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OfflineShrooms4menow
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Drafts of the Second and Fourth sections for my upcoming book
    #28292132 - 04/23/23 08:28 PM (9 months, 18 hours ago)

Section 2; The Millennial Shift:
“Human rights, dissidence, antiracism, SOS-this, SOS-that: these are soft, easy, post coitum historicum ideologies, 'after-the-orgy' ideologies for an easy-going generation which has known neither hard ideologies nor radical philosophies. The ideology of a generation which is neo-sentimental in its politics too, which has rediscovered altruism, conviviality, international charity and the individual bleeding heart. Emotional outpourings, solidarity, cosmopolitan emotiveness, multi-media pathos: all soft values harshly condemned by the Nietzschean, Marxo-Freudian age... A new generation, that of the spoilt children of the crisis, whereas the preceding one was that of the accursed children of history.”
Jean Baudrilard, Cool Memories

For the past 20 years or so we were repeatedly berated with online and magazine articles claiming both that Millennials were “going to save the world” as well as that they are “greedy, entitled narcissists who ruined everything,” yet in all of the myriad of articles and youtube videos on generational differences, the question of what actually separates these Millennials from previous generations and of what the consequences of this might be has been almost completely neglected. As these Millennials themselves become middle-aged, and as they are replaced with the next generation (the Zoomers) they have firmly established themselves as a generation defined by a mood and motif of stagnation. You could even say they “found themselves,” but not only did they not save the world, they have failed even to save themselves, because in every sense they are tangibly worse off than previous generations: from economic opportunities and income mobility to mental illness and suicide rates, our poor Millenials have had their asses handed to them by life in ways previous generations have not.
The only area in which they could be said to have progressed would be in the area of social progress (primarily in a reduction of the prevalence of racism, sexism and homophobia), but with the rise of Intersectional Feminism and its grand project to eliminate all competing versions of Feminism that had existed previously (such as Anarchist and Existentialist Feminism), its correlate, the Alt-Right, combined with a recent authoritarian insurgence from both the “Right” and “Left” we have to question how much social progress has actually been made.

Generation Z has grown up within this situation, creating an atmosphere of gloom and doom, decay and despair, confusion and disorientation as we have transitioned to a society, culture, economy and political system absorbed by over-conceptualization and hyper-abstraction, and as the gap between the concepts and narratives that people try to fit their lives into and their actual material conditions and historical trajectory has become all the more obvious yet all the less recognized. People today spend more time on the internet than engaging in any other activity (it has become the single largest form of both social interaction as well as of self-isolation) and even our economy has itself undergone a process of hyper-abstraction as most of our GDP today consists in mortgage payments, subscriptions, media productions and the service industry. In the area of politics and culture the situation is so bad that they have become almost completely absorbed by dead abstractions and inert ideologies. Through culture we are subject to endless sequels, prequels and spin-offs, derivative musical styles and Intersectional propaganda, while through politics we are subject to an endless stream of meaningless slogans and hyperbolic nonsense.
What used to be heavily abstract Postmodern concepts such hyper-reality, the simulacrum, the disappearance of the social, hauntology, the rhizome, incredulity towards metanarratives, late capitalism, the end of history, etc., have in recent decades become simply descriptions of our daily lives. The attempts to make sense of this historical situation will provoke a widespread social transformation as Millenials scramble to situate themselves historically after having their lives put on hold by economic conditions and COVID, and as Zoomers do likewise in preparation for the utter mindfuck that will be the rest of their lives.
The necessity to restructure our ideas according to our historical reality will force itself into social discourse, and we can already see this beginning to occur in a variety of ways through the growing discontent with the current set of economic, political, social cultural conditions.

