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Laing argued instead for the possibility of radical political change at a meso-
social level (Laing 1968b, 16): “In our society, at certain times, this interlaced
set of systems may lend itself to revolutionary change, not at the extreme
micro or macro ends; that is, not through the individual pirouette of solitary
repentance on the one hand, or by a seizure of the machinery of the state on
the other; but by sudden, structural, radical qualitative changes in the inter-
mediate system levels: changes in a factory, a hospital, a school, a university, a
set of schools, or a whole area of industry, medicine, education, etc.” Kingsley
Hall, of course, was a real example of what Laing was talking about, a new
form of midlevel institution that enacted a novel set of social arrangements
outside the established institutional framework; the Anti-University followed
the next year.
To wrap this discussion up, I can note that the most systematic institu-
tional theorist of the counterculture in Britain was Alexander Trocchi—
Laing's friend and fellow Glaswegian. From the early 1960s onward, Trocchi
laid out a vision of what he called sigma (for “sum,” and favoring the lowercase
Greek symbol), an institutional form that would link together existing coun-
tercultural institutions and accelerate their propagation. Trocchi was clear
that the aim should indeed be a sort of parallel social universe, through which
the counterculture could supersede rather than take over older institutional
forms: “History will not overthrow national governments; it will outflank
them.” As exemplified at Kingsley Hall and later Archway, and again instanti-
ating the cybernetic ontology of exceedingly complex systems, Trocchi imag-
ined sigma as a site for the endless emergence of nonmodern selves: “We
must reject the fiction of 'unchanging human nature.' There is in fact no such
permanence anywhere. There is only becoming .” Concretely,
at a chosen moment in a vacant country house (mill, abbey, church or castle)
not too far from the City of London we shall foment a kind of cultural “jam
session;” out of this will evolve the prototype of our spontaneous university . The
original building will stand deep within its own grounds, preferably on a river
bank. It should be large enough for a pilot group (astronauts of inner space)
to situate itself, orgasm and genius, and their tools and dream-machines and
amazing apparatus and appurtenances; with outhouses for “workshops” large
as could accommodate light industry; the entire site to allow for spontane-
ous architecture and eventual town planning . . . . We envisage the whole as a
vital laboratory for the creation (and evaluation) of conscious situations ; it goes
without saying that it is not only the environment which is in question, plastic,
subject to change, but men also.
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