Generation X and the Rise of the Entertainment Subject 2021002662, 2021002663, 9781793642349, 9781793642356

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Generation X and the Rise of the Entertainment Subject

Generation X: Studies in Culture, Demographics, and Media Representation Series Editors: Elwood Watson (East Tennessee State University) and Tom Pace (John Carroll University) This series examines Generation X, a group of people that has been often overlooked, obscured, and marginalized in academic discourses, mainstream media, and the larger society. This series analyzes the intersections of age, culture, demographics, and media by developing a greater understanding of how the multi-faceted experiences of Generation X will continue to evolve and transform. Books in the series offer analyses through a variety of foci, including race and representation, identity politics and social networks, gender and sexuality, health and disability, marriage, family, and divorce, class and economics, religion, politics, career development, representation in and consumption of popular culture, and more.

Titles in the Series

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Gen X at Middle Age in Popular Culture edited by Pam Hollander Generation X and the Rise of the Entertainment Subject by Robert Samuels

Generation X and the Rise of the Entertainment Subject

Copyright © 2021. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

Robert Samuels

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefeld Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 by The Rowman and Littlefeld Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Samuels, Robert, 1961- author. Title: Generation X and the rise of the entertainment subject / Robert Samuels. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2021] | Series: Generation X: studies in culture, demographics, and media representation | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book posits that Generation X is the frst to be defned by its relationship with entertainment. This relationship, the author argues, is reciprocal: for the frst time, entertainment is created with adolescent consumers in mind who in turn develop a new mode of subjectivity that is informed by the popular culture they consume”— Provided by publisher. Identifers: LCCN 2021002662 (print) | LCCN 2021002663 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793642349 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793642356 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Mass media and youth—United States. | Generation X—United States. | Popular culture—United States. Classifcation: LCC HQ799.2.M352 U6726 2021 (print) | LCC HQ799.2.M352 (ebook) | DDC 305.20973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021002662 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021002663 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

1 Introduction 1 2 Gen X Goes to College

5

3 The Nirvana Principle

17

4 Reality Bites

31

5 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Gen X Cynical Opportunism

41

6 Pulp Fiction and Gen X Romanticism

49

7 Do the Right Thing and the Politics of Representation

57

8 The Politics of Amusing Gen X to Death

65

9 Conclusion 81

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Bibliography95 Index103 About the Author

109

v

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Chapter 1

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Introduction

This book begins by examining many of the claims made by Peter Sacks in his Generation X Goes to College.1 My central argument is that Sacks’ text helps to reveal the transformation between an older modern society run by traditional authority fgures and a post-postmodern culture shaped by the rise of entertainment and a new mode of consumer subjectivity.2 One reason why the examination of college is such a useful way to see this cultural shift is that institutions of higher education often embody a clash between different generations as the faculty and the students are shaped by distinct cultural forces. Colleges also represent a transitional space for young adults who are socialized to move from being children to being full-fedged adults.3 Moreover, as a culture dominated by adolescents and adolescent culture, Generation X is shaped by this transitional stage of human development. A central thesis of this book is that when we examine Gen X culture, we see the roots of our contemporary society, which I defne as the frst culture to be dominated by entertainment subjectivity.4 In developing this social and psychological category, I want to stress the feedback loop between consumers of entertainment and the entertainment they are consuming.5 As we shall see, not only does Gen X mark a catering to adolescent consumers, but these consumers are themselves shaped by the entertainment they are internalizing. For example, in the paradigmatic scene of the Gen X adolescent left alone by working or divorced parents, the “latchkey” young adult turns on the TV and tunes out the rest of the world.6 While this subject is immersed in media consumption, not only does this person begin to see the world through the lens of popular culture, but this culture seeks to cash in on the free time and disposable income of the unoccupied viewer. In the feedback loop between the media and the audience, both mirror each other as a new mode of subjectivity is developed. In fact, I will argue that we see the results of this Gen 1

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2

Chapter 1

X relationship in our contemporary world where people walk around staring into their iPhones or locking themselves in theirs room in order to surf the web and play video games.7 Generation X culture therefore allows us to view the roots of our own media addictions and the formation of the entertainment subject. After I discuss in chapter 2 how Gen X students helped to reconstruct higher education and other fundamental social relationships, I turn in chapter 3 to an analysis of the grunge band Nirvana and their ambivalent relationship with the encroaching media empire. As a central Gen X band, Nirvana offers a self-aware, ironic take on the struggle between individual authenticity and a culture industry seeking to cash in on the adolescent search for identity and group recognition. In a type of culture war, we see how their lyrics are determined by a constant vacillation between compliance and rebellion. We also witness here the effects of turning social and political conficts into private, psychological divisions.8 In chapter 4, I examine the flm Reality Bites to document the pathos of the Gen X subject who is caught between the need for monetary success and the desire for artistic authenticity. As a self-referential media production about the media and its effects on Gen X young adults, this movie highlights the spread of entertainment to all aspects of contemporary life and subjectivity. While the main characters attempt to use irony and cynicism to fght off the loss of their individuality, they become locked into a mode of self-referential nihilism, which Sacks’ equates with postmodern subjectivity. Chapter 5 continues this analysis of Gen X culture and psychology by looking at Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. In this metafctional representation of middle-class youth rebellion, we witness a new form of pragmatic cynicism that fully embraces the expansion of entertainment to all aspects of human existence. Ferris not only addresses the audience directly, while he turns his own life into a spectacle to be viewed by others, but his rebellion against all forms of authority reveals the confict between the Boomer culture of his parents and his own Gen X sensibilities.9 In chapter 6, I read Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction as representing the total victory of entertainment over life. Instead of art imitating life, we are shown how art begins to imitate art in post-postmodern society. By calling Tarantino a New Romanticist, I hope to trace part of our contemporary culture to the past tradition of modern Romanticism.10 As a worldview dedicated to revealing how the artist overcomes social confict and alienation through an authentic vision, Romanticism enables us to understand the rise of the entertainment subject. Chapter 7 continues this analysis of Gen X movies through a critical examination of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. As an early precursor to contemporary identity politics, this flm seeks to question the racism of white

Introduction

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liberal entertainment culture. Although the movie is often interpreted as a story centered on the African American quest for fair representation in the media, the flm itself is framed by a metafctional discourse highlighting the role of money in the culture industry. In chapter 8, I analyze Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death as a way of exploring how the pleasure principle has reshaped our culture and subjectivity. This discussion of the relation between pleasure, culture, and the unconscious is then applied to the use of humor by President Reagan and the role played by in libertarian, Right-wing politics. The conclusion of this book seeks to tie together the different chapters by presenting a generalized theory of entertainment subjectivity. My goal is to use my analysis of Gen X culture to explain why we are so fxated on our phones and computers. I also return to the reshaping of higher education by Gen X students and examine what the changes in this specifc institution tell us about transformations throughout contemporary society.

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NOTES 1. Sacks, Peter. Generation X goes to college. An eye-opening account of teaching in postmodern America. Open Court Publishing Company, 332 South Michigan Avenue, Suite 2000, Chicago, IL 60604, 1996. 2. Rifkin, J. “A postmodern stage.” The Age of Access (2000): 186–220. 3. Field, John, and Natalie Morgan-Klein. “Studenthood and identifcation: Higher education as a liminal transitional space.” 40th Annual SCUTREA Conference. University of Warwick, 2010. 4. Postman, Neil. Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. Penguin, 2006. 5. Adorno, Theodor W. The culture industry: Selected essays on mass culture. Routledge, 2005. 6. Brown, Lisa, Amy Haviland, and Sherri Morris. “Generation X.” Contemporary Education 68.3 (1997): 202. 7. Elhai, Jon D., et al. “Fear of missing out, need for touch, anxiety and depression are related to problematic smartphone use.” Computers in Human Behavior 63 (2016): 509–516. 8. Samuels, Robert. New media, cultural studies, and critical theory after postmodernism: Automodernity from Zizek to Laclau. Springer, 2009. 9. Karp, H. B., and Danilo Sirias. “Generational confict: A new paradigm for teams of the 21st century.” Gestalt Review 5.2 (2001): 71–87. 10. Alsen, Eberhard. The new romanticism: A collection of critical essays. Routledge, 2014.

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Chapter 2

Gen X Goes to College

The goal of this chapter is to examine how certain tendencies derived in part from Generation X have not only reshaped higher education but have also transformed American society more broadly. Drawing from Peter Sacks’ Generation X Goes to College, I will focus on the cultural conficts between the adult-driven modern culture and what he calls the postmodern youth culture. As a Baby Boomer teaching college for the frst time, Sacks was forced to confront an educational context repackaged as a consumer-driven experience.1

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A-MART COLLEGE In his introduction, Sacks laments a loss of standards at what he labels “A-Mart College” (x). By playing on the name of a store for the masses, he argues that colleges are now being forced to satisfy their students as consumers, and what these students often want is high grades while applying little effort.2 Sacks worries over what kind of future we face if students are not taught “how to think and how to distinguish truth from lies . . .” (x). From this perspective, the current culture of fake news, alternative facts, and viral conspiracy theories makes sense since its foundations have been derived from an educational system that has replaced standards with the need to please its customers.3 While this may be a one-sided, extreme view of the effect of Generation X students on higher education, it does point to my central thesis, which is that the rise of the entertainment subject has reshaped many of the basic institutions of contemporary life and subjectivity. It is important to stress that by the term “entertainment subject,” I am referring to Freud’s theory that human beings are driven by the desire to use 5

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Chapter 2

as little mental and physical energy as possible.4 In order to achieve this goal of the law of mental inertia, Freud posits that we seek to avoid all tension and confict, and therefore pleasure is equated with escape. We can understand this strange defnition of the pleasure principle through the notion that entertainment is a mode of enjoyment allowing people to avoid the diffcult realities of their lives. For instance, when I ask students what they get out of the many hours they spend watching media or listening to music, they often respond that this consumption of entertainment is just meaningless enjoyment. Not only does entertainment free them from the reality principle, but it also liberates them from the constraints of meaning.5 Freud’s theory of the pleasure principle is so vital to our understanding of Gen X because this generation is partially defned by an increased access to entertainment, which was enabled by the absence of parental supervision, an increase in media catering to the young adult demographic, and a sizable middle class with access to money and free time.6 We also have to take into account the increased undermining of all forms of traditional authority due to the breaking up of the nuclear family, Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the 1960s counter culture. In short, as the modern and premodern modes of social regulation and meaning lost much of their power, a new culture of pleasure through entertainment stepped in and reshaped social institutions and individual subjectivity.7 For Sacks, “the postmodern student knows the value of learning but expects to be entertained. He has a keen sense of entitlement but little motivation to succeed. This is the essence of Generation X, the frst true generation of the postmodern epoch” (xiii). Sacks does not defne what he means by postmodernity until much later in the book, but his main emphasis is on a cultural transformation from a society based on reason, objective reality, the scientifc method, the Protestant work ethic, and democratic institutions to one centered on relativism, subjectivism, entertainment, spectacle, and hyperconsumerism.8 Although I will later complicate this historical opposition, his argument does dovetail with the Freudian notion of replacing the reality principle with the pleasure principle. A guiding thread of Sacks’ narrative is his sense that as a Baby Boomer, who left his job as a journalist to teach college, he was forced to deal with a Gen X student body resisting his initial attempt to teach through the use of rigorous standards. He frst hones in on the students in the back of the room who displayed looks of total disengagement, which he says confused him because he did not expect this attitude from college students.9 He describes this mode of disengaged subjectivity as coming from a “culture of young people who were born and bred to sit back and enjoy the spectacle that engulfed them. They seemed to resent that I [Sacks] obviously could not measure up to the standards amusement that they learned on Sesame Street

Gen X Goes to College

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in their formative years, standards later reinforced by Beverly Hills 90210, Cosmopolitan, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam” (9–10). His thesis here is similar to Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, which documents how children raised watching television and consuming other popular media privilege entertainment over education or democratic participation. In extending and clarifying Postman’s argument, I hope to show how the creation of the entertainment subject is predicated on the combination of pleasure, escape, and new media technologies.

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PLEASURE, EDUCATION, AND MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES Sacks believes students have not only been shaped by their media culture, but they have also been socialized by “an overly nurturing, hand-holding educational system not to take responsibility for their own actions” (10).10 In fact, much of his book documents how he realized that the only way he could keep his job was if he pleased his students by giving them high grades and easy work.11 Since his tenure depended on receiving excellent student evaluations from his “customers,” he quickly learned that he would have to lower his standards and expectations. Here we see how institutions can collude with changing cultural norms as a way of maintaining a steady customer base.12 Since the colleges need students, and the students will only come back if they are pleased, the colleges have to pressure the teachers to conform to the students’ desires, and according to Sacks, what the students desire is to be entertained and rewarded, even if they are not expending the required effort. For example, Sacks realized that most of his students were simply not doing the assigned reading, so he stopped assigning it, and everyone became much happier (13). One of the things that most upset Sacks about his students was what he considered to be their rudeness as demonstrated by their tendency to read the newspaper in class or hold private conversations while he was teaching (14). In one humorous scene, he describes a student watching a small portable television in another professor’s class (16). This intrusion of media technology into the classroom seems so quaint now as students regularly are on their phones or surfng the Web during class. Sacks thus was catching the early warning signs of a new form of student resistance to learning, which is the intrusion of entertainment technologies into the educational environment. These new media devices deliver instant pleasure and escape to students as they are able to tune out their teachers and tune in to systems of enjoyment.13 Even when his students appeared to be disengaged from their work, they demanded high grades, and if they did not receive what they wanted, they

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Chapter 2

would often complain and challenge his authority and expertise (19). As one student expressed to him, his grading standards were just his opinion, and so they held no real relevance (19). Other students saw his grades as just the starting place for a negotiation (20). From Sack’s perspective, Gen X students had grown up in a world “where everything else was negotiable, fexible, changeable, why not grades?” (20). Moreover, what he quickly learned was that in disputes between a faculty member and a student, the customer was always right, and if he wanted to keep his job, he had to learn how to give them what they desired and not what they deserved. The idea that Generation X comes off as highly entitled is a common theme in the literature on this demographic group, but what is less clear is what drives this form of subjectivity?14 Are these young people just acting like young people have always acted, or is there something different going on? I believe that the answer to this question involves the combined changing nature of parenting, schooling, social media, and the consumer economy. As children of mostly Baby Boomer parents, these young adults were often brought up in a family structure that was transitioning away from the allpowerful patriarch model.15 Moreover, since many of their parents were working, and many of their families suffered divorces, a lack of parental involvement was often coupled with a lack of set rules and a desire to keep the children happy.16 For middle-class and upper-class families, the access to expendable income often resulted in turning to the consumer economy to satisfy the partially-abandoned youth. In turn, the culture industry linked to the consumer economy fed off of a demographic with endless resources and free time. The end result was a privileging of pleasure over reality and the delaying of gratifcation. One problem with Sacks’ narrative is that it does tend to repress the negative aspects of traditional culture as it only sees the new postmodern culture as inherently bad. However, patriarchy and premodern educational systems were often oppressive, and so a change to give more voice and freedom to children and students is not an entirely negative thing, yet, what makes the whole situation seem so corrupt is that no one is actually openly addressing the trade-off between the positive and negative aspects of these transformations. In fact, the education system appears to be bent on getting everyone to conform to the social structure from a position of cynical distance.17 Thus, the schools know that grades corrupt learning, but they use them anyway. They also know that student evaluations are biased and unscientifc, but still they are utilized. In turn, many students have internalized the idea that the only thing that matters in their education is to receive high grades, and their parents reinforce this message by rewarding them for these symbols of achievement.18 Thus, instead of grades being a means to an end, they become the end itself, and students become trained to only care about competing for rewards

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Gen X Goes to College

9

but not for actually caring about learning.19 The end result is some students take on the subjectivity of cynical conformity as they go through the motions of schooling without any interest or real investment. The famous disengagement and entitlement of Generation X can be therefore traced in part to all aspects of society focusing on external rewards versus intrinsic motivation. In this context, when you tell all young people that the only way they can have a decent life in the future is if they get high grades in school, you create a system where most people are socialized to compete for a scarce resource from a position of cynical distance. After all, they are only conforming to get a reward, and when the reward is not there, they have no reason to perform.20 While this analysis indicates that our society has failed to achieve many of its goals, perhaps the opposite is true because what a society on the whole wants is for people not only to conform but also to think that they are acting on their own free will when they are actually copying what others are doing. Ultimately, the (post-)postmodern society of entertainment needs people to be uncritical capitalists who compete for rewards but not really care about what they are doing.21 Sacks’ narrative is itself the story of how he learned to conform to a system he does not respect. Furthermore, his cynical conformity matches the cynical conformity of his colleagues and his students. From this perspective, no one believes in what they are doing, but they do it anyway because they do not see an alternative. This is what has been called “capitalist realism,” because when we think there is no alternative to the current system, all we can do is play the game from the position of disengaged distance.22 The stereotype of Generation X is thus a symptom of a social problem experienced on the level of individual subjectivity: people feel both entitled and apathetic as they force themselves to conform from the position of enlightened distance. After all, the main ideological task of post-postmodernity is to reconcile premodern social hierarchy with modern liberation, and this is achieved when people believe they are being free the moment they are conforming.23 For example, advertisers have to get a large group of people to buy the same thing by convincing them that the product will make them unique individuals.24 This has always been the logic behind mass style and fashion, but what happens with Gen X is that the rise of the consumer culture is linked with the growing freedom and importance of adolescents who are focused on forming an identity by copying peers and pop cultural trends.25 One of the values of Sacks’ work then is that it unintentionally exposes the role played by cynical conformity in all aspects of contemporary life. We have never been so free and so controlled at the same time, and the student resistances he documents are only the symptoms of a larger cultural problem. Since these students have not yet become entirely socialized, their passiveaggressive protests indicate that the system itself is corrosive, but no one can

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imagine an alternative. Moreover, our society has been shaped by an incorrect psychological theory based on the notion that the only way to get anyone to do anything is to give them an external reward.26 However, we know that when people are only working for a reward, they often lose their own internal motivation, and this problem haunts both our capitalist and educational systems. If, according to Freud’s pleasure principle, we are driven to use as little mental and physical energy as possible, and external rewards undermine individual desire, what will make students want to learn or workers want to work? This is a vital question that I will attempt to address at the end of this book, but for now, I want to focus on how the battle between the students’ pleasure principle and the institutional reliance on external rewards results in a culture of cynical conformity coupled with an anonymous mode of irrational social power.

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STUDENT AS TROLL In the middle of Sacks’ book, he relates how he was forced to conform to the expectations of his college because of the threat of losing his jobs due to the comments on his student evaluations.27 Thus, even though he did not want to give up his standards, and he thought that his students were judging him based on noneducational values, he decided to comply with their desires by making his teaching less demanding and more entertaining. What is so interesting about this narrative is the way he is motivated to give up his own beliefs and values based on the anonymous feedback of his students. As an anticipation of the current Web culture of trolls and customer comments, students were able to express their discontent behind a wall of anonymity, and his supervisors used this faulty system of assessment to pressure him to conform.28 Student evaluations not only show the rise of student power in shaping their own education, but these ratings also reveal the way we often outsource quality control to non-experts.29 Since it is simply easier and cheaper to allow the students to evaluate their teachers, colleges use this method, even though they know it is highly subjective and unscientifc. In other words, the same modern institutions that are supposed to be based on reason, science, expertise, and evidence, end up catering to the untrained subjective responses of unidentifed people who have no accountability.30 Like parents catering to their demanding children, this system reverses roles as the traditional authority fgure is forced to submit to subordinates. This may look like a progressive democratic improvement, but what kind of democracy relies on the unchecked power of anonymous voices? If democratic law is centered on an

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impartial judge applying reason to empirical evidence, what happens when the masses are told that their opinions matter as much as any expert’s facts?31 Unknowingly this system of student evaluations has helped to usher in a system where opinions dominate facts, and anonymous aggressions threaten people into silence.32 For instance, on the Web, we have seen scientists shouted down and threatened because they have provided evidence that vaccines are not making children sick. In a culture where opinions have more sway than reasoned evidence, the masses may gain power, but science and democracy suffer, and so it is highly problematic that schools would feed this culture by relying so heavily on opinion-based evaluation systems. What many people do not know is that since the vast majority of faculty are not eligible for tenure, and they are hired to mostly teach, the main thing that determines whether they keep their job or not is their ability to gain high student evaluations.33 As Sacks learned, the best way to achieve these high scores is to give high grades and make class as entertaining as possible. Not only do students give teachers a numerical score, but they also write anonymous comments, and these comments can determine a teacher’s fate. In fact, many of the comments Sacks’ received said that he expected too much and that he was a hard grader. He was also told that he was boring, and they did not fnd his assignments useful (37). In response, he decided to try an experiment by raising his grades, reducing the amount of reading, and avoiding any negative feedback. He called his new teaching method the “sandbox experiment,” and it was based on the idea that students could do no wrong, and he would keep them as happy as possible (85). By calling it an experiment, I believe he was able to keep a cynical distance from his conformity; in other words, because it was only a temporary experiment, he did not have to think he was really compromising his beliefs.34 However, once he adopted his trial, there was no looking back, and he became fully committed to the exact educational strategy he critiques throughout his work. One lesson we can gather here is that even when people only pretend to conform temporarily, they often conform on a long-term basis because they have been able to combine submission with a distance to that submission: they are thus alienated and free at the same time. In order to get his students to like him, Sacks declares that he had to follow the unwritten code: “Don’t act as if you know more than the students, even though you do” (84). The reason for this ironic self-deprecation is that he believed students saw the expert as someone who acts superior to them: “many students were still uncomfortable with the idea that my knowledge or skills were important or even relevant” (84). This rejection of the knowledge of the expert anticipates the cult of the amateur in contemporary online culture.35 Just as citizens may feel that coastal elites use their education to patronize people without the same credentials, Sacks’ students rebelled

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against his expertise because it made them feel inferior. To overcome this problem, he allowed people to call him by his frst name, and he hid the true extent of his experience as a journalist (84). Since students wanted to see him as an equal, he had to deny his own identity and credentials, which is a strange way to try to teach students because it undermines the instructor’s credibility. However, just as many Boomer parents want their Gen X children to see them as friends rather than authority-fgures, it makes sense that these same students would demand to be on the same social level as their teachers. After all, a major aspect of contemporary society is the lessening of the distinction between different age groups. For instance, a lot of adults dress and act like children, and a lot of children expect to be treated like adults.36 One side-effect of this cultural undermining of professional expertise is the de-skilling of many jobs, like the job of being a professor.37 Since people rebel against the know-it-all expert, and they celebrate the common-man amateur, there is no reason to hire faculty full-time or grant them tenure. As Sacks relates, he began to see himself as more of a facilitator and partner in the learning process and less as a professional expert that deserved a certain level of respect. Of course, it was the students who were evaluating him, and so they had a fair amount of social power giving them a sense of superiority, which in turn made it hard for him to grade them. In this upside-down world, the subordinates are in charge of the authorities as everyone is supposed to pretend to be equal. Not only did Sacks learn to give students high grades and demand little in return, but he also saw his new role as one of accommodating the students (85). Against his inner sense that he was doing something wrong, he rationalized that since grades themselves are arbitrary, it did not matter if he was infating them (85). Moreover, he justifed his actions by claiming that because other teachers were doing the same thing, there could be nothing wrong with his abandonment of all standards. These rationalizations point to the way that people often conform to a group because it allows them to escape from any feelings of guilt, shame, and anxiety, and if the pleasure principle is about lowering tension and mental effort, this type of conformity accomplishes both goals. Sacks’ ultimate rationalization for his selling out of all of his previous beliefs and educational values is that it allowed him to write his book: “I might have been wrong to act in the way the system was compelling me to act; but now I am confessing, and hoping that the virtue of my act lies in exposing the corruption that has enveloped much of higher education” (86). The Boomer guilt for conforming to the demands of his Gen X students is thus overcome by an act of retroactive confession. In this structure, guilt and shame are repressed as one justifes one’s actions for the good it will do others.38 Perhaps a difference between the Baby Boomers and the Gen Xers is

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that the latter group often does not believe that good acts can absolve one of responsibility. It is important to point out that not all of the parents of Generation X students were Boomers. In fact, the student evaluation form was developed by an older generation, which was in part responding to the student activism of the 1960s. Since students were demanding more of a say in their own education, some educators thought that allowing these young people to evaluate their teachers would be a good thing. Moreover, while Sacks tends to focus on the opposition between modernity and postmodernity, I think it is important to also differentiate between the postmodern and the post-postmodern. One reason why this distinction is essential is that transition from the modern reality principle to the post-postmodern pleasure principle is mediated by the postmodern rebellion against modernity and premodern social hierarchies based on race, class, and gender. In other words, the postmodern student rebellion of the 1960s conficts with the contemporary culture of media enjoyment. Also, the student revolt against parental and educational authority was coupled with a desire to overturn racial, gender, and class hierarchies. As we shall see throughout this book, the post-postmodern entertainment subject often represents a counter-revolution against postmodern political correctness and identity politics. Related to this distinction between the modern and the postmodern is the idea that many Boomer parents were postmodern rebels in their youth, but as they became adults, they turned to a more reactionary mindset. Furthermore, since some Gen X students were raised by members of the Silent Generation, they were exposed to a more authoritarian parenting culture. Of course, these generational categories are only ideal types and mass generalizations, but they do help us to think about how societies are shaped by certain demographic and historical factors. THE SELF IN EDUCATION AND PARENTING An educational tactic that may have been derived from the Boomers and applied to the Gen Xers is the idea that a key to both teaching and parenting is to raise the self-esteem of the young person.39 As one of his colleagues told Sacks, he should tell his students that they have improved because that makes them feel good about themselves and good about the teacher (89). Here we see the convergence of teaching and parenting on another questionable psychological theory, which is that instead of giving people accurate assessments of their abilities, it is more important to build a secure sense of self, and therefore, everyone should get trophies, even if they never get off of the bench.40 One of the problems with this ideology is that people do not

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learn what they do not know, and they lose their respect for the people who have accomplished certain skills. As Sacks learned, with this social experiment in leveling, the really bright and committed students were often mocked by the inferior students as the class tried to maintain an even level of cool indifference. Sacks remarks how in the back of one of his classes, there was a group of young men that seemed to form an impenetrable fortress against his teaching efforts (98). This type of group resistance is often policed by unconscious body language, which signals to any intruder that anyone attempting to affect the group will be harmed. At one point, Sacks tried to bond with the group by making a sarcastic joke, but what he got in return was looks of utter disdain (99). He interpreted this rejection of his desire to be accepted as a frm wall between generations: in the battle between the children and the adults, the children were winning. Moreover, whenever he tried to talk about his issues with his fellow colleagues, most of them dismissed his complaints and instead simply celebrated the students as driven to improve their lives (100). Against the myth of student success, Sacks exclaims his ultimate admission of cynical conformity: “I knew that compromising standards in order to accommodate students had become a way of life at the institution. Everyone knew it, but nobody would ever publicly admit it” (101). The question now is, who is being cynical? Is it the Boomer adults or the Gen X students? To begin to answer this question, I will turn to an examination of the group Nirvana, which has often been labeled as the paradigmatic Gen X band.

