The Death and Rebirth of Counterculture
Times Square, in New York — a symbol of the city, which is a symbol for American Modernity. it is also the petri dish in which American subcultures and countercultures seemed to be grown. Image taken from wikimedia commons user chensiyuan and used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
In recent weeks, I’ve been thinking about the period of modernity and considering it as a frankly weird phenomenon in world history. Weird in the Fisherian-Miévillian sense, of something intruding, alien, and potentially supercessive. I do not have the necessary materials gathered on this to write on it, but part of this line of thinking has to do with the feeling that we are no longer Modern, or even post-modern, but somehow exmodern or nearing a condition of exmodernity.
Part of this has to do with a thunderous absence in the contemporary period, something that has been present for so long and no longer exists in the context of our time: where is counterculture? It’s entirely possible that I have simply been passed by, that I’m no longer plugged in to the same networks that I was at one time. However, it definitely seems to me that there is a decided and somewhat worrying absence of a unified counterculture at this point in time. It feels like the moment at the top of a roller coaster when you can no longer hear the chain clanking along, but just before the drop happens — the mechanism isn’t involved any more and the mechanics have taken over.
Before I proceed, I feel it necessary to define terms.
The Diggers are fascinating to me — they were, essentially the first movement to propose eliminating monarchy and aristocracy: “But the gentry must come down and the poor shall wear the crown / Stand up now diggers all”
A culture is a set of practices and beliefs that define a population and their behaviors. A counterculture is a subculture that seeks to calve off from the dominant culture, to go its own way or replace it as a hegemonic force. Christianity in the Roman Empire was a counterculture. The various heresies of the middle ages – the Cathars chief among them, – were a counterculture. One could argue that the populist Levellers and proto-socialist Diggers of the English Civil War were countercultures. The Bohemians of the nineteenth century were definitely a counterculture.
In the United States of America, there was a well-developed counterculture that passed the torch from one group to another – the Beats to the Hippies to the Punks. Of course, there is a great deal of dispute about elements of this, and how much continuity there is between the steps in this continuum (there’s also the generational division between them, with the Beats coming from the “Silent” generation, the Hippies from the Baby Boom generation, and the Punks coming out of Generation X – at least if we listen to Strauss and Howe). Of course, the Beats wouldn’t exist without the pre-existing Jazz culture, elements of which they largely appropriated from Black Americans – it was a side-note in James Baldwin’s essay “If Black English Isn’t A Language, Then Tell Me What Is?”, in which he notably said that they misunderstood the things that they were appropriating. From where I’m standing, it certainly seems like they engaged in a lot of the same language-play that you saw in some parts of the Harlem Renaissance. They also wouldn’t exist without the influence of the Romantics, who were an earlier and largely English movement.
James Baldwin had the perfect face for communicating that he was observing nonsense. All pictures of him are either him smiling or him clearly looking at something foolish.
As an aside, it might also be said that from the standpoint of the dominant White, Straight, Christian culture that Black, Latin, Asian (as insufficient as that umbrella label is), Indigenous, Queer, Jewish, Islamic, and Vedic cultures have all been countercultures, at least insofar as they have been anti-assimilationist. I am not qualified to comment on this particular issue, and will seek to educate myself on this.
I know much more about the punk portion of this continuum than I do about the earlier two (I won’t bore you with my bona fides, the punk obsession with gatekeeping is exhausting), and it should be noted that each component of the three-step list of American countercultures is just noting the most widely known or “intellectually” important subculture from that temporal cohort. Space also has to be made in the analysis for metal fans (and there is a lot to analyze there – it’s been going for 50 years, and I don’t know enough about it to really get deep into it), mods, fans of New and No Wave music, and others.
There’s a lot to unpack here. Let me take this in steps.
