Falling out of love with the counter-culture
What participation in Burning Man culture taught me about navigating the devastated zones of aesthetic experience.
A promise of transformation
As someone who has consistently failed to understand, idealise or execute ‘normal’, conformism has never been my vibration. A mash of hipster-hippie ‘alternative’ infused my socio-aesthetic activities from high school through to my late twenties, as I attempted to find, communicate and belong myself.
For a long time, I sought a sense of coherence and collectivism in Queensland’s radical subcultural offerings that aimed to live in defiance of the dominant mode. I found regional Burning Man events, investing myself in building radical communities that could offer a space of escape and subversion.
At varying stages of authenticity, appropriation and evolution, this global culture remains ever-informed by the creative efflorescence and revolutionary imagination of the 1960’s: of freedom from work, the power of self-expression and the sense of spiritual realisation that could counter the numbing stupor of bureaucracy and suburbia. I adored the keen sense of anything-can-happen and the spirit of camaraderie amongst this collection of outsiders. But at its core, I was invested in the pursuit of social, spiritual and political liberation that these socio-aesthetic activities promised. A rejection of corporatism and capitalism in favour of authenticity and connection. A flurry of love, awe, absurdity and magic against a backdrop of hard work, nature and community. I readily absorbed the verbal emanations from participants, that within a span of five days on site, they felt that they had been irreversibly transformed. The potential was dazzling and palpable, and not matched by anything I had experienced in the contemporary art world, which also regularly promised transcendence.
This romanticisation meant that the fall from grace was quite piercing, as the walls I had built around the cognitive dissonance fell all at once. A growing series of interpersonal blows compounded with ongoing struggles to bring the community into a reckoning with privilege, responsibility and power.
While I might not be the first to leave a counter-cultural space in disillusionment when the gap between theory and practice becomes too wide and oblique, I also couldn’t unsee how the socio-aesthetic landscape of a burn wasn’t just stuck in the past. It seemed to synthesise and mirror the rest of the contemporary landscape that we interface with everyday. How did a decades old subculture manage to capture the energetic oppressions of the now? In this, I realised that such ‘transformative’ spaces had never been utopias free from capitalist alienation, but actually places of socio-aesthetic practice that informed capitalism’s aesthetic and economic trajectory. In the current late capitalist context, ‘transformative’ aesthetic experiences are not just so readily available that they are ordinary, they are a key method of extraction that have been innovated and fostered in part by the acid activists, ontological anarchists and non-dual dissidents. Was this counter-culture, in fact, training us to be the ideal late capitalist subjects?
Direct action on the nervous system
Attending a burn means being exposed to an intense affective array: hugs, eye contact, bare skin, charismatic vocal prosodies, large-scale fire, bold colours, bright lights, sparkly things, vibrational drone sounds, rythmic beats and expansive horizons enhanced by a potent combination of chemical assistance, physical exhaustion, unfamiliarity and sleep deprivation. These affects are a key part of its transformative architecture: constant exposure to aesthetic proto-forms with the capacity to disrupt and open experience. (1) “Nonconscious, never-to-be-conscious autonomic remainders”, sensory experiences that enter before meaning making. (2) Philosopher Brian Massumi says that affects are ‘narratively de-localized’; they don’t carry messages that we can cognitively isolate, extract and analyse. (3) They actually don’t inherently mean anything. Instead, they enter straight into the bodymind and compulse a pre-conscious response. However, they still influence meaning-making as they are looped into narrative in the following moments, to maintain continuity and make sense of our embodied response. Massumi argues that affect actually has primacy in our response to the aesthetic environment, over the more cognitive processes of engagement that we tend to foreground in arts education and media discourse. (4) Affects can thus be extremely powerful. They have a motivational quality, what Massumi calls “an active pressure towards taking form” or “an appetite for [their] own eventuation”. (5) If a strong enough affect can be propelled into another’s bodymind, it means they might be driven to engage, respond, and act with immediacy - one of Burning Man’s cultural touchstones.