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NOTES 1. Riesman, David. On higher education: The academic enterprise in an era of rising student consumerism. Transaction Publishers, 1980. 2. Naidoo*, Rajani, and Ian Jamieson. “Empowering participants or corroding learning? Towards a research agenda on the impact of student consumerism in higher education.” Journal of Education Policy 20.3 (2005): 267–281. 3. McComiskey, Bruce. Post-truth rhetoric and composition. University Press of Colorado, 2017. 4. Freud, Sigmund. “Project for a scientifc psychology (1950 [1895]).” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume I (1886–1899): Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts (1966): 281–391. 5. Jean, Baudrillard. “The ecstasy of communication.” The Anti-Aesthetic (1988): 126–134. 6. Pritchard, Annette, and Nigel J. Morgan. “Sex still sells to generation X: Promotional practice and the youth package holiday market.” Journal of Vacation Marketing 3.1 (1996): 68–80.

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7. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991. 8. Rifkin, Jeremy. The age of access: The new culture of hypercapitalism. Penguin, 2001. 9. De Castella, Krista, Don Byrne, and Martin Covington. “Unmotivated or motivated to fail? A cross-cultural study of achievement motivation, fear of failure, and student disengagement.” Journal of Educational Psychology 105.3 (2013): 861. 10. Lukianoff, Greg, and Jonathan Haidt. “The coddling of the American mind.” The Atlantic 316.2 (2015): 42–52. 11. Johnson, Valen E. Grade infation: A crisis in college education. Springer Science & Business Media, 2006. 12. Kirp, David L., et al. Shakespeare, Einstein, and the bottom line. Harvard University Press, 2003. 13. Samuels, Robert. “Auto-modernity after postmodernism: Autonomy and automation in culture, technology, and education.” Digital youth, innovation, and the unexpected (2008). 14. Alexander, Christopher S., and James M. Sysko. “A study of the cognitive determinants of generation Y’s entitlement mentality.” Academy of Educational Leadership Journal 16.2 (2012): 63. 15. Heywood, Leslie, and Jennifer Drake. “It’s all about the Benjamins.” Third wave feminism. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2007. 114–124. 16. Howe, Neil. “A new parent generation: Meet Mr. and Mrs. Gen X.” The Education Digest 75.9 (2010): 4. 17. Samuels, Robert. Educating inequality: Beyond the political myths of higher education and the job market. Routledge, 2017. 18. Labaree, David F. How to succeed in school without really learning: The credentials race in American education. Yale University Press, 1997. 19. Romanowski, Michael H. “Student obsession with grades and achievement.” Kappa Delta Pi Record 40.4 (2004): 149–151. 20. Kohn, Alfe. Punished by rewards: The trouble with gold stars, incentive plans, A’s, praise, and other bribes. Houghton Miffin Harcourt, 1999. 21. Fleming, Peter, and André Spicer. “Working at a cynical distance: Implications for power, subjectivity and resistance.” Organization 10.1 (2003): 157–179. 22. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? John Hunt Publishing, 2009. 23. Žižek, Slavoj. For they know not what they do: Enjoyment as a political factor. Verso, 2002. 24. Brooks, David. Bobos in paradise: The new upper class and how they got there. Simon and Schuster, 2010. 25. Brown, B. Bradford, Donna R. Clasen, and Sue A. Eicher. “Perceptions of peer pressure, peer conformity dispositions, and self-reported behavior among adolescents.” Developmental Psychology 22.4 (1986): 521. 26. Cameron, Judy, and W. David Pierce. “Reinforcement, reward, and intrinsic motivation: A meta-analysis.” Review of Educational Research 64.3 (1994): 363–423.

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Copyright © 2021. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

27. Centra, John A. “Will teachers receive higher student evaluations by giving higher grades and less course work?” Research in Higher Education 44.5 (2003): 495–518. 28. Rainie, Harrison, Janna Quitney Anderson, and Jonathan Albright. “The future of free speech, trolls, anonymity and fake news online.” (2017). 29. Keen, Andrew. The cult of the amateur. New York, 2007. 30. Zhuo, Julie. “Where anonymity breeds contempt.” The Composition of Everyday Life, Concise (2015): 393. 31. Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment now: The case for reason, science, humanism, and progress. Penguin, 2018. 32. Nagle, Angela. Kill all normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right. John Hunt Publishing, 2017. 33. Benjamin, Ernst. “How over-reliance on contingent appointments diminishes faculty involvement in student learning.” Change 1995 (2002): 4–10. 34. Fleming, Peter, and André Spicer. “Working at a cynical distance: Implications for power, subjectivity and resistance.” Organization 10.1 (2003): 157–179. 35. Volkers, Nancy. “Does truth have a future? The growing movement to reject expertise and evidence has hearing and speech professionals scrambling to show why facts matter.” (2019): 42–51. 36. Balducci, Anthony. I won’t grow up!: The comic man-child in flm from 1901 to the present. McFarland, 2015. 37. Kezar, Adrianna, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott. The gig academy: Mapping labor in the neoliberal university. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. 38. Samuels, Robert. “Transference and narcissism.” Freud for the twenty-frst century. Palgrave Pivot, Cham, 2019. 43–51. 39. Neuman, Sharon G. “The negative consequences of the self-esteem movement.” Alberta Journal of Educational Research 38.4 (1992): 251–253. 40. Smith, Richard. “Self‐esteem: The kindly apocalypse.” Journal of Philosophy of Education 36.1 (2002): 87–100.

Chapter 3

The Nirvana Principle

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As we saw in the last chapter, Generation X can be read as issuing a new form of human culture and psychology that privileges pleasure over work, rules, and reality. For Sacks, this transformation was evident in the ways that schools began to cater to the students by offering them easy rewards without demanding too much effort or achievement. To further illustrate this generational shift, I will now focus on a series of popular cultural productions that produce and refect the entertainment subject. In analyzing Kurt Cobain’s lyrics and music, I hope to show how a key aspect of the Gen X entertainment subject is the problem of the pleasure principle. For Freud, pleasure is derived from a lack of tension, and he calls the ultimate form of this fundamental human impulse the Nirvana principle: The dominating tendency of mental life, and perhaps of nervous life in general, is the effort to reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli (the “Nirvana principle,” to borrow a term from Barbara Low)—a tendency which fnds expression in the pleasure principle; and our recognition of that fact is one of our strongest reasons for believing in the existence of death instincts.1

According to this theory, since we are driven to use as little mental and physical energy as possible, we derive pleasure from the release of built-up tension and the avoidance of anything that makes us think. Pleasure is therefore a problem for Freud because its ultimate goal is death or what he calls the Nirvana principle. Moreover, the pleasure principle is seen as opposed to the reality principle because the pursuit of pleasure requires denying the limitations and frustrations of reality.2 Similar to Freud, Jeremy Rifkin argues in The Age of Access that what defnes the transition from the modern world to the postmodern world is 17

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precisely this move from a society based on the reality principle to one centered on the pleasure principle.3 As a reaction to the Protestant work ethic and the need to delay gratifcation and sacrifce for a future reward, the (post-) postmodern subject seeks immediate gratifcation, and this satisfaction is fueled by an entertainment industry dedicated to delivering instant gratifcation. Furthermore, in order to get people to buy things they may not need, the consumer economy has to constantly advertise new products coupled with new desires.4 From this perspective, we can say that while past societies tried to control people through the threat of punishment and violence, the postpostmodern society shapes people’s subjectivity through the production of desire and pleasure.5 However, as we saw with Sacks’ analysis, it is important to differentiate between the postmodern and the post-postmodern because the postmodern is centered on rebellion, progressive social movements, tension, and confict, while the post-postmodern is focused on escaping tension and confict through the easy access to pleasure. Furthermore, as a postmodern Boomer critic, Rifkin documents the tension between the modern reality principle and the post-postmodern pleasure principle from a position of confict and tension that results in the production of cynical conformity. As we move to the dominance of post-postmodernity in Gen X culture, pleasure erases much of the tension still found in Boomer parents. ACTING STUPID AND CONTAGIOUS

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The starkest example of a person driven by the Nirvana principle is an addict whose desire for pleasure and escape is so strong that it leads to self-destruction.6 Instead of seeing addiction as a purely biological disease, we have to realize how the pursuit of pleasure entails an escape from reality. In fact, Freud wrote the following in his Civilization and Its Discontents: The service rendered by intoxicating media in the struggle for happiness and in keeping misery at a distance is so highly prized as a beneft that individuals and people alike have given them an established place in the economics of the libido. We owe to such media not merely the immediate yield of pleasure, but also a greatly desired degree of independence from the external world.7

Freud was talking about drugs here, but what is so interesting is his notion of “intoxicating media.” Just as drugs can help someone gain pleasure by escaping the constraints of the external world, entertainment offers people enjoyment as both a source of pleasure and escape.

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From the perspective of the confict between generations, the Gen X culture can often be seen as stuck in a perpetual adolescence where in the effort to establish a sense of one’s own identity, one attacks one’s parents, and yet, one is still reliant on the people being attacked. This desire for independence often takes the form of experimenting with drugs, sex, and alternative cultures that give access to pleasure and what Freud called “independence from external reality.” Moreover, as peers replace the role previously played by parents, the young adult seeks out a new identity by conforming to a group because the only way to feel independent is to have others recognize the signs of your identity.8 The teen is then thrown into a confict where each form of individuation requires a conformity to a group. This role of peers is especially powerful in the pursuit of pleasure as the teen expresses their sex drive through the social forms of the group mating rituals and preferences. Since desire is shaped by the desire of others, one fnds pleasure in the same ways as other members of one’s identity group. Although we often think of sex as the most natural part of our subjectivity, the way that it is structured by gender norms and courting rituals reveals how it is socially constructed for the teenager seeking both pleasure and acceptance.9 Of course, beauty itself is highly infuenced by culture and history as standards of desirability are transformed by social infuences. In the context of Generation X, the social nature of sex, beauty, and emotions is heightened because the adolescent peer group becomes a prime target of a culture industry seeking to cash in on the free time and available resources of young people freed from the watchful eyes of their parents. Perhaps the strongest evidence of these trends can be found in the development of MTV as a television channel dedicated to sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, and the teen market.10 As a fundamental social institution of Gen X culture, MTV began in 1981, and at frst, all it showed was short music videos that played a dual role of entertaining teens and advertising pop music material.11 Not only were these videos selling images of desire and rock, but they also tended to take on a style of fast cuts between different images. Some have argued that this form of media catered to a postmodern sensibility because style was privileged over substance, and the videos often lacked the narrative cohesion of past forms of cultural productions.12 Feeding the adolescent desire for fast action and reduced attention, MTV walked a diffcult line between art and commerce; after all, were the videos only there to sell records, or were the videos their own form of art?13 It will be my contention that Nirvana stepped into this confict between commerce and artistic expression by offering an alternative: led by Kurt Cobain, Nirvana was a group that was highly aware of its own conficted relationship to its audience and the surrounding culture industry.14

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NEVERMIND The title of Nirvana’s hit album Nevermind tells us much about the Gen X alternative culture. One way of interpreting this phrase is to see it as an act of self-cancellation: they want to say something, but like so many self-conscious teenagers, they stop themselves from expressing what they are thinking.15 This act of self-negation points to an angst-driven irony; one starts to communicate, and then one undermines one’s own communication.16 In fact, many of Nirvana’s lyrics contain this same self-cancelling structure, which I believe reveals what happens when a self-ironic adolescent peer group is catered to by a media industry hungry to cash in on young people with ample free time and access to spending money. We therefore need to consider the dialectical relation between youth culture and the culture industry since they feed off of each other and represent an alternative to the traditional adult world. To think about the infuence and effect of Nirvana, we can begin by looking at the lyrics of their hit song “Smells Like Teen Spirit”:17

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With the lights out, it’s less dangerous Here we are now, entertain us I feel stupid and contagious Here we are now, entertain us A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido Yeah, hey

One way of reading these words is to see them as a challenge to the audience who is asking to be entertained. However, it is Kurt Cobain himself who indicates that he feels stupid and contagious. This act of self-deprecation shows an ironic awareness of how pop culture can be considered to be both meaningless and viral: in fact, it is its lack of meaning that may help it to spread so quickly.18 Yet, irony always entails both saying and unsaying the same thing, and so Cobain is able to both mock the entertainment industry as he profts from the system he is mocking.19 In this self-contradicting rhetoric, we see how the Gen X teen pop culture is highly conficted about the need to conform to consumer capitalism and the desire to rebel from the dominant culture. As an act of metafction, Cobain’s lyrics create a doubling discourse because at the moment he is mocking the stupidity of teem culture, he is producing it.20 Moreover, the second to last line of the lyrics quoted above ends up with a series of words that only are connected because they share the same ending. As Baudrillard posits, in (post-)postmodern culture, the signifer breaks free from the need to represent reality, and so it is able to circulate without constraints of reference and signifcation.21

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This self-cancellation of meaning by the play of the signifer is apparent in the chorus: Hello, hello, hello, how low Hello, hello, hello, how low

Here the repetition of a sound turns a greeting into an indication of a negative state. Perhaps Cobain is expressing his manic-depression as he continuously shifts between high and low affective states.22 Moreover, this alternation between feelings of elation and feelings of despair not only refect the extreme shifts of emotion experienced during adolescence, but it also points to culture where emotions are often rendered extreme and short-lived.23 In fact, much of Cobain’s lyrics point to a privileging of affect over meaning in Gen X pop culture. For instance, the opening lines start off with referring to the serious issues of guns, but the words quickly shift to an ironic posturing:

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Load up on guns, bring your friends It’s fun to lose and to pretend She’s over-bored and self-assured Oh no, I know a dirty word

The idea that it is fun to lose mocks the adult cultural values of success, but this criticism is coupled with the self-referential focus on pretending. Once again heightened self-consciousness and coolness are combined as Cobain jumps between subjects with little concern for order or coherence. After all, we do not know if he is saying that some female is over-bored and selfassured because he is describing an actual person or if the line just sounds good. Furthermore, the neologism “over-bored” itself is playing on the homonym with “overboard,” and the fnal line has no direct relation to what has been said before. For Baudrillard, all systems expand until they no longer serve a purpose because they go beyond their initial meaning or foundation.24 As the signifer continues to spread in Gen X pop culture, it has liberated itself from meaning and reference, and this lack of signifcation indicates a culture of global entertainment nihilism.25 In other words, one reason why American popular culture is able to spread around the world is that it does not confict with the meanings and values of local cultures because it has no inherent meaning, or at least, it denies its own meaning.26 Ironic pop culture is then the perfect vehicle for modern capitalism, which Marx stressed liquifes all solid borders and traditions as it circulates around the globe.27 Since it can mean anything and nothing, this teen spirit is both

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stupid and contagious, and yet it does bring intense pleasure to its audience. The question then is what type of enjoyment does Gen X pop and teen culture produce, and the very name Nirvana gives us a hint. As previously mentioned, Freud argued that we are all driven by a desire to use as little mental and physical energy as possible, and he called this the Nirvana principle. He also equated this drive to escape all tension to the pleasure principle, and here we see how pleasure is often tied to a desire to escape from any internal sense of responsibility, guilt, and shame. What we then fnd in a society bathed in entertainment is a culture dedicated to the pursuit of Nirvana both as a mode of enjoyment and a personal form of escape. For Gen X youth culture, sex, drugs, and rock music are strong sources for pleasure, but in a media-saturated society, irony and metafction are necessary in order to conform from the position of cynical distance.28 We see this dynamic in the song “Comes as You Are”29:

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Come as you are, as you were As I want you to be As a friend, as a friend As an known enemy Take your time, hurry up The choice is yours, don’t be late Take a rest as a friend As an old Memoria, memoria . . . Memoria, memoria And I swear that I don’t have a gun No I don’t have a gun …

The song starts with a series of contradictions as the audience is addressed as a friend and an enemy. Furthermore, they are told to come as they are but also as Cobain wants them to be. Here the confict between individualism and conformity is mediated through a cynical combining of opposites: one is hailed to be both unique and part of a trend. One is also told to take one’s time but also hurry up. In these contradictions, we see how the great ideological trick of post-postmodern culture is to convince people that they are free and unique as they are conforming to social demands. This confict relates to the need of adolescents to discover their identity by fnding a group they can mirror; however, for Gen X culture, cynical conformity is often coupled with an ironic selfawareness that adds an extra dose of indifference to the act of compliance.30 The ultimate irony of this song is that Cobain out of nowhere declares that he does not have a gun, but he actually ended his life by shooting himself.

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Like most other topics, Gen X tends to come down on both sides of every issue as the past and the present are combined in a self-negating discourse. It is as if after all of the traditional forms of belief and authority have been shown to be absent or corrupt, one can only mock them as one continues to conform to them from a distance.31 This conficted state of Gen X subjectivity is apparent in Nirvana’s song “Lithium”32:

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I’m so happy because today I’ve found my friends They’re in my head I’m so ugly, but that’s okay, ‘cause so are you We’ve broken our mirrors Sunday morning is everyday for all I care And I’m not scared Light my candles in a daze ‘Cause I’ve found god Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

What is so striking about these lyrics is the combination of heightened selfconsciousness and self-loathing. In a culture that has moved beyond religion or any other coherent belief system, one is left staring into a broken mirror declaring one’s own ugliness in a dazed state. These tortured lyrics end with a sarcastic reference to fnding god, but as the name of the song indicates, the song itself is mediated by drugs. As a form of escape and pleasure, mood-altering drugs, like Lithium, create a crisis in the self as one does not know if one is feeling something authentic or not.33 After all, where does drug begin and one’s personality end?34 As the frst generation of youth to be heavily medicated by psychotropic drugs, the question of self-identity is rendered problematic by the artifcial manipulation of mental states.35 Whether prescribed or recreational, the daze described by Cobain indicates an anticipation of the culture of virtual reality; since one can no longer distinguish the real from the fake, one is left to wander in an ambiguous state.36 The second verse of “Lithium” delves deeper into the ambivalence of a culture losing any sense of traditional boundaries and borders: I’m so lonely but that’s okay I shaved my head And I’m not sad And just maybe I’m to blame for all I’ve heard But I’m not sure I’m so excited, I can’t wait to meet you there But I don’t care

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I’m so horny but that’s okay My will is good Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

Here, the brooding self-obsession and self-loathing of adolescent culture manifests itself as one tries to change one’s mental state by changing one’s appearance only to realize that one cannot escape one’s own thoughts for long.37 The narrator is both excited and apathetic as the jump between mania and depression continues to spiral. Since the culture industry needs to attract consumers by stimulating their desires, one is left in a constant state of wanting.38 The fnal verse increases the sense of radical ambivalence and ambiguity: I like it, I’m not gonna crack I miss you, I’m not gonna crack I love you, I’m not gonna crack I killed you, I’m not gonna crack

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The repetition of Cobain claiming that he is not going to crack is both a defense and an affrmation of mental instability. Not only does Cobain constantly attack himself, but he also mocks his audience as he desires their attention. The song “In Bloom” is perhaps the best example of the conficted relation Nirvana had with its fans and its role in pop culture39: He’s the one Who like all our pretty songs And he likes to sing along And he likes to shoot his gun But he don’t know what it means Don’t know what it means

Here the fan is mocked for knowing all of the words of the songs but not knowing what they mean. This radical ambivalence is indicative of Gen X’s conficted relation with social success; on the one hand, artists like Cobain crave recognition, but on the other hand, they feel that they are not understood, and they resent being turned into a commodity. Cobain’s angst is displayed as he refects on the “tender age” of adolescence: We can have some more Nature is a whore

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Bruises on the fruit Tender age in bloom

Not only do these lyrics personify nature, but nature and sex are combined and attacked for being promiscuous. As bruised fruit, the youth are seen as both injured and blooming.

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SMELLS LIKE TEEN MONEY What I have been arguing in this chapter is that Nirvana opens a window up to what happens when adolescent angst dominates a culture that has moved beyond most traditional authorities and social meanings. And yet, as much as the youth try to rebel, the more that the culture industry is able to sell their disaffection back to them.40 This dialectic between dissent and commodifcation can be best seen in the role of MTV in using videos to repackage the energy and affects of teen culture.41 In looking at the video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” we witness a paradigmatic encounter between alternative culture and a capitalist system dedicated to cashing in on an identifable group demographic. Before I get into the details of the video, it is important to realize that this form of media often relies on repurposing an existing song for a staged set of moving pictures.42 Moreover, the directors of the videos are usually not the creators of the songs, and so there is an ambiguous sense of authorship: after all, if the director makes the video, but he or she has to incorporate the song, it is unclear what role the original creators have in the fnished product. While it was reported that Cobain worked on the reediting of the fnal version, we do not know what parts came from him and what parts came from the director Samuel Bayer.43 A way of looking at the video is to see it as an attempt of the music industry to contain and channel the energy and chaos of the music. On one level, the production does replicate a live performance of the song, but the band is surrounded by a fake setting as cheerleaders cheer in unison with the music in front of teenagers sitting in the stands. Also throughout the video, there is a constant return to images of a janitor slowly mopping. This depiction of a lower-class laborer stands out in a world inhabited by mostly teens, but his presence may indicate an important aspect of grunge and punk music, which is that they often have their roots in the working class.44 In fact, we shall see that what often differentiates the culture produced by the disaffected Gen Xers from their more conformist peers is the role played by economic deprivation. For the alienated teen group, they simply cannot buy themselves out of their misery, while many of the more contented youth access pleasure without the angst.

