When Down is Up: The Desublimating Impulse (Critical Voices in Art, Theory & Culture)

An interdisciplinary study of the sociological, political, and philosophical background to our contemporary culture from the late 1970s onwards.
This collection of essays explores why the idea of counter-culture and the underground once so suggestive of the Left has been appropriated by the reactionaries of the 1990s taking as examples:
the recent ascendance of a radical right-wing culture
local militias
racist religious sects

and argues this is a consequence of the embodiment of modernism's dissident tendency within a hostile social field. Miller concludes that many of the ideas of the cultural underground came off as hopelessly romantic, if not deluded or childish.