[ecrea] The Way Out. New Book on Invisible Insurrections & Counterculture

New book… a counterculture history of art and experimental politics that 
turns the world inside out
PDF available freely online: http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=822

*The Way Out. Invisible Insurrections and Radical Imaginaries in the UK 
Underground 1961-1991*
Kasper Opstrup

The Way Out examines the radical political and hedonist imaginaries of 
the experimental fringes of the UK Underground from 1961 to 1991 By 
examining the relations between collective and collaborative practices 
with an explicit agenda of cultural revolution, Kasper Opstrup charts a 
hidden history of experiments with cultural engineering, expanding 
current discussions of art, medias, politics, radical education and the 
occult revival. Even though the theatres of operation have changed with 
the rise of the Internet and a globalised finance economy, these 
imaginaries still raise questions that speak directly to the present.

Here we encounter a series of figures – including Alexander Trocchi, R. 
D. Laing, Joseph Berke, Brion Gysin, William Burroughs and Genesis 
P-Orridge – that blurred the lines between inner and outer, the 
invisible and the material. Four singular forms of speculative 
techniques for igniting an invisible insurrection with cultural means 
make up the central case studies: the sigma project, London 
Anti-University, Academy 23 and thee Temple ov Psychick Youth.

Contained within these imaginaries is a new type of action university: a 
communal affair that would improvise a new type of social relation into 
existence by de-programming and de-conditioning us without any 
blueprints for the future besides to make it happen. Instead of being 
turned upside down, the world was to be changed from the inside out.


Bio: Kasper Opstrup is a writer and researcher of radical culture, 
specialising in concatenations of art/literature, radical politics, and 
occultism as counter-culture and underground phenomenon. Currently he is 
working on a book examining aesthetic undercurrents of mystical 
utopianism from surrealism to the contemporary tentatively called An 
Imaginary Kingdom in the Wastelands of the Real – on Art, Esotericism 
and the Politics of Hope.




Released by Minor Compositions, Colchester / Brooklyn / Port Watson
Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing 
from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of 
everyday life.

Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia
www.minorcompositions.info | (minorcompositions /at/ gmail.com)


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