The Posteverything Generation.doc

The Posteverything Generation后一切的一代I never expected to gain any new insight into the nature of my generation, or the changing landscape of American colleges, in Lit Theory. Lit Theory is supposed to be the class where you sit at the back of the room with every other jaded sophomore wearing skinny jeans, thick-framed glasses, an ironic tee-shirt and over-sized retro headphones, just waiting for lecture to be over so you can light up a Turkish Gold and walk to lunch while listening to Wilco. Thats pretty much the way I spent the course, too: through structuralism, formalism, gender theory, and post-colonialism, I was far too busy shuffling through my Ipod to see what the patriarchal world order of capitalist oppression had to do with Ethan Frome. But when we began to study postmodernism, something struck a chord with me and made me sit up and look anew at the seemingly blas college-aged literati of which I was so self-consciously one.我从没指望通过文学理论课来了解我这一代人的特征，或者是了解美国的大学是如何发生变化的。文学理论这门课完全就是让你在课堂上装酷的坐在教室后座，周围都是有着疲惫倦容的大二学生，戴着宽框眼镜和超大号的复古式耳机，身穿印着讽刺意味话语的T恤和紧身牛仔裤，就盼着早点下课，好让你一边点根土耳其金烟（ Turkish Gold）一边听着照办乐队（Wilco）的歌往食堂方向走。一边努力听着结构主义、形式主义、性别理论和后殖民主义等艰深话题，一边这就是我在课堂上消磨时间的方式。可是当我们开始学习后现代主义时，我突然咔嗒一声开了窍，使我为之一振，开始重新审视我乏味的大学生活我身体里作为文人的自我觉醒了。According to my textbook, the problem with defining postmodernism is that its impossible. The difficulty is that it is so.post. It defines itself so negatively against what came before it naturalism, romanticism and the wild revolution of modernism that its sometimes hard to see what it actually is. It denies that anything can be explained neatly or even at all. It is parodic, detached, strange, and sometimes menacing to traditionalists who do not understand it. Although it arose in the post-war west (the term was coined in 1949), the generation that has witnessed its ascendance has yet to come up with an explanation of what postmodern attitudes mean for the future of culture or society. The subject intrigued me because, in a class otherwise consumed by dead-letter theories, postmodernism remained an open book, tempting to the young and curious. But it also intrigued me because the question of what postmodernism what a movement so post-everything, so reticent to define itself is spoke to a larger question about the political and popular culture of today, of the other jaded sophomores sitting around me who had grown up in a postmodern world.据我手上的教科书，从定义的角度上来讲，后现代主义几乎是无法下定义的，定义的难点在于“后”一字，虽然它在西方战后首次出现（术语出现于1949年），但这个课题令我感到好奇，因为In many ways, as a college-aged generation, we are also extremely post: post-Cold War, post-industrial, post-baby boom, post-9/11.at one point in his famous essay, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” literary critic Frederic Jameson even calls us “post-literate.” We are a generation that is riding on the tail-end of a century of war and revolution that toppled civilizations, overturned repressive social orders, and left us with more privilege and opportunity than any other society in history. Ours could be an era to accomplish anything.作为正接受着高等教育的一代，我们在很多方面都被“后”化：后冷战、后工业时代、后婴儿潮、后911文学评论家弗雷德里克詹姆逊（Frederic Jameson）一度曾在他著名的一篇文章里提到，“深受后现代主义，或者说是晚期资本主义文化逻辑的影响”，我们是“后一代学子”，我们这一代人出生于所谓的短世纪末。而短世纪充满了大大小小的战争和革命，这些改变了人类文明，推翻了强权政府，给我们留下了非同寻常的机会和特权，这些特权和机会要比从前任何一代人都来得多。我们这一代，每个人都能思我所思，做我所做。And yet do we take to the streets and the airwaves and say “here we are, and this is what we demand”? Do we plant our flag of youthful rebellion on the mall in Washington and say “we are not leaving until we see change! Our eyes have been opened by our education and our conception of what is possible has been expanded by our privilege and we demand a better world because it is our right”? It would seem we do the opposite. We go to war without so much as questioning the rationale, we sign away our civil liberties, we say nothing when the Supreme Court uses Brown v. Board of Education to outlaw desegregation, and we sit back to watch the carnage on the evening news.然而我们要上街游行和用广播一遍又一遍地大声喊“我们就在这里！这才是我们的需求”吗？