e
songs, we look at the tie-dyed or safety-pinned clothes in our closets, and we recall our
participation in a demonstration or a rally devoted to a cause that we still believe in. Their
critique of the possibility of counterculture, and the use of culture jamming as a tactic
employed by counterculture, opens with a description of grunge icon Kurt Cobain’s suicide
(p. 14):
“What he failed to consider was the possibility that it was all an illusion; that there is no
alternative, no mainstream, no relationship between music and freedom, and no such
thing as selling out. There are just people who make music, and people who listen to it.”
Counterculture is not “counter” any more, if it ever was. Rather, it has escaped its origins in
various historical moments such as the hippies, and become an embedded and
institutionalized aspect of society in general. More to the point, it has replaced more
politically and intellectually sophisticated traditions of critique, such as socialism, and
become the basic template for radical political thought and activity today. Counterculture in
this institutionalized form has claimed more victims than the lead singer of Nirvana; it is a
myth with “untold political consequences” (p. 16).
b. the intellectual origins of counterculture in the Romantic movement
The origins of the idea that artists and other culture-makers are to assume an oppositional
th th
and early 19 century intellectual tradition 英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】known as
role in society begins with the late 18
“Romanticism.” The Romantic movement originated with German artists and philosophers
like Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, and then spread to England, France, and North
America. The Romantics existed as a countertradition in modern culture, opposing the
Enlightenment’s preference for reason, order, system, category, and universality. The Romantics, whose lives were as experimental as their thought, argued instead on behalf of
the non-rational, disorder, nature, difference, and a bold resistance to systems of all kinds.
th
Heath and Potter discuss how important the discovery of the New World in the late 15
century was to romanticism: the Americas demonstrated that there were other ways of living
that lacked Europe’s class-bound hierarchies, religious hegemony, and disdain for nature.
c. from hating systems to hating people: the neo-Marxist turn
Inspired by the Romantic precedent, early modern political activism was aimed at
th
century, the artistic
challenging authority. The anarchists and labour radicals of the 19
th
century traditions of surrealism and Dada: all
revolutionaries that defined the early 20
challenged authority on Romantic terms, critical of aristocracy, hierarchy, and custom. But in
th
century, the nature of political opposition began to change. Where
the second half of the 20
it was once “overwhelmingly populist” (p. 18) and saw social order as the problem and
th
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