Anarchy and Counterculture: The Beats and their Legacy....4/8/00

Intro to the ‘Anarchy and Counterculture’ Series of Talks:

This is the first of a series of talks come debates on the incestuous relationship between political anarchism and counterculture. Which like any intimate relationship is a two way encounter, involving a great variety of positions. But I shall endeavour to map this relation, and shine some light on its dynamics, via an historical theory of its development.

A brief definition of what I mean by counterculture would be the conscious attempt to develop a way of life outside of, or in opposition to, mainstream culture (and often society too). This of course has been going on for centuries, but I argue that it was only after the Second World War (with its revelation of the true nature of western civilisation, through mechanised global warfare, the holocaust and the atom bomb) that any significant large scale counterculture emerged. Previously there had only existed localised experimentation and a tiny bohemian subculture.

Anarchism (or its equivalent predecessors) has been a major influence, if not the primary source, for nearly all these early manifestations and remains a major, if unconscious, influence on what survives of authentic counterculture today. Anarchist theory has shaped countercultural ideals and counterculture has fed back into contemporary anarchism.

A symbiotic relationship which owing to both the often imaginative and experimental nature of counterculture, and the sometimes dogmatic nature of anarchism, has had results both for good and ill. I think some off its offspring are healthy some not, a view that will develop over this series as a whole.

One premise behind this series is that up until the early 60’s anarchism was predominantly classical (the form dating back to Kropotkin) and many on the left wing of this core had increasingly taken onboard alien bolshevik and syndicalist notions.

Corresponding with this had been a rise in puritanical moralism, dogmatic ideology and social conservatism. Fortunately the emergence of counterculture and the so called ‘alternative society’ would begin to change all this.

This was not some new turn however, but more of a revival. Original anarchism had been extremely ‘countercultural’ long before the term had even been thought of. Bakunin, unlike the relatively conservative Kropotkin, was renowned for his unconventional lifestyle, and the bohemian climate of the fin de siecle had proliferated the radical mode of anarchism across Europe. It was only after the Russian Revolution that this began to change, with radicalism becoming marginalised and ‘revolutionary’ orthodoxy taking centre stage.

The influx of counterculture into anarchism not only generated a ‘neo-anarchism’ but also changed the context of all anarchist thought, turning it back towards a purer form.

Classical anarchism (and its left wing) carries on of course but now it in turn is increasingly marginalised, with most of contemporary anarchism split between those firmly within the counterculture and those with more traditional anarchist allegiances, with a myriad of hybrids (like myself) in between. It still retains a political sway by forming organised groups that attempt to channel the wider grassroots movement, but never the less its mindset is no longer held by the silent majority of anarchists.

On the whole I shall be suggesting that this has had a positive effect on anarchism restoring its radical and genuinely revolutionary element, though I shall also be pointing the finger at what I think are the negative effects of this change.

I shall also be suggesting that counterculture has informed just about every aspect of popular culture today. And that while most of this is recuceperated it has created a potentially revolutionary base within Western society. To put it oversimply the new revolutionary subject is potentially all of us captured through popular culture, the working class, or any other subject, is no longer even potentially revolutionary, save through the influence of popular culture. I propose that it is only through this medium that consciousness can now be radically changed. A process that has been occuring for the past forty years and is currently picking up momentum.

Intro to Talk One: ‘The Beats and their Legacy’

In this first talk I want to look at the origins of counterculture in America, and in particular that diverse and eclectic phenomenon that became known as the Beat Generation. A current that would set the context for just about everything countercultural since then.

My interest in the Beats only began this year really. I’d had a subliminal interest for some time of course, like many people of my age. But this only became conscious at the Zippy picnic this year, when the Dionysian Underground, an anarcho-surrealist, crypto-pagan bunch of crazies I’m evolved with, performed a ritualised mass happening that included a collective reading of Ginsberg’s Howl (purely because the picnic fell on his birthday). Both the event itself and the research behind it was so electrifying that I embarked on a project of deeper reading and exploration of the work and ethos of the Beat Generation. In some ways this became a discovery of my own unconscious cultural foundations, and links between them I didn’t know existed, in other ways it was a new discovery of a world I knew little of, and all this happening a decade before I was born. One result of all this has been the material this talk draws on, another has been the development of a profound respect for this phase of the counterculture.

