counterculture
Article
counterculture is a recurring concept in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 12, 2024 and November 12, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Ellie asked if there is such a thing as counterculture in 2024, and if so what is it?“. It most often appears alongside 169 Bar, Adeline Swartzendruber, aesthetic and moral nihilism.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 1
- Issue count: 1
- First seen: November 12, 2024
- Last seen: November 12, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- 169 Bar (1 shared issues)
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- Adeline Swartzendruber (1 shared issues)
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- aesthetic and moral nihilism (1 shared issues)
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- Aimee Armstrong (1 shared issues)
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- Alex Katz (1 shared issues)
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- Alexi Wasser (1 shared issues)
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- Alice Attie (1 shared issues)
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- Allen Street (1 shared issues)
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- Alyssa Davis Gallery (1 shared issues)
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- Annabel Boardman (1 shared issues)
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- Arden Wohl (1 shared issues)
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- August Lamm (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Last week, I linked to Hannah's piece about aesthetic and moral nihilism and value judgment. If you didn't read it then, I am linking it again here. Today, on my phone, I see many things like text saying if you put down your phone it's still 2003, overlayed with a photo of a river - sentiments which are kind of true and kind of annoying because they think they’re clever and they're not that clever and also, they are not that true. A few weeks ago, Ellie asked if there is such a thing as counterculture in 2024, and if so what is it? Outside of vague anecdotes and vibes, how would a contemporary counterculture be defined? I thought about this a lot, particularly in the context of downtown, heterodoxy, material vs aesthetic vs moral platitudes, blah blah blah but you get what I mean. In her GQ piece, Magdalene points out that "if Dimes Square really was some psyop to convert conservative-curious young hipsters into full-on Republican voters, it succeeded." Granted, most things you think are psyops probably aren't, people are pretty predictable, unlikely coincidences were probably actually pretty likely all along but I digress, because the question remains -- Ok, so now what?
Contrarianism becomes trendy as a form of kind of aesthetic resistance, tethered to meaning not as an idea in and of itself, but as a reflection, as an opposite, and as such it has a lot of give, a lot of plausible deniability. This is not necessarily a political idea - anything that identifies itself largely as what it is not is able to maintain an ephemerality in its substance. And not everything should be solidified in substance, the best things sometimes aren't, something often exists as transient in its golden era and yet -- the counterculture is not a terrain marked by its historic longevity. At a certain point, an alternative either becomes incorporated into the mainstream, or it fades away. When the lines become solidly filled in and something either defines itself or becomes laid bare as empty from the inside... then I think some sort of vibe shift probably follows.