Forget It Not; or, Is It Friedman's Fault or Rousseau's?

The redo. It's the greatest temptation of the postmodern era. If something goes wrong, if experience or history gets in the way, just erase it. Start from zero. Nothing that has happened before has any implications for what is to come. Create in the moment. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. The redo is the fantasy behind a film like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but it's also the premise, according to Naomi Klein, behind almost forty years of conservative thought. In her recent book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Klein argues, extremely persuasively, that much of global conservatism since the 1970s can be traced back to the ideas of the economist Milton Friedman, particularly his notion of the "shock doctrine," the idea that societies damaged by war, revolution, or natural disaster can be thrown back to a near-Edenic phase of perfect market capitalism. Much of the influence of Friedman's ideas on 1970s and 1980s Latin America in particular has already been delineated by others, particularly Greg Grandin in his essential study Empire's Workshop: Latin America and the Roots of U. S. Imperialism. What makes Klein's synthesis extraordinarily striking, however, is the way in which she connects Friedman's notions of systemic shock to the rise, not just of torture, but of psychologist Ewan Cameron's specific use of ECT to "shock" individual psyches back to a blank state in which they can be recreated in a more productive form. Hand in hand, these two ideas--and Klein does show rather convincingly that they have frequently been pursued in deliberate tandem in any number of conservative revolutions since the 1970s--allow for the possibility that both societies and their citizens can be wiped clean and brought to a desired fresh state by suitably resolute functionaries.

What's strange about this sort of Edenic notion is that it's not the sort of ideological orientation one expects from pro-capitalists. Yes, yes, yes, Adam Smith, unseen hand, blah blah blah--but have you read The Wealth of Nations lately? Smith's not talking there about going back to something, he's talking about going forward. According to Smith, capitalism and its markets need to be unchecked because they move society forward, progressively, toward ever greater perfection. The problem with market interference for Smith isn't that it changes things, but that it inhibits natural change.

This is typical of most theorists, conservative or liberal (if those words, as usual, have any real meaning) from the American Revolution through World War II. All throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both rabid Marxists and rabid anti-Marxists were interested in societal improvement and advancement. Simply put, they were all in favor of progress. They just disagreed on what it might look like, inevitably asserting that their side was the one doing the advancing, while the other side was atavistically impeding "nature." Historian David Donald once suggested that early nineteenth-century American Whigs and Democrats differed in that the former conceived of society as a flower that needed to be tended and cared for, while the latter saw it as a machine that would run perfectly if left undisturbed, but even at their most diametrically opposed neither party saw society as static or tending toward some perfect pre-diachronic past. Not just the distinctions between political parties, but the sometimes crucial distinction between religious-based and social-science-based reform in the nineteenth century also makes less difference than one would think on this score. As late nineteenth century reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd once put it , "God is the name we give to the future."

All this changes, for some reason, in the mid-twentieth century. For the purposes of this entry I'm not even going to try to speculate why. Round up the usual suspects from the period (the Holocaust, the Cold War, the emerging consumer ethos, etc.) for yourself, and pin it on one of them if you can. What interests me, though, is that by the 1970s, particularly in the United States, there are very few reformers left of any stripe who want to move forward: they all want to go back to the time before Eden was tampered with. These days, the only people I know who believe in progress are those who work in new media and the internet: they exhibit the same faith in the future that the industrialists and social scientists of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century had. For old school liberals, though, the Golden Age now lies in the New Deal/Great Society technocratic nexus, when government seemed compassionate and the broker state kept big capital at bay. For Friedmanites, the trip back is even more radical: they want to go back to the time--which may never have existed--when capital and exchange were in their original, untampered-with state, the theoretically perfect unimpeded free market.

Consequently, the 18th century theorist that diehard Friedmanites remind me of most is not Adam Smith but Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This is odd, because Rousseau is supposed to be a patron saint of liberalism, not conservatism. Things would go much more smoothly here if I linked the Friedmanites up with John Locke and his idea of the "blank slate" of initial consciousness (Locke can be seen as conservative or liberal depending on who's doing the looking), but Rousseau's thought is more resolutely anti-interventionist. Surprisingly, the interventionist/restorationist distinction, like the perfect future/perfect past distinction, is more useful here than throwing around words like Enlightenment or Romantic, let alone liberal or conservative. Even though Rousseau and Friedman would obviously never have agreed in any programmatic way, their work does share a jarring emotional resonance. Everything that's been done before now is clutter. Let's go back to what (I believe) is essential about humanity. Let's deny the relevance of history.

