Lines of Flight 1
Counter Culture
Personal and Social
We have arrived at the crossroads: living fulfillment involves all of sensing, feeling, intuiting, thinking and acting difference. It is personal and social.
In fact, there is no dividing line: to live in the new and open is to break down the barriers between the faculties, and the personal and social.
Expression of creativity takes place in a continuum in which the gates in and between the interior and exterior dissolve. Creativity is all at once within and without.
Collective Movements
We can reference moments in modern history, creations and actions of individuals and collective movements, and find there evidence of the expression of desire as free flowing creativity.
By taking note of certain actors in history and the collective movements that developed coincidentally, we can gain first hand insight into the opening up of multiple perspectives, both psychologically and sociologically.
We can witness the opening up to life as experience and enchantment, and participation in life as a process of becoming.
We can witness the affirmation of life, and the resistance to the transcendence of authority, in the various counterculture movements that developed in the 20th century.
Counter — Culture — Contra — Culture
Counterculture is a tangent away from the norms of the majority. It is the open movement and new path away from the closed authority of a dominant culture and tradition passed down from generation to generation. At times a fresh insight into becoming, at others a diametrical opposition to inherited authority.
The development of counterculture is a process of breaking down striations in society, deterritorializing social formations and creating new lines of flight, new forms of escape from the conformity of social existence.
From time to time, individuals and groups do this in society; individuals connect and form groups and participate in becoming; come together to escape the authority of majoritarian culture, and to personally and socially experiment with new forms of life.
A Leap of Faith
Sometimes movements counter to majoritarian culture evolve into attempts at finding new identities.
But look little closer at their earlier stages of development, and we find not a grasping at new identity, but instead expression of pure creativity, experimentation, and a leap of faith into the unknown.
Experimentation with difference may often involve a rejection of mainstream identity, values and authority, but it is always an embracing of unlimited, unknown possibility.
I hope you enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading!
Tomas
Please join my email list here or email me at tomas@tomasbyrne.com.
Excerpt from my forthcoming book, Becoming: A Life of Pure Difference (Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of the New) Copyright © 2022 by Tomas Byrne. Learn more here.
