Social & Cultural Geography

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Towards an historical geography of

nonrepresentation: making the countercultural
subject in the 1960s

Simon Rycroft

To cite this article: Simon Rycroft (2007) Towards an historical geography of nonrepresentation:
making the countercultural subject in the 1960s, Social & Cultural Geography, 8:4, 615-633, DOI:
10.1080/14649360701529865

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Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 8, No. 4, August 2007

Towards an historical geography

of nonrepresentation: making the countercultural
subject in the 1960s

Simon Rycroft
Department of Geography, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9SJ, UK,
S.P.Rycroft@sussex.ac.uk

It is in the experiments in the arts, media, culture, politics and everyday practices
developed by the counterculture in the 1960s that many nonrepresentational perspectives
emerge. Aspects and examples of those experiments are reviewed with a particular focus
on the construction of the countercultural subject and on some performative practices
developed to shape those subjects, including psychedelics and underground cinema.
During the 1960s nonrepresentational practices emerged and thrived in some enclaves of
countercultural living, but struggled to develop in others. Although many of the
counterculture’s practices explored the nonrepresentational realm, they were still engaged
in representational practices. The relative success of these practices in situ was closely tied
to their representation. In 1960s Los Angeles they remained more represented than
enacted and practised in the city. There is a danger in nonrepresentational work of
rendering representation a stereotypical concept, one that is unchanging in its capacity to
deaden, exclude and enframe. But representation as a practice is also subject to change.
During the postwar period various representational practices, whose referent was a newly
understood cosmos, attempted to evoke a range of sensory, experiential and subconscious
responses in their consumers and performers, creating decidedly nonrepresentational
representational moments.

Key words: counterculture, 1960s, Los Angeles, nonrepresentational thought.

Introduction up from the range of underground publi-

In a 1966 East Village Other article, Allan
Katzman, poet and the paper’s co-founder,
envisioned a future ‘Underground States of
America’. The Underground States would
exist on grounds and principles already
prepared in the enclaves of countercultural
living to be found in many American cities. It
would have its own Declaration of Indepen-
dence and the Fourth Estate would be made
cations that had emerged from these commu-
nities during the previous few years. The idea
of visiting, living in or being part of such a
country was to live creatively, learning this
lifestyle from what was ‘known to the vast
majority of the population as illicit and
underground activity’ (Katzman 1966: 13).
Further, the Underground States would con-
stitute its own brand of American imperialism,
exposing the world to creative environments

ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/07/040615-19 q 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14649360701529865
616 Simon Rycroft
like multi-media lightshows, hallucinogens or
even the editorial offices of underground
papers: ‘The Underground States would
charge all visitors a fee for entering and living
in the country which in effect would be one
great therapy . . . COME ON DOWN . . .
TAKE A TRIP THROUGH THE UNDERG-
ROUND’ (Katzman 1966: 13).
A fanciful vision to be sure. Obviously
Katzman’s dream was never realised, and it
perhaps also failed to either accurately reflect or
predict the nature of countercultures in 1960s
America. Many cities did have enclaves of
countercultural living but these were often
fundamentally different from one another,
even within the same city (Rycroft 2003).
These differences arose from a set of global
and local discourses of dissent, representation
and practice. To explicate this it is worth, for a
moment, taking Katzman’s dream at face value:
Katzman envisioned the establishment of a
nation-state whose morality, laws and statutes
represented the social, cultural and bodily
practices that had established themselves in the
mostly urban enclaves of countercultural living.
That process of representation was not simply a
selective framing (and deadening) of those
practices but emphasized that each was
mutually constitutive of the other: to be a citizen
of this nation, or member of the counterculture,
one was required to enact certain practices and
the practices that marked one out as a citizen
were at once nonrepresentational and represen-
tational. To consume some underground pub-
lications, for instance, required both a conscious
and embodied knowledge of certain counter-
cultural practices, such as multi-media light-
shows or hallucinogens, but these in turn were
also representational practices intended to
invoke a particular understanding of nature
and the cosmos.
The central argument of this paper builds
upon aspects of nonrepresentational theory
but takes as a point of departure the claim that
aspects of nonrepresentational thought
emerged from 1960s innovations in perform-
ance and practice, such as the happening,
psycho-therapeutic interventions, aesthetic
developments in multi-media environments,
and so on. These experiments in the arts,
media, culture, politics, and in performative
and everyday practices developed by the
counterculture in the 1960s, whilst cited in
nonrepresentational work remain largely
unexplored and implicit. For instance, a
lineage can be traced from the therapeutic
spaces arising through the ‘New Age’ dance
practices characterized by McCormack (2003:
490 –491) as ‘spaces emergent through the
enactment of practices that explicitly attempt
to facilitate a kind of transformation in
awareness, thinking, feeling and relating’,
and the ‘spaces’ designed in the multi-media
environment to serve the same function.
Similarly, the concepts of new subjectivities
emerging from nonrepresentational thinking
today, in both the conception of a vital
network of objects and subjects, and in an
appreciation of new technological objects as
extensions of human subjects, where the
distinctions between ‘the software and hard-
ware of our social lives’ (Pels, Hetherington
and Vandenberghe 2002: 1) are blurred,
develop further those favoured by the counter-
culture in for instance synaesthetic cinema,
and early video experimentation.
By exploring the development of some of
these countercultural practices this paper begins
to map out an historical geography of the way of
apprehending the world characteristic of non-
representational thought. This is not to suggest,
however, that nonrepresentational thought does
not have other histories and geographies, nor
indeed to claim that it has all been done
before. Rather, apart from elaborating upon
connections cited but underdeveloped in
 Historical geography of nonrepresentation
nonrepresenational ideas, I focus upon the
counterculture because many of their inno-
vations were performative and practical rather
than conventionally representational and intel-
lectual. The paper reviews aspects and examples
of those experiments with a particular focus on
the construction of the countercultural subject
and on some performative practices developed
to awaken and shape those subjects.
California and Los Angeles in the late 1960s
then briefly become the empirical focus of the
paper. In this I am not claiming that California
was the key space in which putative non-
representational practices were conceived and
nurtured, although the region as a whole did
perhaps have the greatest variety, but to
help illustrate the ways in which these
practices emerged and thrived in particular
spaces, but struggled to develop in others.
