Aldona Jawłowska drogi kontrkultury

audience, and the propagation of contesting ideas. The
Woodstock Festival and the Festival of Life in Chicago
— a culmination in the development of the music and theatre
movement of the counter-culture — were a good illustration
of these principles. We also draw attention to experiments
in new forms of everyday life, customs, and interpersonal
relationships, initiated by communities and more
casual groups, aimed at developing their own consciously
chosen life-style. Counter-culture, in its questioning of the
cultural status quo, its negation, its motto of ,,Starting
everything anew", revealed a considerable similarity, not
only in the direction of its critique but also in its forms
of expression, to other, much earlier, waves of criticism
of contemporary civilization. The contestants' criticism did
not go any further in substance and sharpness than the
rebellion against social reality manifested in literature as
early as the first half of the twentieth century as well as
in certain artistic trends (e.g. Dadaism, surrealism) to
which, incidentally, the contestants of the sixties consciously
refer. Many threads of criticism in the counter-
-culture are also a repetition of critical analyses springing
from the area of American sociology (e.g. Mills, Riesman,
Fromm, Marcuse). And so counter-culture is original not
for the discovery of new conflicts in the contemporary
world nor for new interpretations of these conflicts but
for its attempts at drawing practical conclusions from verbally
expressed dissatisfaction. We are thus looking for
the sources that inspired the youth movement or the
common threads of social criticism formed in youth or
other circles.
Part Three answers the question concerning the significance
of the contesting movement among the meaningful
phenomena of contemporary civilization and culture in general.
This movement, despite its many inconsistencies, political
immaturity, and limited social scope, is a social movement
in the first phase of crystallization, in the phase
of establishing a Utopia. Communities, attempts at creating
new religions based on Oriental traditions, and mystical
and drug experiences are examples of such utopiae, both
experienced and practiced. These utopiae differ from other
attempts at developing an image of a better world, familiar
in history and constantly renewed, in that they arise
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