© ephemera 2007 articles ISSN 1473-2866 e phemera www.ephemeraweb.org theory & politics in organization volume 7(4): 575-587 The Unknown Variable: Multiple Target Markets in One… Prue Burns Lower your expectations because it has been said that Generation Xers can’t write, at least “not in a literary sense” (Dawson, 1997: 22, citing the views of the literary establishment). We are the missing link of literature, disdainful of form, feeling and sensibility. When publishers Allen & Unwin went searching for the “voice of the young urban Australian” in the early 1990s what they found was ‘grunge lit’ (Dawson, 1997: 123). Reportage rather than fiction, it depicts a world of disaffection inhabited by characters with “low pay, low status and low future” (Brown, 2001: 125), drifting toward what appears to be self-annihilation. The writing itself is scrupulously detached and without illusion. It seems we quite like to shock the reader, but as to whether we move them or not, well, we pretend not to care. These so-called non-literary tendencies have been viewed as a cultural trait, arising from the fact that Generation X is “the first generation for whom the book is not the primary source of cultural formation” (Dawson, 1997: 122). Born roughly between 1960 and 1975 (Rymarz, 2004; Dixon, 2004; Brabazon, 1998), we are the urban “children of the media revolution” (Brabazon, 1998: 11): cinema-going, comic-strip- reading, hyper self-aware devotees of pulp, which has the distinction of allowing us to “[indulge] in the playfulness of amorality” (Epstein, 1994, cited in Hopkins, 1995: 15) and try on different identities for size. We appropriate these identities as though they are fashion accessories, discarding one in favour of another, depending on the context and situation. The only society we have known is market driven. Having grown up against a backdrop of economic rationalism and “in the shadow of a great demographic bulge, which foreshadows certain social problems” (Davis, 1997, cited in Brown, 2001: 126) the forces of the ‘real world’ are beyond our control, the patterns of our lives established by the market. Outvoted by the baby boomers, the state sets priorities divergent to all our leanings in life; we are valued by both the state and the market for our purchasing power alone. ‘Economic participation’ is the new sport (i.e. religion) of Australia and those of us without sufficient disposable income are expendable, losers relegated to the margins of society and accused of mental and physical sloth. Ours is a world ruled by 575 © 2007 ephemera 7(4): 575-587 The Unknown Variable articles Prue Burns the marketing departments of corporations, crowded with images and slogans that infiltrate and bend the structure of our consciousness, threatening to transform us into “signs that consume” (Brown, 2001: 131). With “impermanence and uncertainty” (Hopkins, 1995: 17) as the only constants in our lives and no reason to believe that this will ever change, our culture is surely the most high-context in the world today – we have raised situational behaviour to an art form. As Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction gangsters, Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield, say, as they are about to embark on a series of hits, “let’s get into character” (cited in Brabazon, 1998: 17). This lies at the heart of the culture of Generation X. It is the tacit creed by which we live. We have glutted ourselves in Mathews’ (2000) ‘cultural supermarket’ and are unpredictable not because we are ‘deeply individual’ (Way, 2000) and this makes it difficult for outsiders to get a fix on any group characteristics or cultural norms but because we are each multiple characters, fringe dwellers who prefer an in-between space where tedium and ordinariness are less likely to congregate, identity is unfixed and uncertainty prevails. As possibly the first generation of Australians to reject national identity (Brown, 2001) and what Bouras calls “the pathology which calls itself nationalism” (2001: 18), we are now finding this in-between space challenging to preserve. Wedged between the boomers and Gen Y – who seem a curious mix of whimsy and ruthlessness, rather like a generation of child stars – most of us Gen Xers have now suffered the indignity of our being appropriated by the institutions, social structures and expectations that we once scornfully watched govern other people’s lives. We live in a climate that seems increasingly hospitable to Pauline Hanson’s extreme-right wing vision of One Nation1 (who, by the way, has successfully reinvented herself on Dancing with the Stars), an idea that one suspects many more were taken with than cared to admit. Unable to see the world as a value-free playground and not quite sure that its heart isn’t dark and fathomless, our answer to date has been denial, a sort of self-imposed exile. Although it has been mooted that Gen Xers like to look real life right ‘in the eye’ (Brown, 2001: 125) and