← New Books Network
New Books Network
Michael James Roberts et al., "Roll and Flow: The Cultural Politics of Skateboarding and Surfing" (San Diego State UP, 2024)
01:00:59
Loading summary
Transcript48 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hi, everyone. I want to tell you all about another podcast I think you'll enjoy. College Matters from the Chronicle. College Matters is a weekly show from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it's a great resource for news and analysis about colleges and universities. You'll hear sharp discussions with Chronicle journalists offering fresh perspectives on the latest salvos from the Trump administration and keen insights about how faculty and students are adapting to technological changes. College Matters also features incisive interviews with newsmakers, including recent conversations with Chris Eisgruber, Princeton University's president, and Rick Singer, who is best known as the mastermind of the Varsity Blues admissions scandal. Check out College Matters wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:46]
B
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:50]
C
Hello and welcome. My name is Michael Johnston, and this is another episode of New Books Network. And Today I have Dr. Michael Roberts, Dr. Jarrett Rose, and Dr. Kristin Lawler with me today. Michael Roberts is a professor of sociology at San Diego State University, Kristen Lawler, professor of sociology at University of Mount St. Vincent, and then Jarrett Rose, assistant professor of community and Behavioral health at State University of New York, SUNY Polytechnic Institute. Welcome to the show today.
- [01:22]
B
Thank you. Thanks for having us.
- [01:25]
C
Well, today we're going to be talking about Roll and the Cultural Politics of Skateboarding and Surfing that was published in 2024 by SDSU Press. And I just want to start off by asking how you came together and decided to write this collection of chapters and how you decided to pick Roll and Flow, Skateboarding and Surfing.
- [01:49]
B
Well, really, the book came out of a conference that we put on the Surf and Skate Studies Collaborative at San Diego State University. A bunch of us who are very interested in sort of the politics, history, culture of surfing and skateboarding. It's sort of a novel project because there were not things that had really come together before in terms and they, they really rhyme, I think, as the the book shows very nicely. So, yeah, it sort of emerged out of we had this amazing conference and all of these great papers and I, you know, met tons of people who were doing fascinating work and work that was really resonant with the way that we were thinking about surfing and skating. And so, yeah, Roberts and I just kind of like framed it together and invited people to, to, to contribute. And yeah, that. But that's ultimately basically what it came out of. I would say, Robert, you want to add to that.
- [02:57]
D
What I would add to that is that for me it goes a little further back just because Kristen wrote a very important book. I hope Kristin doesn't mind me mentioning this, but Kristin wrote a very important book in surfing studies that was 2010 or 2011, 2011, I think, called the American Surfer Radical Culture and Capitalism. And that book came out around the same time that I was creating a new course at San Diego State on the culture and history of surfing. And that book was like the textbook for my class. And Lawlor was sort of on the cutting. The very beginning of the emergence of surfing studies, especially in the US There had been some people in Australia and New Zealand who were doing stuff in the mid to late 90s, but that was mainly journal articles. There weren't very many book length studies. So Kristin was doing this stuff pretty much before anybody else in the US and we had been thinking about this stuff for a long time. And so the first conference we put on at San Diego State was, I believe, 2019, before COVID And then so we were talking about putting together a edited book that was going to be exclusively on surfing because that first conference we did was only on surfing. And then Covid happened and Black Lives Matter Summer 2020 blew up and there was a major, major event in San Diego. Turns out there are events all around the world. But in San Diego, skateboarders organized this amazing rally called Rolling for Rights. Over a thousand skaters showed up in Balboa park in downtown San Diego. And then as part of the protest that rolled down 6th Avenue in San Diego, it's amazing, took over the whole avenue. And so then Kristen and I were talking about that stuff, what was going on with the skateboarders. And we realized we can't just talk about surfing anymore. And so the subtitle of the book is Cultural Politics. And the skateboarders were showing us with their involvement in black. And surfers were also involved in the Black Lives Matter movement with their paddle outs and stuff. And so that was sort of how we were thinking about framing it is that typically people, when people think about sports, they think about sports as somehow separate from politics, that people are trying to escape from politics by, you know, going to sporting events or participating in sports as like an escape, as somehow distinct and separate from politics. But the summer 2020 changed all that for everybody. So Kristen and I were looking at all these media journalist coverage of all these events, and we're like, this is really interesting that skateboarders and surfers have something important to say about politics. And that kind of what goes against the stereotype of surfers and skaters as somehow not being very bright or not being engaged politically, not having much to say about politics. So that was sort of what changed the scope of the book was. We said, we can't just do surfing. We gotta include the skateboard stuff. I could say more, but I'll just stop there for now. I got a whole lot more to say, but I'll pause there for a bit.
- [06:22]
C
Yeah. One of the things that I enjoyed most about this book is how you didn't leave the. Leave space and time as a backdrop. You made it a major emphasis throughout the whole book. You argue that skateboarding and surfing do more than just occupy space. It's more than just about rolling around on concrete or doing tricks or paddling out. You state that they reorganized how space and time are socially constructed. What exactly is at stake in these interventions in terms of the use of space and time and how they were using it?
