The underground has always existed. There has always been information that was not popular with the establishment. Despite the efforts of those in power to hide certain knowledge from the people, certain advances in the creation and dissemination of media have allowed disparate views to enter the mainstream. From the Library of Alexandria (the first incarnation of the internet) to Gutenberg's creation of a system of disseminating information more quickly than scribes could dream of, with each increase in the speed and simplicity of freeing up information there has been a revolutionary change in science, the arts, philosophy and politics.
The 20th century has witnessed several of these revolutionary advances in information sharing. With the advances in culture and the revolutions in the arts and sciences there has been a rise in the popularity of certain forms of underground literature. From the experimental and explosive literature of the Beatniks to the music of the hippies and beyond to the present day, underground art has been leaking into the mainstream collective unconscious at an exponentially increasing speed.
The increasing popularity of independent and underground music, movies, zines and culture (or sub-culture) have created a separate world of information and ideas that are not part of the mainstream culture. Now with the internet anyone can make their ideas available to the world. This has created a new format for the spread of underground literature, news and art that would not be made available in the much less interactive mainstream media. The internet is a new medium not only for the spread of information and art but for networking these subcultures. It may be the tool that allows the subcultures to slowly spread to the mainstream, bridging the information gap created by the corporate free press and corporate advertainment.
In Celtic society, the Bardic class, the poets and musicians, were assigned a place of great power Great rulers could be deposed by a properly phrased satiric verse, juvenal exposed the truth behind the myth in classical Roman society through poems that simply told it like it was. Since then, poets and artists have had an important effect upon the culture of the times. The artists are the critics of culture and the visionaries that open up possibilities for the future. In the past century, the underground literary tradition has taken up this vein in creating new possibilities for the future. As we enter the digital age, where information takes an even greater role in the formation of the present and future, the underground literary tradition will have an even more important role, and with the aid of the internet the ideas of the underground can be freely spread to the people.
It was the age of the Red Scare. America was united in conformity and one of the major tools used to create this conformity was the new mass media. Hollywood and television served as powerful propaganda tools. The American way of life had been standardized. American values were uniform. Either you were American (a God-loving believer in free enterprise devoted to simple suburban life) or you were a commie pinko fag.
The 50's was a frightening example of how easily America could become a fascist state. Blind patriotism and hatred of a common enemy were benchmarks of the age of Father Knows Best and McCarthy. Orson Welles and other thinkers ahead of their time were blacklisted and pushed to the fringes of the mainstream. Far below the mainstream, however, a group of revolutionary thinkers and artists were releasing information that would create an intellectual explosion and which influenced the underground of the following generations.
A group of writers, many of them commie pinko fags, emerged from the literary scene of the East and West coast and created a genre of literature that was far removed from the whitewashed conformity of everyday American life in the 50's. William S. Burroughs, an openly homosexual novelist. grandson of the inventor of the adding machine and murderer of his wife, published the novel Junkie: Confessions of an Unreformed Addict in the early part of the decade of conformity, Burroughs also wrote a series of novels, including Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded and others that introduced the reader to Interzone.
Interzone was a realm that existed only in the mind of the author. It was some part of the Collective Unconscious that included as characters many other members of the Beat Generation. The fictional characters were based on actual humans, but were still fictions. Burroughs' perception of these real people were fictional, creations of his own imagination. It is hinted in Burroughs' work that Interzone was a very real place, if only in his head, and was responsible for many of the major events in his actual life, including the mysterious death of his wife.
Allen Ginsberg burst onto the Beat scene with the poem Howl which succeeded in introducing to the canon of American literature vulgarity, homosexuality and four letter words. The 50's was America's Victorian age and Ginsberg and the other Beats were fighting the Puritans every chance they got. Ginsberg's Howl was an expose of the actuality of the 50's as well as a diatribe on American culture in general. America was not the land of freedom of opportunity sung of by Walt Whitman, one of Ginsberg's literary heroes. It had grown stale and become everything that it wasn't supposed to be.
