Countercultural Studies

Negli anni Ottanta il punk era una forma d’arte, un simbolo globale di ribellione, una cultura musicale e giovanile: un fenomeno culturale complesso, che ha avuto importanti implicazioni politiche, tanto da diventare un nuovo circuito dell’attivismo giovanile e dell’impegno dopo il declino della “stagione dei movimenti”.

Fondato su un ampio ventaglio di fonti, il libro analizza origini e sviluppi del punk e lo colloca nelle sue reti transnazionali di produzione e mobilitazione: quell’esperienza diventa un osservatorio capace di restituire in modo originale le più ampie trasformazioni culturali e politiche del tempo, con particolare attenzione al caso dell’Italia e della Gran Bretagna.

Siamo nati da soli vuole in questo modo contribuire al rinnovamento delle cornici interpretative degli anni Ottanta, mettendo in discussione il senso comune sul decennio come “tempo del riflusso”, di “fine” della politica, di “trionfo” del privato e di “scomparsa” dei giovani.

For the last two decades, my sexual-emotional relationships have happened within what has come to be known as non-monogamy, a field in which I am an activist, theorist, consultant and who knows what else. And despite all that, and despite dedicating body, mind, emotional networks and a great deal of my energy to the matter, I still come up against repeated difficulties in trying to sustain relationships that are plural and healthy for everybody involved. And it’s not just me. The same thing happens to other people in the social circles I’m involved in: anguish, guilt, jealousy, lack of comprehension by those around us… all the psychological horrors get going.
It’s not me and it’s not us: it’s the system.

For the past forty years shamanism has drawn increasing attention among the general public and academics. There is an enormous literature on shamanism, but no one has tried to understand why and how Western intellectual and popular culture became so fascinated with the topic. Behind fictional and non-fictional works on shamanism, Andrei A. Znamenski uncovers an exciting story that mirrors changing Western attitudes toward the primitive. The Beauty of the Primitive explores how shamanism, an obscure word introduced by the eighteenth-century German explorers of Siberia, entered Western humanities and social sciences, and has now become a powerful idiom used by nature and pagan communities to situate their spiritual quests and anti-modernity sentiments. The major characters of The Beauty of the Primitive are past and present Western scholars, writers, explorers, and spiritual seekers with a variety of views on shamanism. Moving from Enlightenment and Romantic writers and Russian exile ethnographers to the anthropology of Franz Boas to Mircea Eliade and Carlos Castaneda, Znamenski details how the shamanism idiom was gradually transplanted from Siberia to the Native American scene and beyond. He also looks into the circumstances that prompted scholars and writers at first to marginalize shamanism as a mental disorder and then to recast it as high spiritual wisdom in the 1960s and the 1970s. Linking the growing interest in shamanism to the rise of anti-modernism in Western culture and intellectual life, Znamenski examines the role that anthropology, psychology, environmentalism, and Native Americana have played in the emergence of neo-shamanism. He discusses the sources that inspire Western neo-shamans and seeks to explain why lately many of these spiritual seekers have increasingly moved away from non-Western tradition to European folklore. A work of intellectual discovery, The Beauty of the Primitive shows how scholars, writers, and spiritual seekers shape their writings and experiences to suit contemporary cultural, ideological, and spiritual needs. With its interdisciplinary approach and engaging style, it promises to be the definitive account of this neglected strand of intellectual history.

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." 

Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek:

"Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes)

Abstract:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

Zen in the attic. A contribution to the reception of Buddhism in Poland. Abstract: The reception of Buddhism, which in Europe began already in the nineteenth century, did not pass over Poland. Initially limited to scientific milieus and small social circles, in time Buddhism became more widely present, especially in artistic communities and youth subculture groups. After the World War Second, despite of being cut off by the Iron Curtain from main cultural changes, Poland was permeated by fashions and phenomena characteristic of the Atlantic civilization, including the fascination for Oriental religiosity, especially Buddhism. Oriental studies were carried out at universities, while individuals and groups of enthusiasts tried on their own to study Buddha’s writings and teachings. There were among those people Władysław Misiewicz from Radom and Piotr Boniński from Gliwice. Their interest, however, was limited to intellectual reflection and they did not practice Buddhism. One of the first groups to practice Buddhist meditation was the circle of artist Andrzej Urbanowicz, who in 1967, together with his friends established an artistic group called “Oneiron”. Texts and intellectual quest led them towards Zen Buddhism, and Urbanowicz’s atelier became the first place in Poland where meditation was practiced. Meetings were also held at Mąchocice Kapitulne near Kielce. Activities of the still unformal group of Buddhists were kept under surveillance by the secret police. In 1975 Philip Kapleau, an American teacher of Buddhism, answered the group’s invitation, and from that time on, he visited Poland many a time. After Urbanowicz left Poland, in 1978, architect Andrzej Korbel became the leader of the group; in time, the Warsaw circle took the lead, with psychotherapist Wojciech Eichelberger. In the meantime, however, eff orts to legalize the group encountered obstacles and it was not until 1981 that the fi rst Zen Buddhist Community in Poland was established. Later on, next groups were organized but, despite the fact that a real breakthrough took place after 1989, already in the 1980s there were four officially registered Buddhist communities, with branches and circles in different towns and cities.

