Cripping Magic: Composing Madness in My Little Pony

"All the ponies in this town are crazy" 
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

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Due to pressing engagements in the month of August,

including comprehensive exam preparation, conferences, and articles

a lot of writing has been happening but activity on the blog slowed.

I will conclude the month with a look at the processes of writing itself.

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5 Lessons on Mental Illness

Curated on the online visual arts venue, DeviantArt.com, Hannah Truesdell (a.k.a. PrincessDestiny114) created a series of posters using images from the cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (MLP), aimed to fight bullying for a variety of deviant bodies, from queerness to body size to disability. One such poster (pictured below) reading "I'm not insane. Stop bullying," features the manic, party-crazed pony Pinky Pie (DeviantArt).

Under the poster, the artist offers an explanation of the project's personal and social relevance to the crippling effects of perceived mental illness and diagnosis: "See my other posters for the background story on why I started these. Pinkie Pie's poster. I chose the theme of mental illness for this one. This one is an issue particularly close to my heart. I'm bipolar and have had to deal with the stigma of it from the moment I was diagnosed. I have seen friends/roommates visibly step back when I told them this fact. I accept it as part of who I am, but it's still hard. Pinkie Pie is the one everyone likes to make crazy. So here ya go" (DeviantArt.com). Following the trajectory of Disability Studies, the poster takes the discussion of mental illness from the medical sphere and makes it into a social issue.

Immediately the MLP poster got backlash based on the premise that mental illness and disability are personal, not social, problems. Skyp3r101012 is one of the most recent to comment, writing "i always get bullied my hole life i just laugh it off so suck it up...." (DeviantArt). Others such as EccentricBrony, who self-identifies with depression disorder, generalized anxiety, obsessive compulsion, suicidal thoughts and autism, offers the truism that "everything works itself out eventually"  (DeviantArt).  The artist worked to defend her argument throughout the comment section, shedding light on the social dependencies that make blaming the individual generally ineffective and potentially violent. A few viewers comment in support of the poster, acknowledging that "there's not a single person without at least hidden issues defined in the DSM-IV" and calling for solidarity across all those who suffer (EarthPhantomTS,  DeviantArt). Receiving both criticisms and affirmations, the cartoon ponies provoked a surprising amount of critical conversation about mental illness.

One of the most common misconceptions about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (MLP) is that the characters depicted are primarily children concerned with childish problems. It only takes a close reading of the show to reveal that MLP is flush with adults dealing with issues of queer friendships, transgender passing, and dismantling disability in society. This goes to show that childrens' cartoons, children, and their problems are not a distinct category from other social concerns. The writers of MLP critique the wider society as society informs the narratives the show tells.

The show's protagonist, Twilight Sparkle, while a student in the discipline of magic, has a lot more in common with a graduate student (Masters, Ph.D, etc.) than one in college or K-12 education: she is engaged in a prolonged independent research project, she reports to a singular advisor who also functions as a mentor, and finishing her work promises to establish her as an expert in a specialized field. While her adventures are analogous to the school experiences of many younger viewers, MLP is evidently reflecting serious social problems in the academy, not least of them the pressing issue of mental illness.

Issues concerning Disability Studies occur throughout My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. In this examination I focus on "Lesson Zero" from the second season, where Twilight becomes consumed by the pressures of her academic studies sending her into an anxiety driven panic attack that threatens to dismantle her mind, her friendships, and the society around her. In the process I draw on Robert McRuer's "Composing Queerness and Disability: the Corporate University and Alternative Corporealities" from Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability to argue for 5 lessons that MLP elucidates about Mental Illness that draw viewers away from a pathology-based understanding that blames the victims of disabling forces into a critical crip politics that demands improved social investment. Cripping magic in MLP demonstrates that virtually everyone can be affected by socially propelled mental illness and offers specific critiques and alternatives for transforming disability into structural and personal change.

