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” society’s conquest of “higher culture” leads to a reconsideration of the contemporary writings of Susan Sontag, who, in her essays on art and camp, struggled repeatedly with notions of authenticity and theatricality in the context of American culture. Not unlike Marcuse, whose influence she openly acknowledged, Sontag wanted desperately to foster what she called an “erotics of art,” a form of direct experience that would distance the viewer from an era dominated by an overwhelming tendency to separate form from content, and to understand “Being-as-Playing-a-Role.”9
Finally, I will turn to the work of film critic Jacob Brackman, whose 1971 text The Put-On constituted an attempt to comprehend the rapid proliferation of what Sontag called the “Camp sensibility.” Where in 1964 Sontag had written that practices of camp were almost the exclusive province of “homosexuals,” by the late 1960s, according to Brackman, the popularization of these practices had made it difficult to take any statement at face value. The put-on, a mode of inauthentic self-presentation based in the performance of stereotypical identities, had become the basis for an almost standardized form of (mis)communication. By placing these analyses next to one another and using them to reframe the political careers of Cleaver, the Yippies, and the GAA, this book demonstrates that the very theatricality decried by Brustein, Gross, and others might be read not as an indicator of utter political impotence but as a series of critical inflections of the increasingly problematic language of “real” politics. Rather than attempting to separate the political from the aesthetic, I seek here to investigate the extent to which a great deal of sixties activism revealed each to be unthinkable without the other.
For Brustein, political activism in the United States had reached a dead end because the United States lacked the “adequate machinery for the redress of grievances and for social change.”10 As a result, those who found themselves marginalized by the dominant social order could do little more than stage “ineffective” or minimally disruptive demonstrations. Political opposition had been successfully channeled, he argued, because rather than squelching differing opinions American society had welcomed them. Dissent had been smothered by an overwhelming permissiveness. Unlike