The talk will be punctuated by some recorded poetry readings, performances and music for illustration and entertainment. Alas I’ve only got this shitty recorder to play it on but the sound quality is okay for most tracks and it should suffice.

The selected material has no chronological order or close correlation to my talk, but is Beat performance that I came across by chance on the Net while writing this talk. Much of the tracks fit quite well and evoke what is essential to the Beat ethos. For accessibility and entertainment value I’ve chosen tracks that sound quite modern, and much of them are relatively recent recordings. This may upset cultural history buffs but I think will be more fun for the rest of us.

I’d particularly like to thank Napster.com and the network of PC-Pirates that made the original acquisition of the tracks possible and adds another subversive element to the talk.

Now to set the opening scene here’s a little music.

8:15 Opening with - Short extract from On The Road by Jack Kerouac,

adapted and performed by Tom Waits and Primus

Talk Part 1

That was Tom Waits and Primus with an evocative adaptation of extracts from the novel that marked the beginning of the literary Beat phenomena, On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

It was Kerouac who first coined the name of the phenomena, saying in 1949 ‘this is a beat generation’. The term caught on (like a virus as Burroughs would later say) but its exact meaning remains ambiguous. An ambiguity that was no doubt in part intentional, an important tenant of their new worldview was an ironic awareness of paradoxical and deceptive nature of reality.

The term has been said to be a derivation from the popular term at the time, ‘Lost Generation’ (1946-1956), the nihilistic loss of purpose and meaning of the generation immediately after the Second World War. But it meant more as well this generation wasn’t just lost it had lost. Its writers at least had identified with various utopian currents against an emerging industrial capitalism. But by the second half of the twentieth century this battle was perceived to have been lost by most people. Less political Beats had a more subjective viewpoint of the same reality, they had lost in their battle to keep their head above water in contemporary society, and some literally jumped in the river. But for Kerouac and many other prominent Beats the term also had a more positive, optimistic sense, Beat meant Beatific, the first step before sainthood of those achieving a vision of a spiritual reality. Spiritual here meant different things to different people but for the most part meant ‘pure freedom’ and ‘pure existence’, the living of life to the full outside of narrow consumerism and the actualisation of human potential, it had very little moral meaning and was often regarded by the religious as immoral. The term Beat also reflected the a cultural preoccupation with rhythm and music. For these writers the end of traditional utopian political movements and personal dreams was not a tragedy as such but more of an opportunity for a new movement, the social phenomena around this gave the signs if this new direction. Initially emerging as a subculture within the ‘Lost Generation’, by 1956 the ‘Beat Generation’ had come of age and the counterculture was born.

What had happening in society was basically an attempt to escape and reject. In physical terms people took to the road and became itinerant. In some cases as a change of lifestyle, or search for a new way of living outside of mainstream society, like their heirs, the modern day travellers, but more often out of economic necessity in search of temporary non-committed work or crime. This was given a romantic spin by Beat writers, who often took up the lifestyle themselves even if only briefly. It was a return to a more primitive nomadic lifestyle, one that rejected the fixed and dead world of mainstream society for a dynamic natural existence, one in which life could be lived to the full. It was also said to be the opportunity for journeys of self discovery.

Related to this was a parallel rejection of Middle American values, and the affluent society, felt by many at the time. It was a call to life beyond suburbia and conformism, a rejection of bourgeois mentality, and an individual awakening and new self awareness. Or as its detractors would say, a revolt against the American way of life, against decorum, right thinking, the Bible, proper speech and civilised values. Though in other ways it was a return to older, now repressed frontier values, and a forgotten American subculture of dissident nomads and anarchic utopians.

