Living in a world that can't be fixed Reimagining counterculture today

Curtis White, 1951-

Book - 2019

""This is a book about counterculture, and that's a problem..." So begins Curtis White's thrilling call for the revitalization of counterculture today. The problem, White argues, is twofold: first, most of us think of counterculture as a phenomenon stuck in the 1960s, and, second, what passes as counterculture today . . . simply isn't. Nevertheless, a reimagined counterculture is our best hope to save the planet, bypass social antagonisms, and create the world we actually want to live in. Now. White--"the most inspiringly wicked social critic of the moment" (Will Blythe, Elle)--shows how the products of our so-called resistance, from Ken Burns to Black Panther, rarely offer a meaningful challenge to p...ower, and how our loyalty to the "American Lifestyle" is self-defeating and keeps us from making any real social change. The result is an inspiring case for practicing civil disobedience as a way of life, and a clear vision for a better world--full of play, caring, and human connection."--Jacket flap.

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Subjects
Published
Brooklyn, NY : Melville House Publishing 2019.
Language
English
Main Author
Curtis White, 1951- (author)
Physical Description
xx, 140 pages ; 22 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 137-140).
ISBN
9781612198088
  • Introduction
  • Part I. Living Out of Place
  • Part II. What is Hidden in the Sun's Eye
  • Part III. Counterculture is Impertinent
  • Part IV. Counterculture is Improvisational
  • Part V. The Counter-counterculture
  • Part VI. Living in Place
  • Part VII. Coda
  • Acknowledgments
  • Endnotes
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Novelist and social critic White (We, Robots) imagines counterculture as a sanctuary from the madness of a fractured world in this series of rousing essays. He traces the notion of counterculture back to the ethos of the 19th-century English Romantics (drawing inspiration from their rejection of a rigid class system), considers where society is now (with the country's wealth in the hands of a few "oligarchs" and stagnating middle and lower classes), and posits where it is headed (facing, for example, climate change--based migration). One piece, titled "Counterculture Is Impertinent," lambastes the entertainment industry's blockbuster distractions and info-tainment news programs, advocating for work that pushes boundaries and makes the viewer uncomfortable (e.g., Jordan Peele's Get Out over Disney's politically complacent Black Panther). White truly hits his stride in excoriating late-stage capitalism's many ills and identifying a light at the end of the tunnel: "In the process of pushing us away, techno-capitalism pushes us together," and this creates "great undeveloped potential for democratic improvisation." White is careful to warn in his introduction that this is not a "how-to" book, and indeed there are few practical solutions within its pages, but left-leaning readers will find this a refreshing reminder that all hope is not lost, even in a world that may seem irreparably broken. (Nov.)

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Introduction, Living in a World that Can't Be Fixed Introduction This is a book about counterculture, and that's a problem. Counterculture is a word that is "fraught" with associations, connotations, and mendacities. The word counterculture has baggage, as we say ("freight" and "fraught" derive from the same Dutch root). Counterculture has been ridiculed for fifty years in the mainstream/corporate media as something that belongs only to the 1960s, to hedonist, weed-toking hippies, to communes, and to the failed social agenda of the high-'60s (no pun intended). But counterculture was not the creation of hippies, or of Beatniks, Dadaists, decadents, or the turn of the century Arts and Crafts movement before them. All of these movements were, however, countercultural in spirit, especially the Arts and Craft vision of a more authentic (more "handmade") form of living. (Coincidentally, I'm sitting on a Mission Oak sofa as I type this, Stickley chairs waiting around the kitchen table.) So, what was the source of the countercultural spirit they all shared? Counterculture as we know it was a creation--or, better yet, an improvisation --of the English Romantics, the first artistic and social movement to knowingly and deliberately "drop out" of its own world. After the bloody disappointments of the French Revolution, they were no longer under the illusion that nations could be fixed--"what had been a pride / Was now a shame," as Wordsworth wrote--so instead of revolution the Romantics simply withdrew from the dominant culture of early 19th-century England. They dropped out of its rationalism, its industry, its obsession with business and trade, and, most personally, they dropped out of the English class system and its social hierarchies. All of the subsequent movements inspired by the Romantics shared their sense that the world they had been born into offered only punishingly narrow options for life. They felt, as Paul Goodman put it in the 1950s, that if they stayed within that world they had no choice except to "grow up absurd," diminished in their own eyes as human beings, and diminished morally for aiding the larger purposes of their world: poverty, oppression, and war. And so they improvised. Our own moment is not without its absurdities and destructiveness. For instance, many young people now are offered the following: learn to work with intelligent machines, with computers and robots, or else. Never mind the conspicuous fact that to agree to that work not only has the effect of reducing themselves in their own eyes, but it makes them complicit with vast governmental and corporate structures