- [06:57]
B
Well, you know, it worked out quite nicely when we were putting together sort of the theoretical framing of all of this. And as you can tell, these are conversations that Mike and I have been having for a long time. You know, so it was loads of fun to put it together, but sort of role and flow, space and time, skating and surfing, it just sort of. It shook out to a very kind of symmetrical way of thinking about things and a way of thinking about these practices together. And so in terms of space and skateboarding, we were very inspired by a couple of Brazilian skateboarder filmmakers who, especially one group called the Flanantes, who explicitly situated their own practice of urban skateboarding in precisely the tradition in which we saw it, which is sort of based on the ideas of the situationists, Guy Debord, the idea of psychogeography. And the derive also in other ways rooted in something very similar, which is the work of Henri Lefebvre that looks at the way that under capitalism, spatial relations like space is not this, like, empty vessel where in which things happen. And for time, it's similar too. If you come from a Marxist perspective, the idea is always about production, right? And so space, like, it's not. It's not just like a vacuum or something. It is something that is produced, like everything else, by social relations. And so the social relations of capitalism produce space in a particular kind of way that's. That's ideological. It's very abstract. Somebody who's not a Marxist, gay or Simmel in the metropolis and mental life is really good on this stuff too. The abstractions of the clock, the grid, money especially are, you know, have a certain, like, dehumanizing kind of flattening, making blase sort of quality, nevertheless, for Lefebvre, because he's a Marxist and not Sort of an orthodox, like capital logic Marxist. It's not just that space reproduces the power of capital over labor. The. There is that, but there's another level that comes from below, that comes from the struggle of the working classes. That comes from the human or not. I don't mean to say that in a humanist way. That comes from joy, play, pleasure, collectivity, all of the things that make urban life sort of interesting, that pushes against the. The domination of sort of abstract space. And so the idea. And there's someone who is in our book, Ian Borden, who wrote a book. I forget when it came out. It's been a pretty long time now.
- [10:17]
D
But a wonderful 2001, I think.
- [10:18]
B
2001. Yeah, his first book. It's so good. Yeah, he's got a lot of great stuff. But Skateboarding Space and the City, where he uses Lefebvre explicitly to talk about the way in which skateboarders actively reshape urban space according to a logic of flow rather than the imposed logic of segregation. Like, here's where you work, here's where you consume, here's where you. Blah, blah, whatever that. Against that skateboarders reshape, like, produce space in a different way according to a logic of flow, against the logic of, like, work, work. What's your business here? You know, they reshape urban space according to a logic of. Of play and pleasure. And so all of that really shaped the way that we think about what happens, the way in which skateboarding is a kind of act of cultural, creative. Cultural sabotage of these capitalist social relations, of domination, of exploitation, of alienation, of flattening. Against that, we see the skateboarder as in the tradition of the Flanner that Benjamin talks about. Although we have some stuff in the book about ways that it's the same ways that it's different. But it is important that this collective, led by a skater filmmaker named Marillo Romeo in Sao Paulo, they call themselves flamantes. They have an image. Their image is like a skateboarder with a turtle on a leash, which is sort of a classic idea of the slowness of the urban idler. The urban flaner. In that same tradition is the situationist, the derive, especially psychogeography, stuff like that. So we're really situating skating in terms of space in a theoretical way and in like a Marxist Lefebvie, theoretical way. And also just in a tradition of radical cultural politics, which to our. In our opinion, have very often not been taken seriously enough as material interventions into capitalist social relations, specifically around questions of work versus play, pleasure versus alienation, stuff like that. So I think maybe, Robert, do you want to talk about the flow part of things and surfing, how surfing materially reshapes time in a similar way?
