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But there are also daring innovators and experimenters, willing to risk all to contribute their perspective to the ongoing narrative that is our collective heritage. So how can I say “there is no counterculture?”

I can say it, and mean it, because these people would ask you what you're smoking, if you asked what it's like, being a part of “The Counterculture.” There is no Grand Unified Scene.

These innovators I'm speaking of are the people who push their own boundaries, and the boundaries of the culture around them enough that they are simply classified as “counterculture” or “revolutionary” because the culture, and the media, doesn't really know what to make of them. (My hope is, you could very well be one yourself.)

Innovation and Originality

Most of them are engaged in the constant process of figuring out who they are, through exploration of their medium. It has certainly been a common experience for me, to look back upon a project I completed a year or two later and wonder, “who made that?” There's an aspect of skin shedding, of discarding, in the creative process, and a certain remorse most active artists feel when they are likened to the static detritus of yesteryear. These are the people that the fashionista Counterculture du jour will forever be trying to play catch-up with, without necessarily even realizing it. When something has been branded as a movement, most of these people have moved on. (The luckiest of them do so with the assistance of royalties from the last project. As I believe I have made quite clear, being independent doesn't necessarily make you cutting edge or innovative, and getting funding from MGM doesn't necessarily lessen the artistic value of your work. Since the inverse is also true, I'd suggest there may be no significant causal relationship what-so-ever: there are funded and unfunded hacks, and there are funded and unfunded geniuses).

However, let's be clear: originality is not a requirement of innovation. They aren't inventing these things ex nihilo. Their ideas, their art, and their rhetoric is and has always been built on what has come before. This isn't to say that their posthumously declared “movements” are not unique, because they are. But there is a lineage, and there is a tradition, no matter how fragmented it may seem to the outside observer. It is to my mind a great loss that the practice of mentorship under accomplished artists has mostly died out in the past century. Not only does it keep the lineage of a cultural perspective alive, it also fosters a familial aspect of community that has, at least in my experience, mostly been removed from the artistic process. The closest we seem to have is the revolving door found in art schools and universities, which doesn't provide the time or often the one-on-one relationship required to really bring about the benefits of mentorship. It is also interesting that in our society, like with smoking pot, college is one of the only places where “experimenting with” art is condoned. Though many bad artists may be weaned from their aspirations in the “real world,” just as many or more with real potential are driven to other occupations which they may be poorly suited to.

This idea of “originality” as a primary indicator of the value of something is perplexing. It is the vitality of a piece, it's ability to strike the heart or the mind, and wring things out of us we didn't even know we had in us, which speaks to me as “original.” But the elements: the story, the medium, or even the components of the piece itself could have been used a thousand times before. So what? This is equally true in business, where the true innovators take something that's being done, and figure out how to do it better, or more efficiently. Attempts at “true originality” usually result in bizarre and often useless gizmos that at the end of the day do several incompatible things poorly and nothing well. (Anybody remember the Nokia N-Gage?) The art of the collage or montage demonstrates what we all do as thinkers, as painters, as poets, or as scientists. The message of the collage approach is clear enough: do not be afraid to show and honor your influences, and at the same time, don't be afraid to break those idols.

Innovation comes from the fact that each person is unique: our observations, our experiences are our own. We cannot but be original if we are brave enough to be true to that, if by original we mean “vital” and “genuine,” and throw out this idea of creativity occurring in a vacuum. Nothing is more poseur artiste than the desperate drive to create originality for its own sake, without putting your voice, your interest, your passion first. Finally, it isn't about whether a story has been told a hundred times, it's about how you tell it, and how you live it.

Plays Well With Others? (Y/N)

In revealing the nature of the Counterculture myth, we also have to explore the myth of the artist as a unique and individual creator, slaving away in solitude, because this doesn't seem to line up with the history of art, nor does it make a whole lot of sense for the myth-makers to be working in isolation, given the cultural significance of myth itself.

It is true that the unique perspective of a genuine, engaged outsider is part of what gives art its teeth. The revolution comes from listening to your experience, everything else be damned; the necessary compromise comes in learning how to play well with others without putting a pair of scissors in their eye.

