ABSTRACTIONS #2: REBELLION

Enough with the rebellion already. Culturally, we did it. It's done. Time to move on.

Don't get me wrong--I certainly don't have any objection to some of its use in the past. It was a brilliant move on rock's part to latch onto that particular aspect of the adolescent condition, it being such a potent one in the time period in which rock really came to fruition. There really was something to rebel against, there really were widely-held and actively repressive social norms that didn't make any sense. The whole society needed a dose of rule-breaking, and while it was done more potently (while being simultaneously more inevitable) in other fields, it gave the music an extra layer to experience, which is one of the reason it's seemed (and still seems, on rare occasions) so vital.[1] Pop always has to have some connection with a juvenile impulse, I think, and it just so happened in this particular instance that the juvenile impulse involved (rebellion against authority, in the juvenile case stemming from a real feeling of power but still being a minor and thus explicitly under others' control) happened to be one shared by adults. In other words, it was something that, in this particular context, you didn't grow out of, you weren't ashamed of, had relevance to your adult life. And this was true for a large number of people.

But I'm just not sure that's true anymore. The problem, if it is a problem, is that we pretty much won. The kind of change that can be effected by cultural rebellion, by a climate of transgression--which changes are confined to the realm of shared perceptions and assumptions, of what is acceptable to say and do--well, there don't seem to be a whole lot of opportunities for that sort of change anymore, at least not in the areas of the world where the cultural valuation of rebellion is strong. As unjust as it may be, there's a substantive (and, more importantly for cultural change, perceptual) difference between, say, minorities not being able to sit in a certain area of a bus and minorities being largely concentrated in low-income residential areas. The former can be changed by a shift in attitude, but not the latter. The latter is a much harder problem, one which needs to be solved rather than merely rectified.

I'm just not sure what's left for culture to make a dent in with its particular brand of rebellion. This is evidenced in no small part by its utter failure to do so. The speed with which any particular rebellion is subsumed by the larger culture (punk, hip-hop, etc.) is less a function of the ability of a status quo to incorporate opposition (although this is certainly a factor) and more due to the fact that the method itself is not longer really workable.

I mean, what's really left to rebel against? The only thing that's been really galvanizing in recent years, at least in the US, seems to be the various corporate radio issues with ClearChannel and its cohorts. I support that fight, of course, and sympathize, but, sheesh, come on now. It's like rebelling against Nabisco--a) it's a corporation, not a shared truism, and it's a little weird to be rebelling against an entity; and b) it's not something a lot of people support anyway. As to a), the response would have to be "So are they oppressing you?" to which the only reply really is "Well, uh, no, I just don't like them," which is sort of toothless. There is also, of course, government regulation involved, but the response to rebellion against that would be the same as the response to rebellion against a media corporation. (How is the FCC oppressing you exactly?) Add to this the fact that the terms this is usually put in make the issue about not being able to hear the Shins rather than not being able to hear a wide spectrum of political viewpoints and it's all a little odd. And as to b), can you honestly imagine a George Wallace-ish situation where a politician rises to prominence on a pro-ClearChannel platform? It's just not that big of a deal, nor is it widely supported. I don't like ClearChannel, but curing it with rebellion seems a little dumb.

The issue is that to be effective, cultural rebellion, by definition, has to be acting in opposition to something with broad support. What it's seeking/able to do is not so much construct an actual physical rebellion (i.e. crowds of people marching/fighting together) as to inspire/inform people in such a way that they change their individual behaviors. Very capitalistic, if you're into that sort of thing, and fine as it goes. But this only works, as I say above, against problems that can be reversed, and not a whole lot really can. We're sexually repressed? OK, let's start fucking more. Women earn less than men? Well, we can still fuck more, but that will rarely help.

Actually, the values that cultural rebellion could effectively assail are the very ones we lib'ral types want to promote. Because we won, by and large (and because the 50s were, in fact, a reactionary backtracking from the libidinous 20s), progressive values are, in fact, the norm. They are the status quo. And this is why we see conservatives getting so much traction from rebellious tactics, whether it's against "PC thugs" or "the homosexual agenda" (uh, you mean the be-nice-to-people agenda?) or whatever. Regardless of whether these things are, in fact, the views held by a majority of Americans, it's clear that they've achieved enough visibility and acceptance that rebellion against them can gain some real traction. I suppose for some people, the best argument I could make against the rhetoric of cultural rebellion is that at this point (in America at least), it mainly serves conservative aims.

But I guess the main reason this bugs me is that because I think there are other juvenile impulses that fit the criteria described above, that are things we don't (or shouldn't) outgrow, and these things could be championed just as rebellion once was. For one thing, teenagers are remarkably uncool, and this is kind of awesome. Either they're just not cool to begin with, or their conception of cool is so ridiculous that it's laughable, but they have not put up those detached barriers yet. That's something you can use, that exuberance of teenagers at their best (sort of). It may seem only slightly removed from rebellion, but think of it as not the words of "We're not gonna take it!" but the shout itself. Its well-nigh atomic pure energy is certainly something worth harnessing.

