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LawrenceGrossberg
Does not the true characterof each epoch come alive in the nature
of its children?
-Karl Marx
ThanZero2(one of the more chilling representationsof this new generation), offers a vision in which conservativismhas not only engulfed his
beloved aesthetic and political refuge-Bennington-but also his own
abilityto resist:"I'm stayingat Bennington ... because even though it is
1. An earlyversionof thispaperwasdeliveredat a conferenceon PopularMusicin
the University,at CarletonUniversity,Ottawa,in March1985. I would like to thank
FrancoFabbri(who suggestedthe topic to me),James Carey,Jon Crane,and Stuart
Hall (who have made invaluablesuggestionsand criticisms)and all of the "young"
people I havetalkedto overthe yearswho havecontributedto this paper.I hope that
they hearme, at least in part,retellingtheirstories.
2. Brett Easton Ellis, LessThanZero(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985).
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ease with which the current generation of young movie stars (the "brat
pack") moves between playing high school students measuring the reality of their lives against the momentary possibility of an almost enforced openness (TheBreakfastClub)" and post-college yuppies confronting a terrifyingly unromanticized reality (St. Elmo'sFire)12marks
their youthfulness by the undecideability of their ages and class loyalties. These new icons are, in fact, surprisingly diverse-from nerds to
tough guys-and, even more surprisingly, articulate (whatever happened to the inarticulateJames Dean type youth?). Never has youth
talked so much, nor has had so much expertise and knowledge. The
fragmented audiences for such movies, as well as their hyper-stereotypical forms, suggest that traditional explanations of the identification
between spectators and characterscannot account for their popularity.
But we are on treacherous ground here. Given the different sources
of production of media texts and the many different audience factions
that make up the "youth market," we can't take for granted the relations between the lived realityof youth, its social identities, and particular cultural representations. This leaves us with a paradox. Even if the
diversity of audiences, determinations, and interpretations make a sociology of culture impossible, we still want to understand the significance of these cultural texts and practices and their relation to the social body of youth.
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these events by constructing the experiences behind their fans' appreciation. Yet even such an astute commentator as Richard Goldstein,
while rejecting the view that the MTV "market consists of nothing but
Reaganites" and recognizing that "its political loyalties . . . are still up
for grabs," falls back into a hyper-criticalaccount: "But the tube rock
generation does believe in Self, and it loves the spectacle of selves
wrought larger than life.... [M]usic videos promote the oligarchy of
image; it augments the authority of stars.... [I]t's not narrativethese
clips promote but self-image."'3
Perhaps the most controversial event of recent years was the enormous popularity of Bruce Springsteen. His success cannot be explained by pointing to an unequivocally shared meaning nor by appealing to a particular sociologically defined audience-fraction. He
cearly appeals to a new alliance which, in nascent form, had made
groups like REO Speedwagon and the Police commercial successes,
and which is now being constructed as a broader and more fundamental social formation: the site of youth. Yet his audience is not a monolithic, homogeneous collection.
Springsteen'ssuccess embodies many of our questions about the politics and experiences of youth: the contradictionscirculatingaround him
are so stark,and his success is of such a large scale (neithersimply instantaneous nor a constant,progressiveaccumulationof increments).Springsteen: rebel turned patriot? Lyricistturned rocker or, even worse, pop
star? A performer who cherished the sense of intimacy with his audience, playing to audiences of one hundred thousand? The explanations
of the success of the song "Born in the U.S.A." range from those who
which
think it is a patriot'santhem (i.e., Reagan, and the Chicago
Tribune,
labelled him "the Rambo of Rock"),14to those who think that his popu-
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to someone pointing a very large gun in his face); or even, from Ben
Jonson via Hunter Thompson, "He who makes a beast of himself gets
rid of the pain of being a man." It appears in their everyday humor"Don't need your authority figures; Don't need your bogus attitudes.
Don't want it. Can't stand it. I've got enough of my own" (graffiti,University of Illinois). It is also reflected in their appearance - "They look
menacing but almost practical.They look unkempt but totally deliberate. They look alienated but conformist.... They look like they want to
be attractivebut felt they had to startfrom scratch."25All of these statements exhibit an ironic, knowing distance, coupled with a sense of
emotional urgency. The problem is to understand the historical conditions which have enabled and proliferated such statements and to recognize what is unique in them.
