Jules

Anti-Disciplinary Protest
Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism
The sixties was a time when the boundaries between the

political and the aesthetic were deliberately blurred and,
according to some critics, the time when the possibility for
grand social transformation died. Stephens questions the
frameworks that inform commonplace understandings of
this period, arguing that the most distinctive forms of
sixties protest are often marginalized or excluded from
view. She looks at the problematic contemporary and
retrospective accounts of sixties radicalism, and traces the
modernist and postmodern impulses that can be discerned
in the anti-disciplinary protest of the time. Stephens
develops a new theoretical framework for conceptualizing
the relationship between the sixties and later political and
theoretical developments. Drawing on broad-ranging,
lively and often rare sources, this is a provocative con-
tribution to contemporary social theory and cultural
studies.
Julie Stephens is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of

Social and Cultural Studies at Victoria University of Tech-
nology. She is an associate editor of Arena Magazine.
She has published articles in a range of journals and
has recently been a Visiting Fellow at the University
of California, Berkeley, and at the London School of
Economics.
For Boris
Anti-Disciplinary Protest
Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism
Julie Stephens
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA http://www.cup.org
10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia
© Julie Stephens 1998
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1998
Printed in China by L. Rex Printing Company Ltd.
Typeset in Adobe New Aster 9/12 pt
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Stephens, Julie, 1956- .
Anti-disciplinary protest: sixties radicalism and postmodernism/Julie Stephens.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-521-62033-3 (hb: alk. paper). - ISBN 0-521-62976-4 (pb: alk. paper)
1. Radicalism - United States - History - 20th century. 2. Social
movements - United States - History - 20th century. 3. Nineteen
sixties. 4. United States - History - 1961-1969. 5. United States -
Politics and government- 1963-1969.1. Title.
HN90.R3S63 1998
303.48'4-dc21 97-33593
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction: Resurrecting the Death of the Sixties 1
1 Paradigms of Sixties Radicalism 10
2 The Language of an Anti-Disciplinary Politics 24
3 Consuming India 48
4 Co-opting Co-optation 73
5 Aesthetic Radicalism 96
6 Genealogies 720
Notes 128
Bibliography 153
Index 165
Preface
On 4 April 1989 Abbie Hoffman said of the sixties: 'We were young, we were
reckless, arrogant, silly, headstrong - and we were right! I regret nothing'.1 He
was on a panel reviewing the decade's aftermath at Vanderbilt University in
Tennessee, along with Bobby Seale and Timothy Leary. It was during a time
when the debate about the nature and legacy of the sixties was at its most
fervent in the United States. This was to be Abbie's last public appearance.
Eight days later he committed suicide.
The breach between the wild enthusiasms of Hoffman's public utterances
and his private despair in some respects stands as emblematic of the axes of
enchantment and disenchantment, of hope and of loss, around which so
much of the discussion of the radicalism of the sixties revolves. This book
addresses some of the ways in which this polarized thinking shapes
commonplace connections made between sixties radicalism and the current
political field. In the most familiar depictions of the decade, a trajectory
moves from the emancipatory promises of the sixties to the apparent end
of all possibility of a transformative politics. This end is seen to represent the
contemporary situation. I am concerned to disrupt this narrative and to
examine some of the political consequences of these taken-for-granted
understandings.
While the definition, the periodization, the categorization, the location
(national or global) and the outcomes of the sixties can all be contested, the
decade nevertheless is invoked as though its meaning is common, shared and
self-evident. In a recent collection of essays entitled Reassessing the Sixties,
Todd Gitlin makes the point that even now, thirty years on, leading politicians
in the United States are called to account for their role in the sixties, what
vu
viii Preface
they did or did not do (did you inhale, fight for your country?), to take
positions on the decade and to answer true or false questions about it. Why
should the sixties be so significant in determining current definitions of
political identity? For, as Gitlin observes, there is no precedent for this
phenomenon. No politician in the sixties was similarly pressured to take a
position on the thirties, another period equally noted for its radicalism.2
This book begins with the premise that the sixties continues to occupy
a special place in our historical and cultural memory and that representations
of the decade frame the very way we think about the contemporary
political/theoretical landscape. Clearly, the sixties has been overworked, with
sociological, biographical and political literature on the topic and a boundless
media fascination with the decade. Yet it continues to resurface as a reference
point in cultural debate. Take for instance the recent defeat of the
Conservative Party in Britain. In the immediate aftermath of the election of
Tony Blairs New Labour, the spectre of the sixties rose once again. Various
recollections of the decade suddenly appeared in the national press and
discussion about the so-called sixties generation and its legacy briefly
dominated television and radio. This coincided with an exhibition of
photographs, poster art and psychedelia entitled 'Les Sixties: Great Britain
and France 1962-1973' at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery and an accom-
panying book, The Sixties: Britain and France, 1962-1973. The Utopian Years,3
once again confirming the impression there is something about the decade
that continues to trouble and allure.
Perhaps the words of a Sullivan County official in Bethel, New York, sum
up the tenacity of the sixties as a cultural yardstick. The County repeatedly
failed to prevent tens of thousands of pilgrims returning every year to the site
where the 1969 Woodstock music festival was held, despite blocking access
roads, digging ditches and even dumping chicken manure on the field.
Finally, it admitted defeat and decided to turn the whole area into a shrine. As
the County Manager Jonathan Drapkin, who was thirteen at the time of the
festival, said: 'I'm not a flower child or a hippie, but Woodstock was the
equivalent of the Civil War for the people who lived through it'.4
This book is not another attempt to enshrine the sixties. However, it is
testimony to the stature of the decade in the contemporary imagination. It
differs from other reinterpretations in a number of significant ways. While
any rendering of historical events necessarily contains its own narrative logic,
what follows is not intended to be a chronicle of the radicalism of the sixties.
Rather, the concern is with questioning the ways sixties radicalism has been
formulated in many of the retrospective accounts of the decade. The concept
of an 'anti-disciplinary politics' is developed to identify a type of protest often
marginalized or overlooked in scholarly and popular readings of the sixties.
And, in rejecting the link frequently made between the failure of sixties
radicalism and post-sixties political despair, this book proposes an alternative
Preface ix
framework for understanding the relationship between the sixties and later
political and theoretical developments such as postmodernism.
While I come to different conclusions to many other commentators on the
sixties, I share similar preoccupations and motivations: namely, the desire to
theorize the disappearance of mass political involvement without either being
blind to present struggles or representing political disengagement as
somehow an inevitable and conclusive historical development. Nostalgia
seems to be another occupational hazard for those writing on this topic. I
have had to strain against an urge to celebrate some of the sources I have
used in the course of this investigation. Unlike James Farrell, who feels that
there has been too much concentration on the ephemera of the counter-
culture and not enough on its 'ethical core',5 in my view the leaflets, posters,
poetry, travel journals, underground publications and roneoed sheets of the
day provide an unparalleled glimpse of a version of sixties protest not always
given serious attention in accounts of the decade. Far from cringing as
expected when sifting through such material, or when confronting the
spectacularly profane visions of the Diggers or the Yippies, it was difficult not
to be affected by the energy, insight and irreverence of writings which even
today are thoroughly destabilizing. I hope that the extracts included in the
following chapters remind others, as I have been reminded, of what indeed is
possible, and not, as we are told so frequently as this century draws to a close,
of the limits of possibility.
The course of this book has spanned one birth and two deaths. At no stage
has it been easy. It could not have been completed without the excellent
support of Phillipa McGuinness at Cambridge University Press, who re-
mained committed to and enthusiastic about the manuscript over what
seemed to be a very long period of time. She encouraged me to persevere
and for this I am very grateful. As always, others have helped along the way.
At an early point in this project, when everyone was offering an anec-
dote about the sixties, the following people volunteered source material:
Bernadette Delaney, Fabian Hutchinson, David Potts, Max Ryan, John
Sinclair and Bryan Smith. Thanks go to Mark Kitchell for lending me a
copy of his fine film Berkeley in the '60s. Others have provided criticism,
information or comment which at different stages was crucial to the develop-
ment of my ideas: Peter Beilharz, Verity Burgmann, Michele Grossman and
Lenore Stephens. Dennis Altman and Todd Gitlin commented on a much
earlier version of this study, when it was a PhD. Special thanks go to Dipesh
Chakrabarty, who has provided valuable input at significant points in this
book's progress. The early inspiration and encouragement of Dipesh continue
to shape my thinking despite the different paths we have followed.
Ron Adams, who was Head of the Department of Social and Cultural
Studies at Victoria University of Technology for most of the writing of this
x Preface
book, has provided consistent enthusiasm for this project and for intellectual
endeavours in general, at a time of great difficulty for Australian universities.
The staff at the Baillieu Library (University of Melbourne), the Victoria
University of Technology Library at St Albans, the British Museum and the
Bancroft Library (University of California, Berkeley) have also been of
assistance. Ann Jungman and Veronika Fukson provided generous hospitality
while I was collecting material in London and Berkeley respectively.
Others have countered my own anti-disciplinary tendencies. I am grate-
ful beyond words to Sally Nicholls who when faced with a difficult task
has proved to be a meticulous and gifted editor. Sharon Mullins and
Jane Farago of Cambridge University Press have also provided important
support. Erik, Yanni and Violaine Lloga came to the rescue when the tech-
nology failed me, as it always does, in the final stages of revision.
It is much more difficult finding the appropriate way of thanking the people
closest to you. Margaret Stephens has helped at so many crucial moments
along the way that her contribution to this book is impossible to quantify. So
too with Boris Frankel. His commitment to this book and his confidence in its
intellectual and political merit have proved unflagging. As a critical reader his
input has been invaluable, just as his humour has enabled me to always keep
the wider context in view. More than that, Boris has provided me with con-
stant loving support of the most precious kind. This book is dedicated to him.
Introduction
Resurrecting the Death of the Sixties
In the months that followed the highly theatricalized fusion between politics
and art, the combination of street theatre, worker militancy and apocalyptic
rhetoric that was the movement of May '68 in France, numerous publications
about the events rapidly appeared. By the end of that year no fewer than fifty-
two books were in circulation,1 and since then, the flow of publications has
remained steady. Beyond France, the radicalism which has become
analogous with the whole decade of the 1960s has generated an equally
impressive stream of self-reflections and reinterpretations. While, no doubt,
this says much about the 'deliriously commemorative logic' of current
publishing practices, to use Peter Starr's words,2 it also suggests a widespread
cultural preoccupation with this brief yet remarkable period. In the profusion
of popular and scholarly literature looking back on 'the sixties' that has
emerged over the last three decades (and especially over the last ten years),
the sense that this time in particular provides the key to understanding our
contemporary situation is obsessively reinforced.
While the countless rememberings and revisions of the decade of the sixties
weave their way through different material, events, perceptions and often
contrary political agendas, they share a common fixation with the apparent
failure of sixties radicalism. The thread linking much of the material seeking
to express, celebrate or purge the perceived troubling aftermaths of the
decade is the conviction that the sixties marked a breakdown in the
revolutionary model of political change and, at its most dramatic, heralded
an end to any possibility of grand social transformation.
The demise of sixties radicalism is often the central premise on which
standard representations of the decade rest. The voluminous biographical,
2 Anti-Disciplinary Protest
sociological and political reinterpretations of the topic are pervaded with a

similar sense of failed hopes, loss, and bewilderment as to why the promise of
the sixties seemed so suddenly to disappear. This is the case even with those
commentators eager to dissociate themselves from what I shall subsequently
call this 'death of the sixties' narrative. In seeking to prove that there was 'no
simple return to normalcy'3 in the decade's wake, or to record the continuing
political dedication of former sixties activists,4 perspectives which focus on
the achievements of the sixties can equally be situated within this paradigm
of failure/success.
The point of this book is not primarily to debate the truth value of such
proclamations. This has been done by others, most effectively by Todd Gitlin,
who, in one of the most nuanced readings of sixties activism, attempts to
reclaim the 'actual sixties' from 'The Sixties'. As Gitlin puts it, fragments of
media-images (for instance, Kennedys assassination, Martin Luther King
Junior's 'I have a dream' speech) are 'scooped together as if the whole decade
took place in an instant'.5 Nevertheless, there are historical problems with the
failed revolution scenario. It is premised on the assumption that in the sixties
there must have been a very precise and widespread commitment to a
tangible revolution in the orthodox political sense of the term: this of the
decade that also fostered ideas of permanent revolution and employed that
concept as much in a metaphoric as in a literal sense. So what is at stake in
giving priority to the most conventional forms of sixties radicalism in this
death of the sixties narrative?
My interest is in pursuing such questions by examining the range of stories
that are being told about the sixties, particularly those retrospective accounts
making a connection between the demise of sixties radicalism and the current
political and theoretical field. On the one hand this link is constituted as
causal, with the current political landscape being characterized as dominated
by a mood of political disengagement traced directly back to the failures of
the sixties. According to this logic, sixties activists are blamed for their
Utopianism and for their inability to prevent the commodification of all their
values. In this script, mainstream society is the victor; monolithic and ever
able to absorb dissent. Current popular representations of the topic in
newspapers, magazines and the electronic media are shaped by such views
and readily provide a series of commonplace explanations for the failure of
sixties radicalism. Post-sixties political disengagement is thus presented as a
pragmatic and realistic response to the conditions of advanced capitalism. As
I will later discuss, this perspective pits the presumed childish aspirations and
excesses of the sixties against the dispiriting but adult character of later
decades (namely the eighties and nineties).
On the other hand, the link between the contemporary political arena and
the death of the sixties is constituted in philosophical and theoretical terms.
No less causal, this view places great emphasis on the failure of May '68,
Introduction 3
on the fact that the dramatic alliance between students, workers, artists,
anarchists and intellectuals failed to overthrow State power or bring about a
revolutionary transformation of French society. This failure is not located in
the shortcomings of the activists themselves but rather in the impossibility of
grand revolutionary projects or more particularly in macro-political theory of
the Marxist kind. Thomas Docherty, among others to be cited in the pages
which follow, puts it thus:
A key date here of course is 1968. The seeming availability of a

revolution which brought workers and intellectuals together all
across Europe represented a high point for a specific kind of Marxist
theoretical practice. But when these revolutions failed, many began,
at precisely that moment, to rethink their commitment to the
fundamental premises of Marxist theory.6
Unlike the explanations which have gained such popular currency -

although there are obvious overlaps here - an explanation which sets so much
store on May '68 leads to two different but related conclusions: one con-
tending that this failure marks an end to all opposition, and the other that this
end opens up the opportunity for alternative forms of political engagement.
My fascination is with the former as it is this view that dominates accounts
which link the emergence of postmodernism with the death of the sixties. My
particular interest is in the sense of impasse which is said to have been
generated by the failed radicalism of the sixties.
To return to an earlier point, these popular and theoretical explanations
of the post-sixties era share a concern with the most conventional forms of
sixties radicalism. Only those actions which were extensions of a traditional
revolutionary perspective and aimed to convulsively overthrow State power
come into view. On the other hand, the challenges posed by the psychedelic
wing of the movement, by the counterculture or what Jerry Rubin called the
'Marxist acidheads',7 are either marginalized, ignored altogether or rele-
gated to the status of an amusing curiosity. The counterculture as a
phenomenon has generated a set of highly contested meanings which will be
discussed in Chapter 1. According to Brent Whelan, it is less the case that the
critics have forgotten the late sixties counterculture but rather that 'they have
actively rejected the object and excluded it from serious consideration'.8
There are exceptions, notably Whelan's own fine analysis, but on the whole
this appears to be the case.9 In James Millers preface to the 1994 edition of
Democracy Is in the Streets, where he looks at the sixties from the perspective
of the nineties, he acknowledges this process of exclusion as one of the
gravest omissions in his own text. Operating then with a consciously
conventional notion of politics, he comments that: 'Given the political focus
of my narrative, it was all but impossible to convey adequately the era's
carnivalesque atmosphere of confusion - an air of chaos that was depending

on one's aspirations, either fearful or liberatory'.10
One of the purposes of this book is to overcome such shortcomings and to
rethink the connection between the so-called failure of the sixties and the
disenchantment with politics that is forever being held up as the prevailing
cultural mood of the late twentieth century." In an attempt to theorize the
strain of sixties radicalism that boasted no list of demands, no party, no aims
and ideology, no leaders and no followers,121 focus on the distinctive rituals
and language of protest of the 'psychedelic Bolsheviks',13 who, according to
their own self-image, were beyond the picket sign because, in Jerry Rubin's
memorable words: 'our nakedness was our picket sign'.14 This will entail an
examination of what I call an 'anti-disciplinary polities', a language of protest
which rejected hierarchy and leadership, strategy and planning, bureaucratic
organization and political parties and was distinguished from the New Left
by its ridiculing of political commitment, sacrifice, seriousness and co-
herence. The concept of an anti-disciplinary politics refuses many of the
problematic distinctions which shape the familiar paradigms of the sixties,
most notably the boundary between so-called political radicalism and
cultural radicalism, between the activist and the hippie. This sixties critique
of the 'discipline' of politics will be detailed in the first two chapters and is
crucial to what follows.
It makes little sense to turn towards the individuals and groups committed
to the notion that 'there must not be a plan! as it is always the plan that has
done us in',15 and to accuse them of failing to fulfill their revolutionary aims
due to inadequate planning, incoherent ideologies, confused strategies or
impractical goals, as other commentators have done. However, in giving
consideration to the politicized counterculture the issue is not to restore it to
its rightful place in sixties narratives but to call into question the frameworks
which so inform our commonplace understandings of this period and its
relationship to what are perceived to be the anti-political inclinations of
later decades. In the current political/theoretical landscape, the impulses to
political disengagement, represented at one level by a certain tendency of
postmodernism and at another by popular conceptions of the dominant
cultural mood, have been shaped as much by the success of the anti-
disciplinary politics of the sixties counterculture as by the failure of more
traditional conceptions of protest.
As Gitlin suggests, no neat inventory of gains and losses can ever hope to
capture the uneven, inconclusive and unexpected legacies of the sixties.16 In
developing an argument about the enduring forms of anti-disciplinary
protest, the point is not simply to add something to the success side of the
tally sheet. Yet it would be misleading to refuse to situate this text in relation
to the death of the sixties narrative. I do not concur with the view which, on
the basis of May '68 or such like, concludes that there has been a return to
Introduction 5
the status quo since the sixties. Fundamentally, the position outlined in the
following pages is closer to the one put by those who contend that the prior
order has been revolutionized since the sixties often in ways which bear little
resemblance to the expressed intentions of the actual participants. As Carl
Boggs has shown, the 'total break thesis' informing what he calls the
revisionist histories of the New Left, the notion that the popular struggles
associated with the 1960s came to an 'explosive and sudden halt' somewhere
between 1968 and 1970, is simply not supported by the social movement
activity of later decades.17
This does not mean that I am suggesting that the failure scenario is wholly
false. Rather, I intend to propose that post-sixties political disenchantment
can be traced to the re-enchantment of politics attempted by the late sixties
counterculture. The protest which moved politics outside the traditional
political domain by collapsing the distinction between politics and art,
politics and culture, politics and everyday life, and the actions which fostered
a politics of deliberate ambiguity and play successfully paved the way for
forms of political disengagement and re-engagement which were seen to
contradict the hopes of the sixties. I will argue that the anti-disciplinary
politics of the sixties counterculture has also contributed to the widespread
popular and theoretical acceptance of the postmodern notion of the present
political field as impasse. Following Starr, this has direct political impli-
cations.18 Allowing the existing political mood to be dominated by a sense of
an end with no new birth in sight19 justifies the 'significant displacement of
political energies',20 the expansion of the political to encompass everyday
activities and the contraction and disappearance of politics as we have known
it throughout this century.
The kinship I suggest between sixties radicalism and postmodernism raises
questions about which sixties and which version of postmodernism will be
discussed here. On the former, reference will be made to the sixties as a
period in the history of the West (indeed, most of the events and writings to
be examined here do fall within the time from 1960-70), but the intention is
not to offer a comprehensive history of the decade, nor to reproduce yet
another chronology or analysis of the New Left, the Civil Rights Movement,
the counterculture, the drug culture, the music or the fashions. Rather, 'the
sixties' will refer to a particular constellation of ideas about political action
and social change which does not discretely fit into the categories usually
employed to understand the radicalism of the decade.
Such an exercise is necessarily selective. This book concentrates largely on
an American experience of the sixties. This may seem a strange choice,
writing from Australia, but in a sense the American influence is most starkly
evident when viewed from outside the United States. Paradoxically, it would
seem that during the very period when the question of what it meant to be
an 'American' was being renegotiated within the United States, American
cultural influence elsewhere was on the ascendancy. This was especially true
of Australia, where an Americanization which had begun during the Second
World War accelerated during the sixties. The effects on the Australian
counterculture are recorded by Dennis Altman, who observes: 'In many ways
the counter-culture was a product of the United States, and it was exported to
countries like Australia much as are other cultural phenomena'.21 A similar
point is made by Robin Gerster and Jan Bassett. The authors comment that
'even the Australian anti-war movement, so rhetorically antagonistic to Uncle
Sam, derived much of its impetus from the American counterculture'.22 They
document the ways in which Australian student and underground news-
papers of the time were simply 'crammed with American material'. Of the
examples they provide, the Australian publication, Tharunka, is a case in
point, strongly relying on American material and reprinting in full such
things as Jerry Rubin's 'Yippie Manifesto'.23 Similar exchanges of information
are documented by Ron Verzuh between the United States and Canada
where, even though 'the scene was somehow different' from the United States,
the same headline getters, Berkeley People's Park, Chicago or Woodstock,
'had an immense influence'.24 The British Underground equally adopted
motifs, language and modes of cultural protest which were generated in the
United States. Elizabeth Nelson, in a study of the underground press in the
British context, remarks:
And ironically, for the British counter culture, which was trying to
reject what it saw as straight society's acceptance of the 'American
way of life' - including American 'consumerism' - it became involved
itself, to a large extent with what might be termed the 'American
view of the alternative future'.25
The degree to which key battles in America (for example anti-war demon-
strations or the violence at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago)
became the focal point for protests and for underground reportage in Britain
at the time is underscored by Richard Neville in his recent and characteris-
tically irreverent reminiscences, Hippie Hippie Shake. Neville gives numerous
examples of this American influence. Take, for instance, People's Park in
Berkeley in May 1969, where a coalition of students and non-students
struggled against the University of California authorities, the Berkeley police
and, later, the National Guard to retain control of an empty lot they had
transformed into a park. A broadsheet outlining the National Guard's ten-day
siege of 'occupied Berkeley' swiftly arrived from America. Neville duly
inserted it as a poster in Oz 21. As he records, it was on the streets of London
'before the tear gas had evaporated'.26
This influence in part can be accounted for by the creation, marketing,
dissemination and consumption of culture in the sixties, which took on a
Introduction 7
global character with remarkably American overtones. The decade marked

the beginning of a new dimension in the globalization of cultural styles and
identification,27 and this applied no less to the counterculture than to popular
mainstream culture. While 'the movement' (the self-conscious term coined by
the American New Left to designate its supporters) perceived itself to be
genuinely 'international', the circulation of alternative ideas, images, pamph-
lets, items of clothing and understandings of protest became implicated in
less alternative (read commercial) forms of internationalization. Inter-
national connections made by individual activists - as in the case of the
friendship between Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a key figure in May '68 in France,
and Abbie Hoffman, an American Yippie - an ever-globalizing consumer
culture and the transnational distribution of certain underground publica-
tions all contributed to a wide dispersal of the radical style of 'an American
sixties'. Consequently, the national and international characteristics of sixties
movements are difficult to untangle.
At the time, in the United States, the sixties experience was felt to be
especially 'American'. This is recorded by a number of commentators both
retrospectively and in the literature of the day. Gitlin looks back on what he
describes as the utterly American elan and language of the movement28 while,
in an early investigation of the decade, Stuart Hall, in reference to the
'expressive' politics of the hippie culture, notes that Time Magazine and the
mass media in general couldn't help recognizing a 'pure American species'
under the long hair, the beads and the kaftans.29 According to Marshall
Berman, this species was part of a fervently American spirit of development.
Actions like the 1967 'storming of the Pentagon', the march on Washington to
protest US involvement in the Vietnam War which came to take on an iconic
significance for the anti-war movement, demonstrated, in Berman's view, the
strong similarity of spirit that existed between 'the megalomaniac in the
White House' and those protesting outside the Pentagon, shouting the words
of the latest Doors' song, 'We want the world and we want it NOW!'30
Others reflect on a particularly unconventional form of American patri-
otism expressed by the counterculture in the sixties.31 And such perspectives
are frequently supported by the testimonies of sixties radicals who reported
having felt more authentically 'American' than their parents and the insti-
tutions they opposed. Jackie Goldberg in the film Berkeley in the '60s traces
her activism to feeling so committed to the system of American democracy
she was willing to do anything to preserve it.32 However, I am less interested
in the self-perceptions of American radicals than in America as the focal point
in the sixties for the transcontinental movement of activists and the
dissemination of images and ideas of youth protest to the rest of the world.
Nevertheless, it is important to note the special relationship to the sixties that
still exists today in contemporary American public life. Gitlin's comments
about the way leading US politicians are meant to account for their role or
position in the sixties, even now,33 underscores the very specific meaning and
significance the sixties decade has come to have, and how important the
American sixties has become to any discussion of the decade as a whole.
This book selects and discusses material from this American sixties, taking
this experience to be also located outside the United States. An additional
reason for such a choice of material is that America features so strongly in
the literature of the last decade that looks back on the sixties. However, this
selection runs the risk of homogenizing the local characteristics of sixties
movements so, wherever possible and whenever relevant, the specificities of
place will be noted. It is not my intention to document the significant global
aspects of sixties protest. The general strike in France in May '68 alone
sparked consequential demonstrations of solidarity in Mexico City, Berlin,
Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Berkeley and Belgrade, and general strikes in Spain,
Italy and Uruguay followed.34 Consequently, this remarkable context and the
resonances between the protest that emerged in so many different places at
the same time should be kept in mind throughout the analysis to follow.
Briefly, Chapter 1 problematizes the conventional paradigms of sixties
radicalism on which so many of the retrospective accounts of the decade are
founded. Questions of periodization are discussed alongside debates about
defining and categorizing the counterculture, youth culture and 'the sixties'.
The chapter concludes by detailing the development of the concept of an
'anti-disciplinary politics' and establishing its relevance to this study. Fol-
lowing from this reconceptualization of the radicalism of the period, Chapter
2 investigates various expressions of anti-disciplinary protest in such things
as the theatrical antics of the Diggers and Yippies, and in events like the 1967
attempted levitation of the Pentagon. In an effort to chart the new language
of protest that was being forged, elements of the countercultural lexicon
such as the idea of 'free' are analysed as is the anti-disciplinary attack on
rationality and political coherence.
The sixties celebration of different modes of rationality was projected on to
a place which came to have a metaphoric significance. Chapter 3 maps the
remarkable ways 'India' was constituted in the sixties through rituals of
travel, reading and imagining. The countercultural India is traced to and
contrasted with understandings of the subcontinent championed by the
American transcendentalists. The way India was 'performed' in the sixties
through the use of Sanskrit terms, such as 'mantra' and 'karma', and the
commodification of India is also explored. Chapter 4 refuses the common-
place link often made between the commodification and failure of the sixties,
arguing that the anti-disciplinary attempt to move beyond language and
rationality demonstrated a full awareness of the dangers of sixties protest
becoming normative. This chapter documents the effort by groups such as
the Yippies to co-opt co-optation and transcend the logic of recuperation so
dominant at the time. The attempt at a different solution to this problem of
Introduction 9
incorporation offered by the Weathermen (later the Weather Underground)

is also examined.
The desire to break down the distinction between politics and culture,
politics and art and politics and everyday life was another way of trying to
protect against capitalist appropriation. Chapter 5 focuses on various expres-
sions of this desire arguing that postmodern impulses can be read in the
blank parody of certain individuals and groups in the decade. Attention is
given to the borrowing of motifs from popular culture (the figure of the
outlaw, for example) in sixties protest and the way anti-disciplinary versions
of politics proved both alluring and enduring, often displacing more con-
ventional Left understandings of political activism. Chapter 6 returns to the
death of the sixties narrative and its problematic role in genealogies of
postmodernism concluding with an alternative reading of the relationship
between sixties radicalism and the contemporary political/theoretical field.
Like the difficulty in determining which 'sixties' will be discussed, the
question of which 'postmodernism' to feature in this text equally requires
certain principles of selection. Here, the focus will be on the manifestly anti-
political tendencies of this elusive cultural phenomenon. I will argue that in
so much of the literature on the topic the very constitution of postmodernism
as a 'break', and as representing an end to emancipatory possibilities, has also
come to function as a justification for political disengagement. According to
Michel Foucault, who is so often aligned with this sense of impasse, the point
is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous and that 'if
everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do'. In calling for
a hyper and pessimistic activism he stresses that the ethico-political choice
we have to make every day 'is to determine which is the main danger'.35 This
study is about identifying one such danger in reading sixties radicalism and
postmodernism as heralding an end to politics and an end to the promise of
social transformation.
Chapter 1
Paradigms of Sixties Radicalism
The outcome and meaning of the movements of the Sixties are not
treasures to be unearthed with an exultant Aha!, but sand paintings,
something provisional, both created and revised in historical time.
(Todd Gitlin)'
Functioning like a shorthand, 'the sixties' has come variously to denote acts
of protest and rebellion, a distinctive cultural mood, a special style or
atmosphere and more recently a set of consumer items referring back to a
specific period of time. As the decade is selectively remembered and recast,
so its meaning and significance shift and change. However, interest in the
sixties and what the decade represents does not seem to have diminished as
we move further away from it in historical time. On the contrary, in the
profusion of literature on the topic commentators identifying themselves
with either the Left or the Right often share a conviction that the true
significance of the sixties is yet to be unearthed. Nevertheless, despite the
range of definitions given to this chameleon-like object of sociological
investigation, understandings of the sixties rarely move beyond certain rigid
and frequently problematic conceptual boundaries. This chapter attempts to
trace some of the factors which have contributed to the emergence of a new
socio-historical concept called 'the sixties' and examines why it has sup-
planted other ways of knowing the same phenomenon. Particular attention is
given to the resurrection of the sixties in the eighties and the ways in which
earlier theoretical frameworks resurface in contemporary narratives of sixties
radicalism.
10
Paradigms of Sixties Radicalism 11
The how and the when of the sixties

Like other periodizing notions, such as postmodernism, the sixties is a
nebulous and elastic concept. Even though there is barely an area of
intellectual pursuit left untouched by this 'amorphous thing' called post-
modernism, according to Thomas Docherty it none the less remains as
ghostly as ever.2 So too with the sixties, a term which refers directly to a
historical epoch while at the same time defying a precise correspondence to
the decade itself. Whatever way this phenomenon is viewed it appears to
signify much more than simply a set of dates. Commentators therefore not
only disagree about the what and the why of the sixties, but also about the
when: during what period of time 'the sixties' in fact occurred. For example,
Doug McAdam argues that while it is a common assumption that the 'sixties
experience' began in 1964 as the white, student-led revolt of the Berkeley Free
Speech Movement, the real roots of the activism associated with the decade
are much older. McAdam s periodization of the sixties begins in 1955 with the
emergence of the first organized black civil rights protests.3 Theodore Roszak,
in the,introduction to the 1995 edition of his seminal The Making of a Counter
Culture, goes back even further and places the sixties 'within a broader setting
that stretches from 1942 to 1972'.4
Fredric Jameson, on the other hand, traces the beginnings of 'the first world
60s' to the movements of decolonization in British and French Africa.5 He
delineates the period as one in which 'natives' of the Third World and their
equivalent within the First World (blacks, women, and marginal groups)
'became human beings'.6 Even though Jameson proposes other explanations
to account for the emergence of the 'non-class' politics of the sixties (such as
the expulsion of communists from the American labour movement), his
periodization none the less remains linked to what he describes as 'Third
World occasions' like the Vietnam War. He therefore posits an end to the
sixties around 1972-74, coinciding with what in his view marked the end
of American 'Third Worldism': widespread awareness of corruption in the
newly independent African states and the militarization of certain Latin
American regimes.7
While Jameson provides a compelling rationale to support his period-
ization, he rarely loses sight of the problems raised by his own choice of
dates. This is not true of many other theorists who situate the sixties more
cautiously within the confines of the actual decade itself. Other inter-
pretations about the beginning and end of the sixties rest on far more
capricious grounds. Ron Verzuh, for instance, chooses 1973 as signalling the
end of the sixties era simply because it is 'as good a cut off date as any'.8
Roszak too acknowledges the arbitrariness of his own periodization. 9 Both
the arbitrary and the strict chronologies of the sixties are strongly contested
by Barry York. York is critical of the way that all that is important about
the sixties is jammed into the time between May 1960 and May 1970 in
Joseph Conlin's The Troubles: A Jaundiced Glance Back at the Movements
of the Sixties.10 By contrast, he argues for an approach where the notion of
the sixties is understood as a 'socio-political-cultural concept' which cannot
be 'so literally straightjacketed in time'.11 McAdam solves this problem
of periodization by viewing the sixties as a 'psychological' rather than a
chronological experience.12 Both critics challenge the wisdom of attempts to
confine the so-called sixties experience within strict dates.
My concern is less with problems of periodization than with some of the
ways in which the sixties have come to be narrativized, although obviously
the two are closely related. Rather than reading the period in question as
some omnipresent, uniform 'shared style or way of thinking and acting', to
use Jameson's words,131 am interested in the range of stories that have been
told about the sixties, particularly those which seek to reinterpret the decade
in the light of current political and theoretical debates. In identifying some
of the patterns that shape discussions of the sixties as a socio-cultural
phenomenon, it is possible to introduce certain features of sixties radicalism
frequently excluded from view and to posit alternative ways of thinking about
the connections between the sixties and aspects of the contemporary
political/theoretical landscape.
Debates about periodization do little to resolve the problem of which sixties
is 'the' sixties commonly discussed. It is helpful first to examine how in the
popular and scholarly imagination the interpretative framework employed to
account for sixties radicalism has changed over the last three decades. While
the actual decade of the 1960s inspired countless self-contemplations, the
phenomenon of 'the sixties' is a relatively recent object of study. Initially,
'youth' was the distinct sociological category employed as the most appro-
priate paradigm through which mass radical activism could be adequately
understood. Youth became a common sociological preoccupation - defined
as a problem in its own right - and innumerable studies appeared in-
vestigating 'youth rebellion' and the broader 'youth culture'.
Later, in the early and mid-seventies, the 'counterculture' became the prime
object of sociological inquiry of a different but no less significant kind.
According to William O'Neill, studies of the counterculture began to displace
those of youth culture because the idea of youth proved too limiting a concept
to encompass all of the events represented by the decade.14 However, like
youth culture, the counterculture emerged as an equally slippery term very
difficult to anchor to a manageable definition. Was the counterculture, as
Kenneth Westhues has asked, a set of ideas, a set of behaviours or a group of
people?15 Was it a social movement, as Dennis Altman has suggested, em-
bracing an alternative set of values and beliefs (a consciousness), as well as a
set of alternative institutions and behaviour patterns 'united in opposition to
what in radical rhetoric is seen as "the system'"?16 Was it, simply, a con-
venient semantic umbrella with all the ambiguity of the term 'culture' itself?17
Did countercultural opposition represent a 180-degree reversal of
mainstream established values, what Theodore Roszak has called a 'barbaric
intrusion'18 or was it what J. Milton Yinger has described as a 'contra-
culture'?19 Should the counterculture itself be divided into a political and a
mystical wing,20 or was there, as Frank Musgrove has contended, no split
between the political and the aesthetic?21
Contention revolves not only around the issue of how 'counter' the
counterculture was, but also whether or not it represented a new form of
cultural opposition. Musgrove argues against the notion that youth culture
and counterculture were synonymous, seeing the latter as a reflowering of a
Dionysian culture which recurs throughout history at times of economic
growth.22 Following Musgrove, and writing in the Australian context, Janice
Newton links the events of the original 1973 Aquarius Festival in Nimbin,
northern New South Wales, the subsequent formation of an alternative
countercultural community and the ten-year commemorative celebration of
these events in 1983. Newton argues that far from indicating something
exceptional, the Nimbin experience emerges from a distinctively Australian
history of Utopian movements going back to the 1890s.23 Aside from the
differing definitions of the counterculture, it is generally represented in the
literature on the topic as a far less transient phenomenon than what is
signified by the term youth culture. Consequently, periodizing the counter-
culture becomes an even more problematic exercise.
In the eighties, classification by generation supplanted both of these
earlier ways of defining and thinking about the protest and challenges of
the period in question. In fact, the proliferation of writings on the sixties
during this time would suggest not only that the period continued to exert a
powerful fascination but also that the sixties was somehow resurrected in the
eighties to haunt future generations of radicals and conservatives alike.24
Peter Collier and David Horowitz, in Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts
About the Sixties, describe this peculiar occurrence as 'the sixties in the
eighties'.25 Yet on closer examination this 'eighties sixties' shares much
more with the earlier analyses of the topic than may be evident at first sight.
Permissiveness theories
One common theme connecting early studies of youth rebellion, for instance,
was the idea of a causal link between affluence, permissiveness and youth
protest in the sixties decade. Even though original explanations of youth
protest may have come to different political conclusions about whether the
source of radical activism was to be found in certain institutional features of
the broader society,26 in the youths themselves,27 or in generational conflict,28

they were nevertheless linked by a common faith in the equation that
affluence produced permissiveness in parents and the revolt of the young
necessarily followed.
Barbara Ehrenreich has called this formulation 'permissiveness theory'.29
Yet to Barry York the term 'pseudo theory' more accurately describes the
zealous emphasis on child-rearing practices in this branch of the literature.
He prefers the term 'pseudo' because in his view permissiveness theory is so
easily repudiated by empirical research. 'Were the activists of Mexico City,
Delhi, Tokyo, Lima, Rio De Janeiro, Rome, Berlin, Prague ... all pampered at
school and reared on Dr. Spock's manual at home?', he asks.30 But leaving
York's important reservations aside, there is no doubt that a perceived
association between affluence, permissiveness and protest pervaded much of
the scholarship seeking to solve the mystery of why middle-class youths
began to deride the symbols of their class privilege and to reject some of the
marks of the social advantage bestowed upon them.
Lewis Feuer's The Conflict of Generations is the oft-cited perfect example of
this kind of scholarship. It is a text which was much debated at the time of its
publication in 1969 and continued to be an influential source for the critics of
radical student movements in America and abroad. It also influenced popular
understandings of youth rebellion. In this highly systematized and wide-
ranging study, Feuer unearthed what he viewed as the essential 'irrationalities
and self-destructive components of all student movements'.31 Central to his
analysis was the idea that the impetus behind student radicals was simply
their will to define themselves as different from parental figures of authority;
as being uncorrupted, and therefore not like their elders. This 'generational
opposition' was then projected onto a de-authoritized elder generation or
symbols of it, such as the Berkeley Faculty, a site of protest for the Free
Speech Movement, or the New York Stock Exchange, where the infamous
'money-burning' exercise took place in 1967. Hence Feuer s description of the
activism at Berkeley as 'Berkeley's symbolic parricide'.32 Significant to Feuer's
analysis was the students' belief in a kind of 'false consciousness'; they refused
to look within themselves for the subjective cause of their alienation, which
in Feuer's view amounted to nothing short of their emasculation.33
Feuer's work, as York and Ehrenreich have suggested, is easily criticized on
empirical and theoretical grounds.34 Ehrenreich clearly demonstrates that the
concept of permissiveness came to dominate this middle-class reassessment
of itself but her conclusion that permissiveness replaced affluence as the
focus of middle-class anxiety seems difficult to support where the youth
protesters are themselves concerned. Perhaps it is more useful to regard
permissiveness as a code or nodal point around which a whole range of
anxieties about wealth, luxury and consumption converged. Repeatedly, the
permissiveness paradigm surfaced in the early commentaries on the decade.
Even those analyses which set out to deliberately repudiate Feuer's

generational rebellion thesis by providing evidence that student activists were
not rejecting but actually implementing the values of their parents 35 gave
considerable weight to the explosive combination of affluence and a
permissive egalitarianism. Democratic, highly individuating families
produced rebellious offspring, or so the formula ran. Ironically, this perceived
causal link between affluence, permissiveness and student activism was also
expressed in Roszak's The Making of a Counter Culture, which has been taken,
not always with justification, as a blueprint of the countercultural ethos.
When Roszak wrote of 'a strange, new kind of immiseration that comes from
being stranded between a permissive childhood and an obnoxiously con-
formist adulthood', he spoke from within the same conceptual framework
used by many of the counterculture's most ardent critics.36
What Ehrenreich has called the 'grim appeal' exerted by the permissiveness
theory37 was not only confined to the celebrated studies of the day. It is just as
evident in subsequent rewritings of the decade. As Kenneth Keniston's Youth
and Dissent (spanning the period from 1960-71) proposed that the counter-
culture may have arisen 'not because the young are more repressed, but
because some of them are so little repressed',38 and Frank Musgrove
described countercultural protest as a 'revolt of the unoppressed',39 so
Peter Collier and David Horowitz's embittered 'eighties' tirade against two
decades of a 'misguided Left' goes as far as asserting that Feuer was right.
Demonstrating few of the presumed benefits of hindsight the authors con-
clude that politics in the sixties was 'no more than an Oedipal revolt on a
grand scale'.40 Still within the parameters of the permissiveness tradition, the
Australian critic Stephen Alomes (in a notable debate of the early eighties)
argued that 'liberal child-rearing and schooling', combined with an economic
boom, directly produced the radical culture of the sixties.41 Given all that
was purportedly rejected about the sixties in the eighties (in the popular
and academic imagination) it remains surprising to hear echoes of the
permissiveness theory in so much of the 'looking back at the sixties' material
of today.
Participant observation
Before discussing these retrospective analyses it is worth pointing to another
body of literature which emerged in the late sixties and early seventies to
challenge the tenor of the permissiveness debate. This initial strain of
interpretation, the participant observation study, worked within an entirely
different problematic. Such studies did not speak in the parental voice and
unlike the permissiveness theorists and their contemporary counterparts they
have not (for obvious reasons) resurfaced in recent analyses of the period.
Participant observation studies were structured around the metaphor of the

journey. Robert Houriet, for example, commented that in trying several
different approaches to his book, Getting Back Together, 'the one that finally
seemed to fit was that of the odyssey, the journey, the trip - my own'.42 The
intense personal involvement of the researcher in the object of study was
characteristic of this type of interpretation. Note the Preface to Lewis
Yablonsky's The Hippie Trip. He makes a point of telling us the way in which
he involved himself 'first hand' in the hippie panorama and then goes on to
express the extent to which this involvement had been an intense and
meaningful human adventure.43 Delbert Earisman's voyage in Hippies In Our
Midst ends with a similarly involved expression of his deep admiration and
respect for the hippies.44
In the same vein, Helen Perry comments that even though her study, The
Human Be-In, was originally funded by the National Institute of Mental
Health Research, her official task, to look at health issues in the Haight-
Ashbury district, an area of San Francisco where the hippies lived, 'came to
be only a backdrop for an ongoing sorting out of my own values and how they
were changing under the influence of theflowerchildren'. She writes, 'In the
end I could only come to one conclusion: I, too, was a hippie'.45 Participant
observation studies did not pose youth as a problem but rather presented the
counterculture as a solution to problems that existed in the broader society.
As Helen Perry's perceptions show, finding this solution was a sometimes
unintended consequence of the observer's odyssey. In this type of interpre-
tation, the relationship between affluence, permissiveness and protest was
not a causal one. In fact permissiveness did not feature in the equation as the
key to understanding and in turn managing and controlling youth rebellion.
The problem of affluence was posed instead in terms of a loss of meaning,
which was recoverable by immersing oneself in the world and world-view of
the counterculture.
Unlike the permissiveness theory, participant observation studies did not
seek to explain the counterculture in terms of the personal biographies of the
individuals who identified themselves as part of it. The phenomenon was
approached anthropologically with descriptive categories being given priority
over explanatory methods. In fact many of these studies share the same
suspicion about the act of interpretation expressed so often by the
counterculture itself. The focus rather was on rituals, practices and beliefs.
Even though much of the detail was provided by hippie informants, the
movement was analysed more as a culture than as a group of individuals.
Rituals of dress, food, 'getting high', 'happenings',46 ceremonies, and the
'ritualized communication of the rap session'47 were therefore described in
great detail.
In contrast to interpretations of youth protest where youth operates as a
sociological category - a social problem which is a troubling part of the
everyday - these studies approached the counterculture as an exotic, and

alien, 'other'. The act of interpretation then turns into an intrepid journey of
discovery. The popular rendering of the scholarly voyage was the actual Gray
Line bus tour of the Haight-Ashbury district, a frequent reference point in
more recent studies of the sixties.48 The 1967 pamphlet advertising the tours,
the bus company's guide and map of hippieland, reflects and seems to parody
the idea of moving into another world or state of consciousness, a culture
with its own rules,, languages, religions and beliefs.49 This very notion not only
underpins the participant observation genre in which many early interpre-
tations of the counterculture belong, but also had great resonance at the time,
inspiring metaphoric and literal journeys into assorted states of otherness,
variously signalled by actual places, LSD trips, 'exotic' religions, 'alien' rituals
and 'strange' commodities.
The sixties in the eighties
The resurrection of the sixties in the eighties pinpoints an important trend in