In burner spaces, the principle of immediacy is frequently evoked but never entirely explained. It generally operates as a kind of shorthand, used to rationalise or encourage experiences that are deemed more direct, automatic, autonomic, authentic and ‘real’ over their mediated substitutes. Mediation is thus contrasted as fake, less real, less trustworthy and less valuable. The belief is that unmediated, immediate, experience reaches a deeper place beneath the barriers of habitual thinking and ideas, and thus has a unique capacity to drive self-realisation.
One aesthetic methodology of the burn is to distill affect to the extreme through abstraction and minimalism. It rides the coat tails of ‘artistic autonomy’ which emerged in modern art as a counterpoint to Western pre-modern governing regimes that used to control cultural symbolism and collective morality (the church, the monarchy, the state). The belief of artistic autonomy was that aesthetics which were freely self-determining were innately liberatory because, like a liberated individual, they were rendered able to govern themselves. However, these modern art movements also progressively voided art of explicit, traceable, informational content. They had little-no semiotic hooks or hinges on which to hang meaning. No symbolic, representational or cognitive messaging, no orienting cultural or political information. As much as possible, no signs, no form, only affect; a flat colour, a drone, a void. The affect was the transcendent end in itself, which would be trapped or tainted by explicitly communicated politics. Many artists of this era aimed to further transcend humanity and tap into a sense of the universal, as did Lucio Fontana, the founder of revolutionary art movement Spatialism. Famous for his slashed canvases, his pursuit was to escape form and expand into an experience of space, stating in 1967 “Now you see infinity…here is the void, man is reduced to nothing…And my art too is all based on this purity, on this philosophy of nothing, which is not a destructive nothing, but a creative nothing”. (6) Universal potential. However, Gilles Deleuze has famously described this rise of affect over the representational as constituting a kind of violence: unmediated stimulation directly accessing the nervous system without meaning-making orientation to soften the blow. (7) The immediacy of pure sensation just hits you.
This approach is typified in Burning Man’s large-scale artworks which regularly see participants basking under massive, hypnotic light installations that riff on sacred geometry. Quietly consuming sensory-induced awe. Something in us is drawn to these kinds of spiritual fairgrounds. They glamour with a sense of something bigger than us - a peak experience, a non-dual connection with the universe. But, as I have engaged with this community that makes peak experience a regular engagement, I have not seen liberation - at least not of the kind that helps us to recognise and reduce systemic oppression for all. The risk with peak experiences is that they have you feel like something is changing, but change is not guaranteed. Without some kind of narrative framework and political steering that integrates the peak experience with our everyday political lives, we remain in the realm of pure potential. We feel compelled, and then …? (seek or spend). A perfect grease for the attention economy. Meanwhile, awe is now considered so politically safe that the state will readily commission abstract, awe-inducing artworks over the risk of more narratively complex pieces that are inherently liable to create social or discursive friction by the very nature of them having ‘content’.
This is one of the reasons why author Anna Kornbluh argues that immediacy is a constituent aesthetic of contemporary capitalism. Engaging with medium alone is no longer enough of a sensory encounter. Now, an art experience has to enter the whole bodymind, engulfing or ‘immersing’ the spectator, “interpellating a subject of utter sensation whose discipline attunes cultural consumption and corporeal optimization”. (8) She reminds us that, in aesthetic theory’s traditions, mediation is actually an active process of relating and meaning-making by engaging with medium; “making available in language and image and rhythm the super-valent abstractions otherwise unavailable to our sensuous perception—like “justice” or “value.””(9) In this way, immediacy is not only profitable but ideal for a system of consumptive oppression that seeks to remain in place, because the more we stay in immediate experience, the less we can engage in consciousness-raising of the political kind - a kind that takes a great deal of time, a great deal of considered thinking, and a great deal of processing on all levels of experience.
Just go with the flow.