In other words, for a movement to have integrity, each individual must be true to themselves above all else, yet for that to come about, we need solidarity of purpose. This is the dilemma. Creators need one another, for critique, for diversity, for sustainability. They need each other to build a myth of a “scene.” You needn't agree about anything else, but without an alignment of collective and mutual best interest, a movement, a commune, a culture cannot come to be. It will collapse in on itself before it attains any sort of critical mass. This seeming paradox is part of what keeps many creative individuals disenfranchised, biting at each others ankles: they're arguing about the wrong things, and focusing their energy and attention in the wrong place. We need to learn to work together towards common goals, to hell with the politics.

We need no manifestos, no party lines, no armbands. What we do need is space to meet up and share ideas and collaborate, we need a means of making the relevancy of our work evident outside our insular and seemingly elitist circles, we need to be able to eat without completely shilling our ideals or making other creative prerequisites impossible, we need to live and love as we see fit, and the means to come and go as we please. Last but not least, we need time, colossal dedication, and a little less useless distraction. (Which also means that though it is an incredible tool which we should continue to use, we need to get the hell off the Internet and develop means to create and sustain real communities.)

As you will quickly recognize if you try to do this kind of work, a lot of those requirements I spoke of require money-- not just a lump sum deposited by some angel investor, but a sustainable model that recognizes how to leverage the value that such a communal effort could generate, which disburses that potential energy in an egalitarian way based on the explicit best interest, or founding principles, of such a group. Granted, there is another possibility here, one which breaks free of the money model altogether, however to my knowledge very few of these have had any lasting success, and none of those which have reached sustainability without individuals willing to return to an agrarian and barter-based community. For my part, I welcome the Luddites to live amongst the chickens, I simply have no capacity for it, let alone interest. Two weeks at Burning Man may be fun, but try doing it for a year and chances are you'll come back telling me what hell is like.

Of course, after saying this, many baulk. I can only hope my comments in “Wake Up Neo: There Is No Counterculture, You Twit” help demonstrate the counter-productiveness of this reaction, as the purpose of that piece was to get this can of worms out of the way. With profit as a means, and not an end, there is no necessary conflict of interest. We want to build something with relevance, we want to move people, and yes, maybe even change the world. You're not likely to accomplish these things if you're homeless, or selling off the vast majority of your time for a lot less than you're worth.

Myths of the Artist

It is undeniable that there is a real value in a fringe, in an underground, in a community. Even in a concrete way, this ever-changing, forward thinking movement provides something valuable that a healthy culture at large could not do without-- they challenge the status quo, they bring in new ideas from the outside. Most importantly, they create living myths.

Let me be clear: a movement, a counterculture, is itself a myth. You may find people proclaiming to be a part of one, and I'll be damned if I haven't seen signs of them popping into and out of existence all over the place, but you'll never find an absolute, concrete demonstration of it. A movement is an ideal which holds the lure of total freedom, a sweet taste that often quickly sours on the tongue, which is nevertheless integral, and indispensable to the artistic spirit. Like any good myth, or art itself, there's a definite value in it, and there is a kind of truth in it, even if it is also a flat out lie, in a literal sense.

There are several layers of this myth building. There is, first, the myth of there being a particular movement, such as the Beats. Like a corporate entity, this movement develops a brand identity. I can say, “the Beats,” and most people even vaguely aware of American art and literature know what I'm talking about. Think about that a moment. Here are separate artists, living separate lives. Sure, they may have been friends, and they influenced one another. But this idea of “the Beats.” That's branding, plain and simple. Like most successful branding, though they surely had a hand in it, most of it came about over time from the outside. More than anything else, people just needed a name to call them by, and it stuck.

They borrowed from jazz at that time, from the culture and politics at that time; none of it was “original” in that sense, but it was all unique. From this melting pot of experience, personality, and social context a group identity forms, and it might do our more recent would-be underground movements some good to remember that if you do everything else right, and have a cohesive community of vital people who have the means to produce their work, this happens all on its own. You needn't brand before you have an identity.

Then there is the myth of the personalities-- the anecdotes about Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and so on, which also helps perpetuate the myth of the movement. This isn't to say that “William Tell routine” did or didn't happen, but as it moves into the realm of myth, it ceases to matter.

Then, finally, there is the myth contained in the individual works themselves, unique for each artist or group of collaborators, but which would in no way exist as they do without the group as a whole living, growing, arguing, fucking, and ultimately dissipating and dying as they did.

