and there is today hardly any literature, art, or poetry to challenge the adversary
“counterculture” (Heath & Potter 2005: 201).
Rather it is in the capitals of bohemia and counterculture where contemporary
capitalism thrives best, and this is thanks to the counterculture. This can be seen
clearly in Richard Florida’s study of the San Francisco bay area in his book The Rise
of the Creative Class (2002). What Florida sees here is the combination of Protes-
tant work ethics with Bohemian values, something he calls the “Big Morph”. It is a
conflation that transcends what was before seen as an opposition, and in the proc-
ess it generates vast amounts of money (Florida 2002: 190). If the counterculture is
avant-gardist in any way, it is because it mobilizes the “shock troops” of capitalism,
which in their quest for “authenticity” pave the road for gentrification, mass tour-
ism, and the changing expressions of fashion.
Indeed, Heath and Potter’s analysis breaks apart some of the myths of the counter-
culture, but what they fail to take further is that this myth also brings about discus-
sions and action on how we want society to look. It sometimes proposes goals and
means outside the agendas and practices proposed by parliamentary politics, which
politicians offer as the only solution to political problems. Counterculture might
offer no threat to capitalism, and it is hardly revolutionary, but it still lifts politics
into a discussion on how things “might be” and does not chain political visions to
how “things are”. In their great effort of “disabusing the masses of the countercul-
tural ‘myth’ [...] they fail to see that [...] the myth sells valuable incremental re-
form.” (Harold 2007: 68)
The conception that cultures of resistance have to be placed outside the economy
to be “authentic” may have been a misconception from the start. As the theorist
Angela McRobbie (1994) has shown, it is mainly a myth produced by sociologists,
promoting a viewpoint on what “authentic rebellion” is. In the examples of punk
McRobbie describes this process closely. For McRobbie there was never such thing
as a “pure” punk subculture disconnected from the economy. She means that this
view goes against many of the classic academic studies of subcultures, which have
focused on the autonomous ”performance” of subculture.
the very idea that style could be purchased over the counter went against the grain of
those analyses which saw the adoption, for example, of punk style as an act of creative
defiance far removed from the mundane act of buying. The role of McLaren and West-
wood was also downgraded for the similar reason that punk was seen as a kind of
collective creative impulse. To focus on a designer and an art-school entrepreneur
would have been to undermine the ’purity’ or ’authenticity’ of the subculture. (136f )According to McRobbie, it is not only on the stage or on the street fashion scenes
emerge or take place. Street fashion scenes come about in the informal backstage of
culture, in the seeking, discussing, picking, trading, wearing and reselling of the
cultural commodities, something that is often done by the girlfriends of the sub-
cultural “icons”.
shops like the ‘Sex’ shop run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood func-
tioned also as meeting places where the customers and those behind the counter got
to know each other and met up later in the pubs and clubs. Indeed [...] there is more
to buying and selling subcultural style than the simple exchange of cash for goods.
(136)The cultural entrepreneurship of the street styles has been neglected since it made
youth culture and anti-materialist resistance look like just another form of capital-