dr.woooo writes:

"Dissonance and Mutations: Theorising Counter-Culture"

David Eden

Could there be a more telling example? The (International) Noise Conspiracy an apparently revolutionary rock band from Sweden, made up of punks-come-mods, steeped in Situationist esqu rhetoric dancing on mainstream music programs in uber-stylish clothes singing "Everything is up for sale"? Is it the ultimate subversion, the recapturing and repositioning of dominant structures of the culture industry and turning them into opposition voices? Or is it the ultimate recuperation, the transformation of expression of alienation and revolt into niche commodities for expanding youth markets, the conversion of dissent into a spectacle of harmless dissent? Counter-culture( especially that based around "youth") is now a fundamental part of the life of global cyber-industrial civilisation. Often critiqued as a past time for middle-class children in Western nations, young ( and not so young) people all over the world participate in counter-culture on deep personal levels. Anecdotal evidence suggests Malaysia has a larger "death metal" scene than Australia. The realisation that there is no one singular counter-culture is crucial. In stead there is a flourishing and fracturing of multiple trajectories of cultural organisation and expression often overtly political but also apolitical, anti-political and post-political. How can this be theorised? Can any sense be made of such a global phenomenon? Political science is often geared towards an understanding of political life through official organisations and expressed statements. Counter-cultures -- whilst often producing overlapping organisations and manifestos ( for example A New Punk Manifesto) -- are organised far more rhizomally. They fit the pattern of "war machines" articulated in the writings of Delueze and Guattarir. They are "decentred, divergent, transverse, nonhierchaical, lateral" patterns of subverting and recreating patterns of living. Thus the content of their politics exist beyond a level of expressed positions and flourishes of a more molecular relationship: with the social relationships that form the ectoplasm of a counter-culture.

This paper attempts to chart an understanding of counter-culture, built on the belief in their subversive potential that goes beyond their expressed politics. To do this two things ( at least) are necessary : an understanding of the dynamics in current capitalist civilisation and a positioning of the autonomous activities of counter-culture in this context. This involves a move to understand the role that culture and communication has in the total subsumption of social relationships of society by Capital and a willingness to engage with all activity that refuses or challenges this process, however seemingly "primitive" or "simplistic" it seems.

Counter-culture now has a long history in radical discourses especially those post 1945. However similar patterns of cultural association and revolt mark at least the 500 year history of the development of both capitalism and its opposition. In deed the resistance of commoners to the enclosures was often built around their cultural customs and traditions. For example the evolution of the game of soccer shows that quite often it served as a direct way to counter the encouraging power of the state and market. In 1768 at Holland Fen, Lincolnshire 3 football matches were held on recently enclosed land, the first of which ending in violent confrontation with a troop of dragoons. This brings to mind immediately the comparison with today's "Reclaim the Streets" parties. A global phenomenon in which roads are taken over and transformed in carnivals and dance parties, a moved aimed at fighting another kind of "enclosure" and often confronting heavy state violence and/or showing a direct willingness of sections of participants to engage in street fighting with the cops. This suggest a continuum of revelry , celebration and custom as the basic building blocks of class warfare. Is it this spirit that animates counter-culture today? Is it this simple or is something more at work? Is this class war or is it enclosure by consumption?

The overt radical politics of the traditional Left (including but not limited to social democracy, socialism and anarchism) and counter-cultures have had an uncomfortable relationship with each other. During the mid nineties American anarchist circles were divided by an increasingly bitter argument between "life-style" anarchism and" social " anarchism driven meanly through the bitter polemics of Murray Bookchin. This was cruelly ironic considering that whilst Bookchin was denouncing the counter-culturists, 20 years previously he has been their champion. At other times such as the Rock Against Racism gigs organised by the Socialist Workers Parties, more traditionalist Trotskyists worked with a number of punk bands . Positive or negative in large the approach of the traditional Left to counter-culture has been largely opportunistic: viewed as a potential recruiting ground rather than a as a legitimate form of struggle in it own right. This arises from the highly fetishised role of "militants" or "activism" which privileges some forms of activity as real struggle ( selling papers for example) and delegitimates others. Some radicals look to counter-culture as the new expressions of struggle itself . The Berkeley Barb in 1967 wrote "Hippies are more than just people who walk down Haight Street with beads, bells, long hair stoned on drugs. They are a concept, an act of rejection, a militant vanguard, a hope for the future" . But how and why?

Between a Rock and a Non-Place.

