Values and Behavioral Attitudes of Counterculture - Essay Example

Counterculture 2008 Counterculture (also "counter-culture depicts the values and behaviorioral attitudes of a cultural group finding shared solution to problems arising from impeded hopes and wishes of its members or their uncertain place in the wider ("mainstream") society. These groups, called subcultures although separate from the so-called mainstream society, borrow (frequently deforming, inflating, or upturning) its emblems, values, and convictions - an idea extensively used in the sociology of deviance, mainly in studies of youth culture (Marshall, 1998). The counter-culture is the cultural counterpart of of political opposition. This is a new sociological term coined by Theodore Roszak, an American social thinker, whose writings are frequently linked with the "alternative or " "new age" movements. It is Roszak who narrated and explained the European and North American counterculture of the 1960s in his book The Making of a Counter Culture (1969). However, mentions about the term also exist in earlier times, as Stein Rokkan in his models in political science, used the expression to depict the fight of the marginal against the authoritative mainstream central state-and nation-building and that kind of cultural homogenization in 1967 (Alford et al, 1974). Loosely speaking, countercultural trends are prsent in many societies, but what Roszak et al here means is a more important and noticeable trend, reaching a significant target for a certain span of time, a movement expressing the culture, hopes and dreams of a paricular group of people during an epoch - a social expression of zeitgeist, the typical spirit of a historical epoch in its entirety (Zeit contains the sense of "era"), the idea is derived from the belief that the time has a objective meaning and is instilled with content In this sense Countercultural ambiances in 19th century Europe took in the Romantic, Bohemian and the Dandy movements (Dictionary of the History, lib.virginia.edu ). Another movement in the 1950's, Beat generation/Beatniks also had traces of counter culture in it, followed in the 1960s by the hippies. The term 'counterculture' became important in the news media as it referred to the social revolution swaying North America, Western Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand during the 1960s and early 1970s (Roszak, 1969). In modern history of the western world (and for that matter, the world in its entireity) countreculture is often placed synonymouly with the turbulent decades of the 1960os and 1970's that was, accoding to Roszak, a social and political response to the pretense of the mainstream worldly culture from which it rose. In the The Making of a Counter Culture he handles rather truthfully the tensions, problems and incongruities connected with the ascent of the counterculture and the inherent problems it had with it to ultimately heralding for the worldly normal culture. History, no doubt, shows that the philosophy of the 1960s was squashed by the crushing attack of the system and the political and social values of the counterculture finally joined into the realm of private philosophies of hippies as absorbed into the mainstream. Yet while earlier studies on the sixties focus mainly on the "hippie" era, or on the sex, the drugs, and the music, Roszak focuses mostly on the political and social issues of the time including everything from the Vietnam War to how the effect of counter culture on lifestyles of an average American family. He assesses thoroughly the bond between the late 1960's counterculture to avant-garde intellectual ideas of the same age, discussing those of Herbert Marcuse and Norman Brown, among others, in great detail to show clearly how their ideas affected the intellectual and political movements on college campuses in both America and Europe with a remarkable insight especially considering that he wrote The Making of a Counter Culture almost on the same time while the events were still expanding. The counter culture of the 1960's and the 1970's, Roszak shows us, was mainly a youth-centric movement with an "A eclectic taste for mystic, occult, and magical phenomena has been a marked characteristic of our postwar [WWII] youth culture since the days of the beatniks" . It, he says, reachedg it peak between 1965 and the mid-1970s, fighting for racial parity, women's rights, sexual freedom (including gay/lesbian rights), respite from prohibitions against psychotropic drugs, and an end to the Vietnam War. He finds common position between 1960s student revolutionaries and hippie dropouts in their shared denunciation of what he names as the technocracy-the rule of corporate and hi-tech knowledge dictating the industrial society. Roszak shows why in those two tumultuous decades the otherwise intelligent youth went bafflingly defiant. Tracing the cause of the generation gap, the student upheaval, the New Left, the beats and hippies, the psychedelic movement, rock music, the restoration of occultism and mysticism, the protest against American participation in Vietnam, and the apathy of the young to belong to the wealthy technological society-all these things are here sympathetically discussed, and objectively studied her. In the counter cultural movement, posters also act as an essential act of dissention against the mainstream culture using the same art to their benefit. Susan Sontag, in article entitled "Posters: Advertisement, Art, Political Artifact, Commodity," says that poster art now (the article was published in 1970) is in an era of "renaissance. Posters have come to be treated as strange cultural objects, whose "flatness and literalness" only intensify their tone, in addition to being endlessly rich symbols of the society. "Posters have become one of the most ubiquitous kinds of cultural objects-prized partly because they are cheap, unpretentious, "popular" art" (as cited in Heyman, Posters American Style). In an age where art, like activism, is more a study of the character of human populations than moral responsibility, Sontag affirms that posters serve to circulate "already mature elitist art conventions, popularizing what is agreed on, by the arbiters of the worlds of painting and sculpture, as visual good taste. " Clearly then it serves the purpose counter culture, which was a twilight zone of art and revolution in the sixties and much earlier also. In Lipstick Traces (1990), Greil Marcus traces what is according to New York Times (as cited in amazon.com) the "cultural history of society's anarchic fringe". In this extremely skewed description of counter cultural movement reappearing from decade to decade, from the medieval movement of the Free Spirit to the Dadaists, the French Situationists, the flower Children of the May 1968 in France and British punk singers Marcus doesn't find much difference between high and low, for him there were striking similarities between them sometimes also. Drifting gracefully from one to another happening, from punk to Police Academy, and Elvis movies to the Left Bank and Sex pistols, Marcus takes us down the gloomy ways of counter-history, a road to sacrilege, escapade, and shock. His account makes us hear the different kinds of mad, fixed demands on society, art, and all the prevailing structures of daily life in written words, images, and actions conveyed intangibly, but certainly, by people who didn't know each other. We hear mysterious yet known voices of such heretics as those the Free Spirit and the Dadaists sporting death masks, small groups of Paris-based artists and writers encircling Guy Debord, who made blank-screen films, visionary graffiti, and the rioting students and workers of May '68 scribbling obscure slogans on city walls and bringing France to a stop; the Sex Pistols in London, with their disc the "Anarchy in the U.K." and "God Save the Queen." Works Cited Marshall, Gordon, A Dictionary of Sociology, Oxford University Press 1998. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition, Double-day, New York, 1968/1969 Alford, Robert R. and Friedland, Roger Nations, Parties, and Participation: A Critique of Political Sociology , Theory and Society, , Springer, Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn, pp. 307-328, 1974 Dictionary of the History of Ideas, retrieved from http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgiid=dv4-74 Therese Heyman, Posters American Style, retrieved from http://americanart.si.edu/collections/exhibits/posters/essay.html Susan Sontag, "Posters: Advertisement, Art, Political Artifact, Commodity," in Donald Stermer, ed., The Art of Revolution: 96 Posters from Castro's Cuba, 1959-1970, New York: McGraw Hill, 1970 Marcus, Greil, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Harvard University Press, 1990 Read More