What differentiates a subculture from a counterculture? It’s clear to me that a counterculture is a type of subculture – and it should be considered more as a role that a particular subculture plays than as any sort of content of that subculture. Specifically, they act as a counterweight to the dominant culture, a sort of gadfly that forces a reaction. They might be best thought of as a culture-oriented version of what Antonio Gramsci called a “counter-hegemony”, that is there is something called a hegemony – a dominant, self-justifying set of beliefs, practices, and agencies – to which it is in opposition. To the middle-class aspirations of those recently returned from fighting overseas, Kerouac – raised Quebecois Catholic, and therefore always conscious of sin but rarely avoiding it due to a contrarian nature – made apotropaic gestures and traveled west to do speed with his friends and act like he discovered jazz and misfortune. At the time, this drop-out position was a rebellious act (and it still might be, but other parts of his person are a bit distasteful to me. I’d read more to determine exactly what, but I made the mistake of reading Doctor Sax and I just don’t see myself reading anything more by him in the future).
Do not engage with this in print or audio format..
“I’m growing old in rooms full of kids with unruly hair cuts, taking what comfort we can in the fact that every empire’s days are numbered...man. But I don’t think that I can count that high.”
Okay, so what’s a subculture? A subculture is a culture – a set of beliefs, practices, aesthetics and arts – that differentiates those who adhere to it from the mainstream, dominant culture. I’d argue that the vast majority of subcultures are not inherited – they’re things that one joins, or is adopted into, not things one is born into. The vast majority of them have some element of dandyism involved: expensive clothes of a particular style are a common trait of most subcultures (see the Teddyboy and Mod obsession with suits,) though this can be flipped on its head – after punk, dandyism seems to have disappeared from American countercultures, though punk practiced a sort of abject anti-dandyism in its sartorial aesthetic, an obsession with intentional ugliness that you also find, to an extent, in metal and its paradoxical obsession with embracing corruption. The aesthetic also tends to extend beyond the merely sartorial – into music (around which many of these subcultures gravitate originally,) and the visual and linguistic arts. It always seems to me that poetry and literature are the least elements of a subculture to truly develop: one can point at punk art fairly easily, it seems, but any punk literature one finds is generally confined to underground zines, though one could easily see punk visual aesthetics midwifing it into being through the underground comix movement.
From Putthison.com: “When I was young there were beatniks. Hippies. Punks. Gangsters. Now you’re a hacktivist. Which I would probably be if I was 20. Shuttin’ down MasterCard. But there’s no look to that lifestyle! Besides just wearing a bad outfit with bad posture. Has WikiLeaks caused a look? No! I’m mad about that. If your kid comes out of the bedroom and says he just shut down the government, it seems to me he should at least have an outfit for that.”" —John Waters
Why don’t more subcultures grow into counterculture? I think the answer lies in the writings of the Situationist International, which could be easily thought of as the counterculture that was the engine behind the May ‘68 riots in Paris – one of the last hurrahs of real counterculture, though not the end of it, just based on timelines. I haven’t read Guy Debord, though I’m meaning to do a deep dive into it. In the theories put forward by Debord and his confederates, the dominant culture was the Spectacle, which Debord defines as "the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign." The Spectacle works through Recuperation, which we can call (more simply) “capture”: everything outside of itself is encased and forced to work towards its ends (the Situationist response détournement is a sort of counter-capture, hijacking the mechanisms of the Spectacle and working towards another end.) Fundamentally, this means turning a subculture into a group that can be marketed towards, what I’ve called elsewhere a Horizon of Extraction (a place from which value can be taken.) A subculture that resists capture for too long gains strength and challenges the dominant paradigm.
How does this capture work? It functions differently for each subculture, fundamentally. Sometimes it works just by finding out what the people who are involved in it want to buy and selling it to them (call it the “Hot Topic killed Punk” theory of subcultural death). More often, and more costly to the establishment, though, is inviting the subculture into the dominant culture in one way or another: the hippies take up computers, and now we have Silicon Valley to worry about. In this situation, the mainstream is, itself diverted (détournement is the root of “detour”,) but not enough to unseat hegemony. Sometimes, it’s done through culture war – I’m reminded of the Disco Demolition Night, when white metalheads were given a spectacle of their own, given the chance to enact their brutality on a cultural enemy to both them and the mainstream. This, of course, was imperfect and might be part of why metal has such endurance – you could see this as a way of peeling off the least committed to the subcultural vision, leaving only the most committed.
