I don't always agree with Ted Gioia, but he is always coming out with thought-provoking ideas. His latest: 14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture
These are the key indicators that you might be living in a society without a counterculture:
A sense of sameness pervades the creative world
The dominant themes feel static and repetitive, not dynamic and impactful
Imitation of the conventional is rewarded
Movies, music, and other creative pursuits are increasingly evaluated on financial and corporate metrics, with all other considerations having little influence
Alternative voices exist—in fact, they are everywhere—but are rarely heard, and their cultural impact is negligible
Every year the same stories are retold, and this sameness is considered a plus
Creative work is increasingly embedded in genres that feel rigid, not flexible
Even avant-garde work often feels like a rehash of 50-60 years ago
Etc. etc. etc.
Go read the whole thing. He offers a persuasive list of examples. My favorite: "All those nasty, rebellious songs that defy authorities are now owned by hedge funds." Oh yeah!
But let's take a step back. Is having a dynamic, influential counterculture normal? I grew up in the sixties so to me it was a norm. In high school there were the dorky guys going to grow up to be accountants and the other guys with long hair smoking marijuana out behind the gym. We sat at the back of the gym and booed every time there was an assembly. This extended to university. At one of the first assemblies in the music department my theory professor (who was a composer), stood at the back with me and booed the dean of the school (also a composer, but of dorky electronic music). It was pretty much common that every established institution and cultural figure was opposed by independent voices. Of course, over time these independent voices ended up AS the cultural leaders, but their experience seems to have given them the yen to suppress all voices that contradict their dictates.
But back to the question: did most historic cultures have countervailing forces? Perhaps not. There are always disputes, but the free-wheeling rebellious culture of the sixties was not, I suspect, typical in human history. Usually the ruling establishment finds it fairly easy to suppress or simply wipe out opposing cultural forces. Example: the Albigensian Crusade.
The Albigensian Crusade or the Cathar Crusade (1209–1229) was a 20-year military campaign initiated by Pope Innocent III to eliminate Catharism in Languedoc, in southern France. The Crusade was prosecuted primarily by the French crown and promptly took on a political aspect, resulting in not only a significant reduction in the number of practising Cathars, but also a realignment of the County of Toulouse in Languedoc, bringing it into the sphere of the French crown, and diminishing both Languedoc's distinct regional culture and the influence of the counts of Barcelona.
Another example comes from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Before the war there were roughly a million members of the Communist Party in Spain. After the war there were zero members.
If we look at cultural history, perhaps the creative ferment associated with the popular and political culture of the sixties was the exception rather than the rule. We don't have much of a sense of the history of popular culture before the 20th century as it suffers from not having been written down, but we can certainly see that the level of creative discovery waxes and wanes through history. The tiny municipality of Athens in the fifth and fourth century BC was responsible for a nearly incredible amount of the cultural capital we are still living off today. From a city of perhaps 100,000 people came tragedy and comedy, the writing of history, poetics, logic, moral philosophy, metaphysics, democracy and a host of other things. Similar, though lesser, flourishings occurred in Florence in the 14th through 16th centuries, London in the 16th and 17th centuries, Paris in the 17th and 18th centuries, Vienna in the 18th and 19th centuries and so on.
But you could argue that the norm in human history is not creative ferment but dull mediocrity.
So what sets off these periods of creative brilliance? I'm not sure anyone really knows. We might keep an eye out. There are some brilliant creators around, even today. What sorts of things are they doing? And what others might come along? If we look at the history of ancient Greece, we can see that the mighty forces that emerged in the fifth and fourth century BC actually had their roots in the two previous centuries...
Your thoughts?
9 comments:
even within his own work Gioia has noted that yesteryear's rebels tend to become today's establishmentarians or that the powers that be co-opt past revolutions.
But I do wonder whether it's meaningful to write as though there "needs" to be a "counterculture" or that there have been countercultures across human history. What do those sorts of things mean? A subculture cordoned off from the mainstream or the seats of power? Would that be like neo-Assyrian astrological notes for the priests vs. the official documents of record given to kings? In my reading on ancient near eastern divinatory customs it was interesting to read that there were distinctions between astrological customs for the prophetic guilds to preserve astronomical observation and the official oracles given to kings that would cater to political realities. So the stars might say the king would lose a battle to a powerful enemy in terms of the intra-guild indicators but the oracle would say the king would be victorious if careful but to be mindful of risks. I doubt many would consider "that" to be a "counterculture".
I also openly doubt that cultures that have no "counterculture", whatever those are, are characterized by "mediocrity". The ars perfecta of the early modern period in Western Europe was not full of mediocrity. My music teacher in college who conducted choral music pointed out that what he loved about Renaissance music was even the "floor" composers had a wider range of skills and mastery of musical craft than almost any subsequent era. Renaissance choral music was singer's art at its peak.