academic and popular discourse wherein the sixties decade came to function
as a kind of talisman, influencing contemporary understandings of political
quietism and dissent. This trend was marked by an extensive range of
publications and visual exhibitions which sought to express, purge or resolve
the perceived troubling side-effects of the decade. As Robin Gerster and Jan
Bassett note, the 'me' decade of the seventies gave way to what they call the
're' decade of the eighties: 'an age of retrieval and recourse, which looked back
to the sixties in a general spirit of cultural reclamation'.50 To Todd Gitlin, the
sixties were 'rewritten' in the eighties, in much the same way as, in his view,
the sixties rewrote the fifties.51
This eighties rewriting was executed through a wide range of channels
including anthologies, fiction, photographic representations and exhibitions
of sixties memorabilia,52 countless articles in the popular press, nostalgic
stream of consciousness reminiscences, and sociological, political and
cultural studies which often have elements of all, or some of the above.53
Much of this material recycled familiar perspectives on the sixties which had
already gained currency in the post-sixties era. As we have seen, the
permissiveness theory, a parental voice and a certain generational language
typical of the earliest youth culture studies had not been entirely erased from
these more recent investigations of the topic. Among the new elements
included in these rewritings were a representation of the decade as being
everything that the eighties was not, a sense of bewilderment about the
demise of sixties radicalism - manifesting either as nostalgia or contempt
depending on whether the account was sympathetic or antagonistic to the
sixties - and what I have deemed 'the death of the sixties narrative'.
On the first element, almost without exception, the sixties was presented as
the mirror-image of the eighties. Such reinterpretations invariably revolved
around the counterpoints of the idealistic sixties versus the dispiriting
eighties,54 the soulful sixties against the 'Heartless Eighties'55 and other
similar contrasts between the political and the apolitical, the exhilarating and
the dull aspects of these respective periods. The repeated contemporary
references to the celebrated example of Jerry Rubin s transformation from
founding member of the Yippies to Wall Street yuppie is a case in point. As
Gitlin points out, Rubin's move to Wall Street gained more publicity than 'all
the union organizers and anti-nuclear campaigners among New Left
graduates put together'.56 Rubin's transformation is also mentioned in Gerster
and Bassett, Seizures of Youth,11 and in most of the more recent analyses of
the topic. Even Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who sets out to repudiate the declining
activism thesis in his three-part television documentary 1968: The Revolution
Revisited, spends an inordinate amount of time interviewing Rubin about his
Yippie to yuppie move.58
Certain commentators attempt to break through or challenge these domin-
ant understandings of the period and offer a different reading of the decade.
I have already mentioned Gitlin's contribution whereby he acknowledges the
uneven legacy of the sixties:
As an impossible revolution it had failed - how could it have

succeeded? - but as an amalgam of reform efforts, especially for
civil rights (ultimately for Hispanics, Native Americans, and other
minorities as well as blacks) and women's rights and the environ-
ment and against the war, it had been a formidable success.59
With similar intent, Jack Whalen and Richard Flacks attempt to empiri-
cally disprove (via a series of interviews) media-promulgated images of the
sixties generation as having 'sold out', given up or settled down. Importantly,
their study shows how images of sustained commitment, of persistent
principle or of adult idealism, rarely enter the popular discourse.60 Yet the
logic of the tally sheet and the failure/success paradigm still pervades such
perspectives.
Some studies line up more on the limited success side of the equation. In
Getting Saved From the Sixties, Steven Tipton discusses how attempts at
revolution or Utopia in the sixties did fail but makes the qualification that,
since then, there has been 'no simple return to normalcy'. He sees the
challenge to utilitarian culture as a continuing legacy of the period.61 Others
view the counterculture as one of the more enduring aspects of the decade
and as having 'outlived the sixties'.62 Dennis Altman argues persuasively that
the impact of the counterculture extends into 'many of the crucial areas of
society' today in attitudes towards work, authority, sexuality and hierarchy.63
More often, though, a series of commonplace explanations is provided to

account for the disappearance of sixties values or the co-option of sixties
radicals themselves. The anecdote features strongly in such accounts. With
monotonous regularity, stories of actual or perceived retreats from the Left
are run in weekend supplements of major newspapers, fashion magazines
and on television and radio. Tirelessly, instances of personal friends selling
out or celebrity activists becoming conservative are recounted with what
appears to be a dual purpose: to prove that the radicalism associated with the
decade was inherently suspect, and to underscore its purported absence from
the current period. In its popular guise, the death of the sixties has taken on
a commonsensical status. The hippie has become an established ingredient
in many jokes, and according to Bernice Martin features on greeting cards
and in British television comedies: 'No longer a folk devil, but a clown for
whom a wry affection can be entertained'.64 Trite judgements, like that of
Nigel Williams declaring that all that the sixties has left us with is a few
tunes,65 are typical examples of the thinking which has come to dominate the
popular imagination since the eighties.
The same commonplace explanations resurface in the scholarly literature
on the topic. Here, academic and commonsense understandings overlap,
both equally situated within a success/failure paradigm. Tim Wohlforth, for
instance, discusses the movements of 1968 as having failed because, by
definition, a revolution (and the particular consciousness celebrated in the
period) can never be permanent: it 'is only a moment in history when
emancipatory thinking becomes part of the life of millions'.66 He subscribes to
a familiar burnout thesis, used by other commentators as well.67 'Most people
are unable and unwilling to attend fifteen hour meetings which strive to
arrive at consensus', Wohlforth observes, thus offering a very pragmatic
reason for the failure of sixties radicalism.68
Of the counterculture, Elizabeth Nelson provides different evidence to
arrive at the same conclusions about the decade and to support her con-
viction that the counterculture failed to achieve its objectives. Nelson argues
that the counterculture inadequately understood the historical process.69 In
her judgement, the movements preference to talk to the converted, rather
than seeking out new followers, meant that there were very few tangible
legacies of the sixties.70 The projection of a pragmatic logic onto groups
which consciously rejected pragmatism is also evident in one of the earliest
scholarly analyses of the hippies. Adrianne Aron expresses little doubt that
the hippie movement did not succeed in developing its capacity and potential.
According to Aron, the lack of 'a consistent plan for social change' and an
unwillingness to systematize its ideals through a social theory contributed to
the demise of the values and beliefs associated with the decade.71
The second element dominating the eighties literature about the sixties is a
genuine sense of bewilderment about the suddenness with which the decade's
promise seemed to vanish. In the reminiscences of former activists and in

those studies informed by a continuing sympathy for the project of social
transformation, a sense of nostalgia for lost hopes, passing youth and missed
opportunity is not uncommon. This can be detected in the oft-repeated
recollection that at the time there was a widely shared feeling that everything
seemed possible,72 and in the employment of religious metaphors (Collier and
Horowitz's 'epiphanies'73) to describe the events or the significance of the
period. When George Katsiaficas refers to moments in 1968 which meta-
phorically resemble 'the religious transformation of the individual soul
through the sacred baptism in the ocean of universal life and love',74 he is
echoing the less pompous but no less emotionally charged sentiments of
other writers/participants in sixties movements.
It is interesting to speculate on the emphasis in sixties narratives given to
the discontinuity between the period and later decades and on this sense of
bewilderment about the decade's demise. In a climate when the transience
of things gained frequent attention, it seems strange that the apparent
ephemerality of the events experienced should prove to be so troubling later
on. A possible explanation can perhaps be found in looking at the ways
sixties activists represented themselves at the time. In a fascinating and
disturbing record of his twenty months as a participant observer on the staff
of the underground publication the Berkeley Barb, Arthur Seeger documents
the covert (and occasionally overt) censorship mechanisms at work in the
underground press of the late sixties and early seventies. He details the
ways the Barb constructed a flattering presentation of self, of the Haight-
Ashbury district, of the counterculture and of the victories of New Left
and hippie cultural radicalism. In an attempt to disassociate itself from
the mainstream press images of the area, and by virtue of some remark-
ably conventional reporting practices, the Barb failed to report the rape,
violence, theft and intimidation perpetrated by the amphetamine addicts, de-
institutionalized mental patients, ex-convicts, Hell's Angels and the like who
had become part of the alternative community. Seeger is at pains to point out
that this community was far from a cohesive group but claims that it did
share a common demographic of being mostly young, poor, uneducated,
black and male.75
When a group of ex-convicts seized People s Park - the symbol of the anti-
hierarchical, communal spirit of the time - and were involved in rape, battery
and assault against the hippies who used the Park, it went unreported in the
Barb. The irony is not lost on Seeger:
As a consequence, the second battle of 'People's Park' - to reclaim it

from the people some two years after having successfully wrested it
in revolutionary struggle from the despised establishment in the
form of University of California authorities - barely made the pages
of the newspaper which had boosted itself to international celebrity

with its coverage of the first 'battle of People's Park'.76
He concludes that this refusal to acknowledge and to confront the real nature
of the countercultural community had disastrous consequences for the
victims themselves and played right into the hands of the conventional media.
Other conclusions can also be drawn from the events recorded by Seeger.
Perhaps the sense of shock registered by those looking back on the sixties at
the perceived passing of all that the sixties stood for can in part be explained
by the panegyric representations of the protest, values and communities
circulated at the time. If publications such as the Barb mirrored rather
than critiqued the self-image of the movement, then it is hardly surprising
that later decades appeared so bewilderingly bleak and disappointing by
comparison.
The third element pervading the retrospective views on the sixties is a
concern to narrativize key events and experiences of the day under the rubric
of coming to terms with the supposed demise of sixties radicalism. Yet,
regardless of which incidents are selected and retold, conclusions about the
failure or death of the sixties remain consistent throughout this literature.
Two strands emerge in this death of the sixties narrative, both reflecting
actual or perceived divisions in the radical movements of the time. One
considers the main actors in the drama to be the New Left with the action
taking place on university campuses, in street demonstrations, in Washington
and in Chicago. The other gives the key role less to groups or organizations
than to LSD and the counterculture (with Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey and
the Merry Pranksters making guest appearances at Be-ins, Acid Tests, Trips
festivals, communes and light shows).77 At various moments in either
selection of events, in the fusion of hippies and activists in the first battle for
People's Park, for example, such tales, like the movements they describe,
intersect. It is the historical and textual moments where these two divergent
narratives of the sixties meet that are of interest here.
Disavowing the range of sixties radicalism
In my view the wrong sixties is privileged in contemporary discussions about

the connection between the radicalism of the period and the anti-political
tendencies of later decades. The emphasis given to the May-June events in
Paris 1968, particularly in debates about the genesis of postmodernism,
reinforces the impression that the commitment to a very orthodox sense of
revolution in the decade was both widespread and generalizable beyond the
French context. Even as far as France was concerned, Foucault argues that
what made May '68 possible was something profoundly anti-Marxist.78 Yet,
the remarkable combination of street theatre, art, sexuality and politics

which emerged in the May protests is often reduced to its most conventional
Marxist elements. Similarly, the hybridization characteristic of sixties protest
is overlooked in favour of analyses either of the New Left or the counter-
culture, with the latter frequently appearing as a footnote to the former. As
Robert S. Ellwood observes, it is as though, in hindsight, the real action is
considered to have taken place only in the political side of the decades
experience: the free speech, civil rights, black power and anti-war move-
ments. By contrast, the hippies are rejected as a 'clownish sideshow'.79
This represents only one strain of sixties radicalism. It could equally be
argued that, as far as the failure scenario is concerned, the actions which
adopted totalizing revolutionary strategies represent the least characteristic
protest of the decade. What was more distinctive and just as notable was the
radicalism which strove to redefine the very meaning and character of
'polities'. A new language of protest was developed which aimed to transgress
the boundaries between the political and the aesthetic. This new politics was
a playful and self-referential celebration of ambiguity, where the theatrical
and the spectacle were privileged over the politics of State policy (such as the
allocation of public goods, or political-economic structure), and totalities like
socialism, society, and in some cases even objective reality itself were
parodied and dismissed. It was a politics which drew more on the themes of
popular culture than on the heritage of the Left for its language of protest.
In retrospective accounts of the decade, this countercultural sixties features
in a parallel but secondary narrative whose trajectory occasionally crosses
the main action only to return to a path of its own. In the literature on
postmodernism and the sixties, the counterculture is rendered as post-
modernism's antithesis, all of the worn-out Enlightenment values (freedom,
authenticity, liberation, personal and social transformation) rolled into one.
However, absent from both of these pictures is a countercultural sixties which
was highly self-conscious and media-wise, full of self-parodic gestures,
drawing extensively on motifs from popular culture for its language of protest
and distinguished by its spectacular refusals of so-called Enlightenment
rationality, none perhaps more enduring than the conviction that reality
amounted to nothing more and nothing less than a series of mediated images.
It is this sixties which is at the heart of the investigation to follow.
The idea of an 'anti-disciplinary politics' is a useful way of conceptualizing
this new language of protest. It refuses the rigid distinctions on which the
most familiar paradigms of the sixties are often founded: New Left/
counterculture, activists/hippies, political/apolitical, politics/culture. There
are overlaps between these purported dualities, moments which cannot easily
be categorized as either political or cultural. For example, much of the effort
of both the New Left and the counterculture went into distinguishing their
actions from 'straight polities', typified, it would seem, more by the old Left
than by the Right. At various moments both rejected a politics of bureaucratic
organization, hierarchy and leadership, strategy and planning and the notion
that political commitment required grim seriousness and sacrifice to be
effective; in short, what was rejected was the 'discipline' of politics.
In formulating a notion of an anti-disciplinary politics, an obvious refer-
ence point is Foucault. This distinctive strain of sixties protest attempted to
dismantle the discipline of traditional Left politics in an almost Foucauldian
sense. Just as Foucault problematized the binary division between resistance
and non-resistance - the possibility of saying that one thing was only of the
order of 'liberation' and another of the order of 'oppression'80 - so the sixties
counterculture recognized the dangers inherent in the normative criteria of a
political program. As the outlaw manifestos of the sixties, cited in BAMN (By
Any Means Necessary), explained: 'there must not be a plan! as it is always the
plan that has done us in'.81 Foucault questioned any political program which
presented itself as 'more rational, more intelligent, and hence more
acceptable and better than that of the prevailing regime'.82 The concept of an
anti-disciplinary politics has a certain affinity with Foucault s suggestion that
modern society is a 'disciplinary society' where power circulates in other
modes rather than solely through censorship, exclusion, blockage or re-
pression, and produces effects at the levels of knowledge and desire.83 In
numerous ways the sixties counterculture struggled to bypass what they saw
as the disciplinary mechanisms of power of the mainstream society mirrored
in traditional methods of protest and demonstration. However, Foucauldian
critiques of resistance cease to be of relevance to the concept of an anti-
disciplinary politics precisely at the point where the sixties counterculture
retains a commitment to an emancipatory logic despite its rejection of these
disciplinary frameworks.
The language of an anti-disciplinary politics that prided itself on having no
aims, no ideology, no party and no list of demands was expressed and
understood by a range of sixties movements. It can be heard loud and clear in
a variety of actions such as in the 'levitation' of the Pentagon, travel to India
(or the consumption of signs of 'India' in the West), marching in demon-
strations holding signs which, instead of a slogan, had a piece of fruit
represented on them, throwing money on the floor of the New York Stock
Exchange, nominating a pig for President of the USA, or dressing in a
guerrilla uniform complete with a toy M-16 while chanting 'OM' in a Chicago
courtroom. These spectacles, discussed in subsequent chapters, throw a
different light on the relationship between sixties protest and what is
generally held to be the current mood of political quietism, disenchantment
and despair. They lead to an alternative reading of the connection between
the sixties and contemporary political debates. Indeed, the post-sixties
questioning of the project of grand social transformation - coming from
postmodern theorists but also from more popular sources - can be traced as
much to the success of this anti-disciplinary version of politics as to the
purported failure of sixties radicalism.
Chapter 2
The Language of an Anti-Disciplinary Politics
A subject matter, moreover, whose features ran so far beyond the

conceptual power of ordinary politics that it required a wild leap of
the imagination to see that it was precisely politics that was being
put into question.
(Carl Oglesby)1
The upsurge of radicalism in America in the sixties is remembered less for its
unprecedented scale than for its exceptional character. Reminiscences and re-
evaluations of the decade frequently struggle to capture this character as an
atmosphere, style or elan. Artefacts and events of the period often become the
focus of attention as though to invoke them is to convey or tap this sixties
mood. Richard Goldstein, for example, begins his Reporting the Counter-
culture by nostalgically musing over a neglected tie-dyed shirt.2 Others
concentrate on the impact of the release of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album,3
the first human Be-In,4 an encounter between Ken Kesey, Jean Genet and the
Black Panthers, 5 or Kesey s controversial dismissal of the anti-war protests at
the Berkeley Vietnam Day Rally in October 1965 with the advice: 'Just turn
your backs on [the war] and fuck it'.6 Peter Collier and David Horowitz use
the idea of 'epiphanies' (a term very popular at the time) to describe this
telescoping of the significance of the decade into certain actions or things.
The authors comment that epiphanies made the world worthy of the sixties
generation, reminiscing: 'We searched for them like star gazers'.7 These
epiphanies reinforced the conviction that in the sixties 'there was something
apocalyptic lurking behind the ordinary'.8 This feeling, often caricatured as
'transcendental' in post-sixties representations of the hippie, informed much
24
An Anti-Disciplinary Politics 25
of the radical activity of the period and helped shape the uncommon
conception of politics that was to emerge over the decade.
What made the protest of the sixties counterculture atypical and unlike
earlier expressions of American radicalism was not so much its mass
dimensions or its youthful character (although these factors should not be
underplayed) but rather the fact that as a self-consciously anti-capitalist
movement it bypassed most of the conventional organizations of the Left. In
forging a 'new' Left politics, sixties radicals shunned both the trade union
movement and the political party. At the most obvious level, issues of rights
were given priority over the redistribution of wealth and resources and even
though welfare reforms were an occasional by-product of some actions, a
social welfare ethic was spurned as the basis for political action. The 'worker'
as revolutionary subject was replaced by the 'student' as a substitute
proletariat. In the words of Andrew Kopkind, student radicals were 'more
proletarian than the proletariat'.9 Wage labour was rejected and in particular
the connection between work and income was challenged.
However, a significant strand of sixties politics went a step further in
isolating itself from the 'old' Left. Not simply content to bypass the political
party, the worker and the trade union movement, this kind of political
activism - which involved elements of both the New Left and counterculture
- mounted a more penetrating attack on conventional methods of political
mobilization. Notions of leadership and strategy came under fire but, more
particularly, even the political aim of establishing ideological coherence and
conveying a message to mobilize others was abandoned. The most striking
feature of this type of radicalism was its rejection of the discipline of politics:
the surrendering of the idea of political resistance as a struggle involving
sacrifice, obedience, order and restraint. Planning, reliable tactics and
unambiguous aims were dismissed alongside bureaucracy and organization.
It is this sharp deviation from what had previously marked the politically
committed from the politically uninvolved that most shaped the unique
temperament and mood of the decade.
What were some of the features of this anti-disciplinary politics? Certain
tendencies within sixties protest fall into this category, such as the rejection
of organization, hierarchy and leadership, the critique of intelligibility and
coherence, and the call for a 'money-free economy'. These are exemplified in
some of the key moments in the retrospective narratives of the sixties, such as
the so-called levitation of the Pentagon, the 'Death of Money and Birth of
Free' pageant and the wider 'Free' movement. These most distinctive
examples of hybrid forms of protest and efforts to forge an entirely new,
parodic political language express the strain between two kind of politics,
disciplinary and anti-disciplinary: two versions of the political which were in
constant dialogue, often in tension with one another and mingled with if not
dependent on the other for self-definition.
It is important to note that anti-disciplinary impulses can, to varying

degrees, be seen across a range of sixties movements, so it would be
misleading to confine this analysis solely to what other theorists have called
the 'politicized counterculture'.10 As previously indicated, my interest lies
with individuals, groups and actions which cannot be readily classified as
political or cultural. Groups like the Diggers, an iconoclastic and anarchistic
offshoot of the San Francisco Mime Troupe who began to distribute free food
in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the summer of 1966,"
and the Yippies, members of the Youth International Party formed by
Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner and Jerry Rubin in December 1967 with the
aim of bridging the gap between hippie and activist, provide remarkable and
eloquent statements of how such an anti-disciplinary politics was constituted.
Moreover, even the so-called 'apolitical', mystical wing of the counter-
culture - on pilgrimages, in communes or chanting with Allen Ginsberg -
voiced a self-consciously defiant, irreverent and anti-capitalist perspective
and participated in this new politics by retaining the notion of a rebellious
subject engaged in social transformation. At the other extreme, and perhaps
more surprisingly, groups linked with a more orthodox Left position -
certain factions of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), for example
- were far from immune to the enticements and lure of an anti-disciplinary
critique.
Evidence of the tension between these two kinds of politics can be found in
a variety of original sources and in numerous later reinterpretations of the
decade. In Andrew Kopkind's 1966 edited collection of the Thoughts of the
Young Radicals, simultaneous calls for strategy and anti-strategy, leadership
and anti-leadership are uneasily expressed in the same tracts.12 The internal
debates of groups like SDS, so clearly analysed by Todd Gitlin in The Sixties,
reveal this conflict between what he describes as the 'strategic' and
'expressive' components of the movement.13 Even cadre-like groups, such as
the Weathermen, or Weather Underground (discussed in Chapter 4), which
split from SDS in 1969 and embraced a literal and more conventional notion
of revolution, still expressed a troubling blend of the seemingly contradictory
versions of politics that emerged during the sixties. The anti-disciplinary
ingredients which went into producing this discomforting mix are the topic of
this chapter. Some of the noteworthy epiphanies of the period will be re-
examined-in this light.
Incoherence as a sign for radical
In an attempt to forge a new politics uncontaminated by the perceived

failures of vanguardist parties, all notions of leadership, hierarchy and
organization characteristic of the traditional Left were rejected. While this
fact has been well documented in studies of the New Left,14 the detail of
this rejection as it relates to the 'overlap' between the New Left and the
counterculture, the activists and the hippies, is rarely the subject of critical
analysis. The anti-disciplinary critique mounted by the Diggers and the
Yippies of the 'new' New Left politics is often ridiculed and situated out-
side the realm of serious politics. The most self-critical moments of the
countercultural sixties are thus ignored or trivialized in retrospective
narratives of the decade.
The Yippies fashioned an anti-hierarchical language by inverting
organizational categories and methods from both the old and the New Left.
In the words of Jerry Rubin, 'Yippies are Leaders without followers'.^ Rubin
attacked the strictly hierarchical order and classification of membership in
the communist and other political parties at the same time as he parodied
New Left canons about participatory, democratic organization. While the
New Left boasted no leaders, the Yippies vaunted no followers. 'There is no
such thing as a YIPPIE FOLLOWER', Rubin challenged, 'there are 646 [and
a half] million different kinds of yippies, and the definition of a yippie is that
he is a LEADER'.16 Eldridge Cleaver, in his introduction to Rubin's Do It!,
takes this mockery of participatory Left politics to its outrageous limits:
I'm in favour of a Dictatorship by the Indians. It's their land. I don't

care how few of them might be left: if there is only one single Indian
left, I'm in favour of making him an absolute monarch, even if he is
an idiot.17
The heretical pull of such sentiments provided the backbone of an anti-

disciplinary politics.
The Diggers also dismantled the distinction between leaders and followers.
In predating the Yippies, their rhetoric on the leadership issue at first
appeared to have much in common with a New Left perspective. Don McNeill
quotes an East-side Digger in his Moving Through Here:
This trip has no leaders, no spokesmen, because it's revolutionary.

I'm not saying planning doesn't go on, but the planning is just to
ignite. After it's ignited, it sustains itself. What we're out of is
ideology now, because ideology is an ego trip.18
Leaving aside the planning question for a moment, the Diggers' most
fundamental challenge to the notion of leadership and the point at which
they radically broke with conventional political conceptions can be found in
their well-perfected practice of all Diggers adopting the same pseudonyms.
Abbie Hoffman, for instance, was a key member of both the Yippies and
Diggers and used to publish under the name of George Metevsky, a Digger
pseudonym which made reference to 'the famous Mad Bomber who had
terrorized New York in the fifties'.19
Like sections of the New Left and the Yippies, the Diggers rejected the idea
of leaders or even spokespersons. The aim was to prevent the movement
becoming synonymous only with a few notable individuals; what in Digger
vocabulary would constitute the 'ego trip' of politics. This rejection did not
mean dubbing everyone a leader or everyone a follower, like the Yippies did,
but rather took the original form of attributing all public utterances to certain
notorious figures like Emmett Grogan, a flamboyant, original member of the
Diggers who himself published broadsheets under the name of George
Metevsky. Grogan was a key figure in the attack against hippie entrepreneur-
ship in the Haight-Ashbury, and initiated the free food projects.20 As Charles
Perry points out, if anyone asked a Digger who was in charge, 'a Digger would
vigorously answer, "You are!"'.21 The Diggers thus strove for a consummate
anonymity, aiming to prevent the credit (or responsibility) for their actions
being laid misleadingly at the feet of a single person. In Gitlin's account of the
SDS 'Back to the Drawing Boards' conference in June 1967 (an epiphany
discussed in Chapter 4) it would seem that every Digger at some stage called
himself Emmett Grogan while interrupting the proceedings with a chaotic
philosophical and physical assault on members of the New Left.22
While the use of pseudonyms as a non-leadership strategy may have had
only a rhetorical significance to those participating at the time, it is interest-
ing to register the difficulties someone has - without firsthand experience of
America in the 1960s - in tracing the identities of all the Emmett Grogans or
the George Metevskys in Digger pamphlets and publications. Unlike the
Yippies, who made a lot of noise about everyone being a leader but rarely
challenged the celebrity status of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin or Paul
Krassner, with the Diggers it is genuinely puzzling and impossible to deter-
mine who was the 'real' writer, the particular Emmett Grogan. Although such
an exercise is nonsensical in Digger logic, this experience indicates that to a
marked extent the Diggers' critique of conventional political hierarchy
achieved its desired result.
Interestingly, Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit's Obsolete Communism: The
Left Wing Alternative, while working within a more identifiably Marxist
problematic - retaining a commitment to some kind of workers' revolution
and discussing strategy, bureaucracy and the State - also tackles the notion of
leadership and hierarchy in a similarly anti-disciplinary vein. It concludes
with a decidedly countercultural chapter subtitled, 'Make the Revolution,
Here and Now, It's your own'.23 According to the authors (in this seminal text,
widely read and discussed by the New Left in America and elsewhere), the
lesson of the 1968 'May-June events' in Paris was that the traditional 'chain
of command' in political struggle Should be broken. Democracy was not
subordinated by bad leadership, they argued, 'but by the very existence of
leadership'.24 'How can anyone represent anyone else?', the authors asked.
Instead of representation, an involvement which is heterogeneous and
appears to be spontaneous is offered as one of the axioms of the new
revolutionary politics:
We reject the policy committee and the editorial board ... What
we need is not organization with a capital O, but a host of
insurrectional cells, be they ideological groups, study groups - we
can even use street gangs ... Every group must find its own form,
take its own action, speak its own language. When all have learnt to
express themselves, in harmony with the rest, then we shall have a
free society.25
In urging revolutionaries to make up their minds to 'learn to love', in the

concluding remarks of this text,26 the Cohn-Bendits provide concrete evidence
of the philosophical (and empirical) overlap between activist and hippie
during this period.
In some respects, the tensions in the sixties between two competing
versions of politics are crystallized in a text like Obsolete Communism. Even
though the 'Left wing alternative' presented neither rejects nor parodies
Marxism in the same way as the antics of the Diggers or Yippies, it none the
less shares a similar theoretical perspective. Such correspondences are not
merely coincidental given the well-documented international exchange
between different activists in the period.27 Nor is it surprising that the Cohn-
Bendits should be influenced by the American counterculture and by
situationism, a revolutionary anti-art movement, which began in Paris in the
1950s and struggled against a society perceived to be dominated by the
commodity and the spectacle. Rather, what is significant is the uneasy
combination in their analysis of traditional Left conceptions and an anti-
disciplinary ethos. In calling for diversity and splintering ('every group must
find its own form', 'we can even use street gangs') over a totalizing party
requiring uniformity of purpose, moreover in appealing to 'you', as an
individual reader/activist, to make the revolution 'your own', Obsolete
Communism awkwardly dodges traditional Left categories while at other
times straining against the fragmentation implied in its own anti-disciplinary
stance. Note their further comment that 'effective revolutionary action does
not spring from "individual" or "external" needs - it can only occur when the
two coincide so that the distinction itself breaks down'.28 In the context of an
argument positing the individual as the agent of revolutionary change, such
Utopian proclamations do not easily resolve these contradictions.
The friendship between Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Abbie Hoffman and
Jerry Rubin and the connection between Paris and the Yippies are recorded
in Cohn-Bendits three-part television documentary, 1968: The Revolution
Revisited.29 In his frank interviews with Hoffman and Rubin, Cohn-Bendit

refers to the type of transcontinental exchanges discussed in the introduction.
The dialogues between hippies and activists and the intermingling of the two
in the decade are much more striking than their apparent differences. Indeed
to draw such distinctions in the writing and life of someone like Daniel Cohn-
Bendit is to ignore the tenaciously countercultural nature of his work. As far
as May '68 in Paris is concerned - like the key moments of sixties protest in
the United States - radical political rhetoric became a form of 'bricolage',
where cultural borrowing was much more the order of the day than following
the clearly denned parameters of a Left tradition. As Peter Starr says of the
fusion of Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, Trotskyists, situationists, anarchists and
Christian Leftists in the May-June events in Paris:
Calls for the overthrow of the late capitalist order and the replace-
ment of bureaucratic structures with forms of revolutionary self-
management (autogestion) were routinely coupled with calls for
sexual liberation, for a radical disalienation of a modern subject
caught in an increasingly technocratic world, for guerrilla art, or for
new conceptions of urban space.30
The fact that, in retrospect, the purported failure of May '68 (and of the sixties
in general) is based on judgements about relative achievements in a con-
ventional political arena overlooks the hybrid and wholly multi-dimensional
nature of sixties protest.
Utopianism was not the only method adopted by the sixties counterculture
to deal with contradictory or irreconcilable tendencies in its new politics. In
fact, the anxiety evident in the Cohn-Bendits' work stems from a belief -
which for some was as obsolete as the communism being rejected - that, for
an ideology to be convincing, it must, above all, be coherent. In forging a new
anti-disciplinary politics, other sixties movements, instead of feeling com-
pelled to iron out inconsistencies in their approach or analysis, paraded and
celebrated contradiction. Enlightenment notions of rationality were dis-
missed, often in favour of magic, madness and 'pre-modern' modes of logic.31
Once conventional efforts at political mobilization were replaced with the
idea that 'the more people you alienate, the more people you reach',32 many
other remnants of standard political organization also disappeared. The idea
that the impact of a radical movement was dependent on a clear and well-
communicated statement of aims was ridiculed. 'The secret to the Yippie
myth', according to Jerry Rubin, 'is that it is nonsense. Its basic informational
statement is a blank piece of paper'.33 Hence, intelligibility, clarity, political
demands and, above all, reason were ridiculed and therefore marked for
attack.
In Revolution for the Hell of It, Abbie Hoffman comprehensively details the
features of an anti-disciplinary approach to protest while paradoxically
rejecting elucidation as having a valid purpose in radical politics. Clarity,
'alas, is not one of our aims', he writes. 'Confusion is mightier than the
sword!'.34 The aim of 'revolutionary action' was therefore not to generate
understanding. In fact, Hoffman at one point admits to not understanding
this new politics himself, noting that 'if the straight world understood all this
Digger shit, it would render us impotent .. .'.35 Instead, incongruity, in-
coherence and contradiction were specifically promoted by groups such as
the Yippies both to distinguish their radicalism from 'straight' politics and to
tackle a different kind of enemy previously ignored by the Left in America:
the confines of language and a particular form of rationality which in sixties
rhetoric became labelled as 'bureaucratic', 'capitalist', or 'Western'. Words,
according to Hoffman, were 'the absolute in horseshit'.36 Language was per-
ceived as no longer adequate for the purpose of generating understanding
and therefore certain experiences took on the status of being 'beyond
explanation'. This was especially true of incidents involving psychedelic
drugs. Richard Alpert, in Be Here Now, says of the LSD experience that it
was indescribable.37
This sense of the impoverishment of explanation was extended to events
such as political rallies and demonstrations. In reference to the dramatic
events of the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago - the violent
struggles between the police and a diverse assortment of protesters who had
come to Chicago to demonstrate against American involvement in the
Vietnam War - Hoffman comments that 'Chicago' would be impossible to
explain, before then going on to explain it.38 Jerry Rubin demonstrates a
similar resistance to the confines of language and its use in advertising in the
following:
A dying culture destroys everything it touches.

Language is one of the first things to go.
Nobody really communicates with words any more. Words have
lost their ability to shock and make love.
Language prevents communication.
CARS LOVE SHELL
How can I say
'I love you'
after hearing:
CARS LOVE SHELL
Does anyone understand what I mean.39
The anti-disciplinary politics of the sixties was thus defined not only by its
rejection of ideology and political program ('there is no program [because]
program would make our movement sterile'40) but also by its stance on
explanation, and rationality. Yet, as John Gerassi asked, 'No party? No
ideology? No program? How in the hell, then, do we make this humanizing
revolution?'41 The cryptic answer he provided, 'you live the revolution by
being the revolution',42 was expressed in the new, deliberately enigmatic
language that the sixties counterculture fashioned in its quixotic efforts to
move beyond language and explanation.
Peter Clecak describes this phenomenon as a symptom of the frustration
and impotence of those who completely reject the social order. According
to Clecak, political revolutionaries suffer from burnout, exhaustion, sec-
tarianism, elitism and dogmatism, while cultural revolutionaries contract
what he calls 'radical incoherence'.43 Aside from the overly strict and some-
times artificial division he makes between political and cultural revolution-
aries (with SDS representing one pole and the Yippies the other), Clecak's
analysis demonstrates some of the problems inherent in current recon-
ceptualizations of the sixties. In his view, the radical incoherence adopted by
cultural revolutionaries such as the Yippies meant that their protest was
actually incoherent. He therefore overlooks the sense in which such a politics
created an alternative logic which was quite lucid and meaningful within its
own terms. With respect to the Yippies, Clecak concludes that Abbie Hoffman
'was the sad butt of his own elaborate gag'.44 This is tantamount to arguing
that the Yippies would have been more successful had they taken themselves
more seriously. Not only is such an interpretation a contradiction in terms
and a gross misreading of Yippie philosophy but it also implies that the
Yippies would have been more fully 'political' if they had embraced more
conventional definitions of politics - precisely the thing they were resisting in
thefirstplace. Clecak is not alone in this approach. Many later commentators
on the sixties assess the era in terms of whether or not certain protests were
properly planned or particular groups had clear enough political goals.
Questions of organization and strategy are applied to the very groups which
promoted anti-organization and anti-strategy.
Exploiting paradox
One of the remarkable features of this new anti-disciplinary political

language (which no doubt must have been very attractive at the time) was
that certain interpretations outside Yippie or Digger logic were rendered
meaningless. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin exploited paradox. At the same
time as they rejected language and explanation, they boldly engaged in the
act of writing as a means of communication. While strategy was repudiated,
'radical incoherence' (to use Clecak's terminology) was in fact promoted as a
political strategy. Being understood was not considered to be a goal because
in Hoffman's words: 'understanding is the first step to control and control is
the secret of our extinction'.45 Nevertheless, ambiguous and seemingly

impenetrable anti-disciplinary writings and antics were intelligible and
coherent enough to persuade potential activists to join in, transparent enough
to enrage or alienate others and certainly comprehensible enough to unnerve
and pose a threat to their opponents. In discussing the Yippies, Rubin
sardonically bemoaned:
The left immediately attacked us as apolitical, irrational, acidhead

freeks [sic] who were channeling the 'political rebellion of youth' into
dope, rock music and be-ins. The hippies saw us as Marxists in
psychedelic clothes using dope, rock music and be-ins to radicalize
youth politically at the end of a policeman's club. The hippies see us
as politicos and the politicos see us as hippies. Only the right wing
see us for what we actually are.46
While hinting that the Yippies offered something much more radical than
either the hippies or the politics could provide, Rubin revealed that the
Yippies were far from successful in achieving their aim of complete
incomprehensibility.
Incoherence was a sign for radical in the sixties. It pointed to a politics
without disciplinary requirements or resemblance to either the old or
New Left. Yet Digger and Yippie pamphlets and pageants were not 'beyond
codification', as commentators like Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain contend,47
but instead forged a new set of codes, lucid to participants and potential
initiates, enchanting politics with a mysterious and elusive ambience. Seem-
ingly unfathomable political gestures were exclusive in the sense that only the
initiated felt they could decode them, and inclusive as they drew participants
into the meaning process, allowing the freedom of wide, ambiguous
interpretation. However, this re-enchantment of politics, despite claims that
comprehensibility was not the goal,48 was achieved as much by substituting
one familiar form of communication for another as by moving 'beyond
language'. Nicholas von Hoffman calls the form of communication adopted
by radicals in the sixties 'non-linear', and identifies its roots in advertising:
... it is a communication in which ideas are not broken down into

separate analytical parts; subject and predicate, indistinguishably
welded together, come at you in one affective wave. There are no
pieces to take out and examine, no ascertainable linkages between
thoughts and objects, no form, no procession of ideas to a demon-
strated conclusion. It's a form of communication designed to get
you to react. Its epitome is advertising, the most non-debatable,
unanswerable form of communication ever invented, but it works
and we're looking at a generation that has been formed by it.49
The example Nicholas von Hoffman gives of this non-debatable com-

munication comes from poster art and is the image of Allen Ginsbergs head
with an Uncle Sam hat on it.50 Other illustrations can be found in the
distinctive graphics of the period particularly in papers like the San Francisco
Oracle, first published on 20 September 1966. According to Perry, 'the text of
the page was subordinated to its overall design'.51 This meant irregular widths
of lines and spaces between lines, copy crossing the page diagonally as well as
some coloured and even scented issues. A ludic, defiant politics of rebellion
against meaning and Western rationality was played out in each issue of the
Oracle in swirling art nouveau lettering.
This form of non-linear communication was also evident in the cryptic
images the movement projected in its own characterization of itself. Note
the title page of BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) where, in barely legible
cut-out lettering, impossible to reproduce here, the anonymous creators
claim: 'We are outlaws. The cities are our new frontier. There is no limit to
our lawlessness ... Politics is how we live'.52 'We do not wish to project
a calm, secure future', Abbie Hoffman writes: 'We are a disruption. We are hot
... We are cannibals, cowboys, Indians, witches, warlocks, weird looking
freaks that crawl out of the cracks of Amerikas [sic] nightmare'.53 One set
of images is replaced by another, often magnifying the very portrait main-
stream society generates as its Other. This is most evident in Woodstock
Nation, where Abbie Hoffman discusses his trial on charges of conspiracy
in Chicago. In a wry attempt to 'let you know what I mean when I say "I'm
just doin my thing"', Hoffman outlines the contours of this new politics,
making starkly obvious the ways it differed from the conventional Left, while
at the same time pointedly parodying the unstated reasons why he was
on trial:
When I appear in the Chicago courtroom, I want to be tried, not

because I support the National Liberation Front - which I do - but
because I have long hair. Not because I support the Black Liberation
Movement, but because I smoke dope. Not because I'm against the
capitalist system, but because I think property eats shit. Not because
I believe in student power, but that the schools should be destroyed.
Not because I'm against corporate liberalism, but because I think
people should do whatever the fuck they want, and not because I'm
trying to organize the working class, because I think kids should kill
their parents. Finally, I want to be tried for having a good time and
not for being serious.54
Embedded in this final wish - declining both the solemnity of the courtroom
and the politics of high, altruistic, noble ideals - is the most fundamental
paradox at the heart of anti-disciplinary protest.
Before detailing this paradox it is important to briefly note other rejections

of the seriousness and sombre mood of disciplinary politics. Allen Ginsberg
attended Vietnam Day Committee meetings to help organize anti-war teach-
ins on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. He suggested that
protesters, if attacked, should do mass calisthenics. He urged the mass
singing of nursery rhymes at the slightest disturbance and thought anti-war
marches should include huge floats of Thoreau behind bars or Hell's Angels
with halos. He wanted everyone to carry a placard with a picture of a dif-
ferent piece of fruit on each one.55 The 'gloomy earnestness of the "protest"
mentality' will be replaced, Peter Stansill and David Zane Mairowitz write, 'by
a new "tough" frivolity and creative lunacy'.56 Included in their collection
of countercultural ephemera is a leaflet originally distributed by the New
York 'outlaw' group calling itself the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers,
condemning 'white collar radicals' as the 'VD of the revolution'.57 According to
Lee and Shlain, such groups 'pre-figured the paramilitary fad that engulfed
the New Left as the decade drew to a close'.58 However, the Motherfuckers
expressed a paramilitarism with a difference, viewed their 'magic drugs'
(LSD) as an 'ecstatic revolutionary implement',59 and engaged in a type of
mystical anarchism often based on shocking and ridiculing their opponents.
The Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers was a group which expressed many
of the tensions of an anti-disciplinary political stance. Like the Diggers,
Yippies and the Merry Pranksters before them, the Motherfuckers used
unsettling theatrical pranks to get their message across. Yet, they shared the
same peculiar blend of anti-disciplinary and disciplinary aims and methods
as the Weathermen (later the Weather Underground). When in 1969 SDS
ceased to be an effective organization attractive to a broad student body,
some members of the Motherfuckers (such as Jeff Jones) joined with the
Weathermen to continue a more militant and, ironically, 'old' Left style of
politics.
The tactics of frivolity and creative lunacy were championed in different
ways by others. What will put an end to toil, Richard Neville argued, won't be
'grubby marxist leaflets' but 'an irresistible, fun possessed, playpower
culture'.60 Jerry Rubin, echoing the same sentiments in We Are Everywhere,
protested that revolution does not mean Puritanism and that revolution does
not mean self-sacrifice and self-punishment. 'We commies', he continued,
'should out promise all the bourgeois politicians', because 'our communism
will be hedonistic'.61 Abbie Hoffman was similarly repulsed by the concept of
a movement 'built on sacrifice, dedication, responsibility, anger, frustration
and guilt'.62 In the Yippie plans for a Festival of Life to counter what they saw
as the Convention of Death at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago,
aside from the nomination of a pig for President (who is eaten by the people
rather than eating them), other proposals were the running of phoney taxis to
pick up Democratic delegates at their hotels and drop them off miles away in
Wisconsin, to take over the Chicago Biscuit Company and distribute bread
and cookies to the masses, to stage a mass nude-in at Lake Michigan and (the
now infamous threat) to put LSD into the public water supply. According to
Irwin and Debi Unger, these promises were widely reported at the time in
both the underground and the mainstream press.63 The very notion of a
revolution, 'for the hell of it' (the notorious title of Abbie Hoffman's book),
well depicts the centrality of this ethic of playfulness to the concept of politics
being manufactured in the sixties. In the words of Philip Slater, there were
two cultures developing in opposition in America in the sixties, and 'nothing
could be more "old culture" than a traditional Marxist'.64
Doing Gestalt on the nation
In refusing, among other things, the discipline of politics, the aim was to
prevent radical protest from being contaminated by all that it strove to resist.
Laughter, paradox and parody were paraded as ethical forms which would
guarantee the purity of the movement thereby protecting it from adulteration
by the things it despised. As long as playfulness and the aesthetic imagination
were exalted, as Judith Adler points out, countercultural values were seen
to be guarded against 'ossification and self-betrayal'.65 Thus, the fate of
Soviet-style communism and other radical political movements would be
avoided. Without aiming to seize State power - the source of all social and
political oppression - and never protesting for or against anything,66 an anti-
disciplinary approach to politics created the very compelling illusion that it
could not be tainted or compromised. This quest for purity paradoxically
combined with an equally compelling push towards a 'mongrel' politics which
took its language from popular culture, aesthetics and mysticism as much as
it did from Left political rhetoric.
The prevalence of this attitude about political contamination was so wide-
spread it is impossible to fully document. And, as I have already suggested, it
did not stop at refusing the seizure of State power as a political aim. Reason
itself was perceived to be inherently suspect. Hence comments like that of
Barry Melton in the film, Berkeley in the '60s: 'To us, the politicos were the
straight world. They were going to march on Washington. We didn't even
want to know that Washington existed'.67 As the belief spread that 'to fight or
join a system that was rotten to the core' would only lead to 'further
corruption', 68 and individuals and groups previously distrustful of political
involvement became attracted to the movements novel playfulness and
chastity, so new methods of 'fighting' were also devised. The language of
anti-disciplinary politics was translated into acts of protest which ap-
peared spontaneous and particular, circumventing conventional planning,
showing little sign of organization and leadership, and resisting the confines
An Anti-Disciplinary Politics 3 7
of reasoned explanation and interpretation. The best way to withstand the

so-called 'prison' of language and rationality and to project a pure politics was
to 'Do It', as Rubin challenged. In Hoffman's words, the aim was simply, 'to
get people to do, to participate, whether positively or negatively'.69
A good example of what Clecak calls the 'quest for authenticity through
direct action',70 and which can be described as the re-enchantment of
politics, can be found in the proposed 'levitation' of the Pentagon in 1967:
an 'epiphany' of the period illustrating the configurations and tensions
of an anti-disciplinary political stance, and the urge towards an uncon-
taminated, pristine form of politics, achieved by infecting protest with an
anomalous mix of 'popular' ingredients. As part of the march on the Pentagon
to protest US involvement in the Vietnam War, Abbie Hoffman asked for a
permit to levitate the Pentagon, 'explaining that by chanting ancient aramaic
exorcism rites while standing in a circle around the building they could get
it to rise into the air, turn orange and vibrate until all the evil emissions
had fled. The war would end forthwith'.71 Hoffman mockingly displayed
his lofty aspirations for the frivolity of this action with the follow-
ing plot:
We will dye the Potomac red, burn the cherry trees, panhandle
embassies, attack with water pistols, marbles, bubble gum wrappers,
bazookas, girls will run naked and piss on the Pentagon walls,
sorcerers, swamis, witches, voodoo, warlocks, medicine men and
speed freaks will hurl their magic at the faded brown walls ...
We will dance and sing and chant the mighty OM. We will fuck
on the grass and beat ourselves against the doors. Everyone will
scream 'VOTE FOR ME'. We shall raise the flag of nothingness over
the Pentagon and a mighty cheer of liberation will echo through the
land.72
Hoffman expresses here what Todd Gitlin and David Zane Mairowitz each
describe as 'a politics of display'.73 To Christopher Lasch, the levitation
exercise conforms to what he called (following Rubin) doing Gestalt on the
nation, in his view a feature of a certain kind of sixties protest.74 Clecak sees
such actions as constituting a 'metapolitics'.75 Yet, despite the difficulty
various commentators have in precisely classifying this style of protest, it
would be wrong to conclude, as some have done, that the fantasy of raising
the Pentagon was apolitical, anti-political or only semi-political.76 The
accounts of such actions - so remote from conventional understandings of
the political - make it abundantly clear that a new definition of politics was
in the making.
Norman Mailer perhaps provides one of the most evocative and detailed
descriptions of the levitation exercise within the Pentagon protest. In his
chapter entitled 'The Witches and the Fugs', in The Armies of the Night:
History as a Novel, the Novel as History, Mailer documents the 'medieval