The most direct and powerful description has been offered by
"postmodern" critics. We can use the "postmodernity" of contemporary youth to deconstruct the self-assurance of the right's appropriation of youth's everyday practices. But we shall have to withdraw our
consent in the end if we are to arriveat an adequate and more encouraging prognosis for the political possibilities of the new formations of
youth. I shall argue that such postmodern views not only fail to see the
contradictions into which this structure is inserted, but also fail to recognize that its primary power lies on the affective level.
Since the end of the Second World War, youth has had to confront
the possibility of the end of the world, of no future. It has become a
part of the taken-for-grantedrealitythat youth inhabits (much as television has become a constant feature of its existence). What terrifies
older generations defines the only reality of youth; what threatens to
drive many crazy has become a strategyof sanity for others. This goes
beyond the experience of being "damaged by the recent past and uncertain about the future."26History-both past and future-is neither
rejectednor challenged;it has simply become irrelevant,an unfortunate
but inevitable entanglement with the "cultural debris" of others' lives.
Or as Mason's Vietnam vet says, "You can't learn from the past. The
main thing you learn from history is that you can't learn from history.
That's what history is" (226).
25. Glenn O'Brien, "Why Young People Wear Black," Spin, October 1985, 16.
26. M. Coleman, "New Order's Leap of Faith," VillageVoice,11 January 1983, 61.
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Similarly, what once was thought of as an "identity crisis" has become an advertising slogan: "Is there a real me or am I just what you
see." Again, Leavittis helpful, as he defends certain attitudes of youth
by saying, "at least we don't pretend we're not wearing costumes....
At least [we're] not faking it."27What the young are not faking is, of
course, the fact that they are faking. It is a sort of authentic inauthenticity: authenticity as another pose to be taken. It really doesn't matter,
for the only voice it can speak is one of irony, distance, and difference:
it doesn't matter what you are but what you are not. Leavittcontinues,
"If we are without passion or affect, it is because we have decided that
passion and affect are simply not worth the trouble. If we stand
crouched in the shadows of a history in which we refuse to take part, it
is because that's exactly where we've chosen to stand." After all, "characterlessness takes work. It is defiance and defense all at once."28
Consider the image of the Titanic as a substitutefor more traditionally optimistic images of "the spaceship earth." It does not say that things
are falling apart but, rather, that the rules of the game, the game itself,
have changed. It says that the sources of meaning and value are as
much an illusion as the values themselves.Jean Baudrillardargues that
the very possibility of meaning has been lost or imploded because all
differences have become irrelevant. While traditional theories might
have talked about the reduction of realityto the image, Baudrillardtalks
about the supercession of reality by the image.29(Of course, this issue
has a long history, not only in political theory, but also in interpretations of American culture and media.) It is not merely that reality fails
to give up its meaning to us, or even that it no longer has any meaning,
but that it has any meaning we give to it; realityhas disappearedinto its
images. A recent Pepsi commercial-one of the most youth oriented
and postmodern ads on television- offers a clear statement of this collapse. The commercial, for caffeine free Pepsi, is premised upon the
identification of the audience's life with the ad's representation of life
in television land. While the commercial says, "Because your life is already stimulating enough," the life it represents is more accuratelythat
of "Magnum P.I." (Similarly, Lou Reed sings, on a recent album,
27. Leavitt, "The New Lost Generation," 93-94.
28. Ibid., 94.
29. Jean Baudrillard,Simulations,trans. P. Foss, P. Patton and P. Bleitchman (New
York: Semiotexte, 1983).
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may sound silly, but I'm ready to try something new."37Transcendence as a new game? Everything can be taken seriously and, simultaneously, made into a joke.
It is here that we can locate youth's oft-noted dedication to fun and
pleasure, however temporary and artificial the pleasure may be. In
fact, the pleasures of the temporary and the artificial have ironically
displaced the realityof pleasure itself. After all, pleasure is a risky business, and the demand for it is ultimately as unreasonable as any other.
