Among those in the circles in which I moved in high school, two of the most withering epithets one could hurl at another were “poseur” and “conformist.” We were midwestern kids tugging the fag end of a dying punk scene imported from the coasts, many of whose bands were “crossing over,” that is, changing their sound to metal in order to grab a share of that then burgeoning audience. I was called “poseur” and “conformist” at least as many times as I called others the same; though it was a safe bet that, if pressed, I or anyone of my cohorts would’ve had difficulty defining what either of those words meant.
“Poseur” we were pretty sure denoted someone adopted the signature garb, habits and gestures of a particular scene in a bid to gain notoriety in — and perhaps to bag some of the girls belonging to — that scene, while “conformist” indicated the profane — jocks, overachievers, natty dressers, and basically everyone who was not a) us or b) a poseur.
“Poseur” and “conformist” held for my friends and me an incantatory power. Through their liberal application a magic ring resolved around us, only to be broken once metal and new wave rushed in to fill the void left by punk’s decline, conjuring new factions defined by new tastes. Some of us bought Powell Peralta skateboards and began listening to thrash, while others of us (me included) started buttoning our shirts all the way to the top, listening to Depeche Mode and smoking clove cigarettes.
I suppose our group was so easily riven by shifting musical tastes because, truth be told, we all poseurs and conformists. No matter how deeply we plunged into the cultus of punk — buying black trenchcoats from Goodwill, wearing t-shirts purchased in record stores located in sketchy parts of the city, going to shows in warehouses located in even sketchier parts — we were never quite able to overcome the irony of our efforts. The trenchcoats we bought to upset the dress-code enforcers of our high school, which was a private college prep. The punk-band t-shirts we wore we got because our moms drove us to the record shop. The warehouse shows we saw we saw because an older member of our group got the keys to his parent’s Saab that night.
The lives of my friends and me, for all their Oi-Boy pretensions, remained rigidly circumscribed by middle-class privilege. Ours was a midwestern mallrats’ simulation of a real scene in retrograde. Though we didn’t know it at the time, and certainly weren’t capable of knowing it, punk for us was simply a pastiche of defiant gestures — or, to put in in a more theoretically sophisticated way, a system of cultural signs ready for consumption by suburban kids of flyover country.
To even worry about the authenticity of one’s crew seems a rather quaint notion these days, one belonging to a superannuated social formation in which fads and trends cohered around rejection of the diktat of a monolithic culture industry. In the days of my youth subtler, more insidious forms of marketing were still in their infancy, and thus hadn’t set begun to extend beyond the places one typically finds them — on television, on the radio, on billboards and in magazines. The social field was largely free of the paranoia-inducing buzz- or guerrilla-marketing stunts (strategies New York Times columnist Rob Walker calls murketing). There was, in others words, still an “outside” whose sanctity was preserved by the relatively sluggish pre-Internet progression of a trend’s birth to its spotting and subsequent marketing.
The existential question is not whether to conform or not, but whether to conform to one prêt-à-porter lifestyle or another.
Now, however, in these days of long-tail markets and consumerist-inflected individualism, trend spotters and the companies that hire them have more or less closed the gap, aided, of course, by modern media technology. The feedback loop has contracted to such a lightning-quick duration that I wonder sometimes if there is indeed anything even remotely grass-roots about any nascent trend anymore. Maybe all fads now are astroturfed. After all, if Goldman Sachs can, with the assistance of powerful computers, front-run trades on the stock exchange, there’s no reason why some apparel or music company can’t front-run trends.
This is just a long way of saying that 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 suits one’s tendencies 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 theorist 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.
But, as it turns, out, accepting lifestyle as the only means of authentic individual expression exacts a terrible price in the form of a sort of arrest of one’s personality. People become so wedded to their lifestyle, the only bulwark against dizzying anomie and the void, that they cling to it come hell or high water — or come children.
- Birth of the cool: a modern parent.
