radicalism

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.