Hey everyone- no reviews today! But that’s not to say there’s no prose. I finally finished my birthday lecture! A fully written one, not the notes version I delivered in August. All that, and pics of TWO cats!
CONTENTS
Birthday Lecture
Notes Towards an Intellectual History of Generation X
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Guest star!
BIRTHDAY LECTURE: Notes Towards an Intellectual History of Generation X
In retrospect, it’s now clear I took on way too big of a subject. Even with the caveat that this was “notes towards” the intellectual history of a whole generation — even considering I dispute that this generational label, or any other, is relevant to anything other than a portion of any given age cohort! — it was just too big. I had to figure out my methodological stuff, and also provide at least some analysis of Gen X culture. So we’re at over 10000 words here. It’s a big one.
I didn’t really finish it in time for my birthday party in late August. I gave a sort of semi-improvised, notes-based version of it. Some attendees said they liked it that way! They might just have been being nice, or they might have been entirely sincere, but either way, I like having the whole thing written out, and I’ve only just done that.
All that said, I think there’s some good stuff here, and I’m proud I clawed some sense- something that doesn’t read, to me at least, like cheap bowdlerizing with no connection to a larger set of ideas. I talk about what I’m trying to do with the vernacular history of ideas, and I try to apply it to the near-past. Here are some pull quotes I like. Link below.
Perhaps this is vain, but I think a worthwhile vernacular intellectual history more closely resembles genre fiction, and in particular, the two forms of genre fiction that most reliably mount a challenge, both to their readerships and to literature and society in general: science fiction and crime fiction. From science fiction, vernacular intellectual history can draw countless examples of how to understand and depict strange worlds, and a century of experiments in the art of making the familiar strange and vice versa. From crime fiction, we can take the methodology of both characters and authors, the use of manifold, in some cases specialized, unpredictable, or improvised, tools and techniques to illuminate obscurity — who is the killer? — or pry open what has been denied to us — how are we going to get these jewels?
In a time of surplus, it seems logical to think that misprision would often make use of surplus materials. As numerous observers of the late twentieth century have informed us, it was indeed an age of surplus- not just surplus money and consumer goods, but surplus ideas, surplus images, surplus art, surplus discourse, surplus purveyors of all of these things. So, a lot of the misprision we see in Generation X discourse involves substitutions, making use of the many available cultural materials to efface, distract, or obfuscate. Two types of this operation I want to highlight are simple substitutions-as-obfuscations, and somewhat more sophisticated mimicry-substitutions. It’s possible to use one cultural material to obfuscate, crowd out, or demote another, a narrative, movement, or artifact that actors in the cultural space would prefer not to interact with in favor of something else. It’s also possible to mimic a given cultural artifact, to deliver part of whatever message an original concept was supposed to convey but not all of it, or with extra appendages not in the original.
If the world is flat, where else to go but the edge? I did not have time or space to do the history that the concept of “edginess” deserves in this lecture. From what I can glean, it seems like the concept of edginess, to the extent it was ever meant sincerely, came to the fore once it became good and certain that any counterculture could and would get “appropriated” by mass culture, packaged up and sold. The only debate would be whether this was a tragedy, or whether every given counterculture was always already a consumer product, as Thomas Frank argued at the time.
To me, the lesson is clear- we make culture, but we do not make it just as we please. The Gen Xers understood themselves as living in a sort of imaginary Alexandria of heterodoxy and freedom, done in by the Jerusalem of millennial moral fanaticism and the Rome of power-mad boomer revanchism. But here’s the deal: all those cities were in the same damn empire, often enough not even really supervised that closely by the supposed capital. Above all, inhabitants of all of them — and of the Babylon one is tempted to consign this whole period of history to — all wiped their asses with a sponge on a stick kept in a pot of vinegar, if they were lucky, and a third of their kids died before they were five.
Anyway, here it is (embedding links sucks on this web site so just look at the ugly hyperlink): https://toomuchberard.com/2022/11/10/2022-birthday-lecture-notes-towards-an-intellectual-history-of-generation-x/
Enjoy!
LAGNIAPPE
I saw the cat who used to live with us, Ponsie, this week! She moved with a friend who used to live with me who is her parent. She’s a sweet girl.
Ponsie doesn’t especially like other pets. We don’t know if Mithra does, and we know we lucked out with her so don’t try. So we’ll just let them be in the same virtual space, rather than the same physical one.