- [13:20]
D
Yeah. Just two things to add, because that can come up again on the chapter about Hallelujah on the bum. That's based mainly on your words. But I would just add two things to what Christian said. The first is the summer 2020. The politics were very explicit around the questions of race and racism, police brutality, et cetera. But we were trying to connect those sort of explicit macro politics to what had been going on with skateboarding for decades prior to summer 2020, which I like to refer to as more of a micro politics, but like a micro politics of daily life. Like, the summer 2020 was a big political movement moment. But. But Kristin mentioned the philosopher Andre Lefebvre, who focuses on what goes on at the level of daily life. And so the coming and going of skateboarders in urban spaces, in what most people experience is like, mundane everyday life stuff. Skateboarders are always involved in sort of transforming or experiences of everyday life. They sort of a little at sort of what I'm calling the micro level. But skateboarders have built up like a culture of resilience and resistance that's been going on for decades. And so it kind of made sense that when summer 2020 exploded on the scene, that skateboarders were already there waiting to take advantage of that moment to intervene and get involved at the micro level. But the funny thing is that when we were reading all the coverage by the journalists and the news media, they were surprised. Like, wait a minute. Skateboarders are getting involved in politics? I've never seen this before. How do we explain this? So that's what I found really interesting is that the stuff that goes on at the level of everyday life, people tend to kind of. They don't pay attention to it enough. It's sort of. Kirsten mentioned ideology. So ideology is not just something that's only a mental phenomena. It's also sort of a bodily routine that you get into a routine and your body moves through space in a certain way. You go to work, and when you wake up, go to work, come home, go to sleep, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. And then you get habituated to certain routines, and then those routines just become normalized as something we tend not to think about. But that's how the system gets reproduced, is at the level of daily life, those routines that we become habituated to is kind of how the system sort of automatically reproduces itself. But skateboarders are always making little micro interventions to break up the habituation aspects. And the space plays a huge role in the process of habituation and reproducing rituals that keep the system running. But it all becomes kind of normalized at the level of the body or the unconscious, that we tend just to take all this stuff for granted. But skateboarders force you to not take it for granted. Because if you're walking down the street, going to work at an office building or something, you see a skateboarder come flying by and grind their board on the handrail or something. Like your hands are supposed to go on the handrail, but now they've got their feet on it and they put their body into spaces where it's not supposed to be. And that might sound kind of trivial, it doesn't have any significance. But when you think about how skateboarders have turned that into a whole counterculture.
- [16:59]
C
I was just thinking that Honore Lviv, one of the things that he writes is, is about rhythm and rhythm analysis and being able to pick up on the disruptions to the normal, everyday rhythms. It really is meaningful.
- [17:13]
D
Very good point, Very good point. I'll just say one more thing about the time and space, and then we can get back to the time and flow question with the other chapter that hallelujah my bum chapter. But the philosopher Immanuel Kant said that time and space are what he calls forms of intuition. Excuse me, forms of intuition, meaning that we have to have. According to Kant, these, he calls them a priori forms of intuition, meaning that time and space. This is Kant's perspective and Lafez criticizes it. But Kant says that we can't even have experience unless these forms, time and space, are there prior they make experience possible in the first place. In other words, so. And so Kant never really explained, I mean, what he said was why we need these a priori forms to have experience in the first place. But then he doesn't question how these a priori forms are themselves constructed or produced. And that's where the Marxist intervention comes in, is that time and space are produced, like Kristen was saying. And so Lefebvre is the best, obviously, on the question of how space is produced. But in the Marxist tradition, Marx himself, of course, talks about abstract labor, time. But other key figures on the time side of that is a student of Gilles Deleuze, I might miss pronounce his last name. Eric Aliez wrote a book called Capital Times, talking about how Capitalism produces a certain kind of time, but again, at the level of ideology, we don't see that time and space are produced. We just accept them as given. And that's how time and space have a profound effect on us, is that they shape our experiences. Time and space has a profound effect on how we experience everyday life, but we just take all that stuff for granted. That's why the Marxist perspective is so important, showing in how capitalism depends upon a particular kind of time and a particular kind of space. But it presents that stuff as given and universal. And that's how at the level of ideology, we don't question how time and space have been produced. And that helps keep the system reproducing itself because we don't question how these forms are produced in the first place.
- [19:30]
E
My day kicks off with a refreshing Celsius energy drink, then straight to the gym, pre K pickup back home to meal prep. Time for my fire station shift. One more Celsius. Gotta keep the lights on when the three alarm hits. I'm ready. Celsius lift fit. Go grab a cold refreshing Celsius at your local retailer or locate now@celsius.com
- [19:52]
C
yeah, as compared to like Weber where he focuses on all these other cultural things. Whereas, you know, Marx sees the economy as the center of all other institutions and reinforcing behavior through the economy. So yeah, the second article, Hallelujah, I'm a bum. You explore the anti work ethic embedded in surfer wobbly countercultures. How does the refusal of conventional labor discipline operate as a moral or political stance with these communities, within these communities? And in a neoliberal era that celebrates hustle culture, what does the surfer's orientation towards leisure and drift reveal about alternative value systems? So put it another way, these surfers are refusing the conventional labor discipline and, and denying traditional morals and political stances by refusing to work, refusing to hustle or go into a gig economy, but instead fighting back against that traditional culture. What does it say about that?