The idea of unknown countries and invisible republics that lie beneath our eyes, a subterranean dimension that is striving to take its own form and structure in order to produce something new, are part of contemporary forms of protest and rehabilitation. Lettrism and post-war Avant-Gardes reflected the general insatisfaction of times but they still produced a fair amount of formidable works and legacy. The present conference aims at exploring these connections and dimensions, putting apparently distant groups and movements in unexpected harmony, a harmony made not of a continuous progress, but instead full of contradictions, setbacks and surprises.

The three themed articles in this issue take as their subject the contested legacies of the 1960s and ’70s counterculture. All draw on cultural materialism in order to better illuminate the significance of these legacies for our troubled times. They begin from the argument of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ ‘Subcultures, Cultures and Class’. For the CCCS, the counterculture was a ‘profoundly adaptive’ middle-class response to postwar changes in the capitalist productive base. At the same time, the CCCS very much acknowledged the contested nature of countercultural revolt. They noted that a ‘deeper disaffiliation’ from the dominant was possible, hinting at the counterculture’s utopian dimensions and its attempted alliances with the labour movement. Yet they remained ambiguous about the politics of an ‘unfinished’ cultural trajectory.
It is to that trajectory that these three articles return, treating culture and history as always unsettled, contested and complex when it comes to their contemporary significance.

El cine y el rock, formas de arte e industria popular, han mantenido una relación fructífera desde la segunda mitad del siglo XX. A partir de esto, el libro recorre subgéneros como el rockumental, la ópera rock y el biopic; se detiene en movimientos asimilados por el cine como el punk, la no wave o el metal; repasa algunas representaciones de la juventud en el cine de los años cincuenta y en las teen movies; detecta la presencia de la contracultura en el cine estadounidense y francés; para finalmente, explorar el panorama chileno y argentino.

Suban el volumen propone, a través de 13 ensayos firmados por críticos de Chile, Perú y Argentina, cartografiar y descifrar las relaciones entre cine y rock, buscando entusiasmar a melómanos y cinéfilos por partes iguales.

Título: Suban el volumen. 13 ensayos sobre cine y rock.
Editores: Iván Pinto, Álvaro García y Ximena Vergara.
Editorial: Calabaza del Diablo
Escriben: Alvaro Garcia Mateluna, Alejo Janin, Hernán Silva Arriagada, Alejandro Cozza, Juan Carlos Poveda, Iván Pinto, Andrés Nazarala, Mónica Delgado, José Carlos Cabrejo, Griselda Soriano, Luciana Calcagno, Ximena Vergara, Antonia Krebs, Luis Valenzuela, Susana Diaz.

The COURAGE Registry is a digital research tool that allows exploring the legacy of cultural opposition in former Eastern European socialist countries by cataloging and describing relevant collections on dissident culture across Eastern Europe and worldwide. The linked database reveals a great variety of nonconformist cultural practices that were formerly largely unknown and promotes comparative research of similar phenomena in Eastern European societies and cultures. The researchers on the project tended to treat visual sources as traces of the past equally as important as written documents. Images were not only illustrations of the given narratives but, in some cases, visual documents were the only sources that preserved the memory of the alternative or underground activity, while in other cases, it was the act of taking pictures that resulted in the confrontation with official cultural policy. This article aims to provide insight into the basic dilemmas and issues that the project faced dealing with images for the database through three examples. Firstly, we focus on the photo documentation of an exhibition of the Hungarian art group Inconnu that was made by the secret police following the destruction of the artworks. Secondly, we show how photos were also taken by official photographers who operated in the so-called “grey zone.” Finally, our third example refers to Fortepan, a unique public initiative that focuses on the digital preservation of private photographs created between 1900 and 1990.

