11 Comments to “Generations”

1. Kurt Andersen says:

   March 2, 2010 at 7:25 pm

   Yeah, Hirschorn and I are cuspers, true, but it’s maybe worth noting that I had a bunch of OGX cusper collaborators at Spy. In fact, pretty much everyone at Spy except my dear boomer co-founder Graydon Carter (b. 1949) was an OGXer.
2. Joshua Glenn says:

   March 2, 2010 at 9:18 pm

   Thanks, Kurt. In the post I did on OGXers, I make it clear that you’re an OGXer, not a Boomer. But having a foot in either generation, as it were, must have been formative for your particular sensibility? At the late, great Spy, for example, perhaps you were uniquely capable of mediating between Carter and everyone else…
3. Josh Glenn says:

   April 21, 2010 at 2:36 pm

   Benjamin Kunkel writing about Fredric Jameson’s new book,”Valences of the Dialectic,” for the LRB on 4/22/10:

   In ‘The Valences of History’, the concluding essay of the new book, Jameson argues that when the fitful apprehension of history does enter the lives of individuals it is often through the feeling of belonging to a particular generation: ‘The experience of generationality is … a specific collective experience of the present: it marks the enlargement of my existential present into a collective and historical one.’ A generation, he adds, is not forged by passive endurance of events, but by hazarding a collective project. That this too is uncommon enough can be deduced from Jameson’s example of the process: ‘Avant-gardes are so to speak the voluntaristic affirmation of the generation by sheer willpower, the allegories of a generational mission that may never come into being.’ So the small sect crystallises the would-be universal – an ironic and possibly dialectical contradiction, and a fitting suggestion for a Marxist professor to make amid a near unchallenged global capitalism.

   The theme of generations recurs from time to time in Jameson, whose work in any case proceeds less by straightforward argumentation than by a kaleidoscopic rotation across a consistent set of problems. In ‘Periodising the 60s’ (1984), he noted that ‘the classification by generations has become as meaningful for us as it was for the Russians of the late 19th century, who sorted character types out with reference to specific decades,’ and in that essay and elsewhere this rigorously non-confessional writer has hinted at the decisive importance of the 1960s in his own formation. Jameson’s fellow Marxist critics Perry Anderson and Terry Eagleton (with some cosmic design evidently at work in the similarity of all three names) have already testified to his eminence in such a way as to give some sense of his importance to their own generation. It is a generation in which a younger person notices, though not especially among the Marxists, a widespread and not infrequently pathetic tendency toward serial intellectual and cultural faddism, which makes it the more impressive and even inspiring – to Jameson’s peers as well, it may be – that he has stayed so true to the utopian stirrings of the 1960s while remaining open to so much of what’s come since.
4. Joshua Glenn says:

   June 20, 2010 at 10:09 am

   From today’s New York Times Sunday Book Review: Tom Bissell, author of EXTRA LIVES: WHY VIDEO GAMES MATTER, “was born in 1974, which puts him on the cusp of gaming’s generational divide. That transitional position affords him a perspective not unlike — if you’ll indulge the grandiose analogy — that of Tocqueville or McLuhan, figures who stood on the bridges of two great ages, welcoming the horizon while also mourning what the world was leaving behind.” — Chris Suellentrop, an editor at The Times Magazine, has obviously been influenced by the only correct generational periodization scheme!
5. Joshua Glenn says:

   January 28, 2011 at 11:35 pm

   “For many women, and not a few men, the publication of Friedan’s book ["The Feminine Mystique," 1963] was one of those events which seem, in retrospect, to have divided the sixties from the fifties as the day from the night.” — Louis Menand, “Books as Bombs,” New Yorker (January 24, 2011)
6. Josh Glenn says:

   June 1, 2011 at 8:19 am

   “Those years — 1965-1973 — were the American High Sixties. The Vietnam War was in overdrive through most of the period; the US economy was fat and bloody; academic imperialism was as popular as the political kind.” — John Barth, from a 1984 retrospective preface to his 1967 essay “The Literature of Exhaustion.”
7. Joshua Glenn says:

   June 1, 2011 at 8:41 am

   Eric Hobsbawm’s “The Age of Extremes” (1994) claims a US/Western Europe “golden age” of prosperity (during which relatively high ;evels of income throughout society made possible a high level of consumption of goods of all types) lasted from 1945-1973.