I have noticed, for example, an increasing propensity for youth to describe desires and life-changes in terms of a decrease of boredom rather than an increase of pleasure or excitement. "To be modern is to be
hard-edged, coolly aggressive;to celebrate the synthetic and the artificial; to reject softness and easy intimacy and fuzzy-headed visions of
what life has to offer; to feel the pull of polarization in every fiber....
Modem youth is showing America how to tighten its sphincter-and
like it."38 Tom Ward has recently described the political implications
of this condition: "Never deny yourself a pleasure in the name of a
cause, an ideology, an abstraction. . . . Pace yourself wisely, avoid
burnout syndrome .... Save breath; don't argue with persons who
consider the MacNeil-Lehrer Hour must viewing" (i.e., anyone who
takes information and politics too seriously).39
We are in fact surrounded by signs of this postmoder condition:
from the extremely popular post-"SaturdayNight Live" movies (whose
attitude was, as Bill Murraysays in Meatballs,"Itjust doesn't matter"),40
to the production of comedy (i.e., Andy Kaufman, David Letterman,
and Pee Wee Herman) and pleasure (e.g., wrestling) at precisely the
point where reality and image collapse into one another. As a result,
the diverse formations of youth relate to culture differently:youth refuses to look behind the surface, to read its culture as if there were
some hidden meanings to be deciphered. Rather, youth inserts cultural texts into its public and private lives in complex ways. Youth
approaches communication with either a distracted attention and/or a
total absorption. The surface becomes the site at which reality is collected, the space within which power and pleasure are produced.
37.
38.
39.
40.
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one's difference by reaffirming that everything is the same, by becoming even more the same, and by leaving the present behind by entering
into it more fully. Being an object or a commodity becomes a way of
resisting the demand to reaffirm constantly one's subjectivity (i.e., recent slogans like "Born to Buy" and "When the going gets tough, the
tough take a vacation").
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who could negotiate that identity successfully-a real measure of success. Reagan is, after all, as a media star, a part of the world they inhabit. His image as hero and defender of American virtues is entirely
played out within the media's terms (almost as a caricature of itself).
Reagan hides nothing below the surface, as the coverage of his health
problems demonstrated. (It is interesting to note that Mondale's
greatestmoment of success came when he too entered into the media's
spaces, appropriating the advertising slogan, "where's the beef?")
Those who are horrified at this reduction of political choices to media
images assume that their own choices are more stably grounded, but
they too are caught in the artificialityof our images of history.
Reagan reiterated,within the ciches of the media's models, the felt
experience that reality had abandoned us-in this case, that the political systems and values of America, embodied in the Democrats, had
abandoned all of us, just as they continued to ignore youth in their
campaign. We must not assume that these youths were misled or manipulated. They often have quite sophisticated understandings of what
Reagan is about. As one of my pro-Reagan students said, "Ronald
Reagan's America is always moving but never going anywhere." After
all, if progress is an illusion, "stagnantprogress" is as real as any other.
Thus, understood as a postmodern response, we take their vote for
Reagan too seriously if we see it as evidence of a conservativepolitical
turn. For it is, in some ways, no different from their choice of Bruce
SpringsteenoverJulio Iglesias, or BeverlyHills Copover Passageto India.45
On the other hand, it would be a mistake to dismiss such choices as
matters of personal taste or cultural enjoyment. They are, in fact, the
very site at which youth attempts to produce its identity and reality. Its
choice of Reagan affirms, not a particular set of truths or values, but
the necessity-however temporary-of choice, meaning, and value.
Need such choices be seen as selfish or conservative? They certainly
cannot be defined or constrained by any appeal to an abstract collectivity. Myths of "the people" as the source or locus of power appear to
be little more than another media hype, with litte reality in the practices of those who constantly appeal to them. But this does not deny
the sense of a generational collectivity defined by their common situation: trapped on the Titanic. The resonance of this image is crucial:
45. BeverlyHills Cop,Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Production, 1984. Passageto
India,John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin Production, 1984.
