A couple of weeks ago I did a paper
at EMP, the experience of which was a drag -- tepid reaction and a tiny
audience, which got a bit smaller when Robert Christgau, who walked in
late, walked out again a few minutes later. But he saw enough, I guess,
to style it the worst paper presentation
he saw. Now, I dunno, maybe it really did suck. I have no objectivity
about my own stuff. But the reason Christgau gives for his rough grading gives me something to think about, though not what he
presumably would want me to think about.
His [i.e. my] problem: indicated no knowledge of any
difference in historical importance or political acuity between the
Weathermen (dead wrong but smart and momentous), Timothy Leary (never a
political figure even when he claimed to be), and the Manhattan
pseudo-anarchists who briefly gathered under the rubric Up Against the
Wall, Motherfuckers (marginal publicity seekers without even minimal
follow-through).
I
actually don't disagree with what he's saying about these figures.
Well, most of it. Christgau seems pretty confident in saying what is
and isn't political when the boundary was never clear at the time and
hasn't gotten a whole lot clearer since -- blurring that boundary was,
after all, the point. But the basics seem sound enough: the Weatherman
had more detailed critiques and a more intellectual style, grounded in
canons of Marxist thought, than the others; Leary was either a fraud or
a trickster (maybe both?) who became "political" when it suited him;
and the UATWM talked big but didn't really do much more than throw some trash into the Lincoln Center fountain.
But this doesn't change my argument. Not that Christgau would have
known what that was, since he left long before I was done.* Though to
be charitable, I suspect that Christgau and I are after different
things. On this point, he's a splitter, and I'm a lumper. What
Christgau seems to want is to understand the revolutionary imagination
of each groupuscule separately: if each one proceeded from a
slightly different notion of "revolution," and if each differed in the
effectiveness and authenticity of its political commitment, then it doesn't
make sense to lump them together. On the other hand, I think that you
learn something from tracing the strands of revolutionary thought and
(more to the point) sentiment that bind different groups and different
ideologies -- hard-political and countercultural, in various mixtures
-- into a single (albeit loose) historical entity.
Now, I guess I could say "let's agree to disagree" and leave it at
that, but it seems to me that there's something else going on here that
has less to do with historiography in the abstract and more to do with
personal investment in history. The terms by which Christgau wants to
separate these groups from one another (being "smart and momentous"
versus being "marginal publicity seekers," etc.) show nothing so much
as an unreflective acceptance of the same stale categories by which
veterans of the 1960s have always tried (and usually failed)** to write
a convincing analysis of their fondly-remembered youth. Christgau wants
to say that some radicals were realer than others—but what does it mean
to be real when the ruling notion that underwrites all these
different groups, the idea of sudden, total, and irrevocable
Revolution, is itself a kind of fiction? The assertion that Weatherman
was "momentous" and others were just poseurs hides the familiar
metaphysics of authenticity, or doesn't hide it at all, actually, it's
right there on the surface. But as I've said a couple of times,
we're all at a point where we all know that "authenticity" is just an
ideological mystification and yet lack any way of understanding
ourselves and our music without it.
And Christgau's difficulty in answering Joshua Clover's question after his own paper
was a symptom of that. Christgau had spoken knowingly of the pop-crit
habit of finding transgression in the music we happen to like, but
Clover afterward suggested that Christgau was doing the same sort of
thing, finding a voter instead of a revolutionary at the end of every
song. (Can't quite remember how Clover put it, it was better than
that.) For a while Christgau affected not to understand what Clover was
talking about, but after an uncomfortable silence he offered that what
he really meant was that he "misses the monoculture." Now, that's a
whole separate issue that I won't get into, except to say that I sure
don't miss it, and when I hear Christgau saying he does, I'm guessing
that part of what he misses is the power that comes of being its
arbiter.
But what the exchange showed is that while Christgau reviews a
million new records each year—he keeps busy, say that for him—the basic
shape of his thought, the way he views things, hasn't changed much
since the 1970s. And it's a way of thinking that, for all the bourgeois
meliorism it's picked up in the years since, still sentimentalizes the
"ideals of the sixties," as they're always called, honoring the
knucklehead Maoist-Debrayist adventurism of Weatherman as a real
pushback against a real oppressor and defending the purity of their
revolt against usurpers -- much the way rock critics of the old
monoculture days, back when rock was hegemon, would praise some bands
as unco-opted agents of cultural resistance and damn others as sellouts
to the Man, or (for those who picked up a little
Adorno), the "culture industry."
The problem with presenting conference papers is that, in order to
stay within the 20-minute time limit, you can talk about what you think
about, say, Weatherman and Timothy Leary, but you can't really say much
about why you think that way. The warrant of my interpretations is a notion that the various manifestations of political protest in the
late 1960s/early 1970s share a certain sensibility that grows from a belief in a cultural hegemony that must be resisted by aesthetic creation, either of art or the self. (This goes even for the most political types, like Weatherman, which veered towards a cultural-hegemony critique shortly after going underground.) But from my point of view, there's no oppressive cultural dominant, no
"Man," just a shared belief in there being one, and a range of
aesthetic self-stylings available to those who do believe. And this warrant is
necessarily going to remain in the background for a 20-minute paper, but it was still
obvious from the tenor of the talk, which I think explains Christgau's
indignation. You can't expect someone like that to enjoy a point of
view from which there are no distinctions of authentic and co-opted,
radical and poseur -- a point of view from which the distinctions
between Weatherman and UATWM and Timothy Leary pale beside their shared
investment in a fantasy. (Or, in rather more diplomatic cultural-studies terms, a "political imaginary.")