I'm not talking about denying specific sets of inconvenient facts. This is not your gardenvariety Mel Gibson's Dad sort of Holocaust denial here. I'm talking about denying the relevance of change and the specificity of precedent event on general principle. In late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century philosophy, history is a trap, something to be avoided since it can impede action. Not just Friedmanites but existentialists, phenomenologists and postmodernists of nearly every stripe frequently regard the past as a genealogical thicket of obfuscating discourse that must be hacked through and exposed so that one can finally arrive at the clear truth of the current moment. This is one major difference between the standard operating procedure of, say, a (modernist) Freudian and a (postmodernist) Foucauldian: the former disentangles the balled-up threads of past discourse so that future action can be guided in light of a much more evident past; the latter more often shows that all prior logic has been a sham and a scam and need not be taken into account when determining future justifications.

For such latter-day thinkers, there is no God, no Heaven, no Utopia, no future (for you). Only momentary heroism and even bliss may be possible, as in the swim that several characters take as a respite in Camus's The Plague. Hell, of course, may be very real for such thinkers, and it's not just Sartre's other people: postmodern hell is that very thicket of discourse, the paralyzing genealogy of past ways of shared knowing that must be hacked through before any kind of individual action is possible. Maybe the most striking example of this dilemma in 1980s popular culture was Sting's song "History Will Teach Us Nothing" (written by a former English teacher, I might point out), in which an argument is made for the liberation of political prisoners in Augusto Pinochet's Chile on almost exactly the same metaphorical grounds that Pinochet's Friedmanite advisors used to dismantle that country's developmentalist economy: prior discourse is simply superstition--move forward into righteousness in light of what you know.

And here we begin to see why what Donald Schon would have called the generative metaphor of amnesia might be so attractive, not just for conservatives who want to remake the global economy, but for liberals who want to feel happier in their clearly degraded world. In terms of the popular culture versions of such resets over the last three decades, Groundhog Day can be seen as not only ahead of the curve but tied to an earlier form of social philosophy. Like the Back to the Future films that preceded it by a few years, it clings to the idea that one person's incremental knowledge can actually remake things for the better: these films don't present redos predicated not on amnesia but rather on one everyman's ability to remake his environment in light of his augmented knowledge in quasi-technocratic albeit comic fashion. Bill Murray's Phil Conners is not in as excrutiating psychic pain as, say, Dr. Sam Beckett in the "Shock Theatre" episode of Quantum Leap, in which the character literally has to submit to a second course of ECT to stop the experiential memories of all his post-Leap experiences from bleeding back in.

Far closer to our own emotional temperature in the twentyfirst century is a film like Christopher Nolan's Memento. Amnesia has been a commonplace of noir since Cornell Woolrich at least, but even in Woolrich's twisted world, the loss of memory was still usually seen as a bit of a curse. In Nolan's world, though, most of the other characters in the film seem to regard the protagonist Leonard's erasure of memory as a blessing and wonder why he would ever want to have his supposed deficit replenished. In Nolan's world, we don't feel the old school private detective's responsibility that he must close the case so much as the trauma victim's wish that the past be past. Resets are bliss. Accept the present, and don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

I'm obviously exaggerating for effect here, but I do wonder if cultural critics fifty years from now will see amnesia as one of the great shared fantasies of the last quarter-century. Even Joss Whedon's upcoming television series Dollhouse seems to be premised in this idea: the so-called "actives" of this show's world have reportedly chosen to have their memories wiped so that they can exist in a state of moment-to-moment, almost childlike enjoyment of their mutiply identified existence. In this formulation, even depersonalized slavery is preferable to excessively personalized history.