carnival' which took place in the North Parking Lot nearest to the Pentagon
on 21 October 1967.77 Mailer wandered disoriented and amazed through the
various witches and warlocks. He describes the chanting crowds, the frenzied
dancing, the sounds of clanging cymbals, tinklingfingerbells and the music
of the Fugs, a band to become one of the icons of the emerging acid-rock
scene and who were, among other things, dressed as Hindu gurus. As a
permit was not granted to actually encircle the Pentagon, the protesters had
to be content with other - but no less spectacular - exorcism rituals. They
formed Indian triangles and 'Circles of Protection' and chanted 'Out,
demons, out! Out, demons, out!' A mimeographed paper was passed around
demanding, in the name of every god and mythological figure, from Ra,
Jehovah, Isis and Thor to Kali, Shiva-Shakra and the Buddha, 'that the
pentacle of power once again be used to serve the interests of GOD manifest
in the world as man. This leaflet predicted the beginnings of a millennial
movement, claiming that on that very day a new 'suprapolitics' had
emerged.78 Other chants included 'Money made the Pentagon - melt it.
Money made the Pentagon, melt it for love' and 'Burn the money, burn the
money, burn it, burn it'.79
While the levitation features in many of the nostalgic reminiscences of the
sixties (particularly those which appeared in the eighties)80 the tensions
between the very different versions of politics that were eventually expressed
in the actual 'march on the Pentagon' are rarely made explicit. An exception
can be found in Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan's Who Spoke Up?, in their
chapter entitled '1967: The Pentagon: Gandhi and Guerrilla'.81 The authors
examine the extraordinary political arrangements and debates surrounding
the demonstration. They document those involved in planning the action,
numbering SDS national officers (who contested the whole idea of the
protest) alongside church groups, Socialist Workers, radical pacifists, New
Left celebrities as well as the countercultural levitators.
Zaroulis and Sullivan's account of the event provides great insight into the
strains and conflicts which existed at the time between a disciplinary and
anti-disciplinary stance, not, as it is often implied, a tension between an
'apolitical' counterculture and a 'political' New Left. Yet the authors' dis-
approval of the recorded perceptions of one demonstrator who marvelled at
how 'beautiful' the protest was because there was no leadership is indicative
of a problem in many retrospective analyses of the sixties. They discard the
demonstrator's comments with the suggestion: 'Those who were arrested,
who had been clubbed until they were broken and bloody might not have
agreed [about the beauty of this action]'.82 While such a response is under-
standable and indicates where the authors' political sympathies lie, it also
shows how customary it is for commentaries on the decade to only focus on
certain familiar strands of sixties radicalism. However, one would assume
that if interpreting the sixties is the aim (or even if it is the more modest
ambition of comprehending the 'storming' of the Pentagon), the anti-
disciplinary tendencies reflected in the words of this particular demonstrator
are worthy of analysis, just as is the terrible violence which ensued.
The authors seem to make a similar oversight when discussing the disputes
which emerged over tactics, location, leadership and the use of the Viet Cong
flag in the Pentagon protest. Jerry Rubin's contribution to the debate - an
invitation for Americans to 'come and piss on the White House lawn' - does
not seem to be given the same credibility and attention as the contributions
of SDS or the National Mobilization Commitee. Recording, but also echoing,
the view of the organizers, Zaroulis and Sullivan dismiss Rubin's suggestion
as both organizationally unhelpful and alienating to middle-class peace
activists.83 They also seem to ignore the dramatic radical impact of this
so-called 'politics of display' on the targets of protest. If Mailer's uncon-
ventional historical account of the march on the Pentagon is to be taken as
being even remotely accurate, members of the Military Police when actually
confronted with this alarming array of witches, Hindu gurus, dancing
wizards and chanting hippies were unnerved and trembling.84 Mailer's
implication is that these antics proved more threatening than the National
Liberation Front (NLF) flag-waving of old Left hardened 'politicos'.
While I am not arguing that the role of Hoffman or Rubin in this Pentagon
action should be overemphasized, nevertheless the ease with which com-
mentators like Zaroulis and Sullivan repudiate this kind of politics is an
example of the problem of assessing certain kinds of sixties protest in terms
of categories which would be irrelevant if not nonsensical to the protesters
themselves, categories which privilege the mundane and conventional
elements of a particular action and thus exclude or make exotic the most
challenging aspects of the radicalism in question: ironically the very charac-
teristics most distinctive of the decade itself.
An exception to this can be found in Rebecca S. Bjork and Reginald Twigg's
analysis of the hippie lifestyle as rhetorical performance. They argue that
traditional social movement theory cannot account for the rhetorical tactics
of the hippie counterculture.85 Unlike Zaroulis and Sullivan they do not
distinguish between real political action and the merely cultural. The authors
contend that hippies turned to spectacle and performance 'as ways of
subverting the accepted forms of rhetorical practice, thus creating a unique
basis for their own rhetoric of protest'.86 They present the levitation exercise
as a particularly salient example of this, viewing the Pentagon ritual as both
communicating opposition to the Vietnam War and performing a much more
penetrating breach of accepted cultural norms.
To return to Rubin's comments about pissing on the White House lawns:
the project of this new anti-disciplinary politics, typified by Rubin's plan and
the whole plot to exorcise and raise the Pentagon off the ground, was
intrinsically contradictory; it was serious yet ridiculous, self-consciously pure

and unselfconsciously sullied, a double-edged jumble of anti-disciplinary and
disciplinary procedures. The paradoxical nature of the political gestures
expressed in such examples of sixties protest provides one answer to the
frequently asked question of why 'the sixties' disappeared socially and
politically as well as temporally. The sixties counterculture combined deter-
mined efforts to remain theoretically separate from and unblemished by the
very aspects of society being resisted: what in the language of postmodernism
could be called deconstructing the notion of an 'enemy', in the traditional
political sense. Yet, in rejecting the idea of conventional political demands
and insisting on 'the freedom to stand around and do nothing',87 in never
being for or against anything, in protesting no issues because, according to
Rubin, 'the truth was contained' not in any political purpose but 'in the act',88
so the sixties counterculture problematized the very concept of resistance.
Once the very core of familiar notions of radical opposition (the idea of
resistance, for example) was itself called into question, for some it was an
easy slide to the position that there was nothing outside to resist. 'You'
became the revolution. The revolution was achieved by 'being it' or by simply
'living it'. In standing against all totalizing political strategies, meanings
became deliberately contextualized, shifting according to the situation so that
the only overarching political aim became, as Rubin suggested, 'the act' itself.
Wide interpretations of what constituted radical political opposition were
therefore possible, changing with changed contexts. Given these conditions,
it is hardly surprising that the counterculture became so swiftly and so
smoothly enveloped by what Todd Gitlin calls the 'Encounter Culture'.89 And
it is in fact possible to view the redirection of efforts for radical change away
from social structures and political policy towards individual, personal
transformation (as in the self-awareness movements of the seventies and the
New Age cultures of the eighties and nineties) as an extension, rather than a
renunciation, of the 'politics' of the decade, not, as is often suggested, as a
magnification of the anti-political tendencies of the counterculture.
In recasting Left politics by turning its back on Marxism, the sixties
counterculture also became entangled with its other enemy: the culture of
American consumerism. In this respect, the language of anti-disciplinary
protest at times more closely resembled a deliberate pastiche of advertising
jargon and cowboy movies than any recognizable discourse of the Left. This
often raucous celebration of the popular myths of American culture -
primarily intended as radical satire - in effect further displaced the idea that
something 'out there' in society had to be rejected. At the Pentagon
demonstration, Rubin addressed the soldiers: 'We're really brothers because
we grew up listening to the same radio and TV. programs ... I didn't get my
ideas from Mao, Lenin or Ho Chi Minh. I got my ideas from the Lone
Ranger'.90 In blurring all distinctions, the distinction between the counter-
culture and 'straight' society - always troublesome and never the 180-degree
antagonism implied by Roszak - also became obscure. This fact was
frequently noted by Hoffman and Rubin in comments about the way in which
US society had become more Yippie than the Yippies:
LBJ called a press conference. He took out a white handkerchief and

for a moment everyone thought he was going to make history by
blowing his nose on nationwide T.V. Instead he started waving his
handkerchief and mumbling something about politics being 'dirty'.
LBJ WAS SURRENDERING TO THE YIPPIES! LBJ WAS DROP-
PING OUT OF POLITICS. 'Oh Fuck' we moaned. 'LBJ baby, don't
drop out'. It sounded like LBJ was also going to announce that he
was never going to get another haircut. We started sobbing.91
One is reminded here of Foucault's critique of the unreality of the binary

division between resistance and non-resistance.92 Abbie Hoffman makes a
similar point about the hazy boundaries between the resisters and the targets
of their resistance at the time:
The United States political system was proving more insane than
Yippie! Reality and unreality had, in six months switched sides. It
was America that was on a trip; we were just standing still. How
could we pull our pants down? America was already naked. What
could we disrupt? America was falling apart at the seams.93
Ironically, the more efforts that were made to fashion a language of protest
uncontaminated by the rhetoric and methods of conventional Left politics,
the more the language of a mainstream American consumer culture crept in:
a culture which in Abbie Hoffman's view 'was already naked'. In not drawing
a distinction between anti-disciplinary protest and the anti-disciplinary face
of contemporary consumerism, indeed in revelling in the ambiguity of this
relationship, this new sixties politics was fabricated with a very fragile
political identity. At the same time as definitions of politics were being
overturned in the most striking of ways, the limits of an anti-disciplinary
protest were also being drawn. Moreover, once a so-called 'politics without
boundaries' became more than a rhetorical device and began to actually
resemble a politics without boundaries, for many the idea of any distinct
form of political involvement became problematic.
Two important points are worth emphasizing. First, one can read
postmodern impulses in the displays of the Yippies, Diggers and the like,
displays that were chiefly designed to call into question the possibility or
desirability of the modern revolutionary model of political change. Second,
anti-disciplinary protest can be distinguished from postmodern perspectives
in that it did not lead to a wholesale rejection of emancipatory notions.

Somehow it seemed possible in the sixties to act within a political arena while
simultaneously rejecting its fundamental premises. This spectacular doubling
links sixties protest to and dissociates it from that of the post-sixties era.
The free thing
To more fully illustrate the paradoxical nature of an anti-disciplinary politics

it is productive to analyse key terms in the countercultural lexicon which
were representative of the new political language being created in the sixties.
The concept of 'free' is useful for this purpose. Even though the so-called 'free
movement' was international in its scope (as Chapter 3 will show) it is rarely
examined in detail in retrospective commentaries on the period. 'Free' also
reveals much about the uneasy relationship between the sixties counter-
culture and the capitalism it attempted to counter. While an examination of
other significant countercultural idioms may have proved a similarly worth-
while exercise (nakedness or nation, for example), 'free' provides a point
of entry into some of the problems embedded in this particular language of
protest.
'Free', as a word and a concept, functioned like an icon in the sixties. It
appeared emblazoned on Abbie Hoffman's forehead during demonstrations
and protests. It was on posters and placards and it was the name under which
many Yippie pamphlets were written including the book, Revolution for the
Hell of It. Later in the seventies, when Abbie Hoffman was forced under-
ground, the characteristically irreverent name he gave to his new identity was
Barry Freed. Other notorious promoters of 'free' were the Diggers. In 1966 in
Golden Gate Park in San Francisco they set up the infamous Free Frame of
Reference which symbolized the constructed nature of consciousness. Free
stores were established in the Haight-Ashbury where free food, clothing,
blankets and even free dollar bills were distributed. Free Clinics and Free
Legal Services were also set up under Digger auspices. Daily, for a year, from
the autumn of 1966, the Diggers served free meals in the Panhandle district.94
And, almost without exception, underground publications included a free
listing, often in the back of the book or magazine,95 with information ranging
from where to obtain free shelter, clothing, entertainment, education, food
and reading material to how to make free phone calls. The London pub-
lication, Project London Free, lists forty-three free items, including funerals,
ice, dentists, carpets, vets and soda syphons.96
On 16 December 1966 the Diggers orchestrated a public ritual on Haight
Street representing 'the Death of Money and the Birth of Free'. In their own
words, 'street events [were] social acid heightening consciousness of what is
real on the street'.97 They described the funeral thus:
The burial procession. Three black shrouded messengers holding

staffs topped with reflective dollar signs. A runner swinging a red
lantern. Four pall bearers wearing animal heads carry a black casket
filled with blowups of silver dollars. A chorus singing 'Get Out of my
Life Why Don't You Babe' to Chopin's Death March. Members of the
procession give out silver dollars and candles ... Street events are
rituals of release. Re-claiming of territory (sundown, traffic, public
joy) through spirit. Public NewSense.98
According to this logic, typified by Digger street theatre, 'free' signified much
more than simply 'free of charge' or the absence of a monetary transaction. In
the language of anti-disciplinary politics, well expressed in the Death of
Money celebration, 'free' retained its metaphysical resonance, suggesting
liberation, spontaneity, unfetteredness and release, while becoming endowed
with a tangible, corporeal quality. Like a material substance, 'free', as social
acid, could be 'injected', to use Lee and Shlain's words, into any social event."
Whereas money came increasingly to be viewed as a meaningless social
abstraction, 'the mightiest and most secret of all the abstractions' according
to Julian Beck,100 'free', its opposite, took on an almost physical actuality. In
this respect, the attempt to establish an ethic of 'free' was central to the wider
effort of the sixties counterculture to break through the confines of language
and disciplinary rationality and create a nuisance and a 'new sense' of
political rebellion.
However, when this new sense was not being employed or invoked, 'free'
literally meant free of charge. Herein lies both the imaginative attraction of
an anti-disciplinary politics (vaunting itself as a 'living contradiction'101) and
one source of its own ready assimilation. As the meanings of anti-disciplinary
terms like 'free' were deliberately contextualized, so their subversive potential
magnified or diminished according to the situation. Abbie Hoffman described
'the Free thing' as the 'most revolutionary thing in America'.102 Indeed, one is
inclined to agree after reading his 'Steal This Author', the revised 1988
introduction to what was described as the most comprehensive and
entertaining manual on how to do everything free, Steal This Book. Hoffman
echoes earlier anarchist notions of property as theft: 'Capitalism is licence to
steal; the government simply regulates who steals and how much. I always
wanted to put together an outlaw handbook that would help raise con-
sciousness on these points while doing something about evening the score.
There was also the challenge of testing the limits of free speech'.103 It would
seem that on this last point the book was indeed successful. Upon its original
publication, Hoffman faced a litany of court injunctions, class actions, bans,
conspiracy charges and acts of harassment. There is no doubt that Digger
slogans like 'it's free because it's yours', epigrams saying 'you got screwed if
you paid for this',104 or plain calls to 'steal this book' alarmed more than just
booksellers. As Hoffman's later experiences showed, the romantic attempt to

establish a money-free economy was treated by the 'establishment' as more
than a clever rhetorical device. Yet, on the other hand, one could argue that
in every free-listing the logic of the market was constantly reinforced, not
transcended. In shifting between different, self-consciously ambiguous
definitions of 'free', it was possible for 'free' to be extraordinarily subversive
while at the same time taking on a decidedly economic character.
The tensions between disciplinary and anti-disciplinary politics are evident
in the countercultural understanding of the antithesis of 'free': not unfreedom
or confinement, as might have been expected, but 'money'. 'Money doesn't
talk. It swears', boasts a Digger saying, and to quote another: 'Money, like
God, is Dead'.105 Jerry Rubin urged people to eat their money and die and
challenged that 'everything should be free for all, if it's free for some'. Rubin
saw money as violence and believed that America could only become free
'when the dollar bill becomes worthless'. 'Burning money', he continued, 'is
an act of love, an act on behalf of humanity'.106 To dramatize their com-
mitment to these principles, on 23 August 1967, Rubin and Hoffman (with
others) participated in the now famous incident of throwing money onto the
floor of the New York Stock Exchange.107 The Yippies projected an image of a
new society where everything would be free and people would go to museums
just to look at dollar bills.108
What I would call this anti-disciplinary approach to money is quite easily
distinguished from conventional Left attitudes (new and old) towards wealth
and its distribution, although it has some affinity with particular anarchist
currents. It is also a recognizable aspect of the formation of a new political
language which challenged the rationality of deeming the existence of money
an incontrovertible fact. Note Mairowitz's comments that 'Money is not to be
hoarded, it is to be redistributed'.109 The sense of redistribution invoked here
was far from the traditional Left desire to tackle economic injustice. In fact,
early in 1968 when the Digger Free Frame of Reference was revived (after
being closed down in the previous year) and ideas of a Free Bank were
being discussed, a group calling themselves The Free City Distribution
Company 'went from door to door in San Francisco's wealthiest ($100,000)
district asking the inhabitants if they needed anything from the van'.110
Mairowitz goes to the extent of warning that to question this action is to deny
its 'preposterous' and 'beautiful' nature as 'the seasoning on the soup of
revolution'.111
Even though many of the free services (clinics, legal services, and so forth)
were later institutionalized as welfare agencies catering to quite a different
clientele, the 'free' ethic of the sixties could not be accurately described as a
socialist or welfare ethos according to either pre- or post-sixties definitions. In
fact, the socialist redistribution of wealth was spurned as the 'righteousness
of social service', 'the thievery and plunder of a rancid State and economic
system'.112 Rubin provides a telling account of an incident at a Socialist

Workers' Party meeting when he began burning money. 'Why don't you give it
to people who are poor and who need it?', a socialist called out. Rubin's
response reveals the competing realities of a disciplinary and anti-
disciplinary politics: 'I was shocked. The "Socialists" see money just like the
capitalists do. As a real thing'.113 The 'free thing' therefore was far from self-
sacrificing, nor was the aim to elicit praise for theatrical acts of generosity
like handing out free money in the streets. The crux of the sixties counter-
cultural definition of money (and free as its opposite) was a commitment to
a belief in its ultimate unreality. To burn, throw or give it away was to 'scorn
the fundament of an economic mentality',114 not merely to alter existing
economic arrangements. This is very aptly demonstrated by Timothy Leary's
response to his son burning someone else's $1000 bill:
I can't give my beautiful wise, turned on son any logical reason why
he shouldn't burn a thousand dollar bill. And if you think you can,
fellow parents, you just don't understand the problem which the
Buddha saw and the DNA codes and which your kids are facing in
psychedelic-electronic 1968. Then I talked to the young man from
L.A. whose thousand dollar bill had been burned ... The young man
didn't even mention the loss of the money, and when I asked him
about it he said, 'Well I've always wanted to burn a thousand dollar
bill. Hasn't everybody?' And this from a twenty-two year old who
lives with his wife and two kids in a small house on $200 a month.115
The traditional boundaries between the political and non-political were

rendered meaningless according to the carnivalesque politics of 'ecstasy', of
frivolity, playpower, Yippie and Digger. Instead, distinctions were drawn
between 'straight', disciplinary political aims and methods associated with
the Left and an 'innocent' radicalism which attempted to break the margins
of rational thought. Such a politics does not fit comfortably into either one of
the twin (New Left or counterculture) retrospective narratives of the sixties.
Attempts to forge a language which captured this innocence produced
various linguistic markers which signified that certain experiences were
beyond rational explanation. In the extract from Leary cited above, the
mention of the Buddha and the DNA codes served this function. But Leary's
comments are interesting for another reason. Not only do they exemplify an
anti-disciplinary politics placing itself outside conventional definitions of
politics, beyond language and beyond interpretation, but they also represent
a bid (evident in much of the free movement) to move beyond the capitalist
market. Countercultural writings expressed a particular dissatisfaction with
and interpretation of capitalism. They not only demonstrated what was
experienced as oppressive about capitalism by a significant body of white
urban, middle-class youth in the sixties, but, in so doing, also revealed what
capitalism it was that they experienced. It was not the capitalism of the
production line. Rather, capitalist consumption was stamped the main
adversary and became the chief site of radical critique and protest in the
decade.
From 'the free thing' to the commune movement, consumption was tar-
geted as a key arena where 'resistance' would take place. Yet, the relationship
between the sixties counterculture and the consumer capitalism it challenged
was seriously vexed. Leary's comments are no exception in this regard. Why,
for example, in the passage quoted above, does Leary find it necessary to
point out that his son's friend has two children, lives in a small house, is on a
low income and still doesn't care about his $1000 bill being burnt? It is not
difficult to detect in these qualifications the same anxiety over affluence
(discussed in Chapter 1) as that voiced by the permissiveness theorists. Why
would this money-burning exercise have been less remarkable if the reader
assumed that it had happened to and was subsequently approved of by
someone wealthy?
Leary s anxiety over affluence here is no more pronounced than the anxiety
conveyed by many of his similarly prosperous counterparts in the sixties. As
John Gerassi wrote: 'we are the products of capitalism's greatest con-
tradiction - that it simply doesn't satisfy ... I got taught by having it. I've had
the fancy home, the maid, the car, the expense accounts, the titles etc'.116
Timothy Leary as usual chose rather novel means to resolve these anxieties.
Yet, in the passage quoted above, despite the very deliberate efforts he
employs to divert attention away from a reading of the incident that would
raise questions about extravagance, waste, indulgence and excess, his sense of
unease about this episode is none the less conveyed. What interests me about
Leary's failure to retell this story in a language which transcends deeply
embedded codes of American puritanism117 is not the possible biographical
or cultural explanation (which could prove equally illuminating), but, as I
have tried to highlight throughout this chapter, the paradoxical and fragile
task of creating a new 'pure' language of politics purged of a disciplinary
vocabulary.
For some activists in the sixties the inherent paradoxes, tensions, and
internal inconsistencies of this new politics were not a problem; these were
hailed instead as the radical edge of the anti-disciplinary project. This would
include groups like the Diggers, Yippies, Merry Pranksters, Up Against the
Wall Motherfuckers and countless individual activists who moved in and
out or between these groups and other more conventionally 'political'
organizations. It would also embrace those who informally participated in a
'psychedelic' culture; a culture which itself celebrated paradox and confusion.
For others the contradictory threads which constituted the fabric of an anti-
disciplinary politics were under enormous strain. Leary's comments are but
one example of an unsuccessful attempt to disguise, resolve or convincingly

extol these tensions. Another remarkable and as yet untheorized example can
be found in the venture to move the problems of the sixties counterculture
off-shore, to a country where all tensions and incongruities seemed to dis-
appear: a country where different codes and modes of rationality were seen to
be at play; a 'metaphoric' country called 'India', which in the logic of anti-
disciplinary protest was perceived to be beyond the capitalist market.
Chapter 3
Consuming India
I slept all afternoon & when I woke up I thought it was morning, I

didn't know where I was. I had no name for India.
(Allen Ginsberg)1
By 1967 something depicted as 'old Calcutta' appeared on San Francisco

streets. It took the form of 'beggars squatting on the sidewalk',2 anklet bells,
incense, mandalas, and fabrics with paisley designs. Sitar music became
popular, particularly after its pioneering use by the Beatles in their Sgt.
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, and in the spectrum of under-
ground publications published that year in the United States and Canada,
advertisements announced that 'the soul of India' could be found in a Ravi
Shankar record.3 The same publications advertised the Maharishi Yogi as an
'album to experience'.4 San Francisco was described as the 'new Jagannath
Puri'5 and posters and flyers were released with the promise 'Stay High
Forever'. The Jagannath temple at Puri (a holy city of pilgrimage for Hindus
in India) became significant to the Hare Krishna movement because of the
Rath-Yatra, a festival held in June or July in which a cart or chariot sets out
from the temple to commemorate the journey of Krishna from Gokul to
Mathura. The broader appeal of the image of the Lord Jagannath in the
sixties seems to have been generated by the widely held perception that
the image of this god was 'childlike' or 'cartoon'. The fast-growing Hare
Krishna movement meant there was no need to 'come down' any more.6
In England, the recording of the Hare Krishna mantra sold 70,000 copies
in the first week of its release.7 In the Haight-Ashbury, the Cost Plus
Import Store sold out of all its tiny images of the Hindu Lord Jagannath, as
48
Consuming India 49
people suddenly began wearing the god attached to a string around their
necks.8
As Derek Taylor observed retrospectively, 'the Indian influence' came to
pervade the whole era of the sixties (and it is worth noting that, even twenty
years later, the same countercultural misconceptions about India are repro-
duced by Taylor in his focus on the association between cannabis use and
'Indian' religion).9 In Armand Biteaux's The New Consciousness, out of the 133
listings of new consciousness organizations, almost every second group
reflects this Indian influence in the form of Sanskrit names, yoga practices
and the like.10 Stores opened in New York with names like The Electric Lotus.
Swami Satchinanda proclaimed 'America has everything and it should have
yoga too'.11 Everyday speech became punctuated with Sanskrit words and
when English words were written - in magazines, on posters and in books -
they were shaped according to an imitation of Sanskrit lettering. Life
Magazine dubbed 1967 as the 'Year of the Guru'. Issue number 8 of the San
Francisco Oracle was declared the Indian issue with individually scented and
coloured articles on Indian philosophy and mythology.12 And it was during
this same year that Richard Alpert felt more 'real' wandering through the
streets of Delhi, naked except for a dhoti (a length of cloth pulled up between
the legs and worn by some men in India), with a chalkboard as his only
means of communication, than he did in all.his years as a Harvard professor.
He records: 'I was silent all the time. At American Express, writing my words,
I was so high that not at one moment was there even a qualm or doubt'.13
Like the trends documented above, Alpert's lack of 'doubt' exemplifies a
certain kind of exchange between India and the West which was typical of the
sixties. While this exchange had its roots in European trade and expansion,
German and English romanticism and American transcendentalism, it took
on a particularly curious form during the 1960s. Distinctively countercultural
ways of 'knowing' India emerged. In any attempt to outline the unique
features of this sixties episteme and trace its links to other ways of knowing
India, the question of what 'India' was experienced by the sixties counter-
culture must be addressed. Retrospective accounts of the sixties which argue
that the interest in mysticism (and Indian mysticism in particular)
contributed to the demise of sixties radicalism are open to challenge, as is the
view that the turn towards India represented the apolitical wing of sixties
movements. However, these views can be challenged through an examination
of a range of sources which do not regularly feature in the 'looking back'
narratives of the decade. In an effort to move beyond the confines of language
and Western thought into an apparently different mode of rationality India
needs to be viewed as a significant element in anti-disciplinary forms of
sixties protest.
India was undoubtedly 'consumed' by the sixties counterculture but not in
the now customary sense of the term where a monolithic capitalism greedily
appropriates everything in its path. (Such notions of appropriation will be

discussed in Chapter 4.) Here consumption refers to certain practices
which take a cultural and social form, like travelling, participating in
rituals, reading, imbibing drugs, chanting or buying artefacts. That these
consuming practices were not only crucial to maintaining a capitalist
economy but also to the ideology which supported it needs little elaboration.
What makes the countercultural India of particular interest is that it was in
the very effort by hippie travellers to refuse consumption and to move beyond
the capitalist market that their identity as consumers manifested itself most
profoundly.
It is also important to note that the India discussed in this chapter is not
what Robert Bohm calls the 'empirical' India of actual heterogeneous social
relations.14 My concern is rather with the diverse commodities, rituals,
language and ideas which were consumed within and outside the sub-
continent. These include concepts, words, artefacts, thoughts, music, modes
of dress and particular ceremonies which were given the name India' in the
sixties. India, the country, with a specific history, geography and materiality
beyond sixties representations of it, is not the object of investigation here.
Moreover, in the case of the sixties India and what it denoted, the anti-
disciplinary tendencies of the counterculture were often magnified to such an
extent that they became distorted beyond recognition. Hence, the 'real' and
'metaphoric' journeys to India (in search of a guru and/or self-discovery) have
frequently been paraded by later commentators as the definitive example of
the 'apolitical' character of the counterculture, the mystical in opposition to
the political, the mark of the hippie.15 By 'metaphoric' journeys I mean both
the experience of India via the consumption of commodities which signified
India and the LSD trip. Timothy Leary proclaimed that 'the impact of a visit
to India is psychedelic'.16 Similarly, the psychedelic experience was often
represented as being 'India'. See, for example, Be Here Now, where Richard
Alpert after his first psylocibin experience finds it only possible to really
communicate with those who shared his psychedelic experience because
'it was as though we had just been travelling in Tibet'.17 In contrast to
categorizing such travelling as apolitical, 'India' can be viewed as one term in
an anti-disciplinary idiom of resistance, championed in the decade; an under-
standing and experience of India and the West both linked to, and a
manifestation of, the new politics.
There is no doubt that the spotlight on India during the sixties signalled the
personalization of politics, with the individual nature of the journeys often
being emphasized at the expense of the ideal relationship between self and
social transformation so central to sixties definitions of politics. Nevertheless,
as the abundant countercultural writings on the subject show, pilgrimages to
India were frequently portrayed as an extension of the idea that 'you' were the
revolution:18 'your own' revolutionary transformation, according to this logic,
Consuming India 51
clearly signalled a form of political activity. Moreover, the journeys people

made in whatever fashion (actual travel, the consumption of drugs, buying
Indian artefacts or participating in Indian cults in the West) were never
entirely private experiences, regardless of the rhetoric.
Despite the idiosyncrasies characteristic of particular authors, with few
exceptions, most sixties accounts of India follow a certain pattern and reflect
what appears to be a collective experience of the subcontinent. Ideas of what
to expect became so routinized that standard ways of reacting to and inter-
preting experiences of India were widely circulated. Again and again, similar
motifs appear in the writings which document India during this period.
Engaging with India in the sixties was primarily a sign of rebellion. In a
more general sense, the 'exotic' had come to stand for a rejection of the
constraints of both industrialized society and 'straight' politics, as in the
levitation of the Pentagon (discussed in Chapter 2) or in the celebration of
native Americans, Zen Buddhism, anything to do with Mayan civilization,
Chinese Taoism and Islamic Sufism. But India came to be seen as a particular
embodiment of specific countercultural tenets. India signified the ultimate
rebellious stance: namely, to become the 'Other'. To imbibe India was, in one
dramatic gesture, both to demolish the prison of technical Western rationality
and to destroy the constraints of nationality. To paraphrase Gary Snyder, in
his poem, 'A Curse on the Men in the Pentagon, Washington D.C, it was to
kill the white man within.19 Charles Perry connects the Indian theme of the
sixties with the attempt by radicals to dissociate themselves from America
because of its role in Vietnam.20 Yet, while Snyder's poem would seem to bear
out this observation, travel to India was not portrayed as a simple attack on
any single form of national identity. It was put forward as a far more
thoroughgoing resistance to and transcendence of the very idea of nationality
as conceived by the modern State: in this respect travelling to India was not
just another form of anti-Americanism.
This spurning of nationality often centred around the passport, an object
which according to Paul Fussell has had a profound effect on the 'modern
sensibility'.21 Richard Neville recounts the sense of liberation fellow travellers
('on the road to Kathmandu') felt without their passports even though their
actual physical mobility (due to border restrictions) was greatly reduced. He
also cites the example of a thousand hippies from seven different countries
setting up a Hippie Republic in Costa Rica because they wanted to live in 'a
world without frontiers and without laws'.22 Similarly, Harvey Meyers, with
reference to his travels in India in the late sixties, comments that, 'to us, our
passports revealed a past shallowness which almost embarrassed our present
sense of purpose and achievement'.23 Gita Mehta records such sentiments in
her sardonic book, Karma Kola. She quotes the words of a French woman
visiting India:
I remember I was in the holy city of Hardwar, standing by the

river. I looked down and saw that in one hand I carried my passport,
the guarantee of the president of France that I was free to travel
anywhere in the world. In my other hand I carried my mala. Those
beads were also a passport, to the ways of the spirit. I could only
follow one of them. I chose and threw my passport into the river.
As the passport hit the water, will you believe this? From those
very ripples appeared the face of my guru, laughing and calling my
name.24
In the countercultural literature on India, such extremes in the refusal of

familiar versions of both rationality and nationality were not uncommon.
Sixties radicals envisaged the nation as an artificial construct. Benedict
Anderson's seminal concept of an 'imagined community' comes to mind
here.25 Unlike traditional Left 'internationalism', which posited different
kinds of universal categories ('workers', for example) as ways of conceiving of
the connections between people, groups and countries, in the sixties the
critique of the nation went a step further. Like the surrealists of the European
avant-garde, who constructed a new imaginative map of the world (giving
prominence to countries perceived to be spiritual and marginalized, like New
Guinea or Ireland), attempts were made by the counterculture to chart
entirely imaginative links (which were acknowledged as such) as well as
alternative geographic correlations. It is not difficult to observe a relationship
between the desire to challenge certain kinds of nationalism (as expressed in
the Yippie call for nothing short of 'destroying Amerika [sic]', which originally
opened Hoffman's Revolution for the Hell of It but was censored in later
printings of the book26) and the well-worn 'hippie trail' across the East, where,
according to Richard Neville, 'young Americans, Australians, Britishers,
Canadians, French, German, Dutch, Italians, Japanese, Scandinavians and
South Africans, dress, talk and travel the same language'.27 By contrast,
elements of the New Left and counterculture exalted the nationalism ex-
pressed in various 'Third World' struggles.
Neville's romantic comments about the hippie trail would be taken in both
the popular and scholarly discourse on the sixties as reflecting the naive,
apolitical face of the sixties counterculture. However, the hippie trail and the
call for groups to establish themselves as 'liberated zones' within bourgeois
society (as a basis for mass revolutionary action)28 are strongly connected.
Even though the call is more recognizably 'political' in the strict pre-sixties
sense of the term, the two are linked by their anti-disciplinary stance on the
imaginary status of the nation. Note the words Jerry Rubin shouted at a
Canadian border guard: 'There are no such things as borders between the
U.S. and Canada. Our passports are our bodies and the earth is round'.29
Consuming India 53
Similarly, when Abbie Hoffman gave 'Woodstock Nation' as his home address
in the Chicago conspiracy trials, he crystallized this idea of an imagined com-
munity and how it differed from conventional Left internationalism:
We carry it around as a state of mind in the same way the Sioux

Indians carried the Sioux nation with them. It is a nation dedicated
to cooperation versus competition, to the idea that people should
have a better means of exchange than property and money, that there
should be another basis for human interaction.30
Robert S. Ellwood's analysis of American religion in the sixties is based on

the proposition that the spiritual and the political were never conventionally
at opposite ends of the spectrum in the decade. He argues that they had more
in common than it might have appeared on the surface, and that the duality
is to a large extent a false one.31 With similar intent, Rebecca Bjork and
Reginald Twigg investigate the hippie axiom about 'dropping out' and
question conventional approaches which take such notions at face value.
How can 'one understand the protest of a group perceived as apolitical and
arhetorical when the term "protest rhetoric" implies a spoken, reasoned
political opposition', the authors ask.32 They argue that certain spectacles that
hippies performed served the purpose of establishing an identity which was
counter to those practices they saw as destructive: namely, transforming
'oneself into expressions of the 'other'. The authors' view that, in the case of
the hippies, 'the cultural rhetoric of protest is something that is lived through
performative articulation of difference in identity, rather than spoken through
the rhetoric of the platform'33 is particularly suggestive. In some respects,
then, the sixties counterculture performed 'India', and this performance,
alongside other anti-disciplinary gestures, contributed to a powerful lexicon
of protest in the decade.
Other significant elements of anti-disciplinary protest were also extended
under the sign 'India'. The way Sanskrit, for example, was so eagerly received
and interpreted as, among other things, an expression of defiance; a pure,
new magical language which would counter all restrictions of 'Western'
culture. This phenomenon is closely related to the attempt by sixties activists
to move outside traditional Marxist categories and fashion a completely new
language of politics (discussed in Chapters 1 and 2). Similarly, India came to
be seen as an 'uncontaminated' place, far from the polluting influences of
money; a place beyond the market where the ethic of 'free' could flourish
supreme. However, before detailing these distinctive and paradoxical features
of the countercultural experience of India it is important first to locate such
developments within the long history of Euro-American perceptions of the
subcontinent.
Thought as dream
As Wilhelm Halbfass so comprehensively documents, India has played a
significant part in the history of European self-understanding. With roots in
the Enlightenment association between criticism of Christianity and interest
in non-European traditions, India has long functioned as a critique of
Europe. According to Halbfass, the form such criticism often took was the
search for older traditions primarily with the view that a more primitive and
original religious consciousness 'could be found in Asia, and specifically in
India'.34 The theme of India as critique was also assimilated into the romantic
movement, particularly German romanticism, 35 which looked to the Orient
both for the source of Europe's historical being and as a commentary on its
contemporary problems. Halbfass describes the romantic interest in India as
'inseparable from a radical critique of the European present'.36 And, as Ainslie
Embree comments, even though India may have been a symbol of the odd
and the exotic, 'it was always part of the furniture of the Western historical
imagination'.37
This romantic view of 'India as critique' was augmented by another motif
also to reappear dramatically in the sixties: notably, a perception of India as
symbolizing an unspoiled pristine state. In the words of Halbfass:
The very idea of India assumed mythical proportions; the turn

towards India became the quest for the true origins of our own
being, a search for the original, infant state of the human race, for
the lost paradise of all religions and philosophies.38
In 'Orientalist Constructions of India', Ronald Inden characterizes this

feature of romanticism as representing the underside of what he calls the
positivist view of India.39 Like the positivist, secularist or utilitarian outlook,
the romantics agreed India was Europe's opposite.40 In both perspectives,
Indian thought was seen to be inherently symbolic and mythological rather
than rational and logical.41 However, these two branches of the European
discourse on India part company on the point of just what is worthy of
celebration. The very aspects of Indian philosophy, art, asceticism and civil-
ization hailed by the romantics as the pure essence of humanity were found
by the positivists to be repugnant: wasteful, deluded and even repulsive.42
Such positions on India were not confined to Europe alone. In America
since Columbus, according to Robert Bohm, there has 'always been a strange,
semi-mythological quality to the relationship between the United States and
India'.43 This is well expressed in Walt Whitman's famed poem 'Passage to
India', where the voyage or crossing he acclaims is ever a 'Passage to more
than India'.44 Similarly, transcendentalism, a peculiarly American form of
romanticism,45 turned towards India as a vital source of a spirituality which
Consuming India 55
could combat utilitarianism and temper the barren influence of industrial-

ization by metaphorically halting the encroachment of what Leo Marx calls
the 'machine in the garden'.46 Note Henry David Thoreau's musings beside
Walden pond in winter:
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cos-

mogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition
years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our
modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial... I lay down
the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant
of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still
sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the
root of a tree with his crust and water jug.47
Thoreau's notorious hermitage in the Concord woods has been viewed by

some scholars as a quest based directly on his readings of 'Asian Indian
writings', on the model of the Hindu ascetic and sage.48 Throughout Walden
(the work in which Thoreau documents his retreat in such great detail) the
'Hindoos' are invoked as 'poor in outward riches [but] none so rich in in-
ward',49 forever a point of reference against which the shallow materialism of
industrial capitalist society in the early half of nineteenth-century America is
measured. In a comparable vein, Ralph Waldo Emerson hailed Hinduism for
its appreciation of the material universe as only the garment, cloaking an
underlying divine unity within, which in his own society went unrecognized.50
Whereas America worshipped the garment, in India - according to the trans-
cendentalist understanding of it - the essential unity within was more
correctly revered.
It is not difficult to identify links between the sixties counterculture and
nineteenth-centUry transcendentalism, particularly given that, despite its
anti-historical language (in other contexts), the American counterculture
promoted such a lineage. Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau were self-
consciously portrayed as the founding fathers of the hippie movement.
Walden was widely read as a design for back-to-nature enterprises and as an
expression of an anti-consumption ethos.51 Whitman was endlessly 'sung'
(especially by Allen Ginsberg) as the ideal pure uncorrupted consciousness,
and Emerson became the symbol of a spirit capable of transcending the
material world.52 Even without these markers the original works themselves
give ample clues as to why they would attract the sixties counterculture.
Thoreau's proud assertion, 'I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and
I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my
seniors',53 makes it easy to see why hippies (in celebrating a youth culture and
proclaiming open distrust of anyone over thirty) claimed him as their own.
Yet, in true contradictory fashion, the sixties counterculture chose ancestors
who were also significant figures in the nationalist American imagination,

thus highlighting once again the problematic relationship between the desire
to express more authentically 'American' values and the urge to simul-
taneously destroy America.
In Ronald Inden's view, Georg Hegel's likening of Indian thought to 'the
workings of the mind asleep'54 is reproduced in many scholarly accounts of
India today. I would extend Inden's observation to include the sixties India.
Like other themes which can be traced back to European romanticism,
transcendentalism, or even to earlier representations of India,55 the 'thought
as dream' motif frequently reappears in countercultural ways of knowing
India. In its most extreme version, India itself becomes the dream; a per-
spective readily expressed in countless writings on the topic. Allen Ginsberg,
for example, begins his Indian Journals with a dream.56 Throughout his
extensive jottings on his travels, distinctions between thought and dream
are blurred and India features, in many instances, as no more than an
(often unpleasant) hallucination. Obviously this is also due to the fact that
his experience was mediated through extensive use of morphine, opium
and 'ganja' (marijuana). Nevertheless, this alone does not explain why his
hallucinatory observations reproduce an existing framework of knowledge on
India which was expressed centuries earlier by figures who had no empirical
encounter with India nor necessarily with the drugs Ginsberg consumes.
Hence, many of the observations made about India by the sixties counter-
culture - even though they often took a bizarre form - tapped into an existing
framework of knowledge on India employed much earlier by the romantics
and the transcendentalists. Consistent with the 'thought as dream' con-
figuration, George Harrison comments that with Indians you don't have to
talk, 'you just communicate', because unlike Westerners 'they are a bit more
spiritually inclined and they just sort of feel'.57 His impressions about the
dreamlike quality of Indians culminate with the remarkable implication that
speech is somehow redundant in India, because Indians are just happy and
vibrate'.58 As Robert Bohm concludes, 'the counterculture discarded the
factual India' and preferred instead a 'fantasy India, based on the Western
myth that the Indian people were metaphysical and non-empirical'.59
Actually, when anything resembling what Bohm calls the factual India
intruded on the non-empirical sixties experience of the subcontinent the
result was profound disappointment and dissatisfaction. Take, for example,
the comments of one of the early Hare Krishna devotees, when he first went
to India to study. He was shocked to find he was expected to learn 'in just a
mundane school', rather than in a temple, and moreover to study with
ordinary students, 'boys with thin moustaches and giggling girls', not the
enlightened saints and goddesses he had expected.60 Before Richard Alpert
began, as a disciple, to follow Bhagwan Dass around India - notably not an
Indian but rather a 23-year-old Californian in a dhoti - he too was extremely
Consuming India 57
disheartened by the experience of an 'unmetaphorical' India.61 Like the

transcendentalists before them, sixties pilgrims shared a similar disinterest
in contemporary India or anything breaching an idealist conception of the
country's glorious philosophical and contemplative tradition. Thoreau,
according to Rick Fields, even went as far as claiming that it was unnecessary
to learn Sanskrit, because 'in every man's brain is the Sanskrit'.62 Interestingly,
over seventy years later, Timothy Leary reproduced this perspective with the
conviction that 'you can read the Vedas and the Vedanta in your own tissues
and understand'.63
Like their adopted spiritual forefathers,64 many travellers to India in the
sixties experienced the subcontinent as similarly embodying 'the past'. India
was viewed as a living museum of the West, housing animate pure antiquities
which could conveniently function as a tangible critique of the European and
American present. As a US college student commented to Robert Bohm, 'the
nearer I got to India, the more my senses grew that I was getting close to
something ancient that we've lost in the West'.65 Hence, any incursion of the
Indian 'present' into such impressions was dismissed as a fall from Indian
authenticity due to the corruptive influence of the West. At other times, or
even simultaneously, the secularist, positivist negation of India (discussed by
Inden as the other side of romanticism) was employed to explain situations
where the reality did not match up to the dream of India.
The idea of India as somehow 'our' past was reiterated in the oft-recorded
perception that travelling there was just like 'going home'. India was
experienced as familiar. According to one underground publication of the day,
it was 'a warm moist place, very like a womb'.66 However, paradoxically (as
we have seen in the Krishna devotee's comments about the mundane school),
it was only the 'exotic' side of India that was welcomed as familiar. Anything
registered as 'ordinary', strangely did not feel like 'home' at all. Richard Alpert
attempts to describe the homely nature of the exotic and unexpected after his
guru accurately reads his mind:
And I cried and I cried and I cried. And I wasn't happy and I wasn't
sad. It wasn't that sort of crying. The only thing I could say was it felt
like I was home. Like the journey was over. Like I had finished.67
This sensation is later reproduced by other writers and not always with
reference to such unusual events. For example, Phillippa Pullar, in 1981,
describes the feeling of 'being home' as soon as she sees Indians on the 'Air
India' flight from London. Her book, The Shortest Journey, highlights an issue
already discussed in Chapter 1, namely that 'the sixties' refers to a cultural
phenomenon, not just to a set of dates.68 This blend of the familiar and the
uncommon, the mixture of the old and new, the exceptional (or supernatural
in Alpert's case) being experienced as natural and ordinary, was woven into
the very fabric of the sixties understanding of India. India was an ancient,
Euro-American repressed self, but in a new pristine form. What in Edward
Said's terms would be considered an archetypal orientalist problematic69 was
employed to explain both the newness of the events experienced in India and
their homely reception. To travel to India was to return, in a cultural sense, to
an innocence lost. In a biographical sense it was a return to childhood.
The orientalism inherent in such observations cannot be artificially
separated out for analysis. As any cursory glance at the countercultural
literature on India will show, the subcontinent is endlessly and unsurprisingly
represented as being the West's antithesis: essentially spiritual, irrational,
innocent and timeless.70 Such characterizations infuse almost every utterance
on India. This is as true of the Enlightenment notions discussed by Halbfass
as it is of the romanticism analysed by Inden and the writings of the
American transcendentalists as well. In this respect, the countercultural India
was not unique. The same assumptions which reinforced and provided a
rationale for British imperialism were applied with abandon in the sixties.
However, it is worth highlighting the stunningly literal and possessive way in
which sixties travellers implemented the notion that the country was a living
Western past. Witness the language used by Harvey Meyers when describing
sharing a 'chillum' (a special pipe for smoking ganja) with an Indian 'sadhu'
(ascetic, mendicant, or holy man) and a friend called John O'Shea:
On the matter of dhuni71 etiquette, my friend John O'Shea would

take second place to no other sadhu. He showed that matted haired
mongrel the way a chillum should properly be prepared, the amount
of respect, love and devotion that should be poured into Shiva if
knowledge were to result. Travelling with and learning from various
itinerant sadhus, John had come easily to exceed them at their own
game. Something in him was sensitive to the feeling, in tune with the
real spirit of these ancient rituals. Ceremony was part of his nature,
and he tried to express as much of it as any occasion could bear. The
manner in which these once reverent formalities were practised
along the degraded contemporary sadhu circuit offended some native
purist instinct in him and he regarded it almost as a duty to set a
good example at every dhuni.11
Finding some originary, ceremonial spirit in India, people like this John
O'Shea felt it was their right and duty to then educate Indians about what
pure, 'authentic' Indian rituals should be like.73
As Peter Marshall points out, Europeans have always created Hinduism
in their own image. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Hindus
emerged in European thought as, in Marshall's apt phrase, 'adhering to some-
thing akin to undogmatic Protestantism'.74 Later, in the twentieth century,
Consuming India 59
Hindus resurface as mystics.75 Wilhelm Halbfass comes to similar con-