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As the video progresses, the janitor starts swaying to the music while the fans in the stands remain mostly indifferent. However, when Cobain begins to scream the chorus, the audience starts coming alive, and we see fast-cut images of a body surfng over the crowd. It is important to realize that crowd surfng played a key role in grunge music because not only did it show the audience getting involved in the show, but the people being passed around over the heads of the audience had to surrender their fate to the crowd.45 As a mode of communal ritual, crowd surfng then articulates the total submission to the event as one gives up one’s free will and becomes moved by others.46 This giving into the music is doubled by the depiction of the crowd shaking their heads to the music’s pulsation and Cobain’s barely contained rage. In a great depiction of acting stupid and contagious, the bodily movements of the crowd depict what Freud called the contagion of emotions: in group settings, affect spreads as reality testing disappears.47 The virality of emotions then feeds off of the submission of the crowd as everyone begins to copy everyone else. Meanwhile the over-bored cheerleaders continue to cheer in a disaffected way. We can read this use of the cheerleaders as indicating that teen spirit in high school is artifcially channeled through specifc means: emotions are led by the leaders, but the emotions cannot be contained. The return to a more primitive type of communal ritual is enabled by the use of smoke machines and red-tinted camera lenses. While at the start of the video, the crowd was passive and mostly indifferent, with the progression of the production-ritual, the audience begins to spill out of the stands and create an improvised mosh pit.48 Like stage diving and crowd surfng, the mosh pit was a staple of grunge shows and represented a different type of dancing and audience participation. Similar to the anarchist symbols shown throughout the video, the mosh pit is a mode of group bodily anarchy that subverts the traditional forms of prescribed, orderly dancing. The mosh pit also mixes danger and excitement since the moshers never know if they will be harmed by the violent movements of others. Of course, when the video is watched at home from the comfort of the couch, this constant threat of violence is removed, and in this way, the culture industry is successful in packaging and selling subversion in a consumable form. As Cobain was only all-too aware of, every effort to rebel or subvert becomes just another opportunity to commodify and sell.49 Even when the cheerleaders break out of their forced movement and begin to embrace the subversive music, the anarchist symbols on their outfts only signal the containment of the anarchy of youth. This is a spectacle orchestrated by industry adults in order to gain the disposable income of the watching teens who sit passively at home as they envy the energy and chaos of the crowd on the screen. As an example of what Slavoj Zizek has called “inter-passivity,” the

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passive viewers at home have outsourced their own movements and affects to the people in the video.50 The ultimate irony of the video is that while Cobain screams at the crowd about being stupid and contagious, the crowd is shown acting stupid and contagious. It appears that no criticism or rebellion can stop the stupidity of the crowd. In a form of aesthetic populism, the herd mentality allows the audience members to suspend their reality testing and disbelief as they submit their wills to the dictates of the leader, but even the leader cannot contain the release and spread of the emotions that have been produced. By the end of the song, the band has been swallowed up by the crowd as their instruments are shown being destroyed. For the entertainment subject, all resistance appears to be futile as the contagion of pleasure and violence engulfs the artist.51

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WHERE DID POLITICS GO? One way of thinking about the issue of Gen X rebellion and containment is to look at the difference between the original Woodstock festival in 1969 and the events held in 1994 and 1999. While the frst version featured songs of peace, love, and war protest, the later ones became famous for their fres, aggression, and reported rapes.52 In one famous act from the 1994 event, the fans threw mud at the band Green Day, and the lead singer picked up the mud and threw it right back. While some attendees did complain about the high-priced food items they were forced to buy, there were little attempts to produce any directly political messages like the original event. Moreover, the violence often appeared to have no apparent reason other than the release of mostly male aggression, and we can ask if one cause for this air of anarchist violence was the abandonment of political protest and messaging. As the story goes, once the Baby Boomers aged into their middle-life cynical conformity, they brought with them the spirit of political engagement that was so prevalent in the 1960s. As these Boomers started to focus on changing themselves and not the world, they left the Gen Xers with a culture void of any productive outlet for rebellion and discontent other than the commodifcation of disaffection. Nirvana can therefore be read as a complicated text surfacing a generational confict: the Gen X disaffection caused by the cynical conformity of the Boomers is repacked and sold back to the youth as entertainment and style. As we will see in the next chapter, this confict between generations is mediated through an entertainment industry that continues to extend its reach into all aspects of culture and subjectivity. If in Sacks’ account of Gen X students going to college, protest is mainly demonstrated through passive resistance, what we see in flms like Reality Bites is that the hysterical

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postmodern subject is torn between the temptation to conform and the desire to be authentic.

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NOTES 1. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the pleasure principle. Penguin UK, 2003. 55–56. 2. Freud, Sigmund. “Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911–1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works (1958): 213–226. 3. Rifkin, Jeremy. The age of access: The new culture of hypercapitalism. Penguin, 2001. 4. Hennion, Antoine, Cecile Meadel, and Geoffrey Bowker. “The artisans of desire: the mediation of advertising between product and consumer.” Sociological Theory 7.2 (1989): 191–209. 5. McGowan, Todd. End of dissatisfaction?, the: Jacques Lacan and the emerging society of enjoyment. SUNY Press, 2012. 6. Khantzian, Edward J. “Addiction: self-destruction or self-repair.” Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment 6.2 (1989): 75. 7. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its discontents. Broadview Press, 2015. 25. 8. Burlingame, William V. “An investigation of the correlates of adherence to the adolescent peer culture.” (1967). 9. Cavanagh, Shannon E. “The social construction of romantic relationships in adolescence: Examining the role of peer networks, gender, and race.” Sociological Inquiry 77.4 (2007): 572–600. 10. Dickinson, Kay. “Pop, speed, teenagers and the “MTV aesthetic”.” Movie Music, The Film Reader (2003): 143–151. 11. Denisoff, R. Serge. Inside Mtv. Transaction Publishers, 1989. 12. Fiske, John. “MTV: post-structural post-modern.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10.1 (1986): 74–79. 13. Jones, Steve. “MTV: The medium was the message.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22.1 (2005): 83–88. 14. Azerrad, Michael. Come as you are: The story of Nirvana. Three Rivers Press, 1993. 15. Hooper, Giles. ““Nevermind” Nirvana: A post-adornian perspective/postadornovska perspektiva nirvanina albuma nevermind.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music (2007): 91–107. 16. Tappan, Mark B. “Stories lived and stories told: The narrative structure of late adolescent moral development.” Human Development 32.5 (1989): 300–315. 17. Cobain, Kurt, Krist Novoselic, and David Grohl. “Smells like teen spirit.” (1991). 18. Baudrillard, Jean. The transparency of evil: Essays on extreme phenomena. Verso, 1993. 19. Magill, R. Jay. Chic ironic bitterness. University of Michigan Press, 2007.

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20. Scholes, Robert. “Metafction.” The Iowa Review (1970): 100–115. 21. Baudrillard, Jean. “‘What are you doing after the orgy’.” Artforum 22.2 (1983): 42–46. 22. Martin, Michael. Kurt Cobain. Capstone, 2004. 23. Gibbons, Alison. “ii. Metamodern Affect.” Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism (2017): 83. 24. Baudrillard, Jean. The transparency of evil: Essays on extreme phenomena. Verso, 1993. 25. Lugovaya, Julia A., Marina G. Yakovleva, and Natalia F. Fedotova. “Nihilism of postmodernist consciousness and entertaining television.” Ad Alta-Journal of Interdisciplinary Research 7.2 (2017): 122–124. 26. Kooijman, Jaap. Fabricating the absolute fake: America in contemporary pop culture-revised and extended edition. Amsterdam University Press, 2013. 27. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The communist manifesto. Penguin, 2002. 28. Bloom, Peter. “Capitalism’s cynical leviathan: Cynicism, totalitarianism, and hobbes in modern capitalist regulation.” International Journal of Žižek Studies 2.1 (2008). 29. Label, D. G. C. “Come as you are.” Nirvana: 164. 30. Serazio, Michael. “The apolitical irony of generation mash‐up: A cultural case study in popular music.” Popular Music and Society 31.1 (2008): 79–94. 31. Magill, R. Jay. Chic Ironic Bitterness. University of Michigan Press, 2007. 32. Cobain, K. “Lithium.[Nirvana, Performer].” (1991). 33. Woodgett, Jim. “There’s more to lithium than Nirvana.” Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology 14.8 (2013): 466–466. 34. Breggin, Peter R., and Ginger Ross Breggin. Talking back to Prozac: What doctors aren’t telling you about today’s most controversial drug. Macmillan, 1995. 35. Maxmen, Jerrold S., Sidney H. Kennedy, and Roger S. McIntyre. Psychotropic drugs: fast facts. WW Norton & Company, 2008. 36. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and simulation. University of Michigan Press, 1994. 37. Rutter, Philip A., and Andrew E. Behrendt. “Adolescent suicide risk: Four psychosocial factors.” Adolescence 39.154 (2004): 295–303. 38. McGowan, Todd. End of dissatisfaction?, the: Jacques Lacan and the emerging society of enjoyment. SUNY Press, 2012. 39. Recorded by Nirvana, As. “In bloom.” 40. Frank, Thomas, and Matt Weiland, eds. Commodify your dissent: Salvos from the baffer. WW Norton & Company, 1997. 41. Tetzlaff, David J. “MTV and the politics of postmodern pop.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10.1 (1986): 80–91. 42. Baxter, Richard L., et al. “A content analysis of music videos.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 29.3 (1985): 333–340. 43. Baxter, Richard L., et al. “A content analysis of music videos.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 29.3 (1985): 333–340. 44. Shevory, Thomas C. “Bleached resistance: The politics of grunge.” Popular Music & Society 19.2 (1995): 23–48.

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45. Prato, Greg. Grunge is dead: The oral history of Seattle rock music. ECW Press, 2010. 46. Lechuga, Anthony. “A grunge philosophy, or: How i came to speak a subcultural vocabulary negating social binaries.” (2009). 47. Freud, Sigmund. Mass psychology. Penguin UK, 2004. 48. Lakes, Richard. “Mosh pit politics: The subcultural style of punk rage.” Journal of Thought 34.3 (1999): 21–31. 49. Heath, Joseph, and Andrew Potter. The rebel sell: Why the culture can’t be jammed. HarperCollins, 2004. 50. Zizek, Slavoj. “The interpassive subject.” Retrieved March 1 (1998): 2017. 51. Buschman, John. “Talkin’’bout my (neoliberal) generation: Three theses.” Progressive Librarian 29 (2007): 28–40. 52. Laing, Dave. “The three Woodstocks and the live music scene.” Remembering Woodstock. Routledge, 2017. 1–17.

Chapter 4

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Reality Bites

In Generation X Goes to College, we saw the culture of entertainment seep into the college classroom as the students’ demand for pleasure reversed the traditional relationship between the teachers and their pupils. This move from the cynical conformity of the Baby Boomer culture to the rise of adolescent enjoyment was also evident in the artistic battle of Kurt Cobain as he fuctuated between nihilistic rejection and the culture industry’s repackaging of his angst. In the flm Reality Bites, the confict between generations is inscribed within a love triangle, as the female protagonist is forced to make a choice between the conformity of her yuppie boyfriend and the disaffection of her struggling, angst-driven true love.1 However, what really frames this movie is the increased involvement of popular media into all aspects of the Gen Xers’ lives. Not only does the flm start from the perspective of a documentary portraying the confused lives of a group of twenty-year-old graduates, but virtually every scene begins with a view from a television show as the references to pop culture continue to pop up in the everyday conversation of these individuals.2 What we see, then, is the further encroachment of the entertainment culture into all aspects of their lives. As a self-referential movie about the media, there is virtually no aspect of existence that is able to resist the entertainment industry. Moreover, the use of the video camera throughout the flm signals the rise of consumerproduced media in what I have labeled the automodern society.3 On one level, automodernity represents the attempt to make fake media seem real by using real people in unscripted media productions.4 Yet, on another level, automodernity points to the ways new technologies allow people to turn their real lives into media productions. The great ideological trick of this cultural period is to overcome the postmodern confict between individualism and 31

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social conformity by convincing people that they are the most free when they become a media product for others to consume.5 As an early hint of the coming dominance of digital consumer-produced media, the flm reveals some of the tensions and resistances that were felt by Gen Xers as they fought to maintain some level of authenticity outside of the enclosing media empire. The importance of Gen X culture then comes in part from its position as a transitional state between postmodern resistance and automodern co-optation. However, due to the fact that the flm is framed by the distancing effect of the self-referential movie about media, the entire production threatens to be swallowed up by a new form of mass irony. To understand this growing dominance of irony in Gen X culture, we can look at R. Jay Magill’s Chic Ironic Bitterness. According to Magill, irony is “a way to distance oneself from the threats of integrity.”6 In an effort to protect the self’s honesty, authenticity, and sincerity, one uses irony as a defense mechanism, which allows one to maintain a distance from one’s own words and actions: “It must vigilantly maintain the split between the social role and inward self” (x). This protection of the authenticity of the self represents “a private revolt against the world.” In Reality Bites, it is Troy, played by Ethan Hawke, who embodies the cool, ironist who uses humor, sarcasm, and pop culture references to maintain his authenticity against a world that he sees as entirely corrupt and empty.7 Troy’s irony is, in turn, contrasted by the yuppie played by Ben Stiller, who not only directed the flm but also plays a character who works at a fake version of MTV. In fact, as he vies for the love of Lelaina, he also takes her documentary and turns it into a video for his channel. One of the ironies here is that Ben Stiller actually had his own show on MTV, and so the mockery of the fake MTV refects on an ironic criticism of the real MTV.8 In this hall of media mirrors, a real movie uses a fake documentary to discuss the commodifcation of true art by a fake TV channel referring to a real TV channel. This rabbit hole of self-refexivity highlights the diffculty of trying to critique the media from within the media, and part of this diffculty concerns the way that once one realizes that the movie is really a movie about movies; the flm’s discourse becomes doubled and ironic because it is always both saying something and putting that statement in scare quotes.9 As a method of ironic self-protection, the producers of the media cannot be blamed for the negative effects of the media if they show an ironic awareness of what they are doing. Moreover, this doubling allows the self to remain innocent as one produces a distinction between what one is depicting and what one is knowingly saying about that depiction.10 For Magill, the ironist rebels against any direct commitment or politics because these would require a sacrifce of the self. Thus, one reason for the turn away from the politics of the Baby Boomers is that in an effort to discover the true self and protect the authenticity of the individual, one mocks everyone

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else’s enthusiastic endorsement of anything. As Sacks showed in his depictions of Gen X college students, ironic coolness in the classroom results not only in disengaged students but an eye rolling directed toward anyone who is enthusiastic about their education. In a similar vein, Magill writes about that this mode of ironic coolness in the following manner, “It is to stick out one’s tongues at the goals that used to be worthy of enthusiasm, to signal the death of political hopes, the emptiness of ideology . . .” (40). It is this ironic coolness that often dominates the media representation of Gen Xers, but is it accurate? Or is the entire creation of Generation X itself a media production of a demographic that helps the culture industry to create a niche market?11 It is perhaps best to see the relationship between media consumers and media production as a constant feedback loop with no clear boundaries; the more one’s life is saturated by the entertainment industry, the more the industry seeks to comment on its own possibly negative infuence, and yet, the subjective position of coolness helps to double the doubling contained in the media itself. Magill emphasizes that coolness is a form of emotional self-management dedicated to combining external social relationships with internal distance (47).12 Thus, coolness is a performed role in the form of not playing any role (48). Like the character of Troy in the flm, the cool person has to pretend not to be hurt or disappointed precisely when he is feeling both of these things.13

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GEN X RAGE AND DIVORCE The cool subject then often comes off as withholding and haughty because in the desire to protect the self from any aggression or harm, the individual has to dull all responses (49). As a way of hiding feelings of rage, one maintains a mask of indifference. In the case of Reality Bites, we discover that what often lies beneath their ironic coolness of Gen X young adults is their anger at their parents for getting divorced or abandoning them. This repressed rage reveals the tension between the teen’s desire to separate from parents, while still demanding love and protection. Within the context of the movie, Lelaina seeks to become her own independent person, but she can’t help but ask her divorced parents for money to support her.14 Paradoxically for Magill, the core driving force behind coolness is the desire to remain subjectively free as one enacts a self-conscious role. This self-monitoring and role playing of the ironic and cool teenager and post-teenager dovetails perfectly with a pop culture that also constantly refers to itself at a distance. Although viewers of Reality Bites may mostly watch it for the characters and the love story, the flm itself stages its own cool reception. On one level, it does offer a critique of the way the previous generation has sold out its values and politics in the pursuit of the almighty

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dollar, but this critique is doubled and undermined by the way the movie itself seeks to commodify Gen X culture and sells it back to the people it is supposedly mirroring. In a culture where no one any longer believes that anything can really change for the better, the only thing one can do is to critique the culture as one repeats exactly what one is rejecting.15 By taking on an ironic stance, one is able to do both things at once since the self remains pure as it critiques the external world, and even if one conforms to the norms of the discredited society, one is doing it from a position of knowingness and distance. The bookish Troy, who is seen reading a copy of Being and Time while sitting at a diner, combines his investment in philosophy with constant references to old TV shows. It is as if there is no difference between high and low culture for him since he responds to any aspect of culture from the position of the same cool knowingness. This lost distinction between high and the low culture points to the way pop culture itself is able to respond to any reference from the an ironic perspective.16 All of these texts are available to being repackaged and sold because they are always being taken out of context; like the MTV-like appropriation of Lelaina’s documentary, everything is fodder for a culture industry bent on turning any aspect of human life into entertainment. In fact, what so bothers Lelaina about the misuses of her own art project is the fact that it remixes the personal lives of her friends in order to sell pizza. Of course, what this fake MTV show is in part really referencing is the move on the channel from music videos to reality TV shows, like the Real World, which frst debuted on MTV in 1992.17 Like so many other forms of reality-based media, the Real World was one of the frst shows to transform private lives into public spectacles by cashing in on the democratization of stardom.18 We now know that this transformation of everyday life into spectacle enabled social media corporations to get people to provide free content for money-making platforms. Just as individuals on Facebook or YouTube document their daily lives for public consumption, the use of the VCR camera in the flm depicts the commodifcation of everyday life.19 Cool irony appears to be impotent in front of this commercializing machine as people unknowingly provide free access to their personal lives and marketable preferences. In an effort to become quickly famous, one turns to media for one’s ffteen seconds of fame, and it is this transformation to a total media environment that this flm depicts from a position of ironic knowingness. A BATTLE OF GENERATIONS Reality Bites self-consciously and obsessively comments on the rift between the Baby Boomer culture and Gen X response to that culture. For instance, at

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the start of the movie, we watch Lelaina’s documentary of her own college graduation speech as she highlights this generational divide:

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And they wonder why those of us in our twenties refuse to work an 80-hour week just so we can afford to buy their BMWs. Why we aren’t interested in the counterculture that they invented. As if we did not see them disembowel their revolution for a pair of running shoes. But the question remains what are we going to do now? How can we repair all the damage we inherited? Fellow graduates, the answer is simple. The answer is . . . the answer is . . . I don’t know.

This speech emphasizes how the Boomer generation sold out their political revolution in order to focus on the self through consumerism, and so the Gen Xers have been left with an inherited mess, which they are being asked to clean up, but they simply do not know what to do. When she is later asked about her speech on her video, she declares, “I’m not a valedictorian, but I play one on TV.” This line indicates the way the angst and resentments of her generation are defended against by irony and the reference to scripted media. In a culture where entertainment is everywhere, we are all just actors on a stage; however, due to our self-awareness of this mediated distance, we can still protect the desire for an authentic self through cool irony, and yet this ironic detachment is also attacked in the flm.20 We see this internal critique of ironic coolness when Troy is criticized by Lelaina for his slacker attitude: “Look who’s mocking. All you do around here, Troy is eat on the couch and fondle the remote control.” His response to this criticism of cool indifference is, “I am not under any orders to make the world a better place.” From this response, we see that he has traded the Boomer desire for political activism with the Gen X mocking of the television shows they habitually watch. One reason, then, why the revolution will not be televised is that television has replaced the revolution. As Jean Baudrillard asks in his text “After the Orgy,” what do we do when everything has been liberated, including the desire for liberation?21 Baudrillard responds that all we can do is simulate liberation through the circulation of representations of freedom. He adds that the ultimate liberation is the freeing of language itself from any meaning or relation to reality. From this perspective, the 1960s postmodern revolt against all forms of authority and tradition has resulted in a post-postmodern culture without any foundational meanings or limitations. Cool irony then can be considered to be the result of this globalizing nihilism brought on by Boomer rebellion and consumerism. This sense that no one knows what to do now is brought out in Lelaina’s discussion of her documentary: “I’m making this documentary about my

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friends, but it’s really about people who are trying to fnd their own identity without having any real role models or heroes or anything.” Like the adolescent quest to establish a stable identity, these Gen Xers attempt to gain a sense of self, but they feel they have no established role models for this act of self-defnition. Since they feel their parents’ culture has let them down, they are left with no source for identifcation or idealization. In one very telling scene, three of the main characters discuss how their parents’ divorce affected them and how they blame many of their problems on these Boomers for not protecting or nourishing their children.22 Troy adds that when he found out his father was dying of cancer, he met with him, and his father said, “Son, the answers are all inside of this.” His father then held up an empty shell to refect on the emptiness of life. Troy’s nihilistic summary of his father’s advice is: “It’s all just a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes. So I take pleasure in the details, you know. A Quarter-Pounder with cheese.” Since these Gen Xers no longer believe that anything has a meaning or inherent order, all they can do is take pleasure in consumerism and the ironic critique of popular culture.

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GENERATIONAL RESENTMENT One of the constant running themes of the movie is that underlying the resentment felt by Generation X toward their Boomer parents is the fact that in the new economy, a college degree no longer guarantees a stable income. For instance, when Lelaina loses her job and seeks to get fnancial support from her parents, her mother suggests that she should get a job at a fast-food restaurant. When she replies that she was the valedictorian of her university, her mother’s husband replies, “You don’t have to put that down on your application.” The implication here is that college degrees have become less than worthless since in an economy full of low-wage service jobs, a diploma can be a sign of over-qualifcation.23 The cynicism and irony, then, of these post-college grads is not simply the result of an attitude or style; rather, this attitude of the Gen Xers is also a response to a transformed economy where most workers face low wages and no job security. In a culture of downward mobility, where the next generation is no longer likely to make higher wages than the past generation, class resentment can turn into resentment between generations.24 One way this confict is highlighted in the movie is the idea that while the Boomers abandoned their children in order to pursue their careers, the Gen Xers are left working lowpaying service and retail jobs. In fact, the only main character who has stable employment, Vickie, is the one working at the Gap, but Lelaina herself looks

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down on this type of job because it does not seem worthy for someone who has a college degree. Although Vickie appears to accept her retail job, she is obsessed by the threat of getting AIDS. However, even this acknowledgment of the AIDS epidemic is dealt with through the fantasy of seeing her life from the perspective of a TV show: You don’t understand. Every day, all day it’s all that I think about, OK? Every time I sneeze it’s like I’m four sneezes away from the hospice. And it’s like it’s not even happening to me. It’s like I’m watching it on some crappy show like “Melrose Place” or some shit, right? And I’m the new character. I’m the H.I.V.-A.I.D.S. character and I live in the building, and I teach everybody that it’s OK to be near me, it’s OK to talk to me, and then I die and there’s everybody at my funeral wearing halter tops and chokers or some shit like that.

As the media makes her obsessed about getting AIDS, all she can do is to contain the threat by viewing it from the perspective of a character in a media production.25 Moreover, an underlying idea is that while the Boomers were able to experience free love, the Gen Xers are faced with the possibility of death through sex.

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THE MEDIA UNIVERSE As the media empire encroaches on all aspects of the Gen Xers’ lives, they seek to hold on to some level of authenticity and truth. This fght between the culture industry and artistic and personal integrity is highlighted by the fght between Lelaina and the Ben Stiller character of Michael Grates. After Michael gives Lelaina’s video to the MTV-like channel against her will, she agrees to sell it because she has no job and no money. However, when she goes to the showing of her documentary, she is horrifed because it has been radically edited and has been transformed into a superfcial depiction of her friends. In order to defend this commercialized repackaging of her life and art, Michael tells her that the only way to get the kids to consume art is to do what parents do when they want their kids to eat food: they have to pretend that the food is an airplane fying into their mouth. The idea here is that the Gen X audience does not want anything that might be good for them; they want to be entertained. This fght between Michael and Lelaina is doubled by the confict between Michael and Troy. When Michael comes to pick her up for a date, Troy starts to mock him and implies that Michael is just an unintelligent yuppie.

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Michaels responds by comparing Troy to a court jester who laughs at everything “from a safe distance back in Clever-Clever Land.” This criticism reveals the way some Gen Xers respond to their decreased economic and social mobility by turning to irony as a defense against reality. Of course, the entire flm is ironic because at the very moment it mocks the culture industry’s commodifcation of life and art, the movie itself is doing the same thing. This ironic, metafctional production forces us to return to the question of whether the whole Generation X category is just a media fction or is the media simply refecting what was actually going on in the society? As I hope my analysis has shown, this question is no longer valid in a culture where the producers and consumers of the media are locked into a never-ending feedback loop. In the context of the entertainment subject, individuals access subjectivity by being subjected to the culture of the pleasure principle.