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available to us to make sense of our lives, and the other defined by the
affective sense that life can no longer be made sense of. It is this new
status given to the affective as the unrepresentable which defines the
postmodern rupture of youth. It is not that young people do not live
the ideological values of their parents;rather, they find it impossible to
represent their mood-their own affective relationship to the worldin those terms and, increasingly, to invest themselves seriously in such
values. Postmodernity demands that one live schizophrenically, trying,
on the one hand, to live the inherited meanings and, on the other hand,
recognizing the inability of such meanings to respond to one's own
affectiveexperiences. Their "mattering maps"50no longer correspond
to the availablemaps of meanings. Meaning and affect-historically so
closely intertwined-have broken apart, each going off in its own direction. Each takes on its own autonomy, even as sanity demands that
the two be reintegrated.
This autonomous affectivemood is located in the space between terror (the extreme) and boredom (the null). As early as the mid-fifties,
Elvis Presley described life as "a rat race at a snail's pace." Youth lives
its postmodern affect between the boredom of terror and the terror of
boredom; it is positioned in an ironic play (a celebration of excess?)
between the demand/threat of subjectification (boredom) and of
commodification (terror);it exists within the space between the absolute loss of control and the partial recuperation of that mastery at the
level of its own imagery and imaginary. Youth avoids both boredom
and terror by living them out in the highs and lows of our media culture, which has become a buffer zone between this affectivereality and
the lack of an ideological descriptionwhich would enable us to respond
to it. Culture has become the paradoxical site at which youth lives out
an impossible relation to the future.
We can now acknowledge the contradiction inscribed in the political
and cultural practices of youth. It is a contradiction commonly spoken
but rarelythematized: liberals find themselves enjoying films that they
abhor ideologically (i.e., Ramboand El)51 or secretly enjoying Reagan's
new optimism: "Reagan . . . manages to make you feel good about
your country, and about the times in which you are living. All those
50. Rebecca Goldstein, TheMind-BodyProblem(New York: Laurel, 1983), 272.
Univer51. Rambo:FirstBlood,PartII, Tri-StarPictures, 1985. E., theExtra-Terrestrial,
sal Pictures, 1982.
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corny feelings that hid inside of you for so long are waved right out in
public by Reagan for everyone to see-and even while you're listing all
the reasons that you shouldn't fall for it, you're glad that you're falling.
If you're a sucker for the act, that's okay."52Reagan uses the media
affectivelyto recharge the political cliches which have lost their power,
but, in the process, he articulates them into larger ideological structures. He uses the very strategies of the autonomous affect, reducing
questions of politics, values, and meanings to individualized images of
morality, self-sacrifice, and community. There is litte difference between these strategies and Live-Aid's attempt, with its powerful media
images of starvation, to substitute charity for politics. (On the other
hand, the fact that Farm-Aidwas unwilling or unable to appeal to such
images and, therefore, had to claim for itself a real sense of political
opposition resulted in its vilification by both the media and the government.) This has become the new strategy of politics in the media
age. The very realityrof America is displaced into its media images (and
thus, youth can adopt it as another surface identity);it makes sense that
there is little difference in the way Springsteen'sfans invest in it regardless of their national identity. Reagan reestablishes a necessary sense of
difference by using the affectivedifferences generated upon the surface
of the media. By reconnecting these affective differences to the ideological labels which have, until recently, proven so ineffective, he has
managed to create a constituency based on affect rather than ideology.
The danger is that, if left unchallenged, the two could easily become
rearticulatedinto a new (albeit simulated) historical conjuncture. This
possibility, alreadyvisible on the horizon, may account for the new political and affective alliances Reagan is forging. Therefore, we cannot
leave the task of articulating youth's political interests and commitments to the mercy of the conservatives and of the commercial languages of the media, both of which are already offering their interpretations as transparent and commonsensical descriptions. Instead, we
must intervene both as critics and educators. But first, we must allow
ourselves to be educated by those we are attempting to understand, by
the music they listen to, by the practices they engage in. We must learn
how to listen to them if we expect them to listen to us.
52. Bob Greene, "It's Confession Time," ChicagoTribune,11 December 1985.