Melt, Love, Protest
Melt, Love, Protest
Towards a theory of psychedelia
From flower power to punk – pyschedelia comes in many guises. Its multiplicity of forms is part of what inspires the fascination for this movement that continues to this day. In 2005 and 2006 there was a large retrospective exhibition in Frankfurt and Liverpool called Summer of Love. Lars Bang Larsen, currently busy with his doctoral research, is a specialist on the subject. Metropolis M asked him to expound upon the deeper meaning of the movement. The typical idea about psychedelic art of the 1960s is of a life style phenomenon with a busy, colourful visuality.[1] As an almost conditioned response we see hectic light shows before us, and we associate to hippie hedonism and mass protests against the Vietnam War. But psychedelic art and culture – psychedelia – has been written out of art history and misrepresented in popular culture as well as in historical writing, so what seems obvious in relation to style, epoch and politics is often stereotype or prejudice. First off, one has to confront the nostalgia or disgust surrounding the socio-cultural myths of the decade, which have contributed to making it an abject category in art history. Recent exhibitions on the subject have excavated fascinating material, but otherwise contributed with little else thanreproducing these myths and attempts at re-instating the radical subjectivity of the counterculture as an authorial function.[2] Beyond this, it is interesting to discuss psychedelia’s virulent drift towards transformation as a contradictory artistic or socio-poetic strategy that combined idealism with catastrophic – narcotic and sexual – forms of being. Thereby it took criticality away from the Frankfurt School’s notions of distance and opened it up to dimensions of immersion, excess and insanity – at the same as it related to a politics of organised processes. So, how do we understand the ‘Summer of Love’ from our place in the ‘Winter of Money’?
Movement or Moment?
It is difficult to determine whether the psychedelic revolution was a movement or a moment.[3] However, clearly the culmination, after the counterculture’s growth during the 1960s, was the Summer of Love in ‘67. But reactions were to follow quickly from within the counterculture. Already in the autumn of ‘67, the Diggers – a largely anonymous San Francisco street theatre group and a network organising free services for the hippie community – performed a happening in the Haight Ashbury district in the form of a funeral procession: the dead one was ‘hippie, son of mass media’. Or, as one could read in the Swedish underground magazine Puss in the summer of ‘68: ‘Flower power is dead! Don’t send any flowers.’ At that time psychedelia had been established as a mainstream referent, and in the Wall Street Journal it was mentioned as a ‘magic sales word’. Originally, it had been a lifestyle and a communication form used by those who were in the know, and now it had to undergo the anomaly that no avantgarde or neo-avantgarde before that had ever had to endure, but which would become a common condition for artistic or subcultural movements in late capitalism: namely, the sad fact of its co-existence and simultaneity with mainstream culture’s representation of it.Considered as style and visuality, psychedelia was in this way quickly drained of its potential for resistance inside visual culture, even if it lingered in the mainstream by dint of art forms it elaborated or made popular (such as the rock poster and the album cover, which continued to yield interesting results in terms of graphic design). One explanation for the development of its excessive visuality was the double bind it formed with the era’s anti-Oedipal ethos: to really become anti-authoritarian you had to make sure that your moves of resistance were perceived and rejected by authority, something which day-glo colours and intravenous imagery charged by desire seemed to guarantee. Another aspect of the 1960s countercultures was that they only existed fleetingly, in order to find new forms of appearance. The Danish journalist Erik Thygesen writes in 1969: ‘Even if psychedelic light shows and art nouveau-inspired posters and shop fronts are still being made, one no longer does so with reference to the concept “psychedelic”. The word has quite simply disappeared from the columns and has become everyday language. It is quite normal that labels disappear, but not that they disappear this quickly – that they are dug down while the facts they describe continue to exist.’[4] By changing labels as if it were lipstick colour or the length of one’s dress, the bourgeoisie could be provoked in the lack of seriousness with which one changed one’s lifestyle and ideology. Youth culture was in ‘66 hence organised around Provo (also a well-known Dutch phenomenon, of course, and what Thygesen calls ‘the anarchist play-land’); in ‘67 it became ‘hip’ or ‘psychedelic’ (the dream of ‘a religious love commune’); and in ‘68 the forces were gathered in the youth revolt (a demand for the takeover of society’s institutions). In this way psychedelia’s forms of representation not only revolved around irony and hybridity, but also discontinuity and new beginnings. After that – but not necessarily as a part of the same changing logic of protest – comes feminism and homo activism around ‘69; identity politics which remain on the activist agenda up through the 1970s.A part of the fascination with psychedelia is the way it does not allow