Kristeva, Marcuse, and Diane Rehm: How Will I Educate the Next Generation???

This week on Diane Rehm the interview of note to me was with Dr. Madeline Levine, a psychologist to the privileged children of SoCal, who has just published The Price of Privilege. Several points relevant to all children, of all social classes, were made: self-esteem comes from a sense of competence and accomplishment in the face of challenge (no shit, kids, my Grandma coulda told y'all That), and teens need unstructured time with their parents in order to get the kind of communicating done that teens really need (again, no kidding). Our schedules, as we know but refuse to confront, are cutting us off from each other, both in and outside The Family.

Here's what was really interesting: The Esteemed Diane Rehm and Dr. Levine were talking about these teens -- the girls cut themselves, the boys act out with booze and violence, they're all having irresponsible, disconnected, bored and boring sex -- as if this condition of psychological emptiness were new. And perhaps it is, but its possibility is not. We have laid its foundations over decades. Here's part of the synopsis from Harper Collins:Click &c.

Conversations with educators and clinicians across the country as well as meticulous research confirmed Levine's suspicions that something was terribly amiss. Numerous studies show that privileged adolescents are experiencing epidemic rates of depression, anxiety disorders, and substance abuse -- rates that are higher than those of any other socioeconomic group of young people in this country. The various elements of a perfect storm -- materialism, pressure to achieve, perfectionism, disconnection -- are combining to create a crisis in America's culture of affluence. This culture is as unmanageable for parents -- mothers in particular -- as it is for their children. While many privileged kids project confidence and know how to make a good impression, alarming numbers lack the basic foundation of psychological development: an authentic sense of self. Even parents often miss the signs of significant emotional problems in their "star" children.

And just maybe my own Gen X's disaffection for the world in our younger years were the first signs that The Apparatus was getting too strong a grip. Or we new The Situation was too big? At any rate, I'm going to mumble around in the conundrum here.

These kids "have no inner life" and "no ground" and "no sense of who they are beyond what they do." Socially, academically, these are high functioning teens: robust peer groups, good grades, lots of worry going on about which college they'll be accepted to, they play sports, respect their teachers, play instruments. As long as you don't look under their long sleeves, or watch them exchange blow jobs like hand shakes, these kids look great on paper. They have great pedigrees, but no soul.

Why'm I concerned? Because I have to figure out how to open the world of literature to these kids. And for generations and generations, my profession has assumed that students have souls that will reach out and make contact with the literature, through its structure, its pathos, its imagination, its presentation of other internal and external worlds : All we have to do is show them how to get through the looking glass, offer them the blue pill. But, that assumption is now dead. Something about teaching literature may well have to become involved in the revolutionary act of reawakening these kids to their souls.

Dude, where's my soul?

These kids represent the near perfect triumph of an ideological context: the state, the school, the family, sometimes the church that, as Althusser hipped us in "Ideology and the State Apparatus," is intended not to create humans, but to create workers. And good workers these kids will be. They'll hum along unhappily, wondering what's missing, and doing a great job for The Company. They'll raise kids who go to soccer after school, and never, ever, have a minute to just sit and imagine or notice. Humans are often inefficient and unpredictable in their work and purchasing habits. Good producers and consumers are not. Kids who are overscheduled and too wired up make very good producers and consumers because they are … predictable --- which is to say, half dead, one dimensional.

Now, those philosophers called the Frankfurt School/Critical Theorists and Post-Structuralists of a humane stripe have been all over this problem for decades. Granted, reading them isn't reading the newspaper, and granted, we all have to negotiate our entangled relations with The State Apparatus -- so let me catch us up.

Marcuse made it clear in One Dimensional Man (full text here : just peek in on New Forms of Control, sounds old hat now, but in 1964 M was talking about the world we're in now) that notions like freedom to explore one's soul in relation to the world are deprioritized in perfected or post-industrial economic and social structures. In short, the man knew then what we all know now: life in the cube will kill you. It will put your kids through college, but it will suck the humanity out of your human frame in a matter of mere years. Person is not a category in which The Apparatus thinks, and so persons (with imaginations, free time, souls, unpredictable behavior) are dissuaded from coming into existence.

Insert Romantic or American Transcendentalist or Beat Writer Here -- just to re-taste the other direction.

The one dimension required of us is our use value, our productivity, our consumption. Our desire, our love, our adventure, our intimacy with others, our charity, our making of beauty, the way we boogie in the back yard --- these are not needed, and so, not encouraged. Witness the loss of arts programs in public education as the funding squeeze intensifies. Witness our overbusy parents who need overbusy kids in order stay overbusy. Geeeyaawwwd.

And let's not Even Talk about the way families isolate each other from each other in the privileged home now. Trust me: the lifestyle of the rich and famous, or even the well-to-do, is just not what you really want. Though the means to take that level of comfort and use it For the Good, now that is a goal indeed.

Henry Miller had a point, this point differently, in The Air Conditioned Nightmare and The Nightmare Notebook.

Parents matter?