Afro-American culture would have a major impact on all those caught in this social current. Everything Black was seen as the antithesis of White values. Blacks became the archetypal outsiders. Black subculture was a safe place to escape to. It’s language, style and music were enthusiastically adopted (both the Blues idiom, in the country and amongst travellers for the most part, and the more sophisticated Jazz idiom amongst urbanites). It was from this cultural radicalism that much of the slang speech that has characterised counterculture ever since emerged, along with its musical preoccupations and general ‘coolness’.

The Beat writers took all this stylised it, philosophised on it and made poetry of it. Creating and releasing a countercultural virus into the matrix of bourgeois America.

While predominantly white, middle class intellectuals (with some notable exceptions) they were a diverse bunch, but their identity was shaped by their similar perceptions of an emerging subculture, the nightmare of modern society and the need to negate it. They were also brought together by the material influence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the anarchist poet whose journal City Lights published their works and whose bookshop became a focal point for them.

Here’s a taste of an early work by Ferlinghetti.

8:25 See, It Was Like This, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Talk Part 2

The most radical elements of this emerging subculture were its rejection of all western middle class values (maybe sometimes throwing the baby with the bath water, but on the whole a positive rejection), also its rejection of everything safe, over-rational and domesticated and its endless search for ‘life-affirming’ ‘kicks’ (mostly in the form of sex, drugs and fast cars). Its essence being the drive for absolute freedom and total existence. It was not a movement for social justice though. Talk like that was regarded as ‘square’ (and probably rightly so), there was to be no imprisoning ideology or sentimental moralism about this generation. It was however pained by the suffering of those caught up in social injustice and sought an end to this, not by improvement within the system (that was the lost battle) but by the negation of it.

Though its primary focus was the individual (though often only the ‘switched on’ and creative individual) it was an individual within a social context. Their ideal was the ‘Alternative Society’, though what this was was never sharply defined. Some tried to create this in utopian communities while others sought it in imagined Mexico’s, India’s and other places free of the perceived Western contamination.

Another radical element was their sexual libertarianism, though archaic by todays standards they sought a genuine break from bourgeois sexual repression. Although their motive was mainly hedonistic, and women regarded too often as ‘chicks’ or ‘dames’ (and I’m gonna say more about this later), they saw this hedonism as itself a radically liberating move, one that was in theory open to women too. Though many leading Beats had little interest in women, many were openly homosexual and bisexual. This too was a radical step forward and further broke bourgeois norms. Even straight Beats began to challenge gender stereotypes by becoming more androgynous, hair started to be worn long and unisex fashions emerged.

Beyond all this though their remained a very male orientated mentality, sometimes even an accentuated one informed by homo-eroticism. It was the homo-eroticism that also formed one of the main bridges between grass roots, working class rebels and middle class intellectuals. That along with drug supply channels and general outsider empathy. Something that still applies to today even in such conventional circles as class struggle anarchism (in both a homo-erotic and heterosexual form).

It was in the synthesis of these social circles that Beat philosophy emerged. Gregory Corso was an example of this raised in New York and with a history of crime he moved in the same Bohemian circles as the Beat intellectuals. Corso’s work challenged all bourgeois conventions his best known poem looked at the institution of marriage which many rightly saw as the root of all conventional culture. Not from some inauthentic idealistic or dogmatic position however but in a deeply ironic and ambiguous way. Looking at both sides of the argument from both practical and romantic perspectives, Corso concludes that not to marry is to end up old and lonely, to be ostracized and freakish, social pressures are overwhelming. But despite this rational conclusion retains the spiritual will to replace his final vow of ‘I do’ with ‘pie glue’ and breaks loose.

Corso is also well known for his poem Spontaneous Requiem of the American Indian, a work that reversed the popular Cowboys and Indians stereotype of the 50’s and created the contemporary image of the Indian as spiritual nomad. Seattle, named after Chief Seattle an Indian who had written a famous poem of lament for his culture, became a Beat centre for a while. A place that, following recent events, may also go down in history books as the place where the end of Capitalism began.