- [20:55]
B
Well, I really like this question. I do think we should talk about the gig economy, the hustle culture. I, I think it's. We're more trapped in those things than we know and it's not. So I'm not sure people are, you know, sleeping in their cars to drive for Uber because they have some like cultural or to do that. It's because of, as Cory Doctorow points out in and shidification. Like it's so good. It's so good. Everyone should read Cory Doctorow because he just explains why everything is the way that it is. And so let's bracket that for a second because I think there are other things about sort of like the digital flattening of everything that are very much challenged by cultures of surfing and skateboarding. And also, you know, the Varoufakis techno feudalism. And talking about the, just sort of pointing out whatever you think about the, you know, the moniker techno feudalism, the idea is like we are to the point where people are working all the time and don't think they are. We're creating the value of these giant tech corporations that are like destroying the world with our sort of free labor. It's our content, it's our eyeballs, it's the value of our attention that creates the value of these platforms. So I think thinking about those platforms in terms of work is really, really important. And so for me, you know, I, as Mike pointed out, I had written about surfers and my favorite group of surfers were these early San Onofre, kind of like the roots of California surf culture, very much harking back to Hawaiian culture and a lot of back and forth, but, but basically they were kind of like hobos, early 20th century hobos on the beach. And I never quite made the connection, but I, you know, I, I love those guys and I love the whole idea that they sort of, they were these kinds of, you know, dropouts from regular workaday society. And at that moment the hobos were too. And so a couple of things happened. Like Jack London, somebody I wrote about in terms of surfing, also was a hoopoe for a while and wrote a book called the Road and was sort of, you know, an interesting character, some of that stuff. I started studying the Industrial Workers of the World and the hobos and their sort of strategy. One of the reasons that I was so interested in them was because they were called slackers, you know, they were. And the IWW was like, you know, called the I Won't Works. They had a, an explicitly anti work counterculture in the songs, in the newspapers, in the cartoons, in the stand up comedy or, you know, soapboxes in Bughouse Square and other places. And they also had a real strategy for refusal of work at the point of production. They were revolutionary syndicalists as well. And so their idea was, you know, there would be a strike, a sort of. And also striking on the job, like a slowdown, a kind of what was called this is what sabotage is basically is the refusal of industrial efficiency. It's sort of like an inefficiency and insisting on the moments of life as worthy in themselves and not just how much they can produce, like for your boss or something like that. So, yeah, so I was very taken with both of the. Those sides of what the wobblies were all about. The refusal at the point of production, the slowdown at the point of production, and the creat of a working class anti work counterculture that made its way through the Communist Party. What Michael Denning called the cultural front on the road, American counterculture. All kinds of things that I continue to think are very important. So when Roberts and I discovered that the surfers on the beach in San Onofre were singing wobbly songs, I think in this chapter that we wrote, it's the first sort of like scholarly acknowledgement. I mean, this was absolutely huge. And then Roberts, who is really, really good at like keeping up on what's new and sort of surf culture, saw a great documentary, a really interesting documentary called Stoked and broke and 2010, where the lead character and filmmaker, he's doing a kind of like hoboing up and down the coast from beach break to beach break, at one point is out bosking with his friend and he changes the words, which is an old wobbly tradition in itself, changes the words to Hallelujah, I'm a Bum, the all time greatest anti work wobbly song of all time. So when we sort of realized, wow, the culture, the labor movement counterculture, the labor movement politics that are most interesting to us and have always been most interesting to us. I mean, Roberts and I have been thinking together since we were in graduate school. It's like 30 years now that are like most interesting to us are carried through at the moment, sadly, not in the labor movement, but in surf culture. And so that became a very important piece because we had been thinking for a long time also about how serf culture is sort of is an anti work culture, but in essence, and not necessarily explicitly so when we see these explicit moments, also the guy named Hobo Dave, you know, who's Instagram, like, makes reels and stuff like that. Yeah, it was really just very exciting discovery for us that, that this old hobo wobbly culture that is really the root of the most militant labor movement politics in the United States, the most radical and joyful counterculture in the United States that, yes, got squashed, but made its way forward in all kinds of ways that are still bearing fruit. Anyway, it was a very exciting discovery.
- [28:17]
C
Yeah. Everything from labor movements to slavery music has played a central role in creating change throughout the United States society.
- [28:27]
B
Yeah, no question. Yeah. The songs were super important.
