Dissent and the Dynamics of Cultural Change: Lessons from the Underground Presses of the Late Sixties 9780367433611, 9781003002659

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Dissent and the Dynamics of Cultural Change

Dissent and the Dynamics of Cultural Change: Lessons from the ­Underground Presses of the Late Sixties examines alternative presses’ critique of culture at a time of infamous transformation and revolution in the United States. In this new study, author Matthew Pifer seeks to ­delineate the structure of dissent to better understand how cultural change is realized, and explores the relationships between the public and those cultural institutions that define the values and social norms that shaped daily life. Matthew T. Pifer is an Associate Professor of English and Writing ­Center Director at Husson University. His research interests include composition and rhetoric, 19th- and 20th-century American Literature, and creative writing.

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature

30 Origin and Ellipsis in the Writing of Hilary Mantel An Elliptical Dialogue with the Thinking of Jacques Derrida Eileen Pollard 31 Haruki Murakami Storytelling and Productive Distance Chikako Nihei 32 David Foster Wallace and the Body Peter Sloane 33 Urban Captivity Narratives Women’s Writing After 9/11 Heather Hillsburg 34 The Humanist (Re)Turn Reclaiming the Self in Literature Michael Bryson 35 Approaches to Teaching the Work of Edwidge Danticat Edited by Celucien L. Joseph, Suchismita Banerjee, Marvin Hobson, and Danny Hoey 36 Contemporary Capitalism, Crisis, and the Politics of Fiction Literature Beyond Fordism Roberto del Valle Alcalá 37 Dissent and the Dynamics of Cultural Change Lessons from the Underground Presses of the Late Sixties Matthew T. Pifer

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Dissent and the Dynamics of Cultural Change Lessons from the Underground Presses of the Late Sixties Matthew T. Pifer

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Matthew T. Pifer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-36743-361-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-00300-265-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Preface

ix

M AT T H E W T. P I F E R

Acknowledgements Introduction The Sixties in Discourse 1 Mainstream Press 3 Anthologizing the Sixties 7 Structure of the Analysis 13 1 Structure of Dissent Culture and Its Features 20 The Etymology of Dissent 29 Analytical Framework 30 Conclusion 35

xxiii 1

20

SECTION 1

Oppositional Dissent

39

2 Dissent and Politics The Political Institution 40 Dissenting Practices 43 The New Left and the Great Refusal 43 Civil Rights Movement and the Question of Praxis 48 External and Internal Colonialism 53 Social Justice 55 Vietnam War and the “Culture of Death” 60 The Resistance 63 The Draft 65 Dissent and Place 67 Conclusion 69

40

vi Contents 75 3 Dissent and the Economy The Economic Institution 75 Late Capitalism or Advanced Industrial Society 78 Problems with Capitalism 82 Military-Industrial Complex 82 Passive Media, Television and the Conditioning of America 84 Money Economy 86 Automation or the New Industrialism 88 Means of Reforming the Economy 88 The Guaranteed Annual Income 89 Communes 89 Conclusion 91 4 Dissent and Education Educational Institution 95 Underground Press’ Critique of Education 99 The Sciences and Humanities 104 Conclusion 106 Interlude 1: Thinking of Dissent and Physical Space Defining Inner-City Space 112 Dissenting Stories 113 First Frame: Occupying Space 113 Second Frame: Embodied Space 114 Third Frame: Practiced Place 115 Changing Meanings: The Counter-Monument Project 116

95

112

SECTION 2

An Aesthetics

119

5 The Poetics of Dissent Aesthetics 120 Liberation Subjectivity  123 Poetics of Dissent 123 Critiquing the “Mass” in Mass Media 123 The Artistic Manifesto 124 Mode of Expression 125 The Rhetoric of the Underground 126 Designing the Press 127 Rock Music 129 Poetry 132 Conclusion 136

120

Interlude 2: Thinking of the Arts and Dissent

139

Contents  vii SECTION 3

Alternative Dissent

143

6 Dissent and the Family The Institution of the Family 144 The Tribe 144 Feminism and Sexuality 146 The Feminist Papers 150 The Making of the Body 153 Gay Papers 155 Conclusion 157

144

Conclusion: Defining Dissent, a Theory of Cultural Change Defining Dissent 160 Implications for Today 163 Digio-Electracy: The Role of Contemporary Social Media in Socio-Political Activism 164 The Platform 166 Participation versus Motivation 167 Rhetorical Framing, Fracturing but Not Controlling the Message 168 Integration of Social Media Genres into Dissenting Practices 170

160

Bibliography Index

173 183

Preface Matthew T. Pifer

Experiencing Dissent At first glance, you might mistake this book for a Marxist literary history, analyzing dissent as we find it in the underground papers published during the Sixties. However, I make no attempt to track these events using a strictly Marxist methodology nor do I seek to fully historicize this complex collection of cultural artifacts. Abe Peck, Todd Gitlin, John McMillian, and Mark Kurlansky, to name only a few, have written wonderful histories of the decade, offering surveys of the period. Instead, my aim is to explore how the underground press practiced dissent to alter social institutions and affect cultural change. In this sense, I seek to espouse or maybe merely suggest a theory of dissent that in itself can help explain and predict cultural change, taking into consideration how altering discourse, the fundamental source of meaning, can also alter our perception of social institutions. The challenge I face is to develop a dialectic of dissent to guide my interpretation of these archived, often unknown and today unread, artifacts. In this way, I hope to bring the peculiar poignancy of these papers to light, to suggest that their very existence in time offers a way to process the period. To initiate what I hope will reflect dialectical thinking, I open with a reflection on my own emerging interest in this topic, suggesting how my personal experiences with it informs this study. My interest in the underground papers published during the Sixties began in relative isolation and ignorance. Growing up in a small town in northern Michigan, I was not aware of any political activists, except for those letters-to-the-editor published in the Clare County Cleaver that lamented the occasional millage increase, fumed about the poor roads, or the poor performance of a little league umpire.1 I read those letters as one reads tabloids: enamored with the spectacle, the morsel of gossip, the sense of my town as a contentious space—who had the power, who wanted it, who might lose it. I read about those upset about the city’s remodeling of the little league field or the expansion of the county jail’s parking lot. Meanwhile, my sense of national and global politics reached me through the nightly news, which, in the days of three channels, was

x Preface always on at 6 pm. I still recall Tom Brokaw droning about the Middle Eastern conflicts, the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat, and the bombing of the military compound in Beirut, Lebanon. Politics was there not here, never an issue that might affect my everyday experiences. To some, this pastoral detachment was a benefit of my rural upbringing: through social isolation, I was able to approach my future with little fear except for those vague bogeymen of nuclear annihilation and AIDS. 2 The need to be political, essentially from birth, and to fight the government for my basic rights was not part of my experience. Radicalism was sinful, disrespectful (which to my family was a sin worse than other kinds), and unproductive (a sin against the German work ethic, which was the creed that shaped the history of my community). Like many of my town-folk and school peers, I had been taught that the radicalism of the Sixties had been misguided. As Patrick Brantlinger discusses in Crusoe’s Footprints, I had been introduced to the belief that “the current moribund state of the humanities and more generally of education” could be traced to the “radical tendencies of the 1960s.”3 Still, I encountered histories that suggested something deeper might be meant by the pejorative use of the phrase “the Sixties.” Most of these stories emerged in 1985 (I was eleven in 1982 when the Vietnam Memorial was dedicated and only remember some controversy over the designer’s ethnicity) with the flood of Vietnam retrospectives produced to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of our evacuation from Saigon. Around this time, movies, such as Apocalypse Now, The Fourth of July, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket, introduced me to the Vietnam conflict. These movies, in conjunction with the elevation of the Vietnam Veteran in popular culture, portrayed the Sixties as an evil time of rampant exploitation, in which innocent children (noticeably like myself) had been sent to fight or die in an unjust war. The focus of these films, of course, was on the kid tortured by images of death and hatred and the impression that nothing made sense. The “existentialism” of these films, in which nothing had meaning and sense was conveyed through the collision of shattered psychologies, was reportedly a product of Sixties drug culture, its sexual permissiveness, and its disrespect of American traditions. Many of the filmmakers consulted Michael Herr—a war correspondent, author of Dispatches, coauthor of the screenplays for Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now—in making their films. In Dispatches, after his return from Vietnam, Herr provides a compelling description of the Sixties, claiming that the discourse and the war fused into a chaotic mire that was difficult to navigate.4 I began to see the Sixties as a complex characterized by confusion, utopia, idiocy, and hope, following, for example, the title of Todd Gitlin’s book about the Sixties: The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. Herr’s description conveys a sense that everyone is dying, and that the culture of death was more than radical rhetoric, but was a physical  reality.

Preface  xi It was Dantesque, in the sense that all was being drawn into the depths of hell, each level a progression in sin. Post-traumatic stress disorder, the psyche-wrenching dreams of those who could not forget the horrors they had committed and seen, became a condition of postmodern America. The psyche stressed to its limits became a pop-cultural archetype: John Rambo, Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, and Sergeant Barnes. The My Lai massacre seemed its symbol: evil existed in the government and the actions of high-placed American officials. Herr describes 1969 as exhibiting this sense of the social mind becoming unhinged, flailing for some set of common values that might heal the nation, or at least keep it together.5 In these accounts, histories, and personal narratives, it seemed that everyone was trying to get to something like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, that beatific utopia, that sense of love and individual freedom, but kept finding themselves in some industrial malaise complete with a bunch of jerky Hals replacing people at their jobs and, as in 2001: A Space Odyssey, going insane. That’s how the Sixties appeared to me in the 1980s: it seemed the beginning of some odyssey that manifested itself in the anti-intellectual, postmodern, confused present I was living. Sixties radicals seemed akin to Jason and the Argonauts, trying to find their way home after war. The perils were everywhere and strange, cyclopes with pens, skeletons with business plans, krakens on the cover of Time Magazine, and Medusa staring back from the pages of Life. Crazed, postmodern fragmentation faced those coming out of the nostalgia of the 1950s in which things were presented or remembered as uniform, clean, and progressive. New machines meant less work, suburbs and freeways meant quiet isolation and the freedom of individual movement, new industries meant more jobs, and new technologies promised an easier future. Yet, what was made of the inequalities inside this periphery of conformity? What was made of the inner cities that were becoming the forgotten frontiers of American social policy, as industries and capital moved away from the contentiousness of the civil rights movement, Black Nationalism, and the tensions among unions, corporate executives, and anti-unions? During the Civil Right Movement emerged the ideals of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). At the same time, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam called for violent resistance to white oppression. Dissent from the apparent conformity of the 1950s became necessary to achieve full citizenship under the constitution (a need that seemed to throw America into an identity crisis). Still, such dissent was divided into several factions among several different groups, which led me to see the decade as being defined by paradox and contradiction. These antagonistic appearances became one way to describe America’s future: “we must destroy it to save it.” And for me that did seem to be what happened in the Sixties. The war, the riots, and civil unrest in the nation helped explain why my parents, grandparents,

xii Preface and teachers referred to this time with such trepidation or derision. But the complexities made a point, even though there seemed no one point to be taken from the Sixties. The point, in this case, was that ideas and how they are articulated matter. They have the power to change perception, to alter the nation’s consciousness, and to tell the stories and share the experiences of those that had gone unheard and unheeded. It was a search of such ideas that I wished to conduct in my research into the Sixties; I wished to recover, in some way, from history what had been overlooked or discarded. The unrest of the Sixties has been well documented by those who experienced the decade, such as Todd Gitlin, Abe Peck, James Miller, and Maurice Isserman, but the submerged voices, such as those published in the underground press and often only there, have often gone unconsidered, or only considered in terms of the role they played in some larger political organization. Although such considerations are important, it is also important to examine the efforts of these writers who were trying to say and do something about the problems in their own time. This desire informs my investigation of dissent in the Sixties. For me, this project grew out of my own interactions with the city of Detroit and its literature, and out of a desire to understand one in relation to the other. My experiences working in Detroit, reading Philip Levine, traveling to the city, and eating in the restaurants in Trappers Alley and Greek Town suggested something different about what I had been taught about the Sixties. The burned-out, boarded-up shops and homes were witnesses to a past no one seemed much interested in. The Detroit riot of 1967, which produced much of this landscape, did not get revisited very often, but seemed inscribed on Detroit’s urban landscape. In the early 1990s, the past violence of the riots seemed a footnote to the economic difficulties the city was experiencing. As I began to look closer at the Sixties through Levine’s poetry and additional reading of hard-to-find books, I discovered some of the submerged voices that were trying to tell the complex story of Detroit—the story that lies beneath the city’s ruins and extant social tensions. Poets and activists such as B.P. Flanigan, Dudley Randall, and John Sinclair began to suggest that something had been lost in the Sixties. Some vital energy involved in changing society for the better had been squandered, and hope had been replaced with cynicism. But rather than examining, in Levine’s words, “what had come off,” commentators had displaced the Sixties from its historical context.6 Why have so many of the poets of Detroit and the Sixties disappeared? One reason is certainly because poetry itself has declined in importance. Since the Sixties, its audience has shrunk primarily to include academic specialists. Also, the poetry of protest, or poetry devoted to the events of its time, is often discarded along with the history to which it was directly responding. Such poetry, often referred to as didactic or sentimental,

Preface  xiii lacks the necessary transcendence to remain vital throughout the ages. Therefore, it does not find a place in the canon and in university literature courses, which are the only places in which many people will ever read poetry. In addition, much of the poetry of the Sixties was published in relatively rare newspapers and magazines or not at all, existing only in transcripts of oral readings or as part of some activist lore. Simply because a work is not printed in a conventional medium and discreetly shelved in a library should not exclude it from critical consideration, as Cary Nelson points out in his critique of the modern poetic canon in Repression and Recovery.7 I was moved by Detroit’s voices; I was moved by the depths of their insights. The poets Philip Levine, Jim Daniels, Joyce Carol Oates, and Dudley Randall seemed on to something, conscious of some sense of humanity that I wished I had been taught. This impression was in part due, I am sure, to my desire to think differently than those I worked with at the National Bank of Detroit. I wondered what had become of the Sixties activist mentality, or the desire to reimagine society. (It was there but I wasn’t skilled enough to see it.) Some would say it turned into feminism, environmentalism, and pluralism; others that it had sold out to Madison Avenue and was transforming the world into a vat of hyper-consumption; others still that it had been consumed by drugs, sex, and other kinds of excess. Some would argue that the writers of the Sixties were doomed by their influences, pointing to the various characters in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, or William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. They argued that within those pages, those representations, were the remains of a lost generation, solipsistic teenagers tripping along highways, swilling their way on to nowhere. But through these stories I was reminded of other artistic movements that seemed to have a kinship with the Sixties, with the voices that had been discarded for more academically privileged literature. Dadaism and Surrealism provided me with a way to begin understanding the oppositional drive of the activists in Detroit. These movements put culture itself on trial. Tying these artistic movements to the evolving history of the 20th century, Robert Short describes the role Dadaism and Surrealism played in establishing an alternative aesthetic. “Dadaists and Surrealists,” Short states, claimed that there was no longer any point in writing about experience: the act of the poet or artist should be to put his whole sensitivity in direct contact with the universe in a stance of cosmic passivity. In place of the maker of forms, Surrealism posited a new image of the artist as someone who was characterized by his availability to chance, to the promptings of the unconscious and internal impulses, who welcomed everything that occurred spontaneously.8

xiv Preface In this aesthetic, artists accepted sloppy artifacts: items that were generated out of half-thought, half-recognized impressions, which were considered more honest to the degree to which they diverged from a central plan or artistic form. They allowed the artist to work outside of institutionalized reason, searching for a more truly human means of expression. Freed in this way, the artist could critique bourgeois culture, leading to a new romanticism in which a search for a fundamental truth was conducted in the acceptance of the accidental, the natural, and the autochthonous voice that seemed to spring from the very soil underfoot or to form the very soil that had become the asphalt of the city’s streets. Spontaneity and simultaneity became important concepts. No longer was the linear experience the only way to imagine the world. Much was happening at once, and the Dadaists and Surrealists attempted, as artists in the Sixties did, to embrace this sense of an engaged and unpredictable life. Motivated by these Dadaist and Surrealist ideas, I noticed the accident, that tangential grouping of facts or impressions that would open up a world of meaning for me and, thereby, help me understand what had been lost in the Sixties. I admit that my interest at first was naive, intense, and under-theorized, rising primarily out of my confusion with Detroit, my corporate life as a technical writer, and a timely introduction to the poetry of Philip Levine. I also spent time listening to Bob Dylan, the Fugs, the Velvet Underground, the MC5, and Grand Funk Railroad. It seemed as if an important period in American culture had been denied. Blame it on a gap in literary scholarship that lingers about fifty years behind current trends. Blame it on the force of the canon and the academy’s devotion to “cultural literacy.” Blame it on our tendency to define “art” or “literature” as that which is supposed to illuminate the fundamental nature of the human condition by transcending its immediate context. As Nelson states, this view of the canon is political.9 I do not mean to suggest here that the canon, as it “now exists,” is part of some ivory-tower conspiracy. It exists and evolves as it can to include those works that provide insight into “good literature.” The fact that judging “good literature” is controversial should not cause much concern because it is a necessary part of academic exchange and growth. It must remain so if the field is to adapt to ever-changing social and cultural contexts. Re-evaluations of the canon, or occasional divergences from it, should be encouraged and not simply ignored. The canon is best thought of as an ongoing dialogue between tradition, convention, and innovation. Such a dialogue allows the multi-voiced works to emerge in tension with one another, thereby providing new and potentially helpful perspectives for (re)interpreting our individual and communal experiences. At some point (probably while I was trying to avoid writing that next mortgage manual), I encountered Levine’s “Coming Home: 1968.” Levine’s poem articulated the mystery that captivated me and remained

Preface  xv central to my understanding of Detroit and of the fragmented and changeable character of Michigan. Around this one text revolved all the tensions that defined the Detroit I had begun to love and fear. The fear, the racism, the work, the pain, and the loss were all there. Each line consists of an image that forces a pause, a meter pounded out with experience rather than familiar tropes: “One brown child,” “a shower of human breath,” “The charred faces.”10 Michigan’s history and its personality, like those of many states, extend from its major cities. Through history, Detroit has become home to diverse fragments of the past and doles them out in ravished bits over the rest of the sparsely populated northern landscape. The northern town where I grew up, for instance, seemed to collect these bits of Detroit—its bondoed automobiles (which still seem to me a specific type of rural body), together with the effects of its unemployment, depression, and pollution. The city, I have come to realize, is the great modernist text, with its people moving among high rises, guided by them along various streets, down clean alleys, past cars stopping now and then among the statues and fountains, the parks and man-made streams, reading endless advertisements rotating on mechanized billboards while they eat their lunch before going back to their factory jobs. The American city is a drama that ties the history of America to the present efforts of the most silent, marginalized citizens. And like any story, it needs to be told, retold, and studied, for it has a great deal to tell us about how our past has affected and will continue to affect our present. In the 1970s, Detroit seemed little more than a dot on my palm when I was holding my hand to serve as a map of Michigan, or part of my dad’s stories about his youth (Hudson’s department store, the Fox Theater, Dearborn when it was still a rural neighborhood . . .). Later in life, while I was working in and around Detroit, the mystery of its spaces, the vagueness of its interiors, grew more profound. Driving down Gratiot Avenue and over to Belle Isle to wash boats at the Detroit Yacht Club, I always felt as though I had crossed some invisible barrier. Certainly, there was poverty and some of the neighborhoods I passed through were dilapidated, but there was also something less tangible in moving through these areas. It was a feeling, a kind of psychic breeze that kicked up the dust of desperation and whistled through the vacant lots and gutted buildings. The city felt vacant in a sense forgotten, somehow outside of history, and it was like the setting of some post-apocalyptic fairy tale, as in Robocop or Blade Runner. One evening, after having spent about ten hours washing boats at the yacht club, I passed a laundry shop just off of Gratiot Avenue. A large loading door was opened, and I saw rows of washing and wringing machines arranged in straight and efficient rows. Outside, a group of black men were buying sandwiches from a vendor who was set up in the back end of a pickup. As I passed, stopping at the corner, I watched

xvi Preface other men folding large white sheets and white towels, probably to be shipped to the area’s hotels. The contrasts struck me, not just the different colors, white on black, but what that contrast suggested about inner-city Detroit and the outlying suburbs, the poor neighborhoods and the hyper-rich yacht clubs they bordered, and the people who worked in the factories and the disappearance of history, or what Jerry Herron in AfterCulture refers to as its “humiliation.”11 At the end of the summer, I quit my job and returned to graduate school, but Detroit never quite resolved itself in my imagination. I still desired to understand this city; therefore, I began to look beyond the common interpretations of it in literature, looking to the texts that lay beneath the more conventional stories presented in Levine’s work. This search led me to the products of Detroit’s underground press, which are hard to find and once discovered are like words and insights from an entirely different world. I wanted to understand that uncanny feeling that seemed to define the city, that sublime experience I had in walking the streets, eating in historic restaurants, and watching the homeless sell coupons on the corners of Michigan and Fort Avenues. In this way, I stumbled upon the significance of the Sixties while following the trajectory of my literary studies, ending up in the summer of 2000 at the National Poetry Foundation’s conference at the University of Maine. Through my attendance at the conference, I began to think that any project dealing with the Sixties would have to consider the interrelation of artistic forms: how forms converge to create a cultural poetics in which different cultural artifacts modify and inform one another. This poetics functions to open a field of experience that otherwise would remain closed or disfigured by institutional specializations. This conception of poetics informs my present project. One incident I experienced during this conference revealed just how complex the investigation of such a poetics might become. The conference’s title, “The Opening of the Field: A Conference on North American Poetry in the 1960s,” and the program cover design (originally created by Robert Duncan’s partner Jess) were taken from Robert Duncan’s book of poetry titled The Opening of the Field. The relationship between Duncan and Jess illustrates the collaboration often associated with the art of the Sixties, which remains an unrealized ideal for many contemporary humanities scholars. This collaboration, unlike the often-sterile collaboration of contemporary corporations, was sexually charged: i.e. John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s protest from their bed, John Sinclair’s collaboration with his partner Magdalena Arndt, and Charles Olson’s collaboration with his own body. Leafing through the program illustrates the centrality of sexualized methodologies. In the first plenary session, for example, Michael Davidson’s “Missing Larry” discussed embodied poetics, pointing out the relationship between poetic form, the body, and rhetorical intent. In Davidson’s presentation,

Preface  xvii the course for the conference was set. The collaboration between poetry and visual art, between poet and poet, between contributor and editor, between form and content, between the margin and the center, was sexualized, a matter of anxious reproduction, dirty jokes, and men and women in love. Yet in listening to this paper and those to follow, there was a sense that much of it was ludicrous—a feeling Amiri Baraka would voice in an angry outburst during Barrett Watten’s “The Turn to Language after the 1960s.” Amiri Baraka gave voice to one of the tensions present at the conference: the feeling that the presentations were not approaching the period and its literature appropriately. Baraka yelled from the back of the auditorium, You, and by you I mean you all, are pimping off real struggle, the struggle of real people, to get a better job. …. This hyper-rationality and abstraction means nothing, Baraka argued. Watten had been interpreting the failure of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement through a close analysis of its linguistic practices, using the theory of Donald G. McCloud to unravel the movement’s radical identity, which he claimed ultimately remained outside the discourse of power. Incensed, Baraka again yelled, Inside or outside what? If we [by “we” he was referring, I assumed, to ­African Americans and specifically those who were part of the Black Panther Party, which Watten had just criticized] were outside it, we wouldn’t have struggled to change it. I felt that Baraka in his anger raised two compelling points: first, there was the notion that the conference presenters were “pimping off” the struggles of the Sixties to promote their own careers, which suggests that the events of the Sixties and the works produced during that time were being reified or fetishized into a consumable product. At times, it felt as if the dead were being misrepresented or ­ hyper-rationality worse. Second, there was Baraka’s disgust with the “ and abstraction” that defined the interpretive methods of the majority of the presentations, a vagueness created by an unwillingness to return to the primary texts and engage them on their own terms. Such abstractions, though necessary, seemed to dilute the struggle embedded in the art of the Sixties, turning it into little more than a curious commodity. Academic interpretations of the Sixties often seeming to suck the vital force from the period’s art by removing it from its context, divesting it of its raw, often sloppy edge and the sense of the uncanny that originally provoked confusion, anger, and, most importantly, thought. Baraka’s objections, if they did nothing else, reminded me to tread carefully and understand that these works and this time were not only about socio-political theory but also about real efforts to live, if not better, then differently, with a real interest in a more egalitarian and free future. But the Sixties was also a time, a force, to be opposed, as The Second Thoughts Conference illustrates. In 1987, several influential activists from the Sixties met to discuss how they had changed since their activist

xviii Preface or revolutionary days. Peter Collier describes the oppositional stance that defined the conference: The participants at the Second Thoughts Conference gave testimony that serves as an antidote to any simplistic, monochromatic view of the ‘lessons’ of the ‘60s. Others might try to manipulate the truth of the era into an exhilarating lesson for a new generation of activists, but those who came to Washington to tell about their second thoughts had a different curriculum in mind. For them the history of the Movement was a cautionary tale that should not inspire but rather give pause to the huddled millenarians awaiting the advent of the Next Left. For participants at this Conference, the leftism in which they had once believed was an infantile disorder. They felt that it was time to grow up and understand the past rather than condemn another generation to repeat it.12 Collectively, these testimonies represent the nature of hindsight, perhaps the true nature of political history and cultural memory. Many of the papers follow a similar framework, beginning with the identification of what was right about the Sixties and then qualifying these experiences with descriptions of how the ideal went awry. One aspect of what was right about the activism of the Sixties appears to have revolved around a sense of community, of the unifying mission to “cleanse” America of its ills. Many of these activists were members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) or the SNCC. As such, they felt linked by a common set of grievances, which most notably included a commitment to civil rights and to ending the war in Vietnam. Jeffery Herf, a member of the SDS, provides a typical description of the intellectual community many of the New Left activists shared: There was a great deal I relished about the New Left years: community, intellectual stimulation, friendship. . . . I still am proud of our efforts on behalf of civil rights, and recall the pain but also the excitement of the early years of the women’s movement.13 Rev. Richard Neuhaus articulates another version of this community, often referred to as the “Movement.” In his version, he points out that at least early on the members of the Movement thought of themselves as a new moral force, a power for reason and moderation. Of course, this happy band of warriors became more prominent in their role as warriors, such as the Black Panthers, Black Nationalists, or Weathermen. These were groups straying further and further from non-violence and toward armed confrontation with the military-industrial complex (the vaguely perceived establishment) and the police, whom many saw as the strong-arm of this modern urban alliance. In Marxist terms, the

Preface  xix complex owned the means of production and was thereby able to oppress the working class. Morality, in this case, belonged to the proletariat: those struggling to control their own destiny but being eternally thwarted by the capitalist forces. Many found this aspect of the Movement disturbing if not absolutely disastrous. A significant part of this concern stemmed from the criminal behavior many New Left groups covered up or accepted as part of a revolutionary process—a process that increasingly articulated a ­palpable hatred of America itself, which many activists found disconcerting. D ­ avid Horowitz, for instance, makes his disenchantment with the evolving Left clear in “Why I am No Longer a Leftist.” He describes the incident that led to his own second thoughts about the political activities of the late Sixties. While he was working with the Black ­Panthers, Horowitz hired a female bookkeeper who was later “kidnapped, sexually tormented and then brutally murdered by [his] Black Panther comrades.”14 Horowitz describes his disillusionment with those on the Left who ignored such horrible crimes and protected the criminals from justice. He then concludes his account with the following critique of the Left—a critique that reveals one of the major failings that an anti-social, political platform inevitably causes: The lesson I had learned for my pain turned out to be modest and simple: the best intentions can lead to the worst ends. I had believed in the Left because of the good it had promised. I had learned to judge it by the evil it had done.15 The tendency toward unity was one of the drawbacks of the New Left’s political ideology. In “Learning from Experience,” Barry Rubin, once a member of the SDS and an editor of the Guardian underground paper, states, “Perhaps the most vicious component of the Left was its hysterical denunciations and slanders against anyone who disagreed with it.”16 The New Left, like many political parties, refused to budge from the ideals it had accepted, treating this ideology like a religion, as Gitlin points out. Out of this rigidity grew the rhetoric of us-versusthem, those binaries which reduced the real social, economic, and political complexities of America to false choices between the apparently moral Left and fascist military-industrialists. Julius Lester provides a more nuanced description of this sense of us-versus-them in “Beyond Ideology”: There is a Them, but it is not out there. Them is always and eternally Me. To the extent that I take responsibility for the Them that is Me, to that extent do I free others to be persons in all their crystalline fragility. That is the vision with which The Movement began, and it is a vision many of us are still trying to live.17

xx Preface The kind of empathy Lester describes is central to the poetics of the Sixties and may be, as Lester suggests, its most significant legacy. The lessons of these Second Thoughters illustrate the ways in which the New Left strayed from the kind of community it had forged during the composition of the Port Huron Statement in 1962. This community, as Neuhaus argues, was idealistic about changing society for the better, believing that the policies of the Old Left needed to be revised.18 The energy of this revision fed the New Left’s sense of community, driving its early activities. However, the means of achieving this change never seemed well articulated: no economic, political, social, and cultural programs were systematically developed and lobbied into existence as (say) the different elements of the New Deal were. For instance, the “anti-­ anti-communist” stance that the New Left took against the League for Industrial Democracy (LID) was the kind of vague political thinking that occasionally undermined the New Left’s approach to social liberation. Joshua Muravchik, a member of the Young People’s Socialist League, reevaluates the New Left’s ideological foundation in “A Curse Worse than the Cure.” He notes the confusing complexity of the New Left’s evolving social theories: while the New Left ranged from pro-communist to anti-anti-­ communist, [the members of the YPSL] were adamantly anti-­ Communist, regarding Communism as the great betrayal of the socialist ideal. While the New Left preached ‘participatory democracy,’ we were skeptical, wondering if their real aim wasn’t to vitiate representative democracy.19 His group was not Leninist or Stalinist, he states, but Marxist. However, Muravchik points out that Marxist, but not Communist, socialism “at best . . . does not work.”20 It does not work because it devalues the individual’s moral worth, and the individual’s sense of self. As many of the conference presenters argued, this debasing of the individual in the name of some collective leads to totalitarianism, to the repression of personal freedoms that allows a nation to adapt to a changing global environment. These doubts lead Muravchik to the overstated conclusion that “America is arguably the freest country on earth, the most socially egalitarian, and the most generous and peaceful great power in history.”21 Can we forgive him if he overstates his case? Conservative P.J. O’Rourke resorts to a similar patriotic sloganism, stating that ­A merica is “already . . . a highly idealistic, totally revolutionary society” and “that our revolution is based on reality, not bullshit.”22 These second thoughts are based on the realization that Marxist or revolutionary idealism is just that and cannot be easily transformed into a practical political program. In the May 25, 2001 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Alan Wolfe critiqued these second thoughts in

Preface  xxi “The Calling of the Public Intellectual.” Wolfe stressed the willingness with which these left-leaning radicals turned into podium thumping conservatives. He sees in it the hint of financial sponsorship and, perhaps, the justification of their individual economic comforts, forgetting, as many do, that millions continue to suffer under a capitalist, ­neo-liberal ideology for no fault of their own.23 Central to the discontent of the activists Wolfe is critiquing, such as Horowitz, is a division between theory and practice. Many trusted their theories, their manipulations of Marx and Lenin, to lead to a better society, but, as Gitlin says about the New Deal liberals, they failed because they were partially successful. The civil rights, feminist, and Vietnam War movements owe many of their successes to the efforts of the SNCC, the SDS, LID, and others. It seems that these second thoughts are based not on a desire to undermine the achievements of the Sixties but rather to distance these critiques from the decade’s excesses and atrocities, and they are willing to forget the achievements, now already deeply embedded in a changed culture. My experience suggests that the ideology of the New Left has idled into a poetics: what to me seems a vague liberal feeling that remains a subtext to America’s social identity, emerging occasionally to color popular discourse or social policy debates. None of these Second Thoughters wants to be associated with those who caused America’s moral reckoning; none of them wants to be linked to the murders that took place in Cambodia, China, or Russia; none of them wants to be thought of as an academic or corporate sell-out; none of them wants to align himself or herself with the Communists, those losers of history. Yet, it remains important that I am critical of these kinds of political retractions and ideological side-steppings. Such energetic retreats suggest that the Sixties mattered, and that the decade did indeed impact America’s sense of itself in ways that the study of dissent can uncover.

Notes 1 The Clare County Cleaver is published weekly in Harrison, Michigan. www.clarecountycleaver.net/ 2 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 3 Joseph Brantlinger, Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (New York: Routledge, 1990), 3. 4 Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 258. 5 Herr, Dispatches, 259. 6 Philip Levine, “Coming Home, 1968,” in New Selected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1991), 75. 7 Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 41–51. 8 Robert Short, Dada and Surrealism (London: L. King, 1994), 292. 9 Nelson, Repression, 37. 10 Levine, “Coming Home,” 75.

xxii Preface 11 Jerry Herron, AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History ­(Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1993.), 62. 12 Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties (New York: Madison Books, 1989), xi–xii. 13 Jeffery Herf, “When I Hear the Word ‘Movement,’” in Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties, eds. Peter Collier and David Horowitz (New York: Madison Books, 1989), 41. 14 Horowitz, “Why I Am No Longer a Leftist,” in Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties, eds. Peter Collier and David Horowitz (New York: Madison Books, 1989), 54. 15 Horowitz, “Why,” 57. 16 Jerry Rubin, “Learning from Experience,” in Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties, eds. Peter Collier and David Horowitz (New York: Madison Books, 1989), 50. 17 Julius Lester, “Beyond Ideology,” in Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties, eds. Peter Collier and David Horowitz (New York: Madison Books, 1989), 224. 18 Richard Neuhaus, “Second Thoughts,” in Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties, eds. Peter Collier and David Horowitz (New York: Madison Books, 1989), 7. 19 Joshua Muravchik, “A Cure Worse Than the Disease,” in Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties, eds. Peter Collier and David Horowitz (New York: Madison Books, 1989), 161. 20 Muravchik, “Cure,” 162. 21 Muravchik, “Cure,” 165. 22 P.J. O’Rourke, “The Awful Power of Make-Believe,” in Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties, eds. Peter Collier and David Horowitz (New York: Madison Books, 1989), 209. 23 Alan Wolfe, “The Calling of the Public Individual,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 25, 2001, B20.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the staff of the Popular Culture Association and the Ray and Pat Browne Library for Popular Culture Studies for their assistance during the 2017 Summer Popular Culture Research Institute at Bowling Green University. Their support gave me access to the archival resources and research expertise necessary to complete this study. I would like to thank Husson University whose sabbatical funding afforded me the time to navigate the complex issues associated with this research. I would also like to recognize the new online collections of underground/alternative papers that have made not only locating but also analyzing these ephemeral texts much easier. A scholar is now able to consider, as I have, a thematic analysis, considering how the underground press addressed specific social and cultural issues. More recently, Independent Voices has compiled an essential digital collection of underground papers. Independent Voices “is a digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.” Particularly significant is that this collection provides pdf versions of the papers and is searchable, a capability invaluable to researchers.

Introduction

The Sixties in Discourse At the beginning of 2018, Time published a special edition titled 1968: The Year that Shaped a Generation. In the introduction, Lance ­Marrow claims that 1968 was a pivotal year in a time of cultural change.1 ­Others, such as Mark Kurlansky, Michael Kaufman, Charles Kaiser, and ­Lawrence O’Donnell, echo Marrow’s comparison, perceiving 1968 and the Sixties in general as a time of tremendous upheaval and change. The aim of this analysis of the underground papers published during the Sixties is to understand the structure that informs the changes these authors track historically. Fundamental to this consideration is the observation that change of any kind but especially cultural change is difficult to present as existing at the culmination of a series of causes. Making such a claim is difficult because culture is always changing; it is a dynamic concept and our understanding of it is always adapting to new social experience and practices that are either emerging into or being ejected from the established reality principle or, in other words, dominant cultural form. For this reason, to understand change we need to understand it as a process, a mediation of cultural forces, that we can define as dissent. Unlike its common usage, dissent is not merely the act of resisting some prevailing assertion, not merely an example of a cultural dispute or some nascent revolution, but is the process by which change is enacted in culture. 2 The Sixties was an enigmatic decade. In terms of dissent, the Sixties and the underground press began as a response to the credulity of the post-World War II era. In The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Todd Gitlin notes that the reason the Sixties remains important is that “the genies” those times loosed are still abroad in the land. . . . For the civil rights and antiwar and countercultural and women’s and the rest of that decade’s movements forced upon us central issues for Western civilization— fundamental questions of value, fundamental divides of culture, fundamental debates about the nature of the good life.3

2 Introduction The issues Gitlin identifies are those that evolved through the lens of the underground press, which offer a moment for understanding dissent as the mechanism by which “the divides of culture” can be more fully understood as divides in social institutions. A clearer sense of the decade emerges when we examine the institutions that defined the period. As Gitlin claims, the unrest that tends to define the Sixties might be traced to two periods in American history. One would be the erstwhile Old Left that emerged in the Thirties in response to the Great Depression and the corporate practices that made the depression and its social problems possible.4 The other period began after World War II when new social relations began to emerge both to repair the social, physical, and psychological damages of the war and to capitalize on the economic growth and Americas new global political standing. American hegemony was being established globally and the opportunities and upheaval created by this emerging power shaped domestic policies. Examining these institutions offers a more nuanced picture than purely historical accounts of the culture of this period, importantly revealing the structure of the relationships between the oft-cited race, class, and gender or race, politics, and economics. In this analysis, I seek a different understanding of culture than that allowed by this type of triptych. These elements are, of course, present, but incorporated into a larger cultural framework offered by the work of Raymond Williams. Williams’ analysis of culture suggests the position of dissent as an essential part of cultural change, which is the fundamental dynamic by which cultural formations manifest. The details describing the culture of the Sixties are often divided into a series of cultures. I have never been particularly happy with this proliferation of pockets of culture. As in Williams, I understand it in its associations with language and ideology as a prevailing set of ideas or discourses that define social behavior and thus shape social experience. However, I do not understand culture as “false consciousness” but as a mode of consciousness always in the process of formation. Cultural forms do inform how we think about social experiences, which, in complex ways I hope to tease out, are embedded in social institutions. In The Cambridge Companion to the 1960s, David Farber and Beth Bailey examine the culture of the Sixties, describing it in terms of “the good life,” “youth culture,” “counterculture,” and “black culture.”5 While this is a common way to discuss culture, as a qualified noun, it misrepresents how culture functions and the role dissent, which is what Farber and Bailey are actually outlining, plays in cultural change. For now, however, it is useful to see the context provided by their observations. As they note, the Sixties was a time of significant economic growth, which created hope but also elevated class tensions and uncovered fundamental disagreements about the nature of “the good life.”6 According to Farber and Bailey, during the Sixties, the economy grew every month

Introduction  3 from 1960 to 1969. The jobless rate remained at or around 4 percent and “per capita income soared while the official poverty rate dropped from more than 22 percent of Americans in 1960 to just 12 percent in 1969.”7 Though a mere snapshot, these changes suggest a strong middle-class with an increasing amount of disposable income. Yet, the question remains, what was the cost of this growth? Lyndon Johnson outlined the more abstract issue in a speech delivered at the University of Michigan in 1962: have we “the wisdom to use . . . [our] wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the equality of our American civilization?”8 Johnson’s question might be thought of as the foundational assertion that informed a reevaluation of American culture. In one sense, the economic stability opened an interpretive space that allowed many to reflect on what America had become. The underground press took up this reevaluation to address not only value issues, such as those Farber and Bailey outline, but also to interrogate the cultural institutions that had emerged to normalize American hegemony.

Mainstream Press Though the underground press might naturally be positioned against the mainstream press, this wasn’t exactly the case. On many levels, the mainstream and the underground press worked on parallel tracks, if not together, to understand the cultural and social issues defining people’s lives. However, the mainstream press worked within the system to uphold it even as they rigorously questioned it. That is, after all, the function of a free press—to maintain and help to improve society but not necessarily to change it. As such an institution, its general function provides an important context for the underground press and what it reveals about the cultural role of dissent. Central in communicating the values of these institutions was the mainstream, dominant, or straight press; the nomenclature depends upon the group’s particular relationship to the use and distribution of this most important cultural tool. We need a sense at least of how the mainstream press addressed the issues emerging during the Sixties. It is, of course, wrong to castigate all these presses as conservative, proto-fascist, fake, or anti-youth. Even a cursory review of the New York Times publishing habits during the Sixties illustrates the enormous value of the paper’s reporting. The vibrancy of it, the sheer breadth and accuracy, is inspiring to a modern reader, who is endlessly inundated with the innocuous information offered through social media and ­blogs-come-newsrooms like Buzzfeed, Politico, and even the HuffPost. Something has, no doubt, been lost with the slow dissolution of print newspapers. In many cases, the mainstream press held political groups accountable and had more journalistic acumen and funding to support investigative reporting. The New York Times and the Washington Post published the “Pentagon

4 Introduction Papers,” for example, that revealed the extent to which Lyndon Johnson lied to the American people about American military conduct during the Vietnam War. Later, of course, the Washington Post would be instrumental in uncovering the extent of the fraud that characterized Nixon presidency. Even further, in 1968, The New York Times published exposes on the Civil Rights Movement and the race riots occurring the year before around the country. Others in the mainstream press spoke “truth to power” in similar ways. Even given this general fairness and occasional social activism, the mainstream press was not well tuned to the issues presented by the New Left and the Youth Movement. In some cases, the mainstream press was seen as dismissive or antagonistic to the cultural strife of the decade. In other cases, the very nature of their commitment to “objective” reporting was seen as the problem. Being too fair, some thought, allowed the guilty to hide behind the accepted discourses of the established social institutions. The mainstream press, being embedded in this established structure, was not well suited to rupture what Herbert Marcuse refers to as the “established reality principle.” In Notes from the New Underground, Jesse Kornbluth further outlines the relationship between the underground and mainstream press. He points out that several of the papers in the underground press were silenced by perhaps overzealous officials concerned about the oppositional stance these papers represented. He adds a telling review of the situation as he saw it in 1968, for the moment, . . . the underground represents more than a loose configuration of biweekly journals; it is also an attempt to legitimize dissenting reporting, to develop a constituency for radical politics, and, of course, to titillate an audience too well versed in political and cultural affairs to enjoy the mindlessness of mass journalism. 9 This mindlessness of mass journalism is, as C. Wright Mills argued, a product of its objectivity, an attempt to report rather than interpret the news. However, what was deemed worth reporting was a product of the “power structure,” as Kornbluth refers to the dominant culture, and overall functioned to promote establishment values. In addition, as John McMillan cites in Smoking Typewriters, the mainstream press tended to be tone-deaf to the concerns of the youth movement, the New Left, and those seeking to alter accepted norms. Kornbluth claims that every time someone stopped talking about change and began to enact it, which was an aim of many of the underground press, “a defender of the public morals” would rise to the occasion to ask: “What right do you have to criticize if you can’t do better?”10 This reactionary rhetoric was delivered as often as not to dismiss the discontent voiced in the underground press and rarely as a legitimate invitation to enter a dialogue. Indeed, the loss of a rigorous dialogue or dialectic

Introduction  5 among social structures was understood as a deficiency of the dominant culture. People no longer felt free to speak and once that freedom is attenuated, tensions inevitably rise. Of larger concern was that the mainstream press was thought to report obvious lies and so seemed in collusion with the liars. It was this aspect of the mainstream press that critics like Todd Gitlin, C. Wright Mills, and the underground press found most problematic. Gitlin, for instance, argued in the San Francisco Express Times in July of 1968 that anyone . . . who has held to the slightest shred of his own intuition and judgement knows that the media lies. . . . They lie by c­ onspiracy . . . , they lie by implication (‘Communist’ equals arch-demon), they lie by diversion (at least Miss California gets close to Jesus Christ), but mostly they lie by telling what they imagine to be the truth. They lie because of the code of their objectivity, because they have learned not to see, hear, feel, not to believe in the inside of a fact, not to doubt that their leaders lie and their textbooks lie and their teachers equate blue-eyed rock-stable property-gagging manifest-destined 5% interest American with truth.11 These lies, according to Gitlin, were not merely lies of omission or even outright falsifications but instead were lies that permeated the entire journalistic enterprise. A common trope of the decade, responsibility for the problems of society was almost always shifted to the underlying system, the structure of belief, the nature of our assumptions and rarely remained focused on a perpetrator unless that perpetrator was a stooge for the system and so on. The pervasive nature of these lies, a condemnation not nearly as widespread in the Sixties as today, undermined the truth-value of the mainstream press and suggested to those concerned that some shadow agenda was in play. Further developing this critique of the mainstream press, C. Wright Mills, in his influential “Letter to the New left” published in the New Left Review at the beginning of the decade, critiqued the objective reporting practiced by papers such as The New York Times: The disclosure of fact—set forth in a bright-faced or in a dead-pan manner—is the rule. The facts are duly weighed, carefully balanced, always hedged. Their power to outrage, their power to truly enlighten in a political way; their power to aid decision, even their power to clarify some situation—all is blunted or destroyed.12 The aspect of The New York Times that made it such a powerful cultural tool also made it an unwitting agent of the dominant social order. It framed information in a discourse accepted by culture and in so doing did little dissenting cultural work. As Mills put it, the paper did not

6 Introduction conduct necessary “ideological criticism.” What is clear to us now is that Mills’ argument would encourage the type of punditry that haunts contemporary cultural discourse. What was often overlooked in these critiques of the mainstream press was not only that it illustrated a reactionary rhetoric, as Albert O. Hirschman describes it, but that this rhetoric remains an essential part of a healthy cultural dynamic. For change to emerge, a process of push and pull is necessary to align emerging cultural forms with the dominant in a more or less productive way. This is often referred to as appropriation, a pejorative, but appropriation is really one of the aims of dissent. Activists are challenging dominant discourses in order to gain ­acceptance for their ideas. If the established order ignores these ideas, then the culture likely has little use for them. When a reaction does occur, it illustrates that the emerging culture is butting up against an entrenched value often seen as natural; therefore, questioning its validity is met with outrage. The outrage signals the beginning of a dialectic that may lead to change. That change depends on the process of dissent; it is this situation that has led some educators to argue that we should teach dissent in our public schools, treating it as a fundamental skill for a citizen living in a democratic society. One way of countering or dissenting from the perceived deficiencies of the mainstream press was to reinvent journalism, to make it more subjective and in being subjective reflective of a lived truth. To attempt this reinvention, the underground press first took control of the means of production and, in addition, developed a different journalistic tone and ethics. As Geoff Kaplan notes, “with increased availability of cheap offset printing, countless groups linked to the anti-war, civil rights, and various liberation movements were able to spread their messages through both elaborately designed newspapers and visually plainspoken broadsheets.”13 This offset printing was explained by Laurel in the Amazon Quarterly in 1973, but, of course, captures the process used in the Sixties. This instruction manual explains how to typeset, print, and distribute a magazine what we might now call a zine or underground publication.14 Laurel’s explanation reveals the simplicity, and sense of freedom, that this technology made available to dissenting groups. The ease of publication allowed the underground press to establish its subjective and anti-establishment journalistic ethos. As Gitlin notes, what initially motivated this generation of activists was a concern about what might be called the social malaise, seeming comfort in a time of underlying foreboding, an anxiety that something, though no one really knew what, was coming and it would be bad: Yet the affluent Fifties were, as I.F. Stone wrote, haunted. Conformity was supposed to buy contentment, cornucopia promised both private and public utopia, but satisfaction kept slipping out of

Introduction  7 reach. Opportunity meant competition; even the middle class had to ­wonder whether the great meritocratic race was really wide open. Plenitude beckoned, but there was no finish line, no place to rest and assure oneself, once and for all, “I’ve made it.” And there were fears that could barely be kept at bay. The affluent society was awash with fear of the uncontrollable. The personal jitters matched the country’s obsession with “national security.”15 While the presentation of pleasure would inspire the youth, many of their fears would manifest during the Sixties, as Gitlin expertly traces in his memoir: the fight for civil rights would continue to undermine a sense of fairness and a desire for social stability, the Cold War would produce paranoia on a cultural level, and the Vietnam War would both terrify and enrage young university students, as Gitlin describes: “And to nudge the sense of paranoia and apocalypse onward there was also, not least, the Vietnam War. Youth culture stared and trembled at the enormity of what was happening on the other side of the world.”16 At its peak, the underground press sought to dissent from the concerns Gitlin outlines to reimagine society, concerns that social institutions were largely responsible for fostering. Their efforts were complicated by contradictions, idealism, and naiveté. Yet, at the same time, the ideas that emerged during this moment of enormous social change are instructive on at least two levels: 1 These papers offered a way to reimagine culture and one’s function within it. This aspect of the underground press is significant. They offered a means of developing new structures of feeling that informed changes in cultural forms. Such active cultural critique is essential in a vibrant and responsive society and has implications, by the way, for our current use of social media. 2 These papers provided an exemplar of the process of dissent insitu. Studying these presses, especially at this crucial moment in ­A merican history, provides details about the very structure of our lives that can lead to productive change.

