Critical Theory Now

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Critical Theory Now

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Critical Theory Now

Edited by Philip Wexler

The Falmer Press (A member of the Taylor & Francis Group) London • New York • Philadelphia

UK The Falmer Press, 4 John St., London WC1N 2ET

USA The Falmer Press, Taylor & Francis Inc., 1900 Frost Road, Suite 101, Bristol, PA 19007

© Philip Wexler 1991

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

First published 1991

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

British Library Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available on request

ISBN 0-203-21491-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-27137-8 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 1 85000 753-5 (Print Edition) ISBN 1 85000 754-3 pbk.

Contents

Preface 1 Touring Hyperreality: Critical Theory Confronts Informational Society Timothy W.Luke

vii

1

2 Critical Theory, Gramsci and Cultural Studies: From Structuralism to Poststructuralism Raymond A.Morrow

27

3 Playing with the Pieces: The Fragmentation of Social Theory David Ashley

70

4 The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories for Feminist Politics Nancy Fraser

98

5 Theorizing the Decline of Discourse or the Decline of Theoretical Discourse? Ben Agger

117

6 How Mothers Quit Resisting and Managed to Love TV Serafina K.Bathrick

145

7 From Pathos to Panic: American Character Meets the Future Lauren Langman

165

8 Afterword. Collective/Self/Collective: A Short Chapter in the Professional Middle Class Story Philip Wexler

241

Notes on Contributors

250

Index

252


Preface

The first wave of North American critical theory was at once both academic and political. Interest in the works of the early Frankfurt School may have belonged to a more general renaissance of academic social theory that occurred in North America during the late 1960s and early 1970s. But the passion for critical theory came out of a particular historical political moment of self- and collective transformation. Critical theory best gave voice to the New Left understanding of politics as psychological and cultural transformation, and as an unbridgeable difference and dissent from a European and American Marxism that seemed irrelevant to the historical experience of an emergent, socially critical new class. The subsequent defeat of the cultural revolution, and the social movements which fed it, predictably led not only to the formalization of social theory, but to an atrophy of a deep political and psychological passion for social theory. The ritualism of defeat expressed itself in an academicist interest in critical theory. Frankfurt School theory became respectable as an object of scholastic interpretation. In that sense, the academic success of critical theory was a sign of an apparent end to its political transformative project. The North American Restoration—not postmodernism—eviscerated the effort to politicize everyday life. For the new generation, it seemed that theoretical interest was either formal and scientistic, or at best, in a postmodern vein, of an aesthetic interest. Now, there are signs that we are exiting the long night of the Restoration. It is not that corporatism has ceased to flourish, or even that there is a new articulation of mass consciousness. Rather, the scholastic interest in critical theory has again become political, and the social theoretic ideology of the Interregnum, postmodernism, has proven that it can be a channel as well as a damper for the articulation of a critical theory of society. There is a new voice in critical the-

viii CRITICAL THEORY NOW

ory. It is a voice that comes through the historic political struggles of a student movement, of feminism, and of anti-racist and ecological social movements. It is a voice also schooled in a sensitivity to the theories of social disintegration or an ‘implosion’ that characterizes the post-modernist moment. The authors represented in this reader are neither scholastic nor dogmatic. They do not eschew postmodernism for hackneyed slogans, nor do they embrace theory as an aesthetic substitute for theory as a socially transformative practice. They are committed both to social theory and social practice, and it is this which unifies the papers which follow. The authors are a new generation of North American critical theorists who do not retreat to European humanism in the face of social, cultural and self transformation. Each one actively encounters and works through the social and theoretical changes that have occurred since Frankfurt-style critical theory. They offer social analyses of the information society (Luke), the character of public discourse (Agger), and changes in the relation between the family and mass media (Bathrick). They all refuse to simply dismiss postmodernism, poststructuralism or discourse theories on the grounds that they are ‘neo-conservative’ (Habermas, 1981). Morrow, for example, offers an historical account of how critical and cultural theories converge and can incorporate structuralism and poststructuralism. They work through, as Agger describes, a dialectic of postmodernism, and a politically interested critique of discourse theories, which as Fraser so aptly says, will lead to a ‘critique of essentialism without becoming postfeminist’. Ashley takes Baudrillard’s simulacra seriously as a criticism of Marxist ‘productionism’, but notes that Baudrillard ‘does tend to get carried away’. Ashley’s effort to reclaim totality as a critical vantage point, Agger’s postmodern, public intellectual, Bathrick’s mother as transformative mediator, and Morrow’s ‘disciplinary deconstructions’ all show how critical theorists can avoid new forms of sublimation in discourse by a clear social analytic interest, a ‘pragmatic’ interest as Fraser calls it, that is not based on a desire to retain a scholastic critical theory tradition, but instead encounters new forms of cultural expression. Luke offers a reformulation of the political possibilities of critical theory in conditions of ‘hyperreality’, and Langman explores the cultural and psychological conditions within which a contemporary emancipatory project is possible. The authors present different political interests, analytical dimensions and empirical examples. Despite Ashley’s Adornoesque caveat that there are ‘no theoretical solutions’ to contemporary aporias, this

PREFACE ix

new generation of critical theorists does not accept the postmodern, poststructural, discursive dissolution of a subject who can understand and act. Their qualifications to global action are in the service of a practical, theoretically knowledgeable politics. They are redeeming critical theory, but not naively, as the integration of social analysis and political practice, at a time when such a form of life is not easily nurtured. They are exemplifying how the agon of internalized contradictions among subjects of the professional middle class may be overcome in theory and in practice. I believe that readers will find in these essays a thread of continuity with Frankfurt School theory, a political reading of post-modernism, an engagement with contemporary social movements, and—what distinguishes ‘critical’ theory—a fresh effort to articulate a new critical social theory in a new historical moment.


1 Touring Hyperreality: Critical Theory Confronts Informational Society* Timothy W.Luke

As the 1990s begin, it is clear that the frozen impasse of the Cold War has thawed, bringing new possibilities and problems for the capitalist world-system. Yet, some central points must be remembered. During the strategic deadlock of Soviet and American superpower over the past four decades of Cold War, the everyday commerce of transnational corporate capitalism has transformed significantly the established cultures, politics, and society of many nation-states by developing electronically-mediated consumption communities within and alongside their traditional ways of life.1 Indeed, the end of the Cold War marks the intrusion of these transformations even into the centrally planned economies of China, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union. Conventional codes of power, ideology and resistance are changing in all of these still modernizing regions, but in ways that now are unclear, contradictory, and incomplete. Within such transnational consumption communities, the flow of goods, services, and signs generates densely encoded ‘hyperrealities’ or ‘mediascapes’, which form new regions and sites of shared cultural consciousness that continuously but cryptically display the workings of power and ideology. But whose power and whose ideology? The institutionalized forms of organized power are increasingly dominated by the networks of transnational corporate capital (based mainly in Japan, North America, and Western Europe), under the watchful vigilance of weak transnational zone-regimes (tied to either Soviet or American superpower), which reveal their biases most directly in the electronic imagery and technology underpinning the hyperreality of contemporary mass consumption and production. How can one best travel through these essentially contested,hyperreal terrains of the ‘post-industrial’, ‘information-based’, or ‘informational’ society as they have been forming with the globalization of advanced corporate capitalism since 1945? The distinctive features of 1

2 CRITICAL THEORY NOW

postindustrialism, such as the trends toward rising numbers of whitecollar workers, decreasing numbers of blue-collar workers, a greater emphasis on services or information goods rather than industrial manufacturing, the mobilization of science as a factor in production and management, and a consumer-oriented economy of affluence, have been talked about since the mid-1950s. Intense debates over what these changes mean, and how far they go toward actually constituting a new stage of development, continue today.2 Still, these economic and social developments have not led to the carefree utopia of cybernetic postindustrialism that fascinated early space age America in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, new technical and economic forces are creating a more culturally impoverished and ecologically destructive world system, which is now based upon attaining the complete commodification of all aspects of human life. With the emergence of informationalization, one can see concomitant declines in several different but interrelated spheres—environmental quality, urban life, material living standards, cultural vitality, popular political effectiveness, and ordinary everyday community. Consequently, it should be useful here to outline some speculations— grounded in contemporary semiotic and critical theory—about the origins and operations of hyperreality by taking a brief tour through some corners of its mediascapes. In turn, these observations might disclose a few provisional traces of how power and politics seem to work in hyperreality, while setting the scene for some tentative conclusions about the project of critical theory today.

I Speculations: From Ontology to Hyperontology? What is real? How do we know it? Given what is real and how much we know of it, what can we do? Discussing ‘reality’, as such questions indicate, always seems slightly unreal. Questions, like ‘what is’ or ‘what is “is”’ once asked, are difficult to answer. To frame responses, as in this discussion, the metaphors of maps and terrain are inevitably invoked. ‘What is’ or ‘what is “real”’ are usually given the status of an unknown ground whose topography might then be revealed through some conceptual cartography, traced out in linguistic maps or representational grids. These instruments historically have been considered inadequate disclosures of what is ‘real’ inasmuch as no abstractconceptual representation can fully disclose or encapsulate that which is real. The pre-categorical always overwhelms the categorical as the given and the lived evade that which can be thought or spo-

TOURING HYPERREALITY 3

ken. Never completely coextensive, the metaphorical elements of ‘map’ and ‘terrain’ still have delimited the basic boundaries of ontological reflection, resting on the belief that the terrain always precedes and denominates the map as a constant invariable presence beneath its representational narratives. Yet, lately something seems to be changing. Like the survivors of the 1989 California earthquake, who could not describe the very solid reality of the earth shaking beneath their feet without reading their experience and its meaning through their past viewings of simulated earthquake disasters on TV or in old movies, everyday participants in informationalized societies regard what is real, and their knowledge of it, in similarly hyperreal terms. Increasingly, in the innermost individual consciousness, many ordinary judgments of reality, knowledge of the real or even how to act echo the ontology of the earthquake victims: what was it like? It was just like on TV! What did you think was happening? It was like an old sci-fi, disaster movie! Describing and interpreting this sort of ‘hyperreality’ seems more than slightly unreal. The means of information generating the symbolic basis of today’s global, transnational economy unhinge ordinary metaphorical relations between map and terrain inasmuch as the operative principles of this informational order are those of simulation. Abstract narratives can no longer function definitively as ‘the maps’, ‘the doubles’, ‘the mirrors’ or ‘the concepts’ of some ontological terrain metaphorically regarded as ‘the real’. Instead, what were once abstract frames of the real increasingly function in ordinary consciousness as simulations. The terrain is framed by television screens. Its topography is fluid not fixed, flowing in continuously shifting images. The maps are constantly under revision, changing with every new voiceover and scan of the images. The moving frames of all the viewing screens compose the pictures: without the images there is no terrain, and its features are only those drawn into the scan and pan of the camera. As Baudrillard asserts, ‘simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or a reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—it is the map that engenders the territory…’.3 In this hyperspace, the ineluctable non-identity of map and terrain disappears. Therefore, it seems that some provisional hyperontology must now somehow define and describe what ‘is’. If such hyperrealities do exist broadly enough to have these effects, then one must look constantly for something else that is now only inconstantly there:


No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept. No more imaginary coextensity: rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models—and with these it can be reproduced an infinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal, the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.4 The simulation systems of hyperreality play off and on these dissolving differences between true and false, drifting in and out of real and representation. Again, like the California earthquake survivors, as they recounted their adventures to the TV cameras, confusing themselves in the real disaster of 17 October, 1989 with images of Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald in the distant past of San Francisco or Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner in the indistinct future of Earthquake, fact and fiction are interwoven in hyperreality to the point that electronic/cinematic fictions are cited commonly as the ultimate standard for judging material facts. Simulations rest upon absence and negation, eliminating the role of the real or the true in fabricating intersubjective experience. Actually, as Baudrillard suggests: age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials—worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, a more ductile material than meaning in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions, and all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself, that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and shortcircuits all its vicissitudes..... A hyperreal, therefore, is sheltered from thereal and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference.5 While systems of representation may endeavor to appropriate simula-


tion as false representation, the dynamics of simulation turn all representations into simulacra, reducing the sign to a valueless free radical capable of bonding virtually anywhere in any exchange. Specifically, When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative when the object and substance have disappeared and there is a panicstricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production: this is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us—a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.6 The material means of generating hyperreality are mainly the electronic media. Traditional notions of causality, perspective and reasoning are undermined completely by the electronic means of information, which efface the differences between cause and effect, ends and means, subject and object, active and passive. ‘Rather,’ Baudrillard argues, ‘we must think of the media as if they were, in outer orbit, a sort of genetic code which controls the mutation of the real into the hyperreal, just as the other, micro-molecular code controls the passage of the signal from a representative sphere of meaning to the genetic sphere of the programmed signal’.7 Simulation goes beyond the distinctions of space and time, sender and receiver, medium and message, expression and content, as the media generate and maintain a new hyperspace with ‘no sense of place’. Difference vanishes, because ‘nothing separated one pole from the other, the initial from the terminal: there is just a sort of contraction into each other, a fantastic telescoping, a collapsing of the two traditional poles into another: an implosion—an absorption of the radiating model of causality, of the differential mode of determination, with its positive and negative electricity—an implosion of meaning. This is where simulation begins. Everywhere, in whatever political, biological, psychological, mediadomain, where the distinction between poles can no longer be maintained, one enters into simulation, and hence almost absolute manipulation—not passivity, but the non-distinction of active and passive’.8 In elaborating the practical logic of hyperreality, one must recognize how it also reflects the general operation of monopoly capital as


transnational corporate planning effaces the historical contradictions between capital and labor, production and consumption, supply and demand. Traditionally, ‘capital only had to produce goods; consumption ran by itself. Today it is necessary to produce consumers, to produce demand, and this production is infinitely more costly than that of goods’.9 As part of the production of demand, the forms and substance of society itself are manufactured to sustain consumption. Consequently, every dimension of social existence today is essentially a complex simulation of reality, designed specifically to sustain the fragile cycles of political, economic and cultural reproduction. Since individual desires are abstractly autonomized into pre-packaged needs that serve as productive forces, the social devolves into an aggregate of atomized individuals, whose role is to mediate the packaged meaning of their desires in the corporate marketplace. The traditional cultural forms of attaining both individuality and the social collapse under these conditions. Instead, particular individual subjects ‘are only episodic conductors of meaning, for in the main, and profoundly, we form a mass, living most of the time in panic or haphazardly, above and beyond any meaning’.10 At the same time, ‘the masses’ are neither a subject nor an object. These social forces bear little relation to any historical referent—a class, a nation, a folk or the proletariat. Rather, they are a demographic construct, a statistical entity whose only traces appear in the social survey or opinion poll. Their members and extent vary with the complex coding of the media and the marketplaces, which set and reset the outer boundaries of the mass, in that ‘it only exists at the point of convergence of all the media waves which depict it’.11 The masses can no longer act as traditional historical subjects in this social and political context. Nonetheless, they cast an immense shadow as the silent majorities that ground and channel or diffuse and deflect the circuits of corporate power and state authority in their personal activities. What is deterred by hyperreal strategies of deterrence? Essentially, everything that might be or become ‘real life’ totally separate and completely free from the planned imperatives of social programs and designer models of everyday life as set by corporate production agenda. In this vacuum of (in)significance, the proliferation of secondhand authenticity has plainly become the primary growth industry of thepresent era. Power and politics assume new forms in hyperreality as electronic mediations of experience and meaning substitute the imaginary for the real, simulations displace actuality, simulacra merge into the real. No longer duplicity or counterfeit, simulation acquires


an almost total integrity, actually becoming what many regard as what is real. Signs of this process surface in many sites on the contemporary post-1945 political horizon, ranging from televisual democracy to nuclear deterrence to urban renewal. The sites of struggle are staked out here over generating and perhaps resisting hyperreal illusions of what is. By controlling what is considered real, the simulations weakly control human activity. Simulation as an organizing principle requires a continuous and purposeful substitution of the signs of the real for reality itself, but the deeper ties to the cycles of commodification clearly need not be broken. Hyperreality simply brings new forms of hyperreal commodification along with it. The entire ethos of national electoral politics in the United States, for example, largely rests upon the panic-stricken efforts to produce a real consensus, a national mandate, and a true representation of the electorate’s preferences from an increasingly divided, smaller, segmented and apathetic public that participates in a simulation rather than a real representative democracy. In democratic electoral politics, a simulated hyperreality of public life emerges from public opinion polls, whose mathematical indices are substituted in practice for ‘the public’ itself. The ever-changing outcomes of daily, weekly, and monthly surveys continually span the gap between the opinion leaders and opinion holders. The mathematical montages of satisfaction and dissatisfaction from such polls, in turn, increasingly constitute what the contemporary public accepts as its sense of itself. The whole process is one of hyperrealistically simulating a particular type of democratic reality in order to substitute it for the real workings of democracy.12 These artifacts are much more potent than traditional ideology as a mode of exercising power. Most historical forms of ideology entailed the betrayal or distortion of some actual reality with signs as ‘false consciousness’, but simulation entails the complete ‘short-circuit of reality’ and its ‘reduplication by signs’13 in ways that suspend truth and falsity almost entirely in the fabric of hyperreality itself. Much like daily television news programs which create false stylized narratives about contemporary political ‘reality’ with actors, sets and scripts to report ‘what is true’ about American politics by merging reality and representation in an electron haze, the hyperreal practices of democracy form in the changing coded conventions of its own continuous fabrication. At the level of global politics, nuclear deterrence is the epitome of simulation. The arsenals in nuclear arms races are the signs of hyperreality that neutralize the reality of actual nuclear war. Real nuclear war would annihilate the geopolitical stakes at issue in global power


struggles. Consequently, the superpowers devote their energies to the hyperreal simulations of preparing and rehearsing for such a war, which short-circuits that reality.14 However, this struggle reduplicates the conflict as a war of signs between the opposing superpowers. The balance of terror is the terror of balance’, as the simulations ensure that the real event of nuclear war will not disturb the equilibrium of the general system.15 This macrological system of deterrence also pervades the micrological dimensions of everyday life: ‘The same model of planned infallibility, of maximal security and deterrence, now governs the spread of the social’, throughout the networks of social control.16 Every effort is now being made, through constant simulations and resimulations of every conceivable eventuality in daily life, to guarantee that ‘nothing will be left to chance’. The accidents that do occur, like the Three Mile Island or Chernobyl nuclear disasters, are very exceptional. As rare incidents of purposive human error, they are regarded as inconceivable and therefore appear as totally unsimulated events. Once they happen, however, they become, like oil refinery disasters, civil defense drills, airliner crashes, or high-rise fires, a new modeling scenario for innumerable fresh simulations. Indeed, the relatively low loss of life and high degree of social cohesion after the 1989 California earthquake are, in large part, attributable to the Bay Area’s residents’ continuous simulation of coping with disaster in emergency services drills and practice runs. In the decaying core of today’s immense exurban/post-urban agglomerations, for example, expensive efforts at urban revitalization and renewal being made by the Rouse Company and other redevelopment corporations thrash out image-driven simulations of city life in urban dead zones where none has existed for decades. However, these redevelopment programs are typically pitched to the commuting sub-urban upscale gentry rather than ordinary citizens who are still in residence.17 By the late 1950s, the classic urban industrial core of most American cities was in complete decline for many reasons, ranging from suburbanization, maturing markets, and foreign competition, to regional population shifts, runaway shops, and building the interstate highway system. Racial conflict and economic hard times in the 1960s and 1970s virtually killed off what was left in most urban downtowns, turning what were once vibrant self-contained communities into nothing but ‘central business districts’. To recapture some sense of urban excitement and diversity, many consciously planned efforts have been made by alliances of corporate capital and various state agencies since the 1970s to renew, renovate or rebuild certain regions in such cities’ downtown cores via ‘redevel-


opment’. What has been created, however, in such re-creations is not a revitalization of what once was alive. Rather, it is more often merely a gentrified simulation, trading off of memories about what is believed to once have been by presenting packaged fantasies that now will be accepted as true. Remaining essentially ultra-contemporary in both form and function, redevelopment is cleverly denominated, nonetheless, with as many symbols of the past as are necessary to sell the commodity of itself in the present. These simulations displace and surpass serious efforts at careful historical reconstruction by using just enough historic tokens to seem basically convincing to many people. Such commodification of urban spaces only takes on a disguise of close, face-to-face concern for neighborhood renovation, civic preservation, historic conservation. The acids of exchange continue splashing through their familiar transnational tubes behind the hyperreal renovated facades of local architectural and urban traditions. Corporate capital, here in the form of civic-minded urban development partnerships or just plain real estate speculation, aims at colonizing the hitherto and probably otherwise impenetrable preserves of urban decay with new outposts of commodification. Its continuing mission is to accumulate greater power and authority via exchange, but dress up the exchange in spectacle and illusion. These campaigns for expanding the controlled policing of space behind the valorized boundaries of development districts take place behind the screen of hyperreal illusion. Up to a point, at one time, significant questions about the nature of urban life could still be asked. Is it real or is it Memorex? Is this real life or a movie? Is this really happening or are we on television? Is this a live performance or an electronic mediation/ simulation? These are now much less meaningful questions. We all know the answer about life in such cities. Redeveloped or rehabbed urban life is an illusion. Yet, we all seem to like it that way. Hyper-reality absolutely requires the consent of the audiences accepting and incorporating its narratives into its representation of the real in order to close its codes. Commercial megastructures, like Georgetown Park or Union Station in Washington, Baltimore’s Inner Habor, Richmond’s Sixth Street Marketplace, St Louis’ Union Station, Underground Atlanta or The Cannery and Ghiradelli Square in San Francisco are each in their own ways nostalgic expressions of the troubled conscience inmediadriven informational society. Economic exchange and cultural enlightenment, because of the electronic media, computerization, telecommunications, and jet travel, can and do happen almost anywhere.


What was once produced downtown in America is now shipped in from Taiwan, Mauritius, South Korea, Mexico or Thailand. Likewise, what was once learned, enjoyed or found entertaining up-town is now often accessible twenty-four hours a day on cable or satellite TV. Still, the memories of an urban excitement and civic community linger like an unfulfilled wish over the exurban sprawl stretching over hundreds of square miles around many major American cities. Artifacts or sites from America’s once vibrant industrial past, like railway stations, old factories, market buildings or abandoned warehouses sitting empty in decay, are recolonized with signs or resettled by design to generate hyperreal plays of rehabilitated urban life. Something like the activity and allure of old civic institutions are simulated in hyperreal reconstructions of what is believed to have been ‘urban life’ in the highly coded and commodified architectural spectacles of these new urban malls and megastructures. Lacking any other definitions of ‘city living’ in the exurban sprawl of interstate highway-structured cities, these hyperreal spaces become ‘the real’ significations of urban hustle in the promotion of today’s personal consumption. The effect is easily produced given the figurative richness of these sites’ former uses or historical functions. The architectural details and symbols of another era or earlier time are refunctioned as signs of the real substituted for the real itself in order to deter anything other than a nostalgia-driven consumerism. In a panicstricken search for what is real and meaningful, simulation mobilizes the most potent indicators of what was ‘urban’ to escalate consumption and guarantee compliance in the posturban/exurban realities of what is. Actually, however, few if any urban downtowns were ever so upscale, so elite, so stylishly correct as these rehab representations would suggest. The urban revitalizations, aiming to reproduce what was the real thing, only succeed at producing absolute fakes. Masked in the particularities of old train stations, industrial plants, warehouses or habor piers, these nostalgia centers are industrially massproduced to move the goods and services of today’s transnational capitalism to any willing buyer affluent enough to pony up the plastic for such purchases. Here, of course, the demographics of real estate amortization programs define who really is welcome in the rehab city. Affluent tourists, upscale professionals or the leisured classes populate these sites of civic simulation as security guards and the prices keep most locals and the downmarket types out on the streets or commuting to their own suburban commercial strips. Yet, this ‘buying public’, as it is identified by corporate marketing plans, accepts such


weak simulations of urban community as meeting their needs for play, consumption, leisure, community, and work every time they enter these controlled spaces. There are few or no other alternatives. As more and more manufacturing moves offshore, the economic zones of existing industrial cities hollow out and collapse. Thus, the planned campaigns for building and operating these hyperreal simulations of urban life in the 1980s and 1990s are also sold by city halls or corporate developers as programs for job creation, crime control, urban beautification, and tourist generation. The illusory fiction of such hyperreal spectacle cities, then, becomes material reality as bricks and mortar refigure image in the hyperreal architecture of urban revitalization. Tied to the iconic demands of old photographs, paintings, newsreels or advertising images, the reality of what cities once were (or what they actually are on the pavements outside these centers) disappears into the hyperrealism of urban rehab. Moving from these media to the medium of architecture, ‘the real is volatilized; it becomes an allegory of death, but it is reinforced by its very destruction…. Realism had already begun this tendency…. The hyperreal represents a much more advanced phase, in the sense that even this contradiction between the real and the imaginary is effaced. The unreal is no longer that of dream or fantasy, or a beyond or a within, it is that of a hallucinatory resemblance of the real with itself’.18 Why are such illusory urban core areas created? The hunger for the figurative in the emptiness of corporate-coded hyperspaces or a nostalgia for signs of the real are part of it. However, these commercial megastructures are also coded to be seen by the transnational corporate consciousness as any city’s signs of prosperity and wealth beyond their narrow boundaries. Decaying cities that are still wealthy or decisive enough to build or recreate what never was as what once was real are taken as being business-minded, progressive and forwardthinking. Such development may keep in town what businesses still remain or provide the economic, cultural and logistical incentives to attract new investment from outside. To forsake the model may mean forsaking everything, including what little they may already have in the vast expanses of poverty and stagnation. Thus, bits and pieces of a nostalgic past become ‘the real for the real, fetish of the lost object— no longer object of representation, but ecstasy of denegation and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal’.19 Like the total environment of redeveloped urban malls, the deterrent engineering of existence ultimately guarantees an anticipatory control over any possible threat to this hyperreality: ‘Reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality. It no longer


even surpasses fiction: it captures every dream even before it takes on the appearance of a dream. The cool universe of digitality has absorbed the world of metaphor and metonymy’.20 While its larger connections to class contradictions or social conflicts are clearly questionable, this interpretive treatment of simulation presents a useful account for grasping some of the mechanisms behind the strategies of social control embedded in the cultural codes of informational society.

II Provisional Traces: Power and Politics in Hyperreality? Political power prior to the implosions of hyperreality was organized around institutional mediations with different structures of cultural space and time than that found in electronically-mediated hyperrealism.21 As Innis and McLuhan maintain, the metaphors perhaps most appropriate for understanding social ontologies in preinformational societies largely tie back into the bias in their print-driven media, which were the first mass-production industrial technologies for creating cheap, identical products.22 These media essentially create a linear, panoptical or typographical mode of space. The personal and social sense of place are fixed in grids of class, status, or geographical distance. This perspectival space evolves with a particular sense of social time, grounded in diachronous concepts of ‘development-intime’, such as evolution, progress, or maturation. Change is marked by incremental measures of linear change. The ‘new’ is the latest increment of diachronic development in time or space. The power exerted in linear, panoptical space presumes its own production by ‘power-ful’ agents at the top of society, outside of or from within the center of established institutions, which mediate the production and application of power on the ‘power-less’. A difference, in other words, between active and passive, subject and object, message and meaning is strongly apparent. Seen in this mode, preinformational power is clearly coercive, creating and policing its own subjects in the evolving procedures of civil institutions, social organizations, and parastatal discourses conducted in print and in writing across the grids of a perspectival space. Without its strong oversight, the leadership of these institutions assumes everyone would repudiate their directions in complete revolt. Hence individuals are often seen as potential rebels, ready to cast off heavy coercive controls. The state places a very high premium on obedience, loyalty or full integration into its structures of hegemony. Ideologies tend to be a totalistic discursive program for transforming everything


in accord with a fixed theoretical map. Power works through a logic of coercive detainment and continuous indoctrination, which finds expression in elaborate, extended narratives. A shift in social position within the perspectival scope of such space also assumes that some concomitant gain or loss of control over the power production process is experienced. As McLuhan argues in The Gutenberg Galaxy, ‘print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions and fosters a mentality that gradually resists any but a separative and compartmentalizing or specialist outlook’.23 The sovereign agencies of the state—king, republican assembly, or bureaucracy—stand apart in these linear spaces as an author, who adopts and exercises a ‘fixed point of view’ in its narratives of discipline and domination. Within such typographic fields, the state can be seen as a scribe or draftsman, scrolling power across its subjects as objects through discourses of visually-anchored classification. Foucault’s ‘disciplines’ and ‘discourses of power’, for example, might be seen emerging within the interstices of such procedures. A particular kind of individual subjectivity, typically grounded upon a ‘possessive individualism’, is produced as part and parcel of such social realities. Throughout these dimensions of power, as McLuhan observes, ‘the homogenization of men and materials will become the great program of the Gutenberg era, the source of wealth and power unknown to any other time or technology’.24 From such panoptical perspectives, as Bentham proposed, powerful state agencies normalize individual and mass behavior among their subject populations through a continuous regulatory gaze exerted through the police, schools, bureaucracy, health care, and military. The spatiality of print, market exchange, and linear time sets out the expansive dimensions of the panoptical space in which those on top, outside, or at the center of society organize those at the bottom, inside, or margins of society. The analog clock perfectly exemplifies how these relations can be understood. The travel of its hands coterminously creates and regulates measures of time by moving continuously through an enclosed space from a central axis of representation, marking the twenty-four hours that represent one day on a calendar’s grid. To a certain extent, social time can be measured or conceptualized under this logic as the duration or pressures of this kind of power traveling in ‘real time’ through linear space from top to bottom. In turn, relatively clear relational-spatial distinctions of social status, cultural pre-eminence, and political authority develop in line with the print-bound, panoptical space in traditional industrial societies or industrializing agricultural societies.


The ontological nets of hyperrealism, on the other hand, are framed by new structures of cultural space and time made possible by the bias in informational networks of transnational communication and exchange. Metaphors for interpreting it lock into images from telecommunication-based media, which can generate nonlinear, multiperspectival modes of space, containing innumerable hyperreal constructs of unique, nonidentical realities. The personal and social senses of place become more mobile, defined by fluid changing connections into networks of information. One’s ability to log on, call in, switch on, or tune in to cybernetic/electronic media overcomes many types of distance. Electronic transmissions allow for rapid shifts in focus from geographically and culturally unrelated places either in time-sequence or simultaneously through editing, directing, or split screening. If the average TV viewer, for example, is not pleased by the transmitted flow of images, then he or she can create his or her own ‘program’ of rapidly changing and varied images simply by flipping through the channels. Participants in the hyperreality of informational societies no longer live in tightly bounded ethnogeographic settings. They also inhabit a continuously changing mediascape of transnational scope and content with different regions organized around particular image-flows or signs. Television does not ‘bring the entire world into our homes’ as much as it moves everybody who is watching to the same place and into the same events—or into a hyperreality. Such ‘screenal’ space, likewise, builds a new sense of social time based upon synchronic concepts of ‘simultaneity’, including those incompletely expressed in surrealism, postmodernism or simulation. Change is marked by shifting permutations or passage between regions in the current constellation of signs, images, and appearances on synchronic screen displays. The ‘now’ is simply an ephemeral existing configuration of particular images in a shifting sign flux at this or that point, discontinuously differentiated from many other ‘thens’ in other sign fluxes. Power in hyperreality, as it is exercised in imploded, nonlinear, screenal space, however, appears more puzzling. It seems to require continuous coproduction by those with access to ‘behind the screens’ and those without access ‘before the screens’. Informational power is essentially seductive, motivating its subjects with images to collaborate in reproducing or completing the codes’ logic or sequence in hyperreality. Individuals recreate themselves continuously in the permissive coding of individual self-management. The institutional leadership of informational society recognizes that ‘rebelling’ within such screenal spaces is not necessarily a serious threat to the social order.


Given the complexity and rigorous demands of the codes of control, all can, at least in part, style themselves as something of a rebel. It even can become a central theme in selling goods and services. The organization of power, then, forces all to behave as collaborators, who fulfill their needs and desires by completing the outlines of constrained personal choices left partially unfinished in the available codes of commodification. As a result, power rides along acceptable ranges of rebellion by putting an emphasis on containing the deeper roots of dissidence, resistance or opposition existing beneath the constraints of collaboration. Even open rebellion can be tolerated to the extent that police technologies work out their own changing subcodes of interaction with dissidents, rioters, or rebels, designed to contain or deter their activities within specific regions or rituals of interaction. An ideology, if this notion retains its meaning in such hyperreality, often appears as a partial, ad hoc routine pieced together from images or signs assigned to particular goods, behaviors, or styles in constantly changing codes. The final meaning of signs is never completely certain. They are never necessarily received as sent nor sent as received. Image production assumes their being continuously recoded or counter coded during their reception to complete the encoding of their transmission. Power in hyperreality, therefore, follows a logic of collaborative containment and constant deterrence, which exerts its influence through equivocal, ephemeral images. The state in the hyperreality of informational conditions is largely integrated into the loops of code circulation as a systems operator, that can range across and combine multiple points of view in an ‘interdisciplinary’ or ‘networked’ mix of different coding routines, options, and programs. Within these imploded regions, the state can be seen as a scheduler, director, and programmer, constructing contexts for collaboration by its subjects or conflict among them with the assistance of business and industry, which also act as codecoprocessors in the codings of various reified scripts and packages that basically channel, but never totally control, behavior. Political conflict centers around who directs and who is directed or what is coded where, when, and why. As Baudrillard asserts, under these conditions of power in ‘the ecstasy of communication’,25 audiences produce their own message displays and the message displays create their own audiences. Given these shifts, Poster argues that theoretical attention must now be paid to the ‘modes of information’ interoperating between the state and capital rather than the ‘modes of production’ in informational societies.26 Who has and who does not have access, as


well as who is behind and who is before the screens, for the most part, varies with the shifting codes of control. To a large extent, hyperreality can be understood as a field of complete synchrony or as the simultaneous participation of diverse groups in coproducing their discrete networks of power. As McLuhan claims (following James Joyce), its reality (or hyperreality) is based upon ‘allat-once-ness’. In fact, hyperreality becomes culturally meaningful. Selfconscious, complex social groups can and do emerge transnationally around the signs and images of successive discrete ‘news’, like the 1950s, 1960s, or 1970s, that differentiate themselves from each other by the reified insignia of their era’s peculiar commodities. Movies, television programs, popular music or the news serve as hyperreal means of imploding space, defining identity and forming group consciousness. Time can also be understood as being measured in the ‘machine time’ of instantaneous communication or computation, which becomes so pivotal in creating codes of consent and consenting to code-creation. As its metaphor, the digital clock suggests how these forces are apprehended. Time simply reads out statements of its passage in continuously changing screens of LCDs or LEDs; what surrounds or coexists with that reading is that now-ness marked in its digital identity. ‘Now’ is one digital display in the same place as ‘then’, which was only another digital configuration of identical signs. There is no spatial sense of time, as was true with analog clocks, traveling in an enclosed but carefully measured space, only a constantly recirculating set of signs dictating its display of simultaneous read outs. Overall, social control in the screenal spaces of these mediascapes boils down to organizing attractive conditions for collaboration and using different forms of seductive, but nevertheless imposed, selfmanagement in large social aggregates while aggressively containing those who challenge or fail to grasp the conditions of collaboration. Of course, elements of panoptic linear space remain operant at the global level of transnational firms, banks, and superpower states. In the bureaucratic structures of oversight, these modes of power are critical tools of management for those persons with the highest, broadest, deepest points of access to these institutions. Notwithstanding the prophets of postindustrialism, like Alvin Toffler or John Naisbitt, who see high-tech electronics creating new, more equitable, ‘hightouch’ global communities, advanced communications can also reinforce existing social barriers tied to language, class inequalities, education, or basic code competencies. The development of informational production does not totally destroy the power of industrial production as much as it simply subsumes it: literacy and typographic con-


sciousness have not been obliterated. They function as axial subcodes of the larger codes of cultural reproduction. In times of crisis the state can always activate a ‘fixed point of view’ in the coercive powers of its bureaucratic, police, and military organs to scroll power directly across its subjects, forcing them to abide by direct bureaucratic dictates. The screens of power also act as a ‘screen’ in the sense of sheltering, protecting, or concealing those with complete access from the view of those with partial or limited access or none at all. Here, for example, hyperreality can hide many of the everyday routines of military or police containment operations in the ghetto, at the Iron Curtain, outside terrorist hide-outs, or along the borders with the Third World, even as they apparently depict them in action. Screenable images of power, then, are always partial or indistinct. Much like the swarming snow of pixels in television broadcasts, hyperreality forces viewers to project continuously their own gestalts of completion into indistinct images of how ‘they’, who have access to the networks of control, imperfectly steer the intertwined systems of collective choice. The basic expectations projected into the postlinear, multiperspectival, nonpanoptic spaces of the electronic mediascapes are assembled imperfectly and incompletely by individuals in the hyperreal sign systems of image-driven informational society. Those with less access listen to, read across, look through, and constantly watch these ‘screens’, taken now in another sense as the many diverse surfaces upon which signs, images or pictures are projected. From these circulating tokens with their partial, polyvalent meanings, diverse private codes with more total, univocal meanings enable individuals and groups to construct new personal and partial conventions of understanding for the mythologies of the spectacle. As Barthes maintains, the form and content of these projections are soaked with mythologies, which organize ‘a world without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident’.27 A new politics of image, in which the authoritative allocation of values and sanctions spins out of the coding and decoding of widely circulating images by politicized ‘issue groups’, arises alongside and above the interest-group politics of industrial society. Contesting these mythologies can expose some of the contradictions and hidden dimensions of image-driven power. But, on the whole, the endless streams of mythological images in turn bring together the flow of elite control, mass acceptance, and individual consent in a new informational social formation—the ‘society of the spectacle’. In work and play, or in public and private, everyone decodes these signs, giving them an individual slant or group style, because most


commodities ultimately have a ‘do-it-yourself dimension of fulfillment. Conventional culture and unconventional counterculture both rest on the same principles. Everyone’s own needs are interpolated into the screens’ partial, fuzzy images. Not all screens are as explicit as personalized junk mail that attempts to show addressees directly— referring to them by name how a certain commodity fits into their life, why they cannot live fully without the commodity, and how they are or must become what the customized commodity offers. Instead, the codes of commodification most often stipulate that each consumer/ client/citizen complete their own scripts to match the fantasies partially promised on the screens. As hyperreality unfolds, such rudimentary principles provide the shallow ideological tracks of contemporary ‘permissive individualism’. By these actions, individuals alternately can fuse and break their personal desires, at least in part, with the corporate goals of transnational capital and the state, coproducing power by creating their own unique styles of self-government in accord with the codes. On the other hand, ‘those in charge’, like the professional/technical experts, middle-level managers, or the critical intelligentsia, might have slightly greater freedom as code creators or sign managers within more restricted access subscreens of the screen. Yet, beyond the scope of such secured windows, which are defined by these individuals’ special code competence or bureaucratic clearances to access gates, ‘those in charge’ also remain among the code consumers and sign managed. The imperatives of government in hyperreality are those of ‘indirect rule’. Individuals ‘self-manage’ themselves through the mazes of constant commodification. To fuel the growth of transnationalized capitalism, more and more of the everyday lifeworld must be colonized by the corporate coding system reducing autonomous non-commodified behavior to scripted/packaged choices projected across hyperreality. Despite the apparent ‘freedom’ or ‘revolt’ projected by many new cultural styles, the tokens of transnational informational capitalism are still hooked into all the behavioral scripts and material packages flowing across the screens. Moreover, those possibilities that are not yet penetrated soon will be as the codes of exchange absorb new contextual forms to sustain the instrumental substance of exchange. Individual and group resistance constantly works at counter-coding or refunctioning these codes to suit each individual’s or group’s own immediate personal or social uses. Revolutionary changes in these hyperrealities, however, are often not abolitions of the existing regime. Instead, they frequently turn out to be limited affirmations of the regime’s power to expand or contract the degree of freedom in


collective choice within these transnational means of informational reproduction. Hyperreality, then, offers new kinds of ‘liberation’ from the traditional drudgery of everyday life in agricultural or industrial society. Of course, the extent of, and opportunities for, such emancipation vary greatly across the world’s various societies in relation to the growth of corporate markets. The consumer has had only to accept his or her unique place as a permanent client/customer of global commerce to enjoy the rewards of collaboration. Yet, in the bargain, collaboration also enforces new modes of domination over each individual’s self-management through the ceaseless consumption of corporate capital’s codes, scripts and packages from hyperreality. Resistance or contestation is possible, but frequently it is difficult to organize and sustain beyond the threshold of weak, corrective forms of ‘artificial negativity’.28 Even rebellion and radicalism can become heavily encoded lifestyle choices lived out as conventionalized scripts of behavior in almost ritualized coexistence with government surveillance or police containment. Resistance is often very slow in coming, because individuals cocreate the power that dominates them on these shifting mediascapes as they ‘liberate’ themselves in a self-directed consumption montage of Utopian moments. The material goods and symbolic codes of hyperreality can be refunctioned, by individuals in their use and reception of them, but often only temporarily. The systemic utility and personal value of such commodified micro-utopias derives from individual consumers’ psychic management of their own consumption as a perpetual rerun of image bits personally scanned off the screens of power. The ‘utopia’ of the consumer’s countercoded personal ‘style’ in popular culture simultaneously affirms the ‘ideology’ of capital’s over-coded ‘rationality’ in collective choice. Transnational capital within each of its national markets, therefore, tries to provide individuals with the psychosocial means indirectly to rule himself or herself in hyperreal terms, while permitting it to expand the culture and commerce of its electronic world system elsewhere, confident that most of its current clients will basically leave it alone or that their weak resistance may actually strengthen the flexible codes of corporate commodification.