Endless revolutions are probably the most abnormal thing in the history of the arts not just in the West but probably the rest of the world. I think Leonard Meyer called it in the 1960s when he said there were not likely to be any truly "revolutionary" movements in the arts in Music, The Arts, and Ideas. He proposed that what was new and different was the co-existence or simultaneity of all styles and forms in the present and that it would be a challenge to live with that and not reduce it to some one-size-fits-all scholastic read (that's more subtext than text). The revolutionary era of the long 19th century and early 20th century gave way to a later 20th century where the odds were no sea-change movement was coming. Meyer proposed the real challenge was going to be coping with the sheer plethora of stylistic and formal options rather than coming up with something "new". There would be no single dominant style or school for scholars and arts historians peg everything down to.
Dwight MacDonald hypothesized in "Masscult and Midcult" that the avant gardists of the early 20th century didn't even really see themselves as avant garde. They were tired of Victorian sentimentality and Romanticist bombast and wanted to find ways at being creative that stripped out the conventions that they believed got in the way of mediating thought and art in their own era. He also hypothesized that the spectacular artistic cultures of the past, whether Elizabethan England or Athens, had a lot of shared qualities but, more so, a lot of intra-cultural competition. Xenakis went so far as to argue that all Western music oscillates between parameters laid out by Parmenides and Pythagoras as a continuum between their respective ideas. So, eh, I mean Ted Gioia's dualism between the eleatic monists and the Pythagoreans isn't even "that" new if we keep in mind what Greek avant gardists like Xenakis pointed out in the 1950s. The new element, such as it is, is the imposed antagonist binary--the dualism Gioia introduced in his Subversive History was a duality iN Xenakis and that Xenakis approach makes far more sense. Leonard Meyer's proposal half a century ago-ish was that the West has oscillated between classicism and romanticism but that the Romantic era that kicked off in the 19th century was still with us and we haven't left it. If Meyer were still alive he might propose that the pendulum swing away from 2 centuries of Romanticism to some form of classicism might be overdue. Taruskin has practicaly made a career out of writing books on the deleterious influence of Romanticist dogmas on academic musicology.
I love Ted Gioia, but he doesn't keep very close tabs on electronic dance music and hip-hop, which creatively speaking are doing just fine at every level from the most impenetrable experimentalism in bedrooms and basements to the most banal expressions of the commercial marketplace.
I don't doubt that, Ethan. But in many other areas I think that Ted has a point. There does seem to be rather a creative doldrums at present.
I like Gioia's work but I think Leonard Meyer called this in the 1960s when he argued we'd see no dominant style but a polystylistic steady state. He used a metaphor of a swarm of bees once, saying that the hive is a hive of bees but each bee is different. Part of his books-long argument was that if there is no single dominant style then there can also be no countercultural avant garde against which to rebel. When every style is simply a small part of the new mainstream there can't be a significant avant garde that defines itself against the mainstream. He also, provocatively, suggested that the crisis of musical pluralism was that the ideology of pluralism in the West had presumed Eurocentric norms and had not and probably could not keep up with the truly global and non-Eurocentric norms of pluralism in the arts and that, maybe, that Western ideology of presumed Eurocentric pluralism SHOULDN'T be able to keep up with real world worldwide pluralism.
Kyle Gann wrote years ago that when Meyer proposed these ideas in the 1960s they were considered scandalous but he seemed to have been right. Meyer wasn't trying to predict the future of the arts so much as to accurately and honestly account for his then present day. Meyer also proposed, contra Gioia, that there are no MUSICAL universals--just the universals of acoustics and the "probable" universals of human cognition and that that was why we wouldn't run out of music to keep making because it is between those two "universals" that music keeps getting made.
I think if Gioia had read a few books by Meyer he might be slightly less worried about the steady-state Meyer predicted would continue to be the new Western norm.
Corporate whittling of options "is" a problem but it's not like Adorno and Horkheimer and the Frankfurt school Marxists hadn't warned about that in the 1930s through 1940s. Ed Sheeran bleating about "The Shape of You" is simply a variation on what Adorno warned the music industry in the US, by its nature, did ... although Adorno has remained catastrophically wrong about jazz. :)
"Meyer also proposed, contra Gioia, that there are no MUSICAL universals--just the universals of acoustics and the "probable" universals of human cognition and that that was why we wouldn't run out of music to keep making because it is between those two "universals" that music keeps getting made."
I suspect that Meyer was correct about this.
It doesn't make sense to complain that we're in the creative doldrums just because you aren't interested in the music where all the creativity is happening. That's like a person in the 1940s complaining that nothing interesting was happening in Dixieland jazz, or like a person in the 1960s complaining that nothing interesting was happening in big band jazz, or like a person in the 1990s complaining that nothing interesting was happening in disco. All true! But missing the point.
Ted Gioia est un critique musical très respecté, mais il ne suit pas les tendances de la musique de danse électronique et du hip-hop.
Ethan, when you read the Ted Gioia article, did you even notice the breadth of the examples he cited?
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