- [28:31]
D
Can I add just two things? And then maybe we should let Jared talk because we're taking up all the time. So one thing I would like to add is that the original version of Hallelujah My Bum was recorded in 1928 by Harry McLintock. 1928. And then surfers at San Onofre were. It was a hit song, by the way. Huge hit song. I mean, for those standards. And it's just amazing that the surfers in Sanofre were the. The beginning of the surf culture in the mainland. They were singing on the beach in the 30s and then in the 21st century, surfers are still familiar with the tune. And I actually spoke to the guy who directed that and produced that documentary, Stoked and Broken. He didn't really know a whole lot of the detailed history of the iww, had heard of the Wobblies, but he didn't know much about the history. But it's just interesting how the. The cross pollinization of the culture of the labor movement and surfers. That's really interesting because like Krista mentioned, academics don't see that connection. Most of the academics who study surfing link it to the rightly so link it to the environmental movement. That's kind of obvious. Surfers are active in the environmental movement. But the few academics who have tried to theorize class in surfing studies have thought about surfers as being primarily middle class suburban youth and see surfers as a break from the class politics of the so called old labor movement. And so our research shows that actually the surfers have been connected to the labor movement for a very long time. And it's just a mistake to say that surf culture is primarily youth culture of middle class and somehow separate from traditional class politics. Because the contemporary academics think of surfer subcultures as being mainly around questions of consumption, not production. Meaning that they focus on their focus, their theoretical take on how surfers construct identities through consumption and that and think of it as somehow separate from the politics of production. And so again, bringing back like a Marxist perspective on that, we show that the serf culture has an intimate connection to the culture of the labor movement. And the one other thing I want to mention about the time question is there's also an ontological dimension to this. This is sort of the last thing I had to say about the flow question. But there's been a lot of attention in surfing studies around flow as a psychological concept. So there's this psychologist named Csiksmahaley, I hope I pronounce his name properly. But he wrote a book called Flow, and it's had a lot of. It's been used quite a bit in sports studies generally, but also it's been used across the board. Like even people like in management studies use it. But his concept of flow is that. And Jared can speak to this probably better than I can on the psychology of it. But his focus is on flow as a psychological experience. And we get into. And for him, it's about peak performance. You can see why management studies people will like this notion of flow because they want to make their workers more productive. But what I think is interesting, what I find interesting in flow theory is when Csiksmahaly talks about the loss of ego, you don't think of yourself as distinct from the environment. You become kind of one with your environment. Again, I'll let Jared speak to more of that psychological side, but. But I wanted to look at the concept of flow not as a psychological thing, but. But more as an ontological question. And so this kind of gets back to the critique of Immanuel Kant. There's another philosopher who was the same generation as Henri Lefebvre named Henri Bergson, who wrote a book called Time and Free Will. And I've been spending a lot of doing a lot of research on his work. He wrote a bunch of really important books. But he wants to. He thinks of time as not something that's only in our heads as a sort of. As like it's not real. It's something that's merely subjective. But for him, it's linked to his way of thinking about life. And so he has another famous book After Time and Free Will, two books later. It's called Creative Evolution. It's his response to Darwin. But he has this concept that he develops called pure mobility. And he looks at how science fails to capture what it is about time that has a dimension that's in the world. It's not just in our heads, but it's in the world out there. That's what I mean. That's what I mean by ontological. But he says that when science tries to represent time, time is turned into space. And so he has this alternative concept he calls the dure, which is that time flows in a certain way where the past and present are not distinct. They're contracted into how we live time. So he gives this example of music that when we listen to a piece of music, all the notes are contracted into a whole. So you can't really separate one note from the next, otherwise the melody won't make sense. I'm kind of rambling here, but what he says is that our culture creates a certain kind of time, but that doesn't mean that there isn't another alternative time. And so Bergson wants us to think about the time that we consider as obvious is just one kind of time. But there's a, another way in which the world out there unfolds like an evolution, like life unfolds, for example, that, that is a different way of thinking about how we understand what time is. And he wants to put time out there in, in the world, so to speak. So it's not just something that's in our heads. All right, so I could, I could say more about that, but I'm gonna pause there.
- [34:38]
B
Well, I would just like to put in something very quickly, which is that we are starting a new journal that should be out relatively soon. It's called Bored Cultures. And in the first issue, Roberts has an essay on Bergson and time that's freaking brilliant. So I highly recommend it.
- [35:00]
C
Yeah, excellent. Well, I'll definitely have to feature that in the, in the write up with this, with this interview so that we can talk a bit about it after this as well. If there's a particular link out there on the website for the website. And I'll put that in there as well. So now we get to Dr. Rose and his contribution to this anthology. And turn on, tune in and paddle out. And Jerry, you theorize that psychedelic amplification and co production of the souls. You theorize psychedelic amplification and co production in soul surfing era. What do you mean by co production in this context? How does psychedelic amplification. How is it co produced with a soul surfing era?
