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

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 inva sion 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 Afghani stan 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 state ment 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 conse quences. Seen in that light, their gesture to justify and remedy an absence of cultural
attention to the Iraq War simultaneously appears particularly signifi cant. In one part of the questionnaire, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, the author, asked if the absence of the draft explained the difference between the char acter 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 differ ence be productive?4 Mark Tribe’s “The Port Huron Project” was cited in a footnote in this section, serving as an example of “how protest informs intel lectual 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 signifi cant, 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 vari ous 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 radi cal 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 con
temporary antiwar movement.

October’s questionnaire comes tantalizingly close to the question that Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin asked in their 1972 film Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still (FR, 1972): What role can artists and intellectuals play in building a movement to stop the war?6 It seems that any formulation that seeks to oppose or respond to the Iraq War must inevitably confront a comparison with Vietnam and the antiwar movement that that war engen dered. But the ubiquity of the analogy highlights the need to consider how this deployment of history fits into a left-wing political project with respect to the war. The recent spate of art projects that use historical reenactment to consider the resonances between the 1960s and the present and the num ber of retrospectives and exhibitions that investigate and commemorate the political activism of the New Left could all be seen as participating in this “response.”7 In this essay, I read the invocation of the protest movements of the 1960s as a form of what Walter Benjamin termed “left-wing melan choly,” a response to the war in Iraq that treats the apparent absence of an antiwar movement in an oblique manner. More than simply an update, this new “left-wing melancholy”—or, as I term it, New Left-wing melancholy— fetishizes the history of the New Left as a way of avoiding addressing the present. Looking to the past, the practice of reenactment has the potential to generate a new relation to the present, to wrench us into a more proactive relation to the on-going crisis of military occupation and brutality. But Tribe’s reenactments are exemplary of how the reproduction of history can substitute for an analysis of specific histories. In the case of Tribe, the reproduction of a form of protest through the staging of speeches erases the politics and labor of organizing and movement building and in doing so points to a particular relation to history, one that is explained by Michel Foucault’s concept of the archive. The cultural left, as represented by October and various other galleries and museums, has embraced the reenactment and the structure of historical analogy to ’68 as a form of “political” engagement or response to the U.S. military and police actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. This form of historical analogy perpetuates an image of the New Left that obscures the specific his tories of the social movements of the 1960s and the relation to the history of the left that the New Left sought to establish. As a result, the reference to the past functions to forestall an examination of the very real challenges to build ing a contemporary movement, some of which stem from the inheritances of the New Left and its rejection of previous modes of class-based analysis, but many of which derive from the varied
developments in the world and on the left in the intervening years since 1968.

On his website, Tribe describes “The Port Huron Project” as “a series of reenactments of protest speeches from the New Left movements of the 1960s and 70s.”8 Tribe’s choice of title and this short description lay bare the cen tral mechanism of decontextualization that grounds his “project.” Under the rubric of reenactment, Tribe’s project involves a process of selection, perfor mance, documentation, and distribution of these
speeches. Video documen tation is the primary form that this project takes; but the website is integral to the work, organizing the materials that define the project in terms of its production and its circulation. This focus on the mediated and re-mediated aspects of culture continues Tribe’s engagement with new media and forms of networking that began with his role in the cofounding in 1996 of Rhizome. org, a web-based resource for artists. Thus far in the series, six protest speeches have been reenacted: Coretta Scott King’s April 1968 speech at an antiwar
demonstration in New York City, Howard Zinn’s speech about civil disobedi ence delivered on Boston Common in 1971, Paul Potter’s April 1965 speech at an antiwar demonstration in Washington, D.C., César Chávez’s speech at a demonstration in Los Angeles in 1971, Angela Davis’s speech delivered at a 1969 Black Panther rally in Oakland, California, and Stokely
Carmichael’s speech in front of the United Nations in 1967 as part of a national mobili zation against the Vietnam War. In the material provided on his website, Tribe is quite explicit about the elements that constitute a reenactment for this project: a location, a speech, a performer, invited guests, and the presence of cameras and various other recording devices. The events are advertised through news articles, emails, and other networks (the project has a My-Space page as well as now being supported and promoted by Creative Time, an arts organization in New York that orchestrates large-scale public events and exhibitions). As a result, audiences of varying sizes attend the events and are featured prominently in the documentation of the events. Available on Tribe’s website as well as on YouTube, and distributed via DVD, the videos of these events have also been installed in galleries and on large-scale video screens—for example, in Times Square.9

The title of Tribe’s “project” is taken from the Port Huron Statement, a document written in 1962 by members of Students for a Democratic Society, a group of American student activists who were working collectively to cre ate a new formation on the left, a student movement that would break with historical modes of organizing and analysis.10 The publication of the state ment was the announcement of this project, a call to bring into being a new student movement. The Port Huron Statement offered both an analysis of the past and an articulation of a range of convictions. In the document, the authors asserted that both the act of writing and the document they produced were part of “the search for truly democratic alternatives to the present.” The collective authors were more committed to “experiments” than traditional methods of organizing and analysis. The Port Huron Statement was a public utterance, the performance of a break with the Old Left as well as an attempt to bring something else into being. The “New Left” is thus a contested term as well as a fiercely fought transformation. It signals the emergence of a group of young radicals and activists who believed that the poor and the students, not the workers, were capable of transforming society. The document, the publication of which is often cited as one of the founding moments of the New Left, called for and attempted to perform this break.11 The New Left became the umbrella term for the emergence of new groups of radicals who aimed at transforming society as well as relations, analyses, and
strategies as a whole on the left. The New Left can thus be contextualized as an historical designa­tion. But the movements that were lumped under this label were never singu lar nor homogenous, and even SDS, the
organization that developed out of the conference that produced this document, was itself characterized by a set of debates and divisions, all of which have been documented and scrutinized by various critics.12