This panel comprises three papers that examine 20th century avant-garde and countercultural depictions of the human, exploring how immense sociotechnological shifts compelled artists to revise Enlightenment notions of the human subject. 

 

 

Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, written from 1910 and published in 1914, comprises syntactic structures that exclude personal pronouns. However, in poetry written during the First World War, the personal pronoun returns, often with the first-person plural, ‘we’. Lifting Belly is among the most well-known of these works. It contains obscure autobiographical reference, and some of Stein’s most explicit eroticism, alongside language play and dialogic exchanges. But while the voices are multiple, and actively discursive, they are often characterless and undifferentiable. In this paper, I will examine what this multiplicity does to the lyric subject, often read as a stable and singular ‘I’ that identifies with the poet in the moment of utterance. With Stein’s ‘we’, who or what is speaking? Perhaps a pluralised poet-speaker, a pair of intimate partners, a social milieu; or perhaps a ‘we’ without stable deictic reference speaks an impersonal and undifferentiated multiplicity.

Acting out 'free': The San Francisco Diggers and the (R)evolution of Human Society in the Haight-Ashbury. (George Mouratidis)

 

On October 6, 1967, the San Francisco Diggers, a group of guerilla actor-provocateurs and community activists, staged a mock funeral procession to mark “the Death of Hippie” and herald “the birth of Free Man.” While the latter term did not supersede the former as they had hoped, the event nevertheless continue the Diggers’ social experiment of provoking considerations of a more direct, organic relationship between human experience and self-identity, both individual and collective, and the concept of “free” outside institutionalized discourses and modalities of the post-Camelot Vietnam-era America. Taking their name from the proto-socialist English dissidents of the mid-seventeenth century who sought to reform society by agitating public space and repurposing common land, the Diggers combined a community-minded personal politics of liberation and responsibility with avant-garde absurdism, Dada and Situationism to create a living guerilla theatre. Through hit-and-run plays and events such as “The Death of Money” in public spaces and community projects such as the Feed-In and the Free Store, the Diggers saw the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood as a giant public stage in which to challenge prevailing notions of society and civilization by “acting out” alternative, more “authentic” models of living in the face of a dehumanising capitalism run amok.  

 

“I feel! I anger! I fight!”: Exclaiming the human in Jack Kirby’s The New Gods. (James Macaronas)

 

From 1970, artist and writer Jack Kirby began working for DC Comics, where he wrote and illustrated four interconnected titles that would come to be known as the Fourth World saga. The New Gods, the centrepiece of the saga, describes a secret war waged on Earth between the benevolent gods of New Genesis and their tyrannical counterparts on the planet Apokolips. This paper examines Kirby’s mythopoesis as part of a broader post-Sixties response to Western technocracy, which reinvented the human as a split subject, divided between the promise of alternative futures and the reality of the material present. This split is manifest in Kirby’s art, but amplified in his prose, which repeatedly asserts the virtues of the human figure, even as the narrative arc of the text threatens to tear it apart.