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1. It is Not Nothing

The first thing that "Lesson Zero" makes known to its readers is that mental illness "is not nothing," as Twilight yells at her friends in the middle of a breakdown. The structure of Twilight's independent study and the basis for each episode's lessons is that each week she composes a letter to her advisor reporting the insights that she has gained about friendship. Established in the series reboot pilot, Twilight's project is aimed at mapping the interactions between personal power (magic) and social relations (friendship) towards the thesis inscribed in the show's subtitle: "Friendship is Magic." When a week passes and Twilight finds no lesson to report to her advisor, she turns to her friends in a panic for help. Their refusal to see the pressures her friend is under leads to a personal breakdown and a breakdown in their community.

While the fear of being tardy with an assignment and disappointing her mentor may not be, as Twilight believes, a problem as big as "everything," it does constitute a real and present danger for many academics and their community. Depression and anxiety, McRuer argues, functions as a symptom of capitalism and especially in the education industry where the expectations for constant performance and rigid deadlines maintain "gaps, overlaps, dissonances" between worker's accomplishments and the expectations of the field (McRuer 156). The work one does will never be enough. The finish line will constantly be moved. 

The drive to expand a laborer's output while ever narrowing the material and temporal allowances that the laborer receives is a fundamental character of capitalism's exploitation of workers. Even if Twilight's advisor, Princess Celestia, or her friends do not intend on placing this pressure on Twilight, the system by which the academic is understood and managed is based on the implied demand of a certain kind of productivity. The assertion that Twilight is the intellectual and so she has the intellectual answers ignores the intellectual labor involved in producing these answers every week. One can also glean the experience of the show's writers (many of whom likely experienced the pressures of graduate school) as they strain to develop narratives with appropriate lessons for viewers each week.

By highlighting the pressures and the breakdown of Twilight, the show pulls at the thread of mental disability in society to show that it is in fact not "nothing," and as it starts to unravel suggests that it may possible be tied to "everything." Everyone is virtually a victim of capitalism's pressures and implicated in the execution and exclusion of its mentally ill workers (McRuer 151-152). The ubiquitous nature of capitalism and anxiety can make its violence naturalized so that it may seem impossible to imagine life without "the perpetual panic about students' perceived lack of basic (professional-managerial) communication skills they are supposed to need" (McRuer 153). As a result, the causes of mental illness become invisible and so the victims become marked as hyper visible embodiments of a personalized (as opposed to public) mental disability.

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2.  It doesn't (just) get better

Alienated from her friends and having internalized the problem in her work as located in her body, Twilight begins to spiral as she feels there is no escape from the failure that is her life. Curled up on a park bench, a symbolic fetal position that many workers in and out of academia find themselves occupying, Twilight tries to assure herself that "it's fine, it'll all be fine." This truism is a common tool of many dealing with anxiety or anxious persons. It is a capital device because (1) it identifies the problem in the person rather than the environment, i.e. if only they would realize everything is fine they wouldn't be suffering, (2) it may turn out to be true, and (3) it requires no active changes by anyone involved. Laziness and fear of fault, more than optimism, seems to drive this reductive mantra.

Queer theorists and writers have taken the related idea behind the It Get's Better Campaign that promises youths a future that will be livable for them if only they persist in their current life. Aimed implicitly (sometimes explicitly) at lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth in danger of suicide, queer critiques of the campaign have argued that it isolates the problem at the level of the individual while leaving untouched the social violence that marks and marginalizes the child (Sady Doyle, the Atlantic). It effectively becomes another way of blaming the victim, as it establishes a chain of authority where the world-wise adults correct and subordinate the despairing (supposed ignorant) young person (Alex Eichler, the Wire). What is wrong with you that you don't know that it just get's better? One pathology adds onto the the others.

Twilight is quick to pick up on the false-promises of a "it'll all be fine" culture. "The day isn't over yet," she says rephrasing the drive to wait for the future, "but it will be over soon! My time in Ponyville, my academic studies!" Simply waiting for things to just get better is likely to leave Twilight in her disabled state and leave her pray for the threats aimed at those considered disabled (especially mentally ill) in the academy: the loss of her means of living and the loss of her professional standing (McRuer 148). It is no wonder that she is personally spiraling; the structure of the industry sustains the risks in order to keep laborers continually working to avoid falling down a dangerous slope into the classification of professional (and personal) failure (McRuer 156-158). Things seem directed towards getting worse, not getting better. Left alone and without social change, anyone and everyone may enter into categories of disability. 