Beginning with his arrest for possession of marijuana December 24, 1965, Dr. Timothy Leary became embroiled in a very public series of court cases that sought initially to utilize the Free Exercise Clause of the United States Constitution to challenge established United States drug laws regarding marijuana. Though Leary’s attempts at using the Free Exercise Clause were unsuccessful, his case was eventually heard by the United States Supreme Court, who, in 1969, found major elements of the 1937 Marihuana Tax Law unconstitutional and overturned Leary’s conviction. This chapter will trace evolution of Leary’s defense argument from one based on religious freedom to one based on due process and the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. Leary’s initial freedom of religion defense was based on the success of the Native American Church’s 1964 California State Supreme Court ruling that protected that group’s sacramental use of peyote within its religious ceremonies. This chapter will also describe how the success of Native American Church case led Leary to popularize and speak out in favor of small groups of psychedelic users establishing their own “official” religions. Leary followed his own advice by creating the League for Spiritual Discovery in 1966 and was seen as a religious leader by the founder of the Neo-American Church (another psychedelic quasireligion) as well. Seeing themselves as a persecuted people under legal attack for their spiritual and experimental practices, both the NeoAmerican Church and the League for Spiritual Discovery sought to emulate the Native American Church and establish legal protections for the use of illegal substances.

: Los escritos e intervenciones periodísticas de Parménides García Saldaña sobre el rock mexicano revelan otra faceta de su trabajo intelectual. En Piedra Rodante, rearticula la historia nacional en una crítica cultural con tonos benjaminianos en su teorización del rock como género electrónico motivado por cambios en la tecnología que a su vez cambia las generaciones que lo escuchan. Exploro la autoconstrucción de una postura crítica en las crónicas y artículos para trazar su posicionamiento contradictorio e incongruente. Las conexiones internacionales entre el rock mexicano, la historia nacional y la posición marginal del blues y el rock global se ven complementadas por una inserción dentro de los límites del nacionalismo cultural mexicano.

The concept of the “diagram” has been promoted since the 1990s as an advanced mode of designing and thinking about design. This article proposes that the diagram helps us understand a different architectural moment wrestling with the convergence of overwhelming political, technical and philosophical challenges: that of the pioneering ecological scene associated with 1960s counterculture in the United States. This approach is helpful in understanding the countercultural “mind” and the way in which it understood the ecological and ontological relationships between design, place, nature, the social, and the whole. The overreaching ambitions of countercultural architecture stand in contrast to the narrowing of architecture’s agendas since the 1960s, and it reminds us that architecture is hermeneutic—that it is a way of interpreting the world. Readers of the books and magazines in which these diagrams were published were likely inexpert, forming their ideas about the very means and ends of design. The study of architectural diagrams assists in the comparative study of different modes and periods of design which aspire to register the bigger parameters in which design is formed. Though countercultural architecture was the chaos of diagrams without an agreed formal language, diagram architecture nonetheless produced rich formal abstraction.

Wprowadzenie do pop psychedelii - hybrydy sztuki, mody i marketingu, która stała się popularna pod koniec lat 60. na skutek absorpcji kultury psychedelicznej przez mainstream. Omówienie reprezentacji w filmie autorskim, filmie gatunkowym, kinie eksploatacji, muzyce i reklamie.

Spanish translation based on a Keynote address given at the conference, "Youth and Socialism: Transnational Perspectives" (Zurich University, May 2016).  Published in the Uruguayan cultural supplement, Lento, 62 (May 2018): 9-19.  Beautifully illustrated by the Uruguayan graphic artist, Dani Scharf.

The structural, formal, and social eccentricity of the Drop City artists’ commune in Colorado defied conventional definition as architecture, but rendered it a singular motif in accounts of
experimental architecture, and made it a countercultural domicile without peer. Drop City’s architectural innovations included a ‘‘bricolage’’ interpretation of Richard Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, a geometric structural system known as the Zome, and passive solar devices. Before it became a spectacle of degeneration, Drop City was posited as a creative laboratory for cultural and environmental ‘‘praxis,’’ and it remains a case study of altered architectural parameters.

Solidarity, or towards a post-capitalist, post-global warming fashion sense.
This overview was published in the Journal for Design Strategies.
Two issues of Fashion 2012 were released by the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press, 2009, 2010.
Issue 2 contains a short essay by Gavin Grindon.