Most of the time, rather than a singular, purified moment of awe, affects engage us in aggregate with other signs and symbols. Under contemporary capitalism, this increasingly occurs in fragments of intense but decontextualised semiology, entering our system in a neverending flow from digital and material spheres. This is the other major aesthetic experience of a burn: a potpourri of cultural, spiritual, historical and futuristic signifiers presented in costumes, sculptures and architectures that are endlessly recombined in infinite assemblages. Another kind of non-duality where, instead of purifying from meaning to nothing, the constant content creates nothing. This same energy is also reflected in the sociality of a burn, where one will inevitably encounter a medley of spontaneous interactions that can disappear as quickly as they appeared, leaving you disoriented but vaguely inspired. Fall in love with a space man and never see them again. Talk existentialism with a stranger covered in LEDs. Watch a choir of cats instantaneously assemble and disassemble after their rendition of a hit song by Queen (in meows). Nothing stays or completes, the flow must go on.
Here, experiential offerings of pranksterism, performance art and participatory activity are created by the attendees, informed by modernist counter-cultural movements who practiced a kind of liberatory nonsense and believed in the radical potential of a party. Such activity frequently references Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters who originated a defiant acid culture as a means to stick a middle finger to the establishment, and The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence who used drag and religious imagery to protest issues of sex, gender, and morality with satirical street performance. More recently, this aesthetic absurdity and assemblage was used by Extinction Rebellion, exemplified when they disseminated droll image and commentary of their giant, millennial pink octopus affectionately named Jeanne-Luc being kettled by the police (“ANYONE HELPING THE OCTOPUS WILL BE ARRESTED BY THE STATE” announced one commentator on Twitter). (10)
Semi-fictional theorist Hakim Bey is credited as a key thinker who synthesised this counter-cultural activity, influencing the trips to the desert that prefigured Burning Man. For Bey, individuals could be ‘woken up’ from their capitalist alienation with unexpected experiences that liberated their imagination. This could drive someone to seek out a more intense state of existence where life’s essence can win over any and all dogma. The practice wielded spontaneous acts of poetic terrorism and art sabotage that he called ontological anarchism. Of this, Bey provides numerous examples in his 1985 exposition: “Weird dancing in all-night computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they’re the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss.”(11) It can be anything, as long as the aesthetic shock produced is vivid, “at least as strong as the emotion of terror — powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst”. (12) The more disorienting, overwhelming and altering the better, because that vulnerability laid the groundwork for transformation. Break the sensemaking anchors: non-sense is the goal, pure potentiality… to land and solidify is to control and institutionalise and that’s what the machinery of capitalism does.
Bey has been readily critiqued for some of the elements starkly absent from his philosophy: namely consent, care, and collectivity. Those who romanticise the heroes of the counter-culture never seem to engage with the reality of its dark side. I think frequently about an emblematic moment recounted by journalist Tom Wolfe, where a member of the Merry Pranksters had an acid-induced psychotic break whilst on their road trip, and the response was simply to leave her by the side of the road. “You’re either on the bus or off the bus” was the oft-touted refrain. (13) Something more universal is stake. I recognise this moment as characteristic of my own lesser but common experiences and observations. An implicit and explicit message whenever a light was shone on an uncomfortable issue or experience. “You’re ruining the fun/missing the point/thinking to much/just not open enough - you just need to learn to go with the flow”. Immediacy doesn’t wait for stragglers.
