But was it really so simple? Was there really nothing more to the Yippies’ media mythmaking than childish pranks? Had Cleaver really mistaken his rhetoric of armed revolution for an actual uprising? Had the GAA, by employing media “zaps” to call for gay rights, turned the fight for gay liberation into a modest proposal for social reform? Put differently, one might ask, as many did, if each of these individuals and organizations had “sold out” their particular struggles, allowing a legitimate, systemic critique to be co-opted. When approaching their work in terms of the aesthetic, the very aspect that so bothered Brustein, those acts that seemed so thoroughly compromised begin to look quite different. After all, as others have noted in discussions of contemporary art and culture, it was in the 1960s that the very oppositions that had structured so much thinking about politics, the avant-garde, and so on—radical/compromised, alienation/assimilation, outside/inside—became far less stable than had been previously assumed.5 Thus, for example, the artist’s desire to “detach” himself or herself from society and mass culture in an effort to focus solely on his/her chosen medium, so famously described in 1939 by critic Clement Greenberg, appeared to have withered. In place of the hermetic practices of the “avant-garde” there emerged a new generation of artists willing to truck with the objects and images of popular culture.6 Beer cans, comic books, Coca-Cola bottles, pin-up girls—all surfaced, seemingly untransformed, in the work of artists such as Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Mel Ramos. Whether this changing cultural/political perspective was grounded in the collapse of colonialism, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have argued; the transition to “late capitalism,” as proposed in Fredric Jameson’s classic essay; or any other constellation of historical conditions and events, it is nevertheless clear that, in writing the history of “the sixties,” any attempt to oppose “real” politics to its co-opted imitation will most likely run into serious difficulties.7
At the same time, however, these more recent discussions of the collapse of clear political oppositions tend to view this as cause for hope or lament. In the case of Hardt and Negri, for example, the end of any notion of a position that truly stands outside of or removed from the dominant political and cultural formation has given rise to a sense of the “common”—both the collectively produced experiences, languages, and affects that have been expropriated or privatized for the good of the neoliberal “free market,” and the shared experience of life in this economic era. Recognizing the true significance of the common, they argue, will be the necessary first step toward the creation of a truly humane, and truly democratic social order. For Jameson, in contrast, the breakdown of any clear notion of opposition has brought us to an impasse, one in which our ability not just to speak politically but even to determine our position and thus orient ourselves in relation to the current crisis has been critically impaired. Faced with a world in which our sense of history has been largely erased, one in which events, images, styles, and so on, seem to stretch out before us simultaneously, interminably, we have become overwhelmed, caught up in the effective “schizophrenia” of the “hysterical, or camp sublime.”
I am neither so optimistic, nor so anxious. Instead, in the pages that follow I would like to begin to think of this sense of collapse itself as something of a historical phenomenon, while maintaining, at the same time, a sense of the conflict, the antagonism, that was, nevertheless, always present. For that is the fascinating irony—one might say contradiction—that seems to have driven the individuals and organizations discussed herein: the sense that all conflict has been evacuated, stripped of its true significance, even in the face of profound bloodshed, oppression, and exploitation. Something had to be done, and yet, as all antagonism seemed to be neutralized as a simple matter of differing opinions, as the real seemed to have given way to an endless series of images, no one could say just what that something was. On this note, I would like to make clear that my goal in revisiting and reinterpreting the work of the Yippies, the GAA, and Cleaver is not to suggest that the late 1960s marked the point in American political history at which grassroots organizational efforts had to be left behind in favor of the politics of imagery and media performance. The reader should not be left feeling, in the end, as if s/he has to choose between being an “old-fashioned” protester and a mythmaker. This kind of simple, contrarian reversal of calls for “real” politics would hardly be worthwhile. It is not my intention to offer a set of simple oppositions between competing political strategies, fetishizing one as “progressive” and dismissing the other as passé. That is precisely the type of argument I hope to problematize. For as the thinkers and activists discussed in the following chapters demonstrate, the politics of mythmaking was not so much an effective solution but an exploration of what seemed a disavowed paradox at the heart of much contemporary thinking about political activism, namely, that all calls for “direct” action proceeded according to formal conventions determined largely by the media. This book, in other words, is not a story of “good” ironic performance’s victory over “bad” grassroots organizing—and, by extension, a hopeful gesture toward the inevitable end of domination in all its forms—but an invitation to consider the difficulties that face political movements in our time and the historical moment in which a number of individuals and organizations seemed to engage those difficulties in an unexpectedly self-conscious manner.
Paying particular attention to the problem of political representation, of politics as representation, this book seeks to read “the sixties” anew, drawing on the theoretical frameworks developed more recently in fields such as visual culture and performance studies, among others, to rethink the practices employed by those claiming to act in the name of an existentialist-inspired “personal authenticity.” In the chapters that follow it will become quite clear that without the work of authors such as Peggy Phelan, Craig Owens, Sue-Ellen Case, Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, José Muñoz, Matthew Tinkcom, and others, this project may never have been conceived. As Jonathan Dollimore points out, however, these more recent debates over the prospect of a performance-based politics are possible only “because theoretical insights have already been struggled towards by thinkers, writers, activists, and others in specific historical and political struggles where the representative structures of oppression have been massively (if still only ever contingently) in place.”8 With this in mind, I have chosen to focus less on the writings of contemporary theorists than on the works of writers and thinkers of the period. For this reason, three authors in particular will provide the historical and conceptual framework for much of what follows: Herbert Marcuse, Susan Sontag, and Jacob Brackman. In the years between 1964 and 1971, each of these writers attempted to theorize the political ramifications of what they saw as a social and cultural order that had rendered personal authenticity meaningless. Throughout the 1960s Marcuse attempted to describe the historical, dialectical relationship between the flourishing of personal liberty on one hand, and the death of “real” opposition on the other. In works like One-Dimensional Man and “Repressive Tolerance,” he argued repeatedly that “technological society” had succeeded in reconciling desire with the commodity form. From sex to works of art, virtually all of the forms that had once expressed individual dissatisfaction with society had been colonized, circumscribed by a social order that sought to eliminate opposition through a spurious tolerance.
Marcuse’s argument concerning “one-dimensional”