If amnesia is the epic quest of our age, then Dashiell Hammett, even more than Cornell Woolrich, may ultimately be seen as our Homer, because of the famous "Flitcraft story" in The Maltese Falcon, in which a man gets to run away and restart his life fresh, only to repeat it in almost every detail in another town. However aboriginal, though, Hammett's embedded anecdote is still too oldschool for our time, too embedded in the idea that each of us has an innate "nature" that will always prove out when tested by circumstances. One of the reasons why Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is so much more a story of how we would like to forget in our own era is that its whimsical method of memory wiping (so much more discriminating and easier to take than Cameron's global bulkerase) is based in discourse. You remove memories one by one, following threads of genealogy like a Foucaldian dismantling a panopticon, in order to strip away the traces of instrumentality that have caused you pain or trauma.

But Charlie Kaufman, like Dashiell Hammett, has the good sense to know that this is a fantasy, and not just in a technological sense. As the aftermath of wholesale Friedmanite policies has shown again and again in developing nations (even if true-believing corporatists don't want to accept it), you can't erase history without eradicating life. As Ernest Hemingway observed shortly after commencing the electroshock treatments that would ultimately drive him to suicide, "Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient." Like it or not, discourse, history, and experience aren't just our prisons. They are the only tools we will ever have to improve our lives and our worlds. Deal with it--and remember.

Harry, Buffy, and the Post-1980s Adolescent Hero (or, The Boy Who Lived and The Girl Who Died--a Lot)

Let me get the most automatic business out of the way first, and lay out my still unspoiled predictions in advance of 12:01am Saturday: Harry dies. The lightning scar on his forehead is the last of the horcruxes that needs to be destroyed to turn Voldemort mortal again. Snape went undercover with the Death Eaters at the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and was acting on Dumbledore's orders all the while, even when he killed him at the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. (There could be some fudging here with Dumbledore's eventual resurrection via his phoenix Fawkes, but I hope not, for reasons that should be clear after you read what follows.) Depending on how far forward Rowling takes the story in the last chapter, I also expect that we may learn that Hermione eventually becomes a teacher at Hogwarts, possibly of Transfigurations, and maybe even Headmaster.

As I said, that's all the automatic business, but aside from the sheer mechanics of tying up the plot, what does this all mean? Over the last few weeks, journalists have been pouring over the last decade of Pottermania, deciding that it really didn't permanently change adolescent reading habits as much as many had hoped. They have also discovered, most tellingly, that much interest among younger readers dropped off after the first three books--which are, after all, the shortest, least grim, and most self-contained stories in the series. Even allowing for all this hedging, though, the books do seem to have created a sizable cult. In my own lifetime, I think only the world of Star Trek has achieved this level of widespread aesthetic communion, but unlike the Star Trek universe, which stretches across centuries and lightyears, the world of Harry Potter remains within very distinct boundaries of time and space. If Star Trek in all its incarnations captured for its adherents a particular vision of the perfect society, the Potter novels, even with all their shadow governmental agencies and extended backstories, ultimately trace the transit of a single life. Somehow, the books that relate that life have resonated with readers, particularly with the generation of readers who have grown up with them since the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 1997. The depth of that resonance should make us wonder where it comes from.

In that regard, the most useful comparison to Harry Potter may not be any of the members of the United Federation of Planets, but Buffy Anne Summers, more popularly known as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from the film (1992) and television series (1997-2003) that bore that name. I'm not sure if anyone has ever noted it before, but Harry and Buffy are almost the same age. Based on information given in J. K. Rowling's books and the Joss Whedon-supervised television series, Harry was born 31 July 1980, and Buffy was born less than six months later, on 19 January 1981. Although Buffy is younger than Harry, she seems older, in part because her story was told earlier, and in part because the key events in her life happen at later ages than those in Harry's. As every loyal reader knows, Rowling's novels tell the story of Harry's development from age 11 to age 17. By contrast, the core of Buffy's story covers an almost exactly later period, from age 16 to age 22. In other words, Rowling's last two Potter novels cover the same period as the first two seasons of Whedon's television series, both in terms of historical chronology and in terms of their protagonists' ages. Yes, I know both protagonists are fictional, but somehow I find it oddly fitting that in the spring of 1997, just about a month before Harry Potter witnessed Dumbledore's tragic death at Hogwarts, Buffy Summers herself died (for the first of three recorded times) in the caves under the Hellmouth-ridden town of Sunnydale.

