Rockin' with Reagan, Or the Mainstreaming of Postmodernity Author(S): Lawrence Grossberg Source: Cultural Critique, No

Home , Old Before I Die, Prove It All Night

Rockin' with Reagan, or the Mainstreaming of Postmodernity Author(s): Lawrence Grossberg Source: Cultural Critique, No. 10, Popular Narrative, Popular Images (Autumn, 1988), pp. 123- 149 Published by: University of Minnesota Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354110 Accessed: 25/01/2009 17:46

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=umnpress.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

University of Minnesota Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cultural Critique.

http://www.jstor.org Rockin' with Reagan, or the Mainstreaming of Postmodernity

LawrenceGrossberg

Does not the true characterof each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? -Karl Marx

here is, in the United States today, a vague discomfort-if not an outright paranoia-about the new generations of youth, variously characterized as "conservative," "cynical," "selfish," "complacent," "nihilistic," "apolitical," and "mean." Brett Easton Ellis, author of Less 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 staying at Bennington ... because even though it is

1. An earlyversion of this paperwas deliveredat a conferenceon PopularMusic in 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 invaluablesuggestions and criticisms)and all of the "young" people I havetalked to overthe yearswho havecontributed to this paper.I hope that they hear me, at least in part,retelling their stories. 2. Brett Easton Ellis, LessThan Zero (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985). 1988 by CulturalCritique. 0882-4371 (Fall 1988). All rights reserved.

123 124 Grossberg a place whose original conception and ideology has faded, there is no place left to go."3 In order to give himself an identity-"we are con- fused ... because we have no identity"-Ellis is willing to assume that the current generations of youth are, without any sense of contradiction, conservative and narcissistic. Thus, in the name of true art and political opposition, he recreates the arguments of generations of conservative cultural critics by assuming that the masses-in this case, young people-are either inherently conservative, or alternatively,easily duped into conservativism. But the meaning and politics of youth's actions are not indelibly and transparentlywritten upon its surface. Cultural interpretationsare never simple or innocent descriptions. Rather, they construct the events they purport to describe by "articulating" them into particular relationships. I want to weaken the confidence of such ascriptions, to de- stabilize the links that are already being forged between the practices, experiences, and cultural representations of contemporary youth. By absorbing the latter's behavior into traditional political categories, we reflect those interpretations back to it, and it becomes increasingly easy, if not reasonable, for today's youth to see itself in such terms. The question, then, is whether there are alternative interpretations of youth's reality which would both make sense of its experiences and offer viable responses. We need a better description of the gestures, practices, and statements (the "microhabits") of contemporary youth in its everyday activities and of the ways these are connected to its positions as agents within the world. In the effort to rattle the already taken-for-granted connections among youth's cultural and political practices, its lived experience, and already established political positions, we must not merely substitute a different set of assumed connections, which would similarlyreduce the complexity and apparent otherness of this position into already given phenomenological categories. How then do we move beyond the elitism of the current denunciations of the new youth: beyond the illusory neutrality of such descriptions as "yuppies" (young upwardly mobile professionals) and beyond the patronization implicit in such descriptions as "puppies" (paranoid upwardly mobile professionals), while

3. Ellis, "Down and Out at Bennington College," RollingStone, 26 September 1985, 114. Rockin' with Reagan 125 yet recognizing the bit of truth in each of these? Appeals to youth's own self-interpretationsoffer no solution since the question is precisely the lack of fit between its experiences/behavior and the languages available for representing these experiences to youth and others. I propose a more hesitant and partial approach: in order to deconstruct the conservative reading of youth, I will examine some of its practices, events, experiences, statements, and tastes, and will interpret them as signs of a particularaffective context which plays an important determining role in how youth is constructed and lived. However, even this context-fashionably referred to as "postmodemity"-is not sufficient to understand youth's behavior. If youth lives in postmodernity, it also lives in many other places and contexts. Our interpretation of youth's behavior must recognize the contradictions generated out of real historical complexity. Who is this "new youth" that has become the object of so much concern? Its sociological and chronological parameters are difficult to define in advance; there is an increasingly tenuous relationship between age and "youth" in this culture (i.e., where "youth" has become something to be worked for). David Leavitt captures this ambiguous relation: "the goal seems to be to get to thirty as fast as possible, and stay there. Startingout, we are eager, above all else, to be finished."4 If we startwith the median of the "new youth," we can say that it is a generation too young to believe in the counterculture and too old to believe in the computer utopia. It is the generation of the children of the silent majority and, in some cases, of the not-so-silent counterculture: mainstream, middle class, suburban, college and professionally oriented. But this position is too simple, for it ignores the real lines that connect this mainstream to other groups, forming a complex network of different social formations of youth. Chronologically, it extends from the baby-boomers (whether yuppies or "new collar workers")to the younger generations of computer-literate, MTV-watching, politi- cally naive youth (according to a recent poll, over half of the thirteen year olds believe that a third party is illegal). Sociologically, it includes fragments of both working-class and minority youth who seem, similarly, to be espousing "conservative"values. It is this complex interac- tive and often contradictory set of social formations of youth-a space

4. David Leavitt, "The New Lost Generation," Esquire,May 1985, 94. 126 Grossberg in which I too am included-that is in question, for none of this group have escaped the scrutiny and condemnation of critics. It may be more appropriate, then, to think of youth as a field of diverse and contradictory practices, experiences, identities, and discourses. Moreover, at the present moment, youth is a battlefield on which adolescents, baby- boomers, parents, and new-rightistsare strugglingto control its meanings and powers.