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3. It's a matter of time

A common argument for the importance of disability studies is that everyone, if you live long enough, will at some point be considered disabled. It's all a matter of time. The power of the clock to perpetuate disability comes from the regimented time that capitalism inscribes into our bodies. From the formative trajectory from student worker to expert worker, we are trained from a young age to follow the clock. We see Twilight, right in the fit of her panic, showing off her childhood doll, "Smarty-Pants" to several local children. The toy comes, she says, with a "notepad and quill for when you want to pretend she's doing her homework." From a young age we are encouraged to repeat the practice of bringing home work in order to discipline our bodies into the habit of working according to a clock. Tasks are determined to take a certain amount of time for the universal "seamless and univocal" body to accomplish (McRuer 156). This time rarely takes into account the differences in the bodies or environments in which they are performed. The clock, instead of measuring time becomes a tool for enforcing time (McRuer 2-3). When tasks are not accomplished within the dictated period, the failure falls on the worker rather than on the clock.

Twilight's academic anxiety is a matter of time. The pre-determined deadline of one lesson per week was set from the start of her study and each week (each episode) Twilight has been able to accomplish her goals. "The Clock is ticking"  repeats Twilight mimicking the unceasing march of deadlines. When circumstances and flesh get in the way, however, the clock keeps pressing on, causing a conflict between the imagined mechanical worker and the dynamic ebb and flow of real bodies. The ceaseless pace creates a "sense of control" but wears down the body, then the gap between the expected and the real temporality of work (full of stopping, going, and swerving) creates even more tension as failure seems to become a matter of time (McRuer 154-155). Even if Twilight can finish her work this time, the weariness and threat of failure will continue to compound and haunt her like the specter of disability.

As the episode goes on and time passes, the anxiety gets worse and worse, disabling her even more. In the end, the ingrained ideology of failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The same mechanisms that force her to produce, threatens to expel Twilight when her body breaks down. This is the basis of neoliberal capitalism's "raw exploitation" of the worker: use one body until it fails and then replace it with an interchangeable worker (McRuer 2-3). Like the non-human objects on which the industrial theory of labor is based, there is simultaneously an enforced "perpetual panic" and scarcity of employment (creating a certain body of out-of-work desperate workers that threaten to replace members of an industry if ever they begin to slack) as well as an excess of refuse (creating another body of "de-composing" out-of-work disabled workers) (McRuer 154). The weeding out process of academia doesn't begin or end at the graduate level and nor is it limited to students. The whole industry is premised on the idea that nearly anyone, except a protected few who administrate the system, is potentially one failure away from being dismissed (McRuer 152-155). It is this fear that underlays intellectual labor, even as those who bring attention to this anxiety are pathologized and marked for expulsion.

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4. Mental Illness is a Social Problem

When Twilight's advisor arrives and she leaves her friends with a note that the consequences for her failure will likely remove her from her life and work among them, the community finally acknowledges that what they perceived as "nothing" was in fact a real problem and that they are implicated in the violence Twilight is experiencing. Only then, after it appears too late to do anything for Twilight, does Applejack ask "What are we going to do y'all?" At last Rarity declares what Twilight has been telling them throughout the episode, "This is the worst possible thing!" This is a common time-line for many social responses, only after a "personal tragedy" is beyond repair does the wider community work to remember that person and give some measure of political action.

