I read a book this weekend that many may have read but I do recommend it: "The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism" by Thomas Frank, U of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1995. I was taken by two passages: "This book is a study of co-optation rather than counterculture, an analysis of the forces and logic that made rebel youth cultures so attractive to corporate decision-makers rather than a study of those cultures themselves. In doing so, it risks running afoul of what I will call the co-optation theory: faith in the revolutionary potential of 'authentic' counterculture combined with the notion that business mimics and mass-produces fake counterculture in order to cash in on a particular demographic and to subvert the great threat that 'real' counterculture represents. 'Who Built America?', the text book produced by the Social History project, includes a reproduction of the now-infamous '[The]Man Can't Bust Our Music' ad and this caption summary of co-optation theory: 'If you can't beat' em, absorb' em.' (p. 7) and: "...it was and remains difficult to distinguish precisely between authentic counterculture and fake: by almost every account, the counter-culture, as a mass movement distinct from the bohemias that preceded it, was triggered at least as much by developments in mass culture (particularly the arrival of the Beatles in 1964) as changes at the grass roots. Its heroes were rock stars and rebel celebrities, millionaire performers and employees of the culture industry; its greatest moments occurred on television, on the radio, at rock concerts, and in movies. From a distance of thirty years, its language and music seem anything but the authentic populist culture they yearned so desperately to be: from contived cursing to saitly communalism to the embarrassingly faked Woody Guthrie accents of Bob Dylan to the astoundingly pretentious works of groups like Iron Butterfly and The Doors, the relics of the counterculture reek of affectation and phoniness, the leisure-dreams of white suburban children like those who made up so much of the Grateful Dead's audience throughout the 1970s and 1980s." (p.8) So I wondered about the application of this dialectical model (what is counterculture vs "mainstream" culture; fake counterculture vs "real" counterculture; influence of counterculture on "mainstream" culture vs de facto co-optation of counter-culture by "mainstream" culture nominally passed off as increasing acceptance of aspects of "counterculture" within "mainstream" culture; etc ass applied to "Heterodox" versus "Orthodox" Economics. Real versus Fake Heterodoxy?; What does Heterodoxy really mean and what distinguishes a genuinely Heterodox approach from a Fake Heterodox approach or from an "Orthodox" approach? Why the use of "Heterodox instead of "Radical" or is Heterodoxy indeed synonomous with "Radical" or Radical-Left"? How much of Heterodoxy has been co-opted by the so-called "Orthodoxy" in order that the Heterodox might operate in some of the same "permissible" and "acceptable" media dominated by Orthodoxy? How much of Orthodoxy has been really challenged or co-opted by the Heterodox? How much of Heterodoxy is a co-opted caricature--of the caricatures of Radical Left held and spread by the Orthodoxy? How much of Heterodoxy is based on caricatures of the Orthodoxy? These were some of the questions that crossed my mind. I see all sorts of academic programs now openly proclaiming "heterodox" approaches available (after a thorough grounding in the orthodox) but I wonder if this is not simply analogous to the synthetic counterculture that is in reality neither "counter" or any kind of real sub or separate culture from the dominant culture of crass eogism, materialism, competition, racism, sexism, etc. Sort of like the fake Ken Kesey bus that tours the US for Coca Cola's "Fruitopia" drink line? Just some random musings. Jim C James Craven Clark College, 1800 E. McLoughlin Blvd. Vancouver, WA. 98663 (360) 992-2283; Fax: (360) 992-2863 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.home.earthlink.net/~blkfoot5 *My Employer Has No Association With My Private/Protected Opinion*
