Abstract
In many ways, we still inhabit the 1960s. Stock images of ‘swinging’ London have imprinted themselves on the consciousness of contemporary culture. But in doing so, they have obscured much of what was most politically radical or artistically innovative about the era, reducing it to safe images of youthful excess and hippy hedonism. In this important and lively account of the cultural geography of 1960s London counter-culture, Simon Rycroft draws out the links between some of the more familiar images of swinging London and the less well-known, more radical and experimental counter-cultures that came to the surface from 1967. Linking together the seemingly incoherent assemblage of counter-cultural movements, he shows, was a shared cosmology, a novel way of understanding nature, experience, embodiment and representation. Attention is devoted to subjects such as the aesthetic and stylistic origins of swinging London in the 1950s and early 1960s (for example, Angry writing, Beat culture, Pop Art, Op Art); underground journals such the International Times and Oz; forms of expression aiming to overcome hegemonic and technocratic control; and performative and non-textual strategies of counter-cultural politics such as multimedia synaesthetic light shows.
This book is not only a carefully documented historical geography of 1960s cultural politics, however; it can also be read as a contribution to a genealogy of contemporary social science. At the heart of 1960s counter-culture were its experiments with shifting or transgressing the limits and nature of representation. Through discussion of a diverse range of practices including urban planning, literature, visual art, underground journals, happenings, and cinema, Rycroft demonstrates the ways in which a post-Newtonian understanding of nature, technology and humanity informed a series of experiments with making the invisible visible in new ways. Accounts of these practices were frequently couched in language similar to that adopted in present-day ‘non-representational’ approaches in the social sciences. The experiments with performance, embodiment, sensory experience, intuition and non-verbal communication, then, directly anticipated more recent moves in academic cultural theory.
Such an approach is a timely one. It offers a fresh and illuminating perspective on debates concerning representation, materiality and embodiment that have been highly prominent in cultural geography for several years. Historicizing these debates offers a promising route towards a richer understanding of the stakes, implications and outcomes of non-representational (or, to use Rycroft’s preferred term, ‘meta-representational’) practices and politics. As he puts it, ‘apparently contradictory apprehensions of the “material” can be resolved around a more nuanced understanding of representation and specifically an approach that addresses the fundamental changes to the practices of representation that characterised the twentieth century’ (p. 15).
It is for this reason, maybe, that the book avoids tackling in detail some broader theoretical questions concerning the substantive political effects, achievements or failures of the 1960s London underground. This may be a disappointment to those looking for more fuel for a defence or critique of these kinds of cultural politics. But the aim of the book seems to be a different and more interesting one: not to use history as a platform from which to cast judgement, but to use it as a tool for identifying and analysing the composition of forces, energies and experiences that have a keen potency or resonance in the present.