In California, like the other urban enclaves of
countercultural living in Britain and the USA
nonrepresentational practices developed but,
in much the same way as contemporary
concepts of nonrepresentation, they struggled
to escape the politics and practices of
representation. The paper therefore also
addresses recent doubts expressed about
nonrepresentational thought that assert the
importance of representation as practice,
process and object (Kirsch and Mitchell
2004; Matless 2000; Nash 2000; Revill
2004). In short, there is nothing universal per
se about nonrepresentational performative
practices, and their particularity can be
attributed to the material circumstances of
their emergence—their geographies.
Representation, practice and embodiment
The connections between contemporary non-
representational thinking and the experimental
practices of the 1960s’ counterculture arise
617
from the resolution of a shared goal: how to
develop ways of evoking and affecting the
world without recourse to the deadening grip of
dominant representational practices. The non-
representational project is one that asks us not
only to be aware of the limits to representation,
but also to develop an evocative geography
that touches the full range of the senses. In this,
nonrepresentational thinkers acknowledge
and build upon developments from the 1960s
that began to question received represen-
tational practices in for instance a ‘move
away from the traditional authority of the text’
(Thrift and Dewsbury 2000: 411) and a
merging of previously distinct expressive
tropes (Thrift 2000a). For many factions of
the counterculture this shift concerned a
rejection of traditional notions of ‘represen-
tation’ in its broadest sense (from cultural to
political) by targeting linear modes of con-
sciousness and logic and offering, through
multi-media and sometimes psychopharmaco-
logical experimentation, multi-lateral and
multidimensional versions of the world
(Sanford 1995; Simmons and Winograd
1966; Stansill and Mairowitz 1971).
These countercultural developments and
contemporary nonrepresentational thinking
arise from and are part of what appears to be
a shift in the representational register that
occurred during the postwar period. This shift
was based upon the development of a new
cosmology and an associated apprehension of
nature which was developed in technoscientific
discourse and circulated in a range of cultural,
political and everyday practices. During the
1960s this new conception of a multi-
dimensional, infinitely complex cosmic nature
resulted in a range of practices that eschewed
traditional forms of representation and
attempted to develop more intuitive, embodied
and multi-sensory modes of expression, such as
in the multi-media lightshow, developments in
618 Simon Rycroft
underground cinema aesthetics, performance
art, painting, and experiments with the written
word on the pages of certain underground
publications (Rycroft 2003, 2005). The inten-
tion in these practices was not to produce
static, enframed and frozen representations of
nature, but to create microcosmic ‘models’ of
the macrocosmos that were intended to be
experienced in a multi-sensory embodied
mode.
Nonrepresentational thought focuses upon
practice above and before representation
because practice encapsulates non-cognitive
thought—thought which is not guided by a
set of internalized expectations (or received
representations). Non-cognitive thought
leads to action: it is ‘a set of embodied
dispositions (“instincts” if you like) which
have been biologically wired in or culturally
sedimented . . . action-oriented “represen-
tations” which simultaneously describe
aspects of the world and prescribe possible
actions’ (Thrift 2000b: 36). Whilst represen-
tation still has some import here then, it is
practical intelligibility and inarticulate
understanding that form the lens through
which representations are generated and
rendered understandable. Central to this
notion of cognitive unconscious is a sense
of ‘embodiment’, that to experience the
world is a co-relational process whereby the
‘body produces spaces and times through
the things of nature which, in turn, inhabit
the body through that production’ (Thrift
2000b: 47). Knowledge and representations
are generated through this process. We
know our bodies through knowing
nature and vice-versa: ‘a heightened aware-
ness of particular forms of embodiment [in
for instance certain contemplative practices]
. . . allow certain forms of signification to be
grasped “instinctively”’ (Thrift 2000b: 46).
New subjects, new humanities
What is beginning to emerge from nonrepre-
sentational studies is a concept of a new
subject—a new humanity even—that is
formed and constantly reformed in co-relation
to things in the object world—animal,
mineral, viral, vegetable and technological—
and with other human subjects. Much recent
work for instance has developed new appre-
hensions of nature whereby the formation of
human subjects is intricately entangled with
the presence and actions of non-human
subjects (Whatmore 1999, 2002). The intel-
lectual effort in this work is intent upon
questioning lineal thought and focusing upon
fluid and unpredictable complexities:
Increasingly, we have . . . come to appreciate the
fluidity and instability of the (multiple) ontological
boundaries which separate thinglike from
nonthinglike entities (persons, animals, relations,
concepts), in a growing discomfort about the
traditional hierarchies which separated subjects
from objects, cultures from natures, and humans
from nonhumans. (Pels, Hetherington and
Vandenberghe 2002: 3)
The role of technology in this vitalist network
has also become an important focus and it
could be argued that the extension of human
bodies and minds through technological
advance has ushered in contemporary notions
of embodiment. Humanity ‘is technical from
the start, amplified and speeded up by the
demands of an “environment” which does not
keep to its environs’ (Thrift and Dewsbury
2000: 419; see also Thrift and French 2002).
The new human subject is the product of the
enhanced capacities afforded by technology
to the point that the boundary between the
self and object world become redundant
 Historical geography of nonrepresentation
and the human self is redefined. Consciousness
itself is also extended into the environment as
a result of expanded communicative and
memorizing capacities of human and non-
human subjects (Thrift 2003, 2004).
In the discourses of nonrepresentational
thought and 1960s’ countercultural practice a
form of technonature is evident and the
common goal of their projects concerns
making this invisible nature visible. This is
the nature of the wave – particle duality,
the Einsteinian cosmology of matter and energy
in flux to which humanity is intricately bound.
Indeed, the new human subject or ‘transhuman’
that nonrepresentational thinkers talk of is
the product of a practical realization of
the ‘openness of the human organism to the
greater flux of energy, matter and life’ (Clark
2000: 30). Much nonrepresentational work
cites a range of contemplative practices that
have their origins in 1960s’ experimentation
that were (and are) intended to awaken
practitioners to this realization, to achieve a
sense of the moment and momentum of the
world by addressing their embodied connection
to the vital network of human and non-human
subjects and objects (McCormack 2003, 2005).
The transformative potential of such practices
and the spaces emergent from them has
probably been best exploited by management
trainers in their efforts to shape new manage-
ment subjects awakened and attuned to an
accelerated and unstable marketplace (see
Thrift 2000c, 2001), but their avant-garde
origins whilst noted have yet to be explored.
