Tag Archive for: Easy Rider

This paper examines certain dialectic of deviance, not just in the sense of its positive role in the moral conflicts that characterize social progress, but also as nonconformist phenomena that sooner or later becomes commodified. The film Easy Rider can be used as a theoretical tool in order to analyze the individualistic and social aspects of counterculture, with a focus on repressive, de-sublimated practices that invert the meaning of freedom, justice and equality. The paper questions whether the counterculture, in spite of the initial celebration of apostasy and social experiments, eventually ended up being integrated within the system by becoming a mask of social domination itself. Ideological contradictions of Easy Rider show the aesthetic and asocial nature of the countercultural identity, which has culminated in the pathological production of authenticity in capitalism. Instead of alternative, solidaristic community, there is yet again atomistic conception of society. The second part of the paper considers the possibility of abandoning capitalist society. The search for ancorpy was violently suppressed in the film, but in reality the counterculture’s most radical elements were discarded or watered down, in order to sell it as a market product. The paper concludes that the postmodernist cultural Left has neglected the class conflict and focused on the extension of minority rights while the neoliberal deterioration of social rights was in progress. The film anticipates a contemporary social condition, a different kind of ideological hegemony, where the conflict occurs within the subordinated class, among different factions, leaving the power center untouched. Popular culture has lost its utopian dimension, while deviation has acquired a specific capitalist function.