III Questions: What Must Not Be Done? In informational society, the community and solidarity of ‘the masses’


are melting into hyperreality. Where unity or commonality can no longer exist organically, they are created via mobilization of images and illusions, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s with the Woodstock nation, extending through the 1980s with Band-Aid style solidarity, and continuing into the 1990s with George Bush’s (or Roger Ailes’) ‘kinder, gentler America’. Images now form group identity among the silent majorities, unifying together and exerting pressure as blocs of like-minded consumers willing to appear at the sites of consumption to make a statement simply by appearing to consume. By the same logic, exurban consumers shopping at a Banana Republic or Ralph Lauren store at Georgetown Park, Inner Harbor or Union Station believe their buyers’ choices are revitalizing Washington, Baltimore or St Louis as real cities. Here the silent majorities ironically may take on a voice and accept a vision in the hyperreal presentation of this sort of collective consciousness. Saying it or showing it to be so in this or that particular frame makes it so, and in making it so, makes it hyperreal. Power in hyperreality derives from controlling the means of simulation, dominating the codes of representation, and managing the signs of meaning that constitute what hyperreality is taken as being at any particular time. By setting the limits of what is hyperreal, and therefore at least temporarily ‘real’, the managers of media, movements, and displays can set agendas, determine loyalties, frame conflicts, and limit challenges to the prevailing organization of what is or is not taken as being real. In this terrain, then, what is to be done with critical theory today? While there are perhaps as many visions of critical theory as there are critical theorists, critical theory today, particularly given the views provided on this brief tour of hyperreality, must deal with several challenges to its understanding of informational societies. First, critical theory must be essentially reflective, reflexive and ironic rather than positive, objective and methodologically formalistic. In seeking a reflective, reflexive or ironic knowledge of social relations, critical theorizing should repudiate a positivistic mode of knowing tied uncritically to natural science models of investigation. Critical analysts must not follow set-piece research strategies, using formalistic methodologies intent upon grinding some preprocessed empirical data through an allegedly objective but still theory-laden mathematical model. The results of such productions almost always fail to resonate successfully with reality, or, more importantly, hyperreality. Critical theory, instead, is a way of seeing and a form of knowing that employs historical knowledge, reflexive reasoning, and ironic aware-


ness to give people some tools to realize new potentials for the emancipation and enlightenment of ordinary individuals today.29 By adopting insights from semiotic thinking into critical theory, one also should not see semiotics as an all-powerful science of signs that will provide a special, correct consciousness of contemporary society. This danger resides in nearly every corner of modern semiotics. The rise of informational societies arguably places a high premium upon the professional study of codes and communication. Rather than developing semiotics as the open-ended, critical study of how meaning is produced and communicated, experts working in the discipline often seem to reduce it to nothing but a formalized science of signs or methodologies for systematizing signification. To the extent that informationalization travels upon formalized signification systems in the corporate and state rationalization of the economy and society, semiotics as a ‘science’ does perhaps increasingly serve as its ‘appropriate technology’ of both self-disclosure and self-mystification. Its partial deployments in the areas of artificial intelligence, public relations, cryptography, advertising, software engineering, product design, and cognitive science, all illustrate some of these trends. Culture, meaning, and values, however, are much more than merely modes of ‘communication’ or genres of ‘information’. And a critical semiotics can be engaged politically and culturally in disclosing the sources of mystification, power, and domination in the social production and consumption of meaning. When directed to these purposes, it also might broaden the analytical perspective of critical theory on the social context of generating and interpreting knowledge. Second, critical theory must adopt the goal of guiding human actions to realize greater emancipation and enlightenment in the lives of people today. By refining people’s thinking abilities and moral sensibilities, critical theorists should hope to equip individuals with a new consciousness of what must be done and how to do it. This consciousness might help them determine what their best interests should be besides gauging how far they must move away from currently held beliefs that embody elements of domination and exploitation. By helping people come to such realizations, critical theory could advance the process of human emancipation by lessening the victimization that people impose on themselves from within or that is forced upon them from without. Such domination prevents people from attaining their best interests through fully conscious, reasoned activity by blocking the conditions that would allow them to realize liberation. At the same time, however, critical theory must acknowledge the cultural and psychological groundings of the people it addresses.


There are few general categories or universal classes that can be addressed with complete certainty. While transnational forces are clearly at work on a global scale, their impact on any particular individual, group, locality, or region always has unique peculiarities. Such variations must not be entirely explained away or ignored by abstract critical systems. On the contrary, these particularities in the diverse variations of everyday life must be faced locally in the agenda for change in each individual, group, or region. And third, critical theory also must advance a systematic radical critique of society, demystifying how power, position, and privilege relate to class, group and personal inequalities. By elaborating this ideally open-ended and changing critique with an interest in human enlightenment and emancipation, critical theorists can provide some guideposts for the actual resistance groups always forming at the margins of society. Radical critique aims at identifying in a particular society how ideologies and forms of domination might be overcome in this context and time to obtain greater liberation for more people. Yet its ironic outlook must also alert these resistance efforts to the always unexpected and unintended results of any human action as individuals and groups oppose the prevailing systems of power, position and privilege. More specifically, critical theory must not promote any millenarian fantasies of total redemption through political action. All human beings are entangled and enmeshed in a recalcitrant reality made of enduring cultural traditions, the demands of everyday existence, and often unyielding personal identities that no critical theorist can ever wholly unravel. Any critical theory that ignores these realities runs the risk of presuming too much as it allegedly traces out the ruses of reason into some Jacobin or Stalinist excuse for following an infallible road map to the irresistible future. This sense of irony should always remind us that the future is almost always resistible, and there are few reliable road maps to anywhere. Finally, in developing a critical theory for an informationalizing society, it is also essential to begin developing a post-Marxist critique of commodity production and exchange suitable for use in hyperreality. By retooling insights from many diverse discourses, like the studies in this collection, critical theory begins to stake out some preliminary benchmarks for many new post-Marxist critiques of the events and experiences unfolding on the mediascapes of contemporary informational society.


Notes * Sections of this chapter are drawn from my Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination and Resistance in Informational Society, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989. 1 For more detailed treatments of advanced corporate capitalism in its transnational forms of exchange, which is beyond the central focus of this analysis, see Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974; Richard J.Barnet and Ronald E.Mueller, Global Reach: The Power of Multinational Corporations, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974; Andre Gunder Frank, Crisis: in the World Economy, New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980; James O’Connor, Accumulation Crisis, New York: Blackwell, 1984; and Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. 2 For a sample of these discussions, see Richard J.Barnet and Ronald E. Mueller, Global Reach: The Power of Multinational Corporations, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974; Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, New York: Basic Books, 1973; Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, New York: Basic Books, 1976; James R.Beninger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986; Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America, New York: Basic Books, 1982; Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, New York: Viking, 1970; Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959; Peter F. Drucker, The New Society: The Anatomy of Industrial Order, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950; Christopher Evans, The Micro Millenium, New York: Viking Press, 1979; John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 3d ed. rev., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976; Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 3d ed. rev., New York: New American Library, 1978; Alan Gartner and Frank Riessman, The Service Society and the Consumer Vanguard, New York: Harper and Row, 1974; Michael Hudson, Global Fracture: The New International Economic Order,New York: Harper and Row, 1977; Donald M.Lamberton, Ed., The Information Revolution’, Vol. 412, of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1974; Fritz Machlup, The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962; Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 1978; Yoneji Masuda, The Information Society as Post-Industrial Society, Bethesda, MD: World Future Society, 1981; John Naisbitt, Megatrends, New York: Warner Books, 1982; Simon Nora and Alain Minc, The Computerization of Society: A Report to the President of France, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980, Marc Uri Porat, The Information Economy: Definition and Measurement, Washington: Office of Telecommunications, US Department of Commerce, 1977; Robert Reich, The Next American Frontier, New York: Times Books, 1985; Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, New York: William Morrow, 1980; Alain Touraine, The Post-Industrial Society, New York: Random House, 1971; and Frederick Williams, The Communications Revolution, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1982. 3 See Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, New York: Semiotext(3), 1983, 2; and Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Structural Law of Value and the Order of Simulacra’, The Structural Allegory: Reconstructive Encounters With the New French Thought, (Ed.) with introduction by John Fekete, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, 54-71. 4 Baudrillard, Simulations, 3. Baudrillard’s critical project only provisionally sums


5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18

up the state of society as hyperreal simulacra put an end to traditional social reality. For Baudrillard, needs increasingly have no autonomous basis in an authentic conception of humanity outside of commodity exchange. They are, instead, grounded in the prepackaged expectations of cultural codes conveyed to individuals as part and parcel of their aestheticized duty to consume. Consumers serve as the vital productive force of monopoly capitalism, while the code enforces their productive potential through a free-floating flow of signifiers and signs. There are, of course, many considerable weaknesses as well as some strengths in Baudrillard’s system of analysis. Hyperreality often still seems overshadowed by the tenacity of reality in several spheres of everyday life. And, beyond some of the reservations expressed above, his lack of a consistent theory of the subject at both the individual and mass level makes it difficult to envision a way out of the political contradictions of hyperreality he describes. The ‘who’ and ‘whom’ of these power arrangements are never made concrete—institutional mechanisms, group relations, and political conflicts all still need to be defined much more closely. No moral criteria are elaborated for transforming the simulation regime into some more satisfying system of human organization. There is often no clear political direction or better sense of the ethical choices to be had from Baudrillard’s analyses. His work promotes a deep distrust of collective action, while providing new categories to refine one’s faculties of critique and analysis. Yet what must be (or, at least, might be) done to resist or contest the hyperreal web of simulation is largely left unanswered. The future ‘now’ will only be like the present ‘now’, reiterating an endless play of signs in a never-ending simulation of hyperreal models. For some additional critical discussion of Baudrillard’s project, see Kate Linker, ‘From Imitation, to the Copy, to Just Effect: On Reading Jean Baudrillard’, Art-forum, 22, no. 8, 1984:44–48; Andre Frankovits, (Ed.) Seduced and Abandoned: The Baudrillard Scene, Glebe, New South Wales: Stonemoss Services, 1984; John Miller, ‘Baudrillard and his Discontents’, Artscribe International, 63, May 1987:48–51; and, William Bogard, ‘Sociology in the Absence of the Social: The Significance of Baudrillard for Contemporary Thought’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 13, No. 3, 1987, 227– 242. Baudrillard, Simulations, 4. Ibid., 12–13. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 57–58. Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities…or the End of the Social, New York: Semiotext(3), 1983, 27. See also Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, St Louis: Telos Press, 1981, for the initial development of this position. Also see Arthur Kroker, ‘Baudrillard’s Marx’, Theory, Culture, and Society, 2, No. 3, 1985, 69– 84. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 30. See Tim Luke, ‘Televisual Democracy and the Politics of Charisma’, Telos, 70, Winter 1986–7, 59–79. Baudrillard, Simulations, 48. See Timothy W.Luke, ‘What’s Wrong with Deterrence?: A Semiotic Interpretation of National Security Policy’, Intertextual/International Relations: Postmodern and Poststructural Readings of World Politics, (Ed.) James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro, Lexington Books, Lexington, MA, 1989, 207–29. Baudrillard, Simulations, 60. Ibid., 63. See, for example, Jeanne Schuler, ‘Back to Union Station’, Telos, 78, Winter 1988–9, 55–69. Baudrillard, Simulations, 142.


19 Ibid. 20 Baudrillard, Simulations, 152. 21 Also see Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974; Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979; Ralf Darendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959; Bob Jessop, The Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Methods, New York: New York University Press, 1982; David Landes, Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Europe From 1750 to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969; Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society, New York: Basic Books, 1969; Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934; and Max Weber, General Economic History, New York: Collier Books, 1961. 22 See Elizabeth L.Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change:Communications ana Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979; Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977; Harold Innis, Empire and Communications, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972; Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983; Donald M.Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962; Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, New York: Signet Books, 1964; Charles Newman, The Post-Modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1985; and Walter J.Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London: Methuen, 1982. 23 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 126. 24 Ibid., 127. 25 Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture, Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983, 126–34. 26 See Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism and History: Mode of Production versus Mode of Information, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984, 146–69. 27 Roland Barthes, ‘Myth Today’, A Barthes Reader, (Ed.) Susan Sontag, New York: Hill and Wang, 1983, 132. This characterization of myth is echoed in Lefebvre’s critique of advertising publicity: ‘This image duplicates not only an object’s material, perceptible existence but desire and pleasure that it makes into fictions situating them in the land of believe, promising “happiness”—the happiness of being a consumer. Thus publicity that was intended to promote consumption is the first of consumer goods; it creates myths—or since it can create nothing, it borrows existing myths, canalizing signifiers to a dual purpose: to offer them as such for general consumption and to stimulate the consumption of a specific object’. See Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, New York: Harper and Row, 1971, 105. 28 See Paul Piccone, ‘The Crisis of One-Dimensionality’, Telos, 35, Spring 1978:43– 54; and, Tim Luke, ‘Culture and Politics in the Age of Artifical Negativity’, Telos, 35, Spring 1978:55–72. 29 See, for some useful examples, Ben Agger, Fast Capitalism, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989; Fred R. Dallmayr, Beyond Dogma and Despair: Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Politics, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981; Dallmayr, Polis and Praxis: Exercises in Contemporary Political Theory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984; Kathy Ferguson, The Feminist Case against Bureaucracy, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984; David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, Berkeley: University of California


Press, 1980; Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950, Boston: Little, Brown, 1973; John O’Neill, On Critical Theory, New York: Seabury, 1976; and Stephen K. White, The Recent Work of Jurgen Habermas: Reason, Justice, and Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

2 Critical Theory, Gramsci and Cultural Studies: From Structuralism to Poststructuralism Raymond A.Morrow

I Introduction: The Crises of Critical Theory

The Argument The task of this essay is to contextualize historically contemporary critical social theory as a revitalized tradition which can be adequately understood and criticized only in terms of its continuous selftransformation in response to critics, emergent (and often opposing) theoretical movements, and societal change in advanced capitalism. In the process, it will be argued that critical theory broadly understood represents the consistently most productive strategy for learning from the crisis of Marxism, struggling against the co-optation of the human sciences by the welfare state, and coming to terms with the changing context of historical events. As Poster has put it: ‘…critical theory contains the best of what remains in the shambles of the Marxist and neoMarxist theoretical positions, the best of what is left of the Left’ 1989:3). Finally, the example of critical theory’s relation to cultural studies will be used as the basis for illustrating both these more general theses about critical theory and to develop more specific arguments about its continuing contributions to cultural studies.1 First, its resilience and openness as a theoretical tradition will be analyzed with respect to its reponse to three fundamental challenges: structuralist Marxist and related semiotic theories; the subsequent Gramscian turn in British cultural studies; and to various more recent currents associated with the concept of poststructuralism. Second, the outcome of these theoretical transformations will be considered as suggesting signs of, and the basis for, a broad convergence between critical theories and neo27


Gramscian cultural Marxism in the domain of cultural studies. The central thesis will thus be that critical theory has incorporated—or is in the process of successfully incorporating—structuralist, neoGramscian and poststructuralist methods and theoretical constructs without abandoning either an initial commitment to critical theory as a tradition of inquiry or its self-understanding as a political project and form of institutional analysis which has not altogether lost its roots in theories of social and cultural reproduction.2 This is not to say, of course, that critical theory claims some kind of privileged knowledge as the basis for true science; indeed, it implies something rather different: acceptance of its potential fallibility, as well as awareness of its own precarious and contingent relation to social change and the inherent difficulties of any avowedly selfreflective mode of theorizing. As a consequence, critical theory has no need of canonizing its founders (e.g. the first generation Frankfurt School), any more than it needs to canonize Marx, Gramsci, Lukács or any other seminal contributor to social theory. The attitude of the younger generation of critical theorists is expressed by Honneth’s admission that: ‘Only with the awareness of all its deficiencies can one today productively continue the theoretical tradition originated by Max Horkheimer’ (1987:348; see also, Bonß and Honneth, 1982).

Cultural Theory and the Frankfurt School Tradition: Continuities and Discontinuities Critical theory and culture. The focus of this essay will be upon the ongoing re-interpretation of cultural theory in those forms of critical theory which retain some self-conscious identification with the Frankfurt tradition.3 That tradition included a critique of positivism derived from the materialist epistemology of Marx; a political economic analysis of post-liberal capitalism which recognized the primacy of the state as a new source of stability; social psychological research on the foundations of social order in personality structures; and a theoretical analysis of the role of mass culture in the construction of cultural domination. As Honneth concludes, it is in this domain of culture in particular that the original project of critical theory went awry: The theory of culture, the third component of the research project envisaged by Horkheimer, would have been the place to force open the closed functionalism of such an analysis of society. Here it could have been demonstrated that socialized

CRITICAL THEORY, GRAMSCI AND CULTURAL STUDIES 29

subjects are not simply passively subjected to an anonymous steering process but, rather, actively participate with their own interpretative performances in the complex process of social integration. In fact, Horkheimer had, at the beginning, assigned a task to the analysis of culture that theoretically catered for this insight…. If Horkheimer had subsequently followed this line of research, then…that logically independent dimension of social action-orientations and value patterns, which cannot be viewed as a merely functional element in the reproduction of domination, would have become available to him…. In the institute, a type of cultural research was thus adopted in whose framework culture—as in the Marxist superstructural-basis doctrine—appears solely as a functional component of domination securement. (Honneth, 1987:355– 6) Needless to say, a concentration on critical theory as an approach to cultural studies runs the risk of pushing to the margins its simultaneous relationship to political economy and the state, on the one hand, and social psychology, on the other.4 This is of particular importance because one of the distinctive features of critical theory is precisely its attempt to theorize the interrelationship between all three of these forms of analysis. Four phases of cultural analysis. A central theme underlying the analysis of this essay is that the vitality of critical theory in the domain of cultural studies is most evident in its capacity to respond to historical transformations and critically appropriate emergent currents of thinking.5 Though the discussion will focus on the last phase of the process, critical theory generally—and more specifically in the present context its approach to culture—can be loosely periodized in terms of four phases.6 The first three are familiar and need not be reviewed here: (1) an interdisciplinary materialism which attempted to analyze the cultural bases of working-class consciousness in the Weimar Republic; (2) subsequent disillusionment culminating in theories of ‘total administration’ in a ‘one-dimensional society’ in which mass culture had undermined all potential for resistance; and (3) the emergence of an international New Left in the 1960s which drew upon critical theory as part of an effort to reaffirm the existential bases for radical cultural change in advanced capitalism. The fourth phase is of particular concern here because of the way it develops in response to three overlapping, but sequential, fundamental challenges: first, the emergence of structuralist Marxism and discourse theories in the late 1960s as a critique of the voluntarism and


anti-positivism of the New Left; second, the Gramscian turn in British cultural studies in the late 1970s which sought to restore the structureagency dialectic in a theory of hegemony and resistance in popular culture; and, third, the recognition of the broader social theoretical significance of poststructuralism and deconstructionism in the 1980s.7 If the first three phases of critical theory struggled with the shift from the primacy of the economic to the political, this fourth phase can best be described as a fleshing out of the significance of the political significance of the cultural. The various receptions of Gramsci provide a very suggestive guide to the history of the relations between critical theory and cultural studies, as well as to broader issues in social theory and epistemology. In this context, three phases of the reception of Gramsci in cultural studies will be distinguished which broadly coincide with the three challenges to critical theory: first, the Gramsci invoked by the structuralist theory of ideological apparatuses; second, the Gramsci of critical theories of resistance and counterhegemony which characterize the initial Gramscian turn in British cultural studies and its effort to overcome the culturalist/structuralist split; and, third, the Gramsci of poststructuralist critiques of class theory and essentialism. In this respect, Gramsci becomes the absent presence, the shadow around which the transformation of critical theory has danced.

II Critical Theory and Cultural Reproduction: The Challenges of Structuralism and Semiotics

Introduction With the decline of student movements by the early 1970s, the subsiding and/or incorporation and commercialization of broader countercultural tendencies, the emergence of an international economic crisis, and the rise of Thatcherism and Reaganism, the cultural theories and the politics of the critical theory that influenced the New Left were called fundamentally into question. For many, especially in Britain and France, Althusser’s theory of cultural apparatuses, combined with semiotic theories of discourse, and his overall project of a scientific, structuralist Marxism, appeared the obvious alternative to the failures of humanist Marxism, especially the Hegelian Marxism of the Frankfurt tradition. More generally, a rediscovery of the political economic foundations of Marxism was called for in opposition to the idealistic


and romantic humanism of critical theory.8 As we will see, the challenge of structuralism (and its conception of social reproduction and related semiotic theories of discourse) proved decisive for the revision and rethinking of the cultural theory of critical theory in the 1970s. Of decisive importance here was a reconsideration of the tasks of critical theory as a form of empirical research, as well as a rethinking of the nature of the relationship between culture, the state and social movements. The task of surveying the response of critical theory to structuralism and structuralist semiotics is complicated by the difficulties of differentiating the complex of tendencies represented by structuralism and poststructuralism, as well as the arbitrariness of separating off cultural analysis from other concerns of critical theory.9 There is an inevitable difficulty in separating out the response of critical theory to structuralism as opposed to poststructuralism, given that they share many assumptions and that their reception took place more or less simultaneously for many of those with access to the original French texts.10 The primary justification for such a separation, beyond the important theoretical shifts entailed, is that the focus of structuralist theories of society is the reproduction of culture, whereas the focus of poststructuralist theories is in part the impossibility, or at least difficulty, of any positive, representational theory of culture in the former sense. Giddens provides a useful characterization of these underlying continuities. Poststructuralist authors, such as Derrida and Foucault, were reacting against aspects of structuralist thought and yet were indebted to many of its diverse assumptions and arguments (e.g. the work of de Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Lacan, early Barthes). Though handled distinctively in structuralist and post-structuralist writing, a number of shared themes can be identified: …the thesis that linguistics, or more accurately, certain aspects of particular versions of linguistics, are of key importance to philosophy and social theory as a whole; an emphasis on the relational nature of totalities, connected with the thesis of the arbitrary character of the sign, together with a stress upon the primacy of signifiers over what is signified; the decentring of the subject; a peculiar concern with the nature of writing, and therefore with textual materials; and an interest in the character of temporality as somehow constitutively involved with the nature of objects and events. There is not a single one of these themes which does not bear upon issues of importance to social theory today. Equally, however, there is


not one in respect of which the views of any of the writers listed above could be said to be acceptable. (Giddens, 1987:196) The precise boundaries of the theory of culture are also notoriously difficult to define. Some focus on a more narrowly artistic notion of culture, others slip into a more generic and inclusive one. As Grossberg and Nelson note in their recent collection: …cultural theory is now as likely to study political categories (such as democracy), forms of political practice (such as alliances), and structures of domination (including otherness) and experience (such as subjectification) as it is to study art, history, philosophy, science, ethics, communicative codes or technology. Cultural theory is involved with reexamining the concepts of class, social identity, class struggles, and revolution; it is committed to studying questions of pleasure, space, and time; it aims to understand the fabric of social experience and everyday life, even the foundations of the production and organization of power itself. Consequently, it is all but impossible to define the terrain of cultural theory by pointing to a finite set of object-domains or to the search for a limited set of interpretive tools. (1988:6) As such a definition suggests, the contemporary boundaries between the topics of cultural studies and those of critical theory in general are fluid indeed. To that extent, the effort in the following section to focus on the response of critical theory to structuralism will be confronted not only with the difficulty of precisely differentiating structuralism and poststructuralism, but also isolating cultural research as distinct from the two other major substantive themes of critical theory: the theory of the state and social psychology.

The Structuralist Program Setting aside specifically epistemological and methodological issues, three aspects of the structuralist program were taken to demonstrate the inadequacies of the older form of cultural analysis (derisively characterized as ‘humanist’) associated with both the culturalist wing of British cultural studies and the Frankfurt tradition: (1) a structuralist as opposed to an expressivist conception of totality; (2) a conception


of ideological apparatuses based on Gramsci; (3) a theory of ideology as material practices indebted to structuralist semiotics, as opposed to the essentialist theories of interpretation linked with hermeneutics. The strain of British cultural studies associated with Althusserian structuralism has been virulently critical of the Frankfurt tradition which is associated with all of the theoretical sins of ‘historicism’, ‘humanism’ and ‘essentialism’, as well as political impotence (see, e.g., Slater, 1977, and the response in Morrow, 1977). The structuralist program in its Althusserian and cultural studies form has been closely linked with a theory of society, even if the discursive dimensions of social reality are strongly emphasized. Broadly speaking, therefore, the issues of cultural studies overlap with the problematic of theories of social and cultural reproduction, i.e. an approach to cultural studies which is necessarily based on a specific model of cultural reproduction.11 With its thesis of economic determinism ‘in the last instance’, structuralist Marxism provided an ostensible alternative to economism, but at the price of a deterministic theory of cultural reproduction which transformed Gramsci’s theory of hegemony into a crude form of (structuralist) functionalism leaving no room for resistance, agency and the sources of cultural innovation required for fundamental transformation.12 Initially, then, in the British context the reception of Gramsci in cultural studies was filtered through the distorting lens of Althusserian interpretations. Though it is acknowledged that his epistemological position is flawed by ‘historicism’, class reductionism, and a relativization of criteria of theoretical validity, it is argued that this historicism ‘is in no sense a clear-cut issue’ given its ‘partial nature’ (Hall, et al., 1978:46). Such a less critical position, moreover, is held to converge with Althusser’s self-criticism which rejects ‘the generalized divorce between science and ideology as an epistemological position (1978:72). And despite these weaknesses, he does have an ‘unrivalled sense of the material forms and production of ideology and political struggle, the anti-psychologistic stricture that ideology is an epistemological and structural matter, and the lasting value of his own specific concepts…’ (Ibid.). As well, the structuralist intervention suggested the primacy of the theory of ideology (e.g., Hall, et al., 1978) and culminated in more or less reductionist semiotic theories of ideological discourse such as that developed by Michel Pêcheux in France (see Thompson, 1984:232– 54) and expressed in a rather different form in work such as that found in the ‘Screen’ tradition (Coward and Ellis, 1977).


Responding to the Challenges of Structuralism The remarkable rise and rapid fall of structuralist Marxism in the 1970s has now been well-documented (see, for example, Benton, 1984; Morrow, 1986a). What has been noted less often is the salutary effect this transitory movement had upon revitalizing the critical theory of culture and cultural studies generally. Documenting this would require surveying the vast literature which has emerged in the various subfields of critical cultural research such as mass communications, sports, leisure, and popular culture, literature and the arts, education, law, religion and theology, and feminist theory. The following discussion will draw only very selectively on such research for purposes of illustration. The task of the present brief review is to demonstrate how the strategy of critical theory and related responses in cultural studies contributed significantly to the more enduring forms of analysis—despite some residual, unresolved difficulties—which escaped the extremes of either instrumentalism and economism (the heritage of nineteenth century vulgar Marxism), on the one hand, or a hyperstructuralism (the heritage of 1960s French theory) on the other. The most explicit version of this critical engagement with structuralism in critical theory can be found in the work of Giddens. Again, symptomatically, this initially takes place without any explicit reference to Gramsci or the theory of hegemony as such (e.g., Giddens, 1976; 1979; 1984; 1987). In the form of somewhat stylized simplifications, the general response of critical theories to structuralism—despite differences of emphasis and detail—can be described as follows: first, with respect to a theory of totality, a conception of society as a totality in which the theory of cultural reproduction does not collapse the distinction between the systemic and social action levels of analysis; second, a resulting conception of hegemony (or of domination, to use the conventional terminology of the Frankfurt tradition) which increasingly stresses its uneven and contradictory character, as well as its inherent connection with processes of counterhegemony and resistance; third, conceptions of discourse and ideology which preserve a sense of the autonomy of the cultural, as well as breaking down unnecessary, artificial distinctions between critical hermeneutic and social semiotic approaches to cultural analysis; and fourth, an active conception of the subject as agent, but one minus the naive voluntarism of existentialism and social phenomenology. Totality. Whatever the limitations of studies inspired by structuralist political economy, they served to address central empirical ques-


tions in a way which had been initiated by but later neglected in the older Frankfurt School, e.g., its analysis of cultural industries. One of the consequences was a renewed sense of the importance of an ‘empirical turn’ in critical theory (Forester, 1985). Ironically, economism represented one of the original targets of critique within the Frankfurt tradition; on the other hand, its effort to draw upon the concept of totality following Lukács tended to culminate in functionalist type theory of cultural reproduction (e.g. Adorno’s ‘total administration’ and Marcuse’s ‘one-dimensional society’) which, despite different epistemological assumptions, anticipated Althusser’s theory of ideological apparatuses. Responding to both the limitations of this earlier Frankfurt approach, as well as to Althusserian structuralism, students of critical theory and cultural studies moved toward more open models of cultural reproduction, e.g., the cultural-reproductive model of Bourdieu and his associates, and hegemonic-state reproductive models indebted to a non-Althusserian version of Gramsci, and various types of resistance theories (Aronowitz and Giroux, 1985:74–109). Also in this context, Habermas’s (1987) bilevel model of society based on the distinction between systems and social integration could be viewed as a parallel move away from both the economic-reproductive models of structuralist Marxism and the base-superstructure model of early critical theory. Domination. Given that Frankfurt critical theory had long rejected economism, following the lead of Lukács’ conception of totality, it resisted Althusserian structuralism on substantive as well as epistemological grounds because it already had a well-developed theory of cultural reproduction (exemplified in the theory of cultural industries, etc.). The thesis of the decline of the public sphere (Habermas) provided an account of how the rise of the mass media cultural industries had eroded emergent potentials for democratization, but the resulting theory was not reductionist in the sense found in the work of Adorno’s theory of ‘total administration’ and Marcuse’s ‘onedimensional society’. Though the term hegemony as such figured infrequently in the writings of critical theorists, their theory of cultural industries and new social movements converged broadly with non-structuralist interpretations of Gramsci. Ideology. Third, structuralist semiotics and related theories of ideology were initially taken by many to render obsolete the earlier hermeneutically grounded theory of ideology of the type represented in the Habermas-Gadamer debate (see Warnke, 1987). Yet as a number of more recent studies have suggested, a fully social and pragmatic semiotics (e.g., Hodge and Kress, 1988) is not in principle


incompatible with critical theories of ideology (e.g., Thompson, 1984), even though a number of theoretical and methodological issues remain to be worked out. The crucial point is that critical theory has not remained mired in the problematic of hermeneutics and has selectively appropriated useful aspects of semiotic structuralism and theories of discourse. The subject. Finally, critical theories have sought to restore the agency-structure dialectic, fully aware of the difficulties of voluntarism and overly centred conceptions of the subject. The object of critique here has been the notion of an ‘interpellated subject’ found in Althusser. A good example of the resulting response can be found in the work of Connell (1983) which begins with a critique of theories of cultural reproduction and how they need to be complemented by an historical depth psychology which can accommodate issues of embodiment, gender, class formation, and intellectual work. More generally, critical theories of education appropriated Gramscian themes in the name of a theory of resistance (Giroux, 1983). In sum, the challenge to critical theory and related tendencies in cultural studies posed by structuralist Marxism and related tendencies in cultural studies was fourfold: to regain a sense of the empirical importance of economic structures and state mediation, without relapsing into instrumentalist or structuralist reductionism; to develop a theory of cultural struggle which challenges static conceptions of hegemony and domination; to articulate a theory of cultural forms which could draw upon advances in semiotic theories of communication; and to provide an approach to the subject which preserved the agency-structure dialectic and incorporated a theory of resistance, and yet did not rely upon some of the more problematic assumptions of expressivist conceptions of totality and related understandings of ideology and subjectivity.

Cultural Theory and Critical Theory: Residual Problems Whatever the gains made by critical theory in its efforts to develop empirical research, as well as to deal with the challenge of structuralism and semiotics, several general weaknesses continued to hamper the revitalization of critical theory. First, several aspects of critical theory in the 1970s called into question its status as an orientation to theory and research: a lack of clear disciplinary identification and distinctive strategy for empirical research; an ambiguous relation to North American traditions of research and politics given its European


origins; a continuing focus on high culture and an ambivalence toward popular culture inherited from the Fankfurt tradition, and the absence of any clear theoretical contribution to, or well-developed position with respect to, Third World issues.13 Second, it was also confronted with a political challenge on two fronts. On the one hand, critical theory’s abandonment of the theory of proletarian revolution left it without the traditional collective agent of historical change which, with reservations, was retained in neoMarxist political economy. On the other hand, the rise of neoconservatism further called into question its political relevance by suggesting that the theory of legitimation crisis (ostensibly an alternative to traditional class-based crisis theory) failed to provide the promised insights into strategies for a revitalization of the public sphere (Lawrence, 1989). In short, by the early 1980s the resurgence of critical theory seemed once again endangered because of criticism on its neo-Marxist left flank (Eurocommunism), as well as continuing hostility within the mainstream of the academic social sciences. With the decline of Eurocommunism and the collapse of East bloc Marxist ideology, however, the neo-Marxist political challenge has evaporated. As well, the emergence of two new theoretical challenges opened the way for a new phase of theoretical renewal. First, rapid theoretical and political disillusionment with structuralist Marxism elicited a crisis in British cultural studies which culminated in a Gramscian turn which broadly convergences with more recent development in critical cultural theory—the theme of the next section. Further, the gradual penetration in the 1980s of poststructuralist debates (initially confined to philosophy and literary theory) into social theory began to transform dramatically the presuppositional foundations of the confrontation between critical theory, neo-Gramscian theory, and empirical social science.

III The Challenge of The Neo-Gramscian Turn in British Cultural Studies

Cultural Studies and The Second Reception of Gramsci Historically, the use of the term ‘cultural studies’ has its origins in various attempts inspired by the work of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E.P.Thompson and Stuart Hall, with the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies as the initial institutional base.14 Though orig-


inally split between its ‘culturalist’ (Williams, Thompson) and ‘structuralist’ wings (Althusserians), British cultural studies shared an emphasis on the discursive dimensions of cultural reproduction and a critique of economistic Marxism (Hall, 1980). Though eclectically influenced by the Frankfurt tradition, Gramsci, Althusserian structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Foucault and poststructuralism, etc., this tradition was never static and never developed a unified perspective or program (Johnson, 1983). Quite significantly, it attempted to be interdisciplinary and purposely tended to eschew any traditional disciplinary definitions, focusing instead on the ‘cultural’ as a distinctive object of inquiry. Nevertheless, there is a strong identification with the objectives of the social sciences, despite the appropriation of concepts and methods from the humanities and philosophy.

Neo-Gramscian Cultural Studies Beyond the culturalist/structuralist split. With the decline of Althusserianism by the late 1970s, the way was opened for overcoming the simple opposition of ‘structuralism’ and ‘culturalism’ which represented respectively the ‘imported’ and ‘home-grown’ varieties of cultural studies (Bennett, 1986a:xii). ‘In the perspective of structuralism, popular culture was often regarded as an “ideological machine” which dictated the thoughts of the people…with law-like regularity…. Culturalism, by contrast, was often uncritically romantic in its celebration of popular culture as expressing the authentic interests and values of subordinate social groups and classes’ (1986a:xii). Whereas structuralism dominated the study of film, television and popular writing, culturalism was more predominant in the study of sport and subcultures: ‘It was almost as if the cultural sphere were divided into two hermetically separate regions, each exhibiting a different logic’ (1986a: xiii). As Bennett concludes: ‘the only way out of this impasse, therefore, seemed to be to shift the debate on to a new terrain which would displace the structuralist-culturalist opposition, a project which inclined many working in the field at the time to draw increasingly on the writings of Antonio Gramsci, particularly those on the subject of hegemony’ (Ibid.). Redefining the popular. A crucial aspect of the Gramscian turn in cultural studies has been a move away from the abstract, functionalist theorizations of the theory of state ideological apparatuses toward a rethinking of popular culture. This does not reflect an abandonment of the importance of the analysis of dominant cultural institutions,


but it does acknowledge that their functioning cannot be separated from their capacity to incorporate popular culture. On the one hand, this suggests abandoning a content-oriented definition of popular culture as reflecting some kind of relationship to the ‘people’ (i.e., working class). As Bennett suggests: By contrast, I shall argue in favour of an approach which keeps these terms definitionally empty—or at least relatively so —in the interest of filing them politically in varying ways as changing circumstances may require. According to such a view, popular culture can be defined only abstractly as a site— always changing and variable in its constitution and organization—which, since it provides one of the key terrains for the struggle over the political production of ‘the people’ and ‘the popular’, cannot be more precisely specified in terms of these concepts. (1986b:8) As Hall now argues, Gramsci represents a ‘veritable Copernican revolution in Marxist approaches to the state’ because, first, it acknowledges the productive, positive aspects of state power, not only the negative and repressive, and second because of its stress on the importance of culture, especially popular culture (1986:22). For Hall, in the British context that suggests studying the ways in which ‘the British state has always played a crucial role in conforming popular culture to the dominant culture’ (1986:23).

The Gramscian Legacy and Critical Theory The neglect of Gramsci. One of the anomalies of the development of critical theory as a general theoretical approach in sociology has been the virtual absence—until more recently—of any sustained, explicit dialogue between the Frankfurt tradition and the legacy of Antonio Gramsci.15 None of the major representatives of the West German tradition has made this a focus of concern. This tendency has been paralleled in Gramsci’s virtual absence in the writings of the major Anglo-American philosophical and sociological representatives of critical theory such as Giddens, Richard Bernstein, Alvin Gouldner, Norman Birnbaum, etc. Symptomatic here is Gramsci’s absence in John Thompson’s otherwise systematic and wide-ranging Studies in the Theory of Ideology (1984). The notable exceptions have been associated with specifie areas of the sociology of culture or the state or the


Gramscian version of critical theory developed by Paul Piccone and promoted by Telos. Implicit convergence? With the waning of Althusserianism, however, the affinities between contemporary critical theory and cultural Marxism have become clearer, though rarely made explicit. One of the significant, unifying themes of the forms of cultural research influenced by critical theory in the late 1970s onward was the pervasive indirect influence of Gramsci, especially an interpretation at odds with the structuralist account of Althusser. Such ‘humanist’ interpretations stressed the affinities with Frankfurt critical theory. As a consequence, in the domain of cultural research one finds an association between critical theory and Gramscian tendencies which is not reflected in more general discussions of critical theory, most conspicuously among those influenced by Habermas and Claus Offe, though John Keane (1988b) is an exception here. Generally, the anti-structuralist retrieval of Gramsci was closely associated with approaches to cultural analysis which sought to combine a structural theory of society with phenomenologically sensitive analyses of lived-experience and the complexity of hegemonic relations. Within the cultural studies tradition, the work of Willis (1981) on working-class ‘lads’, or more generally work on popular culture (e. g., Bennett, et al., 1986; Gruneau, 1988) is exemplary here. Research in historical sociology with roots in the culturalist tradition, such as that of Corrigan and Sayer (1985) on state formation and culture in Britain, clearly transcends the culturalist/structuralist dichotomy, echoing as well influences from critical theory and Gramsci. As for those identifying with or more directly allied with critical theory, educational research is one of the most important sites of such inquiries (e. g., Apple, 1982; Giroux, 1983). In this educational context the latent tension also becomes evident between studies originating in the Weberian and critical theory problematic of legitimation (as in the work of Giroux) and those beginning with the Marxian-Gramscian problematic of hegemony.16 A number of studies in communications and advertising and elsewhere could also be cited in this context. For example, though mentioning Gramsci only in passing, Kellner finds it unproblematic to explain Horkheimer and Adorno’s theory with a Gramscian vocabulary: ‘In Gramsci’s terminology, the culture industries reproduce capitalist hegemony over the working class by engineering consent to the existing society, thereby establishing a sociopsychological basis for social integration’ (1989:131). But again, Kellner feels no need to justify these affinities—symptomatic of the silent and largely unreflected appropriation of Gramscian themes in con-


temporary critical theory. Similarly, Hearn’s (1978) study of domination, legitimation and resistance in the incorporation of the nineteenth century English working class is based on the work of Marcuse and Habermas and makes no mention of Gramsci, despite obvious affinities. Obviously, this remains a rich area of exploration which requires further development. The crucial point, however, is that whether Gramsci is explicitly cited or not critical theory has converged with neo-Gramscian cultural studies in its stress upon the articulation between state policy and popular culture, completing this as well with a theory of consumption (see Kellner, 1989:146–66) which goes far beyond the weak social psychological foundations of cultural studies.

IV Where is Critical Theory Now? The Poststructuralist Challenge

Introduction The problematic. The forms of critical cultural research alluded to above continue to develop, gain more extensive footholds in disciplines, and exert a small, but significant influence in many areas of professional practice, policy research, and in social movements. Though it is now possible to have a sense of historical perspective with respect to the issues surrounding the reception and critique of structuralism, the same cannot be said of the challenge of poststructuralism. What is in question here are ongoing debates whose resolution or final direction remains to be determined. Further, the issues surrounding the concept of poststructuralism resist any unified characterization and, not surprisingly, the responses of those associated with critical theory have been diverse, and sometimes contradictory. With the rapid decline of structuralist Marxism, and general disillusionment with the possibilities of fundamental change, poststructuralist tendencies emerged in France—associated above all with Derrida’s deconstructionism and Foucault’s theory of power and discourse— and quickly became popular in literary criticism and philosophy, eventually spreading even to sociology in the late 1980s (Hoy, 1986; Norris, 1982). In the process, methods of cultural analysis dependent upon broadly genetic structuralist assumptions (i.e., the sociology of knowledge, as well as both critical theory and neo-Gramscian cultural studies) were called into question. Unlike more orthodox forms of Marxism, however, critical theory has proven resilient in its capacity


to effectively appropriate aspects of poststructuralism without succumbing to either some of its conservative political implications or its tendency toward a pan-discursive reductionism. There are at least three important contexts in which the confrontation of critical theory and poststructuralism could be taken up in the context of cultural studies: (1) the systematic response of Habermas and those influenced by his example (see Dews, 1987); (2) specific disciplinary studies which identify with critical theory but have drawn extensively upon poststructuralist concepts and authors; and (3) the convergence of critical theory and poststructuralism in the context of neo-Gramscian cultural studies. The latter two contexts are of primary concern here.17 But first of all, it must asked, what are the issues at stake with the problematic of ‘poststructuralism’? In many respects these tendencies have provided an even more fundamental threat than structuralism to the Marxist tradition: …rejecting structuralism’s unreflective claims to scientificity, crediting the semiotic and political nature of its own theorizing, recognizing that a more radically problematized human subject did have a place in textual production—it began to confront the implications these positions had for its own critical practice. While cultural Marxists did accept the ideological bases of their own theoretical and political positions, and consequently had begun to recognize the problematic, contingent nature of its own interpretive activities, it was poststructuralism that gave Marxists the vocabulary with which to begin to theorizetheir own determination. (Grossberg and Nelson, 1988:7; emphasis added). Whatever misgivings neo-Marxists may have had toward critical theory, they were mild by comparison to the sense of the threat posed by poststructuralism. And as opposed to the revitalizing effects of the challenge of structuralism and semiotics, the consequences of poststructuralism for neo-Marxism were potentially catastrophic.18 Whereas the transition from instrumentalism to structuralism allowed maintaining, and even enhancing, the identity of Marxism as a scientific enterprise, poststructuralism called into question its very foundations as a form of knowledge. By contrast, critical theory had long confronted the specter of epistemological nihilism in relation to its own critique of positivism and Adorno’s later writings; and it has been suggested that ‘the closest approximation of deconstruction on


the left is the work of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin’ (Ryan, 1982: xiv). As well, from the outset critical theory—unlike cultural Marxism—had been aware of the problematic of its ‘own determination’. Though critical theory could not emerge unscathed, it could retain its (if increasingly decentered) identity and accommodate to an anti-foundationalist epistemology in a way which has been virtually impossible for conventional neo-Marxists who took the challenges of poststructuralism seriously. As will be argued in this section, critical theory has provided the framework for a broader theoretical critique of poststructuralism, as well as appropriated a number of useful concepts and methods which have been used effectively in recent research. The attitude of many critical theorists in this context is effectively captured by Giddens’ pronunciamento: Structuralism, and post-structurahsm also, are dead traditions of thought. Notwithstanding the promise they held in the fresh bloom of youth, they have ultimately failed to generate the revolution in philosophical understanding and social theory that was once their pledge…although they did not transform our intellectual universe in the manner so often claimed, they none the less drew to our attention some problems of considerable and durable significance. (1987:195) For purposes of exposition the response of critical theory to poststructuralism will be identified in relation to the three themes: Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism and the challenge to theories of representation; Michel Foucault’s genealogical inquiries and theory of power; and the modernism/postmodernism debate. Obviously, such complex issues can only be treated superficially in the context of outlining the terrain of debate as an introduction to the final section where several representative examples of critical theory’s appropriation of these poststructuralist themes will be reviewed in two contexts: first, representative efforts to combine critical theory with poststructuralist techniques to deconstruct disciplinary traditions as discourses (e.g. mass communications, education, and sociology as a science); and second, poststructuralist appropriations of Gramsci for the purposes of a form of cultural studies which converges with and complements more conventional forms of contemporary critical theory. Some key issues. As a critique of metaphysics in all its forms, the impact of Derrida in the context of the Marxist tradition and social theory has been that of a challenge to the theories of representation and positive knowledge on which they are grounded. On the one


hand, then, this theme converges with anti-foundationalist critiques of epistemology—a problem to which Habermas’s theory of communicative action attempts a constructive response. On the other hand, conceptions of deconstructive reading point to the possibilities of a form of discourse analysis which (in contrast to a conservative American literary adaptation of deconstructive theory) has been held to provide the basis for a deepened theory of political criticism (e.g., Ryan, 1982). As we shall see, both of these themes have influenced some recent discussions in critical theory. Broadly speaking, Foucault’s critical relation to the Marxist tradition, his anti-positivism, and critique of the instrumental rationality of the human sciences converges on many crucial points with the critical theory tradition. Not surprisingly, his work has produced a largely sympathetic dialogue with a number of critical theorists (e.g., Smart, 1983; Poster, 1984, 1989). At the same time, his theory of power has posed a fundamental challenge to the theory of emancipation and ideal speech which underlies Habermas’s theoretical program in particular, especially his insistence on the constructive aspects of power and the illusory aspects of any utopia which would abolish power relations (D’Amico, 1989; Dews, 1987; Miller, 1987). Though somewhat removed from the discussions that follow, the question of whether modernism has been in a significant way supplanted by a postmodern cultural epoch is also an ongoing source of debate (Featherstone, et al., 1988; Foster, 1983; Huyssen, 1986; Jameson, 1984; Lenz and Schell, 1986; Ross, 1988). On the one hand, Habermas (1987; see Bernstein, 1985) has challenged postmodernist theorists in speaking of modernity as an ‘incomplete project’ and in stressing the conservative and irrational aspects of postmodernism. Others, with affinities to critical theory (e.g. Jameson, Baudrillard, Lyotard), have suggested that postmodern tendencies require a fundamental revision of social theory. As Kellner (1988:266) has concluded that ‘the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School therefore has yet to develop a theory of postmodernism beyond its denunciations of postmodern social theory and culture’, this applies most specifically to Habermas.19 Indirectly, the studies to be reviewed below constructively engage these issues in various ways.