I. "I hopeI get old beforeI die"

The experience of "being young" in the United States has been changing since the end of the Second World War. There are signs of this in the behavior of youth itself. Consider some of the more fright- ening examples: the suicide rate for 15-25 year olds has tripled since 1950. In 1982, one youth committed suicide every two hours. (Inter- estingly, the rates are lower for female and black youths than for white male youths. Do we understand the real connections involved here?) Further, according to government estimates, twenty percent of 15-25 year olds are alcoholics. (The figure has doubled in the past decade.) There is also evidence that the institutionalized relations between the adult population and youth are changing: the lack of willingness to support taxation for education and other social welfare needs; the current debates over teachers' rights to use corporal punishment; the increasing infringements of youth's constitutional rights; the increasing tendency for the courts to treat juvenile offenders as adults; changing child-rearing practices (for example, what Elkind has described as the "theory of hurried childhood" in which the child is given more things and skills earlier);5and adults' changing perceptions of the everyday life of youth (for example, a comparison of the major disciplinary problems in schools in 1940 and 1982 yields rather shocking changes in perception [whether or not the differences are an accurate representation of school life]-in 1940, the major problems were listed, in order, as talking, chewing gum, making noise, running in the halls, getting out of turn in line, wearing improper clothing, not putting paper in wastebaskets; in 1982, they were rape, robbery, assault, burglary,

5. David Elkind, TheHurried Child: Growing up tooFast too Soon(Reading, Ma.: Addi- son-Wesley, 1981). Rockin' with Reagan 127

arson, bombings, murder, suicide, absenteeism, vandalism, extortion, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, gang warfare,pregnancy, abortion, venere- al disease).6 But these changing conditions and experiences are not innocently available to us; there is a struggle taking place in a broad range of contemporary cultural texts over how to describe them. We can see it in the different and, in some cases, new ways in which youth-its experiences, practices and discourses, and the relations amongst these-is represented. In the dominant media, the choices are quite limited: youth embodies all of the (negative) characteristicsof adulthood (i.e., in the currently popular horror/slasher movies, as well as in certain recent television series);youth is radicallydifferent from adulthood (what Carson has described as "alien, inherently Other");7or youth is the re- pository of adult fantasies (with little effort made to hide this manipu- lation, i.e., in Spielberg's films and in the AnimalHouse genre). This diversity-from protectionism to victimage to celebration to apotheosis (where youth becomes the new savior of the world as in TheLast Star- fighter8or, of nerdy parents as in Backto theFuture)9- signals, at the very least, the contradictions in our feelings about youth. Moreover, despite interest in youth as a topic, the television networks seem unable to rework the possibilities of a situation comedy built around youth. The failure of many recent attempts (i.e., "Square Pegs," "Best of Times") may be partly the result of a refusal to deal with the problematic relation between youth as part of a peer culture (i.e., in school and on the streets)and as part of a domestic culture (i.e., in the home). In fact, one might reasonably (and ambiguously) ask whether anyone ever grows up on television. There has been a veritable explosion of discourses from a variety of sources aimed at different fragments of the youth audiences. The current re-emergence of youth-oriented movies crosses a large number of genres, which is all the more startling given the failure of such movies (and their stars) in the seventies (i.e., TheWanderers, Over the Edge).10 The

6. "BlackboardJungle, 1940-1982," Harpers,March 1985, 25. 7. Tom Carson, "Head 'em up, Move 'em out," VillageVoice, 6 November 1984, 73. 8. TheLast Starfighter,Universal-Lorimar Productions, 1984. 9. Backto the Future,Amblin Entertainment, 1985. 10. The Wanderers,Martin Ransohoff Production, 1979. Overthe Edge, George Litto Production, 1979. 128 Grossberg 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 en- forced openness (TheBreakfast Club)" and post-college yuppies con- fronting a terrifyingly unromanticized reality (St. Elmo'sFire)12 marks 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 hap- pened 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-stereo- typical 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 reality of 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 so- ciology of culture impossible, we still want to understand the signifi- cance of these cultural texts and practices and their relation to the social body of youth.