Anthologizing the Sixties Many of the themes important to the underground press can initially be gleaned from the anthologies of underground papers published in the early 1970s. Publishers’ interest in this often amateurish and anonymous material suggests that many found the general reaction to the dominant culture documented in these papers to be worth exploring and preserving. The most popular of these anthologies was The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution “assembled” by Mitchell Goodman. Others include Jesse Kornbluth’s Notes from the New

8 Introduction Underground: Where It’s At and What’s Up, Laurence Leamer’s The Paper Revolutionaries: The Rise of the Underground Press, Barbara Dane and Irwin Silber’s The Vietnam Songbook, and Harold Hayes’ Smiling through the Apocalypse: Esquire’s History of the Sixties. Together, these collections offer a frame for interpreting the events of the Sixties, and for drawing lessons from the decade’s complex events. For instance, Mitchell Goodman’s weighty collection captures in structure the chaos of the Sixties that is echoed in Gitlin’s general characterization. Goodman categorizes the documents he collected around the theme of “experience”: [the book contains] (1) The body of the cumulative experience, and (2) reflections and speculations on that experience. The first element makes up the great bulk of the book. It comprises the Movement as it plans, organizes, acts from day to day. It tells of certain crucial events and shows the lives of certain people (who are meant to be representative examples of the great range of men and women who make their lives in the Movement). The second is a smaller element, a group of a dozen or so items that might be seen as the central nervous system of the book. These are scattered through it in such a way as, to relate, more or less directly, to the material around them. . . . They are analyses, reflections, cogitations, overviews. Each is called a Comprehension.17 The importance of experience, in its various meanings, becomes a central concept during the Sixties. As Goodman suggests, reflecting on the nature of one’s collective experience can be informative, even transformative, and in this sense emerges as a method of inquiry for the underground press. What is your experience, and the answer to that question has practical implications. In a search of the Independent Voices, a database collecting a large number of underground papers, we see an increase in the use of “experience” from 63 in 1960 to 3,178 in 1969. Experience and its relationship to individual freedom and self-definition were central to the dissent of the underground press, which at times reflected the existentialism of, some might argue, Soren Kierkegaard to Albert Camus and J­ ean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, and Ralph Ellison. This existentialism also merged with Marxism and the post-structural thinking of Herbert ­Marcuse, whose analysis of society was enormously influential on the political perspectives of those working in the underground press.18 In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse uses “advanced industrial society” to mean the effective dominant culture. In this type of society, he claims, “the productive apparatus tends to become totalitarian to the extent to which it determines not only the socially needed occupations, skills, and attitudes, but also individual needs and aspirations.”19 For many, this was the central concern, a concern that an industrial society,

Introduction  9 through its control over ideology, erected the institutions and so the values that shaped human experience, as Marcuse puts it: “A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.”20 For this reason, the underground press often attacked the discourses, and occasionally the physical structures, that defined these institutions in the hope of affecting lasting change. Marcuse’s critique encourages this type of dissent, re-seeing or reimaging society rather than destroying it in the hopes of creating something better. Seen in hindsight, the underground press often reflects an existentialist stance. The debate was not only between conservative, liberal, hippie, and radical but instead between different ways of perceiving and living one’s life. C. Wright Mills suggests this in his “Letter to the New Left”: The Right, among other things, means—what you are doing, celebrating society as it is, a going concern. Left means, or ought to mean, just the opposite. It means: structural criticism and reportage and theories of society, which at some point or another are focused politically as demands and programs. 21 The point is that the Left, as Mills defines it, is a critical perspective used to explore the experience of everyday life, an issue central to the Movement as Goodman describes it. This perspective is existentialist, characterized by secular humanism and subjectivity. Gordon Marion notes the subjectivity inherent in existentialism, claiming that “existentialism is a much more personal form of philosophizing than any other.”22 The “I” perspective underscores the move toward individualism and subjectivity and away from the objectivity assumed by the mainstream press. What Marion claims about existentialism might be claimed about the underground press publishing during the Sixties, “In short, existentialism works at the level of personal meaning in contrast to general theory.”23 The underground press developed this individual perspective into an interpretive frame for analyzing dominant American culture and the social institutions of which it is composed. From the existentialist perspective, because there is no transcendent purpose to which all might aspire, experience is all we have; therefore, experience is both the purpose and the lens through which we understand life. Exploring this issue of experience and its representation in literature, Roger Shattuk, writing for Audit in 1960, claims that one thousand and one professors of Existentialism will never convince me that the absurd offers the secret of tragedy. The absurd, relieved of its layers of fashionable clothes, shows us a path away from the traditions of tragic and comic toward a new resoluteness and a new laughter. 24

10 Introduction In Tish, for example, the search for meaning in experience is seen as mitigated through poetry. 25 Exploring existence or experience might have been most notably applied in the Feminist papers following the example of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. As Rachele Dini notes, Beauvoir argues that “women’s oppression is rooted in society’s view of women not as individuals but as ‘an existent who is called upon to make herself object.’ All this can change, though. Since femininity is learned it can also be unlearned.”26 Friedan’s claims echo those of Beauvoir, critiquing as they do the cultural representation of femininity as a myth and arguing that this image could be reimagined. Taken together, these arguments established the primacy of subjectivity and choice and gave a method to the struggle for the self-determination we observe in the underground press, a ­self-determination at once inspiring and discomfiting. Goodman further divides the two experiential elements of his anthology into eight broad sections, including “The New Americans”; “Rebellion, Resistance, Revolutionary Action”; “People of Color”; “GI’s”; “Learning”; “What Price, Salvation Now (Drugs)”; “People Media, Pig Media”; and “How to Live, What to do.”27 These sections function to define an emerging cultural form, suggesting overall a way to structure a new society. Of course, Goodman is providing a historical view of “The Movement,” which refers to the youth movement established, as much as such a notion can be asserted, in 1962 by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They articulated their aims in the oft-referenced but rarely cited Port Huron Statement. Goodman subdivides these eight sections into a number of what he suggests as comprehensions, focused discussions on a theme important to the Movement, but what seem to me “motives,” suggesting ways in which change might be developed and a dialectic continued. Examining these motives, we see Goodman’s aims for a more inclusive society, one that encourages a less stratified social structure and one characterized by critical inquiry in both politics and education, communal engagement including a more egalitarian ­ownership of space, and the acceptance of drugs as a means to develop creativity and new insights. Similar to Marcuse, Goodman characterizes Sixties society invoking a chaotic culture in the midst of change: “We live in confusion verging on chaos, in the midst of a process of change we barely understand.”28 This process of change he cannot name is dissent. This concept is the fundamental process creating a dynamic culture. He goes on to echo Marcuse’s concerns about the advanced industrial society, which Goodman claims can only (really) be understood by the young.29 In this gloss of his time, we see the absurd meeting in an existential parody of society, a set of institutions undermining their own aims, and a series of paradoxes in need of a new social structure within a new cultural formation. And this structure was not to be reason, as such, but based

Introduction  11 first on experience or, as Heidegger put it, “conceptualizing ‘the things themselves.’”30 In Marcuse’s terms, this is a society that has “advanced” to a stage in which “the rights and liberties” that helped create it “are losing their traditional rationale and content.”31 What is lost in these observations is an understanding of how dissent actually functions, a confusion Goodman writing in 1970 admits: Something is happening. It goes deep, deeper than we know. Some call it revolution. Too easily, at times. Too simply. Often without knowing what they mean, until the word is thinned out. Yet it persists. . . . There is a revolution. No other word for it. It has only begun. It lives in the minds of a handful of men and in the hearts of many more. It shows itself in our most intimate lives, and on the streets. It will take a long time—a long revolution. If it succeeds, there will be no end to it.32 Without knowing it, Goodman is offering a definition of dissent, a process of change distinct from revolution, and a better term for what was happening. And as he notes, dissent never ends; it continues as long as the culture persists, defining and redefining the institutions of which that culture is composed. Other anthologies published in the early Seventies reflect similar themes. Jesse Kornbluth, for instance, suggests the absurdist existentialist turn that characterized the perspective of some underground papers: “With the power structure opposed mostly by those even less cohesive than the hippies, contemporary history will read more and more like bad Pinter: something went radically wrong during those years; what was it?”33 The reference to Pinter indicates his view of the presses’ and Movement’s absurdist tendencies to perceive meaning as essentially devoid of information. The something that went wrong was located in the problems of rationality—the structure and the act of making meaning. This was not the idea that meaning was unsettling because there was no ultimate arbiter of its validity except the self; this was the idea that meaning was meaningless and that seeking it was folly. Several of the underground papers employed this type of discourse, attempting to achieve perhaps two aims: one was to show the absurdity of the dominant cultural discourse especially that extolled by the political institutions, but also that which was present in society in general. The second related aim was to consider the totalitarian effects of this discourse on society. In the first instance, the presses would satirize the irrationality of the dominant through comics or visual art exposing what they felt was the sinister truth behind the political pronouncements. In the second case, they would rely on the social theories of C. Wright Mills and Frankfurt school philosophers, such as Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin to frame and interpret the function of and possible remedies to our troubled social institutions.

12 Introduction This absurdist turn is reflected in the underground press’ promotion of the absurdist theater where absurdist plays, such as Harold Pinter’s Tea Party, were performed. This play can be representative of at least one aspect of this philosophy. In a review of this play, Irving Wardle claims that the play concerns suppression. However, as in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, this suppression is imposed by the self upon itself because of a fear of punishment manufactured in an unconscious supplication to dominant cultural norms and values. Albert Camus and other existentialist claimed that life is absurd but argued that the courage of our lives is seeking purpose and meaning given this absurdity. For most underground papers, this was a central contention. However, other presses were drawn more to the absurdity claim, which when taken to extremes tripped into ­nihilism. Dissent from the nihilist perspective is simply refusing to act, mean, and embrace values and social institutions. To write from this perspective is merely an act of denial rather than critique and creation. Yet, most underground papers viewed the dominant culture as absurd, acting without meaning or with malicious intent, as The East Village Other’s January 1969 front page illustrates. The negative exposure of President Nixon critiques both the mainstream media’s use of the image and the duplicitousness of Nixon’s politics. All was hidden and maligned. Such satire can, and, in the case of the underground press, did slip closer and closer to nihilism by the end of the Sixties. Still, these presses viewed their observations about the absurdity of the dominant culture, especially the institution of politics, as a means of uncovering truth. Recently published anthologies have collected dissenting works reflecting dissent’s historical development. Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim’s Book of Dissent examines the concept broadly from our earliest records to contemporary times and recalls Mao Zedong’s Quotations from Chairman Mao. Hsia and Lim make reference to dissent as a means of reimagining the institutions of which a culture is composed: “ ­ Dissenting voices and rebellions against existing authority—pagan, tribal, religious, civil, feudal, bourgeois and Communist—form a global pattern.”34 I contend that lists of this sort are more a grab bag of themes than a careful consideration of dissent as a process of change. Ralph Young’s interesting collection Dissent presents the concept as central to the development of an American identity. Yet, Young’s understanding of dissent reflects a limited sense of the acts relationship to culture and to dominant social structures. This misunderstanding seems to stem from an understanding of dissent as a set of thematic acts of protest. He claims that “history has shown that dissent is . . . complex, that it comes from all political perspectives and in a variety of categories: mostly religious, political, economic, and cultural/social.” In a telling instance of this view, he claims that when people dissented “defenders of the status quo denounced the protestors as unpatriotic and in more recent times as un-American.”35 He goes on to note that

Introduction  13 these counter-protesters were also dissenters: “Individuals and groups that protest against the protestors are also expressing dissent.”36 This complex of dissents confuses the issue and makes dissent appear as a collection of disparate moments defined by the particular interests of the group and not as a necessary aspect of cultural change. What his description of dissent reveals, however, is that dissent is a process by which a culture changes. And this process is characterized not only by dissenting acts but also by the dominant cultural reaction to it, what Hirschman ­persuasively refers to as “reactionary rhetoric.” The process of dissent functions to interrogate the social institutions, such as religion, economics, politics, and the related values and norms attached to these institutions (what Young refers to as cultural/social dissent). Through this process, new “structures of feeling,” as Raymond W ­ illiams calls them, emerge that suggest the culture is changing, and these sites become the loci of cultural conflict. The publication of underground press anthologies during the early part of the Seventies reveals the importance of these presses and this moment of dissent in American history. These anthologies also suggest the difficulties inherent in trying to construct this picture, especially when culture and dissent were concepts weighted with the murkiest abstractions. Contemporary explorations of dissent perpetuate this murkiness as they continue to present culture as one item in a collection of items that roughly define our social experience. Often in these works, dissent is never clearly positioned within definitions of culture, which themselves are often muddy, and rarely understood as the process by which the dynamics of culture is created and maintained. Yet, what is clear is that dissent, as an essential part of American culture, remains important and in need of some functional clarification. Viewing this concept through the maelstrom of the Sixties and the presses that sought to navigate that decade can perhaps afford us some clarity about the function of this most important concept.

Structure of the Analysis The aim of this analysis is to suggest a theory of dissent that explains how culture changes. Related to this objective is an effort to tell a story that has been subject to erasure under an increasingly anti-democratic political environment. Today, the narrative of the Sixties is being revised to suggest that corporations, industry, and “free” workers rather than people organized to seek opportunity and fairness were responsible for America’s achievements. Nothing could be further from the truth. America has always been a contested space with a contested sense of identity, and the underground press in the Sixties, more than other decades, provided a particularly compelling view of America’s identity in the process of formation. In many ways, I am focusing my analysis on the exploration of one of the “unavoidable dilemmas” Gitlin articulates in

14 Introduction his account of the cultural complexities of the Sixties.37 My sense is that the underground press revealed that this “right relation,” Gitlin mentions, was in interrogating and, thus, in dissenting from the ­discourses of dominant culture. The underground press sought to interrogate culture, which they understood, informs the structure of not only our institutions but also of how we experience everyday life. The structure of my analysis pursues this critique wherever it may lead, suggesting that an understanding of culture requires a careful consideration of the social institutions that give it shape. The analysis is structured, in the words of Raymond Williams, to “revalue” the meanings that emerged from the content published in these ephemeral publications.38 This content ranges from debates over the relationships between citizens, the public, and private institutions; to questions about spirituality, sexuality, and the meaning of the body; to the possibilities of artistic expression; and to the very nature of social space. This press can be categorized into two general types: the oppositional press, which worked to affect change through a primarily political process; and the alternative or counter-cultural presses, which sought to create pockets of culture for alternative lifestyles.39 In my case, I refer to both types of papers as the underground press, suggesting that they all engage in the critique of culture. Yet I do suggest a general division in the structure of the chapters. In Chapters 2–4, I discuss the oppositional or political press, which engages the more politically oriented social institutions—politics and legal system, the economy, and education. I understand Chapter 5 as the linchpin connecting the oppositional and alternative papers into the larger underground press movement. This lynchpin is the poetics or the discourse of dissent that activists used in large part to challenge the prevailing aesthetic and cultural “feelings” associated with it. In Chapter 6, I address alternative cultural issues, which were concerned with the day-to-day experiences of dissent. Interspersed among these chapters, I include two interludes that briefly explore how some of the issues discussed in the chapters relate to contemporary instances of dissent. As one might expect with any distinctions used in the analysis of culture, these categories are not absolute, but do provide a means for more closely examining the role of the underground press in cultural and social changes. In Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams provides a location for dissent, which is often defined, as Steven Shiffrin does in Dissent, Injustice, and the Meanings of America, as “speech that criticizes e­ xisting customs, habits, traditions, institutions, or authorities.”40 ­Definitions similar to Shiffrin’s provide little sense of how dissenting acts affect cultural change. Williams’ scheme, on the other hand, creates a space, suggesting how such change is facilitated within dominant cultural practices. These dominant practices, meanings, and values, which Williams collectively refers to as the “effective dominant culture,” are appropriated into social

Introduction  15 practice and are continually remade in relation to existing ­social con­ ppositional cerns.41 These concerns are manifested in alternative and o cultural forms that can be either residual or emergent. Williams’ scheme helps explain the dissent one observes in the underground press, which sought to enact change by critiquing, in a number of ways, the normative values perpetuated by dominant cultural institutions. All too often, what was taken for granted reinforced injustices of one kind or another, or simply reified values that seemed out of touch and, therefore, inconsistent with progressive thinking, however the term “progressive” might be defined. This book reflects on the effects of these attempts to change society and what they might teach us about contemporary efforts to enact change today. In Chapter 1, I construct the theoretical framework that informs my analysis. This framework is adapted from Raymond Williams’ ideas about how alternative and oppositional cultural forms interact with “effective dominant culture” to create a dynamic culture, which I argue is another way of describing dissent. Dissent is not the occasional upheaval of dominant cultural practices, meanings, and values, but is a continual process by which a culture adapts, framing the public’s understanding of the dominant cultural institutions, which include politics, economics, education, aesthetics, the family, and religion. Understanding Williams’ concept of culture is important if one is to understand how the underground press actually functioned as the mechanism of dissent during this period. Without this recognition, the underground papers seemed, at best, anomalies and, at worst, merely the willy-nilly expression of silly adolescents. I realize that such a discussion is often plagued by a specialized jargon; however, this problem can be avoided by using Williams’ ideas to clarify the importance of these presses as an instance of cultural agency. Chapter 2 provides a discussion of the underground press’ critique of the dominant political issues of the decade. The prevailing political thinking during the Sixties might be described as liberal, a position characterized by resistance to communism and the development of a Cold War logic. The New Left’s concern about these prevailing preoccupations is articulated in The Port Huron Statement, which also offers insight into their agenda. Overall, the New Left sought a more responsive political environment, one that would address existing divisive issues, such as racial inequality and social justice, the war in Vietnam, and colonialism in general. In addressing these political issues, the New Left agitated for a participatory democracy and the underground press was one manifestation of that agenda. In Chapter 3, I primarily examine the underground press’ response to Capitalism. Part of the underground press’ critique of Capitalism was the denial of materialism and interrogation of the corporate role in shaping everyday experience. Rather than focusing on work and gaining of social status through the acquisition of materials, the underground press

16 Introduction sought reform of this structure by suggesting alternative modes of exchange and anti-corporate social arrangements such as communes. One prevalent theme in these critiques was the reconsideration of nature as a means of encouraging self-reliance and mutually supportive communities. In addition to the new-ageism of the period, in which nature was called on to perform all manner of miracles, there was also a growing belief that business models based on the self-sustainability could and should be further developed. This obsession with personal experience revealed the sharp contrast in values held by World War II and Sixties generations. Of course, both generations were concerned about self-actualization, but many in each group defined achievement differently and believed that it could and should be attained in dramatically different ways. The older generation, in general, believed that hard work would lead to a life considerably easier than the one their parents had experienced during the Great Depression. Along with this belief in work was an almost blind faith that the government would not interfere. The younger generation, however— growing up in times of unequaled prosperity—had felt that life should be experienced and had little sense that one need sacrifice personal freedom for the vaguely articulated needs of the economy. Central to the underground press’ function was the fact that many were staffed by university students, who had the leisure, the commitment, and often the means to publish these papers. For this reason in Chapter 4, I examine ideas regarding educational reform, which was one of the key locations and means of practicing dissent. In addition to discussing relevant political issues, underground papers also argued for sweeping reforms in the university structure and curriculum. Though the issues were varied, the majority called for open admissions policies; a more individualized education, including greater and more diverse course offerings; and, in some cases, “free universities,” which were not free of charge, but provided unconventional educational settings, such as studying art history at a museum instead of in a lecture hall. The intellectual activity inspired by these reform efforts was the source of many of the activist ideas expressed in the underground press during this period. In the underground press, artistic expression mattered; it was the means by which the Sixties activists, whether part of the New Left, Alt-Right, hippies, or Black Panthers, attempted to create a different sensibility or feeling, a concept articulated in Herbert Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetic. In Chapter 5, I consider how the sense of change fundamental to the creation of a different cultural “feeling” is embedded in the etymology of the term “dissent.” “Dissent” is derived from the Latin dissentire, which contains the root sentire, and means to “differ in sentiment or feeling.”42 What this etymology reveals is that acts of dissent at their core are not necessarily acts of revolution, which force change through various forms of

Introduction  17 coercion, but are acts of persuasion, in which the “effective dominant cultural” sentiments are changed through the imagination, or, to use a phrase from the Sixties, raising consciousness. In this chapter, I explore how the underground papers published during the Sixties facilitated dissent by exploring new structures of feeling, or what might be referred to as a poetics of dissent. Many of the forms the underground press disseminated—including poetry, short stories, cartoons, illustrations, and non-fiction—were ­published with the assumption that artistic imagination could enact change. Some texts aimed at disrupting the accepted definitions of art and decorum, hoping to frustrate rather than communicate. These texts often referred to residual cultural forms such as Dadaism or Surrealism, claiming some affinity to the missions expressed by these movements. Others used more or less accepted forms, such as projective verse, to communicate alternative ideas. These texts often took on a satirical quality, replacing accepted cultural images with the “other.” Through these texts, and the promotion of rock and roll music, the underground press sought to critique the experience of everyday life. The underground press talked openly about lifestyle choices, including the family, sexuality, drugs, and spirituality. In Chapter 6, I  consider how the inclusion of this content helped develop alternatives to those present in the dominant society. Feminist presses argued for women’s rights in the dominant culture, but also among fellow activists. The evolution of the feminist consciousness in many papers reveals the effectiveness of their efforts. Drugs, of course, were seen as a way of transcending the social constraints many felt stifled individual freedom. Activists such as Abbie Hoffman and Allan Ginsberg argued the benefits of marijuana and acid as sacraments of spiritual and artistic inspiration. However, as the decade waned and drug use increased, including the use of heroin, many of the underground papers began to publish campaigns against these “death drugs,” as they were sometimes called. Spiritual concerns were an offshoot of drug use, in which religious fulfillment was associated with acid trips and getting high. In general, religious dogma of any kind was spurned, and many sought, and the underground press attempted to offer, information about alternative spiritual ideas, which included Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religious philosophies. In concluding my study, I explore how contemporary social media, and the opportunities it offers dissenting voices, has democratized debate over issues ranging from the political to the personal, from the immediately relevant to the esoteric, from the accepted to the controversial, and everything in between. Praise for this open access has been widely published in articles and books; however, some have noted troubling issues, such as information intoxication and the amount of inaccurate information caused by a general lack of editorial oversight, e.g. “fake news.” Instead of strengthening dissent, social media, and all it offers,

18 Introduction tends to dilute it by displacing these acts from any connection with lived space. This is perhaps the main difference between the underground press of the Sixties and those on the Internet. An important aspect of the underground press was their presence in a space. Having a tangible, “real-time” existence, these papers would—­after a demonstration, for instance—linger on street corners, in libraries, or cafés. They would be distributed among friends and might be read by the casual pedestrian walking to work or home after a night out. As with the scars of battle, these presses remained as echoes of particular issues, inflected with the particulars of the places from which they emerged. Blogs, tweets, Facebook posts, and websites, on the other hand, are separated from space, ephemeral in both duration and relevance to a social location. One must find them through the ciphering and deciphering screens of the computer. Even though I could create a newsletter in five minutes and send in via email to colleagues, friends, and family, doing so is significantly different from typing up a broadside, making copies on a mimeograph machine, and stapling them up on neighborhood telephone poles, taping them to doors, or sticking them under the windshield wipers of cars. The publishers of underground papers brought dissent to a social space to create and rally a community around some issue; the blogger, in contrast, can only assume that a concerned community will find her work, read it, and act on it. The dilution of dissent on the Internet may not destroy it, creating a discourse sanctioned by the government as in George Orwell’s 1984, but it has and will continue to change its social and cultural functions.

Notes 1 Lance Marrow, “Introduction: 1968,” in Time: 1968, special edition, 2018, 4. 2 It is important to avoid confusing dissent as a synonym of revolution. Revolution is, as I note throughout, the failure of dissent. In addition, it is best to avoid qualifying dissent with other social terms. For instance, using “cultural dissent” or “political dissent” is to confuse the central role of dissent as the process by which culture changes. Raymond Williams’ wok on culture indicates the use of such distinctions, but in this case, these analytical perspectives cause confusion. 3 Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, revised ed. (New York: Bantam, 1993), xiv. Gitlin is a media critic. His book examines the Sixties as an instance of dissent, which I argue is the means by which culture changes. 4 I use Old Left and New Left to distinguish between the more committed Marxist and labor activists of the Old Left and the youth activists of the New Left. 5 David Farber and Beth Bailey, ed., The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 6 In Das Kapital, Karl Marx notes that the obsession with growth in capitalist societies exacerbates issue of inequality between classes. 7 Farber and Bailey, Columbia, 56. 8 Farber and Bailey, Columbia, 55. 9 Jesse Kornbluth, ed, Notes from the New Underground, (New York: Ace Publication, 1968), 14. 10 Kornbluth, Notes, 11.

Introduction  19 11 Todd Gitlin, “Cursing Establishment Seizes Mass Media,” in The Movement Toward a New America, ed. Mitchel Goodman (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1970), 366. 12 C. Wright Mills, “The New Left,” in Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Horowitz (New York: Ballantine Books, 1963), 247–248. 13 Geoff Kaplan, Power to the People: The Graphic Design of the Radical Press and the Rise of the Counter-Culture, 1964–1974 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 6. 14 Kaplan, Power. 15 Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, revised ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), 22. 16 Gitlin, Sixties, 220. 17 Mitchell Goodman, ed., introduction to The Movement Toward a New America (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1970), v. 18 Neophyte is used in both its positive sense, as a student or apprentice, and negative sense, as a supplicant. 19 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964), xlvii. 20 Marcuse, One, 1. 21 Mills, “New Left,” 247–248. 22 Gordon Marion, introduction to Basic Writings of Existentialism (New York: Modern Library, 2004), ix. 23 Marion, introduction to Basic Writings, xii. 24 Roger Shattuk, “Sappers, Diggers, and the Avant-Garde,” Audit, September 1961, Independent Voices, 7. 25 Frank Davey, “One Man’s Look at Projective Verse,” Tish, January 13, 1962, 7. 26 Rachele Dini, A Macat Analysis of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (London: Macat International, 2017), 32. 27 Goodman, introduction to The Movement, v–vi. 28 Goodman, introduction to The Movement, vi. 29 Goodman, introduction to The Movement, vi. 30 Marcuse, One, xii. 31 Marcuse, One, 1. 32 Goodman, Movement, vi. 33 Kornbluth, Notes, 11. 34 Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim, eds, The Verso Book of Dissent: Revolutionary Words from Three Millennia of Rebellion and Resistance (London: Verso, 2016), xvii 35 Ralph Young, Dissent: The History of an American Idea (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 3. 36 Ralph Young, Dissent: The History of an American Idea (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 6. 37 Gitlin, Sixties, 5–6. 38 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 39 In Smoking Typewriters, John McMillan divides these presses into political and counter-cultural. This is a fine division, but one that seems slightly more complex than he suggests. In his book, McMillan focuses most on the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the presses associated with this organization, such as the New Left Notes and SDS Bulletin. 40 Steven H. Shiffrin, Dissent, Injustice, and the Meanings of America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), xi. In his text, Shiffrin is mostly concerned with dissent within the context of the legal system. 41 Williams, Marxism, 123. 42 “Dissent,” Lexico.com. www.lexico.com/en/definition/dissent.

1 Structure of Dissent

Culture and Its Features Abe Peck’s description of culture in Uncovering the Sixties provides a typical characterization of this concept: During the Sixties and early 1970s, a volley of challenges was aimed at the accepted order in the United States. War, racism, class, nationalism, the environment, sexuality, the nature of consciousness, culture, work, lifestyle—all were radically, substantially, sometimes explosively reconsidered.1 When discussing the concept of culture, critics couple the term “culture” with adjectives such as artistic or political and so on, as though it was only one item in a list of distinct social forms. This representation is fairly common and relates back to the Marxist presentation of culture in Das Kapital. According to Marx, society is composed of the base and superstructure. The base is the economic realities that define human experience, which is essentially determined by access to the “means of production.” The superstructure is composed of ideological discourse that justifies these fundamental economic relationships, which, among others, contains cultural discourse. Peck reiterates this relationship, indicating how the social order is shaped by discourses the dominant culture controls. Both critics and proponents of Marxist thinking have often reconsidered the base and superstructure and how both ideas relate to the experience of everyday life. 2 Distinct from these formations, culture is co-constitutive, which suggests that the social institutions that define a culture are always in the process of being constructed. Dissent, then, is the operative means motivating this process of constructive change. Social institutions, which dissent acts upon, are in essence forms of discourse and as such are the recognizable structures used to develop the norms and values that mediate power and define the experience of everyday life. Institutions represent discursive formations in at least two ways: 1 Social institutions function as gatekeepers, determining what social practices are acceptable and which are aberrant or, as they are sometimes called, deviant.

Structure of Dissent  21 2 Social institutions appropriate or transform emerging “structures of feeling,” new cultural forms in formation, to align with dominant expectations.3 In short, no dissent remains pure as it is filtered through the cultural apparatus of a society. The function of institutions and the complexity of change emerge from a careful analysis of the underground press published during the Sixties. Everything can be seen as political. Yet, understanding everything as political leads to an amalgam of issues that might be more clearly considered if removed, as much as possible, from the other cultural issues related to it. The themes that emerge from this analysis of the underground press reveal the relationship between theory and its role in reimagining the discourse of dissent as participatory cultural change. The cultural theorist Raymond Williams reframed the Marxism articulated in the Communist Manifesto in his Marxism and Literature. In this study, Williams explains the structure of culture in an effort to clarify it, arguing that culture is central to our understanding of how the social order is formed and maintained. From Williams’ structure, the location and function of dissent as the operative process by which a culture continues to change can be developed. Dissent from this perspective is essential to understanding how a culture functions as a living, dynamic system of social institutions that both form discourses by which values are rejected and appropriated into the “effective dominant” culture. Relating dissent to culture offers a frame by which dissenting acts can be both discovered and assessed. They can be assessed in terms of their function as a form of cultural work central to social life, to the “the practice of everyday life.”4 The term culture is complex, which is what makes the concept both powerful analytically and endlessly frustrating. Raymond Williams painstakingly reviews the historical use of the term “culture” in much of his work, but perhaps most cogently in Keywords and Culture and Society 1780 –1950s. In Keywords, for instance, he indicates that “culture” is “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.”5 Because of the complexity of the term, “culture” is often confused, as Peck does, with a segment of society, what, in Marxism, is referred to as the “superstructure,” when it is best understood as the context within which society and the institutions defining it are structured. Outlining this structure, and attempting to avoid the enervating complications, will help indicate how dissent then functions as the primary operation of cultural change. Understood in this relational lens, dissent is not merely an act of resistance against a prevailing set of ideas, though that meaning remains, but is a process through which changes in the dominate cultural forms 6 are achieved.

22  Structure of Dissent In Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams responds to the characterization of culture Peck and others articulate: “Instead of making cultural history material…, it was made dependent, secondary, ‘superstructural’: a realm of ‘mere’ ideas, beliefs, arts, customs, determined by the basic material history.”7 Williams’ contention is that culture is not merely a component of a society but is instead the context within which society is shaped and given meaning, as Williams suggests, “For what I see in the history of this word [culture], in its structure of meanings, is a wide and general movement in thought and feeling.”8 In effect, culture is the location in which “social being determines consciousness.”9 Unpacking this point indicates a few fundamental aspects of culture that Peck and others tend to characterize as monological. Social being, or the experience of the social, is defined by the institutions that emerge within society to maintain its structure. These institutions are those that define the dominant political, economic, educational, aesthetic, and familial practices, and these practices determine the dominant ideology that defines not only a culture but the experience of it. In this sense, social institutions determine consciousness in informing what values and norms are acceptable and unacceptable. Central to this contention is that culture is best understood as both a constitutive and dynamic social process rather than constituted and static. Williams adds that culture is, in effect, a record of a number of important and continuing reactions to [. . .] changes in our social, economic and political life, and may be seen, in itself, as a special kind of map by means of which the nature of the changes can be explored.10 As Williams exploration of the etymology of “culture” indicates, changes in language map changes in “life and thought to which the changes in language evidently refer.”11 Constructing this social and discursive map allows us to discuss in more concrete, but no less flexible, terms how dissent works to transform culture. Understanding a culture as a process rather than as a static more accurately represents the dynamics of culture, indicating both how culture functions and how those functions can be analyzed through the lens of dissent. In “The Analysis of Culture,” Williams clarifies the general structure of culture, indicating how culture can be analyzed. An analysis of culture, he contends, tends to proceed from one of three general definitions of the concept: the ideal, the documentary, and the social.12 The ideal refers to the sense of culture as a “state or process of human perfection”; the documentary refers to culture as an expression of certain values through a body of “intellectual and imaginative work”; and the social which suggests that culture is the “description of a particular way of life.”13 These definitions or senses of culture amount to analytical perspectives, outlining particular foci for the study of culture and its relationship to

Structure of Dissent  23 the dominant culture, which is composed of the dominant social institutions shaping day-to-day experiences. This concept of dominant culture can be clarified in terms of “social hegemony,” which Antonio Gramsci characterized in his Prison Notebooks as a relationship between intellectuals and the “world of production, which is ‘mediated’ by the whole fabric of society and by the complex of superstructures. . . ”14 In this case, Gramsci’s use of “intellectuals” relates more to social elites, such as the wealthy or those who have access to the means of production, than to academics, who we generally think of as intellectuals. Nonetheless, Gramsci’s central contention is that the social elites use the institutions through which a culture is defined to maintain power or, as he puts it, to enforce “consent.”15 The power both constructed and maintained through consent is “mediated” through hegemonic discourse, or what we might refer to as the language of power. The idea of language as a means of mediating power helps outline the dimensions of dissent, indicating the importance of understanding it as the operations by which change occurs in cultures. Of course, the structure of language informs the discursive nature of dissent. In his analysis of language, Williams argues that once our sense of language is freed “from simple analogies with physical perception,” its relationship with social dynamics can be better understood.16 The relationship between the social and the formal structure of language is suggested by Saussurean linguistics, as Williams notes: “‘Sign’ itself—the mark or token; the formal element—has to be revalued to emphasize its variability and internally active elements, indicating not only an internal structure but an internal dynamic.”17 The structuring of language, the sign, into signified and signifier, helps position the idea of dissent within discourse, suggesting how dissent relates to cultural dynamics. In essence, dissent becomes the mode by which a sign produces meaning in culture; it is the process by which the meaning of a sign is continually negotiated. With this sense of language, Williams imagined a “dialectical process,” characterizing the interaction between language and social change.18 Language and dissenting practices emerge as a means of developing practical social changes within a cultural. As Williams notes, Gramsci’s definition of hegemony and the l­anguage issues associated with it go beyond the typical definition of culture and suggest how culture functions as a frame for analyzing social experience. Williams outlines this structure as containing the effective dominant cultural sphere, emergent, and residual forms that are either alternative or oppositional in their relationship to the dominant culture (see Figure 1.1). The dominant or hegemonic culture is both defined and maintained by social institutions. Generally, these institutions include political, economic, educational, aesthetic, familial, and religious social structures that are manifested both through language and anchored in social, intellectual space. Emergent and residual cultural forms enter the dominant

24  Structure of Dissent

Culture

Dominant Cultural Codes

Process of Dissent : 1. Oppositional 2. Alternative Emergent Cultural Codes

Residual Cultural Codes

Figure 1.1  S tructure of Dissent.

by interrogating one or more of these institutions through alternative or oppositional discourses of dissent. These interrogations are facilitated through different means, each of which seeks to redefine the institutional discourse and in so doing modify the dominant culture. In this way, the hegemonic institutions are always in flux, delimited by the persuasiveness of the norms and values they help to articulate. Into this tension, dissent enters as the means of interrogation—the only means of modifying existing social hierarchies. In the underground press of the Sixties, the term culture was often used to define the location of social conflict, a term that helps clarify not only the presence but the purpose of dissent as a means of achieving cultural change. Often, the underground press referred to the dominant culture as the “establishment” or the “established culture.” This clearly refers to the established values and norms articulated by the institutions developed in relationship with power. For example, the New Left Notes19 published by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) characterize the dominant culture as a malevolent power, ascribing value to other sectors of society to serve the demands of the political elite. For instance, in defining a “participatory democracy,” which was a goal central, if unstated, to the mission of the underground press, Martin Oppenheimer, writing for the New Left Notes in 1966, claimed PD [political dissent] involves the notion (a) that people are inherently capable of understanding their problems and expressing themselves about these problems and their solutions, if given a social context in which freedom of expression is possible, that is, a situation in

Structure of Dissent  25 which one is free of personal and political hang-ups; (b) that no real solutions to problems are possible without the fullest participation of the people in these solutions, nor without the development of freedom from dependency on authorities and experts; and (c) for community-organizing types of groups, that cultural groups which differ in their value systems from the dominant culture cannot be organized unless a context of free expression is created; and (d) for education-oriented groups, that real education (as distinct from learning information only) cannot take place for anyone unless a situation is created in which the student is able to evaluate what goes on around him critically, without being hung-up on the judgements and values of persons in an authority relationship to him. Finally, of course, ‘P.D.’ is a way of functioning in groups so that those ideas are realized, for the purpose of helping to create a society in which everyone will participate in decisions concerning his every day and long-range affairs to his fullest potential. The assumption is that the good society is one in which people will want to try to function to their fullest potential, and that, conversely, a society cannot be good unless this happens.20 In a similar vein, Paul Booth represented the dominant culture as the producer of not only a hegemonic discourse but also a people, a New Left.21 While this New Left opposed the injustices of Capitalism, it also denied Liberalism and the Old Left’s general ambivalence regarding the abuses of communism. As Booth suggests, many in the underground press understood the dominant aspect of the dominant culture as defined by age, by an older generation, and by the economic abuses of corporations, or what Eisenhower famously referred to as the military-industrial complex. 22 In 1962 in the African American literary magazine Freedomways, John Henrik Clarke, reviewing E. U. Essien-Udom’s Black Nationalism, characterized the dominant culture as a coercive force, in essence forcing rather than negotiating consent.23 These tendencies to see the dominant culture as a coercive force changed slightly during the Sixties. In the early part of the decade, the dominant culture is referred to as a nebulous force controlling the values that define social institutions. Yet by the end of the decade, while this use still existed, it was often represented as a more neutral location. For example, in Freedomways in 1969, the dominant culture is referred to as a valid reality with which marginalized groups contended. Characterized as a discourse shaping the perception of everyday life, the dominant culture is also equated with a “liberal” ideology. For example, in the New Left Notes in 1969, the Radical Arts Troupe of Berkley24 published the satirical “Reserve Liberal Training Camp.” The point of the satirical exchange was to illustrate liberal thinking about the Vietnam War—the military being a political institution that supported

26  Structure of Dissent a liberal ideology. This term may initially be confusing as it may seem to relate to “liberal” as in “liberal education” or “liberal democracy”; however, this is not the case. “Liberal” in the underground press refers to a progressive ideology that was in ascendency and would shape American politics for much of the late 20th and early 21st centuries until challenged temporarily by the reemergence of populism. As an ideology, David Harvey defines neoliberalism, the reemergence of liberal ideas around the turn of the 21st century, as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”25 In this framework, dominant cultural or the “state” functions “to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.”26 The framework that ­Harvey mentions can be visualized in the model of culture developed by ­Raymond ­Williams. Within this framework, dissent is featured to indicate how discourse functions to achieve cultural change, a change that is always ongoing.27 These examples further reveal that the dominant culture is essentially defined as a discourse enforcing assent and consent. The distinction between these terms is subtle but further indicates the function of the dominant culture. Assent is often associated with the means by which one comes to accept an opinion, whereas consent often relates to giving permission to let some action take place. The subtlety of these terms reflects that of cultural activity. In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman argue that the mainstream media often functions to support the dominant culture, even while seeming to critique it.28 In supporting these prevailing hegemonic values, the media in essence “manufactures consent” in viewers. As Chomsky and Herman note: The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. 29 The media does this not so much by misrepresenting the truth, though that is part of the propaganda, but by failing to present issues through a critical lens. Lacking effective framing, the media encourages an acceptance of the dominant culture by failing to provide a means of resisting it. While in The Rights of Assent Sacvan Bercovitch draws a similar conclusion about the function of discourse in a culture to those of Chomsky and Herman, he also argues that institutional values, such as politics, religion, and law, are developed and maintained through ritual or performative language. Performative rhetoric, in effect, manifests

Structure of Dissent  27 that which it invokes, which becomes the prevailing dominant ideology. These cultural theorists indicate that the dominant culture at its core secures through the development of social institutions both consent and assent, concepts that represent a cultural process and not a static state. As discourse assumes and perpetuates opinions, it also encourages action based on those opinions. This process is not inherently bad; it is, of course, part of human social interaction; yet if left unchecked, or unseen, it can lead to the acceptance of social structures that undermine individual freedoms. When the acceptance of cultural values is perceived as a free choice, but is not, its effect on the public is difficult both to perceive and, as necessary, dismantle. In this context, the process of dissent is essential to keep in view and under tension the cultural values and norms that are been disseminated as though they were natural. In addition to concerns about the process of manufacturing assent and consent, those writing in the Sixties underground press often voiced concern about the Movement being “co-opted”; dissent that is co-opted is made to conform to the dominant culture and, as such, loses its dialectical potential. For example, in the SDS Bulletin, Todd Gitlin claimed that “if radicals are not participants in mass movements, then assuredly the movements will be co-opted, or only chaos will result—without radical organization capable of molding the new from the breakdown of the old.”30 Central to this concern was a fear that the establishment would “use” the movement for its own purposes. For example, in April of 1968 in a conversation between Jerry Rubin and Phil Ochs about the Yippies, a countercultural group, Rubin claims that the radical ideas of the Yippies and others couldn’t be appropriated by the establishment because they were aiming their protests against the very institutions that had once appropriated dissenting activities.31 Rubin indicates two central issues prevalent in the underground press: (1) this growing awareness of culture as a construct of institutions. Yet, in Rubin’s comments, we see a general sense of culture as a social institution rather than a prevailing ideological discourse, shaping our perceptions of existing social institutions. (2) A concern that the dominant culture might appropriate their ideas as their own or misrepresent them to serve dominant hegemonic purposes. The cultural push and pull represented by this discourse is common, but seems rarely analyzed, and, therefore, is presented in a chaotic way. Essentially, the push and pull that activists like Rubin discussed is part of the process of dissent. As emergent and residual cultural forms develop, they interrogate and are interrogated by the dominant cultural and its institutions. This part of the dissenting process keeps change from occurring before it can be fully incorporated into the dominant culture, which can only occur once the emergent form has been stabilized. And even though the underground press lamented co-option, it is a necessary aspect of cultural and concurrent social

28  Structure of Dissent change. This aspect of dissent was widely misunderstood and often undermined the efforts of dissenting groups who would often work against change because of a fear that their views would be “accepted” by and become a part of the dominant ideology, which is necessary for social cohesion to exist at all. Yet, as the underground press revealed, a dominant ideology, a dominant culture, and dominant social institutions are not healthy without the process of dissent. Once dissent is quashed, ideology becomes static and emerging differences become stifled. Informing this context, dissent might initially be unpacked in relation to Williams’ notion of a “structure of feeling.”32 Williams defines a structure of feeling as an indication of change in process, or an “experience in solutions”: [Structures of feeling are socially constitutive] first, in that they are changes of presence. . . ; second, in that although they are emergent or pre-emergent, they do not have to await definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action.33 This definition indicates that dissenting practices are associated with these structures of feeling, adding pressure to current institutional definitions and, in so doing, adding pressure to the meanings ascribed to the experience of everyday life. This definition also reveals the importance of language, of symbolic structures, in the construction of a dominant ideology and in the function of dissent. Meaning is always being negotiated and created. The concept that Williams does not stress in his analysis is exactly how a “structure of feeling” gains acceptance, or is made manifest, as part of the value system and institutional expectations that shape and maintain a culture. He suggests that structures of feeling are “social experiences in solution,” which indicates that such changes enter culture through expression and experience, a process that in essence prepares them for acceptance into the dominant cultural institutions. This sense of experience is worth discussing more. Experience in the context of culture is one way of elaborating on meaning, and how it is made and maintained. Michel De Certeau in discussing culture specifically focuses on the experiences or “practices of everyday life.” In his analysis, he argues that the “users” of culture shape experience through their negotiation of the producer’s cultural “tactics.”34 In effect, Certeau’s point is that a user rather than simply accepting the producer’s strategies manipulates them for his or her purposes. The user’s experience then is a product of his or her negotiation of current institutional values out of which the dominant ideology forms. However, the producer’s control of the cultural discourse limits the range of options the user has in reformulating dominant values. Therefore, the user’s experience, though individualized to some degree, is still controlled by the dominant ideology.

Structure of Dissent  29 Dissent can be applied to this gap in our understanding of experience as the means by which this cultural “movement” that Williams identifies is facilitated within a culture, motivating changes in thought and feeling and creating our experience of everyday life.

The Etymology of Dissent The etymology of dissent provides important insight into its function as the process by which cultural change and associated meaning are constructed. To understand the role of dissent as an act, or part of a material social process, it is important to note that it is derived from the Latin dissentire, meaning “to differ in sentiment” and contains the root sentỉre, meaning “feeling.” This etymology suggests that dissent is perhaps best understood as a means of altering “feeling” or in Williams’ phrase manifesting a “structure of feeling.” Yet to understand how dissent functions to construct these emerging feelings or experiences, we should have some sense of what a feeling is. Often, social experiences are reduced to “fixed forms,” suggesting that the social is always past and often understood as an established “feeling,” value, or belief. 35 For ­Williams, the aim of analyzing structures of feeling is to move away from the static and examine how “meanings and values . . . are actively lived and felt.”36 Williams refers to this complex of meanings and values as “social experiences in solution.”37 We might extend this observation to note that social experience is always in the process of coming into focus, being modified and appropriated into the established social order. In this context, dissent can generally be divided into oppositional and alternative forms. These categories are more effective than thinking of dissent as intentional or unintentional or liberal or conservative or by prefacing it with an adjective, such as political, religious, economic, and so on. In Williams’ terms dissent either opposes the dominant discourse or provides an alternative to it. It is important to remember that dissent is a discourse, and oppositional or alternative forms are manifested in language, which once verbalized can manifest in concrete social institutions as the basis for practical changes in behavior. This again is what Williams means by a “feeling.” Dissent brings new “structures of feeling” into a dialectic relationship with the dominant cultural ideology, which can then lead to a real change. In The Underground Press in America, one of those few early studies of the underground press movement, Robert J. Glessing asserts that the “underground press is a reaction to, not a cause of, conditions in society.”38 On its surface, Glessing’s assertion seems valid. The underground press was reacting to the dominant cultural values; however, Glessing seems to give little regard to the function of discourse or of dissent. In the underground press’ reaction to the dominant culture, it sought to reimagine or engage with emergent structures of feeling in order to change the discourse, to modify the

30  Structure of Dissent language used to understand experience. While the underground press didn’t always present cogent cultural forms, they did use the process of dissent to alter the material conditions of American culture. In the underground press, we see how these two forms of dissent, oppositional and alternative, appear in practice.