The intellectual input broadened Beat philosophy too. The physical nomadism and free spiritedness became a manifestation of more philosophical and psychological nomadism. The urge to be free of all constraints and to make contact with an underlying dynamic reality that could only be experienced directly. In many ways this was similar to developments in Europe around the post-surrealist Fluxus movement, and like it had an affinity with Taoist ideas. The main difference however was its emphasis on individual subjectivity and human creativity. Where the Fluxus artist surrendered to the ‘random’ influences of a creative cosmos, the Beat took this randomness and constructed a new reality from it, through the lens of their own subjective being. This element was heightened when the centre of the Beat’s drug exploration shifted from cannabis and speed to mind expanding drugs like LSD. This was to lead to a further spiritual dimension to the Beat ethos, one typified by Corso’s close friend, Allen Ginsberg. Something some derided as religious but in hindsight actually seems more free of religion than the Fluxus approach. Ginsberg professed a search for some Platonic spiritual reality underlying appearance but in practise saw this more as the creation of meaning in a meaningless world, the constructive use of imagination. He remained pragmatic and ironic regarding the truth of all this, was it spirituality, hallucination or just madness? In many ways the question was irrelevant.

8:33 Refrain, Allen Ginsberg (with Sonic Youth)

Talk Part 3

Ginsberg became the centre for this mystical strain in the Beat ethos. He saw himself as the contemporary manifestation of an anarchic spirituality that went back to the Pagans and Gnostics of the Ancient World, and had been taken up by poets such as Blake, Shelley and the other Romantics. A tradition that had been transmitted into America by the great transcentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau, and popularized by Walt Whitman. One also shaped by the European current of fin de siecle Decadence, Symbolism. Bohemianism, Dada and Surrealism. Ginsberg took this eclectic brew and shaped it into a radical form of hedonistic, libertarian spirituality.

His early phase was very Pagan and earthy and influenced by Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. Following his encounter and friendship with Timothy Leary, and LSD, he became more of a mystic and embraced Eastern Spirituality (another anti-thesis to the West). At first this was Pagan Hinduism, as it was with his new mentor Leary, but unlike him soon switched to Oriental thought, particularly Zen Buddhism (after reading Allen Watts). The interchange of the trio of Ginsberg, Leary and Watts was to shape the whole trend in counter culture towards Eastern Philosophy. Something I think had both good and bad results.

Ginsberg’s spirituality was always eclectic and non dogmatic, embracing a thousand mythologies and archetypes to give meaning to his life. His Buddhism was sincere though and based on a transcendental form of his desire to escape from and reject the modern world.

But it increasingly gave him an idealistic and transcendental leaning. One that according to some eventually undermined his radicalism and led to his apparent recuperation by the system. As Corso quipped in one of his poems ‘Al volleyed among the Hindu Gods then traded them all for Buddha’s no-God, then a Guggenheim he got’.

While Ginsberg was the centre of this trend it was one that effected nearly all the Beats. The entire premise of Kerouac’s on the Road is the transformation of its character, based on Neil Cassidy, the archetypal grassroots Beat, from wild drifter to ‘angel headed hipster’ to amoral spiritual being. Kerouac’s philosophy is consciously Zen inspired, albeit in a simplistic way, although he distinguishes between the positive ‘hot Zen’ of living and the negative ‘cool Zen’ of lifeless philosophy. Even Corso regarded himself as the Nuncio of his muse, heir to Hermes, Thoth, Loki and Moses! And this was not just an intellectuals thing, Neil Cassidy, the Dionysian working class Beat, ended up a disciple of Gurdjieff, and his partner a Proto-New Ager into Edgar Cayce and Positive Thinking.

