would give them an opportunity to draw their own conclusions, to insert themselves into, or implicate themselves in the meaning of what they saw or heard. If one could use the media to broadcast those images to greater numbers, so much the better. Thus, where the Diggers looked to make themselves unrepresentable, Hoffman saw mechanical reproducibility as integral to the work of political opposition.
In part, this was because, at approximately the same time as his encounter with the Diggers in Michigan, Hoffman had begun reading the work of media theorist Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan, unlike the Diggers, praised television as the technological form that would give rise to new and radically different social forms. The way in which television presented information to the senses would drastically and irreversibly alter the forms of human interaction. Unlike the “hot” printed word, television was a “cool” medium. It offered viewers the opportunity to insert themselves into its stream of information. As a result, McLuhan argued, it would bring together vastly different cultures in a new “global village.” As he put it in perhaps his most succinct formulation, “The medium is the message”: regardless of its ostensible content, what viewers would ultimately take away from television programming was an entirely new way of engaging the world around them. Drawing on these ideas, Hoffman began to believe that media mythmaking could be used as a form of political activism. Thus, refusing to privilege the direct, personal contact that the Diggers so valued, Hoffman saw television coverage of political demonstrations as not just inevitable but valuable. Seeing viewers as active consumers of the images that entered their homes, rather than as passive receptors, allowed him to conceive of television as a potential instrument of social transformation.
At the same time, however, Hoffman’s belief in television as a revolutionary medium differed from McLuhan’s in one important respect. McLuhan believed that the social forms produced by television would be the result of a fundamental alteration of the senses: “It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and interaction.”26 The instantaneous quality of televisual imagery would lead viewers to perceive the world in spatial rather than temporal terms, and thus to engage every facet of their lives in an altogether different way. Just how television’s potential should be used, however, McLuhan never made clear. In fact, the closest thing one finds to a prescription in Understanding Media smacks of totalitarianism: “We are certainly coming within conceivable range of a world automatically controlled to the point where we could say ‘Six hours less radio in Indonesia next week or there will be a great falling off in literary attention.’ Or, ‘We can program twenty more hours of TV in South Africa next week to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio last week.’”27 Exposure to media could effectively “program” cultures to “keep their emotional climate stable,” he suggested, not unlike the way in which trade could be manipulated to maintain “equilibrium” in market economies. Obviously, Hoffman wanted just the opposite. It was the stable emotional climate of the United States, the “equilibrium in the commercial economies of the world,” that he found so troubling. Playing on McLuhan’s elision between two senses of the term “cool,” Hoffman wrote, “Projecting cool images is not our goal. We do not wish to project a calm secure future. We are disruption. We are hot.”28 Thus, while he looked to McLuhan’s work for the idea that television might play a role in bringing about a new “global village,” Hoffman’s idea of how television would be used to bring that village into existence differed greatly. For Hoffman, the medium and the message were far from inseparable. Although he sought to use television to broadcast his message, that message, ultimately, was a critique of the images television offered.
According to Hoffman, televisual images of the counterculture would never revolutionize society by “cooling off” a potentially dangerous situation. Rather, he argued that they would work by establishing a figure-ground relationship with other images on TV. As he put it, “It’s only when you establish a figure-ground relationship that you can convey information.”29 Footage of “monkey theater,” as he came to call his own version of guerrilla theater, would necessarily interact with, and stand out against, the background formed by more predictable scenes. If these images were outrageous enough, Hoffman believed, viewers would be unable to ignore or dismiss them, regardless of what commentary might be offered to frame or explain them. For this reason, he considered nightly news coverage of monkey theater to be something akin to an “advertisement for the revolution.” Images depicting hippies tossing money onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange would convey information much like the most persuasive images on television: commercials. Discussing the news program Meet the Press, Hoffman wrote, “What happens at the end of the program? Do you think any one of the millions of people watching the show switched from being a liberal to a conservative or vice versa? I doubt it. One thing is certain, though . . . a lot of people are going to buy that fucking soap or whatever else they were pushing in the commercial.”30
Advertisements were figures standing out from the ground that was the regularly scheduled program. They were designed to be quick, to the point, and to capture the viewer’s imagination. To function like an advertisement emerging from the middle of a newscast, therefore, protestors would have to distance themselves from any form of rational debate. Engaging in calm, orderly discussions about substantive issues was the manner of politicians, and, not coincidentally, of organizations like SDS. To Hoffman, any attempt to achieve political change in this fashion seemed doomed to failure: even if one managed to be included in nightly news broadcasts, the chances that what one said would change anyone’s mind were slim. No one “switched from being a liberal to a conservative or vice versa” after watching Meet the Press. Showing, for Hoffman, was completely different from saying—but not in the way that the Diggers had insisted. To be effective, guerrilla theater had to be flattened out, treated, quite literally, as an image: “What does free speech mean to you? To me it is an image like all things.”31 Attention to the form of one’s actions was necessary not because those actions had the potential to bring about a new reality, or because one wanted to “speak truth to power,” but because political opposition had become inextricable from practices and modes of representation. For this reason, monkey theater would assume a very specific form. After all, the actions of private citizens only received national attention when they were in some way sensational. Monkey theater, then, would have to be literally spectacular. In looking to make protest newsworthy, that is, the appearance and mannerisms of those who had already been deemed newsworthy would have to be adopted. Monkey theater would have to speak reporters’ language. As Pierre Bourdieu would argue thirty years later, “You have to produce demonstrations for television so that they interest television types and fit their perceptual categories.”32 Monkey theater, in other words, would have to look like a “revolution”; it would have to conform to television reporters’ conception of an uprising.
Following the events staged at the Stock Exchange, Rubin, captivated by Hoffman’s media savvy, invited him to aid in the organization of an upcoming demonstration sponsored by the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (Mobe). David Dellinger, the head of the Mobe, had enlisted Rubin’s help that summer, after Rubin’s bid to be elected mayor of Berkeley, California, had failed. Although he lost the mayoral race, Rubin’s knack for publicity and his ability to appeal to young people seemed, to Dellinger, just what the Mobe needed. Dellinger was seeking to bring vast numbers of protestors to Washington, DC, in October for a national antiwar demonstration. He asked Rubin to take charge of the project, hoping that Rubin would be able to deploy the creative political tactics for which he had become known in Berkeley on a national stage. By appealing to those youths who might otherwise have been reticent to take part in one of the Mobe’s more conventional actions, Dellinger hoped to assemble the largest antiwar demonstration to date. With Hoffman and Rubin composing the script, however, what was initially conceived quite literally as the antiwar movement’s March on Washington became instead another work of monkey theater.
The event, as they saw it, might begin with a march, but that march would
