The Counterculture, Social Fear, and a Rationale for a Theory of Narrative Movements
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | My project is a study of the counterculture movement and deals specifically with the issue of social fear conditioning during post-War America. I distinguish between three types of counterculture narratives (fiction, non-fiction, and literary journalism) and suggest a key role for these narratives in responding to the production of artificial cultural stimuli. I recognize the American society of the post-War period as a network society, whose mass-communication of propaganda played a major role in social fear conditioning through the fabrication of selective associations to fear-related ancestral conditions. Then I analyze the reception of the counterculture ideology from a cognitive-evolutionary perspective, taking into consideration the psychological and ecological factors underlying the success of the counterculture as a set of (potentially) evolved cultural variants. I will use the findings to analyze the possible ways by which the different texts understudy contributed collectively in the mitigation of the susceptibility to American propaganda and build on this case study to suggest a universal function for “narrative” as a prime mover behind the formation of social movements. I propose to call Narrative Movement the set of “networked” narratives which has the capacity to stir dissidence and revolt by manipulating the cognitive infrastructure of information-transmission. |
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