   Arthur Marwick isn’t the first to talk about a “long sixties” running from roughly 1958 to 1974. He claims the era is characterized by: (1) “the great profusion of new movements, new ideas, new social concerns and new forms of social particiaption, the passion for experimentation, for pushing matters to extremes, and for, of course, challenging established ways of doing things, exemplified by experimental drama, art, poetry, and music groups, New Left, civil rights, anti war and environmental-protection movements, the philosophical pronouncements of the structuralists and post-structuralists, the situationists and of Marshall McLuhan and Timothy Leary, in which excess was succeeded by still further excess.” (2) an upheaval in personal and family relationships and in public and private morals, subverting the authority of men over women and parents over children, and entailing a general sexual liberation. (3) the rise of the unprecedented influence of young people; Marwick claims that youth culture of the period presented “a shifting accommodation” between the imperatives of hedonism and activism, or consumerism and politicization. (4) the enormous growth in the international exchange of cultural products and practices. (5) Absolutely fundamental to the cultural revolution of the long sixties was the “spread to all sections of society of decent living conditions (which is linked to, but not the same thing as, consumerism).” (6) The expansion and strengthening of a liberal, progressive presence, privileging tolerance and due process, within institutions of authority. (A dramatic change from the McCarthy era.) (7) The existence of circumstances leading readily to dogmatism, rigid intolerance, and extreme violence. Certain upholders of the status quo were incited into violent resistance against change; many radical protesters believed in violent overthrow of existing society and/or provoking police violence.
8. Joshua Glenn says:

   June 1, 2011 at 8:44 am

   Christopher Leigh COnnery talks about the “World Sixties” — which begin with the rise of third-worldism as a political force at Dien Bien Phu (154) and end with the conjuncture of the end of the post-War expansion (1973-74), the September 11 bombings ending the Allende regime (1973), the end of the Vietnam War (1975), the death of Mao (1976). [from The Worlding Project]
9. Joshua Glenn says:

   June 1, 2011 at 8:54 am

   Marianne DeKoven’s very useful book “Utopia Limited” claims to coin the phrase “long sixties,” “extending from the late fifties to the early seventies; from the heyday of the Beat movement and the rise of popular youth culture to Watergate.”

   Fredric Jameson’s “Periodizing the Sixties” and Fredric Jameson, Anders Stephanson, and Cornel West’s “A Very Partial Chronology” in The Sixties Without Apology are the strongest conceptualization of the long sixties.

   Arthur Marwick claims that he coined the phrase “The Cultural Revolution of the Long Sixties” — c. 1958-74. See above; also see his essay “1968″ and the Cultural Revolution of the Long Sixties (c. 1958-c.1974) in Transnational Moments of Change. Also see his The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c. 1958-c.1974. This is a period not merely of economic recovery and growth (vs. Hobsbawm) but also multiple and enduring social and cultural change. Note that he distinguishes (in The Sixties) between three sub-periods, 1958-63, 1964-68/9, 1969-74.
10. Joshua Glenn says:

    June 1, 2011 at 9:40 am

    In a 1988 book, “Postmodernism and its Discontents,” E. Ann Kaplan credits Jameson with charting a caesura from the beginning of the “long Sixties.”

    Jameson’s “Periodizing the Sixties” (in The Ideologies of Theory) notes that thinking in terms of historical periods and working with models of historical periodization are theoretically unfashionable. He notes that cultural periodization need not imply some massive homogeneity or identity within a given period; he also notes that a period is simply “the sharing [i.e., by a generation] of an objective situation.” He goes on to say that he is not arguing that the sixties had an organic unity on all levels, but rather “a hypothesis about the rhythm and dynamics of the fundamental [shared] situation in which those various levels develop according to their own internal laws.” By rhythm he means that certain regularities appearing in, say, the cognitive, aesthetic, or revolutionary fields, also appear in widely different fields — because all fields are reacting to the same objective situation.