For Twilight it is not too-late for collective identification and action. Just as she is admitting her guilt to her advisor, Twilight's friends come crashing into the room shouting "Wait!" Grabbing the attention of the authority, they collectively beg for the failure to be considered a group and not a personal problem. "We all saw that Twilight was upset," admits Fluttershy. "But we thought what the thing she was worrying about wasn't worth worrying about" adds Rainbow Dash. "So when she ran off all worked up," continues Applejack, "not a single one of us tried to stop her." "As Twilight's good friends," concludes Rarity, "we should have taken her feeling's seriously and been there for her." Taking the responsibility for the escalation of the anxiety, Fluttershy begs, "Please don't take Twilight away from us just because we were too insensitive to help her." Re-narrating the episode, the group of friends challenges both the compulsory demand for solitary productivity (a lack of help), the  insignificance and invisibility of the pressure to succeed (a lack of recognition), and the drive to mark any one body as disabled or failed (a lack of collectivity).

This conclusion and the decision of the advisor that follows is a crip departure from traditional TV narratives that would have ended with the intellectual (nerdy) character realizing that their school work didn't matter that much and they had just been behaving insane; or with the teacher providing a special exception or lesson for the problem student. It is important that not only does My Little Pony veer away from these narratives that blame the person with anxiety but before the problem is "solved" by the authority, the terms of the problem are re-defined from a singular issue to a "collective" issue (McRuer 155). The intellectual labor was not tardy because Twilight is insane or inept, but because when a challenge was posed to group (the lack of a weekly lesson), the group eschewed responsibility to one person and then to disregard the struggles of that person as insignificant. This is not an instance of a group protecting an individual but the group owning up to its own social productions and "collective writing" (McRuer 155).

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5. Failure Can Be Productive

Twilight's attempts at fixing her "personal" problem ultimately fails. Caught in the ruins of her attempts at producing academic labor when circumstances have not allowed for it, Twilight's friends, who had been absent when she asked for their help, show up just in time to witness her downfall. The sun goes down and her advisor shows up in a burst of light, magically fixing the disarray that her student caused, and sternly shouting "Twilight! Meet me in the library." Bowing her head, expecting the worst, Twilight leaves her friends to face the consequences of her failure, "Goodbye girls, I hope you visit. I'll be in magic kindergarden back in Canterlot." As she walks in to face her boss, the anxiety and alienation that Twilight feels reflects the feelings and nightmares of many intellectuals suffering from what gets called "Impostor Syndrome." The problems in the industry become internalized so that the failure becomes identified with the self rather than the impossible demands of the work. The system is expunged from guilt as it expels its failures.

Rather than dismissing Twilight as a professional failure or as mentally ill, her mentor appreciates the pain and pressure that her student has been under and turns the situation into a chance to explore alternative systems that would better allow Twilight live and work without alienation and impossible expectations. When Twilight confesses that she "missed a deadline" and that this must mean that she is "a bad student," Celestia listens compassionately and then begins the work of moving the blame away from the individual. "You are a wonderful student," she assures Twilight, "I don't need to get a letter every week to know that." By calling out the measures for assessment (the letters) as an imperfect and partially arbitrary means for monitoring her student, Celestia is able to put critical distance between the problem of the examination and the problems of the person. 

A failed exam can mean less for the teacher, who knows the student (although not all teachers do), than for the administration looking to get rid of problems that threaten a downturn in their statistics. Despite this "professional-managerial" business model for education that insists on constant, regular, and "seamless and univocal" measurements for the intellectual capacities of students, this often fails to represent what teachers often know about their students: that they are gifted, smart, and diverse workers (McRuer 156-158). Often the test that aims at a universal standard fails to capture the distinct gifts and limitations of a diverse pool of people.

Instead of punishing failure, Twilight's mentor changes the mode of measurement and productivity. "From this day forth" announces Celestia, "I would like all of you [Twilight's whole community] to report to me, your findings on the magic of friendship, when and only when you discover them." With this move, Celestia attends to several problems at once. First, it demonstrates that the drives and rules of the industry are not natural but a social construct that can be changed (McRuer 148). Second, it acknowledges that intellectual work does not succeed or fail in solitude but is a community product (McRuer 155). Third, it places responsibility for improvement on collective rather than on any one individual (McRuer 152-154). Fourth, it reestablishes the timeline for work to reflect lived experiences rather than arbitrarily assigning deadlines based on some mechanical expectation for productivity, "critical thought" rather than "professional-managerial skills" (McRuer 148-149). Fifth, it returns dignity to Twilight by citing her and her suffering as a providing a important social critiques ("the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excess of meaning") that can lead to better communal relations (McRuer 156-159).

