Customer Reviews

Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Sam Binkley's Getting Loose is a survey of print materials - whether how-to manuals, self-help books, and alternative health, dietary, spiritual and religious literature - that can be said to encompass the newer "lifestyle" culture of the 1970s. Interestingly the author is in the tradition of Michel Foucault and, as such, he occupies a most unusual position in 1970s history and studies. That is, you can feel he has some admiration for the material he covers; but he has just as much skepticism since he feels that the culture is both an effect of and precondition for concomitant changes in both political economy and psychology.

The best part of the book is Binkley's decision to dig deep into all sorts of publications - from the "Briarpatch", to "Whole Earth", and a plethora of subcultural movement periodicals. Many of these are intense in their feeling of being dated. Yet, and this is part of Binkley's larger thesis - much of it feels very mainstream from today's vantage point, as these once radical or fringe ideas have become in a sense commodified and mainstream. There is also an even larger point in Binkley's project. Lest all of this attention to lifestyle and aesthetics might lead a reader to assume that this is merely a history of a certain milieu of a certain time, Binkley is always aware of political economy. That is, for Binkley, new notions of selfhood, however liberatory they may initially appear, have uses for capitalism and the capitalist class. Indeed, they both reflect and create modes conducive to socioeconomic needs in global capital. Binkley is never didactic or forced in this argument and he is never reductionist in the book, but it is refreshing to read a book on aesthetic and lifestyle concerns (post-hippiedom) that connects such matters to political economy. In the spirit of Foucault, Getting Loose is best thought of as a GENEALOGY of a part of 1970s culture. But Binkley's spirit is friendlier to a far older Left, even Marx, in its remembrance of class analysis. According to Binkley, "getting loose" might appear to be a new form of getting strapped.

Binkley also gives biographies of the people who did these writing and how they came to be they people who made the 1970s so much of what they were.

A must in the library of anyone interested in print culture, non-fiction books or even American history.