The similarities between the two heroes are fascinating--both created by authors writing across gender lines, both seconded by clever witches who made it cool for girls to be bookworms, etc.--but it's that age difference that I think is probably most telling. In a sense, Buffy's story begins when Harry's ends. Harry Potter's story is a story of adolescence. It almost functions as the English equivalent of many of the early Marvel comics (Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, X-Men), asking the question: what would you do with powers if you had them? The strongest attraction of such fantasies always lies in their underlying emotional reality. This is what adolescence feels like to the vast middle of teenagers, neither under- nor over-privileged, in a relatively affluent society. If fairy tales offer younger children fantasies of alternative households and parents, superhero stories offer adolescents fantasies of alternative talents and fates: this is what I'm really like, the consumer thinks, I'm just killing time while I wait to fulfill my destiny. Rowling is obviously keenly aware of this and has made her characters' choices of eventual vocations within the magical world a minor but compelling subplot in her series. In the early books, the characters are just having fun with the discovery that they can do magic. As they advance though their education, however, the magic moves beyond mere play, and they begin asking: What do I want to do with this ability?

If Harry's story details a process of adolescent discovery, Buffy's traces her slow acceptance of adult responsibility. One of the most reiterated situations in Buffy's story is her refusal to take on the duties that come with her unique position as Slayer. From her initial awareness of her powers and move to a second high school at age 16, through her running away from home at age 17, to the aftermath of her unwilling resurrection from the dead at age 20, right down to her eventual comfort with her role as counselor, leader, and teacher at age 22. Buffy's path to full adulthood is persistently stymied by a longing to be "normal." She regularly dreams of what it would be like not to be special, not to have powers, not to have a unique destiny. She longs for the sense of play that Harry left behind around the time of the Tri-Wizard Tournament, just as he longs for the clear sense of purpose that she gained around the time that she graduated from high school.

Yet even though these two stories focus on different parts of growing up, they share a common historical grounding. There have been repeated attempts to determine the historical referents for the major events in Rowling's world--from 1930s homegrown fascism, to the rise of Thatcherism, to Tony Blair's role in the war on terror--but the genius of Rowling's creation is that this world is not merely a one-for-one allegory for ours but rather comprises its own internally consistent alternate reality. To my knowledge, there have been no analogous attempts to find historical referents for Buffy's Sunnydale, but even without a specific historical peg on which to hang a sociopolitical analogy, there is always the most accidental thing that the two heroes have in common: their birthdates. Both grew up in the world of the 1980s and 1990s, and their careers and separate paths through adolescence and young adulthood suggest that they are shaped by a shared generational psychology that is apparently transatlantic rather than national in origin.

As generational heroes, Harry and Buffy most clearly stand apart from the analogous characters who preceded them in popular culture by how they regard authority. In Buffy's case, this attitude is perhaps not so striking. In western society, we expect stories of the late high school and college years to entail a certain amount of vague "rebellion." But as parents who have read Harry's adventures to pre-teen children will tell you, it is striking how many rules Hogwarts students break in Rowling's books. When Dorothy Gale broke rules, there was always a consequence. Tom Swift, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys would never even have dreamt of breaking a rule to reach their goals. From their very first adventure, however, Harry, Ron, and Hermione have to break rules, to undermine the authority of nearly every adult around them (up to and including Albus Dumbledore) in order to achieve a satisfactory conclusion. This is not to say that they don't get in trouble for breaking some rules. It would be more accurate to say that one of the most important skills that Harry and his friends acquire over the series is learning which rules you should break and which rules you shouldn't. Unlike earlier adolescent heroes, the students of Hogwarts are not being taught to conform by their adventures.

They are not being taught to rebel either, though, and neither are Buffy and her friends. Rebellion and isolation inevitably lead to bad results, as nearly all of Whedon's characters realize during their first year of college. The appropriate response to oppressive, blind, even destructive conformity for both sets of heroes is not pure independence but the building of new societies: the creation of the armed resistance group Dumbledore's Army in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; the student-led counterattack at Sunnydale High's 1999 graduation ceremony, which ends up being a dry-run for the slayer army that Buffy trains in the last season of the television series and after. The rules cannot be trusted, and neither can the adults who made or enforce them. You can listen to these adults, you can learn from them, but ultimately you have to make your own world from the pieces that they leave you.