I talked quite a bit about the role of art and myth in “Living The Myth: Creating Meaning In A Cultural Void,” which was first published in Generation Hex (Disinformation.) I don't mean to rehash that material here, but to get at the meat of the counterculture as myth, I have to talk about these things again to provide context, if in a slightly different light. (For those wondering, I did intend some faux macabre artist irony in the title, given my opinion that there is no such thing as a “cultural void.” Whether or not I actually thought anyone would catch that is anyone's guess.)

Myths help us understand ourselves, our motivations, our fears, our hopes, our desires; they help us explore the nature of our existence without for a moment being true.

The value that myth provides is demonstrated, first off, in the fact that it has been with us since the birth of civilization: though tools and language may have been more useful in the concrete formation of civilization, the myths and art of antiquity are the first proof we have of this explosion. They are also our only glimpse into how our ancestors felt about themselves, and about the cosmos. Myths and art, nearly inseparable terms so far as I can tell, provide a distorted mirror for us to regard ourselves in. We see ourselves, but in a new light, the best artists showing us greater existential truths through the distortion or even complete abandonment of empirical truths. Artist, and the myths they weave from their own lives, thus point our eyes upon ourselves, both as individuals and as a culture, in a new way.

It is, just from this historic precedent, a self evident fact that myths speak to our humanity; they convey meaning, not truth. Since a very early age this was always clear to me. Even as a youth I remember staring at the television in befuddlement as documentaries would attempt to discover the supposed “historic truth” of a myth-- did giants actually walk the Earth before the time of King Arthur's court? How did Noah manage to get every species of animal aboard a single ship? Way to miss the point. Myths speak to the narrative, the qualitative, to the emotional side of us which quite simply need grand stories and images for us to relate ourselves to. It is psychological nourishment, and cultures that are devoid of it suffer for it.

There is a book by James B. Twitchell called Adcult which speaks about this need and it's fulfillment in a corporate, consumer culture. The thesis made there, and I believe it is well taken, is that we find many of our mythic icons within advertising. Whether it is the Michelin Man, the Jolly Green Giant, or Santa Claus himself, these icons convey a mythic life and meaning to the corporations they represent. However, they do not serve their primary function as myth. They provide no nourishment, only narrative. (And usually a pretty flimsy one, at that.)

There is a clear analogue to this in the food that Americans generally eat, much of which is processed and full of so called “empty calories.” The reason for this is are many-fold, but some causes are depleted soil, which results in inferior products; the requirements of producing consistent products thousands or millions of times over; the requirements of a food industry which must freeze, ship, process, and often re-freeze it's products before they reach the consumer; and of course pesticides and preservatives which keep those products from spoiling during all that time in shipping and on the shelf, as well as artificial additives which attempt to compensate for the lack of flavor that results from all of these factors.

The end result may still provide short term energy, it may fill the stomach, but by and large it does not fulfill it's purpose as food, which is to nourish and sustain the body in a healthy way. Many Americans are both overweight and starving from malnourishment, at the same time. This can just as easily be said for the needs myths are meant to answer, and as a result, we have a massive backlash of people returning to fundamental religions in a desperate attempt to find and reclaim that missing element of humanity.

On that point, allow me a brief, important, tangent. Science is also tied into this cultural malaise, though I wouldn't say that it is cause for it. Many people engage in this “science vs. religion” argument with the idea that the two are attempting to answer the same questions, and serve the same function. The fact of the matter is, they are not. The nature of religion, and of myth, is to relate a person to the world, to the so called “truth,” in a meaningful way; ideally it does so in a way which leads to acts that are in the benefit of the society as a whole. The issue is not, and never was, whether this “mythic truth” is empirically true.

Science aims at discovering the nature of that truth, given the empirical tools we have at our disposal. It does not, or at least should not, propose to answer why things are as they are, or what it means, in an existential way. Thus science and religion are not mutually exclusive, but neither are they polar opposites. To ask “is science or religion right?” is about as nonsensical, and as useless as asking if a microscope or a chainsaw is “right.” It depends on what you're using it for.

