The 60s, Without Apology (review)

148 the minnesota review a connection. Full moon. High tide. Because it's all gesture and nobody ever talked in words. (TS: "Logbook") Raworth's work demands for its appreciation a change in the very way we think the public is constituted, going beyond the split between public and private apparently justified by the existence of the pronoun "I" into a full recognition of the social—and political—constitution of subjectivity. JOHN HIGGINS The 60s, Without Apology edited by Sohnya Sayres, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz and Fredric Jameson. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984. 390 pp. $12.95 (paper); $29.50 (cloth). The 60s, Without Apology opens with a statement of intention—namely, the desire to place the 60s in perspective, "to combine the affirmative with the critical, an attempt to salvage certain positions now under severe attack," and so save the decade in question from the kind of criticism the editors find embodied in Hilton Kramer's journal The New Criterion. When reading the "essays, interviews, and testimonies" included here, however, the comparison which comes to mind has less to do with a contemporary journal of a different slant and more to do with an earlier collection of essays, The God That Failed, which recalled another radical time. Within this earlier work, edited by Richard Crossman and published in 1949, six writers of various backgrounds and nationalities attempted "by an act of imaginative self-analysis" to recall their past experiences with Communism in order "to study the state of mind of the Communist convert, and the atmosphere of the period—from 1917 to 1939—when conversion was so common." but if The 60s, Without Apology and The God That Failed share the same impulse of self-examination and look at the periods they study after the same ten-to-fifteen-year interval, the similarities between the two collections end there—for the breast-beating which characterizes the guilt-ridden retrospective of the Old Left is nowhere to be found in these later essays, which re-examine the New Left and counter-culture movements. On the Contrary, as written by "veterans of the passions of their time," to borrow a phrase of one of the contributors, these essays look at the 60s from a perspective which is often self-critical, sometimes self-congratulatory, but never selfcastigating . As the editors assert at the end of their introduction, "We put this work before the reader in the form of an intervention, and we do so without apology." The collection itself, a double issue of Social Text, is divided into two sections—the first a series of longer critical pieces covering various aspects of the 60s (such as the New Left, civil rights and black nationalism, rock music, feminism, and the Vietnam War), the second a group of shorter and more personalized memoirs concerning prior influences and present remains. Although this diversity necessarily makes the collection quite wide in scope, a number of points crop up often enough so that some generalizations about the decade can be drawn. First, as Stanley Aronowitz's opening essay points out, the decade was characterized by two kinds of countercultures, one devoted to political change, the other to artistic innovation and freedom in personal expression. Second, both reflected a common desire to infuse everyday life with a spiritual sensibility, some larger sense of purpose or meaning. Third, both differed from the radicalism of the 1930s Old Left by ignoring in their discourse the models of Soviet Russia, Marxism, and Communism, and so replacing theory with experience. Perhaps most importantly, both sought goals which were Americanist in derivation. Indeed, while recognizing the bond among radical groups that opposition to the Vietnam War forged, reviews 149 it is the Americanism of their aims that the contributors return to over and over again, the sense of "left isolationism," no matter what specific group they discuss. Aronowitz places the SDS Port Huron Statement within a tradition of American ideas about popular selfgovernment . James Gilbert views the decade's moral priorities in the context of Puritanism, Perfectionism, and other social schemes in which the impulse to live by absolute values alone dominates. David Apter's essay on the left in Japan and...