Ginsberg and Burroughs were both fictionalized in On the Road, the most popular and well known of jack Kerouac's Vanity of Duluoz series, a fictionalization of his life. The enthusiasm and excitement, as well as the decadence of the Beat lifestyle was revealed in Kerouac's classic. It also further fictionalized the lives of Beat writers, creating a rift in the "real world" that the establishment was seeking to create for the people.
Underground magazines and legendary presses like San Francisco's City Lights, edited by seminal Beat poet Laurence Ferlinghetti, helped spread the writing, ideas and revolution of the Beat. The Beatniks opened up a possibility for certain thought. They fought the establishment not with physical terrorism and violence but with artistic and intellectual terrorism. Like the resistance movements under other empires, these visionary artists opened up avenues of thought that could not exist in the narrow world of opinion created by the ruling class of the times.
The Beat poets and authors created an atmosphere of revolution that bled into the decade of social and cultural upheaval and revolt, the 60's. In the early 60's, musicians like Bob Dylan took up the tradition of artistic social criticism and revolt. The early acoustic Dylan albums were socialist critiques of American life. He sung about race relations, the plight of the lower classes and other subjects that hadn't been touched in mainstream media before.
At about the same time, authors like Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe and other writers were dropping acid and writing about the current situation from several different vantage points. Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest can be read as a critique of the treatment of the "mentally ill" or a parable of the mental institution we're all being held in. Wolfe wrote about the experiments in expanding consciousness with groups like the Merry Pranksters in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and introduced psychedelia to the mainstream.
In the 50's ultra-conservative magazine The Nation had, ironically, published Aldous Huxley's account of mescaline experimentation, The Doors of Perception which would later become famous through Jim Morrison's acid rock band the Doors. Many of the Beats had also experienced psychedelic experiences. Burroughs, for instance, tried practically everything including obscure South American drugs like DMT containing Yale, or Ayahuasca. The Psychedelic revolution had begun and it would forever change the face of America, especially the subculture scene.
The American music scene was changed dramatically by psychedelics. Dylan went from acoustic socialism to electric psychedelia after his experiments with LSD The Beatles went from wanting to hold our hand to wanting to turn us on through the experience of psychedelic music coupled with acid. Bands like Cream sang of archetypal figures and Jefferson Airplane sang of revolutions inner and outer while plumbing the depths of the rabbit hole. It was the introduction of the underground to another possible reality which created a multitude of possible universes to choose from, all differing radically from the single reality espoused as Absolute Truth by the establishment.
Movies like Easy Rider experimented with visual styles and non-linear story-telling that would revolutionize the medium of film. The 60's underground movie scene was like Orson Welles on acid and it created a new style that would forever change visual media. The subject matter, style and revolutionary nature of the underground art scene of the 60's would forever change the media of the future generations.
The media was under control at this time. Mainstream society wanted to hear that what we were doing was just and right, so that's what they heard. As a result, the subculture created their own underground press, newspapers and magazines that expressed the ideas, views and news of the underground revolutionary scene were being published and distributed to broaden the reach of these new ideas.
The 60's was a decade of optimism. So many people believed that the underground scene could instantaneously smash the establishment that the technicolor, acid-tinged art reflects the impending changes that would occur in the next few decades. The age of existentialism gave way to the postmodern revolution in philosophy. Everything was changing at the speed of thought. Though the optimism of the 60's didn't erase the control of the established powers, the status quo, it did change society in general. A perceptual transcend occurred which introduced pop Eastern philosophy and music, ideas about ecology and women's rights which would be further entrenched into America's collective psyche in the 70's.
Woodstock was the climax of the flower child revolution. It was a gathering of people for one reason, to listen to music and express their disapproval of the establishment and their wars. And of course to drop loads of acid. With the death of Jim, Janis and Jimi in the early part of the next decade, however, the movement lost much of its momentum. The ideas were almost lost as the status quo clung to power despite the Love-Ins and poetic expressions of revolt that the flower children were sure would be the death of the old structure.