This ambivalence toward adults and what they might have to offer adolescents by way of example is the most compelling aspect of the two series' shared emotional world. Barring anything we might learn Saturday morning from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, with the exception of saintly Albus Dumbledore, no adult in either series can be fully trusted. Politicians and parents prove consistently unreliable, but even the characters' most valued mentors lose their tempers, drink to excess, and can practice unthinking cruelty unless prevented from doing so by the stories' more responsible adolescents. One episode from the third season of Buffy, entitled "Band Candy," showed this perhaps better than any other, when enchanted chocolate made the teachers and parents of Sunnydale revert to their own high school years. If anything, they acted worse than the members of Buffy's generation, with Buffy's usually buttoned-down mentor Rupert Giles being the worst offender of the lot. He slacked off on his Watcher duties, smoked marijuana and had sex with Buffy's mother, stripped down to his tshirt, and began inflicting casual violence and vandalism any chance he could get. The voice of order had reverted to his secret origin: a sneering punk who was only interested in the quickest kicks.

Sirius Black serves as a similarly ambivalent mentor for Harry Potter. In emphasizing that Black was wrongfully imprisoned is Azkaban for over a decade, many readers ignore the hints that he was something of a juvenile delinquent before he got in there: a darkly born, flying motorcycle-riding, unregistered Animagus who played a prank on Severus Snape during their own time at Hogwarts that almost got his classmate killed. Along with his friends (including Harry's father James), he felt that the rules did not apply to him, and that the magical world was made for his amusement. At least once, he seriously considers killing Peter Pettigrew, the man responsible for his imprisonment, in cold blood, and it is only the more responsible Harry who can talk him out of it. Both Giles and Black have a great deal to offer as mentors, but part of their mentees' maturation requires that they learn to do as they say and not always as they do.

Around the time that both Harry and Buffy were born, there was a considerable vogue for wearing tiny buttons with ironic messages. Like many other subcultural tics of the late 1970s and early 1980s, these buttons were both an inheritance from and a refutation of the counterculture of the 1960s. To be precise, the buttons were a continuation of the proudly declared politics of that earlier era, but their ironic messages were clear signs of the more alienated, less forthright era close at hand. My favorite button from this period you can still see around, although I sometimes wonder how many people got the joke. It bore only two words: QUESTION AUTHORITY. When I wore it, I was always surprised how many people read it as if it was a straightahead hippie message. Yeah, man, they thought it meant, don't let the establishment get away with anything, man. When I bought it, though, I had assumed that the first thing people were supposed to notice about the button was that it bore a direct order. Who's telling me to question authority, I thought it meant, and why should I do what they say?

I can't know for sure, but my sense is that if you were born after 1980, you don't need to have the irony of that button explained to you. The most lasting children's fantasies of the 1960s, stories like the film version of Mary Poppins and Roald Dahl's original novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, suggest that all a displaced child needs is to be taken under the wing of nice countercultural types and everything will turn out fine. Even their families will eventually get turned on. But the story changes once the countercultural types become the parents: then rebellion itself can become authority and even a form of legacy. Once you buy your five-year-old a tshirt with an anarchy symbol on it, cultural radicalism is now coexisting side by side with psychological conformity. That kind of unresolvable contradiction is exactly the sort of condition that is ripe for the creation of new pop myths, not just the ones I've traced in Harry's and Buffy's stories but those in a number of other post-1980 books, films, and TV series too, perhaps most arrestingly in Wes Craven's original Nightmare on Elm Street and Richard Kelly's film Donnie Darko.

Joss Whedon and others are currently writing a series for Dark House Comics that is frankly labelled Buffy: Season 8, but for me, the final episode of the TV series four years ago was the only ending I needed. J. K. Rowling has built up enough good will with me that I trust that her seventh book will round out her protagonist's story just as well, even if I'm wrong and he doesn't definitively die. As time goes on, it will be interesting to see if the stories of these characters prove powerful for new readers or simply remain touchstones for the generation that grew up with them. From all reports, the currently rising generation is less worried about having an embarrassing ex-hippie or ex-punk for a parent than they are about the rise of a form of blank conformism that is very different from the kind that ruled during the 1950s. Somewhere right now, someone is glimpsing precisely how different the conformity of our own time is from that of the earlier era. If we're very lucky, they'll use that sense of difference as the cornerstone of a brand new, fully imaginary world, one that finally helps us to clearly see what's going on in our own.