clusions when examining recent examples of what he calls 'India as part of
the history of European self-understanding'. He demonstrates that even the
notion of 'experience' (so emphasized in encounters between India and the
West) is a historical by-product of cultural confrontation and reinterpre-
tation; neither indigenous to pre-colonial Hinduism nor simply a Western
import.76
Conforming to Edward Said's characterization of the way Europe 'invented'
the East,77 the counterculture often unhesitatingly expressed their Indian
experiences as justly reflecting their own self-image. Note, for example, how,
when Allen Ginsberg looks back on the Indian influence in the sixties, he
comments on the sexual freedom Indian garments provided for the genitals.
He describes Paisley as a sperm symbol, 'simultaneously erotic, spiritual and
ecological'.78 Ginsberg thus reveals more about the priorities of his own
culture in the sixties than about India at the time. In her record of Ginsbergs
antics, published in 1968, Jane Kramer includes Ginsberg discussing how,
when he had a Blake vision as a youth, his father sent him to a psychiatrist.
Ginsberg comments that had he grown up in India and experienced a similar
vision, he would have been 'gently encouraged to express [himself], to work it
out and then left alone'.79 This observation, once again, bears little relation-
ship to Indian cultural codes, but says much about Western ones in the
sixties. As Gita Mehta so drily says of Ginsberg's announcement that Calcutta
was the most liberated city in the world because so many people went around
naked: 'it was a characteristically original view'!80 Patrick Marnham's telling
confession about India, 'Nothing was real in our minds until it had known us.
Then it was real',81 is borne out again and again in the sixties literature on
India. Ginsberg (in one of the many revealing dreams he has while in India)
is asked why he is there, sitting 'cross-legged, Buddha style' on a pile of
garbage. He replies: 'I am here to make the refuse sanctified'.82 In such
examples, the countercultural experience of India was unexceptional, draw-
ing upon an abundant source of knowledge about India from the traditions
mentioned above. On the other hand, peculiarly countercultural ways of
knowing India did emerge in the sixties which were less about sanctifying the
refuse or romanticizing the scriptural, mystical India, and more about quite
a different kind of awareness.
Rituals of travel, reading and imagining
The romantic experience of India, typified by American transcendentalism,

was an experience based on the rituals of reading and imagining. Emerson
and Thoreau knew India from Sanskrit works newly translated by British
orientalists at the end of the eighteenth century. They read and discussed
William Jones' Asiatic Researches, published in 1784, and were enchanted

by his 1789 translation of Kalidasa's Shakuntala which, according to
A. K. B. Pillai, was the Indian work most widely read in both Europe and
America until 1900.83 Charles Wilkins' 1785 translation of The Bhagavad Gita
was eagerly devoured as was Jones' 1794 translation of The Laws ofManu. Of
the latter, Thoreau commented that it 'comes to me with such a volume of
sound as if it had been swept unobstructed over the plains of Hindustan'.84 By
immersing themselves in these writings, the transcendentalists had no
trouble imagining the Hindustan plains.85 These imaginings were felt to be so
vivid that actually visiting the country was perceived to be both unnecessary
and irrelevant to a full understanding of India. In the words of Rick Fields:
'The Concordians stayed at home'.86 Reading was an adequate, safe and
satisfying 'passage to India'.
As previously discussed, the counterculture was similarly interested in
a non-empirical India. Nevertheless, in true contradictory fashion, literal
journeys to the country were made and, moreover, were perceived to be
necessary to verify or augment the metaphoric ones. While a certain frame-
work of knowledge on India was shared between the counterculture and the
transcendentalists, many rituals were not. To read Hindu scriptures and
imagine Indian rites remained one route to India. However, the counter-
culture also forged other pathways: namely, a special kind of travelling within
the subcontinent and outside it, and, most notably, a particular economic
consumption of 'things Indian'.
In many ways the 'hippie trail' forcefully proclaimed an anti-modern
aspiration, the desire to somehow recapture a pre-modern state. William
Connolly posits this aspiration - like the drive to be postmodern - as, ironic-
ally, one of 'the paradigmatic ways of being modern'.87 Mimicking people in
other times and places, according to Connolly, is a way defenders and critics
of modernity alike define their own (and modernity's) special status. It marks
what he describes as modernity's perpetual newness, 'its eternal coming into
being'.88 The sixties India well illustrates Connolly's observations. To imitate
rituals, dress and language perceived to be Indian was an attempt to create
both a condition of perpetual newness and a means of delineating 'excep-
tionality', a status granted to certain experiences or to particular individual
initiates.
Victor Turner analyses the counterculture as an endeavour to create a
'communitas' (a social anti-structure, a paradisiacal, Utopian, millennial state
of affairs) permanently contained within life.89 The sixties India bears out
Turner's use of the concept of communitas; a timeless condition and an
eternal 'now' where everything is exceptional.90 Yet the countercultural notion
of India also had a more mundane aspect to it. India was novel, and 'things
Indian' were fresh, original and innovative in a way which had as much
to do with a particular capitalist expression of modernity (very familiar to
Consuming India 61
participants in sixties movements) as with a metaphysical pursuit of the

eternal. In the romantic, transcendentalist version of India, the familiar was
emphasized over the uncommon or the new. Emerson and Thoreau imagined
India as a mislaid part of their own cultural past, something originary, an
ancient source of a religious consciousness forgotten but not strange to the
West. And, as we have seen, the counterculture approached India from within
this paradigm. India was viewed as a living European past, the essence of all
philosophy.
Gary Snyder even includes the philosophy of Marxism in this category:
It is an easy step from the dialectic of Marx and Hegel to an interest

in the dialectic of early Taoism, the I Ching, Yin and Yang theories.
From Taoism, it is another easy step to the philosophies and
mythologies of India - vast, touching the deepest areas of the mind,
and with a view to the ultimate nature of the universe which is
almost identical with the most sophisticated thought in modern
physics - the truth - whatever it is, which is called the dharma.91
Yet, another ingredient to this way of knowing India was added by the
counterculture in the sixties. While the ancient and familiar aspects of Indian
spirituality were underlined, so too were the strange and the new. Novelty was
a key component in the countercultural experience of India. Nevertheless,
Harvey Meyers, for example, writes that on his first visit to India, he knew and
'remembered' Calcutta by feelings and a certain resonance of mood: 'every-
thing in Calcutta felt intimate and familiar'.92 But in the same breath he
stresses that 'no Indian street scene ever struck [him] as commonplace or
without surprise'.93 Like many other accounts of India, it is this latter
observation - much more than the former - that gives the overall shape to
his journey.
Alongside newness, another distinctively countercultural dimension to the
experience of India was an emphasis on 'more'. Novelty was apparently
apprehended in a way which could be quantified. India was represented as
unsurpassed in its newness: more unusual and exotic, more spiritual than
anywhere else, more pure, more perfect. India, by definition, was therefore
less corrupted and less materialistic than the West. In a widely reported 1967
colloquium between the so-called 'leaders' of the underground, organized by
the San Francisco Oracle, Alan Watts comments that when Allen Ginsberg
chants Hindu sutras, 'there's a joyousness and a feeling of delight doing this
chant that has more zip to it than anything we knew in the past as being
holy'.94 Later he continues: 'the mantrams, the images of Krishna, have in this
culture, no foul associations' whereas 'the word God is contaminated'.95
This desire for comparison, where the accent was on India as the summit
of a non-prosaic experience, repeatedly surfaces in countercultural literature.
'More' seemed to verify the novelty of an experience. Note the following

description of the Rath-Yatra festival held in San Francisco in 1969 by the
Hare Krishna movement. As the tall wooden cart carrying images of Hindu
deities was precariously pulled along Haight Street, Bhavandra, a devotee,
ecstatically registers the differences between the thousand hippies at the
festival and the worshippers of Krishna:
Many of these people who attended Rath-yatra were intoxicated. We

were not intoxicated, of course, but we were higher than they. That
we could understand. Everyone was smiling, everyone was laughing,
everyone was in ecstasy, everyone was dancing, everyone was
chanting. And we were doing it more than anyone. We were doing
more chanting, more laughing and smiling and feeling more freedom.
We were free to have a shaved head, free to wear a dhoti, free to blow
a conchshell, free to spin around on the street and jump up. Even if
you were a hippie you couldn't be more far out than the ratha cart
and the Jagannatha, because no-one looks more far out than Him.
The hippies had come dressed up in outfits with big feathers in their
hair and everything, but they were dim compared to Jagannatha.96
It is worth quoting this extract at such length because it most pertinently

exemplifies a very curious quality in the way India was consumed by the
sixties counterculture, something, I would argue, that to date has not been
theorized adequately by any of the commentators on the period. Why was this
freedom to wear a dhoti or blow a conchshell in Haight Street experienced as
so momentously liberating and significant? Why was it so important to feel,
and to be seen to be, more 'far out' than anyone else?
These questions can partly be answered by reference to the sense in which
India and Indian things were perceived somehow to magically thwart dis-
ciplinary boundaries and distinguish the rebellious subject from the duped,
complicit or 'straight' one. To swirl in the street dressed in a dhoti in the
mimicking of an Indian ritual (rather than just being dressed in feathers, for
example) was to demolish the constraints of a certain form of rationality,
nationality, language and 'modern' subjecthood while at the same time
paradoxically drawing on an ancient religion for legitimacy. What Connolly
deems as the very modern desire for novelty or 'perpetual newness' is satisfied
through forms perceived to be 'pre-modern'. That it was necessary to prove
extremities of newness and to compete on a scale of novelty - measured not
through intangible 'states of mind' but through material commodities
(feathers or dhotis) - only highlights the contradictory relationship between
the sixties counterculture and the consumer capitalism it rejected.
Before examining some of the details of this relationship, a little more
needs to be said about other identities embraced in the sixties. It would seem
Consuming India 63
that as the decade progressed, one of the most radical of anti-disciplinary

gestures that could be made was first to reject the disciplinary pressures of
one's own culture (including the confines of Left politics), then go to India
where the constraints of another culture could be wilfully ignored, and finally
abandon all autonomous responsibility for discipline by paradoxically adopt-
ing the authoritarian discipline of a guru. One could almost read such a
chronology as emblematic of the insurgent consciousness of the decade.
However, the progression from political activist to obedient disciple was not
snugly received by all participants in sixties movements as either logical or
subversive. Note, for instance, the reaction, in 1973, to Rennie Davis (one of
the early leaders in the anti-war movement, and a member of the Chicago 8 -
comprising, with him, Abbie Hoffman, Bobby Seale, David Dellinger, John
Froines, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin and Lee Weiner - who were on trial for
conspiracy in 1969). Davis, on his return from India, told interviewers all he
wanted to do was to put his forehead on the boot of Guru Maharaj-ji 'for as
long as he'll let me',97 and the response throughout 'the movement' ranged
from sympathy to ridicule and disgust.98
As far as was practical, 'hippie' travellers to India during the decade
studiously tried to ignore the rules and regulations governing tourists and
Indian citizens alike. Certain 'Indian' conventions and customs were taken up
as acceptable to follow, while many others were scorned. Harvey Meyers
writes that:
Early on, almost at the outset of my venture here, I had decided I

would have no part in the mundane matters of this strange and
chaotic country, would decline involvement in the rules and regu-
lations, call it the reality, which did not govern so much as herd and
corral the lives of its inhabitants.99
Like others in India during this time,100 Meyers' disregard for Indian rules
manifested itself most markedly when monetary transaction was required,
for example with ticket collectors, rickshaw drivers or in payment for other
services. The orientalism at the heart of this preference for the non-empirical
India and the remnants of colonial power relations which made it possible
for these travellers often to 'get away with' breaking the rules is rarely
acknowledged. All kinds of abuses are justified because responsibility and
intentionality are taken over either by an actual guru or, in many instances, a
reified 'India' itself.
India was granted agency in the countercultural writings on the subject.
'India' thus became responsible for people's thoughts and actions. Harvey
Meyers praises India for arranging the theft of his camera, with the obser-
vation: '[trust] India for stripping me of the one possession which could have
kept me from seeing her clearly'.101 Like Richard Alpert, Patrick Marnham,
Allen Ginsberg or Mehta's French girl who threw her passport in the river,102
Meyers presents a picture of being possessed by India through no intention
of his own.103 He notes that the change in his physical well-being while
travelling 'is slight compared with the liberties India had taken with
[his] mind'.104
This (often very selective) renunciation of agency and its projection onto a
fantasy India can be understood as an extension and magnification of anti-
disciplinary tendencies in other forms of sixties protest. Yet in India, more
than 'at home', a range of countercultural desires were satisfied. While India
was the site of all agency, the illusion that the narrow ego or T had been
transcended could be fostered. To ignore the rules and regulations of another
culture enabled the identity of the rebellious subject (and, in the sixties sense,
the political subject) to remain intact. The anti-disciplinary aim of moving
beyond rationality, so typified by the Yippies, was achieved in India by the
abandonment of Enlightenment or scientific notions of cause and effect.105
The desire to live in a world 'without frontiers and laws'106 could be fulfilled
by sitting naked in a restaurant in Calingute village, in Goa, while being
waited upon by Indian women fully clad in saris.107 Surrendering to the
rigorous and strict regime of a guru was a final twist in this rejection of
'modern' forms of logic and causality, discipline, order, work, consumption
and both internal and external regulation. It is not difficult, therefore, to
view submission to a guru not as contrary to but as consistent with anti-
disciplinary approaches to protest.
The complete (but often temporary) transference of self-responsibility and
action either to a reified 'India' or to the charge of a guru (something which
usually, although not always, took place in India), if viewed as an extension
rather than as a rejection of anti-disciplinary tendencies in the sixties
counterculture, is therefore not as incongruous as it would otherwise seem.
Such gestures realized the promises of a particular kind of politics in the
decade. The appetite for a type of protest so radical that it didn't look like
politics at all, as well as the desire to completely smash one's own culture
were equally satisfied by going somewhere else and/or adopting the dress,
rituals, language and behaviour of someone else.
Yet, in the retrospective studies of the period, the Indian experience is often
portrayed as 'selling out':108 the counterculture's betrayal of the movement,
and even the final confirmation of the 'death of the sixties'.109 It is clear,
however, that the sixties India represents the opposite, not the selling out of
the sixties but rather the fulfilment of sixties hopes for the redefinition of
politics. The Indian experience can therefore be reconceptualized as marking
the success of the new anti-disciplinary versions of protest championed in the
decade, with countercultural writings on India providing strong evidence of
the extent to which unconventional definitions of radicalism were being
widely employed in the most unlikely of contexts.
Consuming India 65
Performing India
Sanskrit words, along with incense, sitar music, or certain forms of dress,
were among the 'Indian' items consumed by the counterculture in the sixties.
Such words, usually describing particular Hindu philosophical concepts,
infused the language of protest used by the sixties counterculture. It was one
of the ways India was performed in the decade. Note their predominance at
the first 'human Be-In', in San Francisco in 1967, an event attempting to unite
love and activism. Plans were made for hippies to teach police a special
dispersal 'mantra' (the repetition of sacred words or sounds) to prevent riots
and control the crowds. The police mantra was depicted by the underground
press at the time as a set of magic words 'still used in India to disperse crowds
and multitudes'.110 There was a litter mantra, for cleaning up rubbish after the
event, and a kitchen mantra as well. The 14 January date for the 'Be-In' was
chosen because it was coincident with a 'darshan' (an act of observing the
deity, being in its presence and being seen by it) of unidentified holy men in
Nepal. And for this event or 'gathering of the tribes' to have the proper
religious status as a 'mela' (pilgrimage gathering), an ancient Hindu blessing
ritual called 'pradakshina' (translated as walking clockwise around a polo
field while chanting Sanskrit prayers) had to be performed by Allen Ginsberg
and Gary Snyder."1
Terms like 'mantra', with a very precise philosophical meaning, came to
signify just about anything in the sixties. Allen Ginsberg was noted for always
chanting an elevator mantra when riding in a lift112 and the International
Society for Krishna Consciousness held Mantra Rock Dances in the Haight-
Ashbury district at this time.113
Just as mantra could denote anything from a rock dance to domestic work
so it was defined in a London underground publication as 'an attempt to
return to a community in which individuals can express themselves freely and
communicate in a way in which the authoritarian, capitalist state has learnt
to stifle'.114 Allen Ginsberg, in his essay, 'Reflections on the Mantra' (widely
reprinted in the underground press in America, Canada and England at the
time), defines mantram as a 'short, verbal formula like the Rolling Stones'
"I'm going home" or Gertrude Stein's "A Rose is a Rose is a Rose"'.115 Included
in Ginsberg's definition are Negro spirituals and 'lovers' cries in moments of
crisis like "Oh, I'm coming, coming, I'm coming etc"'.116 Apart from the
surprise this would cause metaphysicians of Indian philosophy, Mehta's point
is reinforced again and again: 'anything goes' where the West's use of India
was concerned.
As the Be-In demonstrates, other Sanskrit words were given similarly
fluid interpretations and were used in both public and private contexts,
particularly where conflict was likely to occur. Ginsberg, for example,
purportedly brought back special 'mudras' (distinct finger movements)
from India for expelling demons and to quieten police during a riot or
demonstration." 7
But, according to Gita Mehta, of all the terms borrowed from Hindu
philosophy, none captured the American imagination quite in the way that
'karma' did. Mehta notes that while there always was a borrowing of language
between India and the West (the British use of jodhpurs and bungalows, for
example), things got 'sticky' when America took 'our most complicated
philosophical concepts as part of its everyday slang'.118 She comments wryly
on how fortunate it is for the hippies that the Hindu pantheon does not
culminate in a Zeus or a Jehovah waiting to punish the crime of blasphemy,
because 'karma' came to mean anything at all in the sixties, accommodating
itself to the needs of anyone who chose to use it. 'He has heavy karma', Mehta
quips, noting that anything goes as karma: coincidence, deja vu, or chance.119
Far from its original meaning, as Mehta points out when reflecting on the
sixties, karma is 'now felt as a sort of vibration'.120
Liberties were taken with other Hindu philosophical concepts too. 'Yoga'
was another term which came to pervade everyday speech in the sixties and
express a comparably fluid set of meanings. Like karma, it was treated as
polysemic by the counterculture. Once again Allen Ginsberg led the way,
preaching that there were other yogas besides LSD. Not surprisingly, his own
liberal translation of yoga covered chanting, sex, love, giving up smoking and
running laps.121 Similarly, 'mudra', a term referring to very specialized finger
movements used in dance, worship and art to convey emotions and signify
gods or animals, was given an extremely generalized and secular meaning.
Harvey Meyers, in Hariyana, records that the mudra was something which
'turned-on', held together and inspired his charming friend John. John is
praised by Meyers for his use of certain finger movements as a means of
domination and control. Meyers admiringly observes: 'and you know, [John]
controlled everything that happened in that [Indian] town'.122 Leaving aside,
for the moment, the orientalism explicit in such claims, it is important to
recall that Sanskrit words were not the only 'things Indian' to be accorded
highly contextualized and flexible meanings in the sixties. As we have already
seen, other items came to shape and contribute to a particular idiom of
resistance through the very elasticity of their message.
The term 'India' was one such item. In 1967, posters appeared in San
Francisco promoting the upcoming Be-In mentioned. They featured the
image of a Shaivite sadhu with a beard, long matted hair, and ashes on his
face, accompanied by a Plains Indian on his horse, with a guitar cradled in
his left arm (instead of the gun from the original photograph on which the
poster was modelled). Gary Snyder, in Earth House Hold, describes these
images as 'the Indians and the Indian',123 thereby expressing the (deliberate)
way the two were conflated at the time. Steve Levine, in publicizing the same
event, discusses the paradox of one Indian, the 'white eye' being resurrected
Consuming India 67
by another, who he calls 'the Indian incarnate'.124 India had no simple or

single referent for the counterculture, but rather functioned as a sign in a
complex network of meaning. As a signifier, India had considerable autonomy
to the extent that people could find a message in it which was sometimes,
totally divorced from, and often bore only the most superficial resemblance
to, the subcontinent and its rituals. The 'Indians and the Indian' were there-
fore collapsed together like two hollow names: their histories and distinct
identities playfully rearranged with ironic irreverence.
Such incongruous juxtaposition (the guitar instead of the gun, or the
Shaivite with the native American) was a key element in a distinctively sixties
way of knowing India and at the same time suffused the language of anti-
disciplinary protest. This type of parodic quotation and discordant collage
(see the discussion with reference to postmodernism in Chapter 6) is at its
most marked in Allen Ginsberg's Indian Journals. Ironically, this chaotic,
literary and often impenetrable text was used by many 'pilgrims' in the sixties
as a kind of surrogate travel guide.125 It may have even been in part
responsible for the route which was subsequently to become the notorious
'hippie trail' through India.
Ginsberg's opening page-long dedication in the Indian Journals sets the
scene for the combination of seemingly improbable images that are to follow.
Among those to whom the book is dedicated there is 'a Mohammedan Baba
in Bombay who kissed Peter Orlovsky', H. H. the Dalai Lama who asked 'If
you take LSD can you see what's in that Briefcase?'; and the disciple of Meher
Baba who took a vow of silence and declared that silence would be good for
America too. Many others are listed in a similar vein, including Citram Onkar
Das Thakur, who 'advised quitting onions, meat, cigarettes in order to find a
guru .. .'.126 This type of irony became a blueprint for other representations of
India in the sixties. Richard Neville, to cite only one other example, follows
the same pattern in his description of India:
Fifteen thousand feet up the Himalayas I lost my sherpa guide, cried

a little, and was found by shepherds who took me to their camp fire,
where we talked a special universal language. I slept among
mountain villagers who wall-papered their mud huts with pages
from my discarded Newsweek; at dawn I was aroused by cows who
pissed on my sleeping bag ... I met a yogi who told me tomorrow; I
watched a Tibetan girl weave rugs as she studied her paperback
edition of Playboy's Party Jokes.127
In classic orientalist fashion, Ginsberg, Neville and others (Leary and

Alpert, for example) describe India by reference to what it is not (the West).
It is even possible to plot, in many of these accounts, an East-West axis
running through the narratives. Every time an Indian incident is mentioned,
it is put alongside its unlikely Western counterpart. Such ironic juxtaposition,

while highlighting the power of the subject making the incongruous con-
nections, also serves another purpose.
The use of Sanskrit words in the sixties in inapplicable circumstances was
more than simple appropriation. Hindu concepts and rituals, Indian
artefacts, and travel to the country itself acted as a fluid code for a type of
politics characteristic of the period. A remarkable ignorance of both the
scriptural and empirical India gave the counterculture the room to fashion a
new political language from someone else's terms. More pliant meanings
were possible with Indian expressions than would have been possible with
idioms from the counterculture's own cultural lexicon. Perhaps the most
remarkable and least accessible example of an incongruous juxtaposition of
Indian and Western terms can be found in Timothy Leary's The Politics of
Ecstasy. Here great liberties are taken with Indian philosophy in Leary's
hierarchy of consciousness schema, which is a blend of specific religions,
their relevant drug counterparts, and pseudo-scientific terms from physics
and biology. Buddhism, for example, is located alongside LSD as the 'atomic,
electronic flash beyond form'.128 It is clear that India, portrayed as the
embodiment of ambiguity, allowed ambiguities to comfortably coexist. It also
reinforced the sixties rejection of linear disciplinary logic. Only when India
was depicted as beyond consumption and the capitalist market did cracks
begin to appear in this usually self-confident and often unreflexive example
of countercultural thought.
Sixties protest targeted consumption more than production in its critique
of capitalism. While a specific challenge to the meaning of 'work' contributed
to the evolution of an anti-work ethic in the sixties, processes of mass
production or the capitalism of the production line came less under fire than
did consumer capitalism. The counterculture experienced as oppressive those
forces which restricted modern life to what was viewed as the endless cycle of
meaningless consumption of superfluous commodities. The fact that the
tyranny of capitalism was located in processes of consumption reflects both
the class position of many participants in the sixties counterculture and the
New Left challenge to traditional Marxism; the transformation of the
revolutionary subject from worker to student. Much has been written about
each of these tendencies, and I do not intend to reproduce these discussions
here. However, it is worth highlighting that whenever attempts were made in
countercultural writing to identify the inhumanity of capitalism, lists of
possessions were often recorded as testimony to its complete and barren
enslavement.129 This is especially true where India was concerned, but by no
means exclusively so.
According to Joseph Berke, the key to what he describes as the total
guerrilla war against the system is 'the refusal to consume'.130 Corresponding
Consuming India 69
views are expressed in a pamphlet entitled 'This In Memoria for Western

Civilization', where, once again, the main target was consumption:
The consumer boycott is the only form of economic resistance that

shall be possible in the labourless future, when people as a whole are
no longer part of the production system. To strike production, like
the workers do and have done, shall be impossible then. To strike at
consumption is the only alternative.131
In fact such convictions were echoed throughout the underground press, in

other examples of countercultural literature and, of course, in the whole
commune movement. Ken Cowan, in Indian Head, described the hippie as
having withdrawn from the process of production/consumption: 'We will
return to the prosperous society and simply refuse to consume. And refuse to
consume', he writes.132 Later, Indian Head advocated refusing the process of
consumption as the way to revolutionary change.133 Similarly, in the 1967 San
Francisco colloquium of key countercultural figures mentioned above, a great
deal of time was spent discussing the abandonment of consumption as a
powerful political strategy. Gary Snyder advocated the voluntary reduction of
consumption as a way of shifting the emphasis from 'things' to 'states of
mind', hence visualizing 'a very complex, sophisticated cybernetic technology
surrounded by thick hedges of trees, somewhere say around Chicago. And the
rest of the nation a buffalo pasture'.134
India was perceived as a place where it was possible to move beyond
consumption and the capitalist market. Described in an issue of the San
Francisco Oracle as 'a crowded holiness turned from materialism',135 India's
alleged spirituality was seen both as a guard against the meaninglessness of
consumption and as a pass to a pure realm untainted and uncommodified.
The poverty of India was read as a guarantee that hippie travellers were safe
from the polluting influence of consumerism. As Paul Willis notes there was
a feeling that India's poverty was inextricably bound up with its treasures, and
he points out that in the dust and poverty of India, the hippie hoped to find
those spiritual values that were so spectacularly lacking in the West.'36 Hence,
many travellers shunned economic transaction while in India. Patrick
Marnham describes his 'road to Kathmandu' as a journey constituting a total
rejection of the philosophy of money and the world of timetables'.137 As an
informant interviewed by Jacob Needleman in The New Religions comments,
the closer he got to India the more he became aware he was on a pilgrimage
and therefore 'nowhere on the trip - about 8000 miles' did he use any trans-
portation involving money.138
This reading of the rejection of money as signifying the refusal of con-
sumption is a another reiterative theme in countercultural accounts of India.
Stories flourish of how travellers begged for food,139 slept in the open for free,
ate free food in Sikh temples,140 and travelled vast distances without ever
having to resort to money. Yet, like the ethic of 'free' discussed in Chapter 2,
such descriptions are not purged of an economic logic. In many instances,
quite the reverse was the case. The economic was underlined in the frequent
boasts of how a ticket collector was outwitted,141 food obtained or other
money transactions avoided. In fact countercultural reports differ little from
other more conventional tourist narratives in their comments about how
cheap things were in India.142 Note the description in a 1967 issue of the
Berkeley Barb of how the East was a 'Hippie Haven' or Shangri-La for 'Bob':
'Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal was like Nirvana for me. It's the most
peaceful place I've visited in my life. And it costs only $1 a day to live in Nepal.
Including good amounts of hash'.143 Richard Nevilles boast that he 'learned to
say "I have no money", in seven different languages and to communicate
with anyone, anywhere without any words at all'144 stands as emblematic of
this peculiar elision of the economic and the metaphysical in the counter-
cultural India.
Paradoxically, the desire to move beyond money seemed only to engender
an obsession with it. However, this was not the only way in which the
countercultural attempt to move beyond consumption misfired. Not just
India, but Indian philosophy and Indian things145 were viewed as a route to a
domain beyond consumption. For example, Gary Snyder says of Buddhism
that its joyous and voluntary poverty', combined with the practice of medi-
tation, 'wipes out mountains of junk being pumped into the mind by the mass
media, supermarkets and universities'.146 Note also the comments of Devi, a
Hare Krishna devotee, describing how liberated she felt wearing a sari and
chanting with Aaron who 'was wearing his yoga pants and it was just
wonderful'.147 Yet, while possibly many identities were actually shed in India,
or outside India, via Indian rituals and beliefs, or even through the adoption
of Indian dress, one identity remained extremely resilient: ironically the
identity of the self as consumer.
The transcendentalists imbibed 'India' and selectively partook of Indian
philosophy in a very different manner. The main distinctions between the
hippies and transcendentalists were not simply that the latter failed to travel
to the subcontinent, nor that their 'India' was any less distorted or mis-
construed than that of the counterculture. Rather, the India of the hippies,
unlike that of the transcendentalists, was infused with a decidedly com-
mercial logic despite the fact that monetary exchange was often so success-
fully bypassed there. In fact India came to symbolize the ultimate promise of
consumer capitalism: that if you purchase this object or that experience, your
desire for future (endless) consumption will finally be sated.
In other ways a consumer ideology based on notions of freedom of choice
was reinforced. This was most evident in the emphasis placed on choice in
Consuming India 71
countercultural writings. The hippie subject was positioned as having both

the right and freedom to choose anything available. Whether it be the finest
Indian philosophy to believe in or the best guru to follow, the ability to
discern and discriminate between one Indian item and another was taken for
granted. Debates occurred about whether Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam or
mystic offshoots of these traditions (Tantra or Sufism, for example) were
worthy of support. However, philosophical distinctions were rarely offered as
reasons why one tradition was viewed as superior to another; distinctions
perhaps the transcendentalists may have offered to explain their preferences.
Hence, Allen Ginsberg compares the superiority of Krishna to the other
Indian gods you 'can sing to', namely Vishnu or Rama. His rationale for why
he prefers the god Krishna, who he describes as the 'friend-lover-helper-LSD-
supervisionary prince',148 are as follows:
I just happen to like Krishna best - I guess because he is a lover. He

has a blue body and he was a cowboy. Like when he was a kid he had
a cow to take care of. Later, he had Radha, his girlfriend. So you can
think of him as either a pure divine lover or a sex lover.149
Richard Alpert offers different grounds for why he always felt 'this
tremendous pull towards Buddhism', but thinks within the same aesthetic
framework as Ginsberg:
... because Hinduism always seemed a little gauche - the paintings

were a little too gross - the colours were bizarre and the whole
thing was too melodramatic and too much emotion. I was pulling
towards that clear simplicity of the Southern Buddhists and the
Zen Buddhists.150
His identity as a consumer here is no less pronounced than the one he

rejected in his pre-Indian self. Even though this identity (self as consumer) is
the very one he travelled to India to shed, it remains none the less remarkably
intact despite the psychedelic and para-normal nature of his experiences.
He chooses between religions like he is buying soap, on the basis of the
packaging, or aesthetics alone. The arbitrary and 'modern' nature of such a
choice is also demonstrated by Harvey Meyers, who rejects Buddhism
because 'Buddhists are too busy distinguishing between the right hands and
the left paths and the greater and lesser vehicles'.151 He cannot agree with his
friend, Richard, who claims that 'the Tibetans have kept their [spiritual]
machinery the cleanest over all these centuries'.152
Although the use of money may have been shunned and intuition and
magic had become key ingredients influencing choice (thereby demonstrating
supposed transcendence of Western modes of reason), the sense of shopping
around and weighing up ideas, traditions and gurus was central to counter-
cultural versions of India.153 It is difficult tofindan account where the self as
consumer is absent from the narrative. Consuming practices thus blended
with conventions of knowledge to produce the sixties India. Conforming to
Marx's notion that in a capitalist economy a product only becomes
meaningful through the act of consumption,154 so the counterculture brought
'India' into being. The sixties India was ironically made 'real' through a range
of consuming practices. India as spectacle was performed repeatedly
throughout the decade both as a language of protest and as just another
commodity.
In some respects, the whole hippie way of knowing India marks one of the
least self-reflexive moments of the counterculture. In some of its different
guises, however, the sixties counterculture was much more self-critical than
later commentators have since credited it with being. Some of these other
moments challenge the crux of post-sixties narratives about the decade,
namely the conviction that the 'commodification' and 'failure' of the sixties
are necessarily linked.
Chapter 4
Co-opting Co-optation
We cannot be co-opted, because we want everything.

(Jerry Rubin)1
A blaming the sixties industry has emerged for academics and journalists
alike.2 Conclusions about the exact legacy of the sixties have fuelled the
debate on political correctness in the United States and elsewhere. And, from
the perspective of the Right, sixties radicalism is seen to have caused a crisis
in higher education,3 to have undermined the Western literary canon,4 to have
produced a moral relativism and a debased democracy, to have fostered a
predatory economic individualism and to have eroded family life in particular
and community life in general.5 On the other hand, the view from the Left
that sixties values have been appropriated, domesticated or have disappeared
altogether has gained the status of commonsense and is used as the basis for
the death of the sixties narrative.
According to Jameson, this 'shorthand language of co-optation' is omni-
present on the Left and far from adequate as a theoretical framework.6 This
is especially true as it is applied to explain the demise of sixties radicalism.
And, in the 'looking back at the sixties' literature, a significant portion of the
blame is laid firmly at the feet of the counterculture. The story tends to
revolve around the figure of simple and gullible hippies easily beguiled by the
entrepreneurs in their own midst. It is a perspective which relies on a portrait
of an ever-absorbent, artful capitalism capable of assimilating all dissent.
Franco Ferrarotti, when discussing the fate of the counterculture, puts it
thus:
73
the struggle against power and its cultural defenders is likely in the
end to result in the formation of a mirror-like counter-power unable
to get out of its logic. It seems to be an exquisite case of con-
tamination through contact. Fighting power effectively implies the
acceptance, at least for practical purposes, of its modus operandi.
The only alternative to a risky power struggle seems to be pure and
simple renunciation with its inevitable consequence: the withdrawal
from the external world into the inner soul of the individual.7
Aside from rejecting the idea that there was such a thing as 'pure and simple
renunciation' in the sixties, as the case of the countercultural India shows,
Ferrarotti's explanation of why hippies gave up the fight is pertinent because
it encapsulates some of the commonplace ways the decade has been read.
Peter Starr conceptualizes the emphasis given to the assimilative power
of capitalism much more suggestively in his comments on different ex-
planations of the failure of May '68. He characterizes as 'the logics of
recuperation' the idea that specific forms of revolutionary action are said to
reinforce and therefore are co-opted by established structures of power.8 He
cites a 1978 conversation between Michael Ryan and Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak as an example of this logic. Ryan, in reference to the theory of
revolution propounded by the so-called New Philosophers, comments that
revolution is impossible because the same always returns as its opposite;
opposing the Master always consolidates the Masters power.9 The resilience
of this logic in narratives of sixties radicalism deserves examination.
As we have seen with the countercultural India, the 'alternative' attitude to
capitalism in the sixties was far from unambiguous. One of the frequently
paraded ironies of the decade is the fact that just as consumption (con-
sumerism) was targeted by sixties activists as representing the tyranny of
capitalism, so protest in turn was fashioned into a series of consumer items.
The desire for the end of consumption and the desire for endless con-
sumption were linked in the sixties particularly in anti-disciplinary forms of
sixties protest, but the assumed connections between commodification and
the failure of sixties radicalism remain problematic.
Evidence of obvious and effortless commodification of the counterculture
is not difficult to find: Charles Perry's history of the Haight-Ashbury district
reads like a testimony to the commercial spirit of enterprising hippies;10 rock
dances promoting the music of an alternative culture played a key role in the
emergent pop record industry;11 psychedelic stores sold the requisite clothing,
jewellery, books, drug paraphernalia and posters used to signal belonging to
a community which rejected the values of mainstream society. And, as the
discussion of India in Chapter 3 indicated, material items were not the only
features of the sixties to be so transformed. The whole anti-materialist ethos
of the decade was commercially recast into spiritual healing workshops,
Co-opting Co-optation 75
massage, yoga, alternative therapies, psychic counselling, and 'Eastern'

spiritual cults.
Todd Gitlin gives this transformed and commodified counterculture the
name 'Encounter Culture'.12 His designation is well supported by Jerry
Rubin's Growing (Up) at 37, which documents Rubin's post-sixties journey
beyond politics via a continuous series of extreme diets, exercise regimes, sex
therapy classes, encounter groups, Erhard training seminars and change-
your-consciousness courses.13 To William L. O'Neill such trends constitute
evidence that the counterculture 'outlasted the sixties' and that therefore its
decline should not be celebrated prematurely.14 However, in the view of
most other commentators, the commercialized and professionalized counter-
culture of the seventies, or its New Age equivalent in the eighties or nineties,
is incontrovertible proof that the radicalism of the period was both bogus and
shortlived.
There is little dialectical suppleness, to use Starr's words,15 in the way the
idea of capitalist co-optation functions as a shorthand in discourses on the
sixties. Many accounts employ a 'top-down' model to explain the purported
demise of the sixties. Capitalist appropriation is portrayed as a one-way
process with advertisers, businesses (alternative and mainstream) and the
media actively transforming countercultural codes into what Stuart Ewen
describes as 'merchandising know-how and phrase book fluency'.16 The
depoliticization and commercialization of the counterculture are seen to be a
clear indication of 'the system's' enormous capacity to absorb and profit from
any attempts to change it. Such a model is utilized by David Gross when he
argues that the countercultural notion of 'lifestyle' was pivotal to providing
the opportunity for the marketeers to come in and destroy the sixties.17 And
even though Brent Whelan employs categories of analysis which broadly
could be considered to be poststructuralist he too has moments where he
slips into a 'top-down' paradigm. He argues that the fated commodification
of the counterculture 'demonstrates the assimilative power of that "official"
culture and its concerted dominance over the most evidently adversarial
cultural practices'.18 While attempting a highly nuanced 'double reading' of
Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, as both ecstatic possibility and as easily
co-opted, there remains a conventional sense of passage in his analysis from
'insurgent' to 'administered' culture in the sixties. The anti-commercial 'acid
tests' of Ken Kesey and the San Francisco Be-In lead to the fully com-
mercialized Woodstock Festival of August 196919 thereby undermining his
own double reading and reinforcing popular understandings of the decade
and the linear chronology of protest to conformity, or, in the eighties version,
from Yippie to yuppie.
It is not the point here to dismiss the obvious validity of interpre-
tations which document the appropriation of sixties values, symbols and
rituals by advertisers and the like. Stuart Ewen shows how deliberate and
self-conscious this process of commercialization was when he cites the

sixteen-question quiz for 'admen' which appeared in a 1967 edition of the
magazine, Madison Avenue. The quiz (bizarre in its simplemindedness, but
obviously successful) was designed to make business and advertisers familiar
with 'the Now Generation', so profit could be generated from protest.20 John
Sinclair provides similar evidence from Australia of how when 'youth as
problem' became 'youth as market', a correspondingly crude countercultural
'education' for advertisers occurred.21
Such blatant commercialization is perhaps of little surprise. As com-
mentators like Ewen have so successfully highlighted, 'a continual feature of
the style market' is its appropriation and commodification of meaning.22
Henri Lefebvre's observation that what was yesterday reviled becomes today's
'cultural consumer-goods' is often cited as illustration of this process.23
According to Lefebvre, 'consumption thus engulfs what was intended to give
meaning and direction'.24 And, in this respect, the case of sixties radicalism
was no exception. Both its very elaborate challenges to consumption and its
more diffuse forms of protest were engulfed in this way. So the point here is
not to deny the commercialization of key aspects of sixties protest. Rather,
the purpose is to offer a theoretical framework to understand this process
which bypasses this inadequate language of co-optation. A related aim is to
address the 'mongrel' politics of the sixties, the groups and individuals who
posed a different model of power, challenging this monolithic version of
capitalism, rethinking the distinction between oppressor and oppressed, and
self-consciously attempting to tackle the logics of recuperation.
While there have been powerful challenges to the view of capitalism as
monolithic, inevitably devouring all opposition and uniformly appropriating
all dissent into a homogeneous dominant culture, they often remain unifocal.
Dick Hebdige, in his influential Subculture: The Meaning of Style, attempts to
theorize the 'notoriously ambiguous' relationship between what he calls
'spectacular subcultures' and the various industries which service and ex-
ploit them. He identifies two forms of incorporation whereby supposedly
threatening subcultures are absorbed back into mundane society. The first,
'commercial', form involves the conversion of subcultural signs into mass-
produced objects, while the second form is 'ideological', the labelling and
redefining of deviant behaviour by dominant groups such as the police or
media.25 While his references are mainly to the British 'punk' subculture, they
are pertinent here. Hebdige argues that:
As the subculture begins to strike its own eminently marketable

pose, as its vocabulary (both visual and verbal) becomes more and
more familiar, so the referential context to which it can be con-
veniently assigned is made increasingly apparent. Eventually the
mods, the punks, the glitter rockers can be incorporated, brought
back into line, located on the preferred 'map of problematic social

reality' ... the fractured order is repaired and the subculture
incorporated as diverting spectacle within the dominant mythology
from which it in part emanates .. .26
Aside from the surprisingly functionalist overtones in this account of

appropriation, Hebdige, in the tradition of British cultural studies, con-
centrates on the uncertainties in the relationship between oppositional
groups and the style industry.27 In line with conventions spawned by the so-
called Birmingham School,28 he adopts a semiotic rather than a sociological
approach to this vexed issue of co-optation. Subcultural consumers and their
commodities are the object of analysis rather than the style industry's own
logic and processes of production. And what appears to be of central interest
is the transformation of meaning that occurs when youth subcultures seize
and reinterpret previously commonplace items: a form of 'bricolage' or
cultural borrowing. Thus Hebdige inverts familiar understandings of co-
optation, so the subcultures themselves feature as agents doing much of the
appropriation. Yet, unlike analyses of the commodity form which emphasize
the active role of the capitalist market in mechanisms of appropriation, the
model employed by Hebdige celebrates the mass society or popular culture
into which subcultural protest is eventually and (as it would seem from such
accounts) inevitably reabsorbed.
The impact of this 'bottom-up' model of co-optation has been extensive,
playing a key role in shaping the discipline that has since come to be known
as Cultural Studies. The Birmingham influence also figures in studies of the
counterculture. For example, Paul E. Willis, in Profane Culture,29 applies a
comparable method in his research into the hippie subculture in Britain. The
conclusions he reaches about consumption and protest are very similar to
those posited by Hebdige. Willis argues that:
Though the whole commodity form provides powerful implications

for the manner of its consumption, it by no means enforces them.
Commodities can be taken out of context, claimed in a particular
way, developed and repossessed to express something deeply and
thereby to change somewhat the very feelings which are their
product.30
In focusing on the way everyday, profane items and their meanings are
transformed into signs of rebellion by hippie groups, Willis rejects the passive
consumer paradigm of youth subcultures. He favours instead a perspective
which embraces hippies as social actors.
While the approach to commodification (typified by Willis and Hebdige)
challenges notions of consumer passivity and enforced conformity, it offers
little towards understanding the contradictory desires at the heart of the

attack on capitalist consumption in the sixties. For this we must look
elsewhere towards a self-critique that was taking place in the literature and
pamphlets of the day.
Self-critical sixties moments

Many observations made in the literature looking back on the sixties do little
more than extend the self-critical moments of that period. This fact is rarely
acknowledged as hippies are particularly held responsible for allowing
commercial interests to take over and destroy sixties values. The counter-
culture is frequently portrayed as having been naive, gullible, and unself-
conscious; both apathetic and earnest at the same time. Such is the basis for
subsequent parodies of the hippie, with the exemplary representation from
the realm of popular youth culture in Britain in the eighties being the figure
of Neal, the vague, simplistic and consistently stupid character in the
television series, The Young Ones.
This widespread privileging of the retrospective gaze in critical studies of
the sixties could not be more misleading. It is as though, at the time,
problems of capitalist appropriation were invisible - its victims silent.
Contrary to this assumption are countless examples of debates during the
decade about the ways in which radical politics was being commodified. The
Psychedelic Shop in the Haight-Ashbury had only been open for a few days
early in 1966 before somebody put a note under the door saying: 'You're
selling out the revolution. You're commercializing it. You're putting it on the
market'.31 Richard Neville ridiculed this commercialization in Play Power,
when he advertised the 'Revolution' in three basic styles: the Student
Internationale with the New Left drive, the Underground model and the
Ghetto Guerrilla.32 And Jerry Rubin made the same point even more strongly:
Revolution is profitable.
So the capitalists try to sell it.
The money pimps take the best things our hearts and minds
produce, turn them into consumer products with a price tag and
then sell them back to us as merchandise.
They take our symbols, drenched with blood from the streets and
make them chic.
They own our music - the music produced by our suffering, our
pain, the collective unconscious of our community! They put our
music on records and in dance halls priced so high that we can't even
afford to hear it.
Paisley rock promoters create fenced-in rock festivals, and pigs use
tear gas and Mace to keep us out.
Beware the psychedelic businessman who talks love on his way to

Chase Manhattan. He grows his hair long and puts on a brightly
coloured shirt because 'that's where it's at' - the money that is. He
has a big pile of cash and a short soul.
A hip capitalist is a pig capitalist.33
Groups like the Diggers made it a mission to alert the counterculture to the
ways advertising in particular and entrepreneurs in general were incorpor-
ating cultural radicalism into the dynamic of capitalist accumulation. A 1967
Digger leaflet published by com/co (the Communication Company, a group of
leafleteers who were active in the Haight-Ashbury and offered to print
anything free of charge and to serve the hip community) challenged: 'Whose
trip are you paying for?/ How long will you tolerate people transforming
your trip into cash?/ Your style is being sold back at you./ New style, same
shuck, new style, same shuck, new style, same shuck'.34 In an open letter to
the Haight-Ashbury community during the same year, the Diggers declared
that love (the cornerstone of the countercultural revolution) had itself
become a bartered commodity. The political struggle against organizations of
the 'establishment', according to the Diggers, had unfortunately turned into
an 'Established Organization'.35
Such expressions do not conform to the naivety supposedly typical of the
era. Portraits of the youthful idealism, dull-wittedness or unselfconsciousness
of the counterculture are often the cornerstone of subsequent commentaries
on the decade. In the Australian context, Robin Gerster and Jan Bassett
observe that 'what looked like revolution in the sixties is often seen now as
childish insubordination'.36 Their study does little to contradict this image of
the 'childishness' of the era, with references to the state of 'frozen adoles-
cence' which afflicted even those 'who got on with their lives after the
1960s'.37 In this they are not alone.
Yet such perspectives ignore the levels of self-criticism and self-
consciousness which equally characterize the sixties. There were exhaustive
disputes about the issue of co-optation and about the nature of consumer
capitalism itself. Indeed, it is difficult to find a New Left or countercul-
tural tract which does not discuss - with varying degrees of detail and
sophistication - the deficiencies and perceived inhumanity of a consumer
culture based on the dictatorship of 'false' needs. While this consumerism was
differently represented depending on the political approach of various groups
or organizations it was generally held to make the movement vulnerable to
assimilation.
To display a high level of consciousness about capitalist modes of pro-
duction and consumption was therefore to be deemed 'radical' in the sixties.
Hence, many cultural activities revolved around forums or study groups like
the International Liberation School in Berkeley, which advertised classes in
the 1969 fall covering the topic 'Understanding the American System of
Capitalism and Imperialism'. Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy's Monopoly
Capitalism was required reading for all the participants.38 While such
examples could run the risk of seeming exceptional it remains accurate to
claim that the sixties were notable for the wide-ranging discussions of
capitalist social relations and economic structures which took place. By
contrast, such debates were conspicuously absent during the eighties, a
decade so often presented in the popular imagination as more realistic, adult
and informed than that of the sixties. While the eighties was noted for the
internationalization of capital and the speculative activities of certain big
entrepreneurs, similar debates to those conducted in the sixties about the
advantages and disadvantages of capitalism were not particularly evident in
the mainstream culture of financial journalism, the popular press, university
courses or popular film, for example. This could equally be said of the
nineties.
The self-critical moments of the sixties generation have largely been
ignored in the literature on the topic. The highly self-conscious, sceptical and
barbed elements of sixties radicalism have been overshadowed by repre-
sentations which focus on the credulity, innocence and solemnity of the
sixties experience. For example, Gerster and Bassett comment that Richard
Neville's Play Power, read twenty years on, is a deplorably scatter-brained and
dated document.39 This is true enough but to underline this point, the authors
cite Charles Shaar Murray's retrospective view that the intellectual com-
plexity of many countercultural theorists can be gauged by the axiom: 'if
eveiybody listened to pop music, wore funny clothes and screwed a lot, the
millennium would come'.40 However, Play Power is a text replete with self-
conscious parody even though it seems at times to be just plain foolish.
While I would not wish to defend the book's misogyny and orientalism it
nevertheless is a wry document, often making fun of itself and being
deliberately absurd. So, despite its obvious shortcomings, it is not as
straightforward a text as such criticisms as Shaar Murray's would imply.
For insight into these self-conscious and self-parodic aspects of the sixties
counterculture The Haight-Ashbury Song Book provides a useful source.41
Subtitled Songs of Love and Haight, this collection would not, I imagine,
represent the sharp edge of sixties radicalism, yet the songs included here are
full of self-mockery. They also present a much more critical picture of life in
the Haight-Ashbury in 1967 than some of the other underground publications
of the day.42 The final verse of 'Haight-Ashbury the Beautiful' (sung to the tune
of 'America the Beautiful') urges listeners to draw their own conclusions
about the district which may 'collapse entire, or die by fire/ but [would] never
go bourgeois!'.43 The 'Digger Lullaby' (sung to the tune of 'Hush Little Baby,
Don't Say a Word') similarly documents the social problems which faced
many of the young rebels who ended up in the Haight-Ashbury: home-
lessness, hunger, medical difficulties, unemployment and police harassment.

