Building counter cultures: the radical praxis of social movement milieux

I started following this line of research as an undergrad in Strasbourg and Hamburg, and kept at it for the next ten years. I was interested in understanding where the social movements I knew had come from, why there seemed to be so much commonality between movement milieux in different countries, and what produced the special "feel" of those milieux. The final result is a historical theory of social movements, combined with an analysis of the "local rationalities" of the contemporary counter culture. It is unashamedly reflexive and engaged: the point is to get a better sense as activists of our situation, the possibilities and limits of our current responses, and what might be involved in moving on.

The thesis is available to anyone sufficiently interested as a PhD in Sociology at Dublin University / Trinity College, Dublin (1999), and should be accessible on inter-library loan. (Please let me know the details if you've tried this, whether you succeed or fail - I'd like to make it as accessible as possible!) I'm very much on the lookout for a publisher who might be interested in a revised version of this, and would be very grateful for any suggestions.Here I've included the abstract and table of contents, as well as a draft chapter that wasn't suitable for academic purposes, but was great fun to write and is a good introduction to the project. Other material from this project can be found with the conference papers.

Laurence Cox

Thesis abstract
Table of contents
Draft first chapter (223k!)

Abstract

This thesis falls into two parts. The first (chapters one to three) states the problematic of the research, develops a critique of the dominant "social movements" literature as unhelpful for understanding the counter culture and argues that the latter can more effectively be theorised in terms of the implicit theory of social movement found within agency-oriented Western Marxism and socialist feminism. This latter theory is developed as an understanding of movement as direction, developing from the local rationalities of everyday life through articulated but partial campaigns to a "movement project" which attempts to deploy such local rationalities to restructure the social whole. Within these terms, it argues for an understanding of counter culture as a movement project from below within disorganised capitalism. This mode of analysis is seen as that of a historical sociology geared to the production of open concepts which can be used by participants to theorise the context of their own choices.

The second part (chapters four to eight) theorises the issues involved in researching social movements within this perspective, entailing the need to engage with tacit knowledge, to thematise conflicts and collusion between researcher and participants. The findings chapters use qualitative interviews from a Dublin movement milieu to develop an analysis, grounded in participation, of the local rationalities of the counter culture. In this section the key findings are a rationality of autonomy as self-development, which is shown to underlie processes of distancing and problems of commitment, and a rationality of radicalised reflexivity, which resolves the problem of institutionalisation through the deployment of a wide range of "techniques of the self". The analysis attempts to locate this reading within the life-histories of participants but also within the historical development of the counter culture, examplifying the ability of the concepts developed in this thesis to engage with the problems facing participants.

Contents

Declaration
Acknowledgements
Summary
Thesis abstract
List of tables
List of abbreviations

Chapter one: stating the argument

Defining the research project

Introducing the thesis
Identifying the problematic
The complexities of the literature
The need for ethnographic sensitivity
The scope of the analysis

Historical concepts

Historical concepts

The concept of counter culture

New social movements or a new left?
Periodising politics
The term "counter culture"
Social movements and the social order
Social movements as active realities

Reading the West German counter culture

Rebuilding from scratch
Sustaining the challenge
Changes in the 1990s
A closed counter culture?
Movements are not given, they are made
The committed and the uncommitted
German Sonderheit?

Summarising the thesis

Chapter two: intellectual histories

Introduction

What is a social movement anyway, and would we know one if we saw one?
Criteria for an effective theory

Categorising the literature

Affirmative categorisations
Critical categorisations
The missing theory I: Marxism as economism
The missing theory II: Marxism as culturalism

Affirmative approaches: "social movements"

Movements as irrational
The declining plausibility of irrationality
The usefulness of rationality
Critiques of RMT
State-centred approaches
Identitarian approaches
Critique of nominalism
Constructivist approaches
General critique of "social movements" writing
A way out of the Panopticon?

Critical approaches: "the social movement"

Alternative usages
The project of critical sociology
Social movements and critical rationality
Mechanistic Marxisms
Critical theory
Materialist cultural studies
Summarising the analysis
Critique

Chapter three: understanding social movements

Introduction

Theorising from and for movements

Theorising agency
Agency and structure
A situated engagement with otherness
Theorising species-being
Active theorisations of class
Rethinking the scope of class
Processual categories for social movement analysis

What is a social movement anyway?

