Generation Bubble
Archive for October, 2009
Fly Away Home: Anthony Toth’s Pan Am Glam
Around Mr. Toth’s hobby one senses an air of melancholy. His garage he has transformed into a cenotaph to a technological optimism whose final death throe came when the Concorde was decommissioned in 2003 (futuristic supersonic flight is now a thing of the past). Perhaps Mr. Toth, an employee of United Airlines, chose to render immortal the glittering past of a defunct competitor because that competitor died an innocent’s death of virginal purity, never having sullied itself in the trenches of the fare wars. No, Pan Am’s eopch is one of crystalline integrity and specificity, like a beautiful insect trapped in amber, into which the materialist historian Anthony Toth seeks to breathe life into once more — at least until his condo is foreclosed on.
Imagined Communities: Rebecca Solnit’s Disaster Paradises
The order in need of reestablishing after disasters, it goes without saying, is the elites’ order, one replete with manifold modes of domination. But in the interim, before such order is reestablished, workaday folks glimpse the power that resides in them alone, one which the dominant culture typically short-circuits with its constant exhortations to earn and spend. It’s as if principles of anarchism — not theoretical anarchism, but a practical, functioning sort — are inscribed in the human genome. Indeed, if there’s anything to regret about disasters, its that the remarkable communities (Solnit goes so far as to call them “utopian”) which spring up during them are all too quickly folded back into the status quo. Yet, short-lived as these communities are, they endure long enough to make me believe that there’s something behind the stenciled graffiti I so often see emblazoned on walls, park benches and sidewalks: Another world is possible.
An Ever-Living Fire: All Things Change Until Nothing Remains
We have since demystified history, carefully taking if from the hands of god or the proletariat to rest it safely in the bosom of religio-scientific “market forces.” But in the process history began to seem not more rational, but less so. The market is somehow larger and more mysterious than God, the Proletariat, or even progress. And what are we, or any individual, compared to the market? Subsumed into it greater will, we are individual data points. Occasionally, through stock ownership or consumer purchases, we get to take part in its mysteries, but never too great a part.
Dialectics at a Standstill: The Pioneer Cult of the Left
In consumer society, the superstructure has become so minutely articulated that it offers endless possibilities for trivial revolutions in taste. And we are in no position to tell if the change for we which we wish to agitate falls under that rubric or if it constitutes something “real,” something related to shifts in the base of productive forces and relations. Further muddying the issue is the consumerist idea that consumption constitutes a peculiarly modern form of production — so that it may in fact be a epoch-shaking intervention when we laugh at an episode of Two and a Half Men instead of with it, or script movies to be acted out within the universe of Halo 3, or perform home remixes on pirated copies of hit songs. While this accelerates the transformation of the superstructure and even grants individuals agency in guiding its transformation, the base remains untouched. Instead, the acceleration merely intensifies consumerism’s entrenchment, its elaboration, while exhausting our desire for social change (now known as novelty) in the process. This is the consequence of our being unable to directly access the “real.” (Perhaps we can ask for nothing more from a society than to provide for the extinguishing of our surplus energy.)
Joy Division: The Culture of Militant Happiness
How do you get a generation reared on relentless manic cartoon optimism, which assures them that everything is fine, that there’s nothing to worry about, that nothing scary or bad will ever happen, to reinvest the world with a “creative social energy”? If anything, the culture of pathological happiness that currently afflicts the United States has effected a great drain on any creative social energy. Just look at the anemic public response to the bailouts and bonuses this past year. How, pray tell, should creative social energy be expended to make this unhappy tale palatable? Should people imagine Wall Street crooks as knights on a quest, searching for a treasure that by rights as theirs, and the citizenry as just do many orcs out to deny them this very thing?
Apoc-ellipsis: Slavoj Žižek on Hipsters (a Translation)
The hipster, then, as the not me, the objet petit a, is a sort of double who “enters through the out door” and allows the hipster to maintain the image of his own individuality, but only as the dislocated site of imagined and imaginary resistance. The taint of hipster is the vehicle of this resistance that, through the magic of surplus value, contains within itself the voiceless ejecta of the Lumpenproletariat, as seen through the gaze of the bourgeoisie. Insofar as this gaze is capable of forgetting history, it transmutes antagonism into agonism. That is, liberation is presented, or rather presents itself, as both the head and the tail (but not the body!) of ouroboros, who must now be shackled, but not “to” itself or its own body.
Hooked on Hedonics: Happiness as the Universal of Feeling
We do not know what happiness is. Like obscenity, perhaps, we think we know it when we see it. But if we actually understood and knew happiness, we probably would not spend so much time, money and effort pursuing the things that are supposed to bring happiness, and would instead simply pursue happiness. But happiness slips away as soon as we examine it. Always represented as freedom from worry or want, happiness is known only through its opposite, the unhappy state of never-ending thirst for something more that successive and compulsive purchases can never quite quench. Happiness seems to exist not so much as an experienced subjective state, but as the echo from a distant future or past of a life beyond what is currently possible.
The Jargon of Authenticity: Modern Parents Keepin’ It Real
I sense that people have conceded that trying to cultivate an identity outside market relations is self-defeating (something my preppie-punk teenage self and friends only learned bye the bye), so the best thing to do is to accommodate oneself to the consumer profile that best suits one’s proclivities and sentiments. The existential question is not whether to conform or not, but whether to conform to one prêt-à-porter lifestyle or another. This latter question at least relieves one of having to confront to the dreariness and tedium of living a life of categorical refusal — of “tarrying with the negative” as Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, following German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, might say. After all, one has only one life to live, so to throw it on the pale fire of one’s scruples seems a waste indeed.
Social Distortion: Wishing Relations Away
The density of social relations necessarily complicates economic transactions, but the results from this are not necessarily positive or negative, just difficult to predict or extrapolate from. In some cases, social relations become social capital — the golf games among the power elite; the inside information passed at lunches. In some case they engender sweetheart deals between contractors. They preempt excessive lawyering. In other cases they constitute an insulating web protecting a community from outsiders. Social relations prompt mimetic purchasing, determine the relative value of positional goods and the degree of conspicuous consumption, the general usefulness of consumerism in signaling. (If no one sees you in your American Apparel, was it worth putting it on?) Social relations likely amplify the biases identified by behavioral economics. All these contingencies play into how goods are priced, contracts are drawn up, and arrangements are settled — rendering supply-demand-equilibrium models much less useful in explaining actual economic behavior.
Right-Wing Melancholy: The Graven Images of Glenn Beck’s Amerikan Kargo Kult
McNaughton’s painting does with images what Beck and Skousen do with words. Blending apotropaic and imitative magic, McNaughton has not created a painting so much as a charm or a spell intended to restore the old America of goodness, virtue and abundance. His symbols, and the control he exercises over them is not an attempt to create meaning, but to strip it away. Once the excess meanings and connotations of these ghosts have been excised, the absent god-men can be properly conjured up, and America will be restored, One Nation Under God, with no King but Jesus.
Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
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