406
LEO BERSANI
of that optimism also as a prognosis. But I don't feel that the nature
of Rubin's theater itself (not to speak of the nature of American
~
ciety) justifies that leap. I'm not, however, particularly bothered by
the touchingly simpleminded vision of Rubin's postrevolutionary world
in
the final pages of
Do It!
It
would be unfair to read the rest of the
book as symbolic scenarios and then to treat the pastorally freaked–
out Utopia evoked at the end as a seriously literal program of social
organization. The very frivolity of Rubin's vision defines its value,
which is to evoke an enthusiasm and delight necessary to
start
work–
ing for a world which will certainly not realize the dreams that may
have inspired it. The yippie festivals and the yippie dreams serve
the same function as the hippie commune. They impractically but
therapeutically enact styles of life which, at least as total commit–
ments, are impossible options for modem society. But the perhaps
self-sacrificial actors in these celebrations embody resources in the rest
of us which almost everything else in society today has trained us to
think of as completely unusable. The commune, for example, can
therefore be thought of as an irrelevant performance which may
in–
spire us to invent
some
relevance for the satisfactions of small, al–
most primitive communities in the giant network of sophisticated tech–
nology which will of course determine more and more what "com–
munity" means in modem societies.
1
What I find troubling in Rubin's book can be pinpointed in the
evasive mysteriousness of the "it" in his title. It's by no means true
that all yippie performances imitate rightist fantasies of them, but
some of them do, and a good deal of the yippie rhetoric (of the
kind I quoted at the beginning of this section) encourages us to
"live up" to those fantasies. What is the rationale of this apparent
perversity? For Rubin, George Wallace explicitly expresses the atti–
tudes obscured by the pietistic language of democratic liberalism.
That is, Wallace's speech is an adequate metalanguage in which to
reformulate Eugene McCarthy's speech. Only the rightists spell out
the boundaries of the liberal imagination: they
advocate
what liberals
1
A recent example of some continuity between Utopian vision and social
reality has been the
militantly
.antibureau.cratic spirit in European trade
unions, the revolt against union leaderships - revolts which make
socially
concrete the French students' "unrealistic" cries
in
1968 for self-manage–
ment and participatory democracy.
