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Friday, January 27, 2006
More Groovy Street Theater?
When the Students for a Democratic Society announced it would be convening this summer for the first time since 1969, my jaw hit the floor. Did Paul Buhle suddenly decide that the New Left and its ideological children weren’t visibly impotent enough? Could he choose a more inappropriate moment to revive the New Left obsession with symbolic politics?
Reading the belabored utopianism of The Port Huron Statement with knowledge of its consequences should be a chilling experience for contemporary academics. Sadly, the institutionalization of unrepetant New Leftists in the humanities ensures a primed audience for the new SDS and their old anti-statist, anti-rationalist message. Only whatever leverage they once had with the Democratic Party they despised has evaporated. Their disdain for practical politics resulted in their withdrawing from “The System” entirely. The rebirth of the SDS will foreground the failure of the New Left to alter the course of American politics, especially when compared to “the New Right” with whom they were once allied. The anti-statist, libertarian-leaning New Right created the working coalitions which stand as political commonplace today: free-market ideologues and Christian fundamentalists now share the Republican stage because the New Right create the conditions necessary to accomplish such a feat in the ‘60s.
The New Left would have created coalitions had it not spent its collective energies on blowing your mind. While the New Right hunkered down in positions of power, the New Left waged a public relations war against the idea of power in all its various guises: “The System,” “The Man,” “Them.” Capitalize one letter of Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff
I don’t know what They have to say
It makes no difference anyway
Whatever it is, I’m against it.
No matter what it is or who commenced it,
I’m against it!Your proposition may be good
But let’s have one thing understood:
Whatever it is, I’m against it.
And even when you’ve changed it or condensed it,
I’m against it!
Like Dr. Wagstaff, the New Left favored performance over complicity in the system. (The resurgent popularity of the Marx Brothers in the ‘60s wasn’t an accident.) When I consider the potential efficacy of such performances cannot help but remember the response of the “little girl” in Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem
I mention to Max and Sharon that some members of the Mime Troup seem to be in blackface.
“It’s street theater,” Sharon assures me. “It’s supposed to be really groovy.”
[...]
“It’s something groovy they call street theater,” she said. I said I wondered if it might not have political overtones. She was seventeen years old and she worked it around in her mind awhile and finally she remembered a couple of words from somewhere. “Maybe it’s some John Birch thing,” she said.
The Mime Troupe believe their performance constitutes of “socio-political involvement.” I suppose it is an involvement. Not a socially viable or politically efficacious one . . . but an involvement nonetheless. The New Left championed such symbolic interventions because the only alternative was complicity in the system. A principled stance, certainly, but when combined with the actual intervention of the New Right into American politics, one with distastrous confidence. Reading the unapologetic explanations for not voting in the recent Canadian election, I heard reproduced the New Left’s complaints about the Democratic Party circa 1968. When someone justified their decision not to vote by declaring “they’ve already compromised everything,” I imagined those words coming from the mouth of Didion’s “little girl” and shuddered at the implications.
They still have so much left to compromise.
This post is informed by Sean McCann and Michael Szalay’s introduction to a forthcoming issue of The Yale Journal of Criticism. I would have discussed the relation between contemporary academia and the New Left, but they cover that ground far better than I could ever hope to . . . and because I didn’t ask permission to recapitulate it and wouldn’t dare to without it.
Comments
The SDS was founded about 1960 and the Port Huron Statement was written about 1962. During its early years it mostly was a support group for the civil rights movement, and aound 1965 it shifted over to the anti-Vietnam War movement. SDS was originally non-ideological and non-exclusive, but because of the non-exclusiveness, once it had a bit of success it was swamped with ideologues (Maoists / Progressive Labor, LaRouchies, the nihilist Weathermen, and Yippie types). The group split up in 1969.
Early SDS was pretty thoughtful, realistic, amd hopeful. But the combined impacts of the Vietnam War (a Democratic war supported by most liberals) and the drug culture ruined everything. SDS 1967-69 was pretty bad but by that time the Port Huron Statement was ancient history.
Since 1941 American politics has been dominated by military concerns. No anti-militarist activity of any sort has had much positive effect since then —mainstream or not. I don’t expect that to change/
Referring to the “New Right” as anti-statist shows some terminological confusion. The Reagan administration was radically Keynesian.
And the rest has the air of thin straw burning.
Referring to the “New Right” in scare quotes, as if it didn’t actually exist and didn’t align itself with the New Left shows some historical confusion.
The rest has the air of ignorant guy yapping.
I’m sorry, but Jonathan, can’t you muster more than that? As John notes, I’m bridging the early New Left with the late in a way which may not be altogether kosher (although given the language of self-realization and distrust of federal entities in the Port Huron Statement I think the connection’s clear as day); but I’m not inventing the New Left only to demolish it here. In fact, I could’ve mentioned many damning episodes in its history but chose not to . . . or would you rather we levitate the Pentagon with the power of our minds?
The New Right--not an easily definable movement, especially as you move into the 70s--has always been in favor of massive state investment in the MIC (phrase coined by noted New Leftist Eisenhower). Therefore, referring to it as “anti-statist” is either disingenuous or ignorant.
There were “Dude” aspects to the New Left, certainly, but so? When asked about changes in political attitudes over the last forty years, Chomsky frequently relates an anecdote about how he was accosted most violently for speaking out against the Vietnam War in the early 60s by students. The fact that there was massive protest against the recent Iraq war before it happened is a more reflective New Left legacy than yippie Forrest Gumpery.
Perhaps you have invented a “New Left” here, Scott, when you conflate groups like the SDS, the Yippies, and Mime Troupes – groups that I would argue had very different notions of both politics (anarchists, Marxist-leninists, Maoists, and, as you note, Groucho-Marxists) and performance (marches, protests, pranks, be-ins, and skits).