Section 4; Counter-Culture:
“History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which uses the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity.”
-Karl Marx, The German Ideology

The Notion of Counterculture was a unique development in twentieth century consciousness, one commonly overlooked due to the way the meaning of the word “culture” has changed over the course of the past century or so, partly as a direct result of the 20th Century Counterculture (creating a general shift in what was perceived as “Culture” to begin with) and partly as a result of Cultural Anthropologists deciding to use a different definition of “Culture” than had existed previously around 1964. Cultural Relativism, Cultural Materialism, Multiculturalism and certain variants of Postmodern Social Theory were all decisive factors in this transformation, and so successful have been their efforts that today we simply take these new conceptions and definitions for granted. Today “culture” is typically understood with reference to concepts such as “subcultures,” of “youth culture,” “pop culture,” “counterculture,” “foreign cultures,” “ancient cultures,” etc., so that we take it for granted that everyone has a culture or is related to a culture and that everything is cultural.
Historically, Culture has been an elitist concept until very recently, and was seen as something either being exclusively possessed by the ruling classes (who were always on a heroic mission to “culture the lower classes,” eg. impose their deluded self-important “visions” on them as they still do today) or something divided into a hierarchy of “High” and “Low” Culture, with the lifestyles, ideals and norms of the ruling classes always occupying the status of “High” Culture. In either case it was only by and through the ruling classes and the reification of the ideals that maintained their status that human activity became “Cultural.”
Then, arround 1964, with the advent of “Cultural Studies,” Cultural Anthropologists began using a new definition of Culture aimed at encompassing virtually all areas of human activity, so that culture has come to be defined as the sum total of all perceptions and behaviors held by or engaged in by a given group of people (rather than as the underlying material structure which organizes those perceptions and behaviors, as in Marxism), and since all perceptions and behaviors have become cultural, our conception of culture has been reduced to a sheer mass of content which includes everything. (A symptom of these cultural abstractions increasingly exerting themselves on more and more aspects of our lives)

The Counterculture itself also played a role in this transformation by changing people’s conceptions of what was considered “cultural” to begin with and this was even pointed out by J Milton Yinger in his article for the National Sociological Review entitled “Contraculture and Subculture” (published in 1960) wherein he coined the term “contraculture,” (the precursor to “Counterculture”):
“To see the cultural element in delinquency or in the domination of an individual by his adolescent group, phenomena that on the surface are non-cultural or even “anti-cultural,” was a long step forward in their explanation.”

But if Counterculture was originally defined in opposition to a different definition of Culture than mistaken for granted today, then its historical significance can’t be understood outside of this transformation. To understand the historical significance of this transformation we would have to refer to previous conceptions of Culture as well as to Yingers original conception of “contraculture,” which he defines as follows:
“I suggest we use the term contraculture wherever the normative system of a group contains, as a primary element, a theme of conflict with the values of the total society, where personality variables are directly involved in the development and maintenance of the groups values, and wherever its norms can be understood only by reference to the relationships of the group to a surrounding dominant culture.”

Counterculture is a process whereby individuals begin to detangle their conceptions of Self from whatever Culture the Society they grew up in tried to impose on them, creating an imperative to structure their own minds, values, relationships and lives by gaining an understanding of how the Culture and Society they live in function and using this understanding to take them as an object both for use and analysis.

To get a better understanding of how these concepts have changed in the popular vocabulary (rather than simply in Philosophy, Sociology and Anthropology departments at Universities), let's compare the definition of Culture provided by the 1947 edition of Webster's Dictionary to that provided by the Webster's Dictionary of today.
The 1947 edition provides the following definitions:
“2. Act of developing by education, discipline, training, etc…. 4. The enlightenment and refinement of taste acquired by intellectual and aesthetic training. 5. A particular stage of advancement in civilization or the characteristic features of such a stage or state; as, primitive, Greek, Germanic culture. ”

The current edition provides these definitions:
“the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group also : the characteristic features of everyday existence (such as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time
b: the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization
c: the set of values, conventions, or social practices associated with a particular field, activity, or societal characteristics
d: the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations
2a: enlightenment and excellence of taste acquired by intellectual and aesthetic training
2b: acquaintance with and taste in fine arts, humanities, and broad aspects of science as distinguished from vocational and technical skills.”

