From Cellblocks to Suburbia: Tattoos as Subcultural Style, Commodity and Self-expression

This research study uses scholarship on tattooing, popular cultural representation and the practice and experience of tattooing to look at how subcultures (social groups excluded from mainstream society) express themselves through style and how style creates meaning and identification. These subcultures differ from other subcultures, such as racially marginalized groups, in that they create style in order to separate themselves from the mainstream. These marginal ideas of style are often picked up and adapted by America’s mainstream, materialistic culture and marketed as “cool” by corporations and other members of mainstream society for mass consumption. When discussing related subcultural theory in light of tattoos, one must not overlook the unique features of tattoos, including their permanent quality and the way society continues to perceive tattoos. Moreover, in today’s consumption-obsessed society, it is difficult to escape capitalism’s effect on “cool” and the ways in which cool is commodified. The mainstream is constantly commodifying subcultural trends, forcing subcultures to continually create new trends to remain marginal. Because commodification is perpetual and corporations are constantly seeking new ways to profit off of the mainstream’s next perceived idea of “cool,” it is somewhat remarkable that a centuries-old form of self-expression has largely managed to escape this process of commodification as tattoos have done

Shifting perspectives: holography and the emergence of technical communities

Holography, the technology of three-dimensional imaging, has repeatedly been reconceptualised by new communities. Conceived in 1947 as a means of improving electron microscopy, holography was revitalized in the early 1960s by engineer-scientists at classified laboratories. The invention promoted the transformation of a would-be discipline (optical engineering) and spawned limited artist-scientist collaborations. However, a separate artisanal community promoted a distinct countercultural form of holography via a revolutionary technology: the sandbox optical table. Their tools, sponsorship, products, literature and engagement with wider culture differentiated the communities, which instituted a limited ‘technological trade’. The subject strikingly illustrates the co-evolution of new technology along with highly dissimilar user groups, neither of which fostered the secure establishment of a profession or discipline. The case generalises the concept of 'research-technologists' and 'peripheral science', and extends the ideas of Langdon Winner by demonstrating how the political dimensions of a technology can be important but evanescent in the growth of technical communities

Timothy Leary and the trace of the posthuman

Author's post-print version.If we trace the line of Timothy Leary’s thought from The Politics of Ecstasy to Your Brain is God, he is outlining his programme for social and personal change based on the consumption of psychedelics and the 3-stage process of ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’. And yet, at the same time, he is mapping out a process which has a profound relationship to the shifting concept of the human. Leary’s programme was one which paradoxically urged the reader to re-humanize him or herself by stepping out of preprogrammed social games even to the extent of temporarily destroying the ego under heavy doses of psychedelics, and yet at the same time sketched out an emerging posthuman future, in which the subject in and of ideology (Althusser) was to be replaced by a post-subjective, post-ideological being whose processes Leary believed would operate on a different ontological level. Leary argued that this level was that of the cellular process of the body, the automatic somatic workings over which the ego has no control and yet which inform and create the majority of sensory impressions and subjective consciousness. His means of reaching this level was, at first, drugs; then from the 1980s his focus shifted to computer technology: ‘Electronics and psychedelics have shattered the sequence of orderly linear identification, the automatic imitation that provides racial and social continuity’. In his introduction to the 1995 reissue of High Priest (1968), Leary pointed out that ‘You will note (and, perhaps, be amused by) our Breathless Spirituality, our lavish use religious metaphors. Today, of course, we are beginning to use neurological and digital terms to suggest how we can operate our brains’; he warns the reader that the Priest in the title is ironic. My focus here is not on the means but the end: not on drugs or computers as such but on Leary’s revisions of the human; on his problematic quest to refashion the human being and move beyond it towards posthuman states which were largely uncharted but towards which his chosen tools, fashionable for each era in which he was writing, could point the way

Filtration Failure: On Selection for Societal Sanity

This paper focuses on the question of filtration through the perspective of “too much information”. It concerns Western society within the context of new media and digital culture. The main aim of this paper is to apply a philosophical reading on the video game concept of Selection for Societal Sanity within the problematics of cultural filtration, control of behaviors and desire, and a problematization of trans-individuation that the selected narrative conveys. The idea of Selection for Societal Sanity, which derives from the first postmodern video game Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001), is applied into a philosophical framework based on select concepts from Bernard Stiegler’s writing and incorporating them with current events such as post-truth or fake news in order to explore the role of techne and filtration within social organizations and individual psyches. Alternate forms of behavior, which contest cultural paradigms, are re-problematized as tension between calculability and incalculability, or market value versus social bonding