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NOTES 1. Bites, Reality. “Ben Stiller, dir., with Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke.” Universal Pictures (1994). 2. O’Reilly, Sally. “Features: Self-refexivity.” Art Monthly (Archive: 1976– 2005) 289 (2005): 7. 3. Samuels, Robert. “Auto-modernity after postmodernism: Autonomy and automation in culture, technology, and education.” Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected (2008). 4. Biressi, Anita, and Heather Nunn. Reality TV: Realism and revelation. Columbia University Press, 2005. 5. Murphy, Patricia L. “The commodifed self in consumer culture: A crosscultural perspective.” The Journal of Social Psychology 140.5 (2000): 636–647. 6. Magill, R. Jay. Chic ironic bitterness. University of Michigan Press, 2007. X. 7. Oake, Jonathon I. “Reality bites and Generation X as spectator.” The Velvet Light Trap 53.1 (2004): 83–97. 8. Alleva, Richard. “All’s ill that ends well—reality bites directed by Ben Stiller/ the snapper directed by Stephen Frears.” Commonweal 121.6 (1994): 16. 9. Nöth, Winfried, and Nina Bishara, eds. Self-reference in the media. Vol. 6. Walter de Gruyter, 2007. 10. Booth, Wayne C. “The empire of irony.” The Georgia Review 37.4 (1983): 719–737. 11. Williams, Kaylene C., and Robert A. Page. “Marketing to the generations.” Journal of Behavioral Studies in Business 3 (2011): 1. 12. McCrindle, Mark. Seriously cool-marketing & communicating with diverse generations. The ABC of XYZ, 2007. 13. Kiefer, Sarah M., and Joy Huanhuan Wang. “Associations of coolness and social goals with aggression and engagement during adolescence.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 44 (2016): 52–62.

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14. Weiss, Myra. “Psychological development in adults who experienced parental divorce during adolescence.” Australian Journal of Sex, Marriage and Family 9.3 (1988): 144–149. 15. Sloterdijk, Peter, Michael Eldred, and Leslie A. Adelson. “Cynicism: The twilight of false consciousness.” New German Critique 33 (1984): 190–206. 16. Collins, Jim. “Genericity in the nineties: Eclectic irony and the new sincerity.” Film Theory Goes to the Movies (1993): 242–263. 17. Curnutt, Hugh. ““A fan crashing the party” exploring reality-celebrity in MTV’s real world franchise.” Television & New Media 10.3 (2009): 251–266. 18. Collins, Sue. “Making the most out of 15 minutes: Reality TV’s dispensable celebrity.” Television & New Media 9.2 (2008): 87–110. 19. Morgan, Michael, James Shanahan, and Cheryl Harris. “VCRs and the effects of television: New diversity or more of the same.” Social and Cultural Aspects of VCR Use (1990): 107–123. 20. Debord, Guy. Society of the spectacle. Bread and Circuses Publishing, 2012. 21. Baudrillard, Jean. “‘What are you doing after the orgy’.” Artforum 22.2 (1983): 42–46. 22. Norton, Arthur J., and Louisa Miller. Marriage, divorce, and remarriage in the 1990’s. No. 180. US Dept. of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, Bureau of the Census, 1992. 23. Samuels, Robert. Educating inequality: Beyond the political myths of higher education and the job market. Routledge, 2017. 24. Newman, Katherine S. Falling from grace: Downward mobility in the age of affuence. Univ of California Press, 1999. 25. Backstrom, Charles H., and Leonard S. Robins. “The media and AIDS: Health elite perspectives of coverage.” Journal of Health & Social Policy 9.3 (1998): 45–69.

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Chapter 5

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Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Gen X Cynical Opportunism

The parents leave. The adolescent lies. The performance begins. The teacher drones on, and the principle tumbles. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off presents key features of Gen X culture as we see the fall of traditional authority coupled with a youth culture bent on enjoyment and escape.1 In a classic scene, we hear a teacher repeat Ferris’ name as the camera pans the students depicted in various states of disengagement. Within the context of the flm, all adults are jokes, and the goal of the youth is to get what they want when they want it.2 As a prime example of the post-postmodern pleasure principle and the rise of the entertainment subject, Ferris performs his Gen X spectacles for his own enjoyment. Here we witness the spread of the pleasure principle to the subject’s performance of individual freedom and enjoyment. While in the early stages of Gen X culture displayed in Sacks’ analysis of higher education, technologies of media pleasure had only begun to encroach on everyday experience, by the time we get to Ferris, all aspects of life are shown to be vulnerable to the pursuit of the pleasure principle. In this process of media expansion, even the ambivalence and resistances of a band like Nirvana or a movie like Reality Bites are lost. Instead of ironic detachment being the central shapers of Gen X subjectivity, we now encounter the full immersion into media pleasure. Of course, Ferris addresses us directly as we become co-conspirators. We are in on the con, and we want to play along with Ferris.3 The fourth wall may be broken, but it does not seem to matter as we are immersed in the invasion of enjoyment into all aspects of traditional culture. No adult is saved—not the parents, the principal, the teachers, the waiters, the maître d; anyone can be conned as the pursuit of happiness overcomes all resistances. Maybe Ferris has planned his day around entertaining his depressed friend, or maybe Ferris just likes to pull one over on society, but what should be 41

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clear is that in a society where adults no longer matter because they are either absent or impotent, the youth will pursue their stupid enjoyment. What then makes this movie such a good illustration of a certain aspect of Gen X culture is that it clearly pits the adolescent against institutions run by older adults. Whether it is schools, families, or businesses, the kids know how to perform their way out of control.4 Never had adolescent males had so much freedom, resources, and free time.5 Never before did they have so much technology and media to inhabit their living fantasies. All the world is a stage for Ferris, and he can turn every situation into a performance because there is nothing holding him back—not money, not time, not parents, not teachers, not religion, not laws, not sin, not guilt, not shame, not responsibility, not work.

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CYNICAL POLITICS Through its depiction of the immersive pleasure principle, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off presents an alternative to the irony of Gen X culture. Instead of critiquing society from a safe distance, Ferris represents what Magill calls the realpolitik of the cynic: since the cynic does not believe in any traditional meaning or authority, he seeks to take advantage of any opportunity without any moral or ethical concerns.6 In Ferris’ case, he simply wants to do whatever will bring him immediate gratifcation, and so he lives by the dictates of the pleasure principle as he escapes from the constraints of the surrounding adult world. By pretending to be sick in order to skip school, he takes full advantage of his freedom while turning every social institution into a spectacle for his own enjoyment. Ferris not only lies to his parents to get out of school, but he uses technology to hack into the school computer and fortify his fabrications. In this way, he signals the coming new high-tech media culture of hacking and subversion from a distance.7 As he manipulates all those around him to do what he wants, he is able to embrace a purely opportunistic mode of existence, which threatens social order and takes advantage of his absent parents. While Ferris fnds multiple ways to avoid the principal of his school, he gets his fellow classmates to start a fund to help him with his imaginary illness. Here we gain an insight into our current politics of amoral opportunism so clearly embodied by Donald Trump. Like the businessman turned reality TV star turned president, Ferris’ success in manipulating others comes from his lack of shame and guilt as he pursues the promotion of his own name and brand.8For the opportunistic cynic, everything is defned by his or her own performance, and here we fnd the essence of the entertainment subject. We can therefore read Ferris as an early indicator of how to succeed in a culture without shared values. Since he does not show any signs of remorse

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and regret as he pursues his pleasure at the expense of others, he provides an alternative to the disaffected Gen X slackers we have encountered so far. Unlike the Boomer cynical conformists who the Gen X ironists attack, the cynical realist operates without a concern for conforming to the dominant social structures. He is a rebel with a cause, but his cause is only his own enjoyment. For Magill, what in part differentiates the cynic from the ironist is that the ironist still has hopes and beliefs, but the cynic believes in nothing (60). This lack of belief for the cynic results in a situation where “he says what he feels and thinks and is not confned by the whisperings of the superego” (61). As a practitioner of realpolitik, the cynic takes advantage of any situation for his or her own beneft. In fact, Magill defnes neo-conservativism by cynicism because the focus is on power and personal gain (62). No longer concerned with ideology or morality, the cynic feels authentic and honest because there is no reason to hide or repress. As a competitive individualist, the cynic knows that survival means not being beaten by anyone, and so in a world of pure power, the one who is most able to take advantage of others is the winner (62). The cynic is then seen as being anti-social and against modern public institutions since all that matters is the competitive battle of isolated individuals against other individuals (63).9 Just as Margaret Thatcher declared that there is no such thing as society, the cynic only sees the brutish competition between individuals who either sink or swim on their own free will.10 One way of understanding the rise of this anti-ideology is to look at how Marx envisioned the effects of modern capitalism on all aspects of life:

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All fxed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.11

For Marx in the Communist Manifesto, due to the ability of the exchange value to replace traditional values, all premodern prejudices, traditions, and borders are dissolved, and therefore people can for the frst time see reality without distortion. However, what Marx may not have anticipated was the way that modern capitalism not only undermines all premodern meanings and values, but it also effaces all meanings and values. Thus, as Jean Baudrillard insists, we have done such a good job at liberating ourselves from all social constraints that we have freed ourselves from any possible understandings of our own lives.12 What then causes the cynicism of people like Ferris or Donald Trump is that they see truth and meaning as merely strategies and tactics dedicated to

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getting what they want in an opportunistic way. The flm thus helps us to see the early roots of this growing ideology that has now spread to become a dominant force in the world. My argument is not the Ferris created Trump, but rather, Ferris’ character displays the logic and meaning behind cynical subjectivity. Moreover, through his use of technology and entertainment to construct a web of fctions, we also see how the contemporary new media culture is derived in part from this mode of opportunistic individualism.

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BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL One of the most interesting aspects of the flm is the way that Ferris constantly addresses the audience in a direct manner. In what has been called the breaking of the fourth wall, this act of speaking to the people watching the flm threatens to break the immersion into the fantasy space created by the spectacle. After all, in order for people to get lost in the movie, they have to suspend their disbelief and forget that they are watching a representation on a screen; this process of immersion is usually created by hiding all indications that the actors are merely acting.13 However, when Ferris talks to us, he is still able to maintain the space of fantasy, and so we must ask how is this possible? One explanation is that even though he gets us to participate in his narrative, we are still the passive viewers of the action he produces. In fact, he makes us co-conspirators to his spectacle as he lets us in on his secrets, and in this way, his transgressions are also our transgressions, and yet we are also removed directly from any sense of responsibility. We can therefore get lost in the flm even while we are being shown how the spectacle is being constructed. Thus, from the perspective of metafction, the flm reveals the cynical manipulation of reality by the media as it provides pleasure to the engaged audience, and since we are in on the lie, we are both inside and outside of the production.14 As a foreshadowing of the coming reality-media craze, the movie seeks to make the fake seem real and authentic by directly addressing the audience and revealing the inner-workings of the produced spectacle. Ferris can therefore be seen as the director of his own media productions and life narrative: he curates his own image for others in the same way that people on social media become public relations entities for a self-constituted brand. In the feedback loops between the media and the consumer, he turns his everyday life into a performance to be viewed by others. Thus, the media has not only seeped into all aspects of contemporary life, but it has also turned the self into a social spectacle, which defnes the entertainment subject. Gen X disaffection and disengagement is therefore shown to be overcome by transcending the confict between the authentic individual and the culture

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industry through combining the subject and the social: Ferris freely addresses his audience because he is always already seeing himself in terms of a virtual Other. As the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan argues, in the structure of narcissism, the idealized ego is verifed by an imaginary Other who serves as the stand-in for the social order itself.15 This ego ideal represses the guilt-inducing super-ego by replacing the harsh judgments of others with an imaginary and idealized audience that can only approve of what the subject is doing. Like someone going on Facebook to have his or her image “liked” by others, Ferris anticipates the virtual narcissism of social media.16 One key aspect of this psychological structure is the humiliation of failed adult authority. Not only are Ferris’ parents constantly being manipulated and tricked, but his ongoing battle with his school’s principal highlights the need to undermine all social authority. The audience, then, receives pleasure by seeing the representation of the law fail to control Ferris’ ego, and vicarious enjoyment is generated by this transgression. As an adolescent, Ferris wants to escape the control of his parents and all other adults in order to establish his freedom and pursue his pleasure.

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THE THERAPEUTIC SELF One challenge to the interpretation I am proposing is the notion that the entire narrative revolves around Ferris’ attempt to cure his friend of depression and anxiety. From this perspective, Ferris performs a type of exposure therapy by getting Cameron to realize the pleasure of living. Part of this process entails sacrifcing Cameron’s father’s prized possession, which is his Ferrari that he appears to love more than his own son. However, this narrative of therapy does not account for the entirety of Ferris’ actions. In fact, it is unclear whether Ferris really cares about anyone other than himself. In one of his direct addresses to the audience, Ferris assesses Cameron’s life and future, and he does not like what he sees: Cameron’s never been in love. At least no one’s ever been in love with him. He’s gonna marry the frst girl he lays. And she’s gonna treat him like shit because he’s gonna kiss her ass for giving him what he’s built-up in his mind as the end-all, be-all of human existence. She won’t respect him because you can’t respect someone who kisses your ass. It just doesn’t work.

Ferris believes that one should only be in a relationship with someone who doesn’t think they can boss you around. Moreover, it is the idealization of the love object that threatens to rob the lover of any control. As a purely amoral pragmatist, Ferris sees all relationships in terms of power and manipulation,

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and therefore he believes the idealization of the other requires a de-idealization of the self, and this is something he wants to avoid at all costs. In many ways, Cameron represents the opposite of Ferris’ joyous affrmation of life. At one point in the movie, we see Cameron fall into a pool, and we fear that he may be trying to commit suicide. After he is saved by Ferris, Cameron will later reveal his view of life: “The whole time I was just thinking things over. I was like, meditating. I was thinking about the future. And I realized it doesn’t make any difference if the present goes to shit.” As the disaffected, nihilistic Gen Xer, Cameron sees no hope in the future or the present, and so it is Ferris’ task to wake him up from his depressed state. At one point, Cameron realizes that he is just being used by Ferris and that Ferris does not care what happens to anyone else: “I was home, sick, you get me out of bed, bring me over here, make me jeopardize my future, make me do a phony phone call on a dean of students, a man who could squeeze my nuts into oblivion and then you deliberately hurt my feelings.” Here Cameron exposes the self-centered basis of Ferris’ manipulations: in his pursuit of pleasure and spectacle, he does not take into consideration the effect he is having on others. In contract, as the hyper-sensitive subject, Cameron blames his depression in part on his parents’ bad marriage and the fact that his father loves his car more than anything else: “It makes me puke. Seeing people treat each other like that. It’s like the car. He loves the car. He hates his wife.” Like so many Gen Xers, Cameron despises the way his Boomer parents relate to each other and the fact this his father values a consumer object more than his own wife. Here the blame for the breakup of the nuclear family is placed on Boomer consumerism. In response, Ferris’ girlfriend, Sloane, says, “My parents are divorced. So what? It’s not like it doesn’t happen ten thousand times a day.” Although Sloane frst appears to take her parents’ divorce in stride as just a common occurrence, she later adds, “Consider this . . . my father canned me and my brother and my Mom for a twenty-fve-year old dipso with fake tits. He dropped us like a rock. Everything was cool at our house. I thought so. We all thought so. Then BLAM! It’s over.” Sloane reveals here how Gen Xers often feel that their parents have destroyed their own families in order to pursue personal pleasure. In response to Sloane declaring that she will never be like her parents and upset her kids just to be selfsh, Ferris addresses the audience and intones: “This is optimism. It’s a common trait with my age group. Adults think it’s cute; it’s like a charming quirk that infests youth. But it’s a cool thing, and I think, deep down, crusty old shits wish they had some.” This declaration of youthful optimism is contrasted by Cameron’s dire pessimism, and therefore we are being shown two different adolescent responses to divorce and other Generation X problems. Of course, Ferris himself does not have to be

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optimistic or pessimistic because he is purely opportunistic and lives in the present moment. In fact, he tells the audience that he didn’t even know about his girlfriend’s parents, which may indicate that he really does not care about what is happening to other people. In another direct address to the audience, Ferris reveals that his desire to teach Cameron a lesson by taking his father’s car may just be a cover for his own pleasure: “The thing with taking his old man’s car? It’s good for him. It teaches him to deal with his fear. Plus, and I must be honest here, I love driving it. I highly recommend picking one up.” Ferris’ exposure therapy has to be seen in light of his pursuit of enjoyment at all costs, and by telling his audience that they should get a car like the one he has taken, he endorses the consumerism his friends have attacked. Ferris therefore represents the emergence of the entertainment subject who is shaped by the twin forces of the culture industry and subjective cynicism. Dedicated only to his own amoral pursuit of pleasure, he becomes a spectacle that directly addresses the audience. As an early example of user-generated media and the commodifcation of the self, he provides a glimpse into the future where an amoral opportunist will move from being a reality TV star to the most powerful person in the world.

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NOTES 1. Off, Ferris Bueller’S. Day. “Directed by John Hughes. 1986.” Burbank: Warner Home Video (2006). 2. Scull, W. Reed, and Gary L. Peltier. “Star power and the schools: Studying popular flms’ portrayal of educators.” The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas 81.1 (2007): 13–17. 3. Shafer, Daniel M., Corey P. Carbonara, and Michael F. Korpi. “Exploring enjoyment of cinematic narratives in virtual reality: A comparison study.”  International Journal of Virtual Reality 18.1 (2018): 1–18. 4. Tropiano, Stephen. Rebels and chicks: A history of the Hollywood teen movie. Backstage Books, 2006. 5. Florin, Dave, et al. “Profting from mega‐trends.” Journal of Product & Brand Management (2007). 6. Magill, R. Jay. Chic ironic bitterness. University of Michigan Press, 2007. 7. Yar, Majid. “Computer hacking: Just another case of juvenile delinquency?” The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 44.4 (2005): 387–399. 8. Kellner, Douglas. American nightmare: Donald Trump, media spectacle, and authoritarian populism. Vol. 117. Springer, 2016. 9. Harries, Owen. “Neoconservatism and Realpolitik.” The National Interest 1 (1985): 124–127. 10. Clarke, Simon. “The neoliberal theory of society.” Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader 50 (2005): 59.

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11. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The communist manifesto. Penguin, 2002. 12. Baudrillard, Jean. The transparency of evil: Essays on extreme phenomena. Verso, 1993. 13. Sawchuk, Alexander A., et al. “From remote media immersion to distributed immersive performance.” Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGMM workshop on experiential telepresence. 2003. 14. Žižek, Slavoj. The sublime object of ideology. Verso, 1989. 15. Lacan, Jacques. “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience 1.” Reading French psychoanalysis. Routledge, 2014. 97–104. 16. Samuels, Robert. “Transference and narcissism.” Freud for the twenty-frst century. Palgrave Pivot, Cham, 2019. 43–51.

Chapter 6

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Pulp Fiction and Gen X Romanticism

Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction offers a keen insight into the role played by art and irony in Generation X culture and subjectivity. As we have seen throughout this book, one of the defning aspects of this social period is the dialectical relationship between the culture industry and adolescent media consumers. Not only did entertainment begin to cater to this particular demographic, but the people consuming the media were themselves shaped by their internalization of media culture. In this mutually reinforcing feedback loop, culture shapes individuals and individuals shape culture as subjectivity and entertainment become further entwined. To further understand the Gen X entertainment subject, we can frst turn to Magill’s discussion of Romanticism.1 His frst key insight is that what connects early European Romanticism to contemporary irony is a shared belief in the power of art and the inability of everyday language to fully account for individual experience (89). Due to the privileging of personal authenticity over social morality, the Romantic ironist stands apart from the world but hungers to have a true experience (89). Irony is then used to shield the individual from the harsh external world, and part of this process entails calling into question the ability of language to represent the real, nature, experience, and inwardness (89). As a rebellion against scientifc reason and the industrial economy, Romanticism turns to art to express what cannot be expressed. Since the Romanticists did not believe that the mind could have a direct access to reality, all they could do was follow Kant and focus on the selfrefexive knowledge of knowledge itself.2 In short, since we cannot know the real, all we can know is the structures and limits of our own knowledge (90). This focus on internal experience and self-refexive knowledge was coupled with a privileging of the self over society, which often led to what have some called an aesthetic retreat: instead of trying to improve society or conform to 49

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its norms, the Romantic ironist critiques the world around him from a safe distance of self-conficting subjectivity (91).3 Magill posits that since the Romantics rejected the possibility of science to represent reality, they turned to art as the only way to approach the real (92). Moreover, any defned social role was seen as a restriction on the free self and a rejection of authenticity. In this structure, art was the only way to assert the individual’s authenticity and freedom, and any social role was seen as mere performance (92). Only subjective feelings were valued for the Romantic individualist, and any attempt at society to impose an identity had to be resisted.4 It may appear strange to see Tarantino as a Romanticist, but I intend to show how the true insight of Pulp Fiction is the ironic effects of a world that has become increasingly aestheticized. What then matters the most when watching this movie is not the multiple story lines or the development of the characters; rather, we have to focus on how Tarantino turns life into art by privileging style over substance.5 We therefore should read his flm on the level of form and not content because his Romantic view is dependent on replacing meaning with an experience. Moreover, as an indication of the increased encroachment of the pleasure principle into all aspects of life, we see here how everyday experience can itself be a form of media entertainment. While Ferris turned himself into a spectacle, Tarantino depicts the spread of spectacle to life itself. One of the main ways to see Tarantino’s Romantic celebration of style over substance is through his use of camera angles and the manipulation of color.6 In many of the scenes, art is shown to triumph over life as we witness characters being flmed in strange ways. This dominance of art is presented when the camera is either too close or too far away or when only part of a character’s body is shown.7 This breaking up of the human form is coupled with overly intense colors that saturate the image and give it an unreal look.8 Another central way that form overcomes content is the breaking up of the sequential order of the plot and the re-ordering of scenes according to some mysterious logic.9 Here, the artist reigns supreme as time and space are subverted by the power of aesthetic imagination. This aestheticization of reality reaches the apex when two of the main characters go to a restaurant that is referred to as a “wax museum with a pulse.”10 As the waiters imitate dead actors and the furniture resembles a past age, time and context is re-arranged by the artist for the pleasure of the audience: only the artist can make the representations of the past come alive. In a key scene, before the main characters are about to commit a murder and take back the magical briefcase, Vincent says, “We better get into character.” The idea here is that we are all actors on a stage playing roles, and so we are all both fake and artistic. Since the limits of the culture industry’s

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reach have been eliminated, all we can do is remark on our own performances from the position of ironic knowingness and distance. Just as we never get to know the contents of the all-important briefcase in the movie, we never really discover the truth or reality about the plot. Like Jules’ fake-looking wig, the characters call attention to their own artifciality.11 The ironic self-refexivity of the movie is highlighted right from the start when we are shown a dictionary defnition of the meaning of pulp fction. As the flm refers to its own title in a knowing way, the audience is signaled to see the flm as a self-aware metafction. This technique of framing the flm by its own cultural position puts the entire movie in quotation marks as Tarantino winks to the audience and creates a doubled discourse.12 Each scene then has to be read not by how it advances the plot or develops the characters, but how it refers to its own production. Like the many scenes where characters make references to other pop culture representations, the artist can only attempt to save a sense of being true and authentic by showing an awareness of the surrounding artifcial world. Tarantino’s Romantic irony therefore should be seen within the context of a generation that grew up watching movies and television from a position of ironic division.13 Jean Baurdrillard once wrote that Disneyland is a fake world placed in Los Angeles so that fake people would seem real.14 According to this ironic logic, the only way to remain authentic in a media-saturated universe is to constantly reference one’s own fakeness from a knowing distance. Through his positing of style over substance, Tarantino not only combines the authentic and the fabricated, but he is able to turn suffering into pleasure and render any serious issue unserious. For instance, many critics have attacked him for his use of violence, racism, and sexism in his flm, but Tarantino can always say that he is only representing characters in an ironic manner, and so he cannot be held accountable for what he is presenting.15 As Freud argued, the joke teller provides pleasure to the audience in exchange for the audience suspending all criticisms, and thus from the artist’s perspective, aesthetics offers a way of escaping from any guilt, shame, or responsibility.16 For Gen Xers growing up in a world where crime and violence are constantly being reported on TV, the aestheticization of reality renders the suffering of others and the threats to the self tolerable.17 Furthermore, irony may be the shackles of youth, but it also opens the door for a mental escape.18 As a virtual drug taken in the open without public disapproval, media technologies offer instant pleasure and an escape from reality in an addictive manner.19 Tarantino’s aesthetic universe thus anticipates our auto-modern world where the iPhone delivers immediate gratifcation and escape on a mass level.20 For the person wearing AirPods, the external world disappears as access to pleasure replaces the resistances of reality.