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More on Queerness & Transgender 

in My Little Pony

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A Fire Rises: Why Millennials Will Let Gotham Burn

“The global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero point.

It’s ‘four riders of the apocalypse’ are comprised by the ecological crisis, 

the consequence of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself…

and the exploding growth of social divisions and exclusions”

Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times

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Warning: Synopsis & Spoiler

The Dark Knight Rises begins 10 years after the previous movie and a full decade since Batman began. Because of the "Dent Laws" passed in memory of the District Attorney that died in the Dark Knight, the city's police have been free to use extraordinary force to arrest the undesirables of the city, often with little or no chance for bail and an expedited trial process. Batman himself has been busy and now with his body in ruins because of the abuse of pushing it for so long, he is looking to retire. 

Then Bane arrives. Explosions begin and the city's bridges are destroyed, making it next to impossible for anyone to leave. Then Bane announces that he will detonate a nuclear device if the city does not submit to his demands, which are, to enter into a French Revolution-like anarchy. The city obliges, homes are burned and looted, and citizen after citizen are put to death in a farce trial (to match those that criminals had recently experienced). Then to commit to the French reference, the prison is stormed and the Dent-Law convicts are set free. 

In the mean time, Batman, aided by a police-comrade and a Catwoman-like thief, confronts Bane only to be defeated and sent to a prison deep in the ground, across the sea (a perfect hell/death metaphor). Batman does return, just before the bomb is to detonate, and defeats Bane. Unfortunately, the bomb will still go off, so Batman takes his new flying machine and goes on a suicide run with the nuclear device across the harbor, vanishing in a burst of light.

Subsequently, we find that Gotham constructs a memorial to Batman and Bruce Wayne's property is distributed to his friends and the poor. In a final scene, however, we discover Bruce Wayne is alive and living abroad in France, with Catwoman. Then we return to Gotham, to discover the name of the police officer which had been Batman's assistant throughout the event, Robin. Robin, aware of Batman's true identity, sneaks onto the Wayne property and the last image we receive is of Robin rising on a stone that emerges from under the water to be gifted by the cave with all of Batman's old weapons and armor.

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Who’s Afraid of the Big Black Bat?

“Does The Dark Knight’s extraordinary popularity not then point towards the fact that it touches a nerve in our idealogico-political constellation: 
the undesirability of truth?”

Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times

We didn’t ask to be born. We didn’t ask for your promises. We didn’t start the fire… But we take it nonetheless, not because of what you’ve said or what you’re now saying, but because we can and will do things that you won’t, like letting things collapse. We aren’t afraid of failure.

A recent article in the Huffington Post, by Ms. Emily Matchar entitled “How those spoiled millennials will make the workplace better for everyone” defends the hiring of the “generation Y” despite their panache for being “entitled:”

• “Generation Y - loosely defined as those born between 1982 and 1999 -also known as millennials. Perhaps you know them by their other media-generated nicknames: teacup kids, for their supposed emotional fragility; boomerang kids, who always wind up back home; trophy kids - everyone’s a winner!; the Peter Pan generation, who’ll never grow up.” 

This characterization alone deserves attention, because Ms Matchar is not alone. CBS News , reported in 2008, in “ ‘The "Millennials" Are Coming:’

• “They were raised by doting parents who told them they are special, played in little leagues with no winners or losers, or all winners. They are laden with trophies just for participating and they think your business-as-usual ethic is for the birds. And if you persist in the belief you can, take your job and shove it”. 

Likewise Meredith Bennett-Smith, in a '12 Huffington Post article, wrote

• “They have been called the Millenials and Generation Y by some: the "Go-Nowhere Generation" and "Generation Why Bother" by others.”

To begin, I don’t know that we do behave as though we are “entitled,” but if we do, it is the fault of our founders. Those that made promises of what our lives and futures would look like, which they can no longer keep. Promises which they told us were our rights to receive. I do not think they lied, but are witnessing their own disastrous inability to make good on their word, they pass the bill (in so many ways) onto us.