In this song the Diggers feature as a paternalistic State, rather than as a group
of radical anarchists. They provide welfare when required and rescue the
'drop-out' (a term used irreverently) even from dropping-out itself:
And if the city does you harm,

You can go and live on a Digger farm,
And if as a drop-out you still can't win,
The Diggers will love you when you drop back in.44
The lyric is unflattering to the 'drop-out' and the Diggers alike. Con-
sequently, the idea that many drop-outs were from middle-class backgrounds
and required 'the system' (albeit an alternative one) to survive, like that of the
hippie transferring patterns of consumption from 'plastic goods' to 'hip
things',45 is far from a recent notion. Nevertheless, in the abundant post-
sixties 'looking back' literature, such observations have been endlessly
recycled as original, as though precursors of these views cannot be found in
the decade itself.
To return to the issue of co-optation, it is easy to see that the anti-rational
language of a politics without aims, boundaries, program or leadership - and
a politics with an emphasis on flexible contextualized meanings, ambiguity
and contradiction - provided plenty of space for advertisers to rework radical
messages into entreaties to consume. However, in many respects, little
intervention was required to transpose attacks on consumption into codes
which were favourable to it. The anti-disciplinary protest of the sixties
counterculture played with such codes. The language of an anti-disciplinary
politics itself closely mirrored the increasingly pronounced anti-disciplinary
side of contemporary capitalism. Ironically, it was the assault on restraint,
self-control, self-denial, sacrifice, and postponement of pleasure that most
perfectly reproduced the language and ethos of consumer capitalism. When
Jerry Rubin declared 'We cannot be co-opted, because we want everything',46
he was demonstrating the paradoxical position groups like the Yippies were
in. On the one hand, it was precisely this insatiable desire which guaranteed
the continuation of consumer capitalism, particularly in its 'appetitive mode'
where, according to P. Rieff, 'an infinity of created needs [could] now be
satisfied'.47 On the other, these anti-disciplinary entreaties to consume were
received as genuinely threatening to mainstream culture.
Sixties activists with more conventional notions of politics represented the
temperament of advanced capitalism as being all about order, restraint,
prudence, control and self-denial, while the Yippies seemed to recognize that
the dominant order had changed and that capitalism had its own anti-
disciplinary side to it. As Abbie Hoffman had declared: 'The United States
political system was proving more insane than Yippie! ... It was America that
was on a trip; we were just standing still'.48 Just as some sixties activists pitted
themselves against a capitalism represented primarily as disciplinary, so the
Yippies set themselves a much more difficult (and ambitious) task. They
acknowledged that the very project of opposition was mongrel and
intermingled with all sorts of tendencies that were common to that which was
being opposed.
Cultural directives to consume were reproduced in a notion of 'resistance'
to capitalism via doctrines of release, hedonism and the satisfaction of
individual desire. But this was not a simple case of appropriation, either 'top-
down' or 'bottom-up'. In this respect the exact creeds which were indis-
pensable to the survival of an economy based on ever greater levels of
consumption were duplicated. The insurgent intent of much sixties protest
was thus remarkably contradictory. Witness the market potential in Richard
Nevilles anti-disciplinary observation:
The most memorable experiences underground are when you

connect to the music, to the light show happening and movie
simultaneously, while being stoned and fucking all at the same time
- swathed in stereo headphones of course.49
Yet, despite the fact that such desires provided openings for newer and more
sophisticated products, it must be remembered that proclamations like
Neville's were unquestionably received at the time as being particularly
destabilizing and, it could be argued, at times were read as more unsettling
than traditional Left notions of sacrifice for the revolution. Allan Bloom, in a
contribution to the 'blaming the sixties' industry, seems to find the anti-
puritanism of sixties radicalism one of its most offensive and disquieting
features. He muses almost nostalgically on other revolutions 'which tended
to be austere and chaste'.50 The excess of pleasure and playfulness
championed by Neville and the like was considered profoundly menacing and
harmful to the dominant social institutions and values of the day, as attested
by the Oz trials for obscenity in 1971 in London. One is also reminded of
Norman Mailer's description of the levitation of the Pentagon (see Chapter 2),
where the assortment of Hindu gurus, witches, dancing wizards and chanting
hippies seemed to daze the Military Police much more than the flag-waving
antics of the hardened politicos.51 It also needs to be remembered that in the
sixties many on both the Left and the Right (the challengers to and defenders
of these values and institutions) equally believed that by undermining the
dominance of the productivist ethos, capitalism would necessarily collapse.
Daniel Bell's influential The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism is per-
haps one of the most detailed expressions of this fear. Here, Bell documents
the productivist and anti-productivist faces of contemporary capitalism,
enumerating the tensions between the bourgeois prudent spirit of calculation
and methodical restraint on the one hand, and the spectre of limitless
acquisitiveness on the other.52 According to Bell, this contradiction, at the
centre of capitalism in its post-war phase, takes a variety of forms: for
example, the disparity between nineteenth-century notions of 'character' as
'the unity of moral codes and disciplined purpose' and the late twentieth-
century emphasis on 'personality', defined as 'enhancement of self through
the compulsive search for individual differentiation'.53 Bell's thesis is that the
former is seriously undermined by the latter. He lists the thirteen useful
virtues originally outlined by Benjamin Franklin and which purportedly
shaped the character of American industrial capitalism: temperance, silence,
order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, clean-
liness, tranquillity, chastity and humility.54 In Bell's view, the emergence of a
voracious, acquisitive ethic untempered by these virtues contained the
potential to undermine industrial discipline and, by implication, capitalism
itself. Clearly, this was not to be the case.
It is easy to see how the anti-disciplinary antics of the Yippies and the
Diggers and the array of anti-puritanical gestures expressed by sixties radicals
offended all thirteen of Franklin's moral codes. For example, in a 1967 issue
of the underground publication, Avatar, the members of a rural commune in
Colorado give free rein to their collective ambitions:
We want to use everything, new, junk, good, bad, we want to make

limitless things. We want T.V., videotape recorders and cameras. We
want computers and miles of colour film and elaborate cine cameras
and tape decks and amps and echo chambers and everywhere. We
want millionaire patrons. We need the most up-to-date equipment in
the world to make our things. We want an atomic reactor.55
While these demands would not stand up to an overly literal read-

ing, and they are not designed to, the desires on which they were predicated
and their parodic intent pose an interesting problem for the model of
capitalism employed by analysts like Bell as well as by some sixties activists
themselves. The question remains as to whether such a lack of restraint
and unchecked rapaciousness, expressed in this instance by a commune in
Colorado, was an articulation of a particular stage of capitalism or subversive
to its interests, or both.
It is important to note that not all analyses of the advanced capitalism of
Western democracies rely so heavily on the simple dual characterization of
productivism (the Protestant ethic) and anti-productivism (consumption)
expounded by Bell and others. Jurgen Habermas, for example, reminds us
that 'capitalist societies were always dependent on cultural boundary con-
ditions they could not themselves reproduce', feeding parasitically on 'the
remains of tradition' (religion, various pre-capitalist particularistic values and
prejudices).56 While it is true that some sixties radicals often used remnants
of tradition in their countercultural displays (the revival of pagan harvest and
fertility festivals in the commune movement, for example), others more
directly linked to an existing Left tradition seemed to overlook the extent to
which the existing, mainstream political culture was already thoroughly
'mixed'; a characteristic which, according to Habermas, advanced capitalist
democracies nurture.57
In contrast to the significance given by Bell to the internal tensions and
contradictions of capitalism, Colin Campbell posits an alternative solution to
the problem of the apparent conflict between cultural directives both to
produce and consume. Campbell argues that consumption and production,
play and work, romanticism and puritanism, are 'twin cultures' equally
crucial to the existence and perpetuation of modern industrialized societies.58
He stresses the ways in which conflicting character ideals (for example,
calculation and impulsiveness) can be successfully incorporated into one
personality system and indeed are institutionalized among the middle class.
According to this perspective, opposing cultural systems which accentuate
either discipline or release, restraint or freedom, thereby coexist in a
symbiotic, complementary relationship within the one political-economic
system.
In a different vein, Robert Crawford adopts a view which, like Bell's,
emphasizes the conflict between cultural directives for self-control and those
demanding release in contemporary society, while he acknowledges (like
Campbell and unlike the counterculture) that the one is dependent on and
necessary to the other. He proposes the contradiction thus:
Contemporary Americans are the objects and subjects of two

opposing mandates, two opposing approaches to the attempt to
achieve well-being. The opposition is structural. At the level of the
social system it is a principal contradiction. The culture of con-
sumption demands a modal personality contrary to the personality
required for production. The mandate for discipline clashes with the
mandate for pleasure.59
This clash encompasses, on the one hand, a language of will-power and

regulation and, on the other, a language of contentment and enjoyment. Yet,
in Crawford's view, any discourse of self-control necessarily contains its
opposite - a discourse of release.60 So, ironically, in promoting both mandates
or discourses, contemporary capitalism simultaneously provides a con-
venient framework for resistance to either one.61 A cultural language of
release and freedom from constraint is therefore readily available when
discipline and control are challenged.
Crawford's perspective, in contrast to the views of those such as Bell, is not
based on the assumption that an attack on the disciplinary, productivist side

of capitalism would automatically lead to its downfall. On the contrary, such
a theoretical framework (which, as Crawford acknowledges, owes much to
Foucault) allows for the possibility that challenges to capitalism may just as
easily enhance its survival as threaten its existence. He argues that release
extended to the shop floor is subversive and self-control and self-denial
extended to the market are similarly subversive.62 While the anti-disciplinary
protest of the sixties counterculture attempted to act its way out of such
bipolarities, it nevertheless tapped into an existing framework or anti-
disciplinary language which already opposed industrial discipline. Thus
release was extended to the very area which so depended on it: the capitalist
market.
The anti-disciplinary politics of the sixties, however, did more than blindly
mirror dominant cultural edicts to consume. If this had constituted the only
purpose and achievement of sixties radicalism then the police, the media,
politicians and other authorities in 'straight' society would not have treated
the phenomenon so seriously and with such direct violence. Nor would its
exponents have experienced such a strong sense of 'liberation' at having
sabotaged mainstream values; the pleasure of transgression is clearly evident
in most countercultural writings.63 How then was this pleasure constituted as
subversive or 'radical' when it so closely reproduced the gratification of
consumption?
The re-enchantment of protest
It would be wrong to assume that the 'virtues' of self-control, order, frugality

or industry were completely obscured by the anti-disciplinary face of
capitalism. Since industrialization, as Max Weber has demonstrated, the
sphere of work has been the foremost source of the disciplinary ethic in
Western capitalist societies.64 And, as Crawford points out, work continues to
be one of our most central social values, 'thoroughly saturated with direct and
indirect controls'.65 The sixties decade was no exception in this regard. The
licence to suspend control and restraint, so necessary for continued con-
sumption, was matched by a powerful embargo on unrestrained gratification
in thefieldof production. Sixties activists (like other bourgeois subjects) were
caught in the tension between these conflicting, but as Campbell suggests
interdependent, cultural stipulations.
Generally, sixties radicals attempted to counter the regulatory culture of
'work' by fostering in its place an anti-work ethic. The purpose of this
challenge was to violate and refuse the strictures and perceived meaning-
lessness of work. A key aspect of the movement's radical image centred
around this opposition, especially in popular media representations. The
rejection of the constraints of paid work as well as mainstream conceptions

of work no doubt also entailed much transgressive pleasure. One of the most
fundamental of all social values was being breached. In Allen Ginsberg's
view the only satisfaction possible that remained for the young was 'the
satisfaction of their Desire - love, body, orgy'.66 Pleasure was substituted for
work, and the fulfilment of a seemingly unfettered individual desire displaced
the coercion of someone else's will. This coercion came to be seen as
synonymous with the workplace and, as was discussed in Chapter 2,
analogous to conventional Left politics. 'I want to live in a world where I don't
have to stand while my boss or the commissar sits', writes John Gerassi.67
According to Richard Neville, all the drop-outs of the world were united by
this singular approach to work. 'They don't', he writes.68
The significance of the anti-work ethic of the counterculture was not that
people didn't work, as Neville insinuates (although certainly enough 'dropped
out' to cause widespread concern among families, Church and community
groups), but more that 'work' was radically redefined. Tuli Kupferberg's
comments are revealing here: 'Play is as good as work. Work has been defined
as something you dislike doing. Fuck that. Do the Beatles work? Who cares?
We like what they do'.69 In other words, to engage in work was somehow
subversive if the experience of work was pleasurable. Kupferberg goes on to
redefine work as the moving of a body through space and comments that: 'A
cock moving up and down in a cunt is doing work'.70 Compulsion was taken
out of the sphere of production, and desire was put in its place. The injection
of desire into work obviously served to open the way for hip entrepreneurs.
But this fact in itself did not seem to undermine the sense of transgression
experienced by sixties radicals in their approach to employment. To return
again to Neville:
The underground has abolished work ... Work is done only for fun;
as a pastime, obsession, hobby or art-form and thus is not work
in an accepted sense. Underground people launch poster, printing,
publishing, record and distribution companies; bookshops, news-
papers, information bureaux, video and film groups ... anything they
enjoy doing. First advantage: every Monday morning is a Saturday
night ... But because the motive is fun and freedom not profit or
power, the laxity of the (non) working conditions is beyond a shop
stewards dreams (or nightmare?). Gone are contracts, time checks,
fixed holidays, strikes, division of labour and doing things in
triplicate.71
With desire celebrated as being inherently subversive, then anything

pleasurable was valid, including work. Moreover, work plus desire did not
equal 'selling out' even though matching the two provided ample space for
enterprising hippies to profit from the sixties movements. Instead, the

inculcation of 'desire' into 'work' constituted another anti-disciplinary and
hence 'radical' gesture. This equation may also partly account for the
subsequent professionalization and academicization of former sixties
radicals and student activists.72 It also prefigures a very different use of these
ideas of work in later decades. The calculated inclusion of relaxed 'leisure'
and gym facilities, casual dress, self-actualization courses and so-called
'flexible' work modes by many businesses and the service sector in order
to boost productivity can be traced back to the sixties mingling of notions
of work/pleasure/personal growth. It is also worth mentioning that the
occupations Neville singles out as work exclude jobs from the manufacturing
sector; there is no reference to unskilled, blue-collar occupations or
repetitious, boring work! In this respect, the conception and understanding of
'work' on which the counterculture predicated its critique was itself highly
selective and unrepresentative of the major kinds of paid employment in
industrialized capitalist societies in the sixties.
The pleasure of transgression was also experienced as a by-product of the
anti-disciplinary stance on consumption (as Rubin said, 'we want every-
thing'73), despite the fact that such a politics reproduced the desire to con-
sume through its celebration of unrestrained pleasure. The cultural mandate
to consume contains its own transgressive elements and forbidden qualities.
In representing the other side of what Crawford calls the mandate for self-
control (epitomized by production), consumption is necessarily experienced
as a tantalizing infringement of various prohibitions. It is hardly surprising,
then, that in covertly and overtly mirroring the anti-disciplinary face of
capitalist consumption the reflection of anti-disciplinary protest should
appear so alluringly radical and subversive.
Following Crawford's schema, contemporary capitalist societies provide a
ready framework of resistance to the disciplinary ethic by simultaneously
promoting its opposite: a discourse of release and reckless abandon. In
tapping into this discourse, groups such as the Yippies positioned themselves
alongside their perceived enemy, reflecting and amplifying its desires. And
they were well aware of, if not perplexed by, this fact. Far from being the
easily beguiled hippies who feature in the literature looking back on the
sixties, as Abbie Hoffman lamented in 1968: 'How could we pull our pants
down? America was already naked'.74 In this respect the idea of co-optation
had little relevance to Yippie perceptions about the relationship between
mainstream and alternative culture: it was neither a top-down nor a bottom-
up occurrence. As some kind of theoretical framework, it simply did not
adequately describe the contradictory processes that were at work at the time.
As Michel Foucault warns us, if power had a solely repressive function it
would be much more easily overthrown.75
Embracing the possibility that power produces effects at the level of desire
is helpful here. The anti-disciplinary protest of the sixties promoted a desire

which magnified and distorted capitalisms promise to satisfy all desire. This
question of desire is rarely addressed in the literature looking back on the
sixties. With the exception of Todd Gitlin, most of the commentators already
cited concentrate only on what was rejected in the sixties: bureaucratic
rationality, materialism, imperialism, the West, racism, or whatever con-
stitutes the focus of their particular analysis.76 The features which drew youth
in such vast numbers to areas like the Haight-Ashbury or to groups like the
Diggers or the Yippies are seldom acknowledged. Gitlin, by contrast, points to
the fact that 'the express train of anti-authority', typified by the Diggers, was,
once moving, almost impossible to derail.77 He also discusses how 'the New
Left had to confront a counterculture that was in many ways more attractive
than radical politics'.78 To comprehend the special re-enchantment of politics
that occurred in the sixties it is important to fathom the basis of this
attraction.
Gitlin s own description of the 1967 'Back to the Drawing Boards' con-
ference in Michigan is a good starting point. Organized by the SDS 'Old
Guard' to 'regather the extended version of the original fused group',79 or to
simply 'rally old faces and see what they had to say to one another',80 the
proceedings were swiftly interrupted by the Diggers, who barged in like 'in
the opening scene of a horror movie',81 and managed to unsettle the whole
conference. It is impossible to reproduce the vigour and comedy of Gitlin's
account of this dramatic event in paraphrase. However, the tale he recounts
features as a pivotal 'moment of truth' in his narrative of the sixties and as
such is most instructive for a wider understanding of the tensions between
disciplinary and anti-disciplinary versions of politics in the decade.
In the clash which ensued between SDS and the Diggers at 'Drawing
Boards', SDS is portrayed by Gitlin as cautious and somewhat formal; a
group of disciplined political organizers mixing militant rhetoric with
reformist aims and lofty in their solemn purpose: 'white radicals', 'the stodgy
New Left', 'square' and 'hypocritical middle class kids', according to the
Diggers.82 By contrast, he characterizes the Diggers as insolent, spirited,
crazed, menacing, self-confident and theatrical. Peter Berg, calling himself
Emmett Grogan, accused the New Left of being ineffectual and derivative,
unable to survive without Vietnam or Cuba. Berg challenged the conference
participants about the precise nature of their politics with the charge: 'You
could be a rich dentist and protest against American intervention'.83 Then
another Emmett Grogan - this time the actual Emmett Grogan - joined the
attack. Gitlin recalls:
'We're trying to understand you,' one [SDS] woman said. 'Are you a
mother?' Grogan asked. 'Yes.' 'You'll never understand us. Your
children will understand us. We're going to take your children.' He
leaped down, kicked over the table, smashed down a chair. He

knocked down one woman and slapped around some others, or went
through the stage motions - accounts disagree. 'Faggots! Fags! Take
your ties, they are chains around your necks. You haven't got the
balls to go mad. You're gonna make a revolution? - you'll piss in your
pants when the violence erupts.' ... Eventually one of the Grogans
announced that they had fuckin' guns and fuckin' bows-and-arrows
in their fuckin' car, and that the next morning they'd be leading
fuckin' target practice.84
What Gitlin finds portentous about this particular episode is that the con-
ference subsequently 'never gained momentum, never broke out of the
Diggers' gravitational field',85 and that it was SDS which was 'shaken, in-
trigued, and tempted by the Diggers, not the other way around'.86 It is this
second point which is of significance here. Without looking for clues in the
internal debates of the specifically American New Left or returning to a sharp
distinction between political and cultural radicalism, how can this perplexing
attraction by dozens of experienced organizers to the chaotic mayhem of
what could be viewed as a few stoned street performers be explained?
Gitlin concludes that this occasion both marked the American New Left's
failure to outgrow the student movement as well as heralding the widening
rift between political and cultural radicals. Yet, in another sense, the events
he describes at 'Drawing Boards' actually point to a narrowing of this
perceived rift. The attraction seems to be away from more conventional
definitions of the 'political' (ironically represented by the 'New' Left) towards
a politics of excess, play and spectacular abandon. Far from hardening the
politicos' sense of clear purpose and separateness from the so-called cultural
radicals, the intrusion of the Diggers appeared to confound the distinction
between the two and destabilize otherwise firmer identities and objectives.
Political protest as conceived by SDS was successfully constructed by the
Diggers as inherently disciplinary: hence conservative and repressive.
Like the New Left at 'Drawing Boards', even the most sceptical and
experienced of old Left activists were not always completely immune to the
attraction of an anti-disciplinary politics. Irving Wexler disarmingly describes
how in the sixties, as a hard-edged older Leftist, he underwent a born-again
transformation listening to Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore East. While
viewing with disdain the capers of the petit-bourgeois young, trying 'to
liberate society out of a narcissistic pleasure principle rather than from truly
objective (that is to say Marxist) social concerns', he finds himself suddenly
swept away 'through the grass clouds - with a mixture of panic and ecstasy'
into 'a whole new state of consciousness'.87 Wexler documents the appeal
of spontaneity, openness and subjective participation as ways to achieve
socialism despite his continued commitment to 'dialectical materialism,
bottom-line economic determinism, and a set pattern of revolutionary

strategy and tactics'.88 His reflections capture the tensions between the
contradictory versions of politics which have since become characteristic of
the decade.
Just as work could be reanimated via the interjection of play into
employment, so 'protest' could similarly appear alluring when elements of
fantasy, burlesque, satire and politics were combined. A key component of
this re-enchanted protest was its fundamental romanticism. Whether as
solicited by the Diggers at 'Drawing Boards' or as experienced by Wexler
through 'deliriously dissolving in the acid meanderings of Grace Slick',89 it
promised the abandon and exhilaration of childhood and a politics free of
disciplinary requirements. It also promised that acts of protest could feel like
the fulfilment of fantasy and desire, release from repression. In James Miller's
words, protesters were trying to empower the imagination:
Struggling to set their wildest fantasies free, musicians, movie

directors, and radical students all tried to lay waste to some part of
the old order: no more melody, no more narrative, no more
governing structure, no taste, no reason, no law and order.90
This romanticized politics offered heroic and mythological roles for its
participants. More alluring than the model of the obedient party hack, the
models of the uncontrollable outlaw, the unruly revolutionary standing
against society, the guerrilla blowing society apart or the magician using
LSD as 'an ecstatic revolutionary implement' proved especially magnetic.91
Leaving aside the gendered nature of these fantasies, such roles offered a type
of adventure, whimsy and romance which drew significantly for its in-
spiration on a popular culture tradition. In particular, American film seemed
to provide basic prototypes for the figure of the political rebel in the sixties.
Note that when the Diggers first burst into the 'Drawing Boards' conference,
Gitlin reports: 'More than one person in the audience thought of The Wild
One'.92 These popular culture themes (to be more fully addressed in Chapter
5) comprised an important ingredient in the romanticism of the counter-
culture as well as adding to the potent and widespread fascination which an
anti-disciplinary type of protest generated during the decade.
Outlaw discipline
Captivation with the 'outlaw' as the paragon of the political subject had
serious consequences for sixties radicalism. Taken to its outermost limits the
image of the romantic revolutionary rejecting disciplinary mandates both
from mainstream society and from the movement itself ironically produced a
return to the kind of vanguardist, Leninist politics anti-disciplinary groups

like the Yippies originally intended to resist. As Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain
put it, by the end of the sixties, 'Yippie tactics of humour and guerrilla theatre
were supplanted by real guerrilla attacks'.93 Of the various ultra-militant
organizations which emerged or expanded during this time,94 the case of the
Weathermen, later the Weather Underground, is particularly revealing. Like
the Diggers at 'Drawing Boards', the Weather Underground represents certain
dispositions and proclivities in the sixties with implications far beyond the
specificities of any one particular instance.
Initially a breakaway faction of SDS, the Weather Underground was,
according to Gitlin's account, one of the main forces which split the
organization in 1969 and thus provoked its subsequent demise.95 While it is
not the object here to provide a chronology of the group's formation (as this
has been very effectively done elsewhere96), it is relevant to a discussion of the
tensions between a disciplinary and anti-disciplinary politics to detail the
contradictory tenets of the 'Weather' approach to radical politics. Central to
the doctrines preached by this group was an unrefined Third Worldism where
what its members called 'white skin privilege' had to be eliminated. Strong
identification with the Vietnamese and other victims of US imperialism was
pronounced alongside the belief that 'white blood must flow to prove ... that
white revolutionaries were serious'.97 The group declared both a commitment
to immediate and violent revolution and the conviction that 'The Revolution'
had already begun.98 They also attacked bourgeois values, aiming to 'scare the
shit out of honky America'99 and unnerve the so-called 'movement creeps'100 as
well. Their slogan, 'Bring the War Home!', which was put into practice on
numerous occasions, most markedly during their notorious 'Four Days of
Rage' at Chicago,101 well encapsulated the critical features of their political
philosophy.
Like its predecessors among the Yippies, the Diggers, the New Left and the
counterculture, the Weather Underground was anti-organization. Mark Rudd
(a principal member in one stage of the group's history) declared that
'organization' in the sense of methodically building a broad-based move-
ment 'was just another way of going slow'.102 Spontaneous direct action
was promoted and the New Left portrayed as torpid and meeting-obsessed.
Yet, ironically, the group's members established themselves into a highly
organized network of secret cells ready for armed action against the State, the
days being taken up with disciplined weapons training and the nights filled
with lengthy meetings.103 The Weather Underground thus embodied both the
anti-disciplinary and disciplinary tendencies of the sixties and perfectly
expressed the strain between the two. On the one hand, the organization
perceived itself as a vanguard (for different groups at different times: the
working class, victims of imperialism, the freak culture) and adopted a
regimented cadre-like structure demanding order and self-control. On the
other hand, LSD was used extensively and collectively to counter self-
repression, to exorcise the remnants of privilege that came with their usually
wealthy backgrounds, and to release the members of the group from any
internal or external controls.
So, release itself was subject to a disciplinary ethic. Couples were
compelled to separate and, in an effort to overcome monogamy, everyone had
to sleep with everybody else. After achieving victory over monogamy, sex then
became the target for self-regulation and celibacy was demanded.104
Similarly, their endless and it would seem gruelling self-criticism sessions
involved a mastery of desire rather than its liberation. While pleasure and the
satisfaction of the most fanciful wish were granted sovereign status -
signifying the mechanism through which all bourgeois values would be
overthrown - the pursuit of desire was simultaneously marked as an
adversary, to be conquered through will, determination and disciplined
action. This mix between doing exactly what came into your head at the time
(like wandering up and down the aisle of an airplane asking for food from
other people's plates)105 and subordinating gratification to the revolution
(accepting hardship in terms of austere living arrangements or going without
food, for example106) embodies the contradictions inherent in far less
dramatic versions of sixties political radicalism. The Weather Underground
thus has been described as the id of the American New Left or the New Left
writ large, 'self-enclosed, contemptuous of liberalism ... exuberant with will,
courageous, reckless, arrogant, burning to act as if anything might be
possible'.107
All the contradictory longings of the decade seemed to manifest themselves
in this group: the desire for revolutionary politics to be fun, spontaneous,
chaotic, quirky, excessive, disorderly, riotous and insolent; the yearning for
clarity of purpose, order, sacrifice and achievable goals; an emphasis on
freeing the imagination and a fear this was not enough - that revolution was
possible; a romantic perception of the 'other' (blacks, at times the industrial
working class, Cubans, the Vietnamese, and so forth); and a craving to
refashion politics into something that resembled the fantasies, myths and
heroes of American popular culture. But just at the very moment when
support for the New Left via the anti-war movement was at its height, as
Gitlin notes, the strain of such incongruous positions shattered the key
organization of the New Left in America. Of the splinters discharged from the
wreckage, the Weather Underground, despite its relatively small numbers,
managed to keep a significant body of the American Left both preoccupied
and enthralled.108
The enchantment exerted by groups like the Weather Underground, the
Diggers or the Yippies is testimony to the problematic relationship between
resistance and complicity, mainstream and alternative, in the sixties. By the
end of the decade the lure was far more towards a politics which looked like
popular culture and where activists mimicked the antics of comic-book
heroes than to the actions and approaches of committed members of
conventional Left political formations. Even in the case of meta-disciplinary
organizations like the Weather Underground, the process of co-optation was
complicated by their simultaneous rejection of the ethos of mainstream
America, and their exploitation of popular culture imagery. Not surprisingly,
when these images of the outlaw were sufficiently enlarged, such a politics
produced its own antithesis, reflecting (in whatever distorted form) the
disciplinary power it attempted to shatter.
'Kicking Ass', the Weather Underground's notorious code for acts of
extreme violence against sometimes puzzling targets,109 replicated the
discipline and retribution of State police, army and courts. As Gitlin pointedly
notes: 'Revolutionary logic, tied in knots, led to a bad imitation of Pentagon
logic'.110 Just as the US army decimated the Vietnamese in order to save them,
so the Weather Underground reproduced similar tactics" 1 (and the reasoning
on which they were predicated) in New York, Chicago and elsewhere. It
seemed that the State violence witnessed by so many during the decade may
have, for some, produced an 'imitation effect' at the level of desire. The
Weather conception of 'resistance' therefore entailed the urge not only to
oppose the coercive powers associated with an oppressive State, but also to
emulate these powers. The issue of who is doing the co-opting here thus
becomes even more complicated.
As is well known, three members of the Weather Underground were killed
by their own bombs in a townhouse in New York, others were forced
underground and some are still serving jail sentences of up to seventy years
for actions which took place as late as 1981. Fredric Jameson argues that
mass culture makes it clear that the image of the terrorist 'is one of the
privileged forms in which an ahistorical culture imagines radical social
change' and that the 'otherness' of terrorism has begun to replace older
images of criminal 'insanity' in the popular imagination.112 While so-called
mass culture was derided by the old and sections of the New Left, many
sixties activists appropriated with great joy popular representations of the
outlaw. The call for all power to the imagination included to the popular
imagination. The point here is that both the anti-disciplinary and the meta-
disciplinary politics of the era had a far more contradictory relationship with
an iconography generated by the mass culture industry than commentators
on the Left and Right have usually considered to be the case.
No simple model of capitalist co-optation is adequate to account
for the apparent demise of sixties radicalism, yet the logic of recuperation is
reiterated again and again in retrospective accounts of the decade. But, like
the European avant-garde before them, the sixties activists were well aware of
the danger that their spectacular politics would quickly become normative.
As Osha Neumann says of the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers: 'Our very
name could not be said. Thus we would be protected from co-option'."3 Anti-
disciplinary groups like the Yippies attempted to co-opt co-optation by
recognizing their own complicity and broadcasting it. They did this by
deliberately exploiting the idea of their own capacity to be assimilated as a
means of distinguishing themselves from the old and New Left, especially
through the parodic borrowing from and display of popular culture motifs.
Significantly, they also tried to resist being recuperated by aiming for
incomprehensibility; working to defy the possibility that their politics could
be understood and represented. It is in these gestures, designed to outwit the
perceived assimilative power of consumer capitalism, that postmodern
impulses can be read most clearly in the anti-disciplinary politics of the
sixties counterculture. But whereas the threat of co-optation - the idea that
opposition will only serve to consolidate the Masters power - has since
functioned as an ideological pretext for political immobilization in the post-
sixties era, groups like the Yippies acknowledged such risks without con-
cluding that disengagement was the only response that would guarantee the
purity of their politics.
The presumed link between commodification and the failure of sixties
radicalism is writ large in the death of the sixties narrative. It is predicated
on a particularly problematic set of assumptions: an idea of a monolithic
and ever-absorbent capitalism; a misreading of the counterculture as un-
selfconscious and easily duped; a sense that the marketability of sixties
radicalism made it inherently suspect; andfinallya simple-minded definition
of co-optation as a straightforward 'top-down' process. Moreover, the com-
mercialization of sixties codes is paraded not only as justification for why the
sixties failed but also as the readily accepted reason why future revolutionary
projects are also doomed to failure. In current political and theoretical
discussions this axiom resurfaces in a variety of similar guises, in a certain
tendency of postmodernism, in both sympathetic and antagonistic retro-
spective examinations of the sixties period, and as an eternal verity in popular
culture representations.
Co-optation is conceptualized as a totalizing process even in discourses
which refuse such categories. In the logic of recuperation, the metaphor of
protest mirroring the dominant order seems to be taken literally, as though
the correspondence between resistance and complicity, between the market
version of cultural opposition and cultural opposition, is precise and
identical. What is overlooked is the margin of non-coincidence between the
two. The prior order was not left intact after the excesses of sixties radicalism.
One can list as proof specific reforms which emerged in the decade's wake, as
Todd Gitlin and Tom Hayden do, such as civil rights legislation or disaffection
and withdrawal from the Vietnam War.114 Additionally, it is feasible

to document, as Dennis Altman does, changes in attitudes towards sexuality,
hierarchy, work and authority as a legacy of the period.115 However, notions of
the subject were also revolutionized by sixties protest as were ideas of
what was possible politically. Postmodern theorists often attribute these
ruptures to the failure of the revolutionary projects of the decade. However,
if a retreat from protest has occurred, it can be traced as much to the success
of the anti-disciplinary politics of the sixties counterculture as to the failure
of sixties radicalism.
Chapter 5
Aesthetic Radicalism
Let me say that the Vietcong attacking the U.S. Embassy in Saigon is
a work of art.
(Abbie Hoffman)1
The conflation of 'art in the streets' with 'revolution in the streets' was a
characteristic feature of the anti-disciplinary politics of the sixties. Evidence
of the many and varied ways in which the separation of art and politics was
contested can not only be found in pageants like the 'Death of Money and the
Birth of Free' - the public ritual orchestrated by the Diggers in the Haight-
Ashbury on 16 December 1966 to reclaim the streets - or in different forms of
theatrical protest at demonstrations, in folk and rock music, in festivals, in
happenings, in poster art, and also in the writings of sixties radicals
themselves: books, pamphlets, poems and manifestos. To the Diggers, theatre
was a territory to create 'life actors', seeking 'audiences that are created by
issues'. Such political theatre, described in The Digger Papers as 'a theatre of
the underground that wants out', aimed primarily to 'create a cast of freed
beings', to 'liberate ground held by consumer wardens and establish a
territory without walls'.2
In the opinion of Abbie Hoffman, the use of art in general and theatre in
particular was also one of the many ways in which the Yippies were
distinguished from other less 'subversive', and disciplinary forms of Left
radicalism. According to Hoffman other political movements were impotent
precisely because they were locked in ideology. The Yippies, by contrast, were
'total theatre', a revolution in the streets which used 'any weapon (prop)' they
could find.3 In Jerry Rubin's words:
96
Aesthetic Radicalism 97
Life is theatre and we are the guerrillas attacking the shrines of

authority, from the priest, to the holy dollar, to the two party system,
zapping peoples minds and putting them through changes in actions
in which everybody is emotionally involved.
The street is the stage.
You are the star of the show and everything we're taught is up
for grabs.4
Needless to say, such sentiments about being the star of the show had their
roots less in political meetings than in popular culture. Just as the so-called
revolutionary avant-garde in Europe endeavoured to dismantle the insti-
tutional autonomy of art by eliminating the boundaries between political
society and high culture, so groups like the Yippies used 'popular' ingredients
to question the autonomy of politics and bring 'politics as art' into the streets.
However, the Yippies represented only one group among many expressing
this desire. They fostered a very different conception of the streets than, for
instance, the organizers of anti-war rallies, whose main purpose was to send
a direct message to the Pentagon. The objective of groups like the Diggers
or the Yippies in 'taking to the streets' was not primarily to extend the
democratic process. On the contrary, one can even detect in their writings and
antics echoes of the surrealist idea that the ultimate work of art (and hence
politics) would be to open fire in the streets. 'Art', Hoffman writes in
Revolution for the Hell of It, was 'the only thing worth dying for'.5 So, in the
Yippie notion of guerrilla theatre, the streets were not simply defined as a
democratic public space but rather as a canvas, a backdrop full of engrossing
and useful props and actors. The street as a stage was therefore the most
appropriate site for a political satire which drew simultaneously from fantasy
and burlesque as well as from the melodrama of a violent clash with the
police.
Guerrilla theatre also developed from more immediate and local sources,
and did not simply recycle remnants from the historical avant-garde. Certain
events - like the first psychedelic 'Family Dog' rock dances, which started in
the Haight-Ashbury in October 1965, Ken Kesey's notorious 'Acid Tests' and
the 'Trips Festivals' late in 1965-66, where the taking of LSD was advertised
with the aim of providing unsettling 'mind blowing situations' - expressed a
new definition of the relationship between art and protest. Attended by so-
called hippies and politicos alike (see the account in Martin Lee and Bruce
Shlain s Acid Dreams of the mix of people present at these early psychedelic
occasions6) these 'happenings' contained all the features of a play: appro-
priate costumes, 'life actors' (spontaneously creating new roles), dramatic
settings, mime exhibitions, light shows, music and dance and even on some
occasions closed circuit television cameras so people could watch themselves
perform. It is significant that Lee and Shlain evoke an aesthetic metaphor to
articulate their conclusions about these events. The authors comment that for
'a brief moment outside of time these young people lived out the implications
of Andre Bretons surrealist invocation: "Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will
not be at all"'P
Herbert Marcuse, in his influential An Essay on Liberation, documented
what he described as a 'new sensibility' emerging in the sixties.8 Marcuse
argued that a historical stage of development had been reached where the
'aesthetic' embodied the only possible form of a 'free society'. He detected this
liberating aesthetic in what he described as the 'mixture of the barricade and
the dance floor, the mingling of love, play and heroism, and in the laughter of
the young'.9 To Marcuse, this new sensibility was expressed in the call for
beauty and the demand for the truth of the imagination. He viewed the
aesthetic ethos as inherently subversive to 'the institutions of capitalism and
their morality',10 and as offering, among other things, a 'universe of human
relationships no longer mediated by the market'.11 As such, this ethos
represented the sixties fulfilment of the avant-gardist promise of the merging
of the desire for beauty with the demand for political action.12
Paradoxically, the realm of the aesthetic was viewed as providing con-
siderable protection against the danger that revolutionary ideals would be
incorporated into mainstream political processes and that protest would end
up mimicking the power it set out to oppose. As discussed in Chapter 4, the
aestheticization of protest in some ways made it more easily assimilated
rather than less so. In this respect, the faith in the aesthetic as representing
some pristine space, unsullied by corrupt tendencies and guaranteeing pure
revolutionary possibility, was a highly romanticized perspective. Such ideas
linking the aesthetic life and the ethical life have a long tradition.
In the anti-disciplinary politics of the counterculture, the aesthetic was
given a double significance; at once pure and uncontaminated and a domain
where the mingling of politics and art could occur. All sorts of fantasies were
projected onto the aesthetic. In the effort to dramatically critique the
dominant view of the political as special and as necessarily distinct from
'culture', 'art' or 'everyday life', certain forms of protest inclined to grant the
aesthetic some kind of agency, subsuming and reducing all categories to it.
Take Abbie Hoffman's depiction of the Viet Cong attack on the American
Embassy in Saigon as a work of art, quoted at the beginning of this chapter,
for example. We can read this typically original rendering as a wilful
modernist gesture invoking 'the aesthetic' as the inherently subversive
category to which Marcuse and the surrealists subscribed. But what is the
connection between this kind of gesture and the way it returns and functions
in retrospective recollections of the decade? In a special Vogue publication in
1988, devoted to reprinting images from the sixties, the following is inserted
under the heading 'Viet Nam - The People': 'Over the mosaic landscape, the
Americans design their own abstractions, painting in red and blue the "Viet
Cong" and the Government-held areas'.13 In putting these two unlikely ex-
tracts together the point is not to decontextualize them, but to question the
connection between a fundamentally subversive idea of the aesthetic and the
aesthetic as an empty category, denuded of all criticality.
In so much of the literature looking back at the sixties, reflection is
dominated by the latter - the clothes, the hair-styles, the record albums, the
commodities. According to Hal Foster, the move from the aesthetic as a
'critical interstice in an otherwise instrumental world' to the aesthetic and
instrumental merging as one represents one of the most significant features
of postmodernism.14 Fredric Jameson refers to the same process as the
abolition of all critical distance where the oppositional and instrumental
combine.15 This empty aesthetic can be detected in certain forms of sixties
radicalism. It is possible to posit a passage from a modernist to a post-
modernist aestheticism in various expressions of the aesthetic radicalism of
the sixties decade. The success of anti-disciplinary notions of politics in the
sixties can be seen to have contributed to the widespread acceptance of
certain tenets of postmodernism in later periods and to have helped seal the
privileged position postmodernism occupies in current theoretical debates.
The celebration of popular culture, the transition from parody to pastiche in
certain forms of protest, and the shift from representation to simulation in
critiques of mediated reality are three postmodern moments in sixties
radicalism. Before examining these moments, it is first necessary to turn to
the concept of postmodernism.
Given that postmodernism is 'irredeemably contested', to use Bryan
Turners words,16 and represented in so many different ways, any discussion
of the concept runs the grave risk of misrepresenting and homogenizing this
slippery phenomenon. Little agreement has been reached on how to define
postmodernism and whether or not it is a periodizing concept referring to
actual historical changes. Does postmodernism exist as an observable
epochal shift or epistemological 'break' with the past, or is it simply another
stage in the project of modernism? For, as John Frow points out, a modern-
ism which did not demand to be superseded would be a contradiction in
terms.17 Is postmodernism something as diffuse as what Jameson provoca-
tively calls a 'cultural dominant'18 or is it plainly a description of current
social reality? Is it accurate even to mention the term without distinguishing
between a Utopian postmodernism and a commercial variety, as E. Ann
Kaplan suggests,19 or heeding Fosters distinction between a postmodernism
which repudiates the 'status quo' and one which celebrates it?20 And can
these conceptual and definitional problems be settled by thinking of post-
modernism as 'nothing more and nothing less than a genre of theoretical
writing'?21
Among the 'proliferating talk of postmodernism', to borrow a phrase from
Alex Callinicos,22 various strategies are adopted to resolve the dilemma of
how adequately to characterize this phenomenon which claims to be so

heterogeneous and diffuse. Some theorists resort to a list and offer inven-
tories of consumable objects, such as television commercials, works of art
and literature, architecture, video clips and combinations of food, as a way
of concretizing postmodernism, situating it as much in specific items from
everyday life as in the realm of philosophy and critical theory.23 Others assert
a link between postmodernism and certain 'lifestyles' and raise the question
of whether postmodernism is a result of the prosperity of a 'new middle class'
in the West, as well as an expression of what Callinicos called 'the cultural
mood of the 1980s'.24 Few would dispute that there have been global shifts in
cultural, political and economic life over recent decades but problems arise
when trying to determine just what postmodernism's role has been in
ushering in or expressing these changes. As Docherty indicates, the term itself
'hovers uncertainly in most current writings' between a difficult philo-
sophical concept and a simplistic notion of a certain nihilistic tendency in
contemporary culture.25
For the purposes of this study one strategy which avoids the wildly
divergent interpretations of the exact meaning of postmodernism is to focus
only on broad areas of agreement in the literature on the topic. First, there is
little controversy about the view that the project of modernity has been
problematized by certain historical and cultural developments. Regardless of
the position taken about the precise nature of this questioning of modernity,
sixties protest, and more particularly the 'failure' of sixties radicalism,
regularly features in this narrative. It is generally held that the emancipatory
idea of global social transformation has somehow been irrevocably dis-
credited post-1968; the point at which First World revolutionary enterprises
are deemed to have floundered,26 and the revolutionary model of political
change is seen to have irrevocably broken down. Franco Ferrarotti con-
ceptualizes it in the following way, expressing all the eternal verities that have
come to dominate this kind of view:
the movement of 1968, for all its vocal propositions, was not able to
last nor succeed in conducting a cold, realistic analysis of the power
structures it intended to attack and eventually demolish. In fact, its
final result consisted paradoxically and quite unintentionally in a
reinforcement of the vested interests and in general of the existing
establishment.27
The second broad area of agreement is that modernism as an oppositional

movement has been called into question. As we are frequently told, a once
scandalizing modernism was effectively canonized and domesticated by the
academy, the museum, the art gallery network, and the culture industry.28
Third, postmodernism is viewed as having emerged from a rejection of this
so-called 'high modernism'; a rejection which can also be traced to the sixties
critique of the institutionalization of art.29 The collapsing of the distinction
between popular and high culture - the central role given to parody and
pastiche, and the idea of reality as nothing more than a series of mediated
images - is taken then to represent the dominant version of postmodernism
under discussion here.
There is an alternative genealogy connecting the sixties and this version of
postmodernism. It is not surprising to find statements linking the appearance
of postmodernism with a 'radical break' heralded either at the beginning of
the sixties or after May '68, or in the failure of the New Left in America and
the disillusionment of the sixties generation that followed, in the aesthetic
field, in the art of Andy Warhol or in the music of John Cage. However, my
question is: 'which sixties' is put under the spotlight in these accounts of
lineage? Clearly, not the sixties counterculture, which is either absent from
most commentaries on the topic, or portrayed as a historical curiosity as well
as widely perceived to be the antithesis of postmodernism. In the view of
some subcultural critics, for example, hippies are quaintly classical humanist
subjects expressing an almost Rousseau-like goodness, whereas the world-
weary punks of the eighties (often presented as the 'other' of the hippies), by
contrast, are celebrated as representatives of a kind of nihilism and a
distinctly postmodern decentred network of desires.30 Cultural theorists such
as Jameson make similar distinctions between the music of the Beatles and
the Rolling Stones, on the one hand (with both standing for a 'high modernist
moment'), against the postmodern synthesis of the classical and popular in
punk, new wave and the music of Philip Glass, on the other.31
Certainly, it is possible and indeed customary to attribute modernist
impulses to sixties radicalism. And my point is not to negate such obser-
vations by inaccurately portraying the counterculture as unproblematically
postmodern. However, in certain anti-disciplinary forms of sixties protest it is
also possible to read the emergent narrative of postmodernism, particularly
in moments of confluence between the psychedelic and the political, the New
Left and the hippies. To date, this argument has not been adequately explored
in the literature on the topic. With the exception of Andreas Huyssen, David
Harvey and Brent Whelan, it is rare for commentators on postmodernism to
even discuss aspects of the sixties which could be considered countercultural.
Huyssen at least raises the question of whether psychedelic art, acid rock, pop
vernacular and street theatre belong to a postmodernist revolt against
classical modernism. Yet, he stops short of fully analysing these forms,
making a tantalizing but ultimately cursory mention of the particulars of
sixties radicalism that concern us here.32 Sketchy mention of the counter-
culture is also made by David Harvey, who attributes an anti-modern (and
hence pre-postmodern) impulse to the 'movement of 1968'.33 Brent Whelan s
fine analysis of Ken Kesey's 'Acid Tests' is notable for the centrality it gives to
a psychedelic politics but, as I discussed in Chapter 1, his analysis falls into

some of the problematic paradigms of sixties radicalism which this book is
attempting to critique.34
Instead of looking to the 'failure' of sixties radicalism to explain a political
disillusionment widely regarded as characteristic of the 'postmodern era', it is
possible to view the 'success' of the sixties counterculture as an alternative
source of these 'anti-political' impulses.
Cultural outlaws, political organizers
One of the least contestable features of postmodernism is its refusal to accept

the hierarchy of value and elitism implied in the distinction between high
culture and popular culture. In the genealogies frequently circulated, post-
modernism is pictured in opposition to two versions of modernism: a mod-
ernism codified and conquered by the academy and museum, incorporated
as a high cultural artefact precisely because of its disengagement with the
popular or commercial; and a modernism which lost its adversary status
and entered the mainstream chiefly through its contamination by mass
production and the culture industry.35 Leaving aside the paradoxical nature
of these observations, Jameson and others identify as a central premise of
postmodern art, literature, architecture or critical theory the effacement
of key boundaries or separations, 'most notably the erosion of the older
distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture'.36
This elimination of boundaries is executed not through 'quotations' from
the popular, like a Joyce or a Mahler might have done (to use Jameson's
examples), but through the incorporation of such quotes 'to the point
where the line between high art and commercial forms seems increasingly
difficult to draw'.37 Hence the postmodern fascination with advertising,
motels, B-grade Hollywood movies, "T.V. Reader's Digest culture', and the
like.3*
However, the exploitation of this fascination as an oppositional cultural
strategy was not unique to postmodernism. The anti-disciplinary politics of
the sixties counterculture was also based on deploying captivating popular
culture themes in its language of protest. As already noted, the figure of the
'outlaw', borrowed from Hollywoodfilm,became the conscious archetype for
the anti-authoritarian revolutionary both parodied and revered by groups like
the Diggers or the Weather Underground. According to Hoffman, while the
cultural view creates outlaws, politics only breeds organizers.39 As a further
example, take Rubin's comments: 'I didn't get my ideas from Mao, Lenin or
Ho Chi Minh', he brags, 'I got my ideas from the Lone Ranger'.40 And, in
another context, the centrality of the popular in the radical imagination of the
sixties is also evident:
I am a child of Amerika [sic].