But oh this is just a transitional phase. Because of course, as I just said, what we're aiming for here is not actual adolescence but Teenagers At Their Best (TATB). Not all teenagers are rebellious, of course; this is simply a condition of adolescence, not necessarily a reality. Similarly, while teenagers can be cruel and exclusionary, TATB, funneling the younger shout of "that's not fair!" that's not so much an argument for freedom or even justice so much as simple equality, a desire to have exactly what your sibling/friend/parent has. Similarly, adolescents can often be anti-individualistic, and this is not necessarily a bad thing; the desire to be simply part of the crowd, when turned on its head, is the desire to include everyone. For all the games of hierarchy that dominate adolescent life, lurking there are these twin impulses, and even if they need to be nurtured they will not be created from whole cloth. There are things there to run with, if you want to. And I'm not even getting into lust or love, but someone else is welcome to.

Now, hold on a minute. Am I really saying that we should eliminate rebellion as a value? No, just as a (pop-)cultural value. Aside from the reasons above, I think that if we do accomplish this removal, maybe we can stop thinking of rebellion in such teenage terms--maybe we can approach it in a mature way and actually make it work. Cultural creation makes things seem inconsequential, but sometimes they're not. And in the case of rebellion, just as it added an extra layer of experience to early rock music, as it made it a fuller expression, so can the inconsequentiality that acts upon those extra layers obscure its value in a different venue, and it's an important value. If a method of political change becomes merely a pop trope, what then? And if it is a pop trope, can it seriously be anything else? Can it be redeemed by itself, or only be something from outside? And would it be better to concentrate on something else?

Here's what I will say: ambivalence is now the handmaiden of change.

[1] You can also make arguments about the way the terms under which it was conceived required it to be so straightforward, which directness is a large part of what makes it so appealing to so many people. The simple fact of its existence was meaningful, and so the more strikingly that existence was expressed, the more effective it would be. Uh, arguably.
posted by Mike B. at 2:15 PM 0 comments

Related to the below: this Richard Rorty critique of a Richard (note: not Sheldon) Wolin book called The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance With Fascism From Nietzsche to Postmodernism. You can pretty much guess what this is all about. I had, once upon a time, intended to comment on this, but now I think my thoughts are in a different place. What I meant to address, I think, was this bit:

Wolin believes that the prevalence of "slack postmodernist relativism" is very dangerous. "The postmodern left," he says, "risks depriving democracy of valuable normative resources at an hour of extreme historical need." His book seeks to demonstrate that "at a certain point postmodernism's hostility towards 'reason' and 'truth' is intellectually untenable and politically debilitating."

My knee-jerk response, of course, is that this is silly; morals are relative, especially in politics, but there are also clear boundaries for "essentialists" just as there are for any functional pomos, so to imply that any relativism is a slow slide into fascism ignores your own. (Relativism, that is.)

But in relation to my point below about the way a confident connection can effect change, I have to wonder: is the (possibly unintended) implication here, i.e. that whether or not they actually exist, absolute norms do serve a positive role in collective governance, actually a corollary of my own point? That is to say, if what we're doing is pretending that something is true in order to make it true, isn't it useful to pretend that certain subjective ideas are true, too?

Well, sure. I certainly think beliefs in things like justice, the rule of law, equality, etc., are necessary for a republic, and I support certain things that foster these beliefs. But at the same time, you have to do the backflip again and realize that just as people have an unsupported, fundamentally faith-based belief in certain cornerstones of democracy, so do people have a naive, unfounded belief in relativism. That a decent number of people manage to live their lives more or less under the belief system of postmodernism (which plays a big part in modern liberalism) attests to the way that relativism can inspire just as much unreasoning devotion as absolutism. Awesome!

posted by Mike B. at 1:56 PM 0 comments

Last Wednesday I caught Bill Clinton on Charlie Rose. (Direct link to stream: here.) Charlie said that there was always a sense of intelligence about Clinton, and asked, "Were you the smartest guy in the room, or was it something else?" Clinton, after making a self-deprecating remark about being in calculus class with someone who was clearly much smarter than him, said this:

I had a peculiar kind of intelligence, I think, which made me well suited to politics. I knew I had both the intellect and the emotional predisposition to synthesize apparently disconnected events and to be able to put things together. And I believed when I became President I needed to put things together in America and then I needed to construct a vision for a more united world.

Yes. And what does this make him? This makes him, of course, a critic.

Making connections, offering cohesive explanations--these are the things a critic does. And this is one of the reasons I really love politics: the genuine ability to create something from nothing.[1] You are taking these things, a "chaos" as Clinton later goes on to describe them, and by connecting them, you change them.[2] You are writing your vision on the world, and if it's done well, it can be extraordinarily effective.