Remember kindergarten? I learned this lesson there. Given this first model, it's amazing I decided to become a professor. I used the wrong colors to color in my mimeograph (remember mimeographs? the blue ink alcohol smell of them, the fuzzy lines?) of the scare crow. For one thing, I was the only person in the room who had ever seen one, but according to my Teacher of the Frightening Eye Make-Up, my colors were wrong. Mine had brown straw hair, a red shirt, and purple overalls. Now, when I handed in my coloring, all proud to have stayed inside the lines without turning the paper over ( I was an "arc-er" she'd said), as per the overt directions, beaming! I was told that mine was to look just like hers: yellow hair (must be some really new straw), red shirt (sure, of course), and blue overalls (because "there are no purple overalls"). Oh, there were covert directions! Well, out of my angelic six year old face came the phrase, "Go to hell," because in my life No One had ever told me that my Imaginative Response to the world was a Problem. I was made to apologize. I did. But I did not mean it. My mother did not require me to mean it, just to do it so that the teacher would not give me a hard time all year. And from that day on, when I smelled "this is the way it must be done, you must be like all the other children, this is how the world is" I wiggled until I got at least a little, and sometimes very, loose. --- Besides, scare crows are dressed in whatever old rags are lying around that will stuff out well with old, usually mildewed, brown, straw that the quadrupeds won't eat. They scare crows by flapping and jostling in the wind, thus convincing the crows that someone is shooing them off the crop. The color is not the issue. And there was Mr. Green Jeans, so I knew damn well that denim didn't have to be blue. But, you know, why would anyone bother to look at the world, at the real, for a sec?

Now, I was not a perfect teen. I was rebellious and irritating, and for a while some folks around town were sure I was headed to the mental ward, the streets, or jail. I was pretty mad, and pretty smart, and that mad-ness got externalized. I was stuck in The Apparatus, I knew it, and I didn't have the means yet to control my relationship to it. I do now. I've read its code. Nobody gets total control of that relationship, but we can get some distance, some 'negative' between us and It.

I had parents who showed me how to use my negative relation The Apparatus for the good, instead of imploding on myself (though, I did some imploding, let's not be unrealistic here).

These kids have not had the benefit of parents who defended their imaginations, their inner life, their sense of self. These kids are going to have to start fighting real hard. Harder than my punk-hippie-new wave-grunge-death metal-goth-Humanities-majors generation had to.

Of course, we're the one's raising these soul-lost children, and something is very much the matter there. Not all of the Gen X kids opted for the Alternatives, many of them went right along with the Apparatus. I'm not sure which set are raising these kids who are in a kind of numb and unnamable pain, but I have a guess.

The Soul and Post-Structuralism???

Julia Kristeva approaches this problem from the Post-structuralist psychoanalytic position. She discusses these new shades on old conditions in New Maladies of the Soul, and alludes to them in Revolt, She Said. To summarize brutally, people are becoming empty. The neurotic has some troubling interference in their overfull self, the depressive has content that's turned against them. The problem used to be that people could feel too acutely, and so the mind warped those feelings so that at least something was being expressed. The new turn in the soul is that : there's no there there. People come to analysis reporting that they have no interests, no feeling, no real reactions. They have been switched off. Their internal life has shriveled. A process of revivification has be put in place with such patients, says Kristeva.

And so finds Dr. Levine. In Revolt, She Said, a collection of interviews, Kristeva is basically out to defend "the negative", the rebel with a cause, the rebellion that knows what it wants besides Woodstock, the demand that society, thought, art, economy, music, place the human and the soul at its center. (FD: yeh, I reviewed it.)In her discussion of May '68, Kristeva gets to the heart of the problem we all face, and even our "best and brightest" are now inhieriting:

Happiness in terms of jouissance is the antithesis of happiness as the satisfaction of consumer needs; it's actually one of the main features of May '68 and yet a lot of people criticized it for that, accusing it of unfortunate irrealism. The call was for the sacred, not for luxury living; it can still be heard, despite the technocratic and automated appearances of the new world order: it's there in the popularity of religous sects (37).... 'We're realists, we want the impossible' ... What was at stake indeed was achieving this impossiblity -- the reality of jouissance. Precisely because it is intrinsically impossible, we'll achieve jouissance in a constraning society, provided that we subject it to fervent and sustained disruption [questioning, doubt, dis-alegiance, the negative].... Part and parcel of the search for a new happiness -- the equivalent of a new sacred -- is the devaluing of homo faber in favor of homo ludens (36).... [Arendt] thought that revolution (particularly the French Revolution) substituted the necessity of economic welfare for the stuggle for freedom, so that the poor people's thirst for material goods blocked freedom, and this led to the failure of the revolution [no diss to the poor, one must start at basic needs!]. I think she underestimated that in France more than elsewhere, 'happiness' doesn't just mean getting rid of poverty but access to an 'art of living,' cultivating eroticism and taste, fulfilling the spirit and the flesh. That's what jouissance means.... Here's the feature that makes the French the closest of the moderns to the Greek ideal: blossom in the public place (41).

The notion that we can flourish, fully, had never died. And that we Need to Flourish is clear, always already.

As Surya Das puts it: Do you want to make a living, or do you want to make a life?

Am I overly concerned for the Privileged Children? No. I'm concerned for all of us, these poor creatures, with all that hard soul-work in front of them, are the just symptom in this missive. But, you know, when the Rich Kids are in this kind of funk, directionless, self-hating, absent, living only on their own surface -- nothing good can follow on that.

And how I'm going to open them to the world of depths, of connections and inter-being that literature shows us, I will have to think long and hard over the next year or so.