The Cultural Production of Teens (1 July 2010)

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Surburbia and the solace of Spin magazine in the mid-1980s (8 March 2010)

The problems of Pleasant Valley are being replicated all over America. The government payroll is being cut at the same time that the unemployment rate is higher than it has been in two generations. There is wealth, but it doesn't find itself in the production of government services. Besides, government services don't seem to work. The schools don't seem to educate. Welfare is hated by everybody: the social workers, the recipients, and the general public who provides the money ... and heath care is a travesty, especially in public institutions.

That sounds sort of familiar, as if could be from an op-ed from last week, but it comes from Suburban Youth in Cultural Crisis, a 1979 book by Ralph Larkin. The book is an ethnography of a suburban high school not unlike the one I went to, with some Marcusean analysis sprinkled on top. So far it has provided enough criticism of "parasitic and wasteful" suburban life to make Joel Kotkin's head explode.

I don't think we are repeating the problems of the 1970s per se, but I wonder if the unemployment now reflects the same sort of underlying structural change: capital needs fewer workers; we must begin marketing ourselves more directly, valorize our own human capital to survive.

I'm also curious to see both if Larkin's book harmonizes with my memory of suburbia and also to see what sociologists were saying about the sort of upbringing children like me were receiving. I wouldn't have said at the time that I was living through a "cultural crisis" but obviously a significant and dislocating transformation took place in the 1980s -- Reagan/Thatcher ideas became common sense as a post-industrial economy took shape. Maybe every generation of kids feels as though they face some unique historical transformation (see Joshua Glenn's periodization of generations for more on that), but it seems in retrospect that teenagers in the 1980s were "consumer natives" in the sense that kids today are sometimes called digital natives, rightly or wrongly. The mall was a given for us in a way it hadn't been before and perhaps hasn't been since. Long commutes, meaningless work, monotonous housing developments, car culture, fast food, throwaway goods -- all of that was essentially fixed like the constellations.

Consumerism seemed to embrace all of life's possibilities, it was the field in which everyday life took place, yet our ability to operate within it seemed curtailed. It was experienced as a form of domination, whereas for earlier generations consumerism and purchasing power and so on were probably gratifying novelties. We took the benefits of consumerism for granted and chafed at its limitations -- the top-down way it implemented trends and appropriate personae, the familiar stereotypes that the suburban teens in John Hughes movies try to escape from. Prepackaged identities were more pervasive than ever, and thus there was more pressure to accomplish the prevalent post-1960s goal of "being yourself" -- not by rejecting the identities but by learning how to manipulate them. This sort of alienation was the cultural crisis, as far as I'm concerned, and I expect Larkin, in his assessment of "an economy based on capital expansion and waste consumption," will bear this out.

Growing up in suburbia, we didn't have an "outside" of suburban life that could be plausibly imagined; it didn't occur to anybody that identity wouldn't be constructed along the lines of the Baudrillardian code, signifying who we were with clothes and music tastes and so on. The pressing issue was staking out some tactical advantage on that consumerist field. Gathering information about signifying cultural product was inordinately important, but sources were fleeting and few, something that is sort of impossible to imagine now. I recently reread the first issue of Spin magazine and it shocked and embarrassed me a bit how much of it was still familiar, how many turns of phrase in it I had committed to memory, how many avenues for exploration it had opened for me, some of which I wouldn't even follow up on until years later. That magazine is how I ended up being a pretentious fan of Hüsker Dü and Sade ("pronounced Sharday, not like the Marquis" -- another avenue opened) concurrently; both were reviewed positively in it. Reading through it was like examining the blueprint to my teenage personality -- to some extent my current personality, such as it is.

Nostalgia aside, I think the cultural crisis was a matter of finding a way out of the dead-end that suburbia had become in producing anxious consumers overly invested in the meanings of what they consume. Larkin sees this as the ramifications of the "post-scarcity society" -- in which more labor is spent consuming the surplus than producing it. A way to turn that angst to account had to be developed, a new form of immaterial labor that could complement a changing economic landscape in the U.S. had to emerge, since there were far fewer jobs in industrial production. Consumption had to become a mode of information production.

