The tribal '80s - Critical Essay

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Blood of the poets: the tribal '80s - Critical Essay
Tom Holert

.....In his 1992 essay "Notes on the New Tribalism," communitarian philosopher Michael Walzer discussed the return of the tribes on a global scale and the problems of the intellectual and political left in comprehending the logic of "tribes" rather than "classes." Tribalism, in this perspective, concerned the integration of individuals through shared tradition and culture, a guarding against the "fragmentation" of Western liberal society and the promise afforded by a community of values that countered the self-centered modes of individualism.

At the same time, looking back on the '80s and forward into the '90s, another philosopher, Zygmunt Bauman, claimed that postmodernity, as the age of "contingency," is also the era of neotribalism and community, since contingency needs friendship as an alternative to madness. The "neo" here points to the difference between traditional practices of community (as corporations with strict regulations of inclusion and exclusion, where membership is seldom a question of individual choice) and the whole of individual acts of self-identification that result in the "tribes" of the present-tribes that tend to be "concepts" rather than "integrated social bodies."....
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....To an apocalyptic structuralist like Jean Baudrillard, however, such primitivism figured as the symptom of the "end of the social," the end of any "normal" sort of relationship. In the New York of 1984 the French po-mo flaneur saw "only tribes, gangs, mafia families, secret societies, and perverse communities." Only such neoprimitivist, postsocial entities had any chance of surviving "the whirl of the city"; traditional communal models (like the heterosexual couple) were on their way into the dustbin of history. ...

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.... At the end of the decade, it was once again nece ssary to realize that the production of art is inseparable from considerations of where one belongs (or is thought of as belonging); every individual is a member of a plurality of families, biological and extended, so it becomes crucial to politicize the question of which are open, which closed. Not to mention what these questions might have to do with the way art is produced, displayed, communicated, received, and used.....