We will take it, nonetheless, but what is doubly interesting, is that according to Ms. Matchar, we are expected to: “Work is done for less and less reward. Wages have been stagnant for years, benefits shorn, opportunities for advancement blocked. While the richest Americans get richer, middle-class workers are left to do more with less. Because jobs are scarce and we’re used to a hierarchical workforce, we accept things the way they are...Into this sorry situation strolls the self-esteem generation, printer-fresh diplomas in hand.…Will they adapt? They won’t. Ever. Instead, through their sense of entitlement and inflated self-esteem, they’ll make the modern workplace adapt”

In the following post I will explore these “entitlements” to demonstrate not how the Millennial’s prospects are grim, but how our embodiment of failure comes to us as projection of terror and despair by generations which witness their successes fail. Then I will demonstrate how our attitude which you cannot understand, is exactly what keeps us from jumping ship while our elders are ramming it into the iceberg after melting iceberg.

We will do it all, while examining the recent Batman film; a story about a home at war with terrorists, a failing economy, an energy crises, increased international and nuclear threats, as well as plagued by a siege mentality (“Get away! There isn’t much left, and we need it! Go try and find a future somewhere else”), and ready to be handed off to a younger generation by those who are ready to retire with a sexy younger girlfriend (who may or may not wear a cat-suit at night).  Ms. Matchar, writing on behalf of these Batmen writes with hope that “we should thank them for it. Because the modern workplace frankly stinks, and the changes wrought by Gen Y will be good for everybody.” Well, go ahead

Batman, Robin’s got this—but first, we will have to let Gotham burn.

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Wards of the State

“Come Mothers and Fathers from across the land, 
and don’t criticize what you don’t understand…

Your old road is rapidly aging, 
please get off of the new one, if you can’t lend a hand” 

Bob Dylan, the Times They Are A-Changing

With the presidential elections over the past year, we have been hearing criticism that over generations we have effectively become wards of the state, dependent on hand outs we can no longer provide on a local, personal level. In its place, some want business to provide for us. What interests me in this, is that on both sides we see a tacit acceptance that the “nuclear family” (in many respects) has dissolved & the question has become: what to do with the orphans?

Between Batman and Robin, we see the Ward of Big Business & the Ward of the State. In the Dark Knight Rises, they come at the threat to Gotham from cross interest groups. Batman embodies the independently wealthy swooping in, trying to save the day with overwhelming force and the developments of new technology. Robin however starts off as a policeman, working as part of a team with the crooks and thugs (as we are led to regard the police of Gotham), attempting to save the day with unions of the faithful and moral superiority.

With the introduction of Bane, the good-times of Gotham’s business and state efforts are suddenly shattered and the city literally begins to crumble, devouring itself in a bloody mix of anarchism and revolutionary socialism (representing the extreme dreams/ nightmares of the right and left respectively). The question, or rather the tension, rises: what do we do when Daddy Business and Mommy Government can’t look after the kids?

Our answer when the city crumbles seems to be: us. When the parents are fighting, the kids band together or else look after ourselves. We may have lack of respect for institutions, but we have been given little reason to respect them given how quickly we are being eliminated:

• Every 10 year-person that keeps his job, seals us out.
• Every 20-year person that loses his job, takes an entry level one.
• Every exec. cutting hours sees that we can’t get enough pay, if hired.

In this respect, Ms. Matchar is working off of good information when she cites Lindsey Pollak, saying that what the Millennials ask for is nothing more elaborate than the needs that all workers want, “they’re the first ones to leave when they don’t get it.”  This is because, while we fight for jobs, but we don’t expect to get them or keep them. We are opportunists. We are surviving, and we have loyalty to those that stick by us (which is largely not our employers).