Multiplying movements unnecessarily
Movement projects

Counter culture as counter hegemony

Understanding hegemony
Understanding counter hegemony
Counter-hegemony and resistance to hegemony

What do movement projects do?

Theorising movements and milieux
The concept of local rationalities
Movements as the development of local rationalities
Local rationalities in conflict

Historicising the counter culture

The results of earlier struggles
The first counter cultural challenge
The response from above
Preconditions for the war of position
The war of movement
The war of position

Chapter four: the politics of knowledge

Introduction

Starting-points: the local rationalities of "movement milieux"

Conceptual issues
Refocussing research
Methodological implications
Movement milieux

Skill and knowledge

Local rationality as skill
Skill and social movements
Skill and methodology

Ethnographic sensitivity in research

Thematising rationalities
Whose rationality?
Seeing through ideologies
Processual categories

The politics of movement research

Collusion and conflict
The material preconditions of research
Reflexivity and transparency

Problems of the research process

Understanding the research context
Ethics and publication
The research context
Occupation
Gender
Ethnicity
Shared experiences

Research method

Participation as locating research
Research details
Interpretive strategy
Knowledge value

Reflexive researching

Hidden discourses
Participation and local rationalities
Living in the counter culture
Acting in the network
Solidarity and conflict
The uses of research

Chapter five: building a reflexive autonomy

A brief network history

Locating the Irish counter culture
Subordinate challenges
Recuperation and peripherality
Co-optation and movement structure

The politics of autonomy

Critiques of the network
Autonomy as self-development
Culture and politics
Autonomy and politics
Tolerance and activism
Autonomous forms of politics
Different kinds of challenges
Roots of autonomy
Externalising the costs of reproduction

Building reflexive autonomy

Breaking out
Breaking with assumptions
Solidarity as a resource
Physical distancing
Earlier generations
The uses of other movement milieux
Free spaces
Networks on the periphery

The difficulties of reflexive autonomy

The difficulties of commitment
Seeking and drifting
Problems of routinisation
Creativity and stagnation

Chapter six: radicalising reflexivity

Reflexive resolutions

Reflexivity as universal human condition
Reflexivity as a specifically modern phenomenon
Social movements and the roots of lifeworld reflexivity
Ironic reflexivity
Radicalising reflexivity

Techniques of the self

Tools for change
Thinking stuckness
The importance of doing nothing
The social production of "individuality"
Free spaces and movement rationalities
Reflexive lifeworlds and autonomous reflexivity
Fun and games
The meanings of music
The use of drugs

Playing with form

Castles in the air
Form and mind games
Techie trips
Collective explorations of form
Reflexive lifeworlds and intellectual activity

Radicalised reflexivity

The limits of the lifeworld

Collective learning processes
Limits and possibilities
The good life
Gender

The war of position

The stakes of conflict

Chapter seven: choices for the counter culture

Introduction

Open theorising and social movements
The strategy of this chapter
How can a movement understand itself?
When can a movement understand itself?
Situating the questions
The context of contemporary Irish movements
Contested movement projects
Tensions within movement projects
Local rationalities and movement projects

Immanent critiques of strategic choices

How do we think about our choices?
Fitting project to rationality
Measuring up to the whole movement
Changing heart and hand
How are we doing?
Provisional answers

The social construction of movement strategies

Historicising the problem
What does a strategy need to work?
Organisational frameworks
Communicative structures
Techniques of the self
The internal politics of movement organisation
How can the chances of success be identified?

Historical context

Both kinds of movements
The changing face of movements
The prospects at the end of the century

Conclusion

Chapter eight: conclusion

Summarising the argument
The intended contributions of this thesis
Further research
The micro-politics of reflexivity

Appendix: voices from the counter culture
Appendix II: who knows best?
Verbal knowledge from above and below
Tacit knowledge from above and below
Bibliography
Supplements: published work related to the research