The Ethos of Cool vs. the Ethos of Chill:
Generation Y and the Waning of Affect
i
In 1989, the sociologist Todd Gitlin attempted to take “the temperature
of our time” by dividing postmodern American popular culture into “hot” and
“cool” categories. A partial list includes:
Cool
Urban/Multinational
Office
Head
MTV
Laurie Anderson
Detached
New York/LA
Michael Graves
The
Three
Davids
(Hockney, Letterman, Byrne)
Hot
Local-Global
Home
Heart
CNN
Queen Ida
Engaged
Montreal/New Orleans
Christopher Alexander
The
Three
Abbeys
(Hoffman, Edward, Road)1
Rather than plumb the whys and wherefores of Gitlin’s criteria for cool and hot
postmodernism (in fact, Gitlin is content to let them speak for themselves),
thirteen years later I strongly question whether we should still apply the concepts
of “cool” and “hot” to the cultural narratives of postmodernism. Indeed, in the
sixties Marshall McLuhan had already appropriated the cool/hot dichotomy in
referring to different “temperatures” of mass media. Gitlin himself drops names
that also hug the cusp of the postmodern era: Abbie Hoffman, Edward Abbey, and
the Beatles’ album Abbey Road. Moreover, associating cool with the head and
hot with the heart would have elicited knowing nods in many historical epochs in
Western civilization, never mind postmodernism.
Gitlin’s list included American age groups from teens to late twenty- and
early thirtysomethings. Narrowing the focus to Americans bom circa 1977 and
after (the beginning of so-called Generation Y), I want to supplement his
dichotomy with my own, one that contrasts the ethos of cool (as a noun, verb, or
adjective) with the ethos of chill, or chilling (as a verb or verbal).
Whether or not the difference between the ethos of cool and of chill is
one of degree or kind is arguable (the transgenerational word cool is still
commonly used, of course: when TV’s popular cartoon character Bart Simpson