Technonature and the cosmology of the
countercultural subject
Whilst the counterculture had many often
contradictory projects throughout the 1960s,
one can divine some commonalities between
619
them. From student radical to Haight dropout
the object of opposition was the same:
technocracy and the technocratic control of
human bodies and minds. What began to
emerge from this broader project, particularly
from the more populist countercultural fac-
tions, was the fashioning of a new, alternative
concept of the human subject, a similar
conception to that developing in nonrepresen-
tational approaches today. A range of thoughts
and thinkers were appropriated by the counter-
culture to help develop this idea. Herbert
Marcuse, Marshall McLuhan, Murray Book-
chin, Paul Goodman, Theodore Roszak,
Buckminster Fuller, R. D. Laing and many
other contemporary thinkers from a range of
disciplines and perspectives who had some-
thing to say to the counterculture about the
relationships between nature, technology and
humanity in particular, were adopted as
patriarchs to the movement (Bookchin 1990
[1971]; Buckminster Fuller 1969; Goodman
1970 [1961]; Laing 1970 [1959]; Marcuse
1991 [1964]; McLuhan 1964; Roszak 1971
[1968]). Similarly, underground publications
reviewed and sponsored books, lectures, con-
ferences and workshops that developed a range
of anti-technocratic thoughts and practices.
Performative practices were developed by
the counterculture to recover the ‘true’ self and
shape new subjectivities.1 The activities with
which the 1960s’ counterculture were synon-
ymous such as be-ins, happenings, various art
and performance-based events and multi-
media shows were based upon this motivation.
Most of the performative innovations were
directed against linear representative practices
and expressed a desire to create microcosmic
versions of the macrocosmos. This ‘environ-
ment’, it was felt, would provoke the discovery
of ‘true self’. The message in these activities
was that the self was fundamentally and
inescapably networked, not only to other
620 Simon Rycroft
subjects in the world, but to the objects of
nature within and beyond the world.
Certain technologies were appropriated by
the counterculture to recover this multi-
dimensional and holistic cosmic nature of
interdependent and co-related objects and
subjects. Amongst these technologies various
hallucinogens are perhaps the most spectacu-
lar examples. In covering developments in
psychedelic technologies, the underground
press stressed the vital networks of minds
and bodies that they facilitated:
the hippy-rock-psychedelic roadshow was at least
as significant as was the gradual development of
electromagnetic wave theory. In the case of
psychedelics, it’s clear that the means of access
will not be another generator or dynamo or reactor,
but that access will take place in the human mind.
Millions of minds whirring, buzzing, flashing,
coming to different kinds of decisions. Millions of
minds responding more intensely. (Stafford 1968: 3)
Despite the fascination with the counter-
culture’s drug experimentation in many
accounts, new electronic technologies had a
greater import than previosuly acknowledged.
Electronic technologies and the global
village
In a range of performative events electronic
technologies were deployed in an attempt to
create environments in which a collective
revelation of ‘true’ selves could be facilitated.
Those environments, which included the
multi-media happening and psychedelic light-
show, were also designed to be microcosmic—
creating synaesthetic experiential models of
the macrocosmos. In these environments, the
‘true’ self would be revealed in co-relation to
the objects and subjects of nature and cosmos.
Advances in communications technology in
particular excited countercultural prac-
titioners:
There has been a gradual and ongoing acceleration
of human evolution in each of its aspects: it is not
coincidental that man’s first conquest of the inner
space of the atom has occurred concurrently with
his first steps into the outer space of the universe,
nor that along with the expansion of the means of
communication come the expansion of
consciousness and a change in the nature of what
is being communicated. (Hartweg 1965: 3)
Countercultural youth were the first gener-
ation whose shared history included television,
computers and transistors. They were ‘the
products of mass education . . . and of
advanced technology, which has given . . . a
more expanded consciousness’ (Sinclair 1972:
5). The co-evolution of technology and
humanity, many in the counterculture felt,
was reaching a point at which social,
economic and cultural orders would return
to a primitive form-pattern: there was ‘at least
some indication that a post-industrial level of
technology [was] creating the rudiments of
pre-industrial (in fact pre-literate) thinking
and social organization’ (Messer 1972: 152).
Media theorist Marshall McLuhan, whose
books were widely toted and consumed by the
counterculture, was an important influence
here. He suggested that electronic technology,
particularly electronic media, set in train a
new phase in the evolutionary process
whereby a segmenting socio-cultural system
brought on by mechanical technologies would
be replaced by an integrative one. McLuhan’s
global village was an integrated, codependent
community in which participation and inter-
action were maximized and where preliterate
oral forms of community organization pre-
dominate. This would result directly from
 Historical geography of nonrepresentation
the spread and use of electronic media because
‘electricity points the way to an extension of
the process of consciousness itself, on a world
scale, and without any verbalization whatever’
(McLuhan 1964: 80; see also McLuhan 1970;
McLuhan and Fiore 1997).
The philosophy behind such projects was
that new technologies allowed the previously
invisible to be made visible (Rycroft 2003).
More populist and less conventionally politi-
cal countercultural factions tended to be
behind ambitious and experimental publi-
cation and multi-media projects. For these
groups, linear modes of expression were
emblematic of the technocratic project and as
such were to be challenged and broken down.
New electronic media these groups felt,
facilitated this breakdown for two reasons:
firstly, like many developments in postwar
aesthetics, electronic media such as television
tended to enfranchise the consumer—the
viewer was interactively engaged in creating
meaning rather than simply receiving it.
Experiments in video were intended to
emphasize and maximize this propensity.
Secondly, the theoretical developments that
excited these factions of the counterculture,
like those of McLuhan or Buckminster Fuller,
seemed to be suggesting that these new
technologies were actually affecting human
evolution, that new subjects were emerging
from a refigured co-relation between technol-
ogy and humanity. The revolutionary poten-
tial of these new movements came from within
technological change; technology became the
means by which liberation was to be achieved
and the basis of a new ‘electronic culture’
(Young 1973: 191). This is not, as Paul Willis
once suggested, a ‘dark romantic rejection of
modernism pure and simple’ (Willis 1978:
179), but a recognition of the possibilities
awarded in the new cybernetic age, in which
the machine would replicate and be replicated
621
by the evolving, living organism (Wiener
1973: 52 –57). Technology, in this comprehen-
sion, was part of the evolutionary process as
both mechanism and outcome (Youngblood
1970a: 42). It is in the deployment of these
concepts in countercultural activities that a
shift in the practices of representation can be
identified, a shift that in contemporary
parlance, emphasized the nonrepresentational
realm.
