The Persistence of Sentiment - Mitchell Morris

Скачать книгу

based on a notion of a quadripartite life cycle indirectly related to the life-cycle theories of Erik Erikson.) In the vision of Strauss and Howe, the “Boomers,” born between 1943 and 1960, were at last confronting the difficult positions of the “Thirteenth generation,” born between 1961 and 1981, and beginning to worry about the condition of the emerging “Millennial generation” born after 1982.8 The resentments and rebellions of the rising generation were the inevitable concomitants of their attempts to differentiate their culture from that of their elders.

      Such arguments have been important, not because they are necessarily accurate, but because they have shown themselves to have a great deal of power to shape the terms of public perception. It is intuitively true that such a thing as a generational consciousness can be said to exist. Especially in a mass-media culture where large numbers of (young people) receive the impact of reportage on major historical events as well as ephemera, the common points of reference establish what psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas has called “generational objects.” These shared things gradually emerge in childhood and especially in the violent self-fashionings of adolescence to become crucial tokens of temporal consciousness in young adulthood.9 Bollas suggests that

      Although each generation passes through, interprets, and signifies the life span in its own way, its fundamental character is fashioned in the twenties. It will continue to experience and interpret new objects, but strictly speaking they are not generational ones, as they are not essential to the defining character of consciousness. Such objects are not so much mental representations as screen memories that express the nature of the generation’s psychic life. Each generational object . . . gives rise to a complex character of experiences peculiar to that time. They sit inside us even when we aren’t thinking of them, within our unconscious in an internal world where each object serves as a generating link to the people of our time.10

      In one’s thirties, observes Bollas, generational objects begin to be mulled over in comparison to those of older and younger generations. Obviously, a given generation’s objects have significance to others—it’s just that they won’t have the same significance.

      For example, the sexual revolution of the seventies was an important event for the Gen-Xers, the Thirteeners of Strauss and Howe, but its importance is shaped by epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases that were taking place at the time that generation was in a position to participate fully. Then, there was the Pill, and there were antibiotics to cure any minor infection one might pick up. But since the eighties, the idea of casual sex as a harmless diversion has become impossible thanks to HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) and HPV (human papillomavirus). Of course casual sex occurs now. But the stakes are quite different. As a result, the fantasy of sexual liberation probably has a more mythological cast to the minds of Xers than it would to their elders. What are the effects of this difference on the ways that disco, one of the most sexually fraught musics created in the 1970s, can be said to enter the body of its would-be devotees?

      Or take the case of marijuana; by the 1990s, it was the most contested drug in America. Its use seemed almost an idiosyncrasy to many in the 1970s. A presidential commission recommended its decriminalization in 1972, and throughout the rest of the decade, it seemed no more dangerous than booze or cigarettes—maybe even less. I recently screened the 1980 film 9 to 5, and was stunned to see a scene I had forgotten, in which the three protagonists (played by Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton) smoke a joint in the midst of female bonding.11 Between that scene and contemporary reality falls any number of crucial material changes—the horrifyingly excessive sentences frequently handed out to offenders, the extraordinary developments in marijuana cultivation in the wake of the War on Drugs (even everyday modern strains are enormously more potent than anything that would have been available in the 1960s and 1970s), and the continuing controversy over medical marijuana laws, to name a few. As of November 2012, public attitudes have turned strongly back towards the calmer ones of the 1970s—but the weight of nearly three decades of neo-Prohibition still lies heavy. A scene like the one in 9 to 5 requires explicit contextualization if it is to have the impact on current teenagers that it was designed to have on audiences at the end of the 1970s. The changing status of marijuana affects its position as a potential generational object. To put it rather crudely, the Boomer’s pot is different from that of the Thirteener. They both differ from the cannabis that that is now experienced by the Millennial generation identified by Howe and Strauss.

      Differences in generational location go a long way to explain the ambivalence with which popular music of the 1970s was often regarded during its period of rehabilitation. One brief example from the trade-book press can stand for many. In her well-intentioned but severely limited Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music, Martha Bayles demonstrated a hopeless incomprehension of music in the 1970s. Speaking of disco, for instance, Bayles imagined it as having a unidimensional groove that became (aesthetically and morally) worse when the groove was produced through the rigid algorithms of a drum machine. Her beef with electronics encompassed synthesized orchestrations as well. For Bayles, irregularities (participatory discrepancies, to invoke Charles Keil) were the primary loci of musical values; the perfect regularity of electronic sound production automatically put these values in danger.12 She also claimed that disco disdained the vocal skills traditionally associated with soul and gospel, styles that carry high value for her. Throughout her account, words like “mechanical” and “cold” expressed her displeasure at the unholy triumph of the machine over the human being. At the same time, Bayles deplored the hedonistic environments in which disco flourished.13 The defenders of the bath houses and the backroom bars might celebrate promiscuity as the means to a new form of community, but Bayles would have none of it—it was just cheap sex, dehumanized from the get-go. Her section heading, Disco: Invasion of the Sex Robots, married the values that ground her musical disapproval to those supporting her sense of sexual restraint.14 This section was perhaps the most overtly neoconservative of the book, but the entire project carried the resonances of an assortment of unresolved boomer bitternesses carried like gallstones in the cultural tract.

      The greatest problem with disco in Bayles’s account arises because disco could not be anything like a generational object to her. The style’s values are too different from those of the objects she treasures, and its consequent remoteness leads her to refuse to look closely at the values it does carry. Early in her book, she offers a mild defense against the likely accusation that she is “an aging flower child longing for the music of her youth” by claiming that it was a full tradition she defends rather than merely the music of her cohort.15 But much of the energy that drives her argument is derived exactly from the position of longing for the continuation of her generational objects as current rather than increasingly part of the past. Following Bollas, we might suggest that if a set of generational objects (such as music) seems to be endangered, then the form of community it constitutes is also at risk. Bayles is genuinely concerned about the loss of “beauty and meaning,” not least because its disappearance betokens her community’s relocation from actuality into history.

      

      It is popular music’s astonishing power to mediate community that gives it such a central role among generational objects. Bollas points out that considered more abstractly, generational objects may be said to

      collect within an actual object (or event) the new generation’s interpretation of its identity. It is a curious mix of the fashioned and the imposed, as the musical choices and lingual inventions rub shoulders with events beyond control: a war, and economic crisis, and so on. Yet generational objects are pop art objects, fashions, precisely because they weave into historic time. It is adolescence that is curiously true to the dialectic in human life between the personal and the social, the responsible and the irrational, the premeditated and the accidental. The reality of our world and the complexity of its events are not fathomable; their simple chaos is always somewhat beyond our organization. It is the adolescent who somehow most intensely lives this tension to its fullest, and who—upon recovery in the twenties—can form ideas of culture and society that identify the group’s experience of life.16

      Generational objects are thus always powerfully copular when not actually transitive. Linking choice and compulsion, mental time and mental space, they offer intersubjective spaces

Скачать книгу