- [35:50]
F
Yeah, I love these, love hearing Lawlor and Roberts talk. These two folks have been so instructive in my educational trajectory. Roberts has been a professor of mine and I've read a lot that Lawler has offered us in the past years. And her book that Dr. Roberts mentioned earlier was really influential actually to this paper. So, I mean, I'll just say that this paper is effectively on the socialization of consciousness, the socialization of culture, the socialization of politics, and when psychedelics arrived. When LSD arrived in the United States in 1949, it was kind of brought into this culture of psychiatry that was really set in terms of like, how to understand schizophrenia, how to understand psychosis. And they thought that LSD was going to, you know, inspire this new, like, revolution in thinking about schizophrenia and how to understand it, how to treat it. But just a couple years later, after people were experimenting with lsd, they thought that, you know, they found that it had very like therapeutic, you know, outcomes, right? And then Aldous Huxley takes mescaline in 1953, has a very spiritual kind of self transcendent experience, you know, with mescaline. And so there's these questions like, what are psychedelics? Like, they seem to produce, like such dramatically distinct outcomes. How is it that we understand, you know, what psychedelics are and what they do for us? And this sort of response to that question is entailed in this notion of set and setting, mindset and physical and social setting. And so what this paper is, is an attempt to sort of use this, this notion of set and setting, this notion of the socialization of consciousness and culture, you know, through the lens of psychedelics. But in terms of its analysis of 1960s, 1970s surf culture. And so it's kind of split up into three parts. The first is what surfing, what the surf scene, what surf culture looked like in the 1940s and 50. And I look at that scene in terms of explaining what surfing and surf culture was like in all of its countercultural activity before psychedelics arrived on the scene. The second section of the paper is on the sort of countercultural series of groups, leftists, anti Vietnam War, anti conservative politics, all these different, you know, leftist movements and kind of the hippies in general and like the very emergence of psychedelics on the scene in 1960s. And the third section kind of takes both of those two prior sections and describes what happens when you take the soul surfing, I should say the foundation of surf culture, infuse psychedelia with it and then the production of the soul surfing ethos. And so I use the notion of amplification to, to describe very broadly what happens when people take psychedelics. And this is kind of like an analytical, scientific concept to explain in broad brushstrokes, psychedelic consciousness, which is that psychedelic consciousness is the amplification of the socialization of the drug use and drug experiences. It's the amplification of set and setting. And so what I do in the third section is I sort of divide it into three and I talk about this group called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which was a group of sort of like ragtag hippie surfer ruffians that developed, you know, a worldwide drug smuggling network. And they brought in a bunch of like, very well known surfers. Mike Hinson being probably the most prominent. Whose nook. Yeah, Rest in Peace Mike Hinson, you know, he was the, the star of Endless Summer, which Is, you know, probably, I think, the most famous surf film of all time, right, two iterations of that. But I talk about Mike Hinson's being socialized into this type of psychedelic consciousness that the Brotherhood of Eternal Love offered right in the Brotherhood of Eternal Love was very intimately connected with Timothy Leary, sort of like the most radical, revolutionary, prominent speaker on psychedelia of the 1960s and 70s. And so there was a political ethos being inspired across the surfers as a whole through this, this collective called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. The second subsection of this third section of the paper kind of gets into how psychedelics were understood as like a tool of consciousness, a tool of learning, kind of like a technology in a sense, that was used to sort of inspire new radical ways of thinking about surfing, about surf boards, about fin systems, about the culture in general. And then in the last subsection, I again kind of turn to the work of Lawlor here and talk about how this new era that was being co produced by psychedelics through surfing was kind of disseminated broadly and across the globe through, you know, various forms of surf media. Whether it was like surf films, surf magazines, you know, et cetera. This soul surfing tradition that again was co produced by the use of psychedelics in socialization and radical political culture, you know, was sort of, you know, disseminated across the globe through these various forms of media. And I think one of the takeaways, and I'll just stop here, but one of the takeaways is that, you know, as Lawlor has argued, right, that this style of surfing has been very, very prominent and it is still tangible to this day, right, and has kind of insert inspired a really radical way of being amongst surfers, amongst surf culture and so on. And so, you know, in summary, this paper just kind of looks at psychedelics and its influence on surfing and in surf culture historically. And I'm actually happy to say that I followed up with a new paper that actually came out this week. It's a new book chapter actually in a book called the Future of Surfing in the Anthropocene. And this is by the editor is a person that I met at one of the Surf and Skate Studies International conferences. And I bring that type of analysis, not necessarily the concepts of amplification and co production, but I bring this type of analysis to contemporary surfers. Jamie Mitchell, Kelly Slater, Cole Christensen, etc, there are people who are still very much connected to the soul serving tradition of the 1960s and 70s who are, you know, inspired by that tradition and are using that type of old school soul surfing knowledge to direct their psychedelic consciousness to this day. And so that that paper and this, this edited collection as a whole came out just this week. So if you're interested in this type of subject, you know, go, go and, and buy that book. Yeah, yeah, right on. All in there. Thanks.
- [43:16]
G
To realize the future America needs, We understand what's needed from us to face each threat head on. We've earned our place in the fight for our nation's future. We are Marines. We were made for this New Year.
- [43:30]
H
New me. Cute, but how about New Year, new money? With Experian, you can actually take control of your finances. Check your FICO score, find ways to save and get matched with credit card offers, giving you time to power through those New Year's goals. You know you're going to crush start the year off right. Download the Experian App based on FICO Score 8 model offers an approval not guaranteed. Eligibility requirements and terms apply subject to credit check which may impact your credit scores. Offers not available in all states. See experian.com for details.
- [43:57]
C
Experian yeah, one of the things that I would like to say is this was only made possible by moving out of a stage that you, in previous works called the psycho model of where the psychedelics were supposed to mimic a psychotic break or psychosis that was maybe caused as a result of schizophrenia or something like that. But the interesting piece about those trips were they were often negative, they were painstaking. But this is quite different than the trips that these soul surfers were having, right?
