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. 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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 genera- tion), 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 contradic- tion, conservative and narcissistic. Thus, in the name of true art and political opposition, he recreates the arguments of generations of con- servative cultural critics by assuming that the masses-in this case, young people-are either inherently conservative, or alternatively,eas- ily duped into conservativism. But the meaning and politics of youth's actions are not indelibly and transparentlywritten upon its surface. Cultural interpretationsare nev- er simple or innocent descriptions. Rather, they construct the events they purport to describe by "articulating" them into particular rela- tionships. 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 of- fer viable responses. We need a better description of the gestures, prac- tices, 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 elit- ism 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 descrip- tions 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 precise- ly 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 decon- struct 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 postmoder- nity, 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 be- tween 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 gen- eration too young to believe in the counterculture and too old to be- lieve 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 ori- ented. 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, simi- larly, 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 contradic- tory 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 mean- ings 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 cur- rent debates over teachers' rights to use corporal punishment; the in- creasing 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 represen- tation of school life]-in 1940, the major problems were listed, in or- der, 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.