II. Who is "theBoss" anyway?

Nowhere is the complexity and urgency of the issues surrounding the differentyouth formations more evident than in the revival, not only of rock-and-roll,but of debates and public discussions about it: rock lyrics and images (whether on albums or MTV) are debated; both their politics and their "psychological effects" are scrutinized with a classic American paranoia about new technologies and culturalforms. On the other hand, critics have lauded recent mega-events (i.e., the Live-Aid and Farm-Aidconcerts) and the broad presence of female starswithin a revitalized top 40. Such events have generated large amounts of contradictory commentary in which writers struggle to define the politics of

11. TheBreakfast Club, A and M Films, 1985. 12. St. Elmo'sFire, Columbia-Delphi IV Productions, 1985. Rockin' with Reagan 129 these events by constructing the experiences behind their fans' appre- ciation. 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 ex- plained 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 fundamen- tal social formation: the site of youth. Yet his audience is not a mono- lithic, homogeneous collection. Springsteen'ssuccess embodies many of our questions about the politics and experiences of youth: the contradictionscirculating around him are so stark,and his success is of such a large scale (neithersimply instan- taneous nor a constant,progressive accumulation of increments).Spring- steen: 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 think it is a patriot'santhem (i.e., Reagan, and the ChicagoTribune, which labelled him "the Rambo of Rock"),14to those who think that his popularity is the result of a mishearing of Springsteenas a patriot,15to those who seem to assume that all of his fans "carepassionately about what his lyricssay,"16 to more cynicalviews of the Americanmyth of authenticity.17

13. Richard Goldstein, "Tube Rock: How Music Video is Changing Music," Village Voice,17 September 1985, 42. 14. "The Rambo of Rock and Roll," ChicagoTribune, 9 August 1985. 15. Greil Marcus, personal conversation, 1983. 16. Jon Pareles, "Bruce Springsteen-Rock's Popular Populist," New YorkTimes, 18 August 1985. 17. Simon Frith, SoundEfects: Youth, Leisure, and thePolitics of Rock'n' Roll (New York: Pantheon, 1981). 130 Grossberg

These interpretations fail to recognize that different audiences may simply interpret his message differently. And, if nothing else, one cannot help but notice the range of ages and styles included within his audience. It goes well beyond the obvious incorporation of a high school (and even younger) audience (which Sharon Thompson has ironically described as a "pack of no-good antifeminist post-punk reactionary hackers, those harbingers of the future, today's teens").18But even this is too simple since his audience has expanded at every age and across sociological and gender (although not racial) boundaries. Springsteen is, quintessentially, an American rock-and-roll star. While rock in England has largely depended upon the working-class appropriation of middle-class signs (i.e., fashion), in America the middle-class audience has dominated (especially since the baby-boomers first reached college where they were, in essence, ghettoized) by appropriating images of working-class styles and aspirations, inflected into scenes of geographical mobility and fun (partying, sexual pleasure). This is not to deny that Springsteen sings of and to working-class experiences, yet his images of unemployment, for example, are somehow able to speak to middle-class adolescents. His male expressions of loneliness and sexual desire are somehow able to speak to women across a wide spectrum of ages and casses. And his American imagery is apparently capable of striking responsive chords across national boundaries (for example, at his concerts in England and Japan, audiences sang along to "Born in the USA" with the same passion as their American counterparts).How is one to make sense of the strength and range of these identifications, and of the passion of his fans? The explanation for Springsteen's popularity cannot be ascribed to his lyrics, anymore than one can read his politics in the iconography of the flag that appears on the cover: patriotic celebration? Rebellious desecration? Or, is he, as Bobbie Ann Mason suggests, "studying it, trying to figure out its meaning. It is such a big flag the stars don't even show in the picture."19After all, nationalism (and its symbols) is an important part of popular consciousness and not necessarily conservative:it is, like youth itself, a site defined by the struggleto articulatepopu- lar consciousness and transform it into particularpolitical effects. The

18. Sharon Thompson, "Young Lust," Village Voice, 27 August 1985, 43. 19. Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 236. Rockin'with Reagan 131

