Our December publication of Volume !’s Countercultures issues moves from the opening discussion on Theory and Scenes that appeared in the September edition, to articles that explore Utopias, Dystopias and Experimentations. Andy Bennett’s opening article on ‘Re-appraising Counterculture’, which also appeared in the September edition and which establishes so many of the debates, is not being repeated here, but you are urged to read this if you have not already done so. My introduction picks up, this time, on three articles that discuss the conflicting ideologies surrounding the Utopias and Dystopias of the 1960s counterculture.
Christophe Den Tandt’s ground-breaking article ‘Rock Culture, between a Modernist Utopia and the Construction of an Alternative Industry’ poses an important question: how do the centrifugal gestures of rock leave ‘residual traces’ in the cultural field, in the form of works, but also specific practices, places and institutions? Den Tandt begins by examining the paradoxes inherent in rock. As he notes, there is no consensus on its aesthetic vocation or on the social function of its supposed rebellion, albeit its frequent interpretation as ‘resisting through rituals’ and the Adornian-like criticisms if it fails. His identification of ‘the utopian’ (as theorised by Jameson and Hassan) opens out the possibility that ‘in rock, the refusal of any form of appropriation (social, academic or even aesthetic) expresses the aspiration to exceed a condition lived as alienated, thus opening up a utopian perspective’ that can be interpreted as ‘apocalyptic’ (revelation requiring the annihilation of the present)…