for conceptual delimitation, and how it refuses to die. Its Protean ontology made it difficult to negate it, to ‘kill it’ (hence perhaps the t-shirt prints encouraging one to ‘Kill all hippies’ or the bar signs saying ‘Hippies use back door’, and so on). Various aspects of it lived on in the militant movements of the 1970s, in New Age, in computer science and in punk. And in fact, when one can be pretty sure that a yuppie was not a punk, there was quite a big amount of punk attitude in psychedelia, no matter what the punks themselves said. In this way psychedelia is very present in different proposals for periodisation of the 1960s, both in the activism of ‘the red decade’ from ‘66 to ‘76 (the philosopher Alain Badiou’s term), but also in the Hungarian artist Tamás St. Auby’s more generous definition of the 1960s as starting with the death of Jackson Pollock in ‘56 and ending with punk in ‘76.
Revolutionary and Consumer
Psychedelia was symptomatic for the phasing out of modern modes of behaviour and the introduction of postmodern ones. In an almost exemplary way it was located where the two crossed each other, epochally and ideologically, and it integrated features from both. The way the psychedelic counterculture constructed radical subjectivity (as drop-out, outlaw, revolutionary and so on) related to modernity as defined by the production of individual or collective subjectivity through the acquisition of civil or political rights (or in art, the production of expressive authenticity). At the same time, and contrary to modernity’s cultural scepticism, the counterculture embraced culture and appropriated its existing forms, for example by creating forms of behaviour that allowed you to be a revolutionary and a consumer at the same time. As the hip directors of 1960s Hollywood put it, their ambition was ‘to get high, make money and express oneself – all at the same time’. Indeed, who could ask for more? Psychedelia as a category is circulating and heterogeneous, without a stable ontology. It always contains two, or more, co-existing states of being: it was both introvertly vegetating and militantly confrontational; functionalist and fantastical; artificial and immediate; and it bridged the ambivalence between control functions and letting go, between collectivism and ‘doing your own thing’. You could say that what is at stake is an overdetermination that focuses on the possible. According to Robert E. L. Masters’ and Jean Houston’s short but apt definition: Psychedelic art is too much. This does not mean that it was ‘anything goes’, far from it. Clearly psychedelia was neither static, homogenous nor immanent; but it also promoted a lifestyle codex which defined what could be done and what could not; categories of hygiene which for example made it clear what drugs were good (the ‘mind-expanding’ ones) and which were bad (alcohol, the preferred drug of parents, politicians and policemen). That being said, drugs were of course a main ingredient on the scene. The most famous formulation remains the LSD guru Timothy Leary’s slogan ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’, with which he advertised a therapeutically harmonious mental exploration. Apart from partying and simply doing what you pleased, taking drugs in the counterculture also came with the intention of using one’s nervous system and reaching out towards the other through states of virtuality. Parts of the counterculture – often on other scenes than those in the Anglo-American world – turned away from Leary’s introvert position and developed activist and self-organised practises to inaugurate new sensorial communities. In this way psychedelia also took militant forms, at least if you thereby understand it as the ability to act without the authorisation of public opinion.With regard to its politics it is hence perhaps first with contemporary theory that we can begin to develop a more facetted understanding of what, artistically speaking, was at stake. Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault have defined biopolitics as power’s direct inscription into the body. In a similar manner, psychedelic artists and activists encircled the somatic as the very element of the political. Naked being was, in the case of the hippies, taken quite literally and implemented by the casting away of laws and language, and by immersion into states defined by the loss of the limits of the self. It represented a bodily and mental state of exception with a potential for social resistance and new alternatives, something which anticipated feminism’s struggle for woman’s right to her own body. The concept of biopolitics can also help unfold psychedelia’s understanding of media and technology, in which a medium was seen to be everything that works for or on subjectivity: narcotic drugs, electronic apparatuses and their intended effects as well as unintended side-effects (feedback in acid rock, for example); but also money, architecture, music, fashion and so on. This was in keeping with the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s idea of how electronic media submitted the subject to a ‘massage’. McLuhan famously sloganeered that ‘the medium is the message’, something he later spun into a biopolitical statement: ‘the medium is the massage’. You could in this way argue that the hippies anticipated forms of distributed being that are central to late capitalism’s global spheres of exchange, whose immaterial forms of production consist in ideological dilations of subjectivity.
