Zsoro ~

To believe that we can construct an alternative culture that exists outside of today's mainstream underestimates the influence of cultural hegemony and assumes that working class people are objective depositories for the ruling class to dump hegemonic ideas into. If this is the case, then all of popular culture – which is really bourgeois culture – must be thrown out so that we can start over, yet this time authentically for the “real” working class. (Which begs the question: Who would get to decide what gets discarded and who is a “real” proletariat?) Rather, people interact with the media they consume, either rejecting falsehoods and trivialities, or recognizing themselves and their experiences. This dynamism between the working class and cultural hegemony is what Stuart Hall calls “the dialectic of the cultural struggle”:

. . . there is a continuous and necessarily uneven and unequal struggle, by the dominant culture, constantly to disorganize and repopularize popular culture; to enclose and confine its definitions and forms within a more inclusive range of dominant forms. There are points of resistance; there are also moments of suppression.12

The old becomes new again; what was once taboo and subversive is now socially acceptable (and profitable). Understood in this way, popular culture (like history) is never fixed but holds within it contradictions and repeated contests over power and influence between the classes. The Left should exploit these tensions and fissures, building a revolutionary popular culture that isn’t just an exclusive club or echo chamber or menagerie of haunting victories but is focused on “the relation between culture and questions of hegemony . . . the class struggle in and over culture.”13 Doing so in the here and now might be one way to wean ourselves off pre-Recession nostalgia, to exit a neoliberal culture of recursion, and to challenge capitalist realism and futurelessness. There is no true refuge in the past, nor is a better world waiting for us – we have to make it.

In bringing our empiricism to psychedelia, we must bear in mind that if we explain things too well, we risk explaining them away. We need to keep a door open for the numinous, for the Mystery, for the soul. In so doing, we stand a chance of healing the rift of modernity, the gulf between our rational and soulful selves – and remembering the waters of life that flow through our psychedelic encounters and our nightly dreaming minds.