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One of the ironies of Romanticism is that the investment in the artistic shaping of the world is coupled with a sense of mysterious inwardness. In this flm, this internal ineffability is represented by the story of the soldier who kept a watch in his anus for years in order to protect it and give it to someone else.21 This strange allegory points to the retention of a secret core deep inside the subject, which is hidden from the outside world, yet still plays a vital role in subjectivity. Since the self has to be protected at all costs, the only solution is to take a negative and ironic view of the surrounding world. In fact, Magill makes this point by quoting the following passage from Hegel: “irony knows itself to be master of every possible content; it is serious about nothing, but plays with all forms . . . it is . . . infnite absolute negativity” (103). From this perspective, the power of the Romantic artist is derived from the ability to play with all forms of representation and render everything that is supposed to be serious unserious. With the spread of entertainment to all aspects of our lives, we are thus seeing a generalized infnite, absolute negativity as reality becomes merely an artifcial rendering that has lost all foundational seriousness.22 Baudrillard insists that we have fnally freed the signifer from its referent and signifed, and so representation is now able to circulate around the world without concern for any set meaning or value.23 The ultimate victory of humans over nature and reality is therefore signaled by the fact that art no longer imitates life, but life is now a part of art imitating art.24 Tarantino’s universe is then an early indicator of our virtualized world of simulations and the dominance of the culture industry. While the original Romanticists sought to protect their art and their inner world from the encroachments of capitalism, for the Gen X subject abandoned by parents and left alone in front of the TV screen, there is no resistance to the entertainment industry. Just as Marx argued that in modernity, all solid traditions and beliefs are melted away and replaced by the pure reign of the exchange value, what we are now seeing is the combination of aesthetics and capital, which robs the individual of any possibility of resistance. The entertainment subject is therefore subjected to the culture industry that sells a fake message of freedom as it tightens its grip and control. THE SOCIETY OF ENJOYMENT In his book The End of Dissatisfaction?, Todd McGowan argues that a defning aspect of contemporary society is the pursuit of pleasure beyond any social constraint. We see this anti-social quest for enjoyment throughout Pulp Fiction. In fact, if the flm is about anything, it is about the way that criminals have to use vigilante justice in order to police the betrayals caused by people

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pursuing their own enjoyment within the plot, everyone ends up betraying everyone else: the boys tried to keep the special briefcase from the boss Marcellus; the boxer Butch goes back on his word and refuses to throw his fght so he can bet on his victory; and Vincent fails keeping Marcellus’ wife, Mia, safe. Each betrayal, in turn, is followed by an act of vigilante justice. In other words, in an amoral universe, everyone has to take justice into their own hands because no one can be trusted. Throughout the flm, these scenes of betrayal and revenge are coupled with constant ironic references to high and low culture. For instance, just before Jules is about to shoot the boys have who failed to pay off Marcellus, he states the following: There’s a passage I got memorized, seems appropriate for this situation: Ezekiel 25:17. “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfsh and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the fnder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.”

In citing the Bible before he commits an act of vigilante justice, Jules seeks to justify his violence by quoting a holy book, which warns against committing selfsh acts. We see here how religion can be utilized to rationalize extreme violence, and in this structure, the violence of betrayal is replaced by the violence of revenge; however, both of these acts still partake in the individualistic pursuit of enjoyment.

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LIFE, LIBERTY, AND PLEASURE From McGowan’s perspective, when a society becomes focused on the pursuit of individual pleasure, all social mediating forces become undermined, and one is left with a battle between isolated individuals (167). Moreover, since everyone is afraid that others are having more enjoyment or are stealing enjoyment from them, the isolated, anti-social individual must punish anyone who betrays them or enjoys too much (177). Within the plot of the flm, this dynamic is played out in the way that Marcellus seeks to protects his wife against other people enjoying her. First, we are told that he threw a man out of a window for touching Mia, and then we watch as Vincent has to deal with her near-overdose during their “date.” In fact, Mia and Vincent are shown to be driven by their addictions, and what frst causes them to betray the trust

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of Marcellus is their drug taking. Therefore, due to their pursuits of pleasure, they not only undermine their bond with others, buy they are also driven to destroy themselves. This blending of self-destruction and enjoyment is expressed when the drug dealer’s wife describes the feeling she gets from her multiple piercings: “It’s as if your entire body has been turned into the tip of a penis.” As the ultimate symbol of jouissance (enjoyment), pain is here equated with intense pleasure, and these piercings become what McGowan calls public images of enjoyment. In other words, while the public realm of law and social mediation is replaced by the battle of individuals pursuing their own enjoyment, there is still a need for people to have their pleasure recognized by others (138). For McGowan, this society of enjoyment rejects political activism or the very existence of the public realm, as everyone seeks to have their pleasure verifed. Furthermore, violence becomes rationalized as people seek to protect their own pursuit of enjoyment at all costs. This emphasis on enjoyment matches the U.S. Constitution’s focus on the protection of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Therefore, we can say that what we fnd in Gen X culture is only the logical result of a society centered on safeguarding the free access to the individual’s pursuit of pleasure. It is therefore not surprising that during the Gen x period, the Republican party began representing taxes as theft and the government as robbers of personal freedom (148). In a society defned by the individual’s right to pursue enjoyment, other people and social institutions only get in the way. While one could argue that we need taxes in order to pay for the protective services of the police and the military, in the world of Pulp Fiction, protection and justice are enacted through the vigilante vengeance of isolated individuals. McGowan adds that in this world where the public realm of social mediation has been discredited, everyone wants to display their enjoyment to show that no one is getting the better of them by stealing their pleasure (168). Just as the government is seen as stealing our money, laws and regulations are experienced as a form of castration threatening our pure pursuit of individual pleasure. In the age of Trump and Covid-19, we see this turn to the pursuit of individual pleasure when people refuse to social distance or wear masks because it goes against their personal freedom and their desire to pursue pleasure and money. THE ENJOYMENT OF THE OTHER With the rise of the entertainment subject, this quest for enjoyment is often experienced through the identifcation with the image of other people accessing pleasure. While we might gain a sense of vicarious enjoyment through

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these images, McGowan warns that envy and violence are often generated by the sight of another person gaining access to unconstrained pleasure. In fact, as we shall see in the next chapter, one driving force behind contemporary racism is the unconscious notion that other races have an easy access to pleasure because they are not constrained by social law or the repressive power of civilization. As McGowan argues, in this fantasy structure, the African American male is seen as having direct access to violence and sex because these instinctual impulses have not been curtailed by the need to sacrifce for the social order (171). What we then get from the media representations of black violence and hyper-sexuality is both a vicarious access to enjoyment coupled with a sense of envy and racial hatred. Thus, as I argue in the next chapter, post-postmodern Gen X culture offers a new form of racism centered on the dominance of the entertainment subject.

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NOTES 1. Berlin, Isaiah. The roots of romanticism. Princeton University Press, 2013. 2. Adorno, Theodor W. Kant’s critique of pure reason. John Wiley & Sons, 2018. 3. Goodman, Kevis. “The Loophole in the retreat: The culture of news and the early life of romantic self-consciousness.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 102.1 (2003): 25–52. 4. Kontula, Osmo, and Elina Haavio-Mannila. “Renaissance of romanticism in the era of increasing individualism.” The state of affairs: Explorations in infdelity and commitment (2004): 79–102. 5. Wierzbicki, James, ed. Music, sound and flmmakers: Sonic style in cinema. Routledge, 2012. 6. Marić, Luka. Characteristics of Quentin Tarantino’s style. Diss. University of Zadar. Department of English, 2017. 7. Conrad, M. (2017). Symbolism, meaning & nihilism in Quentin Tarantino’s pulp fction | issue 19 | philosophy now. [online] Philosophynow​.or​g. Available at: https​:/​/ph​​iloso​​phyno​​w​.org​​/issu​​es​/19​​/Symb​​olism​​_Mean​​ing​_a​​nd​_Ni​​hilis​​m​_in_​​Quent​​ in​_Ta​​ra​nti​​nos​_P​​ulp​_F​​ictio​n [Accessed 23 Apr. 2017]. 8. Makrygianni, Ourania. Ways of visual storytelling in fction flms and their refection on the book. Diss. 2018. 9. Klecker, Cornelia. “Fascination for Confusion: Discontinuous narrative in Tarantino’s pulp fction.” Landscapes of postmodernity: Concepts and paradigms of critical theory 10 (2010): 113. 10. Ihle, J. (2011). “This is Jack Rabbit Slim’s.”: Pulp fction analysis part VIII. [online] Movielistmania​.blogspot​.​hk. Available at: http:​/​/mov​​ielis​​tmani​​a​.blo​​gspot​​.hk​ /2​​011​/0​​2​/thi​​s​-is-​​jack-​​rabbi​​t​-sli​​ms​​-pu​​lp​-f​​ction​​.html​ [Accessed 23 Apr. 2017]. 11. Carew, Anthony. “Quentin Tarantino.” Screen Education 85 (2017): 68. 12. Gormley, Paul. “Trashing whiteness: Pulp fction, se7en, strange days, and articulating affect.” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 6.1 (2001): 155–171.

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13. Rennett, Michael. “Quentin Tarantino and the Director as DJ.” The Journal of Popular Culture 45.2 (2012): 391–409. 14. Baudrillard, Jean. “Hyperreal America.” Economy and Society 22.2 (1993): 243–252. 15. Giroux, Henry A. “Racism and the aesthetic of hyper‐real violence: Pulp fction and other visual tragedies.” Social Identities 1.2 (1995): 333–354. 16. Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. WW Norton & Company, 1960. 17. Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. “High hopes in a grim world: Emerging adults’ views of their futures and “Generation X”.” Youth & Society 31.3 (2000): 267–286. 18. Gabriel, Roth. “You said that irony was the shackles of youth...”: Generation X, postmodernism and late capitalist America. Diss. Brown University, 1995. 19. Griffths, M. D., and D. Kuss. “Adolescent social media addiction (revisited).” Education and Health 35.3 (2017): 49–52. 20. Samuels, Robert. “Auto-modernity after postmodernism: Autonomy and automation in culture, technology, and education.” Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected (2008). 21. Kimball, A. Samuel. ““Bad‐ass dudes” in pulp fction: Homophobia and the counterphobic idealization of women.” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 16.2 (1997): 171–192. 22. Adorno, Theodor W. Lectures on negative dialectics: Fragments of a lecture course 1965/1966. John Wiley & Sons, 2014. 23. Smith, Richard G. Jean Baudrillard: From hyperreality to disappearance. Edinburgh University Press, 2015. 24. Brook, Eric. “Art imitating art.” Contemporary Aesthetics 6.1 (2008): 8.

Chapter 7

Do the Right Thing and the Politics of Representation

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Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing injects issues of race and racism into the Gen X aesthetic culture.1 As a precursor to contemporary identity politics, the flm depicts the transformation of social movement politics into a quest for equal representation in the media, and in this way, the movie anticipates the absorption of the political into the realm of entertainment.2 Like Pulp Fiction, a Romantic aestheticization of everyday life is coupled with self-refexivity, but in this flm, the desire for equal media representation threatens to both politicize aesthetics and transform politics into a mode of media performance.3 Drawing from different strands of black urban Gen X culture, the movie forces us to ask what roles does the media play in containing African American revolutionary politics. Moreover, we need to examine how minority identities are used by the liberal culture as a way of accessing repressed fantasies concerning sexuality and violence.4 It will be my argument that much of black popular culture represents the assimilation of minority subjects into the dominant white culture and the fantasy structure of the entertainment subject. THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION The key driving force behind the flm is the complaint that that there are no pictures of black people on the walls of the pizzeria frequented by the African American community. As an issue of cultural respect, the character Buggin’ Out wants to know why the Italian American owner of the restaurant does not respect the culture of the people from which he is profting. This fght over who is represented on the wall anticipates the growing dominance of identity politics and the fght over who gets fair cultural representation; however, in 57

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this case, representation does not mean political or legal rights; rather, the goal is to have people of color more present in the media. In other words, the civil rights battle over political equality has shifted to a battle over inclusion in the culture industry.5 As a sign of the dominance of entertainment in all aspects of our lives, this absorption of politics into culture presents a way of containing political and social movements into the safe confnes of media representations. Moreover, as politics become combined with aesthetics, the pleasure principle dominates as social strife is transformed into enjoyment for the Gen X entertainment subject. In other words, the postmodern struggles for civil rights are repackaged as a simulation of post-postmodern liberation. Not only does Buggin’ Out complain that there are no pictures of blacks on the wall of Sal’s Pizzeria, but Mookie, played by Spike Lee himself, attacks Sal’s son Pino for his investment in African American popular culture: “Sounds funny to me. As much as you say nigger this and nigger that, all your favorite people are ‘niggers.’” In response to Mookie pointing out that Pino loves Magic Johnson, Eddie Murphy, and Prince, and so he must love black people, Pino responds: “It’s different. Magic, Eddie, Prince are not niggers, I mean, are not Black. I mean, they’re Black but not really Black. They’re more than Black. It’s different.” This idea of black performers not really being black points to the idea that white culture can only invest in people of color if they are seen as transcending their race.6 Moreover, as Mookie argues, this need to both idealize and debase black people is founded on an unconscious identifcation with these fgures drawn from popular culture: “Pino, I think secretly that you wish you were Black. That’s what I think. Vito, what do you say?” Through this interaction, Lee is commenting on the complicated unconscious process of identifcation and repression, which are related to the depiction of people of color in the “liberal” media. From a psychoanalytic perspective, we can say that liberals often project their own repressed violent and sexual urges onto people of color, and then they idealize these debased people for having free access to what the dominant culture has to control and contain.7 The idea here is that what people really hate in the other is what they hate in themselves, but in the structure of liberal subjectivity, this hatred gets reversed into idealization.8 Since liberals do not want to think that they have prejudices and aggressive desires, they have to fnd a way to both use and deny racism. Popular culture becomes the perfect space for representing these repressed and projected feelings onto others because entertainment is seen as a realm that is not serious or even real, and so the liberal subject does not have to feel guilty or responsible for racism and projected violence. As some have argued, we can locate the birth of Rap and Hip Hop culture to Generation X and the growing dominance of MTV music videos.9 From a critical perspective, what occurs in this cultural transformation is that black

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people are paid by mostly white producers to present the worst stereotypes of black people to the dominant culture. In this broadcasting of urban violence, sexuality, and hyper-consumerism, white audiences are able to live vicariously through the idealized freedom of black subjects who supposedly have not been forced to give up their true desires in order to conform to the dominant culture. However, since the white liberal subjects both desire and hate their repressed impulses, they maintain an ambivalent attitude toward the other who receives their unconscious projections.10 A fundamental driving force behind this use and abuse of black urban culture is the dialectic of assimilation.11 Minority subjects often have to show that they are willing to give up their particular identities in order to be accepted by the dominant culture. For instance, while he was frst running for president, Barack Obama had to present his willingness to separate himself from his black separatist pastor in order to show white voters that he was not a threat, and yet he also had to highlight his blackness in order to receive the black vote.12 The solution to this problem is the ironic affrmation of a racialized identity coupled with a willingness to sacrifce one’s own race. From this perspective, Lee is both affrming the value of black popular culture as he unintentionally recirculates some of the worst stereotypes white people have concerning people of color.13 By employing the N-word in the script, Lee highlights the notion that the way people overcome a history of oppression through language is by taking on a hateful word and changing its meaning.14 The problem with this strategy is that it may only serve to reinforce hate speech as it falsely believes that it has appropriated language for its own subversive purposes. Since language relies in part on the history of the shared meaning of a particular term, one may not be able to simply re-signify a symbol for a new purpose.15 In fact, the use of the N-word in black popular culture may act to legitimate racism in a hidden way.16 By motivating black artists to use a term of oppression to represent themselves, the dominant culture industry reveals the willingness of oppressed people to sacrifce their group in the pursuit of money and fame. Of course, none of this is going on in an intentional or conscious way, but from the perspective of psychoanalysis, we see how people unintentionally participate in their own debasement. The strategy of using prejudice to overcome prejudice comes to the foreground in the flm when Lee has a series of characters express their racism in an open manner: MOOKIE Dago, wop, garlic-breath, guinea, pizza-slinging, spaghetti-bending, Vic Damone, Perry Como, Luciano

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Pavarotti, Sole Mio, nonsinging motherfucker. PINO You gold-teeth, gold-chain-wearing, fried-chicken-and-biscuit-eatin’, monkey, ape, baboon, big thigh, fast-running, three-hundred-sixtydegree-basketball-dunking spade Moulan Yan.

While this hyperbolic re-iteration of racist stereotypes may be attempting to undermine prejudices by exposing them in an open manner, it is still unclear whether this strategy can actually succeed. After all, hate speech is being kept alive under the protections of ironic, artistic expression. Fight the Power

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My argument, then, is not that Lee made a racist flm; rather, I am exploring the complicated structure of racialized discourse in Gen X popular culture. Since the birth of Rap and Hip Hop are traced to this period, it is important to understand the role of black urban culture in the dominant public imagination. One place where this issue becomes apparent in the movie is in the use of the Public Enemy song “Fight the Power.”17 The opening verse makes the argument that the ultimate battle in the world for black people is the fght over free speech: While the Black bands sweatin’ And the rhythm rhymes rollin’ Got to give us what we want (uh) Gotta give us what we need (hey) Our freedom of speech is freedom or death We got to fight the powers that be

From an artistic perspective, what fuels identity politics is the desire for uncensored expression and cultural representation.18 Moreover, the second verse directly brings attention to the role played by aesthetics in the fght for black power: It’s a start, a work of art To revolutionize make a change nothing’s strange People, people we are the same No we’re not the same

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‘Cause we don’t know the game What we need is awareness, we can’t get careless

Cultural awareness through art is promoted here as a way to start a revolution for increased black representation; however, it is still unclear whether this is a call for actual political transformation or a demand for the recognition of black artists.19 One reason why Lee may have chosen to highlight this song in his flm is that the lyrics speak directly to the question of black artists like him in the culture industry.20 This pop culture debate is emphasized in the third verse:

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Elvis was a hero to most But he never meant shit to me you see Straight up racist that sucker was Simple and plain Mother fuck him and John Wayne ‘Cause I’m Black and I’m proud I’m ready and hyped plus I’m amped Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps Sample a look back you look and find Nothing but rednecks for four hundred years if you check

The argument here is that the icons of dominant American popular culture have often been white racists, while black artists have constantly been denied the recognition they deserve. Underlying this criticism is the counter-notion that a key to social power is visibility in popular culture. In other words, not only will the next revolution be televised, but it will be about our televisual culture.21 Although the flm does cite directly Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X explicitly, it is still a question of whether the movie is ultimately about the struggle of black artists for recognition or is it about a larger struggle for radical social change.22 While the race riot at the end of the flm appears to be the culmination of the desire to get more black faces on the wall of the white-owned pizzeria, what actually enfames the situation is that the police kill a black man who refuses to turn down his music and who later attacks Sal, the owner of the restaurant, who destroys his Boom Box with a baseball bat. After his prized possession and source of black culture is ruined, Radio Raheem starts to choke Sal. In the script, we read the following: Radio Raheem picks Sal up from behind the counter and starts to choke his ass. Radio Raheem’s prized possession—his box, the only thing he owned of value—his box, the one

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thing that gave him any sense of worth—has been smashed to bits. (Radio Raheem, like many Black youth, is the victim of materialism and a misplaced sense of values.) Now he doesn’t give a fuck anymore. He’s gonna make Sal pay with his life.

It is interesting that the script criticizes black youth for being victims of materialism and misplaced values since the obvious meaning of the scene is that this character is fghting back in rage because his source of cultural enjoyment and identity has been destroyed. Ultimately, the flm reveals the risk of transforming politics into a fght over cultural representation: by turning to art to fght discrimination in art, one may end up only submitting to a culture industry that feeds off of representing people according to accepted stereotypes and prejudices. In fact, the fnal scene of ruinous violence appears to reinforce the media association between crime, violence, and blackness. From this perspective, Lee unintentionally delivers what the dominant audience may desire, which is the reinforcement of their own repressed prejudices and fantasies as they both idealize and devalue the other’s culture. As a central aspect of the entertainment subject, racism is both denied and presented as people seek to gain recognition by conforming to the prejudices that oppress them. Since much of the flm deals with the media depiction of people of color and the lack of black lives in the dominant entertainment culture, we see how even postmodern social movements can be absorbed into the media-saturated post-postmodern culture industry. Through his Romantic aesthetics, Lee creates a self-refexive metafction that obsessively explores the representation of representations. This ironic perspective allows Lee to take the serious issue of racism and place it in a context where it can become a source of pleasure and entertainment. As another indication that resistance to the culture industry and the pleasure principle is futile, Lee’s flm displays that even a critique of the discriminatory nature of popular culture can result in audience enjoyment. The question remains of whether black lives really matter in a world where nothing really matters. As my analysis of this Gen X cultural production reveals, what is so important to understand about this cultural period is the way it depicts the encroachment of the entertainment subject into all aspects of human existence. Even radical social movements can be turned into pleasurable spectacles for a passive audience.

NOTES 1. Lee, Spike, Lisa Jones, and David Lee. Do the right thing: A Spike Lee joint. Simon and Schuster, 1989.

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2. Fraser, Nancy. “Social justice in the age of identity politics.” Geographic Thought: A Praxis Perspective (2009): 72–91. 3. Christensen, Jerome. “Spike Lee, corporate populist.” Critical Inquiry 17.3 (1991): 582–595. 4. Samuels, Robert. “Simon Clarke and the politics and psychoanalysis of racism.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2020): 1–5. 5. Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. “The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception.” Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader 34 (2007). 6. Peffey, Mark, Jon Hurwitz, and Paul M. Sniderman. “Racial stereotypes and whites’ political views of blacks in the context of welfare and crime.” American Journal of Political Science (1997): 30–60. 7. Samuels, Robert. “Simon Clarke and the politics and psychoanalysis of racism.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2020): 1–5. 8. Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to ourselves. Columbia University Press, 1991. 9. Chang, Jeff. Can’t stop won’t stop: A history of the hip-hop generation. St. Martin’s Press, 2007. 10. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. The anatomy of prejudices. Harvard University Press, 1998. 11. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Anti-Semite and Jew.” (1948). 12. Samuels, Robert. New media, cultural studies, and critical theory after postmodernism: Automodernity from Zizek to Laclau. Springer, 2009. 134. 13. Hooks, Bell. Outlaw culture: We don’t wannabe dicks in drag; Altars of sacrifce: re-membering Basquiat; What’s passion got to do with it?: an interview with Marie-France Alderman; Seduction and betrayal: The crying game meets The bodyguard; Censorship from left and right; Talking sex: beyond the patriarchal phallic imaginary; Camille Paglia,” black” pagan or white colonizer; Dissident heat: fre with fre; Katie Roiphe, a little feminist excess goes a long way; Seduced by violence no more; Gangsta culture: sexism…. Routledge, 1994. 14. Asim, Jabari. The N word: Who can say it, who shouldn’t, and why. HMH, 2008. 15. Rahman, Jacquelyn. “The N word: Its history and use in the African American community.” Journal of English Linguistics 40.2 (2012): 137–171. 16. Hart, Walter Edward. “The culture industry, hip hop music, and the white perspective: How one dimensional representation of hip hop music has infuenced white racial attitudes.” (2010). 17. Enemy, Public. “Fight the power.” Fear of a Black Planet (1990): 523446–2. 18. Enemy, Public. “Fight the power.” Fear of a Black Planet (1990): 523446–2. 19. Armstrong, S. “Buy the right thing.” Media Guardian 9 (1996). 20. Cashmore, Ellis. The black culture industry. Routledge, 2006. 21. Grossberg, Lawrence. Caught in the crossfre: Kids, politics, and America’s future. Routledge, 2015. 22. Lubiano, Wahneema. “But compared to what?: Reading realism, representation, and essentialism in School Daze, Do the Right Thing, and the Spike Lee discourse.” Black American Literature Forum. Vol. 25. No. 2. St. Louis University, 1991.

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Chapter 8

The Politics of Amusing Gen X to Death

This chapter turns to Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death in order to more fully explore the relation between the rise of the entertainment subject and Generation X culture.1 Although Postman’s book was frst published in 1985, it helps us to understand the role of media pleasure in all aspects of contemporary life. Moreover, his work anticipates the rise of Right-wing libertarian ideology as represented by the presidency of Ronald Reagan. A LOOK BACK

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In the twentieth anniversary edition of Postman’s book, we fnd an introduction written by his son. What is so interesting about this short text is that it seeks to document the relevancy of the original work for our current culture: Is it really plausible that this book about how TV is turning all public life (education, religion, politics, journalism) into entertainment; how the image is undermining other forms of communication, particularly the written word; and how our bottomless appetite for TV will make content so abundantly available, context be damned, that we’ll be overwhelmed by “information glut” until what is truly meaningful is lost and we no longer care what we’ve lost as long as we’re being amused. . . . Can such a book possibly have relevance to you and The World of 2006 and beyond? (7)

Like his father before him, Postman’s son’s main argument is that TV culture transforms all of our basic social institutions as the dominance of the image produces an endless desire for media consumption.2 Of course, this introduction was written before the full emergence of smart phones and Web 2.0, but 65

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it does clarify some of the relations between Gen X and our current entertainment subject.

