Michael Lewis Goldberg/Current Research Project
The Creation of a 1950s Generational Discourse and the Making, Unmaking, and Re-making of the Counterculture (working title)
Michael Lewis Goldberg
Associate Professor, University
of Washington, Bothell
Interdisciplinary
Arts and Sciences/American Studies
Scholars of the 1960s generally agree upon the roots of the Counterculture: affluence, car culture, the expansion of high school, the baby boom, suburbia, rock'n'roll, teen movies, comic books, teen-oriented magazines, and advertising all work together to create a separate, vaguely oppositional youth culture. Running parallel are the Beats and cultural critics, with the two paths merging in the mid-60s through various cultural events, whose participants become politicized by the influence of the civil rights movement, the New Left, and especially the reaction to the Vietnam War. What remains unexamined is how this conglomeration of social phenomena and cultural texts actually shaped the thoughts and actions of those involved in the counterculture. Further, studies have not explored the contingent, contradictory, and dynamic process by which these "roots" came to be a recognizable discourse. Nor have they considered the dialogic process between cultural producers, their texts, the systems of distribution and dissemination, and specific audiences. Because of these gaps, we now have an imperfect understanding of the Counterculture's limitations and possibilities, as well as its long-term impact on American politics and culture.
In this project, I move beyond the generalized roots of the counterculture to explore the process that established a generational discourse in post-World War II America. This discourse provided privileged youth in the 1950s with a general road map for a broadly defined and highly contradictory rebellion. By appropriating black, "queer," Southern, and working-class signs as their own signifiers, young white urban middle-class men re-imagined themselves as victims and outsiders rather than as privileged heirs to cultural dominance, thus masking their class, racial, regional, and gender prerogatives. The crisis of middle-class white men in the post-war era served as the perfect foil for this newly emergent cultural group. A central dynamic of this process was the attempt to replace the image of the masochistic "corporate man" and emasculated "father" with that of the rebellious (male) youth as the natural inheritor of masculine power and privilege. This masculinist discourse marginalized middle-class white women yet included them within a new and supposedly subordinated category of "youth." Even as these women created cultural spaces to negotiate their roles, the discourse increasingly rendered them as objects rather than subjects. Both young women and men established the practice of rebellion through an active consumerism that featured a conscious use of cultural texts in relation to adult mainstream reaction. But central to this process was the input of the authors of these texts, almost all of whom were not members of the urban white middle class. Their own agendas, both ideological and commercial, created a complex relationship with the emerging audience that went beyond acting as mere victims of appropriation and significantly shaped the discourse.
The contradictory nature of "generationalism" made possible the liberal reforms and radical attempts of the 60s while ultimately undermining the gains made by marginalized groups and the support of them by upper-middle-class "Boomers." In the same way, the masculinist features of the discourse would serve provide a lightening rod for women's liberationists while also helping to contain the initial triumphs of second wave feminism. Further, the discourse played a role in shaping the narcissistic, morally superior, materialistic and faux rebellious "Boomer" (or more lately, "Bobo") culture of the 90s. Going beyond recent critiques of upper-middle-class Boomers (from the 60s to the 90s) that tend to dismiss the counterculture as a failure and its past adherents as simple sellouts, I argue that as with virtually all oppositional middle-class cultures in American history, the counterculture was inherently contradictory–the very elements of the discourse that rendered reform possible made retrenchment and self-absorption likely.
This project brings a larger methodological agenda to this process of discovery. A key factor in creating a successful and sustaining middle-class reform movement–one which can enter into meaningful alliances with other social justice movements from other cultures–is an investigative process that can uncover these subconscious contradictions in order to negotiate them more effectively. In order to accomplish this, I go beyond the boundaries of specific disciplines to bring together approaches that rarely operate as distinctive perspectives within a scholarly work. This methodology requires formalist analysis of specific films, literature, and music; archival research and historical literature to create a causal, contextualized narrative; and theoretical insights to conceptualize how culture "works." Most historians offer fairly uncomplicated readings of cultural texts while ignoring their formalist and technological features. By focusing most of their attention on the lyrics in music and the dialogue in films, historians ignore key ways that these texts convey meaning and affect emotions through complex formalist structures. Further, historians have employed these texts and their authors mainly as static precursors to the ideology of the counterculture. Thus I look to cinema studies, literary studies, and musicology to help discover how texts create "structures of feeling" for their authors and audiences. At the same time, I bring a historian's concern for specific contexts, cause and effect relationships, and the inclusion of a broad range of representative cultural texts–considerations which are often missing from text-based discourse analysis in other disciplines. Finally, I draw from the critical theorists used by cultural studies scholars to provide a theoretical framework for discourse analysis. In this project, I intend to articulate the opportunities as well as the limits of this type of interdisciplinary work; to map out the ways disciplinary knowledge might be extended while acknowledging the current limits of such a perspective at this moment within the discipline's accepted discourse.
Although I claim certain original conclusions and methods, this project is largely (and proudly) one of synthesis, drawing together the conclusions of different disciplines in new ways. Anyone familiar with the various literatures will recognize the contribution of scholars of 1950s youth culture, Hollywood Cinema, popular music, and cultural studies. As Eric Lott notes in Love and Theft, such interdisciplinary poaching should be considered "an opportunity and not an embarrassment." While Lott's work clearly provides a useful (and imposing) model to draw on, this project is stylistically aligned more with the populist approach of Susan Douglas's Where the Girls Are. In addition to continuing my commitment to a writing style accessible to a broadly educated audience, I intend to make use of the multiple perspectives inherent in the material to fashion a narrative structure with shifting voices and points of view. By engaging the content and form in a rhetorical conversation within an interdisciplinary framework, I hope to communicate what is at stake–revealing the complexity of the generational discourse as a way to engage those whose lives have been most deeply touched by it in order to help them re-imagine the limitations and possibilities of civic action.
Projected table of contents:
I. Wild Ones: From Male Masochism to Youth Exceptionalism in "Rebel" Teen Films
II.: Whose Love, Whose Theft?: A Selective (Discursive) History of Rock'n'Roll
III. The Things They Named: Signifying Practices of Authorship and Audience in Youth-oriented Print Media
IV. Culture as Politics: Beats, Beatniks, and Cultural Critics
V. Politics as Culture: Media images of the Civil Rights and Student movements and the Folk Music Soundtrack
VI. The Strange Career of Holden Caulfield
Conclusion: Takin' Bout Their Generation (And Never Growing Old)