COMMENT
The joy of dissidence
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The Woodstock Rock Festival transformed calamity into celebration by an act of imagination. Perhaps its message is worth examining, says SHELLEY WALIA.
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GAMMA
Expressions of music and harmony
NO one had any idea what the Woodstock Rock Festival in 1969 had stood for although the choice of the Woodstock theme at a recent function held in the Punjab University was very apt. Behind it stood a decade of counter-culture that opposed the Vietnam War. It was anti-war in its motivation, with the young people burning their draft orders to demonstrate their resentment against relentless killing. And now with the widespread violence around the world, the students had inadvertently brought back a temperament of revolt that aimed at peace in the world. As Auden wrote about the war in Europe: "In the nightmare of the dark/ All the dogs of Europe bark,/ And the living nations wait,/ Each sequestered in its hate... " War, indeed is as impersonal as virus, a sickness that the whole world will contract and suffer from, before the scourge is over.
The cultural evening took my mind to the 1960s, to the Catskill Mountains and to Bethel (derived from Bethlehem) where the music festival was held so many years ago. Bob Dylan had settled in a small town by the name of Woodstock, a few miles from New York. But because of a lack of space, the venue was shifted to this small village that in its very name had the resonance of fellowship, freedom and love. As in the novel Rameau's Nephew by Diderot, like the "hippy" Rameau, they absorbed all the notions of anti-foundationalism — Rameau is utterly amoral and stands up against the church, state and the traditional forms of moral authority. Dressed in unconventional clothes more in keeping with the free-spirited natives of America or India, the "hippies" expressed a desire to return to the community and tribal way of life. The word "hippies" did not stand for broad hips, but for "hip" that, says Random House, means "familiar with the latest ideas, styles, developments, etc.; informed, sophisticated, knowledgeable (?)." The question mark is a sneaky, but meaningful, piece of editorial comment.
Two European wars, Fascism, Nazism along with guilt-ridden traumas of de-colonisation and critiques of capitalism by western Marxists have all led to the interrogation of the myth of progress. The genesis of this opposition to dehumanised profiteering began in the 1960s when the forces of the New Left born at the University of Berkeley stood up for instant answers to the problems of oppression and poverty. Charles de Gaulle, the powerful president of France, was brought down by the student revolt in Paris. In the wake of Stalin, Mao and Fukuyama excluding cultural relativism from their agenda, this movement attracted not only the intellectuals, but youth all over the world who began to oppose authority and materialism, and protested against the Vietnam War. Their support for the Civil Rights movement through a non-violent anarchy was an optimism for days of liberation, love and equality. Politically outspoken and artistically prolific, they put to rest the naïve criticism that these were young people with mere illusionary and romantic "flower power", with their "great idealism and startling creativity" p.3, In the Sixties).
The outburst of student activism and a healthy confrontation with the status quo was seen in the hippy movement that no doubt went astray owing to its indulgence in decadent drug abuse and unconventional ways of living at the level of ennui and dissipation. However, it had other far-reaching effects on the positive nature of a counter-culture that stood up against western capitalism and endeavoured to resurrect the lost human values of co-existence and indifference to ruthless competition. These were provocative poetic years giving birth to songs like "The answer my friend is blowing in the wind" and "The times they are a' changing" by Bob Dylan or the free spirited communal atmosphere so vivid in Jimi Hendrix's "Star Spangled Banner". Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road or Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest became the bibles of youngsters. Janis Joplin, Joe Cocker, Joan Baez, The WHO or Crosby Still Nash and Young all come back to my mind for their serious involvement in setting the tenor for the future of student power and a revolution that would dismantle authoritarian systems that were out to smother not only creativity, but intellectual freedom and confidence.
Thus came the end of the privileging of centres. The great structuring stories of reform and emancipation which manifested themselves in liberalism or humanism now collapsed in the eyes of the youth. Though the experiment failed in the birth of a free market economy and its undertones of anything-goism foregrounding relativism and sceptical perspectives, this rediscriptive turn infinitely redescribed the individual's position. Freedom of thought in a democratic/consumerising culture gave rise to this interpretative flux that turned out to be empowering for the marginal. The move was to democratise intelligence where a choice of position was necessary. There was no such thing as an unpositioned centre or a possibility of an unpositioned site here. The only choice one had was between a history that is aware of what it is doing and a history that is not. Thus history becomes a field of force in which all discourse is never innocent; it is always for someone and relates people's thoughts about history to interest and power. You must have control over your own discourse and this means that you have power over what you want history to be rather than accepting what others say of it. As Simon and Garfunkel would sing, "I'd rather be a hammer than a nail/ Yes I would" or just as Nietzsche would say, "So I willed it".
The student outburst of activism in the 1960s emerged out of a lack of an ideological opposite to western liberal democracy. They did not want to live without an alternative. In other words, it was what Derrida would demand many years later for a New International of Left-wing interests, a call for dissent against western capitalism, a summons to reengage in a debate. This was to counter the delegitimising of all alternatives.
Do we want the triumphalism that goes with the reasoning that the case of liberal democracy cannot be improved? This note of endism in western thinking is the suppression of history and of political opposition; it is the end of the subject and the superseding of the individual by the systems that govern us. The end of any opposing ideology leads to the end of relativism in a period of globalisation. Homogenisation in cultures and world economies has only one corollary: Goodbye Marx and hello American unilateralism. This acceptance of status quo is the demise of dissent in the absence of the human.
For me, the Sixties generation stood for the use of imagination and the joy of dissidence that unlocks our full humanity. It was, as Wilson Harris writes, a counter culture of the imagination that debated over the nature of reality and countered, in the words of Ben Okri, "the danger of passing a death sentence on the imagination".
The festival in the 1960s transformed calamity into celebration by an act of imagination. It was the pronouncement of the endurance of art in appalling times when music and the power of language become a mode of survival and helped us to live in political history. This message from those heady days could be our antidote to the war just round the corner.
Shelley Walia, a Rothmere Fellow at Oxford, is Professor, Department of English, Punjab University, Chandigarh.
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