the hippie problem

[mtribe@contrib.de (Mark Tribe)]

An open response to Matthew Fuller's recent message about hippie politics,
which I found both intelligent and interesting:

It seems to me that you are correct in arguing that direct action is
ineffective against emergent distributions of power, economic institutions,
political structures and forms of labor, that it tends to be reactive (and
thus easily manipulated), and that it leaves little room for critical
thought about what's going on and what appropriate responses might be. I'm
actually reminded of an article I read in today's International Herald
Tribune about Joan Baez, the prototype of reactive hippie politics. She was
talking about the French lefties who were criticizing her for selling out
because she's no longer politically active. What about Hanoi? they asked.
(She went to Hanoi for 13 days back in the early Seventies, I think). She
said the French lefties were stuck in the Sixties, that she was through
reacting to every issue. For example, she decided not to boycott France and
tour there anyway because she didn't really understand the nuclear testing
issue.

Now I don't want to hold up Joan Baez as some kind of example for sound
politics in the Nineties. A better way to make a decision on France would
be to get informed. And her current cautiousness is grounded in a kind of
touchy-feely self-realization fuzziness that bugs me. But at the same time
I would hesitate to rail against her humanism or her hippie aesthetics.

The things in your argument that I find most interesting and problematic
are your critique of "moralistic humanism" ("the healthy, feeling,
expressive, totally sound human construct whose
authenticity is the ultimate in portable micro-fascisms") and your derision
of hippie style (What's the point of Doing It Yourself if your self is a
tie-died, long-haired morass of half-remembered clichés about consumerism
and the environment?).

Now I understand the arguments against humanism, both the party-line
critique of mid-century Neo-Marxists and contemporary deconstructions of
the notion of an embodied coherent subject, etc. But I wonder if there
aren't ways to think about the discourses of humanism, fucked-up as they
are, that aren't themselves so reactive, ways that don't demonize humanist
thought in terms of fascism and thus accord it a centrality that it is
quickly losing anyway.

By way of comparison:

In the Eighties, contemporary art focused much of its attention on the
discourses of Modern art. Artists from Sigmar Polke to Sherrie Levine
engaged themselves in a useful and necessary critique of Modernism. A host
of micro-movements from Neo-Expressionism to Neo-Geo rehearsed the tropes
of the New York School, Minimalism, etc. in order to destabilize their
claim on history. These days there aren't any readily definable art
movements, but the dynamic seems, generally speaking, no longer to be
focused on the past as Oedipal father. I would characterize the current
mess of contemporary art as tentatively, playfully productive.

Art is just an insignificant but perhaps representative fraction of larger
discourses. The critical discourses of post-modernism, of which
post-humanism is a subset, are both productive and symptomatic of
historical shifts that are well underway.  At the risk of sounding
teleological, there comes a point at which it is no longer useful to define
one's self in relation to dying forms. Modernism continues to rear it's
lovely head in the face of contemporary art, but nowadays I'm inclined to
just let Cy Twombly do his Abstract Expressionist thing and get on with it.
It seems to me that hippie politics is kind of like modernist art: it
refuses to die, wastes a lot of energy and garners a disproportionate
amount of the resources. But it's a shame when those of us who are more
interested in something else add to the excess of attention paid to the
dying horse.

As far as hippie aesthetics go, I would be the last to claim that
aesthetics and style are insignificant. But I wonder if a bunch of
protesters running around in old-fashioned clothes are really such a
problem. The other day I went to a KPDRZ (something like: Kreuzberg
Democratic Realistic Centrist Party) rally. A series of punk bands playing
Sex Pistols covers were followed by the party's candidate, who dropped his
pants and farted the German National Anthem into a strategically-lowered
microphone. I never thought I'd find the German National Anthem funny. But
it occurred to me that Kreutzberg's mohawked punks were the Hippies of the
Nineties: throwbacks to a cool moment in recent history that is
functionally dead but lives on as nostalgia. Nostalgia isn't good politics:
it's an ideological opiate. Like its hippie uncle, Kreuzberg punk politics
is a serious joke (I think Kreutzberg is the only district in Germany in
which the Green party regularly wins a majority).

My bottom line on this is that, as a bemused outsider, I find hippie
politics and aesthetics as interesting as they are problematic, and think
that an engaged critique of these movements would be more useful than a
dismissive one. As an ex-Californian, I am not saying "get over it," but
rather "get into it." Like, figure out what's going on inside those
long-haired heads you find so distasteful and dangerous, so that perhaps
their energy (certainly there's no shortage there) might be strategically
mobilized.

The questions your message raises about how best to deal with problematic
modes of "resistance" are especially germane, given the fact that the Net
will replicate the lame old forms just as surely as it provides
opportunities to produce newer ones.

Mark