One Beat writer who rejected all this was William Burroughs. For Burroughs religion was the worst thing anyone could get involved in, it stank. While even he thought that myth was necessary to create meaning and followed a kind of ‘pantheistic’ Taoist philosophy (along with the ‘esoteric’ ideas of Wilhelm Reich), he rejected the forms of spirituality most Beats took. He saw them as conservative, world denying and escapist, if life was for living lets live it, and not flee to religious delusions and maybe eventually dogmatism no matter how well intentioned.

To be fair though many of these ‘religious’ trends were not religious at all they were merely creative myths giving meaning to life. But Burroughs was right to be wary, they had the potential to carry away the mythmaker into a dangerous world of self delusion. And in a future talk I will argue that this would happen too much of the later Hippy movement.

Fortunately Burroughs became something of a mentor to many of the younger Beat writers, including Ginsberg and Kerouac, and stopped the religious trend going to far, both by influencing their perspectives and creating an alternative mode of Beat philosophy. He was a far more cynical and dark a figure, though no less oppositional to the existing culture.

8:40 title unknown (track 6) , William S Burroughs

Some question whether Burroughs was a Beat writer at all. For sure his work predated the beginning of the Beat phenomenon in 1947, and he differed in certain crucial ways from them.

Not least by being the upper class grandson of the inventor of the first ‘computer’, and initially at least extremely wealthy. Despite ‘dropping out’ he was certainly not the kind of guy to ride in a freight car or join an experimental commune! But he shares certain important concepts with the Beat intellectuals and was both a major influence on them, and was influenced by them in turn. I consider him one of the major Beat figures alongside Ginsberg and Kerouac with whom he formed close friendships. Some see him as the prophet or father of the Beat Generation.

One of the most important things Burroughs supplied to the Beat idiom was a worldly cynicism. Outside of this influence many writers had been drawn into a Romantic idealism, that despite healthy infusions of Dada and dark surrealism, influenced by anti-idols such as Antonin Artaud, predominantly traced its origins to Transcendental American idealists, like Thoreau, and Symbolist seers, such as Rimbaud, and their even more romantic predecessors. Burrough’s cynicism would prevent them floating off into their dream worlds.

More specifically he supplied a distinctly Nietzschean perspective, through the medium of Oswald Spengler and his work ‘Decline of the West’. Spengler’s thesis, that the West was in a phase of decline and plagued by commodification, banality, massification and mediocrity had been enthusiastically taken up by Burrough’s. But, like Adorno, he reversed Spengler’s negative rightist account of the alienated victims of modern society, its degenerate ‘flotsam and jetsam’, to their characterisation as the potential seeds of an alternative society.

But unlike Adorno he didn’t see this in terms of a revolutionary movement, but rather as the basis for a new culture. A culture that for Burroughs was not only a matter of lifestyle, but of our very mode of thinking and the language that it was founded in.

Under the influence of the semanticist Alfred Korzybski, or ‘the Count’, Burroughs developed a theory of semantics that saw contemporary language as the root of all evil, and was particularly distrustful of abstraction, linguistic ‘falsification’, totalization and binary opposition.

A new language was needed to create a new culture he thought. Specifically the damage done by Aristotelian thinking need to be corrected. Terms like ‘is’, which affirmed bourgeois notions of fixed essence and suppressed change, ‘the’, which affirmed absolutes and totalization (as in the truth), and ‘or’ which affirmed exclusive dualism and repressed creative synthesis, and to be replaced by more authentic terms. Languages that used dynamic images (such as Chinese and Ancient Egyptian pictograms) and active verb based languages (such as Native American) were closer to reality he claimed. Language also played as big a role in creating reality as it did representing it. But where as some of his ideas were similar to post structuralist developments he never descended into the semantic idealism of post modernity and maintained that language was still rooted in some kind of independent reality, even if this was conditionable to some extent. Words with no concrete reference should be abandoned as falsifiers of reality he said. If language could be reformed, so would our mindsets and with this society would change.

While this may seem over simplistic and naïve today, it never the less pointed out the importance of language and consciousness in social change.