Analytical Framework Graham P. McDonough provides a definition of dissent as part of his larger argument regarding moral education. His definition contains seven interrelated criteria, illustrating, within the context of culture, how dissent relates to the dominant culture and in general how it functions to establish new cultural forms. The seven criteria McDonough claims define dissent are (1) “enfranchisement,” (2) “shared epistemic history,” (3)  “contra-hegemonic action,” (4) “ethical,” (5) “epistemologically ­selective and constructive,” (6) “publicity,” and (7) “persuasive.”39 He divides these criteria into two categories that he uses to support his argument about the development of a moral education: the first three criteria are primarily descriptive, while the last four are primarily prescriptive. While McDonough’s work, and those of the scholars he cites, provides useful insight into the concept of dissent, his concern with “loyal disagreement” as a moral gauge of appropriate dissent can limit our understanding of it as a product of the social institutions “containing” that dissent. Simply, the assumption that we should distinguish appropriate from inappropriate dissent undermines the central function of this discourse. At its most fundamental, dissent is used to discover which human needs and desires are or are not appropriate to a culture. If this decision is dictated to dissenters, then the discourse is effectively controlled by the dominant value structure and creates little dissonance through which change can be imagined and enacted. If we consider dissent as the process characterizing the dynamics of a culture, then we can modify McDonough’s criteria to suggest the nature of this process. First, enfranchisement indicates that dissent is a reaction to the established social institutions of which the dominant culture is composed and to which the dissenter has a close affiliation.40 In general, the reaction to the dominant can be characterized as either oppositional or alternative and drawing from emergent or residual cultural forms. In this way, as McDonough indicates, the dissenter maintains a position between calls for revolution and those for conformity. From this position, the dissenter can be said to “sit apart” from the culture to critique it.41 The underground press tended to locate this critique in the radical intellectual, who Noam Chomsky argued, in a review of Rosa ­Luxemburg’s ideas, should avoid seeking power and, therefore, avoid the totalitarian tendencies social power can engender. Instead, he claims that the role “of the intellectuals and radical activists . . . must be to assess and evaluate,

Structure of Dissent  31 to attempt to persuade, to organize, but not to seize power and rule.”42 Chomsky separates the intellectual from the radical, viewing them as a collaborative unit, both informing the practices of the other rather than competing with each other. Fashioning this critique of social institutions requires the dissenter to share with the dominant an understanding of the history and assumptions that shape the prevailing social institutions, which McDonough calls “shared-epistemic history.” McDonough’s use of “epistemic” suggests that the “narrative” of the social institutions functions to validate certain knowledge over other types.43 McDonough notes that this does not mean that the dissenter accepts that the prevailing traditions and knowledge are necessarily true but only that the dissenter works within those forms to develop a cogent critique. The underground press interrogated the discourse of the social institutions of which the culture was composed, illustrating their relationship to those dominant institutions. However, some presses such as The Rat, The Realist, (say) Screw, and other primarily campus presses often ignored or satirized the traditional discourse, suggesting that something entirely new, a new spirit, a new lifestyle, was needed. That said, they did not necessarily push for new institutions or an entirely new social structure, but rather agitated for a new way of being in relation to those institutions. McDonough’s primary distinction is that “dissent is therefore a creative challenge which emerges from within the same historical conditions it critiques, for its creativity is rooted within a recovery or reform of traditional corporate [or collective] memory.”44 In this sense, dissent often draws from emergent or residual cultural forms to fashion that critique, one that relates to the history of the dominant but that can be devised to reform it. However, dissenters often draw from traditions outside the dominant, such as using Buddhist concepts to critique Christianity. The distinction between shared-­epistemic history and the next criterion is difficult to summarize. These criteria converge to inform the “contra-hegemonic” discourse of the dissenter.45 The dissenter works against the more subtle implications of cultural hegemony. Of course, this hegemony informs the structure and discourse of the prevailing social institutions and, therefore, is often difficult to deconstruct as it seems natural, appears to be the reality. In the underground press, the aim was often to expose these hegemonic discourses, illustrating alternatives to dominant norms and values. Herbert Marcuse describes this practice as a form of negative thinking in which one questions the principles of the “total administered society” in order to dismantle “instrumental reasoning.” In an advanced industrial society, this instrumental reasoning turned our “freedom from material want . . . into a means of producing servitude” to the capitalist system, a system that turned desire for “true needs,” such as food and sex, into a desire for consumer products, such as washing machines and toasters.46 Gaining freedom from this system requires uncovering its mechanisms

32  Structure of Dissent of manipulation and then articulating alternative social structures, a project in which the underground press was engaged. These criteria describe dissent, but how does one determine if a ­dissenting act is ethical, seeking to achieve a socially beneficial aim? McDonough argues that ethical dissent develops a “framework or culture” that supports “morally desirable dissent.” He notes that this type of dissent seeks to promote justice for the “good of society.”47 What form of discourse constitutes appropriate dissent is determined through its use within prevailing social institutions. A person may find the use of clothing in public repressive and when those issues are presented to the public, the public will determine the social validity of the claim. When President Johnson argued for escalating the war in Vietnam and for the use of the draft, those affected articulated their concerns and found sympathy in the public. This sympathetic response was due in part to a prevailing concern, in the young primarily, that they were being asked to die for the benefit of a group of rich elite capitalists, a point they articulated in the Port Huron Statement and kept articulating throughout the ­Sixties. Others felt that their time was devoted to working for, again, rich elites and that this time could be used to experience life as one chose. Why, so the thinking often went, must I work to live? Why must I place myself in a servile position to some arbitrary figure, in essence, to plead for my life, for the healthcare and paper bills that make life possible? How has such a system come to dominate modern life to such an extent? These questions and others like them gave credence to the underground press’ efforts to reimage and reform society. Something better did actually seem possible. The ethics of the underground press also reflects McDonough’s last three criteria: “epistemologically selective and constructive,” “public,” and “persuasive.” The underground press made diverse kinds of knowledge and perspectives available to the public through its papers. These papers can be divided into oppositional and alternative forms and each sought to persuade its audience to consider alternative norms and values to those established in the dominant social institutions. Alternative forms of dissent overlap in some ways with the oppositional forms, but maintaining the distinction is helpful. Many of the underground papers, especially later in the decade, used the format of the mainstream press. One effect of this format was to mirror mainstream discourse to emphasize dissenting content, creating an alternative voice that might be received as on par with the mainstream. The SDS, for instance, developed the SDS Bulletin and the Liberation New Service in the latter half of the Sixties both of which mirrored some mainstream journalistic practices. As the youth, civil rights, and feminist movements evolved, they often began to mimic the mainstream press, among other issues, to gain acceptance. Such efforts to seek acceptance caused tension, claims of “selling out,” and so on; however, an understanding of

Structure of Dissent  33 dissent as a necessary process in securing cultural change illustrates why such changes are necessary. In the early Sixties, many presses began as primarily oppositional seeking to “offend” or “attack,” as they often put it, dominant cultural practices, practices that they viewed as violent, repressive, or simply misguided. However, as the movements they supported evolved, the presses began to change, engaging cultural institutions more directly to offer not only critique but valid and feasible alternatives to mainstream cultural values and their associated institutions and behaviors. The oppositional and alternative forms of dissent appeared generally in both the format and the content of the underground press. Glessing pointed out that the titles of the presses reflected their dissenting nature. A cursory review suggests the different stances these papers sought to express. Glessing notes that something can be learned about the underground press by simply examining the manner in which the papers are named. Fresh, crazy, biased, irreverent, ‘camp,’ and often unexpectedly inventive, the directors of the new media do not ordinarily settle for traditional nomenclature like the Times, the Tribune, or the Clarion (unless, of course, they can in some way tease, mock, or put-on the establishment press by such titles).48 Putting on, as it were, the mainstream press is one way to understand these titles, but they also suggest themes relevant to a more nuanced discussion of dissent. Alternative and oppositional stances were reflected in the titles, as Glessing notes: titles such as Mother of Voices, Hard Times, and Love Street are “so christened because of the staff’s opposition to the establishment, the absurdity of the world as they see it, or the title’s appropriateness to the publication and the times.”49 Titles like Paper Highway, Paper Tiger, Paper Bag, the Rat, The Rag, Greenfeel, Bullsheet, Bandersnatch, and Yellow Dog suggest a metacognitive, ­self-referential irreverence that denied their own relevance as they sought to impact culture in very relevant ways. For instance, in the first issue of The Rag in 1966, Jeff Shero explicitly addresses the issue of sex, a frank tone that rankled the mores of the mainstream press: One of the brighter aspects of the sexual revolution is that it offers this generation whole new levels of personal manipulation. Instead of the older concept of “nice girls” being virgins upon marriage, the liberated standards offer people the chance to express their deepest feelings to one another in a natural way.50 The response to this type of thinking in the mainstream press does suggest a tendency in the culture of the time to view sex as all but criminal,

34  Structure of Dissent a tendency the underground press railed against, which was a stance that suggests the oppositional and alternative natures of their content. In all, McDonough’s criteria represent one view of the multiple facets of dissent, each an instance of the whole rather than one element requiring the others to exist. Dissent, therefore, is a more integrated process than a practice one might fracture into components. To McDonough’s list of criteria, I would add the establishment’s response to the dissenter, which indicates how the response of the dissenter to the dominant culture shapes the resulting discourse. Albert O. Hirschman examined the relationship between the discourse of dissent and that of the dominant culture, revealing the tension through which change is always being negotiated. He refers to this resistance as “reactionary,” a rhetorical mode characterized by the “perverse effect.”51 Hirschman defines the perverse effect as asserting not only that a movement or policy will fall short of its goal or will occasion unexpected costs or negative side effects but that the attempt to push society in a certain direction will result in its moving in the opposite direction.52 Much of the reaction to the underground press’ efforts to reimagine culture and its social institutions reflects this perverse effect. For instance, the underground press often provided reports describing the dominant’s repressive apparatus. The components used to react against “progressive” ideas included, of course, physical intimidation but also, and perhaps more perniciously, discursive challenges. As Hirschman’s outline reveals, the reactionary rhetoric used by the mainstream was often characterized by the thesis that the progressive efforts of the underground press were leading the country astray. Perhaps the clearest instance of this rhetoric was produced not in the Sixties but rather in the 1980s by a group that has been referred to as the Second Thoughters, a number of erstwhile radicals who published articles, books, and sponsored conferences to reflect upon the negative effects of the activism of the Sixties. The central proponents of this reactionary revision were Peter Collier and David Horowitz who published the anthology Second Thoughts: Radicals Look Back at the Sixties.53 In this collection, several contributors including Horowitz and Collier argue that the cultural movements and changes of the Sixties not only failed but sent American culture in the wrong direction. Horowitz and Collier argue that what these movements sought to achieve actually created the opposite of what they desired or in achieving what they desired created other significant social problems. Part of this reaction, according to Stuart Jefferies, led to the coining of the pejorative phrase “Cultural Marxism,” which some argue characterized the theoretical work of the Frankfurt School, who were often dismissed as intellectuals engaged in the criticism of Capitalism either for nefarious reasons, to open up the West to communist ideological

Structure of Dissent  35 incursion, or merely as an exercise in existentialist navel gazing. Jefferies notes that this form of Marxism was seen as overturning “traditional values by encouraging multiculturalism, political correctness, homosexuality and collectivist economic ideas.”54 Jefferies dismisses the nonsense of these criticisms, pointing out that what is referred to as cultural Marxism is actually the critical examination of dominant discourse and the social structures that inform it, noting that what the right supports is a capitalist system that perpetuates poverty and rule by rich elites. The work of Marcuse and Adorno, and other so-called Cultural Marxists, did inform the work of the Sixties underground; however, claiming that their social inquiries led to the “downfall of western civilization,” is to dismiss these groups’ efforts to improve the social institutions that propped up the worst abuses of the capitalist system.

Conclusion Dissent is a cultural act that facilitates cultural change. When Williams’ scheme is supplemented with a definition of dissent, we begin to get closer to an operative understanding of dissent. In the subsequent chapters, I examine how the underground press interrogated the dominant social institutions. While it is difficult to describe what was broadly believed during any period, it is necessary to get a sense of how the dominant culture shaped the social institutions with which it was composed. This effort requires some generalizations that may seem sweeping; yet, the general premise is that the underground press illustrates how dissent functions to both reveal culture and concomitantly change it. It is also important to remember that dissent is not an act of the moment but is a way of describing a process that is, by necessity, continuous. It only ends when a society dies. Any society lives through dissent, a life cycle I hope to reveal in the analysis that follows. In all, the underground press provided a unique means of viewing American cultural hegemony. And once seen, describe its effects and commitment to changing those hegemonic structures to reflect what those contributing to the underground papers deemed to be social justice. The underground press’ understanding of what exactly constitutes justice and what would make for a more equitable daily life was occasionally suspect. Regardless, the function of the underground press was not to enforce change but to initiate the “process” of dissent, which is the essential value of the forum offered by the underground press during the Sixties.

Notes 1 Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New York: Citadel Press, 1991), xiii (emphasis added). 2 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984).

36  Structure of Dissent 3 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 4 William Carlos Williams expresses a similar point in The American ­Background (1934). The cultural act through which this constant change is maintained is, in short, dissent. 5 Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: ­Oxford University Press, 1976), 87. 6 I use “forms” instead of “context” or other term, not to suggest the ­Neo-Platonist sense of “ideal,” but to indicate that culture is not only a way of framing our thinking but shapes material experience. Determining the nature of this “shaping” is a central aim of my investigation. 7 Williams, Marxism, 19. 8 Williams, Marxism, xvii. 9 Williams, Marxism, 75. Williams offers this idea as a starting point for the analysis of culture, rather than the more fixed notion of base and superstructure. He modifies this position from Marx’s claim that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” (75). 10 Williams, Marxism, xvi–xvii. 11 Williams, Marxism, xii. 12 Williams, Marxism. 13 Raymond Williams, “The Analysis of Culture,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Cultural: A Reader, ed. John Storey (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 48. 14 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International ­Publishers, 1971), 12. 15 Gramsci, Selections, 12–13. 16 Williams, Marxism, 42–43. 17 Williams, Marxism, 42. 18 Williams, Marxism, 44. 19 The New Left Notes became the SDS Bulletin. 20 Martin Oppenheimer, “Alienation or Participation: The Sociology of ­Participatory Democracy,” New Left Notes, November 25, 1966, ­Independent Voices, 4. 21 Paul Booth, “Rustler on the New Frontier: First Impressions of LBJ,” Activist, Winter, 1964, Independent Voices, 4. 22 It should be noted that Eisenhower was not particularly critical of this concept. He saw it as a necessary development of the Cold War, but warned that Americans should proceed into this new age with caution. 23 John Henrick Clark, “Black Nationalism,” Freedomways 2, no. 4, Fall 1962, Independent Voices, 500. 24 The Radical Arts Troupe was part of the loosely organized Guerilla Theater. 25 David Harvey, A Brief Introduction to Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2. 26 Harvey, Brief, 2 27 Radical Art Troupe of Berkley, “Training Corp,” New Left Notes, June 30, 1969, Independent Voices, 2. 28 Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). 29 Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing, 1. 30 Todd Gitlin, “On Soft Facts,” SDS Bulletin, April 8, 1968, Independent Voices, 2. 31 Jerry Rubin and Phil Ochs, Berkeley Barb, April 5–11, 1968, Independent Voices, 4.

Structure of Dissent  37 32 Williams considered “structures of experience” as an alternative phrase (132). 33 Williams, Marxism, 132. 34 De Certeau, The Practice. 35 Williams, Marxism, 129. 36 Williams, Marxism, 132. 37 Williams, Marxism, 132. 38 Robert J. Glessing, Underground Press in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 143. 39 Graham P. McDonough, “Why Dissent Is a Vital Concept in Moral ­Education,” Journal of Moral Education 39, 421–436. doi:10.1080/03057240.2010.521373 40 McDonough, “Why,” 424. 41 McDonough, “Why,” 425. 42 Noam Chomsky, “Elitism, Centralism, Dogmatism, a Warning from Rosa Luxemburg,” in Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 487. 43 McDonough, “Why,” 425. 4 4 McDonough, “Why,” 426. 45 McDonough, “Why,” 426. 46 Stuart Jefferies, Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (London: Verso, 2016), 307. 47 McDonough, “Why,” 430. 48 Glessing, Underground, 114. 49 Glessing, Underground, 114. 50 Jeff Shero, The Rag, October, 10, 1966, Independent Voices, 4. 51 Albert O. Hirschman, “Reactionary Rhetoric,” in The Essential Hirschman, ed. Jeremy Adelman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 296. 52 Hirschman, “Reactionary,” in Essential, 296. 53 Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Second Thoughts: Radicals Look Back at the Sixties (New York: Madison Books, 1989). 54 Jefferies, Hotel, 6.

Section 1

Oppositional Dissent

The papers discussed in this section reflect a general oppositional form of dissent. They make efforts to reform the social institutions they are interrogating. They often do this by problematizing the discourse formulated by these institutions in at least a couple of ways: (1) they offer a new form of discourse that suggests a new way of thinking about the issues relevant to that institution, or (2) they satirize the discourse to illustrate its absurdity and its lack of rationality. The nature of dissent in this section also hints at the structure of the institutions they interrogate, which here include the political, economic, and educational institutions. These institutions are those that most people experience as objective and less open to any form of radical subjectivity. This does not mean that the dissenting practices used to reform them are not radically subjective, but that the stance the dissenters take in articulating their different cultural formations is most often oppositional rather than alternative.

2 Dissent and Politics

The Political Institution A political institution is composed of the government and its various offices. In America, the political institution is characterized by its three branches of government, the executive, judicial, and legislative, and by its strong two-party system. While the structure of the institution is important, perhaps what matters most is how the government functions to create and maintain social stability. In general, it does this through the development and enforcement of social policies, including the funding of social programs and the creation of laws. Through this process, and perhaps most controversially, the political institution also establishes ­social values and norms or, in other words, the standards of conduct the nation deems either to be conducive or destructive to the pursuit of a productive life. During the Sixties, the Cold War and its associated anxieties informed America’s political institutions, which, in addition to pitting America against the Soviet Union, pitted Capitalism against Communism. Situated by this overarching context, liberalism defined the political tone of the period. This tone was exemplified in the politics of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, who both pursued policies that addressed persistent social and global issues, including poverty, racism, and communism. According to David Farber and Beth Bailey, during the Sixties, the New Left “rejected the answers [to these issues provided] by both liberals and conservatives.”1 Todd Gitlin details the tensions between liberalism and the New Left in his memoir The Sixties: Years of Hope Days of Rage: “The movement took liberalism for granted, but at crucial junctures found itself obstructed by liberals. Once liberalism had sacrificed itself on the altar of the Vietnam War and race polarization, what were radicals to do?”2 Raymond Williams’ definition of “liberal” in Keywords offers additional insight into the issues with this political ideology: liberal has often been a group term for progressive or radical opinions, and is still clear in this sense, notably in the USA. But liberal

Dissent and Politics  41 as a pejorative term has also been widely used by socialists and especially Marxists. This use shares the conservative sense of lack of rigor and of weak and sentimental beliefs.3 In the underground press, the effort to establish a political program was both fraught and exhilarating. In turning from liberal and conservative political positions, the New Left sought ideas on the left, some approaching what Jürgen Habermas, a Frankfurt School social theorist, would refer to as “Left Fascism.” Others would simply dismiss the emerging Left’s politics as childish or little more than adolescent playacting from their relatively secure positions as college students or the children of wealthy parents. The childishness of the politics expressed in some of the underground papers is difficult for many to navigate. In Gregory McDonald’s interview with the Yippies in 1968, for example, the silliness of the group’s ­social perceptions is initially disheartening. Appropriations of the “sit-in” or “sit-down” used by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) with “yip-ins” or “strip-ins” and slogans like “We Demand the Politics of Ecstasy!” or “Rise Up and Abandon the Creeping ­Meatball!” seem to diminish efforts to achieve serious social reform. These appropriations relate to the reason for starting the Yippies, as Marty Carey ­described: Carey, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Paul Krassner started the Yippies to offer “an alternative lifestyle. Something to do other than to conform or die.”4 Reflecting this vision of sorts, The Realist, which was edited by the Yippie member Paul Krassner, had two main purposes. One was to report on the conflicts of the day (notably religion) that were typically ignored by the mainstream media, and the other was to satirize the social institutions, calling attention to the absurdity of contemporary socio-political ideology. 5 While these aims seem admirable, they often emerged as absurd, infantile babble. That said, in “Politics of the Movement,” published in the Nation in 1969, John McDermott offered a gracious assessment of these groups in his review of Christopher Lasch’s The Agony of the American Left. Lasch, as one gleans from McDermott’s review, was not convinced that the New Left had the discipline necessary to achieve radical social change. As McDermott notes, “Lasch . . . insists on portraying today’s radicals as animated by moral or cultural (or even) generational protests only marginally related to American politics and social life.”6 ­McDermott disagrees, providing a refutation of Lasch’s assessment of the New Left’s accomplishments. McDermott notes that during the Sixties, the New Left participated in a number of successful political actions: led by the SNCC, the New Left helped end “legal segregation,” they developed an anti-war movement that limited escalation and helped drive Lyndon Johnson from office, and they agitated for significant changes in the university and education.

42  Oppositional Dissent One way to address the different political efforts of groups like the Yippies and the New Left is to see them as promoting either alternative or oppositional cultural forms. These categories illustrate how both ­positions define the dissent of the underground press. Alternative presses ­ pend tended to offer alternative lifestyles. In this sense, they tended to u tightly held social taboos around (for example) sex, religion, and the family. Oppositional presses tended to address the nature of political structures, such as how society was ordered to perpetuate inequalities of all kinds, such as segregation. The New Left tended to promote ­oppositional presses and an oppositional discourse. Change required a rupturing of the status quo, which was one of their central aims. Even though they saw themselves as political, the Yippies, diggers, and hippies, however, promoted alternative presses and alternative practices. At the core of the underground press that emerged along with the New Left was an interrogation of institutions as the locus of the discourse of power, a perspective the presses drew, in large part, from both Marxism and Marcuse’s thinking. As Tom Hayden notes in the Activist in 1964, soon after Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency: In these terms the new President offers little hope for change in the mythical superstructure arching over the American scene. The main possibilities for change seem to lie in the organization of movements, and the development of a social criticism which pierces the mythology and turns the attention of the American people to the building of a new society based on human potentiality instead of military security and anti-communism.7 The Marxist superstructure is often referred to in the underground press as ideology or “false consciousness,” a relationship James Jacobs makes more explicit in the New Left Notes in 1966, “The economic superstructure has created an ‘ideology’ that demands justification.”8 This justification, according to Jacobs, suggests an irrationality central to the decade: “our economic motivations have been extended to ideological and often irrational behavior.”9 Ideology, as we have seen with the superstructure, is a means of explaining American political practices that seem devoid of rational support. For many of the underground papers, the relevance of the Marxist critique as modified by Herbert Marcuse remained significant even as the New Left developed on university campuses largely ambivalent to Marxism as an organizing theory. Indeed, as Tom Hayden claimed in 1963, “Marx, especially Marx the humanist, has much to tell us but his conceptual tools are outmoded and his final vision implausible.”10 Marcuse took up Marx’s humanism, largely leaving behind his call for revolution. For many, the overall aim was to achieve reform, at least initially, more than violent revolution. As Tom Hayden notes in The Port

Dissent and Politics  43 Huron Statement, the New Left was largely opposed to communism as a system of government, but not necessarily of its socialist underpinnings: As Democrats we are in basic opposition to the communist system. The Soviet Union, as a system, rests on the total suppression of ­organized opposition, as well as a vision of the future in the name of which much human life has been sacrificed, and numerous small and large denials of human dignity rationalized.11 For the members of the New Left, non-violence, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Vietnam War proved more immediate motivations than the critique of Capitalism and issues of labor. However, the language of Marxism is everywhere present in the underground press, who often viewed the bourgeois as the witless facilitators of an American political system mutated by Cold War ideology and capitalist greed. While Marxist thought lingered, the politics of the underground press emerged more specifically from the New Left, which Farber and Bailey describe as having been “. . . based on American university campuses” and calling “for a more participatory democracy, new relations with the revolutionary governments of the ‘Third World,’ and a completely different standard of economic justice in the United States.”12 In the New Left Notes, a publication of the SDS, Paul Booth exclaims that “we speak of a new American Left,” a vision initially articulated in the 1962 Port Huron Statement.13 Overall, this is a vision not of the emergence of a revolutionary proletariat, but that of a new generation devoted to ­participatory democracy.

Dissenting Practices The New Left and the Great Refusal In 1968, John Leo reported in the New York Times that the underground press had changed from covering primarily sex, drugs, and rock and roll to covering politics. Leo’s description misrepresents the reality and conflates two types of underground papers—those that John ­McMillian and others refer to as political presses with counter-cultural presses. It was the counter-cultural papers, such as The Rag or Rat that evolved from primarily alternative lifestyle publications to oppositional ones later in the Sixties. In the political presses, such as the New Left Notes and the Guardian, the oppositional stances revolved in large part around the emergence of the youth Movement or the New Left, as it was referred to in the oft-cited but rarely read Port Huron Statement. While the New Left was drawn to Marxist political thought in a hazy way, the Marxisms that interested them related more to the Marxist economic critique rather than its Leninist, Stalinist, or Maoist political

44  Oppositional Dissent interpretations. The New Left, in distinction with the Old Left (if such neologisms have value), was not interested as much in a worker or class revolution as they were in a broader “cultural transformation,” which is where the political and counter-cultural presses begin to converge. The politics of these efforts to achieve a broad assault on the culture help illustrate the aims of the dissent practiced by the underground press. For the underground press, dissent was not a political, economic, or social dissent—whatever those terms mean to historians—but was instead a process by which cultural change might be realized. This program of dissent can initially be viewed through the lens of the New Left, i.e. student or youth movements, whose agenda was articulated in The Port Huron Statement. The Statement opens with a profile of the New Left, “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”14 This is not the proletariat of the Communist Manifesto or the autoworkers of the UAW, but instead young people troubled by two central issues: the inequality of society as evidenced by the Jim Crow south, persistent and illegal segregation, and the opaque inanities of the Cold War.15 The logic surrounding these issues suggested a society that seemed in decline, even in a period of exceptional economic growth. To address the apathy of the general public against these existential concerns, these activists identified the need to interrogate current cultural institutions and encourage participatory democracy, offering an accurate description of dissent.16 Dissent is the process by which institutions are interrogated to achieve change, a point Hayden notes in his reference to the belief among the New Left that there was “an alternative to the present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government.”17 These are the very institutions through which the dominant values and associated norms are manufactured and maintained. Reimagining the institutions of the dominant culture is the means by which the dominant culture changes. Unlike what Marxists tended to argue, effective change does not necessarily require revolutionary action; it can occur on the level of language or discourse. This observation is key to understanding dissent. According to Tom Hayden, a central political aim of the Port Huron Statement and the SDS was to unify the civil rights, peace, labor, liberal, and student movements, claiming that the PHS connected issues not like a menu, not as gestures to diverse identity movements, but more seamlessly, by declaring that the civil rights, antipoverty, and peace movements could realize their dreams by refocusing America’s attention to an unfulfilled domestic agenda instead of the Cold War.18

Dissent and Politics  45 The Cold War, Hayden claims, was the ideology dominating the lives of the New Left, and it was this Cold War logic that the underground press sought to dislodge. In the underground press, this Cold War logic was often defined as Tom Hayden did in “A Letter to the New (young) Left,” which appeared in Activist in 1961 about a year before the Port Huron Statement. In this article, Hayden identifies a litany of international, domestic, and educational problems facing the nation.19 Hayden’s concerns reflect his perception of change as an ongoing and, as is common, unsettling phenomenon, a sense that continues during much of the Sixties. Grappling with these changes at the moment of their emergence is to struggle with a changing “structure of feeling,” which is, as Raymond Williams notes, a pre-emergent cultural form.20 Just a sense then that something is happening but what it is and how to participate in it is hard to d ­ etermine. In this case, Hayden is, in part, reporting the push and pull that is a symptom of dissent. As a “feeling” begins to emerge, it often engenders a ­reaction from the “effective dominant” institutions. It is at these ­locations of action and reaction that culture is in flux and in the ­process of reforming. David Finke, writing in the same edition of Activist, ­attempted to define the dissent suggested in Hayden’s “A Letter to the New (young) Left” and the New Left in general. Finke argues that when faced with the horrors of the Cold War, ­primarily nuclear destruction, we might react in one of three ways: we might accept the status quo response, view the developments with “disgust, horror, outrage, sadness, or a desire to see them changed,” or respond with apathy.21 Finke claims that facing such horrors r­ equires dissent, not because it will lead to change but because it generates ­discussion through which the conditions creating these horrors might be interrogated. In that sense, dissent is always affective, altering feelings, even if not clearly effective, producing a measurable change. Dissent initiates an alteration to the public consciousness about ideas, offering new ways of perceiving current realities. One problem with dissent, however, as Finke unwittingly notes, is its supposed relational aspects. Dissent is generally understood as presenting or suggesting a change that asserts some ideal form; therefore, dissent requires a sense of that ideal, Platonic good. Invoking this universal ideal, Finke claims that he “is one of those difficult people who would go along with the idea that there are eternal values of truth, justice, love, and righteousness.”22 Finke’s view of dissent leads to seeing it as overturning one ideological set of norms and values for another, closer to one group’s sense of some ideal form. This claim runs up against the existentialist view of truth, held by many, that there is no ur-truth, no grand narrative, pulling people into stable relationships. Instead, we exist in constant motion, experiencing continual upheaval and change and dissent functions to facilitate this process of change. Dissent does not

46  Oppositional Dissent merely replace the prevailing myth of progress with another such myth, but instead interrogates social institutions to initiate an evaluation and rearticulation of those discourses engendered through these institutions. C. Wright Mills’ discussion of culture provides insight into the discursive formations through which dissent is established. Hayden’s letter, Finke’s definition, and the New Left in general were directly influenced by C. Wright Mills’ political thought especially that expressed in his “Letter to the New Left.” In his reflection on the Port Huron Statement, Hayden notes the significance to the New Left of C.  Wright Mills’ thinking, especially that articulated in this essay, which was published in 1960 in the New Left Review. In this letter acting as a kind of intellectual foundation for the underground, Mills argues against the type of apathy Finke mentions and that was reflected in the sentiment that “ideology is dead,” a saying Mills claims emerged around 1955. 23 His critique of this apathetic attitude was a motivation for the type of “ideological criticism” that “connect up cultural with political criticism,” which I would argue is close to capturing the function of ­d issent. This type of criticism considers how social institutions function to establish, in Mills terms, the power elite and the status quo. Yet rather than a conscious posture or point of view, dissent is a fundamental ­aspect of cultural change, viewing it as such opens up culture and society to a clearer view and thus a more effective critique. Mills’ argument against apathy reveals a central aspect of dissent in the underground press, the raising of political consciousness. Mills claims that the “New Yorker style of reportage has become triumphant” no longer able to perform necessary cultural critique: The facts are duly weighed, carefully balanced, always hedged. Their power to outrage, their power truly to enlighten in a political way, their power to aid decision, even their power to clarify some situation—all that is blunted or destroyed. 24 Unpacking this claim reveals issues that shaped the underground press’ approach. First, objectivity was seen as “apathy,” an attitude according to Finke and Mills worse than direct opposition. “Fair” reporting would seem to suggest support for the prevailing cultural view of reality, working within the dominant ideology. Therefore, to provide political insight required a working against the grain, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, to reveal alternatives or emerging “structures of feeling” that might suggest productive change. Thinking in this way meant, in part, attacking the prevailing discourse and deconstructing it to suggest both the problem and to offer a sense of différance, or meaning that emerges from the tension between opposites. Or as Mills claims, “this refusal to relate isolated facts and fragmentary comment with the changing institutions of

Dissent and Politics  47 society makes it impossible to understand the structural realities which these facts might reveal.”25 In the underground press, this tension is revealed in its response to the Vietnam War and Cold War ideologies which shaped the meaning of the conflict. In effect, the underground press rather than accepting the “end of ideology” sought instead to critique the prevailing ideology. First Civil Rights and later the Vietnam conflict became central locations for the critique of American political ideology. The members of the Frankfurt School further developed these ideas, which became, in addition to Mills, an important theoretical foundation for their dissenting practices. According to Stuart Jefferies in Hotel Abyss, the members of the Frankfurt School did not pursue direct action because, as Adorno claims, “theory speaks for what is not narrow minded. . . . Despite all its unfreedom, theory is the guarantor of freedom in the midst of unfreedom.”26 Theory in this sense was seen by Adorno and others as “­offering the only space in which the prevailing order could be indicted, if not overthrown.”27 Politically, the underground press was informed by this project, seeking to theorize the movement, providing a perspective that could disrupt and perhaps change the prevailing order. In 1968 in the New Left Notes, for instance, John and Barbara Ehrenreich discussed the role theory played in helping those in the Movement come to understand how social institutions were aligned against them: “The combination of police and press attitudes slowly uncovered the real nature of the society in a very personal way for more and more students.”28 Yet, how to articulate discontent with these institutions was complicated and required an analytic method that could open up the discursive noise of society to identify issues and imagine solutions. Perhaps the central figure in helping develop this analytical method was Herbert Marcuse whose One-Dimensional Man explained the structure of society and how it affected the experience of everyday life. Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, widely read during the Sixties, offers a method and example of cultural critique. As Douglas Kellner claims, Marcuse’s study was seen during the Sixties as “a significant critical diagnosis of the present age and was soon taken up by the emergent New Left as a damning indictment of contemporary Western societies, capitalist and communist.”29 In his influential study, Marcuse laments that the facts and the alternatives [to the dominant cultural institutions] are there like fragments which do not connect, or like a world of mute objects without a subject, without the practice which would move these objects in the new direction.30 At the beginning of the Sixties, Marcuse was calling for a theory that could help connect the fragments of opposition to the “aggressive

48  Oppositional Dissent socialization” that he felt defined the established social institutions. These institutions functioned as loci of control that replaced individual desires with those of the larger society, effectively undermining the dialectical process central to a free society and alienating the individual from it. Within this context of the alienated individual, the theory Marcuse sought was that of dissent. A theory of dissent offers a way of understanding the discourse of the underground press not merely as locations for opposition but instead as polyphonic elements essential to observing the dynamics of cultural change. As a theory of dissent, ­Marcuse’s ideas provide a way to operationalize the concept. In this context, dissent functions as a dialectic or a method of “negative thinking.” What Marcuse means by “negative thinking” is thinking that uses a two-step, analytical process. First, such thinking is a form of analysis that reveals the nature of social repression in order to liberate the individual from it by distinguishing true from false needs. In One-­Dimensional Man, he notes that “the question of what are true and false needs must be answered by the individuals themselves, but only . . . if and when they are free to give their own answer.”31 Marcuse’s assumption is that once liberated, the needs people determine as necessary will be “true.” Marcuse defines this freedom to choose as autonomy, but such autonomy does not exist within a system that limits possible alternatives. He notes that within an “advanced industrial” society, “the very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced.”32 Social institutions are one way to define this mechanism that anchors the individual to society. Marcuse suggests that it is these institutions that appear to be the “very embodiment of reason” and as such effectively control the population, compelling them to perform their role in the “division of l­abor.”33 Dissent functions to rupture this sense of the rational or ­normal experience, and provides a means of addressing the true needs that define one’s life. In this context, even the so-called childish politics of the hippies, diggers, and Yippies have some relevance in unsettling the certainties of the established order. Civil Rights Movement and the Question of Praxis The African American effort to gain civil rights became characterized by two opposed political perspectives. One, led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the SNCC, pursued change through non-violence. This approach inspired the early efforts of the New Left and the SDS. The other, led by Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, argued that change could only be secured through violence. By the end of the decade, this more “confrontational” approach became increasingly common with both African American and white dissenting groups. McDonough’s definition of dissent suggests why non-violence proved more effective than violent

Dissent and Politics  49 confrontation. The non-violent approach shared the dominant culture’s central values, equality in the pursuit of happiness and a focus on participatory democracy, while violent approaches sought to replace the dominant with revolutionary displacement. The values of the violent protests tended to be based on the development of a racial identity separate from others such as whites. Both groups developed underground papers that supported their visions for a better America. As Tom Hayden notes, the Civil Rights Movement, the SNCC, and Martin Luther King, Jr. both inspired and informed the praxis of the New Left. This praxis, or practice informed by theory, might be better understood more clearly as “dissent.” Dissent is a theory associated with a practice. According to John McMillian because the “United States in the 1960s . . . was culturally and politically segregated to an enormous degree,” civil rights activists and the New Left tended to follow “parallel paths.”34 Perhaps because of this tendency, the Civil Rights Movement inspired more through practice than theory. Practicing non-violence protests instead of revolution was generally accepted as a better approach to motivating and enacting social change. Yet, some especially those sympathetic to the Old Left and the traditional Marxist dogma found non-­ violence as a means of change initially difficult to imagine. In “Marxism and Nonviolence” published in Liberation in 1966, Dave Dellinger, A.J. Muste, and Isaac Deutscher discuss revolutionary potential of violence and non-violence. Deutsher, for instance, originally viewed non-violence as counterrevolutionary, but had come by 1966 to see its potential, even within the Marxist framework.35 Overall, the discussion centered on the function of revolution as a form of dissent. The challenge many have in discussing revolution seems that they misunderstand dissent’s relationship to culture and so fail to evaluate dissent as a process. The Civil Rights Movement presents dissent as a mode of revolution. During most of the Sixties, the Civil Rights Movement exemplified how dissent could function to affect change on a number of social institutions simultaneously. A brief review of the history of the Movement reveals this centrally important aspect of dissent, and it was perhaps this, even if not expressly stated, that transformed the efforts of the New Left. For the most part, the Civil Rights Movement most visibly began with the desegregation of the public schools after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. After this decision and the south’s resistance to its enforcement, protests, sit-ins, and demonstrations began in earnest across the south, bringing the plight of African Americans into public view. These efforts led to the passage of Civil Rights legislation in 1964, 1965, and 1968.36 These activities included not only rhetoric but also legal agitation and street marches that took advantage of the importance of place as a marker of remembrance. Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized that dissent needed to alter the discourse facilitated by the dominant, and often racist, political

50  Oppositional Dissent institutions. His papers suggest a general aim to organize (and theorize), respond to dominant reactions, and motivate action. These efforts, often referred to as non-violent practices, were really rearticulations of social discourse that fully bracketed that of the dominant culture. For example, his 1963 “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” functions both to identify and refute prevailing racial discourse and in so doing performs a symbolic liberation. In his letter, King opens by refuting the dismissive comments of white religious leaders in the south who had found his actions in B ­ irmingham, Alabama “unwise and untimely.” In performing his refutation, he ­effectively articulates the method and aims of the Civil Rights ­Movement. The method is to collect the facts of injustice, negotiate with the different groups to right those injustices, pause for self-reflection to determine if any other approach might prove successful, and then—if necessary—to engage in direct and non-violent action to force change. One aim of this method was to create dialogue, illustrating, in two of his most ­famous sayings, that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” and that “whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”37 King stresses that dissent overturns such injustice by ignoring unjust laws. He articulates the distinction between just and unjust laws in both religious (his audience includes both Christians and Jews) and secular terms. His definition is simple, but one that helps inform the dissenting practices of the New Left and other activist groups: An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal. On the other hand, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow, and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.38 It is in pursuit of justice, not mere legality, that he calls for “gadflies” to create “tension” or, as he says elsewhere, dialogue about these issues. Underground papers like Freedomways and Black Dialogue offered these gadflies a forum and helped articulate a new political reality. Freedomways and Black Dialogue were both literary reviews, publishing essays, poems, and fiction, an editorial approach illustrating a commitment to dialectic, juxtaposing different genres to encourage a multiplicity of insights. Yet, each addressed Civil Rights from different points of view. Freedomways efforts aligned with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, focusing on non-violence as the best way to enact change. Black ­Dialogue, on the other hand, supported Black Nationalism and at least the threat of violence as the most “manly” way to force change. Black Dialogue began publishing after Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965. In his dedication of the review to Malcolm X’s memory, ­A rthur A. S­ heridan saw in the example of Malcolm X a leader who could

Dissent and Politics  51 “articulate the deep frustrations and emotions of the oppressed and downtrodden ­A fro-American masses.” In 1969, the editors of Freedomways critiqued this position as a “fawning, subservient mentality” that was “being packaged in supposedly militant phraseology about ‘doing our own thing.’”39 The divide between the Civil Rights activists and Black Nationalists was a significant issue in the African American community. As an instance of the debate that informed the use and understanding of dissent during the Sixties, such antagonisms are revealing. It is worth remembering that the point of dissent, or Marcuse’s “negative thinking,” is to articulate the abuses of the prevailing political structure in order to open a space for subsequent action, an action that we might define as interpretation or the making of meaning. In 1961 in the first issue of Freedomways, a more polished literary review than Black Dialogue, the editors, Shirley Graham, W. Alphaeus Hunton, Margaret G. Burroughs, and Esther Jackson, suggested elements of dissent, noting that “New political, social and economic orders have come into being and men everywhere are demanding the right to determine how they shall live.”40 In Freedomways, James Baldwin ­reflected these ideas, as he articulated one of those issues that underlies the Civil Rights Movement and that the underground press attempted to expose. In short, he sought to articulate the fundamental irrationality of racism: Now, I want to suggest something, and I don’t want to sound rude, but we all know that it has been many generations and it hasn’t stopped yet that black men’s heads have been blown off—and ­nobody cared. Because, as I said before, it wasn’t happening to a person, it was happening to a “nigger.” We all know that this ­country prides itself in something it calls “upward mobility.” “Upward mobility” means, among other things, other sinister things, that if you were born a poor boy, say you are born in the ghetto, or in the back woods [sic] someplace, or in Sicily, and you can’t speak English very well yet, it means that if you work hard and save your pennies and be a good boy—or know how to be a bad boy you can get to be a junior executive by the time you are thirty. That is what “upward mobility” means and that is all it means.41 This theme recurs in Baldwin’s work. In The Fire Next Time, he addresses a letter to his nephew, suggesting that it is the destruction of African Americans by sheer apathy that is most damning: this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.42

52  Oppositional Dissent King also makes this point in his letter, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”43 The letter provides one way that dissent is manifest into both literal and figurative action. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s and Baldwin’s letters suggest a tendency in the early Sixties to use the epistolary form to articulate concerns about civil rights. In the same edition of Freedomways in which Baldwin’s “What Price Freedom?” appeared, Mae Mallory published a “Memo from a Monroe Jail.” In this memo, she recounts the efforts to help beleaguered African Americans fighting an unjust judicial system in Monroe, North Carolina. She was jailed for seeking to help Rob Williams, a black resident who, with a few friends and guns, sought to gain access to the public pool. Obviously, the town reacted to Williams’ efforts with their own desire to enforce racist policies with aggression. However, rather than only seeking to explain Williams’ reasoning for taking such bold action, Mallory uses this incident to indict the system, describing how both blacks and poor whites suffer similar mistreatment at the whim of the rich and powerful. Both groups require liberation, and the inability of the poor whites to recognize this is due to how the system has manipulated their perceptions: By the power structure’s own admission, Union County is the poorest county of the whole poverty-plagued state of North Carolina. The only advantage a white worker has over a black person is the right to take out his frustration by committing acts of cruelty on the black community.44 Monroe’s memo provides the African American perspective but also a broader sense that much of the country is fighting against the same type of oppression perpetrated by a similar group of people. The epistolary form allows the author to address the audience using “you.” And, in these cases, the “you” is intended to be the reader and not a general reference to a generalized reading public. Though subtle, this rhetorical device is effective in engaging both the emotions and reason of the reader. We are asked to identify with the author’s plight and listen, as we might listen to a close acquaintance, to her anguish. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s and Baldwin’s letters function similarly and it is this power of the personal that evokes not only real emotion, instead of artistic artifice, but also truth, the truth of lived experience and not only a report by someone about someone else. This epistolary rhetoric is used throughout the underground press to engage the audience in the political concerns of the Sixties. Open letters, letters to the editor, and even the general tone of many essays reflect a tendency to engage the “you,” the audience as an intellectual equal. This usage was one way to inject subjectivity into typically more objective forms of journalism.

Dissent and Politics  53 External and Internal Colonialism In its last issue of the Sixties, Freedomways published an editorial that articulates the undergrounds deepening concerns with the Vietnam conflict and what it suggested about the colonial mindset. The editors’ note that the violence in Vietnam, such as the massacre at Mai Lai, is deeply rooted in the American political system: Both the “official” and unofficial policy of the United States military arises out of an economic system and a culture which gunned down the American Indians during most of the nineteenth century and put those who survived on reservations. Then our Filipino “allies” were gunned down during the war of U. S. colonial conquest known as the Spanish-American War. We recall also that many of the victims of the nearly 5,000 recorded lynchings in this country were gunned down by sheriff’s posses and the martyrdom of many Freedom Movement activists who, over the years, were gunned down for trying to secure the right to vote and an end to segregation.45 The point the editors are making is that American social institutions are informed by violence. It is through this mechanism of repression that American hegemony is communicated to not only other countries but also other minority groups in America. The will to power, and the need to enforce conformity in order to preserve that power, creates a pervasive colonizing psychology. The efforts inspired by the Civil Rights Movement naturally developed to include the experiences of minority populations in America as well as in other countries. The primary focus was on the mechanisms of colonization and the efforts of indigenous populations to not only gain freedom from their colonizers but also to affirm their identities. Perhaps the most striking instance of this effort was expressed by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth in 1961. In his study of the effects of colonialism, Fanon indicates that colonialism is characterized by both extrinsic and intrinsic aspects.46 The extrinsic aspects are often visible and exterior: the freedom of the indigenous population of a different region has been forcefully repressed to gain access to resources. This repression takes the form of violence that the indigenous population often internalizes. The underground press, however, tended to focus as much on the intrinsic aspects of colonialism, which are characterized by a country’s effort to colonize its own citizens. African Americans and Native Americans often associated this type of repression with their own domestic experience. Black Nationalists, as published in Black Dialogue, for instance, occasionally related African American efforts to gain civil rights to similar efforts in other postcolonial countries, such as Vietnam. Lawrence Neal

54  Oppositional Dissent discusses this connection articulating a Black Nationalist credo: “the revolt [­A frican-American riots in several inner-cities, such as Watts] indicates that ultimately, violence or the threat of violence brings about change.”47 He adds to this claim that to “decolonize” African American elites, those “intellectuals” who have developed a “revolutionary identity,” need to “attach” themselves to the “cultural matrix”: “The ‘native’ intellectual trained by the West is urged to think of his roots, relate to them.”48 Neal’s observation indicates the importance of locating one’s identity in history and in the cultural artifacts that inform that identity. Neal claims that doing this reveals the intellectual as a “defender of his people’s past” and so willing to be seen as “one of them” and so willing to fight for their rights as people.49 Similar responses were developed in the Native American communities. Warpath, for instance, published articles from the United Native Americans Movement, addressing, in the words of the editors, postcolonial concerns, such as securing control over “their own destiny,” achieving “economic justice,” and gaining protection “from non-Indian exploitation.” These efforts at decolonization often included discussion of historical issues, such as treaties and Native rights to the land and its use. The American Indian Movement, which was formed in 1968, would add to these tactics the occupation of historically significant places, such as Alcatraz Island and Wounded Knee. In explaining the reason for establishing the United Native A ­ mericans, Lehman L. Brightman in 1968 expressed the need for autonomy so that “the new Indians” could choose their true needs and “gain some control over” their own “destiny and liberate” themselves from poverty. To accomplish this aim, he asserts that Native American should be independent from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and any other “white” organization infringing upon Native self-determination.50 To support these goals, as Neal and Fanon also claim, Warpath published historical documents, such as speeches by Tecumseh’s and traditional tribal songs. Alongside these items, they also included new poems from different tribal members, indicating that history informed the present vision of the future. The paper sought to unify through a presentation of culture as the locus of a living, active dissent. It is also worth noting that presses like Black Dialogue and Warpath emerged alongside artistic movements, such as the Black Arts Movement and the Native American Renaissance in literature, respectively. The latter, for instance, began with the publication of N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. Momaday’s novel was unique in its portrayal of Abel, a World War II veteran, who, after being released from prison for the murder of what he believed was a witch, reestablishes his connection with his Jemez Pueblo tribe by navigating white society to return home through the use of traditional rituals.51 Momaday’s novel revealed the importance, as Neal states, of

Dissent and Politics  55 reconnecting with one’s roots to gain political agency and achieve a decolonization of the spirit. It is to the enfranchisement of the spirit that informed, at least subtly, agitation for social justice. Social Justice The sense of an intrinsic colonialism was implicit in the critique of social justice during the Sixties. In July of 1967, President Johnson formed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders or Kerner Commission to determine the underlying causes of the riots that summer in places like Detroit, Newark, New Brunswick, and other inner cities across the country. The Kerner Commission report offered a number of conclusions, identifying issues such as housing and unemployment as well as increased radicalism as sources of the unrest. In the summary, the Commission boldly concluded that the unrest was in part due to a system perpetuated by a colonial mindset: What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”52 The Kerner Commission suggested that it was the social institutions that functioned to repress African Americans living in the inner cities, creating ghettos characterized by poverty and desperation. Underlying the issues presented in the report was the implicit need to pursue justice in at least two senses: (1) establishing a sense of just laws and (2) the application of those laws in a just way. Justice is a notoriously problematic term, as uncertain in theory as it is in application. As perhaps the main reason for the establishment of a government and the premise upon which politics is based, determining what is just and was it not is central to the structure of society. As ­Martin Luther King, Jr. points out in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the definitional concern was often between justice and legality. The distinction here is that legality is a social construct and the one determined by the majority. Therefore, legality does not necessarily denote justice. As King points out from several perspectives, justice transcends society and is a law that is “in harmony with moral law.”53 Simply stated, justice is a product of moral conduct and what is moral, therefore, becomes what is good and thus just. The importance of this distinction clarifies the general meaning of justice, and the ideal application of it in society. For instance, compare King’s definition of justice to Allen Bloom’s reflection on morality in The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom laments the loss during the Sixties of the “fact-value” distinction upon which, he claims, morality was once based “that values

56  Oppositional Dissent are essential to life and shape the way facts are seen and used. Therefore values are primary. And if they do not come from reason, then they come from passionate commitment, the essence of morality.”54 Contrary to these long held but hard to enact ideals, he notes that the morality and so justice of the ­Sixties were “a mixture of the makers of revolutions who hawk new moralities and liberate from prevailing constraints, and the heroes of popular existentialist literature whose morality consists in self-­affirmation.”55 Perhaps for Bloom, justice or the “good,” to invoke the Platonic principle, was an engagement with residual notions of the concept. To forget history is to proceed without a footing and in so doing perhaps create a system without coherence. Indeed in the Sixties, the legal system upheld conservative views of American society, perpetuating not only laws of right conduct that often seemed outdated but ideas of right thinking that seemed particularly insidious. The general concern, but one that requires some unwinding, was that the prevailing justice system of the Sixties reflected the panopticon described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, a social delusion, one might claim, that created the carceral society.56 As represented chillingly in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, the carceral society is created when everyone already lives with that sense that they have been indicted and are “docile bodies” merely waiting to be arrested for a crime they cannot be sure they committed.57 In The Trial, Joseph K is arrested, which immediately triggers his paranoia: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”58 Perhaps above all, the carceral society is infused with a pervasive and deleterious paranoia, which at once controls the private behavior and even personal thoughts of citizens while at the same time creating a smoldering desire to revolt or enact revenge against imagined perpetrators of some uncertain complaint. Secrecy and the sense of conspiracy are rampant. Repression leading to the desublimation of desire is a theme present in much of dystopian fiction of the mid-20th century. George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Philip Dick’s Man in the High Tower, or Isaac Asimov’s robot series all suggest that a desire for freedom motivates us, but not only freedom to live as we choose but freedom from the shadowy mechanism of the state.59 In Theory of Justice, John Rawls suggests that justice is not really about laws but about freedom and equality.60 In this sense, justice during the Sixties was perhaps first a civil rights (or social justice) issue and second a legislative concern about how to structure a just and free society. Of course, the two ideas are related but proceed in different tracks in American society. As one might expect, the underground press focused on the abuses of the legal system, casting light on police brutality and the politics of criminality that permeated society. In addressing these issues in various ways, the presses provided different perspectives on how

Dissent and Politics  57 to structure the legal system to ensure social justice. Overall, these were calls for what is often referred to as libertarian principles—less centralized structures in favor of more localized control. It is in this sense that community, written small, emerges as a foundation for different legal reasoning. To understand the role the underground press played in social justice, it is necessary to construct a definition of the concept. As with many ­social issues, the meaning of these concepts is always in flux and d ­ efining them leads to a more nuanced view of the role of the idea in the development and maintenance of social structures. Iris Marion Young, for instance, argues that social justice concerns the degree to which a society contains and supports the institutional conditions necessary for the realization’ of two ‘values’ essential to the construction of ‘the good life’: ‘(1) developing and exercising one’s capacities and expressing one’s experience, and (2) participating in determining one’s action and the conditions of one’s action.’61 In one sense, the effort to ensure justice required the fulfillment of the two aims Young notes. The underground press sought justice by offering a venue for the articulation of alternative views to established hegemonic legal policies and participated in bringing those alternative views into practice. Often emerging in the underground press was a sense of disenfranchisement and alienation, a feeling expressed in the terms “pigamerika” or simply “pig.” These became common terms for police oppression and the fear of a developing police state that was implemented on some university campuses and in many urban communities before and after the series of inner-city riots that occurred between1965 and 1967. But the term “pig” did have a broader political meaning when used in the ­underground press. In addition to being used as a moniker for the police and the legal system in general, “pig” also relates to the dominant culture or the ­establishment. In Helix, Allen Young offers a definition of “pig” after the police broke up the “Death Parade,” related to the “culture of death,” organized in protest of Richard Nixon’s 1968 inauguration: The use of the term “pigs” for the cops was an especially sensitive matter. Many began, however, to overcome their prior revulsion for the term. Many of the demonstrators at first opposed use of the term “pig” because they felt it unfairly denied the cops’ humanity (they’re people, too”). But soon the role of the cops was crystal clear: protecting the ruling class and preventing us from carrying out our aggressive struggle against the ruling class.62

