The “Next Generation,” “Generation X,” and the Limits to Generationalisms
A Red Critique
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • Summer/Fall 1997 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 5, No. 2 (pp. 48-51). | ||
| • September 29, 2003 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.7) from original. | ||
In the knowledge and culture industry of the late 1990s the production of systemic knowledges that can explain and critique objective historical structures of exploitation and oppression has been represented as impossible and unnecessary. On the philosophical level this “post-theoretical” and “post-critique-al” phase in knowledge production is owing to a series of “post-al” theories, from post-structuralism to post-Marxism, which — following the logic that the signifier always stands in a relation of excess to the signified — claim that the practice of producing theoretical concepts that explain reality relies on a “totalizing” closure of meaning that suppresses differences at the level of meaning production and “fixes” reality.
Following from this logic, the “social," rather than being an arena of decisive and conclusive political contestation and material struggle, is understood as a continuum (with no origin and no end) of multiple alternative and playful possibilities. The result of this theorization of the social is that it has made concluding and deciding upon a principled political position (other than the decision to remain “undecided") an extremely difficult task. Consequently, “politics” is no longer understood to refer to principled interventions into social and economic structures and is instead retheorized as the disclosure of established meanings in culture and the social representations “found ed” upon these meanings. This is part of a much broader shift in “left” practices away from revolutionary social transformation and toward a “post-al” ethics which — under standing the “social” as a series of incommensurate, aleatory, “events” or individual instances that have to be approached “care-fully” without the security of any common and underlying principle of judgment — emphasizes “local” and “localizing” resistance and reform.
This retreat away from the world historical task of abolishing the capitalist relations of production and exploitation toward a middle class Foucaultian ethics for the “care of the self” or a Deleuzian ethics of desire is represented as a radical shift in left practices that is “more suitable” for a new world historical phase. Circulating under the names of “information society," “techno-culture," “virtual reality," cyber-reality," and “New Times” this “new world order” is understood as one in which there has been a fundamental transformation or “break” in capitalist relations of production in which labor has been subsumed by information and technology as the basis of social wealth and consequently, production has been superseded by circulation and consumption.
It is this notion of a “New Times” which gives impetus to generationalist interpretations of history. The concerns framed by “Next Generationalist” and “X Generationalist” analyses over how to understand what kind of critical practices young professionals in literary and cultural studies should be engaged in today are at their basis informed by the assumption that the exigencies of today's job market manifest a significant break in material relations from those informing earlier times. Following Donna Haraway's logic that the world has been “intimately restructured through the social relations of science and technology... [which] provide fresh sources of power, [and]... need fresh sources of analysis and political action” (165), generationalist analyses have called for the revision and reformation of knowledge institutions and cultural practices in order to meet these new material realities. “Next Generationalists” want to put behind them the contestations of “older” generations for what is under stood to be a more “flexible," less “dogmatic” and undecided eclectic stance that is meant to be more “open” to “new” possibilities. Far from representing a “break” from the “high theoretical” deconstructionism of Derrida and de Man, the “Next Generational” emphasis on eclecticism is in fact an extension of post-structuralism's rejection of systemic explanations of material reality.
Meanwhile capital is systematically exploiting the majority of people on the planet by compelling (through threats of unemployment, starvation, homelessness, destitution, etc.) those who only have their own labor to sell in order to survive to work part of the day to reproduce the value necessary for their own means of subsistence and part of the day for the benefit of the ruling class. Capital is systematically producing flexible subjects who will think in terms of fulfilling individual desires and adjust to the superstructural changes capital has made in the name of fulfilling these desires. Flexible subjects who, because of their historically and materially produced incapacity to think and act in systemic and collective terms, will be more easily inculcated into labor forces that help capital re-privatize historical and material gains made by workers in previous moments of struggle. Moreover, these strategies of “flexible” subjectivity are crucial in producing a new mode of “high risk” capitalist entrepreneurs whose ruthless and reckless practices know no limits to making profit off of others (Morton 211-213). This “high risk” is further reproduced among the petit-bourgeoisie who, working as managers in the interests of a “high risk” capitalist class, will use excessive practices to maintain, control, divide and subordinate workers. In short, the reality that undergirds these new flexible “virtual-realities” of late capitalism is, as David Harvey suggests, “still... a society where production for profit remains the basic organizing principle of economic life” (121).
This essay will demonstrate that rather than representing a “generational break” in cultural and intellectual practices, the “post-al” knowledge and culture industry of the late 1990s is an extension of a much broader ideological legitimation of capitalism informing all “post-al” theories from the late 1960s to the present. As I will demonstrate through analysis of their logic, “post-al” theories of the 1990s (such as those contained in Donald Lowe's The Body in Late Capitalist USA and Anne Balsamo's Technologies of the Gendered Body) are in fact most effective collaborators with the dominant regime of capital and wage-labor and its social arrangements. Their “success” in this collaboration is owing to the fact that they legitimate capitalism and its reforms in an effective postmodern rhetoric that strikes their readers as “fresh," “non-dogmatic," “collegial," and above all, “non-totalitarian” and “democratic." Yet, the “democracy” advocated in these theories, as it will become clear in my text, is the alibi for the “free market” (i.e., the deregulation of ruling class interests) which works to legitimate the economic hegemony of Euroamerican capitalism in the so called “New World Order." Through legitimating the interests of the North Atlantic ruling class, the post-al knowledge and culture industry helps to construct the “everyday” political debates and discussions toward these ends and interests. It is through its contribution to these “everyday” debates that concepts and terms such as “class," “politics," “production," “labor," and “exploitation” are now replaced by such concepts as “individual responsibility," “ethics," “circulation," “consumption," and “desire.
Using “generation” as a grid for historical interpretation actually participates in the ideological updating of capitalism by presenting current social conditions and knowledge practices as constituting a fundamental “break." In doing so the exigencies of the job market and its impact on intellectual production are read in abstraction from the international division of labor and the class antagonisms which cut across generational lines. Consequently, proposed changes or directions for “Next Generation” and “X Generation” critics are conceived of in terms of immanent reforms of knowledge institutions and practices as ends in themselves. At worst, this winds up in a “Generation X” cynicism which totally retreats away from social theory and critique in a neo-conservative return to the commodification of literature as an “autonomous” and “free standing” practice (literature for literature's sake). At best, this leads toward a “Next Generation” ethics calling for the “reinvention of institutions of literature” and restructuring of institutions of higher education to produce greater “public access” for those seeking to learn and those seeking to teach. Yet this call for “greater access” to the resources of education is a call for the transformation of the distribution and circulation of resources without a systemic critique of the basis of the “crisis” in higher education: global class antagonisms in a society organized to produce for profit not need. By limiting the sphere of change to the reformation of the academy and the distribution of material resources this ends up endorsing a petit-bourgeois politics committed to “greater access” for those already relatively privileged without a fundamental transformation of the relations of production to abolish the exploitation under which material resources are made possible in the first place.
This essay aims to show that in the struggle for a society of equality labels such as the “Next Generation” and “Generation X” are the inventions of a culture industry that is more interested in commodifying ideas than in deploying struggle-concepts for producing effective analyses for social change. In contrast to a generationalist interpretation of the contemporary intellectual and cultural practices, this essay will offer a Red critique which brings back into the sphere of knowledge production the necessity for theory-as-critique and advances a notion of politics as the revolutionary social transformation to abolish production for profit and to build a society free from need.
