The protesters of '68 were a querulous njet set that is finally being replaced, thanks to the ecology movement and the issues it raised, by a generation with the requisite technical and scientific knowledge.
Niklas Luhmann. taz.de 
(1988-08-04)
"Everybody's got something to hide, except me and my monkey," sang the Beatles in 1968, with obvious broad agreement. In retrospect, it's not the accusation that's surprising, but the exception. That everyone is sinful has always been known, but that there was an exception was new. And it was trumpeted to the world in such a way that everyone could believe that he himself was the exception. Whether anyone ever really believed it, we do not know; but one could pretend.
For this, of course, innocence had to be given a position somewhere in the world, but outside of society. The flowers and the beaches, where one could live on nothing, might symbolize this. The universities seemed to offer a possibility – a position from which one could, with funding from others, send out appeals to others. In the end, all that remained of all this were the terrorists' hideouts, and with them the presumption of being able to practice guilt as innocence.
There is an old monastic tradition that says that one must be silent if one wants to avoid any infection with the world. Here the opposite was to be experienced: One would not have to be silent, but to appeal and, if necessary, to give emphasis to one's appeals by action – by innocent action of the actors and their monkeys (and in the field of tools monkey then also means: battering ram, drop hammer). But what kind of position is that from which one can observe, criticize, possibly attack society without belonging to it oneself?
The Beatles also gave information on this in 1968: "Your inside is out and your outside is in." So you can rebel in society as if you were from the outside.
1968 is remembered as a year of unrest, indeed of institutional crisis. The events came as a surprise, even to the actors themselves, and that may have magnified the impression they left. Random incidents, the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg, for example, shot the students out of society – and from then on you could walk across the lawn.
Even in retrospect, there is a lack of convincing explanations. The only thing that is certain is that the current social situation did not offer any reason – neither in France nor in Germany, neither in Italy nor in the USA. Everywhere one could observe economic prosperity, growth in educational opportunities, and a tendency toward consolidated democracy (compared, for example, with the gloomy forecasts of the 1930s and early 1940s). Does, as they say, too much of happiness make one overconfident? Riveting from the bush?
One could also understand the same step as a sequence of the differentiation of functional systems, which were accompanied by great hopes and laudations of advance and then had to disappoint in the organizational realizations of the industrial enterprises, the bureaucracies and oligarchic party structures, and finally the schools and universities. The eulogies and phrases of legitimation of the old did not make sense to the young who had not yet arrived.
However, it then very quickly became apparent that the hope for a solidarization of industrial workers and academic youth based on this remained an illusion – an illusion of the last, the not yet established protesters. What finally emerged was a fragmentation of the once closed socialist social movement into thematically heterogeneous "new social movements" – as if the functionally differentiated society could no longer even formulate its own unity in the form of a protest against itself. Resigned biographical arrangements of a new njet set on the one hand and terror desperados on the other were the result. Those who wanted to attack society from outside had to do so from hiding.
Explanations of this kind are hardly satisfactory. They provide only superficial clues. One has to accept that the loosening of social ties, itself a consequence of functional differentiation, does not generate a new solidarity, as Durkheim had assumed, but releases a bonding potential that can lead to occasion-related surprising amalgamations, which, however, soon dissolve again – biographically and for worldwide orientation and diffusion possibilities.
But mass media are not exactly suited to stimulate reflection, let alone the construction of a contemporary theory. Thus, the paradox of how to observe and criticize society within society as if it were from the outside was naively approached and naively solved – with recourse to already existing literature – half of Marx and the whole (psychodramatically extended) Frankfurt School.
So far, so bad. One could actually have learned from Marx that the critique of political economy is to be carried out in exact connection with precisely its self-representation; and that it is to be expected in society as the result of the dialectic of its own contradictions. However, the position from which this should be done (the position of the exploited class as the intrinsic external observer) had already been dissolved.
The Frankfurt School still held to the idea that the real contradictions of society could be made visible and provide the critical observer with his object reference, however he was then drawn into the contradictions as an enlightener. But how, if the contradictions are at all only a construction of the observer? And how at all should the observer proceed, if he wants to prove (with a logic free of contradictions?) a contradictory reality. Everybody's got something to hide - except me and my monkey?
The suddenness of the outbreak of unrest was matched by the paucity of their intellectual equipment, the insouciance of their slogans, the naiveté of their accusations. What had already served as criticism under completely different conditions was only reloaded and reused. Accordingly, disillusionment came quickly. Certainly: the idea is unavoidable that everything could also go quite differently. A whole army of intellectuals has been inspired by it – only to end up in a yes/but position, without then being able to recognize that one had started wrong.
