Another piece from another notebook: documentary evidence
pertaining to an event organized in 2006. Followed by some brief supplementary
notes.
A tip of the hat to friends: the good Drs. Ashford, Brown
and Pender.
*
In March 1967 International Times, London’s premier
‘underground’ publication was subject to a police raid following a complaint to
the Department of Public Prosecution. In protest against this ‘piece of classic
intimidation’, poet Harry Fainlight roused various staff members and supporters
into staging an impromptu happening, ‘The Death of IT’. Spilling out from
UFO, a nightclub linked to the newspaper, several ‘pallbearers’ carried a
coffin containing Fainlight down Tottenham Court Road and onto Charing Cross.
They were following a route which would noisily weave through Trafalgar Square
and Whitehall eventually arriving at the Cenotaph to meet an assembled group of
photographers and journalists. In addition to the press this colourful, traffic
disrupting group also attracted the attention of the police. According to
author, musician and one time IT editor, Mick Farren, a confrontation was
avoided by the happening participants escaping into a tube station, thereby
getting off the ‘all too historic streets and causing the plods a good deal of
jurisdictional confusion’. Farren continues:
[…] the underground decanted into the Underground and
rode around with coffin and noise spreading alarm…At first we rode at random,
but with a pigeon-like hippie homing instinct we ended up circling the Circle
Line until we arrived at Notting Hill Gate where we re-emerged into the surface
world and began to wend our way north up Portobello Road, to the obvious
displeasure of the market traders who had just set up for Saturday, the big
business day.
Farren shows the tube offering a space conducive to the
carnivalesque aims of the happening. The retreat is not so much an admission of
defeat, a loss of the attacking impetus as it is a movement into psychogeographical
‘play’. The circling and the eventual wormhole-like re-emergence represent an
effective negotiation of various surface-based restrictions through a
non-standard experience of London’s transport system. The gravitation described
thus suggests that there is perhaps more than mere ‘semantic coincidence’
linking the word ‘underground’ as a spatial concept to its role as a cultural
signifier.
It was this intersection and its multiple permutations which
formed the focus of Urban Underworld, an international conference held at the
University of Cambridge in September 2006. Responding to the general subject
rubric of ‘London’s social, spatial and cultural undergrounds from 1825 to the
present day’, Eighteen speakers presented on a variety of topics including;
Jack the Ripper, Quatermass, Iain Sinclair, Mark Augé, Creep, Alexander
Trocchi, Henry Meyhew, narratives of descent, criminal slang, The Wombles and
others. A performative element was also incorporated with the event concluding
with a special happening featuring Michael Horovitz, Ian Patterson, free jazz
quartet Barkingside and films by Rod Mengham and Marc Atkins. The event aimed
to highlight potentially unexpected points of overlap between literary,
cultural and historical perspectives of the underground in its various
manifestations.
*
Spatial metaphors seen to proliferate when considering
notions of the counterculture: underground, subterranean, marginal, periphery.
Associated terms like ‘heathen’ spring to mind with its combination of theology
and geography. To be out on the heath means to be ‘outside’ both in terms of a
physical position and a subject position. Trocchi understood the normative
binary at play in these distinctions. Hence, the Sigma project aimed towards a
totalization of the spontaneous activities described by Farren. Trocchi wanted
the ‘underground’ to be rendered almost indistinguishable from its opposite so
as to participate in an efficient ‘outflanking’ rather than a frontal attack.
There’s a similar scene in Kerouac’s Big Sur (1962) where Jack Dulouz finds
himself in a strange liminal zone. Walking back to San Francisco from Bixby
Canyon he feels cast out of his retreat but at odds with the flow of tourists
driving to the coast. He’s neither at the centre nor the periphery; the city
nor the sea, and is momentarily aware of the contingency of both spaces.
Neither has the oppositional silence that's posited at the start of the book as
a productive alternative, counterpoint and / or escape.
The oppositional structure of any ‘counter’-claim threatens
to negate the potency of its stance. As a label, the ‘counter’ is constantly
haunted by that which it seeks to oppose even if such ‘opposition’ takes the
form of rejection, flight or transplantation. In the meantime the centre is a
black hole: dense, oblivious. ‘Culture’ is the more operative and useful of the
combination. Raymond Williams offers sage counsel: “one of the two or three
most difficult words in the English language”. Let’s plough on anyway:
1. The independent and abstract noun which describes a
general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic
development.
2. The independent noun whether used generally or
specifically which indicates a particular way of life, whether of a people,
period or group.
3. The independent and abstract noun which describes the
works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity.
And then there’s the link to the cultivation of plants, by
way of cultūra, ‘cultivating’, from colere ‘to till’. This root in tillage puts
a useful spin on the notion of counterculture and its possibilities, not least
because it highlights the presence within the term of concepts relating to
geography and materiality. To understand ‘counterculture’ in this light, leads
not to hypothetical spaces of alterity but different modes of cultivation
within a shared stretch of land. The recourse to utopian impossibility is still
easy, of course, (associative conceptions of hidden islands, enclaves and
untouched spots) but grounding the signification of the word in cultivation
rather than confrontation at the very least modifies a restrictive binarism. I
guess in this mode the notion of an ‘underworld’ ceases to act as a level
within a two-story model but begins to connote something akin to a substrate, a
kind of sedimentary matter: the material that underpins and constitutes a given
architecture. Such a model posits a reiterative language of counter activity
(re-structuring, re-organisation, re-constitution), as opposed to one that is
projective.
Nothing new.