problem is that critics have attempted to understand fans' relationship to music by looking at the texts, rather than by looking at the contexts within which those relations are enacted and displayed, contexts of consumption and empowerment. The concert is the obvious place to begin, for Springsteen's success has always depended upon his visual and physical presence; television has made him available to a wider and initially less committed audience. At Chicago's Soldier Field in August 1985, Springsteen played to a heterogeneous audience, one which was unexpectedly straight, even polite (this has been noted about many contemporary rock events). Moreover, this affability serves a purpose--allowing the audience to exist for a while in a "simulacrum" of community in an alienating space, perfectly embodied in the frequent "human waves" which moved across and united the audience of ninety thousand (the "wave" originated at college football games: it consists of fans leaping from their seats, arms stretched out in a staggered procession around the stadium, literally creating a wave effect that is visually stunning, with opposite sides applauding each other as it continues and booing those who impede or interrupt its progress). This simulated identity is embodied in the band's ability to maintain its identification with deep rock-and-roll roots (the history of rock-and-roll is never relegated to the past; it is enacted in the present of his music, another example of Springsteen's explicit desire to "have it all") by integrating both blacks and women as a necessary part of the rock-and-rollcommunity even as it uses the most sophisticated technology to produce that effect. Sitting in the midst of the audience, surrounded by yuppies, valley girls, greeks, and bikers, I was struck by the fact everyone sang along to virtually every song and, moreover, passionately punctuated particular lines and songs. This participation shows how the vast majority of Springsteen's fans appropriate his songs despite their different interpretations of content or meaning (in fact, the majority of fans I have talked to are simply uninterested in the question of Bruce's explicit messages). Both critics and fans generally agree that Springsteen's appeal depends largely upon his concrete imagery, but they fail to locate the power of such images. Many of his songs, as well as the stories he tells during the concert, simultaneously define Springsteen's ordinariness (he is just like us) and difference. This is crucial, for even though his audiences, may not actually share in his narratives(built as they are 132 Grossberg on older male, urban working-class experience), it can identify with them on some other level. Even though they have not lived the experience, they have shared the particular affective or emotional structure that permeates his entire performance. Putting it simply, they have felt like this. Jay Cocks has described it as the contradiction between dreams and reality.20The opposition is, of course, never that simple, for our reality is constructed from our dreams just as our dreams are determined by our realities. Moreover, this affective paradox is certainly not without its own history; it is at the root of much of contemporary youth culture and of rock-and-roll. Nevertheless, it has never been so powerfully combined with populist imagery and mainstream marketing. It is the sense of being "trapped" (not coincidentally the title of Springsteen's popular contribution to the WeAre the Worldalbum) by broken prom- ises. There are many direct expressions of this: i.e., "Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse?" During the performance, every song-from "Cover Me" to "Dancing in the Dark" to "Prove it all Night" to "Pink Cadillac"-is used to make this affective context more and more powerfully felt. I was struck by how many people responded with enormous passion when, in the transition from "Hungry Hearts" to "Cadillac Ranch," Springsteen demanded, "if you're hungry inside, shout it out," and how many sang lines like "And I feel like I'm travelling on a downbound train" with a convinc- ing sense of despair. Springsteen offers no easy solutions or obvious escapes from this de- pressing context. But he does offer something, a glimpse outside, a bit of compensation for the affective terror and emptiness: namely, himself and his performance. For what is obvious, over and over in his performances, is that Springsteen cares about rock-and-roll and its audiences. Perhaps with an unavoidable touch of romanticism, his audience responds to the fact that he has not broken his promise-albeit a small one in the context of global struggles. Again, to cite Bobbie Ann Mason, "So many videos were full of disasters, with everything flying apart, shifting, in the blink of an eye. The random images on the screen were swirling, beyond anyone's control; everything was falling ... but Bruce was still dancing in all that darkness,and the heart of rock-and-roll

20. Jay Cocks, "'Round the World, a Boss Boom," Time,26 August 1985, 69. Rockin' with Reagan 133 was still beating" (230). Springsteen's performance becomes an image of surviving this shared affective experience: "This is what I do. I work on staying together, one day at a time. There's no room for anything else. It takes all my energy."21Not simply equating survival and politics, nor acquiescing to despair, he evokes this affective structure and invokes images of empowerment from within it. Critics and fans often explain this empowerment by appealing to Springsteen's "authenticity"and contrast it to the "coopted" nature of the vast majority of commercial rock-and-roll. Yet, that difference has been eroded (due to punk, disco, and avant-garderock's radical assertion of a politics of style built upon the ambiguity of authenticity and inauthenticity, and as a response to an economic and/or cultural paranoia). In Springsteen's case, authenticity itself has become a powerful style, which is to say that the question of authenticity, while of imme- diate relevance to any fan, is always displaced. They know that his act is rehearsed and repeated, that his authenticity is constructed (although the authentic is not supposed to be). In fact, they want to see his gestures repeated. Thus it is not true to say that Springsteen "has traded the immediacy of the theater for the iconography of the screen,"22for he makes visible their inseparability. This contradiction has always been at the heart of rock-and- roll. As Greil Marcus has pointed out, Elvis Presley'spower as the king of rock- and-roll was in his image as the self-made (populist) king.23And this is the site of Springsteen's popularity: to celebrate simultaneously one's ordinariness and to assert one's fantastic (and even fantasmatic)difference-the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Springsteen's performance celebrates the fans' identity within the mainstream. It gives them an identity in their very lack of difference, or in the artificialityof a constructed difference-in their common affectivelives. Springsteenmakes this more real than their social differences and experiences. We can hear this, over and over, not only in particular songs (i.e., "Prove it all Night" and "I'm on Fire") but also in the very contradictions he invokes, contradictions which empower fans by celebrating the traps (i.e., even though he attacks nostalgia in "Glory Days" and patriotism

21. Mason, In Country,225. 22. Ariel Swartey, "Chief Executive Officer," VillageVoice, 3 September 1985, 65. 23. Greil Marcus, "Lies About Elvis, Lies About Us," VillageVoice Literary Supplement, December 1981, 16-17. 134 Grossberg in "Born in the USA," the songs become emotional affirmations of those impossible realities). Reality and images slide into one another at the affective level. Now we can perhaps begin to make sense of the contradictions in Springsteen's politics and the ambiguities in his audience's interpretations. Springsteen empowers his fans, energizes them, within their affective commonality by invoking personal and local images, as if it were all meant to be shown on television. But even as he recognizes that one must do more (recreatedin his political raps during the concert and in his support for local groups and struggles), even as he appeals to national imagery, his commitment to the local and the image prevents him from engaging in larger issues. America, such a powerful image in his current success, is always invoked as one's "hometown," and Springsteen deals with national history by reducing it to the level of individual lives: "with countries, like people, its easy to let the best part slip away." As he tries to politicize his audiences by personalizing politics, his very success depends upon his ability to turn America into an image, thereby limiting its power to their affective lives.