The imperative to consume massive amounts of information and turn over culture, to accelerate through the cycling of its meanings, seems born of suburban anomie and the utopian idealization of an "alternative" that went along with it. From that has stemmed the institutional production of a series of alternatives -- cultural information manufactured by volunteers for their personal identity's sake but commercially deployed in the social sphere for the sake of corporate profit. Now this evolution is culminating in the contemporaneous explosion of manufactured alternatives in social networks. In effect, everyone is obliged to produce their own potentially influential Spin magazine, which sounds like a great opportunity but is also a lot of hard, anxious, non-remunerative work. It occludes the respite, the haven that friendship might otherwise provide.

Anyway, that's the thesis I am going into Larkin's book with. Suburbia was in the painful process of learning how to produce self-branding cultural entrepreneurs to fit with the broader celebration of creative destruction.

Teen angst continuing to pay off well (22 Dec 2008)

When I cast about for a possible silver lining to the recession, I continually return to the idea that it could at least destroy ephemeral trendy fashion outlets as consumers retrench, hold on to things longer, and focus on spending for necessary goods. The NYT article suggests I can't even hope for that.

In one of the darkest holiday shopping seasons in decades, perhaps it is fitting that a retailer has been given new life by vampires.
While sales at most stores plummeted last month, the teenage retailer Hot Topic enjoyed a 6.5 percent gain, thanks mostly to brisk sales of gear inspired by “Twilight,” the teenage vampire movie.
As the nation’s retailing landscape has deteriorated, Hot Topic is one of a handful of chains that seem to be coming out ahead. The most obvious winners are discounters like Wal-Mart Stores and BJ’s Wholesale Club, which are helping American families trade down to cheaper merchandise. But another, more surprising group of beneficiaries has emerged: niche chains that cater to teenagers and young adults.

Because the crisis has mainly impoverished those with tangible assets and the former ability to rack up debt, it has left teenagers largely unaffected for the time being. With the deflation currently coursing through the economy, they may even felt relatively enriched.

Youth-lifestyle marketer extraordinaire American Apparel, for example has continued to thrive:

Marsha Brady, creative director for American Apparel — which in November had a 6 percent increase in sales at stores open at least a year — said the key to its continued success in this economy is its demographic: young, single, urban creative-types accustomed to living on a shoestring.
“They hear about the stock market but stocks are something their parents worry about,” Ms. Brady said. “They don’t own anything. They rent. They’re not really facing foreclosure or falling property values. If anything they’ll just get another roommate or move into a cheaper rental. It’s not utter devastation to their cores.”

In other words, teenagers and "kidults" are too stupid to see how the economic trouble affects them and are most likely to continue wasting their money as they always have. It's only when the kids' allowances or trust funds are affected that American Apparel might see some red ink.

But it's not as though it's irrational for youth-culture consumers to behave this way.The largest worry in the lives of these "creative types" is not retirement savings or anything so banal; it's being cool in the eyes of one another. Often. coolness is actually their only asset, which is sad, since that is one of the few things that remains more volatile than the current stock market. For companies like Hot Topic, which trade on that volatility and thrive on it, that paucity of assets is the essence of their business model. They can harness the inevitability of aging, or the uncertainty of nascent friendships in a dog-eat-dog social environment, to forge an engine of profitable insecurity that leads consumers to overvalue the significance of coolness. Such companies have every incentive to undermine the possibilities of consumers escaping from the youth ghetto and developing other kinds of value, more productive forms of human capital.

The financial crisis and generational warfare (2 Dec 2008)

Many someone should ask financial analyst James Quinn what he really thinks of Baby Boomers:

Of course, not all Baby Boomers are shallow, greedy, and corrupt. Mostly Boomers with power and wealth fall into this category. There were 76 million Baby Boomers born between 1946 and 1963. They now make up 28% of the U.S. population. Their impact on America is undeniable. The defining events of their generation have been the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Kent State, Woodstock, the 1st man on the moon, and now the collapse of our Ponzi scheme financial system. They rebelled against their parents, protested the Vietnam War, and settled down in 2,300 square foot cookie cutter McMansions with perfectly manicured lawns, in mall infested suburbia. They have raised overscheduled spoiled children, moved up the corporate ladder by pushing paper rather than making things, lived above their means in order to keep up with their neighbors, bought whatever they wanted using debt, and never worried about the future. Over optimism, unrealistic assumptions, selfishness and conspicuous consumption have been their defining characteristics.

