Towards an historical geography of nonrepresentation: making the countercultural subject in the 1960s

Many nonrepresentational perspectives—those emphasizing practice, performance, and experience over fixed representation—first emerged in the 1960s counterculture through experiments in arts, media, politics, and everyday life. These experiments, including psychedelics and underground cinema, aimed to shape a new kind of countercultural subject. Although such nonrepresentational practices thrived in some countercultural enclaves, they struggled in others, partly because their success remained tied to how they were represented. In 1960s Los Angeles, for instance, these practices were more often represented than actually enacted. The text warns against treating representation as a static, deadening force, noting that postwar representational practices themselves evolved to evoke sensory and subconscious responses, creating nonrepresentational moments within representation.

Study at a glance

Abstract

It is in the experiments in the arts, media, culture, politics and everyday practices developed by the counterculture in the 1960s that many nonrepresentational perspectives emerge. Aspects and examples of those experiments are reviewed with a particular focus on the construction of the countercultural subject and on some performative practices developed to shape those subjects, including psychedelics and underground cinema. During the 1960s nonrepresentational practices emerged and thrived in some enclaves of countercultural living, but struggled to develop in others. Although many of the counterculture's practices explored the nonrepresentational realm, they were still engaged in representational practices. The relative success of these practices in situ was closely tied to their representation. In 1960s Los Angeles they remained more represented than enacted and practised in the city. There is a danger in nonrepresentational work of rendering representation a stereotypical concept, one that is unchanging in its capacity to deaden, exclude and enframe. But representation as a practice is also subject to change. During the postwar period various representational practices, whose referent was a newly understood cosmos, attempted to evoke a range of sensory, experiential and subconscious responses in their consumers and performers, creating decidedly nonrepresentational representational moments.