"ARTISAN REVIEW
405
ing symbolic exchanges of significance. It may seem peculiar to apply
this formula from Norman O. Brown's
Love's Body
to the noisy
Rubin, but I
think
that the noise interrupts the speech of American
life in order to create a margin of silence in which competing speeches
may be heard. "Freedom in the use of symbolism," Brown also
writes, "comes from the capacity to experience loss." The sickness
of an individual and of a society can perhaps be measured by the
extent to which they impose upon symbolic objects the burden of
permanently fixed identities. "Bad" symbolism is either archetypal
(dematerializing and antierotic) or, in the opposite direction, erot–
ically fetishistic. In the latter case, we are represented absolutely by
our objects, our manners and our institutions. Any shift in symbolic
equivalences becomes an intolerable loss
if,
unable to accept loss and
death, we confer on things the magical power to immortalize our
absent selves. Fetishism is terrifying in that we equate losing a part
with loss of the whole, but the terror is "compensated" for in the
fantasy that we possess the whole as long as we preserve - and
sacralize - the symbolic literalism of the part.
Do It!
is a contemporary manual for turning away from that
sickness, and Rubin and Hoffman are our exuberantly stoned,
if
nearly martyred, healers. America gives Hoffman the license to vitu–
perate America on TV, but it electronically erases the American
flag he wears as a shirt. To say that a flag does not have to be
sym–
bolic of certain loyalties is of course absurd; what Hoffman does,
and what
we
apparently are unable to take,
is
to remove the flag
from its pole. He is testing our capacity for loss: will the nation col–
lapse
if
it expands its identity by playing with a symbol of its identity?
There is some reason to believe that
it
will, and so we cling all the
more desperately to the fetishistic habits - allegiance to the flag and
to some abstract, permantly inaccessible truth - which petrify our
experience in mechanized rituals and fantasies of intellectual salvation.
And the men I began by speaking of would help us to keep out of
our lives the subverting, depetrifying silences by teaching us to speak
every form of protest in the same deadeningly reductive language of
so-called critical analysis.
The fantastic optimism of
Do It!,
which records incidents of
boisterous silencing, is of course the very spirit of Rubin's revolu–
tionary style; it testifies to
his
power to disrupt what is established in
a manner which contains what is desired.
It
would be nice to think
