Being Gen X: Being Human
In 2010 Gen X is older than our boomer parents ever imagined themselves to be. We are mid-way through raising our children, and at this moment it’s important to remember and understand our own history.
Those of us born or raised in the 70s arrived on the scene after the turmoil of the sixties had been transformed into quiescence and our role models for adult behavior, our childhood memories, are based on this defeat. Bell bottom pants, folk pop, campfire songs, school house rock and the Brady Bunch, are all memories of co-opted resistance.
Today we are creating our own Kodak moments as we wander through sunny summer days and feel blades of cool green grass with our toes. And we do this unconsciously, telling ourselves that this passivity, this retreat, is our resistance. And perhaps it is. Perhaps it could be.
We meditate and percolate. We speak about dissolving our consciousness, but are we in danger of recreating an image of our parents failures? What we want to do is collage the past and all its various futures into our present, not merely out of some postmodern impulse, and not as a symptom of our exhaustion, but as a way to disrupt the field of ideology we find ourselves trapped in.
We let our kids grow their hair long and run barefoot, we dream of untroubled domesticity, of berry bushes and kitchen gardens, of arugula, raspberries, and lemon cucumbers, but this is only one part of our quiet revolution. Or so we tell ourselves.
“By 1973 Victor Burgin had come to see ‘pure’ conceptual art as the last gasp of formalism. Art should be concerned with how things and representations relate to one another in the world today (that is to say ideology). Artists must be involved in the world at large. And the central question was ‘how could artists intervene effectively in this unceasing flow of ideology?’”
There is a call today to return to nature. We are living a life out of balance. We are supersized, oil dependent, television heads who chat together on facebook. We are artificially constructed subjectivities who must learn to surrender to the real. We must finally put aside our egos and all the left brain chatter that comes with these egos. We must give up on our plans. We can see that society is ending, that we are on the verge of breaking the world. But, while we must prepare, while we are obliged to discover organic, local, healthy, sustainable approaches to consumption, while we must take personal responsibility for our individual lives as the tragedy of the totality continues to unfold, we must not seek any kind of total answer. After all, conscious rational attempts to create a system for living is what got us into this mess.
Micah White in the April 2010 issue of Adbusters pointed to our dilemma this way:
“By the time the project of deconstructing distinctions was widespread in academia and had filtered down to society at large, oppression lay not in the maintenance of dualism, but in the opposite–increasing hybridization.”
The revolution will not kill your ego. You will not be taken up on the mothership. You won’t be slipped easily into the oceanic tumble of a psychedelic vision. Instead you’ll be forced more concretely into your own skin as reality slips away and everyday life fades. Say goodbye to the tranquil, adios to surrender.
What is a derive? It is not a dream, or a form of meditation. The derive is a critique. A critique formulated not for its own sake, but with the aim of altering the built environment.
Don Juan explained our situation, our predicament, directly in “A Yaqui Way of Knowledge”:
“You think there are two worlds for you–two paths. But there is only one. The protector showed you this with unbelievable clarity. The only world available to you is the world of men, and that world you cannot choose to leave. You are a man! The protector showed you the world of happiness where there is no difference between things because there is no one there to ask about the difference. But that is not the world of men. The protector shook you out of it and showed you how a man thinks and fights. That is the world of man! And to be a man is to be condemned to that world. You have the vanity to believe you live in two worlds, but that is only your vanity. There is but one single world for us. We are men.”
-pg 152-153, “The Teaching of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge”
This text can be heard as an audio collage in the final “Pick Your Battle” Diet Soap Supplement.