Experiments in cinema from the 1960s best
exemplify this point. Underground cinema
was one countercultural practice that began to
explore the nonrepresentational, which by
appropriating key technologies and contem-
porary ideas, attempted to develop a synaes-
thetic model of humanity and cosmic nature.
This arose, in part, through and adoption of
McLuhan’s notion of technologies as exten-
sions of human bodies and minds: ‘Our
cameras have become personal, like exten-
sions of our fingers and our eyes and they
move to the beat of our hearts’ (Mekas 1966:
8). Gene Youngblood, the media correspon-
dent for the Los Angeles Free Press, referred to
underground cinema as ‘Expanded Cinema’
because it both better reflected its project of
expanding consciousness, and suggested that
the aesthetic itself was part of a movement
towards expanding the network of objects and
subjects that constituted consciousness: ‘the
intermedia network of cinema and television
. . . now functions as nothing less than the
nervous system of mankind’ (Youngblood
1970b: 41).2 Expanded Cinema had, Young-
blood felt, begun to make real progress in
tapping in to the cosmic consciousness,
especially in the genre he labelled synaesthetic
cinema. Synaesthetic cinema was the
only aesthetic language suited to the post-
industrial, post-literate, man-made environment
with its multidimensional simulsensory network
622 Simon Rycroft
of information sources . . . the only aesthetic tool
that even approaches the reality continuum of
conscious existence in the nonuniform, nonlinear,
nonconnected electronic atmosphere of the
Paleocybernetic Age. (Youngblood 1970b: 77)3
Synaesthetic cinema was not composed of
common motifs, themes or styles, and in
general, abandoned traditional cinematic nar-
rative because ‘events in reality do not move in a
linear fashion’. Similarly, it abandoned ‘com-
mon notions of style because there is no style in
nature’ (Youngblood 1968a: 18). Synaesthetic
films consisted of a range of images and
distortion-interference effects projected on to
the screen, edited together as a continuous
movie giving the impression of objects meta-
morphosing into other objects. The production
of synaesthetic movies was driven, Youngblood
felt, more by instinct than design, because they
were in effect extensions of the filmmaker’s
central nervous system. Accordingly, through
synaesthetic cinema ‘man attempts to express a
total phenomenon—his own consciousness’
(Youngblood 1970b: 76; see Razutis 1993).
Synaesthetic movies were an attempt to model
cosmic order and bring it to the senses of
viewers, to expand and awaken a cosmic
consciousness by creating a new kind of vision.
Youngblood likened this expanded conscious-
ness to Freud’s notion of oceanic consciousness,
in which ‘our individual existence is lost in
mystic union with the universe’. Indeed,
nothing ‘could be more appropriate to con-
temporary experience, when for the first time
man has left the boundaries of this globe’
(Youngblood 1970b: 92). This consciousness
was not filtered by experience or received
representations but was constituted by the
same nonrepresentational, prediscursive
moment one achieves through staring in
‘mindless wonder’ at nature, or through
mantra. As such, the ideal outcome of viewing
a synaesthetic show was a kind of gestalt insight
‘seeing things together which previously were
unconnected’ (Youngblood 1968a: 18).
Like much cultural production in the immedi-
ate postwar period, synaesthetic cinema worked
with and manipulated the moment of perception
by using aesthetic strategies that were funda-
mentally nonrepresentational (Riley 1999;
Rycroft 2005). This arose in part because the
subjects that had begun to excite artists and
performers were drawn from recent advances in
technoscience, subjects which were not necess-
arily visible phenomena so much as theoretical
constructs and models. For synaesthetic cinema
this concerned bringing invisible energies and
forces to the senses of the viewer: ‘It’s not what
we’re seeing so much as the process and effect of
seeing: that is, the phenomenon of experience
itself, which exists only in the viewer’ (Young-
blood 1970b: 97). Whilst impossible to ‘rep-
resent’ those forces it was possible to ‘evoke
them in the inarticulate conscious of the viewer’.
Like its close relation kinaesthetic cinema—
which used more formal shapes and patterns to
evoke similar forces—synaesthetic cinema
‘makes us aware of fundamental realities
beneath the surface of normal perception: forces
and energies’ (Youngblood 1970b: 97). But the
reception, bringing to the consciousness and
‘articulation’ of the viewing experience hap-
pened, Youngblood thought, on a ‘nonverbal’
level (1970b: 97).
Material geographies of the nonrepresent-
ational realm
Nonrepresentational thought has an historical
geography, but it is perhaps the emphasis on new
forms of materiality and new comprehensions of
vital human and non-human matrices that has
obscured the connections of nonrepresenta-
tional thought to more obvious geographical
 Historical geography of nonrepresentation
materialities. To illustrate, only one small
element of that historical geography is now
explored, countercultural practices in Los
Angeles during the 1960s. Whilst most major
American cities hosted countercultural
enclaves, with the notable exception of New
York, it was from the West Coast cities that the
innovations in cultural politics associated with
the 1960s’ counterculture emerged. San Fran-
cisco, in particular, developed many of the kinds
of performative practices that are of interest
here. The counterculture in Los Angeles, on the
other hand, whilst hosting the full variety of
factions and associated practices, was not in the
avant grade of innovators.
The project of forming underground citizens
described by Katzman that opened this paper
chimes with the discourse of new humanity
being developed by nonrepresentational thin-
kers in terms of embodiment, cosmology and
new subjectivities. As Katzman implied
though, that project emerged from particular
spaces and territories. Certain territories
nurtured the kinds of performative practices
and thoughts that nonrepresentational
approaches build upon and develop. Other
territories were less conducive. On the West
Coast during the 1960s this propensity can be
directly related to the cultural and material
histories of the territories themselves. The
heightened awareness of embodiment and
connection to the stuff of the universe evoked
through multi-media experimentation differed
in type and extent for instance between the
Sunset Strip and the Venice district in Los
Angeles and the Haight-Ashbury district in San
Francisco. These differences can be explained
with reference to the very different, but related,
representational geographies of each territory.
