Archive That, Comrade!: Left Legacies and the Counter Culture of Remembrance

by Phil Cohen

The book explores issues of archival theory and practice that arise for any project aspiring to provide an open access platform for political dialogue and democratic debate. It is informed by the author's experience of writing a memoir about his involvement in the London underground scene of the 1960s, the London street commune movement, and the occupation of 144 Piccadilly, an event that hit the world's headlines for ten days in July 1969. After a brief introduction that sets the contemporary scene of 'archive fever,' the book considers the political legacy of 1960s counterculture for what it reveals about the process of commemoration. The argument then opens out to discuss the notion of historical legacy and its role in 'the dialectic of generations.' How far can the archive serve as a platform for dialogue and debate between different generations of activists in a culture that fetishizes the evanescent present, practices a profound amnesia about its counterfactual past, and forecloses the sociological imagination of an alternative future? The following section looks at the emergence of a complex apparatus of public fame and celebrity around the spectacle of dissidence and considers how far the Left has subverted or merely mirrored the dominant forms of reputation making and public recognition. Can the Left establish its own autonomous model of commemoration? The final section takes up the challenge of outlining a model for the democratic archive as a revisionary project, creating a resource for building collective capacity to sustain struggles of long duration amongst groups on the front lines of resistance to globalization. A postscript examines how archival strategies of the alt-right have intervened at this juncture to elaborate a politics of false memory.

192 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 5, 2018

About the author

Phil Cohen was a British cultural theorist, urban ethnographer, community activist, educationalist and poet. He was involved in the London underground counter-culture scene and gained public notoriety as "Dr John", a leader in the squatter's rights movement but is now better known for his work on youth culture and the impact of urban regeneration on working-class communities, particularly in East London, with a focus on issues of race and popular racism. More recently the scope of his work has widened to includes issues of identity politics, memory and loss, and the future of the Left in Britain. His most recent writing and research focuses on the transformation of object relations within digital capitalism, especially in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic and the environmental crisis. Most recently (2023) he has embarked on a series of collaborative book projects with graphic artists. Cohen's academic work is trans-disciplinary and draws on concepts from linguistics and narratology, psycho-analysis and anthropology, cultural history and social phenomenology. He was Emeritus Professor at the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of East London, and a member of the Livingmaps Network which he founded in 2013. Cohen was also a member of Compass, a Gramscian think tank within the Labour Party and was on the editorial board of New Formations. His work has been translated into French, German, Swedish, Italian, French and Japanese.