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ORWELL VS. HUXLEY Much of Postman’s original book is framed by the opposition between George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World3: “But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think” (18). From Postman’s perspective, what we have to fear the most in developed countries is not the imposition of totalitarian law; rather our greatest danger is that we will trade in our ability to think by mindlessly idealizing new technologies. In fact, if we look back to my early chapter on the entrance of Gen X students to college, we do gain a frst look at the growing infuence of entertainment technologies into all aspects of human life, and in the case of higher education, the desire for students to be entertained is shown to result in the way they evaluate their teachers and respond to traditional forms of educational authority. As Sacks documents, in a scene that now appears to be very quaint, a professor is stunned when a student brings a small portable TV set to class; this invasion of entertainment technology into the Gen X classroom provides a frst look into the way current students come to school armed with their smart phones and laptops.4 However, in the original context, the professor is shocked; but now, teachers and schools often require students to do their work on these new technologies. For Postman, there is a clear opposition between modern book culture and the new postmodern society of electronic media: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism” (18). It should be clear that we are seeing a growing replacement of modern book culture with new forms of media and information exchange. Moreover, the rise of the entertainment subject does point to the increase in passivity and egoism in automodern culture: “Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death” (21). In this combination of amusement and death through entertainment, Postman highlights Freud’s theories of the pleasure principle and the death drive: since we are driven to avoid all mental and physical effort,

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we turn to new technologies and media to escape from reality and the pain of everyday life. Of course, many of the social changes Postman documents are driven by the rise of consumer capitalism in all aspects of our lives. As he indicates, we are not only witnessing the replacement of use value with exchange value, but this economic principle is itself being affected by the role of marketing in many aspects of our lives: “American businessmen discovered, long before the rest of us, that the quality and usefulness of their goods are subordinate to the artifce of their display” (22). The reality is that quality and usefulness still matter for most products, but the only way people will know about these products is if they are advertised or they circulate in the public. Furthermore, once people have access to basic goods at a moderate cost, they must be encouraged to desire goods they do not really need. Advertising, thus, plays a large role in the growing dominance of entertainment into all aspects of our lives because the selling of products now combines media pleasure with produced desires. In the context of a generalized advertising and entertainment culture, Postman emphasizes the pressure of all social leaders and role models to be amusing: “Indeed, in America God favors all those who possess both a talent and a format to amuse, whether they be preachers, athletes, entrepreneurs, politicians, teachers or journalists” (23). As we saw in Sacks’ description of higher education, even college professors are now being pressured to be entertaining, but it is in the realm of politics that we can perhaps view the greatest encroachment of the entertainment subject.

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THE POLITICS OF ENTERTAINMENT For Postman, a key to understanding Gen X politics is to understand not only how a former actor like Ronald Reagan was elected president, but more important, to understand how politics itself was reshaped by entertainment: “Politics . . . is the greatest spectator sport in America. In 1966, Ronald Reagan used a different metaphor. ‘Politics,’ he said, ‘is just like show business’” (136). As many people have argued, Reagan’s rise to power was aided by his knowledge of how popular culture works, and so the great communicator was in fact a great entertainer.5 From Postman’s perspective, what defned Reagan and the new entertainment subject was the ability to provide pleasure to the audience: “Show business is not entirely without an idea of excellence, but its main business is to please the crowd, and its principal instrument is artifce” (137). From Postman’s vantage point, Reagan showed that some politicians had transitioned in Generation X from being leaders to being entertainers, and a key to

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this transformation was a focus on superfcial appearances, the manipulation of reality, and the enjoyment of the audience.6 Just as virtually everything else in America would become material for advertising, politics itself was reshaped by the television campaign ad: “For though the selling of a President is an astonishing and degrading thing, it is only part of a larger point: In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial” (137). While we often do not think twice about this use of TV advertisements to promote political candidates, Postman argues that this new form of media presentation reshaped every aspect of political and social life: “By bringing together in compact form all of the arts of show business—music, drama, imagery, humor, celebrity—the television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital” (137). Postman’s main claim here is that the use of television ads to promote political candidates has transformed modern politics into another mode of entertainment.7 Since politicians can now be considered to be products being sold through television commercials, the entire structure of political communication is transformed.8 In fact, Postman claims that our current culture no longer relies on reason or textual analysis; instead, he believes that television has undermined the prime modern principles of rationality, objectivity, and impartiality: “To be rationally considered, any claim—commercial or otherwise—must be made in language . . . If that universe of discourse is discarded, then the application of empirical tests, logical analysis or any of the other instruments of reason are impotent” (138). Just as Freud argues that the pleasure principle suspends reality testing and reasoned discourse, Postman posits that in the age of the television commercial, rational logic is removed as the emphasis shifts to the enjoyment of an image.9 It is therefore no longer important to ask if a representation is true or false since what matters is how it makes us feel. While Postman traces the origins to this new discourse to a time before Generation X, he claims that it is only with Gen X culture that politics becomes entirely consumed by television culture. Moreover, he defnes the rise of entertainment as the dominance of emotions over reason: “By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions” (138). As performative discourses, television commercials create their own reality by presenting an artifcial representation of the world, and through a reliance on images and not linear printed texts, this new form of culture enables the audience to be immersed in the scene as considerations of truth or reality are repressed.10 Postman adds that with the dominance of images in TV commercials, there is no reason to question the validity of the value of products or the truth of the claims made by the advertisers: “A McDonald’s commercial, for example, is

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not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama—a mythology, if you will—of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune” (138–139). In this structure, the audience is positioned to identify with the enjoyment of the people in the commercial, and this form of vicarious pleasure is based on the unconscious process of identifcation.11 As Freud argued in relation to hypnosis and the process of falling in love, once a person becomes hyper-focused on a particular object, reality testing and morality are suspended; furthermore, through a process of empathic mirroring, one identifes with the pleasure of the other, and yet none of this requires any level of conscious analysis.12 Postman goes as far as arguing that television commercials act as a form of therapy for the enjoying audience: “The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy” (139). The type of therapy that Postman is describing here is clearly not psychoanalysis since what he emphasizes is the way that the commercial satisfes the unconscious fears and desires of the audience. In contrast to this unconscious mode of communication, psychoanalytic treatment is based on making the unconscious conscious, and part of the way this is accomplished is by the analyst not satisfying the demands of the patent.13 As a false form of therapy, then, commercials provide a mirror to refect and not examine the unconscious fears and desires of the entertainment subject. Another major difference between psychoanalysis and a television commercial is that analysis takes time, while commercials are often less than a minute. As Postman insists, the quickness of these advertisements sends the misleading message that all of our problems can be resolved in a few instants: “The commercial asks us to believe that all problems are solvable, that they are solvable fast, and that they are solvable fast through the interventions of technology, techniques and chemistry” (141). From Postman’s perspective, television commercials have helped to train people to expect quick and easy solutions to every problem, and this desire for a quick fx spreads to the way we use technology, drugs, and superfcial self-help techniques.14 While we may now take this type of culture for granted, during the Gen X period, there was still some space and time to question this new form of media communication. As our entire social world becomes reshaped by advertising, the time for analysis and critical thinking is reduced, and we become forced to take images at their face value: “But the commercial disdains exposition, for that takes time and invites argument. It is a very bad commercial indeed that engages the viewer in wondering about the validity of the point being made” (141). This use of fast images to eliminate critical thought and rational explanation matches the entertainment subject’s pleasure principle, which seeks

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to use as little mental energy as possible by avoiding all confict or tension. Television commercials and the pleasure principle are thus a perfect match, and their relation helps us to understand the feedback loop between the image and the audience. For Postman, it is not surprising that Reagan was an actor since he believes that television turned politicians into celebrities: “Just as a television commercial will use an athlete, an actor, a musician, a novelist, a scientist or a countess to speak for the virtues of a product in no way within their domain of expertise, television also frees politicians from the limited feld of their own expertise” (142). In the Gen X television culture, it was discovered that anyone could be a star, and that one did not need to have knowledge or expertise to become a source of information.15 Moreover, once a person was famous, their fame could be used to make them believable and important in any area of life. An interesting side-effect of this process is that individual celebrities begin to have more power than political parties: “Although it may go too far to say that the politician-as-celebrity has, by itself, made political parties irrelevant, there is certainly a conspicuous correlation between the rise of the former and the decline of the latter” (143). Thus, through the cult of the individual personality, older forms of political organization become less important.16 This transformation helps to explain why someone like Trump could become president even though he challenged many of the elites and norms of his own party.17 Postman argues that what defnes this new type of politician is the way leaders become focused on presenting their followers with an image of what the audience wants: “For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience” (144). Postman’s idea here is that the contemporary politician has to become an image that pleases the audience, and so there is no longer a drive to present the most effective policies or provide needed leadership; instead, the political fgure has to sell an image of enjoyment, and as Freud insisted, what people want is to be released from tension, confict, guilt, and anxiety.18 This relation between the medium and the image can be understood through Lacan’s notion that we frst gain a sense of our own selves as being coherent and separate by identifying with an image in the mirror.19 The ego then is formed through a process of identifcation, and what the image in the mirror provides is not only a view of ourselves but also a way of looking at others. Since we can never see our full body, we need to view it through an external medium, and thus like Narcissus, we derive pleasure from seeing our own refected image.20 Television, then, takes advantage of this psychological structure by providing us with fast and accessible images for identifcation. In fact, Postman himself employs the metaphor of the mirror to explain why our politics and culture are often void of historical understanding: “A

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mirror records only what you are wearing today. It is silent about yesterday. With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present” (147). The mirroring relation between the image and the audience therefore is focused on the present, which serves to remove representations from their context and historical derivation. Postman adds that television now acts as a mirror for its viewers, and in the case of politics, what one wants to see is an ideal refection of oneself.21

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THE LIBERTARIAN SUBJECT According to Postman, the television commercial and its mirroring effects is only a specifc example of a more general shift in culture. What he documents is the way that social control has been able to move from an emphasis on force and punishment to one of pleasure and reward.22 In other words, the way people are socialized to submit to social norms and laws is no longer primarily through a threat of eternal punishment or violent retribution; rather people are seduced through images of pleasure to give up their criticisms of the system: “Tyrants of all varieties have always known about the value of providing the masses with amusements as a means of pacifying discontent. But most of them could not have even hoped for a situation in which the masses would ignore that which does not amuse” (151). As a softer form of control, new media presentations help to pacify the public by motivating them to ignore anything that does not make them happy. This new political use of the pleasure principle has led to the rise of libertarian, Right-wing ideology. After all, if Freud defnes the pleasure principle as a release from tension through an escape from confict, what we fnd in libertarian ideology is a desire to be free from taxes, government regulation, censorship, and the guilt caused by accusations of racism, sexism, and homophobia.23 As a post-postmodern backlash against the postmodern progressive social movements of the 1960s, the new Right turned to libertarian philosophy to allow people to escape from the tension and conficts caused by social upheaval.24 Since the libertarians wanted to focus on the isolated individual who was supposed to sink or swim on his own, they needed to declare that society does not matter and that the government is the enemy. Much of this political movement was driven by a desire of wealthy people to be free from the burden of taxes and government regulations, and by seeing the government as only a source of oppression; pleasure was derived from being released from the need to sacrifce for others. As the frst actor to become president, Reagan not only helped to legitimize the rise of the entertainment subject, but he also provides us insight into how the New Right was able to rise to power.25 Due in part to a backlash against

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the postmodern social movements of the 1960s, Reagan led a counter-revolution by combining pleasure with release. Not only did he tend to use jokes and fctional stories to seduce his audience, but he was able to combine a call to return to traditional values with an investment in an anti-social enjoyment.26 We shall see that what most people fail to understand about libertarian politics is that the celebration of individual freedom is often coupled with an escape from reality. To explore Reagan’s particular mode of politics, I will refer to Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland and focus on the actual words of the former president.27 What I hope to show in this analysis is the importance of not letting the use of humor or fction blind us from the circulation of indirect, symbolic political ideology. In fact, one of the main aspects of contemporary Rightwing politicians is that they rarely say what they mean in a direct way because they are often seeking to appeal to two audiences at once: on one level, these politicians have to get voters to support them who are not self-consciously racist or selfsh, and on another level, they have to appeal to more overtly racist and anti-social segments of the population.28 The way these politicians appeal to these two different groups is by using a form of communication that is symbolic, indirect, and unconscious. In other words, they use techniques borrowed from popular culture to attract and maintain a divided audience. Instead of seeing Reagan as “The Great Communicator,” we can view him as a great political entertainer who utilized many of the techniques that Postman ascribes to the medium of television.29 For instance, Reagan once said that the Republican party should rename itself in order to become a more popular commodity: “You know, in the business I used to be in, we discovered that very often the title of a picture was very important as to whether people went to see it or not” (4). Here we fnd a direct reference to entertainment culture as a way of repacking a political movement for greater public consumption. Just like a better movie title can make a flm more popular, Reagan reasoned that his political party should think about itself in terms of entertainment and audience appeal. Reagan’s focus on simply changing the way his party presented their ideas to the public was determined by his experience as an actor and as someone who worked for General Electric as a television personality promoting their products and political agenda.30 For example, after Gerald Ford lost his election to Jimmy Carter, he told an audience that the only problem with his party was that Republicans “haven’t done a very good job of salesmanship” (66). From the perspective of the entertainment subject, the content of the party’s policies was not the problem; the problem was how they presented and sold their ideas to the public. In this privileging of form over content, Reagan argued that appearance was perhaps more important than the content of the message.

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Throughout Perlstein’s book, we learn that Reagan often paid special attention to the lighting and presence of the camera when he was giving a speech or talking to a small audience: “He would plant himself at a mark taped down to ensure advantageous camera angles. He would pop out his right contact lens so he could simultaneously read the text in front of him with one eye and read the reaction at the frst row of tables—never more than eight feet away, so he would have faces to look directly into, to enhance the aura of sincerity—with the other” (101–102). While other politicians might also think about the theatrical aspects of their presentations, Reagan was obsessed by making sure that he appeared to his audiences in a very particular way. Using his knowledge derived from hours in front of the camera, he required that his interactions with others were always carefully staged.31 This blending of politics and entertainment not only reveals the growing infuence of entertainment into all aspects of Gen X life, but it also shows how entertainment itself is structured by certain ideological infuences. As Perlstein documents, Reagan tended to rely on the same set of jokes that he had been using for years to seduce his audience and communicate his political ideas. Some of his classic jokes are recounted in the following passage: “The reason the Little Old Lady Lived in a Shoe was because property taxes were so high. ‘The dollar’s shrunk, the dime hasn’t changed. You can still use it for a screwdriver.’ The government was like a baby, ‘an alimentary canal with an appetite on one end and no sense of responsibility on the other’” (131). By recycling the same canned jokes, Reagan showed that he used humor to provide his audience with pleasure as he injected false facts and fction to promote his Right-wing ideology.32 For instance, his reference to the Old Lady in the Shoe was employed as a way to convince his audience that this fctional character had to move because her taxes were too high. It did not seem to matter that he was invoking someone who did not exist to sell his political ideology; what mattered was that his audience laughed as he got them to relate in an indirect way to the “horrors” of taxation. By using humor and other forms of popular culture, he was therefore better able to promote the agenda of the wealthy who wanted to reduce their taxes and avoid government regulations.33 Thus, in contrast to Barry Goldwater’s direct attack on the social welfare programs and other governmental agencies, his indirect, symbolic discourse was able to hide a fundamental meanness and selfshness behind the façade of good humor.34 Part of the way that Reagan controlled his message was by controlling his audience and his environment. For example, before he gave a public speech, he insisted on the following: “the room cooled to ffty-fve degrees an hour prior to start time to counteract the TV lights’ heat; backdrop light blue or beige (‘ideal for TV cameras’), free from ‘fancy decorations that distract from the speaker’; a ‘reliable volunteer’ posted outside with orders

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to admit ‘bona fde press,’ banning ‘well-wishers and friends’ who might cause undue distraction” (102–103). These elaborate requirements for his engagement with others show that he saw his relation to the public through the lens of entertainment. Not only was he hyper-aware about the lighting and the placement of the camera, but he also made sure that he would not have to deal with unfriendly questions or unwanted interactions. In this controlled environment, the great communicator could make sure that he was in control of his audience. What is so ironic is that at the same time he was concentrating on manipulating the public, he was telling them that they need to resist being manipulated by the government: “the very frst batch of radio commentaries he recorded in 1975 included one introducing the proverbial housewife whom arrogant far-off bureaucrats presumed ‘too dumb to buy a box of corn fakes without being cheated,’ who resented being bossed around by ‘the professional consumerists in Washington,’ who ‘are really elitists who think they know better than you what’s good for you’” (205). Perhaps the greatest irony of the New Right politicians is that they constantly run for offce by arguing that the government is by defnition evil.35 This anti-government government is coupled with an elitist attack on elitism.36 Through a rhetoric of hyperbole and polarization, the people are positioned as being attacked by the evil, commanding government, and yet, Reagan was asking people to make him part of the system he rejected. The Right has always struggled with this problem of how to promote the interests of powerful wealthy people while gaining the vote of the people without power and wealth, and one of the ways to accomplish this diffcult task is to use humor and fctional stories to blur the distinction between different class categories.37 In insisting that the government was the problem and not the solution, Reagan implied that he was not part of the government and therefore not part of the problem. One way that he sought to avoid the contradictions of his political position was to use optimism and the hope for a better future as a way of negating the present and the past: “We live in the future in America, always have. And the better days are yet to come” (223). It is of course ironic to say that we always live in the future, but what Reagan was trying to accomplish in this nonsensical rhetoric was to get the American audience to believe in a pure message of positive change, even if it had no basis in reality.38 Like his use of jokes and fctional tales, Reagan’s talk about the happy future suspended the reality testing of his audience because there was no longer a clear distinction between what was true and what was fction. Thus, the reason why he could re-use old stories and jokes was that the present context did not matter if you were not interested in actual reality. As a libertarian, Reagan was highly invested in the idea of freedom, but it was often unclear what type of freedom he was proposing.39 In one interesting

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speech about a recent visit to Asia, he made a strange comment about what freedom really means: “One of the things that struck me most was that the people of Taiwan smile so much. Perhaps that is because they have built a society where they are free to work toward fulflling the goals they have set for themselves” (368). As Perlstein points out, at this time, Taiwan was living under an oppressive dictatorship, but what Reagan wanted to stress was the connection between freedom and happiness.40 In this strange logic, people who smile must be free, even if they have no political or personal freedom. Moreover, by equating smiling with freedom, Reagan shows how the pleasure principle helps to shape libertarian politics because the pleasure derived from the escape from confict and tension can be equated with the pleasure derived from not having to pay taxes or deal with social inequality. Just as Freud said that pleasure is caused by the release of anxiety, the libertarians argue that freedom comes from being released from taxes and government regulation. Like many other libertarians, instead of supporting social welfare programs that could help black people escape from poverty and racism, Reagan insisted that the best way to help this disadvantaged group was to help free the market from any governmental restrictions: “Black Americans want what every other kind of American wants: a crack at a decent job, a home, safe streets, and a good education for their children. And the best way to have those things is for government to get out of the way while we make a bigger pie so that everyone can have a bigger slice” (368). While we do not know if Reagan actually believed in this libertarian fantasy, we do know that his insensitivity to different minority groups was fueled by his naïve, polarized belief that the free market was always good and the government was always bad.41 One reason why he might have pretended to care about the plight of black people was that he wanted to signal to more moderate white Republicans that he was not an overt racist.42 We see this tactic all the time when Republicans surround themselves with a few token African Americans; the goal here is not to simply appeal to black voters, which is often a lost cause; rather, by pretending to care about this minority group, an unconscious, indirect signal is sent to moderate white voters that the Republicans are not racists.43 As Nixon discovered with his Southern Strategy, the best way to get the vote of racists and still not offend people who do not want to be seen as racist is to focus on issues like crime and drugs.44 These “dog whistles” allow one to send a message and deny the message at the same time, and this ironic structure refects on the unconscious processes we see in jokes and other forms of popular culture. An example of Reagan using humor to both say and unsay something at the same time can be seen in the way he tried to defend himself against the claim that he was too old to run for president. As Perlstein reports, the

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president used self-deprecating humor to mock his old age: “he was so old he remembered when a hot story broke and the reporter would run into the newsroom crying, ‘Stop the chisels!’ That watching himself on TV in his old movies was like ‘looking at a son you never knew you had.’ That all the wise Confucian leaders he met in Asia thought he was too young to be president” (369). When a politician jokes like this, it is hard to know how to respond because one is not dealing with facts or logic; instead, a strange mix of truth and fction is being presented as the speaker is both saying something and not saying something at the same time.45 Furthermore, as Freud insists, the joke teller bribes the audience with pleasure so that the audience will not criticize the speaker or hold the joke teller responsible for what has been presented.46 Reagan used this technique often to escape from criticism and to leave himself with plausible deniability.47 While we used to have a high tolerance for comics to say offensive things under the banner of just making a joke, Reagan would use humor in serious political contexts. For instance, the following example shows how this loveable guy could be so insensitive to specifc minority groups: “In his frst year as governor he was asked if he thought homosexuals should be barred from public offce. The former lifeguard quipped, ‘Certainly they should be barred from the Department of Beaches and Parks’” (375). This homophobic joke did not cause an uproar because people focused on the laughter and not the underlying aggressive connotations.48 As his failed response to the AIDS epidemic would later show, his homophobia probably played a role in many people losing their lives, but at the time, people had a much higher tolerance for offensive jokes in general.49 By weaponizing humor, Reagan was able to hide his aggression toward the less fortunate under the façade of a smile. Like his reference to “Welfare Queens,” the use of indirect symbolic language was often employed in order to demonize the poor.50 As a form of reversed racism, Reagan sought to represent poor people of color as the ones with real power who were then pictured to be exploiting the wealthy white majority by making them pay taxes for unneeded welfare programs.51 Just as humor works by manipulating unconscious associations in a covert manner, Reagan sought to use his entertainment skills to feed white resentment, while pretending that he was doing no such thing. As the paradigmatic Gen X president, we can read Reagan as leading the Right-wing backlash against civil rights, welfare programs, women’s rights, and gay rights, and in the same way that pleasure is based on avoiding the tension and anxiety caused by guilt and shame, libertarian politics is often centered on denying social inequality and injustice. Since the wealthy white Christian majority wanted to free itself of taxes and criticism, it had to pretend that racism no longer existed, and thus there was no longer any

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justifcation for the government to enact corrective welfare policies.52 Reagan was the perfect messenger for the New Right agenda because he delivered his politics through the medium of entertainment. Of course, Reagan’s smile would be later replaced by the ironic sneer of Donald Trump.

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NOTES 1. Postman, Neil. Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. Penguin, 2006. 2. Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of society 6. Pine Forge Press, 2011. 3. George, Orwell. 1984. Pandora’s Box, 2017; Huxley, Aldous. Brave new world. Ernst Klett Sprachen, 2007. 4. Ames, Morgan G. “Managing mobile multitasking: The culture of iPhones on Stanford campus.” Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work. 2013. 5. Troy, Gil. Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan invented the 1980’s. Vol. 93. Princeton University Press, 2007. 6. Reeves, Richard. President Reagan: The triumph of imagination. Simon and Schuster, 2005. 7. Ewen, Stuart. Captains of consciousness advertising and the social roots of the consumer culture. Basic Books, 2008. 8. Uudelepp, Agu. Propaganda instruments in political television advertisements and modern television commercials. Dissertations of Social Sciences, Tallinn University, Estonia (2008). 9. Boorstin, Daniel Joseph. The image: A guide to pseudo-events in America. Vintage, 1992. 10. Thorson, Esther. “Television commercials as mass media messages.” Message Effects in Communication Science 17 (1989): 195–230. 11. Kneer, Julia, Inna Hemme, and Gary Bente. “Vicarious belongingness.” Journal of Media Psychology (2011). 12. Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. WW Norton & Company, 1975. 13. Terman, David. “Optimum frustration: Structuralization and the therapeutic process.” Learning from Kohut: Progr. Self Psychol 4 (1988): 113–126. 14. Wallace, David Foster. “E unibus pluram: Television and US fction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (1993): 151–151. 15. Ward, Pete. Gods behaving badly: Media, religion, and celebrity culture. Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd, 2010. 16. Leese, Daniel. “The cult of personality and symbolic politics.” The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism, 2014. 17. MacWilliams, Matthew C. “Who decides when the party doesn’t? Authoritarian voters and the rise of Donald Trump.” PS: Political Science & Politics 49.4 (2016): 716–721.

