The Underworld of the Periphery: Countercultures of the Future

Those that just don't fit, the underclass or outcast, those of the periphery, the counter-culture -- these are popular topics around here, and for good reason,

"Peripheries are often border zones where peoples or things are thrown into unexpected contact, hybrid spaces yielding new possibilities for social and cultural organization."

Think of the musical genres, poetic innovations, and linguistic creoles of the Caribbean; or think of the social “margins” or the “queer periphery,” where disenfranchisement and stigmatization give rise to relatively free experimentation in social practices and cultural life. Though centers may seem more advanced or more privileged than peripheries, decisive change and innovation often begin at the fringes. Yet the very tendency toward difference and transformation out on the margins often meets with a violent reimposition of norms from the center: Soviet tanks rolling into Prague, or the Janjaweed and Sudanese military sweeping through Darfur, or the police descending on Stonewall.

There must be a place where this power may, to borrow from these spatial metaphors, centralize, without fearing this kind of backlash from those who would be the center, after all it is often the demigod who descends to the underworld that doesn't want the keys to the kingdom. "You can have it!" they cry, but the dispossessed nevertheless seek solace in the company of other lone wolves, were-wolves, or beings of both worlds.

This site is such a place, even this post (or the links in it) doorways to ideas that might germinate, and as always, help you "find the others."

The countercultures of the future are already being born and are parts of the future’s new markets. 

It can therefore be an advantage to know what to expect from them. They stand up against greed and religion, burst the boundaries of biology, and expand the idea of anarconomy still further. We bring a translated excerpt from the new book Modkultur – fra undergrund til bundlinje (Counterculture – from underground to bottom line).

Present-day countercultures differ from those of the past in one important way. In the past, if you were part of a counterculture, you were in all the way, and it was unthinkable that you could also be part of another counterculture. In the England of the 1960s, you could be mod or rocker, but not both. The hippie culture from the late 1960s involved a strong identity – one which didn’t immediately combine well with other countercultures like e.g. the equally colourful gay culture. This is not how it is today. The number of countercultures has grown immensely, but it isn’t unusual to be part of several and to form your identity from an unique blend of the countercultures and subcultures you choose to be part of. Many young people are situals – individuals that like social chameleons change surface identity according to the situation they are in. One and the same person can easily be goth, trekkie and vegan, and still also be part of the live-action role-playing circuit.
Many things suggest that future countercultures will be even more complex in a future where the entire world is connected via a ubiquitous network of wireless internet and virtual worlds. The critical mass of individuals needed to make a counterculture viable and vibrant does not have to be limited to any particular physical location, but can be spread all over the world.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Murdoch, Media & Mythology: A Hermetic Tale?

By Mr. VI

When you get down to it, the news is Chinese whispers. Despite claims to be fair and balanced, or that they do things in the public interest, the news media have placed their own spin on every event you have read about, seen, heard, or experienced indirectly.

By definition that's what media does, it mediates experience. Marshall McLuhan famously wrote:

"The medium is the message."

Irrevocably, the information becomes part of the medium – events become part of the output of a given signal. The recent events in the UK regarding Rupert Murdoch and so-called 'phone hacking' are the property of those who disseminate them. For example, the BBC coverage of the event is just that – it becomes part of the BBC message. It's exactly the same with Fox, MSNBC or any of the rest of the outlets.

Unless you are directly experiencing the events yourself right now, then you are reliant on media. Even if you are directly experiencing events right now, they are mediated themselves through your senses. Of course we don't like to think about that, because if that's the case then the media could be altered – our senses are equally open to bias, just as a newspaper or television show.

Our culture places great primacy on the phenomenon of the eyewitness, yet recent research suggests that even eyewitnesses may not recall actual events, but in fact recall their own arrangement of events which are influenced by many factors, some internal and some external.

There is a level at which you may think that this is irrelevant, but consider this:

If in fact we cannot say for certain that what we perceive is some kind of truth, then by definition the whole duality of truth versus lie is called into question. The current coverage of the Murdoch scandal has provoked public outrage – employees of his corporation have allegedly committed criminal acts, conspiring to bribe police officers, obtain information illegally and intruded upon the privacy of the families of murder victims and war dead, not just politicians and celebrities.

It's not just Rupert Murdoch and News International which engage in dodgy dealings, because certain forms of journalism operate in grey areas – their acceptability is often backdated once their claim of "public interest" is validated by the audience. In fact, such things are pretty endemic within almost every form of communication, from the white lies you tell yourself and others, to the work of speechwriters and spin doctors.

I've previously referred to Murdoch as a "lizardly Methuselah", and indeed my inaugural post on Modern Mythology made a metaphorical reference to the reptilian agenda, an indirect nod to the wildly strange fears of David Icke and others. Consider this to be if you like, a statement of my credentials – I think Murdoch is a leathery old bastard with billions at his command, and exceedingly cunning ability to get what he wants at almost any cost.