Via Canada’s National Post comes this October 13, 2009 story appearing in Commentary (A conservative-rag two-fer today on Generation Bubble!). Entitled “Grow Up,” the story, the first in a week-long series, exposes the growing phenomenon of parents who refuse to “put away childish things,” as Saint Paul wrote. “Every generation of parents develops the anxieties it deserves,” the Commentary story states flatly. Parental anxieties for a long time centered on the health of their children, the story contends, but as the twentieth century progressed, many of the fatal maladies visiting young ‘uns had been subdued by medical science. Parents responded by shifting their anxieties to their children’s mental health. Incipit the self-esteem movement, of which today’s parents are some of the original beneficiaries.
The Commentary story paints a dispiriting picture of overpraised mediocrity, indiscriminate prize-giving, condoned incompetence, along with other such betrayals of human progress. “In 1969, Nathaniel Branden published The Psychology of Self-Esteem, which argued that the most important factor in a person’s future success was a healthy sense of self-worth,” the story reporting, summarizing the history of the self-esteem movement’s ascendancy.
For decades afterward, children’s television shows reminded their young viewers that they were the most important people in the world. Teachers heaped praise upon even the most lackluster students, and little league coaches dispensed trophies to anyone who showed up to play. Criticism and competition became suspect.
The austere lessons of a winner-take-all became diluted by squishy types who could only tolerate contests in which all are winners. The earnest sentiment behind this impulse put into practice eventually came to have the opposite effect. “Today, the children raised on these accolades are having children of their own,” the Commentary story continues,
and despite the fact that a quiet consensus has emerged among researchers that an excess of praise unattached to achievement undermines self-esteem, the appetite for validation and approval among those raised in Nathaniel Branden’s shadow remains voracious.
The iron rule that everything becomes its other once again rears its ugly head, threatening to thwart plans for the doubleplusgood revolution meant to usher in a generation of mentally and emotionally stable citizens. Rather, these citizens show themselves to be stable only in terms of degree of maturation, which, given the subject’s appearing in the Commentary article, seems to have halted somewhere around age 16. The article puts the situation in no uncertain terms:
This new generation of parents, raised on constant reminders of their own individual uniqueness, refuses to see themselves as merely the latest in a long line of people who have reared children. Because they have so little perspective beyond their own limited experience, their search for authenticity and meaning quickly deteriorates into an orgy of exposure and self-regard. Children are relegated to the role of stagehands in their parents’ dramatic transformation from boy to man, girl to woman. The result, as a recent crop of parenting memoirs and magazines reveal, is a turn from stoicism to solipsism.
It’s difficult to disagree with this assertion, even though it appears in an article for a right-wing magazine. But gold is where you find it. And I’m sure there isn’t a one of my readers whose found him- or herself on the business end of one of those $900 urban assault strollers that these new-model parents use to parade their pride-n-joys, if not as resistance for road training (Rob Horning, Ylajali Hansen, and I were nearly mowed down by one of these beasts, a triple-wide, in Zabar’s Deli). They are fitting emblems for today’s eternal adolescence, representing ostentation and aggression in equal measure.
Welcome to the sandbox — though in truth you never left.
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Fashion and rock music were once about rebellion. Nowadays those trend spotters and the corporations they work for stifle our rebellion and sell it back to us as style.
http://doctorbeatnik.wordpress.com/
Posted by Steven Harris | October 15, 2009, 8:33 amVery nice article,very interesting.I enjoyed reading it
Posted by Antonio | October 15, 2009, 10:01 amAnton, very well put. You toe the line between post-modern thinking and traditional thinking very well.
Posted by Verient | October 15, 2009, 10:34 amwow…you totally had me til you got to the “even though it appears in an article for a right-wing magazine”.
I suppose you think left-wing magazines are credible but right-wing ones written by people too blinded by ideology to say anything valuable.
It’s true: we do all get the anxieties we deserve.
