What It's Like
Chuck Klosterman gets a lot right—and one thing very wrong—about time in his book The Nineties: A Book
Time seems to go by exponentially faster the older we get. I have a theory about this phenomenon that I like to break out in conversations (which should give you an idea of how fun I am at parties). To explain my theory, I have to employ a bit of English grammar: the perfect aspect of the present tense, which people customarily call the present perfect tense. Usually, when we talk about some past event, and when the period in which it took place is over and done with, we use the past tense. We say, “I ate dinner early last night”—last night clearly being a time period that has ended. Meanwhile, when we say “I’ve already had dinner,” this implies that the time for having dinner is still going on. Someone could still have dinner, but I already have. Often there are no words to indicate whether a time setting is over, but we still know when to use the present or past tense. For example, it’s fine for me to say “I’ve eaten escargot,” because if I hadn’t eaten it, I still could. I can’t say “Abraham Lincoln has eaten escargot.” It’s too late for that now.
It’s not always so clear-cut, however, whether the time period in which something might happen is over. If I want to ask someone about their eating of breakfast today, it might be right to ask either “Have you eaten breakfast today?” or “Did you eat breakfast today?” To decide between those possibilities, there are all sorts of considerations I need to make: What time of day is it? Does this person regularly eat breakfast? Is the time for breakfast determined by time of day or a person’s sleep schedule? Am I currently thinking of breakfast as a meal determined by time or as a meal entailing certain kinds of foods? Why am I asking this person about breakfast? Do I want to have breakfast with them? How would they answer all of these questions? We’re subconsciously assessing all of these factors whenever we make a decision about which tense to use.
Apparently, the question of whether a time period is over and done with is ambiguous, and you need to consider a lot more than just time to answer it. It’s a social decision. There are uncountable intersubjective factors you have to weigh. With all of those social considerations, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the older you get, the more unfinished projects and concerns and dilemmas and historical moments accrete in your mind; the more things there are about which you say “I haven’t finished that yet.” And in the mean time, full-fledged adults have been born and grown up, and for them your still-present concerns are not simply things of the past—like Abraham Lincoln, they’re history.
In
his collection The Nineties: A Book, Chuck Klosterman opines that the 1990s weren’t merely the last decade of the twentieth century, they were the last decade whatsoever, at least inasmuch as a decade is a period of time identifiable by a zeitgeist—recognizable fashions and trends, and the commensurate public concerns that seem to engender them. Klosterman’s thesis is two-fold: First, there are breeches in attitudes between decades that give rise to each of their distinctive traits. While many of the social and political turmoils that seemed essential to any past decade had their beginnings in prior decades and carried on into the following decades, there was always—in the everlasting words of, well, Everlast—a “What it’s like” to being in a given decade. “The texture is what mattered,” Klosterman writes of the 1990s specifically. “The feeling of the era, and what that feeling supposedly signified, isolates the nineties from both its distant past and its immediate future.” The second part of Kolsterman’s thesis is bolder. If there was a certain je ne sais quoi that set the experience of being in the nineties apart from that of other decades, in that very sense they were just like any other decade. But Klosterman takes great pains, especially in his last chapter, to show that something—a mixture of things really—happened at the turn of the twenty-first century that caused a more profound kind of change: a paradigm shift.
For Klosterman, the catalyst for change—the thing that accelerated and intensified the process nearly to immediacy, but itself remained a hard and stable fact after the process—were the attacks of September 11, 2001. The communal trauma of those events took many established institutions, which had long-since been growing inadequate to their given tasks, and rendered them finally useless. The most conspicuous example was the news media. Before September 11, it was becoming harder, but news venues could still report on events and set them in their own context. News events could seem major or minor, but always discrete. With all due respect to the inimitable Ms. Lauryn Hill, everything was not yet everything. After September 11, all news stories became high stakes because they were somehow subsumed under the super-narrative of ideological differences.
What was happening, really, was the media version of what physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn had classified as “normal science” in his controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn categorized “normal science” as the day-to-day work scientists do while operating within the framework of a preexisting, universally accepted paradigm. Kuhn’s assertion was that, most of the time, scientific work mostly entails refining little details within a larger umbrella concept that everyone accepts as obviously true. This process continues until the paradigm transforms. The summer of 2001 can be viewed similarly. These were the final months of “normal journalism,” before the transformation.
You’re sort of left, however, searching for what Klosterman considers the underlying causes of that transformation. Yes, September 11 was traumatic, but all of the factors that he claims it pushed into the forefront of people’s minds were present before September 11, as he freely admits: There was the proliferation of the internet, the disruption of traditional markets for goods and services, the climate crisis, the end of American hegemony, and the expansion of wealth disparity. “Many of the polarizing issues that dominate contemporary discourse,” he writes, “were already in play, but ensconced as thought experiments in academic circles.”
But Klosterman is no historical materialist. Such socio-economic abstractions are never decisive in his story. He is a phenomenologist at heart. The ennui of the nineties, in his telling, was the terminal step in the intergenerational battle over the anxiety of influence. One should never underestimate the power of collective vanity among a generation trying to prove that their means of coping with the prevailing forces of their day are superior to the means of previous generations—or if not coping, then being tragically hip in their failure. If previous generations had already rebelled and innovated in every possible manner, what innovation did Generation X have, there at the supposed end of history, but to be indifferent to everything. Little did we know, the weight of all the “actual” decisive factors of social existence would soon render the intergenerational navel gazing moot and replace it with—what, more deliberate navel gazing? You can’t help but wonder why Klosterman thinks all of this focus on “the feeling of the era” is worth writing a book about if that feeling had no real influence on the burgeoning internet, the exacerbation of the climate crisis, or the uneven distribution of wealth. It did. Our daily struggles to wrench control over the larger forces influencing our lives are not merely epiphenomena. We aren’t in the Matrix. To belabor the point with one more metaphor, we’re not phenotypes out here doing the surviving or dying or fitting in, all at the behest of the genotype. First of all, that’s not really how heredity works. Hell, that’s not even how the Matrix worked. The way it felt to live in the nineties and how we comported ourselves directly influenced the material conditions of the time. Of course it did. Of course it has. Of course it does.
There
was no more paradigmatic change between the nineties and today than there were between other decades. If everything that has happened since September 11 feels to Chuck Klosterman like it’s from a single era—if some piece of culture from 2005 seems like it could have been made today (and I’ll admit, it feels like that to me, too)—well, that means we’re getting old and there are lots of things we haven’t finished yet. And if the present era stands in relief with the nineties, that’s because a generation of people have been defining themselves in contradistinction with how we did it back then. When he claims that the defining feature of the present era is the primacy of singular fixations that everyone is obliged to have opinions about, I’m with him. But when he implies that preceding generations were free of such self-absorption because some larger change had not yet happened, I can’t get on board.
The pedantic fussiness of Baby Boomers and the studied alienation of Gen Xers were both, in their own way, as identitarian as the moral policing and virtue signaling of Millennials and GenZers. The reason we cultivate attitudes, as individuals and as a society, toward the social and political conditions of our times is that we live in time. The world and its conditions are constantly changing, and we cannot know how those conditions will shift under our feet from one moment to the next. Even the most capable of us are irremediably burdened by uncertainty. What is more, the way we react to those changes elicits further changes. It’s a recursive system. We are both the pawns and the Kasparovs in the game.