No real time to write on this at the moment, but I re-watched The Weather Underground last night and was struck again by 1) How interesting and potentially inspiring (if deeply flawed and contradictory) were the group’s projects/actions and the (partial) analyses of state power, racism and near-global revolutionary conditions that engendered them; and 2) By how deeply “sympathetic” and compelling was the filmmakers’ portrait of the group, even as they fail pretty miserably in terms of thinking through what it might mean to take seriously in the present moment the questions the Weathermen/Weather Underground were raising. The latter is all the more striking given the grotesque similiarities between (and continuities from) the historical conjuncture the group was addressing and our own. The questions I have in mind include, but aren’t limited to: Through what channels, actions or modes of address can people approach a (US) state power that makes no pretenses about its lack of concern for whatever publics/populations might oppose its wielding of terrorist violence “at home” and “abroad”? How can/should (middle class or bourgeois) white people, particularly young people and students, begin to dismantle and work against their various forms of privelege and attempt modes of mutual struggle with, say, “Third World” social movements or subaltern (inevitably racialized) populations in the US? What kinds of “public appeals” can/should be made by groups struggling against oppression?
I won’t elaborate here the ways in which I think the Weathermen [sic] themselves variously failed and occasionally partially succeeded in answering such questions — though it’s certainly the case that they seem to have had too much faith in their own abilities to answer them and to have thought somewhat too little about the ever-shifting and contingent character of historical conjunctures and the need to construct theoretical/political practices accordingly — but I do think the film’s failures are symptomatic of the larger tendency to look at moments of political struggle — particularly “extreme” moments — without inquiring seriously how they might speak to and through the present, how sediments of the histories of peoples’ struggles be might learned from and reanimated in ways that unsettle and potentially transform the moment(s) in which they’re recalled and retold.
Oh, and they should have relied on someone besides Todd f-ing Gitlin as their historical/intellectual commentator.
0 Responses to “The Weather Underground and (Re)Telling Histories”