory of liberalism in politics and capitalism in economics.”

In terms that do not convey the complexity of the reasoning, one could speak of a radical mutation of the public sphere and of the nature of political conflicts within it. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the social opposition pitted two very different parties against each other. The generations animated by an authentic political passion and driven to form collectives confronted Nixon's "silent majority" and Pasolini's "new bourgeoisie": "[D]isengaged, post-political, individualistic, family-oriented, consumerist, touristic, uninhibited, post-bourgeois, superficially polychrome when seen from close up, intimately cohesive when seen from afar and tendentially centrist". That opposition between two structurally different publics has disappeared . On the one hand, today the majorities "are no longer silent or centrist; instead they behave like 'speaking classes' and polarized that participate every day in a sort of perpetual online assembly divided into bubbles, taking the floor (or commenting on the word of others, even just with a like) within a political space that social networks have completely reshaped". On the other hand, at the same time, this "social" remodeling has also affected the once engaged public of the left, which has completely lost its community spirit and instead expresses "the values ​​of that part of the middle classes that benefits from globalization, loves cosmopolitanism and behaves like an avant-garde in the metamorphosis of customs".

We are therefore witnessing a double and orchestrated effect of transformation of the public sphere. On one side there is the liberal left, plagued by the idolatry of the most disparate rights, from woke rights to fundamentalist animalism, but which ultimately are always private rights: the right of the private citizen who must be able to express his sexuality in the way he deems most appropriate and the right of the private wild boar who must be able to move in full and protected freedom among urban waste. On the other side there is the revanchist white right, cultivator of ancestral values ​​(intended as the only brake on rampant immorality), which ironically elects as a model those who, to the east of our world, would like to put an end to our scantily clad way of life. The common element of these two sides, opposed only in appearance, is the irresistible desire to "take the floor on unknown problems, or those known only second or third hand", on those social networks that know how to offer themselves as a practical stage to anyone with a smartphone. In this context, Trump exercises a force that is both arcane and revealing, especially in his relationship with the people: “He wants to express the popular will and govern it at the same time, he wants to represent the voters and at the same time transcend them.” In doing so, Trump is setting in motion a consolidated and atavistic mechanism of the politics of the golden age: the revanchist white right, which forms his electorate, would not exist without him. It comes to life when he stages it and thus brings it into being.

He does it because he knows how to use better than others those communication techniques that have now replaced the old public opinion of newspapers and cafés. He does it by exploiting the “anarchic individualism” of social media, capable of staging phenomena that are not necessarily true in the reality outside those channels – the one that out of habit rather than conviction we still insist on calling “reality”. While the space of social media, precisely because it is individualistic and anarchic, understandably induces laziness: “The contemporary right does not want military rallies, general mobilization, children in uniform and fascist Saturdays; they want a more or less mild form of apartheid in a gated community protected by the police: a minority of wealthy people (on a global scale almost all Westerners still are) who try to protect themselves, with borders and expulsions”. At the same time, always in the name of that specularity mentioned above, Mazzoni writes that the people of the left are subject to a parallel mechanism of remodeling, which differs from that which occurred on the right in content but not in outcome. In fact, of the different souls of 1968, disinhibition and the transformation of customs triumphed, certainly not the political inspiration of a radical attack on the "system". In that long 1968, "an eternal provincial Italy hybridized with a mythological and largely imaginary America". This hybridization made havoc of every community ideal and every brotherhood to be built, leaving room for a society composed of "individuals and families, or at most identities and tribes".

On the right as on the left, therefore, there are no other scenarios than those of a society made up of "private people who live only for themselves and their loved ones within the framework of the market economy, having lost the ability to even imagine that another world is possible". Senza soccorso therefore offers the same diagnosis to explain the same radical mutation in the two most representative and well-nourished publics today. The common origin of the white right and the woke left is a problem that seems to me to have to do first of all with imagination: the inability to trace an alternative horizon, even if it is unrealizable - moreover, alternative precisely because it is unrealizable, and therefore charged with a crazy utopian force and without any hope of success. Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the utopias of the right and the left, monstrous as you like, had promoted epochal changes with the sole pretense that the world would adapt to the image of society they nourished. Today all this is inhibited by a profuse lack of ideas, or at least of the kind of ideas that cannot be summarized in the filtered photo of a post or in the thirty seconds of a reel. The result is a dysfunction that is not without nefarious effects, and in particular what Mazzoni defines as the "end of shelters". There is a widespread (and true) feeling everywhere that there are no more defensive barriers with respect to problems of a collective nature, such as the climate crisis, the demographic winter, the return of wars, the expansion of non-human intelligences and many others.

We are therefore helplessly witnessing the growth of a fearful asymmetry between the magnitude of those problems and the paucity of our imagination - a fearful asymmetry precisely to the extent that the beginning of the solution to any problem lies in the repertoire of ideas and words with which it is expressed. Of course, one could always argue that the author of Senza soccorso, as well as the writer, suffers from the same improvident blindness that the critics lashed out at in the wonderful compendium of failures put together by Slonimsky. It could well be a question, therefore, of further and new invectives, destined soon to reveal themselves for what they are: the fruit of the fear of something that to us older people appears unknown and unusual only because we are indebted for new ideas. No authentic and definitive "social mutation", therefore, but the everlasting asymmetry between old and new generations. So be it: I make the provocation my own and I lull myself in this comforting mirage. I open Instagram and I see Trump in every shape and color who makes “YMCA” his celebratory anthem. I admire that seventy-eight-year-old who knows how to read the present better than anyone else and who knows how to warm and grow the new generations. And so I admit in my heart: that of the one who writes is nothing but bilious grayness, produced by the frustrated inability to interread in the Trumpian choreography the encrypted message of a radiant future – a future that I hope will be fully realized only once my funeral has been celebrated.

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