It's hard to disagree with any of the analysis, though the tone is occasionally scarily combative. I wonder whether as the recession worsens or drags on, if such sentiment will spread from the disgruntled-analyst sector to the younger generations at large, whether it will shape policy toward the social safety net for the elderly: Will we say, the Boomers blew their chance and lived beyond their means; if they don't get the Social Security benefits they expected, then tough shit. It's natural to want to hold irresponsible borrowers responsible for our overleveraged economy, especially since, as Rebecca Wilder points out here, household debt has yet to drop: "lax lending standards on credit cards allowed consumers to become overly indebted to credit card creditors. Interestingly enough, revolving consumer credit was still 43% of overall credit on November 12, 2008. When will it fall?"

But in many ways, the forces that have driven us into debt are systemic, institutional -- the interlocking forces of assets replacing savings for many families, of status hinging on consumption levels, of the service economy supplanting heavier industry, of more aggressive omnipresent marketing, etc. But I wonder whether there is cyclical generational component to attitudes toward consumerism. As part of the generational warfare, the practices of frugality have been co-opted by hipsterism as a kind of ironic, oppositional stance to the boomer generation. In the 1960s, boomers allegedly rejected their parents' prudent austerity for hedonism, reconceived as the essence of freedom. Perhaps those of us born in the 1960s and 1970s will now war against that hedonism (which turned into financial imprudence) out of necessity, but we will feel all righteous about it as if it were our generation-defining choice.

Fight this generation (11 March 2007)

I've had some fun today trying to figure out what this somewhat enigmatic picture by Ryan McGinley

has to do with the article about "generation next" that it accompanies in today's NYT Magazine. It looks like this fun trio is staying at the vertiginous Orlando Holiday Inn I stayed at last March, that was all in drab monochrome like this room. I can't tell what the guy standing up is doing with his hands: extinguishing a roach? flicking a booger? picking a hangnail? Hmm. Very mysterious. And the couple on the bed -- are they lovers or models? Is she hiding her face or picking sleep out of her eye? Are we supposed to assume that they're waiting for hangnail man to jump in the sack with them? I guess we know they are from the privacy-indifferent generation because they haven't bothered to close the curtain before they get down to whatever business we're supposed to pretend they are contemplating. Feel free to offer your theories in the comments.

In the article itself, Ann Hulber scratches her chin and wonders about 18 to 25 year olds and their alleged struggle to escape from the shadow of their baby boomer parents. Citing poll data that shows them approving of gay marriage and disapproving of abortion more than their parents, she wonders if they are bringing into being some new pro-family political synthesis.

On one level, Gen Nexters sound impatient with a strident stalemate between entrenched judgments of behavior; after all, experience tells them that in the case of both abortion and gay rights, life is complicated and intransigence has only impeded useful social and political compromises. At the same time, Gen Nexters give every indication of being attentive to the moral issues at stake: they aren’t willing to ignore what is troubling about abortion and what is equally troubling about intolerant exclusion. A hardheadedness, but also a high-mindedness and softheartedness, seems to be at work.

And to risk what might be truly wishful thinking, maybe there are signs here that Gen Nexters are primed to do in the years ahead what their elders have so signally failed to manage: actually think beyond their own welfare to worry about — of all things — the next generation. For when you stop to consider it, at the core of Gen Nexters’ seemingly discordant views on these hot-button issues could be an insistence on giving priority to children’s interests. Take seriously the lives you could be creating: the Gen Next wariness of abortion sends that message. Don’t rule out for any kid who is born the advantage of being reared by two legally wedded parents: that is at least one way to read the endorsement of gay marriage.

Yes, this sounds like wishful thinking to me. I guess I'd be more convinced if this was actually one of their number offering this interpretation of their generation rather than a journalist speculating from the wings and trying to wish tepid political moderation into being. Hulber, though, explicitly tells us to ignore what they say about themselves -- but if we do that, why interpret what they tell pollsters, which would certainly be as distorted as the way they choose to represent their generation? Their professed beliefs may be only so much sentimentality about the family, or a naive idealism about the constraints and choices adults face when they truly settle into raising a family or avoiding such a situation. Maybe they exhibit a stronger disapproval of abortion because they are better educated about sex or because presume the morning-after pill is available as an alternative. Who knows? Hulbert doesn't any more than you or I do: she ends with a shrug: "However you end up sorting out the data, fun or crazy wouldn’t be how I would describe the Gen Next mix. Judged against the boomers’ own past or present, though, the outlook definitely looks unique."

