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Arts
The end of culture
With no real counterculture out there, are we in for a totally new cultural experience defined as no culture?
By Kevin Potvin
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Where there is a culture, there will always be a counterculture. And while most countercultures die out, every culture got its start as a counterculture. A good book about Countercultures Through the Ages, by Ken Gofffman, aka R U Sirius (2004), makes this abundantly clear beginning with the original counterculture figures in the West, Abraham and Socrates.
We have no trouble identifying who towers over the previous generation as bona fide counterculture figures: Abby Hoffman and Timothy Leary loom large for starters. But who embodies counterculture today? When we see figures who write songs about shooting the cops and fighting the power, we’re tempted to point to them, until we see them a week later dressed to the nines on stage accepting The Power’s little bronze Grammy trophy and thanking their mom and dad.
One problem is that the corporate marketing departments have gotten so effective at detecting the earliest murmur of a new countercultural outbreak that they’ve appropriated and commodified it before most of us have even heard of it. The garde is passé the moment it’s avant. That’s an old complaint. What’s going on now is the corporations, the mainstreamest doyens of mainstream culture, having caught up to and exhausted all new supply of fresh counterculture, are beginning to manufacture it themselves. A grainy handheld Youtube video at first believed to be someone cutting through a fence at night to spray-paint a subversive message on the President’s Air Force One jet, is in actuality a promotional stunt by a marketing company using an ordinary jumbo jet all photoshopped up. The local inner urban basketball-court counterculture hero is confirmed as such by the next season’s model of running shoe Nike pushed onto his feet in the hopes that the rapid swing of their manufactured counterculture to mainstream culture can carry through at the necessary price point to satisfy expectations of investors and analysts hunched over computers up and down stars-and-stripes-bedecked Wall Street, not far from that very court.
The fact is, the corporate marketing departments are now better at creating counterculture than we are. And besides, counterculture having now become so much the engine of culture, itself so much the engine of the modern mature economy, any counterculture that comes along, whether organically erupting among the people or manufactured and handed down to them by the corporations, serves equally well as founts of new and highly profitable cultural products. I watched from behind a crack in my curtain from inside my house in gritty East Vancouver some hooded figures attack a “Do Not Enter” traffic sign on the street with stickers recently. What’s that all about then, I wondered! The stickers advertised the low tuition rates at a local language school, with the usual admonition to “check out” the web site. Counterculture is our culture.
So what would be counterculture to an entrenched cultural counterculturalism? Tradition is one answer. To hear typical Christian talk radio with all its odd echos of 1960s counterculture complaints, complete with profound distrust of politicians, media companies and Hollywood, is to hear one response to the conundrum: a possible counterculture to a counterculture is a culture, and Christian values-founded culture is what was here before the last counterculture arose. This is why Christian talk radio can at the same time be both angry anti-establishmentarianist and so full of hopeful but empty blandishments.
To see teenagers in goth, punk or grunge get-ups trudging up the street is to see another response that is, in fact, exactly the same response: all we have left, apparently, is reprise of the past, the only difference being one response reaches a bit further back than the other. Predictably, the goth, punk and grunge types, appearing to be so angry at the world, are usually among the most polite, thoughtful and caring young people you can meet. They’re all Sid neo-Vicious the same way the politically active Christian fundamentalists are all neo-conservative. Even today’s illicit drugs, the sine qua non of counterculturalism, are all artificially manufactured, their marketing and distribution handled by crime syndicates every bit as big and corporatist as any international coffee chain.
Possibly we do have a thriving counterculture, only it’s scattered and not obvious both because we are too close to it to notice it in the way a fish can’t see its own fishbowl, and because we are conditioned by the 1960s to think countercultures are all united, loud and effective. Maybe they typically aren’t, or at least, maybe they can be either loud and obvious or not, and still be bona fide countercultures, and the ones we have today happen to be the non-obvious kind.
Still, you’d think there’d be some figures here and there doing some things that catch our notice as genuinely countercultural if we look hard enough. But so far, no one seems to be standing out.
It is entirely possible, on the other hand, that the eternal flame of counterculture, the moon to the sun of culture, has been snuffed out, in the West at least. And if counterculture is snuffed out, counterculture being the fount of culture, perhaps culture itself is not long for our world. Do we have historical knowledge of a society that ever existed without a culture? Goethe and other romantics of his early 1800s era sure thought European culture was wholly dying, and literary Russians like Turgenyev in the later 1800s were convinced Russian culture itself was dying too, and not just transforming.
Does a society without a culture live or die? And in either case, what does it mean for a society to die, or to live, culture free? Or has this in fact never happened before, and so are we moving into completely new terrain right now? Goethe and Turgenyev appear to have been wrong about their cultures, but what we have now sure feels like the real thing they were worried about. Hardly anyone is trying anymore to be genuinely countercultural, and even those who try come off looking like posers because trying to be counterculture is counter to the whole spirit of culture of both the straight up and counter kind.
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