These two insights the ‘alternative society’ of outsiders and the effects of language and culture could be said to mark out Burroughs a the first theoretician of the counterculture (in which his influence is still strong).

Another important aspect of his language theory was the idea of language as a virus. In its negative form this explained the spread of the contagion of linguistic falsification, and was linked to what the Situationists would later call the Spectacle, particularly in the media and advertising of consumer based society. In its positive form it could be used to recuperate media imagery and mainstream culture and mutate them into subversive viruses.

These ideas have much in common with Situationism and developed independently around the same time. Later though there would be more exchange between the Beats and the Situationists, in particular in the form of correspondence between maverick Situationists, such as Alexander Trocchi, and leading countercultural writers like Burroughs and Ginsberg. City Lights bookshop was also twinned with a similar shop in Paris, and this link also served as meeting point of the two streams, as Beats (and later Hippies) passed through Europe on their way to India. Significant cross-fertilisation occurred in some quarters (particular in the overlap between American Situationism and its countercultural backdrop), but on the whole most Beats seem to have thought the French too square, and were in turn denounced as middle class dropouts by more orthodox Situationists like Debord.

Politically Burroughs was an individualist of the old frontier tradition. Some regard him as an anarchist, and he was certainly opposed to centralised authority, middle American values and right wing politics, and supported ‘libertarian left’ causes, but he was too much of a nihilist to be categorised easily. He was also something of a cynic (who sometimes declared Capitalism victorious) and a notorious ‘macho’ misogynist and ‘partial homophobe’ (if not a misanthrope). Moreover it would be difficult to really classify him as left wing, as he publicly denounced Socialism (which he equated with at worst authoritarianism and bureaucracy and at best hypocritical, bleeding heart liberalism). He sincerely warned Ginsberg, who was becoming increasingly involved with Marxism and the Labour Movement, to stay away from such people, if he valued his freedom. But Ginsberg ignored his warnings.

But Burroughs was more concerned with the Beats flirtation with ‘spirituality’ and religion than their political affiliations. As said previously Burroughs was no doubt partly right to do this but may have overestimated their level of commitment to these ideas which were basically a form of creative mythmaking (the same could be said for Ginsberg’s Marxian Communism too).

A more insidious danger was pointed out by Ferlinghetti, the Beat anarchist, who warned against the disengagement from the world inherent in some of the more transcendental elements of Beat counterculture. A fault that can also be found in some of Burrough’s more nihilistic tendencies. As Ferlinghetti would say ‘only the dead are disengaged’.

Finally Burroughs would adopt a ‘space philosophy’ in which he concluded that our existing situation was unreformable and our only chance was to find a ‘new frontier in space’. In this he was much influenced by his association with Timothy Leary and LSD experimentation. Like today’s Autonomous Astronauts (no doubt much indebted to him), he used this as both a metaphor for the transcendence of our conditioning and a practical solution for genuine socio-political liberation. Whether this was more insightful prophecy or just the culmination of his nihilistic detachment remains to be seen.

8:50 Words of Advice for Young People, William S Burroughs

Talk Part 4

I’ll conclude by looking a little closer at the political dimensions of the Beats and their relation to anarchism.

As I described earlier the movement was essentially brought together under the influence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a man J Edgar Hoover targeted as ‘a beatnik rabble-rouser, who might also be a mental case’ (Hoover had recommended that many Beat writers be put on the FBI’s subversives list, and even as late as the Reagan administration prominent ex Beats such as Ginsberg were on a Whitehouse list undesirables. Which did wonders for their reputation). Ferlinghetti is regarded by many as an anarchist, though as far as my research shows he never used the term for himself. He was however much indebted to mentors he described as ‘philosophical anarchists’, most significantly the poet-polemicist Kenneth Rexroth. More importantly, while not being involved with traditional political activity he was committed to the political aspects of counterculture and particularly the critique of contemporary capitalist society. Defending Ginsberg in court, following charges of obscenity resulting from the publication of Howl, he turned what was technically just a poem into a denunciation of modern society played out in the heart of the establishment, the law court.

