Music and psychedelics once made social reality feel transformable.

Evidence

Yet there was also an immanent transformative immediacy in the music of the counterculture. It reinforced the feelings of despair, disaffection and rage that bourgeois culture ordinarily makes us distrust. As such, music functioned as a form of consciousness-raising, in which a mass audience could not only experience its feelings being validated, it could locate the origins of those feelings in oppressive structures. Moreover, the ingestion of hallucinogens by growing numbers of the population, and the emergence of a psychedelic imaginary that touched even those who had never used acid, made for a widespread perception that social reality was provisional, plastic, subject to transformation by collective desire. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1381

Categorization

• SHARE: Would land with anyone into pop-theory: the claim that hallucinogens’ cultural imaginal touched even non-users and loosened reality’s felt permanence.
• XREF: connects to: 1960s psychedelic drug culture prefigured the neoliberal plastic self — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 420; Psychedelics made social reality seem plastic and transformable by collective desire — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1381

Broader Connections

• 1960s psychedelic drug culture prefigured the neoliberal plastic self #expands (0.82) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 420