On November 8th 1971, the English rock band Led Zeppelin released their fourth, untitled, album. Having 22 million copies sold, its success was seen by the record label Atlantic Records as a professional suicide. On this album, the tracks are referring to the 60s rock’s cultural form, when London’s underground offered possibilities of producing musical experiments. However, the album also has transformations, typical of the beginning of the 70s, when rock music was tied to subgenres, in order to be assimilated by marketing strategies and sold in each one of the segmented markets. This situation was due to a London underground scene crisis and this research aims to investigate how much of this crisis can be heard in Led Zeppelin IV and how the band reacted to the new subgenres.

Barbara Pasamonik, 2015, Fundamentalizm kulturowy jako współczesna kontrkultura. Na przykładzie konwersji na islam [w:] Kultury kontestacji. Dziedzictwo kontrkultury i nowe ruchy społecznego sprzeciwu, pod red. Tomasza Maślanki, Rafała Wiśniewskiego, Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, s. 57-72.

The socialist and feminist novelist Angela Carter (1940-1992) is one of the most acclaimed late-Twentieth Century English writers, famous for short stories such as The Bloody Chamber and novels such as Nights at the Circus and Wise Children.  This book investigates Angela Carter’s life and work in the West Country, where she lived in Clifton, Bristol (1961-1969) and Walcot, Bath (1973-1976).

The purpose of this book is two-fold. First, it is to discover and reveal some of Angela Carter’s non-literary influences during her formative years as a writer in the West Country. Second, its primary intention is to take her location in 1960’s Clifton, Bristol and 1970’s Walcot, Bath as a point of departure to explore the broader artistic, radical and experimental communities that flourished in those years.

Based on new oral-history interviews and primary sources, Angela Carter’s ‘Provincial Bohemia’ offers new perspectives on Angela Carter’s experience of alternative Bristol with its radical politics and creative arts scene, exploring its influence on the three novels set in the city Shadow Dance (1966), Several Perspectives (1968) and Love (1971).

This thesis consists of a series of extensive projects which aim to explore a new designer role for fashion. It is a role that experiments with how fashion can be reverse engineered, hacked, tuned and shared among many participants as a form of social activism. This ...

This article explores an origin of architectural sustainability in the 1970s Californian governmental programs of Governor Jerry Brown and the circle around his Consultant, the countercultural entrepreneur Stewart Brand. Focusing on the Bateson Building, designed by State Architect Sim Van der Ryn and his team to be the world’s first large energy-saving, climate-modulating building, the article traces the ambition of the first Brown Administration to reinvent the state as a unified ecology founded on New Age principles, notably those drawn from the second order cybernetics of the Governor’s Advisor, anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Through archival and published sources drawn from government, environmental policy, cybernetics and architecture, the article recounts an ambitious ecological agenda that included a new Office of Appropriate Technology, a projected Space program, and a Water Atlas. The article argues for a reconsideration of the history of sustainable and postmodern architecture alike.

Queer counterpublics have been seen as a significant resource for gay men's HIV prevention and harm reduction (Berlant & Warner 1998; Warner 2002; Race 2009). This chapter works with this concept to think about how critical collectivities of sex and social movements around HIV prevention  might operate in the digital context. The question is particularly timely right now, since we are in the middle of a radical transformation in sexual geography in many Western contexts, and digital technologies are no doubt implicated in whatever will emerge from this. In my home town of Sydney, regarded by many as the historical and symbolic centre of Australian gay life, the intensity of the state assault on 'nightlife' in the last couple of years has left many of us reeling, as one by one bars, clubs, parties and the experience of street-life that connects them seem to be vanishing through closures, curfews and intensive policing. The urban conditions that once made it possible to imagine Sydney's LGBTIQ population as a heterogenous but inclusive sexual community are changing rapidly and inexorably. While some see these changes as a welcome by-product of the increasing acceptance of gays and lesbians into mainstream life, the governmental erasure of urban sexual scenes has occurred alongside a proliferation of homonormative discourses that prioritise marriage equality and normalising conceptions of gay life. In their eagerness to present gays and lesbians as respectable, everyday folk, these discourses frequently assume sex, drug and HIV-phobic forms (Liu 2015, p. 2). Their capacity to shut down constructive responses to the realities of sex, drugs and HIV infection will not be lost on anyone who has followed online discussions of any of these topics recently. These remarkably polarised and polarising debates are conspicuous for their denigration of those expressions of queer or embodied life that are taken to compromise the public image of sexual minorities as normal upstanding citizens. Needless to say, such instances of 'in-group purification' (Goffman 1963, p. 108) further stigmatise practices that require more constructive, generous forms of attention and open acknowledgement, especially with respect to their public health implications.