You contrast “symbolic performance” and “actual politics” here, suggesting that the former necessarily fails to make a difference (like standing on a battleship and pronouncing “Mission Accomplished” perhaps?). A question for you: how do you judge the efficacy of a performance? When the performers are pleased with it? When the audience is “moved” (to tears, to “actual political engagement”)? When the police feel compelled to intervene? In order for a performance to move from the realm of the symbolic/ineffectual to the actual/effective, must a performance bring about The Revolution? Must it stop the war? Must it register someone to vote? Must it change someone’s mind? Ten someones’? One hundred?
It seems to me that if you locate “actual” and effective politics solely in the machinations of the State, then your definition precludes many forms and possibilities of social change—sexual liberation being the most obvious in my mind, a legacy of Sixties leftism (and counterculture) that I don’t think can be so quickly discounted.
Scott, there’s an implication in what you wrote that things would have worked out better if those terrible New Leftists hadn’t shown up. After 1965 all American politics was dominated by the bipartisan Vietnam War. The Democrats’ offer was basically the welfare state plus the warfare state, take it or leave it.
It was very difficult to know what to do in the face of that kind of war and the social pressures (and draft) that accompanied it. While I am not really happy with what was actually done, I’m really at a loss to imagine any more effective strategy or tactics. Anti-militarist popular resistance seems to be almost impossible anywhere, anytime, as we’re seeing today.
The bombing of Afghanistan after 9-11 would have been worse than it was if not for protest beforehand. The US government would likely simply draft an army and invade Venezuela and elsewhere currently, if not for the entrenched public intolerance of any such draft post-Vietnam. That’s not inconsiderable anti-militaristic achievement, by far.
“In fact, I could’ve mentioned many damning episodes in its history but chose not to . . . or would you rather we levitate the Pentagon with the power of our minds?"
50,000 people marching on the Pentagon is supposed to be “damning” compared to… what, exactly?
Early SDS was pretty thoughtful, realistic, amd hopeful. But the combined impacts of the Vietnam War (a Democratic war supported by most liberals) and the drug culture ruined everything. SDS 1967-69 was pretty bad but by that time the Port Huron Statement was ancient history.
Yes. And the distinction between people who thought of themselves as “political” revolutionaries and those who thought of themselves as “cultural” revolutions (i.e. hippies) was real into the 70s and beyond. Different people, different social networks, different clothes, different reading. Some people switched back and forth and some predominantly political people dropped acid, not to mention inhaling, but the differences remained real & there was a certain amount of distance between the two.
There were all those conversations about how the women’s movement would breach the gap between these two through “the personal is political.”
And then . . . .
A few years ago I was invited to Goshen College to talk about music. That was most interesting. For Goshen is a Mennonite college (one of two in the nation). The Mennonites are very conservative Christians, with a long tradition of a capella singing in their services. But they are also skeptical about the state and insist on keeping church and state separate, hence many will not, for example, serve on juries.
And they are also pacifists. The grandfathers of the kids I talked to went to prison in WWII because they refused to go to war. And that is why I didn’t have to go to prison in the 60s because I was a conscientious objector.
So, anyhow, there was a student research conference at Goshen and I was the keynote speaker. Afterward I sat in on some of the conference sessions, undergraduates presenting their original research. Saw a young Mennonite woman in slighly gothed out read a feminist interpretation of an Old Testament text.
And then . . .
there’s the story of how Bay Area hippies created the personal computer revolution in the 1970s and 1980s. That’s where you get a lot of libertarianism, I betcha’. In the 1970s the hip created communes, in the 1980s it was high tech start ups.
If you go here
http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/USBlues.shtml
And read footnote # 24, you’ll find this gloss:
One way to trace the links between the counter-culture of the sixties and the computer culture would be to follow the work of Stewart Brand, whose The Last Whole Earth Catalog published in 1971 quickly became something of a counter-culture bible. Brand published subsequent updates and established a quarterly magazine, The Coevolution Quarterly , which became The Whole Earth Review . In 1984 Brand published the Whole Earth Software Catalog , a guide to personal computing. More recently Brand (1987) wrote a book about MIT’s Media Lab. More recently, Paul Levinson has reminded me, Brand had a role in founding Wired , a computer culture magazine with a graphic and verbal style deeply indebted to the sixties rock culture. Cyberpunk was defined by William Gibson’s 1984 novel, Neuromancer (1984), in which video games meet reggae. The Mississippi Review devoted a special double issue to cyberpunk guest-edited by Larry McCaffery, Volume 16, numbers 2 and 3. For a brief chronology see Ravo and Cash (1993). David Porush has commented on cyberpunk’s cultural and neural imperatives (1987, 1991). For a look at a journalistic fellow-traveller, pick up an issue of Wired , or better yet, of Mondo 2000 , which features garish art direction, guidance on “smart” drugs (i.e. drugs which are supposed to enhance mental performance) and digital media, and interviews.
Wired, of course, still exists, though, like so much else, it isn’t what it once was. As far as I know Mondo 2000 is gone.
About 1969 there was a famous edition of a SF underground newspaper (the Oracle, I think) which featured Timothy Leary, Gary Snider, Ken Kesey, and one other hippie type, in which they speculated about getting the whole world wired, with instant communication. There was a lot of creativity in the counterculture, especially if you allow Henry Ford type empericism, finding 10,000 things that don’t work and one that does.
After a certain point, though, both the politico side and the hippie side went pretty crazy. The influx of new people and the ethos of total freedom swamped whatever leadership and wisdom there was. My own favorite horrible exampe was a Christian commune in Seattle whose sacrament was glue-sniffing. The Weathermen, insofar as they did anything, were dedicated to blind actvisim of a destructive sort. Though fortunately they mostly talked.
