The Accumulation of Slack :: Slacking Slack Slacker papers

The Accumulation of Slack I want to begin with an apology. This paper may be trivial more than a tissue of puns punctuated by obscure cultural texts. It was composed quickly after a late cancellation from this panel, I volunteered to pick up the slack. (Yes, that was the prototypal pun.) Now, in proper Freudian fashion, I will follow that apology with an accusation in 2003, the topic of slacker culture sounds dangerously close to bulge out of date, or at least out of fashion. We critics must have become slackers ourselves, content to re-analyze stale fads when we ought to be braving untrammeled new ground with the gender authorities of Eminem, or the fetish scene of American Idol. But fortunately things ar not so simple. There is an advantage to a certain historical outperform taken from ones subject, as it is especially easy for cultural criticism to get caught up in fad-chasing. Rather than striving for a tauter, tighter connection to the current moment, thence, lets admire the historical slack that has already accumulated between slacker culture and ourselves. If we wish to create more a description of men than manners (35), then for us as newly outdated slacker scholars the same doctrine applies that Sir Walter Scott famously gave about the setting of his Waverley Considering the disadvantages inseparable from this part of my subject, I must be understood to have resolved to avoid them as much as possible (35). Unlike Scott we may not do this by throwing the force of my memoir upon the characters and passions of the actors (35) as Scott did. Instead, lets fix for a moment on a question. What is slack? What is this substance that those devilishly ironic slackers so earnestly want to accumulate? What are the structural characteristics of slack, considered as a substance circulated in a metaphorical or real economy? Should we seek slack, or avoid it? It seems to me that this set of questions is the scoop up way to approach a political and economic eva luation of the slacker phenomenon. I want to suggest a few answers by reading unlike representations of the economy of slack, along with some familiar Marxist cultural criticism. The question of the political economy of slack is an excellent example of a broader dynamic in cultural studies, in that the initially tempting, apparently orthodox cultural-studies reading of slack (which I am about to construct) will turn out to be just wrong in its zeal to construe slack as a form of liberation.