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18. Freud, Sigmund. “Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911–1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works. 1958. 213–226. 19. Lacan, Jacques. “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.” Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. A Reader (1949): 287–292. 20. Gallop, Jane. “Lacan’s” mirror stage”: Where to begin.” SubStance 11 (1982): 118–128. 21. Ferguson, Christopher J., et al. “Mirror, mirror on the wall: Peer competition, television infuences, and body image dissatisfaction.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 30.5 (2011): 458–483. 22. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage, 2012. 23. Iyer, Ravi, et al. “Understanding libertarian morality: The psychological roots of an individualist ideology.” Available at SSRN 1665934 (2010). 24. Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism. Cambridge University Press, 2019. 25. MacKinnon, Kenneth. The politics of popular representation: Reagan, Thatcher, AIDS, and the movies. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1992. 26. Weiskel, Timothy C. “From Sidekick to sideshow—celebrity, entertainment, and the politics of distraction: Why Americans are “sleepwalking toward the end of the earth”.” American Behavioral Scientist 49.3 (2005): 393–409. 27. Perlstein, Rich. Reaganland. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020. 28. Steen, Shannon. “Concealing white supremacy in right-wing populism.” The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics (2019): 115–118. 29. Denton, Robert E. The Primetime Presidency of Ronald Reagan: The era of the television presidency. ABC-CLIO, 1988. 30. Evans, Thomas W. The education of Ronald Reagan: The general electric years and the untold story of his conversion to conservatism. Columbia University Press, 2008. 31. Glaros, Roberta, and Bruce Miroff. “Watching Ronald Reagan: Viewers’ reactions to the president on television.” Congress & the Presidency: A Journal of Capital Studies. Vol. 10. No. 1. Taylor & Francis Group, 1983. 32. Meyer, John. “Ronald Reagan and humor: A politician’s velvet weapon.” Communication Studies 41.1 (1990): 76–88. 33. Prasad, Monica. “The popular origins of neoliberalism in the Reagan tax cut of 1981.” Journal of Policy History 24.3 (2012): 351–383. 34. Wood, Rob, and Dean Smith. Barry Goldwater: The biography of a conservative. Pickle Partners Publishing, 2018. 35. Pelinka, Anton. “Right-wing populism: Concept and typology.”  Right-Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse (2013): 3–22. 36. Derks, Anton. “Populism and the ambivalence of egalitarianism. How do the underprivileged reconcile a right wing party preference with their socio-economic attitudes?.” World Political Science 2.3 (2006).

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37. Frank, Thomas. Pity the billionaire: The hard-times swindle and the unlikely comeback of the right. Macmillan, 2012. 38. Garrison, Justin D. An empire of ideals: The chimeric imagination of Ronald Reagan. Routledge, 2013. 39. Diggins, John P. Ronald Reagan: Fate, freedom, and the making of history. WW Norton & Company, 2007. 40. Moore, Mark P. “Rhetorical criticism of political myth: From Goldwater legend to Reagan mystique.” Communication Studies 42.3 (1991): 295–308. 41. Grant, Otis B. “President Ronald Reagan and the African-American community: Harmful stereotyping and games of choice in market-oriented policy reform.” TM Cooley L. Rev. 25 (2008): 57. 42. Shull, Steven A. A kinder, gentler racism?: The Reagan-Bush civil rights legacy. Routledge, 2017. 43. Snell, Donald D. “Black spokesman or republican pawn.” Negro History Bulletin 32.7 (1969): 6. 44. Kotlowski, Dean J. “Nixon’s southern strategy revisited.”  Journal of Policy History 10.2 (1998): 207–238. 45. Perkins, Robert L., ed. The concept of Irony. Vol. 2. Mercer University Press, 2001. 46. Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. WW Norton & Company, 1960. 47. Hesse, Barnor. “Im/plausible deniability: Racism’s conceptual double bind.” Social Identities 10.1 (2004): 9–29. 48. Schulman, Sarah. My American history: Lesbian and gay life during the Reagan and Bush years. Routledge, 2018. 49. MacKinnon, Kenneth.  The politics of popular representation: Reagan, Thatcher, AIDS, and the movies. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992. 50. Hancock, Ange-Marie. The politics of disgust: The public identity of the welfare queen. NYU Press, 2004. 51. Gomer, Justin, and Christopher Petrella. “How the Reagan administration stoked fears of anti-white racism.” The Washington Post (2017). 52. Edgar, David. “Reagan’s hidden agenda: Racism and the new American right.” Race & Class 22.3 (1981): 221–238.

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Chapter 9

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Conclusion

A central argument of this book has been that a close look at Generation X culture can help to provide insight into our contemporary culture. Not only did the absence of parents allow young adults to spend endless hours in front of the TV screen, but the media began to focus on adolescent culture as these watchers were themselves infuenced by this popular culture. Young people not only wanted their MTV, but MTV also wanted them.1 As a demographic with seemingly endless time and disposable income, mass popular culture began to cater to the teenage desire for instant pleasure. Moreover, as a mode of escape from reality and feelings of shame, guilt, and anxiety, entertainment became the new drug of choice offering pleasure and release.2 Sacks reveals in his examination of Gen X students in college that the new entertainment subject is one where consumerism reshapes all past institutions. For example, by allowing students to evaluate their teachers, while they demanded high grades and entertainment, these schools fipped the relationships between youths and adults and experts and amateurs. In an early glimpse of our current social order, Sacks is astounded that a student would covertly watch TV in class. Now, it is not uncommon for students to openly turn to their phones and laptops when a teacher is addressing them.3 Part of this lack of respect for traditional authority fgures is the result of a culture industry catering to an unsupervised youth demographic. In this democratization of the leisure class, middle-class adolescents shape and are shaped by an entertainment system structured by the combination of art and commerce. Fueled by the breakup of the nuclear family and the rise of the consumer economy, Gen X youth break down the modern distinction between work and pleasure as they invaded education with the demand to be entertained.4 81

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In response to this cultural shift, one of the main ways that we have seen Baby Boomer parents and adults react is by conforming to the demands of the children from a position of cynical distance. As Sacks reports, he knows it is wrong to give high grades for low effort, but everyone else is doing it, and he is afraid of losing his job if he does not comply. It appears that all of the faculty know the system is corrupt, but they also know that they proft from its corruption. Like the use of student evaluations that everyone knows are not real judges of faculty performance, grades themselves become an arbitrary marker of a social negotiation. Moreover, in following the self-esteem parenting movement, some teachers believe that their most important job is to keep their customers happy as they offer praise without criticism or standards.5 This system, then, socializes the students and the faculty to be amoral opportunists, since they have to learn to succeed in a system in which they no longer believe. Like Donald Trump, the entertainment subject is one who is focused on the pure pursuit of pleasure and personal gain without any concern for the feelings of others.6 This breakdown of social trust and the lost investment in social institutions reveals how the advancement of the neoliberal restructuring of public institutions was frst instigated by the liberal post-postmodern combination of entertainment and consumer capitalism. Within this cultural order, the social movements of the 1960s for free love and peace have been repackaged as products for diversion and consumption.7 As Baudrillard argues, politics has become art, and art has become business, and therefore, the modern separations between capitalism and public institutions have been lost.8 In terms of higher education, Gen X students demanded and received schools that combined together instruction with food courts, recreation centers, entertainment hubs, and diverse extra-curricular activities.9 Lost in a sea of competing interests, the new multiversity has no core values or focus.10 It is thus no surprise that a belief in moral relativism is generated by institutions that try to be all things for all people. It is also not surprising that many professors would give up on trying to defend or even defne academic standards. In fact, one part of the story Sacks leaves out is the replacement of secure, tenured professors with part-time faculty lacking any type of job protections. These contingent faculty are judged primarily by student evaluations, and so they are subjected to the tyranny of the student customers.11 Like workers in the gig economy, they have to suffer the fate of anonymous criticisms and performance ratings. Since these teachers know that the best way to get good evaluations is to give high grades and avoid correcting students, there is no place left for a careful assessment of educational quality. Moreover, even though many students are disengaged from their work, they know that they need to get high grades in order to go to graduate school or to get a good job, and so they compete in a system in which they do not believe.12 Furthermore,

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as Sacks documents, when these students feel they are not getting what they want, they often protest through passive-aggressive gestures as they pressure teachers to conform to their demands.

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IPHONE, THEREFORE, I AM This invasion of education by the entertainment subject frst becomes visible during Generation X, but it has become ubiquitous in the twenty-frst century. As people walk around staring into their phones or focused on their laptops, we witness a radical transformation in the relationship between the public and the private.13 Any public space can be privatized by individuals sticking in their earbuds or focusing on their text messages. As an escape from external reality and internal thoughts, these new devices offer instant access to pleasure without delay or effort. From the perspective of this book, this new cultural ordering of subjectivity has its roots in the successful spread of entertainment capital to all aspects of human life during the time when Gen X students frst started to enter higher education. As products of the MTV revolution, Generation X adolescents become a powerful force because they helped to fuel an economic machine transitioning from selling durable goods to commodifying experiences for entertainment and self-recognition.14 Caught in an endless feedback loop, the adolescents shaped the culture and the culture shaped them. However, what in part differentiates Gen X culture from our own is that they still had a sense of the tension between the individual and the social. As we have seen in several movies and songs, Gen X subjects are often divided between the pressure conform and the desire for authenticity. For instance, Cobain is conficted, Ferris seeks to avoid the principal and his parents, Lelaina wants to be an artist but is tempted to sell out, and Mookie is caught between protesting and getting paid. These conficts and tensions have largely evaporated in a society tuned into the privatized realms of their phones and laptops. Locked into their echo chambers and flter bubbles, the automodern youth are no longer as conficted and divided; they simply experience their conditioning as a form of freedom.15 It is thus the tension and pathos of Gen X culture that makes it so instructive for us. In examining this cultural period, we gain a sense of the roots of our own submission to the entertainment pleasure principle. As Todd McGowan argues in his The End of Dissatisfaction? previous social orders tried to control people by prohibiting access to enjoyment, but in our current consumer culture, individuals are controlled through pleasure.16 Not only is entertainment immersive and addictive, but it also becomes compulsive and self-destructive.17 Instead of asking people to sacrifce their enjoyment for

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the good of society, the new entertainment subject is commanded to enjoy in private (3). McGowan argues that this turn to the enjoying self undermines the postmodern quest for social justice (6). In the place of individual pleasure conficting with social restraint, for the entertainment subject, society is centered on the production and consumption of pleasure (7). Thus, while the initial stage of modern capitalism required the subject to delay gratifcation and seek future rewards through hard work and piety, the contemporary subject is called through advertisements and popular culture to enjoy (31).18 In fact, once the mass production of durable goods makes these necessary objects available to a large segment of the population, people have to be convinced that they desire what they do not need. McGowan highlights how the new global capitalist order helps to fuel the demand for enjoyment by providing easy credit to a populace that may be consuming beyond its means (34).19 In this structure, instead of the superego acting as a prohibitor of impulses, the super-ego now commands the subject to enjoy (35). However, this internal authority is coupled with a calling into question of all past forms of traditional authority; not only does the patriarchal father retreat, but all other social authorities, like the priest, the president, or the professor, become disempowered (42).20 In referring the example of the flm Dead Poet’s Society, McGowan highlights how the teacher portrayed by Robin Williams renounces his role of preaching about obedience and instead pushes students to “fnd their own path to enjoyment” (47). Moreover, this new form of an authority fgure is shown to be one who is also focusing on pursuing individual enjoyment, and thus transgression is called for from above. This explanation helps us to see why some supporters of Trump may like that he brags about his wealth and sexually assaulting women; as a father of enjoyment, Trump replaces social authority with the pleasure principle.21 Part of this emphasis on enjoyment over prohibition relates to the dominance of images over the printed word in contemporary culture.22 McGowan argues that images of total enjoyment help to fuel consumer culture and the entertainment subject (60). As we saw in the analysis of MTV’s infuence on Gen X culture, the style of fast-editing and stylized representations helps to replace traditional narrative order with quick images of pleasure. Like Tarantino’s privileging of art over reality, the new aesthetic order is centered on the experiencing of decontextualized representations that have been saturated with enjoyment. In referring to Postman, McGowan traces this new mode of representation to the way advertising has switched from representing the value of a product to creating an image of pleasure (64).23 The power of images then overwhelms any other mode of persuasion and argumentation (64). Of course, this transition poses a major problem for our systems of education, which are still largely based on print culture.24

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Even more threatening to our modern educational structures is the increasing effectiveness of cyberspace and virtual reality to simulate the real. From this perspective, the images delivered by MTV were quaint in relation to the power of new media technologies to offer immersive experiences.25 McGowan points out that in virtual reality, I no longer have to deal with dissatisfaction or the resistances of others and society; I can simply plug into my own desired reality and access immediate pleasure (70). Not only can I download a perfect partner, but I can also change my own identity, and therefore I am able to escape from both my real self and the real other (70). Similar to a drug addiction, virtual reality provides instant, immediate access to pleasure and an escape from reality.26 For Generation X adolescents, their access to media pleasure was severely limited compared to our world where people carry in their pockets immersive media devices. While Sacks complains about the small incursion of devices into his classes, he does not anticipate how ubiquitous these technologies would become. It is therefore increasingly diffcult to maintain control over the transmission of knowledge when students not only have instant access to diversion, but they also can access most of the knowledge that has ever existed in the world. Perhaps the only reasons these institutions of higher education still survive is that they maintain a monopoly over credentialing for future employment. By closely looking at the effects of Gen X students on college culture, Sacks was able to anticipate some of these transformations enabled by the Web and portable media devices. For Sacks’ Gen X students, they had to seek out entertainment and push their teachers to be more enjoyable, but for the contemporary subject, objects of pleasure are immediately available on our screens, which we control and curate. McGowan cites Baudrillard to point out that what is lost in this new entertainment system is the distance between the subject and the object (75). Since virtually everything we want can be presented on the surface of our screens, we experience a world of total presence with no possibility of loss or transcendence (76). Therefore, if objects used to derive their value from their distance and unavailability, for the person immersed in media pleasure, it is hard to say what is valuable (76). A clear example of what McGowan and Baudrillard are talking about in relation to the easy availability of the object can be seen in pornography, which has become more easily accessible to people all around the world.27 As Baudrillard insists, when everything becomes visible, there is no longer any reason to hide anything, and every representation thus becomes an obscenity of transparency (77).28 Like the cynical amoral opportunist who no longer even tries to tell the truth or hide his manipulations, in the culture of the entertainment subject, all distance and loss is evaded. As we saw in Reality Bites, reality TV participates in the breakdown of the public and private by eliminating the difference between the media and

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everyday experience. For McGowan, this mode of entertainment allows us to focus on the hidden aspects of people’s lives and therefore participates in the total transparency of part of human existence that were once secret or at least excluded from the public eye (79). However, this desire to see everything always ultimately fails, and so we continue to look for the hidden cause of our desire, which only pushes us to desire more (79). In this structure, mass media is positioned to be both the problem and the solution. Since language and representation can never fully grasp the unknowable real, the endless quest for the media to become reality itself leaves us wanting.

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BAUDRILLARD’S BLACK HOLE McGowan insists that when we lose the old social order based on prohibition, we also lose the distance between the subject and its object, and this lack of distinction undermines any attempt at critical distance (95). It is thus not surprising that many academic thinkers are turning against critique as they celebrate the experience of readers to make their own use of cultural representations.29 For Baudrillard, what we are really experiencing is the success of the masses to replace previous meanings with the pure ecstasy of communication.30 Like people spending hours clicking on links or text messaging their friends, the viral culture of the masses embodies Nirvana’s claim that the audience is acting “stupid and contagious.” Moreover, in a culture of fashion and planned obsolescence, difference is replaced with indifference.31 Thus, Baudrillard’s In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities affrms that the power of the masses derives from its ability to neutralize all power and representation (3).32 The entertainment subject, then, is a black hole that “engulfs the social” and implodes cultural meaning (4). Lost in infnite networks of information and connection, we endlessly click, surf, and text as we proclaim that our activities only serve to produce meaningless enjoyment.33 What many people dislike about Baudrillard is his total nihilism, but this denial of meaning is only a refection of the entertainment subject.34 By refusing any form of transcendence, we are dominated by the present and live without hope for a different future or a meaningful past. Baudrillard posits that all of our new communication technologies are not actually helping us to communicate; instead our devices often circulate meaningless messages and information (10). For him, the culture of the spectacle represents a fascination with images and simulation that destroy meaning and difference (11). In the face of political and educational pressures, the masses simply respond with passivity and indifference (13). Within this dark vision, we see the roots of the Gen X students who sat at the back of Sacks’ classes and refused to participate or care. However, this resistance of the masses is neither political

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nor social; rather, the black hole of the masses simply refuses progress or enlightenment (15). Baudrillard believes that people now know that politics is based on the pure game of signs and manipulation, and so they have become as cynical as the politicians they reject (16). Baudrillard also insists that the masses no longer represent themselves, but instead, they are constantly being surveyed and polled (20). It is interesting to note that in Sacks’ discussions of student evaluations, he fnds this same effort at surveying the masses to get their opinions.35 The paradox is that this catering to the masses results in the masses swallowing up all cultural authority and meaning in a viral spread of indifference. Even with all of this surveying, the masses remain silent and passive as they refuse any higher truth or social purpose (22). In the urge to represent the masses, one ends up only with meaningless statistics and correlations. Like grades and evaluations in higher education, the desire to give everything a numerical representation only serves to separate representation from meaning.36 As the saying goes, not everything that can be measured has value, and not everything valuable can be measured.37 Similar to the students’ obsession with earning high grades, in the dominance of the exchange value, learning is replaced with earning. While universities seek to outcompete each other in the rankings systems, cynical conformity reigns in a shared participation in a system in which no one believes.38 Gen X students, then, did not change the world on their own when they went to college; rather, these students brought with them the dominance of amoral opportunism and the meaningless enjoyment of the entertainment subject. Furthermore, the scenes Sacks describes reveal the tension between the older modern belief in knowledge, meaning, and collective institutions and the automodern nihilism of the liberated subject. While Marx believed that the power of exchange value to replace all previous values would let people fnally see their reality for the frst time, what really happened was that not only were the masses freed from religion, monarchy, and feudalism, but they also freed themselves from meaning itself. Perhaps my students are correct when the claim that they all of the media they consume is just a meaningless escape. Baudrillard adds that in the new culture of hyper-conformity, the masses are able to absorb all media as the difference between subjects and objects is dissolved (30). Not only does one become a commodity when one sells one’s labor on the market, but one lives vicariously through the objects one watches on one’s screens.39 Identifcation and empathy thus eliminate the distinction between the self and the other as viral media spreads throughout the masses without any resistance or sustained meaning. In a context of instant gratifcation, there is no thought of the future or investment of the past; life becomes a series of moments and experiences for the entertainment subject. According

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to Baudrillard, in the age of mass media and advertising, the medium is the message as the masses trade in critical refection for meaningless fascination (35).40 Importantly, for Baudrillard, sign value has replaced use value and exchange value; what people want are the signs of status and conspicuous consumption (45).41 From this perspective, the asocial masses cannot be educated or socialized because they are a black hole bent on separating signs from referents and meanings, and in their hunger to consume everything, they destroy the signifcance of anything (46). This dark vision of our present pushes Baudrillard to make the controversial claim that terrorism is simply the political version of the masses’ desire for escape and media enjoyment (50). Since terrorist acts rely on the media to spread images of violence, this viral contagion comes with no explicit message or demand (50).42 From this perspective, the terroristic act injects a bomb of meaninglessness into a meaningless system as it is indifferent to whom it targets or whom it affects: it seeks to circulate fascination and panic in the media system through a series of uncontrollable chain reactions (51). Baudrillard posits that terrorism is “senseless and indeterminant like the system it combats, into which it insinuates itself” (52). As an extreme form of indifference and irrationality, the terroristic event mimics the indifference of the masses and the circulatory power of the media.

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RETURN TO THE UNIVERSAL While for Baudrillard, terrorism refects the anonymous global order, which treats everyone and everything with indifference, McGowan seeks to point to a way out of this global nihilism by returning to the modern notion of universality. Drawing from the work of Slavoj Zizek, Frederic Jameson, and Hegel, McGowan posits that one reason why we cannot have a critical perspective on our current world is that we are unable to comprehend the totality of global capitalism (95). Following Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping, he argues that conspiracy theories are failed attempts at understanding the world from a universal perspective (96).43 Although these paranoid delusions construct a false picture of reality, they do help us to see why we need to learn to connect together the different events and experiences that are fragmented by our media culture and our demand for enjoyment. Since in the older culture of prohibition, distance is created between the subject and the object, as one is forced to delay gratifcation and separate images of pleasure from the reality of their existence, critical distance can only occur if we remove ourselves from our immediate immersion in media and pleasure: “Interpretation requires distance and separation, and the society of commanded enjoyment

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allow us neither” (95). In other words, in order to understand our globalized world, we need a universal perspective derived from distance, but our contemporary entertainment culture blocks this mode of comprehension. McGowan adds that since global capitalism is a totalizing system beyond the grasp of our individual consciousness, it becomes diffcult for us to think about this totality (96). Like the conspiracy theorists, we need to fnd a way to connect all of the dots and see how different events relate to each other, but we have to embark in this process of enlightenment without relying on magical thinking.44 Moreover, we also have to avoid the current political trend of rejecting universal perspective by focusing on particular issues and identities (97). Thus, against the current embrace of post-Marxist identity politics, McGowan stresses the need for a global vision of a globalized world. As Steven Pinker argues in his book Enlightenment Now, from a global perspective, people have never longer lived longer, healthier, freer, happier lives.45 Pinker contends that the major causes for this global progress have been the universal discourses of science, reason, and humanism, and he traces these institutions to modern European Enlightenment thinkers. Although many have argued that the Enlightenment was shaped by the values and interests of white European property-owning males, a key idea of this cultural movement is the notion that we need to affrm a bias against bias as we seek to institute impartial judges in science and democratic law. Of course, these ideals of universality, equality, and neutrality can never be fully attained, and yet they set the standards for our modern institutions. It is important to point out that universities are themselves institutions based on universality because on an ideal level, they are dedicated to the pursuit of truth wherever it leads. This means that the scientists cannot be guided by self-interest or cultural bias, and yet this principle of higher education is rarely expressed or defended. However, I would like to argue that one of the ways of overcoming the nihilism shaping the entertainment subject is to return to the modern Enlightenment values of universality, objectivity, neutrality, and empiricism.46 Part of this process means a privileging of facts over opinion as we affrm that our knowledge is always incomplete and a work in progress. Furthermore, as we defend and expand universal human rights, we need to promote the principle of equality under the law. Importantly, this universal global perspective requires affrming the modern separation of science and capitalism on the one hand, and capitalism and democracy on the other hand. Just as universities need to base scientifc research on empirical experimentation and not on the proft motive, legal and political systems should not be shaped by the power of the wealthy and the lack of power of those without resources. In trying to separate democracy from capitalism, we run into the way that the private and public realms are being combined by the entertainment

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subject. Just as McGowan argues that we can have no critical thinking without separation and distance, we cannot defend public institutions if we do not separate private interest from social institutions. Although higher education would appear to be the place where this defense of modern universal democracy and science should occur, what we saw in Sacks’ description of college was the way the positioning of students as consumers of an educational product has undermined the roles played by separation, impartiality, and universality. One solution then is to eliminate student evaluations and maintain standards, but this effort is itself rendered problematic by the role grades play in shaping the students and the priorities of the institutions. In higher education, grades act as a form of capital that students seek to gain as a reward for the completion of their courses.47 Instead of being a means (assessment) to an end (learning), grades become the goal of the students, and when they do not get what they want, they turn on their teachers and give them bad evaluations and resist the faculty member’s educational efforts. The only solution then is to eliminate grades and fnd another model of representing the students work to future employers or graduate schools. Luckily with the Web, it is possible to simply place all of a student’s work online and let others determine its value or level of mastery. In terms of global politics, we need to return to the modern notion of basing public policy on actual facts and transparent research and experimentation instead of ideology and self-interest. Once again, the Web may be part of the solution: if people continue to get most of their information online, then there will be less of a need for expensive television commercials, and this will reduce the need to turn to wealthy donors to fnance campaigns. It is also essential to realize that since we live in a globalized world with a global economy and shared environment, we have to move beyond the confnes of the nation-state. By taking a more universal perspective on politics and economics, we can reverse the current trend of nationalist movements. Of course, none of these needed changes will happen if people become so immersed in their entertainment devices that they simply choose diversion over reality. As virtual reality technologies become even more effective, this threat to global progress only increases. We therefore need to treat media consumption as a public health issue as we seek to restrain our desire for immediate access to gratifcation. This process will take a concerted effort of parents, educators, and other public leaders. For instance, my daughter’s public school has decided to put all of the school’s books and assignment on iPads, which each student is required to use on a daily basis. One problem with this technological solution to expensive textbooks is that the students now have to use a device that includes instant access to entertainment. While in the modern world, work and leisure were often clearly separated, what we fnd in our current automodern culture is that this separation has vanished. Requiring

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students to do all of their work on iPads thus simply furthers the lack of distinction between education and entertainment as students have to show great restraint in order to focus on their work and not their instant access to pleasure.48 I believe that parents have to work with their schools to fnd ways to restrict these devices to only providing access to educational materials. For Sacks, when Generation X went to college, they changed the system by motivating the faculty through student evaluations to give up all standards and become entertainers and hand-holding facilitators, yet what he fails to point out is that due to the increasing reduction of faculty who are eligible for job security, this problem has only become worse since non-tenure-track faculty are hired and rehired mostly through the use of student evaluations. It should be clear that we need to change this system as we make these faulty positions more secure and stop using student evaluations as a method of assessment. Moreover, we have to resist the desire to turn to technology to make higher education more effective and effcient. Once universities and colleges decide to put all of their courses and content online, they give into the unrestricted desires of the entertainment subject.49 As I have tried to demonstrate throughout this book, we need to develop a way of teaching critical media literacy so that we can help students take a more thoughtful approach to their consumption of entertainment.50 Part of this process requires simply stopping the fast fow of images so that one can learn how to read these representations like one reads a diffcult book. We also have to help students contextualized the fragmented bits of information they consume through their media technologies. Similar to the way I have placed Gen X media productions in a historical and cultural context, it is necessary to provide a critical perspective by making meaningless entertainment meaningful. Although Baudrillard believes that there is no way of stopping the masses from absorbing everything into a black hole of indifference, the teaching of critical media literacy can counter the process of immediate gratifcation by slowing down the speed of information. In making entertainment a central subject of college, we can begin the process of rethinking how subjectivity is subjected to media technologies.