that this manifests itself in our unreserved, grungy tales, there is a faint but unmistakable thrum of anxiety that runs through our literature; the candidness seems counterfeit. We can deal with the ugliness of the world but not yet with the possibility of its meaninglessness. We are not ready for the ‘definitive awakening’, of which Camus writes, that occurs when the ‘stage sets collapse’ and the question ‘why?’ arises (1955: 11). Shunning this moment, or perhaps hopeful that it need not arrive at all, we look about us, finding ourselves in the depersonalised space of offices, shopping malls and supermarkets that could be anywhere. It is a stultifying, musty space where we feel __________ 1 Pauline Hanson, a Liberal Party candidate in the 1996 Australian Federal Election, co-founded the One Nation party in 1997. The One Nation party stood for ‘national unity’ in the face of what Hanson viewed as a division in the Australian community arising from discontent with ‘unfair’ policies that advantaged migrants and Indigenous Australians. At her now infamous maiden speech in the Australian Parliament she put forward the concern that Australia was being ‘swamped’ by Asians who did not ‘assimilate’ into Australian culture, with no apparent awareness of the moral and ethical issues associated with the earlier assimilationist policies of Australia enforced to assure the absorption of Indigenous Australians into White Australia. 576 © 2007 ephemera 7(4): 575-587 The Unknown Variable articles Prue Burns that Rushdie’s Alicja might be right: perhaps “these days, character isn’t destiny anymore. Economics is destiny” (Rushdie, 1988: 432). Surrounded by the manifestations of a singular goal and trapped in spaces designed to pimp the market’s wares, our compulsion to consume is literally unforgettable. The thriftiness of the market is unbeatable. It operates 24/7, ingenious at commanding space, creating new strata titles for bill boards, filling nooks and crannies with advertisements reminding us of what we are missing and presenting us with solutions to a discontent it successfully manufactured with last year’s films and television shows. Even litter becomes a form of advertising, at once a sharp reminder of our bulimic condition and the ruination of the earth. Utterly disenchanted with the refuse that surrounds us, we turn and find some truth in Deleuze’s ‘modern fact’: “We [do not] believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us. It is not we who make cinema; it is the world which looks to us like a bad film” (Deleuze, 1989, cited in Buchanan and Lambert, 2005: 4). What we want are real Events. Something ‘absolutely unpredictable’ (Derrida, 2005: 21) and visited upon us with an impact that has zero finesse and shunts the framework we have been operating within so that the way we see and experience the world is radically altered so that something truly different might be glimpsed. We don’t want stoppages about a ground “cross-hatched by psychic or real borderlines,” we want ‘open territories’ (Conley, 2006: 95) that enable free movement, multiple connections and impossible, real-life plot twists – the more dislocating the better. It is a strange and beautiful space to occupy and takes quite some creativity to find, but we manage to get there, although sometimes with a little chemical assistance. When mum and dad invite their daughter over for dinner, they quite literally do not know who is going to turn up. And, often, neither does their daughter. By day she manages staff older than herself and negotiates contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in an office that looks like a set from Gattica, all clean lines, plasma screens and white, white walls. Empty, in the half-light of night, “when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table,” it looks alien (Eliot, 1917, stanza 1, lines 2-3). A place where humanity has been expunged. By night, she travels. Compressed into binary code she slips from state to state, place to place, evading the moral boundary riders with ease. The web is transgression made easy; the antithesis of our day time world where we flex and exercise our judgment – which, as Deleuze suggests, deeply implicates us in issues of justice – and where we support the high order, ‘partition of concepts’, ‘measuring of subjects’ and the hierarchization of these (Deleuze, 1994: 33). In our daytime world we partake of a system similar to that depicted by Derrida and which informed Butler’s theory of performativity.2 In that world, we “[attribute] a certain force to the law” and anticipate __________ 2 Butler’s theory of performativity regarding gender essentially involves questioning the idea that gender (and identity, more broadly) comes from within, or is ‘natural’, pre-destined or inevitable but rather that gender (and identity) might be derived or manufactured from the sustained repetition of actions and ways of being that are regulated by and subject to the politics of society.