Radical Theatrics. Craig J. Peariso

will explore the relationship between eroticism and liberation in Marcuse’s thought in greater detail in the next chapter. For now, I want only to stress that, while Marcuse had not abandoned all hope for a radical, total revolution, the source from which that revolution might spring was difficult to identify. Art, sexuality, alternative ways of life: nearly all forms of opposition had been rendered easily assimilable. Compelled nevertheless to designate a source of potential social transformation, he turned to what he called the “substratum” of the technological society, “the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors” who lived “outside the democratic process.” Given their direct and “immediate” relationship to the failure of American political institutions, the way in which their plight seemed to emblematize the failure of those very institutions, their opposition to authority was “revolutionary even if their consciousness was not. . . . it is an elementary force which violates the rules of the game and, in doing so, reveals it as a rigged game. . . . The fact that they start refusing to play the game may be the fact which marks the beginning of the end of a period.”⁵³ For Marcuse, in other words, the experience of racial oppression provided the critical distance necessary for true critique. Writing in the early 1960s, he praised civil rights activists for their courage. The power of their willingness to “face dogs, stones, and bombs, jail, concentration camps, even death,” he wrote, lay “behind every political demonstration for the victims of law and order.”⁵⁴ By the time “Repressive Tolerance” appeared, however, his perspective had changed slightly. There he wrote that “the exercise of political rights (such as voting, letter-writing to the press, to Senators, etc., protest demonstrations with a priori renunciation of counterviolence) in a society of total administration serves to strengthen this administration by testifying to the existence of democratic liberties which, in reality, have changed their content and lost their effectiveness.”⁵⁵ The turn in Marcuse’s thought clearly reflects the public transition from the nonviolent civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s to the openly confrontational politics of Black Power, but the potential catalyst for a true historical transformation remained in the oppositional strategies of “other races and other colors.” Although the willingness to face dogs, stones, bombs, and so on was no longer sufficient, in the face of a virtually totalizing system of repressive tolerance, racial minorities apparently maintained an element of purity and authenticity otherwise lost. Race, in other words, had supplanted perversion as the true lever of social change. Perhaps Marcuse believed that its “indelible” visibility, an enduring reminder of the persistence of concrete inequality, served to render race ultimately unassimilable. Or, given his reference to the “immediate,” “elemental” character of racial opposition, one might read in this attempt to posit a source of revolutionary consciousness a patronizing reverence akin to that of Norman Mailer’s “White Negro.” But whatever the justification, the racial identities that Marcuse saw as perhaps the last hope for radical opposition were, like the forms of “non-conformity and letting go” he dismissed, far less “immediate” than he assumed. In fact, as Jacob Brackman argued, the figures of the “assimilationist” civil rights activist and the militant black liberationist, along with the rhetoric of Zen, existentialism, and beat ways of life, had already been appropriated and redeployed by the practitioners of a satirically campy mode of miscommunication known as “the put-on.”

The put-on, a seemingly playful, aimless conversational misdirection, was not necessarily new. What was new, and troubling, was its inescapability. Although it had once been only an in-group, “outlaw form,” over the course of the 1960s the put-on had become virtually ubiquitous. What was previously “an occasional surprise tactic—called ‘joshing’ around the turn of the century and ‘kidding’ since the twenties,” Brackman wrote, had been “refined into the very basis of a new form of communication.”⁵⁶ From Warhol’s Brillo Boxes to the maddeningly nonsensical cat-and-mouse interviews given by Bob Dylan, some unsuspecting “victim” was being confounded by a put-on almost everywhere one looked. As Warhol told Gretchen Berg in a 1966 interview ironically titled “Andy Warhol: My True Story,” “I never like to give my background and, anyway, I make it all up different every time I’m asked”⁵⁷—this, one presumes, was how Andy “put his Warhol on.”⁵⁸ Similarly, the unapologetic fusion of high art and pop culture one found in his paintings, sculptures, and events such as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable left one uncertain whether this work was truly progressive, or if museums and galleries had simply been reduced to little more than glorified supermarkets. The put-on had thus necessitated a fundamental shift in the way audiences approached the latest works. Viewers had come to assume that a great deal of contemporary work sought to engage them not in some type of purely sensual communion but in an elaborate “con game.” In response, Brackman suggests, critical arguments seemed to shift from determining what qualified as a “good” work to what constituted a “real” work. In this situation, of course, when a critic dismisses “something that others have considered good, he is no longer simply challenging the merits of a specific work; he is telling the public that his colleagues have been taken in by fraud, that they are hoodwinked in their notions of what constitutes art, that none of us really knows for sure anymore what is real and good.”⁵⁹

      To be sure, if this had remained the problem of a few art critics, it would most likely have merited relatively little discussion. What made the unavoidability of the put-on interesting was precisely the fact that it was not merely the problem of determined formalists. The put-on’s cynical irony had tainted virtually every interpersonal exchange. One did not simply reenter the realm of sincerity by stepping outside of the gallery. And, quite interestingly, this proliferation of the put-on had begun, according to Brackman, with Sontag’s attempt to define camp. Her “disjunct essay in Partisan Review,” he wrote, “was read by tens of thousands, but its reverberations affected the culture consumed by hundreds of millions.”⁶⁰ Whether the popularization of these ideas was actually rooted in the appearance of Sontag’s “Notes” is debatable. After all, Erving Goffman had begun to speak of self-presentation as a type of performance in 1959, and Pierre Bourdieu, writing in France in 1965 of the poses commonly struck in pictures, asserted that the photographic representation of society could only ever be “the representation of a represented society.”⁶¹ Nevertheless, for Brackman it was clear that what had once been preserved within the “classy preconscious” of American culture had, in the second half of the 1960s, surfaced as a part of the popular consciousness. In the process, critical judgment had been “clog[ged]” and aesthetic standards “scuttle[d].”⁶² Although Sontag “had been describing a method of appreciation, her rules were embraced as principles of manufacture.”⁶³ Long before Madonna “struck a pose” and introduced a mass audience to voguing, the put-on had popularized the theatrically queer sensibility of camp. In the process, Brackman argued, that sensibility had been turned into a series of pointless, cruel jokes.

The cruelty of these jokes lay in their conscious effort to render virtually all communication suspect. While the “Camp sensibility” more passively viewed being as playing a role, the “put-on artist” intentionally evoked the citational aspect of every statement. For this reason, “conversation with a put-on artist is a process of escalating confusion and distrust. He doesn’t deal in isolated little tricks; rather, he has developed a personal style of relating to others that perpetually casts what he says into doubt. The put-on . . . is rarely climaxed by setting the truth straight.”⁶⁴ Unlike irony, the put-on worked through the exchange of disinformation. The content of the ironic utterance or gesture, according to Brackman, was essentially fixed; it expressed the opposite of that which was said or done.⁶⁵ Strictly speaking, therefore, misunderstanding marked the failure of irony. The put-on, on the other hand, “inherently cannot be understood.”⁶⁶ The “put-on artist,” speaking from no fixed position, refused only to be pinned down. Always one step ahead, through a potentially infinite series of evasions s/he foregrounded the indeterminacy of her/his statements, leaving interlocutors utterly confounded. Most importantly, however, specific examples would nearly always assume one of two forms: “relentless agreement” or “actualization