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The counter culture, in addition, was co-opted by the culture
industry and became itself a marketable commodity, an article for
consumption. The experimental life-styles it appeared could be tried
on, bought and sold, like new hair styles. Its heroes, often passing
ephemerally through late youth, could be sold as quickly as they could
be materialized; and the speed with which such changes in taste and
allegiance occurred were commensurate with the speed of technologi–
cal change that the culture industry needs and promotes. As Harold
Rosenberg has aptly noted: "reputations are now being made in art as
fast as on Broadway and in Hollywood.... The speedup in history–
making has now reached the point where the interval of critical evalu–
ation seems to have become superfluous." The counter culture, which
started out as a protest against the culture of consumption, and the
imperatives of such a culture to reproduce itself, largely expressed its
refusal on the level of appearance. The repudiation that was its pro–
ject took the form of changes in style-first as a kind of non-style and
then not so paradoxically as a reproducible style. Latent and wide–
spread dissatisfaction among members of the society at large, regis–
tered at first particularly among the young, were articulated by this
style; the model was found to
be
appealing as a means of representing
or asserting restlessness and discontent. In this connection the
counter culture found an only too eager ally in an industry looking
for further avenues of growth and expansion. It was in this way that
the counter culture itself became oriented toward consumption, be–
came a commodity and was in turn consumed.
It
was also self–
consuming and vanished into itself, like the smoke of grass deeply
inhaled. There were many attractive impulses in this movement and
many attractive people as well. But they did not subvert or even finally
outrage the society they had set out to undo and liberate. They were
put. to use, and there is very little left of them now.
The situation at present, therefore, is even more naked and
mystifying-if not mystified-than a present cultural situation usually
is. With modernism over, the era of high culture seems to have come
to an end. Nothing of similar weight or structure has replaced it, and
nothing seems in the near future likely to. This puts the humanists in
the university in a position that is even more vulnerable and exposed
than their ordinary one. As I have suggested earlier the model of the
present that humanists normally impose upon the past in their efforts
of explanation and interpretation is by and large from thirty to fifty
