12.1/The Interpretive Lens/The Intellectual Frame

The Decade Reads Itself, 1989–2001

The Scandal as Advertisement

Between the summer of 1989 and the fall of 1992, American publishing produced a burst of self-diagnosis with few precedents in the century: within roughly forty months, a national culture acquired a name for its new generation, a psychotic mirror for its money, a war over its women, a verdict on its history, and a chemistry set for its moods. Francis Fukuyama’s essay “The End of History?” appeared in The National Interest in the summer of 1989;² Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae arrived from Yale in 1990;³ Douglas Coupland’s Generation X and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho were both published in March 1991;⁴¹ Susan Faludi’s Backlash followed in October;⁵ Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth ran alongside it the same year;⁶ Fukuyama’s book-length version appeared from the Free Press in 1992.⁷ The books were not academic events. They were magazine events — excerpted, reviewed, fought over, and converted into assignments in the weeklies and monthlies of Midtown, where a single October title could generate six months of derivative pieces. A literate New Yorker of 1992 could stand at the front table of a bookstore and read, spine by spine, a culture’s running commentary on itself, printed while the events it described were still occurring.

The commentary sorted into recognizable types. There was a generational frame, which explained the decade by its new cohort. There was a gender frame, which explained it by a war over women’s position. There was an endpoint frame, which explained it as the conclusion of a longer story — of history, of ideology, of scarcity. There was a city frame, imported mostly from sociology, which explained New York by its widening halves. And there was, latest and quietest, a feeling frame, which explained the decade by the texture of its moods and its jobs. Each type sold. Each was argued about at dinner. Each got most of one thing right, and the whole shelf together — this is the documented oddity of the period — failed to describe the two forces that were doing the most to restructure the city in which the shelf was written, edited, and sold.

The Generational Frame

The first frame to arrive named a cohort. Coupland’s Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (St. Martin’s Press, March 1991) supplied not so much a novel as a vocabulary: “McJob,” “veal-fattening pen,” the “slacker” register of underemployed, overeducated young adults narrating their own diminished expectations with more wit than income. The book’s margins carried its glossary like a field guide, and the glossary was the part that traveled. Within two years the terms had licensed hundreds of magazine pieces — trend reporting on twentysomethings, marketing panic about an unreachable demographic, earnest essays on whether the cohort was lazy or merely honest — a volume of coverage that turned a modest paperback into the decade’s first self-description industry.

Ellis’s American Psycho was the frame’s dark twin, and its publication was itself a period event.¹ Read as sociology rather than provocation, the novel was an early prosecution of the brand-knowledge economy — Patrick Bateman’s catalogues of suits, reservations, and wallet leathers rendered status literacy as a symptom, a mind with nothing in it but the code. The prosecution arrived seven years before the crime peaked: the logo-forward luxury economy the novel satirized in 1991 did not reach its full editorial-floor expression until the late 1990s, when the visible mark had become the correct answer to the class test — a code whose applied taxonomy is chronicled elsewhere in this archive. The generational frame, taken whole, got the affect right and the economics wrong: it described a cohort’s mood with precision and assumed the mood’s cause was cultural, when the wage and rent arithmetic underneath it was doing most of the work.

The Gender Frame

The second frame arrived in a single publishing season and ran as a war. Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (Crown, October 1991) argued that the culture industries were running a coordinated counterassault on the previous two decades of women’s gains; it won the National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction and put its author on a Time cover with Gloria Steinem in March 1992.⁸ Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (William Morrow, 1991) made the adjacent argument about appearance as political control. The academy published its own wing of the frame in the same years — Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, both 1990 — books that stayed on the far side of the trade divide and reached the magazine floors, when they reached them at all, as rumors of a vocabulary. Against them stood the contrarian pole, anchored by Paglia’s Sexual Personae (Yale University Press, 1990) and its trade sequel — the Faludi–Paglia wars, fought in magazine offices as much as in books, are treated in one clause here because the heterodox career they anchored is a chapter of its own. What matters for the typology is the venue: the fight ran through Vanity Fair, New York, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and Mirabella on a rotation of a few weeks for roughly three years. The gender frame was the one the magazine industry metabolized most completely, because it was the one that could be staged — two named antagonists, a fresh quote every cycle, a readership sorted into sides. It was also, of the five frames, the one whose subject matter lay closest to the industry’s own labor structure, staffed as the editorial floors were by underpaid, overcredentialed young women; the frame was debated on those floors daily and applied to them almost never.

