Therefore, this first chapter suggests different ways of understanding the Grateful Dead as a kind of hybrid aggregate, assembled from different and sometimes even conflicting parts. Taking as a starting point the Western political and cultural dislocations of the sixties and the counterculture they generated, the discussion focuses on the role of tradition and avant-garde respectively. Framing this discussion is the problem of the public sphere in which a rock band also must work: What happens to the public sphere under the conditions defined by the culture industry? Was it even possible for a counter-sphere to exist? This discussion, which the Grateful Dead substantially contributes to in different ways, provides a foundation for the rest of the book, and for a discussion of the Grateful Dead as the nucleus in a form of resistance.
I
Dennis McNally suggests that the “dislocations of race, class, gender, and culture that defined the 1960s and generated the Dead can … be best understood by looking at them through the lens of improvisation—through the Dead itself”20 I take his lead, both in using improvisation as my guide, and in hinting at the band’s dependence on and contributions to those “dislocations” McNally that points to: improvisation is a relation or attitude to the world, and therefore it can at times, and under special conditions, function as precisely a type of dislocation, and then not only of a musical composition.
These dislocations were far from isolated to popular music, and it is impossible to understand even the Grateful Dead without taking the larger, social dislocations of the 1960s into consideration. Those dislocations can be seen on a global scale, but their immediate effects also could be felt by every individual—the American war on Vietnam was broadcast to every home around the world that could afford a television set. Other dislocations settled in the individual body but were effects of collective movements in the society of late capitalism, such as black liberation, women’s liberation, and the beginning of gay liberation. Here, “hippies” must be included as well, along with student protests around the globe. Fredric Jameson gives us an important reminder, however, by noting that “the 60s, often imagined as a period when capital and First World power are in a retreat all over the globe, can just as easily be conceptualized as a period when capital is in full dynamic and innovative expansion, equipped with a whole armature of fresh production techniques and new ‘means of production.’ ”21 This expansion of capital—which the music industry exemplifies—momentarily generated what Jameson calls “an immense freeing or unbinding of social energies, a prodigious release of untheorized new forces,” forces that Jameson exemplifies rather conventionally as different political movements—the counterculture is not included, unless it is covered by the suggestive formulation, “movements everywhere.” But Jameson also warns that this “sense of freedom and possibility” of the sixties is a “historical illusion”: while this freedom was enacted and enjoyed, society transitioned “from one infrastructural or systemic stage of capitalism to another.”22 One consequence for the analysis of a historical era is that it must dialectically include both power and resistance, both capital and labor. Stephen Paul Miller offers—using Foucauldian terms—a view of the “episteme” or “epistemological horizons” of the sixties as “derived from consumer culture and was in fact immediately merchandised. But in itself it was something else. The forces of the marketplace helped bring sixties culture together and then sold that culture, but the phenomenon of the sixties was a kind of Frankenstein monster that defied the commercial codifications that helped constitute it.”23
Jameson’s rather negative view, perhaps limited by his academic orthodoxy, cannot perceive the kind of community that the counterculture generated and that was forming around the Grateful Dead. Yet a dialectical analysis must be more flexible, and there are other theoreticians who are more open to the potential political significance of countercultural phenomena like the Grateful Dead. In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri seem to imagine a potential Deadhead in what they call a “massive transvaluation of values.”
“Dropping out” was really a poor conception of what was going on in Haight-Ashbury and across the United States in the 1960s. The two essential operations were the refusal of the disciplinary regime and the experimentation with new forms of productivity. The refusal appeared in a wide variety of guises and proliferated in thousands of daily practices. It was the college student who experimented with LSD instead of looking for a job…. The entire panoply of movements and the entire emerging counterculture highlighted the social value of cooperation and communication.24
Hardt and Negri, being much more open to the diversity of the resistance to disciplinary regimes, agree with Jameson about the expansion of capital, which they see as subsuming “all aspects of social production and reproduction, the entire realm of life,” an absolute and totalizing tendency in capitalism observed already by Marx and emphasized by the Frankfurt School, as when Herbert Marcuse talks about how the dynamic character of capitalism means that it can “join and permeate all dimensions of private and public existence.”25 This dynamic, and its resulting penetration of every aspect of everyday life, is observed also by non-Marxist thinkers, as for instance Hannah Arendt in her description of Modernity as “the rule by nobody”—that is, a bureaucratic rule that could become tyrannical. Arendt also sees how society, in its varying historical forms, imposes “innumerable and various rules, all of which tends to ‘normalize’ its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.”26 Hardt and Negri observe how “production processes and economic structures” were being redefined by “cultural relations”: a “regime of production, and above all a regime for the production of subjectivity, was being destroyed and another invented by the enormous accumulations of struggles.”27 I think the key issue is the “production of subjectivity”: the culture industry of Adorno and Horkheimer is still shaping consciousness, subjectivities are still being produced and stylized by impersonal apparatuses, by power relations. The concept of “culture industry” refers to “the entire network by means of which culture is socially transmitted, in other words, it refers to the cultural goods created by the producers, and distributed by agents, the cultural market and the consumption of culture.”28 What this industry produces is ultimately “conformism through stereotypes, obedience through identification, intolerance through normalization”; it is, Adorno and Horkheimer writes, “enlightenment as mass deception.”29 Although this analysis basically rings true, it leaves out the simple fact of resistance: every power relation also generates resistance within these relations. Many small, independent record companies issue albums with music of every noncommercial type; rock bands producing noise music are being formed every day; and rappers appropriate a language that has been distorted by power. Even under an all-encompassing capitalism there always is a margin where other divergent voices are being formulated. This resistance, in its many diverse forms, must not be idealized—but neither should it be neglected. It might not be anti-capitalist but rather anti-commercial, anti-bureaucratic, anti-authoritarian: an opposition against power, consumer society, or simply the boredom of modern life—even if it might be “untheorized,” as Jameson complained.
Herbert Marcuse (from whom Hardt and Negri must have taken their lead) tried to theorize this situation, in which the oppositional finds him- or herself immersed in an “affluent” society which, Marcuse says, could “develop and satisfy material and cultural needs better than before.”30 Against this integration into capitalist society, Marcuse posits “the emergence of new needs, qualitatively different and even opposed to the prevailing aggressive and repressive needs: the emergence of a new type of man, with a vital, biological drive for liberation, and with a consciousness capable of breaking through the material as well as ideological veil of the affluent society.”31 Marcuse went on to include “the Hippie” in the resistance against “efficient and insane reasonableness,” seeing hippies partly as demonstrating “an aggressive nonaggressiveness which achieves, at least potentially, the demonstration of qualitatively different values, a transvaluation of values.”32 In other words: what is so wrong with “peace, love, and understanding”? The alternative values generated within the counterculture did not endure, though, and one can wonder what impact they actually had—on both general and more local levels—if they became mere ideology or