Historicizing Theory

12. The Spectrality of the Sixties

Alas! The time is coming when man will no more shoot the arrow of his longing out over mankind, and the string of his bow will have forgotten how to twang! —Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra In an interview for the documentary Berkeley in the Sixties, activist Frank Bardacke reflects on the utopian aspirations of “People’s Park”: In a down to earth way we were showing in our very activity the image of a new society; our job is to form a counter culture, a more rural culture, a more decentralized culture, to develop counter values of cooperation, production for use rather than production for profit—develop that culture in hopes that that culture would be in revolutionary contradiction to bourgeois culture. And we should view ourselves as revolutionaries but really as mothers and fathers of this counter culture. I can almost convince myself of it now. The utopian impulse contributed to social movements like People’s Park, but it was also a “structure of feeling” that inspired critical theory from the sixties to the present day. Utopia was not always the lucid ideology exemplified by Bardacke’s “image of a new society”; it also appeared as an unspecified desire or hope for major systemic change or what Raymond Williams calls “affective elements of consciousness.”1 The academics of the “next generation,” who did not experience the euphoric and utopian moments of sixties activism in the United States, were nevertheless often trained or inspired by the theory-hope 277 12 The Spectrality of the Sixties BENJAMIN BERTRAM of baby boomers.2 Much of the theoretical work in that decade was inspired by the utopian sense that anything is possible if not in genuine social or political change than surely in the way we interpret, shape, and think about reality . Indeed, many social and political concerns in contemporary theory today are based on the utopian view that radical systemic change is extremely desirable if not imminent. At the same time, utopian ideologies have become hard to maintain amid a crisis of representation.3 In particular, socialist utopianism has been pushed further into the margins as perspectival or molecular formations have taken center stage.4 Utopia may no longer be a structure of feeling or ideology as it was for progressives in the sixties, but I hope to show that Jacques Derrida’s notion of the messianic in Specters of Marx (1994) is one important indication that utopia continues to have a shaping presence in critical theory. The juxtaposition of poststructuralism and Marxism will enable us to see a range of utopian inspirations that were so crucial to the historical emergence of theory. Utopia may be fragmented and uncertain in the postCold War global imaginary, but it still enjoys a strong presence in the Marxist tradition and critical theory in general. Once regarded as the historical residue of the desire for the land of Cockaigne and other folktales of a land of plenty, utopia has more recently been attacked as an egregious totalizing discourse.5 In the 1980s, for example, when irony and fragmentation stood as the pillars of American postmodernism, utopia looked politically bankrupt and outmoded. More ominously, a consensus was formed by many people that, as Jean Baudrillard put it, “the US is utopia achieved.”6 If utopia was almost abandoned by the Left, it was still available to serve other interests, including the Disney vision of the future or the “conservative revolution” of the early 1990s. When utopia no longer serves the interests of left-wing intellectuals, it remains a vital part of popular culture , politics, and artistic symbolism. In fact, as Fredric Jameson points out, utopian consciousness is part of class consciousness or rather the relational structure of collective group struggle. Thus utopia even plays a vital role in the right-wing culture of market economies. Because it grapples with the reality principle, utopia is more than a dream of Cockaigne, an affirmative map that eradicates the negative and social conflict.7 Moreover, utopia transcends Cartesian representational consciousness by operating in unconscious libidinal desires and in the unconscious ideological positions of class conflict. As Jameson’s global perspective on the sixties suggests, the events of that decade called for totalizing or even revolutionary responses. Demonstrating that Third World revolutions can be understood in relation to structural changes and collective forms of praxis in the First World, in particular the United States and France, Jameson links the revolutionary cultural politics of the sixties to anti-colonial wars, the...