Critical Theory and Disciplinary Deconstructions Responses to discourse theory. The concepts of ‘discourse analysis’ and discourse theory generally have become among the more elusive


in modern social theory. Such terms have been applied to such diverse activities as the seemingly directionless and apolitical technical analysis of certain ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts to theories of ideology critique. What such enterprises share, however, is a sense of the textual character and narrative structures of social reality; though not by themselves completely new to the human sciences, such approaches have added a remarkable arsenal of theoretical and methodological resources for the study of meaning and cultural processes generally. What critical theory has necessarily resisted, however, is the tendency of poststructuralist discourse theories to undercut the material dimensions of social explanation altogether. In other words, the analysis of discourse cannot be ultimately separated from socio-historical accounts of their genesis. Poststructuralist theories of discourse have the advantage of rejecting the reductionism of earlier structuralist theories of discourse within which the categories of ideology and economic determinism ‘in the last instance’ play a decisive role. Even if poststructuralism may tend toward a problematic ‘indeterminism in the last instance’, its anti-positivism has left space for a more open and eclectic appropriation by critical theorists. The present selection can only be exemplary, both with respect to the authors and topics; and most obviously, other strategic domains could also be reviewed in similar terms.20Yet each of the following studies clearly illustrates the general argument that fruitful encounters between critical theory and poststructuralist discourse theory have illuminated a number of disciplinary domains—without abandoning the original intentions of critical theory as a political project. Communications discourse. Marike Finlay’s Powermatics: A Discursive Critique of New Communications Technology (1987) is based on a comprehensive analysis of the international discourse on communications technologies as manifest in the range of debate: ‘theory, journalism, advertising, popularized scientific reporting as well as policy and mandate documents’ are utilized (1987:28). The outcome is a closely argued and rigorous analysis which reveals that the discursive practices of those who, in popular debate, are ‘for’ or ‘against’ new technologies are remarkably similar in their reliance upon presuppositions deriving from classical scientism and instrumental conceptions of rationality. Of particular interest here, however, is the method of discourse analysis employed which combines three distinctive elements: an account of the ‘discursive procedures’ through which the discourse on communications technology is constructed; a social and historical contextualization of these discursive social practices; and a constructive


policy strategy for revitalizing the discourse on communications and reconceptualizing communications research. The basis of this approach is a carefully thought out, rigorous appropriation of the analysis of discourse as developed by Foucault, but largely within the framework of a theory of potential communicative competence indebted to Habermas and Bakhtin.21 Rather than stressing the tensions between Foucault and Habermas, she draws out their affinities: the notion of ideal speech in the domain of communications is taken to suggest a form of empowerment, not the abolition of power. From this perspective the realization of a community of ideal speech in relation to communications technology would entail offering rights such as the following to all members of society: ‘(1) equal rights to appropriate discourse; (2) equal rights to change the prepositional content of discourse; (3) equal rights to change the level of discourse, i.e. from object-level to meta-level where the rules of communicating are reevaluated; (4) equal rights to place into question and to reformulate the laws of communication followed at any particular time by a particular society of communicators’ (1987:278–9). Educational discourse. Philip Wexler’s somewhat misleadingly titled Social Analysis of Education: After the New Sociology (1987) is in most respects methodologically parallel to Finlay’s, but departs from a more pessimistic sense of the political conjuncture at hand: The cultural revolution that was expressed early in the student movement and that later appeared in paradigmatic critiques of academic social science has been contained’ (1987:3). To the extent that versions of critical theory penetrated educational discourse much earlier in the context of the ‘new sociology’ of education, there has been time to reflect upon the theoretical implications of its failure. Analogous to Finlay’s finding that the critics of communications shared many of the presuppositions of their opponents, it is argued that in neglecting its own historicity, the new sociology of education’s attack on liberalism remains (pace Foucault) within the same episteme and suffers from the ‘discursive blockage’ entailed in ‘occupying space allocated to negation and critique’ (1987:6). The way out of this discursive blockage is identified with the rather unfortunate term ‘social analysis’: ‘... sociology is being replaced by social analysis’, i.e. the theoretical analogue of a series of global transformations associated with theories of a ‘post-industrial society’, an ‘ecological society’ or, in the cultural sphere, semiotics and poststructuralism. ‘The transformation includes, then, postindustrialism in social life and post-structuralism in social analysis’ (1987:8). In short, such social analysis requires taking seriously the ‘historical movement


that is redundantly announced in many analytical languages: poststructuralism, semiotics, anti-humanism, textualism, postindustrialism, the information society, the micro-electronic revolution, the video-age, anti-logocentrism, deconstruction, decentring’ (1987:11). In applying this approach to the educational left, Wexler seeks to replace the ‘contemporary combination of functionalist structuralism and romantic individualism (‘reproduction’ and ‘resistance’) with an approach which attempts to ‘show how a social reading of post-structuralism and a critical reading of postindustrialism can combine toward a historically appropriate theory and practice of education’ which culminates in ‘a new politics in which education is understood as a collective discursive practice’ (1987:16). Clearly—though it is obscured by the vague notion of ‘social analysis’22—this suggests a somewhat more radical appropriation of poststructuralist themes than that suggested by Finlay’s analysis of communications (which may reflect the somewhat more benign form of conservative restoration in Canada). What is at stake for Wexler is not only a discursive analysis of new cultural phenomena, but how these presage a new ‘semiotic society’ which renders obsolete previous left political strategies: ‘the meaning of critical theory is changing’ because ‘left professional middle-class institutional intellectuals became a socially residual remnant, rather than the institutional vanguard of an ascendant social class segment’ (1987:123). Crucial here was the way in which the new sociologies and old critical theory failed to grasp the significance of ‘textualism’ which was dismissed as ‘idealism’ (1987:124). Parallel with Finlay, however, Wexler insists such textualism not only reflects the emergent form of production, but also ‘helps recast symbolic and literary theories as a new type of critical social theory’ (1987:126). Though this does not entail completely displacing hermeneutic textualism, the poststructuralist and postmodernist themes found in Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, and Baudrillard are given priority. The outcome of this analysis, however, draws us away from disciplinary cultural studies analysis toward the new social psychology of ‘collective, though individualized, identities’ which is to be transformed in the context of education (1987:170ff.). Though an analysis and evaluation of Wexler’s specific strategic considerations go beyond the task here, his approach clearly demonstrates the capacity of critical theory to appropriate poststructuralist themes which parallel, but also radicalize, Finlay’s analysis by implicitly questioning the presuppositions of Habermas’s theory of ideal communication. Sociological discourse. In his Socio(onto)logy: A Disciplinary Read-


ing (1989), Ben Agger turns the textual strategies of poststructuralist theory against the discipline of sociology and ‘mainstream Marxism’. Here we find a third strategy of appropriating poststructuralist themes which recombines a now familiar set of elements: an identification with critical theory, a methodological focus upon the strategic importance of a discursive analysis of disciplinary traditions, and an insistence upon the historical and contextual dimensions of social reality. Several features of Agger’s approach, however, diverge somewhat from the cases of Finlay and Wexler. Unlike Wexler, for whom Habermas is implicitly consigned to the dustbin of ‘old critical theory’, Agger sees an essential continuity between Habermas and socio-textual analysis, but seeks to further radicalize the issues: ‘I too contribute to the reformulation of Marxism as communication theory albeit in ways that more explicitly draw from poststructuralism and feminism’ (1989:22), as well as a theory of ‘fast capitalism’ (analogous to Wexler’s ‘semiotic society’) where texts obscure their own narrative nature. In so doing Agger explicitly acknowledges breaking ‘the strangely symptomatic silence between Derrideans and secondgeneration critical theorists like Habermas, who nonetheless converge on certain issues of substance’ (1989:28; but see Noms [1985] and Ryan [1982] for exceptions here). Agger (via Adorno’s influence) also sides with Derrida on an important issue relating to the nature of science as a form of writing. Whereas Habermas (1987:190ff.) challenges, for epistemological and other reasons, Derrida’s tendency to blur the distinctions between genres (e.g., philosophy, science, literature) by unjustifiably giving rhetoric priority over logic, Agger’s concern with demystifying the representational illusions of positive sociology leads him to remind us that ‘like any scientific literature, sociology embodies a subtext, methodology, enjoining imagination’ (1989:40). Here critical theory appropriates a deconstructionist theme in justifying itself as a literary mode of knowledge: ‘A different version of writing, call it critical theory, demonstrates the possibility of itself and thus of an open world not reproduced iteratively by a text that would end itself in a last paroxysm of cumulated data—text swallowing whole the world finally reduced to the tracelessness of number, signification failing to signify. Otherwise thought dissolves into the whir and hum of computers’ (1989:304). Though both Finlay and Wexler recognize the crucial contribution of poststructuralism to deepening the concept of reflexivity, they do not explicitly couple this in theory (or writing practice) with the ‘literary’ implications of critical theory as a form of communicative competence or its implications for ideal speech.


Gramsci and Poststructuralist Cultural Studies Beyond Gramsci? As we have seen, the legacy of Adorno and Benjamin, along with the linguistic turn in Habermas, have made the dialogue between Frankfurt critical theory and poststructuralism both natural and constructive. Authors such as Finlay, Wexler and Agger clearly demonstrate the power of critical theory to appropriate aspects of poststructuralism without succumbing to its conservative, relativistic, and idealistic tendencies. On the other hand, the confrontation between neo-Gramscian cultural studies and poststructuralism would not seem initially to have such fruitful potential. Nothing might seem more incongruous than Gramsci and poststructuralism. Gramsci the resolute Marxist militant, theorist of praxis, and proponent of an existential strategy based on ‘pessimism of the intellect’ and ‘optimism of the will’, would apper at complete odds with critiques of representation and theories of the subject, let alone poststructuralist theories of power and postmodernity which back off from confronting the monoliths of hegemonic power and dominant ideologies. The sense of that incompatibility is certainly well-grounded, so what meaning could the confrontation of Gramsci and poststructuralism have? The question is whether a third—poststructuralist—reading of Gramsci is possible, one which moves beyond either the structuralist or humanist ones that informed the earlier oppositions within cultural studies.23 If so, then the continuity between the traditions of critical theory and Gramsci might be sustained. The point of departure here was Mouffe’s (1979) contention of a convergence between Gramsci and Foucault, a point which Smart (1983:42) perceptively anticipated. He implied that there is ‘a considerable departure within Gramsci’s work from the central tenets of Marxism’, and that this might ‘simultaneously serve as an indirect confirmation of the limits of the Marxist problematic’. As we shall note in a moment, this was precisely the theme elaborated in Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) subsequent work. To anticipate the argument to follow: as inheritors of a Marxist tradition in ruins (now dramatically symbolized in postmodern form by the celebration of mere ‘bourgeois’ freedoms atop a now liberated Berlin Wall), critical theories of society which aspire to a constructive political project appear to be confronted by two major options: the anti-foundationalist strategy of Habermas’s theory of communicative action or a poststructuralist neo-Gramscian theory of culture, ideology and social movements.24 It is the latter strategy which is of inter-


est now, especially some of its contradictory manifestations: first, those who push the logic of a poststructuralist critique of Gramsci and Marxism to some of its more paradoxical conclusions, yet still attempt to remain within an avowedly leftist perspective; and those who have begun the constructive task of reconstituting a postGramscian critical theory. Pessimism of the intellect? Post-Marxism and panic postmodernism. Laclau and Mouffe’s poststructuralist reading of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony opens the floodgates within mainstream Marxism: Our principal conclusion is that behind the concept of ‘hegemony’ lies hidden something more than a type of political relation complementary to the basic categories of Marxist theory. In fact, it introduces a logic of the social which is incompatible with those categories…. As we shall argue… the expansion and determination of the social logic implicit in the concept of ‘hegemony’—in a direction that goes far beyond Gramsci— will provide us with an anchorage from which contemporary social struggles are thinkable in their specificity, as well as permitting us to outline a new politics for the Left based upon the project of radical democracy. (1985:3) The details of Laclau and Mouffe’s argument are not so important here as the strategic importance of a poststructuralist reading of Gramsci and the radical consequences for any politically interested conception of cultural studies. As they conclude, ‘the very possibility of a unified discourse of the Left is also erased…. Discursive discontinuity becomes primary and constitutive. The discourse of radical democracy is no longer the discourse of the universal…’ (1985:191). Such conclusions shake to the foundations the universalistic theoretical ambitions which even a poststructuralist critical theory still entertains, whether in the strong form represented by Habermas or the weaker forms suggested by Wexler, Agger and others. As well, the political implications of such an approach remain ambiguous. As Keane suggests, ‘Laclau and Mouffe do not specify the institutional mechanisms of hegemonic articulation’ which ‘leaves their interpretation of democracy wide open to traditional Left appropriations…. It remains unclear from their vague account who is to be “articulated”, for what purpose, by whom, and with which means’ (1988a:239). There is a sense in which the ‘panic’ postmodernist politics of Arthur Kroker and his associates (Kroker and Cook, 1986) could be identified as another plausible leftist reading of the post-Marxist theo-


retical and political space opened up by Laclau and Mouffe’s analysis. Though Laclau and Mouffe soberly give lip-service to a new type of political project following from their position, they are not able to ward off the kind of frenzied postmodernist reading which reveals the political and cultural abyss on the ‘post’ side of a Marxist tradition in ruins. Yet there are a number of other variants of a poststructuralist neo-Gramscian theory of culture which attempt to sustain a stronger relation to either the Marxist tradition (e.g., Stuart Hall) or critical theory (e.g., Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux on education or Cornell West on race and the Third World) which should be considered as plausible alternatives. Optimism of the will? The language of possibility. British cultural studies were initially sidetracked by importing a version of Gramsci filtered through Althusser’s structuralist epistemology. The second phase of British cultural studies was characterized by rescuing Gramsci from the straitjacket of Althusserian epistemology and functionalism. The developments in the more recent work of Stuart Hall are interesting in this context because of his clear move toward a poststructuralist version of Gramscian cultural studies, though he remains reluctant to link this back to redefining his relationship to critical theory. As Hall candidly recalls, his original assimilation of Althusser was offset by his relation to Gramsci: Gramsci is where I stopped in the head-on rush into structuralism and theoreticism. At a certain point I stumbled over Gramsci, and I said, ‘Here and no further!’ Gramsci represented a kind of test of historical concreteness for me against the overtheoretical claims of structuralism. (1988:69) As Hall now acknowledges, the crucial test case for cultural studies is explaining the rise of the New Right. For him the answer—presented in an analysis of Thatcherism—is to be found in Gramsci, a strategy which leads him away from his original flirtation with Althusser’s theory of ideology. While continuous with the neo-Gramscian turn in cultural studies, Hall’s current position also reflects a response to poststructuralist theories. Now he explicitly rejects the classical theory of false consciousness as presupposing some ‘empiricist relation of the subject knowledge’ which transforms ordinary people into ‘dupes’, whereas experts in theory ‘are somehow without a trace of illusion and can see, transitively right through into the truth, the essence of a situation’, thus obscuring the possibility ‘that they are themselves living in false consciousness’ (1988:44). Though this does


not justify the deconstructionist tendency to dismiss social determination altogether, class and material factors no longer provide any guarantees of relations between ideological and positional factors: ‘What we know is that there is no unitary logic of inference or deduction from one to the other. The logics of different ideological formations remain poly vocal, or as Volosinov would say of all discourse, “multiaccentual”; not infinitely open-ended, but essentially plural in character’ (1988:45). This position leads Hall away from an overly functionalist Althusserian tendency to collapse the state/civil society distinction and the Lacanian effort to locate social integration primarily in early childhood and infancy. Instead he turns to Foucault’s treatment of discursive practices (though not his overall epistemological position), but couples this with Gramsci: ‘The problem with Foucault, to put it brusquely, is a conception of difference without a conception of articulation, that is, a conception of power without a conception of hegemony’ (1988:53). From the perspective of a theory of hegemony it becomes possible to conceptualize Thatcherism ‘in terms of the struggle to gain ascendancy over a whole social formation, to achieve positions of leadership in a number of different sites of social life at once, to achieve the commanding position on a broad strategic front…. The advantages of the concept of hegemony lay above all in the directness of its address (and not in a lopsided, false conscious way) to the central issue of popular consent.’ Finally, ‘another advantage is the critique of essentialism implicit in all of Gramsci’s formulations. Hegemony is constructed, through a complex series of processes of struggle. It is not given, either in the existing structure of society or in the given class structure of a mode of production…. This implies a conception of the process of social reproduction as continuous and contradictory—the very opposite of a functional achievement’ (1988:53– 4). Hall is less clear, however, about what such a rearticulated bloc of popular struggles might look like in the British context. For anyone who has observed the fate of critical theory—both in its specifically Frankfurt form and more generic sociological versions— over the past two decades, it is refreshing but often ironic to find—in the late 1980s—life-long self-proclaimed Marxists engaging in courageous expressions of self-doubt about categorical issues (e.g., about the primacy of class in relation to gender), encouragement of the proliferation of discourses within Marxism (as opposed to labeling them as ‘revisionist’), and calls for appropriating ‘bourgeois’ theories (rather than ignoring or dismissing them). In this context, it is curious


to note Stuart Hall’s response to the question, ‘What, if anything, do you retain from Marx?’: It is the reductionist understanding of the importance of economic relations that I am opposed to, not the categories themselves…. My critiques of marxism attempt to dethrone its guarantees, because as an ideological system, it has tried to construct its own guarantees…. I think of marxism not as a framework for scientific analysis only but also as a way of helping you sleep well at night…. You can’t see how the economy determines, but just have faith, it does determine in the last instance! The first clause wakes you up and the second puts you to sleep…. I think these are very ideological guarantees. And as soon as you abandon that teleological structure under marxism, the whole classical edifice begins to rock. Now that isn’t any news theoretically these days. Almost everybody of any note is in the business of rocking the marxist foundations. My question is, should we now admit that, since the guaranteed philosophical and epistemological underpinnings of the theory do not stand up, it is finished as a problematic? I want to try to account theoretically for what is still there, what needs to be retained. Can one retheorize the theory in a nonreductionist way? I have tried to suggest some ways in which a modern, more discursive understanding of ideology, which mediates the link between ideas and social forces through language and representation, can accomplish that. That is the contemporary theoretical revolution: the notion that the arena or medium in which ideology functions is one of signification, representation, discursive practices. That is the intervening term that has changed the nature of the debate. I have tried to rethink some of the things that Marx was saying in that more discursive framework. My work, therefore, is in the very unfashionable mode of salvage work, of deconstruction/reconstruction—a dangerous enterprise in the age of deconstruction. (Hall, 1988:72–3) It is refreshing to hear that the shock of Thatcherism has finally shaken the rock of British Marxism much as did Hitlerism for Weimar Critical Theory—even if a little belatedly. The collaborative work of Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux on education and cul-


tural theory illustrates more explicitly the convergent tendencies between critical theory and poststructuralist neo-Gramscian cultural studies. On the one hand, unlike their British counterparts, they are able to sustain a strong (though independent) relation to the traditions of critical theory; on the other, they are able to confront headon the limits of Gramscian theory and the implications of poststructuralist critiques. Accordingly, they are willing to go a few, heretical steps further in drawing out the implications of poststructuralist theory for the Marxist tradition: ‘…the basis for generating a new critical and radical theory appropriate to the problems and lived experiences of the twentieth century demands a new discourse, one that is informed by the legacy of a critical Marxism but that, in the final analysis, has to break with its most fundamental assumptions and, as such, break with Marxism as the master discourse of any emancipatory project’ (1985:116; emphasis added). On the one hand, this master discourse has been linked with economic, class and historical reductionism; on the other, it has underestimated the importance of politics, ideology and culture as the basis of a theory of praxis. This leads Aronowitz and Giroux (here following Laclau and Mouffe) beyond classic Gramscian theory in suggesting that ‘the notion of hegemony is a much broader category than class as a unit of analysis suggests…the rise of new social movements around issues such as race, ecology, feminism, and sexual freedom refer to forms of hegemony that cannot be subsumed within the logic of class struggle’ (1985:125). Further, they combine ‘somewhat unevenly’ insights drawn from Bloch, Foucault, Benjamin and others to argue that the Marxian conception of social time is doubly flawed. First, the Marxian conception of the logic of historical necessity underplays the significance of the radical discontinuities suggested by otherwise apparently trivial aspects of institutional life. Second, the Marxian tradition works with a notion of the uniformity of time which denies ‘the multilayering of the past, present and future’ as ‘present in the sedimented histories and discourses that constitute various individuals and social groups’ (1985:126). Accordingly, they call for a theory of social movements guided by the notion of a ‘language of possibility’ which, following Foucault, acknowledges that ‘power is both a negative and a positive force’ and social control is viewed as ‘not just an instance of domination but also as a form of emancipatory practice’ (1985:155). The case of Cornell West (1988) presents another interesting exemplar of the increasingly heterogeneous (some might say eclectic) confluence of tendencies and openings characteristic of contemporary


critical theory in the context of cultural studies. More explicitly than Hall—or even Aronowitz and Giroux—he proposes a reconciliation of Gramsci, critical theory and poststructuralism: The controversial issue of the relation between historical context and differential intertextuality, ideological closure and infinite dissemination serves as the major bone of contention between Marxists and poststructuralists. My neo-Gramscian viewpoint resists explanatory nihilism, that is, despite immense theoretical difficulties and practical obstacles it does not give up on explaining and transforming history and society. …Poststructuralisms rightly dismantle the logocentric and a priori aspects of Marxist theory, yet they wrongly textualize historical constraints and political praxis into mere endless chains of signifiers…. Gramsci’s metaphor of ‘historical bloc’ performs this function. If appropriately employed, it precludes the logocentric economism of pre-Gramscian Marxisms and the labyrinthine abyss of poststructuralisms. Furthermore, my neo-Gramscian viewpoint rejects the remnant of class reductionism in Gramsci’s work. In short, my neo-Gramscian perspective yields ideological yet differential disclosure— provisional structural constraints and engaged political praxis —but with no guarantees. (1988:24–5) His provocative if sketchy proposal may presage important potentials for, and characteristics of, emergent forms of critical theory in the coming decade. First, he does not define his approach as that of ‘critical theory’ as such; rather it is labeled neo-Gramscian, though the reasons for this are not altogether clear (given that in his notes (1988:28, f.n. 25) he identifies the need for the normative foundations of the type proposed by a communicative ethics); also his terminology may reflect the increasing pervasiveness and diffuse character of the influence of critical theory. Second, he reaches out to the Third World and race, topics traditionally absent in critical theory (except for the special case of anti-Semitism). Third, he incorporates feminist theory as a crucial dimension of analysis in a manner that implies their often neglected complementarity. Fourth, he preserves a relation to political economy and historical institutional analysis. Fifth, he draws upon methodological procedures from Foucault’s genealogical approach and Derrida’s deconstructionism. And finally, he postulates the necessity of normative foundations (as an antidote to poststructuralist skepticism) which


are both rationally grounded as a communicative ethics and yet incorporate the theological moment of the principle of hope.

IV Conclusion: The Convergence of Cultural Studies and Critical Theory?

The Implications of Convergence The argument for the general convergence of poststructuralist cultural studies and the cultural analysis of critical theories turns on two themes: actual convergences of analysis, as well as complementary formulations. For example, it is ironic to note that the discovery of language in cultural studies (e.g., Hall) is seen, finally, to require a rethinking of historical materialism and Marx: regardless of all the residual and continuing differences with respect to how to treat language, that was, after all, the central claim of Habermas in Knowledge and Human Interests (1971) more than two decades ago with his categorical distinction between labor and communicative interaction. As well, the complementarity of the theory legitimation crisis and Hall’s poststructuralist Gramscian analysis of the New Right or West’s post-structuralist extension of Gramsci to race and Third World issues is striking: each tends to account for what the other leaves out. Whereas Habermas lays out the new positional relationships between the economy, the state and crisis possibilities, he has not adequately dealt with, empirically, the cultural dimensions of change as manifest in the discursive reconstitution of ideological forms. In contrast, Hall provides the basis for an analysis of the symbolic dimensions of the state’s displacement of crisis tendencies through the reorganization of a hegemonic historical bloc. West, on the other hand, points to some of the normative and cultural bases of alternative political cultures. Various exemplary disciplinary deconstructions (Finlay, Wexler, Agger) point to strategies for appropriating poststructuralist discourse theories in academic and policy contexts. In a word, the new convergences and continuing divergences between cultural studies and critical theories promise to guide the agenda of critical social theory in this last decade of our century. It would be presumptuous to prophesy the exact directions which the preceding analysis implies for the re-positioning of critical theory, poststructuralism, neo-Gramscian tendencies and cultural studies, let alone the possibilities for synthesis. Yet it is possible to point to some


obvious areas of thematic continuity implied by the previous discussion: (1) the continuing movement of the issues of feminist theory toward the center of social theory, i.e., less ghettoization and greater dialogue and integration of critical and feminist theory (e.g., Benhabib and Cornell, 1987); (2) in contrast to some deconstructionist tendencies, greater stress will be placed upon the Utopian dimensions of the linguistic turn, especially its relation to a rehabilitation of aesthetic themes as in the notion of ‘poetic interaction’ as a complement to ‘communicative’, as in McCumber (1989) or Ingram’s (1987) interpretation of the aesthetic dimension of Habermas’s more recent work; (3) continuing expansion of the selective and critical re-appropriation of deconstructionist and poststructuralist methods and arguments in various domains of the human sciences.

Discursive Re-positioning The other side of convergence is its implications for the discursive repositioning of theoretical paradigms and ideological stances. If we also take into account the delegitimation of East bloc and Soviet Marxism, it is possible that we may be confronted with both the collapse of Marxism as a distinctive approach and the withering away of critical theory as a distinctive theoretical perspective. As Mannheim stressed, the dialogical relationship between various ideological positions has important implications for resulting mutual influence and transformation over time. More recently, this general conception of the strategic importance of theory competition has been reinforced by pragmatic and postempiricist theories of science, especially the theory of argumentation (see Morrow, 1990). What will be the fate of critical theory given the death-agonies of classical Marxism? The decline of Marxism and reconfiguration of ideologies. The elements of convergence between critical theory and poststructuralist cultural studies are closely linked with broader historical and discursive shifts of which two appear to be central: the reconfiguration of Western ideological discourse with the collapse of East bloc ‘dialectical materialism’ and the emergence of the crisis of the Third World as the most fundamental social issue of the twenty-first century. In this context, the tradition of critical theory will likely emerge as the primary discourse of critical reflection upon advanced capitalism, but its continuing neglect of Third World issues remains an anomaly and the primary domain where the Marxist tradition will remain an important intellectual and ideological force. On the other hand, given the


continuing identification of most neo-Gramscian cultural studies with the Marxist tradition, these transformations promise to provoke a confrontation between the neo-Marxian and poststructuralist (and post-Marxist) appropriations of Gramsci (as in Wood, 1986). The withering away of critical theory? Does the collapse of East bloc Marxism, along with the convergences between critical theory and poststructuralist cultural studies, suggest that critical theory is in danger of losing its specific identity? Until now, there has been some justification for distinguishing between ‘critical theory’ as a specific metatheoretical and substantive approach to capitalism (and associated with its origins in the Frankfurt School tradition), on the one hand, and more general and inclusive references to ‘critical perspectives’, ‘critical social science’, or ‘critical sociology’ (Fay, 1987; Morrow, 1985), on the other. But for the purposes of an interrogation of ‘critical theory now’, and in the specific context of cultural studies, it is clearly imperative to expand the definition of critical theory beyond the confines of the Frankfurt school or its German context of origin to include parallel and complementary tendencies elsewhere—without slipping into any conflation of critical theory with neo-Marxism or just any perspective that wants to invoke the label ‘critical’. Why then persist with the term ‘critical theory’? There are two basic reasons. First, it does refer to a specific historical tradition which, despite historical discontinuities and national variations, has a recognizable identity as an approach to the theory of society as evident in its response to the three challenges documented in this essay; it also represents the first coherent and influential break with the Marxist tradition, one which anticipated a half-century ago the current ‘crisis of Marxism’ (Aronowitz, 1981). As a consequence of this break, the price for heresy has been to be excluded from the official camp of ‘Marxism’, an exclusion which most embraced without regret. Yet historically, critical theory’s oppositional strategy with respect to Marxism has been broadly vindicated given that the identity of the latter has collapsed: ‘One can no longer speak of Marxism in isolation from other intellectual and political positions, nor apart from the wider exigencies of history, for Marxism is no longer a single coherent discursive and political practice’ (Grossberg and Nelson, 1988:11; emphasis added). The second is that critical theory in this first historical sense exemplifies an approach to theorizing—a relationship to reconstructing historical materialism, critically appropriating the academic disciplines, responding to changing historical circumstances, and providing theoretical rationales for the practices of social movements—


which has been increasingly taken up, consciously or not, by others working under other labels. Indeed, as Grossberg and Nelson note, ‘an ability to problematize Marx’s writings has been central to the whole renaissance in Marxist theory’ (1988:11). This is not to say that all more recent Marxist theory is critical theory, but it is to argue that much of what now goes under the heading of ‘Marxist’ could increasingly be labeled as critical theory. In the present essay, for example, much of the self-defined Marxist research that takes place under the heading of British cultural studies could be included within the framework of critical theory in this generic sense. But it is also important to remember that critical theory is defined more broadly as a distinct theory of society and its critique, whereas cultural studies is more narrowly defined as a sociology of culture with roots in a Gramscian interpretation of neo-Marxist theory. Only in the context of poststructuralist interpretations do cultural studies begin to loosen their link with the Marxist tradition as a ‘post-Marxist’ approach.

Ecological Crisis and the Third World: The Final Challenge? Finally, it is important to raise a question hinted at only in Cornell West’s essay: the problematic of a convergence between a critique of Eurocentrism, the crisis of the Third World, and the advance of critical social ecology as a theoretical and cultural force. Since these themes have not been directly addressed in the previous discussion, it is necessary to conclude with a brief elaboration. Historically, one of the most distinctive and striking features of critical theory, especially in contrast to the Marxist tradition as a whole, has been its focus on the specifie issues of the crisis of advanced capitalism. Cultural studies have had a similar bias to the extent that their focus has been upon the transformations in the cultural domain which have accompanied the transformations within advanced capitalism. But with occasional exceptions (primarily in the study of postcolonial literatures or in the context of liberation theologies) Third World issues have not been central to critical theory and cultural studies debates, though this will likely change in the future. Further, these elements of convergence should not obscure the broader program of critical theory, as opposed to cultural studies. Most importantly, its concerns with a critique of political economy and social psychology resulted in themes which are virtually absent in the discourse of cultural studies: a critique of technology and the


foundations of an ecological critique of advanced societies (Jones, 1987; Leiss, 1976; Luke, 1987; Luke and White, 1985). Also in this context, the work of ‘anarchist’ mavericks such as Ivan Illich and Murray Bookchin, assumes a strategic significance, whatever the specific flaws or limitations of their work (Luke, 1987; Morrow and Torres, 1990). What such authors share is recognition of the cultural significance of the transformation of technological societies and its broader relation to the survival of the species—a question whose outcome will be closely linked with the models of ‘modernization’ followed in the Third World.

Notes 1 The present argument can be understood in part as a friendly polemical response to the otherwise exemplary introduction by Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson to their reader on Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988). While they provide an insightful introductory analysis in noting that most recently an ‘almost forced dialogue of Marxism with other perspectives has had profound implications for Marxism itself, for the issues defining Marxism have come into question and have been reshaped as a result’ (1988:10), they fail to point out that it was critical theory—initially of Frankfurt inspiration—which has been historically the primary and original source of this dialogue. A consequence of their approach—reflected in the initial selection of participants—is a general neglect (presence by absence?) of the pioneering contributions of Frankfurt and sociological critical theory to cultural analysis in the postwar period. 2 The inspiration for this general line of argument can be traced back to my association as a graduate student in sociology with Ioan Davies at York University in the mid-1970s; in his work and teaching he has consistently defended the importance of reconciling critical theory and British cultural studies. Participation in the Toronto ‘Telos Circle’ during this period also reinforced a strategic sense of the relationship between Gramsci and critical theory. Finally, more recent critical comments by Ian Taylor on an earlier paper of mine (Morrow, 1985) called my attention to many of these outstanding issues by stressing the advantages of the Gramscian version of British cultural studies over my interpretation of critical theory. As well, I have been influenced by a tradition combining critical theory and a distinctive nationalist version of cultural studies in Quebec (e.g., Morrow, 1982; Nielsen, 1985; Rioux, 1978). 3 Paradoxically, many of the concepts and concerns of the older Frankfurt tradition have become so widely diffused that authors are unaware of their indebtedness; others may consciously avoid citations for polemical reasons or the particular academic politics of their publishing venues, issues which caution against any crude use of citation indexes. The present chapter will explore the subsequent fate of cultural analysis in contemporary critical theory which will be taken to refer to three interrelated modes of theoretical discourse: the Frankfurt tradition, especially as fundamentally revised in the work of Habermas and those directly influenced by his example (e.g. Thomas McCarthy, Richard Bernstein, etc.); critical sociological theories which, though influenced by the former (e.g. Norman Birnbaum, Anthony Giddens, Alvin Gouldner, John O’Neill, etc.), incorporate diverse elements as part of a more specifically disciplinary self-definition.


4 For accounts of the social psychological aspects of critical theory, see Wexler (1983). On the relationship between critical theory, political economy, and the state, see Held (1980); and Keane (1984; 1988a; 1988b). 5 Obviously there are significant national variations with respect to these tendencies. The present discussion will focus, however, on British and North American examples. 6 With slight variations, these phases of transition could be applied as well, I think, to the other dimensions of the classical project of critical theory: metatheory, social psychology, political economy and theory of the state. For a good survey of the cultural debates in these first two phases, see Held (1980) and Lunn (1982). 7 One could also argue that the revival of neo-Marxist political economy also represented yet another challenge. I would reject this for two reasons. First, critical theory arose out of a debate with economistic political economy and has always been aware of its strengths and weaknesses. Second, critical theory has also accepted political economy as a useful research method, but rejected its generalization as a general theory of society. Thus the revival of political economy represented not so much a theoretical challenge as a reminder of the importance of an empirical question, i.e., a critical historical sociology. 8 The primary impact of more orthodox forms of political economy upon critical theory was to reinforce a sense of the importance of empirical research; otherwise, beyond its descriptive value as a form of economic determinism, most political economic research adhered to more or less orthodox assumptions—including effort at accommodating to traditional positivistic criteria of scientific method— which had been criticized from the beginning of the Frankfurt tradition. Not surprisingly, this contributed to a certain hostility between many representatives of critical theory and political economy respectively. 9 As well, there are other important structuralist influences which are separate from structuralist Marxism and tangential to the focus on cultural theory here. The most important uses of structuralist theory can be found in Habermas’s turn to developmental psychology (Piaget) and the reconstruction of evolutionary models drawing upon both developmental logic and structuralist concepts (Godelier). But except for the notion of the evolution of worldviews, this reception relates more to epistemological, social psychology and historical issues which lie outside the focus on cultural studies here. 10 For this reason Fredric Jameson falls outside the present schema of analysis which holds primarily within social theory and for those reliant on translations. The case of Jameson is complicated by the fact that even though his early work is in the tradition of humanist Marxism (Sartre) and the early Frankfurt tradition, he subsequently encounters literary structuralism on the way to an appropriation of both structuralism and poststructuralism as part of his own version of a ‘Marxist’ literary criticism culminating in his The Political Unconscious (1981). Indeed, his simultaneous appropriation of structuralist and poststructuralist tendencies, from a perspective informed by but not dogmatically attached to humanistic Marxism, renders his approach unclassifiable in any simple way. His work also violates the pattern of reception assumed by this essay, i.e., the succession of structuralist and poststructuralist influences. 11 This holds for systems and structural functionalist theories as well, though here the ‘function’ of cultural reproduction is the needs of society as a whole, rather than those of a dominant class and/or mode of production. These issues are discussed in more detail in Morrow and Torres (1988) which is the basis of a monograph in preparation. 12 For a thorountgh critique of Althusserianism, see Benton (1984); and for a critique of Althusserian cultural theory, Clarke, et al. (1980). These evaluations are


13 14

15

16 17 18

19

20

21

not advanced from a specific critical theory position, though there are many points of overlap. Critical theory does have a longstanding concern with the analysis of Soviet Communism culminating in Marcuse and more recently, Arato (1982). It might also be possible to identify an American variant of critical cultural studies with close affinities to British cultural Marxism. As opposed to the sociological variants of critical theory (and analogues in political science and social science subfields), and to an extent the Birmingham tradition, this form of cultural Marxism is more institutionally and theoretically rooted in the humanities, especially literature (e.g. Fredric Jameson), history (Stuart Ewen, Mark Poster), and philosophy (e.g. Douglas Kellner) and communications studies (e.g. Lawrence Grossberg). This disciplinary context has contributed to a very marginal foothold in sociology and shapes both the forms of discourse (strongly influenced by the traditions of literary criticism) and the textual focus of cultural analysis. The present discussion will focus, however, on the British example. In the German context, this can in part be traced back to some initial problems of translation and the peculiarities of the Gramsci reception in the German context (see Morrow, 1975); see also Adamson (1985) and Kilminster (1979) generally. Though aspects of Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) approach has affinities with critical theory, they jump over the critical theory debates directly into a poststructuralist critique of Gramsci. The roots of this comparison need to be traced to the similarities and differences between Weber and Gramsci’s approaches; see Bocock, 1986:83–103; and Morrow and Torres, 1990. A comparison of the implications of Habermas’s work for the approaches to cultural studies noted here would go beyond the confines of this chapter. The agonies of Perry Anderson (1984) in attempting to preserve Marxism’s bedrock while conceding various positions to critical theory and poststructuralists are particularly exemplary. On the other hand, Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) version of the shift from a Gramscian Marxism to a post-Marxism illustrates some of the problematic consequences of a comprehensive rejection of ‘essentialist’ categories. Kellner (1989) extends this argument in a major re-interpretation of the Frankfurt tradition built around the theme of modernity. Since this study became available to me only at the last minute of revising this chapter, Kellner’s insights on certain issues could not be fully incorporated in my discussion. Though his book represents an important contribution which goes beyond historical exegesis by presenting the tradition ‘as providing methods a set of positions that are of relevance and importance for contemporary social theory and politics’ (Kellner, 1989:2), he virtually ignores the receptions of structuralism and poststructuralism within critical theory, as well as their relation to the neo-Gramscian problematic, which is the focus of the present discussion. Obviously a central theme in contemporary critical theory is the interplay between feminist theory and poststructuralism, a topic which could be a basis for a paper in its own right. Since feminist theory has tended to define itself independently, without specific reference to the tradition of critical theory (e.g. Diamond and Quinby, 1988), it is difficult to specify those relations. For important exceptions, however, see Benjamin (1988) and Benhabib and Cornell (1987) and Fraser (1989). The following discussion necessarily focuses on cultural studies, hence social psychological issues and the theory of the state are inevitably neglected. Given her specific focus on communications technology, as well as perhaps a reaction against her background in comparative literature, Finlay selfconsciously ignores reference to Derridean deconstructionism as well as the


postmodernist debate. Both of these absences complement the Habermasian problematic within which her version of appropriating poststructuralism unfolds. 22 Agger’s (1989:8) off-hand use of the term ‘social-textual analysis’ is much more suggestive of what Wexler has in mind by reference to ‘social analysis’. 23 Such a reading would have certain parallels with, but be distinct from, one proceeding directly from critical theory as suggested, for example, by Keane that recent European debates raise ‘serious doubts about the adequacy of the Gramscian schema for contemporary political strategy’. Such a ‘post-Gramscian approach’ would have to take into account the changed conditions of Western Europe since Gramsci’s time, his questionable assumptions regarding the leading role of the Communist Party, and an opportunistic conception of civil society coupled with the dubious proposition of abolishing the state (Keane, 1988b: 24–5). 24 In saying this I am self-consciously excluding a third option of the type represented, for example, by Perry Anderson (1984; see the response in Morrow, 1986b). A comparison of these two options is obviously beyond the scope of the present chapter, but see Boggs (1984).