III. Life in the PostmodernWar Zone

We have no direct access to this affective context. We cannot appeal directly to our experiences of it, for they are determined by the available languages. In fact, as soon as we try to say something explicit about this affective structure, we are caught in the gap between event, description, and experience. Nevertheless, we can see its signs-or more accurately, its billboards-everywhere: not only on T-shirts, buttons, records, advertisements, movies, and television shows, but also in concrete choices, self-accounts, practices, relationships, and commit- ments. Let me give a few examples: "Life is hard and then you die;" "It's hopeless but not serious;" "If you're sailing on the Titanic, go first class," "No matter where you go, there you are" (Buckaroo Bonzai)24Other statements are appropriated into the service of this affective organization: "If you only go around once, go for all the gusto you can;" "Makemy day" (said originally,of course, by Clint Eastwood

24. BuckarooBonzai, Sherwood Productions, 1984. Rockin' with Reagan 135

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,Uni- versity of Illinois). It is also reflected in their appearance - "They look menacing but almost practical.They look unkempt but totally deliber- ate. 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 arrive at an adequate and more encour- aging 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-grantedreality that 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 strategy of sanity for others. This goes beyond the experience of being "damaged by the recent past and un- certain about the future."26History-both past and future-is neither rejected nor 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. 136 Grossberg

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, Leavitt is 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, "char- acterlessness takes work. It is defiance and defense all at once."28 Consider the image of the Titanic as a substitute for more traditional- ly 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 disappeared into 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). Rockin'with Reagan 137

"life is a gamble on videotape.") This is not merely a question of how the media represent reality (of whether they reflect or shape our interpretations, or of whether they fairly distribute information) but, rather, of whether the distinction is functional any longer. The ability to distinguish reality and image has become not only increasingly difficult but increasingly less relevant: i.e., the common experience of seeing a news report and vaguely remembering having seen it before as a television movie, only to see it again as a television movie and vaguely re- member having heard it on the news. Which is the real, the original event? At best, "You have to make allowances for the fact that everything we see tonight is real."30Reality is what works on television, what fits the models of mediation which, consequently, no longer mediate. As Baudrillard points out, between Disneyland and Los Angeles, are we certain which is less real or less crazy as an inhabitable space?31I recently overhead two spectators at Farm-Aid talking. The first one com- plained that it was all a P.R. hype. The second responded, "Yes,but then the whole world's a P.R. hype." The American dream was first transformed into suburbia as the media's image of the "good life" and now, into a designer label-its own medium, something which is no longer available by definition to everyone. Radicalism has become the basis of stardom, and history has become a best-selling game. Living in this historical condition does not render one passive; it does not deny the need for action nor the possibility of commitment, albeit always an individualized, local commitment (and it does, ironically, stand back from the very idea of commitment). In this postmodern condition, one is neither terrified into, nor terrified of, acting. "Seek small passions. Big ones are too risky."32People have often pointed to the devastating impact of the increasing divorce rate on the experience of contemporary youth. But they fail to distinguish two contexts within which this is experienced: one in which it is nostalgical- ly constructed as a crisis of faith and the other in which it is taken for granted. While the former produces a "magazine of adult dating" called Futile(with a touch of both irony and pathos, although it could be appropriated into the second position by simply erasing the pathos

30. Don DeLillo,White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1985), 139. 31. Baudrillard,Simulations, 23-26. 32. Tom Ward, "Sex and Drugs and Ronald Reagan,"Village Voice, 29 January 1985, 15. 138 Grossberg of expectations), the latter produces characters like Chloe in TheBig Chill,33who characterizes her relationship with a residual countercul- tural type who has just committed suicide as "wonderful. I had no expectations and he had too many." Such statements are in fact pervasive throughout the cultural products of this new youth formation. In the cult film, LiquidSky,34 one song defiantly asserts: "Me and my rhythm box. We're both high. Know why? It's preprogrammed, so what. Who of your friends are not?" Thus, despite their lack of faith in a future, youths continue to act, often in ways that signal a return to more stable, even traditionalvalues and practices (i.e., the increasing rates of marriage and childbirth, and the increasingly common but self-consciously naive assertion of he- roes). They get married because, as Kathy Acker suggests, "they see how their parents followed every desire and got totally disrupted and how the nihilism of 1979 caused nothing but O.D.'s and cancer."35 They get married against the background of the assumption of divorce as a normal if not likely outcome (whether they maintain their own individual ability to escape the norm, they are confident that others will not escape it, and, if pressed, are they likely to admit the precarious- ness of their own confidence). Their strategy is defined by ambivalence and irreverence. "Ambiv- alence toward life is their only myth, their only dream, the only context in which they can find comfort."36 One always hedges one's bets, holds back a little. Such an attitude produces love songs with titles like "Don't stand so close" and "Dancing with myself," and heroic movies with theme songs that claim "we don't need another hero." It's all right to invest oneself in something as long as you realize that there is nothing really to invest. You play the game for whatever the stakes, without taking either the game or the stakes too seriously (although seriousness is a perfectly acceptable game to play as well). In fact, youths prefer the more traditional forms of behavior where, like retro and new wave fashions, the rules, the stakes, and their artificialityare all the more evident. They do not believe that there is any ultimate investment in them; they do not invest "themselves" in them. "Transcendence

33. TheBig Chill,Carson Productions Group, 1983. 34. LiquidSky, Z Films, 1982. 35. Kathy Acker, GreatExpectations (New York: Grove Press, 1982), 78. 36. Phillip Moffitt, "R U Hip, Sixties People?" Esquire,April 1981, 6. Rockin' with Reagan 139 may sound silly, but I'm ready to try something new."37Transcend- ence 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 reality of pleasure itself. After all, pleasure is a risky busi- ness, 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,"It just 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 re- fuses 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 col- lected, the space within which power and pleasure are produced.