If I'm ever sent to Death Row for my revolutionary 'crimes', I'll
order as my last meal: a hamburger, french fries and a coke.
I dig big cities ...
I love to read the sports pages and gossip columns, listen to the
radio and watch color TV ...
I groove on Hollywood movies - even bad ones.
I speak only one language - English.
I love rock 'n roll.41
In the intersection between the counterculture and the New Left, attempts
were made to fashion a new politics from popular ingredients. Moreover,
importing these ingredients into the domain of politics represented not so
much an attack on high modernism as on 'high Marxism' - in either its old
or New Left guises. 'Quotations' from the popular were incorporated as
subversive elements in a politics which aimed to counter the piety of more
conventional Left strategies, to taint the purity of movements supposedly
based on selfless ideals and noble ancestry, and to playfully incorporate
seductive items from the everyday into an arena often noted for its autonomy
and specialization.
The anti-disciplinary assault on the autonomy of politics and culture was
largely prefigured by wider political-economic developments. Efforts to con-
fuse the lines between politics, art, culture and everyday life did not arise in
a vacuum. The status of these categories and of 'the popular' itself had already
been altered by post-war developments in communications technology and
the related expansion of a prosperous consumer culture. New definitions
of the relationship between popular culture and a dominant high culture
were fostered via the medium of television. And just as a once adversary
modernism was incorporated into the mainstream through advertising,
changes in technologies of production and the creation of mass markets in
the fifties,42 so a once marginal protest tradition embodied in folk music and
culture was commercialized in the sixties, not least through an expanding
record industry.
In one sense, then, the anti-disciplinary revelling in the popular was merely
a reflection of broader cultural changes. So, in harking back to the Lone
Ranger as a begetter of radical ideas, figures like Jerry Rubin illustrate that in
the sixties a new political memory was in the making. This is well expressed
in a notable incident which took place on December 1966 at a mass meeting
about a campus strike in Berkeley. Reporting at the time in the San Francisco
Examiner, Lyn Ludlow records that after six days of demonstrations the
students broke into song. She then notes incredulously that: 'They did NOT
sing We Shall Overcome. They sang Yellow Submarine'!43 Others have also
documented this telling event. Todd Gitlin depicts this spontaneous outburst
in part as evidence of the bridges being built between 'freaks' and 'politicos' at
Berkeley:
At a mass meeting about a campus strike, someone started singing

the old union standby, 'Solidarity Forever'. Voices stumbled, few
knew the words. Then someone started 'Yellow Submarine,' and the
entire roomful rollicked into it, chorus after chorus. With a bit of
effort, the Beatles' song could be taken as the communion of hippies
and activists, students and non-students, all who at long last felt they
could express their beloved single-hearted community.44
This episode epitomizes a rather unselfconscious turn to popular culture and

is in contrast to the more deliberate manipulation of popular culture themes
we see in the later antics of the Yippies. However, the incident also marks a
significant historical moment where an essentially commercial product (the
Beatles' song) overshadows and is experienced as more powerful, resonant
and palpable than the actual heritage of the American Left. My point here is
about a change in historical memory, not about the 'heritage of the American
Left' as an unproblematic notion. Obviously, this 'heritage' involves a myth-
making of its own. In an interesting review essay of John Sayles' Union Dues,
Marianne DeKoven observes that one of these myths revolves around a
supposed continuity in the American Left and that sixties radicals were
'fighting the same good fight against the same oppression that the American
miners fought in 1914'.45 The singing of 'Yellow Submarine' marks a de-
parture from such myths.
As Gitlin suggests it is indeed possible to see in this collective singing an
expression of the students' desire for a 'single-hearted community' and he
quotes from a leaflet written at the time by Michael Rossman, who described
this singing as a fusion of 'head, heart and hands'.46 Yet this would also be
true if they had sung 'Solidarity Forever'! What sets this incident apart and
thereby guarantees its retelling in retrospective accounts of the period is both
the curious choice of song in an otherwise conventional form of political
protest and the students' inability to remember the 'old union standby' and/or
their lack of enthusiasm for it. This makes it possible equally to view the
singing of 'Yellow Submarine' (the song itself being a fairly impenetrable
collage) as a rudimentary postmodern moment, signalling the demise of a
certain kind of political memory where, to use Jamesons words: 'the past as
"referent" finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether .. ,'.47
It is interesting to reflect on whether this commercial song would have been
so readily embraced in a country with a different and perhaps more deeply
embedded Left tradition. For example, it is hard to imagine 'Yellow Sub-
marine' replacing the 'Internationale' at a demonstration in France in the
sixties. This is where the cultural and historical specificities of sixties
movements differ markedly. In America, particularly after McCarthyism, the

political memory could hardly be described as socialist. This incident also
tells us something about a certain attitude to commercialized popular culture
which may have been more uncritical in America than in Europe at the time.
Doubtless, the Yippies were the sixties radicals who most thoroughly
problematized the notion of a referent. Yippie rituals and writings repeatedly
emphasized the extent to which there was nothing but myth in contemporary
society. Political activity, including their own, was invariably depicted as
being all about distortion, myth-making and mediated images. And, to
theatrically illustrate these points, popular culture themes were used by the
Yippies to unsettle familiar distinctions between fantasy and reality. The
line separating politics from art was blurred because, like soap operas or
advertisements or other items from popular culture, politics also involved
myth-making, and was in essence, according to this logic, a fabrication. Once
again, the anti-disciplinary politics of the Yippies departed from both the old
and New Left, which likewise drew on a fine tradition of identifying political
misrepresentation and falsehood elsewhere but stopped short of extending
this critique to include their own practices.
The Yippies thus turned conventional Left interpretations of ideology on
their heads and instead maintained the position that the more distortion the
better in politics. Instances of this conviction being broadcast are apparent
in many of the extracts from the Yippie writings already cited in preceding
chapters. Similarly, Abbie Hoffman's discussion of the relative merits of the
popular Chicago tabloid, the Daily News, and, by comparison, the high
cultural artefact of The New York Times ends up offering a very positive view
of media exaggeration. Hoffman asks which is closer to the 'truth': the Daily
News description of 'Pot-smoking, dirty, beatnik, pinko, sex-crazy, Vietnik,
so-called Yippies', or The New York Times rendering of the Yippies as
'members of the newly formed Youth International Party (YIP)'?48 Hoffman
has no qualms about declaring his love for the former, hailing the Daily
News as being the closest thing to TV ('it [even] looks like a T.V. set')49 and
hence, in his opinion, closer to the fake 'reality' of American society in the
late sixties.
Hoffman's homage to media exaggeration is not without its irony. However,
the further he develops the contrast between the two newspapers the more
the irony seems to diminish:
... I don't consider [the Daily News] the enemy, in the same way that
I don't consider George Wallace the enemy. Corporate liberalism,
Robert Kennedy, Xerox, David Susskind, The New York Times,
Harvard University - that is where the real power in America lies,
and it's the rejection of those institutions and symbols that dis-
tinguishes radicals.50
Mass culture was therefore not the adversary of the radicalism to which
Hoffman refers. Moreover, the chimera-like qualities of popular culture, its
talent for overstatement and ability to magnify and expand the 'real' was
portrayed as somehow liberating and therefore a legitimate focus for
countercultural politics. But this was no artless celebration of the popular. In
fact the relationship between the Yippies and mass culture was double: the
Yippies, on the one hand, relishing in the fantasy world produced by popular
culture and embracing it as being intrinsically antagonistic towards the
dominant institutions of the day, and, on the other, obliquely drawing
attention to the role of the popular in making everything appear equally as
illusory. Ironically, the Yippies did their bit to encourage the media preference
for spectacular politics which pushed conventional Left and social movement
protests to the margins.
In many respects, the quotations from the popular which helped shape the
language of an anti-disciplinary politics in the sixties simultaneously
expressed modernist and postmodernist tendencies. If, in this instance, we
take as valid one of Marshall Berman's definitions of modernism, as 'the
variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as
well as the objects of modernization, to give them the power to change the
world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and
make it their own',51 then even the most anti-disciplinary of groups did not
relinquish such aims. Embedded in their flamboyant use of motifs from
popular culture was a critique of the dehumanizing nature of the mass
culture industry: its uniformity, absurdity and falsehood. The cultures of
so-called elite and mass society were therefore not entirely blended into an
equivalently inconsequential mix. Insinuated in the anti-disciplinary attempts
to erase the distinction between high art and popular culture were a set of
value judgements about both. And from the tacit critique of popular culture
came the modernist promise implied in Yippie forms of political intervention:
by amplifying and enacting the distortion at the heart of mass society (and
linking this deception to high culture as well), transcendence, authenticity
and change would become possible.
Like other forms of sixties radicalism, the anti-disciplinary politics of the
Yippies shared a commitment to the idea of 'the streets'; faith that there was
a space 'outside' and separate from the dominant institutions of mainstream
culture. While this notion of the streets at times literally meant footpaths,
roads and public places where guerrilla theatre could take place, at other
times it took on a more metaphoric significance signalling an autonomous
cultural sphere unclouded by the delusions of mass culture. According
to Jameson, the very conceptions of 'negativity', 'opposition', 'subversion',
'critique' and 'reflexivity' (the stuff of radical politics) essentially rely on such
a spatial and conceptual separation. These ideas share:
a single, fundamentally spatial, presupposition, which may be

resumed in the equally time-honoured formula of 'critical distance'.
No theory of cultural politics current on the Left today has been able
to do without one notion or another of a certain minimal aesthetic
distance, of the possibility of the positioning of the cultural act
outside the massive Being of capital, which then serves as an
Archimedean point from which to assault this last.52
So anti-disciplinary ideas about such things as guerrilla theatre in the streets

were in one sense as much predicated on the logic of a critical distance - the
conviction that it was possible to stand outside and be a genuinely
independent voice - as were more disciplinary forms of sixties radicalism.
Yet, in another and just as compelling sense, the critical distance of the
streets and, alongside it, the emancipatory aims of modernity were effaced by
these anti-disciplinary gestures. In this form of protest, nothing stood outside
the popular. No domain of authenticity was granted existence in high culture,
Left politics or elsewhere. The categories were genuinely muddled. Rather
than a politics with "a logically adversarial relationship to that which it
purportedly resisted, this form of radicalism suffused itself with its opposite.
As the Yippies and similar groups mockingly immersed themselves in the
most cliched forms of the popular, so the possibility of distance became more
unlikely. In this respect quotations from the popular were increasingly
emptied of criticality; they were mere aesthetic embellishments in a politics
which had turned in on itself, so that parody and play became ends in
themselves rather than indications of alternatives to what Perry Anderson
has called, in another context, 'the imperial status-quo of a consumer
capitalism'.53
Parody without a vocation
A special and pronounced use of parody is considered to be one of the

defining features of postmodernism. Unlike the concordance surrounding the
fusion of high art and popular culture in postmodernism, the issue of parody
seems more contentious. According to Linda Hutcheon, 'Parody - often called
ironic quotation, pastiche, appropriation, or intertextuality - is usually
considered central to postmodernism, both by its detractors and defenders'.54
Yet, while it would appear that the importance of parody to postmodernism
is not subject to major dispute, there is in fact little agreement (among allies
and rivals alike) over what makes a particular use of parody distinctively
postmodern. Furthermore, cultural critics are divided over whether the use
of parody confirms postmodernism s status as oppositional - what Foster
defines as a 'postmodernism of resistance' - or complicit, 'a postmodernism

of reaction'.55
Hutcheon's own analysis is a case in point here. She sets out to dispute 'the
prevailing interpretation' of postmodernism as 'a value-free, decorative, de-
historicized quotation of past forms', arguing instead that postmodernist
parody is not reactionary but rather a 'value-problematizing, de-naturalizing
form' of acknowledging the history, irony and politics of representations.56 In
an otherwise illuminating portrait of the phenomenon under scrutiny,
Hutcheon's argument about parody fails to resolve the issue of what is
exclusively postmodern about a parody that is 'value-problematizing' or 'de-
naturalizing'. Modernist uses of parody in art, music and literature precisely
serve such a function, with the ironic use of quotation not only transforming
the meaning of the original but also questioning its canonical significance.
The qualities Hutcheon attributes to postmodernist parody would be just
as apt, therefore, as descriptions of modernism. And the very features she
rejects as being at all characteristic of postmodernism, a 'decorative', 'de-
historicized' form of parody, represent, for a critic like Jameson, exactly the
marks that separate postmodern mimicry from other types of quotation. To
Jameson, parody is 'without a vocation' in postmodernism and consequently
is replaced by pastiche: 'blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs'.57 This
pastiche, Jameson argues, is a neutral practice 'without any of parody's
ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of
any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily
borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists'.58 While all this may
simply reinforce the point repeatedly made that the line between modernism
and postmodernism is notoriously indistinct, this transition from parody to
pastiche is none the less germane to our investigation of the aestheticization
of protest.
A surfeit of parodic quotations from the popular can be found in the anti-
disciplinary politics of the sixties counterculture. Among the sources raided
by sixties radicals were cartoons, Hollywood westerns, television heroes from
the late fifties and the big youth culture films of the sixties. In Woodstock
Nation, for example, Abbie Hoffman describes Easy Rider as 'the perfect
propagandafilm',59and his written blueprints for revolution are littered with
references to Billy the Kid, The Wild One, the Marx Brothers, Lenny Bruce,
Alfred Hitchcock and Bonnie and Clyde - a film which, according to Todd
Gitlin, exerted a strong influence on political activists of the day.60 Even
disciplinary groups like the Black Panthers, who were considered to be more
'authentically' radical than many other organizations, quoted from similar
sources. According to Panther leader, Bobby Seale, the Panthers' notorious
black berets and other parts of their distinctive uniform were chosen from a
B-grade television movie on the French resistance!61 An interesting aside is
that the Panthers themselves were later quoted and mimicked by other
sections of the movement which perceived them to be the archetype for the
true revolutionary.
Such 'borrowing' from the popular was rampant in sixties radicalism. Yet,
in many cases, this was parody with a definite vocation. At the SDS con-
vention in 1969, Murray Bookchin's pamphlet, 'Listen Marxist', was dis-
tributed. On the front was a picture of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Bugs Bunny.62
In the previous year, a Motherfucker had nominated a garbage can to run
against what Gitlin describes as 'one of the national office s slate of ponderous
leftists'. As Gitlin drily records, 'The garbage can narrowly lost'.63 Like the
Yippie 'Pig for President' campaign during the Chicago Democratic Party
Convention in 1968, this kind of parody had a purpose. Far from being 'blank'
or vacant, it was a resonant form of quotation, saturated with serious, ironic
and self-critical references. This is evident in Hoffman's description of the
way in which the pig, both the 'myth of the Pig' and the literal pig,
transformed the political landscape during the demonstrations at the Chicago*
Convention. Apart from the amusing 'technical problems of managing a large
pig', and the sardonic observation that Yippie factions emerged demanding a
'meaner pig' (signalling to Hoffman that the real pig had been 'rejected by the
myth'), his account also highlights a pointedness and intentionality in parody
of this kind:
We were united in our determination to smash the system by using

any means at our disposal and build a new world. In any event it
didn't matter. Jerry's big Pig hit the Civic Center and Mrs. Pig was let
loose in the park hours later ... I dropped the hint that we were
considering running a lion. In the end thousands of pigs were used,
real pigs, pig buttons, nice pigs like Mr. and Mrs. Pig (see wonderful
photo in Chicago Daily News entitled 'Mr. and Mrs. Pig Re-United in
the Pokey') and bad pigs like the cops, Daley, Humphrey and the
politicians. It was shades of Animal Farm and you couldn't tell the
pigs from the farmers or the farmers from the pigs.64
The decade reveals countless anti-disciplinary parodic gestures which were

equally replete with emancipatory significance. The mock 'promotional' film
for the Yippies is another notable example. Apart from being intercut with
frames from old Hollywood movies of the thirties and forties (thus bearing
out my arguments about the centrality of popular culture themes, and the
points to follow about the use of pastiche), the Yippie film is structured like a
bizarre advertisement. The narrator of the film - who himself looks like a
spoof of an American variety show host - asks the question, what is the
difference between an egg, a tomato, a squash, an eggplant, a pumpkin, a
Yippie head? He then proceeds to smash each item with a police truncheon,
concluding that the pumpkin is the closest thing to a policeman's head, and
that the Yippie 'helmet' (head) is 'one up on Mother Nature'.65 The repeated
beating and destruction of all the natural products makes a strong visual
statement about police violence while linking radical politics and burlesque
in a surreal and distinctively Yippie fashion.
Yet, if this pointed and purposeful use of parody is so obvious in the anti-
disciplinary political gestures of the sixties, what is its relationship to the
'empty' blank parody associated with postmodernism? And does the wide-
spread use of parody in sixties radicalism mark an aestheticization of
politics? It would be impossible, if not nonsensical, to attempt to answer
these questions by looking for a specific point at which parody becomes
pastiche during the decade. Often elements of both are evident in the one
anti-disciplinary action. Nevertheless, the traces of such a transition can to
varying degrees be recognized in the strain of sixties politics we have
discussed so far. Take, for instance, the clothing worn by Hoffman and Rubin
in one of their appearances before the House of Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC) trials in October 1968. Their deliberate choice of attire
reflects the paradoxical role of parody in the late sixties. Rubin describes the
thought that went into choosing one of his costumes and his elation when he
settled on what he terms 'a gestalt':
I arrived wearing a Black Panther beret with Panther and yippie

buttons, Egyptian earrings, a Mexican bandolier with live 303 British
Infield bullets around my chest, black silk Viet Kong pajamas,
jangling ankle bracelets, beads and a headband. I had cowbells and
jingle bells around my neck, wrists and ankles so that every time I
moved I sounded like an orchestra. My face, naked hairy chest and
bare feet were painted with psychedelic designs and peace symbols.
Over my shoulder I carried a toy M-16 custom-made rifle, the kind
the Viet Kong use after stealing them from the Amerikans [sic].66
Hoffman's description is as follows: 'Jerry wore a one-man, world conspiracy,

guerrilla costume complete with toy M-16 and live ammunition. I went as an
Indian with feathers, hunting knife and a bull whip. I also carried an electric
yo-yo'.67
Both costumes reflect an attempt to ridicule the HUAC proceedings
through parodic quotation and signal a contempt for the proceedings and
the institution they represent. However, note the difference between Rubin's
and Hoffman's apparel. Elements of the guerrilla outfit can be viewed as
more akin to parody in a modernist sense, but both suggest certain
postmodern impulses and resemble Jameson's definition of pastiche. The
coupling of Hoffman's Indian garb with an electric yo-yo is a more diffuse
type of mockery than that indicated by Rubin's guerrilla costume, particularly
given the escalation of the Vietnam War at the time. Yet each outfit represents
and satirizes different and significant 'others' of the dominant order of the
day: Rubin as soldier turned urban terrorist and Hoffman as the indigenous
American, warrior-like and threatening. Both also summon up cartoon and
television images which turn this threat into mockery. The combination of
this playful quotation from cliched popular culture images of American
history and something as blatantly absurd and 'meaningless' (given the
context) as an electric yo-yo together transform this parody into something
else, reminiscent of Dada and surrealism but also pointing to a new and
impenetrable form of pastiche referring, above all, to itself.
In such moments we witness a situation where the spectacle of protest
becomes more important than any other transformative intent or content it
may have. Moreover, the media fascination with Rubin's and Hoffman's
costumes - and the way in which images of them so attired were subse-
quently circulated - only served to strengthen this impression that style was
politics in the sixties. The most irreverent and hence subversive of strategies
were seen to be best placed in the cultural or aesthetic domain. Furthermore,
this perception was reinforced by the way in which certain forms of cultural
protest were received by the State. Later, before the HUAC again, Hoffman
appeared in court in a shirt which looked like the American flag. He was
promptly arrested, the police ripped the shirt from his back and he spent a
night in jail with bail set for $3000.68 The comedy of this punishment, as
Hoffman portrays it, was that the shirt happened to be commercially made,
easily available, a mass-produced item.
Yet it would be wrong to interpret Hoffman's choice of shirt, or indeed its
'commercial' production, as unreflective gestures and it is as far removed
from the portrayal of the hippie as clown of the retrospective reminiscences
as is possible. Then, as now, great controversies existed about what could and
could not be done with the Americanflag.It is reasonable to imagine that the
shirt would not have been as easily available as Hoffman suggests: its
production, perhaps by certain hip entrepreneurs, being a radical political
gesture and, at the same time, a precursor to certain postmodern com-
modities which set sacred or profane symbols (the cross or the swastika, for
example) in a de-historicized commercial form, thus attempting to divest the
symbols of their original meaning, and to create the (false) impression that
all symbols are equally interchangeable. Even so, the extreme nature of the
police response to the shirt indicates that, in this context, protest with a
purely aesthetic dimension (as avant-garde and modernist artists already
knew) can be just as destabilizing and revolutionary as any other more overtly
'political' form.
Obviously, it is not my argument that the aesthetic is inherently anti-
political. Such an assumption would be as misleading as one which imagines
the aesthetic to be innately revolutionary. Yet, for all the examples of cultural
politics with great disruptive potential in the sixties, there are just as many
instances of sixties protest where the aesthetic as a subversive category spills

over into emptiness. Certain forms of countercultural pastiche are a case in
point here. Poster art, for instance, presented a multifocal, heterogeneous set
of images from a plurality of sources whose purpose was to defy linear
interpretation. On the one hand, given the customary use of posters as
'psychedelic aids' (during LSD trips), it is hardly unexpected to find a
bewildering collage of oriental deities, Victorian cartoon characters, Indian
sadhus, engravings from Greek statues and cowboys from American westerns
as in the posters for Ken Kesey's 'Acid Tests'. Yet, on the other, poster art
represented a 'de-historicized' form of quotation; the 'value-free' and
'decorative' parody to which Hutcheon refers, and a type of quotation usually
associated with postmodernism.69
As far as posters with a more readily identifiable political intent were
concerned these too served an ornamental function as well as signalling
protest and dissent. This fact is highlighted in a poignant story by Lyndon
Walker which evokes among other things the anti-Vietnam period in
Australia. The story opens:
I remember Che. I remember Jimi Hendrix and the Doors; and I

remember Ian Chris and Andrei. I remember the revolution and how
we all believed in it. I remember the posters of Che and Jimi on
bedroom walls. My memory remembers getting the two confused.
Even now, if you gave me a short-answer quiz, in those circular
lecture halls in La Trobe university that smell like old shoes after the
rain, I would probably still get them confused.70
As Walker's narrative documents, one of the most distinctive features of

the sixties was this interchangeability between the status of a rock musician
as a revolutionary hero and an actual revolutionary hero. These de-
contextualized, de-historicized poster images served a similar aesthetic pur-
pose. While obviously these 'revolutionary' posters signalled one's political
affiliations and sense of belonging to the movement at the time, they were
also easily assimilated as mere decor. As an aside, perhaps the decade of the
sixties was unique in this respect, being one of the few periods in history
where images of political revolutionaries were just the thing to fill that empty
spot on a bedroom wall.
Other forms of pastiche can also be found in significant sixties moments.
Music is one example, more fully explored by other commentators, 71 where
quotations from Indian ragas, classical music, popular ballads, radio talkback
programs and motor car noise were jumbled together into various sound
collages. The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's is a perfect example of such trends. While
another germane indication of the aestheticization of radical protest during
the decade can be found in various 'happenings', including rock concerts and
festivals, even blanker forms of parody took place elsewhere. Take Hugh
Romney's comments about his pranks during the lead up to a Rock Benefit
he planned for the Chicago 8. Romney, whose alter ego was Wavy Gravy,
describes how he was arrested for walking around Chicago with a three-foot
plastic banana. 'After that', he writes, 'I never went anywhere without my
banana'.72 He also recalls a meeting with the Black Panthers where he was
'put down because [he] was dressed like a duck and not revolutionary
serious'.73 And at another protest, for the release of Bobby Seale, where those
demonstrating wore gags on their mouths, he recounts how he had to fight
the impulse to also gag his banana' 'cause I knew it would offend my [black]
brothers'. Romney continues: 'But even thinkin' about doin' it made me laugh
just enough not to crack [and do it]'.74
Another of Romney's numerous and fantastical exploits was to release fifty
live turkeys at the Chicago 8 Rock Benefit, a decision which proved a
logistical nightmare (not to mention cruel and hazardous for the turkeys)
until he made particular people officially responsible for each one.75 Such
stunts, while undoubtedly being linked to the unusual personal biography of
Hugh Romney, also represented a trend with wider implications. Importing
components of Dada (minus the historical context in which Dada arose) or
capriciously lifting elements from extraneous sources pushed parody into the
realm of pastiche. Here, with either the banana or the turkeys, we have
Jameson's 'statue with blind eyeballs': an aimless, vacant form of referencing
or random borrowing where parody was without an 'ulterior motive' and the
key driving force seemed to be spectacle, and spectacle alone.
It is therefore somewhat misleading to even use the term 'quotation' to
describe the different ways in which this type of parody or pastiche operated.
'Quotation' implies an intentionality and directedness often deliberately
absent from the more anti-disciplinary forms of protest that we have dis-
cussed so far. 'Quotation' does not adequately capture the arbitrary and
haphazard pirating from various sources that occurred in certain kinds of
cultural politics in the sixties. In addition, it is a description which fore-
shadows some of the difficulties posed by attempting to locate any 'true'
original source of countercultural quotation. This is especially apparent in
the manipulation of popular culture themes. Not only can wefindevidence of
parody without a vocation in the anti-disciplinary imitation and mimicry of
the popular, but the various antics we have considered throughout this study
also go as far as to question the very notion of originality; the idea of a pre-
existing pure source from which copies could eventually emanate. Again, a
movement towards a postmodern ethos can be discerned.
For instance, while sixties activists turned to images of popular American
heroes from film and television to signify something as central to protest as
the concept of 'radicalism', these representations were themselves already
highly mediated - already forms of quotation. This is not to imply that such
choices were innocent or random. Images of images were recycled with little
sense that it was either necessary or logical to search for a historical 'original'.
Nor is this to suggest that if an anti-disciplinary political language had been
fashioned from history books rather than from cartoons, it would have had
its roots in some kind of pure, unmediated source. Rather, my point is that
in refusing to distinguish between sources (from high culture or popular
culture) and, indeed, problematizing the very existence of an original source,
debates which were to plague cultural politics in later decades were thus
prefigured in different forms of sixties radicalism. From the death of orig-
inality, it was a short step towards a position subsequently to have profound
political consequences: a view which, to use Callinicos' words, 'deprives us of
the ability to talk of a world independent of our representations of it, to
distinguish between true and false, real and imaginary'.76
Beyond representation
As we have seen, conventional notions of the 'real' were tested in numerous

and spectacular ways in the sixties. Drug experiences were deliberately con-
trived to dismantle familiar forms of reason (Kesey's 'Acid Tests'). Trips to a
metaphoric India were undertaken to break through the confines of a linear
so-called 'Western' logic. Magic, madness and mysticism were celebrated as
a challenge to bureaucratic, technical rationality. And politics became re-
enchanted through an injection of parody, fantasy and play into anti-
disciplinary forms of protest. On the everyday level, common understandings
of reality were unsettled by declaring the death of money, by fostering an anti-
work ethic, by refusing consumption, by redefining gender roles and by
romanticizing the 'other' of either the Third World, blacks, outlaws, the poor,
or all of the above. However, of these distinctive refusals of capitalist and so-
called Enlightenment rationality, none was more far reaching and enduring
in its significance than the conviction that reality was in essence mythical,
amounting to nothing more and nothing less than a series of mediated
images.
This belief, expressed in different kinds of radical protest, took two separate
but related forms. The first was typified primarily by organizations like SDS,
old Left interventions and other more disciplinary styles of protest. The
world, or reality, was indeed seen to be represented in images, but in-
adequately so. The media was given a starring role in this analysis and
perceived to be responsible for distorting the real, beyond recognition, for the
purposes of capitalist profit and social control. Needless to say, underlying
this view was faith that the world existed independent of our representations
of it. This outlook, with its emphasis on representation, granted legitimacy to
the referent while at the same time problematizing the relationship between
referent, signifier and sign.
The second variant, exemplified more (but not exclusively) by the anti-
disciplinary protest of the Yippies, the Diggers and the hippies, had a similar
focus on representation. However, it denied the autonomy of the referent,
instead emphasizing simulation over and above anything else. While repre-
sentational perspectives charged the media with false image-making and with
misrepresenting reality, the issue of distortion was less relevant for an
analysis centring on simulation. Without a referent, an objective reality or
notion of a genuine source, reality was seen to comprise only images, and all
equally illusory ones at that. Once again, the media was given a significant
place in such a perspective. But the media did not entirely occupy centre
stage, for in the postmodern fusion of popular culture and high art, other
forms of mediation than the usual focus on the press, television, magazines or
advertisements also came under the spotlight.
While the title of Guy Debord s Society of the Spectacle11 comes to mind and
is often used as a shorthand for this simulated world, as Callinicos has
highlighted, Debords influential vision of a society where the principle of
commodity fetishism had gone mad still presupposed that 'something exists
that is being alienated or repressed'.78 This presupposition is absent from
postmodernism as well as from certain aspects of anti-disciplinary radicalism
in the sixties. However, in the latter, it is possible to detect tensions between
a viewpoint emphasizing misrepresentation, manipulation and alienation
and one which accentuates perpetual imitation, echoes with no origin or
what Callinicos pointedly describes as 'hallucinatory evocations of a non-
existent real'.79
This tension underlies the infamous Digger pamphlet, 'Trip Without a
Ticket'. While being far from a disciplinary intervention, and containing all
the elements of postmodernism we have investigated so far - as well as
perfectly expressing an anti-disciplinary language of protest - this leaflet
nevertheless fails to embrace an altogether Baudrillardian celebration of the
simulacrum.80 Witness the following:
How many T.V. specials would it take to establish one Guatemalan

revolution? How many weeks would an ad agency require to face-lift
the image of the Viet Cong? Slowly, very slowly we are led nowhere.
Consumer circuses are held in the ward daily. Critics are tolerated
like exploding novelties. We will be told which burning Asians to take
seriously. Slowly. Later.81
Here, at a fundamental level we see a critique of media influence. Images are

circulated and received as sheer images whether or not they deal with the self-
immolation of Buddhist protesters against the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong or
the suffering in Guatemala. These images appear mirage-like, making little
impact on viewers. In fact the Diggers suggest that media manipulation is so
strong it might indeed be possible to face-lift the Viet Cong if advertisers so

desired. The inertia of viewers thus comes under critical scrutiny.
Yet the Digger leaflet also has a characteristic which distinguishes it from
more conventional Left critiques of the media. The pamphlet takes on a
hallucinatory quality, as do the images to which it refers, and a portrait
follows this extract where citizens are described as being somnambulists in a
psychiatric ward. But, despite the implicit realization that a purely rep-
resentational analysis of media influence is inadequate to explain the potency
of certain images, 'Trip Without a Ticket' ultimately refuses to surrender a
commitment to an underlying basic reality, as is evident in the last line of the
extract. The blunt allusion to 'burning Asians' manages both to refer to a
familiar media image and to summon up some sense of a reality beyond this
macabre representation of it. In this respect the Digger tract could be seen as
a hallucinatory evocation of an existent rather than a 'non-existent' real.
This tension is not, it should be noted, as marked in the writings of Abbie
Hoffman, where the embryonic narrative of postmodernism is more
apparent. The Yippies launched an entirely different kind of critique of the
media, hailing distortion and myth-making as the essence of contemporary
reality. While, as we have seen, Yippie criticism at times targeted the
inadequacy of media representation (thereby retaining some belief in an
'existent real'), it mostly exalted simulation, with hallucination replacing any
sense of an objective reality. Take this extended example from Hoffman's
discussion of the Daily News:
I once wanted to start a newspaper called the New York Liar. It would
be the most honest paper in the country. I would sit in a dark closet
and write all the news ... I would write about events without ever
leaving the closet ... Fantasy is the only truth. Once we had a
demonstration at the Daily News building. About three hundred
people smoked pot, danced, sprayed reporters with body deodorant,
burned money, handed out leaflets to all the employees that began:
'Dear fellow member of the Communist conspiracy'. We called it an
Alternative Fantasy. It worked great... Nobody understood it. That
is, nobody could explain what it all meant yet everybody was
fascinated. It was pure imagery, which in the end is truth.12
Both Hoffman and Rubin make frequent references like this to fantasy as the
ultimate truth. Politics in particular and the social world in general are
portrayed as nothing more than a series of pseudo-events. Hoffman's
comments about the type of news he would like to write in the New York Liar
pre-empt and confirm a conviction later to be associated with post-
modernism: that every 'truth' is equally a fabrication. Writing in a dark closet,
he is arguing, would produce as much or as little true evidence as reporting
a witnessed event. And, as we have already seen, the explanatory power

of a protest like the so-called 'Alternative Fantasy' at the Daily News is
irrelevant. Both the intention and/or the meaning of such a protest is sub-
sumed by its effectiveness as pure spectacle: pure imagery. Interestingly, in
E. L. Doctorow's fictional account of the sixties and the decade's relationship
to the Left radicalism of the thirties, one of the activist characters boasts:
'Society is a put-on, so we put on the put on ... We're going to overthrow the
United States with images'.83
Not only was the world, in this context, non-existent for the Yippies, but the
thing called the 'Yippies' was as well. Of the notorious and influential New
York Stock Exchange 'money burning' incident, Hoffman writes: 'In point of
fact nothing happened. Neither we nor the Stock Exchange exist. We are both
rumours'.84 In other circumstances, any remnant of a referent is corres-
pondingly erased. To the question, 'What does free speech mean to you?',
Hoffman replies, 'To me it is an image like all things'.85 In fact Revolution for
the Hell of It opens with such a response to the suggestion implied in the
book's title: 'Why not [have a revolution]? It's all a bunch of phoney words
anyway'.86 Truth is similarly problematized throughout Hoffman's tract,
particularly when he gives three different explanations for why he begged to
be arrested by the police in a drug bust where only the blacks were detained.
One story portrays his actions as a direct response to racism. Another claims
that the 'fun' of the situation explains his behaviour and yet another asserts
that he really didn't know why he asked to be arrested. Hoffman details which
audience will be given which of the three stories, concluding that there is no
true explanation because all the answers, including everything else he said
about the incident, are simply 'made up'.87 It is important to remember that
this aim for incomprehensibility, this refusal to be subjected to a singular
reading was a key strategy in guarding against the process whereby protest
was assimilated and returned as complicity.
In discussing the link between the concept of a simulacrum (the identical
copy for which no original has ever existed) and postmodern pastiche,
Jameson identifies as among the defining characteristics of this relationship
'the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored
up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture'.88 Sixties radicals had
no compunction about visiting this museum and appropriating its artefacts.
So from the mimicry of Bonnie and Clyde and Billy the Kid to politics as
spectacle (a series of self-referential pseudo-events), the sounds of a
postmodern 'speech in a dead language'89 are clearly audible. And this clatter
is not exclusively confined to anti-disciplinary forms of sixties protest. Even
groups with meta-disciplinary aims like the Weather Underground arbitrarily
plundered the halls of simulated popular culture. The words of the song,
'Yellow Submarine', which had almost gained the status of an anthem in the
Berkeley protests, were altered to: 'We all live in a Weather machine'.90
Popular song titles were used as headings for 'Weather' position papers and
manifestos and, as Gitlin documents, the group sang songs like 'I'm dreaming
of a white riot' to the tune of 'White Christmas' and to the tune of 'Maria' from
West Side Story: 'The most beautiful sound I ever heard/ Kim II Sung ... / I've
just met a Marxist-Leninist named Kim II Sung/ and suddenly his line/ Seems
so correct and fine to me'!91
Yet these seemingly benign forms of quotation neither represent the more
significant nor the more enduring links between sixties radicalism and the
narrative of postmodernism. Rather it was the abandonment of a sense of
something existing outside popular culture representations, the absolute
embracing of simulation over representation that marks the decade's most
postmodern moment and, unexpectedly, one of its most abiding legacies. On
the one hand, this abandonment was expressed as merely a preference for the
image over the thing, the copy over the original, the representation over
reality, the appearance to being. But, in a more extravagant expression of this
tendency, the second part of each equation was bracketed and erased
altogether. Although elements of such abandonment can be discerned in the
whole spectrum of sixties protest, this erasing represents the contradictory
logic of an anti-disciplinary politics.
However, the sixties would not prove to be the decade where this logic
flourished. In fact, while overlaps between sixties radicalism and post-
modernism should now be clear, the strains and contradictions between the
two need also to be contextualized. While the logical conclusion of certain
forms of anti-disciplinary protest may have been the privileging of art over
politics, the obliteration of the referent, the death of originality and the
eclipse of the streets, even groups like the Yippies, which certainly seemed to
take this logic to extremes, paradoxically retained a commitment to radically
emancipatory political projects. Despite their anti-realist rhetoric and love of
the spectacle, the Yippies did in fact attack 'real' targets, powerful institutions
like the Pentagon, universities, the police and the media. In this respect they
retained a dedication to collective, public action. So, while some elements of
the gestures of the Yippies represent the most postmodern moments of the
decade, others bear little resemblance to the aesthetic radicalism of the post-
sixties era.
In subsequent positions identified as postmodern, 'the social' is regarded as
a problematic category.92 Yet, according to Jameson, postmodernism, how-
ever loosely defined, emerged as an attempt to rescue modernism from the
university and gallery network and return art to the streets. He argues that
the phenomenon came into being precisely as a reaction to the domestication
of high modernism by the university, museum and so forth.93 But where are
'the streets' in this world where there is a presumed identity common to
protesters and that which they are protesting against? It is perhaps ironic that
debates about such issues are played out in the very spaces - universities,
galleries and museums - that, according to Jameson's genealogy, post-
modernism sets out to transgress. Consequently, in this and in other respects,
it is important to reaffirm a distinction between sixties radicalism and
postmodernism. But postmodernism can equally be seen to have roots in that
which is usually presented as its 'other': the sixties counterculture in its anti-
disciplinary guise.
Chapter 6
Genealogies
Postmodernity is modernity without the hopes and dreams which

made modernity bearable.
(Dick Hebdige)1
Much has been written that attempts to explain why the sixties failed. Great
emphasis is placed on what has been lost since the sixties, with the current
era characterized by widespread political disillusionment, declining radi-
calism and the demise of the political in favour of personal fulfilment, private
wealth and career success. This all too familiar slant on the sixties portrays
this loss as marking a crisis of faith in apocalyptic revolutionary projects and
is used to explain everything from the purported narcissism of the seventies,
the consumerism of the eighties and the political landscape of the nineties.
Yet generalized claims about the failure of sixties radicalism are empirically
weak and often founded on totalizing and conventional notions of revolution.
And, as we have seen, much sixties protest - particularly of the anti-
disciplinary kind - sought to refute such understandings. Nevertheless, the
death of the sixties narrative has a certain intuitive force to it, and resonates
as one of the axioms of retrospectives of the period. It has also reached
the status of a taken-for-granted truth, as commonsense, in popular repre-
sentations of the topic. Any interrogation of the paradigm of success/
failure should also say something about the death of the sixties narrative;
about the flimsy empirical grounds on which such judgements rest.
The failure script ignores many of the profound changes that were wrought
from the protest in the sixties both of the concrete variety, in the areas of
sexuality, work and authority, and of the metaphysical kind, in the ethical and
120
Genealogies 121
aesthetic domains. It is possible to argue, following Peter Starr, that the 'prior
order', the dominant ethos, was revolutionized by the radicalism of the period
but in ways which bore little resemblance to the announced intentions of
activists and participants themselves.2 Some commentators try to soften their
declarations that by any conventional political standards the sixties decade
was a failure with qualifications like:
Something of value did happen in the sixties. New voices were

heard, new forms of beauty appeared. And most of the large
questions raised by that moment of chaotic openness - political
questions about the limits of freedom, and cultural questions too,
about the authority of the past and the anarchy of the new - are with
us still.3
Yet, as Todd Gitlin so cogently captures with the metaphor of a sand-painting,