In all enclaves of countercultural living the
practices developed were at once represen-
tational and nonrepresentational: re-pre-
senting an emergent technoscientific cosmic
623
nature, but a synaesthetic representation that
was to be appreciated and embodied by
participants in a nonrepresentational spirit.
But the material geographies of representation
played out differently on the ground, either
providing the space for nonrepresentional
practices, or constraining them. San Francis-
co’s position as a centre for esoteric practices
was, by the early 1960s, well-established and
widely celebrated. As a result, the local
underground media and economy was able
to emphasize these aspects and built a
representation of San Francisco as a centre
for cultural experimentation that is still
familiar. Indeed San Francisco can probably
claim to be the birthplace of the multi-media
lightshow, beginning early in the 1950s with
artist Jordan Belson and composer Henry
Jacobs’ Vortex Concerts at the Morrison
Planetarium in Golden Gate Park. Los
Angeles, as we will see, was dominated by a
different brand of cultural politics to which
representation in the political sense encom-
passed a quite traditional socialist and civil
rights outlook and tended to sideline the
synaesthetic and perfomative. Whilst today
Los Angeles celebrates a heritage of exper-
imental cinema, video and multi-media
through exhibitions and in the establishment
of archives such as those of the Iota Center, in
the 1960s there was only really one multi-
media collective of note in the city, the Venice-
based Single Wing Turquoise Bird. The Bay
Area and New York produced and housed the
vast majority of these groups in the USA.
Los Angeles
Whilst Los Angeles hosted the full range of
countercultural activities and factions
throughout the 1960s, the dominant character
of the counterculture in the city was more
624 Simon Rycroft
conventionally liberal and New Left and in
general deeply suspicious of esoteric practices.
This reflects the circumstances of the counter-
culture’s emergence in the city. The counter-
culture found a voice very early in the 1960s
through the establishment of the first under-
ground paper, the Los Angeles Free Press,
in May 1964. Art Kunkin, the editor, and
many of the contributing journalists to the
Free Press came from civil rights and socialist
backgrounds. Kunkin was on the national
committee of the Socialist Party, had edited a
series of working-class newspapers and had
been a labour movement representative in a
number of job shops and car factories.
Working the graveyard shifts at the factory
allowed him to be part of the coffeehouse
culture of Venice and Hollywood during the
late 1950s and early 1960s. These contacts
enabled him to forge a number of connections
with the artistic community who would
eventually also serve as staff writers at the
Free Press, particularly those in the Venice
Beat community. Like many in the 1960s New
Left, it was Kunkin’s sense of the failure of
socialism of ‘not being able to intelligibly
speak to working people’ that drove his
establishment of the paper. Consequently, the
Free Press was directed towards the youth and
cultural communities in the city, mainly
concentrated in the Westside of the city, but
always with the labour movement, minorities
and women’s rights on the editorial agenda
with an ambition of ‘bringing all these
elements finally together’ (Kunkin, personal
communication). Despite these intentions, and
the fact that circulation figures regularly
reached 300,000, the Los Angeles Free Press
did not find a readership amongst the working
class but remained, like most underground
papers, largely a white liberal newssheet.
Only one year into the run of the Free Press
its project was galvanized, and to a certain
extent justified, by events in the Watts uprising
(Hampton 1965; Kunkin 1965). For Kunkin,
the jump in circulation (from around 5,000 to
12,000) was a vindication of his editorial
philosophy,
My whole idea of the Free Press, coming from my
own history, was to watch molecular movements,
attempting to report on events before they hit the
headlines, to get them into people’s lives and see the
changing consciousness there. So Watts was very
big for me and for the Los Angeles Free Press.
(Kunkin, personal communication)
Significant too was the effect of the Watts
rebellion on the discourse of political and
cultural expression in the city with Watts
becoming a touchstone for the coverage of
events later in the decade. At the moment when
psychedelics, happenings and various forms of
multi-media experimentation were affecting
the development of the counterculture else-
where, the mandarins of the Los Angeles
counterculture pursued a different goal: ‘A lot
about the hippy philosophy I thought was
pretty naı̈ve . . . I wasn’t objecting to it, but
I really didn’t believe you could escape that
way. I was already a bit older than most people
involved’ (personal communication). The effect
of this focus initially was to deny column
inches to the more esoteric practices happening
in the city but also, since local underground
publications tended to be the main sponsors of
these activities, to curtail their development.
Early Free Press-sponsored multi-media hap-
penings were usually austere affairs, contrived
to demonstrate the existential dilemma of being
a citizen of an increasingly oppressive society.
‘Process’, one such happening in August 1966,
jointly run by the Free Press and the Exper-
imental Arts Workshop of the Pasadena Arts
Museum, was intended to illustrate how each of
its participants were conditioned, labelled,
 Historical geography of nonrepresentation
pigeon-holed and sapped by a bureaucratised
society: ‘“PROCESS” was a study of stripping
all art symbology from an event . . . to see
how much aesthetic value remained’ (Agnello
1966: 10). Each participant went through a
series of humiliating interviews which, unlike
happenings in other places, tended to alienate
rather than include. All in all, it provided a
distasteful environment, but seen as more true to
life than the ‘joyous absurdity of the New York
style happenings which are intensifying aware-
ness of the real material world, with an
audience-performer unity’ (Kunkin and Morgan
1966: 11).4 The universal, tribal experience of
the be-in (or love-in) in Los Angeles was equally
austere and lasted for only eleven months: the
‘social dream which the “Be-In” originally
represented has degenerated into the fierce
reality of muggings, rapes, arrests and shootings’
(Gold 1967: 3).
Later in the 1960s, however, multi-media
and psychedelics gained a higher profile in the
city. These found coverage and support from a
number of new underground periodicals that
were established from 1967 onwards including
Open City, but also, eventually from the Free
Press as well. The Sunset Strip, ‘that amplified,
hallucinogenic straightway between the Ham-
burger Hamlet and the Hullabaloo’ (Hopkins
1966: 14), witnessed most of the city’s
performative cultural politics, with explora-
tions in sound and light, be-ins and multi-
media environments and venues for the city’s
electronic groups (Garcia 1967: 5). In 1967,
Los Angeles boasted some thirty ‘head-shops’,
a large cluster of which were centred on the
Strip, serving a seasonally nomadic population.