或者高举我们标榜着年轻反叛的旗帜在华盛顿广场叫喊着“不看到变化我们决不离开！教育开阔了我们的眼界，让我们明白了我们有着比前人更多的特权，我们渴望一个更美好的世界，而这也正是我们的权利”？不，我们正做着相反的事情：我们去参战却不问为什么，我们签字放弃了自身的公民自由权，当最高法院通过“布朗诉教育委员会案”取缔种族隔离我们什么都没说,我们静静地坐在电视前看着晚间新闻上报道的屠杀事件。On campus, we sign petitions, join organizations, put our names on mailing lists, make small-money contributions, volunteer a spare hour to tutor, and sport an entire wardrobes worth of Live Strong bracelets advertising our moderately priced opposition to everything from breast cancer to global warming. But what do we really stand for? Like a true postmodern generation we refuse to weave together an overarching narrative to our own political consciousness, to present a cast of inspirational or revolutionary characters on our public stage, or to define a specific philosophy. We are a story seemingly without direction or theme, structure or meaning a generation defined negatively against what came before us. When Al Gore once said “Its the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism,” he might as well have been echoing his entire generations critique of our own. We are a generation for whom even revolution seems trite, and therefore as fair a target for bland imitation as anything else. We are the generation of the Che Geuvera tee-shirt.在大学里，我们在请愿书上签名，加入各种组织，把自己的名字添加到各种邮件通讯录中，戴上为乳腺癌症研究义捐的标志腕带，然后在衣柜里贴满了大大小小的有关全球变暖的小广告，可是我们所做的一切到底是为了谁而发声？就像真正的后现代一代那样，我们无法描述我们的政治抱负，我们没有可以激发灵感、鼓舞斗志的领袖人物，我们没有哲学，我们没有方向或主题。 我们只是被我们之前的一切所定义，当阿尔戈尔(Al Gore)说“自我陶醉和虚伪主义这二者的结合，真正地定义了后现代主义，”同时也提到了他那一代人都需反思批判自身。而我们这一代，呼喊着改革已经是日常，因此我们模仿前人的一切。我们是穿切格瓦拉T恤衫的一代。 Jameson calls it “Pastiche” “the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language.” In literature, this means an author speaking in a style that is not his own borrowing a voice and continuing to use it until the words lose all meaning and the chaos that is real life sets in. It is an imitation of an imitation, something that has been re-envisioned so many times the original model is no longer relevant or recognizable. It is mass-produced individualism, anticipated revolution. It is why postmodernism lacks cohesion, why it seems to lack purpose or direction. For us, the post-everything generation, pastiche is the use and reuse of the old clichs of social change and moral outrage a perfunctory rebelliousness that has culminated in the age of rapidly multiplying non-profits and relief funds. We live our lives in masks and speak our minds in a dead language the language of a society that expects us to agitate because thats what young people do. But how do we rebel against a generation that is expecting, anticipating, nostalgic for revolution?詹姆森称其为“拼凑艺术”带着语言的面具，说着已死亡的语言。在文学上，这是指作者说话风格并非本人这是一种对模仿艺术的模仿，“这就是为什么后现代主义缺乏生命力，How do we rebel against parents that sometimes seem to want revolution more than we do? We dont. We rebel by not rebelling. We wear the defunct masks of protest and moral outrage, but the real energy in campus activism is on the internet, with websites like . It is in the rapidly developing ability to communicate ideas and frustration in chatrooms instead of on the streets, and channel them into nationwide projects striving earnestly for moderate and peaceful change: we are the generation of Students Taking Action Now Darfur; we are the Rock the Vote generation; the generation of letter-writing campaigns and public interest lobbies; the alternative energy generation.但是我们如何反叛怀念革命的父母一代？我们如何去反叛有时候比我们更想闹革命的父母？我们不反叛。不反叛就是我们的反叛。我们真正的精力不是放在校园里，而是放在互联网上，例如moveon网站。网络给我们提供了一个不断发展的交流思想和受挫感的机会。我们用聊天室代替上街游行，以一种更为平和有效的方式推动全国性改变。我们是“同学们,行动起来:达尔富尔”（Students Taking Action Now Darfur）的一代；我们是“摇滚和投票”的一代；我们更倾向于通过书信以及和游说各样利益团体，更有活力更和平的一代。College as America once knew it as an incubator of radical social change is coming to an end. To our generation the word “radicalism” evokes images of al Qaeda, not the Weathermen. “Campus takeover” sounds more like Virginia Tech in 2007 than Columbia University in 1968. Such phrases are a dead language to us. They are vocabulary from another era that does not reflect the realities of today. However, the tec