PostModernism places us in a terrible bind. The ability to construct serious revolutionary transformation is rejected as reality subsides into the black hole of the simulacrum or melts in a seemingly limitless world of choices in a cybernetic existence. These are in Negri's words, the two sides of postmodernism: one is "banal and pessimistic" the other "sophisticated and positive". The former is probably best typified by the writings of Jean Baudrillard , whose conception is of the simulacrum, the "desert of the real". This situation is one in which "the map precedes the territory", and any sense of the authentic is swamped under a "hyper" reality of simulacrum that codes all forms of behaviour. Dissent thus become impossible as the simulacrum implants itself through all behaviour removing any space to build a coherent challenge from. The population 'living' in this hyper reality undergoes a social emplosion and collapses into "atomization and spectatorship" . We can but sit back or fit into the roles provided for us in the serialised and televised apocalypse that unfolds in 3D around us.

The other side to this is a post-modern celebration of the increased development of the internet super-highway. One that sees the potential for multiple fractured subjectivities built by limitless choice of an increasingly consumer globe. Here revolt disappears because it becomes unnecessary the communicative potential of capitalism is portrayed as being so advanced they remove the need for class struggle.

Negri argues that what both sides of this rift within postmodernism are trying to do is map the increased importance of communication in the functioning of capitalist production, consumption and circulation. The response of capitalism to the revolts of the late nineteen sixties which exploded through the old fordist deals has been a strategy of flexible de/reterritoiralizations an the application of mixed forms of co-option and control, this has been coupled with the continual process of the subsumption and thus recreation of all social life within the boundaries of Capital. All of this has been realiant on a massive expansion and digitalisation of the apparatus of information transferral.

The first part of this formulation has been the creation of sophisticated and complex system of social control. This has involved the mutation from a disciplinary society to a society of control. The disciplinary society is one in which power stands out side and above the social interactions that goes on underneath it, intervene to control and limited their potential. It is one characterised by the focusing of social control of separate apparatuses of domination, the police, state censorship and the like. The society of control goes beyond this to a situation in which power enters and animates the personal body and the body politic. To do this a vast expansion of the cybernetic apparatus of control was needed. As Hardt & Negri write, " [p]ower is now exercised through machines that directly organise the brains (in communication systems, information networks, etc) and bodies ( in welfare systems, monitored activities etc) towards a state of autonomous alienation from the sense of life and the desire for creativity. The society of control might thus be characterised by an intensification and generalisation of the normalising apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate our common and daily practices, but in contrast to discipline, this control extends well outside the structured sites of social institutions through flexible and fluctuating networks." . These networks are increasingly the digitalised entertainment products of the culture industry. Crucial to this has been the creation and social wide projection of "life-styles". New and compliant version of subjectivity and identity are brought to life through all of the production/consumption nodes of the capitalist life. Entertainment, cults of celebrity, frantic consumption swarms over all interaction - encoding particular patterns of behaviour, fuelled and made desirable by the actual alienation living beings experience within commodity society. "In short, the 'lifestyle is projected by advertisers the off-the-peg human soft-ware for workers to install (as an aspiration , regardless of how distant it may be from their ability to pay) in order to be able to tolerate the leisure shopping environment of the mega-mall outside"

The important role of globalised digitalised commodity culture is heightened with the development of the real subsumption of society by Capital. The situation of real subsumption is one in which the rules and logics of capital leech out from the traditional sites of production and transform the entire social body into an integrated ensemble of machines for the production/circulation/and consumption of commodities and the extrapolation of surplus value from all nodes within this machine. Changes happen within the productive process itself, as Dyer-Witheford writes , "[s]cience is systematically applied to industry; technological innovation becomes perpetual ; exploitation focuses on a "relative intensification of productivity rather than an "absolute" extension of hours". The result of the first point is the tendency towards the formation of the social factory. Social spaces seemingly exterior or irrelevant to concrete production of goods take on new life as spaces where more amorphous commodities are produced and or where the incredibly important task of the reproduction of labour and its social conditions takes place. The public sphere disappears into a corporate sphere denoted by shopping malls, private entertainment facilities, service industries (often embodiments of a sort of micro-Fordist model of production) and ever present advertising. The boundaries between institutions collapse into each other. As Hardt and Negri write " [t]he processes of the real subsumption, of subsuming labor under capital and absorbing global society within Empire, force the figures of power to destroy the spatial measure and distance that had defined their relationships, merging the figures in hybrid forms".

Thus the subjectivities and organisational modes of different sections of fordist capitalism, (the worker and the factory, the student and the university for example) collapse into each other, into fragmented, hybrid bodies networked together. Simultaneously the individual becomes the mother, the worker, the student - the spending their day reproducing the conditions of labour, working for a wage, consuming, retraining, doing 'shadow work' and on and on. In other words their entire day becomes taken up by abstract labour for Capital generally, through labouring for specific capitalists or institutions specifically at different times. Thus, the individual becomes all subjectivities and none: Part of a generalised proletarian condition, individually heterogenous and paradoxical while socially homogenous.

