Unfurling Theodore Roszak's Countercultural Social Criticism

Do not quote or circulate without permission of the author, [email protected]. "A Tiny Banner Against the Inhumanities of the Technocracy": Unfurling Theodore Roszak's Countercultural Social Criticism Michael J. Kramer History and American Studies, Northwestern University Julian Beck, with Judith Malina of The Living Theatre. "We want to zap them with holiness we want to levitate them with joy we want to open them with love vessels we want to clothe the wretched with linen and light we want to put music and truth in our underwear" So declared the radical anarchist Living Theatre actor and director Julian Beck in a poem printed in a 1968 issue of the underground newspaper International Times. It was the kind of 1 Do not quote or circulate without permission of the author, [email protected]. outlandish countercultural statement that many dismiss as ridiculous hyperbole, but which the social critic Theodore Roszak—trained as a historian, a medievalist in fact—took quite seriously. Roszak's bestselling 1968 book The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition sought to explain this emerging social phenomenon, the counterculture, by treating it as an intellectual movement, though one that, as we shall see, called into question the boundaries, definition, and practice of the intellect itself. Roszak quoted Beck's poem approvingly (151-152). He was all for putting music and truth in our underwear. But Roszak was not exactly a counterculturalist himself, certainly not generationally. Born in 1933, he was a parent by the 1960s. Based in London, he edited a weekly radical pacifist magazine, Peace News, with his wife Betty while on leave from a position in the History Department at Cal State-Hayward. Supportive of the surge of disaffiliation with mainstream society he noticed among younger people in both England and the United States, he began to write a series of essays about what he thought they were thinking, and why. These essays became The Making of a Counter Culture. The book was perhaps most responsible for popularizing "counterculture" (counter culture at first; only after Roszak did the two worlds collapse into one) 2 Do not quote or circulate without permission of the author, [email protected]. as the term to describe the surge of alienation and rebellion against mainstream Western society primarily among young people. Yet while it is superficially grouped with other works that uncritically celebrated the sixties counterculture (one thinks of Charles Reich's The Greening of America), Roszak's work proves far more nuanced upon closer examination. To revisit The Making of a Counter Culture asks us to reconsider, at the very least, three dimensions of the history of the 1960s. First, a close reading of this best-selling book suggests that it might be worth understanding the counterculture as an intellectual rather than a social movement, which is how many typically portray it. Roszak's book presents the counterculture not as an identifiable demographic, but instead as an ideational space of inquiry, hope, desire— more an attitude, sensibility, or atmosphere than a stable, fully structured identity group. It was an intellectual movement that did not demand firm membership so much as a kind of spirit of engagement. Second, the counterculture was shaped as much by commentary on it in books such as Roszak's as autonomously or prior to works of criticism such as his study. The widespread circulation of The Making of a Counter Culture within the very movement it analyzed reminds us that the counterculture as an intellectual atmosphere emerged in part out of a complicated dialectic between insiders and outsiders, participants and commentators. Sometimes these two roles even were held by the same person, as in Roszak himself. As a sympathetic social critic, he moved between perspectives of appreciation on the one hand and hesitation on the other. The particularities and subtleties of an inquiry such as his have often been overshadowed by the urge to either commend or condemn—but in both cases distort—the history of the counterculture. Finally, Roszak's career after The Making of a Counter Culture asks us to consider the presence of a "long counterculture" in American life; but rather than imagine its long presence as a cycle of authentic rebellion and mainstream cooptation on endless repeat, or think of it as an entirely 3 Do not quote or circulate without permission of the author, [email protected]. manufactured "lifestyle" that continues to sucker Americans into a marketed sense of faux- revolution, Roszak's work presents the counterculture as an ongoing intellectual inquiry into the meaning and nature of personal liberation and collective justice—as an energy of asking questions and searching for possible answers to the deepest problems of democracy in modern industrial and post-industrial societies. Talcott Parsons is a hippie? To the first and second of these reconsiderations then. Roszak's book reminds us that the counterculture was a movement born as much from intellectual quarters as anywhere else—and unlikely mainstream intellectual quarters at that. The counterculture's very name first appeared not among the Beats or other bohemians and rebels of American society, but rather in the scholarly functionalist sociology of Talcott Parsons and Milton Yinger. Shaped in part by the effort to understand it, the counterculture was never an anti-intellectual fetishization of experience—it was not some pure rebel yell or barbaric yawp that later resounded in an echo chamber of analysis. From the start, it was an external imposition, an intellectual characterization made from the outside, looking in. For Roszak, the term named a loose, nascent spirit, an ideational and affective state of mind and body that was just coming into view out of a profound alienation with mainstream 4 Do not quote or circulate without permission of the author, [email protected]. values and ideas of normality. "And our alienated young," he asked near the start of his book, "how shall we characterize the counter culture they are in the way of haphazardly assembling?" The answer to this question was, for Roszak, to think of the counterculture as an ambiguous collection of ideas and activities in motion. His was a subtle and agile description of an amorphous atmosphere of uncertainty, dissatisfaction, disaffiliation, rebellion, and questioning. There was, for Roszak, no "manifesto" that would be "unanimously endorsed by the malcontented younger generation" for "the counterculture is scarcely so disciplined a movement." Instead, he pictured the counterculture as "something in the nature of a medieval crusade: a variegated procession constantly in flux, acquiring and losing members all along the route of march" (48). Death of Hippie Parade, Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, 1967. For Roszak, while the younger people and the thinkers influencing them were polyglot, they were brought together by a shared project: they sought to map out a future territory on intellectual and cultural grounds rather than social or political ones. "At their best," he wrote, "these young bohemians are the would-be utopian pioneers of the world that lies beyond intellectual rejection of the Great Society. They seek to invent a cultural base for New Left politics, to discover new types of community, new family patterns, new sexual mores, new kinds of livelihood, new esthetic forms, new personal identities on the far side of power politics, the 5 Do not quote or circulate without permission of the author, [email protected]. bourgeois home, and the consumer society" (66). This new formation embraced a broader sense of what reasoning could involve: not just intellectual thinking conventionally understood, but also what Roszak called "non-intellective" experiences. For not "the level of class, party, or institution," but what Roszak called "the non-intellective level of the personality from which these political and social forms issue" was where the counterculture not so much took its stand but danced its dance (49). To Roszak, "What makes the youthful disaffiliation of our time a cultural phenomenon, rather than merely a political movement, is the fact that it strikes beyond ideology to the level of consciousness, seeking to transform our deepest sense of the self, the other, the environment" (49). William Blake is a hippie. Drawing upon a Romantic anarchist socialist tradition that ran from Blake and Wordsworth to William Morris, John Ruskin, and Patrick Geddes to thinkers directly shaping the counterculture such as Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Paul Goodman, as well as poets such as Allen Ginsberg and educators such as Alan Watts, Roszak crystallized a key aspect of the counterculture: the revolution they sought would have to be personal, and it would need to expand the repertoire of rebellion to a more robust mode of reason that included sensation and experience, the wonders of dance, Gnosticism, and shamanism. Nonetheless it was ultimately an 6 Do not quote or circulate without permission of the author, [email protected]. intellectual endeavor, one broadened in scope and and reach, deepened in its transformative potential, by an enlarged sense of what the intellectual encompassed. As a social critic at once outside and inside the counterculture, observing and analyzing it yet also recognizing his own deep allegiances to and hopes for it, Roszak offers an example of what Michael Walzer has famously called the "connected

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