## Postmodern Rococo
There are some signs that the question of the kind of society we live in has only become more urgent. What has failed is the naiveté and flippancy of description. And what has also failed in the meantime is the rococo of postmodern arbitrariness. What is called for is a new rigor and precision in observing and describing and, if one can go so far, in comprehending.
For the 68 movement, the problem of society had still been primarily, as in the 19th century, a problem of distribution, a problem of justice, a problem of disadvantage, a problem of participation. A society – and when one wanted to attack, one said "domination" – that is incapable of adequately solving this problem appeared as a "system" without legitimacy.
Towards it, a reference to norms and the demand to redeem the norms, which could not be denied, was appropriate. This is how Jürgen Habermas, impeccably in his own way, still argues today. Such norms must be thought of as preconditions of meaningful communication, as something that one must logically accept when one enters into communication to seek understanding. Does this presuppose a pre-socially given individual, that is, a "subject" in the classical sense?
Criticism and rebellion do not take place outside society, they take place inside society. This has been known since 1971 – since Edmund Burke described the French Revolution. One cannot remain innocent.
The theory does not have the last word. If it succeeds as a communication, it changes the society it had described; thus, it changes its object and thereafter no longer applies. Thus, the socialist movement has led to a market independence of labor prices – a fact we now have to live with. Thus the participation movement of 68, as far as it could have an effect, led to huge participation bureaucracies and thus to an immense increase of organized excuses for nothing happening – a fact we now have to live with. Reality looks different from the theory that tried to bring it about.
What is to be learned from this affair?
First and foremost: "The" society has no addresses. What one wants to ask of it, one has to address to organizations.
## Paradoxical effects of social theory
On the level of theoretical descriptions one must take from all this that there is no standpoint outside of society and in moral matters no innocent positions from which one could "critically" describe society and launch accusations. We have no labyrinth theory to explore and then predict how the rats run. We ourselves are the rats and can at best try to find a position in the labyrinth that offers comparatively better opportunities for observation.
A description of society is always a description that must include the describer himself. Otherwise, what an observer could observe remains incomplete. But can a describer describe his own describing? Or does this imposition alone lead him into the pardox of a Tristam Shandy or all other attempts to include himself in his own description?
If one realizes this, then paradoxical effects of the use of social theory are to be expected almost systematically; and what happened to the 68ers, insofar as they used theory as a weapon, is exactly what another theory can foresee and explain.
The scene, and I mean now the philosophical-literary scene, already stages the paradox. Following Nietzsche or Heidegger or Derrida, it gives itself an expressive form, which, however, lacks all rigor and precision. One can assume that here lies the problem that our century would still have to solve.
The ecological movement, if it thinks sharply, faces the same problem. For here it is ultimately a question of whether and how the social system, which as a system excludes its environment and otherwise cannot be a system at all, can nevertheless include information about the environment, so that it becomes possible to assess in society how environmental changes will affect society.
The undeniable, serious future-threatening changes in the natural environment, which society itself is triggering, are gradually becoming the rationality problem of this century. Society depends on high indifference to its environment for its own operations, but can no longer afford precisely this.
From the point of view of the problems and the demands on theory, one must regard it as a historical coincidence that communication about ecological problems began almost simultaneously with, or at least shortly after, the '68 riots. This constellation offered the generation of 68 a new home after the failure of their impulses and after the aging of their theoretical inspirations. Without giving up the opposition to society, the attitude of radical criticism and the vehemence of protest, it was possible to migrate into a new problematic and thus not least to solve the biographical problems of being out of fashion.
In Germany at least – in France the situation is different – the ecological problem thus became the subject of a protest movement with far-reaching effects on public opinion, on reporting in the press and on politics. Such a rapid politicization of environmental problems would hardly have been achieved otherwise.
It may be a bit exaggerated, but it seems to me that the real success and the positive contribution of the 68ers to social policy only came about with this late ignition, only through their entry into taking the ecological problem seriously. Since then, superficial appeasement and extremely short-term consequentialism have had a hard time politically.
On the other hand, solidarity in fear is of course not a principle with which one could govern and manage. In this respect, the movement excludes itself from responsibility when it tries to keep itself in an extreme position of innocence. But just like the Reds, the Greens will darken when they get into office. Only in the organization will they be confronted with a reality of questionable reality.
The 68ers have grown older. They have not become wiser. And they are gradually being replaced by younger offspring who have grown up with the necessary knowledge of half-lives and measurement procedures, dioxin incineration and waste sorting techniques.