RawStory

Counterculture, Commodification, and Social Change

Tom Frank in Conversation with Ken Goffman aka RU Sirius, for Raw Story

Tom Frank's recent book, What's the Matter with Kansas, has had a significant impact on political thinking in America. Kansas offers a sharp and witty analyses of why working class white Americans - particularly those living in the Midwest -- vote to protect the economic interests of the rich. (In other words, why they vote for right-wing Republicans.)

According to Frank, the far right has successfully passed themselves off as the common folk, while portraying liberals and moderates as out-of-touch elitists who are trying to impose liberal cultural values like gay rights, hedonism, and skepticism about religion on the decent folk, committing "endless acts of hubris, sucking down lattes, driving ostentatious European cars, while trying to reform the world."

Part of the problem, according to Frank, may be the way that business promotes a type of counterculturalism that is alienating to ordinary folks, who may not be looking for speed and kicks and upheaval: "It is business that speaks to us over the TV set, always in the throbbing tones of cultural insurgency, forever shocking the squares, humiliating the pious, queering tradition, and crushing patriarchy...TV is... such a zealous promoter of every species of social deviance. It is thanks to New Economy capitalists that our bankers glory in referring to themselves as 'revolutionaries' and our discount brokerages tell us that owning stock will smash conformity and usher in the rock 'n' roll millennium... Indeed, counterculture is so commercial… today that a school of urban theorists thrives by instructing municipal authorities on the fine points of luring artists, hipsters, gays, and rock bands to their cities…”

Frank's critique of countercultural rebellion as a phenomenon easily transformed into a titillating, attractive, libertine whore for big business traces back, at least, to an earlier book, The Conquest of Cool in which Frank argues that American businesses felt stultified by the conformism of the American fifties. He argued that they needed a more expansive, experimental, individualistic consumer base that would be motivated by the frequent changes in what's hip and who would desire a wider variety of products. Through advertising and mainstream media, the business world amplified the rebellious message of sixties youth counterculture, encouraging consumers to "join the Dodge rebellion" and "live for today." Interestingly, while I interpreted Frank’s stance as counterculture-negative, he exhibits a more nuanced view in this conversation.

In the recent non-fiction book Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House, Dan Joy and I reinterpreted counterculture as a perennial historical phenomenon that has powerfully influenced human culture. The book traces the counterculture spirit back, in historical time, to the Socratics in the West and the Taoists in the East.

Our book values authentic non-conformism, dissent, freethinking, and those who have upset traditional values throughout human history. We see most human progress, invention, creativity, and pleasure coming from general countercultural principles that are traceable throughout recorded history. How these qualities play out in the worlds of business and politics is, in some ways, beside the point, at least so far as this particular book is concerned.

But as a citizen living in Bush's oligarchy, questions about the possibilities and consequences of counterculture, commodification, and social change concern me deeply. As a result, I have arranged with Raw Story to conduct three interviews on this topic. The first is with Tom Frank. Subsequent interviews will be with Joseph Heath, co-author of Nation of Rebels: How Counterculture Became Consumer Culture and Douglas Rushkoff, author of ten books and host of the Frontline documentary, Merchants of Cool.

RU SIRIUS: In the book I've written called Counterculture Through The Ages, I've identified counterculture as a perennial historical phenomenon that pops up in a wide variety of guises throughout human history. I characterize counterculture this way:

The primary characteristics of counterculture are threefold: * Countercultures assign primacy to individuality at the expense of social conventions and governmental constraints. * Countercultures challenge authoritarianism in both obvious and subtle forms. * Countercultures embrace individual and social change.

The nearly universal features of counterculture are: * Breakthroughs and radical innovations in art, science, spirituality, philosophy, and living. * Diversity. * Authentic, open communication and profound interpersonal contact. Also, generosity and the democratic sharing of tools. * Persecution by mainstream culture of contemporaneous subcultures. * Exile or dropping out. * A playful prankster attitude.

Among the cultural movements or trends that are included in this history, you will find the Socratics, Sufis, the Enlightenment, bohemian Paris in the early 20th Century, and all the various movements already associated with the word counterculture since the Beats in the 1950s.

So what about the long and wide view? Your up-close analyses in Conquest of Cool about counterculture's contradictions and the perhaps absurd assumptions made about counterculture in the late '60s/early '70s as a revolutionary anti-capitalist force may be dead on. But human history isn't just blighted by class oppression. There are theocratic and ideological reigns of terror that closed off areas of thought and experience, there was the hounding of Copernicus and Galileo and others who sought to change their culture's big picture; there has been censorship and the obstruction of useful information, the imposition of superstition, patriarchy, ad infinitum. Is it all trite? Is there no value and importance yet to be found in cultural liberalism/libertarianism?

TOM FRANK: I haven't read your book yet, but I am suspicious of any cultural- historical scheme that claims to explain such widely different eras and national phenomena as ancient Athens, the Enlightenment, and the Beats of the American 1950s. To begin with, your criteria are so broad they could encompass nearly any dissenting movement in history. Then there are the obvious problems of language, utterly incompatible circumstances, different social systems, and totally different standards of recording history. Worst of all, though, is that this kind of view lends itself to a sort of historical cherry-picking, in which you claim for your own scheme those innovations, individuals, and historical moments that everybody holds in high esteem today and blame the unpleasant examples on somebody else's scheme.

