In my statement I wanted to explain my appeal for these books, describing my interest in the "how-to" manual as a genre. As the ancestor of the homesteading manual and the precursor of the DIY zine (or now, more generically, about.com) the "manual" quite radically cuts out the middle-man and the expenses of training.
However, I also wanted to show the other secret attraction of these books, which is that the manual also allows for the formation of an alternative identity, functioning as an aide in self-actualization/ transformation.
Ironically, it is to this very radical movement of intentional communities that we owe the greenwashed environmentalism of today. I stressed that perhaps the manuals were almost too effective, and that eventually, the radical subjectivities associated with the intentional communities movement were commodified, its fonts and design sensibilities were raided. The middle man was brought back into the picture, not as Whole Earth but as "Whole Foods".
North American tracts and manuals from the seventies:From Whole Earth to Whole Foods
"My small book collection recognizes the "how-to" genre as a means of forming counter-cultural subjectivities in North America during the Yippie, back-to-the-land and intentional communities movements that coincided with the tumultuous period of social change that was the late sixties and early seventies. With books that describe everything from home plumbing to home-birthing, leather-tanning to sprout fasting, structural engineering and "how to be a Yippie," my collection demonstrates forms of guidance beyond the slogan: "turn on, tune in, and drop out."
Books like Jerry Rubin’s Do it! (1970), Stuart Brand’s meta-database The Whole Earth Catalog (1971), Viktoras Kulvinskas’ paranoiac Survival into the 21st Century (1975) and Robert de Ropp’s meticulously detailed homesteading manual (1975) each provided, in one way or another, “access to tools”. Whether a guiding voice or a set of instructions, all of these books allowed readers to channel the dissatisfaction of the sixties into a constructive project turned towards actualizing a Utopian future.
Though such literature may have had precedents in the work-a-day home-economics tracts of the 19th century, the counter-cultural "how-to" was marked by a heightened self-consciousness stoked by an imagined community of readers whose decision to move “off-the grid” was not necessary but political. While offering instruction, these books also provided ideological formation, emphasizing the ethics of communal living and a non-exploitative approach to the environment. In so doing– like all "self-help" books– they proposed “how a person should be” and provided their readers the fantasy of a new, improved self.
It is perhaps a paradoxical testament to the counter-cultural manual’s clarity of purpose then, that today we can see its vestiges in depoliticized "green" enterprises where the only barrier between political consciousness and self-actualization is how much money one can spend at the counter. As such, my collection looks to recuperate the strangeness, daring, and humor of this earlier movement, retracing through its literature the path that leads from Whole Earth to Whole Foods."
–Emilie Anne Yvonne Luse, PhD Student, Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Do you have Abbie Hoffman's STEAL THIS BOOK in your collection? In the 70's, it was kept behind the counter for obvious reasons. Jerry Rubin's later GROWING (UP) AT 37 was not - sort of almost an apologia.
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