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Popular Culture Review
the post-midnight, giggly privacies of women’s dorm rooms and sororities from
coast to coast.
But American cool constituted much more than this. Even before
Dwight David Eisenhower lent his signature to a decade, J.D. Salinger’s fictional
Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye had already endeared himself to
millions of impressionable young readers by embracing a broader-based ethos of
cool, not as a doomsday weapon in the civil wars of young love (Holden had no
love life), but as a Weltanschauung. In an ontological flip-flop that Jean-Paul
Sartre would have appreciated, Holden was more afraid of showing hurt than of
being hurt. In all of Holden’s relationships, it wasn’t better to have cared and lost
than never to have cared at all. Rather, it was cooler to forget it all than lose the
inner compactness which could be associated with, and substituted for, strength
and self-reliance. Salinger understood the unhealthiness of such an attitude, since
it’s clear that Holden is telling his story to a psychiatrist who, in real life,
would’ve found a way to impress upon the tormented teenager the perils inherent
in the construction of a private, not to mention a social, self.
In recent times, the contemporary ethos of “chill” has helped undercut—
perhaps even annihilate—conventional (i.e., pre-postmodern) conceptions of self,
authentic or otherwise. For the cultural commentator Fredric Jameson, “waning
of affect” is directly connected, not to self-destruction, but self-deconstruction:
As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in
contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered
subject may also mean, not merely a liberation from anxiety,
but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since
there is no longer a self present to do the feeling.4
Certainly there’s nothing new about the “disappearance of the self’ as an
overarching issue in modernist Western philosophy, literature, and culture. What
is new—i.e., what’s postmodern—is the notion of a willful deconstruction of a
social identity. Ihab Hassan writes,
[Postmodernism suppresses or disperses . . . the ‘deep’
romantic ego, which remains under dire suspicion in poststructuralist circles as a ‘totalizing principle.’ Losing itself in
the play of language, in the differences from which reality is
plurally made, the self impersonates its absence even as death
stalks its games. It diffuses itself in depthless styles, refusing,
eluding, interpretation.5
In the mid-nineties, Robert Avila, an economist for the Futures Group of
Glastonbury, Connecticut, spoke for thousands of ordinary American parents