37. Coleman, "New Order's Leap of Faith," 61. 38. Frank Rose, "Welcome to the Modem World," Esquire,April 1981, 32. 39. Ward, "Sex and Drugs and Ronald Reagan," 48. 40. Meatballs,Reitman Productions, 1979. 140 Grossberg

The surface becomes nothing but a collection of quotations from youth's own collective historical debris, a mobile game of trivia. The narrative is less important than the images. In "Miami Vice," for example, the cops put on a fashion show (not only of clothes and urban spaces, but of their own "cool attitudes") to a top-40 soundtrack. (An extended video clip? It undermines the difference between narrative cinema, video clip, and advertisement.)Young people spend their lives not so much patrolling Miami as cruising it, only to rediscover the narrative as an afterthought in the last few minutes. Narrative closure becomes a convenience of the medium more than a demand of our lives. The programs seem to ignore the spectator as subject, much like dreams. Perhaps such programs (like MTV) are the unconscious made flesh, Freud's magic writing pad projected onto the television screen and revealed as nothing more than the commodity form. Difference is erased or, rather, transformed: for example, the television program, Puttingon theHits, in which people lip-synch hit records and are judged by a transfigured notion of originality. This new set of strategies empowers these youthful cultural subjects in new ways; their power lies in their ability to appropriate any text, to undermine the distinction between production and consumption and, in this way, to deny the power of ideology and of the commodity itself. Hardcore musician Binky describes this new form of resistance: "the nature of your oppression is the esthetic of our anger."41 It affirms 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").

IV. Rockin'Around the Post

How does rock-and-roll work for youth living in this postmoder condition? There has been a lot of discussion about the condition of rock-and-roll in the eighties. Has the commitment to rock-and-roll

41. Gary Robert, Rob Kulakofsky,and Mike Arrendondo, Loud3D (San Francisco: IN3D, 1984). Rockin' with Reagan 141 decreased? Has its importance in youth's lives diminished, as some have claimed? There is, I believe, little evidence for this. For example, given the lengths to which the fans of M6tley Crue are willing to go for a date,42it is reasonable to assume that the relationship has become even more powerful, caught as it is in the simultaneous inflation/defla- tion of postmodern discourses. A number of features of contemporary rock-and-roll are worth mentioning: first, there is an enormous diversity of styles and sounds; second, rock-and-roll is everywhere, having replaced the homogeneous background Musak with "foregrounded" top 40; third, despite the fragmentation of the rock-and-roll audience, there is a greater sense of a shared center, of commonality, than has been availablefor some time - different people are listening to a wild- ly heterodox mix of music (whether on contemporary hits radio, or MTV, or even "Miami Vice"); fourth, the surface of the fans' lives (i.e., their style) has become less of a sign of any identity. In fact, it is increasingly difficult to read any identity-behavioral or political-off the surface of a fan's appearance or tastes. How do we make sense of these developments? The success of Madonna's "MaterialGirl" is an interesting and controversial example. Those who argue that it is evidence of youth's new conservatism ignore the audience's very sophisticated recognition of, and ability to take pleasure in, the contradictions of surfaces. "Material Girl" is not simply a celebration of materialism and of a particular, "regressive" image of women. As one fan told me, "She's perfectly right but totally ironic." Or as Skow wrote in a Timecover story, "Do the Wanna Be's see materialism glorified here, or mocked? Of course, they see both, and see no contradiction."43Well, perhaps they see the contradiction but know that contradictions are always present, whether one admits it or not. It is, in fact, a celebration of contradiction which reinforces their irrelevance. Again, quoting Tom Ward's postmodern politics, "Put your best face forward and plot your revenge."44And Madonna is, above all, a face (literally?)to be put on, a pose, a put-on. This postmodern condition has apparently become the dominant source of rock-and-roll's power (although it has always been active). It

