Periodizing Postmodernsim

Timothy Gray

English Department
College of Staten Island, CUNY
gray@postbox.csi.cuny.edu

 

Patricia Juliana Smith, ed. The Queer Sixties. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Stephen Miller. The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance.Durham: Duke UP, 1999.

 

When Fredric Jameson tried his hand at periodizing the sixties some years ago, he was engaging in an exercise millions of Americans have undertaken, in their minds if not on paper. “When did the sixties start?” “When did they end?” Whether one answers “Port Huron and the JFK assassination” to the first question, or “Altamont, Kent State, and the release of Led Zeppelin II” to the second, one will no doubt find oneself coming to terms with the strange dialectics that develop when we halt continuity every ten years or so to take a look at our postmodern condition. Even so, many would agree that during the sixties and seventies we had fundamentally different notions of what it meant to be postmodern. Two recent books, taken in tandem, help us rethink the early days of postmodernity, especially since they work against the prevailing zeitgeist of their respective decades. The Queer Sixties takes a decade remembered primarily for its political imbroglios and concentrates on a sexual revolution percolating at its edges. The Seventies Now takes a decade known for its hedonism and plunges headlong into the equally seamy world of politics. To talk of sex and politics in this way is to highlight a false divide, of course. But there is no question that our increasingly nostalgic news outlets, run by baby boomers who think that showing “Time and Again” several times a week is a good idea, tend to emphasize some parts of the equation more forcefully than they do others. Thankfully, a new generation of scholars has decided it is time for some revision.

 

The Queer Sixties, a collection of essays edited by Patricia Juliana Smith, includes close readings of queer texts and applications of queer theory. Although Smith’s introduction suggests that much of the volume will be given over to discussions of homosexuality’s role in cold war politics, none of her contributors takes up this theme with any enthusiasm. Instead, we receive a series of articles on icons and iconoclasts, those larger-than-life figures who embodied the pain and joy that gays and lesbians felt during this turbulent decade. The essayists are most serious when they discuss the status of camp, which itself tends to be rather serious about the trivial and trivial about the serious. Pulp fiction and rock music have a place here, as do “serious” fiction (Baldwin, Capote, Vidal), drama (Orton) and film (The Boys in the Band). Some texts are lauded for being outwardly queer and some for being subversively queer. Some artists and writers are “out” and others are more repressed. Overall, Smith does an effective job organizing the essays so as to bring divergent groups closer together.

 

Especially strong are the paired essays on Andy Warhol and Valerie Solanas that are authored by Kelly Cresap and Laura Winkiel. In his art and writings, Warhol has always seemed the perfect avatar of postmodernism. It was he, more than anyone, who replaced late modernist depth and personal gesture with surface and cool façade. But his art only tells part of the story. According to Cresap, Warhol “not only advocated an anti-contemplative, anti-angst position but acted it out on a daily basis” (46). With his “naïf-trickster” persona, this “dumb blonde” lived out a “cartoon idyll of happy solitary play” (to cite Michael Moon), confounding those who would take strict meaning from his actions, misleading those who believed he did not know the score. By “playing dumb about being gay,” Warhol perfected what D.A. Miller has labeled a “homosexuality of no importance.” Curiously, this brand of homosexuality was practiced with such panache as to become tremendously important in an expanding media culture. Warhol did not mug for the camera so much as he stared back blankly, in imitation of the camera eye, effectively reversing the gaze and questioning the desire of all who looked at him. At the same time, his gay persona was so pronounced (so “swish”) that hardly anyone bothered to inquire about his sexual preference(s). An excess of signification occluded whatever it was that Warhol signified on a personal level. This was all part of his anti-political agenda, his way of keeping his desires to himself. The fact that he resisted the more militant Stonewall/Gay Liberation movement comes as no surprise to Cresap, for the critic finds it “hard to imagine someone of Warhol’s temperament being able to thrive without a constantly maintained and revisited locus of inward retreat” (55). I myself sometimes think Warhol was the inner child so many self-help devotees sought to contact by other means in the seventies and eighties. Like most children, Warhol walked the fine line separating “acceptable” and disruptive behavior, and he did so with an unremitting charm neither his admirers nor his detractors could fully figure out. In his sixties heyday, he was the chimerical figure who compellingly fused America’s competing desires for innocence and prurience, fame and anonymity, purity and danger.

