Comunicados y Avisos
LUKEZICK, MARTA BEATRIZ Renglón 1.
With regard to this reading, central to my work on Anger is the argument that the American countercultural movements of the Sixties, in their various forms, retained the aspiration for the realisation of ‘authentic’ modes of subjectivity.147
Moreover, that Anger’s aspiration to render a ‘transformative’ aesthetic -‐ one that points the way toward liberation -‐ is a direct, eloquent, and indeed emblematic expression of this wider social conditionality. What is crucial to this reading is the proposal that one of the defining aspects of the intellectual and progressive movements of the Sixties within the US was a utopian ideal to apprehend essentialisms concerning the nature of subjectivity -‐ to follow “the rebellious
imperatives of the self” -‐ to reluctantly borrow a phrase from Norman Mailer.148 It
is this aspect that is central to my work regarding the issue of modernism and postmodernism that runs throughout the Sixties. For Brick, the Sixties embodied a “devotion to the ideal of authenticity -‐ of discovering, voicing, and exercising a genuine, whole personality freed from the grip of mortifying convention.”149
Whilst such progressive movements of the Sixties contained postmodern elements of difference, pluralism, and heterogeneity -‐ in the words of Huyssen, “multiple
147 Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America
(Columbia University Press, 1998), Brick, Age of Contradiction, and DeKoven, Utopia Limited.
148 Norman Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” Dissent Magazine,
June 20, 2007, http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=26. I am particularly hesitant in my quotation of Mailer due to his well-‐documented racism and misogyny, but I believe this quote is particularly illustrative of the particularities of the return to the ‘self’ that I argue somewhat encompassed the climate of the counterculture of sixties America. Mailer’s assertion of the ‘return to the self’ were steeped in narcissism however, which denies the communal aspect of the need for authentic and compassionate relations between self and others; a thematic which is certainly not present in Mailer’s work. However, I believe the quote is extremely evocative of the particular Sixties zeitgeist that I am attempting to elucidate in this work. Numerous works have testified to Mailer’s misogyny and violence, but the first to challenge these aspects within his literary work directly was Kate Millet’s seminal 1970 work Sexual Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
forms of otherness as they emerge from differences in subjectivity, gender and sexuality, race and class, temporal Ungleichzietigkeiten and spatial geographic locations and dislocations”150 -‐ I argue that aspirational elements of the
counterculture (and I am speaking specifically of the movement within America) contained certain modernist drives; that they retained essentialist qualities regarding the drive for the realisation of ‘authentic’ modes of consciousness.
Roszack asserts that “the counterculture is, essentially, an exploration of the politics of consciousness…a means to a greater psychic end, namely, the reformation of the personality.”151 The politics of consciousness is the belief that
the transformation of consciousness was an integral factor in the process of liberation. The question of subjectivity, in particular the bringing forth of an ‘authentic self’, I argue is at the heart of the counterculture of Sixties America. Such a desire is grounded in a perceived existential sense of alienation; that of a perceived estrangement from authenticity; a dislocation of ‘being’. During the Sixties, many progressive movements within the US were at their core propelled by the struggle for, and the desire to actualise, authentic expressions of subjectivity. Qualified by this, however, is the intermingling of modernism and postmodernism within the Sixties; a level of ambiguity regarding the nature of subjectivity -‐ to recall Banes, a distinct “conflict between unity – the desire for authenticity, spontaneity, and the collected expanded consciousness of the community – and difference – the application of heterogeneity, pluralism, and enhanced individuality.”152
150 Huyssen, Mapping the Postmodern, p. 50.
151 Roszack, The Making of a Counter-Culture, p. 156. 152 Banes, Greenwich Village 1963, p. 244.
However, if, as stated, my contention is that the counterculture of Sixties America was concerned with the transformation of the conditional self from a state of alienation to authenticity -‐ and that Anger’s practice is a distinct expression of this wider cultural concern -‐ what was the conditional mode of being that demanded such a process of transformation be actualised? The very question of the politics of consciousness is connected not only with assumptions within the Sixties counterculture regarding the conditional nature of the self, but intimately connected with the socio-‐political processes that constitute the given society. As is obvious, the need (and call) for authentic modes of existence is dependent upon a presumed dislocation and alienation from an idealised form. The countercultural drive for subjective authenticity did not appear from abstracted ideological theorems, but rather, as Dickstein argues, “they were acting out of the logic of their own lives, although it sometimes took the language of ideology to convince them that their discontent mattered. The tremors of the sixties, which shook institutions in so many remote corners of society, were generated from society’s own deep core.”153
As Alice Hutchinson highlights, “Anger’s images are often icons taken from a fatalistic, sick and dying society."154 A central facet of the structure of feeling of the
Sixties is, I argue, a drive within the US counterculture towards liberation from an oppressive material and psychical state of alienation. Joe Austin describes how “many of the fires that blazed in the 1960s were first lit during the 1950s.”155 The
turmoil of the Sixties in the US was founded in many respects upon the rejection of
153 Maurice Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1997), p. 69.
154 Hutchinson, Kenneth Anger, p. 16.
155 Joe Austin, “Rome is Burning (Psychedelic): Traces of the Social and Historical Contexts of
the Fifties socio-‐political climate. It is impossible to understand the distinct nature of the Sixties without addressing its immediate forerunner, in which social and historical forces generated the highly specific, and impossibly unique nature of the subsequent era. Indeed, this was the era in which Anger was a teenager trapped within the suburbs of California, and is the point at which he began to produce his first films. What I wish to offer now is by no means a comprehensive social-‐ historical overview of the period, but rather to provide evidence to support my proposition that the US counterculture of the Sixties was driven by a distinct sense of alienation; one that was concurrent with the call for authentic experience. Subjectivity is not dislocated from the surroundings, but is implicitly tied to the social and material conditions of the era; hence, the progressive drive for civil rights and liberties that ran throughout and, in essence, partly defines the Sixties. My aim is to situate the work in the arena most pertinent to Anger’s practice; namely, the assumed nature of the ‘alienated self’ and its need for authentic modes of being. With this in mind, what was the conditional state from which the counterculture believed it needed to rescue itself?