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Introduction: November 1975: The Last Counterculture Conference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2021

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Summary

I think Schizo-Culture is being used here in a special sense, not referring so much to clinical schizophrenia but to the fact that the culture is divided up into all sorts of classes and groups, etc. Some of the old lines are breaking down, and this is a healthy sign.

— William S. Burroughs, Burroughs Live

Seven years prior to Foucault calling Schizo-Culture the “last countercultural conference of the 60s,” Columbia University was host to another event. In April 1968, Columbia students, along with other activists, overtook the campus. Members from Columbia's Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Students’ Afro-American Society (SAS) occupied Hamilton Hall. Students demanded that Columbia's administration sever their ties with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) and halt construction on a segregated gym in Morningside Heights. William Sales Jr., a SAS member and Hamilton Hall occupier, notes how “Columbia had become an important component of the war-making and urban renewal machinery of contemporary America.” The 1968 student occupation, however, was built on years of student resentment to the Vietnam War. Bob Feldman, who discovered the school's affiliation with the IDA, remembers how students and SDS protested CIA and military efforts to recruit Columbia students in 1966. Within the walls of Columbia, occupiers planned a different university. Students, however, did not find allies with faculty members. As one occupier in the 1968 documentary Columbia Revolt remembers, the faculty “couldn't see beyond the occupation of the buildings to the creation of something that might be better.” Student occupiers imagined a new curriculum of “liberation classes.” And after Black students asked SDS and other white activists to leave Hamilton Hall and find another building, they renamed it Malcolm X Hall. The police inevitably ended the student occupation with violent force, but the event and its possibilities persisted in the public imagination after 1968. In Philip K. Dick's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, published one year before the Schizo-Culture conference, one of the characters “had been married to a student commune leader, and for one year she had lived in the rabbit warrens of Columbia University.” Dick imagines a future where “the police and national guard” prevent “the students from creeping across to society like so many black rats swarming out of a leaky ship.”4 The occupation and plotting continue in what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney will name “the undercommons.”

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Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2021

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