 

In “The ‘Sweet Assassin’ and the Performative Politics of the SCUM Manifesto,” Laura Winkiel gives her due to the woman who shot this naïf-trickster down. Over the course of her argument, Winkiel asserts that Valerie Solanas belongs in the satiric tradition of Jonathan Swift (think “A Modest Proposal”) as well as in the company of Judith Butler, Sue-Ellen Case, and other postmodern performance theorists for whom the play is always the thing. Solanas’s sloganeering may have appeared radical on the surface, Winkiel posits, but she was rather dismayed when the feminist movement appropriated the tenets of SCUM (an acronym for “Society for Cutting Up Men”) for its agenda. Similarly, Solanas was chagrined when her 1968 shooting of Warhol was taken as a sign of insanity and not as an artistic “event” (or the “true vengeance of Dada,” as the Up-Against-the-Wall-Motherfuckers Collective suggested at the time). In an ensuing episode that appears to be equal parts insanity and vengeance, Solanas visited the New York Public Library while out of jail on bond. In the staid atmosphere of the library’s main reading room, she proceeded to deface the Olympia Press edition of the SCUM Manifesto, maintaining that its marketable framing and its sensational blurbs by prominent feminists radically altered the original context of her fifty-page mimeographed pamphlet. She was especially perturbed when she noticed that the Olympia editors had added periods to her acronym (so that it now read “S.C.U.M.”), thereby cutting up the word that, when taken whole, threatened to cut up men (presumably the slimy substance to which the unpunctuated acronym also refers). Talk about “The Violence of the Letter”!

 

The articles on queerness in sixties rock are equally intriguing, and speak to a wider collective memory of the decade, even if they are somewhat more uneven in their assertions. To imply that the Beatles and Jim Morrison were closeted gays (as Ann Shillinglaw and Ricardo Ortiz do) is slightly more daring than calling attention to an “out” singer like Dusty Springfield (whose career Smith discusses in her own contribution), and evidence does not always support these claims. True, in news clips and in their movies the Beatles were constantly shown fleeing hordes of screaming women. True, they used lingo from the gay underground to advance and disrupt the plots of Help! and A Hard Day’s Night. But these and other tales of “feminized manhood” fail to convince me that the Beatles were disinterested in or distrustful of women (138). The assessment seems too speculative. Perhaps this is why Shillinglaw feels the need to cite Alexander Doty, who once defended his writings by saying, “Queer readings aren’t ‘alternative’ readings, wishful or willful misreadings, or ‘reading too much into things’ readings. They result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular culture texts and their audiences all along” (133). What Doty says may be true, but queer readings suffer the same fate as other methodological readings when partial evidence fails to support broad claims: their arguments ring hollow.

 

Ricardo Ortiz does a much more effective job in “L.A. Women: Jim Morrison with John Rechy” when he reads the self-fashioning of the Doors’s frontman alongside the stylized portraits of male hustlers in Rechy’s 1963 novel, City of Night. With his black leather outfits, his “alabaster neck,” and his feminized preening, Morrison emerged from the L.A. rock underground in 1966 to attract a diverse cross-section of desiring devotees. Reading the rock star’s body as a text, Ortiz wants to explore “how exactly the signifying surface bulge of Morrison’s leather pants, the object of such intense fascination on the part of the mass of Doors fans, ultimately compelled the divulging of what it signified” (171). Fast forward to the singer’s drunken cock-exposing incident at a Miami concert in March 1969, an unsolved case of “did he or didn’t he?” To hear Ortiz tell it, Morrison’s quasi-shamanistic, quasi-obscene gesture was either a spontaneous game of fort/da or the appearance of a phallic transcendental signifier. In either case it was a mysterious (no-)show that went far beyond the semiotic limits of sixties rock culture. The short and long of it is that Morrison’s virtual cock masked an artificial lack, and that this very disjunction allowed a wide variety of fans to identify and locate their fantasmatic desires. Rarely has Lacanian theory sounded so sexy, so hip, so relevant to the era out of which it sprang.

