Radical Theatrics. Craig J. Peariso
the late 1960s in the last ten years, these questions seem perhaps more urgent than ever.
I am, of course, not the first or only one to believe that the time may be right for a reconsideration of the methods of late-1960s activism. Since the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003, or, rather, since the United States government’s explicit articulation of its intent to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq in 2001 and 2002, interest in the grassroots political tactics of that period has understandably surged. Yet even before these unilateral military actions were on the table, there was still a great deal of scholarly and popular interest in the relationship in that decade between grassroots politics and media representation. Todd Gitlin, Tom Wells, Doug Rossinow, Julie Stephens—a number of authors in the 1980s and ’90s returned to the question of activism and media coverage in an attempt to determine just what we might learn from the struggles, triumphs, and failures of “the sixties.”87 These reappraisals, and others, were part of what has been described as a larger shift in writing about 1960s grassroots politics, a move away from simplistic divisions between politics and culture toward a more nuanced understanding of the mutual influences of, say, the New Left and the counterculture.88 Much as these authors have made an effort to not simply dismiss culture in favor of “real” politics, however, their generosity appears not to extend to engagements with the mass media. The media’s commercial character, its propensity to turn all opposition into simple spectacle, they suggest, ultimately renders protest impotent. The mass media may have “made” the New Left, in Todd Gitlin’s phrasing, but the inevitable allure of fame that accompanied the media’s attention proved irresistible. For this reason, Gitlin and others conclude, media coverage and “real” opposition are best seen as mutually exclusive. Although willing, in other words, to acknowledge the cross-pollination of politics and culture, arguments such as these remain rooted in a basic assumption that true opposition must transcend the boundaries of a given social order: one must either provide a carefully reasoned argument exposing society’s failure to live up to its own promises, or literally enact an alternative.
As it should by now be clear, this assumed choice between transcendence and “selling out” is, and was, not as clear-cut as it may seem. Thus, in the last ten years, authors such as Marianne DeKoven and T. V. Reed have begun to move beyond this basic position.89 DeKoven returns to the work of Marcuse in a thorough and quite fascinating reading—one that has exerted tremendous influence on my own engagement with his work—and highlights the often self-contradictory language used to describe the utopian political visions of groups like Students for a Democratic Society. Reed, on the other hand, stresses the role of song in the civil rights movement, and the theatrical strategies adopted within, among others, the movement for Black Power. Both authors explore cases in which aesthetics and politics intertwine, thus calling into question familiar assumptions regarding the political value of asserting an authentic personal identity and the necessity for “true” critique to originate from a position excluded by the dominant order. In the end, though, neither fully takes on the relationship between the “emergence of the postmodern,” strategies of political performance, and the mass media. This is precisely what makes the work of media historian Aniko Bodroghkozy so interesting. While many analyses could be said to sacrifice either an understanding of the media for an emphasis on history or an understanding of history for an emphasis on media, Bodroghkozy looks to situate television coverage of political demonstrations and protests within a larger discussion of the popular fascination with youth culture in the late 1960s.90 This is an incredibly rich avenue of inquiry, and Bodroghkozy does a great deal to distance herself from the analyses of authors like Gitlin, arguing that the Yippies’ understanding of the mass media may have been far more sophisticated than earlier authors assumed. But her account stops there, leaving the reader to wonder just what the subtleties of Yippie media theory may have been, or why Bodroghkozy insists on separating this “self-conscious” form of protest from what Sontag labeled the “Camp sensibility.”
But the one effort to reassess “the sixties” that is most closely related to my own is David Joselit’s Feedback: Television Against Democracy. Joselit offers a nuanced reading of the cultural significance of television in postwar America, paying particular attention to the way in which it seems to blur the distinction between commodity and network, the way it presents, in effect, the network as a commodity. Along the way, Joselit offers examples of activists seeking to make use of television and film as weapons in the struggles for Black Power or against the Vietnam War. These examples demonstrate, he argues, in contrast to so many who have written on grassroots politics in the late 1960s, that easy oppositions between the media and “real” dissent underestimate the sophistication of these activists and, more importantly, leave later generations facing a political dead end. As a fellow art historian interested in the televisual (re)presentation of political positions, I find Joselit’s ambition, his hope for a thorough reconsideration of art history’s scope, incredibly exciting. The practice of art history, he suggests, should not be approached as a simple matter of cataloging objects, as it is also, or primarily, a concern with the history of taste, aesthetics, and representational conventions. For this reason, he writes, “If we . . . rethink our critical vocabularies and allow them to migrate into areas of vital concern . . . [we] will find ourselves with much to contribute to the social and political debates of our time.”91 As promising as Joselit’s proposal sounds, however, one finds in Feedback a number of moments in which his own attempts to shift the terms of existing debates through art historical intervention appear to fall short. In spite of his urgings to rethink the simple opposition between “real” politics and television, for example, he nevertheless falls back, at times, on a very similar distinction. Chiding those who stubbornly cling to the notion of an “outside” in the face of the “closed circuits that fashion our public worlds,” he rather puzzlingly asserts that neither “the modernist aesthetic tactic of revolution nor the poststructuralist technique of subversion (which in any event are two sides of the same coin)” can provide an adequate response, “unless one is prepared to wage actual political revolution and to pay its price of massive violence (something those with subversive on their lips might well remember).”92 Perhaps moments like these should come as no surprise, given that Joselit’s title pits, quite literally, television against democracy, an incompatibility or mutual exclusivity suggesting that, ultimately, his arguments may not be so far removed from those of Gitlin and others. Moreover, Joselit at times recapitulates, however unconsciously, Marcuse’s most questionable assertion—both factually and politically—by posing a stark contrast between the media-based actions of white artists and activists and those of their “informationally disenfranchised,” that is, nonwhite, counterparts. Activists like Hoffman and artists like Warhol, as complex as their engagements with the media may have been, nevertheless “presume[d] the possession of an intelligible identity,” forgetting that “such self-possession was not a universal privilege.”93 In contrast, Joselit argues, a film like Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, by virtue of its status as an independent, nonstudio production starring the “Black Community,” offers an example of a less-compromised, more authentic version of media politics.
As I have already indicated, and as the chapters that follow will make clear, when we write the put-on back into the history of the late 1960s, this distinction between those whose actions have been rendered image and those who have been denied that “privilege” becomes far more difficult to maintain. No one was exempt from the system of representation and commodification. Like the “militant Negro,” the “hippie,” and the “homosexual” in Brackman’s examples, Cleaver, Hoffman, Rubin, the members of the GAA, and the “queens and nellies” so frequently condemned within the gay liberation movement seemed on some level to recognize the inseparability of politics and performance. This, I argue, is why they appeared to recite time and again the very terms they claimed to dispute. For this reason it may be more fruitful to read Cleaver’s “shit talking,” Hoffman’s “monkey theater,” and the GAA’s “zaps” not as mere symptoms of personal neuroses or indications of a thoroughly co-opted or misguided radicalism, but as put-ons, campy repetitions of political personae that were, in themselves, little more than repetitions of normative conceptions of opposition, whether in the form of black masculinity, youth culture, or same-sex sexuality. My goal, in other words, is not