'Indisciplinary Techniques', Resistance and the English Counterculture

Seminar abstract

John Roberts' talk will present material from his forthcoming book, Red Days: Popular Music and the English Counterculture, 1965 - 1975 (Minor Compositions, 2020).

The English musical counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s is much mythologised or airily dismissed, at the expense of any concrete analysis of the extraordinary cultural insurgency undertaken by a newly ambitious generation of working class and lower-middle class musicians.

In this respect, the English-counterculture bears close comparison to the achievements of the Weimar Republic (1920 - 1932) and the American Culture Front (1934 - 1944).

All three periods last for around the same length of time and all operate as modernist/avant-garde and anti-imperialist clearing zones, as the basis for the radical remaking of popular culture from below.

Indeed, the English musical counterculture is the modernist revolution that 20th century modern English culture never had.

Booking

This is seminar is free for everyone to attend, there is no need to book in advance.

Please feel free to bring along your friends, colleagues and classmates.

Speaker bio

Professor John Roberts is a Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton.

He is an internationally known writer, in the areas of art theory, cultural philosophy as well as art and political philosophy, and authored numerous books including;

• The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling Art After Readymade  (Verso, 2007)
• The Necessity of Errors (Verso, 2010)
• Photography and Its Violations (Columbia Univ. Press, 2014)
• Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (Verso, 2015)
• The Reasoning of Unreason: Universalism, Capitalism and Disenlightenment (Bloomsbury, 2018)

Professor Roberts' recent research has covered;

• Historical and contemporary avant-garde
• Political economy of art
• art and social agency
• skill and deskilling art
• art and the 'everyday' 
• photography

He is currently working on a project on reason, person-hood, and the Enlightenment