Myths are Big Business

In the service of supporting an interesting thesis, many of the forms of myth we do have access to in our culture are overlooked if we proclaim that all our modern myths come from advertising. Forms of media and entertainment are more widely prevalent today than ever before, even Rome, with it's grand spectacles, and some of these manage to fulfill the crucial personal and social functions of myth.

One obvious champion of this can be found in the original Star Wars movies. It is no secret that George Lucas based these stories on mythological themes, with the help of his friend Joseph Campbell, and simply modernized them in a way that would be more compelling to a modern audience. It is also no great secret that the underlying archetypes in this story were somehow leeched out in the production of the more recent trilogy. Be that as it may, major corporations are recognizing that the production of myth as entertainment is viable, even in their language of the bottom line.

This is not to say that intending to create a myth is a prerequisite for creating myth. For example, the anecdotes I have heard about the birth of J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings imply that, though he was quite immersed in Anglo Saxon folklore, he had no intention of creating a pervasive modern myth at the outset. The stories nevertheless had that kind of resonance, the way it has permeated our culture is ample evidence of that, from the “Frodo lives” phenomenon to the recent blockbuster movie trilogy. The linguistic and historic depth of the world he created certainly helped, and has sponsored not only a dedicated modern following of a singular fictional world, but an archetypical approach to world-building that has fostered the creation of worlds upon worlds, in the form of role-playing, game design, and an entire new genre of fiction in the form of “fantasy,” all of which tend to have various permutations of the races and themes Tolkien gave birth to.

Of course, the sponsorship of myth production by the major movie studios and television companies is problematic at best. Based on the track record, the truly successful mythic pieces of media seem to almost be accidental on their part; it would lend one to believe that they are aware of only the surface of what is drawing their audience – for example, a dramatic space movie with flashy combat – as opposed to the psychological and social needs which are fulfilled only when that candy actually coats content that people can relate to in a way that augments or changes their lives. People may not recognize what's missing from the recipe, but many will recognize that it isn't there when it is absent.

This fact is somewhat obfuscated by the power of a brand. For instance, the first Matrix movie had this kind of resonance, which the latter two sequels did not; however, the first had developed such a name for itself, and their cross-branding efforts were so much more aggressive in the course of marketing the second two movies, that it is unlikely that the studios would recognize a failure when dollars and cents are the only indicators used for success.

Widening the Lens

It is quite apparent that fringe political movements, which for instance liberate the workers from wage slavery or develop alternative and sustainable methods of energy, communication, or commerce may appear more essential in the coming years than the mere development and disbursement of myths, however, all of these developments are knitted together. (Myths are the currency and rubric of movements; they are, however, only one way that a culture defines itself, and in that context they may not always be the most viable. It is still a subject often overlooked in the discussion of culture, and it is, if I may be honest, the only course which speaks to me, and to which I am at all suited.) We cannot, in fact, have one without the other. As I put it in Generation Hex,

“There is a common misconception, especially within the capitalistic myth, that art and philosophy are useless endeavors-- at best mental exercises, at worst, activities for criminals and dilettantes. They forget that all of the great periods in human history have occurred side-by-side with quantum leaps in the arts and philosophy. It is impossible, and irrelevant, to definitively argue which came first. Art and philosophy, without trade, commerce, and application, are sterile and masturbatory. Similarly, trade and commerce are brutish and myopic when not applied with the sensibility that comes from in-depth philosophical and artistic debate. All are crucial to evolution, but only when applied together.”

Artists and thinkers are neither engendered nor supported for the value they can produce within other sectors of the economy. This is partially because this value, being qualitative, and in being a part of a systemic benefit, is difficult if not impossible to evaluate. That is a valid problem, as there is a meaningful distinction between advocating the arts, and a free ride. But that isn't really the cause, at least not entirely. Many people, and the system itself, simply does not recognize this benefit at all. The arts are seen as a nuisance, with endowments shrinking every year. (Even if this wasn't the case, the parameters and requirements for artistic grants are so specific and oftentimes so complicated and arcane that they make Heideggar seem plainspoken.) In a country where scientific research is most enfranchised when it can be used to make bombs, and the Department of Defense budget equals what is spent on the entire rest of the country, this comes as no big surprise. However, for this, we all suffer as a result.

