Some time last year, I grabbed a copy of Hal Niedzviecki’s latest book, Hello, I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity, but just recently had time to read it. I met Niedzviecki once a few years ago, and he was intelligent and articulate, but very little that he had written (that I had read, anyway) was especially brilliant. Good? Yes. Excellent? Not so much. But I’m Special was beyond good. It was most definitely excellent. Niedzviecki covers ground that many (including the inimitable David Foster Wallace) have covered before, but without the usual pseudo-intellectual stake-claiming, bullshit, and posturing. As well as looking deep into the social causes of contemporary youth activism and independent media, he links the rise of neo-conservative and neo-traditional groups and movements to the same pop-culture-motivated desire for extreme individuality. It is an excellent read, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in trying to undertand their place in, or the nature of, the chaotic and often savage-seeming world of contemporary popular culture.
Read an extended excerpt:
When activists try to get the word out about the cause on their own, using websites, zines, and pirate radio, the line between chronicling dissent and using one’s status as protester to enter the pop world and futher an I’m-Special agenda is a thin one. The 2001 protest at Quebec City, Canada’s largest protest ever, gave birth to a number of independent encapsulations of the event. Two books emerged in a timely fashion: Resist! published by Halifax’s Fernwood Books, and Counterproductive, put out by Montreal micro-press Cumulus. Both feature a mixture of first-hand reports from the front lines and fervent rhetoric against global capitalism. But much of the writing suggests that the protesters are feeling the I’m-Special vibe. Jennifer Bennett starts her “Anishinaabe Girl in Quebec” essay in Resist! with the sentence: “The best vacation of my life began Wednesday night, April 18th, 2001, at 10 pm, the day after my twenty-third birthday.” A volunteer medic follows up in Counterproductive with the ponouncement: “Going to Quebec Cty was, without a doubt, the craziest, most dangerous, most fun experience I’ve ever had.” This kind of commentary, unfortunately, plays into the hands of cynics such as Jean Chrétien, prime minister at the time, who told the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir before the Quebec City Summit of the Americas: “They say to themselves, ‘Let’s go spend the weekend in Quebec City, we’ll have fun, we’ll protest and blah, blah, blah.'”
Chrétien’s obvious contempt for democratic protest aside, he had a point: How many of the mostly middle-class Westerners who protested at the anti-globalization rallies of the early millennial period were in attendance at least as much to be there as to “work for change”? At Quebec City, there were all-night parties, bonfires under overpasses, booze and drugs aplenty. This is, in fact, probably not that different from the Sixties, a movement that began with parallel battles to oppose systemized racism in the United States and the war in Vietnam, and ended in a confusing swirl of contradictory cultural antics, many of which were more about fun than commitment to any cause. “It wasn’t really a deep-seated sense of pacifism or outrage toward the military,” said one counterculture activist who is quoted in writer Abe Peck’s book about the sixties social revolution. “It was more like ‘here’s a chance for me to get back at parents, government, cops, society, culture, you name it. Them—the big guys, the people in control.'”
Among the three film/video projects released not long after the Quebec City protests is the twenty-minute video assemblage of footage put out by the Toronto Video Activist Collective (TVAC). In the TVAC video, protesters variously chant, attack the giant four-thousand-metre security fence surrounding the summit, lurch away blinded by tear gas, and dance defiantly to the beat of drums under the watchful eyes of the police. It is clear from this video that the protesters descended on the demonstration with fingers poised over the record button. The overall effect is, again, not to communicate any sense of what these protests are about or who they are meant to ultimately assist, but to convey notions of self-empowerment and DIY culture: We are here, we did something, we me me me we.
The fact that none of this material is memorable in the least reminds us of the way pop culture has colonized extremity. The sixties had Abbie Hoffman, who could shock us with entreaties to violate the laws of property by calling his manifesto Steal This Book. Today, mainstream and popular singers, artists, and writers celebrate murder, mayhem, rape. Petty theft seems mundane when every character, from B-movie detective Shaft to Eminem’s “Slim Shady” to even the fictional liberal president of the United States played on TV by a pedigreed actor, is against the state, against the system. Comments Gustin Reichback, a former sixties radical who is now in the downside of his fifties and a New York State Supreme Court justice: “The counterculture of 30 years ago is the mainstream today. Our success shifted the parameters of what constitutes a counterculture.” That is, dissident culture and even dissident protest is now mainstream. Since nothing is shocking, we can never challenge the precepts of mainstream society through an aesthetic that aims to jar passive spectators out of their mindless habits. To try to organize a spectacle is to do a service for the corporate pop-culture world, which demands a series of spectacles that it can endlessly overshadow and turn into their likeness.* When protesters go it alone, producing indie media, they find themselves shut out of the mainstream’s capacity to fetishize and aesthetize, and unable to reach that wider audience that is essential to activate any kind of change. Moreover, they find themselves slipping into I’m-Special mode, creating their own mini-spectacles featuring you-know-who at the centre.
*Emphasis added.
