Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 115

Are We Having Fun Yet?

I ll

Down a nd Out in Paris a nd London and The R oa d to Wigan Pier, Weil understood
that sustained labor under poor working conditions also crushes the spirits of human
beings, transforming many into drug addicts and alcoholics, violent abusers of
each other and of families—even suicides.
And yet, allowing for the dark side of unremitting toil as it was often manifested
in French auto plants, English coal mines, and Idaho beet fields, it can’t be denied
that manual \aborers f e lt something, felt it deeply, authentically, and existentially, in
a fashion that Amer ican young people born after 1970, say, are commonly bereft of.
For today’s youth and young adults live in a virtual world not only of electronic
media, of CD-ROMs and Internet chat rooms, but of work. We take for granted
what would have seemed incredible to a young Lloyd Soyez just two generations
ago— namely that millions of middle-class Americans now in their teens, twenties,
and thirties will live out their professional lives in the disembodied realms of
cyberspace as date processors, software designers, software engineers, network
engineers, television rewrite specialists, marketing researchers, marketing
production assistants, on-line editors, publicity directors, directors of knowledge
management, advertising media buyers, media production consultants, public
information specialists, systems analysts, web developers, web masters, spam
masters, helpdesk administrators. Junior and senior technical analysts, LAN (local
area network) administrators, junior and senior administrative analysts, chief
information officers, junior and senior database administrators, rank and file
telecommunications workers, telecommunications executives, and so on a d
infinitum. Say what you will about manual labor, it n ever distan ces the s e l f fr o m
the body. This distancing is the essence of postmodern work: a divorce of human
sense of self from its center of being, its corporeal seat. No wonder the Canadian
cultural theorists Arthur and Marilouise Kroker chose to label the last decade of
the twentieth century the fle sh -e a ting nineties.
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that so many American young people
in the postmodern era have become addicted to fun, not as a counterbalancing
escape from, but as a substitute for, the self-actualization of work. Now it is fun,
not work, that “enters the body” in the form of nose-, tongue-nipple-, and bellybutton rings, tattoos, branding, and other forms of physical mutilation. Anyone
who has witnessed the bumping and bashing that goes on in the mosh pits of
contemporary rock concerts from coast to coast readily understands the frantic,
unspoken need of young people to literally get in touch with their own bodies,
even if it means suffering cuts, bruises, even broken bones in the process. Why do
so many youths enjoy punishing themselves in this bizarre and disturbing fashion?
As Nietzsche once observed, faced with the choice between feeling pain and
feeling nothing at all human beings will opt for pain every time. Along with so
many other things contemporary, the “mosh pit syndrome” also confirms a