My real message above, though, is that the military/foreign policy elite took over in 1941 and never really has had to let go for very long, and anything political that’s happened in the US has had to accomodate itself to them. The Sixties radicals ran head on into that, and lost. Liberal hawks basically have joined that team, and they will sabotage any attempt to propose a less-militaristic alternative within the Democratic Party.
So call me Chomsky.
Well, after the Moretti event, I guess that people want to settle down with a nice, relaxing, argument about the Sixties.
As for the current-day events—I’m not slagging on Scott here, but it’s always puzzled me why literary studies types think of politics as an issue that they are so interested in. Nothing in literary studies gives one any special insight into politics, as far as I can tell. And for any academic to be really involved in politics takes a sustained effort that very few literary studies people have made. So of course whenever those who think of themselves as radicals write about politics they always have a despairing tone and a complicated set of reasons for doing nothing.
For Paul Buhle, I think that the complaints about his scholarship are more important than whatever designs he has on reviving an old brand name.
Nothing in literary studies gives one any
special insight into politics, as far as I can tell.
Shades of Plato.
A very interesting question.
I saw the politicization of lit studies unfold back in the 60s and 70s. But I wonder about the pre-history of that. I wonder of the local Trilling specialist would have some insight into this question.
I remember the transition of the early Seventies very well. People started to realize that the anti-ear movement, though led in part by people with well-thought out poltical programs, was mostly just an “anti” movement and would disintegrate as soon as the war and the draft ended. The political ideas that filtered down to the footsoldiers were pretty thin and often incoherent.
By that time the inadequacies and pathologies of the hippie counterculture had become clear too. No atter how much anyone respeted the best aspects of the sixties, the whole package was impossible.
The break was from feminists—women who had been part of the movements and had been mistreated by macho jerk leaders. Gay liberation came along about the same time, and the movement to the personal-as-political. But there was a renunciation of politics as politics too. This was really post-New Left, not New Left, though some of the same people were there. (Three stages now: early new left, late new left, political-is-personal.)
People also went into the arts and academia just because the politics wasn’t there any more. There was a lot of movement into abstruse forms of identity politcs, critical theory, marxo- freudianism, etc., that had renounced conventional forms of political activity in favor of cultural politics.
I suppose you could periodize the post-new-left too, but I got off the boat then and stopped keeping track.
Yeah, I hate symbolic politics too! Screw you, Martin Luther King, Jr.! Screw you and your March on Washington! Screw you and your stay in Birmingham Jail! Don’t you know that politics means pinching your nose and voting! That’s it! Marching, talking, writing, that’s all just so symbolic.
[I so suspected I would catch flack for this.]
av, you’re correct, of course, that one can’t judge the efficacy of political theater the way one can, for instance, count votes. But at the same time, the two shouldn’t be divorced. One shouldn’t drop out of the system then complain as it spirals out of control.
Also, I’m not altogether sure we had the best sort of sexual revolution we could have had. What would it have been like, and where would we be now, if it hadn’t been connected to, say, the drug culture?
Tony, maybe I’m more cynical than you, but I don’t think the White House listened to a damn word it didn’t want to. (Largely because it didn’t have to.) Sadly, I don’t think this text misadventure too far from the truth.
Bill and John, I see your point, and I do recognize the broadness of my brush, but I think the former SDS entails the excesses of the latter. Ideologically speaking, the old New Left ain’t all that different from the new New Left. The focus, certainly, had changed, but the general principles hadn’t.
Rich, as you well know, I don’t paint myself some kind of pundit, but when politics collides with literature the way it did with the New Left, they’re treading enough on my turf for my “expertise” to come into play. Maybe.
LB, I wouldn’t quite call MLK a member of the New Left. His late anti-Vietnam stance and the SDS’s early focus on civil rights aside, I don’t see much common ground. (Then again, maybe that’s a lot to leave aside.)
The problem with the New Left in its later stages was not so much that it indulged in symbolic politics. As Luther points out, the civil rights movement by necessity also used symbolic politics, since it was shut out of the political process.
The real problem was the assumption, rife among large parts of the New Left in its twilight years (but not shared by Martin Luther King, Jr., or by the SDS itself in its later phases), that symbolic politics should be an end in itself. I.e., since the “system” is entirely bad, the aim is not to change peoples’ minds through symbolic action demanding specific reforms. Rather, the goal is to enact utopian social relations immediately, in the present, within one’s own insular political or social group.
Oops - substitute “early” for “later” in that parenthesis in the second paragraph.
Scott, I’d just like you to suggest what people should have done 1967-1972. In 1968 the problem was that the Democratic President in office, the Democratic Presidential candidate and the vast majority of Democratic officeholders of any kind still supported the Vietnam War, even though opposition to the war among the electorate was pretty significant. In 1968 plenty of people did work within the system (McCarthy campaign), but that failed and was always a very long shot. Robert Kennedy might have defeated Humphrey, but he was killed and his stance on the war was uncertain.
It’s a very long stretch to deduce the Weathermen and Yippies from the Port Huron statement. You have to make quite an absolute rejection of all non-electoral politics to get that. (I heard Tom Hayden speak in about 1965. He was working in Newark to get a traffic light put in in a poor neighborhood. The hippies in the audience tried to make a joke of it, and he just hated them.
I don’t like puppets and unicycles and jugglers at rallies either, and I’m assuming that that’s what what you’re really talking about. Your sketch of SDS is far off the mark, though, above all because you seem to misunderstand the deaperation of anti-war politics when almost no mainstream figure was willing to speak up.
Much of what you say is true from a liberal hawk point of view, but I don’t think of you as a liberal hawk. What really destroyed that movement was a futile attempt to take on the foreign-affairs / military elite, and while cultural weirdness contributed to the failure, I don’t think that it was the cause.