The Endpoint Frame

The third frame declared a terminus. Fukuyama’s 1989 essay, expanded into The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992), argued that liberal democracy had outlasted its last ideological rival and that the large story of political evolution was, in the meaningful sense, over. The thesis was contested in every serious quarterly, and its career as an argument — who answered it, what the answers claimed, what the political decade did to it — belongs to this part’s political chapters. What belongs here is its function as a mood: the endpoint frame gave the decade permission to understand its own prosperity as a settlement rather than a phase. The same permission arrived from the technology press in a different costume. Wired launched in January 1993 announcing a new economy; the Netscape offering of August 1995 appeared to confirm it; the “long boom” articles that followed projected the confirmation forward indefinitely. End-of-history and new-economy were structurally the same claim — the difficult part is finished, what remains is management and growth — made once in the vocabulary of political philosophy and once in the vocabulary of the stock ticker. The claim was believed by roughly the same people, and it organized the horizon of the same editorial floors.

The City Frame

The fourth frame came from sociology and read the city as a splitting object. Its founding text predated the decade: Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, in English from Harvard in 1984, supplied the instrument — “habitus,” “cultural capital,” class as an internalized system of tastes and dispositions rather than an income bracket — and by the early 1990s the instrument had escaped the seminar room.⁹ Editors who had never opened the book deployed its categories secondhand; the observation that a Manhattan zip code functioned as a class manifesto, that two equal salaries could sit on opposite sides of an unbridgeable distinction, was Bourdieu applied street-level, and the full applied taxonomy of the city’s class fractions is the business of another part of this archive. What this chapter owns is the theory’s arrival as an event: a French sociology of taste becoming, within a decade of translation, the working common sense of the American magazine class describing itself.

Two New York applications followed, and they are the shelf’s great exception, because they saw what the rest of it missed. Saskia Sassen’s The Global City (Princeton University Press, 1991) described New York as a command center of international finance whose growth polarized the city into a high-wage professional stratum and the low-wage service population that maintained it.¹⁰ Robert Fitch’s The Assassination of New York (Verso, 1993) went further and made the polarization a plot: the city’s landholding elites, Fitch argued, had deliberately dismantled its manufacturing base across half a century to raise land values, trading a working-class economy for a rentier one.¹¹ Both books named finance as the restructuring force of the moment. Neither behaved like the rest of the shelf. Sassen’s was academic and slow to travel; Fitch’s was angry, Marxist in method, and reviewed as a polemic. Neither generated a magazine season. The frame that most accurately described the ground the magazines stood on was the one frame the magazines declined to popularize.

The Feeling Frame

The fifth frame was the slowest to assemble, and it assembled at the exact altitude of the editorial floor: the feeling of white-collar work. Its foundation was Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Managed Heart (University of California Press, 1983), which had named “emotional labor” — the management of one’s own feelings to produce a paid-for feeling in someone else — and distinguished the surface acting of a held smile from the deep acting that trains the feeling itself.¹² Written about flight attendants, the analysis fit a fact-checker on the telephone without alteration. Hochschild’s The Time Bind (Metropolitan Books, 1997) extended the diagnosis to the decade’s schedule: the workplace absorbing the emotional functions of home while home shrank to a staging area for work.¹³ Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character (W. W. Norton, 1998) supplied the frame’s labor economics — “flexible capitalism” as the breaking of the career’s long arc into episodes, the worker rewarded for walking away rather than staying, accumulated craft knowledge discounted as attachment.¹⁴ Sennett’s contrast of a janitor father whose routine built a legible life story with a consultant son whose successes did not add up to one was, among other things, a precise description of what the desktop-publishing transition was doing to a magazine’s production floor — the paste-up craft whose chemistry and abolition are chronicled in this archive’s production chapters.

The frame’s academic wing was assembling the same picture in a different vocabulary. Lauren Berlant’s The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Duke University Press, 1997) argued that the national public sphere had become an “intimate public sphere” — citizenship relocated into private feeling, politics experienced as personal mood — an analysis of exactly the inward turn the rest of the shelf exemplified.¹⁵ Sianne Ngai’s essay “Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in Twentieth-Century Aesthetics” (Postmodern Culture, January 2000) named the office’s newest sensation: the fusion of astonishment and tedium produced by finite but exhausting masses of material — the five-hundred-page manuscript, the data-entry backlog, the archive that outlasts attention.¹⁶ It was the first aesthetic category coined for the feeling of watching a screen do something slowly. And David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993) diagnosed the frame’s own occupational disease: irony, once a weapon against institutions, absorbed by commercial culture into a defense of them — a generation confessing its complicity in the act of performing detachment from it, self-awareness as a substitute for change rather than an instrument of it.¹⁷ Wallace’s essay circulated on the editorial floors as a mirror. It described the house style.