This social factory being constituted increasingly through the globe on all social territory is networked together through an increasingly dense mesh of digital information systems. The advent of the social factory and the rise of cybernetic communications (the internet, digital TV and so on) are impossible without each other. The social factory thus manipulates and manages multiple sites node through computerised communication. Increasingly the immaterial labour of symbolic manipulate becomes the most important work of the global industry. More and more emphasis is placed on the creation of consumer desire and then research into it; the production of statistical information about all parts of the labour process; the relabelling and design of all social territory; the projection of reified consumer icons (logos) across all interaction; the meshing of financial markets together; the co-ordination of planetary weapons systems; the organisation of just in time production and international trade to name a few.

The life of the postmodern proletariat is increasingly swamped by this white-noise of communication. Produced as it is out of Capital, the experience of the communication is fundamentally alienating. Commodity fetishism is enlarged to such an extent it metamorphoses into almost something else. Life on a whole is commodified and thus reified above us. The intense psychological sickness of postmodern society -- especially body dismorphias -- is testament to this. The obscene situation of the proliferation of anorexia nervosa, in which biological life is destroyed for not equating synthetic life, is one example.

Yet the struggles of the multitude are never extinguished by capitalism and increasingly the autonomous desires of the people needs to be recruited to keep it functioning. Thus communication has another side, one that interacts dialectically with the former. Negri suggest that communication is to the post-Fordist proletariat as the social wage was to the fordist one. This means at least two things. Firstly that a world of meaningful communication is what the population expects from the system. Movies, music and enjoyment are all part of the daily desires and rewards that we want and expect for our labours. Secondly like the social wage, capitalist hopes its application will be enough to stymie demands for change that go beyond the status quo. Negri has also suggested that just as the social wage was the basis for the expansion of consumption, so to the communication wage is used as the motor for accumulation. Driven by and also against alienation, the want for more contact and more communication with the world is marshalled into a demand for more commodities and services of the culture industries.

This situation goes beyond culture being the realm of ideology and/or hegemony and the culture industry as one industry among many. Instead the whole realm of cultural activity -- "lifestyles" , digital entertainment, cybernetics, as well as the whole raft of entertainment industries and culture commodities -- become increasingly important in the management of populations and the daily and long term functioning of the global hybrid grid of production/consumption that is capitalism .It is an antagonistic and contradictory situation.

Feedback ! / Distortion! / Revolt?

Counter-culture in all it diversity is at the very least feed-back along the circuitry and wires of Capital; feedback that has the potential to burn out the fundamentals of the system. However, the traditional ideologies of the left are often blind to this potential. This is due to the fact that these ideologies and their practitioners have reified certain moments of proletarian history into universal models of struggle. The most common of course is the extreme fetishism that surrounds fordist ideas of the working class : the industrial proletariat organised in trade unions and engaged in "serious" struggle through social democratic parties. While the industrial proletariat, trade unions and social democratic parties still exist, they are no longer hegemonic. All the proletariat exist inside the world of the spectacular commodity economy that was the centre of the critique elaborated by the Situationist International. It is upon this territory of commodities, circulation and consumption that more and more struggles takes place. The refusal of a reified idea of struggle also means accepting that any struggle within capitalism is contradictory , open to recuperation and carries the marks of the past upon it. Any struggle that could totally supersede its context (experience an aufheben) , free it self of alienation, divisions of labour and commodity fetishism would be by definition already in a state of total liberation.

The many actions of auto-valorisation that challenged the mass factory of Fordism seemed small and all most invisible: stealing at work, sabotage absenteeism. However they did contain an often subconscious radical kernel. They went beyond a critique of the quantity of the social wage -- amount of pay access to commodities for example -- to quantitatively challenging the idea of wage labour, the validity of commodities. Counter-culture does this to the communication wage of postmodern capitalism and thus throws up questions about the entire nature of everyday life.

It is impossible to be certain whilst why any individual gets involved in counter-cultures. Generally it would be possible to say it is driven by alienation. More specifically it would be possible to say that it is a discontent with the nature and content of the communication wage, at is inability to deliver its own promised. This rupture works itself into more generally critique and the construction of the origin of subversive social relationships. It does this at numerous points, including the creation of cultural subsistence, the development of new networks of exchange, and the reworking of commodity fetishism.

Whilst communication apparatus and commodities spread out increasingly through society and "life-styles" are manufactured at an almost light speed (literaly if one considers the televisualisation of the world) the ability to communicate recedes. At most people are offered a blend of commodities and interactivities: an ensemble of pre-packaged signs that offer limited interaction and self-expression. Individuals thereby experience both massification and atomisation. Counter-culture is the inversion of this: the simultaneous attempt to assert individuality and community.