that enforce inequality and have every appearance of being in the process of destroying the natural world. Well might a recent college graduate in one of the STEM disciplines complain, "It's not bad enough that we have to accept the absurdity of this work, this life as a data dog, but we have to aid and abet inequality and destruction while we're at it?!" As Goodman put it in Growing Up Absurd (2012), "The question is what it means to grow up into such a fact as: 'During my productive years I will spend eight hours a day doing what is no good.' "1 -- England's Romantic counterculture began with the "cult of feeling" that produced "weeping" novels like Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771). In Mackenzie's novel are prescient expressions of the Romantic such as, "There is a certain poetic ground, on which a man cannot tread without feelings that enlarge the heart: the causes of human depravity vanish before the romantic enthusiasm he professes..." Wordsworth, in his private world apart in the Lake District, turned Mackenzie's notion into the definition of poetry: "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Poetry created an alternative to a world dominated by "facts, facts, facts," as Thomas Gradgrind insisted in Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854). (Dickens was himself famously weepy, and all of his heroes and heroines marked their virtues with tears.) Later, the cult of feeling generated utopian ventures led by poets. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey planned to buy land in Pennsylvania for the purpose of creating a democratic commune called Pantisocracy where birth did not dictate social role, women were equal members, and art was the true if unacknowledged "legislator of the world," in Percy Bysshe Shelley's famous phrase. Shelley renounced his social station and estate (his grandfather was a Peer of the Realm) and devoted himself to poetry and then to atheism, nonviolence, vegetarianism, free love, and the emancipation of women. (Mary Shelley's mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), one of the founding texts of feminism.) Romanticism was not merely a period in art history; it was a social movement first. It was a rebellion against a rigid class system that condemned individuals to specific and limited social roles and denied their individual genius, leaving graveyards full of unrealized "human potential," as we'd say, or "mute inglorious Miltons," as Thomas Gray put it in his "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751). The "Elegy" prefigured the class resentments that would define the English Romantics, and for which upper-class critics attacked them. In particular, Keats was crudely criticized for being of the Cockney School of poetry, a vicious dig at his working class birth. But Keats's critics understood something that was not obvious: this new breed of poet was a threat to their status and their interests. There is a remarkable pattern in the biographies of the English Romantics: all rebelled against the plans that England had for them. Coleridge was meant to be a clergyman, Keats a surgeon, and Shelley a Peer. Wordsworth looked in horror upon the prospect of "vegetating on a paltry curacy." What England offered was too limited, and the Romantics wanted something "oceanic," something "with the feeling of the eternal," as the French novelist Romain Rolland expressed it in a letter to a skeptical Sigmund Freud.* So they refused their "station in life." They wanted to be Poets with a capital P. But Poet was not an approved role available to anybody, rich or poor. To say, "I want to be a poet," was much like the young troubadour of the present saying, "I don't want to write code for Google. I want to write songs and play in a band." To be a poet was in essence to say "fuck off" to everything about the world at that point--the monarchs, the nobility, the men of business, the endless wars, and the gross inequality. The Romantics were war dodgers, blasphemers, and communalists, which is why they lived in fear of prison under the "Sedition and Blasphemy" laws that the Tories established after the French Revolution as a means of controlling revolutionaries, pamphleteers, atheists, and poets. (A spy was assigned to observe the young radicals Wordsworth and Coleridge. This spy reported that the two were suspiciously interested in "spy nozy," also known as Spinoza.) This hatred for the class system has never ceased to animate some of England's best poets and writers. For instance, the novelist Paul Scott in his brilliant Raj Quartet (1965-1975) writes this, referring to the English administrators of the British Raj in colonial India: They were predictable people, predictable because they worked for the robot. What the robot said they would also say, what the robot did they would do, and what the robot believed was what they believed because people like them had fed that belief into it. And they would always be right so long as the robot worked, because the robot was the standard of rightness. There was no originating passion in them. Whatever they felt that was original would die the moment it came into conflict with what the robot was geared to feel. Domination by the great robot (the duties of imperial England's class system)? Originating passion (Wordsworth's "feeling")? Readers might respond positively or negatively to this passage, but they would be unlikely to say, "Ah, Romanticism is alive!" But that is exactly what this passage says: the spirit of Romanticism lives. That's a long way of saying that I will not limit my use of the term "counterculture" to the 1960s. I will use the term to indicate a social movement more than two centuries old whose fundamental purpose has been to displace the violence and inequality of Western capitalist culture. That's its "idea," even if every particular countercultural instance of that idea has been limited or flawed, and many of its participants have been crazy or clueless. And yet many of us now feel a deep gratitude to this tradition, especially to its recent Anglo-American variation. -- I grew up in a prefab East Bay suburb in the 1950s (speaking of passionless robots), a place where uncomprehending alienation was the world and the world was a lusterless fate. But I was fortunate to live near San Francisco and the music culture of the late '60s. Simply put, hippy culture, psychedelia, and anti-war dissidence called to me and I ran, laughing, to embrace it all. I may have thought that I was joining hippy culture, but in fact I was throwing the weight of my young being behind the Romantic appeal of "originating passion." Just as relevant, in the summer of 1969, the summer before my freshman year at the University of San Francisco, I joined a group of Marxist autodidacts in a rented office space in downtown Hayward and, using materials from the Quaker's American Friends Service Committee, studied to become a draft counselor. But in that office were magazines-- Ramparts, The Berkeley Barb, The San Francisco Oracle, National Lampoon --and pamphlets analyzing the United States's motives for the war in Vietnam, the role of money and militarism, and revealing the facts about what our "boots on the ground" meant to the people of Vietnam and to our own soldiers. I was very surprised by all this. I'd never seen anything like it. It certainly wasn't the sort of stuff I was offered in high school. But I reached a quick conclusion: "Oh," I thought, "this is what it's like to think. This is what honesty feels like. Somebody is bothering to tell me the truth." I'd never felt so alive before--not one of the living dead, not another creature of my culture, not another one of Paul Scott's robots. As a consequence, I became deeply skeptical of loyalty to a nation that asked its young to risk their lives in corrupt wars, and I was skeptical that I could be loyal to a social system that offered such one-dimensional lives to its children. But radical honesty? Now, that I could be loyal to. The music I heard at the Fillmore Auditorium, that I could be loyal to. Intelligence, honesty, and music opened things up for me, and created what the first hippies, the Haight-Ashbury's communal anarchists the Diggers, called "free frame of reference." I was free in my mind to join with others in the creation of a world as much unlike the one we knew as possible. I say I became skeptical, but that's not quite right. Skepticism has negative connotations suggesting a degree of cynicism, but I was not and am not cynical. What I learned in that Hayward office space was how to "read against the grain," how, in this context, to resist the assumption that my country would not lie to me and must be telling the truth. Reading against the grain is not about being skeptical. Reading against the grain is about transformation. Debunking the truth claims of social authorities (whether state, community, or family) opens the way to creating alternatives (better ways to think, better ways to live). I would go on to more sophisticated versions of this experience as a university student, reading more of the intellectual heroes of the era, Marcuse, Roszak, Sartre, the anti-psychologist R. D. Laing, and eventually Marx and the pantheon of Western Marxist intellectuals, especially Theodor Adorno. But I had learned something in that grim little office in Hayward that I couldn't have learned elsewhere, not even through Adorno. I learned that this critical intelligence, this truth-telling, this honesty, does not happen in the big world, in what I would learn to call the "dominant culture"; it happens in spaces set apart and inhabited by "freaks" and political radicals, demographics that seemed happily inexhaustible in the Bay Area in 1969. In other words, my political and personal enlightenment came among people who had dropped out of the world as we'd known it. What Allen Ginsberg called the Two Tribes--Berkeley politicos and San Francisco hippies--were united in me and many others. Berkeley's socialists provided a critique of what we endured, and San Francisco's counterculture provided an alternative. In my sixty-eight years on the planet, the only political thought that I have seen succeed to any degree in creating conditions where intelligence, mutual caring, beauty, and health counted for more than power and profit has not been socialism, or communism, or democracy, and certainly not capitalism. It has been counterculture. Counterculture is civil disobedience as a way of life. -- But the point of this book is not to look back. Of course, it's useful to know that we have a distinguished tradition to appeal to, a lineage, but that's finally not the point. The point is to recognize that counterculture and its refusal to join the world in bloody progress is still a viable option. For us. Now. And that is in spite of the well-heeled efforts of Democrats and Republicans alike along with their handmaids in the corporate media to tell us that counterculture is not an option, that it is a failure, a dead thing. For me, the point is to use the traditions of counterculture to create strategies for living in a world that can't be fixed. This book is intended not only as a call to countercultural arms, as if we were to say, "Citizens of the world...relax!" It is also intended as something that seeks the freedom, the playfulness, the intelligence, and the honesty of counterculture. In this book I try to write in counterculture's creative aura. So, a few important understandings before setting off. Although there is a logic to this book, it is as much a "performance" as an "argument." The argument begins with an account of the problem (Parts I and II): all of