Underneath the frame ran a quiet contest over what a self was made of. The psychoanalytic vocabulary available to the 1990s professional came substantially from D. W. Winnicott’s mid-century papers — the “false self” assembled to satisfy a misattuned environment, the “holding environment” that permits a true one, the “transitional object” that bridges inner and outer worlds — collected in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (Hogarth Press, 1965) and kept in circulation by the therapy culture of the period.¹⁸ The federal government had, meanwhile, declared the opposite paradigm: Presidential Proclamation 6158, signed July 17, 1990, designated the 1990s the “Decade of the Brain,” a formal reorientation of the national self-understanding from meaning to metabolism.¹⁹ Peter D. Kramer’s Listening to Prozac (Viking, 1993) carried the reorientation to the bestseller list, reporting patients whose medicated personalities felt to them more authentic than their unmedicated ones and asking what that did to the very idea of a baseline self.²⁰ The feeling frame, in other words, was internally split: one wing said the office was manufacturing false selves, the other said the self was a serotonin level. Both wings were argued in the same magazines, sometimes in the same issue.

What the Frames Missed

Set the shelf against the ledgers of the same years and the gap is documentable. Two forces did more than any others to restructure New York between 1989 and 2001, and the decade’s popular self-diagnosis engaged almost neither.

The first was the consolidation of finance. The collapse of Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1990 and the Salomon Brothers bond scandal of 1991 did not shrink the industry; they concentrated it, shifting its center of gravity toward a smaller set of larger houses and the emerging hedge-fund class whose December bonus became the single most consequential event in the city’s annual economy — pricing its art, its apartments, and by extension the rents of everyone who did not receive one. The top of the city’s income distribution captured the overwhelming share of the decade’s growth while the remainder stagnated in real terms; the city’s inequality, by the standard measures, ended the period at the top of the American league table. This was the restructuring Sassen had modeled in 1991 and Fitch had prosecuted in 1993 — and their books stand as proof that the diagnosis was available in print, in English, in the city, for the whole of the decade. The generational frame did not engage it. The gender frame engaged it only at the margin. The endpoint frame denied it a plot by declaring the plot finished. The feeling frame described its symptoms — the corroded career, the managed heart — while rarely naming the balance sheets that produced them. The shelf read the weather. The ledger was the climate.

The second missed force was the collapse of informational scarcity, and it was missed from closer range, because it was dismantling the shelf’s own distribution system. The entire economic and cultural position of the decade’s magazine intellectual rested on a scarcity: reaching a national literate audience required access to a small number of mastheads, which made the editors of those mastheads gatekeepers and made the gate valuable. The dismantling is precisely datable. Salon launched in November 1995; Slate launched on June 24, 1996, with Michael Kinsley — a former New Republic editor, which was the point — as its editor; McSweeney’s arrived in 1998; and by 2000 the first wave of individually published web journals was running daily commentary with no masthead at all. Each launch was covered in the print press as a curiosity or a rival. Almost nowhere in the decade’s self-diagnostic literature was the pattern named for what the launch dates now document: the gatekeeping function itself was ending, and with it the scarcity that had paid for the fact-checkers, the four-month lead times, and the shelf of books the gatekeepers had spent the decade debating.

There was a third omission, smaller and stranger: the frames had no organ for the senses. A reader can reconstruct the decade’s arguments about itself in exhaustive detail from the shelf — and cannot learn from it what a magazine office sounded like at ten in the morning, what the hallway smelled of after the smoking policy changed, which stores stood on a block in 1993 and were gone by 1999. The self-diagnostic literature ran almost entirely at the altitude of argument; the auditory landscape, the olfactory texture, the ordinary retail furniture of daily life went unrecorded by the very books most determined to say what living in the period was like. The gap is visible in the archive of the decade’s self-study: where the arguments are dense, the sensorium is blank. Theory kept minutes of its own meetings and left the room undescribed.