I think its funny how there are both many ways to define cool as well as one universal definition. What gets me confused, is how there are "bad cools" and "good cools" only depending on your culture map of course.
Now to the rich preppies, its cool to wear sweater vests and tousle your hair in the wind. I'm sure that in Brooklyn its much more cooler to drink 40's at the chicken joint.
What I don't get is who decides what kind of cool is good and which is bad. I think that the deciders of this comes from the society that you live in. Here in this capitalist society, the whit--er.. I mean the right thing to do is go to college (if you don't get daddy's company) and get a job, then eventually have people working for you.
Now, to me it seems that's more often than not, Black people get rich by:
a) playing basketball
b) rapping and/or singing
c) Playing basketball and/or singing then making a reality TV show about the drama surrounding their life.
I mean don't get me wrong, whatever floats your boats. But it seems like there is ONE culture map and and that ONE culture map is passed down. But once in a while (literally only once in a while) some rebel or some outcast breaks the chain.
The break in the chain results in that one person breaking the norm and proving a point by making an example out of themselves. I believe that alot of making a new culture map is at least 70% of self motivation. It also seems that we like to trade off our culture maps.
Like the White kid who thinks that "Fiddy Cent" is "fresh. Or the Black kid that likes sushi. Now for some reason, breaking norms is so ABSURD. It's ILLOGICAL! WE CAN'T HAVE IT. Is it cause we get bored at looking at our own maps. We revert back to kindergarden and the whole "I want his toy" routine.
What if thinking about cool makes us uncool? Obsessing over how you look or sound or how you want to appear might make it look like we all try too hard...what the hell?
Does cool mean you have to be like the people that surround you? Imagine a group of teens all the same interests and tastes. And one of them, just one of them starts to like something different and starts to get in to different kinds of works and blah.. all of a sudden an so and so is an outcast.
It makes me think that it is forbidden to even think about changing your social map. Its almost as if we are locked in to the roles or the class structures that we are born in to, its like a gang... Once you're in you're in for life. And if you manage to make it out alive you have to go through some kind of crazy initiation to join another gang.
Why is it that "lurking late" is bad and "inheriting" is good? I mean its like we live in a society but we don't understand it. This place is like a mind boggling, crazy, f***** up never ending game of Life.
Your roll.
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Sharp presentation of crucial contradictions and paradoxes.
ReplyDeleteSometimes what you're talking about in the first half of your post gets phrased as "hegemonic" - worldviews, norms, perspectives. Hegemonic means ruling - and in Marxist and then post-modern philosophy has come to be used for the absurditiies of a factory worker voting republican against his own 'objective' interests because his way of seeing the world has been shaped by a capitalist-dominated social system (media, family, church, daily reality).
Keep going!
Really what you're caught up in are;
ReplyDelete1. each cultural map is incomplete and absurd and contradictory
2. how do we determine which map is better? how do we evaluate our own maps? how can we usefully criticize another's map (worldview) except by contrasting it with our own, likely also flawed, version?
one way i try to think with these contradictions - does the map seem likely to deliver the goods? how would it be if lots of people had that map? so - for instance - a map which said, "Get rich or die tryin'" - that seems a little useless to me, since i understand that most of us can't win at that zero sum game - so most of us would just 'die tryin'.
another technique i use is to contrast the map with the little i understand of our fundamental situation (of course everything self-referential, i.e. my understanding is also part of my map). certain parts of our fundamental understanding - we didn't exist, we were born, we live, we die, we change. if the maps don't seem relevant to those territories then they're like a map of NYC without manhattan - they won't help you make certain important subway connections.