casey blake reviews the republic of rock in modern intellectual history.
A very powerful review (paywall) of The Republic of Rock, with a sophisticated and sharp critique of how I address citizenship as compared to what reviewer Casey Blake describes as “the fellow feeling among strangers that makes citizenship imaginable,” a kind of “hippie humanism.”
Blake questions the book’s elision of the difference between prophetic and democratic leadership in the counterculture, as well the counterculture’s articulation of what he describes as “romantic anticapitalism, stressing mutuality, community, spirituality, and love against the claims of commerce and the wartime state” in contrast to civics as a “commitment to citizenship” that “requires participation in decisions about matters of public concern with people who in many cases don’t live how we live” (with, for the counterculture, “the rhetoric of 1950s civics textbooks, with their heavy-handed emphasis on civic responsibility (not participation), national service (especially in the military), and respect for authority” lurking in the background).
I would only say that while I agree with Blake in terms of the shortcomings of the language of counterculturalists, which often did not articulate a fully developed theory of democratic civic engagement, I also think that events such as the Acid Tests, the KMPX radio strike, and the Wild West Festival protests also sustained richly contested spaces and energies of dialogue and debate: words, ideas, positions circulated and were exchanged actively, and among a wider range of participants than many assume. Fierce disagreement flourished. This is a counterpublic more along the lines described by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau (Hegemony And Socialist Strategy: Towards A Radical Democratic Politics) than the normative models of Habermas.
The civics here, in other words, was less in normative language than in experience itself, and in experiences in particular that mingled agonism with harmony, chaos with moments of temporary order, radical individualism with moments of heartfelt alliance, difference and solidarity. It was grounded, or better said, ungrounded, in what Nick Bromell, borrowing from William James, describes as a realization of radical pluralism. This radical pluralism, rooted in phenomenological experience, often fostered a kind of anti-foundational foundation for countercultural civic engagement. It opened up a way of deeply grasping for a heightened sense of dynamic difference in the world—among people, even within oneself—that also called forth the need for solidarity and togetherness (that oh-so-popular term during the countercultural years).
Not that the counterculture was some utopia, despite its keen interest in utopianism. It was rather something more pragmatic in its way, Its participants found themselves facing the question: can we create a civics in flux? Is there a mode of citizenship suitable for an ever-moving, active, shape-shifting civic body? This was the democratic experiment that the counterculture found itself pursuing, that we might try to recover from the detritus of its faded, tattered tie dyes, old, broken roach clips and bad, noodling, endless guitar solos.
After all, the counterculture of the Bay Area sustained both reckless leaders and those who criticized them. Not only Ken Kesey, agent provocateur but ultimately, I think, a believer in an ethic of moral love and care, but also far darker figures such as Charles Manson (whom I don’t deal with in The Republic of Rock) who made their way through the Haight alongside all the innocent, sincere hippies. And yet, the counterculture also had space for Joan Holden, whose sharp-edged critique of the Wild West Festival and its protesters Blake approvingly quotes in his review (“You could probably start a revolution with rock music—if you could find someone to outlaw it,” she wrote in Ramparts, a publication we might think of as part of the countercultural mix even as it mostly took anti-countercultural stances). It’s that wild mix that matters—not just as history, but also as an unlikely resource for how we confront the difficulties of democracy, citizenship, politics today.
Blake is absolutely right: The Republic of Rock could do a much better job analyzing the different strains of civic thinking and action within the countercultural milieu. Democratic as compared to prophetic modes of leadership, normative assertions of civic engagement as compared to experimentations in experiential civic interactions, romantic anticapitalism as it circulated paradoxically through the very circuits of American consumer and military empire—these all demand more and finer scrutiny, distinction-making, and precision of explanation.
What the book does try to do is map out how the sixties counterculture might be understood, historically, as a social space, fostered by or revolving around rock music, that extended from the music into everyday lives, discussions, protests, meetings, organizational efforts at many levels, political and social activities, and festive rituals of artistic and sensorial exploration in which normative claims for civic engagement loosened without ever quite totally breaking loose. Counterculturists encountered a kind of citizenship without guarantees (to steal and adopt Stuart Hall’s “Maxism without guarantees” concept). Without either committing themselves wholesale to alternative systems other than the empire of postwar American consumer and military power or embracing total and complete anarchy, most counterculturists attempted to make sense of citizenship as they experienced it—and then to use those experiences as resources for how to live and think about citizenship in turn. Perhaps this is what Blake means when he writes of The Republic of Rock as, “An investigation of rock-as-experience in San Francisco and South Vietnam that raises important questions about the cultural foundations of civic democracy.”
Blake thankfully takes seriously rock culture as a space for thinking and feeling paired together. He roots his analysis in the ideas of figures such as John Dewey and Kenneth Burke, who as he notes may not have wanted to travel to the Fillmore, but who would have paid attention to those who did. It’s a privilege to have him review the book and do so alongside other works I respect quite a bit: Devon Powers’ Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism and Phil Ford’s Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture.
And finally, my favorite part of the review, and not just for the approval of The Republic of Rock it voices (though I’ll take it, I’ll take it!):
Then there was the rock beat pounding in Vietnam itself, a story Kramer tells in the stunning second section of his book. Much as war has inspired powerful critiques from generations of romantic–radical intellectuals in the US—think of Thoreau, Bourne, and Macdonald—the slaughter in Indochina made the “anti-politics” of the rock counterculture in Vietnam both tougher and more inclusive than its San Francisco counterpart. War is the health of romantic antistatism, even when wah-wah pedals are involved.
The review is behind a paywall: Casey Blake, “Rock As Experience,” Modern Intellectual History (April 2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S147924431500044X.