> Tony, maybe I’m more cynical than you, but I don’t think the White House
> listened to a damn word it didn’t want to. (Largely because it didn’t
> have to.) Sadly, I don’t think <a
> href="http://www.defectiveyeti.com/archives/001561.html">this text
> misadventure</a> too far from the truth.
Cynicism has nothing to do with it.
Even totalitarian governments are constrained in many ways by the mood and actions of the public - symbolic and otherwise. Bad as things are it’s easy to imagine (and in some cases know because it’s on record) how very much worse things could be/could have been if not for public opposition, very much of which has roots in the ever growing popular movements of the time period to which you refer and may be seen in “symbolic politics” which you scorn.
Sorry - Luther hit the nail on the head, directly and by analogy.
In my lifetime, anti-war activity has sometimes had the effect of tweaking or moderating American military action, but I doubt that it’s prevented anything, or shortened anything much. From the big escalation (1965) the Vietnam war lasted almost 8 years, which is longer than any previous American war.
John, I don’t know what I would’ve done when disenfranchised, but I’m generally of the “change the system from within” mindset, so I assume that’s what I would’ve encouraged others to do. I keep on wanting to mention Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, because in it you can see the naked machinery of popular politics, and you can see that it was ripe for coopting...only there wasn’t anyone there to coopt them. Abandoning traditional politics had disastrous consequences. We’re living with them. And while I’m being bashed elsewhere for suggesting that the far Right’s ideological coup of the Republican party is something the New Left could have learned from, I still think that the decision to leave the realm of electoral politics brought us, well, here. (And no, I’m not a liberal hawk.)
Tony, I see your point, but it’s nearly impossible to quantify. Take your first statement about the War in Afghanistan: Sure, it could’ve been a lot worse, but do you really believe the current administration felt constrained by popular opinion? I don’t see much evidence that it listens to anyone outside a small Neo-Con cabal. I wouldn’t mind being wrong, mind you. I would love to think that such symbolic politics are as effective as their electoral counterparts, but I don’t see it.
("Robots for Nixon! People for McGovern! Robots for Nixon! People for McGovern!")
> In my lifetime, anti-war activity has sometimes had the effect of tweaking
> or moderating American military action, but I doubt that it’s prevented
> anything, or shortened anything much. From the big escalation (1965) the
> Vietnam war lasted almost 8 years, which is longer than any previous
> American war.
Vietnam could have been nuked off the map. It wasn’t. Venezuela could be under foreign occupation right now. It’s not. Sometimes anti-war activity stiffens the backbone of the larger public, sometimes the larger public helps make more effective anti-war activity. These actions and interactions can have huge repercussions that are hard to trace and attribute. Think of the abolition movement of the 1800s. Often only later is it possible to see starkly the effect and change.
> Tony, I see your point, but it’s nearly impossible to quantify. Take your
> first statement about the War in Afghanistan: Sure, it could’ve been a lot
> worse, but do you really believe the current administration felt
> constrained by popular opinion? I don’t see much evidence that it
> listens to anyone outside a small Neo-Con cabal. I wouldn’t mind being
> wrong, mind you. I would love to think that such symbolic politics are as
> effective as their electoral counterparts, but I don’t see it.
A lot of vital things that occur in life are difficult or impossible to quantify. We’re not talking physics here.
Nevertheless, I picked the Afghanistan example because apparently it has been roughly quantified and accounted for. I don’t have the particular article I came across - I think I read it at ZNet - but it pointed out that the U.S. military via the U.S. government was forced to greatly alter/reduce its initial bombing plans due to the domestic and international outcry over the sure calamity. This outcry was generated in large part by non-governmental organizations, nationally and internationally - organizations oftentimes created and later staffed and supported (financially and otherwise ) by the sort of committed activists and activities ("symbolic" included) that you deride.
Of course, just because something is not “as effective” as something else does not mean it should be pitched out, for obvious reasons - not least because much vital change (maybe most) is brought about in one way or another from the margins, change that institutional insiders have to be forced into.
Well, I don’t think anyone needs to take a general position on “symbolic politics.” Like any other tool, they can be helpful to a political cause or not (and sometimes actually harmful). Likewise, various groups can use them effectively or not.
The Civil Rights Movement was an example of very effective symbolic politics. It captured the nation’s sympathy with its dignity, seriousness, and principled cry for justice.
The various groups in the anti-war movement were less successful at using symbolic politics. Although they managed to produce large crowds of people, their public reception was not so sympathetic. For too many people, they became associated with the lawlessness and cultural anarchy they believed was erupting all around them. The hippies and freaks were perceived as too weird and dangerous by the great mass of squares that determined political consensus. Some historians believe that the anti-war movement may have actually prolonged, rather than shortened the Vietnam War.
Today, street theatre seems largely played out. It is not taken seriously and is quickly dismissed by many as the predictable response of professional protestors and the assorted performance artists and hobby-horse riders, with their stew of pet causes that are often little connected to the actual issue being protested.
I agree with Scott. This is not a time that will be receptive to more of the same symoblic politics and street theatre. At this time, the left side of the aisle needs to show that it can influence public opionion, gain power, and govern through the more mundane political processes.
"It seems to me that if you locate “actual” and effective politics solely in the machinations of the State, then your definition precludes many forms and possibilities of social change—sexual liberation being the most obvious in my mind, a legacy of Sixties leftism (and counterculture) that I don’t think can be so quickly discounted.”
I think av’s objections to Scott’s post are well-taken, but he trips himself up with this closing passage. In fact, the concept of “sexual liberation” fits Scott’s model of supposedly oppositional cultural practices being co-opted by the right-capitalist system better than anything else. And on the interpersonal level, it seems we’ve gotten more transitory physical pleasure along with a much greater amount of emotional pain. (Sorry, I was going to e-mail av about this off-list but it doesn’t seem that he’s left genuine contact info.)
