Counter-culture as Useful Entropy

Sub-cultures are virtual machines, partial representations and bundles of concepts, images, styles of fashion, words, music, values; running like miniature psychological operating systems or systemic microcosms in a host environment of the dominant culture of any particular time and place. For all of the gripes and complaints of conservative ideologies, they fundamentally need these acts of stylistic rebellion to successfully (and inversely) define themselves in terms of what they are not: continuity requires difference. In this sense, ideologies have tangible subjective presence or psychological depth; ideological and political systems respond to difference in ways so similar to notionally individual personalities as to be almost identical to them. Are human beings really only nodal focal points in a distributed energy field of personality and psychological subjectivity? Perhaps, but in any case – the presence of counter-cultural difference and useful entropy as manageable cultural dissonance is as important for ideological and socio-economic continuity as it is for change and metamorphosis.