Narcissism and the Theater of the Absurd - Overexposure to manufactured illusions soon destroys their representational power. The illusion of reality dissolves, not in a hightened sense of reality as we might expect, but in a remarkable indifference to reality. Our sense of reality appears to rest, curiously enough, on our willingness to be taken in by the staged illusion of reality. Even a rational understanding of the techniques by means of which a given illusion is produced does not necessarily destroy our capacity to experience it as a representation of reality. The urge to understand a magician’s tricks, like the recent interest in the special effects behind a movie like Star Wars, shares with the study of literature a willingness to learn from the masters of illusion lessons about reality itself. But a complete indifference even to the mechanics of illusion announces the collapse of the very idea of reality, dependent at every point on the distinction between nature and artifice, reality and illusion. This indifference betrays the erosion of the capacity to take any interest in anything outside the self. Thus the worldly child, unmoved, stuffs herself with cotton candy and “wouldn’t care” even if she knew how twenty-four clowns managed to fit into a single car.
Radicalism as Street Theater - The degeneration of politics into spectacle has not only transformed policy making into publicity, debased political discourse, and turned elections into sporting events in which each side claims the advantage of “momentum,” it has also made it more difficult than ever to organize a political opposition. When the images of power overshadow the reality, those without power find themselves fighting phantoms. Particularly in a society where power likes to present itself in the guise of benevolence—where government seldom resorts to the naked use of force—it is hard to identify the oppressor, let alone to personify him, or to sustain a burning sense of grievance in the masses. In the sixties, the new left attempted to overcome this insubstantiality of the establishment by resorting to politics of confrontation. By deliberately provoking violent repression, it hoped to forestall the co-optation of dissent. The attempt to dramatize official repression, however, imprisoned the left in a politics of theater, of dramatic gestures, of style without substance—a mirror-image of the politics of unreality which it should have been the purpose of the left to unmask.
Theoreticians of the cold war saw the tactics of “escalation” as a means of impressing “relevant audiences” with the nation’s strength of purpose; the strategists of the left, equally obsessed with appearances, believed that gestures of escalating opposition would eventually bring the establishment to its knees. In both cases, politics appeared as a game the object of which was to communicate to the opponent the escalating cost of his own policies.
When he was sufficiently impressed with the cost, on this assumption, he would abandon intransigence in favor of conciliation. Thus opponents of the war in Vietnam announced in 1967, with great fanfare, that they intended to move “from dissent to resistance,” expecting that resistance would have to be countered by repressive measures intolerable to liberal opinion. “It will be bloody,” said one radical in defense of a particularly futile protest, “but blood makes the liberals mad.” Far from provoking a liberal reaction, however, the politics of street theater solidified opposition to the left and created a mounting demand for law and order. The escalation of militant tactics fragmented the left and drew the more “revolutionary” elements into suicidal confrontations with the police and the National Guard. “We are working to build a guerrilla force in an urban environment,” the national secretary of SDS announced in 1967. In fact, SDS was laying the groundwork for its own collapse two years later.
The delusion that street theater represented the newest form of guerrilla warfare helped to ward off an uneasy realization that it represented no more than a form of self-promotion, by means of which the media stars of the left brought themselves to national attention with its concomitant rewards. One exponent of “guerrilla theater,” after exhorting his followers to live by their wits, quickly explained that “to live by your wits is not to imitate the hustler who is a low-class capitalist, but rather the Latin American guerrilla who is a low-class socialist.” Such talk served not only to reassure the faithful but to play up to the “relevant audience” of black and third-world militants, to which the white left had become unduly sensitive and which it desperately wanted to impress with its revolutionary machismo. The rhetoric of black power corrupted the white left and the black left alike, substituting a politics of the media for the civil rights struggles earlier waged in deadly earnest in the South. As the black power rhetoreticians co-opted the civil rights movement, they also captivated white liberals who sought to appease the guilt associated with “white skin privilege” by adopting the gestures and language of black militancy. Both whites and blacks embraced radical style in place of radical substance.
By 1968, when the new left gathered for its “festival of life” outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the prominence of the Youth International led by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman made it clear that a theatrical conception of politics had driven more rational conceptions from the field. “Yippie is gestalt theater of the streets,” Rubin has claimed, “compelling people by example to change their awareness. Entering a Congressional hearing room in a Paul Revere costume or wearing judicial robes to a court proceeding is a way of acting out fantasies and ending repressions.” Acting out fantasies does not end repressions, however; it merely dramatizes the permissible limits of antisocial behavior. In the sixties and early seventies, radicals who transgressed these limits, under the illusion that they were fomenting insurrection or “doing gestalt therapy on the nation,” in Rubin’s words, often paid a heavy price: clubbing, imprisonment, police harassment, or death itself, in the case of the terrorists—the Weathermen and the recruits to the Symbionese Liberation Army—who followed the logic of guerrilla theater to its inevitable ending. Yet these radicals had so few practical results to show for their sacrifices that we are driven to conclude that they embraced radical politics in the first place not because it promised practical results but because it served as a new mode of self-dramatization.
Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations Christopher Lasch
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