Others picking up on this would compare Howl to a new bible, with Ginsberg as the last Hebrew prophet, revealing the evils of our civilisation and hinting at the way out!

Ferlinghetti will also be remembered for introducing Bob Kaufman to the world, one of the few Black Beats to emerge. Kaufman a self declared ‘anarcho-surrealist’ would combine his Black subcultural (and Jewish) inheritance with Beat poetry and psychedelic philosophy to produce his notorious Abomunist Manifesto.

The movement Ferlinghetti brought together while not producing writers who could be classified as traditional anarchists, could never the less be said to be generally anarchist in its orientation. Certainly the synthesis of Ginsberg’s liberating, existential Communism and Burroughs’ anti-bourgeois, frontier Individualism would seem to optimally approximate anarchism. And many writers would consciously make this identification at times, Ginsberg’s references to Sacco and Vanzetti as revolutionary martyrs, Burroughs’ promotion of semi-anarchist Reichian theory, Kaufman’s evocation of Bakunin etc. Anarchism was the natural outcome of Beat philosophy if nothing else.

Practically those influenced by Beat counterculture became involved in the civil liberties, anti-war/military and anti-nuclear movements, though few were complete pacifists. Beyond this activism various attempts at creating alternative communities and lifestyles were initiated.

The Beats would also have a great influence on anarchism in the States and the American left in general, both directly and through intermediaries such as Paul Goodman and the American Pro-Situ crew.

In time both Beat counterculture and Beat influenced anarchism would spread outside of the US, particularly to Britain, where it would cross fertilise with local influences and spawn new countercultural milieus.

I will end by playing a recording of Ginsberg reading Howl. This work is generally held to be the pinnacle of Beat culture, and united Beats as diverse as Ginsberg and Burroughs in their high regard for it. It was initially banned as obscene (and even today the phrase ‘… with mother finally fucked’ is often edited out as it is in this recording) but in Ferlinghetti’s defence of it he declared that it was not the poem that was obscene but the world it describes. Many have described the poem as a ‘journey through hell’, but it also contains seeds of hope.

8:55 Howl, Allen Ginsberg

9:15 Debate (from memory, apologies if any comments missed)

A long talk admittedly (and unavoidably), but some were still awake.

Most thought that Howl was an incredibly moving and powerful poem. It was said to encapsulate how many people experienced life.

An important criticism was the notion that the ‘alternative’ culture of the Beat Generation had now been recuperated by the system and was being fed back to us all the time in the media.

A related point was that it was never that radical in the first place, just another expression of the frontier values that underpinned America. The hedonism of the affluent society may have been rejected but was replaced by the hedonism of drugs, sex and kicks (often necessitated by economic situations). A lot dropped out and back in constantly or lived in two worlds. Burroughs was rich and many Beats were relatively wealthy too, those that weren’t were supported by them, so dropping out and travelling on money from capitalism wasn’t that radical. The ‘mystical’ side merely reflecting a religiosity quite common amongst frontiers people.

This second criticism is probably true for the hangers on and fringes of the phenomena, but I didn’t think this was true for the core of the movement, or all of its adherents. It may draw on ‘traditional’ frontier values to some extent but some of these were more radical than pro establishment historians would like us to believe (as books like ‘Gone To Croatan’ have revealed). Moreover the Beats were only the beginning of something that would get progressively more radical.

Most of those identified as ‘Beatniks’ were not wealthy and genuinely shunned the affluent society and its ‘materialistic’ values. In many ways they anticipated the modern day Travellers (though there are still Trustafarians amongst the Crusties even today). But as a friend of mine (who met some of the Beat writers) said they could only have existed within an affluent society. Though they were aware of this irony.