the aftermath of the decade shifts and changes in historical time and no neat
inventory of losses and gains can adequately capture the ambiguous and
paradoxical legacy of the decade.4 Consequently, in attempts to counter the
logic of the tally sheet and tackle the remarkable resilience of the failure
scenario, it is easy to resort to nebulous pronouncements like those of Fredric
Jameson, whereby the sixties are portrayed as a momentous 'transform-
ational phase' or as opening up 'whole new political spaces'.5
That the literature proclaiming the death of the sixties ignores such
obscurities is hardly surprising. Less predictable is the way such momentous
developments as the early women's liberation movement are overlooked in
accepted versions of the radicalism of the day. In a provocative critique of this
dominant view, Alice Echols argues that women's liberation remains on the
periphery, 'far from the core narrative',6 in retrospective accounts of the
sixties. She points to a 'depressingly familiar metonymy' at work, where the
experiences of white male New Leftists are read as representing universal and
defining aspects of the decade.7 She contends that the record of the late sixties
looks very different if the New Left is dislodged from its choice position in
memoirs, anthologies and documentary films. Other forms of sixties radical-
ism therefore come into focus which recombine in the women's movement in
imaginative and constructive ways.8
Certainly, the idea that despair and apathy immediately followed the so-
called failure of sixties radicalism masks the gravity, growth and ecstatic
ethos of the feminism which flourished in the seventies. This radical
movement was distinguished by its militancy, high expectations and political
enthusiasm, and was a far cry from the quietism which was said to engulf
former sixties activists. The women's liberation movement confounds most
judgements about the demise of sixties protest and indicates that post-sixties
political disillusionment was a gendered experience, or at least delayed for
women. This point is reinforced by Doug McAdam in reflecting on the

interviews he did with the men and women who participated in the 'Freedom
Summer' campaign in 1964 to register black voters in the South of the United
States. While the men expressed varying degrees of political defeat after the
activism of the decade, many of the women experienced the reverse. They
perceived the sixties to be inspirational, in many ways a catalyst for their
subsequent radicalism and continuing feminist involvement.9
One of the challenges offered by Echols' analysis is that problematic
renderings of the sixties have not just been confined to New Left men.
Women's liberationists themselves, she argues, present the relationship
between feminism and sixties radicalism in entirely negative terms.10 Robin
Morgan is a case in point where her conception of women in the movement
is of the cooking of endless pots of stew and the incessant rolling of joints
for activist men." Echols contends that there was a much more creative
relationship between the women's liberation movement and the new con-
ceptions of politics being expressed in the radical actions of the day. In her
view, the disavowal of commonalities between the movement and women's
liberation constructs feminism as a rejection rather than an extension of Left
analysis. Lynne Segal makes a similar point with respect to the counter-
culture and the emergence of second wave feminism. While she rehearses
many of the familiar negatives about the masculinism of Left politics, she
places the early women's liberation movement firmly within the framework
of a Utopian Left perspective.12 Sixties radicalism is characterized as having
animated the women's movement, not as dampening its spirit, as accounts
like Morgan's imply.
My own view is that the example of the feminist movement stands in stark
contradiction to the death of the sixties narrative; to the periodization which
informs it and to the type of radicalism it privileges. Throughout the
subsequent decade, at the very least, feminist groups remained committed to
some concept of revolution (personal, socialist, radical and so forth) and the
imprint of the sixties can be found in a wide variety of feminist actions which
took place long after the 'big' revolution had apparently failed. The women's
peace camp at Greenham Common in Britain is one salient example. The
range of actions this protest encompassed would be almost unintelligible
without explicit links to different forms of sixties radicalism. Beginning in
January 1984 and continuing throughout the eighties, the whole idea of
encirclement, with its distinctly spiritual overtones, had strong counter-
cultural elements. And echoes of the attempt to levitate the Pentagon can be
detected in the whole long Greenham campaign and in the explicit use of
theatre, song and dance to avoid any resemblance to the culture of militarism
being opposed.
Given that the sixties had a multiplicity of aftermaths, it is dispiriting that
only one outcome - the failure scenario - is so regularly accentuated in
Genealogies 123
retrospective accounts of the period. While the figure of Jerry Rubin on Wall
Street has been marched out every time the 'selling out' of the sixties is to be
signified, it has not been nearly as common to see images of the ways certain
countercultural tenets have been successfully incorporated into post-sixties
political movements. The German Greens, for instance, generated a vigorous
and influential style of party and non-party politics in Europe by directly
emulating aspects of the American counterculture.13 They tried to fuse a New
Left commitment to participatory democracy (demonstrating a comparable
talent for endless meetings)14 with countercultural small-scale community
initiatives: health clinics, food co-operatives and a re-enchantment of the
natural environment. Green attempts to blend strategy and anti-strategy, to
intervene and transform the parliamentary process while simultaneously
working in 'grass roots' organizations, and the emphasis on non-patriarchal
forms of leadership and political expression can be viewed as the sixties writ
large in the eighties and nineties. Equally pertinent examples to refute the
idea that the passing of the sixties signals a break with transformative
political projects can be found in the peace movement of the eighties, the
various environmental struggles of the present period and in the spec-
tacularly successful anti-disciplinary antics of groups like the AIDS Coalition
to Unleash Power, ACT UP.15
Additionally, the version of the sixties that has come to dominate our
perspective on the topic excludes from view or marginalizes the very forms
of protest which attempted to rethink most profoundly the meaning and
character of political involvement. If public recollections deny the links
between the New Left and women's liberation, as Echols claims, so they
altogether reduce the heterodox, hybrid nature of sixties radicalism. More
accessible modes of political engagement - the demonstrations, rallies, teach-
ins, civil disobedience and calls for citizenship and racial justice - are
foregrounded at the expense of actions which, in an effort to resist co-
optation, sought to move protest into realms of incomprehensibility. In
designating the latter as an anti-disciplinary politics, I have attempted to
bring into relief moments in the sixties where the distinctions between
the counterculture and the New Left, hippies and politicos, politics and art
and politics and everyday life are themselves under challenge. Attention
has thus been focused on groups like the Yippies and the Diggers and
their politics without aims, ideology, leadership or strategy; a politics
which drew its vocabulary as much from popular culture as from a pre-
existing language of the Left. It has also involved investigating charac-
teristics associated with the decade, such as the rituals of travelling to
India, which have conventionally been read as apolitical or as signifying
a turn away from politics. Claims about the failed revolutionary projects
of the decade appear less substantial if the spotlight is on this other ver-
sion of sixties radicalism, on groups which rejected a self-sacrificing
commitment to a tangible revolution in the conventional disciplinary sense

of the term.
Regardless of the fact that empirical support can be found to counteract
many of the conclusions of the literature looking back at the sixties,
representations of the post-sixties cultural mood as being one of despair and
political disengagement have considerable rhetorical force. While there are
direct political implications in the fact that the present political field is so
regularly represented as an impasse, my point is not that these depictions are
entirely false. Rather, my argument is about the presumed link between the
death of the sixties narrative and contemporary discussions on what is
politically possible 'post' the sixties. This narrative and the so-called failure of
May '68 also feature in genealogies of postmodernism. Moreover, the idea
that we have moved into a postmodern era often operates as a shorthand for
some of the anti-political tendencies said to have sprung from the purported
failure of sixties radicalism. Yet, if we look to a different sixties, to the anti-
disciplinary politics of the sixties counterculture, postmodern impulses can
already be read in its blank parody, its borrowing from the popular, its desire
to move politics into the domain of the cultural and the everyday, and in its
refusal of Enlightenment rationality. This study proposes that the questioning
of revolutionary models of social change and the increasing sense that
opposition is legitimate (and exciting) only if it is located anywhere but in the
specifically political arena can be traced to the success, not the failure, of
sixties radicalism, especially of the anti-disciplinary kind; a form of protest
which has proved to be more allusive and enduring than the other varieties
expressed in the decade.
The critique of conventional Left and New Left politics mounted by the
anti-disciplinary strain of sixties radicalism was so effective that it paved the
way for the widespread acceptance of the idea that mass political involvement
was a thing of the past. In this respect, the psychedelic displays of the
politicized counterculture may have been more influential in shaping the
cultural mood of later decades than the failure of May '68. Put another
way, as the Diggers, hippies, Yippies and the like redefined notions of pro-
test to exclude notions of seriousness, comprehensibility, and strategy, so
most forms of political involvement ceased to appear credible, attractive or
unproblematic.
Alex Callinicos, however, comes to a different and more familiar con-
clusion:
The political odyssey of the 1968 generation is, in my view, crucial to

the widespread acceptance of the idea of a postmodern epoch in the
1980s. This was the decade when those radicalized in the 1960s and
early 1970s began to enter middle age. Usually they did so with all
the hope of socialist revolution gone - indeed, often having ceased to
Genealogies 125
believe in the desirability of any such revolution. Most of them had

by then come to occupy some sort of professional, managerial or
administrative position, to have become members of the new middle
class, at a time when the overconsumptionist dynamic of Western
capitalism offered this class rising living standards ... This
conjuncture - the prosperity of the Western new middle class
combined with the political disillusionment of many of its most
articulate members - provides the context for the proliferating talk
of postmodernism.16
The genealogy of postmodernism favoured in this extract is ironically

permeated with the same kind of generational language typical of the very
first studies of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Like Lewis Feuer before
him, Callinicos naturalizes the commonplace that growing conservatism
necessarily accompanies middle age, unwittingly strengthening the idea that
the dissent of the period was little more than youthful exuberance, simply an
attempt by students to define themselves as different from parental figures of
authority. Profoundly positivistic premises are thereby projected onto a group
of radicals never known for their pragmatism. The story runs that once sixties
activists realized that revolution was neither practical nor feasible (via May
'68 or the fall of SDS, for example) they quickly disposed of their posters
of 'Che' and set about seriously making money. The fact that there may very
well have been an overlap between the biographies of certain radicals and
this failure narrative does not alone adequately account for the laudatory
reception and pervasiveness of this view.
Callinicos puzzles over why the concept of a postmodern era has gained so
much acceptance by 'such large numbers of people'.17 Yet, the sixties attack
on the distinction between politics and culture was replete with postmodern
moments. And the attraction towards this politics, which boasted no list of
demands and no program and which went as far as dismissing the very idea
of objective reality, seemed to strengthen rather than diminish as the decade
drew to a close. Contemporary cultural protest, which, in the name of
postmodernism (however contested this term may be), claims to be a politics
without a referent, radical without a distinction between oppressor and
oppressed (the centre or the margins) and subversive without anything
outside itself to oppose, can therefore be viewed as an extension of this
anti-disciplinary ethos of the sixties.
Reading the emergent narrative of postmodernism in the performative
politics of the sixties counterculture, however, runs the risk of overstating the
confluence between the two. Both sixties radicalism and postmodernism
represent an amalgam of philosophical/political positions. The extraordinary
and paradoxical aspects of the anti-disciplinary protest of the period were
that while it worked to collapse the division between opposition and
complicity and problematized received understandings of the political, at the

same time it reaffirmed its commitment to political involvement as an
emancipatory, collective endeavour. So, while it is apt to detect something in
the sixties which prefigured the mood of postmodernism, there was little in
the script of the decade to spawn, inevitably, or in a linear way, the later
rejection of any possibility of emancipation. Similarly, while it has become
standard to associate the sixties with a retreat into the personal, mass
political involvement and protest as a collective enterprise were repeatedly
celebrated and brought into being. Few equivalents exist in the landscape of
postmodernism of the collective effort which inspired countless underground
newspapers, communes, alternative schools, health co-operatives, food
coalitions and the like. And just as the Yippies resisted the logic of the picket
sign, so they continued to demonstrate; while they shunned words and
language as the 'absolute in horseshit'18 they continued to speak and write
prolifically; and as they destabilized notions of the real, so they joyously
attacked 'real' targets like the New York Stock Exchange, the Democratic
Party Convention and the Pentagon.
Ironically, notions of emancipation creep back into postmodern analyses in
unlikely ways. This is not surprising considering that, according to Andreas
Huyssen, postmodernism is a discourse which understands itself as a political
intervention.19 The desire for a rebellious, transformative politics can still be
read in the peculiarly unreflective romanticism of the postmodern aesthetic.
All kinds of political longings are displaced onto an aesthetic sphere which
fancifully is viewed as an autonomous and, by definition, an ethical domain.20
Moreover, an idea of art as 'transcendentally emancipatory' and pure allows
judgements about truth, freedom and transcendence to resurface in a dis-
course ostensibly opposed to such concepts. With the aesthetic radicalism of
groups like the Yippies, on the other hand, refuge was sought in the aesthetic,
yet emancipatory ideas were never displaced from it in the first place. Nor
was the aesthetic viewed as an autonomous realm. The whole point was to
intermingle politics and art, art and life and so on. In this respect, anti-
disciplinary protest was less purist about its borrowings and paradoxically
appears to have been much more hybrid than postmodernism often claims
to be.
However, it would seem that the very same questioning of the category of
the political that was played out in the sixties, or the unease expressed about
the likelihood of protest becoming complicity, has today produced entirely
different consequences. All kinds of political disengagement are justified on
the basis of the sixties experience, conventionally rendered as 'failure'. The
demand in the underground collection BAMN for 'the freedom to stand
around and do nothing',21 and Abbie Hoffman's directive not to be 'for or
against anything',22 for example, are given literal force in the present
constructions of the current political field as an impasse, a blind alley - an
Genealogies 127
end with no new beginning in sight. The sixties critique of disciplinary

notions of politics generated a sense of endless possibilities for social change
- not the reverse, as is the case with these dominant representations of
postmodernism. Yet, changes to the current situation are widely held to be
unimaginable. Jameson suggests that nobody seriously considers alternatives
to capitalism any longer and that it is easier to imagine the end of the world
(in visions of an ecological crisis) than 'a far more modest change in the mode
of production'.23 While there are all sorts of historical factors at work in such
constructions, the narratives of sixties radicalism have also played their role
in bringing into being a mood of cultural despair at the same time as sixties
radicals are blamed for it. So the link conventionally made between the
failure of the sixties and the impasse characterized as facing us as the century
draws to a close is itself a fabrication, with the political consequence of
concealing and censoring much needed alternative conceptions of post-sixties
radicalism.
Notes
Preface
1 Quoted in Jonah Raskin, For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 252.
2 Todd Gitlin, 'Afterword', in Stephen Macedo (ed.), Reassessing the Sixties: Debating
the Political and Cultural Legacy (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1997), p. 283.
3 David Allen Mellor, The Sixties: Britain and France, 1962-1973. The Utopian Years
(London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 1996).
4 Joseph Berger, 'Town Gives Up Resistance, Will Create a Shrine to the Music
Festival', San Francisco Examiner, 26 January 1997, p. 7.
5 James J. Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties: Making Postwar Radicalism (New York:
Routledge, 1997), p. 204.
Introduction: Resurrecting the death of the sixties

1 E. J. Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1973), p. 234. Also see Peter Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory
After May '68 (Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 218n.
2 Starr, Logics, p. 218n.
3 See, for example, Steven M. Tipton, Getting Saved From the Sixties: Moral Meaning
in Conversion and Cultural Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982),
p. 29.
4 See, for example, Jack Whalen and Richard Flacks, Beyond the Barricades: The
Sixties Generation Grows Up (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).
5 Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books,
1987), pp. 3-4.
6 Thomas Docherty, 'Postmodernism: An Introduction', in Docherty (ed.), Post-
modernism: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 4.
128
Notes (pages 3-7) 129
7 Jerry Rubin, Do It!: Scenarios of the Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1970), p. 82.
8 Brent Whelan, '"Furthur": Reflections on the Counter-Culture and the Post-
modern', Cultural Critique, winter 1988-89, p. 64.
9 Andreas Huyssen's After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) is another notable exception.
10 James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 5.
11 See Krishan Kumar, 'Apocalypse, Millennium and Utopia Today', in Malcolm
Bull (ed.), Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995),
p. 207.
12 See Peter Stansill and David Zane Mairowitz (eds), BAMN (By Any Means
Necessary): Outlaw Manifestos and Ephemera (Harmondsworth, Middlesex:
Penguin, 1971), p. 73
13 Rubin, Do It!, p. 82.
14 Ibid., p. 55.
15 Stansill and Mairowitz, BAMN, p. 73.
16 Gitlin, The Sixties, p. 433.
17 Carl Boggs, 'Rethinking the Sixties Legacy: From New Left to New Social
Movements', in Stanford M. Lyman (ed.), Social Movements: Critiques, Concepts,
Case Studies (New York: New York University Press, 1995), p. 332.
18 See Starr, Logics, p. 7.
19 See Kumar, 'Apocalypse', pp. 207-8.
20 Starr, Logics, p. 7.
21 Dennis Altman, 'The Counter-Culture: Nostalgia or Prophecy?', in A. F. Davies,
et al. (eds), Australian Society: A Sociological Introduction (Melbourne: Longman
Cheshire, 1977), p. 455.
22 See Robin Gerster and Jan Bassett, Seizures of Youth: 'The Sixties' and Australia
(Melbourne: Hyland House, 1991), p. 34.
23 Ibid., p. 68.
24 See, for example, Ron Verzuh's Underground Times: Canada's Flower-Child
Revolutionaries (Ontario: Deneau, 1989), p. 3.
25 Elizabeth Nelson, The British Counter-Culture, 1966-1973: A Study of the Under-
ground Press (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 99.
26 Richard Neville, Hippie Hippie Shake: The Dreams, The Trips, The Trials, The Love-
ins, The Screw Ups, The Sixties (Port Melbourne: Minerva, 1996), p. 154.
27 This point is made by Stephen Alomes in 'Cultural Radicalism in the Sixties', Arena,
no. 62, 1983, pp. 28-54.
29 Stuart Hall, 'The Hippies: An American "Moment"', in Julian Nagel (ed.), Student
Power (London: Merlin Press, 1970), p. 189.
30 Marshall Berman, 'Faust in the '60s', in Gerald Howard (ed.), The Sixties: The Art,
Attitudes, Politics and Media of our Most Explosive Decade (New York: Washington
Square Press, 1982), p. 499.
31 See Helen Perry, The Human Be-In (New York: Basic Books, 1970), p. 12.
32 In the 'Confronting the University' section of Mark Kitchell's film Berkeley in the
'60s (Berkeley, 1990).
130 Notes (pages 8-13)
33 Todd Gitlin, 'Afterword', in Stephen Macedo (ed.), Reassessing the Sixties:

Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1997),
p. 283.
34 George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968
(Boston: South End Press, 1987), p. 3.
35 Michel Foucault, 'On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress', in
H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics, 2nd edn (Chicago University Press, 1983), pp. 231-2.
I Paradigms of sixties radicalism

1987), p. 433.
2 Thomas Docherty, 'Postmodernism: an Introduction', in Docherty (ed.), Post-
modernism: A Reader, p. 1.
3 Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 117.
4 Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic
Society and its Youthful Opposition, rev. edn (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995), p. xi.
5 Fredric Jameson, 'Periodizing the 60s', in Sohnya Sayres, Anders Stephanson,
Stanley Aronowitz and Fredric Jameson (eds), The 60s Without Apology
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 178-209.
6 Ibid., p. 181.
7 Ibid., p. 183.
8 Ron Verzuh, Underground Times: Canada's Flower-Child Revolutionaries (Ontario:
Deneau, 1989), p. 209.
9 Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, p. xi.
10 Joseph Conlin, The Troubles: A Jaundiced Glance Back at the Movements of the
Sixties (New York: Franklin Watts, 1982).
II See Barry York, 'The Sixties Revisited', Melbourne Journal of Politics, vol. 16,
1984-85, p. 106.
12 McAdam, Freedom Summer, p. 116.
13 Jameson, 'Periodizing the 60s', p. 178.
14 William L. O'Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960s (New
York: Quadrangle, 1980), p. 233.
15 Kenneth Westhues, Society's Shadow: Studies in the Sociology of Counter Cultures
(Toronto: McGraw Hill Reyerson, 1972), pp. 9-10.
16 See Dennis Altman, 'The Counter-Culture: Nostalgia or Prophecy?', in A. F. Davies,
Cheshire, 1977), pp. 449-69.
17 See Dennis Altman, Laurie Clancy and Murray Bramwell, 'Notes on the Counter-
Culture', Southern Review, vol. vi, no. 3, Sept. 1973, pp. 239-51.
18 See Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, for an account which presents the
counterculture as reversing all mainstream values. According to William Kephart,
this is also how most sociologists use the term: Extraordinary Groups: The Sociology
of Unconventional Lifestyles (New York: St Martins Press, 1976), p. 300.
19 J. Milton Yinger, Countercultures: The Promise and the Peril of a World Turned
Upside Down (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 29.
20 For example, see the introduction to Sohnya Sayres, Anders Stephanson, Stanley
Aronowitz and Fredric Jameson (eds), The 60s Without Apology (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 6, where the authors describe the 'political
counterculture' as being like a 'second' counterculture.
21 Frank Musgrove, Ecstasy and Holiness: Counter Culture and the Open Society
(London: Methuen, 1973), p. 196.
22 Ibid., p. 6.
23 Janice Newton, 'Aborigines, Tribes and the Counterculture', Social Analysis, no. 23,
Aug. 1988, p. 56.
24 See, for example, the essays in the special double issue, 'The Sixties', of the journal
Witness, vol. 11, no. 2/3, summer/fall 1988; and also L. A. Kauffman, 'Emerging
From the Shadow of the Sixties', Socialist Review, vol. 20, no. 4, 1990, pp. 11-20.
Kauffman discusses how 'eighties' radicals were forever plagued by the activism of
the sixties.
25 Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About
the Sixties (New York: Summit Books, 1989), p. 15.
26 See Kenneth Keniston, Youth and Dissent: The Rise of a New Opposition (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), or Richard Flacks, Youth and Social Change
(Chicago: Markham, 1971).
27 Winni Breines calls these 'psychological types studies', in 'The Sixties Again', Theory
and Society, vol. 14, no. 4, July 1985, p. 512.
28 Lewis Feuer, The Conflict of Generations: The Character and Significance of Student
Movements (New York: Basic Books, 1969).
29 Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York:
Harper, 1990), p. 69.
30 Barry York, 'The Sixties Revisited', p. 102.
31 Feuer, The Conflict of Generations, p. 102.
32 Ibid., p. 470.
33 Ibid., p. 468.
34 As Ehrenreich shows, for example, in Fear of Falling, p. 67, Feuer's analysis was
quite incorrect when applied to activists like Mario Savio.
35 Keniston, Youth and Dissent, p. 154.
36 Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, p. 35.
37 Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling, p. 72.
38 Keniston, Youth and Dissent, p. 341.
39 Musgrove, Ecstasy and Holiness, p. 19. The subtitle of this study, Counter Culture
and the Open Society, indicates the continued influence of permissiveness theory
into the seventies.
40 Collier and Horowitz, Destructive Generation, p. 252.
41 Stephen Alomes, 'Cultural Radicalism in the Sixties', Arena, no. 62, 1983, p. 33.
42 Robert Houriet, Getting Back Together (New York: Coward McCann and
Geoghegan, 1971), p. xiv.
43 Lewis Yablonsky, The Hippie Trip (New York: Pegasus, 1968).
44 Delbert L. Earisman, Hippies In Our Midst: The Rebellion Beyond Rebellion
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968).
45 Helen Perry, The Human Be-In (New York: Basic Books, 1970), p. 1.
46 See Sherri Cavan, Hippies of the Haight (St Louis, Missouri: New Critics Press,
1972), p. 50.
47 See William L. Partridge, The Hippie Ghetto: The Natural History of a Sub-culture
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), p. iii.
48 Jane Stern and Michael Stern, in their The Sixties People (London: Macmillan,
1990), begin the chapter on the 'hippies' by describing this tour. Similar references
are made in many other studies including Derek Taylor, It Was Twenty Years Ago
Today (New York: Bantam, 1987); and Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury: A History
(New York: Random House, 1984).
49 Haight-Ashbury: San Francisco Hippieville: Guide and Map (Sausalito, California:
W T. Samhill, 1967).
50 Robin Gerster and Jan Bassett, Seizures of Youth: 'The Sixties' and Australia
52 In Australia Melbourne's Performing Arts Museum had an exhibition in 1987
entitled 'The Sixties: A Tumultuous Decade in Review'. It was billed as 'a psyche-
delic journey of discovery'. See Gerster and Bassett, Seizures of Youth, p. viii, for
the poster of the exhibition, and p. 3, for comments.
53 For example, see Gerald Howard, The Sixties (New York: Washington Square Press,
1982); John Javna and Gordon Javna, The 60's (New York: St Martins Press, 1983);
Richard Davis and Jeff Stone, Treasures of the Aquarians: The Sixties Discovered
(New York: Viking Penguin, 1985); Stern and Stern, The Sixties People; Maxine
Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (London: Pan Books, 1989);
Hans Koning, Nineteen Sixty-Eight: A Personal Report (New York: Norton, 1987);
Geoffrey O'Brien, Dreamtime: Chapters From the Sixties (New York: Viking, 1988).
54 See Gerald Howard's introduction to his anthology, The Sixties p. 7: 'Where in the
midst of all these dispiriting developments [since the sixties] is the voice of the
generation once hailed on the front pages of news magazines as "the most idealistic
in history"'.
55 See Verzuh, Underground Times, Chapter 10.
57 Gerster and Bassett, Seizures of Youth, p. 18.
58 Daniel Cohn-Bendit, 1968: The Revolution Revisited (Hilverson/Holland: Belbo
Film Productions, 1986).
60 Jack Whalen and Richard Flacks, Beyond the Barricades: The Sixties Generation
Grows Up (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), p. 3.
61 Steven M. Tipton, Getting Saved From the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and
Cultural Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 29.
62 O'Neill, Coming Apart, p. 265.
63 Altman, 'The Counter-Culture: Nostalgia or Prophecy?', p. 464.
64 Bernice Martin, A Sociology of Contemporary Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1981), pp. 245-6.
65 Nigel Williams, Weekend Guardian, London, September, 1990. This is typical of the
thinking expressed in popular commentaries on the sixties to appear during the
late eighties and early nineties.
66 Tim Wohlforth, 'The Sixties in America', New Left Review, no. 178, Nov/Dec 1989,
p. 123.
67 See Koning, Nineteen Sixty-Eight: A Personal Report, and Gitlin, The Sixties.
68 Wohlforth,'The Sixties in America', p. 123.
69 Elizabeth Nelson, The British Counter-Culture, 1966-1973: A Study of the Under-
ground Press (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 141.
70 Ibid., p. 142.
71 Adrianne Aron, 'Social Autism: An Analysis of the Hippie Movement', unpublished
PhD dissertation, Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz,
June 1978, p. 355.
72 Jameson, 'Periodizing the 60s', p. 207.
74 George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968
(Boston: South End Press, 1987), p. 6.
75 Arthur Seeger, 'An Unreported Class War: Ideology and Self-Censorship on the
Berkeley Barb', Communication, vol. 10, 1987, pp. 31-50.
76 Ibid., p. 37.
77 For such an approach to the topic, see Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury; Taylor, It
Was Twenty Years Ago Today; Stern and Stern, The Sixties People; Martin A. Lee and
Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion (New York:
Grove Press, 1985); Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream
(London: Paladin, 1988).
78 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,
1972-1977, Colin Gordon (ed.), trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham
and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 57.
79 Robert S. Ellwood, The Sixties Spiritual Awakening: American Religion Moving from
Modern to Postmodern (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p. 7.
80 See Michel Foucault, 'Space, Power and Knowledge', an interview with Paul
Rabinow in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, trans. Christine Hubert (New
York: Pantheon, 1984).
81 Peter Stansill and David Zane Mairowitz (eds), BAMN (By Any Means Necessary):
Outlaw Manifestos and Ephemera (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971),
p. 73.
82 Colin Gordon, 'Afterword', in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 257.
83 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1975), p. 97; and Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 59.
2 The language of an anti-disciplinary politics

1 Carl Oglesby, in the introduction to Oglesby (ed.), The New Left Reader (New York:
Grove Press, 1969), p. 6.
2 Richard Goldstein, Reporting the Counterculture, Media and Popular Culture 5
(Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. xiii.
3 For example, Derek Taylor, It Was Twenty Years Ago Today (London: Bantam,
1987).
4 See Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (London: Paladin,
1988).
5 Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About
the Sixties (New York: Summit Books, 1989), pp. 11-14.
6 Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties
Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1985), p. 134. This speech, and the reaction to it,
appears in many accounts of the decade. See also Charles Perry, The Haight-
Ashbury: A History (New York: Random House, 1984); Stevens' Storming Heaven;
and, of course, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Bantam
Books, 1968), pp. 196-201.
8 Ibid.
9 Andrew Kopkind (ed.), Thoughts of the Young Radicals (New York: Pitman
Publishing Corporation, 1966), p. 8. For illustrations of this redefinition of the
revolutionary subject see the following anthologies: Mitchell Cohen and Dennis
Hale (eds), The New Student Left (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); Michael V. Miller
and Susan Gilmore (eds), Revolution at Berkeley (New York: Dell Publishing Co.,
1965); Oglesby, The New Left Reader. Paul Goodman's Compulsory Mis-education
and the Community of Scholars (New York: Vintage Books, 1962) also provides
insight into the early roots of student activism.
10 See Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 1.16-17.
11 The Diggers were active in the Haight-Ashbury district in different ways
throughout the decade. For an account of Digger activity in New York, see Don
McNeill, Moving Through Here (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), pp. 121-89.
12 See Kopkind, Thoughts of the Young Radicals.
13 These internal debates underline Gitlin's analysis of the decade. For an outline of
the strategic and expressive elements of the movement, see Todd Gitlin, The Sixties:
Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), p. 6.
14 See Winni Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left: 1962^1968, The
Great Refusal (New York: Praeger, 1982); and George Katsiaficas, The Imagination
of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston: South End Press, 1987); and also
Gitlin, The Sixties.
15 Rubin, Do It!: Scenarios of the Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970),
p. 84 (Rubin's emphasis).
16 Ibid.
17 Eldridge Cleaver's introduction to Rubin, Do It!, p. 6.
18 McNeill, Moving Through Here, p. 185.
19 See Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, p. 90.
20 For an idiosyncratic account of the psychedelic politics of the period, see Emmett
Grogan, Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps (London: Heinemann, 1972).
21 Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, p. 109.
22 See Gitlin, The Sixties, pp. 225-30.
23 Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: The Left Wing
Alternative, trans. Arnold Pomerans (London: Andre Deutsch, 1968), pp. 249-56.
24 Ibid., p. 205.
25 Ibid., pp. 255-6.
26 Ibid., p. 256.
27 See George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left.
28 Cohn-Bendit and Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism, p. 256.
29 Daniel Cohn-Bendit, 1968: The Revolution Revisited (Hilverson/Holland: Belbo

Film Productions, 1986).
30 Peter Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May '68 (Stanford University
Press, 1995), p. 5.
31 To be discussed more fully in Chapter 3.
33 Rubin, Do It!, p. 83 (Rubin's emphasis).
34 Abbie Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It (New York: Dial Press, 1968), p. 26.
35 Ibid., p. 27.
36 Ibid., p. 29.
37 See Richard Alpert, Be Here Now (New York: Lama Foundation, 1971), Section One
(pages unnumbered). See also Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, p. 40, as
well as countless other accounts of the LSD experience in many of the texts cited
so far.
38 See Abbie Hoffman, Revolution, Section 5, 'Off to Chicago', pp. 101-34, for his
account of the dramatic events at the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in
Chicago, when he makes it clear that 'Chicago' would be impossible to explain.
39 Rubin, Do It!, p. 109 (Rubin's emphasis).
40 See Abbie Hoffman, Revolution, p. 80.
41 John Gerassi, 'Revolution By Lifestyle', in Joseph Berke (ed.), Counter Culture
(London: Peter Owen and Fire Books, 1969), p. 71.
42 Ibid.
43 Peter Clecak, Radical Paradoxes: Dilemmas of the American Left: 1945-1970 (New
York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 234.
44 Ibid., p. 165.
45 Abbie Hoffman, Revolution, p. 27.
47 Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams, p. 171.
48 See Abbie Hoffman's comments that 'projecting cool images was not our goal', in
Revolution, p. 80.
49 Nicholas von Hoffman, We Are The People Our Parents Warned Us Against (Chicago:
Quadrangle Books, 1968), p. 160.
50 Ibid.
52 Peter Stansill and David Zane Mairowitz (eds), BAMN (By Any Means Necessary):
p. 12.
54 Abbie Hoffman, 'Woodstock Nation', reprinted in Abbie Hoffman and Daniel
Simon (eds), The Best of Abbie Hoffman (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows,
1989), p. 100. This epiphany is also cited in Clecak, Radical Paradoxes, p. 260.
55 See Rubin's record of Ginsberg's interventions in Do It!, pp. 44-5.
57 Ibid., p. 155.
58 Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams, pp. 227-8. For empirical evidence of this para-
militarism see Map 2, 'Guerrilla Attacks in the U.S., 1965-1970' (from Scanlan's
Monthly), reproduced in Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left, p. 145.
59 Quoted in Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams, p. 228.

60 Richard Neville, Play Power (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 258.
61 Jerry Rubin, We Are Everywhere (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 38.
63 Irwin Unger and Debi Unger, Turning Point: 1968 (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1988), pp. 476-7.
64 Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture At The Breaking Point
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), p. 97.
65 Judith Adler,' "Revolutionary" Art and the "Art" of Revolution: Aesthetic Work in a
Millenarian Period', Theory and Society, vol. 3, no. 3, fall 1976, p. 420.
66 See Lee and Shlain's comments about the Diggers, in Acid Dreams, p. 172. See also
Abbie Hoffman's passage: 'Don't be for or against', in Revolution, p. 27.
67 Barry Melton, commenting in the film, Berkeley in the '60s, directed by Mark
Kitchell.
68 Lee and Shlain's comments about the philosophy of the Diggers, Acid Dreams,
p. 172.
70 Clecak, Radical Paradoxes, p. 247.
72 Ibid., pp. 39-40.
73 See Gitlin, The Sixties, p. 233; and David Zane Mairowitz, The Radical Soap Opera:
Roots of Failure in the American Left (New York: Avon Books, 1974), p. 238.
74 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of
Diminishing Expectations (New York: Warner Books, 1979), p. 154.
75 Clecak, Radical Paradoxes, p. 253.
76 As already noted, Clecak comes to these conclusions about the overall approach of
the Yippies and similar acts of protest, Radical Paradoxes, p. 165.
77 Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), pp. 116-31.
78 Ibid., pp. 120-1.
79 Ibid., p. 122.
80 See, for example, Taylor, It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, pp. 240-3.
81 Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against
the War in Vietnam 1963-1975 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984),
pp. 123^9.
82 Ibid., p. 138.
83 Ibid., p. 136.
84 Mailer, The Armies of the Night, pp. 130-9.
85 Rebecca S. Bjork and Reginald Twigg, 'Hippie Lifestyle as Rhetorical Performance:
Enacting Discourses of Peace', Studies in Communication, vol. 5, 1995, pp. 139-70.
86 Ibid., p. 144 (Bjork and Twigg's emphasis).
88 See Rubin's account of the 'liberation' of the University of British Columbia's
Faculty Club, Do It!, p. 105.
90 Rubin, Do It!, p. 79. This comment of Rubin's and the widespread uses of popular
culture themes will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5.

92 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,
1972-1977, Colin Gordon (ed.), trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham
and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 257.
94 See Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams, p. 173; and for other accounts of Digger
'free' activities, see Gitlin, The Sixties, pp. 232-5; and Charles Perry, The Haight-
Ashbury, p. 114; for a New York perspective, see McNeill, Moving Through Here,
p. 121.
95 See, for example, Neville, Play Power; Stansill and Mairowitz, BAMN; Joseph
Berke, Counter Culture (London: Peter Owen and Fire Books, 1969); and countless
underground countercultural publications, such as the Berkeley Barb, 1966-67, or
the San Francisco Oracle, over the same period. Also, see the back pages of Abbie
Hoffman's Revolution, pp. 217-31.
96 Project London Free, in John E. Pemberton (ed.), The Underground and Alternative
Press in Britain (London: Harvester Press, 1974).
97 From The Digger Papers (San Francisco: The Diggers, 1968), p. 3.
98 Ibid. I have chosen to quote directly from The Digger Papers here although Gitlin,
The Sixties, p. 222, and Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams, p. 170, both give excellent
descriptions and interpretations of this event based also but not solely on this
source.
100 Julian Beck, 'Money, Sex and the Theatre', in Berke, Counter Culture, p. 95.
101 Hoffman, Revolution, p. 80.
102 Ibid, p. 32.
103 Hoffman and Simon, The Best of Abbie Hoffman (Hoffman's emphasis), p. 189.
104 Project London Free, in Pemberton, The Underground and Alternative Press in
Britain, p. 30.
105 Quoted in Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, pp. 98 and 110.
106 Rubin, Do It!, pp. 122-3.
107 There are many accounts of this action including their own. See, for example,
Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, p. 232.
108 Rubin, Dolt!, p. 251.
109 David Zane Mairowitz, 'The Diggers', in Berke, Counter Culture, p. 379.
110 Ibid.
111 Ibid.
112 Ibid.
113 Rubin, Do It!, p. 120 (my emphasis).
114 Mairowitz, 'The Diggers', p. 379.
115 Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy (London: Paladin, 1970), pp. 136-7.
116 John Gerassi, 'Revolution By Lifestyle', pp. 65-7.
117 For a discussion of these codes, see Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the
Spirit of Modern Consumerism (London: Blackwell, 1987).
3 Consuming India
1 Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals (San Francisco: City Lights, 1970) p. 43.
2 Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury: A History (New York: Random House, 1984),
p. 8. For another description of this phenomenon, see Lewis Yablonsky, The Hippie
Trip (New York: Pegasus, 1968), p. 322.
3 See, for example, the Berkeley Barb, 3-9 November 1967, p. 14.
4 See, for example, the East Village Other, 1-5 July 1967 (back page).
5 A comment attributed to A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, in Satsvarupa
dasa Goswami's biography, Only He Could Lead Them (Sydney: Bhaktivedanta
Book Trust, 1981), p. 93.
6 Ibid., p. 79.
7 An observation attributed to George Harrison, in Goswami, Only He Could Lead
Them, p. 33.
8 Goswami, Only He Could Lead Them, p. 92.
9 Derek Taylor, It Was Twenty Years Ago Today (New York: Bantam, 1987), p. 137.
Taylor's observation about the pervasiveness of the Indian influence, however, is
correct.
10 See Armand Biteaux, The New Consciousness (Willis, California: Oliver Press,
1975).
11 Don McNeill, Moving Through Here (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), p. 80.
12 See Charles Perry The Haight-Ashbury, p. 203, for a description of this particular
issue. The confusion between India and native American 'Indians', evident in this
issue of the San Francisco Oracle, will be discussed later.
13 Richard Alpert, Be Here Now (New York: Lama Foundation, 1971), Section One
(pages unnumbered).
14 See Robert Bohm, Notes On India (Boston: South End Press, 1982), p. 200. I am
aware here that a postmodern critique would question Bohm's distinction and
indeed my own later use of the notion of a 'non-empirical' India.
15 See Milton Cantor, for example, who describes 'hippies' as having never made the
leap into politics, The Divided Left: American Radicalism, 1900-1975 (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1978), p. 184.
16 Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy (London: Paladin, 1970), p. 96.
17 See Alpert, Be Here Now, Section One (pages unnumbered).
18 Discussed in Chapter 2 with reference to the Cohn-Bendits' work.
19 Gary Snyder, from the poem, 'A Curse on the Men in the Pentagon, Washington
D.C, quoted in Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, p. 272.
21 See Paul Fussell's discussion about the relationship between the passport and
modern identity, in Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 22.
23 Harvey Meyers, Hariyana (San Francisco: Omkara Press, 1979), p. 237.
24 Gita Mehta, Karma Kola (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 136.
25 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
26 Before this censorship, Abbie Hoffman began: 'This book was written with treason
in my heart ... It was written with the intention of making fun subversive. And
finally, make no mistake about it, it was written with the hope of destroying
Amerika [sic]', Revolution for the Hell of It (New York: Dial Press, 1968), p. 5.
27 Neville, Play Power, p. 207.

28 Joseph Berke, Counter Culture (London: Peter Owen and Fire Books, 1969),
p. 4.
1970), p. 102.
30 From The Tales of Hoffman, by Mark Levine, George McNamee and Daniel Green-
berg, quoted in Robert Buckout (ed.), Toward Social Change: A Handbook for Those
Who Will (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 242.
31 Robert S. Ellwood, The Sixties Spiritual Awakening: American Religion Moving
From Modem to Postmodern (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994),
p. 6.
32 Rebecca S. Bjork and Reginald Twigg, 'Hippie Lifestyle as Rhetorical Performance:
Enacting Discourses of Peace', Studies in Communication, vol. 5, 1995, p. 142.
33 Ibid., p. 148.
34 Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (New York: State
of New York Press, 1988), p. 69.
35 See Halbfass, India and Europe, p. 72.
36 Ibid., p. 83.
37 Ainslie T. Embree, Imagining India: Essays on Indian History (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1989), p. 3. Also, see Martin Bernal's controversial Black Athena:
The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1 (London: Free Association
Books, 1987), pp. 224-80, for an account of the fascination with Sanskrit and
passion for India which developed in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.
38 Halbfass, India and Europe, p. 72.
39 Ronald Inden, 'Orientalist Constructions of India', Modern Asian Studies, vol. 20,
no. 3, 1986, pp. 401-46.
40 Ibid., p. 430.
41 Ibid., p. 402. For further elaboration of these arguments about romanticism, see
Ronald Indens Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 66-9.
42 Inden, 'Orientalist Constructions of India', p. 430. This European perspective
on the monstrous in Indian art is comprehensively analysed by Partha Mitter,
Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1977).
43 Bohm, Notes on India, p. 191.
44 Walt Whitman, 'Passage to India', stanza 9, in Leaves of Grass (New York: Signet,
1958) (my emphasis).
45 See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), for an illuminating discussion
of the way an industrialized American version of the pastoral ideal emerged in the
writings of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
46 Ibid.
47 Henry David Thoreau, Walden (London: Avenel Books, 1985), p. 267.
48 See A. K. B. Pillai, The Transcendental Self: A Comparative Study of Thoreau and the
Psycho-Philosophy of Hinduism and Buddhism (New York: University Press of
America, 1985), p. 43.
49 Thoreau, Walden, p. 11.
50 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson on Transcendentalism, Edward L. Ericson (ed.)

(New York: Ungar, 1986), p. x. See, also, S. Donadio, S. Raitton and O. Seavey (eds),
Emerson and His Legacy (Edwardsville: Sth Illinois University Press, 1986).
51 See, for example, Thoreau's comments on factory-produced clothing, Walden,
p. 19, and also p. 22.
52 The name of 'Emerson' was used as the title for a regular column in the under-
ground publication, Avatar. See, for example, June 9-22 issue, 1967, p. 3.
53 Thoreau, Walden, p. 6.
54 Inden, 'Orientalist Constructions of India', p. 407.
55 Whereas Halbfass traces certain motifs to the European Enlightenment, Inden
posits that evidence of these reiterative themes can also be found in medieval
thought, 'Orientalist Constructions of India', p. 420.
56 Ginsberg, Indian Journals, p. 5. (Note, for example, the passage cited at the opening
of this chapter.)
57 George Harrison in an interview (mainly on Indian music) reproduced in the East
Village Other, vol. 2, no. 15, July 1967, p. 12.
58 Ibid.
59 Bohm, Notes on India, p. 200.
60 Goswami, Only He Could Lead Them, p. 187.
61 Alpert, Be Here Now, Section One (pages unnumbered).
62 See Rick Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism
in America (Boulder: Shambhala, 1981), p. 63.
63 Leary, The Politics Of Ecstasy, p. 97. As an aside, almost twenty years after Leary's
comments while I was travelling in India, a German hippie in Puri asked if I spoke
Hindi. His reply to my negative answer was that I (and other Europeans) already
knew Hindi because it was the source of all Indo-European languages. He advised
that it was unnecessary for me to learn any Indian language. The key, he suggested,
was to really get in touch with India and then an ancient or originary knowledge of
these languages would surface.
64 Called 'The Restless Pioneers' in Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake,
pp. 54-70.
65 Quoted in Bohm, Notes on India, p. 190.
66 In an article entitled 'India and America', the San Francisco Oracle, undated
(1967).
68 Phillippa Pullar, The Shortest Journey (London: Mandala Books, 1981).
69 Edward Said argues that 'as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has
a history and tradition of thought, imagery and vocabulary that have given it a
reality and presence in and for the West', in Orientalism (London: Peregrine, 1978),
p. 5.
70 Ibid., pp. 1-28.
71 Harvey Meyers translates dhuni as a smoking fellowship, association, or circle of
communion where hashish, opium, marijuana, etc., was passed round a circle by
Hindu saints or holy men (sadhus). Meyers, Hariyana, p. 117.
72 Ibid.
73 Note the earlier example of Richard Alpert finding what he was looking for in India
in a 23-year-old Californian.
74 Peter Marshall, The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century

(Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 43-4.
75 Ibid.
76 Halbfass, India and Europe, pp. 379-401.
77 Said, Orientalism, p. 5.
78 Quoted in Taylor, It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, p. 138.
79 Also, see Jane Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America (New York: Random House,
1968), p. 72.
80 Mehta, Karma Kola, p. 69.
81 Patrick Marnham, The Road To Kathmandu as Travelled By a Bunch of Zombies
Like Us (New York: Putnam, 1971), p. 71.
82 Ginsberg, Indian Journals, p. 7.
83 Pillai, The Transcendental Self, p. 41.
84 Quoted in Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake, p. 59.
85 See Thoreau's frequent musings on Hindu gods, nature, etc., in Walden.
86 Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake, p. 55.
87 William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1988), p. 3.
88 Ibid.
89 Victor Turner, Drama, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 261.
90 Ibid., p. 238.
91 Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold: Technical Notes and Queries to Fellow Dharma
Revolutionaries (San Francisco: New Directions, 1969), p. 144.
92 Meyers, Hariyana, p. 3.
93 Ibid., p. 61.
94 Watts, quoted in Jesse Kornbluth (ed.), Notes From the New Underground (New
York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 175 (my emphasis).
95 Ibid.
96 Satsvarupa dasa Goswami, In Every Town and Village (Sydney: Bhaktivedanta
Book Trust, 1982), p. 27 (my emphasis).
97 Davis, quoted in R. Greenfield, The Spiritual Supermarket (New York: Saturday
Review Press, 1975), p. 41.
98 Greenfield, The Spiritual Supermarket, p. 41. As explained in previous chapters,
'the movement' was the name New Left activists in America gave to themselves
and to fellow travellers.
100 See, for example, Marnham, The Road to Kathmandu, Neville, Play Power, and
Alpert, Be Here Now.
104 Ibid., p. 2.
105 See the examples of discovering a guru, already cited, in Mehta, Karma Kola, and
Alpert, Be Here Now.
107 Similar incidents are described by Bohm, Notes On India, pp. 183-91.
108 The response to Rennie Davis, discussed earlier, is an example.

