Bohemian-working-class alliance powered British and Irish popular culture
Evidence
In terms of art and education, what we are potentially seeing here is the reconsolidation of a relationship between bohemia — those elements of the bourgeoisie, which disdain business values — and the working class. That relationship — which allowed the arty working class to escape drudgery, and for the bohemian middle class to make contact with the mutational energies of proletarian culture — was the engine of British and Irish popular culture during the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1558
Categorization
- ADDENDUM: Bear directly on the trees/class-material angle only loosely — but more relevantly, this bohemia-proletariat alliance thesis offers a materialist explanation for how cultural innovation actually happens (like bark cloth artisans or grafting practice), worth linking to how underclass craft is appropriated by elites.
- XREF: Echoes the culture-industry debates in Adorno/Horkheimer but reverses them — where the Frankfurt School saw mass culture as top-down administered, Fisher sees it as an energy flowing up from proletarian culture through bohemian mediation. — connects to: The bohemia-working-class alliance drove British and Irish pop culture for three decades; Popular culture refers not to one class but an alliance of subordinated classes; Popular culture belongs to an alliance of oppressed classes