- [44:37]
F
Yeah, absolutely. You know, when, when, like I said, when psychedelics kind of came into the United States in 1949, 1950, they were really understood through this cultural conception that psychiatry had of the day, which is like, on the one hand, the second coming of the. By the sort of psychopharmacological biological model of mental illness. They thought that drugs were going to, you know, not only, you know, resolve mental distress of various styles, but they thought that drugs were going to help understand the brain and what mental illness actually was. But because of that cultural perception that psychiatry had at the moment, when they brought LSD in, they sort of utilized it under that type of framework, right? But what they did was they, they took, you know, patients who were uneducated on psychedelics and, and, you know, what the, you know, impact of LSD unconsciousness would be, they brought them into, like, very dry, mundane research laboratories underground. They strapped them to hospital beds, they put bright lights on top of them. The psychiatrists, the researchers were like, very antisocial these patients were not made to feel warm, not told that they could have a really pleasurable, remarkable, introspective, spiritual experience. They were treated like laboratory rats. And so if you think about this notion of amplification that helps us understand what psychedelic consciousness does, they were having their worst day of their life amplified, you know, a hundredfold. And they called it the psychotomimetic tradition. And yeah, so it's no doubt that these people had what they thought were psychosis mimicking experiences. You take people and you put them in completely different environments. You tell them, hey, you could have a really remarkable, pleasurable, positive, introspective, spiritual journey. You hold their hand, you know, you give them a nice warm bed to lay down and you put really beautiful music on. They have an entirely different experience. And so, long story short, that's the lesson of set and setting, you know, and what it offers to the experience of psychedelics. And, you know, a lot of what the Brotherhood of Eternal Love were doing was they were taking the lessons learned by Timothy Leary and they were creating the cultural set and setting for people to have really remarkable, you know, beautiful, transcendent, you know, experiences on, on lsd. And that's what the surfers were, were sort of socialized into. It was also the radical politics of Timothy Leary which was inspiring them to think in terms of, you know, cultural revolution.
- [47:09]
C
Yeah, yeah, I think it's like a modern day collective effervescence. If you want to, you know, go to Durkheim or somebody like that. I honestly do think it's a transcendence of both the individual and collective simultaneously.
- [47:23]
F
I just wrote a paper on collective effervescence in group based psychedelic assisted therapy last year. So go check that out. It's in the Sociology of Health and Illness.
- [47:33]
C
Well, now I have a group question on subcultures seen in social transformation across this volume. The thing that I kept seeing was skateboarding and surfing appearing not simply as a leisure activity, but as a cultural formation that contests space, labor, politics and consciousness. I can't help to think but leisure as being once something that was only available to the rich, the wealthy, but now seeing leisure as something to push back against politics and even people being able to find pleasure and desire and even the grind, being able to find pleasure in some of the worst activities that people ever had to do. Do you see this practice, these practices as subcultures, scenes, social movements, or something else entirely? And what theoretical vocabulary would you say best captures the cultural politics of Roland flow?
- [48:26]
B
I can jump in, I think sort of two Pieces of vocabulary that kind of go along with this idea of a refusal and then a creation of a counterculture that sort of fuels that refusal. I think that for one thing, you know, Roberts brought up the summer of 2020. I think we could talk about Minneapolis now. There is something about direct action that opens up all kinds of possibilities, right. When people actually do things, the world changes. It's a logic of direct action, which is an old kind of labor movement logic, but I think we can apply it to all different kinds of places. So I think the way that we're talking about these practices is as a form of direct action that's an intervention into space and into time, into the way that capitalist social relationship produce space, produce time. They intervene in a sort of sabotaging, like counter way, and they open up all kinds of other possibilities. And that's why I think another piece of, I don't know, language that we might use to talk about these things is about imagination and a radical imagination. When we link surfers with wobblies, when we link skateboarders with flaneurs and situationists, we are really situating these practices in a tradition that's about the sort of imagination of something radically different. And imagination is like space, like time, like ideology. It's not just like this, these things that are up there. It is a material force. And so I think that that's. Maybe that's just sort of what comes to my mind from your. But I think in terms of thinking about the emancipatory politics, the working class politics, the anti work politics of these practices, I think thinking about direct action and collective imagination is maybe a nice way to think about it. That's what I would say.
- [50:58]
D
Yeah.
- [50:59]
C
I think of Randall Collins for some reason, with the interaction ritual chains and this concept of emotional energy. And I think that there's an ongoing flux, emotional energy that is always out in the world. And there's something about timing and just that opportunity for something serendipitously to take place and for action to occur. Some of the greatest movements took place without much planning ahead of time.
