After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion

5. Cosmic Architects

5 Cosmic Architects 117 Maybe it was sentimental, if not actually stupid, to romanticize the sixties as an embryonic golden age. Certainly, this fetal age of enlightenment was aborted. Nevertheless, the sixties were special; not only did they differ from the twenties, the fifties, the seventies etc. they were superior to them. Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the sixties constituted a breakthrough , a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realized its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness. Tom Robbins (248) Several decades after the event, baby boomers continue to sit behind “the curtains of darkness,” trying to shed some light on this magical-mystical decade. This quote from Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume (1990) clearly displays the rhetorical double-movement made by many survivors of the sixties counterculture; obliged to dismiss or disown romanticized recollections, and yet, more often than not, doing just that themselves later in the same paragraph. This era (which was obsessed with traditional Western mythical narratives) managed to found an industry dedicated to churning out its own narcissistic myths of the sixties. Even the term the sixties functions today—after several nostalgic revivals—as an omnipresent Rorschach blot on to which people project their own meanings and/or memories. As the steady trickle of memoirs continues into this new millennium , the task of “uncovering” the sixties—of scraping away the sands of time and the misty myths of the media—becomes increasingly archaeological. In Hippie Hippie Shake (1995), Richard Neville presents his book as a “warts and all” analysis, as if most other veterans had forgotten to take off their rose-colored glasses along with their kaftans. To strip away the myth, however, does not uncover some uncut truth or reality, for this is the elusive secret ingredient that held everything together. As Todd Gitlin says in a book simply entitled The Sixties (1987), “the outcome and meaning of the movements of the sixties are not treasures to be unearthed with an exultant Aha!, but sand paintings, something provisional, both created and revised in historical time” (433). The sixties was always, and continues to be, a self-conscious conversation with itself. The mythical glue that was used to fashion that chaotic time into a coherent narrative was reapplied in the 1990s by people as ideologically opposed to one another as Germaine Greer, Camille Paglia, Harold Bloom, Timothy Leary, and Richard Neville. The Sixties has consequently become a shorthand term pointing to a multiplicity of contested meanings and moments, and the revisions of these over time. Many social and political battles have since been pushed to the wayside in the artificial process of fitting history in to clearly demarcated, and morally legible, decades. (Did the sixties really end in 1970? Or begin in 1960?) In this chapter I turn to some very specific texts and technologies that have served as a rhetorical hinge between the decadence of the 1890s and the millenarianism of the 1990s. Some readers may believe it is a little premature—or even ambitious—to be conducting an archaeological expedition into the 1960s. Excavating the libidinal traces of certain rhetorical strategies, however, is an important task in relation to the discussion at hand. Significant figures and struggles are necessarily absent in my selection of voices that speak of the sexual and nuclear revolution, mainly because I seek to uncover a particular stance toward these key moments that qualify as dionysian. Through a recontextualization of Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse, among others, we can forge a greater understanding of the sixties’ influence on today’s millenarians. (Perhaps it is no surprise then, that such narratives are launched, on the whole, by the characteristic dionysian: male, embittered, American or European, educated, and relatively economically privileged.) To scrutinize the warts of the sixties—and indeed there were plenty— is less important, however, than to understand a turbulent time that spent as much energy on pinpointing a stable collective identity as on trying to dissolve the rigid structures of society. In terms of historical symmetry, the sixties came a generation too early. As Angela Carter quipped, “the fin is coming a little early this siècle” (Showalter 1). On the face of it, the sixties zeitgeist had more in common with that of the late nineteenth century than our own. After the Orgy...