To me the first step in not being a poseur or a conformist begins with examining those rules we embraced in high school – the ones governing which “crowd” we’re entitled to hang with. Why can’t we hang with anyone we want? Why can’t we honestly and openly examine each article of clothing, each thought, each action, on its own merits? Well…because we have belief systems about what might happen, if we stood next to the guy with the cooties….
Posted by random passer-by | October 15, 2009, 1:12 pmThe author calling the credibility of a magazine with a right-wing slant into question is not the same thing as the author asserting that left-wing media is credible. How do you know the author is not simply a moderate who would question both flagrant conservative media and liberal media? That seems like a reasonable position.
As for me, I tend toward flagrant liberalism, so I think the skepticism is perfectly merited.
The article sounds like a load of unsupported crap. For every example of a mediocre kid getting a big head because of a perceived PC self-esteem push in the last generation there is an example of a mediocre kid getting a big head because of some stupid competition that ultimately resulted in nothing to be proud about. Some people’s egos are naturally inclined to be boosted while others’ are naturally going to be lower.
It’s not that we shouldn’t be wary about the dumbing down of our culture and the marginalizing of real accomplishments, but it sounds like the article’s author is just coming from a tired, cliche stance of “things were better back when.” Truth is, things weren’t inherently better before the “wave” of political correctness and incorporation of “liberal” values in our educational and child-rearing culture. Things were bad in a whole different way.
I don’t see why trying to instill a sense of self-esteem in your child results in narcissism and ego-mania like the article implies. There’s a balance. You have to acknowledge that in our culture there are forces that thrive off of people feeling bad about themselves. One of the best things you could do is arm your child with a sense of worth that cannot be easily defeated by consumer media, political ploys or general interpersonal nastiness.
Basically, I don’t see where the Commentary writer gets off making this generalization about this generation of parents. Where’s the data? Where’s the evidence? It just sounds like he decided to zero in on something he hated about culture and formed this caricature of new-parenting to go along with it.
At any rate, blogger: I find your writing really intelligent and engaging and I’m glad I stumbled across it on WordPress’s front page. Keep up the good work.
Posted by philthepill136286 | October 16, 2009, 1:15 ami was glad that random passer-by pointed out how that particular statement reflects the dichotomous framework responsible for the many of the piece’s lamentations …although it’s true that statement that follows (re: left-wing magazines) is a bit ironic for the same reasons.
this was a great read, though:)
phil, i think the Commentary story deserves a bit more credit. it doesnt seem nostalgic to me, but rather focused on the present generation (“Every generation of parents develops the anxieties it deserves”…and it provides a brief history of the previous generations’ anxieties–as you said, things *were* bad in a whole different way). also, its argument is not that cultivating self-esteem in our children is harmful to them or to society, but that the empty praise etc etc of the self-esteem movement undermines self-esteem while creating a hunger for praise and unconditional acceptance…and the result, imho, falls in line w the GenBub blurb re: consumption replacing production “as the key aspect of one’s identity”. no longer confident in their competence as producers, members of “generation me” have become even more caught up in the performance of consumption and its utility in self-representation (and the representation of others)….hence the first part of the blog. as a side note, i had a little trouble figuring out the relationship between consumption and parenting as acts of identity formation/expression…is parenting (as personal expression) an equally problematic alternative? or simply another consumer profile with which to identify?
but regardless–and maybe this is just because the blog provided a fantastic lens through which to view it–the Commentary piece, altho i havent read it myself, doesnt seem to make unsubstantiated claims…people can make plenty of meaningful observations about society that aren’t based on quantitative data…the author points to a “recent crop of parenting memoirs and magazines” and we’ve all seen a similar trend in literature, tv, internet (an interesting take…alan kirby’s discussion of pseudo-modernism: http://www.philosophynow.org/issue58/58kirby.htm) a trend that’s indicative of the “turn from stoicism to solipsism” described in the Commentary story…admittedly, that seems…a little dramatic. but what do i know:) anyway! i thought the Generation Bubble piece made lovely use of the Commentary piece in exploring the roots of the latest trend among parents…curious what kind of parents today’s “stagehand” children/”pride-n-joys” (both such perfect descriptions!) will become…
and Generation Bubble folks, im glad to have stumbled across this too! will have to look around more when im not at work:)
Posted by czd | October 16, 2009, 10:53 amA very enlightening piece.
