The Tie-Dyed Owl of Minerva

I spent my adolescence canvassing countercultures. There was a systematic, detached quality to this. I treated each counterculture as a system, probing its limits while considering it both on its own terms and in relation to its antecedents and progeny.

I started in my pre-adolescence with heavy metal and then worked my way up through the obvious contemporary touchstones such as punk rock, jam bands, hip hop, and skateboarding before working my way back through things like jazz/blues, folk, the Beat Generation, and Transcendentalism. In time, broader artistic, intellectual and social corollaries (Dada, postcolonialism, world systems theory, existentialism, surrealism, etc.) joined the pack as I became more sophisticated.

As with most things American, despite nodding recognition of the international context, this countercultural lineage can be provincial. Anthropology and history provide us with strikingly different iterations of human life and experience. Humans can organize themselves in all manner of fascinating ways. As the late David Graeber notes in Possibilities, it can be illuminating and revolutionary to consider the full breadth of documented human modes of life.

Still, for me, there was understandably a certain immediacy to the movements that had most directly arisen from some approximation of my own place and time. It’s worth knowing what humans are capable of when evaluating a social order but applying those insights to the here and now can be unwieldy. Naturally, this isn’t an either-or, and a sharp social thinker will pay attention to both the near and far, but the point still stands.

There was also something personal about that journey of discovery. As the millennial child of boomers, I had the sense that I was growing up in a milieu of digested, semi-digested, undigested, and rejected ‘60s failure, as splendidly captured in books like Pynchon’s Vineland. I still have that feeling when I visit my hometown. That presence isn’t too overt, though the cultural reverberations of my parents’ generation are still in the air in bizarre and bewildering permutations.

Speaking of home, growing up in a rural area in the ‘90s probably fed my countercultural agnosticism and roving eye. With a high school class of 80 students in an effectively pre-internet era, you could only be so particular in your tastes. This was, of course, limiting. At the same time, from another vantage point, there’s a species of broadmindedness that having access to nothing provides that having access to everything chokes out. Constraints both curtail and foster.

As millennials we were (are?) typically more sincere and outwardly focused than our Gen X older siblings. I wanted change, and the stifling irony and cynicism of the placid ‘90s grated. This itself seems quaint now—I’m old enough to remember when the problem was apathy and ignorance rather than rage and information overload.

Perhaps partially because of that generational quirk, I lost track of the countercultural thread for a while, focusing on more direct study of policy and the “timeless” questions traditionally addressed by Western philosophy. I didn’t retreat into full philosophical materialism, I still thought culture mattered and was interesting, but I shifted my attention elsewhere for a time.

I’d had some proclivities back in the direction of culture for a few years before getting to South America, but that interest has deepened and become more central since moving to Colombia. In Bogota, I’ve found myself reconfronted with many of the movements of my past, though in new and illuminating ways.

This hit me over the weekend when I went to see a showing of the film Suenos en Concreto, which documents a social movement in Cali that built a monument of a fist clutching a placard that read “Resist!” I can picture myself rolling my eyes at such a literal, monochromatic statement if such were made in the US. However, that self-indulgent irony would be decadent in a setting where the artists behind the monument spent years of their lives in prison or were forced to flee their country for that or similar displays of defiance.

I’ve found the same to be true of Colombian heavy metal, comic books, street art, and the like. Not only is their content of course unique insofar as that material is put on a more specifically Colombian register, but their more severe social context lends them profound urgency and depth.

Thus, like some dark horse version of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, I find the old countercultural threads of my past resurfacing in new and arguably more realized form. I’d previously had moments of impatience with what had seemed like the stalled momentum of the counterculture (yet another unreflective EZLN t-shirt, cup of organic coffee, pink mohawk, dreads on a white guy). Yet, as my (our?) countercultural dialectic begins a new cycle of the revised past, I find muted fissures and gaps in the initial movements resurface with meanings not only previously unrecognized but previously unimaginable.

The Gen X strategy of encoding political messages in art might have run a little short, but millennial earnestness has just as much lost its center. On a personal level, this generates a paradoxically apolitical quality to aesthetic political engagement. Hiding out from the construction of the world we now inhabit (Trumpism, Instagram, AI, Elon Musk) in a South American bunker is arguably both forward-looking and nostalgic. By working backwards through the cultural antecedents of the present, I’m looking forward—or so it seems.

Perhaps, following Hegel, some tie-dyed Owl of Minerva is spreading its wings on the coming of this dusk.