Critical Models
Biopolitics tend to have a dark undertow, and psychedelia also hid an ambivalence that could flip over into totalitarian forms. If it on the one hand exalted life, it tended on the other hand to reduce the human being to quivering plasma. Timothy Leary held that the human being is nothing but a transient energy structure. From a biological point of view this is probably true enough, but in his case it became a goal in itself as it was informed by the messianic ambition of entering communication ‘with higher freer energies – tuning yourself in to the billion-year-old energy dance’.[5]A similar ambivalence in the counterculture’s struggles for emancipation manifests itself in its gender politics. On the one hand it had an almost transsexual aspect, as androgynous pop stars such as Janis Joplin and Mick Jagger made evident; and psychedelia’s particular concept of the body understood it as energies, cells and DNA rather than a gendered body. In principle, an indifference towards difference was thereby produced: a cosmic, de-gendered, utopian equality. On the other hand psychedelic art often reproduced a masculine gaze, and in the counterculture patriarchal modes of behaviour were widespread to a degree that make some commentators claim that feminism was not a development from the counterculture, but a reaction against it. Women would arrive to the underground scene in London in the belief that it made for an alternative to straight society, but here they were expected to be ‘free’ with their sexuality (otherwise you weren’t hip to the scene), or carry out ‘chick work’. Typically the agents in the underground were men, but also important artists such as Lynda Benglis, Joan Hills, Adrian Piper and Yayoi Kusama worked psychedelically. Psychedelic art could be flatulent, ironic, banal, hysterical, if not downright reactionary. But it also existed in versions which contained a strong dimension of becoming, and a pathos which acknowledged the fragile appearance of ephemeral states of being. It did not only anticipate the emergence of post-media strategies and transdisciplinarity, it also formulated critical practices which made it possible to act artistically from a pro-active perspective of non-control, and thereby engage in inhabited or embodied speculation. This differs from the concepts of criticality that institutional critique and some versions of conceptual art promoted in terms of linguistic and documentary procedures that claimed transparency. Even if – or maybe because of the fact that psychedelia became compromised by its close contact to the culture industry and its own opaque philosophies, its inherent drive towards mixed and ‘unclean’ forms of representation contributed massively to the breaking down of barriers between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Art history typically credits Pop Art with this feat, and to the modest extent that there exists an academic reception of psychedelia, the latter is often misread as a kind of parasite on Pop. But it is necessary to differentiate between the two: Pop Art used ‘low’ culture as a resource and a supply zone to break open conventions around the art work and the authorial function, but did at no point challenge the institutions, media and markets of high culture the way psychedelia did it through anti-artistic modalities in underground galleries and alternative distribution networks. This could be a starting point for a new discussion of the relation between art and visual culture: can a historical investigation of psychedelic art re-employ some of its strategies and key concepts which went beyond radical subjectivity and transhistorical views on culture, such as cybernetic experimentation, self-organisation and micro-strategies for the production of space? If so, can they be re-introduced into contemporary artistic discourse, and can psychedelia’s anti-artistic stance be used to investigate contemporary cultural theory’s resistance to art? Psychedelic art was a tool for stimulating positive collective projects as well as for registering the violence and irritability present in communities. The Dada painter and poet Hans Arp said that ‘the infinite arrives barefoot on this earth’. In the same way, psychedelia was a critique of power that in many ways relates to the peculiar mix of logistics and metaphysics that characterise our culture today, and that poses a profound challenge to dialectical forms of resistance.
Lars Bang Larsen