But people like Christgau won't go away any time soon, and they always have one advantage: I was there, and you weren't.
Of course, one could as easily reply that the people who were there are
the worst authorities for their own experience, because the issues of
the 1960s refuse to die***, and those with an investment in those
times, something from the past they have to defend in the present, are
not going to proceed in the spirit of disinterested inquiry. But we've
been having this historiographic argument for a long time, and we'll
keep having it until the boomers are gone. And maybe even
still after that. Now this is why I want to write about this kind of
stuff: it's fascinating in itself, and it's so obviously relevant to
things that matter now. And yet for young American scholars, writing
about the 1960s is always going to be a minefield, for the same reason
that French scholars are always going to have problems dealing with
their own signal moment of modernity, the French Revolution.
(Revolutions, again.) Francois Furet, a revisionist French historian
whose work on the French Revolution stirred up the same sorts of
passions as revisionist work on the 1960s does now, wrote about this
phenomenon:
Historians engaged in the study of the
Merovingian Kings or the Hundred Years War are not asked at every turn
to present their research permits. . . .
The historian of the
French Revolution, on the other hand, must produce more than proof of
competence. He must show his colors. He must state from the outset
where he comes from, what he thinks and what he is looking for; what he
writes about the French Revolution is assigned a meaning and label even
before he starts working: the writing is taken as his opinion, a form
of judgment that is not required when dealing with the Merovingians but
indispensable when it comes to treating 1789 or 1793. As soon as the
historian states that opinion, the matter is settled; he is labeled a
royalist, a liberal or a Jacobin. Once he has given the password his
history has a specific meaning, a determined place and a claim to
legitimacy.” (François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster, p. 1)
Those
scholars my age or younger who find themselves working on America in the first three decades after WW II: get ready. Have your research permit handy. You will be asked for it. In many ways nothing has changed in the 12 years since Rick Perlstein wrote his Lingua Franca essay Who Owns the Sixties?,
which dealt with the "possessive memory" of sixties veterans and the
resulting turf wars between Gitlin's generation of scholars and younger
writers like David Farber and Doug Rossinow. The excellent 2002
Routledge essay anthology Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s includes a weary note in the acknowledgments section:
The
gestation of this project witnessed a whole set of obstacles,
setbacks, and quirky or menacing characters that would not have been
out of place in your average sixties flashback. Over the past four
years we were confronted by faux Hopi curses; the "possessive memory"
of certain veterans of the era who took umbrage at anyone outside their
ranks writing "their" history; photographers who sold us vintage photos
for the volume, but insisted we meet them at 11 p.m. in Washington
Square Park and bring cash; and peer-reviewers who treated us like a
neo-Stalinist cell that had fatally deviated from the party line. (p. v)
I've
had to deal with a certain amount of that, and so have other friends of
mine -- especially the "possessive memory" part. (Not as much the Hopi
curses.) Eric Drott (one of the most brilliant scholars working on the
postwar avant-garde) ran the 1968 evening panel at the AMS national
meeting in Los Angeles a couple of years ago and encountered a number
of people pulling the old what-the-hell-do-you-know-sonny routine as
well. It can't be helped; it can only be borne. But we're not going away either.****
*And with the ostentatious rudeness of someone who sticks around at
a concert until the Boulez and then leaves moments after the piece
starts: the thing had an air of Making A Point, that Some Things Are
Not To Be Tolerated.
**All exceptions duly noted, of course -- for ex., they don't come more archetypally 1960s-veteranish than Todd Gitlin, whose Years of Hope, Days of Rage is, for all its unavoidable biases, an astonishing, wonderful book.
***As we've seen again and again in the present Obama-Clinton
campaign -- the Weatherman even put in an appearance! -- with Clinton
doggedly dragging us back into the cultural-war issues that got seeded
in the 1960s and 1970s and Obama trying to get past them. There is,
with Clinton and her supporters, the same habit of thinking of
everybody in terms of demography, as if the only thing that matters is
that she would be a woman president, or as if the choice between her
and Obama is really only a choice between a woman and a black guy.
Obama's not free of this kind of thinking either, and as Carl Wilson
has pointed out,
it's an ideological inheritance that no-one, left or right, seems able
to shake. The relevance to this particular blog post is probably pretty
obvious: I don't think that the social position of various actors in
the 1960s radical left determines their cultural position, but it's
hard for people to imagine there's any other way to see it.
****Of course, if I live long enough, there's a special hell waiting for
me in like 2050: some young jerk is going to come up with boldly revisionist reading
of the current decade, and I will find myself asking "how can someone
who wasn't even born then talk about the Bush years?"