Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption by Rob Latham (review)

Abstract

MLR, 99.2, 2004 481 there is a striking tolerance shown towards the personal behaviour and views of the writers. Understandably, the essays tend towards biography and to invoking the social and political contexts in which the writers worked. Analysis of the poetry tends to be astute and explanatory; at times one certainly wanted to read more of the poetry, and perhaps an anthology of these writers would be a helpful related project. Although the aim of raising the profile of neglected women Beats can seem a simple one, it does have significant ramifications, which include the potential destabilizingof whatever consensus has existed regarding the definition of Beat. The diverse range of writing practices used by these writers seems to enlarge our definition of Beat so much that the term almost threatens to become redundant. The uncertainty of defining Beat is evident in the recurring references to Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and LeRoi Jones, who were Beat contemporaries and who had sometimes important connections with the Beat women writers, but whose relations to Beat are vexed. More significantly , perhaps, because Beat can be so readily represented as almost aggressively masculine, this study of women Beats inevitably does more than simply enlarge or add to our understanding of Beat. In particular it can, perhaps surprisingly, serve to reveal that the Beats were much more imbricated in 1950s gender codes than most would willingly accept. As Tim Hunt puts it, 'scholarship on women Beats reveals the extent to which the Beat writers [. . .] in large part re-enacted the era's gender codes with their limited range of roles and expression for women' (p. 255). This is not to say that the collection's two aims are contradictory, and a measure ofthe book's success is how far they are creatively intertwined. Trinity College Dublin Stephen Matterson Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption. By Rob Latham. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2002. x +321pp. $50; ?31-50 (pbk $22; ?14). ISBN 0-226-46891-7 (pbk 0-226-46892-5). The cyborg and the vampire have become ubiquitous figures in cultural criticism over the last decade or so, scarcely a conference going by without their invocation. It was thus inevitable that eventually someone would conceive ofdiscussing the two together. In this extremely timely work, Rob Latham considers the vampire and the cyborg as interconnected outlets of late capitalism, figures uniquely positioned to express the fears and desires of contemporary youth. As the deliberately dualistic wording of the title suggests, Latham's book seeks to investigate the processes through which youth both consumes and is consumed. Latham's study is founded in Marx's description ofthe nineteenth-century factory as a vampiric machine draining the life from its workers. Vampirism, technology, and economic production neatly coincide in a single figure. Nevertheless, while Latham's argument sustains this network of associations throughout the book, individual links between vampirism and cyborgs occasionally seem over-strained or tenuous, medi? ated only by the 'culture of consumption' that forms the third term of the subtitle. The lack of a separate conclusion drawing the two sets of chapters together means that Consuming Youth sometimes reads like two separate books rather than a sustained single argument. The value Latham's study provides, however, lies in his resolutely rational voice in a field that often provokes hysteria, and his insistence on placing these over-theorized (and frequently over-idealized) icons of popular culture in a social and economic context. Latham's command of economic discourses is impressive, and provides the backbone to his enquiry. He consistently aims for a rational middle way between left and right politics, technophobia, and technophilia. For Latham, late twentieth-century 482 Reviews consumer society is not a meaningless, disempowering culture of zombified mall rats and couch potatoes, but it is not a euphoric zone of limitless pleasure, choice, and free expression either. His book carefully charts a sensible, considered path between the two. One of the most profitable insights he has to offeris that the vampire as metaphor foryouth consumption is always inherently double, simultaneously offeringexploita? tion and empowerment. This queasy ambiguity suggestively enables, for example, a complex reading of vampire...