58  Oppositional Dissent In this sense, “pig” relates to the dominant ideology of the established political institution’s repressive tactics. In one sense, these were inhuman practices suggestive of a police state. Art Spiegelman famously used pigs to represent polish Nazi sympathizers in his graphic novels Maus I and II, which describes his parents’ experiences during the ­Jewish ­Holocaust.63 The sense is that oppression is pernicious and often ­enabled by the average citizen, who is convinced that promulgating hate will benefit them. The police were often seen as ignorant patsies, doing the work of the power elite. Eldridge Knight, a Black Panther Party activist and writer for R ­ amparts, also invokes this “pig” neologism to critique American policies in a series of articles published in Ramparts and The Liberation News Service (LNS). In the LNS in 1969, for instance, he uses “pig” to describe cops but also, it seems, the white power structures invoked in the Kerner Report and those he and other African Americans were struggling to resist.64 In “A Note to My Friends,” written while in exile in Algeria, Knight observes that during his travels, he has seen the effects of “colonialism and exploitation,” noting that “the United States of America is the chief culprit.”65 His frustration with legal policies and the perceived lack of social justice was reflected disturbingly in his significant collection of essays Soul on Ice published in 1968. Parts of this book were printed in Ramparts and written while in prison serving a sentence for committing rape. About this experience, he claimed “rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and ­trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values.”66 Often, the effort to ignore laws was founded in a discontent with the system, but such justifications firmly aligned the majority of society against him and by extension the Black Panthers. In the Kerner Report, the commission referred to increased radicalism of this sort as a source of unrest rather than a symptom of it. As an initial member of the Black Panther Party, Knight played a role in articulating the group’s manifesto, a political form worth exploring briefly. The performative rhetoric of dissent noted in the Civil Rights protests is powerfully illustrated in the use of the manifesto. This form has a long and varied history, some of which is reflected in the efforts of the underground press. The Communist Manifesto is perhaps the most familiar example of the manifesto form, which was clearly an important model for dissenters during the Sixties. The polemical rhetoric central to the tone of the manifesto is defined as a form of discourse asserting a strong often political position that in articulating a group’s beliefs and desires offers members of that group a sense of identity defined by a clear purpose. A set of manifestos, such as those collected in the anthology BAMN, illustrate the particular power of the manifesto form.67 The Black Panther Party organized their manifesto into two sections: “what we want”

Dissent and Politics  59 and “what we believe.” This structure suggests that their desires are informed by their beliefs. For instance, the first “want” is “freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black community.” Their first belief is “that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our own destiny.”68 The implication is that what one wants is then achieved through one’s beliefs. The manifesto ends with the first part of the Declaration of Independence, which infuses the Panther’s “wants” and “desires” with both a sense of urgency and legitimacy. The manifesto describes a desire to resist, above all, police brutality in order to develop a productive and vibrant community. As Knight notes in his underground publications, resisting the established power structures requires a commitment to armed resistance and a focus on community-building programs. Yet with an increase in militancy came less social dialogue and more police actions, creating a difficult dynamic for those seeking to affect productive and lasting changes. Writing for the Berkeley Barb, Gandalf articulates the function of the police as tools of established power: The contention that the present police attitude is extremely dangerous to our society is unquestionably valid, but the fact remains: given the human animal in his present mental and emotional state, the police are a necessary, even desirable part of our society. What is UN necessary, and UN desirable is that they should control that society rather than protect it.69 Gandalf, the pseudonym itself a playful disregard for convention, ­argues that it’s not the police that are the issue but the ideology defining the police officer’s job.70 They are not encouraged to “serve and protect” ­citizens but prop up the status quo, supporting the priorities of ­established values and norms. The issue underlying the use of “pig” is a ­concern for this pervasive and shadowy desire to control dissenting opinions and restrict alternatives. This issue of control was particularly present in the inner city. During the Sixties and early Seventies, the underground press often noted the efforts of the institutions of power, or “power elite” in C. Wright Mills’ words, to repress African American activities. For instance, beginning on January 1, 1971, the Detroit Police Department implemented STRESS, which meant “Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets.” The aim of this program was to reduce street crime in the inner city by using undercover police officers to apprehend criminals in the act of committing a crime. What the program achieved during the two and a half years it was in operation was in effect the death of 22 Detroit citizens and 500 warrantless searches. According to Kenneth Cockrel, a defense lawyer during the time STRESS was in operation, the objective of these units was to repress black citizens.71

60  Oppositional Dissent While these anti-crime initiatives emerged to address real concerns, especially those noted in the Kerner Report and experienced across the country in the inner cities, they often rested on faulty assumptions, certainly motivated by an implicit if not explicit racism, but also by a ­prevailing conservative sense of community service, a form of service one was to submit to without question. But, when that service became increasingly disconnected from the nature of the community or its needs, violence was often, but not always, the only means of redressing immediate personal danger. Following the accepted judicial procedures might have eventually prevailed in some cases, one would need to sacrifice his or her entire life to achieve justice. In this way, the justice system, as it does today, struggles with providing immediate relief to problems intrinsic to the prevailing social structures. Into this lack enters frustration and slogans like “By Any Means Necessary” and groups determined to use that philosophy to force change. At the end of the Sixties, groups like the Black Panthers, weatherman, and others began to promote violence as the only effective means to enact change. In part, the consideration of violence as a means of dissent was informed by Marxist ideology, an ideology that trickled through much of the discourse of this period. Marx argues in The Communist Manifesto that revolution, and not non-violence or negotiation, was the only means to enact changes in the system.72 Many sympathized with this position, but others influenced by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights protests had come to the conclusion that other approaches were preferable. Yet, violence was used, which led to police reprisals, and some feel that this precipitated the end for some of the Sixties protest movements. Vietnam War and the “Culture of Death” For the majority of the public, the Vietnam War began with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that escalated the war. The Gulf of Tonkin incident after which the resolution is named also became, once revealed, an illustration of the kinds of lies upon which American foreign, and by extension, domestic policy was founded. After the resolution, the number of American troops in Vietnam increased from around 20,000 in 1964 to 50,000 in 1968.73 Then came the Tet Offensive in 1968 and the draft lottery at the end of 1969. American military policies in Vietnam became increasingly unpopular as victory became increasingly elusive. During this time, the Vietnam War was understood as the central symptom of what many in the underground press saw as the American colonial mindset, which was exacerbated by the “military-industrial complex” that Dwight D. Eisenhower outlined in his January 21, 1961 speech to the nation. In The Port Huron Statement, Tom Hayden amplifies Eisenhower’s more measured concerns, “Business and politics, when significantly militarized, affect the whole living condition of each

Dissent and Politics  61 American citizen.”74 The effect on the living conditions is subtle, but pernicious: “Worker and family depend on the Cold War for life. Half of all research and development is concentrated on military ends.”75 These priorities then create a reality that becomes institutionalized through the economy, education, church, and politics. The underground press sought a way to appropriate the discourse of these institutions, developing a less violent and more democratic vision of American society. Jeremy Brecher locates this approach among the other strands of ­dissent practiced, or proposed, during the Sixties. As he saw it, the War ­ Moratorium, a mass movement against continuing the Vietnam War, revealed three political “strands.” These strands included (1) a faith that expressing discontent will sway President Johnson to change Vietnam policy, (2) a commitment to the democratic process as a way to enact a broad political change, and (3) “confrontation” or what Brecher describes as protests that carry the threat of violence.76 All of these strands, he sees as problematic as they assume the mechanisms of change, are primarily located in Washington, D.C. A better approach, Brecher claims, is to engage the population to resist war policies by denying them through a change in the discourse, through mass resistance and strikes.77 Due in part to this tension, the Vietnam War burned a hole in American culture. It emerges out of the Cold War malaise and is its most challenging symbol. However, it did not begin that way. It was the type of complex, postmodern conflict that illustrated the absurdity of governmental reasoning (the Domino Effect) and the extent of human desperation. Its meaning is bound in an intricate web of motivations, misunderstandings, and manipulations; therefore, trying to make sense of the conflict as the impetus of the underground press is difficult. Yet, it was central to the underground press’ motivation to change what some in the underground referred to as the pervasive “culture of death.” After the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, this sense that death defined life that the logic of the oxymoron had replaced reason inflected the discourse of this period. Even the rather sober C. Wright Mills claimed that the political atmosphere of the Sixties revealed an “epochal transition” that neither Marxism nor Liberalism could explain. In his words, we had entered a time in which “increased rationality” did not necessarily lead to “increased freedom.”78 If one could not reason to right thinking, then what recourse was left? In 1969, The New Left Notes published an article referring to this “culture of death”: White kids have a choice. We can wimp out, let ourselves be fucked over, and live our lives inside of cages. Or we can fight on the side of the Vietnamese and the blacks to destroy the pigamerikan monster. We can choose to live the culture of death, or we can make our lives a Wargasm.79

62  Oppositional Dissent The concern is this pervasive impetus to war, defining a culture that the SDS often characterized in this breathless way: Bourgeois culture is uptightness, isolation, fear. Bourgeois culture wants us to sit like punks and listen to things, watch things, be passive spectators. But we don’t know how to hear music without dancing. We are motion. Every time we refuse to sit still, we destroy bourgeois culture. Every move we make creates a new form. Bourgeois culture wants us to get married, not to fuck, not to experience each other. To keep to ourselves, to be competitive. Women should just want to be wives and mothers, baby machines. Men should need to control women, to feed their own ego trips. Permeating these descriptions is the notion that to resist this numbing, false consciousness, is to stay in motion, which suggests a need to maintain change or continue to dissent. Motion is literal in the sense of marching in the streets to protest the abuses of dominant culture and the established political order, or liberalism. Motion is figurative in the sense of changing the values of society by changing the discourse and, therefore, changing consciousness. One instance of changing the discourse to expose the underlying ideology is the use of “wargasm.” During the end of 1969, at the height of Vietnam War protests, this term circulated among the underground press. In The Rag, a “wargasm” is described as “A total feeling experience through hitting, kicking, cursing, killing and getting killed. Pleasure, a loss of separate self, release of tension.”80 The amalgam of war and orgasm suggests a satirical fetishizing of war and death as an answer to social problems. The Rag goes on to elucidate: Understanding that Amerika is built on fucking people over, robbing people of their work, their bread, their human-ness. And we are learning—the hard way—that survival in Amerika means destroying Amerika. To love we must fight. Break on through to the other side. Amerika, Pigamerika. The use of the “k” is powerful and scary. Like seeing your own reflection in a cracked mirror; and it’s true, the USA is like that—scary ugly, distorted, like a shattered mirror, trying to shatter us all.81 Anger and the nihilism engendered by impotence leak uncomfortably from this description. Again, the absurdity of killing something to love it, an oxymoronic logic famously touted by General Westmoreland during the Vietnam War, is echoed in this passage, suggesting that this irrationalism fractures America and in so doing fractures the individual sense of self. The “k” being scary is so because of its relationship to fascist oppression, which many felt was taking hold, especially after the draft

Dissent and Politics  63 lottery was instituted on December 1, 1969. The “k” used instead of a “c” was a common way for the underground press to make connections between the American government and German fascism under Hitler. Fascist qualities were a significant concern during the Sixties and the underground press expressed no faith in the mainstream press’ a­ bility or willingness to redress their concerns. In Dispatches, Michael Herr suggests some of the conflicts between the mainstream press and the underground press in their ability to confront this culture of death. In reporting on the Vietnam War, Herr describes how the journalism of the mainstream press inherently supported the status quo, “It was inevitable that once the media took the diversions seriously enough to report them, they also legitimized them.”82 The fact of death became dissociated from the act of living. Herr notes that the idea of death became commonplace, so much so that the news could r­ eport that “only eighty GI’s had died in combat, and you’d feel like you’d just gotten a bargain.”83 This effect emerged from a press that failed to engage the facts with due skepticism and outrage; they, to be fair, gave all details equal weight, all opinions equal value even those clearly absurd, such as we needed to destroy the country in order to save it. Mills also responded to this issue, claiming that the mainstream press had lost the ability to “outrage” and approach “official reports” with necessary rigor and art.84 The Resistance In January of 1969, Fortune magazine published an article by Charles Burke describing the youth movements of the late Sixties. In part, the article illustrates the fractured nature of the New Left, noting that “in fact” the Movement “is incredibly diverse—as multi-leveled and varied as American society itself” and had “evolved from a somewhat reformist organization into a revolutionary one.”85 This observation echoes that of Leo in the New York Times, who claimed that by 1968 the underground press had evolved from counter-cultural to more political in ­nature. Burke’s aim, it seems, is to indicate the generally misguided views of the New Left and SDS, its most prolific political organization, claiming repeatedly that these groups were anarchic in nature, encouraging individual and local activism over more organized efforts, such as that promoted by the Old Left. This anarchic tendency in the underground press suggests another view of the presses existentialist turn. It is true that many of the underground presses, as The Port Huron Statement makes clear, favored individualism and participatory democratic practices over more organized and hierarchical activities. This political stance emerged for at least a couple of identifiable reasons: 1 The underground papers and the groups using them repeatedly noted the importance of a personal commitment. For instance,

64  Oppositional Dissent in 1969 in an article about Mark Rudd and Les Coleman, Walter ­Tyler of the Spectator claimed that the Weatherman and the Revolutionary Youth Movement (“2 factions of the SDS respectively”) encouraged “personal commitment” in students as an “organizing strategy,” which some, such as Burke, saw as a paradox.86 This personal commitment was seen to disrupt political organizing rather than promoting it. The personal commitment meant a commitment to face the consequences of one’s actions. This willingness to face consequences also encouraged an understanding of what one was fighting for. Effective dissent meant that each person was an active agent in change, and not a puppet of a larger ideology. 2 The underground press was suspect of ideology or dogma. Often, they sought to resist acts of control. The Fifth Estate in 1969, for instance, linked personal commitment to unity In the coming months and years the musical attention given Michigan will exceed many of our present dreams, and it’s a total community responsibility to extend this environment just as far as we can through personal commitment and joint cooperation. It is with these sincere feelings that “A Day of Peace, 1969” is presented.87 Again, the suggestion is that individual and local efforts are necessary to sustain the Movement, and no contradiction is seen between this personal commitment and community responsibility. This rhetoric often primes personal responsibility suggesting that we should understand the phrase in relation to community. This sense of an individualized unity is often how anarchy, at least in the underground press, is understood. Anarchy is a means of shaping individual purpose toward a common goal, but who defines that common goal is, as Burke observed, hard to determine. Therefore, a proliferation of movements emerged, each founded on not only a politically oppositional or cultural alternative point of view but also on an emergent sense of purpose. For much of the decade of the Sixties, the purpose of the underground press was resistance to the Vietnam War and more specifically the draft as a concrete symbol of the war. The “second” most significant organization, according to Burke, was The Resistance, which, he claims, “began in 1967 as a sort of accumulation of small anti-draft groups on the east and west coasts.”88 As he notes, The Resistance attempted to disrupt the draft and in so doing disrupt what Burke refers to as “other institutions and issues.”89 Clearly, addressing institutionalized cultural norms was the aim of The Resistance, but to do that the group had to broaden its efforts to problematize the discourse of war, the “culture of death.” This discourse, as we have seen, permeated the culture and engaging the ideas in one cultural form required an engagement in another. Addressing a variety

Dissent and Politics  65 of cultural forms, each defined by a set of values, led to the proliferation Burke and Leo observed. Each node required a response, which gave The Movement its generally anarchic structure: “The Resistance is an ideological anomaly: a functioning anarchy.”90 In terms of the Vietnam War, this dissent against institutionalized values took the form of resistance against the draft and the cultural values associated with it. The Draft The peacetime military draft had been instituted in 1954 but the number of draftees increased after 1964 when President Johnson escalated the war. The draft lottery was instituted on December 1, 1969. The draft in general but the draft lottery in particular was widely seen by the SDS and the underground press as an instance of governmental overreach. Paul Potter, for instance, asserted that the Vietnam War and policies like the draft lottery revealed that “America was run ‘by faceless and terrible bureaucracies . . . that consistently put material values before human values.’”91 Resisting the draft was a concrete way to resist American political policies that included America’s imperialist tendencies. The ethics of the issue seemed clear. A country geared toward more peaceful aims in the world and that appreciated a person’s right to self-­determination was necessary and good. Resisting the draft further energized the ­anti-war movement exemplified by a number of protests across the country, ­including the march on the Pentagon in 1967, dramatized in Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night. In the underground press, support for soldiers took the form of support for freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and support for deserters. Several of the papers in the underground press were published by these communities of dissenters or exiles, as they often referred to themselves. The underground press reported on trials in which soldiers were prosecuted for writing and distributing anti-war material. In one case in 1968, Allen Myers was found not guilty of disobeying an order. He had been charged with distributing a leaflet containing anti-war sentiments “put out by the Philadelphia Student Mobilization Committee.”92 Instances of this type led to the creation of funds and organizations to offer legal assistance to soldiers. One such group was the American Servicemen’s Union. This group defined itself as organizing legal assistance, demonstrations and publicity in support of servicemen who are fighting for their rights, harassed by the racist brass, are AWOL, or refuse to do the dirty work for the billionaires who use the armed forces to preserve their far flung financial empires [sic].93 The ASU and similar groups in support of disaffected soldiers often sought to dismantle the aspects of control that defined military discipline

66  Oppositional Dissent and seemed to reflect prescriptions against personal freedom. The ASU published a brief GI Bill of Rights that included the following items: “An end to saluting and ‘Sir”-ing of officers,” “racial equality,” “The right to disobey illegal orders—like orders to go and fight an illegal war in Vietnam,” and “The right of collective bargaining.” Of course, part of the point is that a military, as we know it, would cease to exist without stringent discipline, which was at least in part the point. Resistance to the draft led to the publication of more than 200 GI anti-war papers by the end of 1972.94 These presses illustrated the veterans’ view of the war, some of which reflected those concerns articulated in the state-side presses while others did not, voicing both frustration with the status quo and with the anti-war movement in general. In the state-side presses, the soldiers’ views often found their way into  the “Letters to the Editor” sections (again illustrating the importance of the epistolary form) of the underground papers. To these editors credit, they often published these letters as they were, promoting the freedom of speech while also enacting freedom of the press. In a particularly ­sophisticated letter in the October 27, 1966 issue of The Paper, the airman, Barry Goldberg, writes that his letter is “part agreement, part rebuttal, part advice, part pet theory . . . and part sounding off about nothing in particular.”95 Immediately note the uncertainty he has about his point of view and perhaps an uncertainty about his relationship to the ­experiences he has had and what others say about them. The airman is responding to Bradford Lang’s earlier article “At the Ends of the Earth.” In this article, Lang offers a profile of what he claims is an “accurate picture of the average GI” he compiled during his USO tour of the Sondrestrom Air Base in Greenland.96 Lang claims, complete with arrogant sexism, that inject a few girls into the picture, and remove some of the element of force, and Joe Airman might as well be a sophomore history major living in Free Dormitory. Or he could just as easily be a 20-year old shoe salesman living in a downtown Lansing apartment.97 Goldberg bristles at this portrayal, which seems indicative of an attitude common in the underground press. Often, soldiers are described as mere insensate objects, buffeted about by the political inanities of Washington. They are texts to be written on rather than written about; they are talked at rather than listened to. Lang follows his profile with a satirical proposal to the Michigan State administration, calling for donations to fund more USO missions, more opportunity for “Joe Airman” to get himself figured out. Responding as much to this attitude as to what Lang proposes, which is plenty dim, Goldberg notes that few soldiers care about these programs, most of which go unattended. Instead, the men gamble, drink, and dream of home. Many are uneducated and

Dissent and Politics  67 unmotivated, entering the Air Force because “it is easy,” or what Goldberg refers to as a “soft womb” for essentially dimwitted men. What Goldberg seems most concerned to convey is that people engage with the “facts,” as he notes, and not use soldiers and their situation as pathos to further a political argument. In some cases to counter their use as props by the government, the New Left or, in others, to voice their views of the war established through lived experience, the veterans began to publish their own underground papers. Many of these were amateurish, but offered interesting perspectives. One such press was Graffiti, which used the concept of graffiti to comment on stories about the war published in the mainstream press. These editors pasted stories and then commented on them or within them in pen or in typed pieces disrupting the original text. This type of dialogue offered an immediate refutation of the claims made in the mainstream press, which is one of the functions of graffiti. It disrupts the prevailing narrative of society by rupturing it with dissenting voices. Others included the “Draft Clearing House Memorandum,” which described the different anti-draft organizations established around the country. These papers fought the draft not only to save fellow citizens from serving in what the underground press saw as an illegal and immoral war but also to reveal and reform liberal political policies. Dissent and Place These dissenting practices reveal the importance of place in the dissent of the Sixties. In semiotic terms, place is a sign defined by a space, the delimited geography of a location, and an activity, the human engagement with that geography.98 In the protests of the Sixties, activists engaged the geography of a space to create the political meaning or place in a number of ways. These include marches, the occupation of parks and other open spaces, the use of graffiti, and sit- and other types of -“ins.” The protest march and occupation of open spaces appropriate the street or the park and use the symbolic structure of either the parade or ritual to develop a message of dissent. The importance of the street was expressed in a leaflet distributed by the Free City Diggers in the late Sixties (probably 1968). In the leaflet, the street is described as “what you all own together” and represents a place where everyone can meet. The street as a nexus of difference and peaceful debate suggests that people in effect become the “Street.”99 The street or park, as a metonym for the Movement or the people, is a place to be seen, heard, and read. The protest signs, flyers, and slogans become an important part of the dissenting message. These texts help create a unified purpose, which, in turn, unifies the protestors. The sense of solidarity is located in the meaning of a place. A place reminds people not only of the geographical location but also of what occurred there, the actions that make that place important.

68  Oppositional Dissent In 1969, F. Bardacke articulated the aims of the People’s Park in the poster “Who Owns the Park?” In this position statement, Bardacke appropriates Native American iconography and issues to justify the creation of the park on University of California’s property.100 First, it is important to remember that Marx called for abolishing the principle of private property in the Communist Manifesto.101 Protesters in the Sixties, and after, typically express this point. The land being a product of nature and not humans belongs to everyone. Bardacke tells a brief story of the acquisition of the land the People’s Park was built on. The story is one characterized by a series of thefts. The Costanoan Indians first lived on the land, which was then stolen by Catholic missionaries; these missionaries lost it to the Mexican Government, who lost it to the Americans, who sold it to settlers and gave them a deed representing ownership, which was then bought and sold among the rich, who destroyed the homes on it to make money, eventually selling the deed representing the land to the University of Berkley.102 Giving the land a story locates it not only as a contested space in history but also as a memorial to an injustice that motivates resistance and reform. In 1969, Todd Gitlin and John Simon discussed the meaning of the People’s Park in Berkley, California, which the University of California eventually tore down. Gitlin and Simon claim that “the park is physically, touchably, verifiably there, not just for its makers but for any eyes and hands. ‘Serving the people’ requires physical proof, and the Park was that. Straight people were welcome, and they used the Park.”103 They add that creating what is needed will eventually lead to a conflict with “the world capitalism has made.”104 The contested nature of the space gives it meaning as a symbol of resistance. It suggests an alternative logic to that of Capitalism, which in terms of property ownership cannot be reconciled with the needs of the people. To make something that is not owned denies a central premise of the Capitalist system; therefore, it must be destroyed. These conflicts in a space are often expressed through graffiti and other ephemeral documents such as leaflets, buttons, broadsides, and posters. These texts often remain after the space has been reclaimed by the dominant, offering a dialogue with those using that space afterward. Several presses comment on graffiti located in bathrooms or in the Subway System.105 These instances are generally comic, satirizing the space, suggesting any number of ulterior motives for its use. More serious instances are noted, however. In Vietnam GI in 1968, the ­editors report that “More leaflets written by G.I.’s are appearing, and anti-war graffiti is to be found everywhere around the fort.”106 Janet Wolfe writing in the East Village Other in 1966 describes the use of buttons: “A  new nose-thumbing form of communication—the slogan-­ bearing ­lapel ­button—is solving old a­ fflictions of identity and social protest while burying many of these same problems under a sometimes dangerous deception of humor.”107 Though concerned with the smutty

Dissent and Politics  69 or  scatological humor, Wolfe identifies the rupture in discourse these types of texts create. This rupture indicates a tension that promotes discussion or ­interpretation. A couple of the buttons she describes read “Cunnilingus Now” and “Copulation for Co-existence,” respectively. From a sociological point of view, these slogans represent ideas that find expression only in such clandestine forms.108 The clandestine form, written on a space, pinned to a body, or tossed on the ground, is meant to be seen, creating dissenting rather than docile bodies. Often, they assume an audience located in the future, who might one day enter that space. In this way, these texts offer that audience an alternative interpretation of the space that connects them with the past in a meaningful way, even if that meaning is represented in a distasteful joke. Sit-ins entailed the occupation of a contested location, branding it with oppositional meanings. This form of protest was used by the SNCC early in the Sixties to protest segregation. One famous instance was the Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, which inspired other similar actions across the south. The purpose of the sit-in was to agitate for change by disrupting a business’ established function. In asking to be served as any other Greensboro citizen, the lunch counter protesters disrupted and called attention to the racist practices of Woolworth’s, which were widely accepted in the south. This tactic was used by the New Left during campus protests also to illustrate and call attention to an underlying logic they saw as problematic. By shutting down the function of the university, protestors were able to express their frustrations, whether those be with racism, the relationship between the university and the military operations in Vietnam, or with the military draft. The “sit-in” was appropriated by other groups and became associated with alternative actions whether specifically political or more generally counter-cultural. In the underground press, one finds the use of “be-ins,” “teach-ins,” “love-ins,” or in one instance “Fish-in.” Perhaps the proliferation of “ins” diminished the term’s political impact as the suffix began to connote a gathering, such as an orgy, rather than the expression of a need for change. In all, the appropriation of a space to give it meaning as a place of resistance was extremely important in countering the established political messages of the time. These places would become analogies for the continued struggle against policies the Left saw as destructive and had the potential of helping propel that message into the future.

Conclusion In political terms, the dissent facilitated by the underground press seemed to pursue two goals: (1) develop a “revolutionary” or dissenting identity and (2) articulate a reformed political ideology. This dissenting identity was set against liberalism, if we understand liberalism as illustrated in

70  Oppositional Dissent President Kennedy’s speeches, such as his 1963 civil rights speech. In this address to the nation, Kennedy expressed the need for equal rights for all American citizens, which, he argued, could come from the democratic and legislative processes rather than street protests. He stressed that protests in the streets were the sign of failure not of progress. It was this subtle aspect of American liberalism, among other issues, that inspired resistance even as liberal leaders tried to devise effect solutions to the nation’s problems, problems clearly articulated in the Kerner Commission Report in 1967. In practice, Dissent is the necessary means of rupturing the established structure of society not to destroy it but instead to reveal it, opening it for critique. This rupture is achieved not only by voicing discontent or the articulation of ills but also by laying bare the means of exploitation embedded in society’s political practices. If politics is a means to power, then we might head C. Wright Mills definition of the concept in “The Structure of Power in American Society”: “Power has to do with whatever decisions men make about the arrangements under which they live, and about the events which make up the history of their times.”109 The decisions we make about the structure of society determine who has access to its institutions, to their support, and to the potential they offer to create a more just life. In the Sixties, access was limited not so much by a coercive political system but rather by its failure to identify and remedy people’s legitimate political concerns. Liberalism, here, but also Socialism, in Russian and elsewhere, failed to provide redress to the social ills our country faced. In part, this represents a disconnect between how the political institution’s goals were developed and implemented. John F. Kennedy, for instance, could assert, without qualification or bluster, that we should not ask what the country could do for us but what we could do for our country. Though perhaps a noble sentiment, the statement illustrates the disconnect between the liberal sense of service and the public’s demand for egalitarian guidance.

Notes 1 David Farber and Beth Bailey, The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 23. 2 Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), 6. 3 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 181. 4 Gregory McDonald, Souvenirs of a Blown World (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1985), 221. 5 Paul Krassner, “An Angry Young Magazine,” The Realist, June–July 1958, Independent Voices, 1–2. 6 John McDermott, “Politics of the Movement,” in The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 499.

Dissent and Politics  71 7 Tom Hayden, David McRenolds, Paul Booth, Gregory Gallo, Dan Turner, and Bernard Nossiter, “Rustler on the New Frontier: First Impressions of LBJ,” Activist, Winter 1964, Independent Voices, 60. 8 James Jacobs, “American Intervention in the World,” New Left Notes, ­August 24, 1966, Independent Voices, 3. 9 Jacobs, “American,” 3. 10 Tom Hayden, “Tom Hayden in 1963, A Recognition and a Prophecy,” in The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 467. 11 In the 26 August 1966 issue of the Berkeley Barb, the “Rat Fink” in the “Roving Rat Fink” column claimed that “In fact, the New Left could do with a bit more Marxism. To explain why the oldtime bloated capitalist exploited the workers, it’s not necessary to assume that he hated them. His economic motivation is obvious” (4). 12 Farber and Bailey, Columbia, 30. 13 Paul Booth, “Rustler on the New Frontier: First Impressions of LBJ,” Activist, Winter 1964, Independent Voices, 4. 14 Tom Hayden, Port Huron Statement: The Visionary Call of the 1960s Revolution (reprint 1962, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005), 45. 15 Hayden, Port Huron, 46–47. 16 Hayden, Port Huron, 48. 17 Hayden, Port Huron, 48. 18 Hayden, Port Huron, 14. 19 Tom Hayden, “Letter to the New (Young) Left,” Activist, Winter 1961, 4. This discussion reveals early efforts to identify those institutions central to the effective dominant culture. However, there seems little recognition of these keywords as institutions central to the articulation of cultural norms and values. Instead, these terms appear as primary themes of particular interest. In this sense, they provide little sense of how dissent might work to redress social issues. 20 Raymond Williams, Marxist and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 21 David Finke, “The Meaning of Dissent,” Activist, Winter 1961, 8. 22 Finke, “Meaning,” 10. 23 Mills claims in “Letter to the New Left” that the phrase “ideology is dead” began in the mid-fifties, mainly in intellectual circles more or less associated with the Milan Conference of 1955. 24 C. Wright Mills, “New Left,” in Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright mills (New York: Ballantine Books, 1963), 248. 25 Mills, “New Left,” 248. 26 Stuart Jefferies, The Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (London: Verso, 2016), 6 27 Jefferies, Grand, 6. 28 John and Barbara Ehrenreich, “European Student Movements: Part One— Germany,” New Left Notes, July 29, 1968, Independent Voices, 8. 29 Douglas Kellner, Introduction to One Dimensional Man, Herbert ­Marcuse (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964),xi. 30 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964), 258. 31 Marcuse, One-Dimensional, 6. 32 Marcuse, One-Dimensional, 9. 33 Marcuse, One-Dimensional, 9. 34 John Campbell McMillian, Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 12.

72  Oppositional Dissent 35 Dave Dellinger, A. J. Muste, and Isaac Deutscher, “Marxism and Nonviolence,” in The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 596–601. 36 Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prevents employment discrimination and established the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). In 1965, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 disallowed the use of literacy tests as a prerequisite for voting. In 1968, The Fair Housing Act eliminated the use of race, religion, or national origin in determining access to affordable housing. 37 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” 1963, http:// web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/letter_birmingham_jail.pdf 38 King, Jr., “Letter.” 39 Shirley Graham, W. Alphaeus Hunton, Margaret G. Burroughs, and Esther Jackson, eds., Freedomways (Fourth Quarter) 1969, Independent Voices, 296. 40 Graham, Hunton, Burroughs, Jackson, “It’s a Journal,” Freedomways, Spring 1961, Independent Voices, 18. 41 James Baldwin, “What Price Freedom,” Freedomways, Spring (Second Quarter) 1964, Independent Voices, 191. 42 James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1962), 5. 43 King, Jr., “Letter.” 44 Mae Monroe, Freedomways, Spring (Second Quarter) 1964 – Independent Voices, 207. 45 Graham, Hunton, Burroughs, Jackson, “Gunning Down the Vietnamese,” Freedomways (Fourth Quarter) 1969, Independent Voices, 295. 46 Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 1963). 47 Lawrence Neal, “Problems of Afro-Americans,” Black Dialogue 1, no. 3–4, 1966, Independent Voices, 5–8. 48 Neal, “Problems,” 16. 49 Neal, “Problems,” 16. 50 Lehman L. Brightman, “The New Indian,” Warpath, Fall 1968, 9. 51 N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010). 52 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, The Report of the ­National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, DC: ­NACCD, 1968), 1. 53 King, Jr., “Letter,” Accessed June 10, 2019. 54 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 325. 55 Bloom, Closing, 326. 56 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977). 57 Foucault, Discipline, 135–138. 58 Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schoken Books, 1956), 1. 59 James T. Stewart, “Revolutionary Black Artist,” Black Dialogue 1, no. 3–4, 1966, Independent Voices, 17. 60 Rusty L. Monhollon, “Law and Justice,” in The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s, eds. David Farber and Beth Bailey (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 281. 61 Mitchell Goodman, A Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution (New York: Pilgrim Press-Knopf, 1970), 31.

Dissent and Politics  73 62 Allen Young, “Washington Inauguration,” Helix 6, no. 5, 1969, Independent Voices, 6. 63 Art Spiegleman, Maus I & II (New York: Pantheon, 1993). 64 Eldridge Knight, “Note to My Friends,” Liberation News Service, August 21, 1969, Independent Voices, 1–10. 65 Knight, “A Note,” 5. 66 Eldridge Knight, Soul on Ice (New York: Delta-Random House, 1968.), 33. 67 Peter Stansill and David Mairowitz, eds., BAMN (By Any Means Necessary): Outlaw Manifestos & Ephemera 1965–1970 (1971: repr., Brooklyn, NY: Automedia, 1999). 68 Stansill and Mairowitz, BAMN, 74–75. 69 Gandalf, “You, Me, and the Law,” Berkley Barb, September 12–18, 1969, Independent Voices, 6. 70 This shifting of responsibility from the perpetrator to the system that created the perpetrator is so common in the underground press that we might refer to it as a rhetorical trope. It does suggest a particular cultural theory that behavior is socially constructed, but is used so broadly that it begins to function as a justification for the ills of society. 71 Dan Georgakis and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do MInd Dying (Cambridge, MA: Southend Press, 1998.), 151–174. 72 Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto, ed. Frederic L. Bender, 2nd ed. (1848: repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 81–83. 73 Farber and Bailey, Columbia, 38. 74 Hayden, Port Huron, 87. 75 Hayden, Port Huron, 87. 76 Jeremy Brecher, “Where to? Where to? Where to?” in Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchel Goodman (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 497–498. 77 Brecher, “Where,” in Movement, 498–499. 78 C. Wright Mills, “Culture and Politics,” Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (New York: Ballantine Books, 1963), 237. 79 I Hear the Sound of Wargasm,” New Left Notes, September 20, 1969, Independent Voices, 4. 80 Liberation News Service, “Wargasm,” The Rag, November 17, 1969, Independent Voices, 17. 81 LNS, “Wargasm,” 17. 82 Herr, Dispatches, 215. 83 Herr, Dispatches, 215. 84 C. Wright Mills, “The New Left,” Power, 248. A version of this essay was originally published in the New Left Review in 1960 under the title “Letter to the New Left.” 85 Charles Burke, “Student Activists: Free-Form Revolutionaries.” Fortune, January 1969, para. 3–6. http://fortune.com/2011/10/16/student-activistsfree-form-revolutionaries-fortune-1969/ 86 Walter Tyler, “If You Don’t Use the Handle,” The Spectator, October 7, 1969, Independent Voices, 5. 87 Peter Andrews, Fifth Estate, October 30–November 12, 1969, Independent Voices, 28. 88 Burke, “Students,” para. 9. 89 Burke, para. 9. 90 Burke, para. 9. 91 David Farber and Beth Bailey, “The Vietnam War,” in The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 40.

74  Oppositional Dissent 92 Goodman, Movement, 610. 93 American Servicemen’s Union Newspackets, March, 18, 1969, Independent Voices, 1. 94 David Farber and Beth Bailey, “Polarization,” in The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 52. 95 Barry Goldberg, Letters, The Paper, October 27, 1966, 8. 96 Goldberg, Letter, 12. 97 Goldberg, Letter, 12. 98 Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989). 99 BAMN [by any means necessary]: Outlaw Manifestos & Ephemera (New York: Automedia, 1971), 78. 100 F. Bardacke, “Who Owns the Park?” in Movement, 305. 101 Marx, Communist Manifesto, 75. 102 Bardacke, “Who Owns the Park?” in Movement, 305. 103 Todd Gitlin and John Simon, “The Meaning of People’s Park,” in Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchel Goodman (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 306–309. By “straight” people, Gitlin means the typical American consumer, the politically normalized person. 104 Gitlin and Simon, “Meaning,” 306–309. 105 R. R, “The Roving Rat Fink Digs Graffiti,” Berkeley Barb, June 17, 1966, Independent Voices, 5. 106 “From Fort Ord,” Vietnam GI, April, 1968, Independent Voices, 5. 107 Janet L. Wolfe, “Bugging Buy Button,” East Village Other, September 1 – 15, 1966, Independent Voices, 7. 108 Irving Louis Horowitz, Introduction to Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills (New York: Bantam Books, 1963), 7. 109 Mills, “The Structure of Power in American Society,” in Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Horowitz (New York: Ballantine Books, 1963), 23.

3 Dissent and the Economy

The Economic Institution It is a cliché we often hear that everything is political. In a sense, everything is political, even the personal, but what is often meant by this slogan is that everything is about economics, and about the production and distribution of goods; it is about making money. Some cynicism often attends our discussion of modern economics—the abuses are all too clear and often disheartening. Yet, no one tends to doubt that Capitalism is the central economic theory of our time. While admittedly a complex concept when coupled with culture, Capitalism does provide a framework for understanding culture as a process and dissent as the operation by which a culture becomes, which is to suggest that culture is always unsettled and in the process of being formed. Often when we discuss culture, we discuss a snapshot of it—a moment, whether that moment is long or short, that seems of particular interest. This practice makes sense, but is misleading because culture is in a dialectical relationship with experience. In essence, we make culture as we experience it, and it could be said that culture shapes us as we live it. This aspect of culture makes it very difficult to discuss cogently, which is both why we must try and why it is such an important concept to understand. One distinguishing element of culture is its relationship to ideology. Raymond Williams defines ideology as “the science of ideas,” but the concept was often associated with “abstract and false thought” or consciousness, and culture became associated with this sense of informing our ideas and, therefore, shaping our consciousness.1 However, the earliest use of ideology might be recovered to suggest as Williams does that the concept exposes for critique the role economics plays in culture. In this sense, Williams relates ideology to Marxist theory and the critique of Capitalism in three ways: 1 A system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group. 2 A system of illusory beliefs—false ideas or false consciousness— which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge. 3 The general process of the production of meanings and ideas. 2

76  Oppositional Dissent In many ways, these senses provide a reasonable heuristic for a definition of economics. The economy is a central social institution. It affects not only the structure of Capitalism but also the possibilities of human experience. Modern economic thinking traces back at least to Adam Smith, who famously indicated that in terms of economic theory, people are motivated most directly by self-interest. The impact this simple observation has on society is significant. For instance, Smith claims “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”3 From this moment, a self-interested economic structure becomes a normative cultural value, an arrogance that freed the rich from guilt and made their wealth seem justified, even righteous. Interrogating the ideas inherited from Adam Smith’s “free hand of the economy,” Karl Marx’s critique of Capitalism revealed the complex relationships manifested through industrialism, relationships that were, as Smith suggested, defined by self-interest. Marx determined that Capitalism, and the drive for profit, created profound inequality and injustice in the lives of both workers and capitalists. For instance, in his description of historical materialism, Marx notes that history is defined by the pursuit of material goods, or, in other words, a person’s effort to secure the material necessary for survival. This concept of history indicates that history is a product of production and is shaped in many ways by one’s access to the “means of production.” The effect this concept has on our understanding of culture is represented in what Marx referred to as the material dialectic, “base and superstructure.” The tensions that created class difference would ultimately lead to the proletarian revolution and the dismantling of Capitalism in favor of a more egalitarian Communism. This extraordinary view of culture helped reveal how inequality becomes manifest in our social institutions, which then function to define how we understand the cultural values that determine day-to-day experience. Perhaps the key to understanding the relationship between Marxist economic thinking and the underground press is to understand Marxism as a theory of culture as well as one of economics. The politics of labor was generally not the issue driving the New Left as it might be said to have motivated and sustained the Old Left. For the New Left, the question of the economy was in large part a question of culture, a question of how to live better lives in part free from commodity fetishism but freer from economic mechanisms of control. For this reason, the underground press’ critique of the established economic structure can seem naive or just oddly uninformed. Yet, emerging from this critique was an effort, worth revisiting today, to reimagine economic pursuits in the age of conspicuous consumption and what that critique suggests about the structure of late Capitalism or what Herbert Marcuse refers to as the “advanced industrial civilization.”4

Dissent and the Economy  77 Late Capitalism, as Theodor Adorno argued, was characterized by an economic process that perpetuated “domination over human beings.”5 Similar to Adorno’s definition, Fredric Jameson claimed that late Capitalism denoted hyper-consumerism, which indicated that life was a product or simulacrum of reality, one that capitalists could easily manipulate to control society.6 The underground press’ concerns about late capitalist practices reveal an alternative cultural vision at once compelling and comic, and sometimes that comic or absurd vision functions as critique. Some might consider these alternative visions troubling because of the economic thinking they inspired. Others might find the effort to imagine an alternative to a neo-liberal future inspiring. In all, reimagining America’s economic structure was an essential means of dissent—reimagining the relationship between money, social values, and human desire. Reimagining a new discourse required a response to established economic institutions, those institutions that both controlled the production and distribution of goods, and also determined the object of desire or the justification and gratification of want. The economic conditions of the Sixties, as many have noted, were characterized by growth. Some claim that this was a period of rapid expansion of the economy; however, the numbers suggest something slightly more modest. By the end of the decade, the Gross National Product had nearly doubled from about 504 billion in 1960 to 976 billion in 1970 and unemployment remained at or near 4% for most of the decade, reaching its lowest point of 3.5% in 1969. Yet, such growth appears to have been fairly common after the Great Depression. From 1940 to 1950, the GNP more than doubled from 100 billion to 285 billion, and it doubled again from 1950 to 1960. The central point is that during and after World War II, growth in the American economy was consistent. Yet, even though these trends were not unprecedented during the Sixties, they do explain the feeling of prosperity that defined the decade. The question remains, though, that even with this prosperity, something about the social structure seemed inadequate. A closer examination of the numbers suggests how discontent emerged from a general sense of wellbeing, a sense that Capitalism worked. Particularly galling for some was that women and non-white workers were unemployed at a nearly 1% to 4% higher rate, respectively, than white males. Unemployment alone suggests a significant source of class tensions that erupted into inner-city violence across the country during the late Sixties. In addition, 17.3% of Americans earned what was considered a low income (below $3,601) in 1965, and of this number 47.1% were African American. These economic tensions were exacerbated by the decline of the inner city, as white residence left the cities for the suburbs, which led to less money for inner-city schools and less economic opportunities in general.7 The conditions that had emerged in American

78  Oppositional Dissent cities were detailed in the Kerner Commission report submitted in 1967, and the commission noted the economic issues that had undermined the inner-city communities: What the rioters appeared to be seeking was fuller participation in the social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the majority of American citizens. Rather than rejecting the American system, they were anxious to obtain a place for themselves in it.8 The right to access was a prevailing concern in African American communities. The report stressed that access was not simply a matter of recognizing a lack and correcting it, but was part of a racist system that removed the economic mechanism necessary to compete from African American communities. For many African American activists, the racist system and how it constructed African American identity was the problem. Even though the Sixties seemed prosperous, a multitude of inequalities were becoming more starkly outlined and the values and norms that had served the nation were changing as the social institutions became more prominently dominated by a capitalist logic. Marcuse referred to this logic in terms of technology as “technological rationality.”9 He claimed, according to Douglas Kellner, that this logic and “unparalleled affluence” of mid-century America “had produced new forms of social administration and a ‘society without opposition’ that threatened individuality and that closed off possibilities of radical social change.”10 Economic practices helped create this “one ­d imensional” person that had lost the will if not the ability to argue for alternative modes of existence. At the beginning of One-Dimensional Man, after noting the benefits achieved through Capitalism and technology, Marcuse articulates the paradox inherent in the system: “Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population.”11 In essence, this condition defined day-to-day experience for those living in late Capitalism or an “advanced industrial society.”

Late Capitalism or Advanced Industrial Society These conditions offer some sense of the economic context of late ­Capitalism, but tell us little else. In the underground press, references to “late capitalism” are limited. However, these presses stressed the importance of reimagining the economy. Leviathan, named after Thomas Hobbes’ famous critique of the state, often explored economic issues.12 For instance, Robin Blackburn discussed the relationship between the New Left and socialism. In his analysis, he discussed his concerns about

Dissent and the Economy  79 the structure of late Capitalism, describing its relationship to social institutions as follows: Firstly, there is the repressive mobilization of late capitalist society, known as the backlash. This is the official unveiling of the system of pluralistic authoritarianism. In order to preserve the ideologically important forms of liberal society. Democracy at a national level must be sustained by an effective authoritarian organization of all the constitutive institutions in the society.13 Blackburn points to the role institutions play in establishing and ­maintaining the social order, and it is these institutions, often without knowing it, that the underground press sought to reform. Blackburn, as others did, notes that some sought transitional forms to achieve change, while others argued that the social order could only be affected by a broad reform on all the cultural institutions. Yet, Blackburn’s argument overlooks the role of dissent in facilitating change without discarding those institutions that exist. It was this thought, perhaps more than any issue, that created the type of concern and confusion Blackburn expresses in his assessment of the New Left at the end of the decade. The idea that change meant recreating society was misguided and overlooked the commitment to participatory democracy expressed in texts such as The Port Huron Statement. Often, dissent was perceived as merely one act in an ocean of acts, qualified into incoherence, but in effect, dissent shaped the discourse that led to the type of sustained change necessary for cultural and social reforms. In Mitchell Goodman’s collection Movement Toward a New A ­ merica, Capitalism is also critiqued as a system of exploitation, following Marx, but, in an echo of Hegel’s dialectic, as destructive to both workers and capitalists. The underground press’ aim seemed more often than not to reveal Capitalism as detrimental to all. Of course, calls for abolishing the whole system, as Blackburn also indicates, and starting over existed, but more convincing were the efforts to reforming Capitalism, which provides a view of dissent as a means to adjusting everyday practices to encourage (1) a more egalitarian life, (2) a life lived in an organic relationship to existing resources, and (3) a life defined by one’s own choices. The focus on an individual consciousness was imperative and explains the oft-cited call for “raising consciousness.” Becoming aware of one’s role in the economy and how that presence was shaped by ­economic institutions was essential to experimenting with and potentially enacting new economic relations. Once in place, these new relations would ­encourage ancillary changes that could ultimately lead to a new, hopefully better, society. In this way, dissent was used to develop ethical ­resolutions to a number of social problems Capitalism had either caused or exacerbated.

80  Oppositional Dissent As Goodman’s collection reveals, the central problems with Capitalism were its exploitation of people and the harm it could do to the enjoyment of life, if such enjoyment is understood as the pursuit of “true needs” over those we might designate as false or unnecessary.14 Prefacing a collage of articles discussing Capitalism, Goodman includes a quote from Mario Savio, “The ‘futures’ and ‘careers’ for which American students now prepare are for the most part intellectual and moral wastelands. This chrome-plated consumers’ paradise would have us grow up to be well-behaved children.”15 Savio’s complaint encapsulates many of the concerns with American economic institutions. He initially calls attention to education that focuses more on job training than on the liberal arts. This was a tendency that emerged after World War II and the associated increase in industrial production when the GI Bill gave many more individuals access to higher education. A central concern of these students was job preparation to equip them for new careers in the industrial and service industries. The push for vocational training was seen to conflict with liberal education, an issue we still struggle with today. Several recent books, including Fareed Zakaria’s In Defense of a Liberal Education (2015), argue for not only retaining but promoting the liberal arts as a way to increase the very skills Savio suggests are needed: intellectual and moral understanding. The concern about teaching the liberal arts was a central issue during the Sixties, as it was seen as a way teaching informed resistance to the most dangerous aspects of capitalist ideology, which included the construction of haves and have-nots. Savio takes this concern further, however, suggesting that Capitalism creates an intellectual and moral wasteland. Goodman’s collage offers one definition of this wasteland. He includes print ads from an unnamed whiskey company and Porsche. Both ads explicitly claim that those who have worked hard and been successful order “things just because they’re expensive.”16 The sheer normality of such conspicuous consumption is striking. The Porsche ad makes this norm even more cringe-worthy: “Once you get hooked, it’s for life! Inevitably, nothing less than the unique Porsche performance will satisfy you. After all, caviar connoisseurs don’t go back to tuna fish salad.”17 The elitism or classism expressed here is clear and unabashed, and the idea that “you” get “hooked” suggests the mindlessness of consumption. Like a fish, one is baited into accepting these values, violently hooked and removed from one’s previous life, living or dying as Porsche allows. While deconstructing the binaries of advertising is revealing, and a common technique of the underground press (see Graffiti, for instance), more damning is a focus on the thoughtlessness of the products companies produced. In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, which called attention to the magnitude of the destruction caused by DDT and other pesticides.18 Following this type of socially

Dissent and the Economy  81 responsible critique, the underground press pressured companies like Dow Chemical to review their activities. In a collage drawn from Dow Chemical documents, the D.C. 9 vividly illustrated Dow’s moral bankruptcy, an immorality to which Savio refers. The collage is anchored by a skull in an Uncle Sam top hat, suggesting the “culture of death” that many argued defined American politics, and an actual image of a victim of Dow’s napalm. Pasted above and below these images are excerpts from Dow’s annual reports and a few internal memoranda. One clip is taken from the July 10, 1969 Today Show transcript. In it, Herbert Doan claims that “This napalm is a good discriminate, strategic weapon, and we feel those folks oughta have it. . . . To us this is a moral decision to stay in this product.”19 Such euphemism makes terms like “moral” relatively meaningless, and, given Doan’s willingness to discuss such a product on mainstream television, suggests how desensitized the public had become to this type of anonymous carnage. The underground press obviously worked to transform public opinion not only about napalm but about Capitalism and its social implications in general. To illustrate this capitalist thinking, The Daily Californian published in 1968 a response to a question from an electrical engineering student about to graduate from Michigan State University. The student asked Mr. Doan of Dow Chemical whether “a business career” would allow him to “attain . . . a proper balance among all aspects of life,” aspects that included raising a family and meeting family obligations. 20 Doan’s response is telling and reflects a corporate attitude that permeated the Sixties, and the post-war period, To summarize: If you want to achieve the maximum success in any field you had better be prepared to work long, hard, dedicated hours. This kind of advice admits a heavy imbalance in the way you spend your time, as I am quite aware, but the choice is yours. 21 Most obvious at issue is Doan’s assertion that “maximum success,” defined as long hours, and sacrificing time with family, is intrinsically valuable. In addition, such success is indicated as a matter of choice, but it is a false choice symptomatic of the “either/or” fallacy. Either one chooses to undermine his community ties for some specifically narcissistic aim or one will achieve suboptimal success or failure, Doan’s tone certainly suggests. The infusion of this attitude within culture created a mood that permeated everyday experience and, the underground press noted, degraded human life. In responding to this ideology, the underground press envisioned an economy structured, as one might expect, in relation to Marxist ideology but also as a means of freeing individuals to participate more fully in the development of society.