These outlets or ‘outposts of revolution’
served an important role as centres of infor-
mation for the countercultural community
that briefly came to rival the underground
press itself (Chase 1967: 1). The district played
host to the city’s Digger community who were
625
attempting, through free food distribution and
arts and craft education, to develop an alterna-
tive economy (Pine 1967; Veribushi 1967). The
Strip also supported an underground film
theatre, ‘Cinematheque 16’, the first in the city,
opening on 9 June 1966 (Carson 1966: 7). Such
arrivals were late on the scene in Los Angeles:
both New York and San Francisco had had
thriving Underground film venues since the early
1960s.
As a result of the development of counter-
cultural infrastructure on the Sunset Strip but
also in Venice, from around 1967 onwards,
different voices were heard in the city and the
theme of ‘Love, motion and light’ as the
‘working ground of the underground’ became
more widespread (Mekas 1966: 8). Partly as a
result of minor riots on the Sunset Strip in
1967 key figures in the city’s countercultural
community who rejected the Free Press line
sensed a new phase: ‘We feel that Los Angeles
is on the verge of a cultural and political
renaissance . . . that it is about to enter one of
those golden periods in which a more open,
more loving and more human city will
blossom’ (Open City 1967: 4). Gene Young-
blood was one of the central figures in the
change through his ‘intermedia’ column in
the Free Press. Although most frequently
reporting on activities and events outside of
the city, especially from San Francisco and
New York, Youngblood maintained that Los
Angeles provided an ideal environment for
such happenings. The vast mile-high plastic
dome that would one day preserve New York
as a museum piece he said would be
manufactured in southern California because
on the West Coast ‘physical evolution’ ceased
and evolution had reached a new phase.
California as a whole, he argued, was at the
forefront of this human evolution that was
developing a seamless connection to electronic
technologies:
626 Simon Rycroft
Here on the west coast where tradition has died,
where change is the only constant, where
technologist-visionaries are constructing a super-
world where television extends our senses into
space, where the ears of science listen to pulsar
messages from the cosmos . . . a new consciousness
is being born. (Youngblood 1968b: 31)
Los Angeles was particularly suited to nurtur-
ing this new consciousness for the same
reasons that others, including the mandarins
of the counterculture, criticized the city: an
urban morphology in a constant state of flux.
Despite the coverage, some press sponsor-
ship, and the efforts of people like Youngblood
to promote these activities, at no stage did they
represent the core of the counterculture’s
practices in Los Angeles. The dominance of
the Free Press ensured that the concerns of the
city’s radical communities were directed, in a
more conventional political approach, toward
challenging the sinister workings of capital.
This is not surprising given that the justifica-
tion for the paper’s project came from the
Watts uprising, the causes of which the Free
Press quickly pinned not only on endemic
racism but also, significantly, on economic
restructuring. The material effect of these
forces was the favoured target for the paper
throughout its run and was often expressed in
the desire to preserve the physical infrastruc-
ture of the city. Initially this focused upon
long-running conflicts between developers and
community activists in the Venice district from
which many of the key figures in the counter-
culture emerged.
The Venice beachead
During the postwar period, Venice accommo-
dated a small Beatnik community. They had
been attracted to the area by resident Beat
writers and artists who were led by crime
fiction author Lawrence Lipton. Lipton, who
went on to write a regular column for the Free
Press, ‘The Wasp’, often bankrolled his
favoured protégés in a concerted effort to
build a different, more pure, Beat community
to the more notorious ones of Greenwich
Village, New York, and North Beach San
Francisco (Lipton 1959). Lipton’s elite began
colonizing the run-down buildings of Venice,
converting them into Coffee Houses, Jazz-
Poetry dens and makeshift residences.
The Ocean front walk became the focus of
their activities, including John Haag’s Venice
West Cafe, the Gas House, and the exclusive
artists colony on an upper floor of the Grand
Hotel, a ‘kind of Beat monastery’, which
supported the most disaffiliate of Lipton’s
disciples (Maynard 1991: 124). The infra-
structure that the Venice Beats chose to
occupy was constructed with an entirely
different community in mind. Founded in
1905 as the realized dream of property
developer Abbot Kinney, Venice West as it
became known in the 1950s, was intended to
mimic the real Venice, incorporating seawater
canals lined with colonnaded buildings,
spanned by authentic bridges and traversed
by gondolas. Built as a coastal leisure resort
for Los Angeles’s business community, Kin-
ney’s dream quickly soured: the inappropriate
tidal regime meant that the canals tended to
silt up and stagnate and were costly to
maintain; and the discovery of oil off the
coast in 1927 led to the city’s annexation of
the district and a long-running series of battles
over planning and redevelopment. The resul-
tant degradation of Venice’s infrastructure,
coupled with the areas reputation as a
marginal space of ‘cheap thrills and oddness’,
meant that the district became the ideal site
for a consciously disaffiliate community with
few resources (Maynard 1991: 13).
 Historical geography of nonrepresentation
From the early 1950s onwards, the Venice
Beats appropriated not only what was left of
Kinney’s infrastructure, but through cam-
paigns to save various buildings, attached
their values to that infrastructure. The
counterculture of Los Angeles that emerged
from the Venice Beat community early in the
1960s carried the same attachment to the
physical infrastructure of the district and
resisted a number of development pressures
throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s,
which were also accompanied by a series of
city ordinances restricting aspects of the
countercultural lifestyle, especially perform-
ance. The protection and conservation of old
Venice was justified in terms of its cultural
integrity, which could be read in the physical
structure of the district (Rycroft 1998).
Campaigns over the conservation of build-
ings seem far distant from the evocative and
esoteric countercultural performative politics
explored earlier in this paper. In the case of the
Venice district especially, however, this was
directed towards an infrastructure that had
housed and nurtured precisely those politics
from their origins in Beat performance.
The buildings, facades and canals of Venice
West were seen to represent these practices, to
symbolize the lifestyle that emerged and which
the counterculture developed. Lipton cast the
Venice community of 1950s Beat poets and
artists as ‘Holy Barbarians’ who, through the
early development of multi-media aesthetics,
were the first signs of the emergence of a new
subject ‘sparked by the electronics revolution
in communication, by the phonograph, radio,
tape recorder, and the audio-visual media of
motion pictures and television’ (Lipton 1959:
221). Later, in the 1960s, the connections
between architecture and countercultural life-
style were crystallized and made
explicit especially through the local under-
ground paper, the Free Venice Beachead.
