Marianne DeKoven — Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern

105 published claims from this book.

• 1989 completed the sixties-era shift to postmodernity
• A bestseller’s political analysis can interest a minority while its lifestyle vision sells
• A group’s shared ”we” is an illusion with no underlying organism
• A literary lineage of self-as-performance predates postmodern performativity theory
• A relational language with no bare ‘I’ pronoun shapes personal identity.
• Adorno’s complicitous-critique stance explains his intellectual persistence over Marcuse
• American officials underestimated Vietnamese resilience
• American utopianism peaked in the antebellum era, allied with abolitionism
• Anti-binary theories can align misogynists with radical feminists
• Attacking hierarchy-producing binaries actually magnified the differences they sought to erase.
• Barthes held that proletarian culture never exists, only bourgeois ideology
• Barthes saw avant-garde literature as resistance to, not enforcer of, bourgeois hegemony
• Barthes subordinated political critique to structural-linguistic semiological demonstration
• Barthes’s Mythologies embodies both modernist contempt and postmodern valorization at once.
• Barthes’s war on the bourgeois targeted cultural studies’ own populist constituency.
• Black feminist identity politics lodged universal revolution within a particular identity category.
• Burroughs equated overcoming heroin addiction with liberating language
• Burroughs rejected the possibility of pure or total resistance.
• Burroughs treated word-and-image combinations as literally addictive like drugs.
• Burroughs’s work spans both modernist and postmodern positions simultaneously
• Civil Rights support was compatible with liberal faith in the system
• Civil-rights-era writers appeared moderate only retrospectively, not to contemporaries.
• Consciousness-raising’s self-transformation methods seeded postmodern identity politics
• Covering the drug conference meant attending under false pretenses as the enemy within.
• Deference to authority enabled liberals to tolerate the war
• Democratization as a core commitment makes avant-garde practice postmodern, not modernist
• Democratizing surveillance tools can nullify any monopoly control system
• Dissolving the inner-outer split erases the structure of revolutionary opposition itself
• Disturbing art must also exploit the audience’s attraction to what disturbs
• Duke’s Vegas belonging marks postmodernity while his horror stays modernist.
• Eliminating gender difference was the second wave’s modern arm, affirming womanhood its postmodern arm.
• Evening news coverage made the war feel immediate to students
• Fear and Loathing simultaneously dramatizes betrayed American dreams and embraces a surface-only reality
• Fear and Loathing’s excess enacts right-wing paranoia about the counterculture.
• Feminist politics is irreducibly torn between claims as women and claims as humans.
• Firestone located sexual difference as the deepest, invisible source of all oppression
• Firestone’s technological utopianism prefigured queer theory and cyborg feminism
• FitzGerald constructed Vietnamese culture as postmodern in her very mode of describing it
• FitzGerald’s antiwar case was built on postmodern critique of abstraction
• French feminism collapsed revolutionary transformation into the mere achievement of feminine subjectivity.
• Historical displacement lets fiction examine utopia’s aftermath cleanly
• Laing’s attack on inner-outer dualism still operated within a modern paradigm
• Laing’s subject politics severed revolutionary change from material social conditions
• Marcuse’s account of self-recognition in commodities prefigures the postmodern structure of feeling
• Modern and postmodern views differ mainly by emphasis on recontainment versus resistance
• Modernist allusion and postmodern pastiche were indistinguishable in the sixties
• Monte Carlo and Las Vegas embodied opposing class cultures from their founding.
• Officials’ generalization of the NLF to a category obscured its reality
• One-dimensional management discourse replaces structural wage grievance with a singular case, defusing critique.
• Paradise Now embodies both modernist totality and postmodern local particularity at once
• Participatory democracy politics of the self displaced social structural politics
• Paternalist abolitionists reproduced rather than abolished racial hierarchy
• Personal meaning now comes from the very activism and consumerism the sixties rejected
• phs simultaneously particularized and universalized its white male subjectivity
• Poirier and Venturi merged at the level of method despite opposite stances on modernism
• Post-1960s popular culture carried a clear audible technological date stamp
• Postmodern fiction resists from within instead of opposing wholesale
• Postmodern madness is involuntary, unlike the modernist chosen seer-trip
• Postmodern politics runs on spin rather than totalized official lies.
• Postmodern subjectivity replaced the heroic vanguard self with shifting affinity coalitions
• Postmodern theory holds that no one escapes culture’s ideological constructions
• Postmodern theory inherited sixties process aesthetics stripped of their revolutionary grit
• Postmodernity extends modernity’s egalitarianism to subaltern others
• Queer theory aims to deconstruct gender binaries, not eliminate them.
• Racial division damages white and black Americans alike
• Radical feminism’s internal contradiction prefigured the modern-postmodern feminist split.
• Real material progress and democratization form the progressive elements of mass culture
• Right-wing survivalists inherited the sixties’ apocalyptic vision and language
• Rival periodizing terms like globalism and postcolonialism describe no phenomena distinct from postmodernity
• Second-wave feminism fused modern universalism with postmodern binary critique inseparably.
• Second-wave feminism’s slogan inverted into a privatized politics by decade’s end
• Sexual liberalization in consumer society can function repressively, not liberatory
• Sixties counterculture found itself at home in Vegas because postmodernity emerged seamlessly from it
• Sixties debates lack the generational emotional experience of the period
• Sixties egalitarian communes seeded postmodern authoritarian fundamentalisms
• Sixties male texts commodified women yet produced proto-feminist representations
• Sixties politics reframed the political as contests over subjectivity itself
• Sixties radical thought was still committed to totalized utopian master narratives
• Sixties texts are now dated precisely by straddling modern and postmodern paradigms
• Slave resistance centered on claiming the power to name oneself
• Stable village economies made wealth accumulation read as theft from neighbors.
• Structure of feeling transforms identical campus behavior across eras
• The 1970 Wisconsin math building bombing marked the self-destructive climax of sixties radicalism
• The draft radicalized college students into the New Left
• The end of Reconstruction coincided with the dawn of modern racism
• The I Ching’s fluidity-changes cosmology prefigured the postmodern worldview.
• The New Left’s communal we was an aggregate of consenting individuals
• The particular marked body replaces the abstract universal subject in postmodernity
• The personal is political inverted into the political is personal as feminism went postmodern
• The personal is political leveled political and bodily experiences into a single category
• The shift to subjectivity-based politics relocated rather than abandoned the political
• The sixties apocalyptic sense of imminent upheaval is now barely accessible
• The socialist meaning of participatory democracy faded while the politics-of-the-self meaning triumphed.
• The Statement self-consciously revised constitutional universalism toward generational particularity.
• The utopian attack on dualism pivoted into postmodern philosophy
• Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing as a sixties epitaph from an anti-Vegas stance.
• Total racial hatred is self-destructive because it erases too much of one’s own humanity
• Unregulated capitalism with amoral science converts the Eden myth into its obverse
• Vegas-era machismo defeated the androgynous gender-utopian sixties male ideal
• War opposition trumped distaste for SDS tactics
• Williams coined ‘structure of feeling’ to bridge the social-personal split
• Wolfe elevated customized cars to high-art status against corporate culture
• Wolfe inhabited the undecidable cusp between modern and postmodern
• Wolfe saw Vegas as corruption of modernism, not its repudiation
• Women’s liberation consciousness made the utopia-maternal link explicit in fiction