New Left-Wing Melancholy: Mark Tribe's "The Port Huron Project" and the Politics of Reenactment

Abstract

New Left-Wing Melancholy:Mark Tribe's "The Port Huron Project" and the Politics of Reenactment Paige Sarlin (bio) The journal October sent a questionnaire to artists, critics, and art historians in the summer of 2007. The central question, and the one they reprinted on the cover of the issue that contained all the responses, was: "In what ways have artists, academics, and cultural institutions responded to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq?" The questionnaire and the published responses served as an answer to the lack of attention to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that had marked the journal during the previous three years.1 A journal other than October might never have felt the need to address contemporary political conditions. But this journal had been founded with a strident statement of purpose. In 1978, the editors claimed the cultural arena as a site for political action, one in which philosophical and aesthetic questions were not pre-given but rather crucially important, with potential political consequences. Seen in that light, their gesture to justify and remedy an absence of cultural attention to the Iraq War simultaneously appears particularly significant. In one part of the questionnaire, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, the author, asked if the absence of the draft explained the difference between the character of the protests against the war in Vietnam and the protests against the war in Iraq.2 This question invoked a range of criticisms within the responses (including a criticism from me, as a member of the group 16Beaver).3 And so in the introduction to the special issue, Buchloh and coeditor Rachel Churner devoted a small section to defending themselves from the various objections and qualifications that were raised about their use of the comparison with Vietnam. They argued that the analogy that they drew upon was intended to "encourage action" through raising a generational question: What is it that we are doing that is different and how can the awareness of this difference be productive?4 Mark Tribe's "The Port Huron Project" was cited in a [End Page 139] footnote in this section, serving as an example of "how protest informs intellectual history and how significantly we have internalized the intellectual paradigms from that generation."5 Tribe's project both served as proof of the influence of historic protests on cultural producers and simultaneously validated Buchloh and Churner's use of the historical comparison in their questionnaire and analysis of the responses to the war in Iraq (figured as the "absence" of a mass movement). But what, one might ask, is the relation of "The Port Huron Project" to the history that it reenacts? And, more significant, what is at stake in the comparison of the contemporary response to the war and the left-wing political activity of the late 1960s that October and various other cultural institutions have invoked and explored over the last year, which was the fortieth anniversary of 1968? Tribe's project gives a blank form to the differences and the similarities between then and now, assuming a form of resonance and significance that the project then re-produces and amplifies. Without questioning the utility of the comparison, Tribe's project works to elaborate itself not in relation to the specificity of the past or the present, but somewhere in between, in relation to this structure of analogy. In this way, the project shares with October's questionnaire and special issue a lack of clarity about the specific ideological and political character of the social movements of the 1960s (and the American left more broadly). "The Port Huron Project" gestures toward a general sense of the politically radical character of the historical period that accompanied the escalation of the American war in Vietnam and the marked increase in the level of class and social justice struggles in the United States and on a global scale. This use of analogy trades on the association with this "radical" history, but it sidesteps the myriad of difficult questions that generic references to protest, the New Left, or social movements of the 1960s could raise with respect to the contemporary antiwar movement. October's questionnaire comes tantalizingly close to...