627
The buildings and spaces in which Beat and
later countercultural performance occurred
were celebrated and made to symbolize
dissaffiliation. This also happened in response
to a series of redevelopment initiatives and city
ordinances specifically targeting aspects of
countercultural lifestyle in Venice, such as
public drumming.
In Venice then, not only were the putative
nonrepresentational practices characteristic of
Beat and countercultual experimentation con-
strained through representation in a powerful
local underground media, but also by symbo-
lization in the material space of the district
itself. Associated with both these represen-
tational practices were the inevitable practical
politics of defending the territory from
development, police pressure and legal threat.5
In short then early nonrepresentational prac-
tices developed from Beat aesthetic exper-
imentation did not develop in Venice as well as
it did in, say, Haight-Ashbury, because they
were affected by a different set of local politics
of representation.
And these battles over conserving the
infrastructural integrity of the Venice district
also had an effect on the wider cultural politics
that emerged and became predominant in the
Los Angeles counterculture. The Los Angeles
Free Press especially conducted a series of
campaigns directed against forces that the
editors and staff felt worked to create a sense
of geographical non-identity in the city. They
targeted a perceived lack of integrity to the
built environment in Los Angeles: Architectu-
rally ‘Los Angeles is a taco stand, a used car lot,
a chrome and glass restaurant, a laundromat, a
tract of filing cabinets . . . a junk yard’
(Chamberlain 1965: 1). This politics was
more traditional, even conservative, and
certainly representational culturally and pol-
itically, despite its nonrepresentational aspects.
And this encapsulates the experience
628 Simon Rycroft
of putative nonrepresentational countercul-
tural practices in 1960s Los Angeles: a power-
ful group of editors and journalists whose
politics were more traditionally radical tended
to sideline the kinds of creative, evocative
politics that thrived for longer in other cities.
The limits of representation and non-
representation
The main purpose of this paper has been to begin
to map an historical geography of nonrepresen-
tational ways of thinking by demonstrating how
the counterculture of the 1960s picked up upon
and operationalized many of the ideas currently
favoured by geographers and social scientists
wishing to develop a way of ‘understanding the
world in terms of effectivity rather than
representation’ (Thrift 2000a: 216). With these
connections in mind I want to draw out three
concluding points.
First, it can be argued that although many of
the counterculture’s practices explored the
nonrepresentational realm, they were still
engaged in representational practices, albeit
innovative ones. The counterculture devel-
oped performative practices that were at once
representational and nonrepresentational.
They did so by building upon aesthetic
developments in the visual and the performing
arts such as the abstraction of Op painting or
the Beat Generation’s fusion of poetry and
jazz. The countercultural practices that I have
described built upon and were part of a shift in
representational practices evident in the post-
war period. This shift was characterized by the
desire of artists and performers working in a
range of genres to evoke the full range of the
senses in the consumers and performers of
their work, to privilege more ways of knowing
than the cognitive, oral and visual. Creative
and aesthetic strategies in this way were
intended to talk directly to the embodied
subconscious by excluding or manipulating
figurative content in an effort to bypass
common association or received meanings.
Although nonrepresentational in this sense,
these were also, certainly in the case of the
countercultural practices reviewed here, rep-
resentational practices whose referent was a
newly conceived cosmic nature. Many in the
counterculture were fascinated by develop-
ments in technoscience, developments that
were beginning to reveal not only a quantum
understanding of the cosmos but also the role
that new technological objects could play in
connecting humanity to this realization.
Innovations in a range of communicative and
expressive media that were directed by the
counterculture attempted to evoke and re-
present these developments.
Second, the relative success of these prac-
tices in situ was closely tied to their
representation: as we have seen, even though
putative nonrepresentational ideas were cir-
culating through the pages of the underground
press in Los Angeles throughout the late 1960s
and early 1970s, they remained more rep-
resented than enacted and practised in the city.
The nonrepresentational was then ‘contingent
and exceptional rather than universal and
mundane’ (Revill 2004: 208). Specific material
and representational circumstances seem to
have affected the development of these
practices in the 1960s. In Los Angeles, the
counterculture emerged early in the 1960s
from civil rights and socialist foundations, was
particularly associated with the Venice district
and its travails over various redevelopment
initiatives, and within a year of its establish-
ment, was galvanized and bolstered by events
in Watts. The Los Angeles Free Press claimed
and exercised the power to represent the city’s
counterculture, a power that in speaking of
and speaking for its constituency, like
 Historical geography of nonrepresentation
all representational practices, tended to
exclude as well include. Here, that enframing
representational process worked both to deny
column inches to innovative countercultural
practices, but also, as the monopoly supplier
of underground information in Los Angeles
for a number of years, the Free Press favoured
other causes with its funds. Even within
minority media one cannot underestimate the
‘ineluctability and the resources of represen-
tation’ (Castree and MacMillan 2004: 474)
Nonrepresentational approaches do accept
these important political issues of power and
control that accompany representational prac-
tices. Much cultural geography of the last two
decades has been focused upon the same issues,
even though recent criticism suggests more
could have been done by cultural geographers
in this regard (Mitchell 1995, 2000).
But, whereas cultural geographers have con-
cerned themselves with exploring and exposing
the limits to representation, nonrepresenta-
tional approaches direct our attention to the
realms of what lies beyond those limits and
attempt to develop a different type of politics.
This politics would be a politics of evocation
rather than representation that, like the exper-
iments in performance and aesthetics developed
in the 1960s, would activate and bring about
new subjectivities. Just as the success of
countercultural experiments relied upon under-
ground media coverage, so the success of the
nonrepresentational project relies upon conven-
tional (academic) representational practices: the
‘challenge to the process of representation will
be carried out through the means of represen-
tation’ (Thrift and Dewsbury 2000: 427). It is
not my intention to suggest that the same fate
will ultimately befall nonrepresentational con-
cepts as that of the counterculture’s exper-
iments, but rather to point out that this way of
thinking has always struggled to escape rep-
resentational frameworks. As others have
629
suggested, it is sensible to simultaneously work
through both the limits to representation and
the dynamics of what lies beyond (Matless
2000; Nash 2000; Revill 2004).
