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Millennial Ethos Take Two: Institution Builders or Semiotic Dilletantes?

Alex at The Seminal takes issue with my "drooling economium" over Nicholas Handler's essay on the current meaning of college. His critique is short, so I'll reprint it here:

And to conclude, Mike Connery over at Future Majority has a drooling encomium of a piece by Yale student Nicholas Handler entitled The Post-Everything Generation. The gist of this thing is that college kids nowadays aren’t like the “radicals” of the 60’s. They are the generation of the postmodern, the “open book” that rejects the “dogmatism” of modernism and the expected revolution that never came for their parents. Our activism is supposed to be one of the “rapidly developing ability to communicate ideas and frustration in chatrooms instead of on the streets, and channel them into nationwide projects striving earnestly for moderate and peaceful change…”

I think Handler’s fool of shit. Our generation has only inherited the theory of the 60’s, the same postmodern tripe that didn’t call for changes at the point of production and real changes regarding oppression, be racial, gender, or on any other front. No, the 60’s and us as its ideological inheritors have only been concerned with changing the “spectacle” of society, rejecting the “mainstream” culture and adopting our own to “subvert” it, as if some subjective rearrangement of the semiotic chairs could seriously “affect change” on the sinking ship of oppressive institutions. I recommend a perusal of Heath & Potter’s The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed. While I don’t agree with all their points, it raises a lot of good questions about the effectiveness of what Connery calls the “New College Experience” and its predecessors.

I think Alex missed the point, or at least we have very different readings of Handler's essay. Alex lumps myself and Handler in with the "predecessors," which is shorthand for 60's radicals and theorists, but that misses the point. We're talking about a rejection of those groups. I don't want to "semiotically rearrange the deckchairs" anymore than he does, and I assume the same is true for Handler. We are rejecting so much of the past - that rebelliousness and college as an "incubator of radical change" - precisely because we recognize how coopted and inneffective it is for actually accomplishing real, fundamental change.

Instead, we're talking about a generation dedicated to new institution building. Working precisely within the economic and political systems that govern us to effect change. That's what I see when I talk about a [dot]Org Boom in youth organizating, initiated and run by our own generation. That's what I see Handler referencing using the short hand of "MoveOn.org." That's what Rick Perlstein observed in his conversations with kids interested in corporate social responsibility in his essay, which kicked-off the contest.

My familiarity with postmodern and Marxist theory is admittedly 6 years rusty, and I haven't read The Rebel Sell, but I think Alex is misreading Handler, and I wonder how different our opinions of this really are.

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October 2nd, 2007 11:10am
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We're not there yet

Submitted by J-Ro on Tue, 2007-10-02 12:24.

My view is we're not there yet. Our generation loves the Internet, but the times that we break out of the electronic realm and really affect the world are rare so far. These opportunities for real change via electronic communication will keep growing, but I do feel we're in transition, which is where I disagree with Handler a bit.

Granted

Submitted by Michael Connery on Tue, 2007-10-02 13:13.

Granted. I take Handler's focus on internet politics to be shorthand for a larger trend that Handler himself may or may not be aware of, but is in fact happening. For him, this "revolution" is happening via the netroots. For me, that's a part of it and I agree we're not totally there yet.

But I also see this in "the real world." Young people are institution-building, and I think that our multilateral/global views on a number of issues can bring about fundamental change in already established institutions. It will take time. This is a change that we will be working on for the rest of our lives. That's why it's a generational shift. We're not going to cut off anyone's head and turn the system upside down (another thing, btw, that I think is wrong with the protest mentality - storming the gates raises expectations for that traditionally revolutionary change, which you are just not going to see unless shit gets really, really, really bad).

It's a slow, pragmatic process.

We're not them

Submitted by Fred Gooltz on Tue, 2007-10-02 19:38.

here's a little story, it's sad but true...

I'll never forget in 2005, the New York Democratic Party official who, when told that I did not advocate for Corzine and Spitzer to propose Northern secession, howled that the problem with "my generation is that we're not radical enough."

I was flabbergasted that he would want good organizers to waste their time and credibility on such a retarded suicide campaign.

I asked him if the point was just to push the envelope in order to give (then candidates Corzine and Spitzer) cover to bash the federal governments' Southern State welfare thru taxation system [where Blue States are taxed more than Red States yet htey receive less money than the Red States in the form of program funding.]

No, he said, the point was to make the case that the two states should secede. End of story.

I said that there's better ways to go about fixing the federal tax structure, and I suggested off the top of my head a few fun campaign style things that are culture jamming/funny viral in nature, to inject the issue into the dialogue - coupled with state-based bills to sue the federal government - theatre legislation to get traditional media coverage on top of the word-of-mouth name recognition gained by the viral stuff...

he just looked at me disgusted that i hadn't taken my college dean hostage or something.

"but no one is talking about secession' he said.

"because no one listens to crazy people' i replied. that was the end of the conversation.

I don't agree with Alex's

Submitted by dweinand on Tue, 2007-10-02 20:54.

I don't agree with Alex's points, but I similarly thought Handler's essay wasn't all that great. In my mind it failed to effectively argue that our generation is actually taking real action. If anything it helped reinforce the notion (amongst some people at least) that our generation just complains and wears the shirt or the button as a badge of indignation without trying to really change anything.

I also thought the whole post-modern angle was more of a distraction than anything. I actually think the the reason that colleges now don't look like colleges in the 60's is simpler than that.