Existing at a time when the former definitions were what was referred to by the word “Culture,” the “Counterculture” (or Contraculture) would naturally have been defined in opposition to it. The Beatniks (the earliest incarnation of the 20th Century Counterculture, existing before the above mentioned change in definitions) were opposed to all of the things listed in that first definition: the typical Beat view was that schools are brainwashing camps where kids are sent to have every trace of sanity drained from them, that society was intrinsically mind destroying and that all that was held up as ideal by the mainstream is a waste of time. Instead of staying in line with contemporary modes of thought (with those of our “particular stage of advancement in civilization”), they reasoned, we should develop new and better modes of thought with no regard for social consequences. The 20th Century Counterculture was a trend away from reified ideals and the development of a critical view of Society. This critical view took a large variety of forms, many of which were incompatible, but what held them together was a growing acknowledgement that Culture is not a reflection of our values but something diametrically opposed to them, something which negates actual values and stifles our attempts to make meaning out of our lives. This realization was especially emphasized by Terence Mckenna, who defined Culture  as follows in lecture at the Whole Life Expo in 1999:
“Culture is a closed system of thinking and values, of the sort I am denouncing. And the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency, is your culture… Culture and ideology are not your friends… culture is for the convenience of culture, not you. How many times have your sexual desires, career aspirations, financial dealings, and aesthetic inclinations been squashed, twisted, rejected, and minimized by cultural values?... it’s a kind of a con game. It is, in fact, strangely enough, a kind of virtual reality.”

“Sometimes people divide human beings into two classes, the cultured and the uncultured. The former, insofar as they are worthy of the name, concerned themselves with thoughts, with the spirit, and because they were the rulers in the time after Christ, in which the principle is thought, they demanded a servile respect for the thoughts that they recognized. State, emperor, God, morality, order, etc., are such thoughts or spirits, which are only for the mind. A mere living being, an animal, cares as little for them as a child. But the uncultured are actually nothing but children, and anyone who only dwells on his life’s needs is indifferent to those spirits; but because he is also weak before them, he is subject to their power, and is ruled by—thoughts. This is the meaning of hierarchy.”
Max Stirner

“The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behavior. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.”
The German Ideology

Politics may be downstream from Culture, but Culture is downstream from Economics, so that any attempted cultural change requires changes in how the economy is structured to have any lasting effect. If, on the other hand, everything becomes Political as well as Cultural, as Badrillard claimed, this means that everything has in reality become subject to the Economy, which Marx calls the “Mode of Production,” and the consequence of this is the reduction of all human life and activity to a series of sign values.
This tendency has not completely gone away, but has considerably diminished in influence over the past 50 years. Near nonexistent economic opportunities combined with rising housing costs have meant that Millenials and Zoomers have been more concerned with survival than gaining control over and interpreting their own lives, thus eliminating one of the major contributors to the development of Counterculture throughout the 20th Century, which used to be young people having more leisure time and disposable income.

Another factor is the steep rise in the cost of housing since the mid 20th Century,
“If there’s one factor above all else which contributes to cultural conservatism, it is the vast inflation in the cost of rent and mortgages. It’s no accident that the efflorescence of cultural invention in London and New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s (in the punk and post-punk scenes) coincided with the availability of squatted and cheap property in those cities. Since then, the decline of social housing, the attacks on squatting, and the delirious rise in property prices have meant that the amount of time and energy available for cultural production has massively diminished.”
Ghosts of my life

The 20th Century counterculture was centered around various forms of new communication and transportation technologies such as radios, TVs, affordable typewriters and paper, affordable motorcycles, etc. Today we can observe something very similar occurring with online troll subculture,

“Those who claim that the new right-wing sensibility online today is just more of the same old right, undeserving of attention or differentiation, are wrong. Although it is constantly changing, in this important early stage of its appeal, its ability to assume the aesthetics of counterculture, transgression and nonconformity tells us many things about the nature of its appeal and about the liberal establishment it defines itself against. It has more in common with the 1968 left’s slogan ‘It is forbidden to forbid!’ than it does with anything most recognize as part of any traditionalist right. Instead of interpreting it as part of other right-wing movements, conservative or libertarian, I would argue that the style being channeled by the Pepe meme-posting trolls and online transgressives follows a tradition that can be traced from the eighteenth-century writings of the Marquis de Sade, surviving through to the nineteenth-century Parisian avantgarde, the Surrealists, the rebel rejection of feminized conformity of post-war America and then to what film critics called 1990s ‘male rampage films’ like American Psycho and Fight Club.”
Kill all normies

