19 November 2006
no orgasm has ever taken place as the result of two classes embracing each other
Reading Theweleit's Male Fantasies alongside Cawthorne's Sex Lives of Famous Lesbians introduces the question of defunct generations. Colette's riotous literary, sexual and emotional promiscuity in a world of Countesses, novelists, artists, poets, actors and businessfolk seems not only oddly quaint (cross-dressing on the Champs-Elyses, ice-skating with your pet bulldog, trapezees in the bedroom) but also now strictly impossible - dubious politics aside, who today has the time or energy to be a 21st-century Colette? A relentless project of perpetual self-creation and the proliferation of autonomic universes consisting of gloriously trashy physical profligacy alongside sincere and intense love, not to mention extraordinary literary production...from syphilis to state funerals...
The literary revelations of the Freikorps extracted so well by Theweleit have an odd consistency, but it is the consistency of a generation so singular that one can hardly make parallels with any that precede or follow it. Red Women, the Communist threat in every sense of the word, have faces to Freikorps members 'like a tiger that's been licking blood' (Zöberlein) and the militarisation of desire (the total elimination of seduction) is exhibited as a 'natural' unity: 'I plunge my gaze into the eyes of passing women, fleeting and penetrating as a pistol shot, and rejoice when they are forced to smile' (Jünger).
Are we to conclude that those that felt themselves to be most unique, most trail-blazing are in fact they sublime representatives of their generation and age? Was Colette 'made possible' only by the age that surrounded her or did she actively contribute to generating the debauched end of the 'Lost Generation'?
The problem with most theories of Generations are their reactionary, cyclical nature. Even though one characterises each 'generation' with reference to events and innovations of a technological or cultural kind, this eminently modernist notion of discontinuity and revolutions (of any size) is subsumed under a rather more pagan or even 'Zen bourgeois' conception of the cyclical nature of cohorts and personality types, which has about as much to say about a progressive political project as horoscopes do about the real state of your bank balance.
What are we to make of this kind of classificatory project? The Transcendental Generation, for example named individuals and painted their portraits, believed in truth and justice), whereas The MTV Generation is apparently committed to the Goonies franchise, and is somehow shaped by the Waco siege and Nintendo. Whether one feels part of Generation X, Generation Y, Generation XY, or my personal favourite 'The No Generation' (what Cohn-Bendit sniffily called the 2005 French protestors, attacking them for their lack of '68-type positive energy), is apparently irrevelant in the face of such retroactively posited categories. The very act of 'generationalising' carries its own form of determinism (ah Rubix Cube! How could it have been otherwise?) and reduces cultural and economic contingency to a set of historical a prioris that make other accounts of the past impossible.
If we must remain with all this essentialising talk of ages, zeitgeists, cycles and periodisation, let us take the 'No Generation' tag in both sense of the word - the death of self-ironisation and the refusal to admit that our projects are exhausted in the detached pursuit of cultural tat and market-compatible personality traits.