Politics is the translation of word into deed, of proclamation into force, and while there are all sorts of interesting dynamics going on in making this actually happen (to say nothing of the dynamics of it not happening), this is, at heart, the ultimate purpose of governance: to do something with your words. Politics is criticism by act, of taking your interpretation of events (poverty is the result of insufficient incentives to work v. poverty is the result of structural factors that demand it, for instance) and applying it. The official statement of a viewpoint (that certain guns are assault weapons and others are not, for example; that poverty is defined as making below X dollars per year, for another) actually causes things to happen. We all know that your worldview inevitably effects your actions, and we can see certain ways criticism/art does this to individuals (particularly the creation that is religion, or certain critical interpretations thereof--witness the effect a very particular interpretation of Islam is effecting the world right now), but politics is a literalized version of this.

Maybe it's the post-modernist in me[3], but I really like that, in politics, perception is reality; it sort of neatly sorts out the more messy way this plays out in other arenas. You should only make policy on the basis of facts, of course (which facts can include how likely something is to actually get passed), but actually getting that policy implemented is, as Clinton states above, partly a matter of emotion, of knowing how to present the policy in a way that it will be embraced. And that's OK. If FDR hadn't lied about Social Security, we wouldn't have it today, and I'm comfortable with that. Much of our lives consist of doing things we don't really want to do, and if one or two of those things end of being a great positive collective benefit, then hey! Rock on, Washington.

Of course, like criticism, politics is a conversation; one party[4] offers their interpretation, and this is countered by another. Sometimes policy clashes directly with its criticism and there's a kind of synthesis.

But I'm not just trying to big up politics here, I'm trying to reflect that back onto criticism to show the value that it could have if people took it either more or less seriously--I can't really decide which. But in either case, I think it should be a broader model, a good way of understanding things, and a way of acting. If we can positivize the essential negation of a lot of post-structuralist theory, I think something good could result. But, of course, I could be wrong.

[1] See Hannah Arendt. A bunch of the links here are good. Here is a good summary: "Arendt introduces the idea [of natality] in the course of her attempt to draw out the significance of the ever-present possibility that someone, somewhere, some time might say or do something that makes possible a fresh start in the realm of human affairs." The way she ties this explicitly to Christian morality has a lot of way interesting parallels with, if I recall correctly, the intended conclusion of my and Jason's reading project, Eric Voegelin, and his phrase "immanentizing the eschaton." Natality, not mortality.
[2] This is related to the non-discussion I had below about finding a way out of post-structuralism; OK, we know there's no meaning, but given that meaning can be a positive force, how do we create it effectively?
[3] And for every conservative criticism of the perceived post-modernist worldview (that morals are illusory, that there are no universal standards, generally a confusion w/nihilism) you can find a conservative political act that would presumably make Foucault wet himself.
[4] Har har har.

posted by Mike B. at 12:55 PM 0 comments

It came up in a private correspondence about referentiality, so I might as well post it here: Eliot's "The Waste Land" in hypertext, i.e. with clickable links for all the references that'll at least let you know what the hell Eliot was talking about. I do kind of wish it wasn't on Tripod, though. If the proprietor checks his references (ha!) and sees this post, I'll gladly host it on my private webspace for ya.

posted by Mike B. at 12:23 PM 0 comments

So I am now watching Freaks and Geeks. I'll maybe do a longer post on it later, but for now, in relation to My So-Called Life, which we discussed a while back, I still stand by my previous assertion: by the terms discussed, MSCL does it better. To wit, it is a more accurate portrayal of teenage life from the actual teenage perspective, which is the particular valuable thing I think MSCL provided (and, again, I doubt F&G would have been possible w/o it). For all the accuracy of certain high school relationships/types in F&G, it's undeniably shaped from an adult's analytical perspective, whereas MSCL's impact centetered firmly on the immediacy of the experience, the particular inability to see the bigger picture that's one of the hallmarks of adolescence. It seems obvious to me, even on a superficial level: F&G takes place 19 years in the past, whereas MSCL took place in the present day. The former is a show of reminiscence, the latter of the feeling of being inside the storm; the former centering on I-know-better-now embarassment, the latter on this-matters-so-much hyperdrama.

It's hard to tell which one I like more, especially given the nostalgia factor associated with each (the actual memories of viewing MSCL while it was on the air in my own teenhood v. F&G's referencing of things from my youth) but I am certainly enjoying F&G a lot, so don't take this as necessarily a criticism of the show; I just think it's trying to do something different from MSCL, speaking to a different audience in a different way. Although the F&G commentaries rub me the wrong way; they're muddled and in-jokey and have an annoyingly elevated regard for themselves. I remember something in the 101 commentary to the effect of "See how we don't use much music? It's not like those WB teen dramas that use current pop songs all the time." Yeah, because WB teen dramas and current pop songs both suck balls.

posted by Mike B. at 10:51 AM 0 comments