Nevertheless, I picked the Afghanistan example because apparently it has been roughly quantified and accounted for. I don’t have the particular article I came across - I think I read it at ZNet - but it pointed out that the U.S. military via the U.S. government was forced to greatly alter/reduce its initial bombing plans due to the domestic and international outcry over the sure calamity. This outcry was generated in large part by non-governmental organizations, nationally and internationally - organizations oftentimes created and later staffed and supported (financially and otherwise ) by the sort of committed activists and activities ("symbolic" included) that you deride.
If what you say is correct, this strikes me more as mundane politics than the symbolic variety. From what you describe, it sounds like the NGOs were attempting to influence public and worldwide opinion by describing unnecessary civilian suffering, and in turn hoping that foriegn allies and the U.S. public would pressure the government to take an approach that would be less harmful to the civilians and that the U.S. government would perceive its own interests as being served by being more respectful for the plight of Afghani civilians. I don’t think this is particularly “symbolic.”
Chomsky believes that the US attained its goals in Vietnam—not controlling Vietnam itself, but letting the rest of the world know what we’re willing and able to do. The negative international repurcussions of nuking Vietnam would have been too much.
That may have been true about Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the US seems to be committed to a policy of almost unrestrained aggression for at least as long as the Republicans stay in office.
I basically agree with Scott about contemporary street theatre and 60’s nostalgia politics. I think that his perception of the 60’s is inaccurate, and I think that he underestimates the difficulty of resisting the foreign-relations / military revolving door elite. People who worked within the system (Humphrey, McGovern and Carter especially, perhaps even Clinton) were trashed too if they displeased the inside players.
stephan: “As Luther points out, the civil rights movement by necessity also used symbolic politics”
Luther is wrong in this case, and stephan is also. The sphere of politics is not neatly divided into the two alternatives “symbolic” and “electoral”. The Civil Rights movement required large amounts of community organizing. In no sense was it symbolic in the sense that I think that Scott means. Just to take one initial example, when Rosa Parks didn’t move out of her seat on the bus, that wasn’t “symbolic politics”—it was the trigger for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which took immense amounts of work and solidarity. What most people seem to stigmatize as symbolic politics is the attempt to have a propaganda incident without the organized followup that will turn it into something more than a media blip.
For the larger question of whether literary studies helps one understand politics, why should it? You understand politics by doing it, or possibly through well-informed political theory. Literary studies people have no time or (in most cases) real interest to do politics of any sort, and the idea of literary theory being applied to politics produces results that are in my opinion, and in the communal opinion of the organizing tradition from within which I’ve worked, worthless.
You’ve misunderstood my point, Rich. Luther was (I think) conflating the symbolic politics of the later New Left (i.e., levitating the Pentagon) with that of the civil rights movement. I was pointing out the need to draw a distinction between symbolic actions that try to rhetorically appeal to a broader audience and effect pragmatic changes, and symbolic actions that magically call into being a new society or some other apocalyptic nonsense. Obviously, the civil rights movement used a combination of pragmatic symbolic protests and procedural methods (i.e., the NAACP’s legal challenges to segregation laws). I don’t think you and I are in fundamental disagreement about this.
Regarding “working within the system”, the civil rights movement was sort of a limit case. People excluded from normal electoral politics worked outside the system in order to get in, and broke laws in order to become real citizens.
By and large, mainstream Democrats and liberals did NOT support the civil rights movement in its early years. “Working within the system” would have meant gradualist efforts of incremental changes. “They’re going too fast” was the recieved opinion, and only at the very end was MLK respectable.
For better or worse, those who worked in the civil rights movement (I especially mean the whites, who were more or less expelled around 1965 and told to find other things to do; essentially the paradox of a paternalistic white-led movement liberating blacks became unresolvable) became disillusioned with mainstream politics. It wasn’t because SDS corrupted them that they became so.
Levitating the Pentagon was a joke. I can’t remember whether it was a joke pure and simple or whether it was an action of a ridiculous fringe group, but it wasn’t characteristic of anything.
> stephan: “As Luther points out, the civil rights movement by necessity also
> used symbolic politics”
>
> Luther is wrong in this case, and stephan is also. The sphere of politics
> is not neatly divided into the two alternatives “symbolic” and
> “electoral”. The Civil Rights movement required large amounts of
> community organizing. In no sense was it symbolic in the sense that I think
> that Scott means. Just to take one initial example, when Rosa Parks didn’t
> move out of her seat on the bus, that wasn’t “symbolic politics”—it
> was the trigger for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which took immense amounts
> of work and solidarity.
Rosa Parks had an actual effect and a huge symbolic effect that inspires to this day. The measure of her symbolic effect is far from zero. Nor does every symbolic effect need to have an initial actual effect to contribute to change.
> What most people seem to stigmatize as symbolic
> politics is the attempt to have a propaganda incident without the organized
> followup that will turn it into something more than a media blip.
>
> For the larger question of whether literary studies helps one understand
> politics, why should it?
Why should it not?
> You understand politics by doing it, or possibly
Much literature is itself strongly political. And could be far moreso in the academy. You don’t need to go to Haiti to be moved by literature to get involved on behalf of Haitian people, etc. You don’t need to go to a picket line to get involved on behalf of labor issues. Not that it would hurt. But sometimes reading and studying a book for a class is what gets a person involved. I know a number of people who have been inspired in part by books read and studied as literature who have gotten active and involved due to such reading, analysis, reflection. This is far from uncommon. And this is the tip of the iceberg - think of the study of overtly political theater and film, and their productions.... There could be a lot more of it, but it’s there, and has effect. And there are a number of studies that document some of these very real effects…
> through well-informed political theory. Literary studies people have no
> time or (in most cases) real interest to do politics of any sort, and the
I also know plenty of people who give the lie to this statement. It’s just false.
