Discussion 6: Howl by Allen Ginsberg

This poem’ has come to represent an enduring counterculture, a set of young rebels – the Beats, and then their successors – who dress oddly, speak their own argot and hold straight, square and old bourgeois ways in fiery contempt…. And yet to look hard at the poem itself is to see a paradox. ’ - Stephen Burt - The Paradox of Howl

In my opinion even though the poem declares the forthcoming of a new culture and the end to the old habits of the past, Ginsberg has deeply intertwined the writing with the past. It’s as though he is fighting the machine. Ginsberg releases a continuous flow of thoughts, feelings, and impressions that has got me thinking about the world we are living in today. Perhaps we are all stuck in a matrix being controlled by what the machine does. Everything we do today is around the machine, even a simple visit to the super market or to the doctor. The machine is telling us what we should be eating and not, as well as the doctor telling us we’ve had too many units or aren’t eating healthy. Well I eat as much junk food as I please and drink when I want and I’m healthy so perhaps the machine is wrong.

As the poem talks about the coming of this new culture, where the machine controls all, we looked at Archigram in relation as they were obsession in the institute of state – machinery. Their approach was futurist, anti-heroic and pro-consumerist; they draw their inspiration from the technology in order to create a new reality that was expressed through hypothetical projects. It is quite scary as one looks around us as the world we are living in is becoming more and more like the archigram design. Everything we do is almost through a social network of the computer. As we are advancing more in technology we seem to be feeding the machine and advancing its control. Ginsberg and Archigram work predicted the forthcoming of this machine, which I feel as lead me to read and appreciate their work without the context of the time through the social and racial unrest. I feel their work at the time was futurist but as we stand today, its reality.
Who’s ready to fight the machine?