Western cultural history abounds with anti-hegemonic, resistance or utopian currents. 2 Today's alternative culture is expressed in various social movements (e.g. communitarian, bohemian, agitation art, healing-arts, green, feminist, queer, peace, civil and land rights movements), new spiritualities (e.g. Neo-Paganism or the New Age), and youth subcultures (e.g. new traveller, raver-dance, feral). It is the combination of such currents, their accumulation and their fusion, that I refer to as the ACM - a heterogeneous movement, a matrix, even palimpsest, of voluntary and unstable de-centrist 'neo-tribes' (Maffesoli 1996), affinity groups and 'disorganisations' holding to alternative values and vocabularies. This is a network consisting of diffuse, sometimes openly antagonistic, sometimes 'submerged', groups variously committed to sustainability, reconciliation, civil rights, freedom of expression, personal wellbeing and co-operative living. Their lifestyle may be articulated via symbolic identity repertoires (Melucci 1989), constructions no longer regarded as anomalies in the study of social movements traditionally focused on resource mobilisation (Johnston and Lio 1998).
The ACM has been credited as 'DiY'. For McKay (1998:2), 'DiY Culture' is 'a kind of 1990s counterculture': 'a youth-centred and -directed cluster of interests and practices around green radicalism, direct action politics, new musical sounds and experiences' (see also Purdue et al. 1997). While the 'DiY community' is a diverse expression of resistance, with varying manifestations from street parties, to squats, protest camps and alternative press, most combine 'party and protest' under the ethic of NVDA. Here, social criticism is combined with cultural creativity in what is 'both a utopian gesture and a practical display of resistance' (McKay 1998:27). The party/protest, pleasure/politics fusion customary to DiY Culture presents a contemporary manifestation of what Musgrove called 'the dialectics of utopia' (1974:16), a dynamic tension of political activism (resistance) and personal growth (aesthetics and play) which characterised the 'counterculture'.
Despite such neat and comfortable terms like 'counterculture'3 or 'DiY Culture', a recurrent problem for researchers of alternative culture is that its constituents are not united under a single ideology or cause. To speak of a united front of opposition or a comfortably amalgamated de-centrism is erroneous as it falsely presumes consensus between de-centralising elements around that which constitutes 'the centre'. Different rejections of 'the centre' activate an abundance of alternative 'truths', other ways of being - conflicting authentica. Although networks enhance connections, alternative culture is not a homogeneous culture. 'Culture', here, consists of a plurality of contradictory and/or complementary discourses and practices. It also consists of the process by which their various proponents attempt to reconcile or embrace differences, or take advantage of semblance.
Some components of this culture desire to remain underground, on the edge, or in the gaps. They seek to avoid defusion. Others desire the dissemination of their values, ideas and practices. They seek to enact cultural diffusion. A detectable ambivalence, therefore, exists within the ACM, a tension between the desire to remain undiscovered and immediate, and the pro-active desire for exposure and reform; between actively avoiding recuperation via commodification and the disclosure of alternative discourse and practice; between the desire to maintain boundaries and breaking them down; between de-centring and re-centring.
Of course, adherents of either attitude may experience difficulty in preserving 'unadulterated' desires. This has been the subject of much critical investigation on 'resistance' as a cultural tactic, whether stated or implicit. Various commentators have suggested that social dissidence is defused as radical alternatives, gestures of refusal, and modes of authenticity are co-opted, domesticated (cf. Munro-Clarke 1986:225; Metcalf and Vanclay 1985:94-95) or recuperated (Hebdige 1979) by the dominant culture. Under market forces rebellion becomes a consumable fashion accessory for 'target' groups whose social and political motivations remain spurious. The counterculture's stress on freedom and individuality proved to be an especially marketable trait. In Australia, radical rhetoric, rebellion and romanticism were speedily absorbed into consumer culture. According to Alomes (1983:45), the themes of experience, harmony, friendship and the consolation of nature characteristic of 1960s 'alternative lifestyles' were rapidly 'translated into the wider romantic social mythology of consumer capitalism'. Later, in the birthplace of the 'counterculture', the music festival to mark the 25th anniversary of 'Woodstock Nation', had a US$135.00 cover charge!
Others speak of dissidence as a temporary, youthful, affectation, or a rite of passage - especially for the more privileged. In this vein, Kanter (1972:196), regards communes as 'temporary way stations', transitional sanctuaries appearing in an increasingly mobile society.4 Moreover, Brake (1980:87) suggests that the 'dropping out' performed by sixties youth 'presupposes a location in the class structure from which to drop (and to return)'. Moore (1998a:176) argues that bohemia is 'the acting out by the young bourgeoisie of marginal lifestyles to dramatise ambivalence toward their own identities, to refuse - if only temporarily - a stable and limited identity'. Here, there is an 'urge to disrupt and subvert ... but not to abolish' (ibid:176-7). Similarly, Bey's 'temporary autonomous zone' or TAZ (1991a) (see Chapter 2) has been denounced as 'episodic rebellion', even an 'anarchist club-med' - a 'socially innocuous' 'lifestyle anarchism' (cf. Bookchin 1995), or possibly 'repressive desublimation', which Marcuse thought allowed 'just enough freedom to disrupt and integrate discontent - but not enough to endanger the discipline necessary for a stable industrial order' (in Roszak 1995:xxii). Other modes of 'resistance' have been relegated to the field of 'leisure' and construed, therein, as ineffectual. Such was the fate of British working class youth subcultures, the pursuits of whom, under the Marxist gaze of Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies researchers, were said to be merely symbolic, 'rituals of resistance' (Clarke et al. 1976).
Yet, despite intra-cultural disputation, the risk of co-optation, ever present charges of temporality and insinuations of class privilege, as long as 'the centre' remains, there will always be an edge - that is, marginal cultural ideas and sites. Contemporaneous, multitudinous and often subterranean, the edge is the result of the perennial insistence to range beyond the boundaries of the familiar and conventional, to seek alternatives. At the edge (which may also be interstitial) there are limitless possibilities.
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Footnotes
Appendices
Glossary of Acronyms and Abbreviations
References: A-L
References: M-Z
Chapter One Contents
Thesis Contents