My own thoughts about counterculture apply mainly to the late 1960s in the US (and slightly to the UK) and to the very particular variety of consumer culture that has prevailed in the years since then. That's all. I'm not an expert on Copernicus or Galileo, but I know they lived long before an American-style consumer culture came on the scene, and so I can't imagine how my ideas would apply to them.

One of the distinctions I wanted to make in the book was between genuine dissent and the sort of domesticated, consumer-friendly dissent that our culture produces in such enormous quantities. But I never got very far with inventing sweeping theoretical distinctions that one might use to sort any bohemian episode in history into one category or the other. I will say that there is most definitely value in dissent. Hell, that’s my calling in life.

RU: In What's the Matter with Kansas, you say that (I'm paraphrasing) because an artist sticks a crucifix in a jar of urine, industries will be deregulated and the working class will continue to get screwed (couldn't find the exact quote, but it's certainly resonant!). We get the political point, but what about the artist? Should he not stick a crucifix in a jar of urine if that’s the statement he chooses to make? Should gays forget about getting married so that workers in Kansas will vote in their own self-interest? Ralph Nader once said about gay rights, "I'm not going to get into gonadal politics." Nobody has any intention of shutting up, so can these cultural conflicts truly be ignored or over-ruled by class interests?

TF: Artists can do whatever they want. Obviously my statement was descriptive, not an edict of some kind. I was describing the backlash dynamic that has operated in our culture, again, since the late 1960s. How artists want to react to this one-sentence critique, or to any of my much longer critiques written over the years, is up to them. My guess is that they will ignore my criticism; that they will continue to embrace the shallow imperative of square-shocking that has prevailed in the art world for the last century. And conservatives will continue to react in their highly successful culture-war manner. After all, why not? This sort of bullshit battle serves both sides: conservatives win elections, and artists get to imagine that they're pissing off the man. It's a win-win situation! Liberals, meanwhile, will have to find some way of dealing with the culture wars, and confronting the false populism of the backlash - it’s good humble you versus these goddamn highfalutin artists!- with real populism is just about the only workable strategy that’s out there.

RU: Human beings, even outside Kansas, define themselves by more than their economic interests. I could take you to a "Rainbow Gathering" where aging "hippies" who have spent their entire lives as poor as Wal-Mart workers feel pretty good about their experiences (albeit they're still politically pissed off.) Even the poorest people in the world value ceremonies and other forms of shared cultural expression; they're passionate about music and maybe art; they care deeply about religious or spiritual matters; they have taboos and various levels of liberality or conservatism around sexuality; they like to be entertained, ad infinitum.

It seems to me that one of the big mistakes Marxist revolutions made in the 20th Century was to try to reduce people down to economic interests, and even to separate them from their culture. And they didn't just try (sometimes) to diminish common people's identification with "old and reactionary" cultural forms, the communists tended to also kill off or jail the experimental artists and bohos who frequently participated in the making of these revolutions and who might have created attractive and interesting new, "progressive" cultural forms. Pure populist economic movements that ignore cultural "values" don’t work, not in the long term -- and not in any way that is desirable from a humanistic perspective. In other words, culture "wars," debates about sexuality, cultural content, life "styles", ad infinitum are essential and need to be met head on. And like it or not, more working class people were probably moved by the fact that Howard Stern endorsed John Kerry than Tom Frank or the teacher's union. That inchoate anti-authoritarian impulse may yet prove to be political liberalism's ace in the hole, particularly if the Republicans continue to lean towards the theocratic element of their coalition.

TF: There are countless examples through history of people overlooking their economic interests in favor of cultural/religious/ values factors. The present is one of them. The reason I emphasized this point so much in What's the Matter with Kansas? is, first of all, because almost nobody talks about right-wing politics in this way anymore. The problem in America is not that we have an excess of Marxists or Chicago-schoolers or anybody else ramming economics down our throat and forcing us to be rational economic choosers; it's just the opposite. In our culture, economic interests are not believed to be primary; the first thing you are supposed to care about is how flash you look in your new convertible or with that bag of xtreme corn chips in your hand. Average Americans these days are great authorities on the symbolic meaning of nearly every kind of cultural icon, but economic issues have slowly been drained out of the public sphere. They’re a matter for the business pages, for the econ departments, for the executives and the professional traders.

Over the last 30 years we have become so habituated to the phenomenon of working-class conservatism that we think it's normal. The point I wanted to make in the book is that it’s not normal, that once upon a time working-class people were pretty reliably liberal, and that their switch from one side to the other has had terrible consequences. Making this point does not mean I have some soulless, mechanistic conception of life or that I think values don't matter; it means I am trying to make the present seem weird and problematic rather than comfortable and A-OK.

(I am annoyed by that bit about Marxist regimes suppressing artists. What am I supposed to say, "no, I'm not a supporter of Marxist totalitarianism"? If it wasn't such a preposterous suggestion I would take the time to point out that the sort of traditional liberals that I admire were always massively supportive of the arts--think New Deal, WPA, Federal Theater Project, MOMA, etc. These were all controversial, yes, and invoked the wrath of the right, yes, and there is no easy answer to that conundrum.)

I agree about the importance of culture, and also about the explosive power of anti-authoritarianism, and every time I get the chance I talk about the importance of Dems presenting themselves as the party of dissent, not the party of contentment as they so clearly did this time around.

Continued on page 2. Click to read more

Originally published on Monday February 7, 2005.