42. Bob Greene, "Words of Love," Esquire,May 1985, 112-13. 43. John Skow, "Madonna Rocks the Land," Time,27 May 1985, 77. 44. Ward, "Sex and Drugs and Reagan," 48. 142 Grossberg is increasingly a dominant theme (from Springsteen to Talking Heads) and is the leitmotiv of many contemporary rock images. In fact, the move from the 70s (punk) to the 80s (new wave) can be metaphorically represented in the transition from the Gang of Four's "Anthrax" ("Love will get you like a case of anthrax .... Sometimes I feel like a beetle on its back") to the Human League's "Love Action" ("I believe in the truth though I lie a lot.... No matter what you put me through, I'll still believe in love. I love your love action. Love's just a distrac- tion"). In the universe of the Human League, it doesn't matter whether one believes in the truth and lies, or doesn't believe in the truth and lies, or doesn't believe in the truth and never lies. It is all inscribed on the slippery surface because any content or depth puts one at risk of being coopted. (You can't lose what you never claimed to have.) This may lend some intelligibility to the return of Top 40 and of the sudden tendency-across the range of rock-and-roll audiences, in social groups and individual lives, on radio and television-to mix styles in a way that goes beyond a mere tolerance for difference or laissez- faire individualism; it resembles more a kind of anarchist or situation- ist strategy. Eclecticism becomes an act of transgression. (In this sense, MTV is not merely the imperialistic, capitalistic destruction of rock- and-roll which has dismantled the difference between authentic and hyped music or has reduced music to visual style. In fact, it has been a liberatory medium by giving expression to the postmodern voice implicit in all of rock-and-roll, a voice which the dominant media have consistently refused to recognize. For example, the Grammy awards consistently attempt to present rock-and-roll as merely another form of professional music but, as the presence of Dee Snyder of Twisted Sister on the last awards show reminded fans, somehow the Grammy still goes to the likes of Lionel Ritchie, just as Pepsi was airing his com- mercials.) Difference is simultaneously affirmed and negated, sought out despite the fact that it doesn't make a difference.

V. Politics Tied to the Post

Once we recognize this postmoder context, we can easily deconstruct the conservativeinterpretation of the political practices of the va- ried youth formations. I will talk about two of the more obvious signs Rockin'with Reagan 143 of youth's "conservatism":its support of Reagan and its political apathy. Is it true that a significantproportion of youth voted for Reagan? If one looks at the so-called youth vote (between the ages of 18 and 35, according to the pollsters)in the last election, only forty percent of those eligible voted (less than the national figure). Of those between 18 and 24 who voted, approximatelysixty percent voted for Reagan (the figure for 25-34 year olds was slighty lower). Nevertheless, many of those who voted for Reagan readily admit that they do not agree with many, if not most, of his policies and programs. (What, then, were they voting for?) Surveys suggest that only about twenty-fivepercent of youth in the U.S. have any interest in, or identification with, institutional politics. (Of those who were willing to define their position, slightly more claimed to be inde- pendent or Democrats than Republicans.)Is a distinction between institutional/media politics and social/normative politics an adequate account? It is obvious that the question of youth's political position within the contemporary field is not decided by its voting behavior. Is youth today apathetic and inactive? There have been visible and effective protests against Apartheid (perhaps the result of the media's interest as much as of the students), but the majority do seem unwilling to make public political gestures, even when it apparently in- volves their own self-interest and/or image. Reagan's educational bud- get cuts, announced last year, would have had devastating effects on the student population. When challenged, Secretary of Education Bennett responded that, since students were so anxious to have universities divest their holdings in South Africa, it was time they di- vested themselves of their stereos, televisions, and spring breaks in Florida. Yet there were few major protests on college campuses to either of these attacks. (There were, of course, symbolic demonstrations across the country, usually sparsely attended.) But then, the faculty did not actively protest this attack on the educational infrastructure. What do such attitudes and actions mean in the context of postmoderity: not that youths do not feel alienated but that they do not make sense of their alienation in ideological terms, not that traditional moral and political categories are wrong but that they are simply inapplica- ble. Many of those who voted for Reagan did not vote for a set of meanings or values that they subscribe to; they voted for the "acting president." They voted, paradoxically, for the more real of the candi- dates, the less boring, the one entirely defined as a media object and 144 Grossberg 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 inhab- it. 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 greatest moment 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 ma- nipulated. 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 conservative political 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. Rockin'with Reagan 145 there are no identifiable enemies and no ground for confidence in the possibilities of change. Yet one feels threatened, under constant attack, simultaneously antagonistic and powerless. As David Bowie sings in "Pressure," "It's the terror of knowing what this world is about/ Watching some good friends scream, let me out."

VI. "It isn't supposedto be this way"

But this description is, in the end, as inadequate and incomplete as the conservative reading. If we take Ellis and Leavitt (both of whom have been described as the "Salinger"of their generation) as emblems of these options, both fail to recognize the complexity and contradictions that are as much a part of youth's social and political positions as anyone else's. If Ellis's aesthetic elitism blinds him to the possibilities of resistance within youth's everyday practices, Leavitt's postmoder populism finds political resistance in every act of quotidian survival. One takes the masses to be dopes; the other takes them to be the van- guard of a new socio-political formation. In fact, there are very real ambiguities, if not dangers, in the interpretation and the practices postmodernism engenders. It too easily renders questions of real global threats and relations of power irrelevant. Because postmodernism assumes a radical rupture in history, it can easily ignore the distinc- tions between conservativeand progressive political positions. It estab- lishes a space within which politics no longer exists except as, quoting Schneider, "a luxury of the underprivileged."46Moreover, postmodernism sees this disassociation of the present and the past/future reflected in every event. It transfers such disassociations from cultural texts onto the experience of the audience, as if it had some privileged and innocent access to the truth of history. In fact, the postmodernist's descriptions remain oddly unencumber- ed by the concrete realities and relations of practices, events, and contexts in youth's everydaylife. Everythingis described as if it existed on the same level of abstraction.For example, if we consider rock-and-roll once more, we need to ask what specific groups do with it, what it does for them, how they listen to it, how it is articulatedin their experiences

