ah, this is the new burkean?! i'd been wondering what had happened to your entries! cool cool - i hope the entry is lucid; i wrote it in a bit of a haze last night. anyway, glad you enjoyed.
Ok, need to go back and read this in depth, only gave it a skim for now because... well... I was reading all fucking about this yesterday. Weird timing, man
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nah, we just read similar sources? atleast in terms of ls. the adbusters piece is like that douchebag who said, upon the fall of communism, that it was "the end of history" and that from now on there would be universal peace and capitalism. hipsters will be succeeded by something worst and even more vapid eventually, and then people will reminisce and make something romantic out of hipsterism. i can just see the ken burns documentary about it now
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So my first gripethewolpertingerFebruary 6 2009, 19:10:58 UTC
I like the idea of taking the examination of “What is counterculture?” as far back as possible (in your case, as far back as the Rennaisance) but… I certainly cannot agree that “ At a societal level, counterculture is bullshit; it is the identification of a "way of life" different from the standard of the ruling class at the moment, adopted by members of the ruling class with varying degrees of intensity
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Re: So my first gripefrontdispatchesFebruary 6 2009, 21:37:28 UTC
oh yay! i'm actually really glad you've replied to this as i imagine you'd have good input! right: with regards to the provos, i actually thought about this (tho not them in particular) over the course of writing this yesterday, because i knew i was being a bit vague - that's the problem, really, with the term "counterculture". or rather, the problem is its misapplication. i would, entirely, say that the legitimate anarchist would qualify as counterculture - quite literally, they were fully against the dominant culture, and decidedly with the case i know best - that is to say, spanish anarchism - they were so literally contrary to the dominant culture that they contributed in a huge way to the spanish republic losing the civil war because, rather than fighting franco's troops, they focused on attempting to make revolution within the loyal territory first. your provos reminded me of that - the spanish anarchists managed to become the dominant group over the first half of the war simply because people who happened to be part of their
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interesting to read your account of St. Louis U. in Madrid… and you’re right that it isn’t unique and really I wonder if just about any college experience is unique anymore as in the last 50 years Colleges and Universities have become such a big business. I imagine it as like Carpet Salesmen coming together for a convention and trading ideas and best business practices and then going off to all their businesses with the same ideas that work (in a profit building sort of way)... And you wind up with all the carpet sales places around the country being pretty much exactly the same with slight regional differences that don't really actually make a difference because they're certianly not coming from the business itself. This seems, to me, to be what most Colleges and Universities do now.. Ok, that was a bit of a digression, but
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yes and no, i'd say. i mean, the problem is that, obviously, i don't have enough experience with american colleges to speak; in terms of spanish campuses, there is a radical difference between public and private, only in that, atleast with my experience, the private was run by the opus dei, the public had heavy communist influence...but in both, it was considered entirely kosher for professors to speak their opinions (and shape the course material around them), so i guess it's not a different experience per se, just different ideologies. i think, with the sense of that most colleges state that their objective is to "form" students, most of them really do have to do just that, and naturally they'll take the best methods they hear of from other places during conferences, and naturally it all begins to become fairly uniform; aye, i think this has to do alot with the need for them to be money-makers these days. but, to the point: exactly - it is up to you to get what you can out of it. the problem with the colonial existence is, perhaps,
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dont be so quick to dismissthewolpertingerFebruary 6 2009, 19:29:24 UTC
You seem to shrug off the 1950s/1960s movement away from “the cookie-cutter conformity of the American post-war, baby-boom existence” but I think it's hard for us to imagine what a big fucking deal it was. Yes, a lot of this is coming from students who must've felt pretty damn cozy, all things considered... Most of them were on their parent's ticket or riding a scholarship, the enormous amounts of debt us students rack up these days was unheard of at the time, so the "loafing class" of the age might have found it easy to "buck trends"... but i think when you're living in a culture where the Father Knows Best model is not only the norm but insisted upon as THE ONLY WAY THINGS SHOULD BE AND THE ONLY WAY WE WILL SURVIVE... well... Then yeh, burning your bra (and, to a more important extent, burning your draft card) is an act of rebellion and counter-culture. It may not be particularly individualistic at the time, but it is counter-culture
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Re: dont be so quick to dismissfrontdispatchesFebruary 6 2009, 21:51:26 UTC
aye, yes, my point exactly - and that's why at the end, i did make the point that some people actually do make a difference...but these are generally the first people to do it, and often times people we never hear about, simply because it doesn't become a "movement" until either A) some asshole gets self-righteous and starts practicing self-promotion - "look what cool thing i did!", or B) someone cool makes the mistake of bringing some-such asshole along while they're doing something cool, and eventually someone ends up writing about it in the Times. you put it perfectly in your last paragraph, so i'd say we agree
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