The Beat phenomena can be seen as a manifestation of the contradictions inherent in Western civilisation, and a conscious amplification of those contradictions, drawing in particular on that which it attempts to exclude in its drive for coherence (Black subculture, ethnicity, the lumpen-proletariat, the female, independent thinking (and acting), sex, violence, spirituality, irrationality, adolescent rebellion etc). The Beats encapsulated this and launched the virus that became counterculture.

As for their recuperation, I conceded this is largely true. In fact it is now true alas for nearly all of contemporary counterculture. The system has an insatiable ability to recuperate opposition. And with ‘counterculture’ does so very effectively, both by absorbing sanitised versions of it into its marketing imagery (and creating trendy subcultures) and by tolerating subtly policed islands of cathartic rebellion (at the weekend). However radical counterculture does survive in the ‘underground’ movement, which is currently growing and becoming more politicised, but even this is facing constant recuperative assaults.

However recuperation itself may not be all that bad I suggested. The more the system recuperates counterculture the more radical counterculture has to be to distinguish itself from banal subculture. As the system recuperates this in turn the contradictions it take onboard become even more extreme. Recuperation both weakens the system and radicalises counterculture. The virus is terminal. As Burroughs insisted it is also possible to recuperate the system ourselves, taking on its imagery and subverting it in radical forms, thus exploiting its contradictions even more.

Most people thought this was over optimistic and that using media imagery only reinforced the system, which was powerful enough to absorb anything. I remained optimistic believing that while it was difficult to do right, the system’s images and ideals could be subverted in a kind of Taoist manoeuvre. While the system appeared to absorb all, this was an illusion, eventually the catastrophe point would be reached and change would accelerate rapidly.

Questions on whether the Beats had a coherent philosophy, plan or practical program were raised. Philosophies such as Burroughs’ language theories were pointed to, and the many experimental communities and lifestyles of the period were highlighted. But it was emphasised that like anarchists they did not push solutions they just encouraged free thought and experimentation.

Everyone felt that the free thought and gradual change of consciousness sought by counterculturalists was crucial to political change, and that the Beats had pushed this forward. But we also thought something more politically engaged and practical, and perhaps directly oppositional, was also needed, as the system actively opposes any change and marginalises dissenters. Counterculture lacked this. Though we differed as to what this was actually entailed. Reference was made to the critical mass theory, in which when enough dissenters exist a mass change in consciousness occurs (presumably to large to marginalise), but most thought this over optimistic and somewhat ‘new age’.

The lack of a unified program was put forward by some as a problem, something clearly demonstrated by the anti-capitalist demos it was claimed. The rest of us saw this as a strength the creation of a space for change. The unification point was the destruction of the system. This was held to be both impossible, given the tactics (hedonism doesn’t change anything), and undesirable by some. Many didn’t want to lose Industrialism and return to back-breaking agriculture (or famine and disease), which seemed somewhat in contradiction of countercultural hedonism. But as was countered that mass hedonism would make Capitalism unworkable, and that back-breaking agriculture is a product of exploitation. In a free society agricultural work (like any other kind) would be minimal. In the post-scarcity economy there would be plenty of time to party between the few hours of work each day. Some of us thought that such a society could also retain human scale high tech, it wouldn’t necessarily be entirely agricultural.

A contradiction in Beat philosophy was pointed out, in that its nomadism seemed impossible in such a society which seemed more settled than the existing one. Would such nomads be parasites or did they want us to return to a hunter-gatherer society? The response to this was that there was nothing wrong with a little hunting and gathering (in whatever form it might take)! Crowded, settled living was a major cause of disease, which more nomadism might alleviate. Perhaps the ideal situation would be a culture of nomadism (for those who wanted it) between a variety of settled communities, within a pluralistic and constantly evolving civilisation (as in Bolo Bolo).

Some thought this too utopian, particularly as there were too many people and not enough space. Others disagreed. Though then we had strayed to far into speculation and ran out of time.

We ended with another suitable piece from Burroughs.

9:55 Closing with - Dead City Radio, William S Burroughs

All recordings available via a PC, Modem and Napster(www.napster.com)!