Con Ill's Underside
KING, RICHARD H.
Con III's Underside Freak Culture: Life Style and Politics By Daniel Foss Dutton. 212 pp. $8.95 Reviewed by Richard H. King Assistant Professor of History and Philosophy, Federal City...
...The freaks shun coherent, rational programs as intellectualistic constructs that constrict and distort reality, and they see ideological organizations and mass parties as historically outmoded, since such static conglomerates are too easily infiltrated and bought off...
...This lack of a defined object of wrath explains, perhaps, why the freaks contrast so sharply with the black militants who, however outraged and filled with hate, believe they know who the enemy is...
...The problem is not that such men have nothing to say to us, but rather that Foss' application and elucidation of their concepts is mechanical and uninspired...
...In this context, Daniel Foss' Freak Culture is an anachronism...
...and teaches sociology at Rutgers University...
...The optimists among the radical futurists tended to see the whole phenomenon as a gigantic civiliza-tional growing pain...
...It is more useful to try to understand what it was that drove some older people to advocate patently ridiculous and pathetic positions, risking ridicule from their colleagues and even, one suspects, from themselves...
...Freak Culture can be read as an unwitting example of a consciousness divided against itself, a sensibility vacillating between the forms of conventional academic discourse and the "let it all hang out" gut cry of the freaks...
...How, then, do those who have dropped out come together to make sense of the "whole" and transform it...
...For them the freaks were the advance group who, released from the heavy pressures of the old routines, had to first enter a cultural decompression chamber...
...Alternating with these stabs at social theory are documents illuminating the lifestyle of the freak culture, often in prose as pretentiously banal as Foss...
...It is cynical to hope that Foss' freaks will eventually settle down to a family, a good and rewarding job, and business as usual...
...Suffering from a pervasive boredom, a surfeit of the self and of things, the freaks lead lives that demand nothing of them and have no consequences...
...The young have learned the explicit and implicit lessons of their parents and the cultural arbiters only too well...
...Long stretches consist of virtually unreadable jargon via such social theorists as Galbraith, Weber, Mar-cuse, and others...
...For the more pessimistically inclined, the new culture has represented the best in the society gone to waste, a symptom of and not an antidote for what ails us...
...More conventionally, one could enlist in the Army and fight for one's country...
...One might say that his book is to The Greening of America as Last Exit to Brooklyn is to Love Story...
...When most were poor the very attempt to rise in status provided diverting and at times rewarding opportunities...
...For a heavy air of sheer disgust permeates the freak consciousness, an impulse to be as obnoxious and raunchy as possible, and Foss openly reveals this seamy underside of Con III...
...For Foss, the freaks are a "cultural mutant," embodying the negation of a technocratic society that is characterized by objective affluence and subjective poverty...
...But at this point in our history none of those "safety valves" seems to exist...
...Yet it is too easy to write off men like Foss as sellouts, the countercultural equivalent of what used to be called "jock-sniffers...
...The underlying emotional logic is the now measured and "responsible," now frantic and nihilistic search for something that will test one's mettle and justify one's being...
...We are also treated to collages of quotes and pronouncements by everyone from Jerry Rubin to Norman Mailer, as well as to comic strips by R. Crumb, so dear to and reflective of freak consciousness...
...A chorus of "I told you so" and "What did you expect...
...As a result of the progressive escalation of racial conflict at home and military adventures in Asia, however, it has nothing but contempt and disgust for the straight society...
...This is not so much maddening as it is depressing...
...Never having experienced poverty, the freak culture is unable to make sense of what Foss terms the "Scarcity Principle...
...While all of this is familiar by now, the ambiguities of Foss' own position as revealed in his language and style are interesting...
...Once the adjustment was made, a new, freer, more polymorphously structured lifestyle and personality would emerge...
...In giving us this exhausting account of the new sensibility, Foss is leagues ahead of Roszak, Slater and Reich...
...It belongs with those volumes which, wavering between description and advocacy, heralded the emergence of a new, vital culture from the ruins of the old one...
...They are de trop, and their only response has been a convulsive, almost desperate, plea for an existence in which what is said and done makes a difference...
...In retrospect we can see that it was, after all, not a terribly long jump from joining the Peace Corps or going to Mississippi in the early '60s, to quitting graduate school and working in the 1968 McCarthy campaign, to shucking off all the cultural and material baggage of middle class life...
...And some of the young themselves can be heard questioning the breathless admiration once directed toward them by the touters of the new culture...
...can regularly be heard from voices on the Left and the Right...
...The book's jacket blurb tells us that Foss has a Ph.D...
...More political and hard-nosed than the benign hippies, the freaks take as their categorical imperative the creation of a cultural condition where "the primary obligation will, and in fact necessarily must, become the continuing creation of the self...
...Even former adult champions of the Aquarian Age are currently beating a hasty retreat to higher and more defensible ground, all the while assuring us that that was not what they meant at all...
...From the San Francisco Oracle, for example, we have: "LSD becomes a sacrificial decondi-tioner expanding consciousness, allowing each person to actually experience the logic of self-discovery...
...Indeed, all the internal evidence suggests that Foss completed the manuscript sometime late in 1968-his analysis differs only slightly from similar works by Theodore Roszak, Charles Reich and Philip Slater-and one wonders why publication was postponed for so long...
...The new sensibility, he explains, arises out of the "Reality Gap," the cleft between the objective givens of advanced industrial society and the subjectivist, often private, visions that grip the minds of its youth...
...In the past, such individual and collective cultural discontent could find surcease in lighting out for the frontier, seeking God, or joining an ideological movement that promised to transform the self as well as the society...
...The answer is that, in conventional terms, they don't, preferring rather to conduct a continual guerrilla warfare in the heartland of the old culture with the hope of exposing the absurdities and gaucheries of the straights...
...Middle-class, secular, affluent existence is for many of them a bore, and one can only wonder, in Yeats' ominous words, "what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born...
...More fundamentally, it seems important to probe the source of the inchoate nausea that freaks aim at society and, because they cannot clearly affix responsibility for their situation, at themselves as well...
...what appeared to be pathology would turn out to be a higher health...
...8.95 Reviewed by Richard H. King Assistant Professor of History and Philosophy, Federal City College Those who were originally skeptical about the unique virtues of the New Left and the counterculture are now tempted to gloat...
...Finally, Foss himself engages in ridiculously extensive and serious lit-crit explications of acid-rock lyrics, apparently the definitive texts of the freak culture...
Vol. 55 • September 1972 • No. 17