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KELLNER, D. (1988) ‘Postmodernism as Social Theory: Some Challenges and Problems’, Theory Culture and Society, 5:239–69. – (1989) Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. KILMINSTER, R. (1979) Praxis and Method: A Sociological Dialogue with Lukacs, Gramsci and the Early Frankfurt School, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. KROKER, A. and COOK, D. (1986) The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics, Montreal: New World Perspectives. LACLAU, E. and MOUFFE, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. MOORE, W. and CAMMACK, P., London: Verso. LAWRENCE, P.K. (1989) ‘The State and Legitimation: The Work of Jürgen Habermas’, in DUNCAN, G. (Ed.) Democracy and the Capitalist State, pp. 133–158, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LEISS, W. (1976) The Limits to Satisfaction, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. LENZ, G.H. and SHELL, K.L. (Eds) (1986) The Crisis of Modernity: Recent Critical Theories of Culture and Society in the United States and West Germany, Frankfurt am Main/Boulder: Campus Verlag/ Westview Press. LUKE, T.W. (1987) ‘Social Ecology as Critical Political Economy’, The Social Science Journal , 24:303–15. – and WHITE, S.K. (1985) ‘Critical Theory, the Information Revolution, and an Ecological Path to Modernity’, in FORESTER, J. (Ed.) Critical Theory and Public Life, pp. 23–53, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. LUNN, E. (1982) Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. MCCUMBER, J. (1989) Poetic Interaction: Language, Freedom, Reason, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. MILLER, P. (1987) Domination and Power, London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. MORROW, R.A. (1975) ‘Gramsci in Germany’. Telos, 32:193–216. – (1977) ‘Amnesia Critique: The “Marxist” Appropriation of the Frankfurt School’, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 1:105–16. – (1982) ‘Deux pays pour vivre: Critical Sociology and the New Canadian Political Economy’, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 6: 61–105.


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3 Playing with the Pieces: The Fragmentation of Social Theory David Ashley

They will no longer savagely uproot you from your life in order to deliver you to the machine—they integrate you in your infancy, with your quirks, your human relations and unconscious drives, even with your refusal to work. They will find a place for you somewhere, a personalized job, or in default a share of unemployment calculated according to your own equation. In any event, they will never abandon you, for what is essential is that everybody is the terminal of the entire network, a lowly terminal, but a term/end (terme) nevertheless—above all not of an inarticulate cry, but a term of language, in terms of the sole structural network of language…. Labor-power is no longer bought or sold brutally, it designates itself, it markets itself as merchandise—production rejoins the system of the signs of consumption. Jean Baudrillard (1989:9–10)

The End of Production In the last part of the twentieth century, in an era—as Jay (1988) has put it—of ‘fin de siècle socialism’, a strange, unkind, fate has overtaken Marxism. As the residual reservoirs and slivers of shattered lifeworlds are colonized by the ‘system imperatives’ of money and power (Habermas, 1987a:301–73), the Marxist critique of modernity, perversely in step with these developments, seems to have become progressively less relevant. In the late-twentieth century the commodity form has not turned out to be less total or less abstract than expected, nor have Western ‘liberal democracies’ managed to avoid new levels of triviality, vacuity and imbecility that would have befu70

PLAYING WITH THE PIECES 71

dled even Marx. Capitalism today is hardly less rapacious or dehumanizing than it was in 1917. Yet as commodity relations complete their penetration and dissolution of non-Western cultures, as global economic relations become even more rationalized, and as inequalities within this world system increase, Marxism—at least in its more ‘orthodox’ Marxist-Leninist form (Lukács, 1971:1–24)—has been steadily marginalized. In the process, what used to be the definitive internal critique of a social form called capitalism—the idea of socialist transformation—has become increasingly unbelievable or has been progressively softened and diluted. A starting point for the analysis of this ironic state of affairs should be the examination of changes in the relationship of capital to its dialectically or internally produced oppositions and critical antitheses. Theorists of postmodernism perhaps have made the most significant contribution to this kind of investigation (see, for instance, Baudrillard, 1975, 1981:112–84, 1983a:1–77, 1983b, 1987a:9–64, 1989; Harvey, 1989; Jameson, 1984, 1988a, 1988b, 1988c, 1989; Lyotard, 1973a, 1973b, 1974, 1984, 1987, 1988b:45–76; Rorty, 1985a, 1989). Jean Baudrillard has probably taken the analysis of the internal relationship between capitalist development and the fate of Marxist critique further than any other post-Marxist critic. This essay will therefore pay particular attention to his work. I would like to suggest that, as a mode of critical selfunderstanding, Marxism remains a master discourse as long as commodity production, with its alibi of use-value (Baudrillard, 1975:30), is the primary means of social formation. Perhaps, though, the end of the classical or modernist dialectic is not merely a matter of a shift in the mode of production. Maybe, as Jean Baudrillard (1989) has suggested, when an industrial emphasis on the rationalization of labor gives way to the commodification of the image and the need for ‘hyperreality’, it is no longer necessary to produce (and alienate) what used to be defined as ‘species-being’. If so, then Marxism has now been turned against itself because, as a modernist and not a universal discourse, it is—and in fact always was—parasitically attached to a mode of reality production that in a ‘postmodern’ era can no longer be sustained. According to Baudrillard (1987b:64–6), ‘modernity’ involved ‘individualistic and modern rationalist thought’, ‘the modern, centralized and democratic, bourgeois State’, ‘urban concentration, and the gigantic development of the means of communication and information’, a ‘way of life articulated on change and innovation’, ‘anxiety, instability, continued mobilization, shifting subjectivity, tension, crisis’, the


‘integrated hierarchy of personal relations’, etc. Above all, however, Baudrillard emphasizes that ‘modernity’ meant ‘the prodigious expansion of science and technique, the rational and systematic development of the means of production, their management and organization’. These latter developments mark ‘modernity as the era of productivity: an intensification of human labor and of human domination over labor, both reduced to the status of productive forces and to the schemas of efficacy and maximal output. This is the common denominator of all modern nations’ emphasis supplied. It is only in the postmodern era: that we can conceive of a new peripetia of power—a catastrophic one this time—where power no longer succeeds in producing the real, in reproducing itself as real, or in opening new spaces to the reality principle, and where it falls into the hyperreal and vanishes: this is the end of power, the end of the strategy of the real. (Baudrillard, 1987a:33) Once, capital respected the reality principle. For Baudrillard (see Poster, 1988:180), however, capital has now liquidated this principle ‘in the extermination of every use value, or every real equivalence’. Thus, in the postmodern era what has sealed Marxism’s fate has been capitalism’s new-found ability to subsume and absorb those antagonistic and irreconcilable forces and oppositions that it once produced.

Fateful Dialectics In order to trace the shift from the modern to the so-called ‘postmodern’ it is helpful to chart the changing function of the sign, the ‘precession of simulacra’ (Baudrillard, 1983a) from representation to pure simulation and from reality-production to the implosion of meaning. Figure 3.1 illustrates five distinct operations of the sign.1 (I do not assume that these options are exhaustive). With the first three operations it is possible to talk about the production of the real because all these operations posit or assume a referent. The latter two operations, however, do not posit or assume a referent; they can be classified as ‘postmodern’. ‘Fetishism’ refers to a type of operation that can be holistic (e.g., the kind of orientation described by Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind), or partial (e.g., ‘commodity fetishism’, described by Marx in Das Kapital). Holistic fetishism presents a totalistic, reified concep-


Figure 3.1 The Sign and the Production of the Real

tion of the universe, but a partial fetishism could conceivably be taken up and dropped again, as in the early stages of capitalism, when individuals caught between tradition and abstract value moved uneasily between two worlds of meaning. The essence of fetishistic thinking is that it does not distinguish between observation and interpretation, thus—so it appears—signs carry their meaning with them (LéviStrauss, 1966:223). In a similar fashion, commodity fetishism configures social relations as necessary and objectively real relations among things—thereby ensuring that such relations cannot be discursively redeemed. For Baudrillard (1983a:84), fetishism traditionally has produced a ‘strong’, ‘cruel’ symbolic order. In feudal, caste societies, for instance, ‘each sign functions with its full value as interdiction, each is a reciprocal obligation between castes, clans or persons’. Such interdiction ‘protects the sign’ and eliminates the possibility of a counterfeit presentation. The only kind of (meaningful) social deviance that would be possible in such a symbolic order would be ‘sacrilege’ or ‘black magic’. Baudrillard (1983a:83–5) suggests that ‘Counterfeit (and fashion at the same time) is born with the renaissance, with the destructuring of the feudal order by the bourgeois order and the emergence of open competition on the level of the distinctive sign’. This is the beginning of a ‘disenchanted universe’ containing arbitrary signs which ‘instead of linking two persons in an unbreakable reciprocity…[refer] back to


the disenchanted universe of the signified, common denominator of the real world toward which no one has any obligation’. The sign is thus used cynically or opportunistically in impression-management. Rennaissance drama—including, for instance, the works of Shakespeare—is often almost obsessed with the desire to explore the effects and consequences of the proliferation of the ‘counterfeit’ that occurred during this era.2 As a third possibility, the sign can mask or screen reality. Here we are within the domain not of simulation but dissimulation. To simulate is to feign what is not, and to dissimulate is to hide or conceal what is. While level-3 dissimulation masks or screens the real, it still invokes the existence of a referent, albeit one that is hidden. Dissimulation can operate through religious or aesthetic imagery, where what is concealed or hidden is portrayed as sublime or as beyond representation. It also explains the panic of the iconoclast who fears that the boundary between level-3 and level-4 dissimulation is being erased. The iconoclast is threatened by images of God because such simulacra represent not merely the divine but also the terrible possibility that what is depicted does not exist. A more serene attitude is maintained by more sophisticated theodicies. Buddhism, for example, cautions us not to take human simulations at face value but to see through the ‘masks of eternity’ to understand what is ultimate and complete in itself, an impossible task in this world. In attempting to locate what was being screened or masked within modernity the two great critical theories of that epoch—Marxism and psychoanalysis—helped instantiate the realities that determined them. The dialectic of modernity they analyzed involved the exploration of the oppositions posited within (1) level-3 dissimulations (e.g. commodity fetishism, screen memories) which, (2) understood as distorted simulations of the real, would explain observable, empirical manifestations (of class domination or perceived irrationality). What neither Marx nor Freud could sweep into the domain of their analysis, however,was the connection between such demystification and determination, i.e., the collusion between (1) the critique of what assuredly are no more than partial or one-sided conceptions of reality (Vernunft), and (2) the attempt to discover what is being masked through such dissimulation.3 Such a procedure is destined to result in conceptual puzzlement. As Baudrillard (1983a:1) observes: ultimately, ‘the simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth that conceals that there is none’ (emphasis added). For Marx, what commodity relations masked was the hidden source of value; for Freud, what was screened were the workings of


the unconscious. Given the collusive relationship between Das Kapital and the mode of domination it successfully penetrated it is not surprising that Marx’s critical examination of the commodity revealed that, while use-value could not be reduced to exchange-value, it becomes its accomplice: In other words, the system of political economy does not produce only the individual as labor power that is sold and exchanged: it produces the very conception of labor power as the fundamental human potential…. And in this Marxism assists the cunning of capital. It convinces men that they are alienated by the sale of their labor power, thus censoring the much more radical hypothesis that they might be alienated as labor power, as the ‘inalienable’ power of creating value by their labor. (Baudrillard, 1975:30, emphasis removed) In a similar fashion, Freud’s radical critique of the unconscious as a producer—of dreams, slips of the tongue, repetition, etc.—convinces modern individuals that their individuality is a personal and a difficult compromise between archaic natural and upstart cultural forces. They therefore accept that character must be brutally forged on the anvil of repression. A more radical hypothesis would suggest that the unconscious is a mythological territory in terms of which modern subjects can learn (in depth) how to understand—and thereby produce— themselves. The unconsious is not, therefore, a producer; it is a language of desire that must first be forced into hiding before its discovery can be made possible. When the sign operates to mask the absence of a reality, or is its own pure simulacrum, we are, according to Baudrillard, beyond production and have put an end to the reality principle. At levels 4 and 5 in Figure 3.1 simulation does not posit a referent. A politics that has grasped that the sign masks the absence of a reality is one of ‘panic’ (Kroker, Kroker and Cook, 1989) or ‘deterrence’ (Baudrillard, 1983a:25). A politics of deterrence works vainly to try to save the reality principle, which, under the conditions of capitalism, is predicated on the supposition that the value of commodities must be determined by the conditions of their production. Thus in Marx’s (1970:42–3) terminology, while exchange-value merely enabled everything to be related to everything else, use-value was a touchstone: it is ‘independent of all forms of society…[and] an external natureimposed necessity without which there can be no material exchange between man and Nature, and therefore no life’. While the labor the-


ory of value was foundational both for Marx and for bourgeois political economy, in a postmodern society it has little relevance. When Marx was alive the ‘cunning’ of capitalism was merely ‘to veil itself continually in the evidence of content…and to produce itself in the obviousness of [exchange] value’ (Baudrillard, 1981:145). In his critique of bourgeois domination Marx thus was able to demonstrate successfully that bourgeois political economy was the concealed code of domination institutionalized within civil society: a form of representation that was invisible and unrecognizable because it was lived. Demystifying (unmasking) the code in terms of which this lived experience was produced, Marx showed that commodity fetishism was an illusion that nevertheless masked the ‘real’, the true source of value: expropriated, material, productive labor. For Marx, then, the political economy of capitalism and the ultimate significance of the commodity was founded on the bedrock provided by the productive power of social labor. While the value of the commodity could be obscured or screened, it could never, according to Marx, simply cease to exist. Marx declared that individual workers recycled value as the usevalue of their labor power was commodified, turned into exchangevalue, used to produce surplus-value, and finally reproduced, as laborers purchased those commodity objects that kept them working. Although alienating, this process was at least rational. Today, consumption tends not to be rooted in use-value; often it is not even disciplined by the need to exchange labor-as-commodity for the objectas-commodity. In a postmodern world, consumers are no longer penny-counting wage slaves who consume and recycle rationally. They are more likely to be restless, empty vessels dominated by a resurgent id and by infantile cravings. Unlike the ego, the id cannot be rationalized. Given that postmodern culture de-differentiates (the opposite of rationalization) and de-individualizes, what becomes infrastructural are the fantasies of the consumer, not the means by which surplus-value is extracted. Under postmodernity, commodities possess mostly ‘sign-value’ signifying difference. The commodity connotes meaning that cannot be explained in terms of the real or objective world of material production. Signs respond only to the indeterminacy of a code that is constantly in flux; they are tied to a structural play of value that manifests itself through advertising, marketing or subcultural reworkings of the code. This code is one of pure simulation in that signs ‘exchange among themselves [as commodities]…without interacting with the real’ (Poster, 1988:125). The Coca-Cola Company spent


over a million dollars scientifically demonstrating that consumers preferred the taste of ‘new’ to ‘old’ (now ‘Classic’) Coke. At the end of the day what they learned was that the value of Coca-Cola could not be reduced either to its taste or to its cost of production. In the early stages of capitalism money made money (m` c` m′) within a cycle of production containing labor exploitation, the extraction of surplus-value, and reinvestment. For the arbitragers and finance capitalists of the 1980s money was magically made out of money without having to have recourse to the messy and brutal world of production. At least two levels of abstraction were involved. First is the abstraction of commodity relations from social relations, the process of mystification analyzed so definitively by Marx. But second is a hyperabstraction that departs from the already abstracted domain of commodification. The enormous profits made by speculators and by junk-bond salesmen during the Reagan era were completely disconnected from the real world of commodity production. Of course, this is not to say that there are no earthly limits to such activity. Clearly, however, in the last decade capitalism has managed, at least in part, to detach itself institutionally from the ‘infrastructural’ mode of production analyzed by Marx.4 A politics of deterrence must persuade us of the rationality of our economy and society, (and, the ‘end of production’ notwithstanding, must also hide the fact that America still manages to produce crime, despair and irrationality quite successfully). In a larger sense, however, deterrence must work to conceal the fact that celebrations of ‘democracy’ and ‘the American Way’ mask the absence of any institutionalized procedures that might guarantee substantive justice. For Baudrillard (1983a;1988b), America has become a giant ‘deterrence machine’ that functions to conceal the absence that it masks. Politics is hyperreal: not disciplined or constrained by any referent or by the recognition of any finality outside simulation. Because a public sphere of accountability no longer exists, ‘Watergate’ and ‘Irancontragate’ conceal the fact that political scandals can no longer occur. Hysteria about the significance of bruises on toddlers’ thighs and the number of horses being sacrificed in the nation’s day-care centers deters consideration of legions of brain-damaged, poverty-stricken, malnourished, and drug-ridden infants. America’s bizarre ‘War on Drugs’ (which cannot even be taken seriously by an image-sodden media) serves to mask the fact that individuals can no longer understand, let alone control, the forces and substances that have penetrated and dispersed their bodies. It also attempts to signify that the strong state will do something to prevent the lawlessness it must produce.


The sign always has been its own pure simulacrum; when this is understood it finally can be acknowledged that the secret of power is that it does not exist. This is not to say that there are not, or have not been, victims and oppressors—the dominated and those who dominate. However, the institution of power, like the institution of spatial perspective versus “real” space in the Renaissance, is only a simulation of perspective’ (Baudrillard, 1987a:41). This is something that Foucault never grasped. While his genealogies of power brilliantly showed how power was produced through ‘discrimination…the violent founding act of Reason’ (ibid.: 37), according to Baudrillard (ibid.: 40), ‘Foucault…does not tell us anything concerning the simulacrum of power itself’. In the final analysis, power is limited and inferior to seduction because power has to be produced, and, therefore, unlike seduction, must be self-limiting. The dialectic of modernity described above (i.e., the oppositions between the critique of dissimulation and the attempt to discover what really is being masked) is limited, death-ridden and ultimately fated to be seduced by the reversibility which haunts it. Seduction is stronger than power because it is [i.e., knows itself to be] a reversible and mortal process, while power wants to be irreversible like value, as well as cumulative and immortal, like value. Power shares all the illusions of the real and of production; it wants to belong to the order of the real and so falls over into the imaginary and into selfsuperstition…. Seduction, however, does not partake of the real order. (Baudrillard, 1987a:45) Seduction is not opposed to production; it seduces it. It is not concerned with ‘mastering the universe of meaning’ but of ‘mastering the reign of appearances’, it is ‘simply that which lets appearance circulate and move as a secret’ (Baudrillard, 1988a:57–63; see, also, Baudrillard, 1979:19ff.). It is stronger than power because it ‘envelops the whole real process of power, as well as the whole real order of production, with this never-ending reversibility and disaccumulation— without which neither power nor production would even exist’ (Baudrillard, 1987a:45). Seduction knows that there is nothing beyond simulation and acknowledges that meaning cannot be anchored by reference points or finalities outside the simulacrum. Subjects can move only on the inside of the discourses that constitute them; there are no longer any dualisms between the name and its referent. According to Baudrillard (1988a:59): ‘Seduction is the world’s elementary


dynamic’. It is the fundamental truth that governs the operation of the sign.

Disappearance of the Narrative of Modernity Once upon a time human subjects located themselves in terms of the philosophico-political referents of the ‘grand narratives’ or ‘metanarratives’ of post-Enlightenment modernity (Lyotard, 1973b; 1974; 1984:31–7). These included themes like the dialectic of the Spirit that supposedly came to know itself as it struggled blindly against the barriers it had erected against its own self-understanding. For Lyotard (1984:21–3), narratives transmit pragmatic rules that constitute the social bond. They require no other authorization than themselves: they ‘define what has the right to be said and done in the culture in question, and since they are themselves a part of that culture, they are legitimated by the simple fact that they do what they do’. The most powerful metanarrative of the modern era was a story of the progressive mastery of productive forces as the proletariat struggled toward the light. It affected many diverse facets of modern aestheticism. For instance, in his crusade for ‘a new spirit’ that could reconcile technology with democracy, le Corbusier’s dream was to represent this heroic narrative architecturally. Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus of 1923 (‘the cathedral of the future’), the International Style, the futurists, all represented another kind of heroic, modernist narrative (Jencks, 1986:31–2). In terms of this narrative, a universal subject would initially be forged on the anvil of material production, a process that would create a first-order discursive practice that would undergo a sudden reversal during a period of revolutionary upheaval. ‘If man is shaped by his material environment’, said Marx in ‘The Holy Family’, ‘this environment must be made human’. As a universal subject, humankind one day would be the measure of all things. This narrative has now been cast into doubt by those trends consolidated by Baudrillard under the slogan ‘the end of production’. As we have seen, these include panic, deterrence and the exuberant explosion of sign-value. While signs are still exchanged as commodities they now tend to represent little more than the endless play of difference. As market value loses significance, the ‘discipline of the market’, which compels producers to respect its referents, is replaced by a system in which what will always be in short supply are not workers or products but sign-value and meaningful relations of consumption. In terms of this ‘structural law of value’ (Baudrillard, 1989:5–6; Poster,


1988:180), exchange-value and use-value are no longer anchored by the referential labor theory of value; rather, value expands endlessly and horizontally. With sign-value, the medium is always the message; thus value is merely the constituent and exclusive part of media that circulates meaning, usually in the form of desire. In the nineteenth century, for the most part, capitalism had only to produce goods and services, consumption took care of itself. In the late-twentieth century the structural law of value has begun to erase the referential dimension of value. In line with these developments, today ‘labor is no longer a force, it has become one sign among many…. Neither more nor less “alienated”, it is no more the locus of a singular historical “praxis” engendering singular social relations’ (Baudrillard, 1989:6). Indeed, the structural law of value puts an end to the ‘brutal’ buying and selling of labor-power: This is why the end of primitive accumulation marks a decisive turning point in political economy, the passage to the preponderance of dead labor, to a social relation crystallized and incarnated in dead labor weighing on the whole society like the code of domination itself. It was Marx’s fantastic error to have innocently believed, in spite of machines, techniques and science, that all of this could become living social labor after the liquidation of the system of capital, when it is precisely there that it founded itself, (ibid.: 11) Of course it still might be argued that the Marxist critique should be as central to the subject’s critical self-understanding as ever because, even under the conditions of postmodernity, commodity relations (i. e., the exchange of the sign as commodity) remain ‘the purest form of social domination’ (Baudrillard, 1989:5). Baudrillard, however, maintains that such domination is now ‘unreadable’: it can be reproduced ‘without references to a dominant class or a relation of forces, [it is] without violence, entirely absorbed without a trace of blood in the signs that envelop us’ (ibid.: 5–6). Similarly, Lyotard has argued that Marxism’s vitality as a narrative of emancipation has withered in the face of the dissolution and dispersal of that subject to which such a narrative supposedly is addressed and which, alone, could ground it as a form of practice. Thus two of the leading theorists of postmodernism—Baudrillard and Lyotard—have both concluded not that Marxism is ‘wrong’ or ‘untrue’ in some sense but that, as a rhetoric of enlightenment, it can no longer help us address the real.


The purpose of theory, said Marx, is to abolish itself. If Baudrillard (1975:21–51; 1981:130–42), for one, is right in pointing to the collusion in modern society that linked the order of production to that of representation it becomes easier to understand how this principle might apply to Marxism. The modern subject was interpellated both by the classical form of capital and, simultaneously, by the Marxist narrative of emancipation. Because of the interpenetration of bourgeois, democratic-liberal ideology and Marxist criticism, the end of the possibility of institutionalizing the ‘progressive’ worldview of the latter is not, however, the philosophical or ideological triumph of the former but the marker of its irrelevance and ultimate disappearance. Modernity (and thus Marxism) placed the potentially universal selfreflective subject at the center of the universe. Today, the selfobjectification of this once tragical and now farcical figure has become progressively more untenable.

The End of History In our era, the oppositions of the Cold War have been replaced by ‘cool communicational obscenity’ (Baudrillard, 1988a:24): a seamless, network of information and sign-value that eliminates traditional epistemologies of dualism and referentiality and the distinction between the interior and exterior of discourse. In the ideal-typical postmodern world we are either inside the simulator or outside a meaningful universe. There are no longer any barriers to the total hyperrealization of this universe; all references to finalities or ontologies become superfluous. According to Baudrillard (1988a:20ff.), postmodernism entails the disappearance of the difference between private and public spaces, together with the ability of the subject to see itself reflected in the objectively real. Postmodern subjects can no longer produce themselves in a mirror, i.e., self-reflectively, but only as ‘a pure screen, a pure absorption and reabsorption surface of the influent networks’ (Baudrillard, 1988a:27). By way of contrast, while early capitalism’s forced differentiation between the ‘private’ and residual sphere of subjective will-formation and the objectifying tendencies of commodity rationalization was alienating, it at least contained the symbolic benefit of alienation (the fact that the other exists) and that otherness can be played out for better or for worse…. Obscenity begins when there is no more specta-


cle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusion, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. (Baudrillard, 1988a:21) The major cause of such obscenity—and the reason for the concomitant marginalization of Marxism—is thus the progressive universalization and abstraction of the sign, this ultimately facilitated by the development of new technologies of communication.5 As noted above, in its most advanced form, capitalism must now be described not primarily as a mode of commodity production but as the globalization of a system that is predominantly concerned with signs and images. The allure and the fascination of these disembodied media images are now impossible to resist, and the once-familiar ideological interpellations of the Cold War now convey merely a feeling of nostalgia for something that has disappeared. Today, the ruined remnants of ‘actually existing socialism’ whimsically invoke other modernist disasters like Ronan Point in London or the Pruit-Igoe public housing complex in St Louis blown up in 1972. Even the Berlin Wall, which (among other things) heroically and futilely attempted to protect social capital and block the enticements of consumerism and the seduction of the sign, has now been swept aside in an orgy of celebration—a great modern spectacle—that played on Western TV screens like the finale from Les Misérables. The attempt to represent shopping expeditions in heroic modernist terms has been too much, though, even for some élite intellectuals. As Goerge A.Carver, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, explained to The New York Times, the desire of many East Germans ‘to decamp for the West’ was not an ideological victory; rather ‘the bulk of the population set their standards by what they see on their TV screens…it’s not so much the news stories but the commercials that get to them’.6 Once upon a time the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe were at the forefront of a war against those who tried to resist commodification. MTV would have been more seductive. Carver has not been the only élite intellectual to sense, lately, that the triumph of Western capitalism may turn out to be something of a Pyrrhic victory. In a now notorious thesis that was first published in National Interest, a periodical that expresses the views of establishment ideologues who helped prepare the agenda for the Reagan and Bush administrations, Fukuyama, a deputy director of the State Department, recently created a maelstrom of controversy by suggest-


ing that ‘history’ has ‘come to an end’.7 According to Fukuyama (1989:3), ‘the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism’, together with ‘the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as the peasants’ markets and color televisions now omnipresent throughout China’, or the rock music ‘enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran’, signifies the apotheosis of a culture that, as Weber put it, had ‘universal culture and significance’. Fukuyama argues that it is now impossible to envision the emergence of any oppositional force or power that could impede the rationalizing and totalizing system of global consumer capitalism. He concedes, of course, that most human beings will continue to eke out a marginal existence on the periphery of the world system, away from where the action is, but, given the ‘exhaustion’ of Marxism-Leninism as a revolutionary creed, they now lack the ability to have any purchase on something that has, in any case, ceased to exist, i.e., on ‘history’. Indeed, Fukuyama suggests that if history were to be jump-started one day the impetus would come not from the wretched of the earth but from the boredom of yuppies suffering from aleatory exhaustion. Fukuyama thus can smugly conclude that, for the time being at least, the ‘triumph of the West’ will keep the world safe for banality. The ‘universalization of Western, liberal democracy’ will be ‘the final form of human government’ because we now have reached ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution’. Even so (like Baudrillard), Fukuyama cannot purge himself of a residual nostalgia: The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. (1989:3)

Strategies of Resistance Baudrillard has successfully managed to analyze some of the characteristics of ‘postmodernism’, nevertheless he does tend to get carried away. As Best (1989:48) has pointed out, he ‘confuses tendencies of


contemporary society with a finalized state of affairs’. This is a serious error. In order to ascertain whether strategies of resistance are still possible within the hypercapitalist core it is first necessary to identify whether ‘postmodernism’ means the end of modernity or merely its exhaustion. As we have seen, Baudrillard concludes that as the masses can no longer be passed through the ‘mirror stage’ of class consciousness they can no longer be alienated. In a postmodern society the only weapon available to the silent majorities is silence. The power of the masses now becomes merely the ability to remain indifferent, the power to soak up meaning and absorb it utterly, leaving no trace behind. ‘Who can say which is winning today: the simulation power performs on the masses, or the inverse simulation held out by the masses for power to be swallowed up in’ (Baudrillard, 1983a:29–30). For all his undoubted brilliance, Baudrillard cannot—or will not— (how could he?) attain the kind of critical vantage point that would enable him to determine whether, or to what extent, the postmodernity he describes represents a complete rupture from the past. Thus, labeling Baudrillard ‘a neo-aristocratic sign fetishist’, Kellner (1989c:199) has suggested that Baudrillard finds himself torn…between fascination and melancholy in the face of the disappearance of deep signs, the big signs of modernity like the real or art, and the advent of ‘obscene’ signs (flat, onedimensional, fully explicit) in the society of simulations. This helps explain why Baudrillard vacillates between giddiness and nostalgia (unlike Fukuyama who vacillates between boredom and nostalgia). While there is a strategy of ‘resistance’ implicit in Baudrillard’s analysis—one of withdrawal and ‘hyperconformity’ (see, Baudrillard, 1983b)—the strategy is itself (to use a term that Baudrillard favors) ‘imploded’. As it is unable to get beyond the domination it describes but can only seduce it from within, this strategy lacks any kind of independent perspective. Thus Baudrillard’s plan of ‘resistance’ is indeed ‘fatal’: it cannot escape the orbital pull of that which it surveys, and it cannot even find a reason for trying. It would, therefore, be impossible to try to pretend that Baudrillard has defined a meaningful politics of resistance. Of course, this might be because such a strategy is no longer possible. However, as Baudrillard’s text passes across the glassy surface of contemporary life it takes no interest even in searching for the ‘privileged’ vantage point that Habermas (1987b:126–7) has indicated must be located if


theorists are to avoid merely being a part of that which they survey. Baudrillard’s fatalism results from a dogmatic metaphysical insistence that to struggle against what seeks to be productive is merely to select how one is already determined. His necrophilia—the obsession with death and with the end of everything—is an inevitable consequence of this fatalism. There is only waste, excretion and morbidity because there is nothing beyond what already exists and no other place to go. Marxist theorists, including Frankfurt Schoolers, were able to reject such a sad dogma because of their commitment to Aufhebung, the idea that criticism can overcome and transcend—as well as address, incorporate and preserve—its oppositions. Yet if such a critical strategy is to be made to work the idea of totality must be preserved. This means that analysis must identify a system wherein partial entities and relations can be shown to be determined and structured by a set of rules or principles that permit critical understanding of how such a ‘system’ was produced in the first place. Marx’s genius was to identify how the system of modernity would universalize itself and colonize the lifeworld according to a code of commodity exchange based on industrialized and bureaucratized production. As we have seen, though, there is reason to believe that—to some extent at least—the rationalizing system that Marx identified is breaking down. Nevertheless, even when describing the ‘end of production’, Baudrillard can still invoke the idea of ‘system’: e.g., ‘the masses… know there is no liberation, and that a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic’ (1983b:46). Baudrillard believes that the logic of hypercapitalism is beyond a rational recall, i.e., it is beyond the understanding of self-reflective individuals (who, in any case, supposedly have ceased to exist). The ‘system’ of hypercapitalism contains subjects who are no longer capable of taking a revolutionary stance. According to Baudrillard, the only way in which postmodern culture can be ruptured is by taking its internal logic to the limits. Thus, exuberant paranoia and the frenetic excretion of garbage becomes the apogée of political will-formation. For Marx, Freud, and for the members of the Frankfurt School, the function of the critic was to identify and help excise pathology. Yet, as Hebdige (1988:209) has pointed out, for Baudrillard The critic-as-surgeon cutting out and analyzing diseased or damaged tissue is replaced by the critic-as-homeopath ‘shadowing’ and paralleling the signs of sickness by prescribing natural poisons which produce in the patient’s body a simulation of the original symptoms.


Presumably Baudrillard exempts himself from his own analysis. Granted he has spent a fair amount of time driving around America in rented automobiles soaking up its ‘inspired banality’, taking photographs and engaging in wasteful excess (see, for instance, Baudrillard, 1988b). But he has also gone to great pains to simulate the kind of élitist (partial) thinking that one would expect to find coming from a bona fide member of the French intelligentsia. Overall, Baudrillard is not at all interested in pursuing the critical possibilities of his sociology, his remarks about a ‘hyperlogic’ of resistance notwithstanding. This does not invalidate his clever description of hypercapitalism, but it does, I think, jeopardize his chances of making a lasting or definitive impact on theory. Certainly Baudrillard is vulnerable to the charges of ‘neoconservatism’ that Habermas (1981) has leveled against postmodernists. In the final analysis, his strategy of hyper conformity, while posing as radical, not only helps reproduce consumerism (albeit ironically) but also buries deeper the subject that might be expected to have provided some kind of input. In this regard, Baudrillard’s postmodernism seems inferior, for instance, to Georg Simmel’s analysis of aesthetic modernism. Although Simmel anticipated many of the hyperreal forms of consumerism described by Baudrillard and other postmodernists, he never lost sight of the dialectical relationship that invariably obtains between subjects and their objects of production or simulation. Similarly, in describing the fragmentation and increased abstraction of experience in late modernity, Simmel anticipated the progressive disappearance of those reference points that once might have been capable of anchoring the endless flux of life. Although Simmel believed that both the individual and the social whole were striving toward unities of self-expression that were logically incompatible he did not conclude that a sense of individuation or individuality would simply disappear. I think that this is because, unlike Baudrillard, Simmel was never consumed by nostalgic yearning. Also, Baudrillard’s image of the lost social is derived from nowunfashionable structuralist thinking. Simmel did not suffer from such a handicap. While postmodernism has a dark side, it also has a liberating potential, albeit one that tends to be unfocused.8 No one can doubt that in the last two or three decades there have been profound changes in the textual experience of many individuals living in Western societies. The critique of language and of rigid, totalizing modes of experience— an integral part of postmodernism—is to be welcomed, not condemned. Nevertheless, the weakening and possible disappearance of


modernist narratives of emancipation in Western societies is certainly a potentially catastrophic development, especially when these narratives are replaced by forms of cultural expression that tend merely to insert the commodification of the sign into every partial and disconnected life sphere. Unlike Baudrillard, Lyotard (1988a; see, also, Lyotard and Thébaud, 1985) does attempt to describe how a non-foundationalist theory of critical judgment could be institutionalized within the condition of postmodernity. Lyotard does not appeal to non-existent static, transcendental, or totalistic rules of discourse, nor—unlike Habermas —does he invoke transcendental principles of communicative rationality to which competent subjects must be bound. Indeed, Lyotard (1984:xxv) insists that Habermas’s commitment to a rationalization of communicative action must be rejected because of the ‘violence’ it would do ‘to the heterogeneity of language games’. According to Lyotard (1984:41), we do not have to allow ourselves to be dominated by ‘pessimism’ about the contemporary heterogenous splintering of language-games. For Lyotard, the history of the humanities was a sequence of limited police-actions that were supposed to demarcate and protect the proper boundaries of the subject. Now, philosophy and the humanities can relinquish their ‘legitimation duties’ with a sigh of relief; the ‘mourning process has been completed’. Lyotard would thus both understand and enjoy the panic experienced by contemporary intellectuals like Fukuyama. Similarly, he has little patience for stiff ‘old Europeans’ (as Habermas likes to think of himself) who cannot disavow the now discredited grand narratives of a lost past. Disavowing his earlier belief that the choice facing humanity is socialisme ou barbarie,9 Lyotard (1984:41) suggests: ‘Most people have lost the nostalgia for the lost narrative. It in no way follows that they are reduced to barbarity’. Today, ‘legitimation’ can be based only ‘on performativity. That is what the postmodern world is all about’. While Lyotard’s ‘performative principle’ cheerfully suggests that postmodernism has unleashed new creative possibilities that will permit the subject to ‘wage a war on totality’, ‘activate the differences and save the honor of the name’ (Lyotard 1984:82), the immediate prospects for such revolutionary action appear quite remote. Furthermore, Lyotard’s (1984:60ff.) peculiar insistence that science is consistent with postmodernism because at root it is based upon ‘paralogy’ (i. e., on deliberately contradictory reasoning) is highly problematic, indeed implausible, as several commentators have pointed out. It is difficult to believe that, because it will concern itself mostly with


‘undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, ‘fracta’, catastrophes and pragmatic paradoxes …’ (ibid.: 60), a ‘postmodern science’ will be a liberating influence, as Lyotard argues. Such a suggestion seems merely fanciful. According to Lyotard (ibid.: 66), we must ‘arrive at an idea and a practice of justice that is not linked to that of consensus’. This theory of justice is further explored in The Differend (1988a). But the description of difference, plurality and indeterminacy endemic to language described in this work does not enable Lyotard to identify critical judgment as resting on anything other than respect for the alterity of the other. For Lyotard, the issue of justice cannot be understood, let alone resolved, in narrow moralistic or cognitive terms. He does assert suggestively that justice cannot be separated from the problem of representation—including the problem of encapsulating feeling— because this is mandated by respect for alterity. However, he cannot, of course, suggest a program or a formula that would enable subjects to generate critical self-judgment mechanistically. (Consistently, he also refuses to give a definitive or universal account of postmodernity.) For Lyotard, ‘justice’ will show itself in a thousand points of light. These disembodied points will twinkle arbitrarily. Any relationship among them will be fortuitous.10

Concluding Remarks In the 1980s, theorists of postmodernism, like Baudrillard and Lyotard, have helped radically to transform social theory. As I have tried to show, this was not merely an academic or theoretical achievement; these transformations are of one piece with profound changes in the substance of human experience in Western cultures since the early 1960s. What is of unquestionable significance in the writings of Baudrillard and Lyotard is the analysis of the displacement of production by simulation, the collapse of conventional modes of reality production, the weakening hold of classical theories of modernity (like those of Marx and Freud) and the increasing irrelevance of the ‘grand narratives’ that have had such a grip on the Western mind since the so-called ‘Enlightenment’. We are now beyond the point where the postmodernist tendencies of ‘advanced’ Western societies can be ignored. At the same time, we cannot afford merely to survey the damage. As Jameson (1988b:111) has pointed out: ‘The point is that we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as


any equally facile celebration of it is complacent and corrupt’. One of the major tasks now facing theory must therefore be the attempt to locate that critical and privileged vantage point that would enable the writer to be more than a bubble on the surface of contemporary life. A starting point here should be a reformulation of the idea of totality. I have suggested above that neither Lyotard nor Baudrillard can entirely dispense with this concept. For instance, Baudrillard does not expunge the notion of ‘system’ from his work; indeed, if he were to do so it would be difficult to comprehend how he could say anything at all about the contours of postmodernism. Certainly, for instance, his discussion of a ‘politics of deterrence’ implicitly affirms that it is still necessary to conceal the fact that there is nothing, that political leaders still have to concern themselves with the problem of movement across an absent political domain. Baudrillard is surprisingly mute about the significance of this problem, perhaps because its existence suggests that contemporary politicians have not yet completely managed to replace dissimulation with hyperreality. Hence, perhaps, to some extent, there is still the chance that they might be held accountable. In trying to reconstruct the idea of totality under the conditions of postmodernity a starting point should be the ongoing relationship between capitalism and the ‘postmodern’ cultural tendencies described above. Clearly there are totalizing tendencies in postmodernism, as well as obvious fragmentation and pluralism. Since the nineteenth century, capital has progressively assimilated first labor then culture; finally it has attempted to commodify all signs, images and events. This has led Best (1989:24) to point out that, although the ‘commodification of reality’ has been an undeniable trend, the ‘reality of commodification has not come to an end’. Similarly, while acknowledging that ‘we need to rethink the problematics of radical politics, of socialism or even radical social transformation or emancipation’, Kellner (1989b:19) argues that ‘the hegemony of capital is still the fundamental principle of social organization…’. Yet the transition from the commodity as sign to the sign as commodity has marked a definitive break between two qualitatively different kinds of capitalism. Whereas early market capitalism produces a cultural form of ‘realism’ based on production and use-value, ‘postindustrial’ or ‘multinational’ capitalism sustains and reproduces the condition of ‘postmodernism’ (Jameson, 1984:78), i.e., nihilism and implosion. The major impediment to developing a critique of the totalizing effects of the structural law of value remains the difficulties associated with the concomitant disappearance of the relatively indepen-


dent, self-reflective and critical subject. Unfortunately, by definition, the disappearance or marginalization of such a subject must of necessity be a part of such totalization. Jameson (1989) is sanguine about a reconciliation between Marxism and postmodernism, declaring that there is no necessary incompatability between them. He claims (1989:386–7), we are now in a ‘transitional period between two stages of capitalism’, the earlier stage having had to deal with the oppositions it had helped produce, viz., ‘labor movements and insurgencies, mass socialist parties, even socialist states…’, the latter being a period in which capital will enjoy ‘greater elbow-room and space for maneuver’ than ever before. Still, Jameson is optimistic about the future: ‘That a new international proletariat (taking forms we cannot yet imagine) will reemerge from this convulsive upheaval it needs no prophet to predict…’. An important issue raised by Jameson and by others is the possible impact of Third World rebels on the culture of core capitalist societies. Like Fukuyama, Baudrillard is quite willing to relegate the majority of the world’s population to a state of utter oblivion and invisibility. Doubtless Jameson is correct in suggesting that there will be unforeseeable explosions among the ranks of the utterly deprived. It is perhaps significant that as state socialism was rolled up in Germany of the people of El Salvador fought back against the barbarism inflicted on them by the United States with a degree of courage and organization that caught the governing élite in this country completely off balance. However, Jameson is unable to locate a new rhetoric or narrative of struggle that would unite a dislocated and fragmented international proletariat. The question here must be whether commodity penetration in ‘traditional’ societies will effectively neutralize the opportunities radical elements will have to organize resistance against Western and Asian capital. It is extremely difficult to build a revolutionary society behind closed boundaries, but, as the Sandinistas discovered, it is also almost impossible to chart an independent revolutionary course in a society that is daily subject to economic and ideological penetration. Because the commodification of the sign has increasingly come under centralized control, in the foreseeable future any resistance to capital per se will probably continue to be concentrated in the core societies. Attempts to preserve a recognizably Marxist narrative of emancipation will prevail only to the extent that this narrative will interpellate subjects still capable of resisting commodification and who —in the midst of indeterminacy—can manage to ground the reality of their critical practice. As I have already suggested, the production of


such actors is now inherently problematic. While I do not reject out of hand the possibility of identifying vantage points that permit a privileged or critical perspective, I do not believe it likely that such a perspective could easily be universalized. It must therefore be acknowledged that, as a total narrative of emancipation, Marxism today has run its course. Critical theory must now help subjects to discover the internally imposed limits of their practices or language games. Only within this context can Marxism still have relevance. These developments, however, need not be fatal. As Rorty (1989:189) has observed, even if we can no longer believe in ‘core selves’ (souls), or history, and even if we can no longer place our trust in traditional or modern institutions, ‘belief can still regulate action, can still be thought worth dying for, among people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance’. The end of a universalistic narrative of emancipation does not mean the end of unitary discourses constructing very specifie subjects. In fact, it might even be the case that the ‘category of the subject remains highly viable in large part because it has never been so hotly contested’ (Collins, 1987:24). Over half a century ago, Adorno (1973:325) acknowledged that modernity had required us to ‘renounce the illusion with which philosophical systems formerly began: that it is possible to grasp the totality of thought through the power of thought’. There are no theoretical solutions either to the problems of modernity or to the aporias of postmodernity. If we can no longer believe in the likelihood of a total critique of society we can perhaps take comfort in the thought that total mechanisms of cooptation are probably equally unlikely. Lyotard has suggested that the end of modernist reification opens up at least the possibility of new performatives, the outcome of which cannot be determined in advance. Even Baudrillard (1987a:71)— somewhat inconsistently and paradoxically—has suggested that the nihilism of postmodernism opens up ‘a more exciting world’: ‘Not a more reassuring world, but certainly more thrilling, a world where the name of the game remains secret. A world ruled by reversibility and indetermination…’.


