"Furthur": Reflections on Counter-Culture and the Postmodern

Abstract

[ en Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, as they embarked on their celebrated trip in the summer of 1964, were sign-bearers, a vast signifying machinery, the effects of which reached into nearly every corner of the burgeoning world of 1960s counter-culture. But the sign thus borne was necessarily a divided, differential one: at one end, the avantgarde slogan Furthur, toward new paths not only in experience but in the written sign (as well as a falling-off from literacy); at the other, Caution, the recoiling of the Prankster gesture around the very eccentricity of the group. Other dichotomies suggest themselves as well: for example, the backward look at historical precedent, but also the newness of technological revision--Bosch doing 60 down the freeway.