82  Oppositional Dissent

Problems with Capitalism Traditionally, labor unions helped facilitate fair representation for workers in the economy, offering them more access to the means of production and, therefore, more control over the conditions of their success. This relationship gave workers a more active role in determining not only economic but also social conditions. Yet, The Port Huron Statement also notes that during the Sixties, unions had become co-opted by industry and challenged in the South by intense resistance from businesses and “right to work laws.”22 Due to both of these developments, labor became less able to “organize” against capitalist overreach, countering such efforts with alternative or oppositional cultural forms. In The Port Huron Statement, Hayden argued that the decline of union radicalism represents a larger political apathy, a concept further developed in C. Wright Mills’ “Letter to the New Left.” In this letter, Mills describes the apathy he saw as a lack of vision and lack of ­political ­action. 23 The underground press took up this challenge critiquing Capitalism and imagining new social structures. Specific concerns articulated in the underground press that further defined this ideology ­included the i­rrationalities of the military-industrial complex, the i­mpact of corporate advertising, the manipulations of a money economy, and the dangers of technology and automation, all of which functioned in large part to undermine individual participation in society, alienating the individual not only from the means of production but also from fair representation in society and culture. Military-Industrial Complex A phrase coined by Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 17, 1961, the “military-industrial complex” describes the economic convergence of the arms industry and the nation’s military interests, or as defined in The Port Huron Statement, “the powerful congruence of interest and structure among military and business elites which affects so much of our development and destiny.”24 Eisenhower “recognized the need” for developing this confluence of resources; however, he also stressed that this alignment would have an unprecedented influence on the American economy, politics, and “even” spirituality. 25 In The Port Huron Statement, Hayden notes that his generation was “not only. . . the first generation to live with the possibility of worldwide cataclysm—it is the first to experience the actual social preparation for cataclysm.”26 The Cold War logic of preparing a society for destruction shaped the tone and intent of many of the underground papers. For instance in 1966 in The Berkeley Barb, G.K. claimed in the recurring ramblings of “8 ½” that “as the G ­ erman people did not overthrow Hitler, just so the American people cannot get rid of the military-industrial complex

Dissent and the Economy  83 that controls our President, Congress, and God.”27 G.K. notes that the military-industrial complex encourages not only war but also a pervasive culture of death. As did Eisenhower, G.K. also suggests that the complex controls God, suggesting something Eisenhower only hints at in his address that the church is also implicated in the function of this complex. Here and elsewhere, this lingering delusion resonated beneath American foreign policy that America was on a religious errand to establish, as the separatist preacher John Winthrop famously proclaimed, a city upon a hill that would be an example of righteousness to the rest of world. 28 Similarly to the church, the university was also implicated in this complex, as the editors of The Paper note in referencing Eisenhower: We pointed out then some of the financial connections between the university and the ‘military-industrial complex,’ that specter of dollar-based totalitarianism against which President Eisenhower warned in his Farewell Address. We asked some questions about the possibility of the university’s being a center of detached inquiry when it is, apparently, integrally tied into the economic life of the nation. 29 Eisenhower doesn’t exactly critique “dollar-based” organizations, or Capitalism. Instead, as I mentioned, he understands that global conditions have justified the formation of this complex; however, he warns that it is likely to have an impact on the everyday lives of Americans. The specific nature of this impact, he leaves vague, creating a discursive space for others to insert the specifics. One, as the editors of The Paper note, is the loss of the University as a location for disinterested study, an issue with which we continue to struggle.30 Hayden, Goodman, and Peter Marin warned that education had been co-opted by industry to socialize students to accept and thus perpetuate the Cold War logic and the culture of violence and death. For instance, Martin Nicolaus, another educational critic, in 1966 argued that there was a troubling relationship between the universities and the military-­ industrial complex, a relationship that undermined the ideal of education. Nicolaus notes: we no longer have education; we have a knowledge industry. . . . We know have a system of ‘inducation’ or ‘induction’ into society. What the knowledge industry is trying to do (and what it is doing) is to train people for industry.31 Nicolaus uses the image of an iceberg to represent this situation, claiming that the military apparatus is merely the tip of the iceberg while the

84  Oppositional Dissent university is the larger, hidden, structure used to facilitate military destruction. He articulates this problem in a series of questions: It is often argued that most of the research on these things [military weapons such as napalm] is done in the Dow Chemical research laboratories, not a university campus. But who trains the people for Dow laboratories? Who gives them the skills and the ethics that are necessary in order to produce people who are willing to make napalm? who produces people who will make ordinances, learn how to do ballistics, or learn to do social studies of what happens to the social network when people are bombed out? Obviously this is all done by the universities.32 The point is that the military-industrial complex informs the very nature of our educational institutions and to resist this is to modify educational practices themselves.33 In The Port Huron Statement, Hayden problematizes the issue with the University. He notes that the university has been co-opted by the complex, but also argues that this co-option is also a sign of the University’s potential power to enact dissent: “Social relevance, the accessibility of knowledge, and internal openness—these together make the university a potential base and agency in a movement of social change.”34 Hayden lays out six features of the ideal, progressive university, a profile that focuses on the importance of a liberal education and the type of education many universities have dismissed in favor of vocational or job training, a type of education Hayden also champions as a way to liberate people from poverty. In reconciling these visions, a sense of education as a means of dissent begins to emerge. Lacking agency against the logic of this complex, war becomes a central, and desublimated, feature of everyone’s daily life. Passive Media, Television and the Conditioning of America In 1987, Alan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, in which he famously excoriated the dissolution of peoples’ critical faculties. In looking back at the Sixties, he blamed rock music, television, and other new media of diming our mental capacity and making us passive consumers of culture rather than active participants in its development. In The Port Huron Statement, Hayden claims that “the desire for sales spurs phenomenal advertising efforts,” which created a sense that social value was dependent upon commercial value.35 Taken together, this media, designed as a corporate tool, created what the editors refer to as a “remote control economy” or an economy empty of conscience and centered on the television. In Limbo in 1966, L. W. Michaelson of

Dissent and the Economy  85 Limbo stressed that advertising was the central means of manipulating the public: There seems to be no question in [Leroy Collins’s] mind, or the minds of his colleagues, that a continuous barrage of television advertising can alter a person’s life and buying habits forever. Collins seems to take it for granted that we are committed to a Penguin Island philosophy, that we are all pretty much helpless pawns of the machinations of an advertising firm and their staff psychologists.36 Raymond Williams also critiques advertising. In 1961, he published The Long Revolution, which contained a detailed discussion of advertising as a “magic system.” Williams notes that advertising in papers originated from what came to be called “classifieds,” which were characterized by items for sale, items lost or found, and available services. Advertising developed during World War I and after to include more psychological elements, aimed at new modes of persuasion. Williams cites one British ad from the Great War (1914–1915) that rather than simple asserting and supplying more or less genuine information used the pathos of anxiety to not only convince readers of the importance of the war effort but the social implications of resisting it: at the bottom of the ad, the son asks, “Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?”37 Williams argues that ads of this sort moved advertising away from more stayed, and crude, sales practices and toward psychological persuasion. In this way, advertising began to impact social thinking in more significant ways and illustrated the type of impact consumerism could have on how people behaved. As Williams argues, “The place of advertising goes far beyond [its] commercial context. It is increasingly the source of finance for a whole range of general communication” that we can only understand if we can develop a kind of total analysis in which the economic, social and cultural facts are visibly related. We may then also find, taking advertising as a major form of modern social communication, that we can understand our society itself in new ways.38 If advertising functions as a social discourse conveying a broad sense of social values, then its purpose has a significant effect on our perception of these values.39 To Williams, because advertising seeks to encourage consumption to increase profit and not to engage in a dialectic about social realities, it is, in effect, dangerous. The undergrounded presses tended, often explicitly, to avoid advertising to avoid corporate influence. The effort to publish without advertising was understood as the direct repudiation of capitalist intervention in the creation and distribution of knowledge, and its associated values. Illustrating the disdain underground press had for advertising and more

86  Oppositional Dissent specifically the medium of television, the Realist, edited by the Yippies, in 1960 asked their readers to write the producers and advertisers of a contemporary television show making a “vague” complaint about a recent episode. The results, according to the Realist, were telling: The prevailing theory in the television industry is that every letter received represents 50,000 that weren’t sent—and commercial backers of a medium certainly don’t want to alienate their market. The Realist hoax in effect satirized the frightened state of mind that propagates this theory.40 The advertiser’s influence on the content of television indicates a central concern the underground press had with all corporate media—that it was designed primarily to manipulate the public into purchasing products and fixating on material objects to satisfy their needs. But as Marcuse points out, these “false needs” support a system that doesn’t have the best interests of the public in mind. In this sense, television and advertising diminish the influence of the publics, creating, through mass production and mass consumption, a single public with one aim, conspicuous consumption. The marketplace of ideas becomes co-opted for business purposes, and, according to Hayden, “it becomes evident that Money, instead of dignity of character, remains a pivotal American value and Profitability, instead of social use, a pivotal standard in determining priorities of resource allocation.”41 The Realist and other underground papers tended to satirize this link between society and the corporate drive for profits to suggest other modes of resource allocation. Money Economy As argued in the Realist and The Port Huron Statement, “Money,” as Marx wrote early in his thinking, is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. Hence it has robbed the whole world, the human world as well as nature, of its proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s labour and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.42 Regardless of the value we might place in Capitalism, and the benefits are many, the social relations the system creates and the values it promulgates are as distressing today as they were during the mid-19th century. This concern about money as a metonym for human value, as a replacement for human inspiration and motivation, is explored in the underground press. In these presses, a central point of contention was the money economy, which was often viewed as a social ill for two general reasons: (1) money creates haves and have-nots, which leads to a

Dissent and the Economy  87 seemingly insoluble social tension based on inequality, and (2) in supporting this unfair system, it helps create false desires and, therefore, an inhumane and misleading value system. Both issues had to do with access to power, as Jerry Rubin claims in The Berkeley Barb: The money economy is without morality. Money is based totally on power and manipulation, and on a recklessness which offends the natural exchange between human beings, an exchange based on common need. A riot is a natural expression in a money system. A system based on stealing cannot condemn stealing. Everything should be free for all if it is free for some.43 The relationship between money and manipulative power recurs, suggesting that social forms of exchange shape not only our behavior but our values, our morality. This situation motivated radical visions of a new society free from the “money economy,” such as that articulated in Other Scenes in May of 1968: A universal sharing is what must come first. Whites must open their homes to blacks, blacks to whites: people must physically move in with one another. Thousands of new communes must be started. Universal communism must be proclaimed. Everyone must refuse to be inducted. The police must give up their guns. The money economy must disappear immediately; starting perhaps with massive loot-ins.44 The society imagined here is not the one many would choose to live in. Yet, it does illustrate the search for alternatives that were always part of the underground press’ overall project. And in that search, dystopian vision was often very near the surface. When taken too far, as was sometimes the case, a leftist fascism could emerge that seemed as intolerant and authoritarian as any communist regime. The White Panther Party’s vision of a better society included a ten-point platform to reflect the ten points included on the Black Panther Party manifesto, who the White Panthers fully supported. Two of these ten points include number 2 “The end of money—we demand free exchange of energy and materials” and number 3, which contained a three-part “program”—“Total assault on the Culture by any means necessary, including Rock and Roll, Dope, and Fucking in the Streets.” The White Panthers’ vision ends with a list of those they demand to be “freed,” such as all soldiers and prisoners. Not seemingly practicable in any real sense, these visions of a new society stressed in their polemical and comic ways values such as the development of small governing entities to encourage community governance

88  Oppositional Dissent over the use of large centralized governmental agencies. They also agitated for more free choice and an end to traditional inhibitions, such as those denying the pleasures of drugs and sex. Ending the money economy was seen as a way to end the abusive relationship between Capitalism and labor, and, instead of working for a living, focusing more on appreciating the various dimensions of human experience as one’s highest ambition. Automation or the New Industrialism Marcuse was particularly concerned about the technologized society, the rationality of which, according to Douglas Kellner, he saw as “colonizing everyday life, robbing individuals of freedom and individuality by imposing technological imperatives, rules, and structures upon their thought and behavior.”45 Such a society discarded its workers, focusing more and more on profit and supporting the economic elites than building social structures to promote individual advancement. In The Port Huron Statement, automation and technology, “which could be a blessing to society, becomes more and more a sinister threat to humanistic and rational enterprise.”46

Means of Reforming the Economy The economic concerns that emerged during the Sixties led to a number of innovations reported in the underground press. Some echo ­issues of our own time, which indeed stem from this historical moment, while others are particularly obscure even comic. In the countercultural press, these remedies tended toward the satirical or absurd, as in the case of the Yippie retreats and the Woodstock Festival, while in the more politically focused presses, they tended toward more ­serious analyses, both well researched and theoretically sophisticated. In all, the aim was to liberate the individual to both imagine and ­pursue a different future, a point Kellner makes about Marcuse’s One-­Dimensional Man: His argument is that the system’s much lauded economic, political, and social freedoms, formerly a source of social progress, lose their progressive function and become subtle instruments of domination which serve to keep individuals in bondage to the system that they strengthen and perpetuate.47 For Marcuse, like Marx, the objective is to discover “new modes of realization . . . corresponding to the new capabilities of society.”48 These “modes of realization,” as they tended to emerge in the underground press, are complicated but worth brief consideration.

Dissent and the Economy  89 The Guaranteed Annual Income The underground press considered ways to address the abuses of the money economy through the implementation of the guaranteed annual income. In Activist, for example, John Quirk considered the pros and cons of this policy, arguing that The Triple Revolutionists contend that adoption of the GAI [guaranteed annual income] will result in a far-reaching humanizing revolution emphasizing the welfare of people before the welfare of the production process and leading to realization of creative potentials and engagement in ‘ennobling activities.’49 Quirk critiques the use of a GAI, claiming that its use would create an underclass, which would have even less access to power than now, in effect creating a class dependent upon both the benevolence and vicissitudes of the government. Quirk’s concern illustrates one of the issues central to the economic thinking presented in many of the underground papers: regardless of the program, these papers tended to distrust government interventions unless those interventions were founded on public ­participation in the developmental process. Freedom depended upon participatory democracy and economic self-­determination. In an obvious sense, such freedom meant ensuring one’s access to the means of production, which motivated the development of at least some ­communes. In many cases, these communes were purported to support decentralized government and communal practices, as generally advocated by existing communist governments. However, there was little critical analysis of the communist system until its abuses became abundantly clear. Communes As a means of reforming the economy, communes fostered communal economics, which were founded on the apparent simplicity of the barter system and the type of social structures this simple economic vision encouraged. In general, this movement away from the status quo and toward structures more organic seems healthy, and in many cases they proved to be just that, healthy. Yet, on other occasions, communes became disassociated with larger social goals and, in developing in isolation, gave credence to myopic, anti-social behavior, such as that observed in some religious cults. In resisting social institutions, they offered little comment on their reformation. In this sense, communes became a means of denial, of disregard, and misguided dissent. Instead, communes more often offered insight into a different purpose for dissenting. Rather than articulating a structure of feeling emerging within a culture

90  Oppositional Dissent and seeking to articulate it as a viable alternative to existing institutional norms and values, communes were an example of the use of alternative residual cultural forms to passively dissent from the dominant culture. This mode of dissent, often led to the type of appropriation we see in Gary Snyder’s “Why Tribe.” In his essay, published in Earth House Hold and reprinted in the underground press, Gary Snyder describes a new social structure informed by the concept of the Tribe. He notes that “we use the term Tribe because it suggests the type of new society now emerging within the industrial nations.”50 In Williams’ terms, Snyder is referring to an alternative, residual cultural form that is attempting not to gain access to culture but to resist co-option, providing a different way of life complete with requisite social institutions. For instance, Snyder describes the group’s economic structure: The Tribe proposes a totally different style: based on community houses, villages and ashrams; tribe-run farms or workshops or companies; large open families; pilgrimages and wanderings from center to center. A synthesis of Gandhian ‘village anarchism’ and I. W. W. syndicalism.51 Snyder’s reference to anarchism and syndicalism indicates that this Tribe is founded on the Marxist concept of returning the means of production to the workers’ control. I. W. W. refers to the Industrial Workers of the World, an organization that claims not to be syndicalist, as the organization doesn’t seek a forcible redistribution of wealth but instead to help workers retain control of their labor power. Their current mission, for example, indicates that the organization teaches workers that what they really require is not to influence the state favorably toward them, but to put themselves in such position, through an economic class organization, that they will be enabled to pro­tect themselves against the hostility of the capitalist state.52 Snyder’s central point is that the Tribe’s aim is to develop economic independence, retaining control of the means of production, and in so doing ensure freedom from government control. The analogies Snyder makes with other cultural groups further indicate the Tribe’s relationship to culture: In America of course the word has association with the American Indians, which we like. This new subculture is in fact more similar to that ancient and successful tribe, the European Gypsies—a group without nation or territory which maintains its own values, its language and religion, no matter what country it may be in.53

Dissent and the Economy  91 Romanticizing the experiences of Native Americans and European Gypsies is a problematic way to articulate a dissenting ideology. Native American writers such as Geary Hobson and Leslie Marmon Silko resented Snyder’s appropriation, arguing, as Mark Shackleton explains, that Gary Snyder’s use of Native American myths and legends has been seen as a classic case of appropriation. Geary Hobson points out that the ‘white shaman’ fad among mainstream American poets seems to have begun with Snyder and his ‘Shaman Songs’ section of Myths and Texts (1960), while Leslie Marmon Silko has advised Snyder to look into the history of his own (white) ancestors in his search for a genuine American identity, rather than borrowing from the myths of Native peoples.54 In a similar sense, Isabel Fonseca’s Bury Me Standing describes the profound social struggles of Gypsies living in Eastern Europe.55 In light of these realities, Snyder’s claims for the Tribe seem privileged, the romantic resistance of a group fully aware that they could and often would return to middle-class America. Yet even though romantic and naive, many of the communes provided a means of understanding life differently, as Snyder’s conclusion about the Tribe reveals: The revolution has ceased to be an ideological concern. Instead, people are trying it out right now—communism in small communities, new family organization. . . . The signal [that you have meet a member of the Tribe] i a bright and tender look; calmness and gentleness, freshness and ease of manner. Men, women and children—all of whom together hope to follow the timeless path of love and wisdom, in affectionate company with the sky, winds, clouds, trees, waters, animals and grasses—this is the tribe.”56 Rhetorically, Snyder’s description of the signs of a tribe member suggests that everyone who is kind and appreciative of nature is already a member of the group. This subtle suggestion illustrates how communes bridged the gap with the dominant culture and enacted dissent rather than mere disregard of established social institutions.

Conclusion The underground press’ critique of the economy illustrates Marxist concerns, which are often rolled out to give a critique some oppositional credibility. But what is perhaps more prescient is the use of dissent to unravel corporate logic. In The Port Huron Statement, Hayden asserts that “corporations should be made publicly responsible” and, so, accountable

92  Oppositional Dissent to the public. Along with this, resources should be made available based on “social need.”57 No longer is the focus on workers and their relationship with capitalists, but more on the specifics of how capitalist ideology functions to undermine the structures of democratic institutions to the detriment of everyday life. This, of course, reflects Marx’s concern about how the superstructure enables the capitalist ownership of the means of production. But the means of production gives way to a concern over what is produced and the impact those products have on the definition of economy as a cultural form. The economy defines in large part the practice of everyday life and how it is understood shapes our day-today experience. The underground press struggled to reveal the corporate logic that diminished that experience. According to C. Wright Mills, America in the Sixties was becoming an “Overdeveloped Society,” a society in which the standard of living dominates the style of life; its inhabitants are possessed, as it were by its industrial and commercial apparatus: collectively, by the maintenance of conspicuous production; individually, by the frenzied pursuit and maintenance of commodities. Around these fetishes, life, labor and leisure are increasingly organized.58 The underground press at its best offered alternatives to this fetishizing of consumption, imagining ways to live otherwise. At their worst, the presses appropriated the cultural practices of marginal groups that led to the misrepresentation and misunderstanding of those practices. Overall, the presses attempted to express in perhaps real terms the society Mills describes as the “Properly Developed Society”: one in which deliberately cultivated styles of life would be central; decisions about standards of living would be made in terms of debated choices among such styles; the industrial equipment of such a society would be maintained as an instrument to increase the range of choice among styles of life.59 A society structured around alternatives and choice would be a society able to offer different people a way to define their existence within a society rather than lingering outside of it.

Notes 1 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, revised ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 153–155. 2 Williams, Keywords, 55. 3 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations: Books I–III, (1776: repr., New York: Penguin, 1986), 119.

Dissent and the Economy  93 4 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964.), 123. 5 Theodore Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (1951: repr., London: Verso, 2005), 112. 6 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 35–54. 7 David Farber and Beth Bailey, The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 355–363. Farber and Bailey provide extensive raw economic data. 8 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, The Report of the ­National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, DC: ­NACCD, 1967), 6. 9 Douglas Kellner, Introduction to Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964), xxiv. 10 Kellner, Introduction, xxv. 11 Marcuse, One-Dimensional, 2. 12 In its original prospectus dated February 3, 1969, the editors of Leviathan described their proposed content as in practice Leviathan will write about national and international policy, the political economy and mainstream culture from the point of view of the subjects and victims of the American system. At the same time the magazine will review and debate the organized efforts of insurgent groups to secure basic changes. (5) 13 Robin Blackburn, “Revolutionary Theory: The New Left and Lenin,” Leviathan, October–November, 1969, Independent Voices, 8. 14 Marcuse, One-Dimensional, 8–9. 15 Mario Savio, In the Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 70. 16 Mitchell Goodman, The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 78–79. 17 Goodman, Movement, 70. 18 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston, MA: Mariner-Houghton Mifflin, 1962). 19 Goodman, Movement, 75. 20 Goodman, Movement, 73. 21 Goodman, Movement, 73. 22 Tom Hayden, Port Huron Statement (1962: repr., New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005), 84. 23 C. Wright Mills, “The New Left,” in Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Works of C. Wright Mills, ed. by Irving Louis Horowitz (New York: Ballantine Books, 1963), 248–249. 24 Hayden, Port Huron Statement, 76. 25 Dwight Eisenhower, “Eisenhower Warns the US of Military Industrial Complex,” YouTube, Posted by RobUniv, August 4, 2006, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY 26 Hayden, Port Huron Statement, 76. 27 G.K, “Catch 8 ½,” Berkeley Barb, July 15, 1966, Independent Voices, 4. 28 John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity.” in American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King Jr., ed. Michael Warner (New York: The Library of America, 1999), 42. 29 Stuart Dowty, “Land Grant Pocketbook,” The Paper, October 27, 1966, Independent Voices, 7.

94  Oppositional Dissent 30 Several books in the last two decades or more have called for the preservation of the liberal arts. These calls have gone largely ignored while, at the same time, the business model of education has taken hold. 31 Nicolaus argues that education is becoming an industry that reflects the worst practices of the industrial revolution: turning knowledge and skills that once allowed people to produce complete items into narrow “motions.” 32 Martin Nicolaus, in The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 327. 33 Marin Nicolaus presented these ideas in the paper “The Iceberg Strategy” at the Conference on “The University and the Military” at the University of Chicago on November 10, 1967. It was later published by The Radical Education Project located in Ann Arbor, Michigan. 34 Hayden, Port Huron Statement, 166. 35 Hayden, Port Huron Statement, 73. 36 L. W. Michaelson, “Future Times: Here and Now,” Limbo, April 1964 – Independent Voices, 56. Leroy Collins was a television executive. 37 Raymond Williams, “Advertising: The Magic System.” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1993), 230. 38 Williams, “Advertising,” 334–335. 39 Williams, “Advertising,” 336. 40 “T.V. Hoax,” The Realist, June 1, 1960, Independent Voices, 3. 41 Hayden, Port Huron Statement, 73. 42 Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 60. 43 Jerry Rubin, “Rubin Raps—Money’s to Burn,” Berkeley Barb, January 19–26, 1968 – Independent Voices, 2. 4 4 John Wilcock, “Yiggers, Blonkies, & Crackers,” Other Scenes, May 1, 1968, 7. 45 Kellner, Introduction to Herbert Marcuse, xiv. 46 Hayden, The Port Huron Statement, 81. 47 Kellner, Introduction to Herbert Marcuse, xxxi. 48 Marcuse, One-Dimensional, 4. 49 John Quirk, “The Guaranteed Income: Technocratic Triumph,” Activist, May 1, 1966, Independent Voices, 8. 50 Gary Snyder, “Why Tribe” in A Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 662. 51 Snyder, “Why Tribe,” in Movement, 662. 52 I.W.W Mission Statement, www.iww.org/history/library/iww/responseto RILU/4 53 Snyder, “Why Tribe,” in Goodman, Movement, 662. 54 Mark Shackleton, “Whose Myth is it Anyway? Coyote in the Poetry of Gary Snyder and Simon J. Ortiz,” in American Mythologies: New Essays on Contemporary Literature, eds. William Blazek and Michael K. G ­ lenday (­Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), 226–242. Geary Hobson discusses “White Shamanism” in The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Literature, Ed. Geary Hobson (1981), 102. 55 Gypsies are more accurately referred to as the Roma. 56 Snyder, “Why,” in Movement, 662. 57 Hayden, Port Huron Statement, 138–139. 58 C. Wright Mills, “Culture and Politics,” in Power, Politics, People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (New York: Ballantine Books, 1963), 240. 59 Mills, “Culture and Politics,” in Power, 240.

4 Dissent and Education

Educational Institution Allan Bloom argues in The Closing of the American Mind that the student protests of the Sixties undermined higher education in ways that continue to haunt us. In particular, he claims that the “Enlightenment in America came close to breathing its last during the Sixties.” As his reference to the Enlightenment suggests, his primary concern was with how the student movements undermined traditional curricular offerings, claiming that the new educational prerogatives were “without content” and so “replaced something with nothing.” As these points clearly suggest, Bloom found not only little, but absolutely “nothing positive coming from” the student movements and, one can assume, from the dissent of the Sixties. Disingenuously, he concedes that some good came from the Sixties. He heard, for instance, that the period led to “‘greater openness,’ ‘less rigidity,’ ‘freedom from authority,’ etc.—but,” in dismissing these ideas, claims that “these have no content and express no view of what is wanted from a university education.” Indeed, he asserts that the contemporary (1980s) need to return to the basics “is directly traceable to both the teachings and the deeds of the universities in the Sixties.” In all, Bloom’s account suggests that in the attempt to create equality through education—opening the canon to a plurality of views, rather than just those drawn from “western culture,” and giving voice to the voiceless— what Bloom refers to as “leveling off the peaks”, the Sixties nearly caused the “collapse of the entire American educational structure.”1 Even though we may find it easy to refute Bloom’s dismissive view of the Sixties, the points he makes resonated in the Eighties and continue to do so today. 2 Central among the reasons Bloom’s critique persists is the challenge of determining what knowledge and skills an educated person should acquire during her education. Bloom felt that an educated person was one well-versed in the liberal arts, which he describes as composed of a static core of texts, beginning with Homer and populated by the great books of the Western Canon. 3 Bloom claims that an education fostered through these texts gave way in the Sixties to one confused by the inclusion of (say) communist treatises, such as Mao, Che Guevara, Castro, and Lenin. Perhaps not surprisingly, many educational activists

96  Oppositional Dissent of the Sixties felt the same way as Bloom about these core texts and the associated ideas, but noted that the prevailing concept of Western Civilization needed to be engaged dialogically, including ideas from other perspectives and cultures. Bloom’s argument reflects a Cold War logic: for America literally to survive, its citizens must resist not only a physical attack from communists but also one on American ideals. These ideals that inform the norms and values upon which a stable culture is based are communicated through the great texts of Western Civilization. Education, so the logic continues, is the primary means by which our social institutions are reinforced to resist the kind of decadence and degeneration seen in the demise of other once great societies, such as Rome and so on. I do sympathize with Bloom’s argument; I too find that our curriculum suffers in the loss of the Western Canon, but my sense is that the dissent of the Sixties may not have been the primary culprit, but was rather that last, faltering gasps of liberal education in America. A survey of the underground press’ critique of education suggests that the challenges education faces are due, on the one hand, to ossification or intolerance and, on the other, Capitalism and the tendency of educators to promote increasingly utilitarian aims. In the underground press, the traditional aims of the liberal arts persisted, but the objectives central to this type of education were both problematized and contextualized. This act was often seen as the primary means of developing a counter-education or, to echo Graham McDonough’s concept of dissent, contra-hegemonic education.4 Often, the main concern expressed in the underground press was that the traditional education Bloom and others implicitly espoused was stifling, a point Bloom celebrates as rigor while dismissing the underground press’ concern with antiquated modes of curriculum development and content delivery. Indeed, several of the problems Bloom associates with the Sixties activists were problems the activists had with the prevailing educational system. Among these included the claim that the other educators did not offer “alternatives.” Bloom claims that “freedom had been restricted in the most effective way—by the impoverishment of alternatives. Nothing that was not known to or experienced by those who constitute the enormous majority. . . had any reality.”5 As stressed by existentialist philosophy, the underground press promoted individual choice and experience as a means of achieving a meaningful education, an idea promoted long before by John Dewey and others, who argued for a more individualized or student-centered education free from the rigidity of traditional pedagogical and curricular practices. But as Bloom laments, the New Left and many of the underground papers saw the universities as a primary locus for the development of dissent and, as is the function of dissent, cultural change. As Tom Hayden claims, “perhaps the most important [contribution of the Port Huron Statement] was the insight that university communities

Dissent and Education  97 had a role in social change.”6 This role was made manifest in 1970 when Maurice Stein and Larry Miller published the Blueprint for Counter Education, an avant-garde educational curriculum initially developed in the summer of 1968, that claimed to make “obsolete the t­ raditional university process. . . . There is [in this curriculum] no textbook, no ­fi nal exam; and the ‘faculty’ includes Marcuse, McLuhan, Eldridge Cleaver, and Jean-Luc Godard.”7 As Jeffrey Schnapp notes, “Marcuse and ­McLuhan emerged as the structuring poles of Stein’s account of contemporary society and culture” and, therefore, the intellectual center of an effective education.8 Marcuse’s concept of “repressive desublimation” existed on one end and McLuhan’s “emerging audio-tactile ­environment” on the other. These concepts were understood as the lens through which ­contemporary culture could be analyzed. Marcuse’s “­repressive desublimation” refers to his observation that in an “advanced industrial society,” alternative values and norms are repressed to create a discourse characterized by one dimension, lacking, in other words, dialogue. Stein and Miller understood McLuhan’s “emerging audio-tactile environment” as a view of new media as potentially useful in creating the type of dialectic discourse Marcuse saw as disappearing as capitalist consumer ideology became more deeply seated in modern psychology. The primary aim of the Blueprint was to disrupt the dominant educational program and promote critical self-awareness as a tool for critical thinking, or as Stein and Miller reported to The Los Angeles Free Press in 1970, “Our problem at the California Institute of the Arts in particular, and the problem of counter education in general, would seem to be that of establishing an educational environment in which radical energy can be sustained, deepened and transformed.”9 Central to developing critical thinking skills is to appreciate the connection between ideas, or being able to pursue questions without obsessing about answers. Stein and Miller embedded this objective into their concept of a counter-education, illustrating the instability of ideas in an ever-changing series of tenuous relationships. As Schnapp notes, this curriculum suggested that the ideas and the culture shaped by them are an “ever-changing totality that eludes conventional logics of explanation, causation, and growth”10 In other words, Stein and Miller created in their counter-education an image of dissent in action, dissent working to affect change in the culture by initiating conversation about the structure of social institutions. They presented this dissenting curriculum in three wall charts, which could be considered mind maps, or collages, that offered students ways of “exploring and expanding upon the ‘alternative explanations’ formulated by. . . thinkers [,such as McLuhan, Marcuse, Webb, and others],” modes of inquiry that Stein and Miller thought were “the necessary stepping stone towards alternative future for humankind.”11 The charts were accompanied by a “shooting script” that offered more resources and ways of thinking about and presenting these charts

98  Oppositional Dissent to students or an audience.12 Stein and Miller admitted that the blueprints or charts are “indecipherable,” suggesting rather than dictating relationships between ideas, a pedagogy that requires students to determine how to process the information making individual connections between different ideas. As noted in the “shooting script,” students or the “reader-players” are asked to “take the initiative” and engage with the blueprints, creating their own version as part of a critical response to the material presented in and supplemental to the shooting script.13 The concept of play is significant in this vision of education. In fact, Stein and Miller refer to their counter-educational curriculum as “a highly participative series of art-life-politics games” used not by students but by “reader/player/viewers” or “r/p/v”s. While today we often hear of the gamification of education, play during this period suggests more of a willingness to try alternatives and experiment with new ideas and less with the idea that education should be fun for students in the sense of entertaining. These were ideas reflected in the educational content posited by the underground press of the Sixties. As the Blueprint illustrates, not only the act of educating the young but the very concept of education itself was being reimagined if not radically revised. In general, this revision addressed concerns in three ways: 1 The underground press critiqued the educational system, associating it, for example, with prison. This analogy is provocative, certainly, and not exactly accurate, but it does suggest the nature of the torpor and angst the contemporary education inspired. 2 The underground press related education to rebellion, an inaccurate assessment, but one that suggests education could motivate cultural work and not merely achieve indoctrination and could, in this way, liberate students. Liberation becomes a central theme of the ­counter-education promoted by the underground press. 3 To achieve this liberation, the underground press argued that the school curriculum could open up to address shifting social realities rather than focusing on traditional knowledge borrowed from an antiquated Europe to prop up the elite and the status quo. These “free” or open universities suggested a dynamic learning community, such as that articulated in the Blueprint, but one that Bloom and others argued was devoid of content. What emerges in this debate is a new idea of what education might be and how dissent functions through it. C. Wright Mills claims that the “transformation of a community of publics into a mass society” was a significant aspect of modernity.14 This transformation to a mass society was, in part, facilitated by a diminished liberal education. As in his other works, Mills understood a mass society as a totalitarian society while the community of publics was a structure based on

Dissent and Education  99 individual agency. He articulates four criteria that differentiate the publics from the masses, and, in these criteria, the main concern running through them is the need for the agency both to articulate an opinion and share it with others.15 Failure to develop this modern agora leads to a repressed and potentially repressive society that can cause dismay and, in extreme cases, violence. Mills’ sense of the publics as free and the masses as deluded was also invoked in the Port Huron Statement in which Hayden argues that a politics without publics was totalitarian, ruled by the masses or majority.16 The culprits of this transformation are telling and illustrate the targets of a dissenting education that we see developing in the underground press. ­Essential to a democracy is teaching its citizens to distinguish between differing perceptions of the truth, to make connections between different forms of knowledge, and to articulate the resulting ideas effectively. As noted in Chapter 1, dissent is commonly understood as a discourse that through some medium opposes a prevailing or dominant value system. This definition locates dissent primarily in a linguistic act. Dissent might also be understood in its relation to assent, which is often how education is understood: as a means of developing consent or assent: the official acceptance of a dominant assertion or conformity to a prevailing set of values.17 Here again is the suggestion that cultural values are often conveyed and confronted through a linguistic act, even if that act is ­silence. Action is the operative aspect of dissent and informs its location in Raymond Williams’ sense of culture and the process of cultural change. Williams identifies three general definitions of culture that he presents as an analytical process: the first definition and phase of analysis is the “ideal,” the second is the “documentary,” and the third is the “social,” which employs the ideal and documentary perceptions of culture to inform an investigation of the “modes of change to discover certain general ‘laws’ or ‘trends,’ by which social and cultural development as a whole can be better understood.”18 Education is a mode of change where dissent is often located, driving our understanding of how an emerging “structure of feeling” becomes a new cultural form, a form the larger society can now examine and evaluate. The educational ideas published in the underground press offer insight into the anxieties of the Sixties and how those fundamental concerns might be addressed to ­create a better society. How much better that society could be is, as Bloom’s refutation of the Sixties suggests, open to debate.

Underground Press’ Critique of Education During the Sixties, students and some professors voiced their frustration with what they felt was the “miseducation” fostered by a rigid and, in some cases, antiquated educational system. In the Sixties, Peter Marin described three faulty premises upon which education was then, and some might say now, based. First was the belief that the young were

100  Oppositional Dissent “naturally depraved” and, therefore, needed to be “trained” to be decent members of society; second was the idea that educators needed to “Americanize” immigrants to “create a common experience and character,” or again to make students decent members of society; third was the “need in an industrial society for” a trained but intellectually uninformed labor force that was “technically capable” but still dependent upon the guidance and instruction of an “authority,” helping assure students could become productive members of society.19 The premise unifying all three of these ideas is that education then was primarily a means of “indoctrination” or “induction,” a term some critics in the alternative press favored for its echo of draft rhetoric. For Mitchell Goodman, the belief that education is, in practice, primarily about correcting students, making them right, or making them useful is problematic. Similarly, John Holt, writing in The Nation, claims that in this system students began to “feel that learning is a passive process, something that someone else does to [them] instead of something [they] do for [themselves].”20 The obvious concern one has is who defines “right,” “correct,” or “useful” and to what use are such definitions put. Some in the alternative presses argued, as one would expect, that the corporations, rich elite, or some other nebulous group had foisted these concepts upon those least able to provide a coherent counter-definition. Jerry Farber, for instance, claimed that “very little education takes place in the schools. How could it? You can’t educate slaves; you can only train them or, to use an even uglier and more timely word, you can only program them.”21 In The Underground and Education, Mike Smith offers a more measured analysis, pointing out that the failure of education was not due to some conspiracy, but to the general inability of well-­ intentioned progressive educators to address the limitations of their aims and expectations and to revise them accordingly. 22 Smith used five images to characterize education: the pottery-­making model, the gardening model, the animal-training model, the priestly model, and the dialogic model. Like Stein and Miller, Smith found all these ineffective except the dialogic model, which provided a more interactive mode of learning where all students’ ideas could be heard and weighed. As with Goodman, Smith suggested that the other pedagogical models favored authority, induction, or indoctrination, over free inquiry or active learning. Then, as today, a central concern about education was its limited focus on the dynamics of learning, learning as a sloppy, individualized process. As Smith noted: It needs to be recognized, finally, that the only possible procedure in such circumstances is to start from an assumption of the autonomy of the learner. A rationale for his actions is something that has to be developed by the individual himself. It is not something that can be given or imposed from outside. 23

Dissent and Education  101 Stein and Miller’s Blueprint offered this type of curriculum, one in which students engaged with both the artifacts and the theory of culture to construct meaning. The meaning that emerged was illustrated in what we again can refer to as mind maps, or the dialectical relationship between the student’s experience and the concepts that invest that experience with meaning. Enabled by the constraints of McLuhan’s and Marcuse’s ideas about culture, media, and discourse students effectively enacted cultural dissent. As Smith indicated, at the core of the underground press’ critique of education was the idea that people have an inborn desire to learn, and, therefore, need no system to initiate or sustain the process. John Holt, as did others, used a child’s natural acquisition of language as a model for education: “[A child has learned] by exploring, experimenting, by developing his own model of grammar of language, by trying it out and seeing whether it works, by gradually changing and refining it until it does work” (269). Holt’s analogy suggests that people will learn if given the freedom to do so; they are not only born with intellectual curiosity, but with the skills necessary to form, test, and revise hypotheses that can lead them to rational conclusions. However, for this model of education to work, a student needed to be part of a learning community. The learning community, as envisioned by the underground press, provided the support, enabling constraints that would ensure s­ tudents achieved an education, as Holt described: children should “work ­together, help each other, learn from each other and each other’s mistakes” (of course, this is an idea Lev Vygotsky more fully developed).24 The educational importance of the community was not only a classroom issue, which traditionally suggests that there are separate learning and living spaces, but also extended into living spaces that combined into a single collaborative educational environment, as David Rogers’ 1968 report suggested: Militant ghetto groups in New York and elsewhere. . . have turned to decentralization and community control. They saw how desegregation and compulsory education programs were subverted by the educators, and they want to make the educators more accountable to the public by relocating power and authority at the local community level.25 We all take for granted the importance of community in the classroom, but during the Sixties, many felt that a learning community required the dismantling of the classroom structure, allowing the students’ natural curiosity to guide them. This focus on student intellect was a guiding principle for Stein and Miller. A counter-education required this type of dialectic exchange.

102  Oppositional Dissent Toward this end, the underground press outlined free, alternative, or open universities. In general, these schools were founded on the belief that, as articulated in the mission of the Midpeninsula Free University, “The natural state of man is ecstatic wonder; that we should not settle for less.”26 Similarly, the Alternative U in New York is described as “an inexpensive school free of grades, credit and age restrictions, offering a wide range of courses whose content and approach are not available elsewhere. It is democratically run through weekly meetings open to the entire Alternative U community.”27 The aim in both cases was to provide a school devoted to free inquiry run by its students, a point the Free School made explicit: In public schools we are told what to learn, when to learn it, and when to stop learning. At the Free School we will decide for ourselves. The teachers at our school will not plan courses and throw them at us. We will plan the courses with them and will be involved in continually re-evaluating the classes to see if our questions are being answered. 28 The operative principle of these schools was to place authority in the individual not only to learn but also to decide what should be learned. The issue here is how do uneducated students know what they should know and whether they are being taught anything of value? Any s­ tudent-led endeavor can suffer from this problem. Today, students might be tempted to avoid all communication and arts courses, for instance, if these were not part of the student’s general education requirements. Stein and Miller anticipated this issue in their curriculum, suggesting that the professor functions more to guide students through their analysis rather than dictating to them what the students’ explorations should ultimately mean. For a professor during the Sixties, this role was relatively new, but the one that the social complexities of the decade revealed as necessary, not only to that time but to the very essence of an education. Learning has always required students to become unmoored in the process of gaining uncomfortable but ultimately enlightening knowledge. Stein and Miller suggest that students can find their way by following their interests and finding someone in a given learning community to help them pursue those interests. Some examples of the issues students wished to explore at these free universities included the following: “Pig Law,” “Anarchism,” “Introduction to Political Theory,” “Graphic Workshop,” and “Political Street Theater.” At another school, courses included “Zombie Drawing,” “Poetry and Undergraduate Journalism,” and “Striking back at the son of a bitches.” Of course, one wonders how serious these curricula were. They seem designed, more than anything, to train social activism or professional misanthropy. In line with the free university, but in a more measured tone, Paul Goodman argued that

Dissent and Education  103 “what must be taught are the underlying ideas of scientific thought as part of the substance of [the student’s] life, fantasy, and experience.”29 Goodman, as the free universities attempted, called for teaching the ability to dismantle the arguments used to indoctrinate, which Goodman suggested had become the primary, even though unconscious, aim of education: “progressive education was changed into a psychology of ‘belonging’ combined with ‘socially useful’ subjects and ‘citizenship.’”30 Overall, the aim of the free education was to address, in Goodman’s terms, the crucial modern problem of every advanced country in the world: how to cope with high industrialism and scientific technology, which are strange to people; how to live in new cities; how to have a free society in such conditions; how to make the high industrial system worth something, rather than a machine running for its own sake.31 Many in the underground press argued that none of these changes to education worked, however, unless compulsory education was abandoned. These presses continually argued against compelling people to learn. Learning only happens when students’ interests are engaged, and they are embraced in an enabling community of learners. Any structure, any attempt to teach excellences or excellent dispositions undermined the natural educational process. In this scheme, compulsory education is often compared to prison in that a compulsory education is fashioned to reform, reprogram, or repress a student’s “natural depravity,” to recall Goodman’s phrase; the underground press cited the institutional hierarchies and evaluative practices that facilitate compulsory education as being part of its repressive machinery. These notably included academic departments and standardized testing. Holt notes, for instance, that “we don’t know now, and never will know, how to measure what another person knows or understands.”32 As many critics assert, standardized testing undermines student learning by measuring its most trivial aspects, those one might regurgitate in a timed, decontextualized performance. Preparation for this kind of evaluation leaves little time for free investigation or intellectual play. How might we test intellectual engagement? Maybe ask students if they like school—if “yes,” why, if “no,” why not? End of test. Returning to the underground press reminds us that different approaches to education exist, and may offer ways to address contemporary concerns. Departments and the associated disciplines were represented as similarly misguided, developed not to facilitate learning but, in Martin Nicolaus’ terms, to assist the industrial-military complex: “The reason that we have departments in the first place, other than administrative convenience, is because industry needs. . . people with job classifications that are standardized, rationalized, and computerized.”33 Nicolaus’ observations

104  Oppositional Dissent suggest that resisting this complex might reinforce learning and the centrality of a liberal arts education over the “body of knowledge” currently entrusted to disciplines and departments. Two very general disciplinary categorizations are the humanities and the s­ cience. These two disciplines correspond to two different epistemological ­approaches: the quantitative and the qualitative.

The Sciences and Humanities The concerns noted in the underground press about education and its ­reform also suggest ways to approach the traditional academic disciplines of the sciences and humanities (or arts).34 These disciplines, as C.P. Snow observed in his 1959 Rede Lecture “Two Cultures,” reflect two epistemologies that are often seen as irreconcilable. The claim guiding Snow’s argument identifies the two poles of a false dichotomy: “­Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists. . . Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.”35 Snow’s concern is that accepting this false division between the disciplines and the epistemologies characterizing them creates two cultures, or two different ways of understanding the world. If maintained, he feared that those abiding by the conventions of these cultures would not be able to communicate effectively and the resulting impasse would impact not only education but the overall function of society. Snow sums up the issues, noting the need for more thoughtful educational solutions to redress them: When those two senses have grown apart, then no society is going to be able to think with wisdom. For the sake of the intellectual life, for the sake of this country’s special danger, for the sake of the western society living precariously rich among the poor, for the sake of the poor who needn’t be poor if there is intelligence in the world, it is obligatory for us and the Americans and the whole West to look at our education with fresh eyes.36 Suggesting such an effort to assess education with fresh eyes, the editors of Limbo in 1965 promised to publish the article “Re-educating Yourself after Reading C.P. Snow.” It appears that this article was never finished or never published. Yet the title alone does suggest the impact Snow’s ideas, and those like it, had on the underground press’ analysis of education. Alternatives and individual choice could reduce not only the gap in human knowledge but the various gaps in the prevailing social structure. It could do this not to conflate them but to bring them into productive conversation and suggest how understanding might offer paths forward. Such an understanding might bring a level of empathy to

Dissent and Education  105 the work of science that some felt was lacking, as illustrated in the logic of the Cold War and the resulting rush toward nuclear destruction. For instance, in the Los Angeles Free Press in 1968, Ted Zatlyn published a report on the anti-ballistic missile system (ABM) President Nixon sought to fund even though President Eisenhower resisted its ­implementation. As was a common technique, Zatlyn defined an ABM as not “anti anything except humanity and reason.”37 As in other papers, this ­militarization of society was a significant threat to not only peace but to the meaning of a good society. The underground press often noted how science had been coopted by corporate interests to create the military-industrial complex. This complex, as The Port Huron Statement explained and papers such as The Paper, The Los Angeles Free Press, and Connections often recounted, relied upon the university to prepare scientists with the necessary skills to construct weapons while remaining ignorant to or dismissive of the ethical implications of their work. In Connections in 1968, a paper published at the University of Wisconsin, the editors note in a statement at the beginning how efforts to expose Dow Chemical’s role in the development of inhumane weapons (if a weapon can ever be called humane), such as napalm, turned into a commitment to resist the “oppression” they believed was inherent in society. In what they referred to as the “scream” from the dormitories, a scream that could no longer remain “muffled,” a commitment was forged to combine the different levels on which we individually and collectively relate to the society. Our actions must be more than m ­ omentary releases for what has come before; they must create the commitments, strengths, and understandings which can endure whatever is to come.38 This statement has the strident tone of the campus underground, which often lacked the more measured, analytical insights of The Port Huron Statement, but it does reflect the desire of many university radicals to find connections between their education and the events of the world. In part, the desire for opening the canon, for interdisciplinarity as a common practice rather than as an exception, and for student-centered curricula and free universities, revealed one possible path of dissent that might help deny the efforts to turn the university into merely the training department of the military-industrial complex. In some ways, the ­humanities was understood as offering a set of analytical tools that could help unite the disciplines in the critique, construction, and revision of the prevailing social institutions. This thinking emerged as not only a means of delivering knowledge but also as a path to liberation. The presentation of educational alternatives in the underground press also reflects a tendency to rethink supposedly established hierarchies,

106  Oppositional Dissent combining disciplines that were often held apart by university elitism and devotion to tradition. For instance, in 1961, Robert Ardrey, working in the spirit of C.P. Snow, published African Genesis, which popularized academic research supporting the African origins of the human race. 39 Ardrey’s claim, based upon his review of contemporary anthropological research, challenged the assumption that humanity and culture emerged from Europe. In his account, he focused on refuting the “Romantic ­Fallacy,” and suggesting not only the African origin of humanity but by extension the lack of validity in arguments about racial superiority.40 Ardrey’s book reflects the role science combined with the humanities played in reconsidering Eurocentric or Western assumptions about culture, the type of Eurocentrism that Bloom seemed so comfortable accepting. For decades, scientists simply assumed contemporary social hierarchies reflected those inherited from the past. However, this pseudoscientific claim was being challenged in the Sixties and the underground press participated in exploring these new explanations of human relations, considerations that began to deconstruct the logic used to support contemporary cultural ideology about race, gender, and sexuality. In Black Dialogue in 1965, for instance, Gerado Rosal published the “European-Latin Myth: An Open Letter from an Indoamerican Student.” In this open letter, Rosal, as did other minority researchers, noted how science had altered the view of race: “Neither white nor colored people knew all of this [the role of Africans and Native Americans in creating agriculture] until modern science was developed enough to show convincing proof of the true facts of history.”41 These true facts were often extracted from the research record by humanists interested in telling larger stories about the descent and potential ascent of humanity. The common view of the humanities we have inherited is that it is a left-leaning discipline focused on indoctrinating the young into an ­ever-emerging, neo-socialist, proto-communist system. The assumptions these dismissive claims are based on are inaccurate. In the Sixties, the humanities offered a way of dissenting from the system as described in the New Left Notes in 1968: “Many, disillusioned by the War and the inequities of the System, were dropping out or going into the humanities rather than into business, engineering, or nuclear physics.”42 Yet the humanities most significant dissent from the Ivory Tower, and from the stayed yammering of the Western Canon, was its use in uniting theory and practice and helping illustrate how we relate to the technology of our time. How we create rather than find our stories.

