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Sam Binkley is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Emerson College.
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""Getting Loose" is a work of historical sociology that both draws on and challenges central theoretical perspectives on consumption and consumer culture, identity, postmodernism and late modernity, post-Fordism, and contemporary moral culture through exceptionally creative analyses of 1970s lifestyle philosophies and practices."--Don Slater, author of "Consumer Culture and Modernity"

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Getting Loose

Duke University Press

Contents

List of Illustrations...........................................................................ixAcknowledgments.................................................................................xiIntroduction: Mediated Immediacy: Living in the Now.............................................11. Of Swingers and Organization Men: Loose Modernities..........................................272. Experts Unbound: Intimate Professionals and the Value of Lifestyle...........................773. Book as Tool: Lifestyle Print Culture and the West Coast Publishing Boom.....................1014. Being One: From Knowledge to Consciousness in the Spaceship Society..........................1295. Loving Each Other: From Phony to Real in the New Togetherness................................1656. Letting It All Hang Out: From Mind to Muscle in the Relaxed Body.............................207Conclusion: Morning in America: Pulling in the Slack............................................243Notes...........................................................................................251Bibliography....................................................................................263Index...........................................................................................287

Chapter One

The moral culture of the American middle class was profoundly shaken by the social conflicts of the 1960s and by the years of economic slowdown that followed. The 1970s is a decade recalled for its dubious legacy of soured hopes and sagging ideals-a mood of "malaise" resulting from the unraveling of cultural and economic structures whose disintegration had long been churning at the heart of American society, now showing itself on the surface of everyday life in forms that ranged from the mundane to the extraordinary. With the decline of manufacture and the emergence of a new service sector, the production of symbolic and informational goods continued a slow eclipse of the old industrial base as the lynchpin of capitalist development, displacing the managerial and manufacturing jobs that composed the core of middle- and working-class economic life. Belief in the ability of the state to act as the custodian of the collective interest was eroded under the scandals of Watergate and the festering of the welfare state, and the idyllic picture of the nuclear family as a respite from social turbulence was shaken by a revolution in values and outlooks, expressed in soaring divorce rates and a devastating generation gap. The crises of the 1970s witnessed a striking erosion in the power of public institutions to command popular faiths and a waning belief in collective solutions to public ills-a sentiment conjured by the New York Daily News's famous headline announcing the federal government's forfeit on the goal of urban renewal: "Ford to City: Drop Dead."

But if these crises signaled the impoverishment of shared public goals, they also hailed a vast and radical expansion of private ones. Recalled as the "Me decade," the 1970s inspired a culture of narcissism, as Christopher Lasch so famously christened it, in which a new emphasis on personal inwardness offered a compensatory safe haven, offsetting the stress of overpowering social and cultural insecurity. The new introspectiveness announced the demise of an established set of traditional faiths centered on work and the postponement of gratification, and the emergence of a consumption-oriented lifestyle ethic centered on lived experience and the immediacy of daily lifestyle choices. Where work discipline, national duty, group affiliation, and professional merit served the "organization man" of the 1950s as the measure of attainment and self-worth, the 1970s produced a morality of self-realization through consumption, leisure, experiential learning, and therapeutic release-a looser morality whose exemplar was undoubtedly the dashing, fun-loving, and flirtatious "swinger." But the slide from organization man to swinger was for many one of atavistic decline: "In the hedonistic life," sociologist Daniel Bell complained, "there is a loss of will and fortitude," and a slackening of conviction and self-control-a sentiment that has occasioned decades of cultural crusades (captured famously in Robert Bork's Slouching toward Gomorrah) aimed at expurgating once and for all what neoconservatives consider the self-indulgent residue of the 1960s counterculture.

An inquiry into the emergence of the looser self requires that we evaluate more carefully this slouching trope. It asks that we consider the anxieties and imaginary investments that beset the cultural authority of the middle class and examine the dynamic that set loose swingers and tight organization men in their respective camps. Indeed, this crisis was not unique to the 1970s at all but was expressive of a dynamic of fear and hope, of disintegration and renewal, that characterizes the experience of modern social and cultural change in general. In the pages that follow, the explosive predicament of the crisis decade will be read for the unique modernity it expressed-the modernity of the 1970s-wherein a crisis in public authorities and a passionate loosening of the self related a dynamic of innovation, rupture, and imaginary flight, woven together with a panic at the prospect of a world without moral foundations.

Whitey on the Moon: The Modernity of the 1970s

Modernities are never experienced in a total sense, as the zeitgeist of an age, an epoch, or a civilization, but neither are they merely localized phenomena, scattered across a social surface in disconnected groups. The experience of modernity is felt at the intersection of changing social configurations and in the specific trajectories followed by individuals and groups across preexisting social and cultural boundaries. Such experiences are of the rumbling that accompanies seismic shifts in the ordering of a society, the movement of tectonic plates in the underlying social structure. Modernities must be considered as they develop in their conjunctural specificity, at the interstices opened up by emerging and receding patterns of life, by the concomitant fragmentation and demise of old social groups and the constitution of new ones. Modernities are never the property of one group, much less the unconditioned spirit of an age, but the articulation of moments and temporal trajectories at the reconfigured boundaries between groups. Modernities are, in this sense, "without guarantees" in the meaning given the phrase by Stuart Hall: they express the efforts of individuals to bring their experiences into alignment with structural changes, to articulate everydayness together with changing regimes of power, changing distributions of capital and economy, and changing boundaries between competing clusters of people. Indeed, the reconfiguration of social proximities and spaces is inextricably linked to the way people experience novelty and anticipate its consequences: the experience of the new is often one of disaffiliation and rupture within previously consolidated groups, but also a regrouping, an investment, emulation (or even fetishization) of identity across the boundaries dividing previously competing groups.

What I am calling the modernity of the 1970s was a modernity experienced by a...