Finally, the development of that new form of
politics needs not only to take account of the
difficulty in dissimilating the nonrepresenta-
tional project from representational practices
and politics, but also that representation itself
is not fixed or inflexible. Ironically, there is a
danger in nonrepresentational work of render-
ing representation a stereotypical concept, one
that is unchanging in its capacity to deaden,
exclude and enframe. But representation as a
practice is also subject to change. As we have
seen, during the postwar period various
representational practices attempted to evoke
a range of sensory, experiential and subcon-
scious responses in their consumers and
performers, creating decidedly nonrepresenta-
tional representational moments. This shift in
the representational register underpinned a
new form of politicking during the 1960s
similar to that proposed by nonrepresenta-
tional concepts in its emphasis on evocation
and creativity rather than conventional and
exclusive forms of political representation.
In Allan Katzman’s vision of an Underground
States of America, although exclusion is of
course explicit to the idea of charging an
entrance fee, one can see an expression of this
new politics where citizenship or a sense of
collective belonging entailed a conscious and
embodied knowledge of nonrepresentational
representational practices.
Notes
1 Many in the counterculture drew this notion of the true
self from the work of the psychotherapist R. D. Laing.
At the heart of this understanding was a tension within
the identity of the self. That tension arose because
self-identity was two-dimensional, a conjunction
630 Simon Rycroft
of self-identity for others and self-identity for oneself,
with the former ‘false self’ relating to objective
existence, and the latter, ‘true self’ concerning
subjective existence. One-dimensional society, Laing
argued, demanded a balance between the two, a
separation of the universes of consciousness and action
(Laing 1970: 94–105, see also Laing 1967, 1972).
For interesting accounts of Laing’s engagement with
the counterculture, see Crossley (1999) and DeKoven
(2003).
2 Youngblood followed the light-show and Acid Rock
scene in the city and throughout the country in a series
of columns entitled ‘Intermedia’ throughout the late
1960s and early 1970s. These columns and his
journalism formed the groundwork for his book
Expanded Cinema (Youngblood 1970b).
3 ‘Paleocybernetic is valuable as a conceptual tool with
which to grasp the significance of our present
environment: combining the primitive potential
associated with Paleolithic and the transcendental
integrities of “practical utopianism” associated with
Cybernetic. So I call it the Paleocybernetic Age:
an image of a hairy, buckskinned, barefooted atomic
physicist with a brain full of mescaline and logarithms,
working out the heuristics of computer-generated
holograms or krypton laser interferometry’ (Young-
blood 1970b: 41).
4 It must be noted that even though I can find no
reference to it, ‘Process’ could have been related to the
Scientology group of the same name, particularly
active in London at this time.
5 Interestingly, the various protest events organized by
the local counterculture to resist this pressure rarely
entailed the use of performative practices. Rather the
battles were fought in the spaces of representational
democracy: the court room and City Hall.
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Abstract translations
Vers une géographie historique de la non-représen-
tation: la fabrication du sujet de la contre-culture
dans les années 1960
Les expériences menées par la contre-culture des
années 1960 dans les arts, les médias, la culture,
les politiques et les pratiques quotidiennes ont
donné lieu à l’émergence d’un nombre de
perspectives non-représentatives. Un examen de
divers aspects et d’exemples de ces expériences
porte particulièrement sur la conception d’un
sujet de la contre-culture et sur les pratiques
performatives mises de l’avant pour donner forme
à ces sujets, parmi lesquelles les psychédéliques
et le cinéma souterrain. Les années 1960 ont vu
émerger les pratiques non-représentatives qui ont
prospéré dans certains milieux contre-culturels,
mais ont stagné dans d’autres. Bien que plusieurs
des pratiques de la contre-culture aient exploré le
monde de la non-représentativité, des pratiques
représentatives étaient également courantes. Le
succès de ces pratiques in situ dépendait en effet
de leur représentation. Dans les années 1960 à
Los Angeles, elles continuaient à être représentées
davantage que mises en œuvre et pratiquées dans
la ville. Dans les ouvrages non-représentatifs, il
existe un danger de faire de la représentation une
conception stéréotypée qui est figée dans sa
capacité pour pouvoir émousser, exclure
et encadrer. Toutefois, la pratique de la représen-
tation est appelée à changer. Durant la période
d’après-guerre, diverses pratiques représentatives
renvoyant à l’idée nouvelle qu’on se faisait du
cosmos ont tenté d’évoquer une série de réactions
sensorielles, expérimentales et subconscientes autant
chez leurs clientèles que leurs interprètes, qui ont
soutenu la création de moments nettement non-
représentatifs représentatifs.
Mots-clefs: contre-culture, années 1960, Los
Angeles, pensée non-représentative.
Hacia una geografı́a histórica de no-representación:
construyendo el sujeto contracultural en los años 60
Es en los experimentos dentro de las artes, los
medios de comunicación, la polı́tica y las prácticas
cotidianas desarrollados por la contracultura de los
años sesenta que salen muchas perspectivas no-
representativas. Estudio aquı́ aspectos y ejemplos de
aqellos experimentos, centrando en particular en la
construcción del sujeto de contracultura y en
algunas de las prácticas performativas que fueron
desarrolladas para moldear aquellos sujetos, como
por ejemplo psicodélicos y cine clandestino.
Durante los años sesenta las prácticas no-represen-
tacionales salieron y crecieron con fuerza en
algunos cotos de la vida contracultural mientras
que desarrollaron con dificultad en otros. Aunque
muchas de las prácticas contraculturales explor-
aban la esfera no-representacional, también parti-
cipaban en prácticas representacionales. El éxito
relativo de estas prácticas en su lugar estaba
estrechamente ligado a su representación. En la
ciudad de Los Angeles de los años sesenta
continuaban a ser más representadas que actuadas
y practicadas en la ciudad. En el trabajo no-
representacional se corre el peligro de interpretar la
representación como un concepto estereotı́pico, un
concepto que no altera su capacidad de amortiguar,
de excluir y de enmarcar. Y sin embargo, la
 Historical geography of nonrepresentation 633

representación como práctica es también sujeto a
cambios. Durante el periodo pos-guerra varias
prácticas representacionales, el referente de las
cuales era un cosmos nuevamente comprendido,
pretendı́an evocar una variedad de respuestas
sensoriales, experienciales y subconscientes en sus
consumidores y actores, creando momentos repre-
sentacionales decidiamente no-representacionales.
Palabras claves: contracultura, los años 60, Los
Angeles, pensamiento no-representacional.