Why do I feel so much more at home in Finland than in France, in spite of having spent a good part of my adult life trying to fit in in the latter republic, jetting back and forth to Charles de Gaulle, learning to gossip about Sarkozy as if I cared, nodding knowingly when some third party, some briefcase-toting little man in a fine-tailored suit, is marked out as a normalien? I come back to Helsinki after 19 years, for only the second time in my life, the language is just as impenetrable as ever, and yet I experience the whole thing as fitting and easy, while every visit to Paris is experienced as nothing more than a resistance test.
What is it, exactly? There is a general feeling of at-homeness that I have not just in Finland, but in a certain swath of the world that extends mostly across the northern zones of the continents of the North Atlantic. I only very gradually came to realize that this swath is co-extensive with that small bit of the earth's surface which, 400-some years ago, was swept up in the spirit of Reformation. Now I would like to think that this is a distinction that does not matter. I spent a good part of my life in complete ignorance of it, and even have a distinct memory of being 13 and still being confused as to which of the pair of terms, 'Protestant' and 'prostitute', means what. But now it seems clear and undeniable to me that there is a deep cultural divide that, while it might not in fact trace its causes back to the wars of religion, somehow sits on the map in the same way as those wars' eventual boundaries.
If I can put this in a different way, and in a way that will at first sound like a change of subject: I think it's safe to say that one would be hard pressed to locate a single French academic in his thirties who could correctly identify a song by Motörhead. In my recent unscientific survey of a comparison class of Finnish philosophers, by contrast, I discovered that five out of five displayed a high level of Motörhead-recognition ability, could make fine-grained distinctions between black metal, death metal, Viking metal and other sub-sub-genres of metal, and, while not ignorant of baroque chamber music, certainly would not see familiarity with it as the key to upward mobility towards the cultural elite. What, one wonders, would Distinction have looked like if Bourdieu had been a Finn?
Of course, it would be nearly impossible to be Finnish and to remain ignorant of the sub-sub-genres of metal just alluded to, as it is hard to overemphasize to the outsider the tremendous cultural role that metal plays across Fennoscandia. This is a role that briefly moved into broader European consciousness a few years ago, when the Finnish satirical heavy metal band Lordi won the Eurovision song contest, much to the confusion, no doubt, of the sequined and synthesized pop products sent forth by the Catholic lands, looking like so many Olympic ice-dancers.
But the proliferation of metal and its subgenres in Scandinavia in recent decades is, I think, but a further development of a distinctive trend in Protestant lands that goes back at lest 50 years, to the beginning of the era of rock-and-roll. If I may be permitted to exaggerate, since as Thomas Bernhard says, there is no art greater than the art of exaggeration: there never really was such a thing as rock-and-roll in Catholic Europe (Latin America is a different story, and one I'm not ready to tell). There were glitzy television reviews that catered to mass, cross-generational taste, which remain immensely popular in countries like Italy today. Their closest American counterpart is that benchmark of out-dated kitsch, the now defunct Lawrence Welk Show. Like the bandleader from North Dakota, these Southern European entertainments offer a certain amount of rock-and-roll-themed musical numbers, in the same way that they might next put on a ragtime-themed, or a Caribbean-steel-drum-themed, performance.
In the Catholic lands, I mean to say, rock-and-roll is only an imitation, packaged for mass entertainment, of a musical tradition that one might call indigenous to the area surrounding the northern sea. Germany, being split down the middle geographically and demographically with respect to confession, takes part in both of these worlds: with some of the schmaltziest Schlager and some of the hardest hardcore existing side by side.
I read a rather mocking article in the New York Times a few months ago about an academic conference on heavy metal. One of the few papers to be summarized in any detail --from, I think, a junior professor in some obscure department of German-- argued that, at bottom, the ritual and symbolism of Norwegian black metal duplicates the Catholic liturgy. Effectively, the stuff about Satan on this account is not really worship of Satan, but rather the expression of a longing to return to a more ornate theology and demonology that had room for Satan at all. That is, a longing to return to Catholicism. Thus, the article argued, if I recall correctly, that Scandinavian black metal is in effect the sole surviving vestige of the Counter-Reformation. On this line of thinking, I suppose, the defenders of the legacy of punk, in turn, are the descendants of the radical Protestant sects like the ranters and the diggers, who wanted to level the cathedrals with the bishops still inside them.
It sounds reasonable enough to me. As Tom Petty once observed with incredible honesty, surely all this music fandom could not really be about the music: it's just not good enough to warrant such intense attachment and identification. If not the music, then what? Well presumably these subcultures descend from social movements that long precede the forms of music in the name of which the current members of the subcultures believe their scenes were born.
From what I have been able to observe, a Finnish intellectual knows how
to tell dark metal from Viking metal in roughly the same way that some
Anglican wit might have relished running through the various
extravagances of Popery. But the true musical identification of the
Finnish intellectual is punk, probably with Iggy Pop as consummate
reformer.
Now in France and Italy, the counterpart intellectual wears his suit, and carries his briefcase, and goes to chamber music concerts. A normalien dresses, and moves, and acts as a man already at an age when I, for one, was still entirely identified with my own youth subculture, and would have been escorted, as unwanted riff-raff, to the nearest exit from the opera house.
It's been pointed out that during the student movement of '68, one of the major differences between Paris and Berkeley was that Paris did not have rock-and-roll, but at most jazz. This could explain in part why the French chapter of this world-wide moment was characterized by hardcore Maoism, or the semblance of it, while the American version had much more to do with self-indulgence. A generation later, the production of the cultural elite in France, where youth culture was never really defined by its own distinct music, continued on as if nothing had changed, while in the parts of the world taken over by rock-and-roll the very notion of what it is to be a member of the cultural elite changed entirely. Fast-forward a bit more to 2010, and we find aging punks in Scandinavia producing scholarly research on the history of philosophy, with longish greying hair, still hoping to make it to make it to the show the next time Motörhead comes through town. (Lemmy is like Origen or some other Church Father, who stands pristinely before the later rifts, a universally revered figure on whom all combatant factions can agree.)
I'm being ridiculously monocausal here, and I'm sure there are aspects of this history that I'm missing entirely. But as I've agreed to start calling this blog a 'blog', let it be just that, and not some imitation of a scholarly forum. Qua blogger, what I wanted to do was simply to reflect on why I feel so very much at home, with so little effort, here in Helsinki; and so very foreign, in spite of so much effort, in Paris. I think it has to do with Martin Luther, first of all; and, second, with the spread of musical subcultures throughout the world over the past half century, which, I suspect, did not supplant older cultural rifts, but only crusted over them; and, third and finally, with the fact, as I might have been naturally inclined to say had I not spent all these years following my own vain and misguided path to distinction, that Finnish philosophers are just so fucking cool.