Notes 1 Figure 1 is partially adapted from Baudrillard (1983a:11–12, 83–7). 2 To use the sign cynically is to produce a certain effect. This effect is produced as part of simulation. Yet, as Erving Goffman liked to point out, whether or not an observer is aware that something is being simulated is not of ultimate importance in determining whether the real is being produced. The fundamental question Goffman (1974:2) asked was ‘Under what conditions are things real in their effect on us?’. As he demonstrated repeatedly, as far as counterfeiting is concerned, an awareness on the part of an observer that something is being simulated will not in and of itself affect the reality or unreality of an experience. Brahms’ violin concerto played by a synthesizer can still produce the same emotional effects as the almost identical sounds made by a violin player and an orchestra. 3 I should point out here that I am not trying to make dogmatic metaphysical statements. I do not wish—or need—to address the issue of whether there is anything outside simulation or beyond the simulacrum. (I do not know whether there is or is not; more to the point, I do not know how this question could ever be resolved satisfactorily). I am merely pointing out that it is useless to try to persuade oneself that one has located some timeless truth by pointing to the existence of finalities already produced in discourse. Instead, I think the ‘real’ is best explained by identifying the conditions under which the referent is produced. Thus I endorse Rorty’s (1985a) post-Wittgensteinian argument that much of modern (post-Cartesian) philosophy has been an irrelevant ‘sideshow’ and that most of the classical epistemological problems with which ‘an isolated order of priests’ have devoted themselves over the last few hundred years can be retired. 4 As Terry Eagleton (1986:134) has suggested, the interpenetration of hyperreality and hypercapitalism helps illustrate the embeddedness of poststructuralism and postmodernism in contemporary experience:

It is not difficult…to see a relation between the philosophy of J.L.Austin and IBM, or between the various neoNietzscheans of a poststructuralist epoch and Standard Oil. It is not surprising that classical models of truth and cognition are increasingly out of favor in a society where what matters is whether you deliver the commercial or rhetorical goods. Whether among discourse theorists or the Institute of Directors, the goal is no longer truth but performativity, not reason but power. The CBI are in this sense spontaneous poststructuralists to a man, utterly disenchanted (did they but know it) with epistemological realism and the correspondence theory of truth. 5 Postmodern developments have transformed what is now meant by ‘science’ or ‘knowledge’. As Lyotard (1984:3–4) has pointed out, it explains why

for the last forty years the ‘leading’ sciences and technolo-


gies have had to do with language: phonology and theories of linguistics, problems of communication and cybernetics, modern theories of algebra and informatics, computers and their languages, problems of translation and the search for areas of compatibility among computer languages, problems of information storage and data banks, telematics and the perfection of intelligent terminals, paradoxology. 6 The New York Times, 8 November, 1989. 7 Fukuyama’s essay has been introduced to the world as an insightful work of genius. National Interest initially published it with accompanying commentary from Senator Patrick Daniel Moynihan, Irving Kristol, Allan Bloom, and other leading thinkers, thus drawing attention to its importance, centrality, and originality. It has even been given extensive coverage by the mass media (see, for instance, ‘Has History Come to an End?’, Time, 4 September 1989:57). Admittedly, as a work of description, rather than analysis, ‘The End of History’ does have a certain dogged plausibility. And Fukuyama’s discomfort as he contemplates the disappearance of the ground on which he would like to place his feet does give the essay a certain poignancy. In a dim sort of way Fukuyama understands for whom the bell is tolling. Unlike Baudrillard, though, he lacks a sense of irony. Like Weber, whom he quotes fulsomely, Fukuyama tends to portray Western rationalism as an inscrutable excrescence that is now unredeemable. Yet, unlike Weber, Fukuyama cannot even try to locate the beginning of the end of history in history. 8 For a good discussion of postmodernist culture as a positive, creative influence, see Hebdige (1988). 9 Like Baudrillard, Lyotard is a lapsed Marxist. From 1954–64 he was part of an independent Marxist group, Socialisme ou Barberie, which also included Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis. 10 As Rorty (1985b) has pointed out, the problem with Lyotard is that he tends to posit a false dichotomy: representation must either be totalitarian or anarchistic. Rorty claims that a middle ground between these two extremes does exist, the example here (besides himself) being the work of the American pragmatists, including William James, Charles Peirce and William Dewey. Honneth (1985:155) has shown how Lyotard’s ‘aversion against the universal’ has created avoidable aporias:

For [Lyotard] every universal is the false, outright: each universalism, every assertion of universal conditions or rules of collective human rights bears on its brow the mark of the will to suppress cultural differences…. However, because he is not at all able to ignore the problem of the universal without remainder, Lyotard must in the end become ensnared in the premises of his own thought; the antipathy to universalism forbids a solution to the very


problem which he came up against with his demand for an unforced pluralism of social language-games. For, if recourse to universal norms is on principle blocked in the interests of a critique of ideology, then a meaningful argument in support of the equal right to coexistence of all everyday cultures cannot be constructed.

References ADORNO, T.W. (1973) [1931] ‘Die Aktualitát der Philosophie’, Gesammelte Schriften, 1. ASHLEY, D. (1990a) ‘Postmodernism and the “End of the Individual”: From Repressive Self-Mastery to Ecstatic Communication’, in WILSON, J. (Ed.) Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Vol. X, pp. 195–221, Greenwich, Connecticut: Jai Press. – (1990b) ‘Postmodernism and Anti-Foundationalism’, in DICKENS, D.R. and FONTANA, A. (Eds) Postmodernism and Social Inquiry, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. BAUDRILLARD, J. (1975) [1973] The Mirror of Production, translated by POSTER, M., St Louis: Telos Press. – (1979) De la Seduction, Paris: Denoel-Gonthier. – (1981) [1972] For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, translated by LEVIN, C., St Louis: Telos Press. – (1982) ‘Fatality or Reversible Imminence: Beyond the Uncertainty Principle’, translated by PARK, P., Social Research, 49:272–93. – (1983a) Simulations, translated by Foss, P., PATTON, P. and BEITCHMAN, P., New York: Semiotext(e), Foreign Agent Press. – (1983b) In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, translated by Foss, P., PATTON, P. and JOHNSTON, J., New York: Semiotext(e), Foreign Agent Press. – (1987a) [1977] Forget Foucault, New York: Semiotext(e), Foreign Agent Press. – (1987b) ‘Modernity’, translated by JAMES, D., Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 11:63–72. – (1987c) The Evil Demon of Images, translated by PATTON, P. and Foss, P., Sydney: Power Institute Publications. – (1988a) The Ecstasy of Communication, edited by LOTRINGER, S., translated by SCHUTZE, B. and C., New York: Semiotext(e), Foreign Agent Press.


– (1988b) America, translated by TURNER, C., London: Verso. – (1988c) ‘Hunting Nazis and Losing Reality’, New Statesman, 115:15–17. – (1989) ‘The End of Production’, translated by JULIAN, A., Polygraph 2/3: 5–29. BEST, S. (1989) ‘The Commodification of Reality and the Reality of Commodification’, in WILSON, J. (Ed.) Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Vol. IX, pp. 23–51, Greenwich, Connecticut: Jai Press. COLONS, J. (1987) ‘Postmodernism and Cultural Practice’, Screen, 28:11–26. DEWS, P. (1987) Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory, London: Verso. EAGLETON, T. (Ed.) (1986) ‘Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism’, in Against the Grain: Essays 1975–1985, pp. 131–48, London: Verso. FOUCAULT, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–77, edited by GORDON, C., New York: Pantheon. – (1989) Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966–84), translated by JOHNSTONE, J., edited by LOTRINGER, S., New York: Semiotext(e), Foreign Agent Press. FUKUYAMA, F. (1989) ‘The End of History’, National Interest, 16:3–18. GOFFMAN, E. (1974) Frame Analysis, New York: Harper. HABERMAS, J. (1981) ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’, New German Critique, 22:3–14. – (1984) [1981] The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, translated by MCCARTHY, T., Boston: Beacon Press. – (1987a) [1981] The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, translated by MCCARTHY, T., Boston: Beacon Press. – (1987b) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, translated by LAWRENCE, F., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. HARVEY, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. HEBDIGE, D. (1988) Hiding in the Light. On Images and Things, London: Routledge. HONNETH, A. (1985) ‘An Aversion Against the Universal. A Commentary on Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition’, Theory, Culture, and Society, 2:147–56.


JAMESON, F. (1984) ‘Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, 146: 53–92. – (1988a) ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in KAPLAN, E.A. (Ed.) Postmodernism and its Discontents, pp. 13–29, London: Verso. – (1988b) [1984] ‘The Politics of Theory. Ideological Positions in the Post-modern Debate’, in The Ideologies of Theory. Essays 1971– 1986, Vol. II, pp. 103–13, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. – (1988c) [1984] ‘Periodizing the 60s’, in The Ideologies of Theory, op. cit. pp. 178–208. – (1989) ‘Afterword—Marxism and Postmodernism’, in KELLNER, D. (Ed.) Postmodernism, Jameson, Critique, pp. 369–87, Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press. JAY, M. (1984) Marxism and Totality. The Adventures of a Concept from Lukàcs to Habermas, Berkeley: University of California Press. – (1988) Fin-de-Siècle Socialism and Other Essays, London: Routledge. JENCKS, C. (1986) What is Post-Modernism? New York: St Martin’s Press. KAPLAN, E.A. (Ed.) (1988) Postmodernism and Its Discontents, London: Verso. KELLNER, D. (Ed.) (1989a) Postmodernism, Jameson, Critique, Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press. – (1989b) ‘Boundaries and Borderlines: Reflections on Jean Baudrillard and Critical Theory’, in WILSON, J. (Ed.) Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Vol. IX, pp. 23–51, Greenwich, Connecticut: Jai Press. – (1989c) Jean Baudrillard. From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond, CA: Stanford University Press. KROKER, A. and COOK, D. (1986) The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics, New York: St Martin’s Press. KROKER, A., KROKER, M. and COOK, D. (1989) Panic Encyclopedia. The Definitive Guide to the Postmodern Scene, New York: St Martin’s Press. LÉVI-STRAUSS, C. (1966) The Savage Mind, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. LUKÁCS, G. (1971) [1923] History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics, translated by LIVINGSTONE, R., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. LYOTARD, J.-F. (1973a) Des dispositifs pulsionnels, Paris: Union générale d’editions.


– (1973b) Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud, Paris: Union générale d’editions. – (1974) Economie libidinale, Paris: Minuit. – (1984) [1979] The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by BENNINGTON, G. and MASSUMI, B., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. – (1985) ‘Missive sur l’Histoire’, Critique, 41:456–78. – (1987) ‘Rules and Paradoxes and Svelte Appendix’, Cultural Critique, 5:209–19. – (1988a) [1983] The Differend. Phrases in Dispute, translated by VAN DEN ABBEELE, G., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. – (1988b) Peregrinations. Law, Form, Event, New York: Columbia University Press. LYOTARD, J.-F. and THÉBAUD, J.L. (1985) [1979] Just Gaming, translated by GODZICH, W., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. MARX, K. (1970) [1867] Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, New York: International Publishers. POSTER, M. (Ed.) (1988) Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Cambridge, England: Polity Press. VAN REIJEN, W. and VEERMAN, D. (1988) ‘An Interview with Jean-Francois Lyotard’, Theory, Culture and Society, 5:277–310. RODERICK, R. (1989) ‘Beyond a Boundary: Baudrillard and New Critical Theory’, in WILSON, J. (Ed.) Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Vol. IX, pp. 3–4, Greenwich, Connecticut: Jai Press. RORTY, R. (1985a) ‘Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity’, in BERNSTEIN, R.J. (Ed.) Habermas and Modernity, pp. 161–75, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. – (1985b) ‘Le Cosmopolitisme sans émancipation: en réponse à JeanFrancois Lyotard’, Critique, 41:570–83. – (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DE SAUSSURE, F. (1959) [1916] Course in General Linguistics, edited by BALLY, C. and SECHEHAYE, A., translated by BASKIN, W., New York: Philosophical Library. SIMMEL, G. (1968) ‘The Concept and Tragedy of Culture’, in ETZKORN, P.K. (trans. and Ed.) The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays, pp. 27–46, New York: Teachers College Press. –(1978) [1907] The Philosophy of Money, trans. by BOTTOMORE, T. and FRISBY, D., London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

4 The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories for Feminist Politics1 Nancy Fraser

This essay grows out of an experience of severe puzzlement. For several years now I have been watching with growing incomprehension as increasing numbers of feminist scholars have been trying to use or adapt the theory of Jacques Lacan for feminist purposes. I myself have felt a deep disaffinity with Lacan, a disaffinity as much intellectual as political. So while many of my fellow feminists have been using Lacanian ideas to theorize the discursive construction of subjectivity in film and literature, I have been relying on alternative models of language to develop a feminist social theory. Until now, I have avoided any explicit, metatheoretical discussion of these matters. I have explained neither to myself nor to my colleagues why it is that the footnotes in my recent papers contain some positive or quasipositive references to Foucault, Bourdieu, Bakhtin, Habermas, and Gramsci but not positive references to Lacan, Kristeva, Saussure, and Derrida.2 In this essay, I want to begin to provide such an explanation. I will try to explain why I think feminists should have no truck with Lacan and why we should have only the most minimal truck with Julia Kristeva. I will also try to identify some places where I think we can find more satisfactory alternatives.

What do Feminists want in a Discourse Theory? Let me begin by posing the questions: what might a theory of discourse contribute to feminism and what, therefore, do feminists want in a discourse theory? I suggest that a theory of discourse can help us understand at least four things, all of which are interrelated. First, it can help us understand how people’s social identities are fashioned and altered over time. Second, it can help us understand how, under conditions of inequality, social groups in the sense of collective agents 98

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are formed and unformed. Third, a theory of discourse can illuminate how the cultural hegemony of dominant groups in society is secured and contested. Fourth, it can shed light on the prospects for emancipatory social change and political practice. Let me elaborate. First, consider the uses of a theory of discourse for understanding social identities. The basic idea here is that people’s social identities are complexes of meanings, networks of interpretation. To have a social identity, to be a woman or a man, for example, just is to live and to act under a set of descriptions. These descriptions, of course, are not simply secreted by people’s bodies, still less are they exuded by people’s psyches. Rather, they are drawn from the fund of interpretive possibilities available to agents in specific societies. It follows that in order to understand anyone’s feminine or masculine gender identity, it does not suffice to study biology or psychology. Instead, one must study the historically specific social practices through which cultural-descriptions of gender are produced and circulated.3 Moreover, social identities are exceedingly complex. They are knit from a plurality of different descriptions arising from a plurality of different signifying practices. Thus, no one is simply a woman; one is rather, for example, a white, Jewish, middle-class woman, a philosopher, a lesbian, a socialist, and a mother.4 Moreover, since everyone acts in a plurality of social contexts, the different descriptions comprising any individual’s social identity fade in and out of focus. Thus, one is not always a woman in the same degree; in some contexts, one’s womanhood figures centrally in the set of descriptions under which one acts; in others, it is peripheral or latent.5 Finally, it is not the case that people’s social identities are constructed once and for all and definitively fixed. Rather, they alter over time, shifting with shifts in agents’ practices and affiliations. Thus, even the way in which one is a woman will shift, as it does, to take a dramatic example, when one becomes a feminist. In short, social identities are discursively constructed in historically specific social contexts; they are complex and plural; and they shift over time. One use of a theory of discourse for feminist politics, then, is in understanding social identities in their full socio-cultural complexity, thus in demystifying static, single variable, essentialist views of gender identity. A second use of a theory of discourse for feminist politics is in understanding the formation of social groups. How does it happen, under conditions of inequality, that people come together, arrange themselves under the banner of collective identities, and constitute themselves as collective social agents? How do class formation and, by analogy, gender formation, occur?


Clearly, group formation involves shifts in people’s social identities and therefore also in their relation to discourse. One thing that happens here is that pre-existing strands of identities acquire a new sort of salience and centrality. These strands, previously submerged among many others, are reinscribed as the nub of new self-definitions and affiliations.6 For example, in the current wave of feminist ferment, many of us who had previously been ‘women’ in some takenfor-granted way have now become ‘women’ in the very different sense of a discursively self-constituted political collectivity. In the process, we have remade entire regions of social discourse. We have invented new terms for describing social reality, for example, ‘sexism’, ‘sexual harassment’, ‘marital, date, and acquaintance rape’, ‘labor force sexsegregation’, ‘the double shift’, and ‘wife-battery’. We have also invented new language games such as consciousness-raising and new, institutionalized public spheres such as the Society for Women in Philosophy.7 The point is that the formation of social groups proceeds by struggles over social discourse. Thus, a theory of discourse is useful here, both for understanding social groups and for coming to grips with the closely related issue of socio-cultural hegemony. ‘Hegemony’ is the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s term for the discursive face of power. It is the power to establish the ‘common sense’ or ‘doxa’ of a society, the fund of self-evident descriptions of social reality that normally go without saying.8 This includes the power to establish authoritative definitions of social situations and social needs, the power to define the universe of legitimate disagreement, and the power to shape the political agenda. Hegemony, then, expresses the advantaged position of dominant social groups with respect to discourse. It is a concept that allows us to recast the issues of social identity and social groups in the light of societal inequality. How do pervasive axes of dominance and subordination affect the production and circulation of social meanings? How does stratification along lines of gender, race, and class affect the discursive construction of social identities and the formation of social groups? The notion of hegemony points to the intersection of power, inequality, and discourse. However, it does not entail that the ensemble of descriptions that circulate in society comprise a monolithic and seamless web, nor that dominant groups exercise an absolute, topdown control of meaning. On the contrary, ‘hegemony’ designates a process wherein cultural authority is negotiated and contested. It presupposes that societies contain a plurality of discourses and discursive sites, a plurality of positions and perspectives from which to speak. Of course, not all of these have equal authority. Yet conflict and con-


testation are part of the story. Thus, one use of a theory of discourse for feminist politics is to shed light on the processes by which the socio-cultural hegemony of dominant groups is achieved and contested. What are the processes by which definitions and interpretations inimical to women’s interests acquire cultural authority? What are the prospects for mobilizing counter-hegemonic feminist definitions and interpretations to create broad oppositional groups and alliances? I trust that the link between these questions and emancipatory political practice is obvious. A theory of discourse that lets us examine identities, groups, and hegemony in the ways I have been describing would be a great aid to feminist practice. It would valorize the empowering dimensions of discursive struggles without leading to ‘culturalist’ retreats from political engagement.9 In addition, the right kind of theory would counter the disabling assumption that women are just passive victims of male dominance. That assumption overtotalizes male dominance, treating men as the only social agents and rendering inconceivable our own existence as feminist theorists and activists. In contrast, the sort of theory I have been proposing would help us understand how, even under conditions of subordination, women participate in the making of culture.

Jacques Lacan and the Limits of Structuralism In light of the foregoing, what sort of theory of discourse will be useful for feminist politics? What sort of theory can best meet our needs to understand identities, groups, hegemony, and emancipatory practice? In recent years, two general models for theorizing language have emerged in France. The first of these is the structuralist model, which studies language as a symbolic system or code. This model is derived from Saussure, presupposed in Lacan, and abstractly negated but not entirely superseded in deconstruction and in related forms of French women’s writing. The second model, by contrast, I shall call the pragmatic model: it studies language at the level of discourses, as historically specific social practices of communication. This model is operative in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and in some but not all dimensions of the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. In this section, I shall argue that the first, structuralist model is not very useful for feminist politics. Let me begin by noting that there are good prima facie reasons for


feminists to be suspicious of the structuralist model. This model constructs its object of study by abstracting from exactly what we need to focus on, namely, the social practice and social context of communication. Indeed, the abstraction from practice and context are among the founding gestures of Saussurean linguistics. Saussure began by splitting signification into langue, the symbolic system or code, and parole, speakers’ uses of language in communicative practice or speech. He then made the first of these, langue, the proper object of the new science of linguistics, and relegated the second, parole, to the status of a devalued remainder.10At the same time, Saussure insisted that the study of langue be synchronic rather than diachronic; he thereby posited his object of study as static and atemporal, abstracting it from historical change. Finally, the founder of structuralist linguistics posited that langue was indeed a single system; he made its unity and systematicity consist in the putative fact that every signifier, every material, signifying element of the code, derives its meaning positionally by way of its difference from all of the others. Together, these founding operations render the structuralist approach of doubtful utility for feminist politics.11 Because it abstracts from parole, the structuralist model brackets questions of practice, agency, and the speaking subject. Thus, it is cannot shed light on social identity and group formation. Moreover, because this approach brackets the diachronic, it will not tell us anything about shifts in identities and affiliations over time. Similarly, because it abstracts from the social context of communication, the model brackets issues of power and inequality. Thus, it cannot illuminate the processes by which cultural hegemony is secured and contested. Finally, because the model theorizes the fund of available linguistic meanings as a single symbolic system, it lends itself to a monolithic view of signification that denies tensions and contradictions among social meanings. In short, by reducing discourse to a ‘symbolic system’, the structuralist model evacuates social agency, social conflict, and social practice.12 Let me now try to illustrate these problems by means of a brief discussion of the work of Jacques Lacan. Lacan serves as a useful example for several reasons, including his continuing appeal for many feminists. In addition, his work exemplifies the dilemma of many ‘poststructuralist’ theorists whose abstract attempts to break free of structuralism only render them all the more bound to it. At first sight, Lacan’s work seems to have some advantages for feminist theorists. By conjoining the Freudian problematic of the construction of gendered subjectivity to the Saussurean model of structural


linguistics, he seems to provide each with its needed corrective. The introduction of the Freudian problematic promises to supply the speaking subject that is missing in Saussure and thereby to reopen the excluded questions about identity, speech, and social practice. Conversely, the use of the Saussurean model promises to remedy some of Freud’s deficiencies. By insisting that gender identity is discursively constructed, Lacan appears to eliminate lingering vestiges of biologism in Freud, to treat gender as socio-cultural all the way down, and to render it in principle more open to change. However, these apparent advantages vanish upon closer inspection. Instead, it becomes clear that Lacan’s theory is viciously circular. On the one hand, it purports to describe the process by which individuals acquire gendered subjectivity through their painful conscription as young children into a pre-existing phallocentric symbolic order. Here the structure of the symbolic order determines the character of individual subjectivity. But on the other hand, and at the same time, the theory purports to show that the symbolic order must necessarily be phallocentric since the attainment of subjectivity requires submission to ‘the Father’s Law’. Here, then, the nature of individual subjectivity, as dictated by an autonomous psychology, determines the character of the symbolic order. One result of this circularity is an ironclad determinism. As Dorothy Leland has noted, the theory casts the developments it describes as necessary, invariant, and unalterable.13 Phallocentrism, woman’s disadvantaged place in the symbolic order, the encoding of cultural authority as masculine, the impossibility of describing a nonphallic sexuality, in short, any number of trappings of male dominance now appear as invariable features of the human condition. Women’s subordination, then, is inscribed as the inevitable destiny of civilization. I can spot several spurious steps in this reasoning, some of which have their roots in the presupposition of the structuralist model. First, to the degree Lacan has succeeded in eliminating biologism, and that is dubious for reasons I cannot take up here,14 he has replaced it with psychologism, the untenable view that autonomous psychological imperatives given independently of culture and history can dictate the way they are interpreted and acted on within culture and history. Lacan falls prey to psychologism when he claims that the phallocentricity of the symbolic order is required by the demands of an enculturation process that is itself independent of culture.15 If one half of Lacan’s circular argument is vitiated by psychologism, then the other half is vitiated by what I should like to call ‘symboli-


cism’. By symbolicism, I mean, first, the homogenizing reification of diverse signifying practices into a monolithic and allpervasive ‘symbolic order’, and, second, the endowing of that order with an exclusive and unlimited causal power to fix people’s subjectivities once and for all. Symbolicism, then, is an operation whereby the structuralist abstraction langue is troped into a quasi-divinity, a normative ‘symbolic order’ whose power to shape identities dwarfs to the point of extinction that of mere historical institutions and practices. Actually, as Deborah Cameron has noted, Lacan equivocates on the expression ‘the symbolic order’.16 Sometimes he uses this expression relatively narrowly to refer to Saussurean langue, the structure of language as a system of signs. In this narrow usage, Lacan would be committed to the implausible view that the sign system itself determines individual’s subjectivities independently of the social context and social practice of its uses. At other times, by contrast, Lacan uses the expression ‘the symbolic order’ far more broadly to refer to an amalgam that includes not only linguistic structures, but also cultural traditions and kinship structures, the latter mistakenly equated with social structure in general.17Here he conflates the ahistorical structural abstraction langue with variable historical phenomena like family forms and childrearing practices; cultural representations of love and authority in art, literature, and philosphy; the gender division of labor; forms of political organization and of other institutional sources of power and status. The result is a notion of ‘the symbolic order’ that essentializes and homogenizes contingent historical practices and traditions, erasing tensions, contradictions, and possibilities for change. It is a notion, moreover, that is so broad that the claim that it determines the structure of subjectivity is an empty tautology.18 The combination of psychologism and symbolicism in Lacan results in a theory that is of little use for feminist politics. To be sure, this theory offers an account of the discursive construction of social identity. However, it is not an account that can make sense of the complexity and multiplicity of social identities, the ways they are woven from a plurality of discursive strands. Granted, Lacan stresses that the apparent unity and simplicity of ego identity is imaginary, that the subject is irreparably split both by language and drives. But this insistence on fracture does not lead to an appreciation of the diversity of the socio-cultural discursive practices from which identities are woven. It leads, rather, to a unitary view of the human condition as inherently tragic. In fact, Lacan differentiates identities only in binary terms, along the single axis of having or lacking the phallus. Now, as Luce Irigaray


has shown, this phallic conception of sexual difference is not an adequate basis for understanding femininity19—nor, I would add, masculinity. Still less, then, is it able to shed light on other dimensions of social identities, including ethnicity, color, and social class. Nor could the theory be emended to incorporate these manifestly historical phenomena, given its postulation of an ahistorical, tension-free ‘symbolic order’ equated with kinship.20 Moreover, Lacan’s account of identity construction cannot account for identity shifts over time. It is committed to the psychoanalytic proposition that gender identity (the only kind of identity it considers) is basically fixed once and for all with the resolution of the Oedipus complex. Lacan equates this resolution with the child’s entry into a fixed, monolithic, and all-powerful symbolic order. Thus, if anything, he actually increases the degree of identity fixity found in classical Freudian theory. It is true, as Jacqueline Rose points out, that the theory stresses that gender identity is always precarious, that its apparent unity and stability are always threatened by repressed libidinal drives.21 But this emphasis on precariousness is not an opening onto genuine historical thinking about shifts in people’s social identities. On the contrary, it is an insistence on a permanent, ahistorical condition, since in Lacan’s view the only alternative to fixed gender identity is psychosis. If the Lacanian model cannot provide an account of social identity that is useful for feminist politics, then it is unlikely to help us understand group formation. For Lacan, affiliation falls under the rubric of the imaginary. To affiliate with others, then, to align oneself with others in a social movement, would be to fall prey to the illusions of the imaginary ego. It would be to deny loss and lack, to seek an impossible unification and fulfillment. Thus, from a Lacanian perspective, collective movements would by definition be vehicles of delusion; they could not even in principle be emancipatory.22 Moreover, insofar as group formation depends on linguistic innovation, it is untheorizable from a Lacanian perspective. Since Lacan posits a fixed, monolithic symbolic system and a speaker who is wholly subjected to it, it is inconceivable how there could ever be any linguistic innovation. Speaking subjects could only ever reproduce the existing symbolic order, they could not possibly alter it. It follows that one cannot even pose the question of cultural hegemony. There can be no question about how the cultural authority of dominant groups in society is established and contested, no question of unequal negotiations between different social groups occupying different discursive positions. On the contrary, on the Lacanian view


there is simply ‘the symbolic order’, a single universe of discourse that is so systematic, so all-pervasive, so monolithic that one cannot even conceive of such things as alternative perspectives, multiple discursive sites, struggles over social meanings, contests between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic definitions of social situations, conflicts of interpretation of social needs. One cannot even conceive, really, of a plurality of different speakers. With the way blocked to a political understanding of identities, groups and cultural hegemony, the way is also blocked to an understanding of political practice. For one thing, there is no conceivable agent of such practice. None of the three moments that comprise the Lacanian view of the person can qualify as a political agent. The speaking subject is simply a grammatical ‘I’ wholly subjected to the symbolic order; it can only and forever reproduce that order. The Lacanian ego is an imaginary projection, deluded about its own stability and self-possession, hooked on an impossible desire for unity and self-completion; it therefore can only and forever tilt at windmills. Finally, there is the ambiguous Lacanian unconscious, sometimes an ensemble of repressed libidinal drives, sometimes the face of language as Other, but never anything that could count as a social agent. This discussion shows, I think, that there are many things wrong with Lacan. I have focused here on conceptual as opposed to empirical issues, and I have not directly addressed the question: is Lacan’s theory true? With respect to that question, I will note only that Lacan himself was remarkably unconcerned with empirical confirmation and that recent research on the development of subjectivity in infants and young children does not support his views. It now appears that even at the earliest stages children are not passive, blank slates on which symbolic structures are inscribed but, rather, active participants in the interactions that construct their experience.23 Be that as it may, in focusing here on Lacan’s conceptual shortcomings, I have stressed those deficiencies that have their roots in the presupposition of the structuralist conception of language. Lacan seemed to want to get beyond structuralism by introducing the concept of the speaking subject. This in turn seemed to hold out the promise of a way of theorizing discursive practice. However, as I hope I have shown, these promises have remained unfulfilled. The speaking subject introduced by Lacan is not the agent of discursive practice. It is simply an effect of the symbolic order conjoined to some repressed libidinal drives. Thus, the introduction of the speaking subject has not succeeded in dereifying linguistic structure. On the contrary, a reified conception of language as system has colonized the speaking subject.


Julia Kristeva between Structuralism and Pragmatics So far, I have been arguing that the structural model of language is not especially useful for feminist politics. Now I want to suggest that the pragmatic model is more promising. Indeed, there are good prima facie reasons for feminists to prefer a pragmatic approach to the study of language. Unlike the structuralist approach, the pragmatic view studies language as social practice in social context. This model takes discourses, not structures, as its object. Discourses are historically specific, socially situated, signifying practices. They are the communicative frames in which speakers interact by exchanging speech acts. Yet discourses are themselves set within social institutions and action contexts. Thus, the concept of a discourse links the study of language to the study of society. The pragmatic model offers several potential advantages for feminist politics. First, it treats discourses as contingent, positing that they arise, alter and disappear over time. Thus, the model lends itself to historical contextualization; and it allows us to thematize change. Second, the pragmatic approach understands signification as action rather than as representation. It is concerned with how people ‘do things with words’. Thus, the model allows us to see speaking subjects not simply as effects of structures and systems, but rather as socially situated agents. Third, the pragmatic model treats discourses in the plural. It starts from the assumption that there are a plurality of different discourses in society, therefore a plurality of communicative sites from which to speak. Because it posits that individuals assume different discursive positions as they move from one discursive frame to another, this model lends itself to a theorization of social identities as non-monolithic. Next, the pragmatic approach rejects the assumption that the totality of social meanings in circulation constitutes a single, coherent, self-reproducing ‘symbolic system’. Instead, it allows for conflicts among social schemas of interpretation and among the agents who deploy them. Finally, because it links the study of discourses to the study of society, the pragmatic approach allows us to focus on power and inequality. In short, the pragmatic approach has many of the features we need in order to understand the complexity of social identities, the formation of social groups, the securing and contesting of cultural hegemony, and the possibility and actuality of political practice. Let me illustrate the uses of the pragmatic model for feminist politics by considering the ambiguous case of Julia Kristeva. Kristeva’s case is instructive in that she began her career as a critic of structural-


ism and a proponent of a pragmatic alternative. However, having fallen under Lacan’s sway along the way, she has not managed to maintain a consistently pragmatic orientation. Instead, she has ended up producing a strange, hybrid theory, one that oscillates between structuralism and pragmatics. In what follows, I shall argue that the politically fruitful aspects of Kristeva’s thought are linked to its pragmatic dimensions, while the political impasses she arrives at derive from structuralist lapses. Kristeva’s intention to break with structuralism is most clearly and succinctly announced in a brilliant 1973 paper, ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’.24 Here she argues that, because it conceives language as a symbolic system, structuralist semiotics is necessarily incapable of understanding oppositional practice and change. To remedy these lacunae, she proposes a new approach oriented to ‘signifying practices’. These she defines as norm-governed, but not necessarily allpowerfully constraining, and as situated in ‘historically determined relations of production’. As a complement to this concept of signifying practices, Kristeva also proposes a new concept of the ‘speaking subject’. This subject is socially and historically situated, to be sure, but it is not wholly subjected to the reigning social and discursive conventions. It is a subject, rather, who is capable of innovative practice. In a few bold strokes, then, Kristeva rejects the exclusion of context, practice, agency, and innovation; and she proposes a new model of discursive pragmatics. Her general idea is that speakers act in socially situated, norm-governed signifying practices. In so doing, they sometimes transgress the established norms in force. Transgressive practice gives rise to discursive innovations and these in turn may lead to actual change. Innovative practice may subsequently be normalized in the form of new or modified discursive norms, thereby ‘renovating’ signifying practices.25 The uses of this sort of approach for feminist politics should by now be apparent. Yet there are also some warning signs of possible problems. First, there is Kristeva’s antinomian bent, her tendency, at least in this early quasi-Maoist phase of her career, to valorize transgression and innovation per se irrespective of content.26 The flip side of this attitude is a penchant for inflecting norm-conforming practice as negative tout court, irrespective of the content of the norms. Obviously, this attitude is not particularly helpful for feminist politics, since such politics require ethical distinctions between oppressive and emancipatory social norms. A second potential problem here is Kristeva’s aestheticizing bent, her association of valorized transgression with ‘poetic practice’. Kris-


teva tends to treat avant-garde aesthetic production as the privileged site of innovation. By contrast, communicative practice in everyday life appears as conformism simpliciter. This tendency to enclave or regionalize innovative practice is not useful for feminist politics. We need to recognize and assess the emancipatory potential of oppositional practice wherever it appears—in bedrooms, on shopfloors, in the caucuses of the American Philosophical Association. The third and most serious problem that I want to discuss is Kristeva’s additive approach to theorizing. By this I mean her penchant for remedying theoretical problems by simply adding to deficient theories instead of by scrapping or overhauling them. This, I submit, is how she ends up handling certain features of structuralism; rather than eliminating certain structuralist notions altogether, she simply adds other, anti-structuralist notions along side of them. Kristeva’s additive, dualistic style of theorizing is apparent in the way she analyzes and classifies signifying practices. She takes such practices to consist in varying proportions of two basic ingredients. One of these is ‘the symbolic’, a linguistic register keyed to the transmission of prepositional content via the observance of grammatical and syntactical rules. The other is ‘the semiotic’, a register keyed to the expression of libidinal drives via intonation and rhythm and not bound by linguistic rules. The symbolic, then, is the axis of discursive practice that helps reproduce the social order by imposing linguistic conventions on anarchic desires. The semiotic, in contrast, expresses a material, bodily source of revolutionary negativity, the power to break through convention and initiate change. According to Kristeva, all signifying practices contain some measure of each of these two registers of language, but with the single exception of poetic practice, the symbolic register is always the dominant one. In her later work, Kristeva provides a psychoanalytically grounded gender subtext to her distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic. Following Lacan, she associates the symbolic with the paternal, and she describes it as a monolithically phallocentric, rule-bound order to which subjects submit as the price of sociality when they resolve the Oedipal complex by accepting the Father’s Law. But then Kristeva breaks with Lacan in insisting on the underlying persistence of a feminine, maternal element in all signifying practice. She associates the semiotic with the pre-Oedipal and the maternal, and she valorizes it as a point of resistance to paternally-coded cultural authority, a sort of oppositional feminine beachhead within discursive practice. Now, this way of analyzing and classifying signifying practices may


seem at first sight to have some potential utility for feminist politics. It seems to contest the Lacanian presumption that language is monolithically phallocentric and to identify a locus of feminist opposition to the dominance of masculine power. However, on closer inspection, this appearance of political usefulness turns out to be largely illusory. In fact, Kristeva’s analysis of signifying practices betrays her best pragmatic intentions. The decomposition of such practices into symbolic and semiotic constituents does not lead beyond structuralism. The ‘symbolic’, after all, is a repetition of Lacan’s reified, phallocentric symbolic order. And while the ‘semiotic’ is a force that momentarily disrupts that symbolic order, it does not constitute an alternative to it. On the contrary, as Judith Butler has shown, the contest between the two modes of signification is stacked in favor of the symbolic: the semiotic is by definition transitory and subordinate, always doomed in advance to reabsorption by the symbolic order.27 Moreover, and more fundamentally problematic, I think, is the fact that the semiotic is defined parasitically over against the symbolic as the latter’s mirror image and abstract negation. Simply adding the two together, then, cannot and does not lead to pragmatics. Rather, it yields an amalgam of structure and anti-structure. Moreover, this amalgam is, in Hegel’s phrase, a ‘bad infinity’, since it leaves us oscillating ceaselessly between a structuralist moment and an antistructuralist moment without ever getting to anything else. Thus, by resorting to an additive mode of theorizing, Kristeva surrenders her promising pragmatic notion of signifying practice to a quasi-Lacanian neo-structuralism. In the process, she ends up reproducing some of Lacan’s most unfortunate errors. She, too, often lapses into symbolicism, treating the symbolic order as an allpowerful causal mechanism and conflating linguistic structure, kinship structure, and social structure in general.28 On the other hand, Kristeva sometimes does better than Lacan in appreciating the historical specificity and complexity of particular cultural traditions; much of her later work analyzes cultural representations of gender in such traditions. Even here, however, she often lapses into psychologism; for example, she mars her potentially very interesting studies of cultural representations of femininity and maternity in Christian theology and in Italian Renaissance painting by falling back on reductive schemes of interpretation that treat the historical material as reflexes of autonomous, ahistorical, psychological imperatives like ‘castration anxiety’ and ‘feminine paranoia’.29 All told, then, Kristeva’s theory of discourse surrenders many of the advantages of pragmatics for feminist politics. In the end, she loses


the pragmatic stress on the contingency and historicity of discursive practices, their openness to possible change. Instead, she lapses into a quasi-structuralist emphasis on the recuperating power of a reified symbolic order and thereby surrenders the possibility of explaining change. Likewise, her theory loses the pragmatic stress on the plurality of discursive practices. Instead, it lapses into a quasi-structuralist homogenizing and binarizing orientation, one that distinguishes practices along the sole axis of proportion of semiotic to symbolic, feminine to masculine, and thereby surrenders the potential to understand complex identities. Next, Kristeva loses the pragmatic stress on social context. Instead, she lapses into a quasi-structuralist conflation of ‘symbolic order’ with social context and thereby surrenders the capacity to link discursive dominance to societal inequality. Finally, her theory loses the pragmatic stress on interaction and social conflict. Instead, as Andrea Nye has shown, it focuses almost exclusively on intrasubjective tensions and thereby surrenders its ability to understand intersubjective phenomena, including affiliation, on the one hand, and struggle, on the other.30 This last point can be brought home by considering Kristeva’s account of the speaking subject. Far from being useful for feminist politics, her view replicates many of the disabling features of Lacan’s. Her subject, like his, is split into two halves, neither of which is a potential political agent. The subject of the symbolic is an oversocialized conformist, thoroughly subjected to symbolic conventions and norms. To be sure, its conformism is put ‘on trial’ by the rebellious, desiring ensemble of bodily-based drives associated with the semiotic. But, as before, the mere addition of an anti-structuralist force does not lead beyond structuralism. The semiotic ‘subject’ cannot itself be an agent of feminist political practice for several reasons. First, it is located beneath, rather than within, culture and society; so it is unclear how its practice could be political practice.31 Second, it is defined exclusively in terms of the transgression of social norms; thus, it cannot engage in the reconstructive moment of feminist politics, a moment essential to social transformation. Finally, it is defined in terms of the shattering of social identity, and so it cannot figure in the reconstruction of the new, politically constituted, collective identities and solidarities that are essential to feminist politics. By definition, then, neither half of Kristeva’s split subject can be a feminist political agent. Nor, I submit, can the two halves be joined together. They tend rather simply to cancel one another out, one forever shattering the identitarian pretensions of the other, the second forever recuperating the first and reconstituting itself as before. The


upshot is a paralyzing oscillation between identity and non-identity without any determinate practical issue. Here, then, is another instance of a ‘bad infinity’, an amalgam of structuralism and its abstract negation. If there are no individual agents of emancipatory practice in Kristeva’s universe, then there are no such collective agents either. This can be seen by examining one last instance of her additive pattern of thinking, namely, her treatment of the feminist movement itself. This topic is most directly addressed in an essay called ‘Women’s Time’ for which Kristeva is best known in feminist circles.32 Here, she identifies three ‘generations’ of feminist movements: first, an egalitarian, reformoriented, humanist feminism, aiming to secure women’s full participation in the public sphere, a feminism best personified perhaps by Simone de Beauvoir; second, a culturally-oriented gynocentric feminism, aiming to foster the expression of a non-male-defined feminine sexual and symbolic specificity, a feminism represented by the proponents of écriture féminine and parler femme; and finally, Kristeva’s own, self-proclaimed brand of feminism—in my view, actually postfeminism—a radically nominalist, anti-essentialist approach that stresses that ‘women’ do not exist and that collective identities are dangerous fictions.33 Now, I want to argue that, despite the explicitly tripartite character of this categorization, there is a deeper logic in Kristeva’s thinking about feminism that conforms to her additive, dualistic pattern. For one thing, the first, egalitarian humanist moment of feminism drops out of the picture, since Kristeva falsely, and astoundingly, assumes its programme has already been achieved. Thus, there are really only two ‘generations’ of feminism she is concerned with. Next, despite her explicit criticisms of gynocentrism, there is a strand of her thought that implicitly partakes of it: I mean Kristeva’s quasi-biologistic, essentializing identification of women’s femininity with maternity. Maternity, for her, is the way that women, as opposed to men, touch base with the pre-Oedipal, semiotic residue. (Men do it by writing avantgarde poetry; women do it by having babies). Here, Kristeva dehistoricizes and psychologizes motherhood, conflating conception, pregnancy, birthing, nursing, and childrearing, abstracting all of them from the socio-political context, and erecting her own essentialist stereotype of femininity. But then she reverses herself and recoils from her construct, insisting that us do not exist, that feminine identity is fictitious, and that feminist movements therefore tend toward the religious and the proto-totalitarian. The overall pattern of Kristeva’s thinking about feminism, then, is additive and dualistic: she ends up


alternating essentialist gynocentric moments with anti-essentialist nominalistic moments, moments that consolidate an ahistorical, undifferentiated, maternal feminine gender identity with moments that repudiate women’s identities altogether. With respect to feminism, then, Kristeva leaves us oscillating between a regressive version of gynocentric-maternalist essentialism, on the one hand, and a postfeminist anti-essentialism, on the other. Neither of these is useful for feminist politics. In Denise Riley’s terms, the first overfeminizes women by defining us maternally. The second, by contrast, underfeminizes us by insisting that ‘women’ do not exist and by dismissing the feminist movement as a proto-totalitarian fiction.34 Simply putting the two together, moreover, does not overcome the limits of either. On the contrary, it constitutes another ‘bad infinity’, and so another proof of the uselessness for feminist politics of an approach that merely conjoins an abstract negation of structuralism to a structuralist model left otherwise intact.