Counterculture researchers like Dr. Timothy Leary and Dr. John C. Lilly did numerous experiments with psychedelics and researched topics that the establishment Inquisition disallowed, disapproved, and officially disbelieved. Leary and Lilly both experimented with journeys into Inner Space, the Jungian realm of the Collective Unconscious as well as experimenting with telepathy and interstellar communication. (Though the Navy and CIA also did some strange parapsychological experiments that aren't on the public record).
Much of the underground literature of the early and mid 70's reflected the loss of innocence brought about by the failure of the optimistic flower children. The revolt had ended with two kinds of casualties, the burnouts and the assimilated. Numerous psychedelic explorers had gotten lost in Inner Space by irresponsibly experimenting with powerful drugs or by resorting to hard drugs like coke. Others had joined the establishment they had been fighting and cashed in, like counter-culture hero of the Yippies, Abbie Hoffman.
Philip K. Dick further opened up the possibilities of other world in his psychedelic science fiction. Dick, who is considered a visionary by some, a schizophrenic by others, was regardless, a writer who changed the face of science fiction. Dick released some dangerous ideas about reality which could damage the infrastructure of the Spectacle. He pulled apart consensus reality and exposed much of the Illusion that hid underneath the order of the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm which was now dying due to the influence of Quantum Physics, Transpersonal and Jungian psychology and Postmodern and Deconstructionist philosophy.
What Dick did was create an alternate universe that was connected to this one in the same way as Burroughs' Interzone was. He turned his reality, one piece of the Great Dream, into fiction. He was attacking the integrity of the reality of the history books and establishment mythology by creating a false world which was just as real as the one we are expected to believe in. After the Quantum revolution it was discovered that we experience only a fraction of one percent of "objective reality." Since what we experience and perceive isn't real, then this means our dreams may have as much of a connection to reality as what we perceive as "the real world."
Like Jim said, "They've got the guns, we've got the numbers." Since they had the guns it was impossible to oppose them physically. Since they controlled the media, the means of spreading information, it was impossible to oppose them through music and art that only members of the subculture would view. There was another possibility however. Their was a way of attacking the establishment metaphysically by attacking reality itself. By blurring the lines between reality and dream, hallucination and subjective reality, consensus trance and collective unconscious, perhaps the status quo and their order could be finally defeated.
Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, aka Dr. Duke, fought in the same vein. His writing was based on "hallucinations" that he experienced while under the influence of various drugs. The subjective reality he reported however, was just as valid as the subjective reality that the mainstream media tried to pass of as objective truth. Dr. Duke lived in a world of conspiracy and intrigue chasing an elusive ideal known as the American Dream. This world he travelled through, full of lizards and nefarious midgets (foreshadowing David Icke's conspiranoia and Lynch's bizarre expose of the Illuminati in Twin Peaks), bore the same relation to "objective reality" as Burroughs' Interzone or William F. Buckley's conservative hallucination of the world around him.
Around the same time in the mid and late 70's Robert Anton Wilson was further blurring the lines between reality and illusion. In Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati Wilson explains the strange synchronicities and miscellaneous weirdness he actually experienced in the hallucination he calls his life. Wilson with Bob Shea wrote the Illuminatus! trilogy, a fictional account of the supposed secret rulers of the world involved in various conspiracy theories, all connected somehow even though many of which cancel each other out. This cemented the tradition of reality annihilation that the Beats began and the hippies carried out.
Illuminatus!, The Final Secret of the Illuminati, Prometheus Rising and other books by Wilson took the ideas of counterculture figures like Leary, Gurdjieff and others and turned them into something of a lesson plan for escaping the robot reality of the Spectacle. The books are revolutionary underground classics that further the war for reality.
In the late 70's and 80's despite the influence of the Me Generation which encouraged more television, hedonic self-gratification and conspicuous consumption, there was a further flowering of underground zines spreading the ideas of socialism, communism, anarchism and other revolutionary ideologies. The Reagan years began a trend by the establishment to recreate the 50's. Now the war was on drugs, taking the advice of former Mk-Ultra mind control experimenter, Dr. Morris Jolyon West, that illegal drugs, especially psychedelics, should remain illegal forcing the users (which include many members of the revolutionary subcultures) to the fringes of society.