- [51:29]
B
Yeah, and there's a lot of great stuff about sort of the politics of affect that's out there. It's sort of a Spinozan way of thinking about things. But Brian Masoomi, Patricia Clough, a lot of people do really interesting things about the politics of affect, both in. In terms of thinking about. I think it's relevant to questions of social movements, as you're pointing out, but also questions of, you know, platform capitalism and how the algorithm, what feed, what the algorithm feeds on and stuff like that. It really is affect, you know, I
- [52:03]
D
wanted to just real quick kind of respond to some of the stuff that Jarrett was saying just because it's making me think. Rethink some of my stuff I was saying about flow. Because the co production of the soul surfer, the surfer culture and then the psychedelic culture and the effect. And I think the phrase Jarrett used was socialization of consciousness. I forgot I meant to mention that when I was talking about flow and the experience of time and surfing. In my paper on Bergson, I opened up with a quote from the surfer Sean Thompson, Former world champion Sean Thompson. And he said that when you're inside the barrel of a wave, he said life slows down. And then there was. There was a psychologist from somewhere in Florida who did a whole study on that about how surfers experience time. Specifically in the barrel of a wave. I think they can experience time, an alternative time, not only just in a barrel, just in a braking wave. It doesn't have to be a barreling wave, but anyway. And the way I was interpreting that in my piece on Bergson was that surfers are engaging in a different kind of time. But previous psychological research that I mentioned, this professor from Florida was saying that the brain is doing it like that there's something going on in the brain. When the brain is stimulated by the environment of surfing, then it changes something in the brain. And then they have this different way of a different kind of consciousness. And I was trying to make the case that it's the natural environment, not the brain by itself, but the natural environment of the ocean that allows surfers to step out of the socially constructed capitalist form of time and then get into what Bergson calls the time of life. Like nature has rhythms and we can step out of the socially constructed rhythm and get into the natural rhythm. But now I'm wondering if there was some unique moment in the history of surfing in the 60s based upon what Jarrett's research about. Okay, so we have the natural environment, we have the social environment, and now we drop in psychedelics in there. I'm just thinking that there's more research to be done and thinking about the question of consciousness at. In these three different levels. Anyway, I just wanted to kind of throw that out there. I know we're moving away from Michael's last question, but Jarrett's discussion was making me. Comments were making me think about that.
- [54:44]
F
Let me, Let me quote the late great Mike Hinson, if you don't mind, on this notion of psychedelic amplification. Okay. You know, Mike Hinson as well as I forget Jost wrote this book in 2009. So he's talking about his experience about surfing and being on psychedelics. And I think I wrote this actually in the chapter where I quoted him. And he says, I was the observer when the board was the pilot. I was in the realism of no reference. My contact with nature was so perfect that the wave picked me up and instinctively followed the natural angle of my movement. The breeze coursed over my whole being as I sailed across the celestial sea. Everything was symptomatic of nature, Swells of the current, sounds and smells of the ocean, all enhanced by my cosmic environment.
- [55:38]
C
I think how that calls to question the liminal. Like we hear about liminal space, but isn't a liminal space? Or is it a greater attachment, one that can be understood without some sort of a psychedelic amplification?
- [55:53]
F
Or maybe it's like meditation where you practice more and more and you can begin to drop in immediately and utilize it and make sense of the lessons in real life. Even when you're not just sitting by yourself in a quiet space with your eyes closed. Right. You can have that experience riding on the subway in a hectic rush hour traffic or whatever. Right. Like, the more that you engage in these types of consciousness expanding experiences, the more that you can kind of tap into those moments in everyday life. Right. And make use of those as practices, I guess. Right.
- [56:27]
C
So rather than liminal space, transcendental space, maybe. Yeah.
- [56:32]
B
Jarrett, what you're saying is just reminding me of, you know, the reality right now. There's sort of a movement out there called like, attention activism. And there are people who are challenging the kind of, you know, super flattening of the attention economy with collective practices of attention. Many of them are, you know, and this is folks in New York City do this out of a place called the Strother School of Radical Attention, the Friends of Attention, which is a group I'm involved in. And. And there is something about that, like dropping in, slowing down, amplifying, expanding. And I love LSD as much as the next guy, but, you know, there is a possibility. It's like a little impractical sometimes, I guess. There is this emerging movement of people getting together and doing those kinds of practices of attention together, and then sort of producing a certain counter shared world out of paying that kind of almost quasi psychedelic attention to the world. It's pretty cool. So they just came out with a book called A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. So that's if you're interested. That's an interesting way to think about doing this. That's not just individual.
- [58:07]
F
It's so cool. I think you and I have discussed this actually in the past, but it is a fact that Michael Johnston and I will be in New York City in August for the American Sociological Association Conference. Maybe we'll have to all go and sit with them together and enjoy.
- [58:24]
B
Nice. That sounds fantastic. I'm in.
- [58:27]
C
Well, thank you. Thank you, Michael Jarrett, Kristen, thank you all for being here today to discuss your book. And I hope everybody who's listening to this today will have an opportunity to go out and buy the book, read the book and enjoy it as much as I did.
- [58:43]
D
Thanks for having us, Michael.
- [58:45]
B
This is great.
- [58:46]
D
Great conversation.
- [58:47]
B
Yeah. Fantastic.
- [58:49]
C
All right, this has been another episode of New Books Network and I'm Michael Johnston signing off. Have a great day.