Conclusion As Schnapp notes in his analysis of Stein and Miller’s Blueprint, he found in it a compelling and, I might add, necessary challenge to traditional “brick and mortar” institutions.43 Schnapp suggests a critique of higher

Dissent and Education  107 education that is now long standing—the idea that higher education serves an elite population or that in doing so it simply reaffirms the status quo. Examples of counter-education such as the Blueprint and those others articulated in the underground press aim primarily at liberating the individual to take control of her cultural agency and do cultural work. In that sense, these counter-educational platforms promote the liberal arts, the humanities, higher intellectual activities such as analysis and creativity over memorizing established facts. The type of cultural work promoted is that identified by Marcuse in One-­Dimensional Man. It is a form of critique that creates alternative perspectives of culture, ways in which culture might function differently to promote freedom and resist the “totally administered society.”44 In this society, slop and play are ways to maintain the dynamics that lead to change, understanding that change is necessary. Education can create the structure for play as inquiry and inquiry as a way of testing new possibilities.45 Along these lines, Smith claimed that the remedy, in the view of the alternative critics, is two-fold: first, the ‘hidden’ values of disciplines, institutions and training programs should be exposed, so that the learner can choose to adopt them or not; secondly, the disciplines themselves need to become more ­existentially-oriented, they need to be developed, that is, in terms of the implications they have for life and action.46 Paulo Freire and Bell Hooks, to name just two, illustrate how these ideas might inform contemporary pedagogical practices to, in Bell Hooks’ terms, approach education as “the practice of freedom.” In reflecting on Freire’s influence on her teaching, Hooks quotes Freire in Teaching to Transgress: praxis is not blind action, deprived of intention or of finality. It is ­ ecause action and reflection. . . Men and women are human beings b they are historically constituted as beings of praxis, and in the ­process they have become capable of transforming the world—of giving it meaning.47 Freire is indicating two elements embedded in the concept of dissent: (1) action and (2) reflection that lead to the creation of meaning, such as in the creation of cultural narratives and counter-narratives. The creation of these narrative is what a dissenting education might provide— ways to disrupt the normative discourses that perpetuate automatic, often passive thinking. As Chandra Mohanty argues, “resistance lies in self-conscious engagement with dominant, normative discourses and representations and in the active creation of oppositional analytic and cultural spaces.”48

108  Oppositional Dissent To this analysis, I might append three conclusions that inform some of our current efforts to reform higher education: 1 Why do students tend to take a combative stance toward their education. 2 How might community involvement be reimagined to encourage an education that grows from and responds more naturally to students’ lives, experiences, and needs. 3 Given the general mood for remaking the university, what is the best role for the liberal arts in this new university? I have never been comfortable with the animosity students feel toward education. Their petulance during class and the willingness of many to express contempt for their teachers are sometimes shocking. This vitriol so often goes beyond the “they had a bad experience” explanation, hinting instead at a more deeply rooted cause. To me, digging into the underground press has illuminated at least some of the causes of this discontent. Students often feel locked into a rigid, and expensive, course of study that is rarely justified meaningfully to them. Either such a justification is believed too reductive or simply too difficult. Sometimes, no one can extract the education from the educated. In such cases, maybe in all cases, what is learned has made the person, shaping her subjectivity and engaging her inherent ambitions. The liberal arts becomes a linchpin in a university structure that is less factional, where interdisciplinarity is encouraged in both professors and students in spite of the specific job descriptions created by employers. Students will get an education and then seek jobs that interest them. I see no need, except that dictated by current convention, to allow higher education to be coopted by corporations. Students can use the useless things they learn to shape corporations, society, and politics. The liberal arts which requires students to use critical thinking and writing to solve problems can provide the matrix by which old departments and disciplines are drawn into productive collaborations, creating universities that are less about division and more about intellectual integration. This seems a more important trajectory for education than bowing to the whimsy of CEOs, who certainly do not have the best interests of students in mind. It may be useful at this point to consider our approach to teaching dissent. Some find the idea surprising that we might teach students to dissent from the effective dominant culture and its prevailing pronouncements. But this is indeed the case, as Sarah Stitzlein argues in Teaching Dissent, dissent “is key to the maintenance and improvement of democracy. . .—even if not always effective and well done—brings new promise for improved democratic life and citizen participation.”49 While Stitzlein’s argument—as is that of Bell Hooks and, of course, Paulo Freire—that

Dissent and Education  109 dissent or transgression, in Bell Hook’s terms, should be taught, how it is taught gains nuance from the study of the underground press active during the Sixties. Stitzlein argues that dissent should be stressed as an essential aim of our current curriculum, and understood as an essential ability for an educated and socially active citizenry. She argues that the education of dissent should be located within the humanities because it is the humanities disciplines, such as English, Philosophy, Art, and Languages that offer “a systematic and connected approach to cultivating the habits, dispositions, and skills of dissent.”50 Even more specifically, I would argue that teaching dissent through art and aesthetic criticism might prove both effective and compelling. Herbert Marcuse makes the point in the ­Aesthetic Dimension: the radical qualities of art, that is to say, its indictment of the established reality and its invocation of the beautiful image. . . of liberation are grounded precisely in the dimensions where art transcends its social determination and emancipates itself from the given universe of discourse and behavior while preserving its overwhelming presence.51

Notes 1 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 314–321. 2 One might consider the claim that the Frankfurt School introduced “cultural Marxism.” As discussed in Chapter 1, this concept suggests that Marxism’s influence on cultural theory led to a cultural communism, such as the belief that we are all equal or should be treated that way. Of course, this overlooks the point stressed during the Enlightenment, and as seen in the American Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. These critiques have no problem with the sexist use of men because, in short, men and women are indeed biologically different. Even though we like to think so, much of the lessons of the Sixties we might have thought easy to accept still remain contentious. 3 It is interesting to note that Harold Bloom, no relation to Allan Bloom, published The Western Canon in 1994. This analysis of the literary canon through three ages, the aristocratic, democratic, and chaotic, offers a broad view of the debate over the canon through much of its educational history. The book was also significant for the books Bloom claimed might compose the Western literary canon. The sheer breadth and scholarly insight of his recommended syllabus remain stunning. One, if not Bloom whose reading speed is legendary, would require a few lifetimes, and a working knowledge of several languages, to carefully read all of these texts. 4 Graham P. McDonough, “Why Dissent Is a Vital Concept in Moral Education,” Journal of Moral Education 39, 421–436. doi:10.1080/03057240.20 10.521373 5 Bloom, Closing, 319. 6 Tom Hayden, The Port Huron Statement: The Visionary Call of the 1960s Revolution (1962: repr., New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005), 31.

110  Oppositional Dissent 7 Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Blueprint for a Blueprint,” in Blueprint for Counter Education, eds. Maurice Stein, Larry Miller, and Marshall Henrich (New York: Inventory Press, 2016), 4. 8 Schnapp, “Blueprint,” 9. 9 Lawrence Lipton, “Education, Diseducation, Reeducation,” Los Angeles Free Press, June 5, 1970, Independent Voices, 34. 10 Schnapp, “Blueprint,” 13. 11 Schnapp, “Blueprint,’ 22. 12 “Shooting script” was meant to relate to film or multimedia production, which both Stein and Miller thought a useful analogy for their project. 13 Maurice Stein, Larry Miller, and Marshall Henrich, “Shooting Script,” in Blueprint for Counter Education: Expanded Reprint, ed. Eugenia Bell (1970, repr., New York: Inventory Press, 2016.), n.p. 14 C. Wright Mills, “Mass Society and Liberal Education,” in Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (New York: Ballantine, 1963), 353. 15 Mills, “Mass,” 353. 16 The rule of the majority is a particularly pernicious aspect of most 21st-­ century populist movements (such could probably be said about the 19th-century iterations as well). 17 Sacvan Bercovitch examines the concept of assent in The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America. 18 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 49. 19 Peter Marin, “Desperate Attempts to Keep the Young in Schools that are Hopelessly Outdated,” in Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (New York: ­Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 266. 20 John Holt, “School Is Bad for Children,” in Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 269. 21 Jerry Farber, “The Student as Nigger,” in The Underground Reader, eds. Mel Howard and Thomas King Forcade (New York: New American ­Library, 1972), 14. 22 Mike Smith, Underground and Education (London: Methuen, 1978). 23 Smith, Underground, 15. 24 Holt, in Movement, 270. Lev Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development” illustrates how social interaction can help students learn. 25 David Rogers, “Help Sought on Researching the University,” in The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 267. 26 “Free You,” in The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchel Goodman (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 289. 27 “Alternate U,” in The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchel Goodman (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 290. 28 “Free School,” in The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchel Goodman (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 267. 29 Paul Goodman, “From John Dewey to A. S. Neill,” in Movement Toward a New America, ed. Mitchell Goodman (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1970), 291. 30 Goodman, “From John Dewey,”291.

Dissent and Education  111 31 Goodman, “From John Dewey,” 291. 32 Holt, in Movement, 270. 33 Marin Nicolaus, “The Iceberg Strategy,” in The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 327. 34 The Humanities is often referred to as The Arts. These terms are not ­synonyms, but in general they do tend to be used in similar senses in underground papers. 35 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4. 36 Snow, Two Cultures, 50. 37 Ted Zatlyn, “Anti-Ballistic Missiles,” Los Angeles Free Press, March 28– April 4,1969, Independent Voice, 8. 38 “A Statement,” Connections, November 4–22, 1968, Independent Voices, 2. 39 Robert Ardrey, African Genesis (New York: Dell, 1961), 147–148. 40 Ardrey, African. 41 Gerado Rosal, “An Open Letter from and Indoamerican Student,” Black Dialogue, July–August, 1965, Independent Voices, 19. 42 Michael Klonsky, “SDS Draft Organizing,” New Left Notes, August 19, 1968, Independent Voices, 7. 43 Schnapp, “Blueprint,” 7. 4 4 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964), xii. 45 It is worth noting that one of Jacques Derrida’s central concepts is that discursive play is essential to language use. 46 Smith, Underground, 15. 47 Bell Hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 47–48. 48 Hooks, Teaching, 22. 49 Sarah Stitzlein, Teaching for Dissent: Citizenship Education and Political Activism (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2014), 2. 50 Stitzlein, Teaching for Dissent, 173. Stitzlein adds that “Good humanities teachers can help students invite and respond to the perspective of others and to deliberate about them to arrive at an enhanced understanding or a plan of action” (173). Her thinking about the humanities and dissent relates to Marcuse’s suggestion about how to resist the narrowing of our critical faculties. Marcuse saw in the New Left (or youth movement) students who had the potential to learn dialectics, engaging in debate and negative thinking rather than merely assenting to the status quo. 51 Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1978), 6. Also, refer to “Interlude 2” for a short reflection on art and dissent.

Interlude 1 Thinking of Dissent and Physical Space

As the efforts to both critique and redefine justice and its application reveal, space, as a social construct, has become important in our current reflections on the meanings of dissent. In exploring the Occupy Wall Street Movement’s protest in 2011, we see the role dissent plays in defining space as a place to resist the abuses of the established order.

Defining Inner-City Space To better conceptualize how dissent can function to change space and its associated meanings, we need a broader sense of what a space is. We tend to think of urban spaces as having been (passively) produced, functioning as static objects with an a priori existence. For most, they are as natural, or as naturally unnatural, as a mountain or expressway. However, underlying the static edifice of the city exists a complex of interactions that define everyday experience and, more significantly, our understanding of them. In his human geography, Yi-Fu Tuan describes the experience of place from the concrete to the abstract: space is “experienced as the relative location of objects or places, … and— more abstractly—as the area defined by a network of places.”1 Tuan’s schematic presentation can be misleading. These three experiences of space occur simultaneously. Therefore, in a real sense, urban space is imagined, or, as Henri Lefebvre asserts, is an “oeuvre, closer to a work of art than to a simple material product.”2 This sense of space as an oeuvre relates to his concept of heterotopia. To me, these heterotopias, which “emerge everywhere,” are created by the types of “spatial stories” Michel De Certeau describes in The Practice of Everyday Life. For De Certeau, these stories “traverse and organize places”; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. 3 Dissent, in this context, is essentially a story through which space is reimagined and its meaning is articulated in the terms of a drama enacted on a human scale. Think of dissent as a means by which the meaning of a space is revised within both the physical and cognitive spheres of the individual.

Thinking of Dissent and Physical Space  113

Dissenting Stories In analyzing the “materialist interpretation of spatiality,” Edward W. Soja notes that “spatiality is socially produced and, like society itself, exists in both substantial forms (concrete spatialities) and as a set of relations between individuals and groups.”4 In one sense, Soja’s idea of spatiality is produced through stories that link concrete or perceived space to conceived or imagined space. In De Certeau’s phrase, such a link suggests that “space is practiced place.”5 We might consider these practices to include not only the profile of those protesting—such the protestors’ race, gender, and class—but also how those protests are enacted as well as how they are framed. Frames are fictions, and when used to dissent, they have the potential to create a tension between the imagined and the real out of which meaning of one sort or another can emerge. An example of how these framing fictions facilitate dissent is illustrated in the Occupy Wall Street Movement’s protest at the privately-owned Zuccotti Park in New York in September of 2011.

First Frame: Occupying Space The initial frame is revealed in the tactics of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, as David Harvey describes them. The tactics of the Occupy movement are to take a central public space, a park or a square, close to where many of the levers of power are centered, and, by putting human bodies in that place, to convert public space into a political ­commons—a place for open discussion and debate over what that power is doing and how best to oppose its reach.6 This frame of occupation facilitates dissent by founding its identity in relation to the grand narratives of Wall Street, which, in the case of ­Zuccotti Park, is located only a few blocks away. In an op-ed published on Truthout.org, John Clark, a professor of philosophy at Loyola University, describes four of these overlapping grand narratives: Wall Street, he claims, ranges from signifying “global capitalism” to the “devious or mysterious” cause of “economic crisis and decline.”7 What Wall Street signifies becomes the factors that inform the protest—to protest Wall Street clearly means to protest the economy but it also means protesting the continuity of the capitalist narrative that Wall Street perpetuates in its use of the street. As Harvey notes, in total, the Wall Street narrative claims that “they and only they have the exclusive right to regulate and dispose of public space” and, by extension, the practices of everyday life.8

114  Oppositional Dissent In opposition to these grand narratives and the social meanings they promote and maintain, the Occupy movement, according to Clark, signifies “above all . . . a rejection of conventional American politics and the embracing of a new politics of direct action, . . . an affirmation of self-expression, self-determination, and self-management of social change.”9 The frame, Clark describes, is expressed in the movement’s central message, a message that affirms the power of occupation: We are the 99percent. We have the majority and this majority can, must and shall prevail. Since all other channels of expression are closed to us by money power, we have no other option except to occupy the parks, squares and streets of our cities until our opinions are heard and our needs attended to.10 On the one hand, this frame of occupation denies the capitalist narrative of Wall Street, as illustrated in the eviction notice posted up at the park during the protest that asserted the owner’s right not only to property but also to urban space and by extension the meanings associated with it. On the other hand, the occupation frame provides the concrete place and emotional context within which dissenting action can proceed, actions that can restructure the emergent meaning of a place.

Second Frame: Embodied Space Harvey claims that the Occupy movement “shows us that the collective power of bodies in public space is still the most effective instrument of opposition when all other means of access are blocked.”11 The embodied protest, as D. R. Koukal argues, inserts the subjects into “the practice of political dissent.”12 These subjects become recognizable characters in the story of the protest, and this story can be read, interpreted, and perhaps most importantly used to establish a community of dissent that is not only about the presentation of demands but also about reinscribing space with the dissenters’ presence. This presence can, and often does, continue to resonate with the larger public after the protest has ended. Harvey points out that these aims cannot be achieved in virtual spaces. For him, it is the bodies on the street that matter, “not the babble of sentiments on Twitter or Facebook.”13 Malcolm Gladwell echoes this concern about the need for embodied protest, providing an explanation of why virtual protests ultimately do not work. He claims that virtual protests suffer from two critical flaws: 1 Activism appears to be a “‘strong tie’ phenomenon” in which people use the physical presence of others to motivate and sustain action. Social media, on the other hand, “are built around weak ties

Thinking of Dissent and Physical Space  115 [,which] rarely lead to high risk activism,” such as that required to displace the norms and values established by social institutions. 2 “The second crucial distinction between traditional activism and its online variant” is that social media cannot provide the necessary discipline and hierarchical organization to effectively shape long-term activism. This idea of a hierarchy is easy to confuse. What he suggests and the Sixties underground press revealed is that organization comes from a group’s commitment to a cause and less to its actual organizational structure. An organization, such as the SDS, can, however, offer a sense of purpose and community necessary to shape a clear dissenting message, but it does not exactly equate with the protest itself. To be sustained, a ­protest movement seems to require a story, composed of a past, present, and future, that individuals can locate themselves and their actions within. While many have disagreed with Gladwell’s assessment, it does suggest, and experience seems to bear this out, those embodied protests are more effective at creating meaning, as the cultural artifacts that emerged from the Occupy movement suggest.

Third Frame: Practiced Place The cultural artifacts created as part of the various local occupations shaped the conception of space by representing and enacting its meaning through various art forms. These works link the occupied space to a larger cultural context and in so doing restructure the meaning of those social spaces, transforming them into places, places that contain residual memories of a protest, embedding those protests in time. Consider, for instance, how Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, continues to resonate with meaning so many decades after the protest ended. These artifacts take many forms, such as photographs, poems, and visual art, but one form that combines both is the graffiti inscribed on or near the various occupied spaces. Often, this graffiti is located in the liminal space between the city’s dominant structures and the occupied space. In this location, the graffiti expresses and interprets the tension between these opposing social and political narratives. Such “semiotic imagery and cognitive mappings,” in the words of Soja, “play a powerful role in shaping the spatiality of social life.”14 This dialectic transforms the urban space by giving voice to those who do not feel represented by its structures, and suggests the “something different” that is possible, which, as Harvey notes, “does not necessarily arise out of conscious plan, but more simply out of what people do, feel, sense, and come to articulate as they seek meaning in their daily lives.”15 Graffiti is this type of perceived and therefore

116  Oppositional Dissent felt action, emerging from a lack of agency. In one example from the Zucatti protest, the author asserts, in a text placed upon the wall of what appears to be an apartment building, one of the Occupy movement’s subtexts, “We will ask nothing / We will demand nothing / We will take, Occupy.” In essence, the Occupy movement, so this author claims, is not about making demands, or “asking” for something but rather is about claiming an individual’s right to the city, the individual’s right, as Lefebvre argues, to “participation in and appropriation of urban space.”16 Other examples provide similar slogans that give focus to various aspects of the movement’s agenda. In an example from the Middle East, faceless individuals are shown holding one letter in the word freedom, indicating that the movement promotes freedom while also suggesting that this freedom can only be achieved by an embodied protest, by bodies in the streets acting to assert their rights. As these two examples illustrate, graffiti can help frame a protest, creating a broader and more nuanced story.

Changing Meanings: The Counter-Monument Project In summarizing Paul-Henry Chombart’s ideas about the use of aerial photographs, Jeanne Haffner claims that “an overview of a society’s urban monuments would shed light on its values, its religion, and its natural history.”17 Public monuments open up social space for this type of interpretation. Monuments root perception to space and relate that space to a specific meaning. For instance, we might understand a monument as a proxy for the human body, anchoring the viewer’s perception to the remains of the city. Leaf through a friend’s photo album of a trip to Washington, D.C. and he may have pictures that represent one of two general perspectives—either your friend has documented the existence of the monument from his vantage point, which becomes in that instant your vantage point, or he has adopted the perspective of the monument, documenting the public’s view of it. The monument comes to inhabit our consciousness in this way, fitting our understanding of the space, the city, to that monument. Dissent can be used to fracture these lenses and their meanings. The most obvious approach to this creative endeavor might be to perform dissent upon the monument or within its zone of influence. Drape a banner over the top of the Washington monument, for example, to alter its meaning. However, this replaces dialogue with polemic. A more compelling approach might be to juxtapose monuments, creating a dialectical monument in which both respond to the other. For instance, a monument to radical dissenters could be erected next to the Vietnam Memorial. Both monuments would speak in the tension created by the

Thinking of Dissent and Physical Space  117 juxtaposition. One suggests that dissenting from the government’s will to war is as important as the often-selfless service of the military to the country’s foreign policies. A good example of how juxtaposing monuments might function to redefine space through dialogue is illustrated in the placement in 2013 of an atheist monument near one listing the Ten Commandments on the lawn in front of the Bradford County Courthouse in Florida. Located in what residents refer to as a “free-speech zone,” the monument contains quotes refuting the antiquated and clearly barbaric ideas contained in the Ten Commandments as well as quotes from Thomas Jefferson and others indicating that the United States was not founded on Christian ideals but rather on secular principles of fairness.18 The dialogue generated by the placement of both of these monuments provides a frame for discussion of faith and its absence as well as the role religion has played in our legal system, helping perpetuate hate and fear as the systems central modes of operation. Or perhaps juxtapose the Washington Monument with a monument to the poor or politically disenfranchised. Create a link that points to contested meanings. These meanings provide the narrative tension that leads to understanding, and to active integration through interrogation of social values. One useful act of dissent would be to create monuments that are the mental and social antitheses to the sanctioned form. The ­anti-Washington Monument might reverse the shape, including 193 headstones rather than the commemorative stones it now contains.

Notes 1 Yi-Fu Tan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 12. 2 Henri Lefebvre, Writing on Cities, trans. Elonore Kaufman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), 101. 3 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984: repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 115. 4 Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 120. 5 De Certeau, Practice, 117. 6 David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012), 161. 7 John Clark, op-ed, “The Significance of Occupy Wall Street,” Truthout.org, October 31, 2011, https://truthout.org/articles/the-significance-of-occupywall-street / https://truthout.org /articles/the-significance-of-occupywall-street/ 8 Harvey, Rebel, 163. 9 Clark, “Significance,” https://truthout.org/articles/the-significance-of-occupywall-street/ 10 Harvey, Rebel, 162. 11 Harvey, Rebel, 162.

118  Oppositional Dissent 12 D. R. Koukal, Presented to the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, York University (Toronto, Canada), May 27–29, 2006, 2. 13 Harvey, Rebel, 162. 14 Soja, Postmodern, 121. 15 Harvey, Rebel, xvii. 16 Lefebvre, Writing, 101. 17 Jeanne Heffner, The View From Above: The Science of Social Space (­Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 77. 18 Brendan Farrington, “Atheists Unveil Monument Near Ten Commandments in Florida,” The Washington Post, June 29, 2013, accessed June 10, 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/national/atheists-unveil-monument-next-to-ten-­ commandments-at-florida-courthouse/2013/06/29/f226a614-e10c-11e286b4-4efb8c53d62b_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b9a04ec4dfa8.

Section 2

An Aesthetics

An aesthetics, call it the aesthetics of the underground or an aesthetic principle, permeates the papers in the underground press and to a degree links them. Reading these documents is not the same experience as reading the New York Times or New Yorker, The Washington Post, or other mainstream media. In these presses, there exists a particular intensity that one is tempted to call naive or immature, which was the tendency of the critics of these papers during the Sixties. Yet for me, dismissing the aesthetics of these presses remains uncomfortable. Often, there is a youthfulness in these artistic efforts, especially in areas of poetry and visual art, and a strident, argumentative rhetoric in the reporting. In all, the resounding tone is one of exploration, experimentation, and even wonder, a sense that at times meanders into delusion but often thuds with insight. If these are primarily youthful traits, then, as Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests in his essay Nature, youthfulness and immaturity may be good for the intellect and worth revisiting as we and society age.

5 The Poetics of Dissent

Aesthetics In the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake invents the image “the doors of perception” to suggest that people often limit their experiences, which then limits their available perspectives. The beauty of art might be said to reside between Emerson’s all-seeing eyeball and Blake’s doors. I might express the equation this way—conscious versus unconscious perception equals consciousness. Psychologists would express it differently, but this equation seems imbedded in the perceptions of the underground press. Blake, an important poet for the Sixties underground, suggests the aesthetic intentions of many of its papers. The aim was to cleanse or remove the myopic striving that dominated American life, and that was so well articulated in William Wordsworth’s sonnet “The World is Too Much With Us.” In reaching back to Romantic English poets, we begin to see in the underground press an aesthetic that sought transcendence in a headlong and often headless jaunt into the particularities, the euphoria, and even the banalities of everyday experience. We see the alienated, existential individual considering why personal presence matters, and why exceeding the limits of perception might evince truth. Within the context of the alienated individual, the theory Herbert Marcuse seems to pursue in his social analysis, but never names, is a theory of dissent. The praxis of dissent is not merely synonymous with opposition but instead helps inform the process that in essence defines the dynamics of cultural change. Dissent offers a way of understanding the aesthetics of the underground press, an aesthetics that functions as both the reflection and the negation of dominant reality, or, in other words, the established understanding of what is accepted as true. In the Aesthetic Dimension, Marcuse sums up the role of art in culture: Art reflects this dynamic in its insistence on its own truth, which has its ground in social reality and is yet its “other.” Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the

The Poetics of Dissent  121 law of the established reality principle. The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.1 Marcuse’s observations about art, primarily literature in this case, emerge as a critique of a Marxist aesthetics, an aesthetics that provides an inaccurate theory for the appreciation of art as a “revolutionary” discourse. 2 He presents six theses that he feels define a Marxist aesthetics and uses them to structure the development of a different sense of the aesthetic. A central theme running through these theses is the assumption that “the political and the aesthetic, the revolutionary content and the artistic quality tend to coincide.”3 In short, Marxism suggests that both artists and their art need to reflect class and the class struggle, suggesting that the only “true” art is that which speaks in the realist mode to the tension between the Base, or means of production; and the construction of the Superstructure, or the false consciousness that maintains the unreality of the status quo. Marcuse’s concern is that the Marxist formulation of aesthetics underappreciates the transcendent possibilities of art, which he, in part, locates in the separation of art from the “process of material production,” which has enabled it [art] to demystify the reality reproduced in this process. Art challenges the monopoly of the established reality to determine what is ‘real,’ and it does so by creating a fictitious world which is nevertheless ‘more real than reality.’4 How the underground press’ exploration of art through literature, visual design, and criticism challenged establish reality reveals dissent as a means of capturing what Raymond Williams refers to as “structures of feeling,”5 giving these emerging structures a place in the debate over the meaning of society and everyday experience. Of course, many assume, for good reason, that the underground press was concerned about artistic expression and its role in facilitating change. This was certainly part of the New Left’s prevailing desire to resee the world, denying the Cold War delusions they claimed had come to dominate American political and social realities. The implications of the artistic prerogatives of the underground press in relation to Marcus’ observations about the liberating potential of art are less clear. Certainly, the psychedelic tendencies emerged as part of a drug logic, suggesting both a visual and experiential reimagining of reality and its meaning. The turn from comics to comix, a form of radical art, suggested a sense that satire was one way to interrogate the absurdity of contemporary culture. Yet, the overall effect of these artistic pursuits was part of a psychology that defined the “unfreedom of individuals in

122  An Aesthetics the unfree society,” as Marcuse put it: “Art remains marked by unfreedom; in contradicting it, art achieves its autonomy.”6 In one sense, art, broadly defined to include textual and visual forms, published in the underground press asserted an autonomy that informed a dissenting view of reality. Through art, the realities around which dominant norms and values were formed and maintained were deconstructed. And both were reassembled and replaced by new ways of not only seeing but also interpreting that reality. To locate the aesthetics of the underground press, we might first consider the relationship of the Sixties artistic concerns to modernist and postmodern artistic movements. In Repression and Recovery, Cary Nelson explores modernist poetry from 1910 to 1945. In his analysis, he is very careful to stress that any singular narrative about the development of artistic movements is doomed to inaccuracy, even outrageous inaccuracies. He outlines three general problems with literary history, two of which seem prescient in this case: the term ‘literary history’ is itself a curious one, for the two words—’literary’ and ‘history’—collaborate to disguise the substantial absence of each other’s presence in the enterprise as we have known it. . . . Literary history is generally addicted to narrative presentations that ignore diversity when it cannot be fitted into a coherent historical sequence.7 Analyzing the underground press thematically allows me to avoid the problems inherent in narrating a period that is almost inexhaustibly complex while also providing a structure that allows for the consideration of diverse material from a variety of sources. The most tempting claim is to assert that during the Sixties the modernist experiment was transformed into postmodernism fragmentation that saw the elevation of subjectivity, individual truth, and the disintegration of prevailing grand narratives that once informed social and international relationships, and personal behavior. Those grand narratives that drove us into the world wars and welcomed the rise of industrialism and human and ecological impacts were increasingly understood as a product of fallacious rationalism. While this rationalism gave us war and the Nazi state, it also introduced the real possibility of human extinction. During the same period, realist art produced fascistic representations of the ideal human, the eternal Aryan, and the simplicities of communist populism—all of humanity pointing, as communist models seem to, toward a “glorious” nationalistic future. Perhaps upon visions such as these, the idea of a nation was rearticulated as that of the world power. No longer were we living in a world that sought security in a group of stable alliances between distinct

The Poetics of Dissent  123 nations. As still seems to be the case, we appear to be moving toward one nation to rule them all. At their best, the artists producing for the underground press resisted the abyss of reason and its tendency to monopolize the image, and at their worst blundered about creating an incipient slop that, in its inadequacies, made art actually more meaningful as a tool for personal expression and a means of promoting participatory democratic practices.

Liberation Subjectivity Many in the underground press motivated by Marcuse’s thinking sought a “liberating subjectivity” or an aesthetics that by expressing the individual’s experience of reality raised consciousness and revealed some sort of truth to power.8 That truth may not have held sway or ranged far from its source, but often it did emit some level of energy, enacting some degree of dissent. Marcuse argues that “with all its ­affirmative-ideological features, art remains a dissenting force.”9 What Marcuse means by a dissenting force is not fully developed; however, it is this idea that informs the function of art in the underground press. On one level, the underground press argued for change, wrangling with emerging cultural artifacts, those artifacts that suggested a new perspective on experience. These emerging forms were the product of a culture in the process of changing and explained much of the art published in the underground press. Indeed, this understanding of dissent is embedded in its etymology. “Dissent” is derived from the Latin dissentire, which contains the root sentire, and means to “differ in sentiment or feeling.” What this etymology reveals is that acts of dissent at their core are not necessarily acts of revolution, which force change through various forms of coercion, but are acts of persuasion, in which the dominant cultural sentiments are changed through the imagination, or, to use a phrase from the Sixties, the raising of consciousness. We might refer to what emerges as a poetics of dissent.

Poetics of Dissent Critiquing the “Mass” in Mass Media During the Fifties and Sixties, C. Wright Mills, a theorist often cited in the underground press, examined the effect of mass communication on public opinion. In his examination, he discusses three models for how mass communication affects public opinion: 1 The “classic” view: Ideas are shared in a free marketplace and those deemed most worthy are accepted and appropriated through the democratic process.

124  An Aesthetics 2 The “totalitarian” view”: A mass society is created by monopolized mass communication. Opinion is impressed upon citizens as free debate is limited. In this situation, public opinion is affected by ­person-to-person communication. 3 The “synthetic” view: During the Sixties, Mills found that public opinion was influenced by both a free mass media and more intimate person-to-person communication.10 We can initially situate the underground press using Mills’ frame. Through a focus on experience, the underground press attempted to modify its content and style to be more immediate, developing a style that interrogated the events of the period rather than primarily reporting on them, even though for the oppositional papers reporting remained central.11 Counterintuitively, Mills found that it wasn’t objective reporting that shaped public opinion beyond primarily reaffirming what the public already believed. Instead, Mills observed that person-to-person communication guided by influencers was most effective in changing people’s opinions about social issues. He suggests that these types of interactions created strong social bonds that helped reinforce the information passed on by the influencers.12 In this context, the underground press, in effect, functioned as an influencer that could move the public not always to protest on political issues but often to interrogate the way social institutions had constructed reality, meaning, and one’s purpose in relation to both. The Artistic Manifesto Artistic manifestos were often used to preface the efforts of the underground press to shape public perceptions of reality. In 2018, the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal (MAC) in Canada presented Julian Rosefeldt’s 2015 art project Manifesto. This project was composed of 13 short films, featuring the actor Cate Blanchett, that represented nine artistic or aesthetic movements important during the middle of the 20th century, including the Situationalists, Dadaists, and Futurists.13 Rosefeldt’s exhibition framed these art manifestos within the context of the Marxist critique of capitalist society, which functioned, at least at the MAC, as the first film and manifesto viewers encountered. Having placed these movements within this context invited the viewers to see them as dissenting from capitalist and industrial values of production and progress. Rosefeldt used the text of the manifestos as the characters’ dialogue, and these characters included a variety of everyday types, such as a teacher, a mother, an aging industrial worker, and a Punk artist. This convergence of forms revealed two interrelated issues relevant to the study of art in the underground press. First, it revealed that art when placed within the context of day-to-day life can transform our

The Poetics of Dissent  125 understanding of that life, and it suggests that artistic expression, in all its various abstractions, is always concerned about life, about when, why, how, and to what extent it might be lived. Simone de Beauvoir offers a way of seeing ambiguity, and I would argue artistic abstraction, as meaningful. Simone de Beauvoir’s study of the “ethics of ambiguity” suggests one way to approach these manifestos. Beauvoir claims that ambiguity must be distinguished from absurdity in the following way: The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won.14 (413) Rosefeldt’s presentation of the artistic manifestos represents this type of ambiguity, and it does this by placing those texts within a lived context. Alone on the page, these manifestos offer little of the urgency that once motivated them. Rosefeldt’s work doesn’t recapture the original moment of inception, but attempts to show that marginalized artistic thought meant to have and does have lived relevance. Therefore, the absurdist tendency in some manifestos denies meaning, while their ambiguous nature opens a space for interpretation that engages in the development of meaning, which is the space that Rosefeldt and the underground press entered. This structure points to the emergent poetics of the Sixties, which was presented in Donald Allen’s influential poetry anthology published in 1960. In Allen’s anthology, it was the different poetic “statements” he collected at the end of the anthology that articulated a change in process. In this section, several poets composed poetic manifestos that echoed the claim of Bernadette Mayer’s in “The obfuscated Poem”: “the best obfuscation bewilders old meanings while reflecting or imitating or creating a structure of a beauty that we know.”15 Her point here is that obfuscation is not a means to “knowing” but a way to unlearn what we think we know and open, as the saying went, the doors of perception. This is also de Beauvoir’s point, and the aim of many manifestos in Allen’s anthology—in denying meaning a way is open to reimagine it. Mode of Expression The poetics of the underground press can be initially understood, as Gwen Allen suggests, through Roland Barthes’ call for the “‘birth of the reader,’” in which Barthes is “insisting that cultural meaning should not be dictated from above by an individual author but produced collectively by readers.”16 Allen’s observation suggests that the poetics of the underground press was informed by a desire to express individual

126  An Aesthetics subjectivity, or what Marcuse refers to as “radical subjectivity.” This radical subjectivity emerges in a style characterized by what Marcuse calls “introjection”: ‘introjection’ implies the existence of an inner dimension distinguished from and even antagonistic to external exigencies. . . . The idea of ‘inner freedom’ here has its reality: it designates the private space in which man may become and remain ‘himself.’17 This introjection is how dissent often appeared in the underground press. It was radical in that it broke established journalistic norms, inserting a subjective perspective into a public medium. The space created by the insertion of the subjective mind could be seen as the space of dissent, a discursive location where interpretation is both invited and necessary to construct meaning. The use of this technique can be observed in writing related to different social institutions and cultural artifacts, including rock music, visual design, and poetry. These locations suggest how the underground press created an aesthetics of dissent or perhaps a dissenting aesthetics. I don’t want to belabor the distinction, but an aesthetics is often understood as static within specific constraints. These constraints can be a particular decade or social sector, e.g. the Sixties aesthetic or the punk aesthetic. This use of aesthetics seems to suffer from the same inaccuracy as when adjectives are applied to culture, e.g. scientific culture, Sixties culture, and so on. A dissenting aesthetics suggests an aesthetics that is defined by an action, such as resisting, reimagining, or creating. The aesthetics of the underground press was this sort an aesthetics, as I would argue all aesthetics are, in the process of formation, and what took form expressed an emerging sense of reality. The Rhetoric of the Underground The “sense” in my use of “sense of reality” needs some development. As seems clear, reality is not a static object, a condition of reality that has been the subject of innumerable studies, from the Greek philosophers to contemporary scholars. I don’t intend a survey of mimesis, but the use of the “sense” of some things is so common that it might be helpful to reflect on what is being claimed about reality. When using this term in this type of phrase, “the sense of reality,” most intend to indicate that they don’t really have a sense of reality or what is being said about it. Instead, they suggest that some creative agent is approaching a sensation of something we might refer to as reality. Impressionism, expressionism, and poetry, for example, all provide a sense of the real but what is designated by the use of “sense” is the audience’s right or perhaps requirement to interpret that reality, an act that reveals the real is in a dialectical relationship

The Poetics of Dissent  127 with the sensing or the interpreting of it. Williams captures something of this idea in his discussion of a “structure of feeling,” or the sense of an emerging cultural form that is yet to manifest fully or recognizably within the dominant culture.18 The compelling aspect of this phrase is the application of “structure” to the abstract concept “feeling.” What is sensed about an emerging cultural form or idea is the way it structures or defines how the audience feels about some issue. How we sense reality might equate to this idea of structure: when I sense reality, I am actually developing a clearer view of two aspects at once. I begin to see how the reality, such as the pond Claude Monet is pondering, is structured in his perception of it. He does not see it as colored points, but as a collocation of colors that he can use to represent reality through the performance of pointillism. The means of representation is the performance of meaning and that performance can be determined by perception or by the comment on that perception. At the same time as I see this structure or sense of reality, I also confront Monet’s interpretation of that reality and must, even just to process the image, evaluate its validity. Through this dialectical process, I gain much that can be said to transcend the information about the subject of the representation. In this fundamental exchange, there is the possibility of personal transformation offered in my appreciation of the work of art. This exchange provides one approach to an analysis of the art published in the underground press. Designing the Press By their very nature as cheaply printed papers, newsletters, broadsides, and broadsheets, the underground press challenged not only the conventions of visual art but also of the graphic design used in the standard newspapers to supplement the written text. The reciprocal relationship between the visual design and the text is one of the more commonly overlooked aspects of the modes of dissent used in the underground press. In Power to the People, Gwen Allen claims that while the art in the underground press of the Sixties might be dismissed as amateurish and maybe naïve, the editors and contributors of these presses “strategically employed a range of sophisticated visual practices that parallel those utilized by artists during this period—even as they challenged the conventions of both official high culture and mass-produced commercial culture.”19 Allen notes that in disrupting established practices of art, the artists of the underground press engaged in a social movement intent on reimagining the concept not only of beauty but of the function of art within the culture. The inward turn, Marcuse’s “radical subjectivity,” characterizes the difficulty of this art as well as its potential for envisioning and expressing change. Often, the art was compartmentalized in blocks matching the layout of the page (see Figure 5.1).

128  An Aesthetics

Standard Text

Image

Image

Text

Figure 5.1  Standard Newspaper Format.

Art in these cases fitted the conventions of mainstream journalism. The blocks contained photographs or other images cropped to match the text it supported and supplemented. The reciprocity of this arrangement limited or closed the level of interpretation possible. An image clarified a description; it did not problematize the text or vice versa. This layout was used when the clarity of the reporting was deemed of primary importance; therefore, papers such as The Guardian, The Fifth Estate, New Left Notes, The SDS Bulletin, and The Paper used a standard layout structure, including the headline, byline, columns and body text, and photographs often with informative captions. Though generally standard, this use did offer opportunities for visual disruption. For instance, The Guardian often used oversized headline and non-standard fonts to call attention to an article. The headlines in most of the underground papers didn’t abide by the standards of decorum or etiquette used in the mainstream press. These attention-grabbing headlines in an otherwise standard-looking newspaper could have an appropriately jarring effect. For instance, The San Francisco Express Times contained puns such as “FBI Agent Finger Hoover” or “GOP Convention: National Masochism.”20 Papers that we might distinguish as alternative, offering alternatives to the dominant social institutions, often used a design layout that disrupted the text. The disruption often began with the title of the paper and continued in the relationship between text and image. Often, the image ruptured or engaged the text to encourage seeing the text and image as part of a larger interpretive performance. The text in these cases is presented as the basis for a dialogue between the image and other call-outs (Figure 5.2). Graffiti, a Vietnam Veteran paper, used this approach, adding dissenting comments to excerpts from the mainstream or underground press. The Berkley Barb, though more standard than Graffiti, used the column

The Poetics of Dissent  129

Non-Standard

Thing

Text Image

Figure 5.2  Underground Press Format.

structure, but disrupted it with drawings and headlines that ran across columns or down into the text. Taken together, these papers used design to disrupt the reception of the text and convey the introjection of the subject into the message of the paper. Allen hints at the graphic design as a mode of dissent: “As headlines broadcast radical political views and lifestyle choices, the underground press gave rise to an equally revolutionary new visual culture through which it reimagined the meanings of gender, race, authority, technology, and the environment.”21 As is commonly the case, Allen presents these categories as distinct aspects, but it is worth recalling that each aspect relates to culture through the social institutions that function to define them. Without this context, the way the art—published or, we might say, performed in the underground press—affected change is obfuscated, as each instance is understood as a single comment on either the social, political, or cultural activities of the Sixties rather than on the culture as a whole. Williams’ concept of emergent and residual cultural forms that are positioned as either alternative or oppositional to the dominant cultural form offers a clearer view of how this art functions as a form of dissent. Rock Music The relationship between the underground press and the emergent rock music of the era revolves around the review and critique of the form. On one level, the underground press offered reviews of rock music, often perceiving in it a means of cultural transformation through its purported

130  An Aesthetics visceral form of cultural discourse. For instance, in an editorial about John Lennon in the Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner claimed, “the Beatles have been the single dominant force in the new social thought and style for which the Sixties will forever be remembered.”22 Wenner’s assumption is that music shapes “thought” or perhaps culture and the associated structure of feeling that defines how people experience it. As Joel Hagan reports, Wenner makes this connection explicit, observing that the Rolling Stone “was ‘not just about music, but also about the things and attitudes that the music embraces.’”23 In several of the underground papers, similar assertions were made. For instance, The Vietnam Song Book provided music to accompany protests. The point of the collection, as noted in the foreword, was to offer music not only to motivate but also accompany change.24 Of course, the relationship between music and change, even in as influential a magazine as Rolling Stone, is complicated by the nature of music as a cultural artifact and, therefore, as a location for cultural interpretation and ultimately cultural change. A voice that provided a consistent comment on rock music from the underground was John Sinclair, an activist who lived in the Detroit and Ann Arbor areas during the Sixties. He was well known and perhaps infamous for helping found Translove Energies, a kind of artistic commune, and the White Panther Party that developed in support of the Black Panther Party, though the White Panthers were widely seen as deaf to the larger African American concerns. He was also an advocate for marijuana legalization and became a celebrity and martyr for the cause when he was sentenced to 91/2 to 10 years for possessing two joints. 25 In Guitar Army—a collection of his articles drawn from underground papers, such as The Ann Arbor Argus, The Fifth Estate, Ann Arbor Sun, and Creem—he argues for the revolutionary potential of music, especially Blues, Jazz, and Rock and Roll. Essentially, he sees in music the possibility of a “total assault on culture.” The army he sees as engaging in this assault is the “guitar army,” who he defines as “a raggedy horde of holy barbarians marching into the future, pushed forward by a powerful blast of sound, a whole new people singing a whole new song of ourselves.”26 This army of rock and roll revolutionaries would, in all innocence as Sinclair suggests, bring about a new culture. Of course, this new culture was at most a new way of articulating cultural change or dissent. Yet the energy of his tale is compelling as it illustrates the function of music as a means of expressing in the same instant both isolation and change. Sinclair argues, if his polemic and breathless style can be called an argument, that rock began with African American music and became through their inspiration a hybrid, polyphonic form that expressed a “whole way of life”: “Rock and roll,” Sinclair claims, “not only reflected but it also created a whole new life-form on this planet, it not

The Poetics of Dissent  131 only marked but it also created the line of debarkation from the old world to the New.”27 A new way of life, he notes, based on resisting the status quo, which he characterized as understanding music as merely a commodity for the public’s entertainment. 28 For Sinclair, rock music offered an ecstatic experience, something akin to a religious transformation, revealing to the initiated those truths often muted by the established order. As the manager or spiritual advisor to the MC5, he expresses a view of the psychedelic artistic perspective. Several of the MC5 songs are explicitly political and others are clearly surrealistic sound collages. The 1965 live album Kick Out the Jams recorded at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, includes songs such as “Kick Out the Jams, Motherfucker,” echoing the political group that used the moniker “Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers,” was a political statement, noting the power of rock to engage society. As an example of Sixties hard driving, early punk-styled music, it is excellent. Listening to the album, one gains a sense of the exhilaration of this type of live performance, which did attempt to comment broadly on the contemporary social institutions. The MC5 used music in ways similar to U2’s The Joshua Tree or Pink Floyd’s The Wall. These albums offer unique critiques of the culture of their day and generate perspectives that can be used to engage social institutions. Sinclair’s characterization of rock echoes Marcuse’s much more sophisticated claim that the loss of the “‘inner’ dimension of the mind” occurs in the advanced industrial society.”29 Rock might be said to liberate this inner dimension, offering a language to use in critiquing society. Many would point to the artists who performed at Woodstock in 1969 as the emissaries of this new Hegelian mind and accompanying social discourse. This discourse resisted the monological malaise of the dominant culture, a culture that was implicit in normalizing racism, war, sexism, and capitalist exploitation. The national anthem performed by Jimi Hendrix and “War” performed by Richie Havens addressed American imperialism and were often noted in the underground press as giving voice to both a disaffected youth and the concerns of African Americans. Yet, the Woodstock Festival was a complicated event, as Ted Franklin’s August 2, 1969 report on the event illustrates. He points out both the positive and negative natures of the event and its complicated relationship to dissent. Franklin takes particular note of the terrible conditions: the mud that permeated everything, the waste disposal issues, the bad water, and the bad drugs. These were conditions, he claims, that were exacerbated by the promoters’ lack of preparation, noting that the event was intended as a moneymaking venture. He details the reported deaths and the shocking number of reported miscarriages, issues that suggest the event was a disaster. And while Franklin doesn’t downplay the disaster that characterized Woodstock, he predicts that most will remember

132  An Aesthetics the event as a success, citing the general decency of those around them, who often helped when difficulties arose.30 This is indeed how the event is often described today, as an example of art engaging our better angels. Franklin’s report also indicates that Woodstock wasn’t exactly an ­anti-establishment effort. He notes that many representatives of The Movement, or New Left, were housed in “Movement City” across the woods from the main stage, and had garnered from the promoters “$10,000” that was distributed among the different groups.31 In this report, The Movement representatives seem more focused on extortion, of a sort, than on liberation. Woodstock, on the one hand, had suggested that music could transcend political division to communicate a message. On the other, the event illustrates the power of capital to appropriate these voices to make money. Coming at the end of the decade, The Woodstock Festival provides a case study for how culture changes; it is not a revolution, as many claim to desire, but instead a constant process of dissent and reform. This reform often occurs in what appear as limited conceptions that, over time, become a fully realized change in the dominant culture. Poetry The poetry of the underground press tends to feel derivative of the Dadaists, then the surrealists, then the imagists, and full of youthful angst (think of Sturm und Drang). The slop of this work is at once off putting and encouraging in that it was occasional in purpose, exploring the issues of the day. What is encouraging is that using poetry to dissent provides a particularly powerful means of transcending, in a Marcusian frame, the established reality. Unlike the mainstream press, the editors of the underground press often juxtaposed poetry with news reporting, which was further mingled with comics, classifieds or “unclassifieds,” and opinion columns. The result was a hybrid, or polyphonic discourse, that offered an intuitive structure that encouraged reflection and created an intellectual space for debate. Among the papers that made the most use of this poetics of structure were The Berkeley Barb, The East Village Other, The Ann Arbor Sun, Rat, and The New Left Notes. On the one hand, these papers emulated the layout of the mainstream press, as noted earlier, but, on the other, incorporated content that the mainstream press often dismissed or deemed inappropriate for serious journalism. The Poetry, though inconsistent in quality, persisted in the underground press. In one sense, this discourse inherited some of Donald Allen’s project that culminated in his popular poetry anthology The New American Poetry published in 1960. 32 This anthology would, to some degree, shape the poetry and poetics to follow. This poetics is obviously reflected in his choice of poets to include but also in the “Statements on Poetics” with which he concludes the anthology. Allen selected poets all

The Poetics of Dissent  133 of whom had “one common characteristic: a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse.”33 In this sense, the anthology is a form of dissent in its very existence, but one wonders what he intends by contrasting his selection criteria with that of the academy. He praises the earlier generation of poets, such as William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, H.D., Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Kenneth Rexroth, and Robert Lowell. Therefore, he may be contrasting the new poetry with that of more traditional poets, such as Robert Frost, who used and argued for the traditional poetic forms and practices, such as the sonnet, villanelle, or ode, and rhyming and scansion. Maybe he is decrying those poets informed more by the history of the discourse rather than the lived, embodied poetry emerging during the second half of the 20th century. The reviews of the anthology by academics, a couple of which Allen includes in his afterword, offer another hint about this distinction Allen is making. John Simon, for instance, claimed that “the majority of Mr. Allen’s poets . . . are kids who took up poetry the way one takes up marijuana, Buddhism, switchblade knives, wife-swapping, or riding in box-cars, neither more nor less seriously than other ‘kicks’.”34 My sense is that Allen’s concern with academic poets has more to do with the issues they do not address than with those they do explore. In particular, Allen claims that the younger poets collected in his anthology have already created their own tradition, their own press, and their public. They are our avant-garde, the true continuers of the modern movement in American poetry. Through their work many are closely allied to modern jazz and abstract expressionist painting.35 In this sense, the poets Allen includes are those free of the poetic dictates of tradition and free from playing the standard role academic publishing requires. Allen’s poets rely on their subjectivities for motivation and evaluation. What is good is good, the individual poet first and perhaps foremost. The poetics revealed in the anthology and by extension that of the underground press might be defined as postmodern, hybrid forms associated more with subjective truth than any grand, modernist narrative. Indeed, many contemporary editors place most of the authors Allen includes in postmodern anthologies. For instance, Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry includes most of those Allen selected. Hoover defines postmodernism in temporal terms, including those poets publishing after World War II, and in generic terms, including poets understood as “avant garde”: art that “opposes the bourgeois model of consciousness by attempting to close the gap between art and life.”36 The poets in Allen’s anthology reflect this general definition. Yet, more nuance is offered in how Allen organizes the anthology.