The extreme rebelliousness of the 60's were a reaction to the extreme post-war repression. Acts of defiance during the vietnam era were as much about defying a society and parents that espoused the virtues of rigid conformity as they were about trying to affect real change.

Our generation has grown up under very different circumstances. We also have the benefit of hindsight. It amazes me that when boomers chastise us for acting like their romanticized and nostalgic view of the past, nobody mentions how ineffective much of the 60's tactics were in actually achieving real change.

I'd like to think our generation is more interested in real action than hollow symbolism. And if you look at the various instances where members of our generation has tried to emulate the radicals of the past in cargo cult fashion, you'll see very few ever achieving any real success.

I don't think I'm miss reading Handler...

Submitted by Alex on Thu, 2007-10-04 03:12.

Handler's analysis of the current situation in youth activism is very unclear, and I certainly hope he's not speaking for me. Some of my objections to him have been echoed slightly in J-Ro's post and dweinand's post. So, let me expand a little bit.

We traditionally understand the protest of the 60's as the sit-in, the walk out, the whatever was going down on campus. But this really just underlines the action part of the protest, however. If you talked to someone in the 60's, the nature of their protest would be one of "going against the system". The system could be anything from capitalism, to the state, but a good deal of the time it was the "mainstream". It was "culture jamming", wearing rose-colored glasses (literally), tye-dye shirts, and love beads. It was "polymorphous perversity, or performance art, or modern primitivism, or mind-expanding drugs" as Heath and Potter put it. The bottom line is that the theory of action in the 60's was an abstractly negative concept, possibly targeting a "system of oppression" but really just hitting out against the previous culture of the 60's and of their parents.

You find that the theory of the then and theory of now hasn't changed all that much. How can I tell? Well, because we're still in the theory of postmodernity. I disagree with dweinand that the mention of the postmodern is just a distraction (perhaps it's the very vagueness of the postmodern that makes it seem so unrelated). Handler says youths are getting "past the pastiche of postmodernity", speaking in a variety of narratives that don't use the same "overarching narrative of revolution" of the 60's. But... we really are. If we're just talking about culture jamming, letter writing campaigns, Live Strong bracelets and skinny jeans, then we're doing the same thing the 60's is doing: creating our own reality and altering in such a way that will "subvert" the "system".

Bottom line is, Handler's analysis of present campus activism is ephemeral at best. He wants to get at the power of the internet and communication, and while the internet is a very powerful tool, and education and dialogue are certainly important... well, there's a lot of kids dying in Africa. There's about 3,000 miners trapped in a mine there right now, actually. And there's a lot of sweatshop workers in India and China. And, ya know, in America, the paneling's peeled away enough from the car that we can see the Jena 6 and institutional racism peek through. Women still only earn 70 cents on the male dollar. You get my drift. When there are objective facts in society that are prevalent and WE KNOW are morally wrong, we need to do something. But that something doesn't involve a simple amount of patting ourselves on the back because we write for a blog, or write letters to Congress. Our generation has failed in materializing concrete ways to change society, ways that are in touch with changing material conditions and not just "educating" ourselves to death. And it's not going to look like direct action of the 60's. Good lord, I hope it doesn't! But it can't use old, defunct categories like culture jamming and changing things only in our heads. I'm not even asking people to be "radical", but I'm saying be real and work to articulate a theory of change that gets past your keyboard.

Only Part of Handler's Critique

Submitted by Michael Connery on Thu, 2007-10-04 10:51.

I think you are only reading part of Handler's critique. Or maybe I"m reading too much of my own beliefs into it.

You say:

If we're just talking about culture jamming, letter writing campaigns, Live Strong bracelets and skinny jeans, then we're doing the same thing the 60's is doing: creating our own reality and altering in such a way that will "subvert" the "system".

I read Handler as saying that this is the world our parents - and the 60's - gave us. We inhabit it, and when the "adults" look to us to take action, it is in these forms: parodic echoes of their own brand of activism.

He says:

For us, the post-everything generation, pastiche is the use and reuse of the old cliches of social change and moral outrage–a perfunctory rebelliousness that has culminated in the age of rapidly multiplying non-profits and relief funds. We live our lives in masks and speak our minds in a dead language–the language of a society that expects us to agitate because that’s what young people do.

But that's not what Handler believes about our generation. He explicity thinks that we reject that brand of activism. In the very next sentence he goes on to ask how we rebel against this very state/mode of participation and protest. His conclusion is MoveOn, but, as I commented up thread, I read that as just shorthand for a whole slew of activities: the explosion in youth political participation (we're not "dropping out"), the creation of new institutions in our democracy, a movement towards corporate social responsibility, living greener, cleaner lives, etc.

Have these wrought radical change in the modes of production or eliminated the moral outrages that persist in our society, globally and nationally? Of course not! This is a project of decades and it is just getting started. Our parents rebelled against the system and were eventually coopted without accomplishing many of the goals they set out to achieve. Our generation seems to be taking a more pragmatic view: longterm change through new institution building. It's wht the GI generation did before and after WWII, which gave us much that we have today, and it is very different from the spirit of the 60s, which left almost no longterm institutions. Now, maybe the GI's were flawed in what they set out to achieve and how they did so, but so what? We will be too. As I said before, the perfect should not be the enemy of the good.

Handler may not have captured all of this in his essay, but that does not make it less real. And for a college student I think he did a damn good job of sussing out some of the major themes in how the perception of social change in our generation has been shaped.