    Jameson traces the beginning of the sixties to the movement of decolonization in British and French Africa. 1957 — independence of Ghana; 1961 – agony of the Congo; the Battle of Algiers – 1957. Reaction to their countries’ colonial wars helped give rise to the two most powerful student mass movements of the sixties, in the US and France. He notes that the US also had a sort of decolonization movement, which began with sit-ins in North Carolina in 1960 (though it could be argued the civil rights movement began in 1954). The First World’s “inner colonized” — “minorities,” marginals, and women — would struggle against colonization during the sixties.

    This argument suggests, to me, that the late 1950s and even early 1960s part of the “long sixties” is a different period — part of a “long fifties” that isn’t properly conceived by historians of the sixties. Decolonization, that is, marks a Fifties period (my hypothesis: 1954-63) articulated by a political rhetoric of self-determination; inner decolonization marks a Sixties (my hypothesis: 1964-73) articulated by a psychological and cultural rhetoric of new collective “identities.” (I’m borrowing Jameson’s formulations.) During the 1964-73 period, anti-colonialism (old-fashioned imperialism) shifts to anti-neocolonialism (the invention and construction of a new kind of imperialism). Cultural revolution becomes a strategy for “breaking the immermorial habits of subalternity and obedience which have become internalized as a kind of second nature in all the laborious and exploited classes in human history.” Jameson himself suggests there is a difference between the early part of the “long sixties” and the later part when he says things like “It was as though the protracted experiences of the earlier part of the decade [e.g., the Vietnam War, technocratic dynamism, the Communist party's resistance to de-Stalinization, the tremendous expansion of the media apparatus and the culture of consumerism] gradually burned into the minds of the participants a specific lesson.”

    Jameson also suggests that the long sixties begins in part with the merging of the AFL and CIO in 1955 — the merger was a triumph of McCarthyism, an expulsion of communists. I’d instead suggest this is one of the starting points of the Fifties.

    Jameson claims the assassination of JFK in 1963 was a major turning point — for future New Left activists. Yes — I’d suggest it’s one of the moments that marks the end of the Fifties and beginning of the Sixties.

    Jameson suggests the long sixties ends with the dashing of the hopes of new (sixties) social forces — for Thirld-Worldism, awareness of institutional corruption and militarization after, e.g., the Chilean coup of 1973. He notes that the black movement and women’s movement in the US both enter a period of splintering and exhaustion in 1972-74. This period marks the end of the sixties, for Jameson.
11. Joshua Glenn says:

    December 6, 2011 at 3:02 pm

    Excerpt from a review of Will Hermes’ “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire” (whose subtitle calls the period from 1973 to 1977 “Five Years in New York that Changed Music Forever”) in today’s NYT:

    Mr. Hermes, a senior critic at Rolling Stone and frequent contributor to The New York Times, has isolated a crucial, if sometimes awkward, period of transition in American music, hitherto dismissed as “a cultural dead zone,” and his painstakingly nuanced preface argues only that the figures he discusses “were breaking music apart and rebuilding it for a new era,” not that such an era had yet arrived.

    His principal figures include the uptown D.J.’s Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash; the downtown club D.J.’s David Mancuso and Nicky Siano; the punk-rocking Ramones and New York Dolls; the so-called minimalist composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich; the salsa musicians Willie Colon and the Fania All Stars; and the post-Coltrane jazz players David Murray and Anthony Braxton. They were all “young iconoclasts on the edge of the mainstream,” whose “DIY moves,” Mr. Hermes writes, “would grow into movements that continue to shape music around the world.” Like Louis Armstrong or Hank Williams or Elvis Presley before them, they were engaged in “taking the lousy hands they’d been dealt and dreaming them into music of great consequence.”