We know how to share (easy as a ‘click’ for us) and how make do with owning less. We are skilled scavengers, ask most of us when we last paid for music. Companies are going under, staff is liquidated, and often because they are trying to solve new problems by outdated means; the execs don’t care so long as they make money. They burn down the house to collect the insurance. You can’t convince us to stay in burning houses. We aren’t afraid of the streets, we can’t be.

This brings us to a fundamental misconception with Ms Matchar’s description of the Millennials as entitled is her understanding of the relationship between our parenting and our development: “Since the cradle, these privileged kids have been offered autonomy, control and choices… encouraged to show their creativity and to take their extracurricular interests seriously. Raised by parents who wanted to be friends with their kids, they’re used to seeing their elders as peers rather than authority figures. When they want something, they’re not afraid to say so.” The problem with this description is not that it is wholly inaccurate, but that it functions off of a fraction of the facts. Entitlement may have been the plan of how our generation was raised, but its execution and context changed the results; such that we hold even less closely to mom & dad.

The United States over the last couple decades has gone through a crisis of “family,” with divorce rates now in the majority over “in-tact” partnerships. At the same time, we see an increase of women going for career and educational advancement instead of “settling down and starting a family.” Likewise more Gays and Lesbians are feeling free to come out, while remaining barred from marriage or adoption.  In the wake of these changes, the Millennial Generation is also the first Generation without a certain kind of “traditional” family and without great hope for its resurgence.

As a result, our lack of fear or sense of self-entitlement may come from a sense that we don’t have to worry about being marriage or parent material (at least not most of us or not for a while yet), so the concerns of settling into a stable job, getting a savings going, and finding a house (or moving out of our parent’s house) is not a concern.  This is then not really a feeling of “entitlement” but of dispossession. As orphans of the nuclear household, we see little reason to try to revive the “family-business”. We are less unilaterally interested in self-perpetuating institutions, we are ready to let many of them burn out.

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A City Under Siege

“In order to apply a norm it is necessary to suspend its application, 
to produce an exception.” 
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception

America is a country that feels perpetually under siege. Whether it is the Communists, the Terrorists, the Immigrants, the Exported Jobs, we have been told to fear the increasingly porous borders and globalization.

In this respect, America qua Gotham, are incredibly Medieval. The Knight was not only the protector at home, he was the one that went out of the safety of the walled-borders.  In that way, we was also a potential traitor. Like the mouth, the anus, genitals, etc, we are often very protective of our points crossing and of the things that cross in and out of them. Being a Knight, in this respect, is a Dark, dirty job. We want him to do our dirty work so we can stay clean, to be fearless so we can be afraid, to get hurt so we can stay safe--and Millennials are getting enlisted to serve as the outcasts and saviors by going where others won’t.

Evidence: The country remains afraid of myriad threats & enemies it perceives around the world.

• It may criticize the ballooning military, but we don’t take serious measures to reduce it. And here too we have a generation gap. While many youth are opposed to our foreign wars, we nonetheless make up two thirds of its combatants. 
• Besides the Border, Professionally, everyone is hunkering down. 
• I can’t go to a conferences without there being a handful of panels about how Academia is under-siege and with voices continuing warnings that young scholars to go elsewhere.
• I have looked and my fellow Millenials experience that statistic that the Washington Post offers, that 53% of us are out of work or underpaid. 
• My friends in journalism, publishing, and yes, law, finance, and medicine are being told by all their mentors to look for work elsewhere because the field is over-saturated. 
• Nearly every colleague of mine that went into teaching at public schools has since been eliminated from their position because of cut backs. 
• Tech-jobs, supposed to be our generations golden ticket, are exported.

All over professionals are pulling up the draw-bridge, ridiculing millennials, left on the outside to scrape a living wherever we can, by moving back in with parents or drifting from job to job.

Those that are free to be naysayers and secret supporters are older and younger generations that stay safely behind our borders. Go ahead, call us entitled; we’ll stand by the friends that have died in your war, those that have come back with metal shards in their body, those that are out of work or growing deeper in debt. We understand fear, we understand what you are afraid of, we just don’t have the luxury to let it stop us (and you really don’t want us to). Those of you looking forward to a social security check, national security, and continued service industries are banking that we make it.