46. Peter Schneider, TheWall Jumper: A BerlinStory, trans. Leigh Hafrey (New York: Random House, 1983), 123. 146 Grossberg and practices, how it empowers or enervates and disempowers them?47It is into this context that we must reinsert rock-and-roll'scele- bration of fun in opposition to the "economy of seriousness" that is equated with the responsibilities of adulthood. Of course, we cannot talk about rock-and-roll in the singular;we must not assume its conti- nuity, unity, or the unity of its audiences. On the other hand, it is not a series of isolated genres each with its own isolated audiences defining particularcontents, uses, and gratifications.We must recognize the relations, differences, and developments: differences between the various genres and subcultures, between the mainstreams and the mar- gins, between the commercial and the avant-garde,between the mass- distributed and the independents, etc. And yet, these relations, consti- tutive of the history of rock-and-roll, are becoming harder to make in the present context. We must also be careful to acknowledge the contradictory relations that fans have with the music-affective, ideological, economic, historical, and sociological. Thus, it makes perfect sense that youth realizes that it is exposed to music more than any other medium of culture and, yet, it is ironic that young people do not recognize music's influ- ence on their individual lives. At the same time, youth can perceive a larger social and historical impact: "My father always blamed it on the rock 'n' roll: the drugs, the sex, the faithless wild boys and girls obey- ing no authority and bearing no responsibility, playing havoc with America in a mindless quest for the good time they believed was owed them by the world. My father's not stupid."48 Thus, we need an alternativestrategy to that posed by both the conservative and postmoder interpretations. We need to see this historical field as a "contested terrain"where no description is necessary and the politics of those living within it are not guaranteed. The struggle is precisely over what language describes this terrain, articulatesthe relations within it, in such a way as to allow us both to recognize the struggles already taking place within it and to extend those sites into viable and effective political actions and alliances. We need to find a description which enables us to act locally but think globally.We can only begin

47. See Lawrence Grossberg, "I'd Rather Feel Bad than Not Feel at All," Enclitic8, nos. 1-2 (1984): 94-111. 48. Robert Duncan, TheNoise: Notes fom a Rock'n' RollEra (New York:Ticknor and Fields, 1984), 1. Rockin' with Reagan 147 to define such a position if we are careful to distinguish the events we describe from the descriptions, and the real historical events from how they are experienced. The politics of the various youth formations are not inherent in the young or in their practices, nor is it already defined and fixed. (Even those forms of rock-and-roll that are most often taken to be obviously conservative, i.e, heavy metal, are contradictory and, therefore, the sites of political and cultural struggle.) We need to seek out new voices and vocabularies, new linkages and new projects:"We know that our dreams are not going to cometrue. Are never going to cometrue. We have learned that our dreams are importantnot becausethey cometrue, but because they take you places you would never have otherwise gone, and teachyou what you never knew was thereto learn."49We need to find new ways of describing and understanding our obsession with images, our sense that there are no criteriaby which we can judge, or even predict the future. We also need to develop new moral and political positions which do not simply deny, condemn, or celebrate such historicalchanges. We need to tell a better story, one which is more in touch with the concrete realities of youth's historicalrealities, one which offers new possibilities for youth to take up viable political positions in the modem world. Obviously youth exists within more than one determining context. The descriptions offered by the postmodernists must be located within the broader social and cultural fields of everyday life and the struggles of power, domination, subordination, and resistance that take place within them. Moreover, postmodernism's tendency to totalize its own descriptions, to slide from a description of a determining structure to the identification of that level with the totality of our lived and historical realities, must be resisted. One cannot ignore the internal contradictions within any structure, or their relations with other determining structures. In fact, I want to suggest that the postmodemity of our historical moment cannot be located in a single plane of our existence (despite the fact that I previously described it as an affective structure). The rupture of postmoderity is not purely within the affective plane itself but in the relation between affect and signification. It is a crisis, not of faith, but of the relationship between faith and commonsense. It is not that nothing matters but that it doesn't matter what matters. It is as if one has to live two lives, one defined by the meanings and values

49. Michael Ventura, ShadowDancing in the USA (Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarchner, 1985), 55. 148 Grossberg 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 world- in 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 affective experiences. Their "mattering maps"50no longer correspond to the available maps of meanings. Meaning and affect-historically so closely intertwined-have broken apart, each going off in its own di- rection. Each takes on its own autonomy, even as sanity demands that the two be reintegrated. This autonomous affective mood 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 abso- lute 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 affective reality and the lack of an ideological description which 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 rarely thematized: 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-Body Problem (New York: Laurel, 1983), 272. 51. Rambo:First Blood, Part II, Tri-StarPictures, 1985. E., theExtra-Terrestrial, Univer- sal Pictures, 1982. Rockin' with Reagan 149 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 regard- less of their national identity. Reagan reestablishes a necessary sense of difference by using the affective differences 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 commit- ments 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.