http://danakennedy.wordpress.com/
Posted by danakennedy | October 15, 2009, 2:35 pmExcellent read! It brought back so many memories of my own days hurling and dodging the poseur and conformist insults. For me however, I finally reached that point of “Who cares?” and since then I couldn’t care less where people think I fit in, or whether or not I’m doing the non-conformist thing. As I grew up and a new generation of “scene-kids” started to take over I realized just how conformist trying not to conform had become, and that for me was the breakthrough.
Posted by Doulos | October 15, 2009, 2:46 pmPerfect quote, “You non-conformists are all the same”
It is hard to find the middle ground of not being conformist without getting lost in being a non-conformist. I think even reaching the “Who cares?” stage is giving in somewhat to conformity. Makes me wonder if true originality exists or not.
Of course one thing is always true: I’m original…but I guess everyone says that.
http://coganhiggins.wordpress.com/
Posted by coganhiggins | October 16, 2009, 3:24 am“The Commentary story paints a dispiriting picture of overpraised mediocrity, indiscrimant prize-giving, condoned incompetence, along with other such betrayals of human progress.”
I understand that kids need a sense of self worth growing up and need to learn to develop self confidence, but that’s part of growing up is finding something you’re actually good at, working hard at it, and THEN receiving some sort of praise. This attitude towards children creates a whole generation of underachievers.
Posted by triciajune | October 15, 2009, 5:04 pmHere I was waiting for the punchline, and it never came. It seems to me that these arguments are more of the same right-wing hyperbole – society is going to hell and we need to reign it in with a good dose of old fashioned christian values and WASPish anal fortitude. Not to mention deflection from the true causes of western (and slowly, world) culture’s sorry state – the rise of unbridled capitalism and the sad channeling of meaning into consumption and materialism.
There is a cure for the post-millennial consumer malaise and it is called creation. As I’m sure you’re well aware from writing your post, which, by the way, I enjoyed muchly – even with the occasional spelling errors – the act of creation creates a sense of authenticity through its mere execution. Whether that expression is unique or brilliant doesn’t really matter, it is the process of creation, not the product which makes one feel good to be alive.
So too with the act of parenting. Being the father of an 18 month old and further one who is not willing to forsake my own creative dreams in order to get a real job and commit my life to a mortgage and material accumulation, I have some first hand experience in being a Peter Pan parent. I can assure you though that my child is happy, well cared for, and enjoying the fact that she has a stay home parent to care for her rather than a line in a will leaving her a mac-mansion, widescreen TV, a hefty portfolio of stocks and bonds and an early career in developing her neuroses in child care.
Perhaps this is not the kind of parenting that Commentary is aiming its cataractic lens at. While I appreciate the materialism of modern society has created a new kind of cultural expression, it is consumerism, that appears to be the culprit here, not self-esteem psychology. The ridiculous search for validation solely in the external world by endlessly buying more stuff is not a recipe for a healthy culture, a healthy planet – let alone healthy individuals.
We, in the first world, are blessed with riches and connections that we can use for good or ill – creating greater opportunity for self expression and community, or ridiculous personal wealth and material acquisition. Opportunities exist in our society to explore these courses and many more besides. In the end, if through our own soul searching we opt for the health of connection or the dysfunction of independence, the choice is our own to make.
Posted by t.k. bollinger | October 15, 2009, 7:44 pmFrom Seth Godin’s blog: “Tom Hanks reportedly said ‘Hollywood is like high school, but with money.’” I would replace “Hollywood” with “parenting”.
Great read. Where did you learn to write like that?
Posted by cam_writes | October 16, 2009, 4:49 am