The Rebel Sell

[T_i_B]

Just started reading this, just wondering if anyone else has read it and if so, what do you think?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rebel_Sell

The Rebel Sell: Why the culture can't be jammed is the name of a popular non-fiction book written by Canadian authors Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter in 2004. The claim of the book is that counter-cultural movements have failed, and that they all share a common fatal error in the way they understand society. Thus counter-culture is not a threat to "the system".
(The U.S. release of the book is called Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture)

Potter and Heath look to many counter-cultural perspectives such as ecological activists, culture-jammers, thugs, skateboarders, and anti-consumerists and draw similarities between all of them. They all perceive the rest of the world (the mainstream), as oppressed or brainwashed into conforming by a larger social force, and society's rules (formal and otherwise) are thought to be suppressive of human nature for this reason. These parallels lead Potter and Heath to conclude that counter-cultural movements are not as unique as they appear. Hippies and Yuppies, Potter and Heath claim, are of the same origin; there is less irony in the oft-noted transition by many 1960s hippies to a yuppie lifestyle than many claim, because both lifestyles stand for similar core values, expressed in different ways: one deemed 'alternative,' the other deemed 'mainstream'.

http://www.goodreads.ca/rebelsell/

According to the Counter-Cultural idea, what people need to be liberated from is not a specific class that oppresses them, or from a system of exploitation that imposes poverty on them. It's because people are trapped in a gilded cage and have come to love their own enslavement. Society controls them by limiting their imagination and suppressing their deepest needs. So what they need to escape from its own conformity, and to do, they must reject the culture in it's entirety. They must form a counter-culture. One based on freedom and individuality.

Theodore Roszack, who's 1969 book, The Making of a Counter-Culture introduces the term counter-culture 'counter-culture' to general usage. He referred to the system of mass manipulation as a 'technocracy'. He said because the discipline of the machine and the factory floor have been extended to encompass every dimension of human life, nothing short of a total rejection of the entire culture and society will suffice. In Roszack's view, traditional Leftist parties, not to mention communists and trade-unionists had become the stooges of the technocracy. He said, quote, 'this brand of politics finishes with merely redesigning the turrets and towers of the technocratic citadel. It is the foundations of the edifice that must be stopped'.

It's important to see what profound re-orientation to radical politics this represents. Traditional Leftist concerns such as poverty, living standards, or access to medical care come to be seen as superficial in the sense that they only aim at institutional reform. The counter-culture by contrast is interested in what Roszack calls the 'psychic liberation of the oppressed'. Thus, the hipster, cooling his heels in a jazz club, comes to be seen as a more profound critic to civil society than a civil rights activist working to enlist voters, or the feminist politician campaigning for a constitutional amendment.

[Berry Cool]

1. I picked this up last time I was in Canada. Very interesting book.

Had a very "Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac" feeling about it. It's been a while since I read it so I'd have to go back and reread some of it to say much more, but I liked some of what they said, such as the idea that images and postures mean nothing if not accompanied by deeds. That you don't become a rebel by buying something some corporation designed specifically to market to "the would-be rebel demographic" (and that eventually everything that starts out from the grassroots tends to get coopted somewhere along the line by some corporation or other that sees profit in exploiting it). And that some of the things people think they are doing to "rebel" or "culture jam" aren't all that rebellious, or actually don't do that much good, or do more harm than good. And that sometimes people do things with what they think are good intentions as far as the broader culture is concerned that actually have the opposite effect on both them and the culture due to finite resources.

[T_i_B]

2. I have now finished it

I have to say that I do pretty much agree with its conclusions that the "counter-cultural" movement has been one of the causes of the left losing it's way in the past few decades. Indeed, one of the main criticisms that I have is that the book does not go far enough in its criticism of the counter-cultural left.

The other criticism that I have is that the book spends far too long analyzing Hollywood movies, and it even commits the heinous crime of trying to decipher The Matrix. Other then that, I would have to recommend this book, especially if you are getting weary of what you see every day in GD.

[T_i_B]

3. Just to say...

...that I'm reading 1984 at present, and the authours of The Rebel Sell would have done themselves a massive favour by examining that great work as well as The Matrix and American Beauty.