the millions of people on this planet who lack a sense of place, a sense of belonging to a place that they know as their home; and all of the millions of people who live in isolation--whether that means living under a freeway overpass or 24/7 in front of a smartphone--who experience firsthand our current epidemic of mass loneliness, depression, drug abuse, and suicide. In response to this problem are two sections (Parts III and IV) that describe counterculture as both a critique and an alternative way of living. Counterculture, I contend, is both impertinent and improvisational. Counterculture lives through a thoughtful and often comic scorn for the status quo. It makes itself impertinent, both insolent and useless to the purposes of the larger world. Released by this impertinence from the burden of what others take to be "reality," counterculture proceeds to improvise an alternative. As the hippies put it, counterculture "does its own thing." It improvises a counter-world. In this way, it seeks both freedom and happiness. My argument continues with a sort of reprise, da capo, of the problem, emphasizing the ways in which the dominant culture frustrates or prohibits counterculture (Part V), followed by two concluding sections (Parts VI and VII) in which I consider what counterculture can mean for us now. That's the logic of this book, but not its entirety. If the world cannot be fixed, it is because the institutions that are charged with fixing it are actively doing the opposite, are energetically treating the world not as the subject of care but as the object of self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement. I do not hope for the Democratic Party or even the Democratic Socialists to fix this situation. As Nancy Pelosi remarked at a CNN town hall meeting in 2018: "We're all capitalists, and that's the way it is." Even Elizabeth Warren has confessed that "I believe in markets." To both of them we ought to reply, impertinently, "So much the worse for your world, representatives! You leave us no choice except to make our own." We must be impertinent in order not to do what the robots (among whom we must include Speaker Pelosi) want us to do. In addition, we will need to re-learn the power of improvisation in order to create worlds that we might choose to live in, might be happy to live in, as opposed to the world that we do live in, the one that is administered by our masters. This may not sound like something you know how to do, and in truth nobody does. It is mostly a world to be discovered. But because of the threat of climate disaster and nuclear war, things out of all proportion to anything our species has ever experienced, we will need to figure it out. As Taj Mahal sang in 1969, "You're gonna need somebody on your bond." You're gonna need other people if you want to get to heaven, or for us, forget heaven, we're gonna need other bodies on our bond just to survive. We may not need a socialist state, but we will need social bonds--neighbors or comrades, community or congregation, doesn't matter what you call them--if we are to survive the calamities that threaten us. This renewed social bonding is, obviously, not what is happening now. Millions of jobs have been added to urban areas since the Great Recession, but many of the people in those jobs live in expensive apartment ghettos where employees are warehoused in human abstraction. It's hard to imagine what those mostly young people will do at the "end of civilization" that some climate scientists are predicting for us. In other words, there is an element not only of socialism but of survivalism, a socialist survivalism, if you will, in the countercultures we will create. Counterculture provides a way forward. While working through it, we no longer soak in puddles of anxiety waiting for Rachel Maddow to explain it all to us, or wait for the House of Representatives to get busy and impeach somebody, anybody, to "lock them up!" Instead we will be living, and enlarging. Not waiting for the revolution and the arrival of the perfected socialist state or even an imperfect version thereof (which is certainly what we'd get), but living now in our own strength and creativity. That is what I'd like to persuade my readers of, but I will often seek to persuade in the way that music persuades: by providing an experience that readers will want to join and carry forward. This book is theatrical as well as discursive, especially in its three "improvisations," tucked in among the arguments: my guitar solos, so to speak. In other words, this book is a performance intended as an example of a possible intellectual/literary counterculture. And that's important because in these improvisations the book tries to be what it calls for. Finally, this is not a how-to book. I am not trying to persuade anybody to do anything in particular, and I'm certainly not trying to give instructions for making a chicken coop. Like Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human, this is a book seeking companions, seeking "free spirits." In a sense, I'm trying not only to persuade but to seduce, seduce into the awareness that this or something like this is what we WANT--in both senses of the term: what we lack and what we desire. Theodor Adorno famously said that in capitalist culture "Life does not live." So, let's live. But live how? It is in the nature of counterculture to refuse the world as something already determined. It creates a welcoming openness to change, to drift, to try things. It is laughing freedom. It is disenchanted with capitalist reality and says, "Dissolve! Diffuse! Dissipate! In order to recreate!" (Coleridge). That's the neighborhood I want to live in! Excerpted from Living in a World That Can't Be Fixed: Reimagining Counterculture Today by Curtis White All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.