Conclusion I hope the foregoing has provided a reasonably vivid and persuasive illustration of my most general point, namely, the superior utility for feminist politics of pragmatic over structuralist approaches to the study of language. Instead of reiterating the advantages of pragmatic theories, I shall close with one specific example of their uses for feminist politics. As I argued, pragmatic theories insist on the social context and social practice of communication, and they study a plurality of historically changing discursive sites and practices. As a result, these theories offer us the possibility of thinking of social identities as complex, changing, and discursively constructed. This in turn seems to me our best hope for avoiding some of Kristeva’s difficulties. Complex, shifting, discursively constructed social identities provide an alternative to reified, essentialist conceptions of gender identity, on the one hand, and to simple negations and dispersals of identity, on the other. They thus permit us to navigate safely between the twin shoals of essentialism and nominalism, between reifying women’s social identities under stereotypes of femininity on the one hand, and dissolving them into sheer nullity and oblivion, on the other.35 I am claiming, therefore, that with the help of a pragmatic theory of discourse we can accept the critique of essentialism without becoming postfeminists. This


seems to me to be an invaluable help. For it will not be time to speak of postfeminism until we can legitimately speak of postpatriarchy.36

Notes 1 I am grateful for helpful comments and suggestions from Jonathan Arac, David Levin, Paul Mattick, Jr., John McCumber, and Diana T.Meyers. 2 I group these writers together not because all are Lacanians—clearly only Kristeva and Lacan himself are—but rather because, disclaimers notwithstanding, all continue the structuralist reduction of discourse to symbolic system. I shall develop this point later in this chapter. 3 Thus, the fund of interpretive possibilities available to me, a late twentiethcentury American, overlaps very little with that available to the thirteenthcentury Chinese woman I may want to imagine as my sister. And yet in both cases, hers and mine, the interpretive possibilities are established in the medium of social discourse. It is in the medium of discourse that each of us encounters an interpretation of what it is to be a person, as well as a menu of possible descriptions specifying the particular sort of person each is to be. 4 See Elizabeth V.Spelman, Inessential Woman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988). 5 See Denise Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 6 See Jane Jenson, ‘Paradigms and Political Discourse: Labour and Social Policy in the USA and France before 1914’, Working Paper Series, Center for European Studies, Harvard University (Winter, 1989). 7 See my ‘Struggle over Needs: Outline of a Socialist-Feminist Critical Theory of Late Capitalist Political Culture’, in Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) and Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’. 8 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from The Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, Eds and tr. (New York: International Publishers, 1972). 9 For the critique of ‘cultural feminism’ as a retreat from political struggle, see Alice Echols, ‘The New Feminism of Yin and Yang’, in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, Eds (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983). 10 For a brilliant critique of this move, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1977). Similar objections are found in Julia Kristeva’s ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’, in The Kristeva Reader, Toril Moi, Ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), to be discussed below, and in the Soviet Marxist critique of Russian formalism from which Kristeva’s views derive. 11 I leave it to linguists to decide whether it is useful for other purposes. 12 These criticisms pertain to what may be called ‘global’ structuralisms, that is, approaches that treat the whole of language as a single symbolic system. They are not intended to rule out the potential utility of approaches that analyze structural relations in limited, socially situated, culturally and historically specific sublanguages or discourses. On the contrary, it is possible that approaches of this latter sort can be usefully articulated with the pragmatic model discussed below. 13 Dorothy Leland, ‘Lacanian Psychoanalysis and French Feminism: Toward an Adequate Political Psychology’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 3, 3 (Winter 1989):81–103.


14 Lacan’s claim to have overcome biologism rests on his insistence that the phallus is not the penis. However, many feminist critics have shown that he fails to prevent the collapse of the symbolic signifier into the organ. The clearest indication of this failure is his claim, in ‘The Meaning of the Phallus’, that the phallus becomes the master signifier because of its ‘turgidity’ which suggests ‘the transmission of vital flow’ in copulation. See Jacques Lacan, ‘The Meaning of the Phallus’ in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, Eds (New York: W.W.Norton, 1982). 15 A version of this argument is made by Dorothy Leland in ‘Lacanian Psychoanalysis and French Feminism’. 16 Deborah Cameron, Feminism and Linguistic Theory (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1985). 17 For an account of the declining significance of kinship as a social structural component of modern capitalist societies, see Linda J.Nicholson, Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 18 In fact, the main function of this broad usage seems to be ideological. For it is only by collapsing into a single category what is supposedly ahistorical and necessary and what is historical and contingent that Lacan can endow his claim about the inevitability of phallocentrism with a deceptive appearance of plausibility. 19 See ‘The Blind Spot in an Old Dream of Symmetry’ in Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, Gillian C.Gill, tr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Here she shows how the use of a phallic standard to conceptualize sexual difference casts woman negatively as ‘lack’. 20 For a brilliant critical discussion of this issue as it emerges in relation to the version of feminist psychoanalysis developed in the USA by Nancy Chodorow, see Elizabeth V.Spelman, Inessential Woman. 21 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Introduction—II’, in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne. 22 Even Lacanian feminists have been known on occasion to engage in this sort of movement-baiting. It seems to me that, in her introductory chapter to The Daughter’s Seduction, Jane Gallop comes perilously close to dismissing the politics of a feminist movement informed by ethical commitments as ‘imaginary’. See Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). 23 See for example Beatrice Beebe and Frank Lachman, ‘Mother-Infant Mutual Influence and Precursors of Psychic Structure’, in Arnold Goldberg, Ed., Frontiers in Self Psychology, Progress in Self Psychology 3 (Hillsdale NJ: The Analytic Press, 1988). I am grateful to Paul Mattick, Jr. for alerting me to this work. 24 See note 10 above. 25 ‘Renovation’ and ‘renewal’ are standard English translations of Kristeva’s term, ‘renouvellement’. Yet they lack some of the force of the French. Perhaps this explains why readers have not always noticed the change-making aspect of her account of transgression, why they have instead tended to treat it as pure negation with no positive consequences. For an example of this interpretation, see Judith Butler, ‘The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 3, 3 (Winter 1989):104–18. 26 This tendency fades in her later writings, where it is replaced by an equally undiscriminating, even shrill, neo-conservative emphasis on the ‘totalitarian’ dangers lurking in every attempt at uncontrolled innovation. 27 See Butler, ‘The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva’. 28 For an example, see Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Leon S.Roudiez, tr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 29 See Julia Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’ in Toril Moi, Ed., The Kristeva Reader and


30 31 32 33

34

35

36

‘Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini’ in Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Art and Literature, Leon S. Roudiez, Ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). For a brilliant critical discussion of Kristeva’s philosophy of language, one to which the present account is much indebted, see Andrea Nye, ‘Woman Clothed with the Sun’, Signs 12, 4 (1987):664–86. Butler makes this point in ‘The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva’. Reprinted in Toril Moi, Ed., The Kristeva Reader. I take the terms ‘humanist feminism’ and ‘gynocentric feminism’ from Iris Young, ‘Humanism, gynocentrism and feminist politics’, Hypatia 3, published as a special issue of Women’s Studies International Forum 8, 3 (1985):173–83. I take the term ‘nominalist feminism’ from Linda Alcoff, ‘Cultural Feminism versus Poststructuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory’, Signs 13, 3 (Spring 1988):405–36. For the terms ‘underfeminization’ and ‘overfeminization’, see Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’. For a useful discussion of Kristeva’s neo-liberal equation of collective liberation movements with ‘totalitarianism’, see Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Julia Kristeva on Femininity: The Limits of a Semiotic Politics’, Feminist Review 18 (1984): 56–73. This point builds on work that Linda Nicholson and I did jointly and that she is continuing. See our ‘Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism’, Theory, Culture & Society, special issue on Postmodernism, 5, 2–3 (June 1988): 373–94. I borrow this line from Toril Moi, who uttered it in another context in her talk at a conference on ‘Convergence in Crisis: Narratives of the History of Theory’, Duke University, September 24–7, 1987.

5 Theorizing the Decline of Discourse or the Decline of Theoretical Discourse? Ben Agger

Theory as Public Speech My interest in this chapter is the public sphere, the polity. I am concerned to trace the decline of the public sphere to certain structural and cultural elements of literary political economy in late capitalism— the institutional ways in which writing and reading are organized. My argument is that writers no longer write sharp, imaginative, accessible prose for general readers because they are compelled by the profit and discipline requirements of mass culture and academia, respectively, to narrow their focus and domesticate their arguments. In this sense, I analyze the decline of discourse both in terms of economic and ideological factors, in this continuing the long tradition of western Marxism (e.g., Agger, 1979) that refuses to seperate these two dimensions of social reality (Horkheimer, 1972). I characterize the rampant loss of public voice as the decline of discourse (see Agger, 1990b). The decline of discourse matters because accessible speech and writing connect us to an authentic realm of political discussion and practice otherwise controlled by élites (O’Neil, 1972; Habermas, 1975; Sennett, 1978; Agger, 1985). Unwittingly, people who theorize about politics, especially leftists, often contribute to the specialization and professionalization of public language by composing themselves in ways accessible to a few hundred, not a few hundred million (Jacoby, 1987). The left critique of declining discourse ironically only compounds the problem. Part of this is inevitable. Analyses of what is going wrong with our literary political economy cannot proceed without some reliance on abstract and technical concepts, whether words like ‘commodification’ or ‘hegemony’. Of course, these terms can be defined and hence democratized; they must be, if we are to create the populist polity in 117


which what Habermas calls dialogue chances (McCarthy, 1978:306– 10) are democratically distributed. But this chapter demonstrates that social analysis and diagnosis can proceed without involuted technical categories only deepening the problem they originally intended to address. The Frankfurt School (e.g., Marcuse, 1969) has called this ‘prefiguration’—the inescapable fact that what we do and say in the present helps create a certain future in its image. For example, oppressing our colleagues and comrades out of alleged revolutionary exigency only entrenches authoritarianism, albeit flying different flags. By the same token, writing as if people could understand it and join one’s discourse dialogically helps create that very polity, albeit in halting, accumulating steps. It is unlikely that any literary product will have the same sweeping impact as Marx’s oeuvre. Writings are too readily coopted by the culture industry for all that, either defused as the ravings of lunatics or sold profitably as evidence of the system’s alleged openness (precisely what happens when academic presses publish left-leaning work). Yet writings matter if only because they are matter; they exist as what Wittgenstein (1953) called ‘forms of life’, ‘language games’ with their own interpretive and dialogical rules. Textual politics is not all politics, yet it is undeniably political, especially in light of a theory of ideology that attunes itself to the way popular discourse helps maintain the status quo. Thus, people who theorize discourse must attend to their own political stance, their own complicity in worsening the very problem they bemoan—here, the erosion of a genuinely public language with which to create a new polity and hence a whole new world. British analytic philosophers continually lament the inability or refusal of European social theorists to write clearly (see Gellner, 1959). They read obscurantism as incorrigible élitism and infantilism. It is not as simple as that if only because the complex world requires a good deal of conceptual and empirical complexity in order to be understood. International capitalism demands training in sophisticated economic theory, just as cultural criticism forces one to study labyrinthine interpretive theories. But that does not mean that critical theorists ought to ignore the prefigurative implications of their own writing for the very polity they so desperately desire. C.Wright Mills, a self-styled ‘plain Marxist’ (1962), argued eloquently against academic obscurantism (1959), showing in the example of his own work an admirable ability to write clearly about broad-gauged issues of social criticism. Russell Jacoby (1987) is correct to lament the absence of the accessible public book typified by those of Mills. Of course, as he well

THEORIZING THE DECLINE OF DISCOURSE OR THE DECLINE OF THEORETICAL DISCOURSE? 119

knows, this is largely conditioned by literary political economy itself; commercial publishers want blockbusters and hence they avoid controversy. Academic publishers demand intellectual conformity plus the rarefied, stultified methodological apparatus of ‘scholarship’. And Mills’ own house, Oxford University Press, has become largely a trade publisher concerned to make money. But Jacoby correctly holds writers, especially left-wing ones, responsible for blithely complying with these external imperatives, even endorsing them. Left academics are frequently no less obscurantist than centrist and right-wing ones; their commitment to élitist academese outweighs their political commitment to a democratic world. The example of Habermas is prominent here: he writes about the importance of ‘universal speech situations’ and democratized ‘dialogue chances’ in a code that is virtually impossible to crack without years of training in European philosophy and social theory. He justifies this literary strategy as an attempt to legitimate critical theory in the bourgeois university. But that is a meager benefit when balanced against the loss of his public voice. Where C.Wright Mills influenced and energized the New Left, particularly the Port Huron Statement of the original Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Habermas’ comments about the ‘colonization of the life world’ by oppressive ‘systems’ provoke little but ennui. His architectonic Parsonian Marxism produces footnotes but not political passion. One has to dig deep beneath the surface of his text to find the secret heartbeat at the core of every literary act. Neoconservatives valorize plain language simply to restrict public access to élite codes of power (see Freire, 1970; Bernstein, 1971; O’Neill, 1976). In no way should the left take all the blame for the gaping distance between élites and masses today. But the left cannot ignore its own victimization by academic discourse that reproduces hierarchy and conformity. Left critics must write straight ahead through the thickets of confusion and complexity confronting any responsible social analyst; this confusion and complexity can be simplified, even if one must acknowledge that simplification always threatens to recede deconstructively into the murky soup out of which clarification initially arises in a bold stroke. That nothing is simple today is all the more reason for theorists to write simply and forcefully. We must avoid the methodologization of this notion of public discourse, however, whereby we try to translate difficulty into simplicity directly. There are no one-for-one principles of translation or semiotization according to which we can replace a complex concept with a simpler, terser one. The responsibility for writing public discourse is more a matter of temperament and style than a methodological injunc-


tion to craft brief sentences. As Adorno shows in his most powerful and penetrating prose, dialectical allusion is often clearer than the linearity pretending to grasp complexity in monosyllables. The principle of public speech involves a commitment to political education, the systematic consciousness raising that allows the disempowered to learn and use complex languages and thus to challenge power. Today, especially in North America, political education smacks of agitprop. They call it consciousness raising, a concept concocted by the women’s movement in response to the male supremacy of the New Left. Or simply call it public discourse. It matters little what pedigree we give our commitment to creating a new polity in which dialogue chances are more or less equal. This commitment has been called many things: socialism, feminism, democracy, etc. Whatever words we use to talk about the restoration of the public sphere, we must recognize that our analytic and diagnostic language itself bears responsibility for the world we would create. Intellectuals are political actors, hence we must address the politics of intellectuality, as I have tried to do in other work (e.g., Agger, 1990b).

The Politics of Textuality/Intellectuality Textual politics are politics, although not all politics. Literary political economy, as I have called it, helps us understand what happens to writing and writers when they become merely white-collar employees (Mills, 1951), losing both autonomy and vision. They work, write and live for others, whether in popular culture (advertising, journalism, trade fiction, television, movies) or in academia. Their literary craft is dictated by their status as wage laborers in the culture industry, no matter that they are white-collar workers with ample emoluments, even corporate benefit packages. The commodification of culture inevitably degrades it where it blocks the critical imagination by diverting it into the narrow profit and disciplinary requirements of popular culture and academia, respectively. Literary political economy, which I derive from a version of postmodernism emphasizing its liberatory possibilities, has both economic and ideological features. After all, the decline of discourse has both objective and subjective dimensions—what editors decide the market will bear and what writers write. On the one hand, the commodification of literary activity turns writing into yet another exchange value and writers into wage and salary slaves. On the other hand, literary political economy involves hegemony, a dominant culture of ideas


and values reproduced by these literary underworkers. It is still true (viz. The German Ideology [Marx and Engels, 1947]) that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, propagated through what Horkheimer and Adorno (1972:120–67) called the culture industry. Original Marxism was long on economic analysis of commodification but short on ideological and cultural critique showing the interconnection between profit motive and political/ideational/cultural hegemony. Marx’s model of ideology was simplistic; he characterized ideology as a ‘camera obscura’ through which people are coaxed to view the world upside down. Gramsci’s (1971) notion of hegemony renders the discussion of ideology more sophisticated. One cannot trace hegemony to an original conspiracy of editors, publishers and producers any more than one can reduce each and every cultural expression to the profit motive per se. There is dissonance around the edges of the late-capitalist totality, notably including postmodernism itself which, in significant respects, veers away from traditional bourgeois concepts of modernity, the subject, reason, values, etc. Although Lyotard’s (1984) affirmative version of postmodernism is affiliated to the project of capitalist modernization (e.g., for all practical purposes Bell [1960]; Lyotard [1984]), postmodernism addresses and legitimates a much more complex late capitalism (Jameson, 1984b, following Mandel, 1975) in which ‘difference’ (Derrida, 1976) is supposedly the best post-modern, postcapitalist, post-rationalist principle of integration. Of course, this is fraudulent; difference, once deconstructed, can be traced to all the usual centers and samenesses of capital, gender, race. Postmodernity is no more pluralist than modernity; in fact, to the extent to which postmodernism functions as an occluding ideology duping people about the prevalence of real difference, postmodernity regresses behind earlier stages and versions of modernity that ambivalently contained both the project of general enlightenment and liberation (viz. Habermas’ [1981, 1987a, 1987b] valorization of enlightenment) on the one hand and cooptation/coercion/discipline on the other. The culture industry is not a mystery. It involves considerations of cultural corporate concentration, market, ratings, cosmopolitanism and literary imagination. All of these things can be viewed materially without reducing cultural products simply to market reflexes or to conspiracies of publishers and editors. What Gramsci called hegemony as a way of updating Marx’s earlier notion of ideology can be traced to the political economy of literary production, involving both institutional and motivational features. Surely the culture industry would grind to a halt without willing writers. Just as surely, words


are a big business, highly constraining the authorial choices available to writers today. In this sense, then, modernity and modernism are somehow more dialectical than postmodernity and postmodernism, which flatten bourgeois civilization into a Nietzschean tableau of eternal presentness —unproblematic gratification. Marcuse (1955) already carefully explained late capitalism’s need for ‘repressive desublimation’, loosening discipline’s hold on people lest they chafe too much against earlyProtestant superego restraints. Postmodernism in its neoconservative Lyotard (1984) variant theorizes and legitimizes this repressive desublimation, outfitting the world in Gucci clothes, feeding them American fast-food as well as Americanized ‘foreign’ food, entertaining them with the ‘pastiches’ and ‘collages’ (Jameson, 1984b) of cultural expression drawn from diverse historical and global sources, and housing them in a postmodern cityscape apparently adding soul and depth to the usual modernist skyscrapers, offices and factories. Indeed, I have serious doubts that Jameson’s own (1984b:92; 1988) strategy of ‘cognitive mapping’ can help overcome the very ‘multinational capitalism’ he decries. But I do not pretend to have a better strategy. As such, postmodernism is both an economic and cultural phenomenon, what Jameson (1984b) appropriately called the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’. I want to suggest a version of postmodernism much more closely affiliated to the culture-critical project of western Marxism, especially the Frankfurt School (Kellner, 1988). I (e.g., Agger, 1989b, 1990b) derive an empirical and dialectical sociology of culture from it, notably a theory of literary political economy allowing me to address the decline of discourse in concrete terms: what writers write and how they live are largely dictated by the forces of literary commodification. As such, literary liberation must address the culture industry squarely and neither lament the passing of a golden age that never existed (e.g., freelancing) nor burden heroic, solitary writers with the weight of the world. Writers can only do so much to change things around, although it is undeniable that they must involve themselves in overall social change—the politics of textuality/ intellectuality. At the very least, this will help transform the culture industry and thus dominant ideology in general. To work through an alternative postmodernism not beholden to Lyotard’s (1984) aversion to the grand ‘metanarratives’ of history — Marxism, feminism, etc.—we must split postmodernism into affirmative and dialectical moments. With Aronowitz (1981, 1988, 1990), Huyssen (1984, 1986), Jameson (1984a, 1984b, 1988), Kellner


(1988, 1989a, 1989b, 1989c) and others, I believe that we can salvage the emancipatory and critical insights of postmodernism in a way that dialectically preserves the continuity between modernity and postmodernity. This is relevant especially where we use postmodernism against itself to combat the quiescent ‘postmodernism’ (e.g. Lyotard, 1984; Kroker and Cook, 1986) celebrating the putative end of modernity as our collective liberation from the ‘metanarratives’ of universal liberation. Names matter less than the analytical and political work that they do. One could as easily suggest that postmodernism is a radical modernism, emphasizing Marx’s own modernist penchant for a universalistic philosophy of history preserved in the work of western Marxists, particularly the thinkers of the Frankfurt School (e.g., Adorno, 1973; Habermas, 1984, 1987b). In effect, then, my dialectical version of postmodernism issues in a radical cultural studies (Denzin, 1991). This approach to cultural analysis and criticism that explains and opposes the decline of public discourse in terms of concrete structural arrangements of writing and reading is political work in its own terms. It is critique of ideology, deriving from Marx’s (Marx and Engels, 1947) classical model of ideological unmasking. I conduct the critique of bourgeois postmodernism from within the rhetorical frame of reference of postmodernism itself precisely in order to implode it, what the Frankfurt theorists called immanent critique. I believe that there is no such thing as the end-of-the-modern, postmodernity, but only new iterations and variations of the same world-historical capitalism first addressed by Marx and later by feminists and opponents of racism and the domination of nature. In this sense, the postmodern agenda is the end-ofhistory as depicted by Marx—the transcendence of global alienation. And one of the most significant routes toward this end is a version of radical cultural studies that squarely addresses what Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) called the culture industry. Postmodernism functions empirically, critically and politically as a theory of cultural production and reception explaining the ways in which ideology is scripted by people for people, hence hinting at its transformation. Unfortunately, textual politics have a decidedly ambiguous status in American higher education and American letters generally, especially on the left. This relates to larger questions about the role of critical intellectuals, which I want to address further in this chapter. First, here, I discuss the false duality of materialist and idealist perspectives on the politics of intellectuality and then I conclude with a discussion of postmodern intellectual life (although I should properly call that


post-postmodern if we are talking about postmodernism as affirmative ideology and not as critical theory). The ambiguous status of textual and cultural politics on the left has very much to do with the classical problem of economism in Marxism. Although Horkheimer (1972) definitively laid to rest the notion that Marx was economistic or reductionist in his method, thus suggesting a critical theory that closely linked economic with cultural and ideological processes, the Frankfurt School’s perspective on cultural politics is far from universally accepted on the left. More orthodox Marxists reject what they take to be the untoward focus on culture on the part of western Marxists and others heavily involved in literary theory and cultural criticism. Although I believe that they are wrong not to recognize the imbeddedness of literary political economy in political economy generally, culture critics tend to fetishize textuality to the exclusion of almost everything else (see Agger, 1989a). This fetishism ignores the political economy of textuality and intellectuality. Poststructuralists and postmodernists, fond of Derrida’s notion that the text has no outside, only continue a line of argument embraced earlier by the New Criticism (Ransom, 1941; for a critique, see Fekete, 1978). This is ironic in that poststructuralist and postmodernist literary criticism formulated itself in opposition to the textual objectivism of New Criticism, where each text is treated critically on its own terms. As I read it, this is only a family difference. Derrida, and later those Americans who have methodologized poststructuralism into deconstruction (e.g. the Yale School), also close off textuality from a kind of social reading, although deconstruction expands the notion of the text from literature per se—the actual pages on which it is inscribed—to all manner of social and cultural expressions. Poststructuralist sociologists even write books called Society as Text (Brown, 1987), reflecting this tendency to extrapolate the notion of textuality from the authorial product per se into a veritable ensemble of interpersonal and cultural expressions. The poststructural and postmodern fetishes of textuality (Agger, 1989a: ch. 6) miss the dynamic, non-identical relationship between (material) text and (material) world, ignoring literary political economy altogether. But textuality is a political battleground and must be addressed materially, albeit in a way that recognizes that the ‘texts’ of ideology are powerfully constitutive in their own right. Ignoring postmodern textual politics is tantamount to ignoring ideology which, as Marx, Lukacs and the Frankfurt theorists knew, is a crucial political factor in its own right. Indeed, Horkheimer’s (1972) original 1937 article on ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ argues that political economy


includes both economic and ideological elements that are virtually impossible to separate. Regrettably, though, once one enters into the thicket of conceptual, interpretive and empirical problems surrounding the radical sociology of culture, notably the close examination of the culture industry, one is almost inevitably trapped on the sticky flypaper of literary and cultural theory oblivious to the material nature of textuality. Deconstruction, fetishized in American departments of English and Comparative Literature, is one result; it is apolitical, precious and pretentious. In claiming the world for textuality (Derrida: the text has no outside), this textualism loses the world. Stanley Fish’s influential book Is There a Text in the Class? (1980) needs to be reformulated materially. Indeed, John O’Neill has done so (1991). He asks: is there a class in this text? Not frequently enough, in the work of the deconstructors. Stanley Aronowitz remarked that some postmodernists invest themselves so deeply in literature and the literary that their soi-disant Marxism loses its political coordinates. Aronowitz lamented the degeneration of critical literary theory into aestheticism. He said that he can write of Dickens and still ground his argument in empirical political theory—what for the left are the bread-and-butter issues of the theory/practice merger. Here, Adorno’s later considerations of aesthetic theory (e.g., 1984) suggest the impasse of Frankfurt critical theory, later occasioning the Kantian and Parsonian Marxism of Habermas (1984, 1987b). Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1973) suggests an ideology-critical agenda for critical theory that by 1984 (Aesthetic Theory) he had largely foresworn in favor of a critical theory ensconced in aesthetic interpretation and opposition. Although there is much that is attractive about the various Frankfurt perspectives on aesthetic politics (Agger, 1976a), Adorno’s 1984 book and Marcuse’s own 1978 book, The Aesthetic Dimension, retreat to aesthetic expression as adequate (or the only available) modes of political resistance, the fateful trajectory of Marcuse’s (1964:257) Great Refusal. Interestingly, the trajectory of Jameson’s own work (from Marxism and Form [1971] to The Political Unconscious [1981]) has been similar, threatening to lose touch with the political moment of aesthetic theory in favor of a highly self-referential theory of interpretation. Empirically, Adorno, Marcuse and Jameson are correct. Late capitalism swallows virtually every resistance and opposition, requiring dissent to find unconventional, even nondiscursive, forms. This is the essential message of the theory of the cultural industry, and one that is central to my argument here. I accept Frankfurt aesthetic theory as far as it goes. But aesthetic theory, especially in the frames of post-


structuralism and postmodernism, almost inevitably becomes aestheticism, an approach to cultural studies that sacrifices political critique to the disciplinary project of interpretation. Of course, we can and must redefine the region of the political. Culture is not a world apart from political economy and thus our criticism must address culture in thoroughly material terms, asking phenomenologically how, where, why, when and what real flesh-and-blood writers can write in order to avoid the implosive tendencies of aesthetic commodification. The Frankfurt School’s aesthetic theory, especially pre-Aesthetic Theory, kept this firmly in mind. Some of Adorno’s discussions of television (1954), radio (1945) and journalism (1974) are unparalleled examples of materialist cultural criticism that avoids its own empty methodologization. Tellingly, Adorno’s WWII exodus in the US, when he collaborated first with Paul Laszarsfeld, one of the doyens of sophisticated social-science empirical research methodology, and then with the California social psychologists on The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950), was among his most productive in terms of this nuanced cultural criticism and media studies (Adorno, 1969). After he and Horkheimer returned to West Germany, Adorno reverted to earlier, more apocalyptic and philosophically abstract modes of theorizing (Jay, 1984). The politically promising sociology of culture that Adorno and some of his other Frankfurt colleagues like Marcuse had begun during the 1940s gave way to the world-historical musings of Minima Moralia and Aesthetic Theory. It is important to note that the issue here is not simply political pessimism or the lack of it (Slater, 1977; Agger, 1983). Orthodox Marxists who ground optimism in a socialist dialectic of nature mislead themselves as much as do postmodernists who disdain political discourse as shabby and out-of-date. Pessimism and optimism are temperamental categories, nothing more. Political predictions are empirical, nothing less. Adorno’s lack of hopefulness during the post-WWII reconstruction period, when capitalism knitted itself back together on a global scale, thus integrating aspects of fascism (Foucault’s disciplinary society), was largely justified on the evidence. Yet his ventures in aesthetic theory closed off some very real political possibilities. Of course, were he alive today, he might well recant some of the strictures on the impossibility of political resistance. Adorno was much less a metaphysician than met the untutored eye. As Jay (1984) and Ryan (1982) have pointed out, there are some important continuities between Adorno’s critical theory and both poststructuralism and postmodernism. The postmodern problematic only emerged in somewhat clearer light since Adorno’s death, making predictions about


whether he would have approved of a left version of postmodernism impossible. Perhaps an engagement with the problematic of modernity and postmodernity (e.g. Habermas, 1981) would have softened Adorno’s commitment to purely aesthetic resistance or led him to reformulate that resistance in a more political-economic direction, like my work here. My argument is scarcely imaginable without Adorno’s concept of negative dialectics (1973), indeed without the example of his whole oeuvre. But the tone of my discussion here is precisely the problem with theory today. People’s search for pedigree becomes all-consuming; we forget the empirical and political issues of the day in favor of scholarship, the career capital of academics. Then again, intellectuals almost inevitably become academics in late capitalism. The intellectual as a social category is archaic. To talk about the politics of intellectuality is really to talk about the relationship between academics, university, state and culture. My analysis here is a contribution to that discussion, although I need to extend that discussion into a fuller consideration of intellectuality and intellectual life today. Who or what is the postmodern intellectual?

The Postmodern Intellectual Above all, the postmodern intellectual is a writer; that is my theme. Whether writers today are intellectuals is another question. My answer has been largely negative. Writers do everything but think, indentured to producers, publishers, studios, editors, department heads, promotion-and-tenure committees. I include myself in this, of course. Obscurantism is a virtually unavoidable outcome of academic discourse in the late-capitalist university. People like Jacoby (1987) who rail against academization are voices in the wilderness. But I decided to compose this chapter in a more pedestrian discourse than my earlier work and certainly than my intellectual heroes like Adorno. We must write as if there were an intelligent public capable not only of understanding what we are saying but joining us in community-building dialogue. This is to say that we must take Habermas’ (1979) ideal speechsituation seriously as a radical goal. In doing so, we must not exempt ourselves as intellectuals and writers from the requirement of public discourse; indeed, we prefigure the world we want in what we do today, including how we treat our intimates and how we talk about our larger political aims. Habermas is a stunning example of a radical


intellectual who contradictorily preaches communicative democracy but thwarts it at every turn, falling back on academicism and its technical argot. One can argue that Habermas is merely doing what any rigorous intellectual would in expecting his readers to master the various civilizational oeuvres constituting our intellectual culture. It is impossible to understand our own political and cultural formation without having tackled Plato, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Habermas himself. But Habermas is a critical theorist who wants dialogue chances and thus power to be democratized. Therefore his own discourse bears examination as a prefigurative medium. He only invites scorn by those who hold him out as an example of yet another phony radical who cannot bring himself to talk to the people in a language they can understand. Above all, the postmodern intellectual will accept some responsibility for creating the ideal speech situation and hence the democratic polity. Interestingly, American feminists have been more sensitive to the constitutive nature of their own discourse than have most male leftists. This might reflect only the fact that Marxism derives canonically from the hallowed oeuvre of Marx and his epigones; feminism is only as old as yesterday and thus it poses fewer interpretive and devotional problematics (quickly being remedied by the involution of the French poststructuralist feminists!). But I suspect it reflects something deeper: American feminists may be more democratic than American and European male leftists, an issue addressed by those who trace the origins of feminism in the male-dominated New Left (e.g. Evans, 1980). Now the parallel between western Marxism and particularly critical theory, and feminism has been noted before (Marshall, 1988; Agger 1990a). But critical theorists, with few notable exceptions, have been unable or unwilling to jettison their own élite symbolic codes for more accessible ones; they have never overrated the agitational possibilities of critical theory. And American feminists, although more discursively democratic, have been short on theory, frequently failing to articulate their own critique of male supremacy in terms of a larger theory of class, gender and race interrelations. This has slowly begun to change, especially where critical theorists and feminist theorists are starting to recognize not only their own possible political mutuality but the extraordinary fact that their critiques of sexist capitalism are very similar at root (e.g. Marshall, 1988). The postmodern intellectual is post-specialist and post-élitist, even if his or her theoretical discourse is sometimes fine-grained and complex. Where the world’s difficulty provokes analytical difficulty, the


postmodern intellectual must work as hard as possible to prevent difficult language from sedimenting itself into a code so impossibly restricted that public comprehension and hence consensus formation— political mobilization—are thwarted. That is the nub of the issue. Intellectuals today fail to engage the public because they have either neglected or forgotten the practical and political role of intellectual activity. Habermas, other critical theorists, left feminist theorists, poststructuralists and postmodernists want to restore a decent, democratic public sphere. But that is all the more reason why they must prevent the decline of their own discourse lest they merely reproduce hierarchies in their own lives, notably the hierarchy of writers over readers. In the next section, I will discuss more concretely the nature of public voice. Here I want to consider just where intellectuals have failed to attend to the politically constitutive nature of their own discourse as a way of suggesting some remedies. I want to contrast archetypes of the modernist and postmodernist intellectual. The modernist intellectual is typified by Marx, Beckett, Adorno, Benjamin, Beauvoir, Sartre, Habermas. The modernist intellectual feverishly wants things to change, to improve, and thus devotes his or her intellectual energy to dissecting and diagnosing the dismal present. Marx’s engagement remains exemplary for this intellectual archetype. Where Marx in the Manifesto called working people to arms, suggesting to them their own world-historical opportunity for ending class society, in Capital he analyzed the functioning of capitalism in rigorously detailed terms, authoring Marxism as a dialectical science of society. Unfortunately, at least among Marxists and Marxologists, the second book has received much more interpretive attention than the first. After all, it is longer, denser, more susceptible to close hermeneutic work. And it purports to lay the foundation for Marxism as a systematic theory or science. Similarly, Adorno’s essays (e.g., 1967) blaze the way for his dense philosophical (1973) and aesthetic-theoretic (1984) books. They are thus read as preparatory, even if Adorno intended them as self-sufficient in their own right. Modernist left scholarship almost inevitably intends itself as a dialogue with others who speak jargon. Most fail to examine or counteract the irony that these very leftists argue for the democratization of dialogue chances. Modernist intellectuals fail to descend from the rarefied heights of scholarship, interpretation and historiography to the terra firma of public discourse. Indeed, many of us on the critical left have become adept at defending our aloofness in terms of the very empirical theories of late capitalism that explain the cooptation of intellectual work in convincing terms (e.g., Marcuse’s [1964] One-


Dimensional Man). Although this defense is credible, it is also selfserving. Better, it fails to move beyond itself toward a theoretical practice—public discourse—that empowers non-specialists to join the debates. At one level, then, the postmodern intellectual must deal with the disproportion, the hierarchy, between intellectuals and the masses in much the way Marx and Gramsci (1971) first formulated the problem. Marx prophesised an all-round individual capable of shifting from one role to another without taking on their life-long imprints (Marx and Engels, 1947); Gramsci suggested an organic intellectual devoted to a ‘philosophy of praxis’ that explicates the necessity of democratizing intellectuality. These modernists took seriously their own responsibility for transcending the very world making them intellectuals and others laborers. That is why both Marx and Gramsci took pains to elaborate the political role of radical intellectuals. Although the Frankfurt theorists were also committed to a democratic public sphere (e.g., Habermas 1975; Keane 1984), they were less convinced than Marx and Gramsci that modernity could be rearranged in significant ways. If Marx was an early modernist, Adorno was a high or late modernist, if not sufficiently postmodern in the way he theorized the relation between intellectuals and public life. And if Adorno was a late modernist, Habermas is a late-late modernist, given the circumlocutions of his highly byzantine critical theory. Irony abounds here for Habermas (1981) was among the first to take Lyotard’s postmodernism to task for betraying the project of the Enlightenment and hence of modernity. Perhaps he realizes that his commitment to ideal speech and his inability to engage in it are clearly contradictory! I fully agree with his condemnation of Lyotardpostmodernism as neo-conservative in its thoroughgoing anti-Marxism. A genuinely postmodern intellectual would not have to recant the radical theories and perspectives of earlier modernists, notably Marx and Marxists. In fact, I believe that one cannot inhabit the contemporary world and hope to improve it without being powerfully energized by the modernist impulse, dating all the way back to the Enlightenment. Nietzsche’s critique of the Enlightenment only goes so far. At a certain point, his negation must be negated and we must salvage what we can from the philosophes’ vision of a new world, albeit refusing Comte’s imagery of a benevolent reign of technocrats. But modernism fails precisely where it is élitist. Modernists in one way or another endorse vanguardism—the notion that societies will only change where small groups of leaders enforce discipline on the


masses, leading them out of the wilderness. In this sense, modernism inhibits democracy. The issue is not whether the masses need leadership, education, enlightenment. That is certainly not arguable in the era of the culture industry and authoritarian state (Horkheimer, 1973). But modernist intellectuals embrace their own vanguard roles too cavalierly, unselfconsciously lapsing into esoteric language that only perpetuates itself ‘after’ the revolution, in spite of Marx’s, Gramsci’s and Freire’s warnings to the contrary. Indeed, for Marxist intellectuals to warn themselves and others against vanguardism is thoroughly ironic for it was Marxism itself that gave birth to the notion of ideology-critique, if also to the notion of educating the educator, ever the left-modernist dilemma. We can read Marx in a host of different ways. I chose to read Marx as humble before the task of political education. I think he understood how precarious it was for intellectuals and tacticians to take license with the communicative and intellectual incompetence of the masses, especially on the part of those who genuinely wanted the élitist state to wither away after capitalism. But, after Marx, we have Marxists, feminists, critical theorists, poststructuralists and postmodernists who do not heed his warning. We assume that educating-the-educator is no longer problematic since we all sport doctoral degrees from the finest institutions of higher education, have healthy curriculum vitae full of erudite publications, and possess the gift of professional gab which we refine at professional meetings and in the classroom. Theory talk is inevitably rarefied these days, only compounding the problem of political education. This is the legacy of modernism to which a genuinely radical postmodernism must be a response. Modernist theorizing is so Apollonian, so elevated, that virtually no one can climb these mighty peaks without years of acclimation, not just trusty roadmaps. Unavoidably, this entombs theoretical conversation in the university, ensuring that theory itself will not help revivify the public sphere—ever our most important political agenda. Even to utter these thoughts will earn the disrespect of my left colleagues who have worked so hard to learn Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Frankfurt, deconstruction, feminism. I am not pulling rank, although I have spent my share of time sweating through this arduous apprenticeship. But there is something profoundly unreflexive about theory that forgets its own connection to the body politic (O’Neill, 1972), even hastening the dissolution of this connection. Modernity is permeated by expert cultures that disempower those on the outside. The most constitutive expert culture is called capitalism, as Marx recog-


nized. But there are others, too. One of the aims of an interdisciplinary critical theory is precisely to weave together a narrative about how these expert cultures fit together and, together, sustain themselves. We use a variety of terms like capitalism, sexism and racism to do this job. But we must also attend to critical theory itself as an expert culture that inhibits its own democratization, hence democracy in general. This is less a doctrinal question than one of temperament. My left comrades are committed to democracy as a radical endpoint. But too few of them are genuinely democratic in spirit, hence they ignore the contribution their own argot makes to hierarchy, empowering only those who speak in the arcane phrases of European high theory. Theory has become an academic specialty, not a mode of address to the political world. How many theorists address the flesh-and-blood individuals who could not care less about Kristeva and Habermas but care desperately that the world be a less hellish place? Too few. Theory is a modern project in that it does not doubt the legitimacy of its own epistemological privilege. Left theorists ironically would end capitalist modernity by professionalizing and specializing their discourse even further. They call this postmodernism. But this only further marginalizes critical theory as well as entrenches expertise. Postmodern intellectuals must question the contribution of intellectual and political modernism to the very world we all profess to oppose. At the same time, we must not recant the liberating modernism of the Enlightenment, Marxism, feminism, etc. The alternative to capitalist modernity, with its self-perpetuating expert cultures, is not counter-modernity—a left Luddism. The only suitable alternative is a rethinking of the modern in a way that makes writers responsible for their own agitational and rhetorical stance toward the masses. Whether this means we should simply democratize our language is a question I take up shortly, in this chapter’s concluding section. I suspect it is not as simple as that for theory must overcome the tendency of all intellectuality since the Greeks to seal itself off hermetically from the ebb-and-flow of everyday life. Even Marxists have not learned enough from Marx about how to engage theory with the nonexpert cultures occupied by most of the world’s billions in order to change the very value of intellectuality, making it ‘committed’ in Sartre’s (1965) terms. The postmodern intellectual must address his or her public role politically; this inevitably requires some degree of de-academization, of distancing from the life world of professional journals, books, conferences, classrooms. I am not suggesting that intellectuals deny their


intellectuality, embracing whatever excrescence of so-called popular culture is most current or most profitable. American survey research knows nearly everything there is to know about public opinion. Instead, postmodern intellectuals must find a way to offer their discourse as a rule of societal reconstruction, neither shrinking from analytical difficulty and abstraction nor ignoring the tendency of theory itself to become a hierarchical language game—just another expert culture to which access is granted through credentialing processes. Postmodern intellectuality must invent itself, and thus a whole new world, without renouncing the liberating tendency of genuine modernism. But we must be clear about this: the modernist intellectual, whether Adorno or bourgeois social scientist, contributes to bad modernity where he or she not only ignores but increases the social distance between the life worlds of theory and popular experience.