134  An Aesthetics He groups the poets into five sections using the following criteria: Section one includes those poets closely associated with Black Mountain College and Origin and the Black Mountain Review;37 Section two includes poets linked to the San Francisco Renaissance, but what was reborn isn’t exactly clear; Section three includes Beat poets; Section four gathers New York poets; and Section five concludes the anthology with young poets. As Allen notes, these sections are reflected in the “Statements of Poetics” at the end of the anthology, and it is these statements that offer a more complex definition of the poetics of dissent observed in the underground press. In short, these essays invoke a sense of play (or simply nonsense), a desire to theorize about how the content of a poem is reflected in its form, and perhaps a sense of how poetry might function within an ever-changing culture. Charles Olsen and Robert Creeley were often noted as figures influential in shaping the poetics of the decade. Together, they developed the concept of “projective verse” and “composition by field.” Both Olsen and Creeley developed as faculty at the famous Black Mountain College, an art school that began in 1933 and closed in 1957. The college was renowned for pursuing art on the margins, exploring new forms from the visual collage to poetic experimentation. Olsen’s “projective or Open verse” was a type of “composition by field” that he characterized as composed of three central elements. These elements were its “kinetics,” “principle,” and “process.” Together, these elements define the relationship between a poem and reality.38 The “kinetics” of a poem is the idea that each aspect of a poem “transfers” energy from the poet’s perception of her object to its manifestation in the resulting form of the poem. This engagement with the object of the poem and the subsequent transfer of energy to the audience is accomplished through “field composition.” In one sense, this “field” is the blank page, what a painter might call the ground, upon which the poem is enacted. The idea that a poem is a performance is suggested by the “principle” guiding Olen’s poetics. His claim, modified from Robert Creeley, is that the “right form” of a poem is determined by its “content.”39 Or, as Denise Levertov notes, “content is discovered only in form.”40 For Olsen, the right form is composed of the syllable and the line, both of which are products of the breath. The syllable arises “spontaneously” from the contemplation of the subject of the poem, while the line is how these spontaneous impressions are shaped into meaning. This suggests that the content of the poem is subjective, as reflected by the confessional poets such as Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton. Yet Olsen seems to anticipate this observation and asserts that projective verse is not focused on the poet’s subjective appreciation of the object. Instead, the focus of projective verse is on the perception of the object, and in this way, the object comes to replace the poet’s subjectivity. It is this aspect of the poem that is conveyed in the “process” of Olsen’s poetics:

The Poetics of Dissent  135 “one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception.”41 In writing a poem, the poet is engaged in the perception of the object in the now of it, as Creeley notes.42 Taking account of the object in its state of being gives the poem a sense of “moving,” a point other poets in Allen’s “Statement of Poetics” section make. Frank O’Hara claims that to him a poem emerges from his observation of the “world as I experience it.”43 Similarly, Philip Whalen says that “poetry is a picture or graph of the mind moving.”44 If we see Allen’s anthology as documenting an important poetics for the decade, then it suggests that the poetry found in the underground press might reflect these principles as a means of dissent, of commenting on the now in the process of becoming. In the underground press, the poetry represented a collection of types widely ranging in quality. Some of the poets included in Allen’s anthology appeared regularly in the underground press. These poets included Gary Snyder, John Wieners, and LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka). At its best, the poetry collected in these papers reflected an avant-garde poetic vision, seeking to bring poetry into conversation with life, to reflect the physicality of its open composition as Olsen’s poetics suggested it should. In one sense, this is accomplished when poetry is associated with other discursive practices such as jazz and journalism. These hybrid forms, whether conscious or not, provided a broader comment on culture, offering a vision of an alternative to the dominant reality. Poems similar to Olsen’s or Creeley’s ruptured the prevailing perception to invite interpretation. Creating this space is essential to enacting dissent and potentially cultural change. Unlike the mainstream media, the underground press regularly published poetry alongside and often inserted within more conventional journalism. This use critiqued the high-low culture divided, using poetry, often associated with high culture, to comment on contemporary events and to give voice to lived experience. Yet, much of the poetry published in the underground press was not good in a conventional sense. Often limited in its facility with figurative language and poetic techniques, the sentiments ranged from unapologetically incoherence to achingly sentimental rage. Still, in the context of Olsen’s poetics, the poems tended to combine the occasional, which Levertov didn’t like, with the associative, one observation leading to the next, capturing an emotional response to a particular event. In these instances, the poems functioned to gauge the resonances of the events reported in the paper. This usage suggests that the poems were often received as an intertextual response to the journalism, offering the experience of a transcendent meaning. By transcendence, I don’t wish to suggest that the poems were mystically elevated by their relationship to the journalism; what I mean to suggest is that the poems invested the journalism with more of an emotional dimension. The Berkeley Barb and the East Village Other often used the intertextual to communicate

136  An Aesthetics multiple dimensions of a story. As Olsen claims, the typewriter, in his case, helped poets convey the breath in the construction of the syllables and lines. In her study of these papers, Gwen Allen echoes this observation, noting that the poetry published in the underground press was most provocative when it invoked the “materiality” of print.45 For example, concrete poems were common, conflating the graphic and linguistic, indicating how print could shape one’s perception of meaning. Together, these features created a powerful poetic technique for transforming reader perceptions and engaging a new sense of reality.

Conclusion Emerging in the underground press was a discursive space between artist and audience. In this space, the artist rejects the material transaction with the audience, transcending the limitations of the material exchange. In this way, art engages culture as a dissenting practice, part of the process of change as opposed to an object reified for consumption. Marcuse implies this relationship, claiming: The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality (i.e. of those who established it) to define what is real. In this rupture, which is the achievement of aesthetic form, the fictitious world of art appears as true reality.46 In other words, art produced for consumption supports the existing institutions, affirming it and validating those values these institutions promote. Art for the aggrandizement of the state, for example. Such art is informed by conformity not resistance and change and certainly it doesn’t rupture through the established reality principle to promote questions and radical inquiry. From this notion of rupture, the aesthetics of the underground press served its dissenting purpose in at least two ways: (1) the aesthetic encouraged a convergence between language and visual design, a hybrid object that suggested a multifaceted dissenting discourse that functioned both as object and argument; (2) an intellectual space for exploring how art could suggest new social possibilities indicative of hope, a proposition that had the potential to extend into and inform the future. This aesthetic emerged as a social critique, a critique of capitalist logic, but evolved through a number of artistic obsessions to become at once comfortingly naive and strikingly innovative.

Notes 1 Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1977), 72.

The Poetics of Dissent  137 2 Marcuse describes the revolutionary potential of art as providing the components, not exactly the means, of radical change, perhaps the vision necessary to assess alternative explanations: “It seems that art as art expresses a truth, an experience, a necessity which, although not in the domain of radical praxis, are nevertheless essential components of revolution” (1). 3 Marcuse, Aesthetic, 2. 4 Marcuse, Aesthetic, 22. 5 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128. 6 Marcuse, Aesthetic, 73. 7 Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 6–7. 8 Marcuse, Aesthetic, 5. 9 Marcuse, Aesthetic, 8. 10 C. Wright Mills, “Mass Media and Public Opinion,” in Power, Politics, and People: The collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (New York: Ballantine Books, 1963), 585–586. 11 See New Left Notes, New Left Bulletin, and Guardian for examples of professional journalism. All but the Guardian are well represented in the Independent Voices database at the time of this writing. 12 Mills, “Mass,” 597. 13 Julian Rosefeldt, Manifesto, MAC Montréal, 2018,accessed 17 June 2019, https://macm.org/en/exhibitions/julian-rosefeldt-manifesto 14 Simone de Beauvoir, “The Ethics of Ambiguity,” Introduction to Basic Writings of Existentialism, ed. Gordon Marion(New York: Modern ­Library, 2004), 413. 15 Bernadette Mayer, “The Obfuscated Poem,” in Postmodern American Poetry, ed. Paul Hoover (New York: Norton, 1994), 659. 16 Gwen Allen, “Design as a Social Movement,” in Power to the People: The Graphic Design of the Radical Press and the Rise of the Counter-Culture, 1964–1974, ed. Geoff Kaplan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 121. 17 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964), 10. 18 Williams, Marxism, 128–135. 19 Allen, “Design,”80. 20 San Francisco Express Times, August 7, 1968, Independent Voices. 21 Gwen Allen, Power to the People: The Graphic Design of the Radical Press and the Rise of the Counter-Culture, 1964–1974 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 81. 22 Joe Hagan, Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine (New York: Knopf, 2017), 5. 23 Hagan, Sticky, 5. 24 Barbara Dane and Irwin Silber, eds., The Vietnam Song Book (New York: The Guardian, 1969). 25 John Sinclair, Guitar Army: Street Writing/Prison Writings (New York: Douglas Book Corporation, 1972), 169. 26 Sinclair, Guitar, 5. 27 Sinclair, Guitar, 10. 28 Sinclair, Guitar, 13. 29 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 12.

138  An Aesthetics 30 Ted Franklin, “Woodstock: Youth Culture in the Wilderness,” Liberation News Service, August 2, 1969, 1–4. 31 Franklin, “Woodstock,” 3. 32 It is important to note that of the 44 poets collected in Allen’s anthology, only four are women: Denise Levertov, Helen Adam, Madeline Gleason, and Barbara Guest. 33 Donald Allen, The New American Poetry: 1945–1960 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1960), xi. 34 John Simon, in The New American Poetry: 1945–1960, ed. Donald Allen (Berkley: University of California Press, 1960), 450. 35 D. Allen, New American Poetry, xi. 36 Paul Hoover, ed., Introduction to Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (New York: Norton, 1994), xxv. 37 Black Mountain College was an experimental art college, similar to the later development of CalArts, located in. 38 Charles Olsen, “Projective Verse vs. the Non-Projective,” in The New American Poetry: 1945–1960, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 386. 39 Olsen, “Projective,” 387. 40 Denise Levertov, “Denise Levertov,” in The New American Poetry, 1 ­ 945–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 412. 41 Olsen, “Projective,” 388. 42 Robert Creeley, “Robert Creeley: To Define,” in The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 408. 43 Frank O’Hara, “Frank O’Hara,” in The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 419. 4 4 Philip Whalen, “Philip Whalen,” in The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 420. 45 Allen, Power, 80. 46 Marcuse, Aesthetic, 9.

Interlude 2 Thinking of the Arts and Dissent

One recent instance of the use of art to indict the established order is the collection of poetry, ephemeral even in the age of the Internet, produced during the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City in 2011.1 As has often been the case, poetry loves a protest, seeming to evoke its cadence, its abstraction, and its effort to construct meaning beyond the barricades. In the introduction to the poetry collected in the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology, Danny Schechter, an Occupy Wall Street activist, claims a point about poetry that can be overlooked: poetry often accompanies a protest. The reason it does is because it can provide a condensed and emotionally resonant statement of a group’s position and it is memorable.2 Poetry also carries with it the history of the form that acts as a cue to content. Consider, for example, how poets have used the poetry and prose of Walt Whitman. It is poetry or the poetics of dissent that emerges from poetic discourse. Schechter later invokes Whitman whose inclusive rhetoric informed the Beats, such as Allen Ginsberg, who dedicates The Fall of America to Whitman using a quote from Whitman’s Democratic Vistas (1871). The quote is worth reflecting on: It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship, (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it,) that I look for the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof.3 Whitman echoes Marcuse’s sentiment about art, pointing to imaginative literature as a means of creating comradeship in opposition to materialism, or those worst aspects of Capitalism that limit or diminish the viability of new ideas and alternative perspectives. Teaching aesthetics, or aesthetics acts such as writing poetry, painting, and making music (to name only three) as a mode of dissent might encourage an understanding of dissent not only as a means of transgressing boundaries but also of engaging with the institutional discourses that can lead to productive

140  An Aesthetics (rather than destructive) change. Art, broadly applied, is perhaps the means by which this aim can most immediately be achieved. Yet, the achievement is not as Whitman’s, or Ginsberg’s, example might suggest. In the OWS Poetry Anthology, we might claim and echo of “Song of Myself.” I celebrate myself, and sign myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.4 The fine balance between individual agency and communal identity in both content and structure is precise in Whitman’s poem. In three lines, we witness the quantum mechanics of being—as are the atoms of our bodies, we are all stitched together, knowingly and unknowingly creators of now and, at the same time, the ancestors of tomorrow. His proselytizing of this vision flows with certainty but also with a lack of self-conscious posturing. It is not “what I believe you will believe” but instead the consciousness is one founded on assumptions—sensations that we hold in common, premises upon which we can proceed to further dialectical inquiry. We are at once ourselves and the self of our companion both in the present and, as he suggests in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” the future: “And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in/my meditations, than you might suppose.”5 Whitman’s poetry transcends, as Marcuse claims art can, the established reality, providing an opportunity for the reader to imagine an alternative; however, it is not merely a difference but an alternative that emerges from that established reality: for instance, from crossing the Brooklyn River or from me singing, not declaiming, the dimensions of my self. Unlike Whitman, the poetry of the OWS anthology tends to announce one’s struggle with the meaning of a moment, but it struggles to transcend that moment. For instance, several poets claim to be searching for the “voice” of that poet who might fully bring the protest to life.6 Some describe and relate but don’t enter the scene and its discourse; they tend not to “loaf,” as does Whitman, among those they engage and sing a discourse that resists at the same time that it reveals. Capturing Whitman’s poetics, especially that of his best poems, is a tall order. Many of the OWS poets seem to be trying to explain the meaning of the protests to themselves. They pronounce without walking, full of attention and concern, among the objects of their day to find in those objects that all important connection between this and that. A connection, as Lucille Clifton suggests in the last line of “blessing the boats (at St. Mary’s),” that we can travel to find meaning in the differences contained within conformity to the dominant. In a poetics of dissent, this path to developing alternatives exists a little more prominently.

Thinking of the Arts and Dissent  141

Notes 1 Version 4 of the OWS anthology claims a publication date of November 9, 2011. On the OWS site on Truthout.org, the last response was dated April 1, 2015 (https://peopleslibrary.wordpress.com). This posting was a request to complete a survey regarding the poetry anthology. The Turkish M.A. student was completing a research project in Cologne and described the use of the questionnaire as follows: This questionnaire will be used for a research paper I am writing with the help of Prof. Hanjo Berressem at the University of Cologne. I will also benefit from this questionnaire for my master thesis at which I study the interaction between poetry and protests in a broader sense, focusing on Gezi Park protests which took place in Istanbul in 2013 along with OWS protests. (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdpMiExKejGU3hQHTW7pF0o34iQgPRQk6ocEXISXuSfqnHxA/viewform) 2 Danny Schechter, “Poems Are the Ultimate Weapon of The 99%: An Introduction,” in Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology, ver. 4, 21, https:// peopleslibrary.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/ows-poetry-anthology5.pdf 3 Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (New York: J. S. Redfield Publishers, 1871), 61, quoted in Allan Ginsberg, The Fall of America (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers, 1972), i. 4 Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass, eds. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 28. 5 Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in Leaves of Grass, eds. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 160. 6 It is perhaps disheartening, or too real, that some of the authors submitting to the OWS anthology wished to maintain a hold on their intellectual property. The corporate ethos, that desire is always to secure credit that might eventually transform into fame and fortune, is strong indeed.

Section 3

Alternative Dissent

The papers discussed in this brief section reflect an alternative form of dissent. They often present alternative forms of culture. Of course, the difference between this mode of dissent and that of the oppositional papers is subtle, one of impression rather than purpose. Both the oppositional and alternative modes of dissent seek change, but the means of achieving change are presented in different ways. Part of the distinction is created by the different institutions upon which these forms of dissent function. In this section, I examine the institutions of family and religion. These institutions seem more conceptual even though they are experienced as normative, steeped in the power of tradition. Perhaps for this reason, dissenting practices offer alternatives to these formations rather than agitating for specific reforms. As we see today, even though reformation of the family and religion happen, such reforms are complicated and glacial in pace.

6 Dissent and the Family

The Institution of the Family As a structure significant in shaping everyday experience, most considered the family a positive cultural structure, even though it could lead to a variety of social tensions and a number of troubling iniquities. Some feminist papers, such as No More Fun and Games, called for the abolition of the family, private property, and the state, noting that the monogamous family allowed for the capitalist system and, therefore, female subjugation to continue.1 This desire for the abolition of the family was informed by Engels’ research and conformed to a distinct communist view, such as that developed in Marx’s Communist Manifesto. In the manifesto, for instance, Marx asserts that the proletariat revolution would include the abolition of private property as one of the means of eliminating destructive class tensions. 2 From a feminist point of view, private property also related to how women tended to be perceived, as the property of their father and then husbands. Abolishing private property also meant abolishing the logic of ownership that Capitalism tended to encourage both explicitly and implicitly across society. This included the institution of marriage, which explicitly made a woman the property of a man. The ideology of submission and ownership communicated through marriage was pervasive and abolishing it was important for social liberation of both men and women. Others in the underground press tended to identify the social benefits of strong family ties, but sought to expose the possibilities between strict conformity to and complete dissolution of the family. Between these poles, many began to rethink traditional gender roles, the nature of human sexuality, and the importance of religion.

The Tribe During the Sixties, the concept of the “tribe” emerged as an alternative to the family, in both economic and social terms. In economic terms, as I have mentioned earlier, the tribe developed as an alternative economic structure as implemented in communes. In social terms, the tribe offered a way

Dissent and the Family  145 of redefining personal and political relationships. In “The Tribal Model,” Howard Banow in 1968 noted that the tribal model, specifically that of the Masai in Africa, illustrates how a “‘consensus’ decision-making” model might work as a way of encouraging participatory democracy, a concept many in the New Left argued was necessary to create a better society.3 This sense of the tribe also informs a broader sense of the need for community as a means of support and organized resistance. Some in the underground press, such as Leviathan, noted that “collectives” could help reduce the factionalism that had created divisions in the resistance; “the most important one being the unresolved division between our ‘political’ and ‘personal’ lives.”4 The authors voiced a common theme in the underground press that resistance couldn’t function as a part-time effort; it had to weave into the daily lives of those involved. Collectives, as they argue, could help encourage “comradeship” and the sense that all involved were “brothers and sisters.”5 These types of “tribal” structures could ensure that both the responsibilities and benefits of the decisions made would be shared, which would make organizing and communicating more effective. Eastern religions also emerged to encourage less ego-driven political efforts. The Zen Buddhism that Allan Ginsberg, still influential during the Sixties, promoted called for the type of collective thinking that could encourage peace. Even though centrally a spiritual practice, it also informed alternative ideas about communal relationships. In essence, Zen ­Buddhism discarding material concerns for those transcendent experiences, such as community and love. The philosophy was often associated with the hippies, who seemed to manifest something of this alternative perspective during the Summer of Love in 1968. The hippies, the Yippies, and the diggers were similarly inclined to exploring alternatives that were occasionally categorized as “dropping out.” The Yippies were more political than either the diggers or the hippies but all three groups sought to disrupt the dominant culture through undermining accepted norms and values. Guy Strait in “What is Hippie?” claimed that a hippie discarded “middle-class values” such as the “neutral appearance.”6 Instead, the hippie sought flamboyance, to indicate in appearance the type of values he held. At the core, these values were the negation of the status quo, negation of the capitalist ideals of competition and money, which Strait saw as akin to “religious” dogma.7 In a similar vein, Tuli ­Kupferberg offers five generalizations that characterized the hippie. These general characteristics include long hair, a reliance on music, discarding machine-made shoes and clothes for nudity, a desire to “drop out” of the society as then structured, and the use of drugs as a means of avoiding an obsession with the past in favor of a focus on the future.8 References to drugs were everywhere in the underground press during the Sixties. Most commonly referenced were marijuana and LSD; these drugs were seen by their purveyors as something akin to religious sacraments, creating a religious or proto-religious experience. They modified

146  Alternative Dissent the senses, altering the perception of reality to promote the discovery of alternatives to normative social values. In 1966, for instance, the Berkley Barb reported on the Congressional testimony of Arthur Kleps. A member of the Neo-American Church, he argued that LSD was a religious sacrament.9 As such, Kleps argued that the constitutional protection of religion should protect the religious use of LSD. Kleps noted that Timothy Leary was seen as the leading “spiritual” guide in the use of LSD to transcend the banalities or constrictions of the everyday experience. In his LSD manual, The Psychedelic Experience, Leary related taking LSD to the ritual described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. By studying this book, he claimed that the LSD experience is “fluid” and can be divided into three phases or periods: the first “period” is characterized by “total transcendence,” which he defines as an overall freedom from “game” or predetermined social “roles,” values, and norms; the second period involves the experience of “hallucinations” that are interspersed with moments of conscious clarity; and the final period that includes a return to full consciousness.10 Taking LSD was itself a dissident experience, as Todd Gitlin suggests in Years of Hope. Days of Rage. Describing the New Left activism of 1967, Gitlin ponders whether taking LSD, and the changes it induced in the perception of reality, motivated some of the more militant radical behavior at the end of the decade. He notes that such a causal relationship can’t be made, but at the time he did see the two phenomena emerging at a similar time.11 Spirituality functioned as a means of dissent in at least two ways. It created an individual practice one could use to deny the validity of the dominant social discourse, and it offered access to alternative realities that were vividly and persuasively manifested. These novel insights could be used to suggest different social structures that defined alternative and perhaps more inclusive social relationships. Into these spaces of dissent, entered feminist and gay activists.

Feminism and Sexuality Within the context of alternative family structures, the construction of the body takes on increased significance, particularly as it relates to female liberation. Understanding of the modern body was shaped by 18thand 19th-century conceptions of biology and sexuality. According to Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, representations and routines of the body were transformed during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and . . . those transformations were linked to the emergence of modern social organizations . . . , a discourse that not only attributed a new set of social, political, and cultural meanings to bodies but also placed them at the very center of social, political, and cultural significance.12

Dissent and the Family  147 Much the same can be said about the body as represented during the Sixties in the underground press. In these papers, the body and the social institutions defining it were confronted, and in that confrontation, the thinking of the modern body was transformed. Reflecting on the writing of the Port Huron Statement, Tom Hayden claims that “some of our pronouncements were absurd or embarrassing, like . . . the unquestioned utilization of grating sexist terminology (‘men’ instead of ‘human being’) in sweeping affirmations about dignity and equality.”13 The women working in the underground press detested this attitude, as Roxanne Dunbar noted in No More Fun and Games, claiming that the SDS’s 1968 “resolution on women’s liberation” did little to advance the agenda of women’s liberation.14 Around this time, women began to move away from the sexism that permeated the underground press. In part, they were motivated by existentialist philosophy such as that developed in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). In these books, Beauvoir and Friedan critique the institutional reasoning that kept women submissive to men in society. In the early part of the 20th century, society was dominated by a static view of human nature. In the minds of most philosophers, biology was understood as more determined and was, therefore, naturally reflected in the prevailing social structures. However, in The Second Sex, published in French in 1949 and in English in 1953, Beauvoir developed a groundbreaking analysis of how women were constructed within modern western society. She examined this question through biological, social, and historical lenses, illustrating how the diminished social status of women was a product of contemporary social perceptions. In this book, Beauvoir examined how the social status of women was socially constructed, and she did this not merely by interrogating the logic of contemporary discourse but more importantly by first dismantling the biological argument upon which the social argument had been based. This analytical model, interrogating both the science and the social institutions, was followed by Friedan and others. Beauvoir describes her method as follows: So we will begin by discussing woman from a biological, psychoanalytical, and historical materialist point of view. We will then attempt to positively demonstrate how “feminine reality” has been constituted, why woman has been defined as Other, and what the consequences have been from men’s point of view. Then we will describe the world from the woman’s point of view such as it is offered to her, and we will see the difficulties women are up against just when, trying to escape the sphere they have been assigned until now, they seek to be part of the human Mitsein.15 What seems particularly effective about Beauvoir’s methodology is that she approaches the social issues from a scientific basis, avoiding, as she

148  Alternative Dissent says, the “polemicizing” that often had the effect of undermining the feminist argument for equal social status. Of the many possible choices, one example of such a polemical argument is the “Feminist Manifesto” (1914) by Mina Loy. In this manifesto, she makes shocking and compelling points about women and their contemporary social status, such as “to gain power women should cast aside their virginity.” The social significance of the claim is clear, but its persuasive value relies on unifying the base and not on dismantling the underlying logic used by the patriarchy to diminish the contributions of women. The polemical rhetoric functions to direct discontent toward a particular end, while Beauvoir’s method aims to reform the fundamental reasoning upon which discrimination is based. Beauvoir took advantage of enlightenment rhetoric to establish her argument for equality in scientific fact. She then moved from that basis to an interrogation of the illogical claims the patriarchy made about the status of women in society. She began by unpacking biological determinism and the ideas of Freud. This critique of Freud is often repeated in the feminist underground papers. The female organism was a theme used both to refute Freud’s, and by extension the patriarchy’s, claims about female sexuality and as a symbol of women’s liberation. Writing for Ramparts in 1968, Susan Lydon, as did Beauvoir years before, refutes Freud’s claims about clitoral versus vaginal primacy in female sexuality as a “myth,” citing the research of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, showing that the female organism was composed of a complex of sexual responses.16 These responses suggested that women could define their sexuality in their own terms, no longer relying on its relation to male sexuality, male desire, and reproduction. Along with the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960, a woman could define her desire and construct a liberated identity within society. In the History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that rather than an increase in sexual repression, during the Seventies, and certainly emerging to some degree during the Sixties, discussions of sex proliferated: We must. . . abandon the hypothesis that modern industrial societies ushered in an age of increased sexual repression. We have not only witnessed a visible explosion of unorthodox sexualities; but—and this is the important point—a deployment quite different from the law, even if it is locally dependent on procedures of prohibition, has ensured, through a network of interconnecting mechanisms, the proliferation of specific pleasures and the multiplication of disparate sexualities.17 Rather than the law, which still affected homosexual experience, sexuality was socially constructed, loosed in large part from the prescription of the legal system. In Foucault’s view, sex is a social construct and reflects

Dissent and the Family  149 the power invested in social institutions; however, this aspect of sexuality did not make assumptions about sex any less myopic or confused, a point both Beauvoir and Freidan made. The underground press tended to affirm sexuality both by celebrating it and frustrating its accepted standards. The general paradox expressed in the underground press is reflected in Dana Densmore’s “On Celibacy” published in No More Fun and Games in 1968: If you don’t act like a woman he doesn’t see himself as a man, since his sexual identity depends on the differences, and so he feels actually castrated. Expect no love, no desire, no mercy from this man. You have to be prepared, then, to be not just unattractive but actually sexually repulsive to most men, perhaps including all the men you currently admire.18 The inverse relationship, Densmore notes, relates to Foucault’s examination of power as indicated through social discourse: for a man to identify as such requires a woman to correspond to his idea of a woman; treated by her as a man feels is appropriate. This relationship creates a sense of male identity, established in the discourse of social institutions, that invests it with the power to shape day-to-day experience. Foucault sees the power of this relationship established in the “law” or institution of marriage and, what he calls, “the order of desire.”19 The point of making this observation about sexuality is that, according to Foucault, sex was not only a matter of sensation and pleasure, of law and taboo, but also of truth and falsehood, that the truth of sex became something fundamental, useful, or dangerous, precious or formidable: in short, that sex was constituted as a problem of truth. 20 Densmore’s observation about male identity as it relates to female sexuality, a sexuality that is used to affirm male sexuality and male dominance, reflects Foucault’s ideas about sex as truth and as such a location of power. The feminist papers sought to rupture, in Marcuse’s terms, this principle of reality. They did this, at least in part, in two ways: 1 By refuting Freud’s views on female sexuality, following the detailed refutation offered by Beauvoir in The Second Sex, and suggesting a different sexual presence than that offered by marriage, child rearing, and relegation to the private sector where women were to function in support of men. 2 By deconstructing the discourse of sex that placed women in a subordinate position to men in the patriarchal conception of society.

150  Alternative Dissent Perhaps most common in the underground press was a celebration of female sexuality, a sexuality that was understood as deviant or a product of “penis envy.” Of course, Freud’s description of female sexual development was seen as flawed, as part of the patriarchal reasoning that permeated all aspects of culture. Beauvoir’s expansive study informs Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), which took up some of the themes Beauvoir examines. Friedan noted that her book was, in part, a response to critics of Beauvoir’s work: When a Frenchwoman named Simone de Beauvoir wrote a book called The Second Sex, an American critic commented that she obviously ‘didn’t know what life was all about,’ and besides, she was talking about French women. The ‘woman problem’ in American no longer existed.21 Reacting to this dismissive thinking, Friedan focused her study on women’s lived experience, which Beauvoir covered in the second half of her work, and how the role of women was constructed in American culture. This theme of the “other” or “alterity” became important to the underground press of the Sixties. Like Beauvoir, they asked “What is woman?” and like Friedan, they sought ways to reimagine this category as one of individual agency rather than social subjugation.

The Feminist Papers In developing a response to this question, the underground press reflected the radical feminist strand of feminism, the other often identified as the liberal feminist strand. However, a better way to describe the feminisms of this period is not to wrench them into strands but to see them as different forms of dissent. 22 As Bailey points out, tension remains over the definition of these strands: Critiques of liberal feminism made in the 1960s and 1970s, which continue to shape these histories, hold that liberal feminists simply demanded access to a racist society marred by many forms of inequity, while radicals sought to remake that society. 23 Relating these feminisms to culture suggests that liberal feminism argued from the position of an alternative, emergent cultural form, while the radical feminists argued from an oppositional perspective. However, they were both part of defining and appropriating this emergent cultural form into the dominant culture. This structure suggests that liberal and radical feminists were not necessarily opposed but part of a process of cultural transformation, which allows us to discuss them in light of this larger cultural context.

Dissent and the Family  151 Feminist underground papers began to emerge in earnest around 1968–1970, in part as a response to the often-sexist papers run by men. This sentiment was expressed in 1968 by the editors of No More Fun and Games and was echoed in most of the feminist presses of that time. In some ways, this idea becomes a launching point for achieving broader feminist objectives, such as the “revolutionary restructuring of the most basic institutions in society.”24 We resent most the hypocrisy of those who call themselves revolutionaries. Women are asked to help out, and even die machine-gun in hand, helping their men, but ultimately they will be invited (forced) back home to raise men to be children. The young white radical likes very much the “new girl” who is half-liberated-just enough to be willing to go to bed at any time with any one of them, and ask no questions.25 Similarly in Leviathan in 1969, Marge Piercy argued that “there is much anger here at movement men, but I know they have been warped and programmed by the same society that has damn near crippled us.”26 Piercy voices a common theme presented in these presses that it was the social structure, the system of Capitalism and its reliance on exploitation, that caused the problem and that both men and women were trapped within it. Yet given this, feminist activists, as does Piercy, were specific about their anger: “My anger is because they [male activists] have created in the movement a microcosm of that oppression and are proud of it.”27 In the feminist presses, women stressed resistance to this hypocrisy and their use as support for rather than as contributors to a dissenting discourse. It Ain’t Me, Babe, one of the earlier feminist papers, published its first edition in 1970. In that edition, the editors describe their mission in a manifesto: Resistance from male-dominated society is to be expected as the movement for women’s liberation grows in strength and influence. That this should take the form of a male backlash is as unavoidable as the white backlash that followed the emergence of black liberation forces. Male backlash is a reactionary phenomenon based on the sort of fear which everywhere divides oppressed peoples preventing the recognition of their common interests. The expression “castrating bitch” is often heard, but is it in fact women who are responsible for male feelings of impotence or is it the established power structure which frustrates the desires of both men and women for self-expression and control over their lives. 28 Again, it is particularly interesting that the editors indict the “established power structure,” the dominant cultural institutions, and not just men for a general inability for both men and women to pursue their

152  Alternative Dissent desires. Echoing this sentiment from a Marxist perspective, the editors of Old Mole published an article, claiming that “Marxists have quite rightly always stressed that the subordination of women is part of the total mutual devouring process called Capitalism. No one group can be liberated except through a transformation of the whole structure of social relationships.”29 Female liberation was constructed as a mutual effort; however, many feminists began to see the limits of this thinking, arguing that men, even well-meaning activists, were deeply embedded in a patriarchal system, a system that even when being resisted still reflected them, still supported their identities. Such was not the case with women, as the Redstocking and other feminist manifestos clearly assert. The Redstockings articulate their sense of the women’s movement in their “Redstocking Manifesto” published in 1969. In this manifesto, the Redstockings argue that “After centuries of individual and preliminary political struggle, women are uniting to achieve their final liberation from male supremacy. Redstockings is dedicated to building this unity and winning our freedom.”30 The Redstockings echo the term Blue Stockings, which was a group of intellectual and literary women active in the 18th century. The focus in the case of the Redstockings is on Marxist theory and how it informs the ideas of the group. Their manifesto includes seven assertions that stress the importance of women and their perspective as the center of the movement, stating that “women are an oppressed class” and their “oppression is total, affecting every facet” of their lives. For this reason, they understood that essential to female liberation was liberation from the system of oppression, which was a “male dominated system”: “We identify the agents of our oppression as men. Male supremacy is the oldest, most basic form of domination. All other forms of exploitation and oppression . . . are extensions of male supremacy.”31 Unlike some of the earlier iterations in the feminist presses, the Redstockings rejected the attempts that were made “to shift the burden of responsibility from men to institutions or to women themselves,” suggesting that any easy alliance between men and women to change the social conditions oppressing women was, at best, misguided. They close the manifesto invoking their commitment to “internal democracy” to struggling for every woman’s right to a voice and to her choice about her function in society.32 In this closing, the notion of identity as internal democracy is stressed as is a commitment to all women. This aim is reflected in the thinking of some women who responded to the first addition of Up From Under in 1970. Now I realize that my not being liberated will not save my marriage or my sanity. To save both, I will need to: (1). Get my feelings out openly, without hiding those which might not be “feminine”; (2). have friends of my own, not relying on my husband’s acquaintances; (3). participate more in the decisions we have to make together; (4). pull together plans for a job, return to school, and an eventual

Dissent and the Family  153 career so that I can act on them immediately after I am out of here. Betty Friedan does not go far enough in considering the situation of women because she limits herself to possible careers for women. She does not seem to realize how much women who just have jobs have to go through, or how much career women have to exploit other women as nursemaids and housekeepers.33 Hyning indicates the way many women viewed liberation, as a form of autonomy from men that would allow them opportunities to participate with men in society. The claims seem so mild in retrospect that it is easy to understand both the struggles women faced and the dire need to find a way out from such a suffocating system. According to Beth Bailey, one of the unreconciled issues during the Sixties feminist movement was the problem of “difference”: “differences among women were equally difficult to resolve, and the women’s liberation movement itself was ultimately rent by the problem of ‘difference.’”34 This included perhaps most notably racial differences. For instance, Bailey states that “women of color, from a radically different stance, have questioned the relevance of a white feminist movement to their lives and struggles.”35 John McMillian’s claims about the New Left and the Civil Rights movement might also be applied in the case of the feminist movement. Efforts for liberation for white women and women of color moved along parallel paths. These paths would intersect, but the challenges each group faced were significantly different on several points. Women of color, perhaps most centrally, struggled not only with male prejudice but racial prejudice as well, contending against a racist, patriarchal society. Because of this, women of color occasionally attenuated their personal concerns to those of the Civil Rights movement. Even though the issues were complex, one particular compelling concern central to the feminist movement was how the body was constructed in society to reflect the established reality principle. The underground press often sought to rewrite the body, offering a different principle upon which to base a women’s sense of identity, or how the body functions as a location of social meaning and, therefore, dissent.

The Making of the Body The female body, and indeed the body in general, is a location of conflict. Judith Butler observes in Bodies That Matters that in order for feminism to proceed as a critical practice, it must ground itself in the sexed specificity of the female body. Even as the category of sex is always reinscribed as gender, that sex must still be presumed as the irreducible point of departure for the various cultural construction it has come to bear.36

154  Alternative Dissent The underground press explored a similar idea of the body as a location of meaning. In terms of the underground press, liberating women required the liberation of the representation of the body. Reacting to the established cultural understanding of the feminine, the feminist presses deconstructed the language and images used to represent the feminine. One particular frame for understanding the construction of the body is often represented in the “male gaze,” which was itself enacted or broadly perpetrated by popular media. The television, like the print media, articulated women into being. The oft-criticized ads suggested not only the ideal form, which has been extensively unpacked, but also the ideal sexual attitude. Mitchell Goodman collects a number of these images in A Movement Toward a New America. They can also be perused in the archives of the New York Times and other mainstream papers. These ads suggest the underlying assumptions people make about the body, its function, and its relationship to power. For this reason, deconstructing those images is necessary to reveal the logic expressed in their construction. Overall, the images of the body reflect a heteronormative assumption, the idea that men and women come together to create the proper relationship for consumption. In this way, the body became an object to be consumed. An image could be picked at random to illustrate this point; the meanings inferred remain rather consistent. An image Goodman includes is for Serax, an anti-anxiety drug. The rhetoric of the ad is pernicious: “You can’t set her free. But you can help her feel less anxious.”37 To whom the ad is referring as “you” suggests the position of the woman in the ad, who is wearing a head cloth and is located behind a cell composed of brooms and mops. Instead of referring to the woman’s own agency to help herself, she is positioned as the one in need of help from this “you,” who seems to refer to her guardian, such as her husband, who has the power to help “relieve her anxiety and tension.”38 In addition to how it positions this woman, the drug itself invokes ideas of hysteria, a traditional sickness that women were thought to suffer if they resisted the established reality. Women were represented in terms of the mind–body duality: they were bodies without minds—by colonizing the body, one owned the mind. Papers similar to No More Fun and Games would often critique this male gaze through Marxist theory, illustrating how the gaze imprisoned women in false representations. In this paper in 1969, Betsey Warrior addressed this false representation, this false duality, arguing that it is the mind that had become the product: There is an even more subtle exploitation now, the mind is the product. It has taken over the number one position from the body, completely in some circles. In this ancient capitalistic system, persons were always products. Utilities or decorations. But thinking people could usually transcend their environment and see this. Now the thought process itself has become a product.39

Dissent and the Family  155 On the one hand, Warrior suggested that female power was often presented as the symptom of a sickness such as hysteria, anxiety, or schizophrenia, implying that the feminine mind was deficient to that of men. On the other hand, as warrior indicated, right thinking was itself represented and marketed as an elitist attitude, as though one was in on the secret of success represented by some product. In this way, not only the body but the intellect becomes adjunct to Capitalism and its patriarchal reasoning. In essence, the male gaze was extended by popular media. Television, for instance, streamed the male-constructed feminine form into living rooms, a situation feminist critiques recognized. In the underground press, the editors manipulated this gaze to both critique it and use it to achieve their dissenting aims. In liberating the body and the mind, one could begin to liberate the individual.

Gay Papers The Stonewall Inn uprising on June 28th, 1969 outside the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, which had become a gay bar where homosexual dancing was allowed, revealed the tensions present between America’s gay and heterosexual communities. This uprising reportedly started, like so many riots of the era, in response to often accepted but ostensibly illegal clandestine activities. In this case, the Stonewall Inn was reportedly owned by the mafia and had offered the police payoffs for years. As with the Detroit’s speakeasies and other inner-city establishments favored by minority, or emergent cultural groups, the police would occasionally target these establishments to reassert the dominant power structures, structures and the attendant values that those in power often felt were being eroded by emerging social realities. For the patrons of the Stonewall Inn, the police raid that night was a clear attempt to demonize the homosexual lifestyle. The ensuing conflict illustrated the gay communities increasing desire, and sense of emerging socio-political voice, that their lifestyle be legitimized and accepted within the prevailing culture. The uprising and others of its sort reveal that while dissent can be anchored in the symbols of a particularly intense incident, its function extends beyond that moment. Agitation for Gay Rights in the underground press began long before the Stonewall incident. For instance, One: The Homosexual Magazine began publishing in 1953. In its first anniversary issue in 1954, the editors articulated its mission: ONE does not claim that homosexuals are better or worse than anyone else, that they are special in any but one sense. And in that one sense/ONE claims positively that homosexuals do not have the civil rights assured all other citizens.40

156  Alternative Dissent As with other gay papers, One sought to express the complexities of a homosexual identity, giving the community a voice and, importantly, a sense of safety to allow members to express their personal and political stories freely. Similarly, in 1965, Tangents began publishing, claiming in the first issue a sexual-political position: It makes no difference that it is our colossal hypocrisy regarding sex which is at the root of our problems. That we do one thing and say another, that we refuse to bring our laws and public attitudes into line with our private practice seems to trouble us very little. No wonder our sexual theory generally is among the most confused of all aspects of human knowledge.41 Though not the same, homosexual activists, as did feminists, saw in restrictive sexual attitudes the foundation for discrimination. By breaking these stereotypes and expressing a need for more inclusive sexual mores, they could use dissent to more concretely manifest the homosexual alternative within dominant culture. Clarifying this perspective was to state the position polemically in manifestos. As the “Gay Liberation Front’s Demands” indicated, “all discrimination against gay people, male and female, by the law, by employers, and by society at large, should end.”42 The central focus for these emergent cultural forms, and often the focus of their dissenting practices, was to end discrimination by proposing new discursive practices, such as asserting that “sex education in schools stop being exclusively heterosexual.”43 Altering education was a way of changing perception, which could then be further encoded in dominant discursive practices. Of course, discourse and education are co-constitutive, one informs the other, and once a change is initiated in one, the other tends to follow suit. In the underground press, the concern of gays was signified in primarily two ways. The gay community deconstructed existing prejudiced perspectives first to indicate that the gay lifestyle was an alternative but natural way of life, equitable to heterosexual behavior. This approach followed that of both Beauvoir and Freidan. The aberrant nature of homosexuality was a social construct—biology told a different, more neutral story and one that united people in their differences. Other underground papers embraced those aspects that were perceived as aberrant and presented them as oppositional, as a new way of thinking about human experience. It is from this perspective that terms such as “queer” and even “faggot” were disarmed and used to describe an alternative cultural perspective that was located in an emergent cultural form. The Stonewall Inn continues to function in the homosexual community as a symbol not only of the Gay Rights Movement but more as a location of dissent that invites a dialectic between meaning and

Dissent and the Family  157 interpretation, between a story and its ongoing revision and reemergence within culture. Functioning in this way, dissent can be seen as an essential tool for unsettling that which becomes reified in order to give it meaning and continuance in the experience of everyday life. If Gay Rights were defined by the Stonewall Inn incident alone, many, such as the Trans community, would be left out. The dissent in the underground press opened the discourse to not decide on all issues but to engage them without the editorial oversight of mainstream journalism. It freed the voice and energized the culture with difference and, thus, potentiality.

Conclusion Taken as a whole, the construction of the family in relation to the social body and sexuality represents the construction of identity. According to Tom Hayden, one of the accomplishments of dissent during the Sixties was “a rainbow of identity movements . . . staked out independent identities and broadened the public discourse.”44 The lesson is how to move from these identity politics and their fractured and fractious imaginings to an understanding based upon the experiences these movements revealed. The aim of these dissenting acts was to develop from the emergent structure of feeling a cultural form promoting alternative social institutions to establish the meaning of family as a more diverse unit within society. This effort is a challenge but a challenge that is a natural part of the process of dissent. Dissent is uncomfortable as it brings different cultural discourses into contact and often into conflict. Resulting reactionary rhetoric is frustrating, but recognizing this as a process might invigorate and help continue such necessary dialogue.

Notes 1 Roxanne Dunbar, “Female Liberation as the Basis for Social Revolution,” No More Fun and Games, February, 1969 – Independent Voices, 103–115. 2 Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 82. In this section of the Manifesto, Marx also claims that the proletariat, for a limited time after the revolution, would take control of society. The totalitarian implications are chilling. 3 Howard Banow, “Tribal Model,” in Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 450. 4 Randy Rappaport, Beverly Leman, and Carol McEldowney, “Political Collectives: To Close the Gap and Leave No Space for the Man to Come Between Us,” in Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 451. 5 Rappaport, Leman, and McEldowney, “Political,” 451. 6 Guy Strait, “What Is a Hippie?,” in Notes from the Underground: Where It’s At and What’s Up, ed. Jesse Kornbluth (New York: Ace Publishing, 1968), 221.

158  Alternative Dissent 7 Strait, “What,” 222. 8 Tuli Kupferberg, “The Hip and the Square: The Hippie Generation,” in Notes from the Underground: Where It’s At and What’s Up, ed. Jesse ­Kornbluth (New York: Ace Publishing, 1968), 224–228. 9 Walter Bowart, “Neo-American Church Gives ‘em Hell,” Berkeley Barb, June 24, 1966, Independent Voices, 10. 10 Timothy Leary, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the ­Tibetan Book of the Dead (New York: The Citadel Press, 1964), 13. 11 Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. Revised edition (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), 253. 12 Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), vii. 13 Tom Hayden, Port Huron Statement: The Visionary Call of the 1960s Revolution (1962: repr. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005), 9. 14 Dunbar, “Female,” 103. 15 Simon de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 38. 16 Susan Lydon, “Understanding Orgasm,” in Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 37–38. 17 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 49. 18 Dana Densmore, “On Celibacy,” No More Fun and Games, October, 1968, Independent Voices, 26. 19 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 37. 20 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 56. 21 Betty Friedan, The Feminist Mystique (New York: Norton, 1997). 6. 22 My use of “form” here suggests a means of expression and not the more general understanding as an example or version of dissent. The distinction is that form, as Marcuse notes in The Aesthetic Dimension, expresses the content; content, in other words, is form. 23 Beth Bailey, “The Women’s Movement,” in The Columbia Guide to ­A merica in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 127. 24 Heather Dean, “Free Woman,” in Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (New York: ­Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 43. 25 No More Fun and Games, editorial, No More Fun and Games, October, 1968—Independent Voices, 4. 26 Marge Piercy, “The Grand Coolie Dam,” in Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 60. 27 Piercy, “Grand,” 60. 28 It AINT Me BABE, editorial, January, 15, 1970, Independent Voices, 1–2. 29 A Structure in which Both Sexes are Tragically Trapped,” in Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 51. 30 Redstockings, “Redstocking Manifesto,” in Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 50. 31 Redstockings, “Redstocking,” 50. 32 Redstockings, “Redstocking,” 50.

Dissent and the Family  159 33 Sheila Van Hyning, “Letter to the Editor,” Up From Under, May–June, 1970, Independent Voices, 4. 34 David Farber and Beth Bailey, The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 126. 35 Farberand Bailey, Columbia, 129. 36 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 28. 37 Mitchell Goodman, ed., Movement Toward a New America: The B ­ eginnings of a Long Revolution (New York: Pilgrim-Knopf, 1970), 50. 38 Goodman, Movement, 50. 39 Betsey Warrior, “Drag Queen Intellect,” No More Fun and Games, ­February, 1969, Independent Voices, 51. 40 “One.” ONE, January 1, 1954, Independent Voices, 1–2. 41 Don Slater, editorial, Tangents, October, 1965, Independent Voices, 5. 42 Gay Liberation Front, “The Gay Liberation Front Demands. . . ,” in BAMN [By Any Means Necessary]: Outlaw Manifestos & Ephemera, ed. Peter Stansill and David Zane Mairowitz (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1971), 200. 43 Gay Liberation Front, BAMN, 200. 4 4 Hayden, Port Huron Statement, 29.

Conclusion Defining Dissent, a Theory of Cultural Change

Defining Dissent My aim has been to define dissent in order to suggest how it functions as a cultural practice, facilitating the change of cultural institutions. The value of those changes will certainly continue to be debated. A critique of the social institutions that constitute culture, that functions as its consciousness, reveals the co-constitutive relationship or dialectic dissent and culture share. This dialectic relationship informs dissent. In all the efforts the underground press initiated to achieve formative changes in cultural institutions and so society, one is left asking: was their effort successful? A corollary to this question is, was the vision developed by these presses even worth seeking? The answer to that question is at times hopeful, suggesting transformative possibilities, and at times distressing, suggesting the depths of human despair. Some groups established clearer ideas about how to achieve change and what a better structure might be. The visions of these groups might be categorized, using Raymond Williams’ scheme, as oppositional and alternative. Each group developed a different sense of how social institutions might combine to create a more inclusive “effective dominant culture.” In the oppositional presses, which were primarily focused on reimagining political institutions, the vision of a new society was founded on at least two essential concepts: one was the idea of a participatory democracy defined by democratic institutions. The second was the belief that socialist principles, in general, would help structure a more egalitarian society. Existentialism informed both of these ideas of a better society, primarily the notion that individuals should choose how they want to live and that these individual conceptions might converge into an egalitarian social structure. The alternative press, however, sought to establish a society different from that which existed. They did not seek to replace it exactly, though that rhetoric did exist, but sought to provide an alternative to the dominant. From these visions and the dissenting practices that shaped them, we develop a deeper understanding of dissent.

Conclusion  161 What we learn about dissent from the underground press is that for a culture to be healthy, dissent is essential. This relationship suggests a theory of dissent that rests upon two central premises: 1 Dissent is a mode of discourse that functions to both critique and interpret culture, or, in other words, as a way of understanding the structure of everyday life. 2 Dissent is the process by which culture is adapted to a dynamic present. The agent engaged in this adaptation is of particular interest. These two premises deny the sense of progression that tends to undermine our understanding of change. Dissent indicates how cultural experience emerges as a process that can be used as a tool. Cultures are always changing that is clear, but that change has nothing to do with the arrow of progress or the particular plans of a specific ideology. The change has everything to do with how the present, our experience of emergence, is interpreted. For this reason, dissent functions as a neutral and inevitable cultural operation that will, no matter what, lead to change. Learning both to identify the nature of dissenting practices and how change emerges from them can create space for a dialectic that can inform culture and help us engage more deeply with our experiences, understanding how they define our everyday lives. In this study of dissent, the Sixties underground press reveals two additional issues: 1 Social institutions overlap, one affirmed by the other in what I imagine in the interlocking of puzzle pieces. The segments are not the same but they tightly engage with the other. This structure might be another way to imagine the scheme of culture that Raymond Williams establishes. In this scheme, dissent is the mechanism shaping the ways those pieces interlock with different cultural forms. 2 The trope of blaming the system for the behavior of the individual shifts the responsibility for acting in good faith from individuals to a system that is at best nebulous. Generally, this system is understood as the capitalist system, but how capitalism functions to construct anti-social behavior is harder to see. Marx offers insight into how this system or structure diminishes the cultural capital of workers and Michel Foucault offers insight into how the discourses of power are centered in institutions which then shape our relation to power and thus how we behave. However, in shifting blame from individuals and groups, such as police officers, to the system or social structures, the underground press began to sound hollow.

