Shawyer dissertation May 2008 final version - The University of ...

performative has the potential to effect change, on a small scale, if actors and audiencecarry that hope away from the performance moment and put it into play in the largerpolitical and social world. This is what the Yippies hoped, for their audience and fellowparticipants to leave the performance ready to write letters to politicians, join a protestmarch, or allow themselves to dream of different cultural and political possibilities.The potential for creating communitas through performance was of vitalsignificance for the Yippies, because they had few other means of organizing their actorsand audience into political action. The Youth International Party was not an organizedpolitical party consisting of a hierarchical structure of leaders, steering committees, andgrassroots faithful. The Youth International Party was instead a loose network of activistswith a variety of agendas. Some Yippies were anti-war protesters, others supported BlackNationalism, and still more campaigned for civil rights or student power. There wereanarchist Yippies, socialist Yippies, and hippie Yippies. The background of the Chicagoposter, listing a wide range of people and experiences, demonstrates the extent of theYippie network. The name Yippie was the banner under which this large network ofactivists organized, and the performance of revolutionary action-theater their rallyingpoint.The concept of the network has emerged as a new site of sociological andphilosophical inquiry, due to the explosion of digitalized information technology in thepast few decades. Leading the field is sociologist Manuel Castells, who in The Rise of theNetwork Society (1996) recognizes the network as a basic organizational structure insociety that modifies social behaviors and processes (469). A network is essentially a19