The exemplification of queer counterpublics in the critical literature draws extensively on the cultural forms of late twentieth-century urban sexual subcultures in the West, pre-Internet. This paper aims to distil some key principles from this work and consider how they might be taken forward and enacted in the present context, given the increasing prominence of sexual media and hookup apps as constituent elements of gay sexual culture.

"La autora realiza con estas páginas un aporte fundamental al debate sobre las condiciones en las que se practica y se usa la comunicación por parte de organizaciones que se apartan de la lógica industrial propia de las grandes empresas de medios y del Estado. Las tensiones y la relativa autonomía de los medios alternativos y comunitarios respecto de la institucionalidad estatal por un lado, y de las lógicas mercantiles por el otro, configuran un nudo problemático que es al mismo tiempo teórico y empírico y que, además, define los contornos políticos de las diversas experiencias de este sector.
Sin el sector de medios comunitarios y alternativos es imposible comprender la evolución del sistema de comunicación en el país y los conflictos, disputas y regulaciones que éste tuvo en las últimas décadas. Por lo tanto, sin la sistematización lograda en este libro el panorama de la comunicación en la Argentina resulta inconcluso. (...)
El texto de Natalia Vinelli es al mismo tiempo reflexivo y crítico, pero el lugar de la enunciadora no es neutral ni pretende asepsia alguna: al contrario, desde sus primeras líneas el libro reconoce una trayectoria política y social de compromiso constante con las tradiciones políticas y comunicacionales abordadas. Sin embargo, lejos de la apología que suele signar el abordaje de temáticas afines por parte cierta literatura de divulgación, Natalia Vinelli enhebra un estudio que abraza la reflexión y, al hacerlo, no escamotea la crítica. Esta crítica, que es también autocrítica por la posición que asume la autora, representa una contribución que por su seriedad, consistencia, capacidad analítica, profundidad intelectual y vocación crítica es notablemente superadora del panegírico zalamero que es regla en numerosos escritos sobre la democratización de la comunicación en la Argentina." (Del prólogo de Martín Becerra)

Il giorno dell’inaugurazione c’erano enormi palloni installati da Franco Mazzucchelli attorno a San Carpoforo. Palloni “abitabili” dove svolgere anche assemblee e discussioni. Irrompevano nel grigio della vita di quartiere come sfere aliene, messaggi da altri mondi. I passanti si fermavano incuriositi, sorpresi, tornavano bambini: la meraviglia illumina la strada. La Fabbrica di Comunicazione resisterà circa un anno e mezzo, poi trionferà la Grande Brera col suo ordine, le gerarchie, le mostre, i giri d’affari, le iniziative soffocanti della cultura con la c” maiuscola.

On the inauguration day there were huge balloons installed by Franco  Mazzucchelli  a-round San Carpoforo. “Habitable” balloons where meetings and discussions could also be held. They burst into the gray of neighborhood life like alien spheres, messages from other worlds. Passers-by stopped curiously, surprised, they became children again: wonder illuminates the road. The Com-munication Factory will last for a year and a half, then the “Grande Brera” will triumph with its or-der, hierarchies, exhibitions, business trips, suf-focating cultural initiatives with a capital “c”.

Este trabajo es una etnografía que habla de un grupo de locos, jóvenes que viajan por períodos extendidos y trabajan con “arte” callejero: malabaristas, músicos y artesanos. El trabajo de campo para esta investigación tuvo lugar entre 2017 y 2018 en varios puntos de
Ecuador y Colombia. Como metodología utiliza la etnografía multilocal, la observación participante y la realización de entrevistas semi-estructuradas. Los datos adicionales los recopilé durante los últimos tres años a través de mi propia participación en la escena del
viaje de los locos. Se concentra en un estilo de viaje que transita el espacio liminal de dejar ser joven y comenzar a ser adulto, que además encara los riesgos de viajar sin dinero y su implícita marginalidad. Primero que todo, el trabajo explica las nociones teóricas utilizadas
a lo largo del trabajo. Luego, presenta un marco histórico y social. En seguida, la descripción etnográfica de sus lugares y prácticas con el fin de entender el significado que le dan al viaje. Por último, aborda el viaje como un momento ritual de importancia ontológica asociado a un peregrinaje contemporáneo. El objetivo principal de este trabajo es
comprender las narrativas y prácticas de los locos en sus viajes en torno a sus búsquedas, transformaciones personales y negociaciones con los valores, prácticas y estilos de vida dominantes en sus sociedades parentales. Pretende aportar al estudio del viaje de los locos en el orden que lo entiende como un fenómeno en el que el viaje se inscribe de manera ritual, que ha sido poco estudiado en y desde Latinoamérica.