On this, Ms. Matchar again strike ironic tones, from inside the tower, watching us run out of the gate: “we could continue to roll our eyes at Gen Y, accuse them of being spoiled and entitled and clueless little brats. We could wish that they’d get taken down a peg by the “school of hard knocks” and learn to accept that this is just the way things are. But if we’re smart, we’ll cheer them on. Be selfish, Gen Y! Be entitled! Demand what you want. Because we want it, too.”

Likewise, I have to insist, invest in us. You may not like our attitudes and methods, you may not like us, but if you’re only interested in your own well being, you need to see that we succeed, in our waywardness. Sieges are won by starving out the city or smoked out. Unless Knights have the ability to go out & come back, to boomerang, nothing of your generation will survive the fire.

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The Once and Future Generation

“Save Yourself, I’ll Hold Them Back”

My Chemical Romance, Danger Days: the True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys

Too big to fail has become a motto revered and hated in today’s infrastructures. The great irony being, of course, they fail. In the Dark Knight Rises, we very much see our state of affairs embodied by Gotham, Bane, & Batman wherein the forces of Creation, Destruction, & Salvation (or Self, Other, & Exception) respectively brought to the limit at which each part fails.

• Gotham's success, in terms of finance & security, calls Bane wrath. 
• Likewise, the scale of Bane’s terror, which withholds nuclear obliteration to bring about greater spiritual desolation (here I mean spiritual to refer to a whole host of intangibles), provides the room by which Gotham is able to preserve itself. 
• Finally, Batman has raised himself physically & symbolically to such a limit, godlike, king-like, Christ-like, that materially he is deteriorating & literarily he can go no further without becoming void or else transcendent—which is what happens: Batman dies, comes back for a time, then finally disappears across the sea, into the clouds, consumed by light—then like Arthur & Camelot or Jesus & the Apostles, the people are left alone. 

Ultimately the salvation of Batman is no final victory, but more like a stimulus package, to hold back one great catastrophe, while the over-stressed bulk of Gotham continues to literally burn.

That is why we need Robin—which is no guarantee that he will fulfill our dreams of him. Honestly, our fantasies will continue to resemble a kind of exaggerated or even regressive images of our old regime: a New Batman; a New Great(est) Generation. The “undesirable truth” which Zizek refers to, and to which I have been trying to stress, is that this is not coming. What may make the Millennials most adored and most hated is the new promise being made for us that we will be the death knell and the savior of the great society; and both will be fueled by the half-truth that we will fulfill those roles. The Millennials will let Gotham burn—and we will build a new city, constructed by the broken pieces of the past and for the broken challenges of the future.

So what might the Millennial Gotham look-like? No doubt, there will be some dreams fulfilled, giving credence to Ms. Matchar’s prophecies from the past that: “The American workplace has been transformed during economic upswings and downturns. The weekend was a product of labor union demands during the relative boom of the early 20th century. The Great Depression led to the New Deal’s Fair Labor Standards Act, which introduced the 40-hour work week and overtime pay to most Americans. But now, workplace change is coming from unadulterated, unorganized worker pushiness.” The bad-news, so to speak, is that the possibility of such new deals will come out of the loss of old deals. Our lack of loyalty to things which we currently hold as sacred is what will allow us to harvest them for resources to serve the ends which we do hold as important. You can dream that the King will return from Avalon, but the reality, for better and for worst, is that you will receive something utterly new and different.

What will come?--- We make no promises. We may have hope, but our search for it will be like looking through Pandora's box. As such, I finish with a few parting words in and on Pandora's Hope, by Bruno Latour, in 1999:"In this century, which fortunately is coming to a close, we seem to have exhausted the evils that emerged from the open box of the clumsy Pandora. Though it was her unrestrained curiosity that made the artificial maiden open the box, there is no reason to stop being curious about what is left inside. To retrieve the Hope that is lodged in there, at the bottom, we need a new and rather convoluted contrivance. I have had a go at it. Maybe we will succeed with the next attempt."

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More on Relics & Ruins in Film

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