NOTES 1. Tannenbaum, Rob, and Craig Marks. I want my MTV: The uncensored story of the music video revolution. Penguin, 2011. 2. Shusterman, Richard. “Entertainment: A question for aesthetics.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 43.3 (2003): 289-307. 3. Giurgiu, Luminita, and Ghita Barsan. “The impact of iphone in education.” Buletin Stiintifc 13.2 (2008).

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4. Lury, Celia. Consumer culture. Rutgers University Press, 1996. 5. Lukianoff, Greg, and Jonathan Haidt. “The coddling of the American mind.” The Atlantic 316.2 (2015): 42–52. 6. Wilson, Rick. Everything Trump touches dies: A Republican strategist gets real about the worst president ever. Simon and Schuster, 2018. 7. Brooks, D. Bobo in paradise: Where does the new elite come from. Trans. from English by D. Simanovsky. Moscow: Ad Marginem Press, 2013. 8. Baudrillard, Jean. The transparency of evil: Essays on extreme phenomena. Verso, 1993. 9. Samuels, Robert. Why public higher education should be free: how to decrease cost and increase quality at American universities. Rutgers University Press, 2013. 10. Krücken, Georg, Anna Kosmützky, and Marc Torka. Towards a multiversity?: Universities between global trends and national traditions. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007. 11. Benjamin, Ernst. “How over-reliance on contingent appointments diminishes faculty involvement in student learning.” Change 1995 (2002): 4–10. 12. Samuels, Robert. Educating inequality: Beyond the political myths of higher education and the job market. Taylor & Francis, 2017. 13. Goggin, Gerard. “The iPhone and communication.” Studying mobile media. Routledge, 2012. 19–35. 14. Rifkin, Jeremy. The age of access: The new culture of hypercapitalism. Penguin, 2001. 15. Samuels, Robert. “Auto-modernity after postmodernism: Autonomy and automation in culture, technology, and education.” Digital youth, innovation, and the unexpected (2008). 16. McGowan, Todd. The End of dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the emerging society of enjoyment. SUNY Press, 2012. 2. 17. Hawi, Nazir S., and Maya Samaha. “The relations among social media addiction, self-esteem, and life satisfaction in university students.” Social Science Computer Review 35.5 (2017): 576–586. 18. Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy your symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out. Taylor & Francis, 2008. 19. Hake, Eric R., and Martin Bruce King. “The Veblenian credit economy and the corporatization of American meatpacking.” Journal of Economic Issues 36.2 (2002): 495–505. 20. Flisfeder, Matthew. “Postmodern Marxism Today: Jameson, Žižek, and the Demise of Symbolic Effciency.” International Journal of Žižek Studies 13.1 (2019). 21. Foster, Hal. “Père Trump.” October (2017): 3–6. 22. Boorstin, Daniel Joseph. The image: A guide to pseudo-events in America. Vintage, 1992. 23. Postman, Neil. Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. Penguin, 2006. 24. Ohmann, Richard. Politics of knowledge: The commercialization of the university, the professions, and print culture. Wesleyan University Press, 2003.

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25. Plusquellec, M. “Are virtual worlds a threat to the mental health of children and adolescents?”  Archives de pediatrie: organe offciel de la Societe francaise de pediatrie 7.2 (2000): 209–210. 26. Dryer, Joy A., and Ruth M. Lijtmae. “Cyber-sex as twilight zone between virtual reality and virtual fantasy: Creative play space or destructive addiction?” The Psychoanalytic Review 94.1 (2007): 39–61. 27. Wondracek, Gilbert, et al. “Is the internet for porn? An insight into the online adult industry.” WEIS (2010). 28. Sobchack, Vivian. “Baudrillard’s obscenity.” Science Fiction Studies (1991): 327–329. 29. Felski, Rita. The limits of critique. University of Chicago Press, 2015. 30. Baudrillard, Jean, and Sylvère Lotringer. “The ecstasy of communication.” (1988). 31. Bulow, Jeremy. “An economic theory of planned obsolescence.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 101.4 (1986): 729–749. 32. Baudrillard, Jean, et al. “In the shadow of the silent majorities.” (2007). 33. Žižek, Slavoj. For they know not what they do: Enjoyment as a political factor. Verso, 2002. 34. Rojek, Chris, Mr Bryan S. Turner, and Bryan Turner. Forget Baudrillard? Routledge, 2002. 35. Zuboff, Shoshana. “Big other: Surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization.” Journal of Information Technology 30.1 (2015): 75–88. 36. Giora, Rachel, et al. “Weapons of mass distraction: Optimal innovation and pleasure ratings.” Metaphor and Symbol 19.2 (2004): 115–141. 37. McKee, Martin. “Not everything that counts can be counted; not everything that can be counted counts.” Bmj 328.7432 (2004): 153. 38. Ehrenberg, Ronald G. “Reaching for the brass ring: The US News & World Report rankings and competition.” The Review of Higher Education 26.2 (2003): 145–162. 39. Green, Melanie C., Timothy C. Brock, and Geoff F. Kaufman. “Understanding media enjoyment: The role of transportation into narrative worlds.” Communication Theory 14.4 (2004): 311–327. 40. McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. “The medium is the message.” New York 123 (1967): 126–128. 41. Kroker, Arthur. “Baudrillard’s Marx.” Theory, Culture & Society 2.3 (1985): 69–83. 42. Baudrillard, Jean. The spirit of terrorism and other essays. Verso Trade, 2013. 43. Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive mapping.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Macmillan Education UK, 1988. 347–357. 44. Goertzel, Ted. “Belief in conspiracy theories.” Political Psychology (1994): 731–742. 45. Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment now: The case for reason, science, humanism, and progress. Penguin, 2018. 46. Habermas, Jürgen, and Seyla Ben-Habib. “Modernity versus postmodernity.” New German Critique 22 (1981): 3–14.

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47. Kohn, Alfe. Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes. Houghton Miffin Harcourt, 1999. 48. Griffths, Mark. “Does Internet and computer ‘addiction’ exist? Some case study evidence.” CyberPsychology and Behavior 3.2 (2000): 211–218. 49. Krause, Steven D., and C. Lowe. “After the invasion: What’s next for MOOCs.” Invasion of the MOOCs: The promises and perils of massive open online courses (2014): 223–228. 50. Kellner, Douglas, and Jeff Share. “Toward critical media literacy: Core concepts, debates, organizations, and policy.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 26.3 (2005): 369–386.

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Index

addiction, 2, 18, 28, 53, 56, 85, 92–94 adolescence, 1, 2, 19, 20, 24, 25, 28, 29, 31, 36, 41, 42, 45, 46, 49, 56, 81 Adorno, Theodor W., 3, 28, 55, 56, 63 advertising, 9, 18, 19, 28, 67–71, 77, 84 aesthetics, 28, 51, 52, 56–58, 60, 62, 91 affect (emotion), 14, 19, 21, 25–27, 29, 31, 33, 36, 55, 68 African American, 3, 55, 57, 58, 63, 75, 79 AIDS, 25, 37, 39, 76, 78, 79 Alexander, Christopher S., and James M. Sysko, 15 Alleva, Richard, 38 Alsen, Eberhard, 3 ambivalence, 2, 23, 24, 41, 59, 78 Ames, Morgan G., 77 amoral, 42, 45, 47, 53, 82, 85, 87 anonymity, 10, 11, 16, 82, 88 anxiety, 3, 12, 45, 70, 75, 76, 81 Armstrong, S., 63 Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen, 56 art, 2, 19, 24, 27, 31, 32, 34, 37–39, 49–52, 59–62, 81, 82, 84, 85 Asim, Jabari, 63 assimilation, 57, 59 authenticity, 2, 23, 28, 32, 35, 37, 43, 44, 49–51, 83 authority, 1, 2, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 23, 35, 41, 42, 45, 66, 81, 84, 87

automodernity, 3, 31, 32, 63, 66, 83, 87, 90 Azerrad, Michael, 28 baby boomer, 2, 5, 6, 8, 12–14, 18, 27, 31, 32, 34–37, 43, 46, 82 backlash, 71, 76, 78 Backstrom, Charles H., and Leonard S. Robins, 39 Balducci, Anthony, 16 Baudrillard, Jean, 14, 20, 21, 28, 29, 35, 39, 43, 48, 52, 56, 82, 85–89, 91–93 Baxter, Richard L., et al., 29 Benjamin, Ernst, 16 Berlin, Isaiah, 55 Bible, The, 53 Biressi, Anita, and Heather Nunn, 38 black, 53, 57–63, 75, 79 Bloom, Peter, 29 Boorstin, Daniel Joseph, 77, 92 Booth, Wayne C., 38 Breggin, Peter R., and Ginger Ross Breggin, 29 Brook, Eric, 56 Brooks, David, 15, 92 Brown, B. Bradford, Donna R. Clasen, and Sue A. Eicher, 15 Brown, Lisa, Amy Haviland, and Sherri Morris, 3 103

104

Index

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Burlingame, William V., 28 Buschman, John, 30 Cameron, Judy, and W. David Pierce, 15 capitalism, 15, 20, 21, 28, 29, 43, 52, 67, 82, 84, 88, 89, 92, 93 Carew, Anthony, 55 Carter, Jimmy, 72 Cashmore, Ellis, 63 Cavanagh, Shannon E., 28 Centra, John A, 16 Chang, Jeff, 63 Christensen, Jerome, 63 Clarke, Simon, 47, 63 Cobain, Kurt, 17, 19–29, 31, 83 Collins, Jim, 39 Collins, Sue, 39 “Come as you are,” 22–23 commodifcation, 24–27, 29, 32, 34, 38, 47, 72, 83, 87 Conrad, M., 55 consumerism, 1, 5, 6, 8, 9, 14, 18, 20, 24, 28, 31–33, 35, 36, 38, 44, 46, 47, 49, 59, 67–69, 74, 77, 81–84, 90, 92 contingent faculty, 16, 82, 92 coolness, 14, 21, 32–35, 38, 46 Covid-19, 54 culture industry, 2, 3, 8, 18–20, 24, 25, 27, 31, 33, 34, 37, 38, 44–45, 47, 49, 50, 52, 58, 59, 61–63, 81 Curnutt, Hugh, 39 cynical conformity, 9, 10, 14, 18, 22, 27, 31, 37, 43, 87 cynicism, 2, 8–11, 14–16, 18, 22, 27, 29, 31, 36, 39, 41–45, 47, 82, 85, 87 Dead Poet’s Society, 84 Debord, Guy, 39 De Castella, Krista, Don Byrne, and Martin Covington, 15 democracy, 6, 7, 10, 11, 34, 81, 89, 90 Denisoff, R. Serge, 28 depression, 3, 21, 24, 45

desire, 2, 5, 7, 8, 10, 13, 14, 18–20, 22, 24, 28, 33, 35, 54, 58–62, 65, 67, 69, 71, 81, 83, 85–88, 90, 91 Dickinson, Kay, 28 disengagement, 6, 7, 9, 15, 33, 41, 44, 82 divorce, 1, 8, 33, 36, 39, 46 Do the Right Thing, 2, 57–63 drugs, 18, 19, 22, 23, 29, 69, 75 Dryer, Joy A., and Ruth M. Lijtmae, 93 Edgar, David, 79 ego ideal, 45, 70 Elhai, Jon D., et al., 3 enjoyment, 3, 6, 7, 13, 15, 18, 22, 28, 29, 31, 41–43, 45, 47, 52–55, 58, 62, 68–70, 72, 83, 84, 86–88, 92, 93 enlightenment, The, 16, 63, 87, 89, 93 Enlightenment Now, 16, 89, 93 entertainment subject, the, 1–3, 5–7, 9, 13, 17, 18, 27, 34, 38, 42, 44, 47, 49, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58, 62, 65–69, 71–74, 76–77, 81–87, 89–91 equality, 12, 15, 39, 57, 58, 75, 76, 89, 92 Evans, Thomas W., 78 expertise, 8, 10–12, 16, 70, 81 Facebook, 34, 45 fantasy, 37, 44, 55, 57, 75, 93 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 2, 41–48, 50, 83 “Fight the Power,” 60–61 Ford, Gerald, 72 freedom, 8, 9, 35, 41, 42, 45, 50, 52, 54, 59, 60, 72, 74–75, 79, 83 Freud, Sigmund, 5–6, 10, 14, 16–19, 22, 26, 28, 30, 48, 51, 56, 68–71, 75–79 gender, 13, 19, 28 Generation X, 1–3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 13, 14, 17, 19, 31, 33, 36, 38, 46, 49, 56, 58, 65, 67–68, 81, 83, 85, 91 globalization, 21, 35, 84, 88–90, 92

Index

Goldwater, Barry, 73, 78, 79 grading, 5, 7–9, 11, 12, 15, 16, 81, 82, 87, 90 Green Day, 27 guilt, 12, 22, 42, 45, 51, 58, 70, 71, 76, 81

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Hawke, Ethan, 32, 38 Heath, Joseph, and Andrew Potter, 30 Hennion, Antoine, Cecile Meadel, and Geoffrey Bowker, 28 Heywood, Leslie, and Jennifer Drake, 15 higher education, 1, 3, 5–15, 27, 31, 33, 35–37, 67, 81, 85, 87, 90, 91 Hip Hop, 58, 60, 63 homophobia, 56, 71, 76 Hooper, Giles, 28 Howe, Neil, 15 humor, 3, 7, 14, 32, 41, 51, 56, 68, 72–76, 78 Huxley, Aldous, 66, 77 hypnosis, 69 idealization, 36, 45–46, 56, 58, 59, 62, 66 identifcation, 3, 10, 25, 36, 54, 58, 69, 70, 87 identity politics, 2, 13, 57, 60, 63 ideology, 2, 13, 22, 31, 33, 43–44, 48, 65, 68, 71–73, 78, 90 immersion, 1, 41, 42, 44, 48, 68, 83, 85, 88, 90 “In Bloom,” 24–25, 29 individualism, 2, 6, 9, 10, 18, 22, 31–34, 38, 41, 43, 44, 49–50, 52–55, 70–72, 78, 83, 84, 89 inertia, 6 iPhones (smart phones), 2, 3, 7, 51, 65, 66, 77, 81, 83, 91, 92 irony, 2, 11, 20–22, 27–29, 32–36, 38, 39, 41–43, 47, 49–53, 56, 59, 60, 62, 74, 75, 77, 79

105

Jameson, Fredric, 15, 93 Johnson, Valen E., 15 Jones, Steve, 28 Kant, Immanuel, 49, 55 Karp, H. B., and Danilo Sirias, 3 Keen, Andrew, 16 Kezar, Adrianna, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott, 16 Khantzian, Edward J., 28 Kiefer, Sarah M., and Joy Huanhuan Wang, 38 King, Martin Luther, 61 Kirp, David L., 15 Kohn, Alfe, 15, 94 Kooijman, Jaap, 29 Labaree, David F., 15 Label, D. G. C., 29 Lacan, Jacques, 28, 29, 45, 48, 70, 78, 92 Laing, Dave, 30 Lakes, Richard, 30 laptops, 66, 81, 83 Lechuga, Anthony, 30 Lee, Spike, 2, 57, 58, 62, 63 liberalism, 3, 57–59, 82 libertarianism, 3, 65, 71–72, 74–76, 78 “Lithium,” 23, 29 Lugovaya, Julia A., Marina G. Yakovleva, and Natalia F. Fedotova, 29 Lukianoff, Greg, and Jonathan Haidt, 15, 92 Magill, R. Jay, 28, 29, 32, 33, 38, 42, 43, 47, 49–50, 52 Malcolm X, 61 Martin, Michael, 29 Marx, Karl, 21, 29, 43, 48, 52, 87, 89, 92, 93 mass media, 1–3, 6–8, 13, 15, 18–20, 22, 23, 25, 27–29, 31–35, 37–39,

106

Index

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41–42, 44, 45, 47–51, 53–58, 62, 63, 65–69, 71, 77, 81, 85–86, 88, 90–94 Maxmen, Jerrold S., Sidney H. Kennedy, and Roger S. McIntyre, 29 McComiskey, Bruce, 14 McCrindle, Mark, 38 McGowan, Todd, 28, 29, 52, 54–55, 83–86, 88–90, 92 McKee, Martin, 93 McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore, 93 metafction, 2, 3, 20, 22, 29, 38, 44, 51, 62, 93 Meyer, John, 78 mirroring, 1, 22, 23, 32, 34, 48, 69–71, 78 mockery, 14, 20, 21, 23, 24, 32, 35, 37–38, 76 modernity, 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 17, 18, 21, 29, 43, 52, 66, 68, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87–90, 92, 93 Moore, Mark P., 79 MTV, 19, 25, 28, 29, 32, 34, 37, 39, 58, 81, 83–85, 91 Murphy, Patricia L., 38 Nagle, Angela, 16 Naidoo, Rajani, and Ian Jamieson, 14 narcissism, 16, 45, 48 Neo-Liberalism, 16, 30, 47, 82 Neuman, Sharon G., 16 neutrality, 89 Newman, Katherine S., 39 new media, 3, 7, 39, 44, 63, 71, 85 new romanticism, 3 nihilism, 2, 21, 29, 31, 35, 36, 46, 55, 86–89 Nirvana, 2, 7, 14, 17–29, 41 Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart, 78 Norton, Arthur J., and Louisa Miller, 39 Nöth, Winfried, and Nina Bishara, 38 nuclear family, 6, 46, 81 Oake, Jonathon I., 38 Obama, Barak, 59

Ohmann, Richard, 92 O’Reilly, Sally, 38 Orwell, George, 66, 77 parenting, 1, 2, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 15, 18, 19, 33, 36, 37, 39, 41, 42, 45–47, 52, 82, 83, 90, 91 patriarchy, 8, 63, 84 peer culture, 9, 15, 19, 20, 25, 28, 78 Peffey, Mark, Jon Hurwitz, and Paul M. Sniderman, 63 Pelinka, Anton, 78 Perkins, Robert L., 79 Perlstein, Rich, 72, 73, 75–76, 78 Pinker, Steven, 16, 89, 93 pleasure principle, 3, 6, 10, 12, 13, 17–19, 22, 28, 38, 41, 42, 50, 58, 62, 66, 68–71, 75, 80, 81, 83, 84 Plusquellec, M., 93 political correctness, 13 popular culture, 1, 7, 17, 21, 29, 31, 36, 47, 56–62, 67, 72, 73, 75, 78, 81, 84 Postman, Neil, 3, 7, 65, 71, 72, 77, 84, 92 postmodern, 1–3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 13, 17–20, 22, 28, 29, 31, 32, 35, 41, 58, 62, 66, 71, 72, 84, 92 post-postmodern, 1, 2, 9, 13, 18, 22, 35, 41, 55, 58, 62, 71, 82 Prasad, Monica, 78 Prato, Greg, 30 prejudice, 43, 58–60, 62, 63 premodern, 6, 8, 9, 13, 43 Pritchard, Annette, and Nigel J. Morgan, 14 projection, 59 psychoanalysis, 45, 48, 58, 59, 63, 69, 78, 93 Public Enemy, 60, 63 Pulp Fiction, 2, 49–57 race, 13, 15, 28, 55, 57–63, 79 racism, 2, 51, 55–59, 62, 63, 71, 75, 76, 79 Rahman, Jacquelyn, 63

Index

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Rap, 58, 60 Reagan, Ronald, 3, 65, 67–79 Reality Bites, 2, 27, 31–39, 41, 85 reality-media, 44 reality principle, 6, 13, 17–18 reason, 6, 10, 11, 16, 49, 55, 68, 89, 93 Reeves, Richard, 17 Rennett, Michael, 56 Republican Party, 54, 72, 75, 79, 92 resentment, 35, 36, 76 resistance, 6, 7, 9, 14–16, 27, 29, 32, 36, 41, 50–52, 62, 68, 74, 85–87, 90, 91 Riesman, David, 14 Rifkin, Jeremy, 3, 15, 17, 18, 28, 92 Right-wing, 3, 65, 71, 73, 76, 78 Ritzer, George, 77 Rock N’ Roll, 19, 22, 30 Rojek, Chris and Bryan S. Turner, 93 Romanowski, Michael H., 15 Romanticism, 49–52, 55, 57, 62 Rutter, Philip A., and Andrew E. Behrendt, 29 Sacks, Peter, 1–3, 5–14, 17, 18, 27, 33, 41, 66, 67, 81–83, 85–87, 90, 91 Samuels, Robert, 3, 15, 16, 38, 39, 48, 56, 63, 92 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 63 Sawchuk, Alexander A., et al., 48 Scholes, Robert, 29 Schulman, Sarah, 79 science, 10, 11, 50, 89, 90, 93 Scull, W. Reed, and Gary L. Peltier, 47 self, 2, 11, 13, 16, 18, 20–24, 28, 32–36, 38, 44–47, 49–53, 55, 71–73, 76, 77, 82–85, 87, 89, 90, 92 self-refexive, 2, 21, 31, 32, 38, 49, 57, 62, 83 Serazio, Michael, 29 sex, 14, 19, 22, 25, 37, 39, 55, 57–59, 63, 84, 93 sexism, 51, 63, 71 Shafer, Daniel M., Corey P. Carbonara, and Michael F. Korpi, 47 shame, 12, 22, 42, 51, 76, 81

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Shevory, Thomas C., 29 Shull, Steven A., 79 Shusterman, Richard, 91 Silent Generation, The, 13 Sloterdijk, Peter, Michael Eldred, and Leslie A. Adelson, 39 “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” 20, 25, 28 Smith, Richard, 16 Smith, Richard G., 56 Snell, Donald D., 79 Sobchack, Vivian, 93 social movements, 18, 57, 58, 62, 71–72, 82 spectacle, 2, 6, 26, 34, 39, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47, 50, 62, 86 Steen, Shannon, 78 stereotype, 9, 59, 60, 62, 63, 79 Stiller, Ben, 32, 37, 38 student evaluations, 7, 8, 10–13, 16, 66, 81, 82, 87, 90, 91 subjectivity, 1–3, 5–6, 8–10, 15, 16, 18, 19, 23, 27, 33, 38, 41, 44, 47, 49–50, 52, 83, 91 super-ego, 43, 45, 84 Tannenbaum, Rob, and Craig Marks, 91 Tappan, Mark B., 28 Tarantino, Quentin, 2, 49–57 taxes, 54, 71, 73, 75, 76, 78 television, 7, 19, 29, 31, 35, 39, 51, 61, 68–72, 77, 78 tenure, 7, 11, 12, 82, 91 Terman, David, 77 Tetzlaff, David J., 29 Thatcher, Margaret, 43, 77, 79 therapy, 45, 47, 69, 77 Thorson, Esther, 77 tradition, 1, 6, 8, 10, 20, 23, 25, 26, 31, 41–43, 66, 72, 81, 84 trolling, 10, 16 Tropiano, Stephen, 47 Troy, Gil, 77 Trump, Donald, 16, 42–44, 47, 54, 70, 77, 78, 82, 84, 92

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unconscious, 3, 14, 55, 56, 58–59, 69, 72, 75, 76, 79 universality, 88–90 Uudelepp, Agu, 77 video games, 2 vigilante, 52–54 violence, 18, 26, 27, 51, 53–59, 62, 63, 88 viral, 5, 20, 26, 85, 87, 88 virtual reality, 23, 31, 45, 47, 68, 85, 90, 93 Volkers, Nancy, 16

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Wallace, David Foster, 77 Ward, Pete, 77 Weiskel, Timothy C., 78 Weiss, Myra, 39 whiteness, 55

Index

Wierzbicki, James, 55 Williams, Kaylene C., and Robert A. Page, 38 Williams, Robin, 84 Wilson, Rick, 92 Wondracek, Gilbert, et al., 93 Wood, Rob, and Dean Smith, 78 Woodgett, Jim, 29 Woodstock, 27, 30 World Wide Web, 2, 7, 10, 11, 65–66, 85, 90 Yar, Majid, 47 Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, 63 Žižek, Slavoj, 3, 22, 26, 29, 30, 48, 63, 88, 92, 93 Zuboff, Shoshana, 93

About the Author

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Robert Samuels teaches in the writing program at UCSB, and he has doctorates in English and psychoanalysis. He is the author of fourteen books, including Freud for the Twenty-First Century and Zizek and the Rhetorical Unconscious. His teaching and research deal with the interplay among culture, nature, psychology, and literacy.

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