Generation X as an "imagined scene"

So what are generations anyway, and how do they work? And what, precisely, defines Generation X?

Not everyone agrees that “generations”, as distinct or discrete socio-cultural entities, are a useful way of carving up society. Some sociologists have argued that they are useless for either explaining or predicting social behaviour, or that any use they do have can be reduced to documenting cohort effects.  Others argue they are – at best – mere marketing constructs, handy for selling soft drinks or record albums or movie tickets, or maybe even buying votes.

Yet for all the skepticism, the idea of generations has been around for a surprisingly long time. I mean, you can find kids these days sorts of arguments as far back as Plato. But talk of generations in the terms we are most familiar came into its own in the middle of the 19th century.  It was driven by the rapid economic and social change that came with modernity and industrialization, along with the breakdown of more traditional allegiances and loyalties and categories. 

From the start, generations were conceived as broad and extended social groupings, characterized by youthful rebellion and emancipation and a subsequent “generation gap” between youth and their parents. As the philosopher Auguste Comte argued, social change is driven by conflict between successive demographic waves. When the members of a given demographic cohort grow older, what he called their “instinct of social conservation” gets stronger, which brings them into conflict with the more innovative cohort coming up behind them. 

So are generations just cohorts then, or is there something more to it? Comte thought it was the former. He was one of the originators of what has been called the “pulse-rate” theory, where the population of a society is made of distinct, non-overlapping cohorts or demographic “pulses” that develop distinct personalities based on when they grew up, and how they responded to their elders. 

But there is also what has been called the “imprint” theory, which holds that generations as we talk about them (having distinct personalities or character traits or dispositions) are produced by specific historical events or circumstances, which lead them to have significantly different worldviews than their parents. Think about how we talk about the “Greatest Generation”, who lived through the Depression, and fought in the Second World War; or the Baby Boomers, that giant post-war cohort who were shaped by the Vietnam War. Other generations may be shaped by economic factors, rapid technological change, or geopolitical crisis, but on the imprint view, while everyone is, almost by definition, part of a demographic cohort, not everyone is necessarily a member of a generation. It all depends on your particular formative experiences.

The problem we have is that many of us, especially journalists, cultural commentators, and social researchers, tend to mash both theories together. We adopt a generalized imprint theory to talk about a generation’s personality, but then overlay a pulse-rate theory to try to draw its boundaries. A typical example is this Pew Research report, which characterizes Millennials as the group whose youth was defined by 9/11, and who entered the workforce into the teeth of the Great Recession. It then assigns millennials to the demographic pulse between 1981 and 1996.  

There’s a bit of both theories in our folk understanding of how society works, but we don’t have to worry too much about trying to litigate either one. What both of these approaches are trying to get a handle on is the key aspect of generations, which is that they are like what we used to call a “scene”:  As I’ve written before, whatever else it is, a generation is something that has its own tastes and moods and music fashions and jargon, its own sense of what is in and what is out, what is cool and what’s square, and who belongs and who does not. 

Usually when we talk about scenes, though, we are referring to something relatively local – a cluster of cultural and social activity in a particular neighbourhood or city, or at best a region (think of the role of Seattle in grunge, or Williamsburg in the hipster 2000s, or the meaning of Southern California to the 1980s). How, then, can we talk about a subset of the population of an entire country, or even continent, as belonging to a scene? Here I’ll happily borrow a line from Benedict Anderson, who famously described nations as “imagined communities”.  As I see it, generations are imagined scenes.  And my scene – our scene, probably, if you’re reading this – is Generation X. 

The advantage to treating generations as scenes is that you don’t have to get too fussy about the age boundaries. My dad was born during the war, but he’s as much a Boomer as my mom, who was born after. What matters to a generation is who you claim as your own, and who claims you. So while most demographers try to define Gen X as the cohort born between 1965 and 1980, and while some push it back to 1963, none would credibly include anyone born in 1960 – that’s pure Boomer territory. Except Richard Linklater was born in 1960. Douglas Coupland was born in 1962. And David Foster Wallace was born in 1962. And if they aren’t Gen Xers, then this whole project makes little sense.

So what makes them Xers?

While there’s no single cultural moment or grand political event that draws Gen X together, as I see it, there are three long-term social trends that all came to a head in the seventies and eighties, and which shaped the scene: First, there was  the great economic stagnation of the 1970s and the political reaction of the Reagan years. Second, there was the shift from analog to digital culture, which slow-rolled through the home computing craze of the eighties, only to explode in 1993 with the launch of the World Wide Web. And behind all of this was the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, which was such a profound cultural preoccupation we didn’t even notice it as a preoccupation, until suddenly it disappeared. 

All of these topics are  on the agenda for this newsletter. But more than anything, what defines a generation are the battles it chooses to fight. For the Boomers, it was one long-running countercultural campaign against The System, aka The Man or The Patriarchy, while the Millennials decided to mine the deepest and darkest recesses of identity politics. 

Generation X, though,  was always uniquely preoccupied with the problem of authenticity and the terror of selling out. That terror is the fuel rod at the core of the Gen X reactor, and it is where our cultural fires burned hottest. The fear of selling out is what motivated what I see as the three most important Gen X figures: Kurt Cobain, David Foster Wallace, and Naomi Klein. We will be discussing all three in some depth in the weeks and months to come. 

But first, there is a bit more housekeeping to be done. In the next dispatch, we will try to settle once and for all the crucial question: Which is the first generation in history to do worse than its parents?

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The first posts to this newsletter got a better response than I was expecting. Please circulate this to anyone you think might be interested, and I’ll try to deliver on the increasing number of promises I’m making here. I’ll engage with any comments as much as I can, and please let me know if there are things you think we should be covering here. Thanks to everyone who has signed up so far! — ap