> idea of literary theory being applied to politics produces results that are
> in my opinion, and in the communal opinion of the organizing tradition from
> within which I’ve worked, worthless.
I think what is called literary theory is largely disconnected from social change myself - but “lit theory” is far from the end all be all of literary study - in fact, it scarcely touches the community colleges where, I believe, about half of current college students attend, let alone, secondary schools and four year colleges.
It was one of Abbie Hoffman’s media stunts, right? In which case, it was a joke, but in the service of a dada-anarchist ideology that viewed such stunts as the very stuff of political activism.
Rich writes, “The sphere of politics is not neatly divided into the two alternatives “symbolic” and “electoral”.”
That’s exactly my point. Scott wrote that he’s of the “change the system from within” group. If by “the System” Scott means the government, then that leaves all political work outside The System in the realm of what Scott seems to be criticizing as “symbolic politics.” I think symbolic politics is totally essential, as long as they are in the service of specific policy changes and not just of a lifestyle.
And Rich, if community organizing equals non-symbolic politics, then a good deal of the anti-war and Black Power and gay rights and feminist movements wouldn’t be symbolic. I’ve met a lot of black folks who had steady meals due to Black Power community initiatives.
I’m not trying to defend the New Left. But too much of the anti-New-Left critique sounds like a bunch of straight white men complaining that *their* agenda lost because of the New Left, when the true forces that defeated the Old Left include (a) the association of American class politics with Stalinists and Communism; (b) the “defeat” of Communism; (c) the demonization of the black and urban poor; (d) the use of abortion, and now gay rights, to split the blue collar vote. The Right has grown in power precisely by alienating the cities (both symbolically and actually), by pitting white against black, by pitting Christians against gays and abortion. Point of fact: if the Democrats had opposed abortion in 04, the Republicans would have lost hard.
And the reaction by a lot of anti-New-Left guys is to blame blacks, women, and gays—by blaming the New Left.
> Chomsky believes that the US attained its goals in Vietnam—not
> controlling Vietnam itself, but letting the rest of the world know what
> we’re willing and able to do. The negative international repurcussions of
> nuking Vietnam would have been too much.
That’s correct (and the U.S. achieved more besides). That’s part of my point. The thing is, “the negative international repercussions” and the negative domestice repercussions might well not have been much to worry the US if activists everywhere were not active on peace and justice issues.
For example, simply regarding conventional bombing, it’s known that US bombing was limited - it’s on record - because the FBI reported that if the US intensified the war it could not guarantee domestic security. It appeared there would have been too much public outrage and upheaval. That’s fact, easily looked up. Vietnam was horrific. The record shows that without domestic public outrage and awareness - and who was raising awareness? - it would have been even much worse.
> That may have been true about Afghanistan.
It apparently was true about Afghanistan, as I’ve explained it. Pressure came from a lot of sources at the time. And the capacity to apply that pressure had been building for decades. People who raised awareness and acted, symbolically or otherwise, have and continue to contribute to this in significant ways.
Sorry for the misunderstanding, stephan. But I do think that there is still some disagreement, as you write: “I was pointing out the need to draw a distinction between symbolic actions that try to rhetorically appeal to a broader audience and effect pragmatic changes, and symbolic actions that magically call into being a new society or some other apocalyptic nonsense.” I don’t think that there is such a thing as a symbolic action that tries to effect a pragmatic change (or rather, perhaps people try, but they will never succeed). There are symbolic actions that are organizing triggers, but the actual work of effecting the pragmatic change is done later. The kind of media shorthand and celebrity creation that symbolizes Rosa Parks as the motive factor rather than the Montgomery Bus Boycott is a prime reason why current protest politics often seems so ineffectual—people have the idea that a gesture can possibly lead to a result without any idea of what kind of followup needs to happen.
> Nevertheless, I picked the Afghanistan example because apparently it has
> been roughly quantified and accounted for. I don’t have the particular
> article I came across - I think I read it at ZNet - but it pointed out that
> the U.S. military via the U.S. government was forced to greatly alter/reduce
> its initial bombing plans due to the domestic and international outcry over
> the sure calamity. This outcry was generated in large part by
> non-governmental organizations, nationally and internationally -
> organizations oftentimes created and later staffed and supported
> (financially and otherwise ) by the sort of committed activists and
> activities ("symbolic" included) that you deride.
>
> If what you say is correct, this strikes me more as mundane politics than
> the symbolic variety. From what you describe, it sounds like the NGOs were
> attempting to influence public and worldwide opinion by describing
> unnecessary civilian suffering, and in turn hoping that foriegn allies and
> the U.S. public would pressure the government to take an approach that would
> be less harmful to the civilians and that the U.S. government would perceive
> its own interests as being served by being more respectful for the plight of
> Afghani civilians. I don’t think this is particularly “symbolic.”
What I said is that symbolic activities often help gain support for these NGOs and other institutions that are in more direct position to leverage power.... How do symbolic activities achieve this? By raising awareness, largely. That’s not a symbolic effect either but as has been pointed out, symbolic isn’t quite the right term. Sometimes “symbolic” activities are used to raise funds or happen to serve to train leaders and organizers who go on to found and staff NGOs, etc. And this has been going on for decades. Take another look at what I wrote.
I should’ve framed this discussion differently, I suppose, but it is what it is now. I’ll start by defining “symbolic politics” as “New Left stunts which occupied intelligence, time and energy that would’ve been better spent on creating working coalitions between politically diverse peoples of the sort which led to the Civil Rights movement.” I’ll define it like that because this conversation took a turn to the absurd as soon as MLK and Malcolm X entered into the equation. As I wrote elsewhere:
The Civil Rights movement was a concerted political action, not political theater. It wasn’t symbolic in the sense that the New Left stunts were so much as acts of civil disobedience. Big difference. But your mention of Malcolm X is fortuituous, since the veiled threat he presented is partly responsible for MLK’s success: MLK could point to X and say “That’s your alternative."