Building a green economy? Sustainability transitions in the UK building sector

This paper explores the interest by policy makers to encourage and develop a green economy, with a particular focus on UK government attempts to engender a shift in the mainstream building and construction sector towards adopting green building methods and techniques. The building sector has been the focus of endeavours to engender a shift towards greener ways of working and building, due to its high contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and associated concerns over enhanced global warming and climate change. The paper outlines the recent development of national UK policy on green building as exemplified in legislation for the Code for Sustainable Homes and in Building Regulations. These have given rise to a particular set of responses to green building requirements that favour technological solutions that can readily be accommodated by the existing system. In critiquing these developments we draw upon socio-technical sustainability transitions research, one strand of which has focused on the ways in which niche developments can challenge and disrupt existing regimes of practice. We do this empirically through our research into the green building sector which has involved in-depth interviews with a range of actors from the UK green building sector, including architects, building companies, materials suppliers and policy makers. Respondents from within the green building niche are critical of current UK legislation, and argue that its narrow conceptualisation fails to adequately encourage, or recognise, what they would consider to be green building forms that will contribute to substantial reductions in carbon emissions, nor does it respect locally appropriate building methods

Relocating the American Dream : The America of the 1960s as Portrayed by the New Journalists Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe

The concept of the American Dream was subject to a strong re-evaluation process in the 1960s, as counterculture became a prominent force in American society. A massive generation of young people, moved by the Vietnam War, the hippie movement, and psychedelic experimentation, created substantial social turbulence in their efforts to break out of conventional patterns and to create a new kind of society. This thesis outlines and analyses the concept of the American Dream in popular imagination through three works of new journalism. My primary data consists of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1967), Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971), and Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (1968). In defining the American Dream, I discuss the history of the concept as well as its manifestations in popular culture. Because of its elusive and amorphous nature, the concept of the American Dream can only be examined in cultural texts that portray the values, sentiments, and customs of a certain era. I have divided the analytical section of my thesis into three parts. In the first part I examine how the authors discuss the American society of their time in relation to ideology, capitalism, and the media. In the second part I focus on the Vietnam War and the controversy it creates in relation to the notions of freedom and patriotism. In the third part I discuss how the authors portray the countercultural visions of a better America that challenged the traditional interpretations of the American Dream. I also discuss the dark side of the new dream: the problems and disillusions that came with the effort to change the world. This thesis is an effort to trace the relocation of the American Dream in the context of the 1960s counterculture and new journalism. It hopes to provide a valuable addition to the cultural history of the sixties and to the effort of conceptualizing the American Dream.Amerikkalaisen unelman käsite joutui rajun uudelleenmärittelyn kohteeksi 1960-luvulla, vastakulttuurin noustessa vuosikymmenen keskeiseksi toimijaksi amerikkalaisessa yhteiskunnassa. Vietnamin sota, hippikulttuuri psykedeelisine kokeiluineen sekä ennennäkemättömän runsaslukuinen nuorten sukupolvi sai aikaan laajaa liikehdintää: moni murtautui ulos perinteisen hyvän elämän mallista ja pyrki hahmottamaan uudenlaista yhteiskuntaa. Tämä tutkielma hahmottaa ja analysoi amerikkalaisen unelman käsitettä populaarissa mielikuvituksessa kolmen, ns. uutta journalismia (new journalism) edustavan teoksen kautta. Aineistonani on Tom Wolfen The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1967), Hunter S. Thompsonin Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971) ja Norman Mailerin Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (1968). Pohjana amerikkalaisen unelman määrittelyssä olen käyttänyt käsitteen historiaa ja kehitystä kartoittavia teoksia sekä ilmentymiä populaarikulttuurissa. Koska amerikkalaisen unelman käsite on hyvin abstrakti, on sitä mahdollista tutkia vain tietyn aikakauden arvoja, tuntoja ja tapoja ilmentävissä kulttuurisissa teksteissä. Tutkielmani analyysiosuus on jaettu kolmeen osaan. Ensimmäisessä osassa tarkastelen kirjailijoiden tapaa käsitellä amerikkalaista yhteiskuntaa ideologiaan, kapitalismiin ja mediaan liittyvien huomioiden kautta. Toisessa osassa tarkastelen kirjailijoiden suhtautumista Vietnamin sotaan ja sen herättämiin ristiriitoihin amerikkalaisen vapauskäsityksen ja isänmaallisuuden konseptin kanssa. Kolmannessa osassa kiinnitän huomioni siihen, kuinka kirjailijat kuvaavat vastakulttuurin piirissä syntyneitä visioita paremmasta Amerikasta ja uudesta amerikkalaisesta unelmasta, joka virisi vastustamaan perinteistä hyvän elämän mallia. Kolmannessa osassa myös tarkastelen millaisia ongelmia uusi unelma kohtasi, ja kuinka kirjailijat kuvaavat kuusikymmentäluvun vastakulttuurin tarjoaman vaihtoehdon varjopuolia. Tämä tutkielma on yritys hahmottaa amerikkalaisen unelman siirtymää 1960-luvun vastakulttuurissa journalististen tekstien kautta. Sen kontribuutio on uudenlaisen ymmärryksen tuottaminen amerikkalaisen unelman käsitteen kehityskaaresta, ja niistä muutoksista, jotka vaikuttivat unelman uudelleen määrittelyyn (relocation) tuona aikakautena

Out of sight: the mediation of the music festival

Ye