 

Because Morrison was as over-the-top with his stud rock posturing as Warhol was with his swish, because “the real Jim” could not possibly be present in all that flamboyant performativity, a large portion of the Doors audience found it hard to explain their attraction or repulsion. Amidst all the excess, something seemed to be missing. Take, for instance, the bewilderment of Joan Didion, who in The White Album recalls having seen Morrison light a match and lower it to the crotch of his black vinyl pants while killing time in an L.A. recording studio. For the ever-ironic Didion this fly-lighting incident was a pathetic gesture of Dionysian sublimity in an atmosphere otherwise marked by languor, deflation, and ennui. Like poetry, Morrison “makes nothing happen,” and herein lies a strange combination of allure and disappointment (Ortiz 174-75). Similarly, when Rolling Stone put Morrison on its cover in the early eighties with a caption that read “He’s Hot, He’s Sexy, and He’s Dead,” it was mocking a new generation of listeners and gazers that had the hots for a vanished anti-hero, “another lost angel.” But we must remember that absence has always been at the heart of desire. Morrison may or may not have persuaded Didion or Rolling Stone (or himself) that he had fire in the loins, but like any successful performer he knew that leaving his audience begging for more was the key to his staying power, both musically and sexually. Ortiz says as much in these pages. Like a patron in Rechy’s novel I approached this essay warily but left feeling convinced.

 

Stephen Paul Miller’s thesis in The Seventies Now–that the good times Americans professed to enjoy in the seventies were but a thin covering for the surveillance, deconstruction, and other forms of deceit lurking beneath the surface and hiding around corners–is not nearly as controversial. In the seventies, most would agree, Americans lived life to the hilt yet constantly suffered the pangs of emptiness. It was as though the open secrets of the sixties wilted under the artificial light of sunlamps and before the reflected glare of mirrored disco balls. But Miller would have us see that these feelings of emptiness were themselves based on a lack of evidence. As a cultural historian, he is thus obliged to look for a trace of what had already vanished from view, namely the sixties. If the sixties were a “dream state”–an escape or break from reality–the seventies were a codification and commodification of that dream (not for nothing did two suspiciously linked words, “lifestyle” and “affordable,” enter our vocabulary during this decade, as if on cue). In a very real sense, the seventies lived the fantasy of the sixties after the fact, slowing them down for purposes of evaluation and belated appreciation. If it “seemed like nothing happened,” as Paul Carroll once complained (qtd. in Miller 50), it was because our tropological reality was marked by a referential absence (143). We were all trying desperately to enjoy the symptoms of a previous decade while chasing an elusive Lacanian Real.

 

In order to come to terms with the “undecade,” Miller engages in an “uncanny criticism.” Traditional historical means, like cause and effect, are of little use to a critic who “walks a tightrope over a void, a void that does not exist until it is recognized” (21). Throughout his study Miller foregrounds “the production of an interpretation based upon seemingly absent links” (368n). And in the seventies, as never before, absent links became the rule rather than the exception. The over-hyped Kahoutek comet never arrived in the skies in 1973, but Skylab fell unexpectedly from the sky six years later. Richard Nixon dismissed a special prosecutor and two high ranking members of his administration on a Saturday night, the so-called “black hole” of the weekly news cycle, in order to escape detection. Not long afterward, a long gap in a White House tape said with silence what reams of documents could only begin to articulate. After considering these events in poststructural context, Miller claims that deconstruction should in truth be regarded as “America’s gift to Derrida” (343).