What is critiqued less often is the lack of consent, care and collectivity in the treatment of aesthetics themselves. It is generally not until a hippie wears something that amounts to cultural appropriation that their aesthetic practice is denounced. However, cultural appropriation is a symptom of a deeper issue: that there is no consideration for historical or cultural legacies, collective meanings and the long-term ramifications of endless aesthetic decontextualisation and recombination. As elaborated in Capitalist Realism, we now “trudge through the ruins and the relics” of the aesthetic landscape since beliefs have collapsed at the level of symbolism, bringing with it an immense desacralisation of culture, with ad-hoc reinscription that can only exist if it benefits someone somewhere else in the economic food chain. (14)
I now recognise the aesthetic practices of a burn as exceedingly colonial as well as capitalist, the two being so intimately intertwined. Tyson Yunkaporta is one of many philosophers to describe the thick, responsible and intergenerational knitting of symbols with knowledges, narratives, cultural practices, sciences, care for Country and spirituality that constitutes an Indigenous Australian ontology (or as he calls the practice in Sand Talk, “supra-rational interdimensional ontology endogenous to custodial ritual complexes”). (15) Burners will wonder why they struggle to gain racial diversity at their event, failing to recognise that the event is not just unsafe socio-politically but also aesthetically: that this kind of cultural destruction has been utilised by colonists to further supremacy agendas for centuries, and the pastiche implicitly signals a cultural clash no matter how many others one strives to universally ‘include’. I view this Indigenous ontology to have been warding against what now seems like the natural outcome of Bey’s pranksterism - for me, symbolised by that image of ‘Q-shaman’ amongst the unlikely collection who stormed the capitol in 2021. An event dubbed by Twitter as “white supremacist Burning Man” and incisefully posited by one blogger to be “not a coup but a carnival”. (16)
Many of us are still coming to terms not just with the failures of the counter-culture, but the fact that it ushered in something new and more lifelike in its fragmented, overstimulating complexity that is, in a sense, more dangerous. As art theorist Lane Relyea points out, late capitalism actually sold itself to us as a kind of artistic revolution of autonomy and self-realisation, a rebellion against conformity, bureacracy and red tape. However, it did so with a hidden agenda to shift risk onto the individuals and decimate government support. He therefore argues that this still-ubiquitous archetype, a “hacker of culture and poet of the everyday” who searches for a more rich and authentic existence actually plays into neoliberal ideals rather than resisting them. (17) That “our sense of expanded agency has been purchased largely through an aggressive shattering and collapse of the larger social structure”, and should be viewed as a tragedy rather than a triumph. (18) The global Burner movements and their antecedents may not have subverted anything at all, but rather aided in innovating it. Perhaps a burn is better viewed as a kind of nervous system training for ‘going with the flow’ of increasing socio-economic and aesthetic precarity.
Better pleasures.
In one of her best known essays The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1978), Audre Lorde constructs the erotic in contrast to the pornographic, explaining that they are too-often confused. Instead of bringing a feeling forward to be felt and made into meaning, the pornographic actually suppresses feeling by emphasising an abstract and acute sensation instead. With pornography, we have no intention of engaging in the multilayered, complex, contextual and time-bound reality of relational efforts, responsibilities and risks. But, we desire the immediate affect, and thus pornography provides. However, this also comes without the deep sense of satisfaction or completion that emerges from an erotic encounter with a whole and complex other. Lorde considers the erotic to be a spiritual endeavour, pointing out how patriarchal, colonial enlightenment thinking has taught us to separate them, “reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing.” (19)
I recognise all kinds of pornographies perpetuated by capitalism’s immediacy. Pornographies of freedom, of enlightenment, of liberation, of politics, of relationships, of community, and of art. Flat substitutes which keep us in constant consumptive movement, but which, ironically, are actually incredibly ascetic. However, Lorde says that, in this context, the erotic can be a powerful measuring stick: “a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe”. (20)
Many critiques of burner culture take aim at the excessive consumption, noting the shocking privilege and scale of the endeavour amongst a backdrop of austerity and environmental crisis. This is certainly a powerful juxtaposition to frame. However, Robert Pfaller suggests the radical possibilities of pleasure in a society and economy, and notes that blanket austerity might not be the way through, since the fragmented deluge has an austerity of its own; an essence of never-landing, never-completing, and thus never building. He writes,
“Today, we spend without noticing. Our consumption exists, but not on a grand scale abounding with pleasure. This is why today’s society destroys its surpluses through forms of unconscious pleasure that are actually neurotic and devoid of pleasure… Just as there are societies that know they make magic and those that are not aware of that, there are societies that know they spend and those that are not aware of it. It is the latter that have created huge spending mechanisms that gobble up their sources. Since they are not aware of it, they also miss out on the magical glow, the glamour of their spending, and thus no longer know the feeling of doing things on a grand scale.” (21)
When we have become disillusioned, it is oftentimes easier to relegate an entire experience to the category of “fucked up”, “toxic” and “the past” than to remember its whole. However, in reality, burn experiences are swampy, fluctuating on a spectrum between pornography and eros. With enough distance, I recognise that the dynamics I have described are characteristic of burn culture, but are not the entirety. Part of what is crazymaking about a burn is that it doesn’t just host moments of addictive, shallow stimulation, but also some of the most thickly joyful connection, and the same can be said for capitalism at large. Where there were plenty of hugs from strangers designed to induce immediate sensations of love without relationship, there are also people I continue to love over years of friction and complexity. Affect, context and meaning looping together, jostling to cohere in a way that make new sense rather than dismantle it. When I think about these moments, I remember that the main reason certain experiences are desirable for capitalism to pornogrify is precisely because the original versions are both brilliant, and ever-rarer under current conditions of its own making. Capitalism is hyperventilating, trying desperately to find the moments it can still harness, and I believe it is coming upon its limits.