There Is No Movement; Apply Within

And there we have it. As in many times in the past, there is a strong and demonstrable need for creative movements and cultural revolutions that the culture at large may neither recognize, understand, nor support. All these facts do not mean that you should not, or can not, bring it about. Supposing this is a course that speaks to you, as it does to me, barring bad luck and the “acts of God,” the only real barrier is in ourselves, in the forms of egotism, laziness, isolation, a lack of vision, planning, and compromise. (And, of course, funding, but that only comes about as a result of a failure of the other prerequisites.)

I'd like to give a couple final, slightly more personal observations on this subject before I go in search of the high quality coffee beans that are my birthright.

As is probably plainly obvious, the subject of this article is far from merely academic for me. The pursuit of these ideas, and development of the skills, connections, and means to create media which fulfills these needs, has been my life focus for as long as I can remember. At many points in time it is this alone which kept me going, and at all points the creation of art, with the interpretation of “art as myth,” has been the only common theme. If it wasn't for that, I find it doubtful I could string together all the people I have been in the past and recognize them as part of the same thread. This bias makes me something of an expert on the subject, experientially speaking, but as with all biases it is also a limiting factor. I can only hope it is a useful one, and one that is shared by many of my readers.

I have found that there is nothing quite like the friendship between driven and dedicated artists; nothing can be such a good instructor as that of an informed equal, or provide such a feeling of belonging, whether or not you find yourselves agreeing on a single ideological point. For relatively brief periods of time, I have personally been a part of such vital communities, and I have always worked to make my projects collaborative, at least to some degree, as that seems to be the real burning point of the creative process, at least in my experience. (This you can plainly see by looking at the credit lists for any of the projects I've worked on.)

In more recent years, I have seen these groups fragment, and have worked primarily in isolation using the Internet to communicate with my collaborators. Though a unique opportunity provided by the age we live in, this is not, to be sure, the ideal way for community to come about, and I cannot deny some toll having been exactly on myself in all imaginable ways as a result. As I said, movements cannot occur in a vacuum, and though solitude is often required to create the work itself, isolation is good neither for the work nor for the soul. Time and again, in conversations with these collaborators, numbering in the hundreds by this time, the subject of this article has come up; barely a day goes by that someone doesn't make a reference to “community,” “the tribe,” and so on as if these are things that exist in reality rather than our imaginations. I still take this as a sign that it is a subject close to many of our hearts, and indeed something many of us are in desperate need of.

The question then, as always, is not what we can imagine, but what we can realize.

To get to my point in “Wake Up Neo,” we have no need for a counterculture, an ultraculture, or any other movement so long as it is for the sake of fashion, so long as we hobble ourselves or one another or use elitism or ideological disagreements as excuses that keep us from getting something done. Nor do we have any use for these things if they are anything but a means to an end which realizes the common and manifest goals of its members. It matters less than not at all if you consider yourself a Chaos Magickian, a Pagan, a Christian, or a Muslim, so long as we can find the fulcrum point of a common ground, and a common good, to lift us both up with. If on the other hand, we both define ourselves as Chaos Magickians, but can find no such leverage, we'd probably be better off going our own ways. We can have our ideological arguments over tea; there is no ideology in my mind which trumps someone being a genuine, open-minded, passionate person, and no party line agreement can provide reparations if they are not.

Revolution, or evolution for that matter, isn't going to be found in a common manner of dress, speech, or ideology. If it is found at all, it will come in the chance meeting of equals in this wasteland that we call the world, and the work they do to water the desert until it flowers.

Should the budding elements of such a new movement realize these things, and knock on my door, I'll welcome them in. (That is, supposing they have a financial model that allows their good intentions to actually go somewhere in this world, flawed as that requirement may be in an “ideal” world.) Until that day, I'll continue the development of my own blueprints for this constant revolution in my secret underground lair.

James performs in industrial rock concerts, bitches incessantly on his blog, skulks about in dark recording studios, and writes dystopian graphic novels and novels for a generation of disenfranchised drug addicts. Rumors of being a key member of a harem of feral lesbians are slightly exaggerated. He has written articles for Disinformation, Key23, and Jive Magazine. As a co-founder and creative director of Mythos Media he hopes to develop a viable platform for the creation of more living, modern myths. His most recent novel, “Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning” is nearing completion, and will most likely offend a lot of people when it's put to print.

Other Works:

For interviews, free media, and other projects, check out www.jamescurcio.net