ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 narrates the development of a bohemian aesthetic in post-war America. The chapter shows how the aesthetic developed against the rationality of modernity, typified by the corporate organisation. I understand the post-war period through Georges Bataille’s concept of unemployed negativity which conceptualises the insufficiency of administrative reason at the end of history. Developing first in nineteenth-century France, bohemia was a reaction to modernity that sought new ways of existing in the modern world. It rebelled against bourgeois society and sought the creation of new identities. The stultifying conformity of the corporate organisation in post-war America produced the revolt that emerged within the Beat Generation and which later fed into the counterculture of the 1960s by embodying a seductive aesthetic of rebellion imbued with a sense of individual liberty. Within the context of American culture it is the assertion of individual liberty, conceptualised in the mythology of the frontier, which overturns administrative rationality, and it is this spirit which is key to the legacy of bohemia within the California Ideology and the moral underpinnings of neoliberalism.