I’m not sure how the New Left’s variety of “political theater” was yoked into concert with the Civil Rights movement, but it shouldn’t be. Obviously, the Civil Rights movement benefited greatly from the staged protests...but those protests were often intended to shift the burden of law from the legislatures to the judiciary. The same cannot be said about the “symbolic politics” of the New Left which were designed to, well, I suppose amuse themselves, their friends, and annoy “the Average American” into...being annoyed.
LB, I’m not sure why you would associate community organizing as “symbolic politics” in the first place, since I think that’s pretty clearly the kind of “working coalition” I was discussing above. Maybe that last nod to those who proudly didn’t vote in the last Canadian election made it seem like I had set up a binary between voting and everything else, but that certainly wasn’t my original intent.
The sphere of politics is not neatly divided into the two alternatives “symbolic” and “electoral”. The Civil Rights movement required large amounts of community organizing. In no sense was it symbolic in the sense that I think that Scott means.
I think that gets right to the heart of the problem with the post - Scott doesn’t explain what “symbolic” protest is, except to contrast it to “viable” and “efficacious.” So any arguments about activity by the New Left, or similar activity by other political movements, which did have political effect can just be discounted with the claim, “that wasn’t symbolic in the sense I meant.” Scott’s criticism here has no content.
"Maybe that last nod to those who proudly didn’t vote in the last Canadian election made it seem like I had set up a binary between voting and everything else.”
That’s how it sounded to me.
Point taken, Tim. I didn’t explicitly define it. I thought the not-quite-implicit comparison of “street theater” to “coalition-building in a participatory democracy” would’ve pointed people in the direction I intended, but obviously I was mistaken.
Tim, that sounded snarky. I didn’t mean it to be. I honestly think this discussion would have been far more productive had I been clear about the distinction as I saw it.
Jon, I only included that as an afterthought, a way to point to the kind of “strategic withdrawal” from conventional politics responsible for the political emasculation of the Left in US.
I share Luther’s disinclination to blame anything on the New Left, though probably for different reasons. Whenever you make current politics about The Sixties, you buy into a right-wing frame. It’s history that’s too distant to be immediately applicable yet too close to be divorced from polemical use.
Luther writes: “Scott wrote that he’s of the “change the system from within” group. If by “the System” Scott means the government, then that leaves all political work outside The System in the realm of what Scott seems to be criticizing as “symbolic politics.””
I don’t think that such a binary is implied by what Scott wrote. Take Superfund, for an example that I’m familiar with. A quintessentially within-the-system government program, involving billions of dollars, right? (And let’s not start an argument about how bad Superfund is; there’s a huge body of right-wing propaganda devoted to slagging it that I’d have to get through. Suffice it to say that not many government programs actually have “polluter pays” written into them.) But Superfund would not have come into existence without a non-electoral local community organizing effort that people might mistake for a series of symbolic actions. So were the people responsible working within the system, or outside the system?
Try to make a snap decision on that, then add to your mental classification scheme the fact that just before the community organizers won, people in the group broke out guns and took two EPA staffers hostage. (They got away with it. A story in itself.) Then they went to some degree into policy wonkery, successfully assisting in exporting their local victory nationwide.
I think that in the end, this intervention was within The System, though as indicated above it took some strange avenues to get there. What matters are the goals and the result. A lot of what people seem to criticize when they criticize people for trying to be outside the system is apocalypticism, which is a general feature of a lot of the supposedly political literary theory that is out there.
Rich, I think that right-wing frame caveat only applies to moral judgments drawn about the New Left. Sure, you have the Reagan-era critique of ‘60s culture, and sure, that’s associated with the New Left, but that’s an argument about “the moral fabric of the country” or what-not. My argument, not to mention my assignment of blame squarely on the New Left, is purely tactical. I could drain the New Left of its New Leftiness and make the same strategic critique.
I really think your reading even of the late New Left (67-73 or so) is off. Using levitating the Pentagon as part of your case is really ill-intended and silly. That was deliberate media fluff and was part of an initially-successful but ultimately disastrous attempt to “play” the media. The predominant New Left actions were a.) normal politics and petitioning, b.) enormous, peaceful, dignified demonstrations modelled on the Civil Rights movement, c.) disruptive demonstrations, as at Chicago 68 and Kent State, and d.) various sorts of civil disobedience and sabotage.
What provoked hatred was c.) and d.), not the street theatre.
Uneasiness about and opposition to the Vietnam War were very widespread during the war, but probably never a majority and absolutely not an effective majority. I think thatit would have taken some kind of public-opinion supermajority to actually end the war any quicker than it did.
A small point about ‘68, John. McCarthy was a viable anti-war candidate till RFK entered the race. SDS, via Carl Oglesby, encouraged people not to vote or work for him on the ground that they would be coopted by the system. And, while it’s true that Humphrey wasn’t calling for withdrawal, he surely would have been preferable to Nixon, who won a narrow victory (and who not only carried on the war for another 6 years, but bequeathed us a number of the creeps still running the Republican party). I’m sure everyboy would agree, though, that there were no good options at the time. I took Scott’s objection to be to the institutionalization of some of the attitudes that resulted. The fact that one of the places they were institutionalized arguably has been literary academia is the only reason the discussion’s relevant here, I think. An addendum to Scott’s last point about the Civil Rights movement, a major part of the movement was aimed at securing voting rights. The Voting Rights Act of 65 turned out to be one of the genuinely transformative events in American politics.
[This comment is by Sean McCann, whatever the author tag may say. We are experiencing technical difficulties. - the Management.]
In my perception, what was institutionalized in literary-cultural studies wasn’t the New Left, but the “The political is the personal” brand of sexual and identity politics—which was a reaction against the New Left—together with the more defeatist, antipopular aspects of critical theory (Adorno et. seq.)