“The rise of Milo, Trump and the alt-right are not evidence of the return of the conservatism, but instead of the absolute hegemony of the culture of non-conformism, self-expression, transgression and irreverence for its own sake – an aesthetic that suits those who believe in nothing but the liberation of the individual and the id, whether they’re on the left or the right. The principle-free idea of counterculture did not go away; it has just become the style of the new right.”

Later on she compounds this mistake by misrepresenting these tendencies as emerging out of the 1960’s, writing that:
“the idea of the inherent value of aesthetic qualities that have dominated in Western pop culture since the 60s, like transgression, subversion and counterculture, have turned out to be the defining features of an online far right that finds itself full of old bigotries of the far right but liberated from any Christian moral constraints by its Nietzschean antimoralism. It feels full of righteous contempt for anything mainstream, conformist, basic”

She then concludes from this that:
“it may be time to lay the very recent and very modern aesthetic values of counterculture and the entire paradigm to rest and create something new.”

However, this view is far from accurate, as the Counterculture had always incorporated a large variety of political and apolitical views. This misperception seems to consist in equating 60’s radicals with the 60’s Counterculture and seams to be the reason why Nagel claims that the subversive tendencies of the Counterculture were diametrically opposed to the interests and sensibilities of the working class:
“Ideas of transgression and cultural radicalism were largely irrelevant to this working-class left. The 1962 Port Huron statement, the manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society, contained a very different kind of message: ‘We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably at the world we inherit.’”

In his book entitled “Hells Angels,” Hunter Thompson explains that [the initial incarnation of] the Angels were formed directly out of the working class, drawing particularly from disenfranchised young men [mostly World War Two Veterans] who found themselves detached from mainstream society and without opportunities following World War Two. A bona fide component of the 20th Century Counterculture and a staple at Grateful Dead Concerts, where they were known among other things for getting insanely drunk, starting riots and notifying the local hippie community of what pathetic wimps they were.

“Culture is the general sphere of knowledge and of representations of lived experiences within historical societies divided into classes. As such, it is a generalizing power which itself exists as a separate entity, as division of intellectual labor and as intellectual labor of division. Culture detached itself from the unity of myth-based society "when human life lost its unifying power and when opposites lost their living connections and interactions and became autonomous" (The Diff erence Between the Systems of Fichte and Schelling). In thus gaining its independence, culture embarked on an imperialistic career of self-enrichment that ultimately led to the decline of that independence. The history that gave rise to the relative autonomy of culture, and to the ideological illusions regarding that autonomy, is also expressed as the history of culture. And this whole triumphant history of culture can be understood as a progressive revelation of the inadequacy of culture, as a march toward culture's self abolition. Culture is the terrain of the quest for lost unity. In the course of this quest, culture as a separate sphere is obliged to negate itself.”
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

“Culture grew out of a history that dissolved the previous way of life, but as a separate sphere within a partially historical society its understanding and sensory communication inevitably remain partial. It is the meaning of an insufficiently meaningful world.”

“The end of the history of culture manifests itself in two opposing forms: the project of culture's self-transcendence within total history, and its preservation as a dead object for spectacular contemplation. The first tendency has linked its fate to social critique, the second to the defense of class power.”

“The real values of culture can be maintained only by actually negating culture. But this negation can no longer be a cultural negation. It may in a sense take place within culture, but it points beyond it.
In the language of contradiction, the critique of culture is a unified critique, in that it dominates the whole of culture its knowledge as well as its poetry-and in that it no longer separates itself from the critique of the social totality. This unified theoretical critique is on its way to meet a unified social practice.”
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle


Edited by Shrooms4menow (04/23/23 08:29 PM)


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