109 The fact that journeys to India which could be considered 'counterculturaT took
place long after the decade came to a close (and are still taking place) is often
overlooked. See, for example, Pullar, The Shortest Journey.
110 San Francisco Oracle, no. 6, February 1967 (pages unnumbered).
112 See Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America, p. 192.
113 The International Society for Krishna Consciousness took up residence in the
Haight-Ashbury on 16 January 1967.
114 See Mantra (London), vol. 1, 1972, p. 3.
115 Allen Ginsberg, 'Reflections on the Mantra', International Times, 13-26 February
1967, p. 8.
116 Ibid.
117 Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America, p. 85.
119 Ibid., p. 104.
120 Ibid. Note that 'karma', far from being a 'sort of vibration', is translated as 'the fruit
of work' or 'action'. According to Robert Hume, it is a concept linked to the notion
of metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls from one being to another: Hume,
The Thirteen Principal Upanishads (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 55.
121 Quoted in Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America, p. 53. Robert Hume defines 'y°g a ' a s
coming from the root 'yuj', and meaning to join, yoke or harness, The Thirteen
Principal Upanishads, p. 68.
123 Snyder, Earth House Hold, p. 103.
124 Steve Levine, 'The First American Mela: Notes From the San Andreas Fault', San
Francisco Oracle, no. 6, 1967, p. 24.
125 From a personal communication with Bryan Smith, one such traveller, who, like
others, read the Journals as preparation for India. It is interesting that this status
was accorded Ginsberg's writings when Gary Snyder's Passage Through India (San
Francisco: Gray Fox Press, 1983), also written in 1962, reads much more like a
conventional travelogue.
126 Ginsberg, Indian Journals, p. 4.
128 Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy, p. 40.
129 For example Richard Alpert goes on at length about his apartment in Cambridge,
his antiques, his car, motorcycle, Cessna airplane, sailboat, his publications,
appointments, research contracts and the cost of his psychoanalysis: Be Here Now,
p. 1. From a different perspective, but within the same paradigm, John Gerassi
describes his fancy home, car, the maid, the expense account, the titles and the
Bigelows on the floor: 'Revolution By Lifestyle', in Joseph Berke (ed.), Counter
Culture (London: Peter Owen and Fire Books, 1969), p. 65.
130 Berke, Counter Culture, p. 30.
131 This pamphlet was possibly translated from the Dutch and distributed in Holland
during the Provo movement, which was begun in Amsterdam in 1965 by a group
of non-violent anarchists with a strong anti-car approach to the city - what we
would consider now to be an 'environmental' ethic. Their symbol was a white
bicycle and their art happenings and antics, according to Martin A. Lee and Bruce
Shlain, anticipated the San Francisco Diggers: Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the
Sixties Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1985), p. 213. The pamphlet is included
in Peter Stansill and David Zane Mairowitz, BAMN (By Any Means Necessary):
p. 25. Note that in the reference to a 'labourless future', the belief is expressed that
technology was going to eventually make work redundant. This view was also
widely held by the American counterculture.
132 See 'The Hippy in Your Head', Indian Head, vol. 1, no. 5, 1966.
133 See Indian Head, 15 September 1967, p. 7.
134 Quoted in Kornbluth, Notes From the New Underground, p. 140.
135 San Francisco Oracle, 1967 (undated and pages unnumbered).
136 Paul E. Willis, Profane Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 128.
137 Marnham, The Road to Kathmandu, p. 59.
138 Quoted by Jacob Needleman, The New Religions (New York: Pocket Books, 1970),
p. 87.
139 See the description of Eik's talents in this area in Marnham, The Road to
Kathmandu, p. 215.
140 See Pullar, The Shortest Journey, pp. 46-7.
141 Richard Neville gives instructions on how best this can be done, Play Power,
p. 301. See also Meyers, Hariyana, p. 6.
142 See Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York:
Schocken Books, 1976), for an analysis of these conventional narratives.
143 Berkeley Barb, 8-14 September 1967, p. 6.
145 See earlier comments about the Jagannath figures people began to wear around
their necks.
146 Gary Snyder, 'Buddhism and the Coming Revolution', International Times, 13-26
February 1967, p. 9.
147 Quoted in E. Burke Rockford Jnr, Hare Krishna in America (New Jersey: Rutgers
University Press, 1985), p. 99.
148 Quoted in Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America, p. 107.
149 Ibid., pp. 107-8.
152 Ibid., p. 22 (my emphasis, to highlight the frequency with which competitive
comparisons were made).
153 Hence, the later and quite unselfconscious texts, such as Rick M. Chapman's How
To Choose a Guru (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).
154 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans.
Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books in association with
New Left Review, 1973), p. 91.
4 Co-opting co-optation
1970), p. 235.
2 See Aidan Rankin, 'Christopher Lasch and the Moral Agony of the Left', New Left
Review, no. 215, January/February 1996, pp. 149-55.
3 Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education
(New York: Harper and Row, 1990).
4 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed
Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1987).
5 Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New
York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1995).
6 Fredric Jameson, 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', New
Left Review, no. 146, July/August 1984, p. 87.
7 Franco Ferrarotti, 'Foreshadowings of Postmodernism: Counter-Cultures of the
Apocalypse'', International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, vol. 9, no. 2, 1995,
p. 243.
Press, 1995), p. 3.
9 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Michael Ryan, 'Anarchism Revisited: A New
Philosophy' (Diacritics, vol. 8, no. 2, Summer 1978, pp. 66-79), cited in Starr,
Logics, p. 15.
10 Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury: A History (New York: Random House, 1984).
11 See Simon Friths essay, 'Rock and the Politics of Memory', for an interesting
discussion of how the subversive ideology of rock music turned out to be 'a
wonderful source of sales rhetoric', in Sohnya Sayres, et al. (eds), The 60s Without
Apology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 59-69.
1987), p. 423.
13 Jerry Rubin, Growing (Up) at 37 (New York: Warner Books, 1976).
14 William L. O'Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960s (New
York: Quadrangle, 1980), p. 265.
15 Starr, Logics, p. 19.
16 Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture
(New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 249.
17 David Gross, 'Culture, Politics and Lifestyle in the 1960s', in Adolph Reed (ed.),
Race, Politics and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960's (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1986), pp. 104-5.
modern', Cultural Critique, winter 1988-89, p. 76.
19 Ibid., pp. 74-5.
20 Ewen, All Consuming Images, p. 249.
21 John Sinclair, 'Mass Media and the Dialectics of Social Change: The Melbourne
Herald and the Counter-Culture in the Late Sixties', unpublished MA thesis, La
Trobe University, 1976.
22 Ewen, All Consuming Images, p. 251.
23 See, for example, Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London:
Methuen, 1979), p. 92, for his use of Lefebvre.
24 Quoted in Hebdige, Subculture, p. 92.
25 Hebdige, Subculture, p. 92.
26 Ibid., p. 94.
27 Ibid., p. 94, and see also Hebdige's later book, Hiding in the Light: On Images and
Things (London: Routledge, 1988).
28 For an example of these conventions and the empirical work and theoretical
insights associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at
Birmingham University in the 1970s, see Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds),
Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London:
Hutchinson, 1976).
29 Paul E. Willis, Profane Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
30 Ibid., p. 6.
31 Quoted in Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (London:
Paladin, 1988), p. 407.
34 Quoted in Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbuty, p. 151.
35 Quoted in Anthony Ashbolt, 'Cultural and Radical Polities', Arena, no. 63, 1983,
p. 54.
36 Robin Gerster and Jan Bassett, Seizures of Youth: 'The Sixties' and Australia
37 Ibid., p. 2, for example.
38 International Liberation School pamphlet held in the Social Protest Collection
1960-1992, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
39 Gerster and Bassett, Seizures of Youth, p. 21.
40 Quoted in Gerster and Bassett, Seizures of Youth, p. 21.
41 Ashleigh Brilliant, The Haight-Ashbury Song Book: Songs of Love and Haight (San
Francisco: H.B. Publications, 1967).
42 For example, Arthur Seeger's analysis of the Berkeley Barb, discussed in Chapter 1:
Seeger, 'An Unreported Class War: Ideology and Self-Censorship on the Berkeley
Barb', Communication, vol. 10, 1987, pp. 31-50.
43 As a visit to the Haight-Ashbury today would show, at least in this respect, Ashleigh
Brilliant was wrong.
44 Brilliant, The Haight-Ashbury Song Book.
45 Ken Cowan, 'The Hippy in Your Head', Indian Head, vol. 1, no. 5, 1966.
47 Quoted by Robert Crawford, 'A Cultural Account of "Health": Control, Release and
the Social Body', in John B. McKinlay (ed.), Issues in the Political Economy of
Health Care (New York: Tavistock, 1984), p. 91.
48 Abbie Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It (New York: Dial Press, 1968),
p. 105.
50 See Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, p. 328.
51 Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), pp. 130-9.
52 Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books,
1976), p. xxiv.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., p. 58.
55 Albin Wagner, 'Drop City: A Total Living Environment', Avatar, 4 August 1967. Also
cited in Jesse Kornbluth (ed.), Notes From the New Underground (New York: Viking
Press, 1968), p. 234.
56 Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1975), p. 76.
57 Ibid.
58 Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism
(London: Blackwell, 1987), p. 227.
59 Crawford, 'A Cultural Account of "Health"', p. 92.
60 Ibid., p. 81.
61 Ibid., p. 97.
62 Ibid., p. 92.
63 In even the most cursory glance at Abbie Hoffman's Revolution for the Hell of It or
Jerry Rubin's Do It! this 'pleasure' and sense of subversion are evident.
64 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen
and Unwin, 1930); Crawford, 'A Cultural Account of "Health"', p. 78, also develops
this point.
65 Crawford, 'A Cultural Account of "Health"', p. 78.
66 Allen Ginsberg, 'Renaissance or Die', East Village Other, 10 January 1967.
67 John Gerassi, 'Revolution By Lifestyle' in Joseph Berke, Counter Culture (London:
Peter Owen and Fire Books, 1969), p. 64.
69 Tuli Kupferberg, in Joseph Berke, Counter Culture (London: Peter Owen and Fire
Books, 1969), p. 85.
70 Ibid.
71 Neville, Play Power, pp. 262-3.
72 See Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe
(New York: Basic Books, 1987), and Kimball, Tenured Radicals.
73 Rubin, Do It!, p. 235. This anti-disciplinary stance on consumption was in contrast
to a more 'disciplinary' approach (typified by the commune movement) where the
emphasis was on refusing to consume.
75 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction (New York:
Pantheon, 1978), p. 58.
76 For example, Kenneth Keniston, Youth and Dissent: The Rise of a New Opposition
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971). Keniston's comments about 'heads'
are fairly typical. In his chapter entitled 'Drug Users: Heads and Seekers', he
identifies their 'defining characteristic' as a 'generalized rejection of prevailing
American values, which they criticize largely on cultural and humanistic grounds.
American society is trashy, cheap and commercial; it "de-humanizes" its members;
its values of success, materialism, monetary accomplishment, and achievement
undercut more spiritual values': p. 238.
78 Ibid., p. 6.
79 Ibid., p. 225.
80 Ibid., p. 227.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid., p. 225.
83 Paraphrased in Gitlin, The Sixties, p. 228.
84 Ibid., pp. 228-9. This incident is also described by Abbie Hoffman in Revolution,
pp. 33-8. In his account the Diggers are given a very heroic and romantic role.
86 Ibid., p. 230.
87 Irving Wexler, 'New Wine in Old Bottles', in Sohnya Sayres, et al., The 60s Without
Apology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 223.
88 Ibid., p. 224.
89 Ibid., p. 223.
91 These roles were all gendered 'male' even though, with the case of the Weather
Underground, women like Bernardine Dohrn provided a crucial role model for the
'outlaw' (for both men and women). This contradiction of women's militancy in
the sixties has not been adequately examined to date. Robin Morgan's
characteristically provocative The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism
(London: Methuen, 1989) is a useful (if at times problematic) intervention.
93 Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties
Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1985), pp. 228-9.
94 Such as the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, the Black Panthers, the White
Panthers and imitators of the Weathermen.
95 See Gitlin, The Sixties, p. 338, for a full account of how the Weather Underground
destroyed the October 1969 SDS convention.
96 For example, Gitlin, The Sixties, pp. 380-408; Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams,
pp. 223-35; Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second
Thoughts About the Sixties (New York: Summit Books, 1989), pp. 69-120; Paul
Walton, 'The Case of the Weathermen: Social Reaction and Radical Commitment',
in I. Taylor and L. Taylor (eds), Politics and Deviance (Harmondsworth, Middlesex:
Penguin,-1973), pp. 157-81.
99 Bernardine Dohrn, quoted in Gitlin, The Sixties, p. 400.
100 Ibid., p. 393.
101 See Gitlin, The Sixties, pp. 391-6, for his account of these Weather Actions.
102 Quoted in Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams, p. 234.
103 Ibid., p. 231.
105 Ibid., p. 399.
108 Ibid., p. 396.
109 For example, pushing teachers around in blue-collar high schools, where working-
class kids found their actions bewildering and, in one case, even mobilized to fight
against the Weather Underground. See Gitlin, The Sixties, pp. 391-3.
110 Ibid., p. 403.
111 Ibid.
112 Jameson, 'Periodizing the 60s', in Sayres, et al. (eds), The 60s Without Apology
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 203.
113 Osha Neumann, 'Motherfuckers Then and Now: My Sixties Problem', in Marcy
Darnovsky, et al. (eds), Cultural Politics and Social Movements (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1995), p. 56.
114 See Gitlin, The Sixties, and Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random
House, 1988).
115 Dennis Altman, 'The Counter-Culture: Nostalgia or Prophecy?', in A. F. Davies,
Cheshire, 1977), p. 464.
5 Aesthetic radicalism
2 The Digger Papers, p. 3.
4 Rubin, Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970),
p. 250.
6 Of the first so-called rock extravaganza, Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain note the
presence of many who earlier that day had participated in the Berkeley rally; Acid
Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1985),
p. 142.
7 Quoted in Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams, pp. 142-3.
8 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (London: Allen Lane, 1969).
9 Ibid., p. 25.
10 Ibid., p. 28.
11 Ibid., p. 27.
12 Ibid., p. 30.
13 Nicholas Drake (ed.), The Sixties: A Decade in Vogue (New York: Prentice Hall,
1988), p. 131.
14 'Postmodernism: a Preface', in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on
Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), p. xv.
15 See Fredric Jameson, 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism',
New Left Review, no. 146, July/August 1984, pp. 53-92: and Jameson 'Post-
modernism and Consumer Society', in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays
on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 111-25.
16 Bryan S. Turner, 'Periodization and Politics in the Postmodern', in Turner (ed.),
Theories of Modernity and Postmodemity (London: Sage Publications, 1990), p. 1.
17 John Frow, What Was Postmodernism? (Sydney: Local Consumption Press, 1991),
p. 19.
18 See Jameson, 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism'.
19 E. Ann Kaplan, Postmodernism and its Discontents: Theories, Practices (London:
Verso, 1988), p. 3.
20 Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic, pp. xi-xii.
21 Frow, What Was Postmodernism?, p. 3.
22 Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (Cambridge: Polity

Press, 1989), p. 168.
23 See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984). Todd Gitlin also provides a list in his 'Hip-Deep in
Postmodernism', New York Times Book Review, 6 November 1988, p. 35. John Frow
discusses this tendency towards lists when defining postmodernism and points out
that Gitlin 'Both thematizes and practices the list... ironizing and incorporating it
through another postmodern trope, the quotation': What Was Postmodernism?,
p. 10.
24 Callinicos characterizes this cultural mood as an obsession with style and high
levels of consumption, in Against Postmodernism, p. 168.
25 Thomas Docherty, 'Postmodernism: an Introduction', in Docherty (ed.), Post-
modernism: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 1.
26 Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, p. 82.
27 Franco Ferrarotti, 'Foreshadowings of Postmodernism: Counter-Cultures of the
Apocalypse', International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, vol. 9, no. 2, 1995,
p. 255.
28 See Jameson, 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', p. 56;
and Jameson, 'Postmodernism and Consumer Society', p. I l l ; also, see Andreas
Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 188.
29 Ibid., p. 190.
30 Punks also characterized themselves as the 'other' of the counterculture. See for
example, Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979)
and Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (London: Routledge, 1988). Guy
Rundell reproduces the punk/counterculture binary with the view that punk was
the negation of 'the Rousseauist themes of the counter-culture'. The narrative of co-
optation also features in his analysis with the 'May 68 /Woodstock moment'
becoming the 'hot tub/personal development culture of the 70s', in 'Anarchy in Oz',
Arena Magazine, no. 26, Dec/Jan 1996/97, p. 19.
31 Jameson, 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', p. 54. It
should be noted that, in making this distinction, Jameson overlooks a similar
synthesis between the classical and the popular in the Beatles, especially in albums
like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
32 Huyssen, After the Great Divide, p. 190.
33 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989),
p. 38.
modern', Cultural Critique, winter 1988-89, pp. 63-8.
35 See Huyssen, After the Great Divide, pp. 190-3. He proposes that this kind of
incorporation took place in the fifties.
36 Jameson, 'Postmodernism and Consumer Society', p. 112.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Abbie Hoffman, 'Woodstock Nation', in Abbie Hoffman and Daniel Simon (eds),
The Best of Abbie Hoffman (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1989), p. 99.

41 Ibid., p. 12.
42 As Huyssen argues, in After the Great Divide, p. 90.
43 Lyn Ludlow, San Francisco Examiner, 11 December 1966, quoted in Helen Perry,
The Human Be-In (New York: Basic Books, 1970), p. 56.
1987), pp. 109-10.
45 Marianne DeKoven, 'To Bury and To Praise: John Sayles on the Death of the
Sixties', Minnesota Review, no. 30/31 spring/fall, 1988, p. 144.
46 Quoted in Gitlin, The Sixties, p. 210.
47 Jameson, 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', p. 66.
48 See Hoffman, Revolution, p. 65.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Marshall Berman's definition, in AW That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience
of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), p. 16, captures the relationship between
Enlightenment notions of emancipation and what he calls the 'dialectics of
modernization'.
52 Jameson, 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', p. 87. For a
full discussion of this idea, see pp. 85-8.
53 Perry Anderson, 'Modernity and Revolution', New Left Review, no. 144, March-
April 1984, p. 112.
54 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 93.
55 Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic, p. xii.
56 Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, p. 94.
58 Ibid.
59 Abbie Hoffman, 'Woodstock Nation', p. 102.
60 Gitlin discusses the ways in which violence was decontextualized in this and other
films, in The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and the Unmaking
of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 197-200.
61 This was revealed by Bobby Seale at the first public reunion of key members of the
Black Panthers at Berkeley in October 1990.
63 Ibid.
65 Footage from this remarkable film is shown in part one of Daniel Cohn-Bendit's
three-part documentary series, 1968: The Revolution Revisited (Hilverson/Holland:
Belbo Film Productions, 1986).
68 Ibid., p. 213.
69 The collage of poster art was thus similar to but also distinguished from the
collage and montage pioneered by modernist painters like Braque and Picasso.
See, for example, Gregory L. Ulmer, 'The Object of Post-Criticism', in H. Foster
(ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983),
pp. 84-7.
70 Lyndon Walker, 'I Remember Che', Meanjin, no. 4, 1991, pp.

71 See Terry Bloomfield, 'It's Sooner Than You Think, or Where Are We in the History
of Rock Music', New Left Review, no. 190, Nov/Dec 1991, pp. 59-81.
72 Hugh Romney (Wavy Gravy), The Hog Farm and Friends (New York: Links, 1974),
p. 98.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid., p. 103.
76 Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, p. 145. Callinicos uses this phrase in relation to
Baudrillard.
77 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, unauthorized translation (Detroit: Black and
Red Books, 1970).
78 Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, p. 146.
79 Ibid., p. 145.
80 See, for example, Jean Baudrillard, 'The Precession of Simulacra', trans. Paul Foss
and Paul Patton, Art and Text, 11, spring 1983, pp. 3-48.
81 The Digger Papers, p. 3.
82 Abbie Hoffman, Revolution, pp. 65-6 (my emphasis).
83 E. L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel (London: Picador, 1973).
85 Ibid., p. 15.
86 Ibid., p. 9.
87 Ibid., p. 20.
89 Ibid.
90 The songs of the Weather Underground are reproduced in Gitlin, The Sixties,
p. 386.
91 Ibid.
92 See previous references to Bryan S. Turner's introduction to Theories of Modernity
and Postmodemity.
93 Jameson, 'Postmodernism and Consumer Society', p. 111.
6 Genealogies
1 Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (London: Routledge,
1988), p. 195.
Press, 1995), p. 15.
1987), p. 433.
5 Fredric Jameson, 'Periodizing the 60s', in Sohyna Sayres, et al. (eds), The 60s
Without Apology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 182 and
p. 207.
6 Alice Echols, 'We Gotta Get Out Of This Place: Notes Towards Remapping the
Sixties', Socialist Review, vol. 22, no. 2, April/June 1992, p. 11.
7 Ibid., p. 12.
8 Ibid., p. 15.
9 Doug McAdam made this observation in a seminar entitled 'The Intersection of
History and Biography: The Case of "Freedom Summer"', Berkeley Sociology
Department, University of California, 25 October 1990.
10 Echols, 'We Gotta Get Out Of This Place', p. 18.
11 See Robin Morgan, The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism (London:
Methuen, 1989), pp. 217^3.
12 Lynne Segal, Straight Sex: The Politics of Pleasure (London: Virago, 1994), p. 33.
13 This view is generally acknowledged by commentators on the German Greens,
although to my knowledge there has been no comprehensive investigation of these
links. For general analyses, see Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought (London:
Unwin Hyman, 1990), and Elim Papadakis, 'Struggles for Social Change: The
Green Party in West Germany', in Christine Jennett and Randal G. Stewart (eds),
Politics of the Future: The Role of Social Movements (South Melbourne: Macmillan,
1989), pp. 76-98.
14 See Fritjof Capra and Charlene Spretnak, Green Politics: The Global Promise (New
York: E. P. Dutton, 1984), pp. 125-26, where they detail the participatory process in
the formulation of Green Policy documents with meetings running over six
consecutive weekends.
15 See Douglas Crimp (ed.), AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism (Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press, 1988).
16 Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1989), p. 168. Other references to the failed revolutionary hopes of the sixties
generation appear in this text: see, for example, p. 171.
17 Ibid., p. 168.
19 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 210.
20 See David Beech and John Roberts, 'Spectres of the Aesthetic', New Left Review, no.
218, July/August, 1996, pp. 102-27, for a discussion of this tendency in what they
call the 'new aestheticism'.
21 Peter Stansill and David Zane Mairowitz, BAMN (By Any Means Necessary): Outlaw
Manifestos and Ephemera (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971), p. 105.
22 Abbie Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It, p. 31.
23 Jameson, quoted in Slavoj Zizek, 'The Spectre of Ideology', in Zizek (ed.), Mapping
Ideology (London: Verso, 1994), p. 1.
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Index
Acid Tests, 21,75, 97, 101, 112,114 anti-productivism, 83-5

ACT UP, 123 anti-work ethic, 68, 85-7, 114
Adler, Judith, 36 Aron, Adrianne, 19, 133 n. 71
Alomes, Stephen, 15, 129 n. 27 avant-garde, European, 52, 93, 111
Alpert, Richard Dada, 111,113
anti-consumerism, 49, 142 n. 129 surrealism, 98, 111
drug experiences, 31, 50
guru worship, 56, 57, 140 n. 73 BAMN, 23, 34, 35
Indian experiences, 49, 63, 67, 71 Baran, Paul, 80
Altman, Dennis, 6, 13, 18, 95 Bassett, Jan, 6, 17-18, 79-80, 132 n. 52
anarchists, anarchism, 3, 30, 81 Baudrillardian, 115
Anderson, Benedict, 52 Beatles, the, 24, 48, 86, 101, 104, 112
Anderson, Perry, 107 "Yellow Submarine', 103-5, 117
anti-disciplinary politics becoming the other, 51, 53, 62-3
capitalist consumption and, 87-8 Bell, Daniel, 8 2 ^
characteristics of, 4, 25-7, 30-1, 36, 96 Berg, Peter, 88
counterculture and, 5, 94, 98 Berke, Joseph, 68
development of concept of, viii, 8, Berkeley, 6, 8, 24, 35, 79, 103-4, 117
22-3,25-7, 123 Berkeley Barb, 20-1, 70, 137 n. 95,
gestures, 33, 39, 40, 53, 63, 83, 87, 145 n. 42
109-10 Berkeley Free Speech Movement, 11, 14,
India and, 63-4 124
language of, 32, 36, 41, 45, 53, 81, 84, Berkeley in the '60s, ix, 7, 36
114 Berman, Marshall, 7, 106, 150 n. 51
paradoxical elements of, 29, 32, 34, 46, Bernal, Martin, 139 n. 37
118, 126 Birmingham School, 77
parody and pastiche in, 36, 108-14 Biteaux, Armand, 49
postmodernism and, 5, 41, 95, 102, Bjork, Rebecca S., 39, 53
107, 115 Black Panthers, 24, 108, 110, 113,
success of, 95, 99, 101-3, 119, 120, 147 n. 94
125-6 black power, 22, 34
writings, 33 Blair, Tony, viii
anti-political impulses, 102, 124 blaming the sixties, 73, 82
165
166 Index
Bloom, Allan, 82 globalizing, 7

Boggs, Carl, 5 popular, 22, 36, 40, 90, 93, 94, 100,
Bohm, Robert, 50, 54, 56, 57, 138 n. 14, 102-7, 113-14, 115
141 n. 107 psychedelic, 3, 4, 31, 33, 46, 71, 74, 78,
Bookchin, Murray, 109 101, 112, 124
Breines, Winni, 131 n. 27 Punk, 76, 149 n. 30
Breton, Andre\ 98 youth, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 33, 46, 55, 76,
Buddhism, 70, 71 77,80
Cage, John, 101 Dalai Lama, 67

Callinicos, Alex, 99-100, 114, 124-5, Dass, Bhagwan, 56
149 n. 24 Davis, Rennie, 63
Campbell, Colin, 84-5, 137 n. 117 death of sixties radicalism
Cantor, Milton, 138 n. 15 commodification and, 8, 75, 78
capitalist consumption, critique of, narratives of, 4, 9, 20, 64, 94, 122
68-70,74,78,79,81,82,84,87 post-sixties political disenchantment
Capra, Fritjof, 152 n. 14 and, viii, 95, 102, 120-1, 124-5, -
carnivalesque, 4, 45 152 n. 16
Chicago conspiracy trials, 34, 53, 110 representations of the sixties and,
Chicago 8, 63, 113 1-2, 17
Civil Rights Movement, 5, 18, 22 Debord, Guy, 115
Clecak, Peter, 32, 37, 136 n. 76 DeKoven, Marianne, 104
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 7, 18, 28, 29, 30, Dellinger, D., 63
150 n. 65 Democratic Party Convention, Chicago,
Cohn-Bendit, Gabriel, 28, 29 1968,6,31,35,91,93,109, 126,
Collier, Peter, 13, 15,20,24 135 n. 38
commodification of the sixties, 8, 75, 76, see also Chicago conspiracy trials;
77,94 Chicago 8
Conlin, Joseph, 12 Diggers
Connolly, William, 60, 62 activities in the Haight-Ashbury, 79,
co-opting the sixties, 76-7, 79 80,81, 137 n. 94
conceptualizations of co-optation, antics of, 8, 35, 83, 102
76-8, 93-4 'Free' ethic and, 26, 42-6
counterculture iconoclasm of, viii, 31
American, 5-8 New York and, 134 n. 11
Australian, 5-6, 13, 29 pamphlets of, 115-16
British, 6 rejection of New Left, 27-9, 88-92,
definitions of, 3, 12-13,39 123-4
explanations of, 15-16 disciplinary politics
Haight-Ashbury and, 20, 79 see also characteristics of, 23, 25, 35, 40, 89-90
Diggers language of, 43, 85, 114-15
impact of, 18, 73 tensions with anti-disciplinary politics,
intersection with the New Left, 22, 26, 38, 45, 46, 91-6, 107-8, 146 n. 74
29, 30, 36, 103, 123 Docherty, Thomas, 3, 11, 100
language and rituals of, 32, 45, 81, 84 Doctorow, E. L., 117
see also money-free economy Dohrn, Bernadine, 147 n. 91
pastiche and postmodern impulses, 36, Doors, the, 7
40, 112,113, 124 drugs
politicized, 4, 5, 26 consumption of, 50, 51, 56, 114,
trivialization of, ix, 22-3, 78 117
see also hippies; India LSD, 17, 21, 35, 36, 50, 68, 71, 74, 90,
Cowan, Ken, 69 92,97,112
Crawford, Robert, 84-7
culture Earisman, Delbert, 16
American, 36, 40 Echols, Alice, 121-3
consumer, 41 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 14-15, 131 n. 34
Index 167
Ellwood, Robert S., 22, 53 Habermas, Jurgen, 83-4

Embree, Ainslee, 54 Haight-Ashbury
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 55, 59, 61, characteristics of, 16, 20, 74, 78, 88,
139 n. 45, 140 n. 52 145 n. 43
end to politics see post-sixties political Free projects, 26, 28, 42, 79
disengagement Gray Line Bus Tours of, 17
Engles, Frederick, 109 Haight-Ashbury Song Book, 80
Ewen, Stuart, 75 rituals of, 48, 62, 65, 96-7
Halbfass, William, 54, 58-9
failure of the sixties see death of sixties Hall, Stuart, 7, 145 n. 28
radicalism Hare Krishna movement, 48, 51, 56, 62,
Farrell, James, ix 70, 142 n. 113
feminism, 121-3 Harrison, George, 56
Ferrarotti, Franco, 73-4, 100 Harvey, David, 101
Feuer, Lewis, 14-15 Hayden, Tom, 63, 94
Fields, Rick, 57, 60 Hebdige, Dick, 76-7, 120
Flacks, Richard, 18 Hegel, Georg, 56, 61
flower children see hippies Hell's Angels, 20, 35
Foster, Hal, 99, 107 Hindu gods, 48, 61, 62, 65, 71, 141 n. 85
Foucault, Michel, 9, 21, 23, 41, 85, 87 hippies
Franklin, Benjamin, 83 activists and, 4, 29, 97, 101
'Free', the ethic of, 42-7 clothing of, 62
Frith, Simon, 144 n. 11 consumer capitalism and, 69-71, 77-8,
Froines, John, 63 87
Frow, John, 99 hippie trail, 50, 52, 60, 63 see also
Fugs, the, 37, 38 India
Fussell, Paul, 51, 138 n. 21 influence of, 16, 19
politics of, 7, 20, 39, 53, 115, 124
Genet, Jean, 24 trivialization of, 22, 73, 111
Gerassi, John, 32, 46, 86 see also counterculture
Gerster, Robin, 6, 17,18, 79, 80, 132 n. 52 Ho Chi Minh, 40, 102
Ginsberg, Allen Hoffman, Abbie
chanting, 26, 61 art and, 96, 98
images of, 34 as Barry Freed, 42
India and, 48, 55-6, 59, 61, 64-7, 71, Cohn-Bendit and, 29-30
142 n. 125 conspiracy trials, 53, 109
protests of, 35, 86 cultural outlaws, 102, 108
Gitlin, Todd Democratic Party Convention,
character of the sixties, vii, viii, 7 Chicago, 1968,8,31,63
Diggers, 28, 89, 137 n. 98 Diggers and, 27
encounter culture, 40, 75 ethic of playfulness, 35-6, 110-11,
expressive politics, 37, 134 n. 13 146 n. 64
popular culture, 103-5, 108, 150 n. 60 exploiting paradox, 31-3, 37, 126
postmodernism, 149 n. 23 'Free' ethic, 43
sixties legacy, 4, 10, 18, 121 leadership and, 28
sixties as media fragments, 2 levitation of the Pentagon and, 39
Weathermen, 26, 92-4, 117-18 on mainstream America, 34, 41, 52,
Glass, Philip, 101 81-2,87, 138 n. 26
Goldberg, Jackie, 7 media and, 41, 105-6, 116-17
Goldstein, Richard, 24 suicide of, vii
Goswami, Satsvarupa dasa, 138 n. 5 see also Yippies
Greenham Common, 122 Hoffman, Nicholas von, 33-4.
Greens, 123, 152 n. 13 Horowitz, David, 13, 15, 20, 24
Grogan, Emmett, 28, 88-9, 134 n. 20 Houriet, Robert, 16
Gross, David, 75 Howard, Gerald, 132 n. 54
guerrilla theatre, 30, 91, 96-7, 101, 106 Hutcheon, Linda, 107-8, 112
168 Index
Huyssen, Andreas, 101, 126, 129 n. 9, Lee, Martin, 33, 43, 91, 97, 137 n. 98,
149 n. 35 143 n. 131, 148 n. 6
Lefebvre, Henri, 76
Inden, Ronald, 54, 56 Left
India New Left, 4, 5, 7, 18, 20-2, 25, 33, 38,
as critique of the West, 54-7 45, 52, 68, 78, 79, 88-94, 101, 105,
consumption of, 48, 59, 60, 62, 70 121
through music and musical Diggers' rejection of, 27-9, 88-92,
influences, 48, 65, 112 123-4
through the use of Sanskrit words, intersection with counterculture,
49, 65-6, 68-9, 140 n. 63, 22, 26, 29, 30, 36, 103, 123
142 n. 120, n. 121 and Yippies, 27-30, 124, 126
through travel, 23 masculinism of, 122, 147 n. 91
countercultural India, 8, 49, 50, 52, 53, old Left, 22-5, 29, 30, 33, 35, 40, 41,
56, 58-65, 67-70, 72, 74, 114, 44, 52-3, 82, 84, 86, 89, 93, 103-6,
142 n. 109 114, 115, 124
metaphoric, 47 Levine, Steve, 66
performing India, 38, 53, 65-72 Ludlow, Lyn, 103
transcendentalist's India, 59-61, 70
Indians (native American), 27, 34, 53, McAdam, Doug, 11, 12,121, 152 n. 9
111 McCarthyism, 105
McNeill, Don, 27
Jameson, Frederic Maharaj-ji, Guru, 63
on co-optation, 73 Maharishi Yogi, 48
periodizing the sixties, 11 Mailer, Norman, 37-9, 82
postmodernism, 99, 101, 102, 104, Mairowitz, David Zane, 23, 34, 35, 37, 44
106-8, 110, 113, 118-19, 121, Marcuse, Herbert, 98
149 n. 31, 150 n. 52 Marnham, Patrick, 59, 63, 69
terrorism and the popular, 93 Marshall, Peter, 58
Jefferson Airplane, 89-90 Martin, Bernice, 19
Jones, Jeff, 35 Marx, Karl, 72, 109
Jones, William, 60 Marx, Leo, 55, 139 n. 45
Marxist, Marxism, 3, 21-2, 28, 29, 30, 33,
Kalidasa, 60 36,40,53,61,68,89, 103, 118
Kaplan, E. Ann, 99 May '68, 1-4, 7, 8, 21, 28, 29, 30, 74, 101,
Katsiaficas, George, 20 124-5
Kauffman, L. A., 131 n. 24 Meher Baba, 67
Keniston, Kenneth, 15, 146 n. 76 Mehta, Gita, 51-2, 64-6
Kennedy, J. K, 2 Melton, Barry, 36, 136 n. 67
Kesey, Ken, 21,24, 75, 97 Merry Pranksters, 21, 35, 46, 75
Kim II Sung, 118 meta-disciplinary politics, 93-4
King, Martin Luther, 2 Metevsky, George, 27, 28
Kitchell, Mark, ix Meyers, Harvey, 51, 58, 61, 63, 64, 66, 71,
Kopkind, Andrew, 25-6 140 n. 71
Kramer, Jane, 59 Miller, James, 3, 90
Krassner, Paul, 26, 28 Mitter, Partha, 139 n. 42
Kupferberg, Tuli, 86 modernism, 99, 100, 106, 108, 118, 120
money-free economy, 44
language Death of Money and Birth of Free
of anti-disciplinary politics, 24-47 ritual, 25, 42-3, 96
the confines of, 31, 32, 33, 37, 43, 62, money-burning, 14, 23, 45
65,66,76, 126 Morgan, Robin, 122, 147 n. 91
of disciplinary politics, 43, 85, 114-15 Motherfuckers see Up Against the Wall
Lasch, Christopher, 37 Motherfuckers
Leary, Timothy, vii, 21, 45-6, 50, 57, 67, movement, the, 16, 19, 21, 26, 28, 34, 36,
68, 140 n. 63 141 n. 98
Index 169
Murray, Charles Schaar, 80 post-sixties political disengagement, 2-4,

Musgrove, Frank, 13, 15, 131 n. 39 9, 23, 42
Protestant ethic, 83
narratives of the sixties see retrospective Provo movement, 142 n. 131
accounts of the sixties Pullar, Phillippa, 57
Needleman, Jacob, 69 Punk culture see culture
Nelson, Elizabeth, 6, 19
Neumann, Osha, 94 radicalism
Neville, Richard, 6, 35, 51, 52, 67, 70, 78, post-sixties, 127
80, 82, 86-7 sixties, vii, viii, 3, 4, 10, 12, 15, 21-3,
New Age, 40, 75 38, 73, 74, 76
Newton, Janice, 13 see also death of sixties radicalism
Nimbin, 13 Reiff, Philip, 81
retrospective accounts of the sixties, viii,
Oglesby, Carl, 24 ix, 12, 20, 24, 25, 32, 38, 49, 81, 88,
O'Neill, William, 12, 75 99, 124
Oracle, see San Francisco Oracle 'eighties sixties', 13, 15, 17-19, 72
orientalism, 58, 59, 66, 67, 80 revolution
Orlovsky, Peter, 67 commodification of, 78
O'Shea, John, 58 failure of, 18,32,94
revolutionary logic, 31, 40, 50, 90, 93,
Pentagon 111, 117
levitation of, 23, 25, 37-9, 51, 82, 122 revolutionary model of political
logic of, 93 change, 1, 3, 22, 41, 91-2, 98, 100,
storming of, 7, 8, 39, 97, 118, 126 120, 123, 125
People's Park, 6, 20-1 revolutionary subject, 112, 134 n. 9
permissiveness theory, 13-17 Right, 73, 82, 93
Perry, Charles, 28, 51, 74, 138 n. 12 Rolling Stones, the, 65, 101
Perry, Helen, 16 romanticism, 54, 56, 59, 61, 84, 90, 92,
Pillai, A. K., 60 126, 139 n. 41
political parties, rejection of, 32 Romney, Hugh (Wavy Gravy), 113
politics Rossman, Michael, 104
aestheticization, 98, 110-11, 126 Roszak, Theodore, 11, 13, 15, 41,
art and, 5, 9, 105 130 n. 18
cultural, 89, 107, 111, 113-14 Rubin, Jerry
personalization of, 50 Chicago 8 and, 63
re-enchantment of, 5 on co-optation, 73, 81, 87
transformative, vii, 1, 9 defining Yippie ethos, 3, 4, 6, 26-33,
see also anti-disciplinary politics; 40,52
disciplinary politics; meta- 'Free' ethic and, 44—5
disciplinary politics gestural politics of, 39, 111, 136 n. 88
popular culture see culture guerrilla theatre, 96-7
postmodernism mainstream America and, 41
anti-disciplinary protest and, 41, 60, on popular culture, 102-3, 116
126-7 rejection of language, 31, 37
as counterculture's antithesis, 22, 119 on revolution, 35, 78
death of sixties radicalism and, ix, 3-5, on Wall Street, 18,75, 123
95, 120, 124 see also Yippies
definitions of, 99-102 Rudd, Mark, 91
parody and pastiche in, 107-10, Rundell, Guy, 149 n. 30
117-18 Ryan, Michael, 74
periodizing notion, 11
representation and, 114-19 Said, Edward, 58-9, 140 n. 69
see also counterculture, pastiche San Francisco Mime Troupe, 26
and postmodern impulses; culture, San Francisco Oracle, 34, 49, 61, 69
popular Savio, Mario, 131 n. 34
170 Index
Sayles, John, 104 Utopianism, 2, 13, 18, 29, 30, 60, 99, 122
Sayres, Sohnya, 131 n. 20
SDS see Students for a Democratic Verzuh, Ron, 6, 11
Society Viet Cong, 96, 98-9, 110, 115-16
Seale, Bobby, vii, 63, 108, 113 Vietnam Day Committee, 35
Seeger, Arthur, 20-1 Vietnamese, 91-3
Segal, Lynne, 122 Vietnam War, 7, 11, 31, 37, 39, 51, 95,
self-critical sixties, 78-85 110
sexual liberation, 30
Shankar, Ravi, 48 Walker, Lyndon, 112
Shlain, Bruce, 33, 43, 91, 97, 137 n. 98, Warhol, Andy, 101
143 n. 131, 148 n. 6 Watts, Alan, 61
Sinclair, John, 76 Wavy Gravy see Romney, Hugh
situationism, 29, 30 Weathermen, Weather Underground, 9,
sixties generation, 18, 24, 80, 101 26, 35, 91-4, 102, 117-19, 147 n. 91,
Slater, Philip, 36 151 n. 90
Slick, Grace, 90 Weber, Max, 85
Snyder, Gary, 51, 61, 65, 66, 69, 70 Weiner, Lee, 63
social movements, 5 Westhues, Kenneth, 12
Socialist Workers Party, 38, 45 Wexler, Irving, 89-90
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 74 Whalen, Jack, 18
Spock, Dr Benjamin, 14 Whelan, Brent, 3, 75, 101
Spretnak, Charlene, 152 n. 14 Whitman, Walt, 54, 55
Stansill, Peter, 23, 34, 35 Wilkins, Charles, 60
Starr, Peter, 1, 5, 30, 74 ,75, 121 Williams, Nigel, 19
Stein, Gertrude, 65 Willis, Paul, 69, 77
Stern, Jane, 132 n. 48 Wohlforth, Tim, 19
Stern, Michael, 132 n. 48 Wolfe, Tom, 135 n. 37
students 3, 25, 35, 134 n. 9 women's movement, 11, 18, 121, 123
Students for a Democratic Society see also feminism
(SDS), 26, 28, 32, 38, 39, 88-9, 91, Woodstock, viii, 6, 75
109, 114,125 Woodstock Nation, 53
Sullivan, Gerald, 38-9 Woodstock Nation, 34, 108
Swami Satchinanda, 49
Sweezy, Paul, 80 Yablonsky, Lewis, 16
Yinger, J. Milton, 13
Taylor, Derek, 49, 132 n. 48, 138 n. 9 Yippies
Tharunka, 6 Cohn-Bendit and, 7, 18
Third Worldism, 11, 52, 91-3, 114 critiques of the media, 31, 105-6,
Thoreau, Henry David, 35, 55, 57, 59-61, 115-17
139 n. 45, 140 n. 51 formation of, 26
Tipton, Steven S., 18 'Free' ethic and, 44-6
transcendentalism, transcendentalists, iconoclasm of, ix, 52, 64
55, 56, 59-61, 70 see also India mainstream America and, 41, 81-3, 87,
Trotskyism, 30 94, 106-12, 123
Turner, Bryan, 99 New Left and, 27-30, 124, 126
Turner, Victor, 60 theatrical antics of, 8, 33, 35, 91-2,
Twig, Reginald, 39, 53 96-8
see also Hoffman, Abbie; Rubin, Jerry
Unger, Debi, 36 York, Barry, 12, 14
Unger, Irwin, 36 yuppies, 18, 75
Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, 35,
46, 109, 147 n. 94 Zaroulis, Nancy, 38-9

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Anti-Disciplinary Protest

Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism

The sixties was a time when the boundaries between the

Julie Stephens is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

© Julie Stephens 1998

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 1998

Printed in China by L. Rex Printing Company Ltd.

Typeset in Adobe New Aster 9/12 pt

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Introduction: Resurrecting the Death of the Sixties 1

1 Paradigms of Sixties Radicalism 10

2 The Language of an Anti-Disciplinary Politics 24

sociological and political reinterpretations of the topic are pervaded with a

A key date here of course is 1968. The seeming availability of a

Unlike the explanations which have gained such popular currency -

carnivalesque atmosphere of confusion - an air of chaos that was depending

global character with remarkably American overtones. The decade marked

incorporation offered by the Weathermen (later the Weather Underground)

The how and the when of the sixties

the broader society,26 in the youths themselves,27 or in generational conflict,28

Even those analyses which set out to deliberately repudiate Feuer's

Participant observation studies were structured around the metaphor of the

everyday - these studies approached the counterculture as an exotic, and

The sixties in the eighties

The resurrection of the sixties in the eighties pinpoints an important trend in

As an impossible revolution it had failed - how could it have

More often, though, a series of commonplace explanations is provided to

promise seemed to vanish. In the reminiscences of former activists and in

As a consequence, the second battle of 'People's Park' - to reclaim it

of the newspaper which had boosted itself to international celebrity

Disavowing the range of sixties radicalism

In my view the wrong sixties is privileged in contemporary discussions about

the remarkable combination of street theatre, art, sexuality and politics

A subject matter, moreover, whose features ran so far beyond the

It is important to note that anti-disciplinary impulses can, to varying

Incoherence as a sign for radical

In an attempt to forge a new politics uncontaminated by the perceived

I'm in favour of a Dictatorship by the Indians. It's their land. I don't

The heretical pull of such sentiments provided the backbone of an anti-

This trip has no leaders, no spokesmen, because it's revolutionary.

In urging revolutionaries to make up their minds to 'learn to love', in the

Revisited.29 In his frank interviews with Hoffman and Rubin, Cohn-Bendit

A dying culture destroys everything it touches.

One of the remarkable features of this new anti-disciplinary political

the secret of our extinction'.45 Nevertheless, ambiguous and seemingly

The left immediately attacked us as apolitical, irrational, acidhead

... it is a communication in which ideas are not broken down into

The example Nicholas von Hoffman gives of this non-debatable com-

When I appear in the Chicago courtroom, I want to be tried, not

Before detailing this paradox it is important to briefly note other rejections

Doing Gestalt on the nation

of reasoned explanation and interpretation. The best way to withstand the

History as a Novel, the Novel as History, Mailer documents the 'medieval

intrinsically contradictory; it was serious yet ridiculous, self-consciously pure

LBJ called a press conference. He took out a white handkerchief and

One is reminded here of Foucault's critique of the unreality of the binary

in that it did not lead to a wholesale rejection of emancipatory notions.

The free thing

To more fully illustrate the paradoxical nature of an anti-disciplinary politics

The burial procession. Three black shrouded messengers holding

booksellers. As Hoffman's later experiences showed, the romantic attempt to

system'.112 Rubin provides a telling account of an incident at a Socialist