Is there a counterculture now? I’d argue that there’s a desire for a counterculture, but no actual counterculture. The internet – specifically Web 2.0 and social media – has made it possible for everyone to retreat into a walled garden of their own interests, but these are always-already markets. I’d even argue that most of these groups don’t really rise to the level of fully-developed subcultures: these identities, if they can even be called that are commodities. They are, from a cultural sense, predigested.
It bears saying: George W. Bush was the worst president we’ve ever had, and did irreparable harm to America on all axes.
Of course, there are other reasons that what we might call the “American subcultural ecosystem” was disrupted – September 11, 2001 had long-ranging effects on the American psyche that we just haven’t bothered to fully map out. If part of the job of the media is to manufacture consent, then 9/11 overproduced consent, with both right and left getting on board for wars that are still going on. Since there was widespread consensus – about the rectitude of going to war with Afghanistan and Iraq, about the fact that “they hate our freedom”, about how we had to “support the troops”, and about how we had to offer critical support to the President even if we didn’t like him. For a good seven years – from 9/11 to the 2008 Financial Crisis – the cultural environment was a monoculture. There were certainly variations within that monoculture, but I would argue that there was no dissent beyond the purely aesthetic. By the time the Financial Crisis rolled around, we no longer had to consent but the apparatus of capture was ready for us if we didn’t: Facebook and Twitter were there already, waiting to swallow up whatever emerged.
(An important caveat, added after the fact: the emo subculture as it was known in the 2000s is somewhat notable as a reaction against the hypermasculine performative toughness of the Bush years, albeit a swiftly commercialized one, privileging discourses around vulnerability and gender nonconformity. I have invited Edgar, who identified with that subculture, to write something on this at a later date, but they’re quite busy these days.)
This all leads to a really odd situation – since there is no periphery, there’s also no center. Mainstream culture, lacking a counterweight, has lost all structure. It is for this reason, I believe, that we have fallen so deeply into the nostalgic mode: nothing new is being produced, so we’re just flipping through the library of what has already been made, trying to figure out what to do now.
Suggested reading for any alt-right types who show up. (as a side note: I am desperately looking for the origin point of this and related photoshops.)
Is conservatism the new counterculture? No. And if you believe that it is, you can take your nipster ass and jump down the deepest hole you can find. The perception that the right wing is now the counterculture is the perception that the left is somehow ascendant and victorious. We still have capitalism. We still have systemic white supremacy. We still have autocratic and oligarchic rule. The left hasn’t won, so the right doesn’t get to play at being the underdog. This is, of course, leaving aside the fact that they’ve never had a new idea – it’s always just “I want to say the word, but this time I’m going to do it with a hard r.” (Okay, rant over.)
Now, the real question is whether or not we need a counterculture. I’d argue that we do – while I’m not 100% sold on the idea of dialectics as a science or anything, it makes sense that for the mainstream to innovate and change, there needs to be an outside to it, something that escapes that can then be pursued and incorporated. Without this, it simply sits, boiling in its own nostalgic juices. Of course, whatever Counterculture emerges would also need the political and aesthetic teeth to actually threaten the dominant paradigm.
I’m reasonably certain that such a new counterculture couldn’t really be something that emerges on the internet, and it couldn’t be something that uses the internet as its primary vehicle. Social media strangles counterculture in the cradle. It would have to be on a platform like Tumblr or one of the open-source social media networks, something that lacks the ability to profit off of the data generated (Tumblr targeted ads are notoriously surreal and unappealing, largely due to an inability to actually “target” anything.) It’s possible that resurrecting the old proto-social media fora that populated the internet would be the only way that such a thing could grow, but such platforms aren’t any good for outreach, simply distributing things within themselves, but perhaps that could still have value? Either way, there needs to be a way to distribute the art and ideas without capture by the markets.
Once the Aftertimes rolls around, someone is going to have to find a way to start a countercultural response to the present situation. As I’ve discussed several times, I hope we don’t return to normal, because “normal” wasn’t working. To make sure that it doesn’t, we need to start building a counterweight to what we see outside our windows.
I’m not naive enough to think that a short story or a song or a film or whatever can break the world open on its own, can change everything, but I do believe that it’s an important component in the process. After all, it’s not enough for a counterculture to simply be “counter-”, it must have the second part.