162  Conclusion These two central observations suggest an important location for dissent in the analysis of culture. Through dissent, we begin to see how discourse functions to interrogate culture and give the “structures of feeling” Williams discusses, culture meaning and presence. Dissent as a way of life is characterized by dialectic, a mode of discourse that helps reveal the nature of cognitive dissonance out of which meaning emerges. In On Tyranny, for instance, Timothy Snyder discusses the importance of supporting our social institutions to resist tyranny. He claims that “it is institutions that help us to preserve decency” and by extension a wide range of attitudes and behaviors through which society and thus culture is structured.1 His point indicates that it is institutions that determine how we live, and it is these that tyrants will attempt to appropriate. However, the aim is not to simply support those institutions but to interrogate them: “We tend to assume that institutions will automatically maintain themselves against even the most direct attacks.” Even though Snyder means to support the dominant codes the social institutions establish, he also reveals that institutions are not self-sustaining; they do not contain a mechanism to correct themselves most obviously because what is correct has been naturalized and, therefore, decoding those meanings is unconscious. Yet, these codes need to be continually debated and defined to determine what constitutes the good. The underground papers published during the Sixties illustrate how dissent functions to expose the values propagated by our institutions, offering a means for engaging them. Dissent is a discourse, and as a discourse, it is one of the means by which social meanings and the social behaviors associated with them are constructed. This construction occurs “in” and not “through” language, a point Walter Benjamin stresses. 2 Benjamin’s distinction indicates that discourse is socially constructed through the process of coding and decoding language signs, as Stuart Hall indicates. 3 Social institutions frame this coding/decoding process, naturalizing both the code while at the same time “constructing some of the limits and parameters within which decodings will operate.”4 Dissent functions by interrupting or rupturing this coding/decoding process at the points of coding and decoding. At these points of convergence, as coding informs the construction of the ideas meaning, dissent denaturalizes the product of the process (the meaning) through oppositional or alternative reinterpretations of it. Hall refers to this type of code as an “oppositional code” through which the “politics of signification” is enacted. 5 Relating this perspective to that of Raymond Williams’ view of the dynamics of culture, we can locate dissent more clearly. Dissent is an oppositional and alternative means of understanding this process, and, in interrupting how social institutions construct and maintain dominant codes, it offers oppositional and alternative understandings of emerging cultural forms or, in Halls terms, codes. These forms are

Conclusion  163 codes in the process of manifesting within the dominant form. What Hall suggests is that the aim of dissent is not merely to offer resistance but to complete the integration of the emergent cultural form within the “effective dominant.”6 Accomplishing this transformation of culture is not merely to reform current institutional codes (e.g. values and norms), but instead to change them. In this sense, change is a transformation in which previously held codes do not disappear but remain as emergent or residual forms. In these locations, altered or discarded forms continue to have an effect upon the development and incorporation of new forms into the dominant culture. This process of dissent, defining the dynamics of cultural change, is what keeps the culture and society stable, offering a means of problematizing codes that are too easily held and reducing the disconnect between emerging cultural codes and how people understand them as a frame for acceptable behavior. The underground press, and the press in general, is so important in the process of dissent because it can address a broad spectrum of issues as they are taking shape, giving people access to emerging “structures of feelings” and a means of discussing them in order to manifest them as fully realized cultural forms. Considering dissent in the context of contemporary social media provides a sense of what we learn from the underground press publishing during the Sixties.

Implications for Today We think we understand dissent and the role today’s social media plays in it. We can produce examples of these media, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or WhatsApp. These apps have identifiable attributes, a clear and more or less easy to use apparatus. Yet, what can be said to define these applications is that they allow users to create and share content with others and, through these activities, develop social networks that make developing and disseminating dissenting message possible. Examples of such dissent continue to resonate—perhaps most notably is the Arab Spring uprising in 2010, which was widely hailed as an example of the power of social media to facilitate change. Current trends suggest a different interpretation. In a recent article in the New York Times, Mike Isaac identifies a shift in the use of social media from these more public forms of sharing, again Facebook and Twitter, to more private ones, such as email newsletters. The reason for this shift, Isaac claims, is twofold: 1 The email newsletter offers him a closer connection with his audience. He can email his newsletter to specific people and they can respond. In this way, a more nuanced conversation can develop, which allows for more attention on the message rather than the fact that the message is public.

164  Conclusion 2 He owns his audience; therefore, he does not need to rely upon the media’s apparatus to provide an audience through the application of their logarithm. Because of this situation, he can manage the audience in ways he deems both appropriate and advantageous to him and the community.7 Isaac’s anecdote indicates the importance of considering how such media functions—how content creation, social sharing, and networking function in general and, here, as a means of dissent. And it is this process essential to the function of social media that the underground press of the Sixties provides some unexpected but compelling insights. The underground press suggests a way of defining dissent not merely as a term but as a process or means of engaging in debate with the dominant in a way to achieve change by testing alternative cultural codes and ultimately establishing them in culture. As the editors of BAMN ponder, “After all the loudmouthed posturing and wishful thinking, all the manifestos and ephemera, will it really be the ones and zeros of the computer’s binary code that render authority obsolete and redefine human relations?”8 The short answer to the editors may be “no.” Yet, the slightly more nuanced response must be “no” and “yes.” No to computers rendering authority obsolete, most definitely no. And “yes,” to computers redefining human relations, a redefinition that has had a profound impact on the function of dissent.

Digio-Electracy: The Role of Contemporary Social Media in Socio-Political Activism During a TED Talk presentation in 2011, Wael Ghonim described the role social media played in the Egyptian uprising (what he referred to as “Revolution 2.0”).9 During this presentation, he claimed that “no one was a hero” and that everyone involved in the uprising “contributed something.” He concluded the presentation with a moving description of what he wrote on his Facebook page during these events: I said that we are going to win. We are going to win because we don’t understand politics because, we are going to win because we don’t play their dirty games, we are going to win because we don’t have an agenda. Ghonim’s claims relate to a concern Malcolm Gladwell expresses in “Why the Revolution will not be Tweeted.” In this essay, Gladwell argues that social media are not well suited to facilitate dissent because of the type of network ties they create. Gladwell claims that activism requires “strong ties,” and that social media create “weak ties.” These weak ties can promote “participation” but not “motivation,” and

Conclusion  165 without motivation, dissent has little chance of changing “entrenched norms and practices.”10 Fundamental to the motivation promoted by such “strong ties” is a centralized hierarchy, which can establish the “discipline” necessary to develop long-term political strategies. Gladwell argues that because social media are not well suited to developing “the clear lines of authority associated with [hierarchies],” their users have “real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals” and achieving “systematic change.”11 Other researchers, such as Sarah Joseph and Clay Shirky, interpret the role of social media in dissent more positively. Quoting Shirky, Joseph argues that social media are “tools” that “alter the ‘dynamics of the public sphere’ by allowing citizens to ‘coordinate more rapidly and on a larger scale than before these tools existed.’”12 Similarly, Daniel Ritter and Alexander Trechsel conclude that the scale and speed with which protests can be mobilized through social media affect the revolutionary process in two ways: it allows “for an impressive multiplication and amplification of voices that complicate regime efforts to control expressions of dissent” and weaves “the international and domestic spheres . . . into a feedback loop that can accelerate a revolution” (19–21). Finally, in summing up his analysis of the effects of social media on political activism, Marc Lynch observes that the strongest case for the fundamentally transformative effects of the new media may lie in the general emergence of a public sphere capable of eroding the ability of states to monopolize information and argument, of pushing the transparency and accountability, and of facilitating new networks across society.13 These technologies may provide a space for narratives counter to the dominant; however, the concern is that narratives will emerge within a formless framework lacking the strong ties or hierarchies to link them coherently. Sensing stagnation in this debate, Lynch concludes by noting that these uprisings “should push debates about the effects of new media away from stylized arguments between optimists and skeptics and towards more careful empirical testing of specific mechanisms and claims.”14 In analyzing the types of empirical studies Lynch mentions, I explore the relationship between social media and dissent, formulating from this analysis a tentative outline of a theory describing how social media functions as a mode of dissent, potentially encouraging “cultural work.” Social media is a means by which dissent can be facilitated, engaging users in conversations about specific “norms and practices,” to use Gladwell’s terms, that seem at odds with the public good. Social media, according to Shirky, supports the two-step process required to develop “well-considered political opinions”: “The first step requires

166  Conclusion access to information; the second, use of that information in conversations and debate.”15 However, the question that Shirky’s analysis seems to overlook is to what extent do social media promote debate and the development of reasoned opinions over the production of mere conversation.

The Platform As Hall’s analysis of television suggests, social media platforms are “structured in dominance.”16 In general, this structure means that coding of messages on these platforms is in part dictated by the design and tools available to the user, and these features are controlled by the dominant ideology. These tools create a standardized format that channels discussion around a particular set of assumptions. In Facebook, posts are anchored by “statuses.” The “status” suggests a particular logic: one’s status is a reflection on her current attitude. This stance is particularly solipsistic and positions the audience as respondents to that status. Therefore, the decoding of a message is primarily focused on one’s personal perception and less on the particulars of the information. Instead of considering if the information is accurate and interesting, users tend to consider whether the attitude is positive or negative in relation to one’s own perception, or as Gladwell claims, “where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools.”17 Disrupting this structure is not possible from within a particular platform. A user can’t, for instance, change how statuses, tweets, or Instagram feeds are designed nor how the messages they contain are delivered. If I tweet a message, it must be limited to a certain length and contain certain, though broad, types of information. If I articulate an opinion outside those established by the platform, and what discourse is allowed often reflects a dominant set of values, then I will be banned, effectively censored. Hall might refer to the content on social media as a “negotiated code,” in that even if I disagree and voice that disagreement, I am still supporting the dominant discursive practices. This coding/decoding process is perhaps one of the central issues with social media. User-created content is not the primary function of the design. The design that shapes the content and reading of it is directed toward promoting consumption. Users are encouraged to engage not just the messages but the design, scrolling to find more and more messages and in so doing receive more and more advertising. Unconsciously by supporting the structure of the platform, the community becomes a community of consumers and consuming becomes the central act of engagement—­every click, link, or “like” becomes an invitation to advertisers to sell the user a product. Users cannot meaningfully resist the aims of this design and tend to submit to the prevailing code and the limitations it builds into decoding messages.

Conclusion  167

Participation versus Motivation Gladwell picks up on this paradox in developing a distinction between participation and motivation in dissent. He argues that “social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.”18 Gladwell’s claim suggests that social media tend to undermine “motivation” by fragmenting the sense of purpose that a more consistent and coherent message can offer. Inadvertently supporting this observation, Ritter and Trechsel, as well as Ghonim, note that the Egyptian uprising was “decidedly decentralized.”19 For Ghonim, this decentralization was a benefit to the uprising because it promoted multiple voices and encouraged broad participation; however, for others, such as Gladwell, decentralization reveals how a media platform “structured in dominance” can become a means of disseminating misleading information and creating a potential method and location for repression. The underground press suffered from a similar level of decentralization; yet within the protesting groups, a paper helped create a cohesive sense of the message and how it related to the dominant discourse created by the prevailing social institutions. Social media, however, tends to create a vision of one, which might relate to a protest movement, but not facilitate an identification with it and its specific participants. Gladwell’s point is echoed in the rhetorical studies of social media. Jane Fife, for example, assigned her students the task of analyzing the rhetorical practices used in Facebook. 20 Her findings, though naturally limited, indicate several of the discursive issues often overlooked when using this and other social media sites. Fife found that Facebook is often perceived as lying outside rhetorical considerations. Citing Christine Rosen, Fife notes that “Facebook is more about creating status by amassing large numbers of friends than about connecting with genuine friends”21 while Jamerson Magwood claims that Facebook profiles are not arguments: ‘Each account is an individual representation of someone else’s view, but not an affirmed point on a given argument. The accounts do not really establish a thesis or intend to prove a point, which does not work with traditional rhetorical standards. 22 Fife’s, Rosen’s, and Magwood’s observations suggest that Facebook is (like other social media) not well suited to the development of arguments. Instead, these platforms tend to provide locations or containers where surface impressions or feelings can be deposited as insular points of interest. Social media tend to limit argumentation because the platform design and tools are not well suited to encouraging debate. In part, this is due

168  Conclusion to the fractured structure of these media, containing significant amounts of information translated through innumerable perspectives, and in part because people are not taught to use the media to articulate clear theses and provide effective support for them. Yet, Fife’s informal analysis and the more formal studies by Christopher Mascaro, Alison Novak, and Sean Goggins, as well as Jules Boykoff illustrate how analyzing interpretive frames reveals the argumentative structure of these media and how they might be used to facilitate dissent.

Rhetorical Framing, Fracturing but Not Controlling the Message Boykoff analyzes how the mass media (not including social media) tends to frame social movements, noting that “Social movements and the actions they undertake are portrayed through mass media framing, whereby news is presented through identifiable lenses.”23 As in Fife’s analysis of the types of “interpretive” frames used to structure Facebook profiles, the frames used by the mass media tend to function as commonplaces or topoi. Aristotle argues that these commonplaces help authors construct effective arguments by situating them within logical frameworks upon which their ideas can be communicated. Moreover, these frameworks facilitate understanding by creating the common ground across which audience and author connect. However, these commonplaces or frames, as Boykoff suggests, can cause arguments and the actions associated with them to become “routinized,” which affects the “interest that social movements garner from the media.”24 An understanding of framing practices provides, on the one hand, an opportunity for the users of social media, who can develop messages that circumvent larger media channels, to fracture the “episodic” framing that Boykoff argues “leads to shallower—and in some instances, misinformed—understandings of political and social issues.”25 These decentralized messages make them, as Ritter and Treschel claim, difficult for a given regime to control (19) but also, as Evgeny Morozov argues, difficult to turn into real “political change.”26 In this context, dissent on social media has three overarching conventions central to analyzing these platforms: 1 Episodic Framing using moderators: According to Marc Lynch, the “key to most arguments about the transformative effects of the Internet is that new individual competencies and networked forms of communication will aggregate over time into systemic change.”27 How the mechanism fostering such accretion would work remains uncertain. Many seem to think that this process is a natural part of discourse that has at its center a specific concern or message. However, such coalescing does not appear to occur in any systematic way, which frustrates the development of coherent goals and practices.

Conclusion  169 In a study of the framing practices employed by the Facebook pages of contemporary political groups, Mascaro, Novak, and Goggin found that administrators would use status updates to articulate theses that were then commented on. Within the comments, they found those messages that were most coherent featured administrators and contributors who could “influence the direction of the discourse,” creating an intellectual exchange that approximated a debate.28 2 Linking of social and mass media outlets: Ritter and Trechsel argue that the interaction between social media and the mass media, Al-Jazeera in their case, helped disseminate information about the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings to both domestic and international audiences. Applying Boykoff’s observations about framing to Ritter and Trechsel’s description of Al-Jazeera’s role reveals that part of the reason for the initial success of these uprisings was due to how Al-Jazeera framed the issues, providing the “thematic framing” that Boykoff argues is essential to effective communication. Social media tends to fragment the dissenting message leading to a less coherent linking between social media and mass media. The papers used by the underground press, however, could be more coherently framed in two ways: a

The papers contained a coherent structure that both the mass media and general readers could clearly decode, even when the content was commenting on the journalistic form itself. b The message conveyed through these papers was less fragmented due to the use of the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS) and the Liberation News Service (LNS). The UPS and LNS distributed packets to their members that contained articles ready for publication. These packets helped create a unified message across a wide variety of papers. Unlike this structure, which approaches the centralized hierarchy Gladwell sees as necessary, social media promotes users who are both the creator and the consumer of their own messages, creating a self-­justifying loop that undermines both debate and communication of ideas. 3 Linking social media to physical protests: Nathan Jurgenson, similar to a point Ghonim suggests in his presentation, argues that the use of social media “effectively merge the digital and physical into an augmented reality” that has created “augmented revolutions.”29 The benefit of this augmentation, according to Jurgenson, is that it helps protestors reach an audience, or in Jurgenson’s words, “No longer are protesters just shouting into the wind . . .; they are also shouting into a network where there may be an audience receptive to the message”30 (88). Jurgenson’s admission that their “may be” an audience for a dissenting message illustrates the issue with these

170  Conclusion types of connections. No real audience is necessarily present to engage with the message, leaving it displaced in the digital sphere where it is unlikely to be confronted by anyone. Unlike the documents that once supported social movements, such as underground papers, broadsides, flyers, and pamphlets—the virtual message is often decoupled from a physical space. These spaces add an important lived dimension that embeds protests within the public imagination. For example, Tiananmen Square in Beijing or Wenceslas Square in Prague became central to the discourses surrounding the movements associated with them, locating them within reality and providing a motif for thematic framing to promote, as Joseph calls it, “progressive change.”31

Integration of Social Media Genres into Dissenting Practices Even though the issues with social media and dissent are significant, the media continue to be used as a tool of protest. Certainly, the importance of social media in recent global protests justifies their inclusion not only as part of our research agendas but also as valid literacies to be taught in the classroom. According to Henry Giroux, effective social discourse, and thus dissent, a practice essential to mature democratic engagement, needs to be taught: Given this current crisis, educators need a new political and pedagogical language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing our world. . . . At stake here is recognizing the power of education in creating the formative culture necessary to both challenge the various threats being mobilized against the very idea of justice and democracy while also fighting for those public spheres and formative cultures that offer alternative modes of identity, social relations and politics.32 Social media, if used as a means of coding effective dissenting messages, could help drive the type of culture work Giroux describes. One way we might test how effectively social media, such as Facebook, functions to facilitate change might be the following: Develop a Facebook page for student government. On it, administrators might claim that students need to meet on the lacrosse field at a specific time to receive news “that will change their lives.” At the same time, another group might post up flyers arguing that students need to meet on the football field to receive news “that will change their lives.” Once students arrive, they might receive a gift part of which is a request to set up and advertise a “change your life” event in (say) the library,

Conclusion  171 using either print or virtual media, but not both. After a few weeks, one might assess which medium, physical or virtual, was the most effective. The aim of the experiment would be to test how effectively media is at mobilizing, sustaining, and, thus, motivating actions that might lead to systemic changes. This may illustrate how dissent can function, but it wouldn’t emulate how the complexities of real struggle are conveyed and redressed on social media. The only way to consider these issues is to study them during and after they occur. This examination of dissent in the underground press published during the tumult of the Sixties provides insight into the role social and other digital media play in contemporary protests. An analysis of this relationship also suggests how these media might come to enable dissent.

Notes 1 Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017), 22. 2 Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Reflections, trans. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 314. 3 Stuart Hall, “Encoding, Decoding,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1993), 90–103. 4 Hall, “Encoding,” 100. 5 Hall, “Encoding,” 103. 6 Hall, “Encoding,” 95. 7 Mike Isaac, “The New Social Network That Isn’t New at All,” New York Times, March 19, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/technology/new-­ social-network-email-newsletter.html 8 Peter Stansill and David Mairowitz, BAMN [by any means necessary]: Outlaw Manifestos & Ephemera, 1965–1970) (Brooklyn, NY: Automedia, 1971), 10. 9 Wael Ghonim, “Inside the Egyptian Revolution,” YouTube, posted March 4, 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWvJxasiSZ8 10 Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted,” The New Yorker, October 4, 2010. 11 Gladwell, “Small Change.” 12 Sarah Joseph, “Social Media, Political Change, and Human Rights,” Boston College International and Comparative Law Review 35, no. 1, 167. 13 Marc Lynch, “After Egypt: The Limits and Promise of Online Challenges to the Authoritarian Arab State,” Reflections, June, 2011, 307. 14 Lynch, “After,” 307. 15 Joseph, “Social Media,” 152. 16 Hall, “Encoding,” 91. 17 Gladwell, “Small Change.” 18 Gladwell, “Small Change.” 19 Daniel Ritter and Alexander H. Trechsel, “Revolutionary Cells: On the Role of Texts, Tweets, and Status Updates in Nonviolent Revolutions,” Conference paper. Conference on Internet, Voting and Democracy. Laguna Beach, California, May 14–15, 2011, 13. 20 Jane Mathison Fife, “Using Facebook To Teach Rhetorical Analysis,” Pedagogy 10, no. 3, 2010, Academic Search Complete, 555. 21 Fife, “Using Facebook,” 556.

172  Conclusion 22 Fife, “Using Facebook,” 557. 23 Jules Boykoff, “Framing Dissent: Mass-Media Coverage of the Global Justice Movement,” New Political Science 28, no. 2, 2006, Academic Search Complete, 204. 24 Boykoff, “Framing,” 204. 25 Boykoff, “Framing,” 206. 26 Lynch, “After,” 303. 27 Lynch, “After,” 303. 28 Christopher M. Mascaro, Alison N. Novak, and Sean P. Goggins, “Emergent Networks of Topical Discourse: A Comparative Framing and Social Network Analysis of the Coffee Party and Tea Party Patriots Groups on Facebook,” in Web 2.0 Technologies and Democratic Governance: Political, Policy and Management Implications, vol. 1, eds. Christopher G. Reddick and Stephen Kwamena Aikins (New York: Springer, 2012), 16. 29 Nathan Jurgenson, “When Atoms Meet Bits: Social Media, the Mobile Web and Augmented Revolution,” Future Internet 4, 2012, 84. 30 Jurgenson, 88. 31 Joseph, “Social,” 152. 32 Henry Giroux, “Critical Pedagogy in Dark Times,” Praxis 17, no. 2, July– December, 2013, 28.

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Activist 42, 45, 71n19, 89 Adorno, Theodor 35, 47, 77 advanced industrial civilization 9, 76 advanced industrial society 8, 10, 31, 48, 78–81, 97, 131 advertising 85; corporate 82; deconstructing the binaries of 80; as a “magic system” 85; Raymond Williams on 85; social values and 85; World War I, development during 85 The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetic (Marcuse) 16, 109, 111n51, 120, 158n22 aesthetics 120–3; of dissent 123; Marxist 121; teaching 139–40 African American(s) 48–9, 51–5, 58–9, 77–8, 130–1 African American identity 78 African Genesis (Ardrey) 106 “aggressive socialization” 47–8 The Agony of the American Left (Lasch) 41 Allen, Donald 125, 132 Allen, Gwen 125, 127, 129, 132–4, 136 Amazon Quarterly (Laurel) 6 America: conditioning of 84–6 American culture 3, 9, 13, 30, 34, 150 American hegemony 2–3, 53 American identity 12, 91 American Indian Movement 54 American liberalism 70 American politics 26, 41–3, 47, 81, 114 American Servicemen’s Union (ASU) 65–6

analysis of culture 2, 14, 22, 36n9, 162 “The Analysis of Culture” (Williams) 22 The Ann Arbor Argus 130 Ann Arbor Sun 130 anthologizing the Sixties 7–13 Ardrey, Robert 106 Armies of the Night (Mailer) 65 artistic manifestos 124–5 arts: and dissent 139–40; liberal 80, 94n29, 95–6, 104, 107–8 Asimov, Isaac 56 “At the Ends of the Earth” (Lang) 66 Audit 9 automation 82, 88; see also new industrialism Bailey, Beth 2–3, 40, 43, 150, 152, 153 Baldwin, James 51–2 BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) (Stansill and Mairowitz) 58, 73n67, 164 Bandersnatch 33 Banow, Howard 145 Baraka, Amiri 135 Bardacke, F. 68 Barthes, Roland 125 Benjamin, Walter 11, 46, 162 Bercovitch, Sacvan 26, 110n17 The Berkeley Barb 59, 71n11, 82, 87, 132, 135 Bishop, Elizabeth 133 Black Arts Movement 54 Blackburn, Robin 78–9 “black culture” 2 Black Dialogue 50–1, 53–4, 106 Black Mountain Review 134

184 Index Black Nationalism 50 Black Nationalism (Essien-Udom) 25 Black Nationalists 51, 53 Black Panther Party 58, 87, 130 Black Panthers 16, 48, 58, 60 Blake, William 120 Blanchett, Cate 124 Bloom, Allan 55–6, 84, 95–6, 98, 106, 109n3 Bloom, Harold 109n3 Blueprint for Counter Education (Stein and Miller) 97–8, 101, 106–7 Blue Stockings 152 Bodies That Matters (Butler) 153 body: making of 153–5; meaning of 14; mind–body duality 154; modern 146; social 157 Book of Dissent (Hsiao and Lim) 12 Booth, Paul 25, 43, 71n7 Boykoff, Jules 168–9 Brave New World (Huxley) 56 Brecher, Jeremy 61 Brightman, Lehman L. 54 Brown vs. Board of Education 49 Buddhism 17, 133 Bullsheet 33 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) 54 Burke, Charles 63–5 Burroughs, Margaret G. 51, 72n39 Bury Me Standing (Fonseca) 91 Butler, Judith 153 Buzzfeed 3 “By Any Means Necessary” slogan 60 The Cambridge Companion to the 1960s (Farber and Bailey) 2 Camus, Albert 8, 12 Capitalism 15; automation or new industrialism 88; Communism and 40; global 113; late 78–81; Marx’s critique of 76; military-industrial complex 82–4; money economy 86–8; New Left and 25; passive media, television and conditioning of America 84–6; problems with 82–8; Raymond Williams on ideology and 75–6 capitalist consumer ideology 97 capitalist ideology 80, 92 Carey, Marty 41 Carson, Rachel 80 Castro, Fidel 95 Catholic missionaries 68 Certeau, Michel De 28, 112

Che Guevara 95 Chombart, Paul-Henry 116 Chomsky, Noam 26, 30–1 Christianity 31 Christians 50 Civil Rights Movement 4; John McMillian on 153; New Left and 43, 49, 153; and question of praxis 48–52; during Sixties 49–50; Tom Hayden on 49 Clark, John 113–14 Clarke, John Henrik 25 Cleaver, Eldridge 97 Clifton, Lucille 140 The Closing of the American Mind (Bloom) 55, 84, 95 Cockrel, Kenneth 59 Cold War 7, 36n22, 40, 43–5, 47, 61, 96, 105, 121 Cold War logic 15, 45, 82–3, 96 Coleman, Les 64 Collier, Peter 34 colonialism 53; external 53–5; Fanon on 53; internal 53–5; intrinsic 53, 55; Knight on 58; New Left and 15 communes 89–91 communication: mass 123–4; personto-person 124 communism 15; abuses of 25; Capitalism and 40; cultural 109n2; egalitarian 76; New Left and 43; Old Left and 25 Communist Manifesto (Marx) 21, 44, 58, 60, 68, 144, 157n2 communist populism 122 conditioning of America: capitalism and 84–6 Connections 105 consumerism 85 corporate advertising 82 Costanoan Indians 68 “counterculture” 2 Counter-Monument Project 116–17 Creeley, Robert 134–5 Creem 130 critiquing, “mass” in mass media 123–4 cultural communism 109n2 cultural Marxism 34–5, 109n2 Cultural Marxists 35 culture: American 3, 9, 13, 30, 34, 150; black 2; counterculture 2; divides of 2; established 24; feminisms and 150–1; and its

Index  185 features 20–9; Marxist presentation of 20; mass-produced commercial 127; role of art in 120–1; scientific 126; Sixties 126; Western 95; Western assumptions about 106; youth 2, 7 Culture and Society 1780–1950s (Williams) 21 “culture of death” 57, 60–4, 81, 83; Vietnam War and 60–3 Dadaism 17 Dadaists 124, 132 The Daily Californian 81 Dane, Barbara 8 Das Kapital (Marx) 18n6, 20 “death drugs” 17 “Death Parade” 57 De Beauvoir, Simone 8, 10, 125, 147–50, 156 Declaration of Independence 59 Dellinger, Dave 49, 72n35 democracy: internal 152; liberal 26; participatory 15, 24, 43–4, 49, 79, 89, 145, 160 Democratic Vistas (Whitman) 139 Densmore, Dana 148 designing, press 127–9 Detroit Police Department 59 Deutscher, Isaac 49, 72n35 Dewey, John 96 Dick, Philip 56 digio-electracy 164–6 Dini, Rachele 10 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Foucault) 56 Dispatches (Herr) 63 dissent: aesthetics of 123; culture and its features 20–9; defining 160–3; digio-electracy 164–6; etymology of 29–30; implications for today 163–4; integration of social media genres into dissenting practices 170–1; participation versus motivation 167–8; and place 67–9; platform 166; rhetorical framing, fracturing but not controlling message 168–70 Dissent (Young) 12 Dissent, Injustice, and the Meanings of America (Shiffrin) 14 dissenting practices 43–69; Civil Rights Movement and question of praxis 48–52; dissent and place

67–9; draft 65–7; external and internal colonialism 53–5; New Left and the great refusal 43–8; resistance 63–5; social justice 55–60; Vietnam War and the “culture of death” 60–3 dissenting stories 113 “division of labor” 48 Doan, Herbert 81 dominant social order 5 Domino Effect 61 Dow Chemical 81, 84, 105 draft 65–7 “Draft Clearing House Memorandum” 67 drugs 17; death 17; Serax 154; underground press during Sixties and 145–6 Dunbar, Roxanne 147 Earth House Hold 90 The East Village Other 12, 68, 132, 135 economic institutions 75–8 economic reforms, means of 88–91; communes 89–91; guaranteed annual income 89 economy: capitalism, problems with 82–8; economic institution 75–8; late capitalism or advanced industrial society 78–81; means of reforming 88–91 education: becoming an industry 94n30; compulsory 103; educational institution 95–9; higher 80, 95, 107–8; liberal 26, 80, 84, 96, 98; moral 30; Nicolaus on 94n30; sciences and humanities 104–6; underground press’ critique of 99–104 educational institutions 95–9 “effective dominant culture” 14–15, 21, 71n19, 108, 160 egalitarian Communism 76 Ehrenreich, Barbara 47 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 25, 36n22, 60, 82–3, 105 Ellison, Ralph 8 embodied space 114–15 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 119, 120 Enlightenment 95, 109n2 Essien-Udom, E. U. 25 “established culture” 24 “established reality principle” 4

186 Index “ethics of ambiguity” 125 etymology of dissent 29–30 Eurocentrism 106 European Gypsies 91 “European-Latin Myth: An Open Letter from an Indoamerican Student” (Rosal) 106 existentialism 8–9, 160 expression: mode of 125–6 external colonialism 53–5 Facebook 163–4, 166–70 The Fall of America 139 “false consciousness” 2, 42, 62, 121 family: case for identity 157; feminism and sexuality 146–50; feminist papers 150–3; gay papers 155–7; institution of 144; making of the body 153–5; tribe 144–6 Fanon, Frantz 53–4 Farber, David 2–3, 40, 43 Farber, Jerry 100 fascism: German 63; leftist 41, 87 The Feminine Mystique (Friedan) 10, 147, 150 femininity 10 feminism: liberal 150; radical feminist strand of 150; and sexuality 146–50 “Feminist Manifesto” (Loy) 148 feminist papers 150–3 Fife, Jane 167–8 The Fifth Estate 64, 128, 130 Finke, David 45–6 The Fire Next Time (Baldwin) 51 Fonseca, Isabel 91 Fortune magazine 63 Foucault, Michel 56, 148–9, 161 Frankfurt School 11, 34, 41, 47, 109n2 Franklin, Ted 131 Free City Diggers 67 Freedomways 25, 50–3 “free universities” 16 Freire, Paulo 107–8 Friedan, Betty 10, 147, 150 Frost, Robert 133 Futurists 124 GAI 89 Gallagher, Catherine 146 Gandalf 59 “Gay Liberation Front’s Demands” 156

gay papers 155–7 German fascism 63 Ghonim, Wael 164, 167, 169 GI Bill of Rights 66, 80 Ginsberg, Allan 17, 139–40 Giroux, Henry 170 Gitlin, Todd 1–2, 5–8, 13–14, 18n3, 27, 40, 68, 74n103, 146 Gladwell, Malcolm 114–15, 164–7, 169 Glessing, Robert J. 29, 33 Godard, Jean-Luc 97 Goggins, Sean 168, 172n28 Goldberg, Barry 66–7 Goodman, Mitchell 7–11, 79–80, 83, 100, 154 Goodman, Paul 102–3 Graffiti 67, 128 Graham, Shirley 51 Gramsci, Antonio 23 Great Depression 2, 16, 77 Great War (1914–1915) 85 Greenfeel 33 Gross National Product 77 guaranteed annual income 89 Guardian 43, 128, 137n11 Guitar Army 130 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution 60 Habermas, Jürgen 41 Haffner, Jeanne 116 Hagan, Joel 130 Hard Times 33 Harvey, David 26, 113–15 Havens, Richie 131 Hayden, Tom 42, 44–6, 49, 60, 71n7, 71n19, 82–4, 86, 91, 96, 99, 147, 157 Hayes, Harold 8 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 79 Helix (Young) 57 Hendrix, Jimi 131 Herman, Edward S. 26 Herr, Michael 63 higher education 80, 95, 107–8 Hinduism 17 hippies 11, 16, 42, 48, 145 Hirschman, Albert O. 6, 13, 34 History of Sexuality (Foucault) 148 Hitler, Adolf 63, 82 Hobbes, Thomas 78 Hobson, Geary 91 Hoffman, Abbie 17, 41

Index  187 Holt, John 100–1, 103 Hooks, Bell 107–8 Hoover, Paul 133 Horowitz, David 34 Hotel Abyss (Jefferies) 47 House Made of Dawn (Momaday) 54 Hsiao, Andrew 12 HuffPost 3 Hunton, W. Alphaeus 51 Huxley, Aldous 56 hyper-consumerism 77 identity: family and 157 “ideological criticism” 6 ideology: American political 47; capitalist 80, 92; capitalist consumer 97; Cold War 43; contemporary socio-political 41; defined 75; liberal 25–6; Marxist 60, 81; progressive 26; Raymond Williams on 75; as “the science of ideas” 75 In Defense of a Liberal Education (Zakaria) 80 Independent Voices (database) 8 industrialism 76 Industrial Workers of the World 90 inner-city space: defining 112 Instagram 163, 166 “instrumental reasoning” 31 internal colonialism 53–5 internal democracy 152 introjection 126, 129 Isaac, Mike 163 It Ain’t Me, Babe 151 Jackson, Esther 51 Jacobs, James 42 Jameson, Fredric 77 Jefferies, Stuart 34–5, 47 Jefferson, Thomas 117 Jemez Pueblo tribe 54 Jewish Holocaust 58 Jews 50 Johnson, Lyndon Baines 3–4, 32, 40–2, 55, 61, 65 Johnson, Virginia 148 Jones, LeRoi 135 Joseph, Sarah 165, 170 The Joshua Tree 131 Kafka, Franz 12 Kaiser, Charles 1

Kaplan, Geoff 6 Kaufman, Michael 1 Kellner, Douglas 47, 78, 88 Kennedy, John F. 40, 61, 70 Kennedy, Robert 61 Kerner Commission 55; see also National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders Kerner Commission Report 55, 58, 70, 78 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Williams) 21, 40 Kick Out the Jams 131 “Kick Out the Jams, Motherfucker” 131 Kierkegaard, Soren 8 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 48–50, 52, 55, 60–1 Kleps, Arthur 145–6 Knight, Eldridge 58–9 Kornbluth, Jesse 4, 7, 11 Koukal, D. R. 114, 118n12 Krassner, Paul 41 Kupferberg, Tuli 145 Kurlansky, Mark 1 labor unions 82 Lang, Bradford 66 Laqueur, Thomas 146 Lasch, Christopher 41 late capitalism 78–81 Leamer, Laurence 8 Lefebvre, Henri 112, 116 “Left Fascism” 41 leftist fascism 87 Lenin, Vladimir 95 Lennon, John 130 Leo, John 43, 63, 65 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (King) 50, 55 “Letter to the New Left” (Mills) 5, 9, 82 “A Letter to the New (young) Left” (Hayden) 45, 71n19 Levertov, Denise 134–5, 138n33 Leviathan 78, 93n11, 145, 151 liberal arts 80, 94n29, 95–6, 104, 107–8 “liberal democracy” 26 liberal education 26, 80, 84, 96, 98 liberal feminism 150 Liberalism 61; American 70; New Left and 25, 40

188 Index Liberation 49 The Liberation News Service (LNS) 32, 58, 169 Lim, Audrea 12 Limbo 84–5 The Long Revolution (Williams) 85 The Los Angeles Free Press 97, 105 Love Street 33 Lowell, Robert 133–4 Loy, Mina 148 Luxemburg, Rosa 30, 37n41 Lydon, Susan 148 Lynch, Marc 165, 168 Magwood, Jamerson 167 Mai Lai massacre 53 Mailer, Norman 65 mainstream media Malcolm X 48, 50, 61 “male gaze” 154 Mallory, Mae 52 Man in the High Tower (Dick) 56 Manufacturing Consent (Chomsky and Herman) 26 Mao Zedong 12, 95 Marcuse, Herbert 4, 8–11, 16, 31, 35, 42, 47–8, 51, 76, 78, 86, 88, 97, 101, 107, 109, 111n50, 120–3, 126–7, 131, 136, 137n2, 139–40, 149, 158n22 Marin, Peter 83, 99 Marion, Gordon 9 Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Blake) 120 Marrow, Lance 1, 18n1 Mascaro, Christopher 168–9, 172n28 Marx, Karl 20, 76, 79; Communist Manifesto 21, 44, 58, 60, 68, 144, 157n2; critique of Capitalism 76, 79; Das Kapital 18n6, 20; humanism of 42; New Left and 18n4; Old Left and 18n4; on private property 68; on proletariat revolution 144, 157n2 Marxism 8, 21, 61; cultural 34–5, 109n2; cultural communism and 109n2; superstructure 21; as a theory of culture 76 Marxism and Literature (Williams) 14, 21 “Marxism and Nonviolence” (Dellinger, Muste, and Deutscher) 49 Marxist aesthetics 121

Marxist ideology 60, 81 mass communication: “classic” view 123; “synthetic” view 124; “totalitarian” view 124 mass media: critiquing “mass” in 123–4; interaction between social media and 169; social movements and 168 Masters, William 148 materialism 15; historical 76; imaginative literature and 139; Whitman on 139 Maus I and II (Spiegelman) 58 Mayer, Bernadette 125 McDermott, John 41 McDonough, Graham P. 30–2, 34, 48, 96 MC5 songs 131 McLuhan, Marshall 97, 101 McMillian, John 4, 19n36, 43, 49, 153 media: mainstream (see mainstream media); mass (see mass media); passive 84–6; social (see social media) “Memo from a Monroe Jail” (Mallory) 52 Michaelson, L. W. 84 Middle East 116 Midpeninsula Free University 102 military-industrial complex 25, 60, 82–4, 105 Miller, Larry 97–8, 100–2, 106 Mills, C. Wright 4–6, 9, 11, 46–7, 59, 61, 63, 70, 71n23, 82, 92, 98–9, 123–4 mind–body duality 154 mode of expression 125–6 Mohanty, Chandra 107 Momaday, N. Scott 54 Monet, Claude 127 money 86–7 money economy 86–8 moral education 30 Morozov, Evgeny 168 Mother of Voices 33 motivation: money as 86; participation vs. 167–8 The Movement 132 The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution 7, 79, 154 Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal (MAC) 124

Index  189 Muste, A. J. 49, 72n35 Myers, Allen 65 The Nation 41, 100 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders 55; see also Kerner Commission Native American iconography 68 Native American Renaissance 54 Native Americans 53–4, 68, 91, 106 Nature (Emerson) 119 Neal, Lawrence 53–4 “negative thinking” 48 Nelson, Cary 122 Neo-American Church 146 neoliberalism: David Harvey on 26; defined 26 The New American Poetry (Allen) 132 new industrialism 88; see also automation New Left 4; and great refusal 43–8; Old Left and 18n4, 44, 76 The New Left Notes 19n39, 24–5, 42–3, 47, 61, 106, 128, 132, 137n11 New Left Review 5, 46 New Yorker 119 New York Times 3–5, 43, 63, 119, 154, 163 Nicolaus, Marin 83, 94n30, 94n31, 103 1984 (Orwell) 18, 56 Nixon, Richard 4, 12, 57, 105 No More Fun and Games 144, 147, 149, 151, 154, 157n1 non-violence 43, 48–50, 60 Notes from the New Underground: Where It’s At and What’s Up (Kornbluth) 4, 7–8 “A Note to My Friends” (Knight) 58 Novak, Alison 168–9, 172n28 “The obfuscated Poem” (Mayer) 125 occupying space 113–14 Occupy Wall Street Movement 112–16, 139 Ochs, Phil 27 O’Donnell, Lawrence 1 O’Hara, Frank 135 Old Left: abuses of communism and 25; emergence in the Thirties 2; Great Depression and 2; Marxist and labor activists of 18n4; New Left and 18n4, 44, 76

Old Mole 152 Olsen, Charles 134–6 “On Celibacy” (Densmore) 148 One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse) 8, 47–8, 78, 88, 107 One: The Homosexual Magazine 155–6 On Tyranny (Snyder) 162 Oppenheimer, Martin 24 Origin 134 Orwell, George 18, 56 Other Scenes 87 OWS Poetry Anthology 140, 141n1 The Paper 66, 83, 105 Paper Bag 33 Paper Highway 33 The Paper Revolutionaries: The Rise of the Underground Press (Leamer) 8 Paper Tiger 33 participation vs. motivation 167–8 participatory democracy 15, 24, 43–4, 49, 79, 89, 145, 160 passive media, and Capitalism 84–6 peacetime military draft 65 Peck, Abe 20–2 “Pentagon Papers” 3–4 People’s Park in Berkley, California 68 person-to-person communication 124 “perverse effect” 34 Philadelphia Student Mobilization Committee 65 Piercy, Marge 151 Pink Floyd 131 Pinter, Harold 11, 12 place: dissent and 67–9; practiced 115–16 poetics of dissent: aesthetics 120–3; aesthetics of dissent 123; artistic manifestos 124–5; critiquing the “mass” in mass media 123–4; designing the press 127–9; mode of expression 125–6; poetry 132–6; rhetoric of the underground 126–7; rock music 129–32 poetry 132–6 pointillism 127 political institutions 40–3 Politico 3 politics: Civil Rights Movement and question of praxis 48–52; dissent and place 67–9; dissenting practices 43–69; draft 65–7; external and

190 Index internal colonialism 53–5; New Left and great refusal 43–8; political institution 40–3; resistance 63–5; social justice 55–60; Vietnam War and the “culture of death” 60–3 “Politics of the Movement” (McDermott) 41 populism: communist 122; reemergence of 26 Porsche 80 The Port Huron Statement (Hayden) 10, 15, 32, 42–6, 60, 63, 79, 82, 84, 86, 88, 91, 96, 99, 105, 109, 147 Postmodern American Poetry (Hoover) 133 Potter, Paul 65 Pound, Ezra 133 poverty 35, 40, 54–5, 84 Power to the People (Allen) 127 The Practice of Everyday Life (De Certeau) 112 practiced place 115–16 press: designing 127–9; mainstream 3–7 Prison Notebooks (Gramsci) 23 The Psychedelic Experience (Leary) 146 Quirk, John 89 Quotations from Chairman Mao (Mao Zedong) 12 race riots 4 racism 20, 40, 51, 60, 69, 131 Radical Arts Troupe of Berkley 25 radical subjectivity 39, 126–7 The Rag 33, 43, 62 Ramparts 58, 148 The Rat 31, 33, 43 Rawls, John 56 “reactionary rhetoric” 13 The Realist 31, 41, 86 “Redstocking Manifesto” 152 “Re-educating Yourself after Reading C.P. Snow” 104 “remote control economy” 84 Repression and Recovery (Nelson) 122 “repressive desublimation” 97 “Reserve Liberal Training Camp” 25 The Resistance 63–5 Revolutionary Youth Movement 64 Rexroth, Kenneth 133

rhetoric of the underground 126–7 The Rights of Assent (Bercovitch) 26 “Rise Up and Abandon the Creeping Meatball!” slogan 41 Ritter, Daniel 165, 167–9 rock music 129–32 Rogers, David 101 Rolling Stone 130 “Romantic Fallacy” 106 Rosal, Gerado 106 Rosefeldt, Julian 124–5 Rosen, Christine 167 Rubin, Jerry 27, 41, 87 Rudd, Mark 64 San Francisco Express Times 5 San Francisco Renaissance 134 Sartre, Jean-Paul 8 Savio, Mario 80–1 Schechter, Danny 139, 141n2 Schnapp, Jeffrey 97, 106 sciences and humanities 104–6 scientific culture 126 Screw 31 SDS Bulletin 19n39, 27, 32, 36n19, 128 The Second Sex (Beauvoir) 10, 147, 149–50 Second Thoughters 34 Second Thoughts: Radicals Look Back at the Sixties (Collier and Horowitz) 34 secular humanism 9 Sexton, Anne 134 sexuality 14; 18th-century conceptions of 146; 19th-century conceptions of 146; Catherine Gallagher on 146–7; female 148–50; feminism and 146–50; male 148–9; Thomas Laqueur on 146–7 Shackleton, Mark 91 “shared-epistemic history” 31 Shattuk, Roger 9 Sheridan, Arthur A. 50 Shero, Jeff 33 Shiffrin, Steven 14, 19n40 Shirky, Clay 165 Silber, Irwin 8 Silent Spring (Carson) 80 Silko, Leslie Marmon 91 Simon, John 68, 133 Sinclair, John 130–1 Situationalists 124

Index  191 Sixties 7; culture 126 The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Gitlin) 1, 40 Smiling through the Apocalypse: Esquire’s History of the Sixties (Hayes) 8 Smith, Adam 76 Smith, Mike 100–1, 107 Smoking Typewriters (McMillan) 4 Snow, C. P. 104, 106 Snyder, Gary 90–1, 135 Snyder, Timothy 162 social elites 23 “social hegemony” 23 social institutions 2, 4, 7, 9, 11–14, 20–3, 25–35, 39, 41, 46–9, 53, 55, 76, 78–9, 89–91, 96–7, 105, 115, 124, 128–9, 131, 147, 157 socialism 70, 79 social justice 55–60 social media: Arab Spring uprising and 163; Egyptian uprising and 163–4; functions as a mode of dissent 165–6; and mass media 169; and physical protests 169–70; socio-political activism and 164–6 socio-political activism: role of contemporary social media in 164–6 Soja, Edward W. 113, 115 Soul on Ice (Knight) 58 Soviet Union 40, 43 space: embodied 114–15; occupying 113–14 Spectator 64 Spiegelman, Art 58 spirituality 14, 17, 82 Stein, Maurice 97–8, 100–2, 106 Stevens, Wallace 133 Stitzlein, Sarah 108–9, 111n50 Stonewall Inn uprising 155–6 Strait, Guy 145 STRESS (“Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets”) 59 “structure of feeling” 28–9, 45, 89, 99, 127, 130, 157 “The Structure of Power in American Society” 70 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) 41, 48, 49, 69 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) 10, 19n39, 24, 32, 43–4, 48, 62–5, 115

subjectivity: existentialism and 9; liberating 123; poet’s 134; primacy of 10; radical 39, 126–7 Surrealism 17 Tangents 156 Teaching Dissent (Stitzlein) 108 Teaching to Transgress (Hooks) 107 Tea Party (Pinter) 12 technological rationality 78 TED Talk 164 television: capitalism 84–6; content of 86; male gaze and 155; women and 154 Ten Commandments 117 Tet Offensive 60 Theory of Justice (Rawls) 56 ‘Third World’ 43 Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China 115, 170 Tibetan Book of the Dead (Leary) 146 Time 1 Tish 10 Today Show 81 “total administered society” 31, 107 Translove Energies 130 Trechsel, Alexander 165, 167, 169 The Trial (Kafka) 12, 56 “The Tribal Model” (Banow) 145 tribe 144–6 Truthout.org 113 Tuan, Yi-Fu 112 Twitter 114, 163 “Two Cultures” (Snow) 104 Tyler, Walter 64 UAW 44 Uncovering the Sixties (Peck) 20 The Underground and Education (Smith) 100 underground press 1–18, 21, 24–35, 41–8, 51–3, 56–9, 61–7, 69, 76–82, 85–92, 96, 98–9, 101–8, 115, 12–135; see also specific entries underground press anthologies 13 The Underground Press in America (Glessing) 29 Underground Press Syndicate (UPS) 169 United Native Americans Movement 54 University of Berkley 68 University of California 68

192 Index University of Michigan 3 University of Wisconsin 105 Up From Under 152 Vietnam GI 68 Vietnam Memorial 116 The Vietnam Songbook (Dane and Silber) 8 Vietnam War 7, 60; American culture and 61; American military conduct during 4; and “culture of death” 60–3; ideologies 47; liberalism and 40; New Left and 43; War Moratorium and 61 violence 49; American social institutions and 53; inner-city 77 Vygotsky, Lev 101 The Wall 131 “War” 131 Wardle, Irving 12 “wargasm” 62 War Moratorium 61 Warpath 54 Warrior, Betsey 154–5 Washington Monument 116–17 Washington Post 3, 119 Weatherman 60, 64 “We Demand the Politics of Ecstasy!” slogan 41 Wenner, Jann 130 Western Civilization 96 Western culture 95 Westmoreland, William Childs 62 Whalen, Philip 135

“What is Hippie?” (Strait) 145 “What Price Freedom?” (Baldwin) 52 WhatsApp 163 White Panther Party 87 Whitman, Walt 139–40 “Why the Revolution will not be Tweeted” (Gladwell) 164 “Why Tribe” (Snyder) 90 Wieners, John 135 Williams, Raymond 2, 13, 14, 75 Williams, Rob 52 Williams, William Carlos 133 Winthrop, John 83 Wolfe, Janet 68 Woodstock Festival 88 Wordsworth, William 120 “The World is Too Much With Us” (Wordsworth) 120 World War I 85 World War II 2, 16, 54, 77, 80 The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon) 53 Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Gitlin) 146 Yellow Dog 33 Yippies (countercultural group) 27, 86 Young, Allen 57 Young, Iris Marion 57 Young, Ralph 12 youth culture 2, 7 Youth Movement 4 Zakaria, Fareed 80 Zatlyn, Ted 105 Zen Buddhism 145