But right now, in this place and time, he is widely regarded by some to be almost as bad as the devil himself. This makes an interesting to us because in actuality, Murdoch and his ilk have a long, long mythic pedigree…

Vampire Sun, Werewolf Moon (pt. 1)

By Wes Unruh

Two thousand years ago, today would have been the first day of Lupercalia. Now bear with me, I haven't blogged like this in a while, but there is a link between Valentine's Day, the werewolf, Pan, and this post I'll explain in part 2. James' article on True Blood back in August of '09 convinced me to give that series a shot, and it's only fitting that this be the first post I publish to this blog, for reasons that will become clearer in tomorrow's post.

In this post I'll begin to highlight how the vampire manifests as an inversion of the solar hero and werewolf as inversion of the lunar hero's path. If you have seen contemporary texts like Buffy, True Blood, Underworld, Supernatural, or Twilight you're more than empowered to know what I mean when I say vampire and werewolf

While it seems that there are a lot of different ways that people manifest fantasy and fetish in their adult lives, fantasizing about vampires and werewolves is a consistent and resilient trend. More than enough ink has been devoted to why the vampire and the werewolf have continued to evolve alongside culture-and continue to also bring in revenue. With Twilight, vampires and werewolves created a high water mark in terms of pure profit for the publishing industry. Vampires and werewolves are the twin archetypal draws in western commercial pop culture.

The zombie comes in at a strong third, of course, especially when you lump in the promethean Frankenstien's Monster - clearly a manifestation of fear of death combined with fear of eternity and given significant anchoring both in religious references and an entirely predictable fear of the exploited seeking vengeance. There's also the mind-controlled killer, a shadow of the zombified murderer most purely expressed in Fritz Lang's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and referenced nowadays as alternatively a 'manchurian'/'monarch mind-control' assassin or as a shambling, brain-eating ghoul. I suspect there are far fewer teens laying awake at night longing to be turned into a mind-controlled killer or shambling, feral ghoul than there are teens hoping to be bitten by a werewolf or a vampire (although, if Poppy Z. Brite had written Twilight, perhaps things would be different.)

This hints at a kind of mythomathematics - there are certain innate qualities that dictate where vampire begins and ends, where werewolf begins and ends, and they both oppose and unite, a constant dance. The vampire is the inversion of the sun, specifically - not of light. The sun cannot see itself in the mirror, because it does nothing but radiate light - the vampire is the sun's shadow, and in it's presence ignites, becomes enflamed, and the vampire's individual self is eradicated.

The moon, however, is a reflective, mutable space - when the werewolf bathes in lunar light it changes, cycles. Why is the vampire destroyed by its symbol while the werewolf is transformed? It speaks to a larger mapping of symbol to myth.

The vampire is not a solar hero, it's an antithesis of that archetype - the solar hero is a conquering and vanquishing hero - so the vampire is changed, often destroyed utterly by the sun, and exists as the shadow of the sun. The werewolf, on the other hand, is lunar - the lunar hero does not conquer, the hero transforms, transcends, and overcomes through metamorphosis. The werewolf, on the other hand, is the inversion of the lunar hero - the werewolf is overcome by transformation when exposed to the full moon, and the transformation eradicates the consciousness, leaving only the Id behind and in charge.

Let me be clear, I do not think that writers sit down with a mythic map scripted, but rather that these mythic entities resonate in ways which lead the writer down culturally indicated paths. Stephanie Meyer distilled the essential duality then played within it as a melodramatic frame for teen angst. It is a formulae that produces catharsis and is obviously well-adapted to the present zeitgeist, much like J. K. Rowling's remarkable placement of Harry Potter into the vacuum left in culture by the evolution of Disney away from being the conduit by which magick and witchcraft could be safely sampled. Neither Meyer or Rowling ar transgressing into the myth space - they are reinforcing it, and in many ways expanding it. Still the dualism of Sun and Moon remains strewn throughout the vampires and the werewolves of Stephanie Meyer, and the elite and the technologically enabled magical children, once almost entirely the dominion of Walt Disney's kingdom, are now flooding into the mindshare of the memeplex geographically materialized in the Wizarding World at Universal Orlando.

The sheer publishing glut of vampire and werewolf narratives ensures that every possible iteration of plot will eventually be explored, something that requires fan texts to enact this transgressive allegorythym. Transgressive Star Trek fan-fiction could assimilate the borg through some klingonicization into a functional part of the Federation - which to a Trekker is as queering of a social space as Harry/Draco fanfic is of a personal space to a young fan of Harry Potter.

Transgressive mythmaking becomes a space that calls to a writer because there a kind of synthesis can be achieved - transgressive art an inroad to synthesis - "Rejection" is a by-product of "acceptance" since it acknowledges existence, and allows the rejected a voice. Once the voice begins utterance, the possibility of a dialogue towards synthesis begins. For a writer, there are a number of ways to play with transgression. Blade, for example, is an outsider, a queer in both vampire and human worlds, able to walk in sunlight. Underworld and its sequels all follow transgressive trends that seek a synthesis - as all thesis and antithesis must synthesize - and also in Underworld the vampire and werewolf trangressively merge into a queer razor-taloned green-skinned mutant who is both lunar and solar - conqueror of transformation.

(more to come)

Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.