An Agenda of Radical Cultural Studies This immediately suggests a postmodern research agenda to be formulated in a democratizing rhetoric that I call the public voice. Let me describe this agenda and then conclude with a few comments about the public voice. Of course, these two things are inseparable; I am not distancing the topics of radical writing from the writing itself. Methodology will not win the day, especially where methodology has itself become a suffocating expert culture. Programmatism must already write in the voice it recommends; that is one of the key postmodern insights. Writing is already a social practice; it creates a new public world through the prefigurative and constitutive example of its very word. Of course, although writing is not all of politics, textual politics is definitely an arena and vehicle of the political, especially in a fast capitalism in which images, concepts and advertising dominate our public discourse. Ignoring cultural politics is suicidal for those who would both decode and transform the public sphere. In this sense, theorists must cease their exhaustive and exhausting exegetical work (haven’t we learned enough already about the classics of high theory?) and instead turn their attention to critiques of the culture industry—political education, critique of ideology or consciousness raising. Names matter less than the deconstructive practice of opening seemingly deauthored cultural texts to the reality of their own artifice, thus inviting new texts; I have done this with regard to positivist social science (Agger, 1989b). One of the central claims of a radical postmodernism is that cultural discourses do not just fall from


the sky but can be traced backward to authorial gestures that could have been made differently. In this sense, postmodernism explodes the distinction between high and low culture, or at least renders that distinction inherently dialectical at a time when it is difficult to draw a clear line between them. The culture industry mobilizes all sorts of texts against the threat of Utopian imagination—popular culture more than high culture, in fact. For this reason, a radical cultural studies must address these entwining texts as political practices, refusing to ignore them simply because they are pedestrian. Their pedestrian character is precisely their efficacy when it comes to shutting down political imagination. Deconstruction can become a vital critical methodology once liberated from its fetishism in English departments as yet another interpretive perspective on the literary canon. Derrida meant for deconstruction to undo the hidden contradictions and ironies of texts that are otherwise smoothly integrated into the world as the truths they purport to contain. Deconstruction lets authorial artifice shine through, revealing, for example, network television to be a corrigible, deliberate product of busy scribes and not the intractable piece of nature it often appears to be, as close to hand as the remote-control channel changer. As such, by ‘reading’ television (e.g., Miller, 1988) through the deconstructive lens of radical cultural studies we can not only undo its hold on us but even rewrite it, or at least formulate a possible television appropriate to a socialist-feminist-postmodernist society. Cultural studies, like poststructuralist deconstruction, tends to fetishize itself, missing the materialist foundation of commodified discourses. For this reason, I have formulated my version of cultural studies as literary political economy, thus stressing the connection between the study of literary commodification on the one hand and literary hegemony on the other. These things are fundamentally inseparable; television’s thirst for profit is reflected in, and reproduces, the way in which television is a screen of power (Luke, 1989) basically vitiating critical intelligence and Utopian imagination. My study of textual politics here demonstrates the possible relevance of literary political economy to a larger discussion of the future of the public sphere especially as I focus on the nature and status of the postmodern intellectual.

The Public Voice Let me return to the role of postmodern intellectuals, having sug-


gested that our primary political work will fall under the rubric of radical cultural studies (once armed with literary political economy). As I said, to programmatize a postmodern research agenda is absolutely inseparable from a discussion of (and in) the postmodern critical voice—the language game of postmodernity, one might say. I have already lamented the tendency for modernist intellectuals to deny their own imbeddedness in a self-reproducing expert culture, suggesting by implication a postmodern intellectuality opposed to the cult of its own expertise. But there is a difference between expertise and the cult of expertise. At some level, we must admit that intellectuals are still occupants of a rare and privileged social stratum and thus have a peculiar political opportunity unavailable to almost everyone else. Political education assumes that some need education more than others; my point here is that political educators—postmodern intellectuals —must never forget that their discourse itself, notably its attitude toward its own monologic tendencies, has extraordinarily powerful implications for the ‘content’ of that education to be imparted. It is one thing to preach democracy, it is quite another to preach democracy democratically, as if one is really willing and ready to generalize one’s communicative competence over a whole society such that readers become writers, hence efficacious and critical citizens. Can we meaningfully talk of intellectuals as a distinct social stratum when everyone is capable of engaging in creative intellectual discourse or simply public speech? I think not, although we are very far from that day. How many radical intellectuals are willing to relinquish their own privilege? How many really embrace lifeworldgrounded ideal speech—real democracy—in Habermas’ terms? Fewer than one would expect if one focuses on radicals’ unwillingness to open up their self-perpetuating rhetoric. The left abounds with what Habermas calls ‘left fascism’. This is to understand left obscurantism as a purposeful strategy and not just an occupational hazard; political vanguardism plays out on rhetorical and epistemological levels. Postmodern intellectual discourse is just discourse itself—public speech spoken in an accessibly public voice. In this sense, discourse is an antidote to left fascism. Let me define that public voice, recognizing that any definition of that voice must already speak in it. By public voice I am referring to the way postmodern discourse is nontechnical but nonetheless can understand, and even use, technical language where necessary. Public voice expertly subverts its own expert culture, broadening communicative competence as well as Utopian imagination far beyond its own academic ranks. It is a mistake to confuse public voice with ordinary language; ordi-


nary language is riddled with unconsciousness, acquiescence, lapses and contradiction, where public voice comprehends the deformation of discourse in thoroughly political terms. British analytic philosophers who mute the esoteric tones of high theory do so not in order to create the ideal speech situation but simply to undercut radical insight delivered complexly. Public voice does not shrink from difficulty or abstraction but labors hard to make these maximally accessible, in the process educating itself about its own unreflected reliance on categories and catechism. Too many theorists use their technical conceptual apparatus without really thinking about the utility of their neologisms. Theory deconstructs itself where it tries to break its own dependence on a theoretical apparatus that essentially robs thought of vitality. We must try to remember what sharp concepts meant before they became dulled by their ceaseless repetition. Words like domination, oppression, freedom, liberation can be restored to meaningfulness if we work hard to counteract their tendency to become clichés, used whenever we cannot solve intellectual and political problems in their own terms. Public voice abhors the decline of discourse into clichés, although it does not for that reason dispense with all technical language, as intellectual Luddites might. As Freire (1970) has amply demonstrated, the process of ‘conscientization’ requires a political pedagogy empowering the disempowered to understand and use languages heretofore reserved for élites. Expert culture in defending its own privilege gives expertise a bad name, as much on the left as in the mainstream. There is simply no excuse for theorists to invest so much in their own rhetoric that they forget how to think beyond the received wisdom of their particular language games. I could repeat terms like ‘decline of discourse’ or ‘literary political economy’ a million times without getting them to solve intellectual problems in a genuine way. As a result, much of my own recent work has been written in a way that invites the non-expert reader to develop a facility with the occasional theoretical digressions required to raise my writing from mere description to analysis and diagnosis. After all, against Lyotard’s postmodernism, the world’s totality cannot be grasped without the aid of totalizing categories like exploitation, domination, hegemony and patriarchy. This is a delicate balance; on the one hand, we must use abstract concepts to understand the mammoth structuring forces invading and constituting our lives. On the other hand, we must avoid the ritualization of these categories lest they cease to do any useful analytical work. Most important, we must democratize expert cultures of all sorts, including the culture of theory. This democratization does not


just flatten theory talk into prosaic terms of everyday discourse; that would only rob critical categories of their diagnostic ability. It trades on theoretical insights without turning theory itself into a new force of mystification and élite self-justification. Democratizing expert language reinvents language, overcoming the distinction between quotidian discourse and a more rarefied code heretofore monopolized by jealous professionals, including the left. This reinvention of language is easier said than done. I fully intend this chapter to contribute toward that reinvention, moving back and forth between theory and a lower-level discourse unashamed of its popular nature. The decline of discourse will be reversed only if we transform popular culture so that it incorporates heretofore recondite elements of expert language, transvaluing the very distinction between lay and expert rationalities. This is a profoundly political project today given the enormous power of the culture industry and its textual politics. It takes little rigorous research to show that television, journalism and science have constitutive roles in shaping the body politic and thus in perpetuating an unequal distribution of wealth and power. Writers write discourse commodified and displaced into the ‘texts’ of popular and academic culture. As such, they could reinvent these texts as well as the whole world to which they are addressed. I am not simply saying that writers comprise a new vanguard, for that whole military metaphor of tactics and conquest is inappropriate to radical democracy. Yet writers matter because writing matters; we who compose are firmly ensconced in literary political economy, which is part of a larger political economy generally. Our words are converted into economic, cultural and career capital. They have enormous political impact if what we write is sucked into the vortex of the culture industry both as a mode of production and reproduction. A playful deconstructor might say that our words constitute a cultural vortext. In any case, writers, including academics, constitute an important class and cultural fraction. Ideology is written through us and thus it could be written differently. Of course, solitary literary heroism will have little impact on the machine of cultural production. It is precisely for that reason that I call for critical writers to develop a public voice with which to enter into dialogue with those convinced that the present social order is inherently intractable or, as some say, postmodern. Ultimately, the problem with postmodernism as a discourse is that it pretends too clean a rupture between the fluid period of industrializing modernity and the present period of hardened postmodernity. One cannot date or periodize the shift between the two anymore than


one can specify the transition between feudalism and modernity. Certainly postmodernity did not dawn on the morning after the French publication of Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report of Knowledge. Existentialism reminds us that history is open; there are no certainties, either about the eternity of social perfection or the inevitability of decline. Instead, history is indeterminate, as such susceptible to transformations. Dialecticians—better, call us ironists— recognize that in transforming the world we are ourselves transformed. Or, more aptly, we cannot change things without working to change ourselves in the process. Otherwise, change is chimerical, things stay the same, albeit under different flags, different regimes. I would prefer to see modernity and postmodernity as a continuum, a perpetual set of possibilities. We will never escape modernity unless we fry and chill ourselves into nuclear winter, the only conceivable end-of-history. Short of that, we will face a future somehow continuous with the past and present and yet also open to being radically rerouted. Writing as public speech is a way of inserting ourselves into history, a way of making a difference. In any case, capitalism requires writing in order to script the products, lifestyles and imagination appropriate to it. Commodities must be textualized just as texts become commodities themselves. Otherwise, they will fail to traffic in the marketplace, appearing to be the false needs (Heller, 1976; Leiss, 1976; Marcuse, 1964) they really are. And without a restless, frenetic consumerism, capitalism grinds to a halt, just as Marx perspicaciously foresaw. At root, literary political economy exists to prime the general economy (in which texts, too, acquire exchange value or status value). It is tempting to end by methodologizing my notion of public voice, offering a set of inflexible criteria by which we can judge talk as public or not. But that is foreign to the dialogical, dialectical project of genuine discourse, which responds to the world and to other interlocutors in a comprehensible, comprehending sense making. We must work hard to be understood, just as we want to raise the level of understanding. A nation that watches Miami Vice and White Christmas, reads People and tabloids, and votes for Reagan and then BushQuayle must be addressed in its own pedestrian terms, although without forgetting that the point of public discourse is to remake the polity by democratizing expert culture (hence blurring the boundary between lay and expert rationalities). This is political education in the best sense of the word. But that is not to endorse didacticism any more than it is to eschew polemic and passion. One of the left’s historic problems has been its inflexibility


with regard to what is now tellingly called political correctness. Apart from some general commitments to life, liberty and social justice, public life necessarily defies the institutional ritualism that all too quickly leads to a combination of tyranny and mass apathy. There are no singular or simple answers to what ails us apart from some general observations about the colonizing imperatives of capital, patriarchy, racism and the domination of nature (e.g., Habermas 1984, 1987b). The most pressing political work ahead is the critique of ideology, revealing the aporias of literary claims about the rationality of reality. We literary workers must deconstruct cultural claims made on behalf of the present order of things as a way of reauthoring the world. We must recognize that we are being used as conduits of ideology and ontology. It seems that books (scripts, advertisements, journal articles, etc.) write authors, not the other way around. Literary political economy fosters this illusion; in fact, writers write the texts of ideology further diminishing our public competence to think, speak, write and act in ways that answer to our fundamental human needs. No matter how impenetrable the dense web of capitalist textual politics, no matter how disempowered the solitary author, ideology does not fall from the sky, it is composed by people working in the service of ideology, the busy wage slaves of the culture industry. Even to recognize this is a step in the right direction, toward a public literary culture. Of course, recognizing it is not enough. We must reauthor the whole public world, not just theorize about what is going wrong. In this sense, writers who attain public voice must narrate the world anew, suggesting heretofore suppressed social possibilities in believable, convincing terms. Marxism, and to a lesser extent feminism, make little headway in North America because their scant imageries of a different world are too remote from North American experience. The working-class white people and minorities who voted for Reagan and Bush are not addressed by political education relying heavily on European left theory; no matter how comprehensible, The Communist Manifesto does not play in Peoria. It never will. American leftism (Agger 1979; Kann, 1982) must speak American; that is, we on the left must pay attention to the thematic issues of our time, as well as to the current (low) level of political consciousness, and not hope to transmit the truths of high European social theory by injection or hypnotism. Although we have learned from Marx, Lukács, Frankfurt, Gramsci and feminism, we must cease an exegetical mode of political education. Even if ordinary working-class and middleclass Americans would sit still for courses in the Basic Texts of Modern Marxism, the point is not to impart book knowledge of these


canonical writers and texts but to help average Americans apply notions like domination, hegemony and alienation to their own daily lives and then to reinvent their sense of what is possible. Ultimately, our political education will be a dismal failure if we do not empower these dulled readers to become writers themselves. Everyone can learn the public voice, at least to the extent to which people begin to resist élite culture on the local level. If this sounds like a Tocqueville version of American Marxism and feminism, so be it. The New England town meeting is our own equivalent of the Paris Commune and we must respect this difference lest we doom ourselves to irrelevance. This does not mean that we theorists and writers should recant the analytical and diagnostic apparatus of Marxismfeminism but only that we must generalize the liberatory insights of this tradition to a generic public practice; here, I call it public voice, although, obviously, we could name it differently. The notion that everyone can and must become writers—public speakers—is genuinely radicalizing at a time when virtually everyone capitulates to the imperatives imposed on them by experts. Critical theorists (e.g., Habermas, 1979, 1984, 1987b; Mueller, 1973; Wellmer, 1976) have made communication thematic precisely because the monopoly of wealth and power is reinforced, and reinforces, the monopoly of information, expertise and dialogue chances. The culture industry both creates false needs and diverts us from true needs. To the extent to which culture could be scripted differently, the notion that everyone can produce culture is potentially powerful. A radical version of cultural studies represents what I think is most enduring about the long legacy of critical theory since Marx. But it is imperative that cultural studies resists its own academization; works about culture written by and for other specialists only compound the problem. For this reason, critical theorists must carefully examine their own unreflected reliance on élite discourse. Critical theory can and must be written in a new voice; I have called this the public voice, suggesting the political relevance of critical theory at a time when both criticism and theory are only academic projects. Reversing the decline of discourse begins at home.

References ADORNO, T.W. (1945) ‘A Social Critique of Radio Music’, Kenyon Review, 8, 2, pp. 208–17.


– (1954) ‘How to Look at Television’, Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television, 3:213–35. – (1967) Prisms, London: Neville Spearman. – (1969) ‘Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America’, in FLEMING, D. and BAILY, B. (Eds) The Intellectual Migration, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. – (1973) Negative Dialectics, New York: Seabury. – (1974) ‘The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column: A Study in Secondary Superstition’, Telos, 19:13–90. – (1984) Aesthetic Theory, London: RKP. ADORNO, T.W., FRENKEL-BRUNSWIK, E., LEVINSON, D. and SANFORD, R.N. (1950) The Authoritarian Personality, New York: Harper and Row. AGGER, B. (1979) Western Marxism: An Introduction, Santa Monica, Ca.: Goodyear. – (1983) ‘“Marxism” or “the Frankfurt School?’”, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 13, 3:347–65. – (1985) ‘The Dialectic of Deindustrialization: An Essay on Advanced Capitalism’, in FORESTER, J. (Ed.) Critical Theory and Public Life, pp. 3–21, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. – (1989a) Fast Capitalism: A Critical Theory of Significance, Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press. – (1989b) Socio(onto)logy: A Disciplinary Reading, Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press. – (1990a) ‘Critical Theory, Poststructuralism and Postmodernism’, Annual Review of Sociology. – (1990b) The Decline of Discourse: Reading, Writing and Resistance in Postmodern Capitalism, London/Philadephia: Falmer Press. ARONOWITZ, S. (1981) The Crisis in Historical Materialism, New York: Praeger. – (1988) Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. – (1990) The Crisis in Historical Materialism, 2nd Ed., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. BELL, D. (1960) The End of Ideology, Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. BERNSTEIN, B. (1971) Class, Codes and Control, London: RKP. BROWN, R. (1987) Society as Text, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DENZIN, N. (1991) ‘Doing Cultural Studies’, Current Perspectives on Social Theory, 11. DERRIDA, J. (1976) Of Grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.


EVANS, S. (1980) Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left, New York: Vintage. FEKETE, J. (1978) The Critical Twilight: Explorations in the Ideology of AngloAmerican Literary Theory from Eliot to McLuhan, London: RKP. FISH, S. (1980) Is There a Text in the Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. FREIRE, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Seabury. GELLNER, E. (1959) Words and Things, London: Gollancz. GRAMSCI, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart. HABERMAS, J. (1975) Legitimation Crisis, Boston: Beacon Press. – (1979) Communication and the Evolution of Society, Boston: Beacon Press. – (1981) ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’, New German Critique, 22:3–14. – (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, Boston: Beacon Press. – (1987a) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. – (1987b) The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, Boston: Beacon Press. HELLER, A. (1976) The Theory of Need in Marx, New York: St Martin’s Press. HORKHEIMER, M. (1972) ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, in HORKHEIMER, M. Critical Theory, pp. 188–243, New York: Herder and Herder. – (1973) ‘The Authoritarian State’, Telos, 15:3–20. – (1974) Eclipse of Reason, New York: Seabury. HORKHEIMER, M. and ADORNO, T.W. (1972) Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York: Herder and Herder. HUYSSEN, A. (1984) ‘Mapping the Postmodern’, New German Critique, 33: 5–52. – (1986) After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. JACOBY, R. (1987) The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, New York: Basic. JAMESON, F. (1971) Marxism and Form, Princeton: Princeton University Press. – (1981) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.


– (1984a) ‘The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate’, New German Critique, 33:53–65. – (1984b) ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, 146:53–93. – (1988) ‘Cognitive Mapping’ in NELSON, C. and GROSSBERG, L. (Eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, pp. 347–57, Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press. JAY, M. (1984) Adorno, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. KANN, M. (1982) The American Left, New York: Praeger. KEANE, J. (1984) Public Life and Late Capitalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. KELLNER, D. (1988) ‘Postmodernism as Social Theory: Some Challenges and Problems’, Theory, Culture and Society, 5, 2/3:239–69. – (1989a) ‘Boundaries and Borderlines: Reflections on Jean Baudrillard and Critical Theory’, Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 9:5–22. – (1989b) Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press. – (1989c) Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond, Cambridge: Polity Press. KROKER, A. and COOK, D. (1986) The Postmodern Scene, New York: St Martin’s Press . LEISS, W. (1976) The Limits to Satisfaction: An Essay on the Problem of Needs and Commodities, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. LUKE, T. (1989) Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination and Resistance in Informational Society, Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press. LYOTARD, J-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. MANDEL, E. (1975) Late Capitalism, London: New Left Books. MARCUSE, H. (1955) Eros and Civilization, New York: Vintage. – (1964) One-Dimensional Man, Boston: Beacon Press. – (1969) An Essay on Liberation, Boston: Beacon Press. – (1978) The Aesthetic Dimension, Boston: Beacon Press. MARSHALL, B. (1988) ‘Feminist Theory and Critical Theory’, Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 25, 2:208–30. MARX, K. and ENGELS, F. (1947) The German Ideology, New York: International Publishers. – (1964) The Communist Manifesto, New York: Washington Square Press.


McCARTHY, T. (1978) The Critical Theory of jurgen Habermas, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. MILLER, M.C. (1988) Boxed In: The Culture of TV, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. MILLS, C.W. (1951) White Collar, New York: Oxford University Press. MILLS, C.W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination, New York: Oxford University Press. – (1962) The Marxists, New York: Dell. MUELLER, C. (1973) The Politics of Communication, New York; Oxford University Press. O’NEILL, J. (1972) ‘Public and Private Space’, in O’NEILL, J. (Ed.) Sociology as a Skin Trade, pp. 20–37, New York: Harper and Row. – (1976) ‘Critique and Remembrance’, in O’NEILL, J. (Ed.) On Critical Theory, pp. 1–11, New York: Seabury. – (1991) ‘Is There a Class in This Text?’, manuscript. RANSOM, J.C. (1941) The New Criticism, Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions. RYAN, M. (1982) Marxism and Deconstruction, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. SARTRE, J-P. (1965) What is Literature?, New York: Harper and Row. SENNETT, R. (1978) The Fall of Public Man, New York: Vintage. SLATER, P. (1977) Origin and Significance of the Frankfurt School, London: RKP. WELLMER, A. (1976) ‘Communications and Emancipation: Reflections on the Linguistic Turn in Critical Theory’, in O’NEILL, J. (Ed.) In Critical Theory, pp. 231–63, New York: Seabury. WITTGENSTEIN, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

6 How Mothers Quit Resisting and Managed to Love TV Serafina K.Bathrick

The critical analysis of mass culture must encompass an inherent paradox: while every text pleases its audience with the familiar, affirming the status quo by asking only the questions it can answer, it may also uncover something new and provoke that same audience to experience emancipatory feelings and to ask questions about possibilities for change. Critics have tended to polarize these two characteristics, insisting on one or the other rather than allowing for a perspective which reveals that they are simultaneously operative. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argue that the very concept of a culture industry brings with it the impossibility of emancipation. Because ‘a technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself, there is no room for spontaneity among the producers of mass culture.1 Nor can there be a critical response from an audience that is ‘the object of calculation, an appendage of the machinery’.2 Walter Benjamin on the other hand attributes an emancipatory potential to the media, in particular to film, as its subject matter represents the interests of the masses and its technical apparatus speaks to their determination to see themselves as a force in history. Believing that the incidental sign and the peripheral space reveal particular meanings, Benjamin responds to the Utopian possibility that the media can disseminate such unseen and essential details to the masses, and with its mobile camera-eye can challenge the static social relationships that have long held élitist values in place. A feminist theory of mass culture can benefit from both Adorno and Benjamin’s work, but must offer a corrective to these two extremes. First, it must emphasize the importance of an historically specific context for understanding these theories, and in borrowing from each of them, must explore how the mass media simultaneously address two aspects of women’s experience: on the one hand keeping them bound as spectator-consumers to the private sphere, on the 145


other, exposing them to a world where their potential as producers may challenge the very ideology of gender. Above all, a feminist reading must emphasize the potential for public action. This chapter will look closely at the impact of television on women and will explore the changing public roles of mothers within families. In taking up Benjamin’s emphasis on the importance of participation, it will speculate about how television culture diminishes the authority of mothers at home to nurture a participatory ideal, at the same time that it may free them from the privatised aspects of family life. In this sense, the concept of family in the consumer age must be viewed in less reductive terms than Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory would suggest, although their perspective offers a useful way to identify some of the dangers inherent in a managerial model of mothering. This chapter will explore Parents’ Magazine, a mass produced and widely distributed monthly publication which addressed the modern mother’s role as both consumer and producer. It will focus on the decade when television first appeared on the market and in the American home. At this time, Parents’ response to an entirely new kind of family culture, a powerful blend of the cinematic and the broadcast media, offers an interesting glimpse into the paradoxical meanings of mass culture, as well as an opportunity to explore the changing roles of women within families at that time. While it first appeared in 1927, during the decade when advertising became big business and consumerism increasingly defined a way of life, this primer for modern parents addressed its readers with a strong plea for the importance of home life as an alternative culture to that which was promoted and sold in the market-place. In particular, Parents’ gained a reputation for helping mothers look critically at the mass media. A monthly guide to Hollywood movies and current recorded music, along with a yearly review of comic books, formed the backbone to this effort throughout the 1930s and 1940s. With an attitude that accepted the inevitability of the mass media, the magazine emphasized the responsibility of parents. Frequent articles on ‘movie values’ for instance, warned readers: ‘The motion picture producers are not as much to blame as are we if our children see such pictures.’3 At the same time that mothers were encouraged to catch up with and monitor their children’s experience with commercial media, they were also inundated with frequent feature articles about the importance of participatory activities for children and with advice about ways to maintain an artisanal dimension to the production of daily life at home. Puppets, parades, peep shows, theatrical performances, reading aloud, games and crafts: life at home should be playful and

HOW MOTHERS QUIT RESISTING AND MANAGED TO LOVE TV 147

cooperative. Readers were thus exposed to two distinct traditions, and were instructed by the magazine’s example how to mediate between them. Parents’ promoted the idea that participatory democracy begins at home and that consumerism and spectatorship must be carefully monitored. It was primarily women at home who were guided in these two aspects of mothering. In these ways, the magazine may be seen to address much of what Adorno and Horkheimer warn against when they harangue about the dangers of an instrumental culture that is ‘geared to mimetic regression’ where the spectator learns ‘rather to reiterate it ritualistically than actually to produce it.’4 Like all mass culture texts, Parents’ Magazine was also caught up in the class- and gender-based ideology of separate spheres, evident in the fact that it addressed its readers as a white, middle-class constituency whose primary commitment to the private sphere remained unquestioned. The two distinct ideologies for the woman at home had their roots in different eras within the nineteenth century. Evidence of the early nineteenth century ‘Cult of True Womanhood’ existed in the magazine’s Utopian expectation that women could stave off the corrupting aspects of commerce as they endangered community and creativity. But along with the ‘angel of the home’ ideal of service and sacrifice, Parents’ Magazine was strongly informed by an emphasis on home management.5 In response to increasing professionalization in the fields of science and technology, home economists in the 1880s and 1890s insisted that ‘women should bring to their “occupation” the same sort of rationality and openness to expert advice that their husbands brought to their occupations.’6 The possibility that family life would thus take its cue from the priorities and postures of an increasingly bureaucratized society confirms the fears of Adorno and Horkheimer who view as inevitable the rationalization of all culture by the interests of industry. With the gradual obsolescence of traditional childrearing modes, which had granted women a particular kind of authority to shape children’s interests in relation to past familial values, Parents’ Magazine spoke with a new authority which surely diminished that of actual parents and grandparents. Its expertise claimed to better address the needs of an increasingly rationalized society than could the early nineteenth century rules for mothering. At that time, mothers provided their children with a firm respect for the values of a preindustrial past, an undeniable form of political power. Mary Ryan writes: ‘under the banner of the cult of motherhood women participated in the creation, circulation and generational transfer of social


values, thus providing the integrative tissue for an emerging middle class.’7 It is important to note that until after World War II, Parents’ continued to promote a blend of these two nineteenth century ideals which kept women at home but granted them both cooperative/ emotional and managerial responsibilities. Maintaining a balance between advising women to shelter their families from the indifference or competitiveness of the marketplace and educating women to provide their families with the same up-to-date expertise that moved and facilitated that world of commerce—such was the delicate work of the editorial staff at Parents’ Magazine. This chapter will focus on the decade between 1947 and 1957 when the magazine first responds to the arrival of television. It is at this point that Parents’ could no longer mediate between the realities of modern family life and the traditional activities which had been associated with women’s capacities to resist its colonization by commercial interests. By exploring this historical moment, we may look closely at the intersection, if not the collision, between a new and powerful television culture industry and the fading authority of women at home. When we look at the first decades of Parents’ we find a balance between these two seemingly oppositional approaches: readers are encouraged to view their roles as mothers in the light of an urgent mandate to keep family values safe from the instrumentality of public life, at the same time that they are presumed to be the guardians of a private sphere which increasingly trivializes their work by associating it with consumerism. With the arrival of television these contradictory voices can no longer be managed or contained by the magazine’s editorial stance. It is revealing that Parents’ never assumes a serious responsibility for guiding mothers through the first decade of television. There is no systematic approach to programs that in any way matches the monthly movie guide, nor does the magazine touch on the phenomenon of television as a home-based threat to women’s authority, a possibly unstoppable invasion of the commercial world into the home. In Gender and History, Linda Nicholson writes that ‘in the modern period in the West, female devaluation and gender in general appear strongly linked to the separation of public and private’.8 Indeed, she and others emphasize that feminism in America is a response to the widening gap between home and work which gives rise to an ideology of separate spheres in the early nineteenth century. It is also clear that the modern feminist movement of the 1960s gained some of its momentum from the claim that ‘the personal is political’, and from a


critique of family that revealed its immense power to naturalize an institution that kept women isolated from public life. This chapter will look at the decade before the Women’s Liberation Movement, and while it recognizes the considerable energy unleashed by a feminist consciousness of the inequities in the politics of everyday life, it will also argue for an understanding of the family as a place where women’s subjectivity provided an essential alternative to the impulse within mass culture to colonize daily life so as to synchronize its rhythms with those of the marketplace. In this way, Parents’ Magazine, while very much belonging to modern mass culture, made clear its commitment to women as a force in history, recalling for contemporary readers the urgency to keep alive an earlier time when the gap between public and private life allowed for cultural resistance. When the TV set became a living room centerpiece and a primary source of home entertainment, the relationship between private and public life was transformed. From Horkheimer and Adorno’s perspective, the new medium contributed to a principle of private life that increasingly mirrored the norms and values associated with the world of work and commerce. As the promotion of products became integral to home life, public and private spheres were brought closer. From this point of view, the possibilities for resistance, or indeed for the production of any kind of alternative culture, were reduced. To follow this argument is to see that as each member of her household was now targeted as a potential consumer by television sponsors, the middle-class mother was far less able to shelter her family from the time-is-money norms of the marketplace. The opportunity to mediate between the opposing values associated with these two worlds was thus wrenched from her at this time, challenging her authority as an individual subject within the home. Public and private life were also split more widely apart, separated as families grew more physically and socially isolated from their neighbors and from the very ideal of community. Daniel Boorstin’s analysis of the impact of television echoes that of Horkheimer and Adorno. He emphasizes the deadening effect of private viewing, where the only ‘ other people at the performance take the invisible forms of “canned” laughter and applause.’9 This situation also sharply challenged the traditional role of mothers who were encouraged to value cooperative play and to organize participatory activities as central to life at home and as a basic preparation for an active associational life within a larger community. This chapter will examine how, with both of these responses to television, the authority of mothers was diminished. This argument may permit us to speculate about


this era as it represents a step towards a deeper, more general concern about the contemporary crisis in family life. If families cannot be depended upon to nurture cooperation and to foster alternatives to the norms of industry, then where do we turn for these values? It is at this point that a critical theory of mass culture most clearly provides the groundwork for understanding how these changes may be evaluated. While they do not address the historically specific implications of their theory, the work of Horkheimer and Adorno on the culture industry provides a useful way to examine one approach taken by Parents’ Magazine in the early years of television. Viewed as another commodity, like ‘automobiles, bombs, and movies’, these critics claim that television contributes to a leveling of social life which breaks down any ‘distinction between the logic of work and that of the social system’.10 Inherent in their case for ‘mass deception’, as it is propagated by the media, is a belief that the fusion of culture and entertainment leads to the ‘depravation of culture and the intellectualization of amusement’.11 Above all, the interdependence between instrumental reason, as it bespeaks the corruption of Enlightenment goals, and technology, insures that mass culture is simply another means by which economic and political domination is exercized. The system is air-tight: there is no opportunity for resistance, an important consideration as we take up the question of women at home. Horkheimer and Adorno express concern for how the combination of sound and image on the movie or TV screen makes real life indistinguishable from the image-world of commerce, but their focus is primarily on the ways in which audiences are affected. Their reductive argument is based on the assumption that the consumer is helpless to experience or to imagine alternatives to mass culture, and thus submits gladly to each new medium, as if offered a new opportunity to ‘belong’ to a society where ‘progress literally keeps men apart’.12 What is promoted as the latest technology for free home entertainment is seen by these critics as a new mode of social control, particularly effective because audiences are duped by what they believe is a ‘gift system’. ‘As culture is represented as a bonus with undoubted private and social advantages, they have to seize the chance. They rush in lest they miss something’.13 There is room for neither resistance nor alternatives to this culture which has amalgamated with advertising, and so gained omnipotence over all of private life. But what these critics saw in TV as a new coercive mechanism might have been viewed quite differently by Walter Benjamin. His writing recognizes a Utopian dimension to the mass media, and he is hopeful about the potential of mechanical reproduction to provide a


more widespread access and more critical reception to culture. His observations are based on an analysis of the media themselves, and less on the dangers of a closed system of social control. Benjamin writes that, because the mechanically reproduced image ‘detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition’, it opens up the potential for a new kind of access and social awareness.14 Groups who have been denied an understanding of their own histories may gain new insights and experience, a new catalyst for empowerment through exposure to film narratives. Related to this, and of particular relevance to TV, he states: ‘in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced’.15 That is, the historically fixed image may attain a different meaning when viewed in a context where art and social privilege are no longer entangled.16 In contrast to Horkheimer and Adorno’s position, he imagines that a mass audience gains a more critical perspective because it identifies not with the live performer, but with the camera and its multiple points of view. Benjamin decribes a ‘testing’ process that takes place during the reception of film, and believes that such interactivity was not possible when traditional performances were staged only for élite audiences.17 He viewed the masses as the very subject matter for the mass media, and while his emphasis is on cinema, by his claim that live events could be represented as they occurred, Benjamin strongly suggests the potential of television to liberate its viewers from the historical bias of élitist interpretation. His point of view demands that we weigh the possibility that all is not lost with the advent of mass produced culture, rather that new modes of cultural dissemination may give rise to new social formations, ones that contribute to a more active viewer and a more democratic society. It is important to keep in mind that as women learned to adapt to television, they experienced a new kind of conflict between the demands of their traditional roles within the private sphere and their experience as mediators between public and private life. Parents’ provides its own version of this historical moment. It is a version that may be understood in the light of the possibilities implied in both Horkheimer and Adorno’s dark predictions as well as by the utopian vision of Benjamin. As the former critics might have predicted, the magazine operates in part to promote consumerism, like any ‘irrefutable prophet of the prevailing order’.18 From its mix of subjective articles, advertisements, and expert advice, it published the testimonials of mothers who proudly insured that their families would conform to television’s programmed time frame. Acting as the allies


of industry, America’s mothers granted manufacturers and networks profitable and advantageous cultural legitimacy. At the same time, Parents’ published another perspective, one that encouraged readers to resist the new medium—and thus the magazine also served to ‘reactivate’ a more utopian notion that home life must always represent an alternative to the norms of industry. We may also speculate on the implications of Parents’ refusal to deal substantively with television programming, in particular with its early claims to providing ‘live’ coverage in both news and entertainment programs. In a magazine that ultimately affirmed the primary role of mothers as full-time parents, it is revealing to note that its editors never took up the questions of access raised by Benjamin or pursued the possibilities for a new historical consciousness among women in a medium that brought the public world into their homes. Television culture was only minimally acknowledged as a possible impetus for women to see themselves less as consumers in the private sphere than as participants in the political world. An advertisement for ‘Nitey-Nite’ pajamas in a 1952 Parents’ Magazine depicts two young siblings playing at a child-sized table and chairs. There is a noisemaker for the older brother and the younger child holds a paper butterfly. Marking the event as a home-grown festivity is the fact that both children wear decorated pajamas and hats that identify them as garden produce. The caption reads: ‘ Clever mothers can trim Nitey-Nites into a radish or a watermelon-as seen at this party’.19 Indeed, one pair of red pajamas has been covered with black ‘seeds’ of fabric and the radish child has sprigs of green material attached to her pajama feet. From its first issue in 1927, Parents’ Magazine encouraged its readers to invent activities for children and, more specifically, to involve them in activities which tranformed consumer goods into personalized playthings. It was in this way that mothers mediated between the world of mass produced goods and the family as the site of a more artisanal cultural production. In addition to this kind of advertisement, the editorials and features promoted an ideal of home life that was essentially play-full: a time and place for experiment in a world not driven by necessity. Herbert Marcuse describes play as ‘freedom itself’, where ‘want and need (are) satisfied without alienated labor’.20 Given this commitment to the ideals of communal and co-operative play at home, it is noteworthy that soon after the Second World War Parents’ Magazine begins to warn its readers about some recent developments that appear to mitigate against the acceptance of play within the family:


In America…we are product-minded. We are time-conscious. We want to see results. We are impatient of mistakes… This makes it hard for us to feel good about play. For play is messing around; play is experimentation; play is a slow sinking in of life’s lessons; play is doing over and over. Play is practice for good living, but we can only tolerate practice when it seems highly directed to some clear-cut end, with the sure promise of quick results.21 This article, written by a professor of education in 1949 seems particularly relevant when we look at a very different advertisement for ‘Nitey-Nites’ from a 1957 issue of Parents’ Magazine. Three children are shown sitting together in their pajamas, staring intently at the same source of light. Posed stiffly as if for a formal family portrait, their faces and pastel nightclothes glow from an invisible television screen. The copy promotes a domestic scene where children are spectator-consumers. The young siblings have learned to behave themselves, and are likened to little adults out on the town: there to see and be seen ‘as…in the best night spots’.22 Life-at-home life has become identical with public life, which in turn, is associated with mass entertainment. This new image of a bedtime ritual in front of the TV, along with the above article on the diminished value of play, strongly corroborate Horkheimer and Adorno’s belief that ‘amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work’.23 While their position is sharpened by a direct assault on consumerism, which would never appear in Parents’ Magazine, their words address a similar sense of loss, as ‘distraction becomes exertion’. The culture industry supplies entertainment that ruins the fun by allowing business considerations to involve it in the ideological clichés of a culture in the process of self-liquidation.24 In ‘Authority and the Family’, Horkheimer notes that, in keeping with the powers of commerce to erode fun, the modern family has given itself over to ‘the application of reason’.25 He compares this situation to an earlier period when the family provided a refuge from and an opportunity to resist the instrumental values of the industrial marketplace: Within the family…unlike public life, relationships were not mediated through the market and the individual members were not competing with each other. Consequently the indi-


vidual always had the possibility there of living not as a mere function but as a human being.26 If we return to ‘Why Play is Important’, the above-cited article in Parents’ Magazine, and examine it in the light of an historical perspective on nineteenth century domestic ideology which promoted the image of ‘True Womanhood’ so as to trivialize women’s actual experience as the social and moral center within the family, then Professor Hymes’ advice to his readers takes on a different meaning. While he begins with a rhetorical flurry, saying ‘The country that once proudly proclaimed the pursuit of happiness as a decent and legitimate human goal now feels apologetic if its children have fun’, his conclusion holds out for the possibility that mothers will continue to help children to build ‘a play world’, a clear alternative to the ways of an economy which values only the finished product. The details are spelled out: by providing children with the raw materials: ‘clay and paints… wheels; dolls; rope; the odds and ends of closets and scrap piles’, mothers counter the prevailing values which privilege timesaving and profit-making over participation and play.27 Although Parents’ has its roots in the decade when the needs of the marketplace mobilized new advertising strategies and an increasing commitment to sell consumerism to women as a way of life, its emphasis on artisan activities for children provides an important corrective in an age of ready-made goods. We see the paradox within mass culture: Parents’ Magazine simultaneously offers its readers two contradictory perspectives. One, corroborated by advertising imagery, is geared to promote a family of rapt spectators in the form of children watching bedtime television; the other encourages resistance to this aspect of passive consumerism. In the first, Adorno and Horkheimer’s predictions about the merging worlds of mass produced imagery and individual imagination are promoted as a new lifestyle. But in the light of Walter Benjamin’s Utopian belief that the mass media may function to ‘reactivate the object reproduced’, the magazine recalls an historical awareness of women’s potential to work against an ideology which trivializes their own social role by associating it largely with consumption rather than production. In ‘The Author as Producer’, Benjamin observes that the bourgeois press ‘can assimilate astonishing quantities of revolutionary themes, indeed can propagate them without calling its own existence, and the existence of the class that owns it, seriously into question’.28 In order to explore the changes and challenges posed by the entry of television into the home, let us look at these two tendencies in Par-


ents’ Magazine: one which encouraged mothers to resist the rationalization of private life, the other which provided incentives for them to believe in themselves as expert managers and the allies of industry. Before the arrival of television, these two impulses were represented as coexisting modes for middle-class motherhood. In 1949, Parents’ Magazine included two features on television and many more which advised mothers to keep their children interested in games and crafts. These articles make clear that it is within the domestic sphere that children learn by doing and thus internalize the values associated with both individualism and cooperation. From its beginnings, the editors encouraged readers to define the American family as a democratic community and to associate its activities with a participatory notion of culture. These values were still promoted in the early years of television. In an article about being prepared to guide children’s activities, a ‘Mother and Former Playground Director’ includes directions for numerous outdoor games like Giant Steps, Follow the Leader, and Stealing Sticks. At the outset she warns against authoritarian tactics and regimentation: ‘It is best to approach youngsters in a casual manner when suggesting activities’.29 She also includes a detailed description of activities involving theatrical productions: Peep Shows can be made from shoe boxes with characters and props cut out of paper. Many such articles recommend making puppets as well as encouraging children to dress up and perform their own plays. Ideas for activities like circus parades in the basement, and how to make wristband jingle bells to inspire dancing are included in every issue of Parents’. Many of these articles are written as testimonials by women who rely on cooperative efforts at childcare and are part of an active community of mothers who share their collective energies and creative ideas. While Adorno and Horkheimer would view the magazine’s efforts as merely substituting for real community, Benjamin’s arguments might point to the possibility that a mass medium can serve to cultivate another kind of community born of mutual responsiveness to past ideals. He writes of the possibility that in these instances, ‘work itself has its turn to speak’.30 We find in these magazine testimonials that the same women who produce an alternative culture, speak out as authors and experts. But what happens when mothers testify about how they have introduced their families to television? When we look at its response to television in the late 1940s, we see little willingness in Parents’ Magazine to encounter television at all. This reticence to engage in a critical discussion of either programming or viewing habits may help us understand how this medium, and the new priorities that accompanied it, dealt a serious blow to the role of


women as historical subjects within the family and to the ideal upheld by women for a relationship between family and community. A medium which combines the invasiveness of radio with the visual allure of movies was indeed a powerful challenge to the boundaries of the American household and to the authority of women to bridge the gap between private and public worlds. Never before had the family adapted itself so completely to the rhythms and requirements of consumerism. Never had entertainment and information been linked so directly to the promotion and sale of goods. In viewing television as the ultimate ‘triumph of invested capital’, Horkheimer and Adorno describe it as the fulfillment of Wagner’s ‘Gesamtkunstwerk—the fusion of all the arts in one work’.31 Their critique is its most vehement in relation to television, for this they see as a medium and a mode of social control that will ready its audiences for Fascism. Surely they would find evidence that family situation comedies intercut with sales pitches for family-related products were capable of creating a closed loop between the medium and its captive family audience. So too the genre system of production, filled with ‘ready made clichés to be slotted in anywhere’, insures that its ‘prearranged harmony is a mockery of what had to be striven after in the great bourgeois works of art’.32 To what extent, we may ask, did Horkheimer and Adorno’s hyperbole provide an explanation for at least one aspect of women’s experience with the new medium? Television mobilized the American family in the 1950s, seemingly taking over the mother’s domestic tasks in a violent act of substitution while simultaneously promoting consumerism as a way of life for the entire family. Whereas with movies, radio and comics, Parents’ magazine had encouraged women to practice their skills as primary cultural producers and to thus select and discuss genres that were compatible with family-generated activities, with the colonization by the television set partially facilitated by the managerial mother, the authority of the inventive mother gave way to the appetite of the spectator child. In a poignant article written in 1948 by a housewife named Ella April Codel, Parents’ Magazine published its first testimonial on how ‘Television has Changed Our Lives’. In one of the few features devoted to the new medium in the period between 1947 and 1957, the author assures her readers that ‘while family activities go on as usual, television both enriches and entertains’.33 She then reverses her argument by describing several ways in which, following a ‘family conference’ to determine the placement of the set, its presence challenges and changes the very rhythms of family life itself. But there is a