Punk culture was an anarchistic, attitude soaked revision of the flower children's attempt at a musical revolution. Punk and DIY culture created numerous zines spreading the ideas further among the subculture members of the dark days of the Reagan era. Television and Hollywood once again were attempting to create a false reality inducing conspicuous consumption and corporate loyalty. At the same time a revolution in information dissemination was becoming increasingly more relevant.
Then there was the internet. To say the internet changed the world just might be the understatement of the millenium. The internet can bring about a revolution as wide ranging as Gutenberg's press. The internet not only freed up obscure information that couldn't be discovered in mainstream media, but it also provided a forum for discussion in real time of anything and everything. Anyone with free time now can introduce their ideas, philosophy and selves to the world.
William Gibson, science fiction author carrying on in the vein of Philip K. Dick, coined the term cyberspace and created a new mythos about the digital Library of Alexandria that we call the internet. Douglas Rushkoff, digital spawn of McLuhan, is the social critic of the New Media and the changes that are occurring in this post-postmodern world of information. The movie The Matrix introduced a theory about information that is as old as the Hindu Vedas and the Taoist theory of binary existence (yin/yang, O/I) Independent films like Magnolia and Memento have totally non-linear plots that can only be expressed in multimedia format. Hypertext (a postmodern term coined by Ted Nelson), creates an interesting metaphor for the web of individual thought and the web of human thought Jung called the Collective Unconscious.
Reality annihilation is still taking place but is now being utilized by the establishment. Our president wasn't elected, but you can call in to Fox and have two strangers coupled for better or worse. What began with Survivor and Big Brother culminated in a seemingly endless series of reality tv shows. Now politics is being exposed as sham in a reality tv show which has Gary Coleman and a #### star facing up against "real" candidate, Arnold Schwarzenneger, friend of the Bushes and husband of a Kennedy.
The subcultures are linked digitally now. Underground zines are popping up all over to spread information not found on Fox News Channel. The media has taken sides once again and there is a vast information gap. Authors like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn have deconstructed politics and exposed them as a self-serving arm of the corporations. This information is guarded, however, not released to the public due to its control by the corporate nation.
There is a world of information being shared digitally however in the latest revolutionary attempt by the artistic and literary underground. There are numerous alternative media sources on the net including TomPaine.net, www.altpress.org and others. Forums like Disinformation (www.disinfo.com) provide access to information and allow surfers to comment on it, FusionAnomaly (www.fusionanomaly.net) provides a great deal of subversive, esoteric knowledge related to subculture literacy.
Hypertext allows one to become immersed in this alternate world. We can now swim through the seas of information that make the Library of Alexandria look like an incomplete World Book encyclopedia. Websites like Fusionanomaly and Disinfo use hyptertext to allow instantaneous travel between thoughts. While reading an article on Burroughs that mentions his influence on Robert Wilson, you can travel directly to a nexus of information about Wilson and then go from there back and forth through all of this connected information.
The revolution is still alive, spreading throughout the digital world. The underground artistic and literary tradition has evolved over the past half century and as it spreads, more people are affected by it. The information is of such a nature that it changes the receiver into a vessel for the meme of resistance. This information when received by a human vessel creates a situation: the vessel realizes that it contains information that can change the world but is being hidden from others. Due to this situation the vessel can choose to either forget the information or spread the meme. With the rise of the internet, this meme can spread and infect more and more of the supposedly apathetic members of Gen X and Gen Y.
Underground media is now being spread via the net which is, among other things, a digital forum for possible social change. The new digital underground may provide the mouthpiece for a new perceptual transcend allowing humans to choose their own reality, instead of borrowing or buying into a corporate subculture and emulating a sitcom character. The history of underground media is the story of artists at odds with the establishment. The ideas they express are constantly evolving but the information they are slowly leaking into the mainstream are changing things at increasing speed. The digital underground provides unlimited potential for information freedom.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Visual Studies Workshop
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
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