The first act of Counter-culture is creation: the creation of music, of clothing, or of zines for example. Whilst outside commentary and recuperative entertainment industry executives try to reduce counter-culture to individual niches of musical style, there is far more going on beyond the surface. Individuals form bands, organising, gigs record records, make clothes in other words produce culture. Superficially they do so through capitalist means. Money remains fundamental to much of this operation. However, since counter-culture is produced in a context of proletarianisation and exile from the dominant communication apparatus it is inevitably pushed against Capital. Under financial pressures, it can either go one of two ways : The first is to try to fit into the apparatus, by watering down musical style or lyrical content and thus transform into a niche market; the second is to challenge commodification and property rights.

Culture needs space. People need places to meet, bands need places to play, DJs places to spin records, and places are needed for people to meet swap and trade records, zines, clothing and food. Sometimes it is possible for counter-culture to find cracks and to hold space temporally. Traditionally in Sydney alternative venues have been run-down pubs desperate for customers ( such as the Green Square in Alexandria, Tailors on George in Surry Hills). It is never a happy scenario and mini hierarchies develop around who has the power to book acts . The growing tendencies of pubs to replace live music with gambling machines, along with the increased control over music venues exercised by promotional agencies and booking agencies, has added extra pressure. Therefore, across the gamut of counter-cultures the necessity to challenge the privitization of space has developed. For years now electronic music ( often called "Doof") has been holding parties in public areas varying from bushland to abandoned army bases. Punks in Sydney regularly hold unauthorised picnics in Sydney Park in St Peters. Often these events happen 'under the radar' of state authorities. However at other times they encounter direct state intervention. Graffiti, for example, is increasingly stigmatised in the media and has become a focus for heavy policing and punishment by society's disciplinary apparatuses. The Reclaim the Streets parties mentioned above has faced repeated confrontations with the cops. The reasons for this repression are that the reclamation of space for counter-culture threatens to intervene and destabilise various nodes in the social factory. From directly clogging traffic ( and consequently goods, commerce , and works) to challenging the spectacle of gentrification of inner-city Sydney counter-culture by claiming its space starts jamming the communication of Capitalism.

The most concrete expression of this is the formation of long term squats or social centres. Examples of this are the Grand Midnight Star in Sydney or ABC No Rio in New York . Both spaces were abandoned buildings that were squatted publicly and converted into Social Centres; specifically collectively run free spaces for political organisation and cultural expressions. Both have required large amounts of direct action and confrontation with state authorities. Here most explicitly it is evidenced that the need for space pushed counter-culture onto a insurrectionary and radicalising trajectory that increasingly brings them into conflict with wider and wider social forces. As Capital transforms the city in a megalopolis defined by social stratification, intensified policing and gentrification, the illegal and collective occupation of space threatens to destabilise its fundamentals.

Looser networks too form to maintain the operation of a counter-culture. In the absence of professional tour promoters and massive record companies. The production and distribution of the counter-culture relies on multiple voluntary work. Felix Havoc from the band Code 13 describes how they toured throughout Asia and Australia through a host of networks, staying in people's houses and relying on the good will and co-operation of an increasingly global punk community. This is typical. Starting with the Buzzcocks releasing their own single out of both necessity and desire, a strong DIY ethic has developed through punk. American zine Maximum RockandRoll complies every year a massive publication called Book Your Own Fucking Life . This text list thousands of contacts of bands, zines, free accomadation, people to organise gigs for, independent and often not for profit record labels amongst others. It is only a snap shot of a much wider picture it is common through the vast majority of counter-cultures. Some counter-cultures such as Punk, Hip Hop and Doof explicitly state the political reasons for self-organisation however even those who don't are forced to do so out of necessity.

This participation that weaves together a counter-culture is the antithesis of the social relationships of capitalist commodity culture: which is to consume and to spectate. Activity is conferred onto a few idols or stars (often on high rotation) and passivity and the absence of control define the experience of interaction with them. At most one might buy a CD or attend a concert but little else. Counter-cultures can only set let only flourish with a high level of democratic participation with in them. They rely upon constant social co-operation .This can be likened to what Guattarri would call a "molecular revolution"; that is a revolt within the very specific social logics that hold individuals together in capitalism. The necessity of participation for a counter-culture to survive means that it becomes a series of networked mutations that pass experiences and identities in increasingly rhizomic patterns.

Discipline within a society of control is embedded in social relationships . Molecular revolutions extend the capacity to which people are ungovernable. They pull at the restrictions of passivity and replace them with open ended co-operation. Counter-cultures out of necessity then start to break open the numerous social locks throughout the social factory. They begin to reclaim public space, challenge the nature of production and leisure, and develop a sense of individual and collective self-agency. Thus, they undermine important apparatuses of social control, production and circulation as well as weaving together a cultural 'commons'. It would be simplistic to suggest that the dismantling of capitalism will be the work of counter-cultures alone, but their importance seems increasingly obvious.

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