 

At certain junctures Miller attempts to periodize the seventies by “micro-periodizing” them (by year, by month, and even by day), even though he admits that micro-periods are never uniform, and that they tend to overlap (243). At one point he seizes upon the headlines in the October 10, 1973 issue of the New York Post: “Mets Win Pennant”; “Syria Invades Israel”; “Agnew Resigns.” What follows is a rather uneasy yoking together of three unrelated stories, awkwardly privileged here as “associative devices to indicate the changes the nation was undergoing” (125). I find Miller to be far more effective when his logic runs in the opposite direction, when (following Foucault) he “de-periodizes” the seventies by “zoning” or spatializing its events. This particular method shows that “an instantaneousness of field and an apparent totalization,” of the kind we see in the micro-periodizing sections, can be deconstructed at any given moment (367n). In his primary effort to “zone” his thesis, Miller explains that he has organized his book as a triptych, a triangulated “historian’s bow,” so that one phenomenon “pulls back the bow” of the other two and gives us some depth of field (107). So it is that John Ashbery, Jasper Johns, and Richard Nixon are given the most space. Unfortunately, Miller’s massive project feels at times like a seventies variety show, with minor characters seen scurrying across the stage to compete with the three main stars, in this case a poet, a painter, and a politician. The wealth of knowledge Miller brings to his survey is formidable, but some of his material (especially on film) seems tangential to his thesis.

 

Because Miller is a poet-critic as well as a cultural critic, it is not surprising that he shines when he discusses Ashbery. More than any other literary work, Ashbery’s “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” signifies for Miller the nostalgia for reality and unity that characterized the mid-seventies, even as he assures us that the poet himself tried to undermine such “truths.” This long poem, which takes its title and some of its content from a Parmagianino painting of 1524, appeared in Poetry in August 1974, the same month Nixon resigned the presidency. The poem also resembles the Watergate fiasco in that its sovereign subject is trapped by his own surveillance (be it in the mirror or on tape) (109). Miller offers fuller explanation of this self-surveillance paradox in “Mystery Tain,” a section whose title employs a word Derrida used to signify the delimitation of semiotic play. The “tain,” or the backing of a mirror, guarantees unity and predetermines possibilities of surface phenomena, since a mirror with no backing would throw forth an image so limitless and formless as to escape detection (146). Thus, according to Derrida, whatever we think we see in the mirror is always already limited by some infrastructural agency written on the mirror’s invisible side, in secret code (111). In his new version of a Romantic crisis poem, Ashbery reinforces Derrida’s thesis on speculation-as-mirror-play. When he sat down to paint, Parmagianino found that he was unable to locate a coherent subjectivity in the convex mirror, even though (and especially since) he was unable to escape himself (with a convex mirror there is no angle oblique enough for a subject to escape reflection and detection). Nor could the painter see beyond the surface to regard the tain that ordered his existence from afar, though he was aware that there was some bottom somewhere. As a postmodern poet, Ashbery felt the same anxiety when he sat down at the typewriter. How does one get beyond the reflective nature of language to see the backing that makes our communication possible, and yet so strangely limited? Answers are not immediately forthcoming, for the simple reason that we continue to communicate largely through language and images. As Derrida and Miller note, it is “the specular nature of philosophic reflection” not to be able to explain “what is outside it,” no matter how wildly the philosopher (or painter, or poet) may summon external phenomena (112).

 

Miller spends less time discussing Jasper Johns, and when he does his argument continues along the same lines. In the early seventies, Miller writes, Johns dedicated most of his energies to a series of “cross-hatch” paintings. These paintings, with their “busy layering of the seen upon the hidden,” can be regarded on one level as a parody of abstract expressionism and its “all over” techniques. But Miller goes further to suggest that Johns’s innovative works are really the opposite of expressionism, since they seal off free signification and gesture with their seamless webs of closure (225). The cross-hatched lines draw out the surface of the painting only to show that not everything is surface, and to indicate that there is an organizing principle that lurks just beyond (or below) our ability to perceive (or fathom) it. Adapting himself to the critical theory of his times, Johns faces the void at the center of human consciousness by covering it up and sneaking a peek (235).

