In the outset of the book Heath and Potter draw on thesis of Guy Debord, who was a radical Marxist author, to help the reader gain insight into what constitutes countercultural thinking. Debord’s thesis is simple, “The world that we live in is not real. Consumer capitalism has taken every authentic human experience, transformed it into a commodity and then sold it back to us through advertising and the mass media. Thus every part of human life has been drawn into ‘the spectacle’, which itself is nothing but a system of symbols and representations, governed by its own internal logic. ‘The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image.’ [….] The spectacle is a dream that has become necessary, ‘the nightmare of imprisoned modern society, which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep.’” (7).
For Debord, in order to escape this “oppression” people have to seek two things: “‘consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness.’ In other words, we must try to discover our own sources of pleasure, independent of the needs that are imposed upon us by the system, and we must try to wake up from the nightmare of ‘the spectacle’. Like Neo [in the movie The Matrix], we must choose the red pill” (7-8). Thus culture, for countercultural thinkers, seems to be located in people’s consciousness. Thus, if you want to change culture you have to change [expand] consciousness.
This understanding of the world has extreme consequences of how countercultural people interact with their culture and how they attempt to bring about change. The authors describe this engagement in the following way: “In other words, when it comes to rebellion and political activism, there is no point trying to change little details in the system. What does it matter who is rich and who is poor? Or who has the right to vote and who doesn’t? Or who has access to jobs and opportunities? These are all just ephemera, illusions. If commodities are just images, who cares if some people have more of them, others less? What we need to do is recognize that the entire culture, the entire society, is a waking dream – on we must reject in its entirety.” (8). Thus the rebel’s and activist seek to provoke and reject this “illusion” everybody lives in by acts of protest and dissonance with the system.
The countercultural understanding of society, emerges out of Karl Marx’s critique of ‘ideology’ [Commodity fetishism and alienated labor provide the ideology of capitalism.] and Freud’s theory of repression. Heath and Potter write, “Marx was concerned primarily with the exploitation of the working class; Freud was concerned with repression in the entire population. Out of the synthesis of the two, a new concept was born: oppression. An oppressed group is like a class, in that it exists in an asymmetric power relationship with other groups in society. But it is unlike a class in that the power relationship is exercised not through an anonymous institutional mechanism (such as the system of property rights), but rather through a form of psychological domination. Members of oppressed groups are repressed in other words, by virtue of their membership in a dominated group.” (60-61) The authors go on and argue that,
“The ‘politics of oppression’ bears some resemblance to the ‘politics of exploitation’. The difference, however, is that it considers the roots of the injustice to be psychological, not social.” (61) The end result of this thinking is that instead of working on changing a specific institution, you work on transforming the consciouness of the oppressed. Thus concrete issues such as poverty, violence, growing disparity between rich and poor are seen as merely “superficial” and an attempt is made to address the “deeper issue” of transforming people’s consciousness.
Heath and Potter go on and describe how in countercultural thinking change is brought about. They write, “One can see here an implicit picture of how society works, with a relationship of hierarchical dependence between social institutions, the culture and, finally, individual psychology. The latter two are thought to determine the first. So if you want to change the economy, you need to change the culture, and if you want to change the culture, fundamentally you have to change people’s consciousness. This led to two fateful conclusions. First, it suggested that cultural politics was more fundamental than the traditional politics of distributive justice. Any act of nonconformity was thought to have important political consequences, even if it appeared to have nothing to odd with anything that would be considered ‘political’ or ‘economic’ in the traditional sense of the term. Second, and even more unhelpful, was the suggestion that changing one’s own consciousness was more important than changing the culture (much les the political or economic system).” (61-62) This view can be summed up as, “change the prevailing mode of consciousness and you change the world.” (62)
It is clear that countercultural rebellion has failed to change anything because it is built on a false theory of how society changes. Potter and Heath describe a more realistic view of society, by writing: “We do not live in the Matrix, nor do we live in the spectacle. The world that we live in is in fact much more prosaic. It consists of billions of human beings, each pursuing some more or less plausible conception of the good, trying to cooperate with one another, and doing so with varying degrees of success. There is no single, overarching system that integrates it all. The culture cannot be jammed because there is no such thing as ‘the culture’ or ‘the system’. There is only a hodgepodge of social institutions, most tentatively thrown together, which distribute the benefits and burdens of social cooperation in ways that sometimes we recognize to be just, but that are usually manifestly inequitable. In a world of this type, countercultural rebellion is not just unhelpful, it is positively counterproductive. Not only does it distract energy and effort away from the sort of initiatives that lead to concrete improvements in people’s lives, but it encourages wholesale contempt for such incremental changes.” (10)
I applaud Potter and Heath’s courage to challenge the progressive left to entangle questions of social justice from a countercultural critique that is based on a flawed understanding of society. However, Potter and Heath’s only constructive suggestion on how to engage concrete problems in our society is political engagement. As I have recently learned from another book, there are a lot of problems in our society that cannot adequately be addressed by politics. When we politicizes public spaces we engage in the abstraction of public spaces that we ourselves our meant to engage directly.
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