Thus, what I am now interested in is the aesthetic task of sorting-through, discerning, fleshing out, weaving, healing, contextualising, bolstering and being custodian to the soulfulness in each of these complex knots. Finding ways to be satiated rather than seeking, landing together to celebrate the gifts that orient human alive-ness. Repairing a collective, embodied coherence that can buttress our political work and prevent the further hemorrhaging of leftists to emerging reactionary movements and spiritual bypasses with pornographied promises. Living in the paradox that we have to know what erotic surplus feels like in order to discern ascetic wastefulness.
This is a liberatory socio-aesthetic cause that counter-cultural movements could more expressly take up. However, my sense is that to do so takes an appetite for getting comfortable with ambiguity. The disquieting truth is, since the emergence of modernism, counter-cultures have appropriated life, just like capitalism. We are still making plenty of our own pornographies that are getting more and more immediate, immersive, participatory and lifelike. It seems to me that it is all too easy for the erotic original and the capitalist imitation to coagulate and overlap. Sometimes they feel the same, operate the same, and the distinction lies only in the frame or the individual’s processing of the moment thereafter. And while this places us in an awkward position, our denial does nothing to help us steer away from our current shared trajectory. Swampy, indeterminate activities have the capacity to reveal limits, nuances and new distinctions. Distinctions that might just be able to nurture a form of socio-aesthetic literacy which can assist us to keep our bearings in the devastated zones of experience.
(1) Genosko (2016). Critical Semiotics: Theory, from Information to Affect. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 2
(2) Massumi, B. (2021). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation (Twentieth anniversary edition.). Duke University Press. p. 25
(3) Ibid.
(4) Ibid., p. 24
(5) Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of affect. Polity. p. 205
(6) Barcio, P. (2016). Cutting the Canvas—The Story of Lucio Fontana | Ideelart. IdeelArt.Com. https://www.ideelart.com/magazine/lucio-fontana
(7) Berry, J. (2019). Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry. Sternberg Press. p. 90, quoting Gilles Deleuze’s description of a Francis Bacon painting.
(8) Kornbluh, A. (2024). Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism. Verso Trade. p. 2
(9) Ibid., p. 5
(10) Mills, J. (2019, October 9). Police kettle giant pink octopus and march it to Trafalgar Square. Metro. https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/09/police-kettle-giant-pink-octopus-march-trafalgar-square-10889223/
(11) Bey, H. (1985). T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Theanarchistlibrary.Org. p. 9
(12) Ibid.
(13) Wolfe, T. (1968). The electric kool-aid acid test.
(14) Fisher, M. (2010). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books. p. 4
(15) Yunkaporta, T. (2019). Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. Text Publishing. p. 22
(16) Lhooq, M. (2021, January 8). DC WAS MAGA BURNING MAN [Substack newsletter]. Rave New World. https://ravenewworld.substack.com/p/dc-was-maga-burning-man
(17) Relyea, L. (2013). Your everyday art world. MIT Press. p. 12
(18) Ibid., p. 13
(19) Lorde, A. (2019). Sister outsider. Penguin Books. p. 46
(20) Ibid., p. 44
(21) Pfaller, R. (2011). Wofür es sich zu leben lohnt: Elemente materialistischer Philosophie (5th edition). S. Fischer Verlag. p. 203 & 204. In Kunst, B. (2015). Artist at Work, Proximity of Art and Capitalism. John Hunt Publishing. p. 179-180
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