 

Miller’s argument really catches fire when he discusses Nixon, the anti-star of a negative decade. For Miller, Nixon’s career is “a thread through which post-World War II America intertwines” (36). He is “our secret self” (39). In fact, after reading Miller’s book I have come to believe that it was Nixon who was America’s gift to Derrida. No one was more practiced than “Tricky Dick” at the art of deconstruction. After all, the “plumbers” Nixon sent to bug Democratic offices at the Watergate Hotel deliberately left “traces” of their break-in, as though they were writing their signature at the crime scene. In the meantime, Nixon’s elaborate taping system in the Oval Office was working around the clock, leaving documentation of his presidency unarranged, unhierarchicized, and indiscriminate: in short, “postmodern.” In a way, Nixon’s plan for eight straight years of taping White House conversation does not sound so different from the Andy Warhol movie that trained a camera on its slumbering subject for eight straight hours (putting many a viewer to sleep). Nor does it sound so different from Ashbery’s “Self Portrait.” During the Nixon years the Oval Office resembled a convex mirror insofar as its geometric design and extensive recording system accommodated pure circulation and obscured a fundamental point of origin. Come to think of it, so much about Nixon’s long career seems circular in its logic. The young politician who made his name exposing espionage and cover-ups in the Hiss case became the older politician who destroyed himself with espionage and cover-ups. As president he ordered henchmen like John Ehrlichman to expose unflattering secrets about the reporters who had exposed unflattering national secrets like the My Lai massacre and the Cambodia bombings (the latter of which Nixon carried out while watching Patton). The same man who in 1962 scolded a hostile press by saying “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” would later tell a reporter, “one of my strengths is that I try to be my own severest critic” (285). If I may paraphrase Santayana, it is as though he who failed to recognize his own irony was condemned to repeat it.

 

But for a pure dose of Nixonian deconstruction, nothing compares with the eighteen minute, twenty-eight second gap in the subpoenaed White House tapes. Like two landmarks of American postmodernism–John Cage’s Four Minutes, Thirty-three Seconds and Robert Rauschenberg’s De Kooning Erased–the tape in question “framed and dispensed” silence and absence, and by so doing divulged everything Americans had feared. As Derrida might say, all three of these postmodern texts acknowledged their status as trace, and asked us to fill in the gaps (294). In a bizarre and curiously pleasurable sequence, Miller proceeds to do just that, as he reads the white noise and “percussive interruptions” of Nixon’s mysterious tape (295-96). This white noise should stand as the last word on Nixon. I find it somewhat bizarre that a politician hell-bent on secrecy and surveillance came to represent a decade in which many people thought themselves footloose and fancy-free. But no one symbolized better than Nixon (who first dreamed of becoming president as he listened to a lonesome train whistle, only to be carried away from the White House on a heavily guarded helicopter) the strange emptiness and bitter irony at the heart of the American dream.

 

The post-Nixon seventies, which Miller treats briefly, are usually regarded as a period of “malaise.” For many Americans the word “malaise” will forever be associated with Jimmy Carter, who as it happened never actually uttered the word in his disastrous 1979 television address, contrary to the assumptions of the media and most of his viewing audience. When the chief spokesperson for our country has words put into his mouth, we know we are dealing with a truly postmodern moment. In the sixties we survived the death of a president and the “death of the author,” but Carter’s predicament heralded something altogether new: the death of communicative efficacy. Enter, stage right, Ronald Reagan, the actor reborn as the “Great Communicator.” As so often happens, our nation was all too willing to embrace an indefatigable optimist when reality got too ugly. So it was that “Morning in America” replaced mourning in America at the dawn of a new decade.

 

From the spectral photograph of a South Vietnamese pilot ditching his helicopter in the South China Sea during the last days of the Vietnam War, to the extended final chapter on Watergate, The Seventies Now surveys the failures and disjunctions that plagued America in the middle of its global moment. One would be hard pressed to find a more detailed or nuanced appraisal of the uneasiness and paranoia that reigned during the “undecade.” I admit that I would have liked to have seen more thinking about the role of sexuality in the seventies, just as I would have liked to have seen a fuller account of political activism in the Smith collection. But these are gaps we should probably fill in ourselves, on our own time. Indeed, I can imagine a rather high-octane seminar being organized around the themes of secrecy, surveillance, self-fashioning and sexuality that are discussed with brio and intelligence in these volumes. Now, if students would just line up for this seminar the way motorists did around gas pumps in 1973.