Some months ago, Gary Shteyngart, author of the underwhelming
Russian Debutante's Handbook and the overwhelmingly excellent "Several Anecdotes About My Wife" (in
Granta 78: Bad Company), wrote an exceptional paragraph on
my alma mater:
In the late nineteen-eighties, I was sent to Stuyvesant High School, in Manhattan, a magnet school specializing in math and the sciences that was also a kind of holding pen for multinational nerds. The majority of us were immigrants or the children of immigrants, although a good number of sweet native-born kids from the Upper West Side were on hand to teach us about the right music and the proper drugs. Despite their best efforts, our outsiders' angst often found its expression in the Eurotrash New Wave tunes of a Long Island radio station called WLIR (later renamed WDRE), broadcasting from deep in the suburban interior of Garden City. We-and by "we" I mean pimply young Russians, Koreans, Chinese, Indians-were lost between two worlds. We went to school in Manhattan, but we lived in Flushing, Jackson Heights, Midwood, and Bayside, and couldn't resist WLIR, that clarion call of squeaky synthesizer music, and the narcoleptic Goth outfits and the spiky hair that went with it. The usual British suspects ruled the airwaves: Depeche Mode, Erasure (their bittersweet hit "Oh l'Amour" was an inspiration to the loveless), and, of course, the Smiths, the princes of the gelled-hair set, best known for their moody anthem "How Soon Is Now?"
This is embarrassingly dead on. It is embarrassing in that I cringe at the thought of outsiders reading this. Fortunately, they will shrug and be perplexed and then fail to process it or remember. I went to Stuyvesant in the late 1990s and I listened rap music and, uh, the music described above in its latter-day incarnations. (Portishead, with the hip-hop inflection, was a favorite.) I did a good deal of dancing in lieu of homework. You have every reason to ask, "What the 'F' is up with the stroll down memory lane? I read this religiously to identify evil and, when appropriate, to obliterate it." Right on.
It's evil you want, and it's evil you'll get.
Let's talk about social reproduction, man. That shit is ill.
This is a tangent. I love Anthony Appiah. This is perhaps predictable. In that case, go scratch your bum or set yourself ablaze and watch me weep. Oh wait, I'm not weeping. But I'm weeping on the inside. Honest. Moving right along, check
this out. Yeah, go there and read "The State and the Shaping of Identity." He's been writing very insightful stuff on this subject since at least his 1994 essay in
Multiculturalism: The Politics of Recognition ("Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction"). Again, this has nothing to do with anything. But read it. Seriously.
Social reproduction. The fancy-pants bastards heavily-laden with US cultural capital (rather than cultural capital of foreign vintage, which is only imperfectly transferable) ran the show and called the shots, and the same will be true of their spawn. Worse yet, the talented and ambitious from among the goons, the solid citizens, the squares, mimic them and thus strengthen their grip. Would we have it any other way? Would we deny said individuals the opportunity to be educated in the fancy-pants vein in the name of giving the world more rabble-rousers? Do the rabble need to be roused? Are rabble-rousers, often enough fancy-pants bastards, doing any bloody good, or are they manipulative Bolshies pursuing their own narrow need to be liked and loved? It's a never-ending tragedy, and I see it unfolding before my eyes. The quality kids go to proper schools, get cleaned up; they wise up and become irremediably North American national-cosmopolitans. Speech affectations and insider mannerisms are acquired by osmosis, and the bad guys win. A la America, understood by the Ayatollahs as "the Great Satan" because it is the Great Tempter, this is driven by the undeniable charms of a charmed and effortless existence defined by the post-materialist values of those at the tail end of the
Buddenbrooks sequence.
Some will argue that this set, which is defined less by ethnicity or even income than by taste (
Bourdieu is in the house), is powerless and thus irrelevant, thus making my rage a misplaced baleful howl that ought to be directed forcefully against the rapacious buccaneers with their hands tightly wrapped around the levers of power. It's a good point. The problem is that the buccaneers serve a function: they gave us just-in-time manufacturing and they make America fabulously rich, so I salute them. Here's to the
Buccaneers.
So what's up? Why fret? Perhaps I am privileging a set of oppositional values that is the reflexive product of what was in fact the less-than-traumatic encounter I've witnessed, i.e., the encounter between immigrants shaped (spoiled is the wrong word) by PBS, the museums, tracking in the public schools, and bourgeois aspirations and the post-60s public culture of self-consciously smart and emancipated native Americans. Whenever I read about the battle for Brownsville, I can't help but identify with the ethnics against the eggheads. Ergo, the eggheads, particularly the most fashionable of the eggheads, are necessarily the enemy. But this, perhaps inevitably, doesn't quite square with the truth of the matter. In my very limited experience, it seems almost impossible to tease out one's real motivations and drives, thus strongly suggesting that one ought to focus on the more quotidian questions: Is our behavior constructive? Is it alienating, or destructive?
Still, this process of social reproduction strikes me as pretty brutal at times. It's also exactly the opposite: a lot of individuals transition into and out of the ill-defined elite I've described, and they do it without very much in the way of wear and tear. In describing the process of brutal, I mean only that a good deal is lost, and there's little choice in the middle. One can't have it both ways, except in the most trivial sense. One can strategically retain badges of ethnicity that are free of content -- DesiWear comes to mind -- and otherwise become deracinated. (You'll notice that the bodies on display are lithe, lean, and tall.) Or one can embrace a separatism that represents nostalgia of the worst kind. I imagine panethnic solidarities based on the lower middle class virtues as the alternative, but can this coexist with the very valuable broadmindedness of the eggheads? I don't know.
As a kid told me a few months ago during an interview, "we're all on one conveyer belt or another." A few kids resist the conveyer belt and the result is generally dissatisfying. You're neither
here nor
there.