Youth as authenticity (17 October 2006)

In a consumer society, shopping is never strictly about the goods themselves. Because we by and large define ourselves through consumer choice rather than what we do, we use shopping as a means to answer larger questions than "What can I clean my dishes with?" and "How many pairs of socks do I need to get me through to laundry day?" We try to get at things like "Why I am I here?" "Who am I supposed to be?" and "How can I make sure I seem more important than him?" In other words, shopping becomes the field in which we pursue not just utility but meaning, we pursue objects that anchor reality, give it shape, remind us of our place within it while making us feel as though we have the power to shape it. (When I buy that new widescreen flat-panel monitor for my computer at home, I have in a very tangible way changed the shape of reality as I experience it.) We seek to access the wellspring of authenticity; we want triggers that remind us we are having a real experience.

N+1 editor Mark Greif, in an essay reprinted in the most recent Harper's, suggests that we collectively locate that fountain of authentic experience in sexualized children. He argues that we are socialized to regard our first sexual experiences as our first real experiences -- fumbling and awkward as they often are at the time, they become the core of all our nostalgic yearnings as we grow older, and advertising's efficacy derives from exploiting those forever-lost moments of pure possibility. "The lure of a permanent childhood in America" (and here I think of postcollegiate enclaves like Williamsburg, Brooklyn) "springs from the overwhelming feeling that one hasn't achieved one's true youth, because true youth would be defined by a sexual freedom so total that no one can attain it." Though we never know this kind of libidinal bliss, we acclimate ourselves to the notion we could have had it if only we weren't so stupid when we were young, and by having fleeting images of the erotic elysium repeatedly thrust before our eyes, we can't bring ourselves to let it go. Instead we let these images represent to ourselves what we should have been, what we were in our chrysalis, what we still might be now underneath the wear and tear of age. "From the desire to repossess what has been lost (or was never taken advantage of) comes the ceaseless extension of competition" -- competition for commodified youthfulness, now identified with desirability and authenticity, and conveniently enough, impossible to ever truly possess.

In Greif's view, this leads to sexualizing children, the bearers of youthful sexuality (the lodestone for our fantasies of recapturing authenticity) in its most pungent, concentrated form. "One fears our cultural preoccupation with pedophilia is not really about valuing childhood but about overvaluing child sex" -- the specter of pedophilia occults the images of youth used for marketing and sharpens their appeal. And even a cursory glimpse at Star or In Touch Weekly is enough to confirm the unsavory obsession with teenage celebrities and their budding sexuality. Even if we don't know their names or recognize their specific faces, they are the centrifuges capable of enriching inert consumer commodities with explosive energy. They serve as the matrix from which desires are manufactured and refreshed. They are humans as pure objects, without self-awareness but supercharged with the attention of others, they seem to promise that all the human qualities we yearn for can simply be possessed as objects -- purchased, even, from indifferent vendors -- rather than laboriously and tentatively teased out of rare fortuitous moments of existence after fraught, fragile interactions with those we care about.

This may explain why pedophilia was pointedly invoked with regard to the Foley scandal, which involved pages who were past the age of consent. Some argued this was a way to tar homosexuality, as though it was always a perversion like pedophilia; it may also be an expression of how our culture's instinct is to wish to expand the boundaries of youth, extend its domain and aura and enchant more of our shared experience. Because sexuality has become so bound up with the marketing of youth, it has become, in Greif's term, "a new kind of unfreedom" -- echoing Foucault's argument in the first volume of his History of Sexuality Greif argues that we are compelled to a sexual "liberation" that plays out as a compulsion to confess and be evaluated in terms of sexual standards not entirely our own but the social products of fashionability and novelty (the correlative of youthfulness). We are forbidden from not thinking about it.

Wisely, Harper's pairs Greif's essay with Chinese personal ads from people who aspire to asexuality yet seek the companionship of marriage. I wonder if it represents a specifically Chinese reaction to the encroachment of sexualized marketing that comes with consumer capitalism, or whether similar enclaves exist in America. Has it gotten so bad that asexuality could be the new distinction, the latest way to be cool?