Excerpt 2 from The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984

This excerpt is about the influence of poststructuralism (theories in English and Cultural studies) on the Art Scene in Downtown NYC in 1974-1984, a time of punk music and experimental art.
I include some of this in my thesis, and I will later write more of my own words about this. But for your inspiration, enjoy!


"Writing Downtown" by Robert Siegle:

“A more contemporary influence came in the form of poststructuralist thought, whose explosion in America in the 1970s paralleled the intensity of Downtown writing at the time. Both were manifestations of a profound slide (as Roland Bathes would have it) or break (as paradigm theorists would prefer) in how we experienced daily life, and both illustrated the extent to which profoundly different assumptions and metaphors were needed if we were to find our way out of what increasingly felt like a dead end. The theory invasion was mainly French, and it was led largely by English departments, where a new generation of critics had experienced the bewildering effects of close reading. A faculty suddenly more diverse in terms of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation couldn’t help but mount challenges to the canon and our ways of reading, changing the nature of literary politics. Why did America finally begin listening? The leaders were shot in the 1960s, the braggarts embarrassed in Vietnam, the liars exposed in Watergate, the great men deflated by the mediocrity of 1970s politicians—we were ready for lessons on how to think about economics, power, and the cultural and political seduction of our investment of desire.

From Jacques Lacan we learned that the kind of subjectivity we thought was transcendental truth was in fact infantile neurosis. From Jacques Derrida we learned that the kind of textuality we thought was sacramental or scriptural was agonistic self-deception, and that the tradition of conceptuality we called Truth was a structure of repression and mythology. From [Michel] Foucault we learned that we were looking in the wrong direction when we hunted for power, that what ran through our bodies told us more about power than the series of failed sovereigns we watched in sound bites. From Jean-Francois Lyotard we learned that the grand theories, the master narratives of modern intellectual life, were already dead, even if we had barely (begun to) read them. And the list goes on to include Helen Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deluese and Felix Guattari, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillar.

Skimming indexed, footnotes, and textual references of the time suggests the pervasiveness of poststructuralist thought, the amount of energy it produced, and how frequently it provided vocabulary and concepts for understanding how culture works, how art works, and what is possible through art. I wouldn’t argue that every writer mastered the intricacies of Derrida, but it is remarkable the extent to which the historical distrust of theorizing and explantion among many writers gave way to using such thinking to amplify and expedite what they were trying to do. ‘At this point in my life. . . , politics . . . take place inside my body,’ wrote Kathy Acker, describing the political inscription of individuality. We ‘exist, like a shadow, in the interstices of argument,’ wrote Lynne Tillman, alluding to our passage through all the determining strands of cultural codes. Even among writers who were not particularly interested in theory or criticism, the ideas that pervaded the Downtown climate during the 1970s reinforced difference in their way of understanding what they were about and the distinctive, postmodern reality in which they found themselves.” (138-139).

The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984. M. J. Taylor (ed.). New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006.