Apolitical deadhead type hijinks also survived, and Ann Coulter is a Deadhead, so I’ll grant Scott that. The Kesey / Leary / Garcia type hippies really hated “politicos” and did what they could to make them look ridiculous.
Whenever you make current politics about The Sixties, you buy into a right-wing frame. It’s history that’s too distant to be immediately applicable yet too close to be divorced from polemical use.
The common truism Rich references is undoubtedly correct - the sixties, much like MLK, have been irrevocably polemicized, so just citing them (or invoking the common pejorative) as an authority on the present day is not helpful. But that hardly means one cannot talk, or seek - from a paradigmatic perspective, even - to understand historical context and consequences, and from a wide variety of angles. Surely there are still more and less responsible and more or less precise ways to engage in such decade-speak, to seek to address the significance of the 60s (and what is perhaps more important, the unique political backlash that followed what was a period of relatively unprecedented social upheaval). Maybe “the” failure, if anywhere, resides in “the Left’s” understandably inadequate response to this unprecedented backlash (cf. Christian Parenti’s _Lockdown America_), a backlash in which those in power took “symbolic” politics by the horns, you might say. Hence, you know, some significant features of our post-modern or as some would have it post-political era, or condition. Needless to say, simply renouncing “symbolic politics” (making as if, not unlike “Theory,” this were in any deeply useful or truthful manner a self-evident and self-contained entity and not just a convenient, reductive categorization) -at this stage will hardly do, and as an (allegedly pure) “tactical” approach especially, it simply will not do.
Blaming “political literary theory” is even more absurd, if not reactionary.
(But I say, before Rich takes us down the rather polemical “apocalyptic” road yet again, someone should probably tell McCann’s comment-editor to close the italics tag back there. The thread seems to have gone all wavy from an early comment by McCann on, and as an afterthought.)
Scott, is “emasculation” really the term you intended to employ?
At some visceral level, an effective majority of Americans, including many ex-participants, rejected the Sixties, while at the same time a fair minority continued to live in the Sixties to a degree. I think that that’s one of the reasons why drug laws are so harsh; a big chunk of Americans want the Sixties to be erased.
Scott wrote, “LB, I’m not sure why you would associate community organizing as “symbolic politics” in the first place, since I think that’s pretty clearly the kind of “working coalition” I was discussing above.”
My point was simply that the New Left was a set of coalitions—or, to use Laclau and Mouffe’s term, articulations—of various groups that used a wide array of political tactics, some symbolic, some less so. So a critique couldn’t simply identify the New Left with symbolic action, but would have to take into account the complex inbrication of symbolic and non-symbolic forms of political action across the various articulated groups constituting the New Left.
“New Left” is turning into “Theory”—literally here! Watch reification at work!
Matt: “Blaming “political literary theory” is even more absurd, if not reactionary.”
No one has blamed it for anything, as far as I remember. I wrote that I thought that it was worthless within politics, which is not at all the same thing.
“(But I say, before Rich takes us down the rather polemical “apocalyptic” road yet again [...]”
I never saw an actual reason to disagree with the characterization, just a lot of sneering, like your continued use of the epithet Sean Mc-Doesn’t-Get-It. That’s not an argument. There has been a difference of opinion lasting through, at least, the 20th century, between those who favor revolutionary change and those who favor gradualism. I don’t know of any better way to describe favoring revolutionary change plus pseudo-religious belief than apocalypticism. If you’d like to suggest a better word, feel free.
Jon, I left out the word “blanched,” which makes the nod more obvious. I meant to gently mock the idea that there’s something academically unsavory about critiquing the New Left.
Matt, when I refer to the “New Left,” I refer to people who called themselves such after the break from Howe and the newly minted “Old Left.” And I’m specifically not talking artificial demarcations like “the ‘60s” here for exactly the reasons you specify. That said, while I think we agree (how could we not?) that there’s been a backlash, we differ as to its origins. I locate them, pace this post, in part in the withdrawal of leftists from conventional politics.
LB, point taken. Still, I think there’s a distinction to be drawn (as others have above) between early and late instantiations of the New Left. I’m condemning the later, obviously, because I see in its withdrawal from the very coalitional politics which made its earlier instantiation successful as what opened the doors to our contemporary situation. I probably should’ve stressed their anti-institutional claims more strongly, since opposition to the very idea of institutions (both corporate and political) motivated both their critique of the corruption they saw and their desire to avoid conventional politics.
Oh, and I can turn this debate to Theory more explicitly: the New Left was composed of academics who, after unsuccessful attempts to change the world from an extra-institutional position, took to academia and attempted to alter it from within. Much of the advocacy criticism, not to mention its tone and self-righteousness, came from this particular crowd who, I should add, took “symbolic politics” to another level...but I don’t want to turn the debate in this direction, lest people think that’s where I was nefariously headed all along. (It wasn’t.)
My own opinion at this point is that, while politics outside the system is futile, equal futility can be attained by working within the Democratic Party, so there’s no reason to swithc. Of course, maybe I’m wrong.
Again, Scott—the New Left was mostly not academics, though some were and many went into academia when the New Left collapsed.
John, that’s what I meant to say. I left a “partly” out there. (I’m too cold-medicine-addled to be participating in this discussion...not that it’s stopped me, stupidly.)
Also, I don’t think I’m quite a cynical as you quite yet. I don’t believe in the system, but I do believe through it.
John Emerson: “My own opinion at this point is that, while politics outside the system is futile, equal futility can be attained by working within the Democratic Party, so there’s no reason to swithc. Of course, maybe I’m wrong.”
John, it all depends on how you define futility. When people say that political action (within the system, without, whatever) is futile, they generally seem to be doing some combination of defining succe