certain pride communicated as Ella Codel describes what she experiences in her new role as exhibitor/entrepreneur: The logical spot in the room was left vacant, awaiting the television installation. I brought down an old table which was not a thing of beauty, but which was the correct size and height on which to place the set. I then made a circular tablecloth with heavy fringe on the botton to cover the table. In the back of the table I hung ceiling-to-floor draperies of the same fabric to give a simple and unobtrusive effect. The sofa, flanked by lounge chairs, was placed at the opposite end of the room facing the television set.34 With the furniture organized to mirror the mise-en-scène of every living room in every situation comedy, the traditional hearth or even the piano already have been displaced. The efforts cited by Ella Codel to create a place for the television include placing the set in front of hanging curtains, thereby privileging the new medium and marking it as her family’s primary source of entertainment. The living room is now an intimate and familiar auditorium.35 So too the reorganization of time is acknowledged as an important concession to television programming. Next, the author describes the need to be more organized and efficient in her home. Her younger children want to watch a seven o’clock ‘ Small Fry’ program so that dinner has to be set ahead. Ella Codel assures her readers that she makes these adjustments gladly and has made TV viewing with the family ‘a habit, no matter what the program or my chores’.36 The television age mother was thus swept into a new role at home. Her managerial skills are crucial to the newly coordinated rhythm of family life and television programs. But there is also resignation implied by this housewife’s concession to television time, by the giving-over to its primacy. As anticipated by Horkheimer and Adorno’s bleak prognosis, ‘something is provided for all so that none may escape’.37 In spite of her efforts to assure Parents’ readers that a democratic family life was still in existence as the group learned to vote on what programs represented a common choice and as a ‘television etiquette’ emerged, this author’s narrative also records a sense of loss. But what makes this substitution of home-made culture by industrial programming so threatening to women and to the democratic values they had upheld, is the fact that in their efforts to accomodate the new medium, television culture gained the authority to promote itself as an integral feature of family life. In this way, women as


homemakers were further identified as the allies of industry as they facilitated the intrusion of television into their homes in the name of a more informed and efficiently managed family. It is possible that just as they had been encouraged by Parent’s Magazine to personalize other purchases, so too they brought television sets into their family’s lives in the hopes that these little theaters were akin to the puppet shows, costumed plays and readings aloud that had been central to their production of life at home. However, another reading of this testimonial is also possible. When Codel is explaining the details of what might be seen as an enormous effort to coordinate daily life with televised culture, she suggests there are some personal rewards: Nightly schedules are pretty well fixed, so I plan accordingly. When a special program is set which I want to see, I usually know about it ahead of time and plan for it. Most of the times it is worth the effort for the satisfaction of witnessing an important event in which I could not have otherwise participated.38 In the decade of the 1950s, 70 per cent of the households in America were made up of fathers who were full-time employees and mothers who were full-time houseworkers. The fifties is the decade that spurred Betty Friedan to name the ‘problem that has no name’, and in 1961 to publish an emotionally charged critique, The Feminine Mystique. She makes little reference to television, but does acknowledge the impact of media images on the lives of women who stay home. While her focus is largely on women’s magazines, Friedan’s arguments would support the claim that women’s isolated experience as homemakers produces a myopic perception of the world and a sense of self-worth that is always vulnerable to trivialization. We have seen support for Friedan’s argument in Ella Codel’s willingness to adapt and conform to life around the set. Joshua Meyrowitz, writing in the 1980s about fifties’ television, takes a very different position about the impact of this particular medium on women’s lives. His explanation for how women were so rapidly mobilized to form a feminist movement in the 1960s is based largely on a belief that television produced shifts in patterns of access to information. When it entered the homes of the millions, television facilitated’…the merging of male and female situations or information systems’.39 Meyrowitz’s argument recalls Walter Benjamin’s essay on the potential of cinema to democratize culture and to produce,


through its analogy to live events, a more critical spectator and active participant in the social process. While Adorno and Horkheimer’s somewhat behaviorist model of spectatorship could easily inform Friedan’s polemic, Miriam Hansen has written in defence of Benjamin’s perspective. She suggests that his position on spectatorship ‘is in the end more complex, because he is less interested in a critique of ideology than in redeeming the reified images of mass culture and modernity for a theory and politics of experience’.40 Meyrowitz’s argument catches some of Benjamin’s intent as it claims that television exposes women to ‘male’ political topics, thereby broadening their social environment. Similarly, he states that because men and women viewed a certain amount of informational programming together, television closed the gap between the informed man and the isolated woman. Lastly, Meyrowitz suggests that women saw themselves represented on television as an isolated minority, and thereby gained a certain consciousness of their own history from this experience. Aside from certain technological determinist dangers to his argument, Meyrowitz’s position supports the possibility that when Ella Codel confuses spectatorship with participation, she may well be voicing a pre-feminist recognition that mass culture can provide an emancipatory ingredient to the lives of women at home. It should be noted that in the first decade of television, Parents’ published only one article that focused directly on the impact of working mothers on family life. Ironically, among the author’s concerns is the question: ‘Will her home become a schedule-ridden household?’.41 As if in defense of the managerial mother, one other article from 1949 describes a mother’s experience with television’s impact on her family’s life. Henrietta Battle gives her readers a few warnings about the effects of television viewing on children’s eyes, but focuses primarily on the ways in which women should learn to manage meals and family activities around the times of TV programs. She emphasizes some of the rewards for this accommodation, and her suggestions for new dimensions in television-time-management at home go far beyond Ella Codel’s. She explains that with older children ‘you may have to change your schedule around and have dinner, a little later’, while for younger children an earlier dinner hour will be easier to plan. My two girls are six and three. At quarter to five they come in from play, literally fly into their bathrobes and slippers, and are ready for supper shortly after five. They eat their meal without dawdling, for they know that 5:30 is ‘Howdy-Doody Time’ (their favorite program). Don’t start letting them take


their plates with them. They will be too absorbed in the program to eat, and you will lose a valuable way of getting them to clean up their suppers with dispatch. While your children are happily and quietly watching their programs, you can work in the kitchen with peace of mind.42 This new mandate for precision in the family routine is heightened as the author goes on to explain how, at alternating fifteen-minute intervals the 3-year-old and the 6-year-old move like robots between their television programs and their baths and beds, so that while she is putting the younger child down to sleep, ‘I run the tub for the six year old. She comes up promptly at 6:45 for her bath, and is in bed shortly after 7:00’.43 She notes that any ‘whining or dawdling’ will mean that the child will lose her ‘television privilege for the next night’. The word ‘dawdle’ gains a specific meaning in the age of television, as children are disciplined to program their lives around the set. The very idea that daily life should be subordinated to the authoritarian rhythms of the culture industry recalls Horkeheimer’s words regarding the potential for contemporary citizens to surrender their freedom to the will of the market. He describes the modern family ‘which has shrunk to being a consumer community’, wherein the authority of the father is defined only ‘by the money he brings in’.44 We might also observe that the mother’s capacity to resist this instrumentalism is equally eroded by the forces of industrially-produced culture. As if to address some of these dangers, Parents’ continues to publish a limited number of articles which offer advice on family television habits. It is in these efforts to keep alive a mother’s critical role in relation to television that the magazine encourages readers to maintain a more participatory attitude towards the medium. One such author, president of Junior Programs, Inc., writes enthusiastically about the potential for families to find new ways to gather and discuss what interests them on TV, the message being that as long as the mother maintains a close watch on her family of spectators, she can continue to monitor and guide their appreciation of democratic values. ‘Television Comes to Our Children’ argues for the many ways that programming is rooted in traditional forms of family-generated entertainment. Puppets, storytellers, and ‘drawing programs’ promise to become popular, and the implication is not that they will replace family productions, but that they are wholesome because they affirm and re-present that culture. As with numerous articles on how mothers could shape an exhibitor’s choices of movies in their local theaters, there is a claim that television ‘ programmers would welcome


suggestions concerning the age appeal of their present shows, and ideas concerning the likes and dislikes of the various ages’.45 Democracy should be practiced in ways that were ignored as radio programming developed: This is the time for individual parents and community groups to make constructive suggestions. With radio, they waited until the patterns were set, and then offered more criticism than practical ideas. In television, however, there are no precedents as yet. New ideas are welcomed and those who know children’s theatre, literature and hobbies should offer any ideas and suggestions that they may have.46 This utopian idea that television was a responsive medium, organized around principles that would permit local community participation was short-lived. Indeed, William Boddy writes that ‘the history of commercial television is the story of the deliberate shepherding of a technological apparatus by powerful established interests in electronic manufacturing and broadcasting’.47 The evidence is that there was little debate regarding the proper social uses of television, as there had been in the early days of radio. In this sense Parents’ efforts to cultivate among its readers a willingness to think collectively about the content or broadcast times of television programming was less about the possibilities inherent in the new medium and more about their past editorial position regarding women’s traditional roles as mediators between public and private life. In the years that follow, Parents’ Magazine devotes only a smaD percentage of its monthly fare to television related articles, sometimes only one per year and never more than two. These features are written entirely by experts who inform mothers that as long as they are vigilant there will be little dangr (delinquency and poor grades in school are the acknowledged hazards) posed by the presence of the set. In 1954 a professor of psychology recommends that mothers maintain a ‘television corner’ which can ‘make the viewing productive’. So that older children will be inspired to check on the facts that they learn from television, this advisor tells his readers to surround the set with encyclopedias and maps. And for younger children who will gain imaginative ideas from their programs, ‘have a drawer or shelf at hand, containing a drawing board or clipboard, crayons, large pads, blunt scissors and other materials needed for participation in activity programs’.48 The clear mandate here is aimed to affirm women as full-time mothers, in this case wholly devoted to


their children’s television reception. The task seems formidable: mothers should be present during all of their family’s viewing hours, monitoring and continually supplementing what appears on screen. The contradictory directives for mothers at home is heightened, and as the new form of family entertainment produces a spectator-mindedness among family members, mothers are asked to promote participatory activities around the set. Only a feminist analysis can provide the necessary and historically specific adjunct to Horkheimer and Adorno’s position concerning the inescapable power of the mass media to create a new culture of everyday life. In this instance, a family-oriented magazine may be seen to fail its readers as it encourages women alone to bear the increasing burden of making sense, in human terms, of a consumer lifestyle. Television becomes the family’s primary cultural source, yet readers are addressed as though still empowered to mediate between family and community and between consumer and home-made cultures. Without a willingness to acknowledge the limits for women that are inherent in their isolated positions within the home, Parents’ can only continue to call up its old formulae for good mothering. But now the encouragement to resist gives way to an acceptance that everyday life is ultimately trivial in being shaped by a consumerist ideology. So too the magazine’s resistance to any exploration of working mothers, at the core of its middle-class bias, appears to mitigate against its understanding for either the dangers of television or its liberatory possibilities for women. Parents’ Magazine reached a kind of paralysis in the 1950s, and we learn from an examination of its treatment of television in the light of critical theory some of what brought feminists in the 1960s to focus on the politics of family. Perhaps this impulse was in part motivated by an effort to salvage some aspects of their own roles as producers of a participatory culture. In order to understand culture as a dynamic structure, an approach which Horkheimer notes is ‘not congenial to a contemplative outlook on history’, it is worthwhile for feminists to turn to the mass-produced advice and the testimonials that guided our mothers in the decade before the contemporary Women’s Liberation Movement.49 We may better understand the cultural paradox which they confronted. While television opened doors to a public world, potentially freeing women to enter the job market, the contradictory ideologies of good mothering closed the doors, trivializing women’s lives at home by diminishing their public role as producers of a participatory ideal of family and society.


Notes 1 T.W.Adorno (with M.Horkheimer), ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1973): 121. 2 T.W.Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, New German Critique, 6 (Fall, 1975): 12. 3 Fred C.Lasch, ‘Movie Values for Boys and Girls’, Parents’ Magazine (December, 1937): 27. 4 T.W.Adorno, ‘Service to the Customer’, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: New Left Books, 1974): 201. 5 Barbara Welter, ‘The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860’, American Quarterly, XVIII (1966): 151–74. 6 Jan E.Dizard and Howard Gadlin, The Minimal Family (Amhurst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990): 38. 7 Mary Ryan, ‘The Empire of the Mother: American Writing About Domesticity, 1830–1860’, Women and History, 2/3, (1982): 18. 8 Linda J.Nicholson, Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of The Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986): 90. 9 Daniel Boorstin, ‘TV’s Impact on Society’, LIFE (September 10, 1971). 10 T.W.Adorno (with M.Horkheimer), ‘The Culture Industry’: 121. 11 Ibid.: 143. 12 T.W.Adorno (with M.Horkheimer), ‘Isolation by Communication’, in ‘Notes and Drafts’, Dialectic of the Enlightenment: 221. 13 T.W.Adorno (with M.Horkeheimer), ‘The Culture Industry’: 143. 14 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World): 223. 15 Ibid.: 223. 16 Miriam Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: “The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology"', New German Critique, 40 (Winter, 1987): 183. 17 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’: 230–1. 18 T.W.Adorno (with M.Horkheimer), ‘The Culture Industry’: 147. 19 Parents’ Magazine (September, 1952): 86. 20 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (New York: Vintage, 1962): 171–2. 21 James L.Hymes, Jr., ‘Why Play is Important’, Parents’ Magazine (November, 1949): 43. 22 Parents’ Magazine (October, 1957): 40. 23 T.W.Adorno (with M.Horkheimer), ‘The Culture Industry’: 137. 24 Ibid.: 142–3. 25 M.Horkheimer, ‘Authority and the Family’, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Seabury, 1972): 100. 26 Ibid.: 114. 27 James L.Hymes, Jr., ‘Why Play is Important’: 125. 28 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978): 229. 29 Elizabeth Lee Schweiger, ‘When They Say “What Shall We Do Now’”, Parents’ Magazine (August, 1949): 34. 30 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’: 225. 31 T.W.Adorno (with M.Horkheimer), ‘The Culture Industry’: 124. 32 Ibid.: 125–6. 33 Ella Codel, ‘How Television Has Changed Our Lives’, Parents’ Magazine (December, 1948): 42. 34 Ibid.: 64.


35 An excellent discussion of ‘the theatricalization and specularization of domestic space’ is to be found in an article by Lynn Spigel: ‘Installing the Television Set: Popular Discourses on Television and Domestic Space’, Camera Obscura, 16 (January, 1988). 36 Ella Codel, ‘How Television Has Changed Our Lives’: 66. 37 Ibid.: 66. 38 Ibid.: 66. 39 Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place (New York: Oxford, 1985): 200. 40 Miriam Hansen, op. cit.: 222. 41 Ruth Schley Goldman, ‘Should a Mother Work?’, Parents’ Magazine (September, 1950): 40. 42 Henrietta Battle, ‘Television Comes to Your Child’, Parents’ Magazine (November, 1949): 57. 43 Ibid.: 57. 44 M.Horkheimer, ‘Authority and the Family’: 108. 45 Dorothy L.McFadden, ‘Television Comes to Our Children’, Parents’ Magazine (January, 1949): 76. 46 Ibid.: 27. 47 William Boddy, Fifties Television (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1990): 16. 48 Robert M.Goldenson, ‘How to Get the Most Out of Television’, Parents’ Magazine (November, 1954): 128. 49 M.Horkheimer, ‘Authority and the Family’: 59.

I am grateful to David Bathrick and Joan Tronto for their advice and help with this chapter.

7 From Pathos to Panic: American Character Meets the Future Lauren Langman

Introduction The reproduction of a social order and its structures of privilege is a complex multidimensional process that occurs at several levels of analysis: cultural, social and personal. It involves a constant interaction between these elements. A society’s ideology, (legitimation, aspirations and self-understandings) is loudly proclaimed and ritualized in emotion-laden ceremonies. But as ideologies mystify and sanctify power arrangements, they lie hidden in everyday routines, discourses and interactional patterns that seem ‘normal’.1 This normalcy includes the practices and beliefs that inform childhood socialization to produce a typicality of character, shared stocks of knowledge and interpersonal patterns that recursively secure reproduction. In this way the arbitrary becomes typical and the typical unquestioned and the unquestioned endures. This is especially important to modern societies whose polities require a high degree of social and economic stability. But the socialized and legitimated nature of ordinary life practices, discourses and typical character that well serve hegemonic stabilization, may, however, provide the individual personal malaise. In the early seventeenth century, a group of English Protestant dissenters, Puritans, established colonies in the New World that would come to be known as New England. They avidly pursued commerce and agriculture in highly ordered, theocratic communities. In the Southern colonies, others pursued agriculture. These colonies prospered. Within 150 years the colonials would declare their independence from England. By the 1830s these historic legacies, informed by certain biblical and republican traditions, had created a more or less distinct national character.2 By the beginning of the twentieth century

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the nation so formed would become the most powerful economic, political and military force in the world. American capitalism provided enormous material abundance, but at the same time, most observers have long reported a high degree of personal duress and anxiety associated with its wealth. The attempt to decode this paradox has been a central question from Tocqueville to Reisman to Bellah. As acute as such observations may be, they have not been located within theoretical perspectives that properly inform questions of human suffering.3 Marxian theory, while concerned with the nature of human suffering, alienation and domination, has generally remained a critique of political economy and has said little about the concrete individual and his or her personal angst. Psychoanalysis, while perhaps most sensitive to individual malaise, has generally confused history and biology and given little concern to the specific socio-structural factors that impact upon the socialization process and personality in ways that bring anxiety, sadness or malaise. The Frankfurt School of critical theory, in an attempt to integrate philosophy and social science, found that Freudian depth psychology offered unique insights for the critique of late capital. By examining the historical determinants of unconscious development and character formation, the internalization of ideology, the shaping of human feelings and social origins of gratifications and frustrations, they could better understand the social formation and specific political ramifications. But this tradition emerged in the context of the rise of Fascism. The recent transition of America to an amusement society of commodified spectacles and simulations promises gratification, but instead produces panic. This is especially the case when traditional expressions of national character encounter the hyperreal self as its doppelganger.

Part I Capital, Culture and Character

From Sin to Angst The promise of the Enlightenment was meliorative; science and reason would emancipate humanity from religion, superstition and myth, darkness and oppression to knowledge and freedom. For Hegel, reason was the goal of history that would enable universal selfrealization. But the Marxian critique argued instead that domination was an inherent feature of the modern economic system. Capitalism

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(wage labor) fostered privilege as well as exploitation, alienation and immisseration. Yet Marx was an optimist, the dialectical contradictions of capital would initiate its demise, socialism would triumph, and deliver humanity from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Marxian economism had become an official orthodoxy. But others such as Lukács, Korsh and Gramsci would suggest that the critique of capital need take more careful note of capitalist culture in which bourgeois reifications mystified class domination, and ruling class ideology was promulgated as the general good, and critique deemed deviant. At the same time, perhaps as a legacy of Nietzsche, a number of scholars became somewhat appalled at modernity in general and doubtful of Marxism in particular.4 This Kulturpessimus that would indict rationality itself would include Freud, Weber and Simmel (see Kalberg, 1977). Each in his own way would see the triumph of reason as warping and degrading human potential. Freud would argue that the progress of civilization and its veneer of rationality were based on increasing requirements for the repression of biological drives. Behind the prudery of the bourgeoisie lay powerful impulses that required social constraints. While guilt led the neurotic to personal suffering, for civilization the rational repression of instinct was the basis of general human malaise. For Weber, the rationality of science and the capitalist market were the dominant ideological and organizational features of modern society. The ‘iron cage’ of bureaucratic organization would destroy freedom and transform the person to an impersonal abstraction. The end of individuality would be completed by rational science-behavioral psychology and scientific management—Taylorism.5 Weber feared that socialism would, if successful as a revolution, replace the venalities of capitalism with a more onerous dictatorship of ‘rational’ bureaucrats.6 Finally for Weber, the modern world would see traditional authority replaced by rational legal authority based on individual competence and structured patterns of organization. But he would also note that in cases of crisis, charismatic authority could emerge and certain individuals, on the basis of the power of their personality, could evoke irrational mass folio wings. For Weber and Freud, the optimism of the Enlightenment as freedom from domination becomes the pessimism of modernity. Locked in an iron cage of guilt, modern man lost his humanity and freedom while his anxiety and instinctual renunciations were without meaning and the traditional solace of reli-


gion. Each in his own way anticipated a charismatic father figure leading discontented masses.

The Frankfurt School These events and ideas must be considered as the context in which Marxism was subjected to a number of critiques from both within and without. In 1923 the Institute fur Socialforchung, (Jay, 1973) the Frankfurt School of critical theory, was formed. While Hegelian Marxism began to locate the reproduction of capital and its deformation of the human spirit in the nature of bourgeois culture, its instrumental rationality (market logic), its aesthetics and popular culture, fortuitous conditions in Frankfurt led to the assembly of a number of highly gifted scholars. The legacy and power of their critique of culture and character was in part dependent on the powerful intellects and personalities of its members. Horkheimer became director in 1931. This began a project to articulate a philosophy of totality in the Hegelian tradition that went deeper than the phenomenology of mind to consider the role of unconscious, albeit socially transformed, desire in the face of socially required repressions (cf. Jay, 1984). The critique of capital’s culture would consider the role of character. Specifically, Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm (at that time) and Marcuse, established a Freudo-Marxist tradition that would to this very day inform theory and research.7 This tradition began with the studies of authority and the family that culminated in the empirical studies of authoritarianism. One of the unique contributions of this approach was to consider how individual character structure was an element of the totality of culture and consciousness that secured political economy. Specifically, the early experiences in the historically variable family structure shaped character in ways that reproduced social arrangements through the internalization of domination qua values, authority patterns, transformed desire and construction of defenses against self-awareness. The submission to authority that sustained and reproduced society, was not coercion, but the internalization of authority in the ‘normal’ course of character formation. Freud’s understanding of the development of the superego showed the admixture of childhood fear and idealization of the father as essential elements of the internalization of authority, both the personal authority of the father and bourgeois authority relationships in general.8 This predisposed not only submission to authority, but in face


of crisis, a yearning for a powerful father figure who would exchange love for obedience and assuage malaise. This insight provided a linkage between a historically situated family structure, parental values and socialized character on the one hand, and subsequent predispositions to certain political leanings, on the other.9 Authoritarianism as a dimension of character could explain a number of seemingly unrelated aspects of economy, class and political ideologies. Depth psychology thus added a missing dimension to the Marxian critique: it illuminated the socialization processes through which a society transformed desire and domination into willing assent to secure its reproduction.10 Just as ideology obscured the operations of an economy, the individual’s defenses mystified his or her behavior to the person. But further, it showed in more precise ways how the social formation fostered suffering. For Freud, repression of desire was the very sine qua non of civilization. The individualization of that repression, the superego, was a normal legacy of character development. But this was also an internalization of the specific role requirements of the political economy. However, the superego was based in part on the child’s internalization of the father’s superego; the resulting character structure did not always fit hand in glove with the economy. Indeed, character patterns could be more recalcitrant to change than social institutions. Cultures in general, and capitalist culture in particular, were then reproduced at the level of individual character. But as the character structure was shaped not only by contemporary experiences but the legacies of earlier generations, more archaic legacies endured sub rosa and could sustain particular values and beliefs despite social change. This early integration of depth psychology with the critique of capital culminated in understanding the atavistic nihilism that led from Hitler’s rise to power to the Final Solution. The hostility to Jews, communists, and even democracy was not a simple question of economics. The economistic reductionism of orthodox Marxism could not fathom the devotion, obedience, hypnotic power, and passionate intensity of the attachment to Hitler. Nor could economic factors explain the power of the symbols of archaic Nordic culture, and the ability of the new mass media, film and radio to construct a reality and mobilize legitimacy. It was said that the Fascists offered moving rituals and affective gratifications, the Marxists—history lessons. By locating these diverse elements in the ambivalent relation to the father, the restoration of lost community (object ties) via membership in the Nazi movement and fostering the projection of aggression to Jews who were blamed for the contradictions of capital as well as Ver-


sailles, the Frankfurt School secured an enduring role for considerations of depth psychology. Considerations of character were just one aspect of critical theory as an articulation of cultural Marxism. Informed by Benjamin’s insights on the extent to which aesthetics served a political function, and Freud’s considerations of depth psychology, they began a critique of the then new mass media, especially radio, as used by the Fascists. The analysis of Nazi propaganda showed how symbolic needgratification served political functions. These insights provided a framework for the postwar critique of the ‘culture industries’. Mass culture was intentionally produced for a market and served not only to provide profits, but to affirm the hegemony of bourgeois culture. It provided escapism and ersatz gratification rather than critical insight. Indeed it would destroy the same. It provided a realm of satisfaction in an ideal world apart from actual conditions; that is, it provided microspheres of empowerment in a world of increasing manipulation and control.11 It promulgated a ‘one dimensional’ logic that sustained an ever more irrational dehumanized culture. With the death of Marcuse, the first generation of the Frankfurt School came to an end. The second generation of critical theory, perhaps most clearly expressed in the work of Habermas, Offe and Mueller, has paid more attention to political economy, the crisis tendencies in advanced capitalism, the distortions of language and the possibilities of a praxis based on a universal pragmatic that would free communication from distortions. At the same time, these developments have said little about character, feelings and the role of mass mediated culture in reproducing society.

The Frankfurt School Revisited Social theory is itself rooted in historical context. The foundations of critical theory cannot be thought of apart from the rise of Fascism, the irrationality of Hitler’s charisma, the quietude of the postwar global Pax Americana and proliferation of its popular culture. In the period of American hegemony, the few that dared critique, did so in muted tones that decried the other directed conformity of organization, men living in suburbs or the status anxiety of conservative movements.12 But in the wake of the 1960s, the glaring nature of racism, sexism and imperialist wars shook American society and exposed the contradictions of bourgeois ideologies. American social


thought was unable to analyze and comprehend these events (cf. Gouldner, 1970). Functionalism had reached its limits. These events could not easily be understood in classical Marxian terms. What functions did racism serve? Why were the domestic socio-emotional leaders (mothers) depressed? Why would members of the privileged classes oppose the injustices of their own privilege? It was in this context that a number of scholars found that the Frankfurt School’s critical theory offered an emancipatory critique of capitalism that did not see Soviet communism as an alternative.13 While the Authoritarian Personality had been widely read, it was perhaps the writings of Marcuse that led to greater interest in that tradition (Kellner, 1984). By the 1980s, it could be said that a diverse group of scholars had discovered the critical tradition and utilized it in their work. Critical theory, in part a reaction to the atomistic forms of positivism in traditional theory, drew on a wide range of traditions (see, Habermas, 1987; Horkheimer, 1972; Jay, 1984). While its scope is wide, and it may draw on diverse approaches, it makes no attempt at eclecticism. As critique in its classical form, it seeks to apprehend that which is behind appearance. As an emancipatory critique, it speaks to the issues of domination and deformation of the human spirit (Habermas, 1971). In this way, Freudian theory offered a means of illuminating domination as an internalized aspect of character that was functional for social reproduction—albeit at the cost of personal suffering. In the more than half century since the first outlines of the Frankfurt School’s perspective on culture and character, there have been a number of intellectual developments that have informed critique. Thus, for example, Habermas (1987) has considered systems theory, moral development and communication theory, etc., in his project of reconstructing historical Marxism through articulating a theory of reproduction in which structural components, culture, society and personality intersect with the reproduction processes of cultural reproduction, social integration and socialization.14 Specifically, he argues that these structures and processes converge in the lifeworld and serve to reproduce it. His synthesis is at once monumental and at the same time raises as many problems as it solves.15 Specifically, the Freudian theory of drive, defense and character plays less of a role than its method of clarification or demystification of distorted communication. Instead, he has relied on traditions of symbolic interaction and developmental psycholinguistics. While this opens up new directions for critical the-


ory, at the same time, more traditional concerns with commodification, the production of character and the manipulation of desire are not addressed. Thus, while his work informs the understanding of motivational crisis, he says little about structural sources of everyday malaise. Similarly, his level of analysis is Western capitalism, a broad umbrella that covers France, the US and Japan. The early concerns with German expressions of authoritarianism or American forms of ‘one dimensionality’ were lost. To consider the problem of this chapter, the contradiction of American wealth and malaise, we will remember the critical tradition to examine everyday life as the intersection point of the political economy, the national culture and the socialized character that seeks meaning and gratification in the loves, labors and spectacles of everyday life. But as we shall see, the meanings of life have become problematic, gratifications partial, relationships problematic, and the self ever more tenuous. The cornerstone of this understanding depends upon considerations of affect, how biological legacies become appropriated by political economy to secure its own reproduction.

Part II Everyday Life

Hegemony and the Ordinary It is at the level of everyday life where the socialized individual finds meaning and gratifications from available objects, activities, discourses and interpersonal relationships, i.e., this is the intersection point between the individual and the social structure. In the patterning of these elements culture is articulated and regularities or habituations of social structure are enacted as patterns of individual behavior (cf. Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1984; Turner, 1988). Within the limits or ranges established by prior socialization and current realities, individual character is expressed. Everyday routines, patterns of selfexpression, reflection, interaction and attempts to minimize anxiety in these acts and thoughts, constitute the essence of what Giddens (1984) terms structuration as recursive actions that reproduce the social order. For Lukács and Gramsci, the reproduction of late capitalism was found in the culture of everyday life—the reified thoughts, standards of action and judgement that seem normal and ordinary. Typicality makes the arbitrary ordinary and the ordinariness of everyday life


maintains and disguises domination structures of class, race, gender, etc. The very ordinariness of everyday life has safeguarded it from careful scrutiny.16 This is how hegemonic process operates, what is ‘natural’ sustains and reproduces structure and privilege, not through coercive forms of domination, but the willing assent of desire transformed and the arbitrary made normal, unquestioned, continually enacted in daily routines, and understood in mystified discourses that distort rather than illuminate. The ‘ taken for granted’ ‘typifications’ of thought, action and word mask ideology and express ruling class interest as the general good. Deviance from ‘normality’ becomes defined by various ‘experts’ as bizarre, pathological and immature. Every epoch has its moral guardians, from the priests to psychiatrists that control discourse in ways that both give them power and sustains the hegemonic bloc (cf. Foucault, 1961). These are the organic intellectuals in Gramsci’s terms. But today these are not priests, teachers, writers, or others associated with the written word, but commodified experts and celebrities.17 (As will be argued, the commodified popular culture of an amusement society is now an integral feature of everyday life). Society acts more as a set of limits upon choice and empowerment than coercive constraints on automatons or cheerful robots.18 But what must be noted, and is central for the current argument, is that hegemonic process is as much affective as it is cognitive, as much due to internalized norms as spoken utterances. Insofar as everyday life is felt normal, alternatives imagined unpleasant, and personal duress mystified, the reproductive processes at the level of everyday life must consider feelings. Thus, while many suggest that a good deal of everyday life is motivated by anxiety reduction/avoidance, much of this anxiety is a result of the social arrangements of capitalism. Further, a critical dramaturgy shows the culture of commodifications does provide a number of partial and often compensatory gratifications that sustain it (cf. Deegan, 1988). While understood by Freud and the Frankfurt School, this has been little considered in recent critique of capital.19 Critique of everyday life starts at the level of the here and now, but phenomenological reduction obscures, if not ignores, its structural and historical determination.20 Everyday life today is located at a particular historical juncture that in the contemporary world has been ‘colonized’ by the political economy which is regulated by ‘rational’ steering mechanisms (Habermas, 1987).21 Most objects and activities, and as will be argued, self and relationships, have become dominated by the commodity form. But this very commodification has also led to


systematic distortions of discourse and understanding that mask its implications. (This is the meaning of what Marx called commodity fetishism, understood as distorted communication by Habermas). Secondly, social life has been differentiated into specific spheres, public and private that seem ‘natural’. Thus we cannot examine everyday life outside of its history and that history is one of increasing commodification. This commodification of everyday life is evident in the many objects we need, desire and use. But these allocations are a part of hegemonic process that shapes the daily routines of work, family and friendship and is expressed in lifestyle. The work we do, food we eat, persons we choose for friends or lovers, games we play and private havens of solace that seem natural are the products of historical transformation, namely the growth of capitalism. But further, the growth and proliferation of a popular ‘amusement’ culture is now an integral feature of everyday life as people hum commercials, read and gossip about the manufactured ‘private’ lives of celebrities and analyze the ‘relationships’ of TV characters or merits of various entertainers/ superstars.

The Capitalist Ethic and The Spirit of Commodification In pre-capitalist society, most of the objects of daily life, food, clothes, household artifacts, were produced by the users, or in some cases, traded. There had long been a limited use of coin money for some exchanges. But in the several centuries in which capitalism gradually emerged, more and more objects of daily life were produced for an impersonal market. Capitalism can be seen as an economic system in which objects and the activities that produce them become commodified, that is their value depends on marketplace exchange. This was the essence of wage labor, labor power was sold for a cash wage that was itself used to purchase the necessities of everyday life so labor could reproduce itself and provide the surplus value to spur greater growth. But what is significant, is that the commodification process has generalized from the production of goods to almost every aspect of social and personal life. This very separation was a consequence of the expansion of the market. In broad outline, capitalism evolved in three stages. First was the gradual emergence of trade as a significant economic force that in turn altered other aspects of the society (cf. Braudel, 1981; Polyani, 1985; Weber, 1961). This included the rise of a trading class, larger


cities and cash farming. This would set in motion the cultural changes of the Renaissance and plant the seeds of rationalism, Protestant dissent and later, the Enlightenment. There would be changes in science and technology.22 One of these, the printing press, would shake the world by fostering literacy, that in turn led to an erosion of oral tradition, the loss of scribal culture, the growth of schools and invention of childhood. Ultimately, this would make possible the magazines and dime novels of popular culture. The second phase, artificial power for transportation and manufacture, the Industrial Revolution, would complete the transformation of the social order, erode monarchies, foster even larger cities and an urban middle class. The bifurcation of household and work would become ever more characteristic of the labor force. The separation of public and private spheres would become a significant aspect of bourgeois life. There would be innovations of mass communication, telegraph, telephone, the rotary press, radio and film. The growth of capitalism would now begin to foster the separation of ownership and management and usher the growth of managerial cadres as well as technical specialists. There was an increasing expansion of the commodification process to produce goods for national markets of private households such as prepared foods with brand names like Kellogs, Heinz and Campbell, ready-to-wear clothes, home appliances, etc. By the early twentieth century, there was an emergent consumer society with its mass mediated marketing and advertising that would become integral parts of the culture and economy.23 The systematic production of images and desires would play larger and larger roles in economic, political and cultural life (cf. Ewen, 1988, Liess et al., 1986). This will culminate in the amusement society. In the postwar period, as services and information began to comprise larger and larger parts of the economy, these earlier tendencies of electronic communication, newer technologies (TV and more recently VCR and camcorder), and increased urban populations with greater income and leissure time, would increase the market for entertainment which would become one of the dominant factors of modern society. The mechanical reproduction of culture and its commodification so shaped the contents and genres of cultural productions (including advertising) for the market that traditional notions of material culture (object, techniques), normative culture (values, belief) and cognitive culture (knowledge) become intertwined fragmented moments. Thus a variety of cultural productions, consumer items and lifestyles became part of a consumer culture. This would usher the


transition to what will be termed the amusement society, where the production of needs and consumers becomes paramount.

The Spheres of Capital The growth of capitalism, which separated household and work, created separate spheres that are intrinsic features of everyday life. There was the public realm of work and politics, mostly male, and the private realm, if not haven, of ‘true womanhood’, tender feelings, and morality.24 This historical transition of little more than a century that created a private realm of supposed gratification, now confronts us as the ‘natural’ order of everyday life.25 The public spheres of work, instrumental activities, include production and distribution of goods, services, and information as well as communication and transportation, finance and legal services, health care, etc. Private life, which emerged as the realm of love, affectivity, authentic selfhood and personal virtue, especially in codes of (female) sexual restraint, became increasingly distinct from the competition of the working world. It became the ‘natural’ locus of love and affection of husband and wife, parent and child. This would become the site of the gratification and fulfillment denied in the rationalized world of commerce. Once this realm emerged, it would not be long until it engendered ‘scientific research’ and fell under the jurisdiction of experts whose ‘knowledge’ served to reproduce these arrangements, swell their own coffers, and eventually create celebrity superstars of psychological advice givers. (These would constitute organic intellectuals in Gramci’s sense). That such ‘healing’ professions emerged is testament to the contradiction between promises of private gratification and the realities of the sadness, emptiness, violence, etc., of personal life under capitalism. The ‘experts’ locate the deficiencies in the individual and leave unquestioned the system. In highly complex modern societies, the creation of private life together with a high degree of differentiation and specialization, fosters a number of institutions which function to socialize a labor force, e.g., family, school and churches, ideological state apparatuses in Althuser’s terms, and to amuse and mystify that labor force, e.g., journalism, mass media, etc. But socialization is ever less likely in the private realm and increasingly left to the media. Whereas once we could talk about political, educational and religious socialization, these have been transformed into gratifying entertainments. What must be noted, is that these various institutions, as socialization


agents, become increasingly associated with private consumption as well-being. Candidate A makes you feel better, education locates you in a status based ‘taste culture’ and God loves those who live well. Modern political economies have developed certain mechanisms or steering principles to assure a certain degree of equilibrium between production and consumption to maintain certain optimal levels of stable growth.26 They also have a number of inducements for consumption in the private spheres of friendship and family. While they may seem autonomous, that autonomy is more apparent than real in that the private realms are systematically besieged by market forces that influence the family economy, and the codes of signification that infiltrate the ‘private’ realm to transform desire for the sake of consumption. It is thus in the private realms of personal life that have been ‘colonized’ by the codes of signification that consumption allays the terrors and gratifies the desires that are either systematically generated by or the inadvertent consequences of late capitalism as an amusement society. The creation of and subsequent invasion into personal life serves three highly important functions. It is the site of initial socialization where character is initially formed so it becomes the primary locus of socialization into consumerism. (By about 3, most children can say ‘buy me a…’. In later life, this personal realm of self and intimates is the site of most consumption from the trivial to the ownership of the house.27 Secondly, this has fostered a retreat from the public realm and exaltation of the personal, what Habermas has called ‘civic privatism’ in which there is less and less concern with political and public issues, e.g., the decline in voter rates, etc. Political contests are less and less likely between parties, save on a symbolic issue like abortion, and have increasingly shifted to the realms of media. The intertwining of the personal, political and economic, privatized hedonism, creates the conditions for self-blame/victim-blame in which those who are materially successful credit self and ignore infrastructure and class origin, etc., and those who fail locate the fault in themselves.28 The result of this process, as shall be argued, is an enfeebled self whose ‘authenticity’ is expressed in the private realm in a language of consumption.

Commodified Objects We noted that by the end of the nineteenth century, the commodification process had expanded to produce many, if not most, of the


objects employed in everyday life. One of the most evident ways in which we encounter everyday life is in the use and/or consumption of its objects. Consider only the working day that begins with an alarm clock, bed, linen, bathroom, toilet paper, soap, toothpaste, shaving cream, morning entertainment (news), underwear, outerwear, cereal, car… (Note how many of these we associate with brand names). The day off is for the purchase of commodities and personal consumption. The classical function of manufactured or otherwise marketed objects was to provide the capitalist with profit (surplus value) through market exchange. Indeed, Marx wrote about linen, steel and shirts, etc. As capitalism advanced, more and more goods became available. Perhaps the Sears and Wards catalogs are the testaments to this process. The relation of wage labor to commodity production has now become increasingly problematic in advanced societies where so much of the labor consists of services that to be sure have been commodified.29 What is increasingly important is the consumption of objects that serve a number of functions for the consumer, producer and society. For Baudrillard (1981) these objects now constitute a system of signification, sign exchange value and symbolic exchange value, as autonomous semiotic realms that can no longer be reducible to political economy. Consumer objects now have to be thought of in terms of gratifications, communications and expressions of self. One of the important functions of taste and style of consumption is social placement and identity. For Veblen, the sign of success was conspicuous consumption. In the tradition of Chapin’s classical studies of living rooms to Bourdieu’s analyses of ‘cultural capital’, consumer tastes in everything from food to furniture to clothes to vacation spot, are indications of one’s privilege and status—including the feigned disdain of consumerism by intellectuals and artists. While this topic has been most fully explored by Baudrillard, Paul Fussell’s Class (1983) remains the most humorous exposition on the affluent preference for wool vs. polyester, white wine vs. beer and modern art (or nudes) vs. cats with big eyes. But the important point is that consumption, as a communication, is a sign of group membership in a basically three-dimensional matrix of status, lifestyle and gender. For the current perspective, the consumption/possession of objects needs to be understood in terms of personal gratifications—noting that both the personal realm and its gratifications are social constructions. To anticipate the later argument, the transformation of capitalism to an amusement society was closely allied to the increasing bifurcation of public and private spheres and, in more recent times, a shift in the locus of selfhood from institutional to personal realms (R.


Turner, 1976). This is what postmodernists call the death of the subject (cf. Jameson, 1989). The possession and display of objects is increasingly an indication of self rather than a sign of social placement. Consumption in general and the possession of certain objects in particular serves as a means of self-expression gaining recognition. In Kohut’s (1971) theory of narcissism, other people, when used for selfserving need gratification, are termed ‘ self-objects’. I am suggesting that material goods, clothes, ornaments, etc., are similarly used; while over half a century ago Simmel (1950) observed the function of dress was directed to the other, I would like to call this general class of objects used by the self ‘recognition props’, (the term used by Goffman as objects to sustain self presentations) in this context, to further secure recognition. These ‘props’ are themselves now forms of symbolic self-presentations—in their spectacular forms.

Knowing and Talking Social life as everyday routines includes implicit assumptions and interpretations, what can be called stocks of knowledge that guide actions and plans for further actions. These understandings assume a logic of causality or influence so that goals can be achieved (cf. Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Garfinkel, 1967; Schutz, 1967). Without some predictability based on shared meanings and interpretations so that certain outcomes are likely, social life could not take place and structures be reproduced. These assumptions are learned in the socialization processes and supported by interactional patterns and/or institutional norms. But what must be noted again is that both the common sense understandings of everyday life, as well as most professional expertise, serves to legitimate and reproduce the society. Everyday life includes the discourse or communications through which social constructions of reality are negotiated, individuals reflect upon and define themselves, communicate with others and articulate their interests (cf. Habermas, 1987; Marcuse, 1964; Mueller, 1970). Discourses typically mask the power that comes from the defining of what is reality, and how it should be dealt with. The systematic distortion of communication and meaning by rationality that is evidenced in everyday utterances has been a central theme for Habermas and recent critical theory. Insofar as language emanates from the public realm, even when used in the most personal of ways, indeed in dreams and slips of the tongue, it is another one of the means by which that persona is secured for the sake of social reproduction.


There is little that the present chapter can add to this analysis, but for the sake of the later discussion two points must be noted. Definitions and explanations of reality that are born in one set of circumstances may endure and at a later period, fail to apprehend the new realities. In our particular case, this is what Bellah (1985) understands as the ‘first language’, of individualism and community in a framework that emerged in the context of the theocratic cities on the hill. But the understandings of yesterday that yet inform utterance and understanding, now limit and distort in an age of advanced technology, a global economy and a hedonistic popular culture. Finally, discourses and understandings can allay anxieties and provide gratifications.

Interaction Rituals Simmel (1950) suggested that the concern with relationships was modern, unique to a mobile age in which strangers travelled from one place to another and people had to make new friends. This was the reality of the new market society. Traditionally the stranger, Jews for instance, were distrusted. For Weber, capitalism required a rational market in which one would trust strangers. The growth of the market could be seen in the emergence of ritualized forms of interaction among the bourgeois class. As Elias (1978) notes, the growth of civilization could be seen in etiquette and manners. Whereas the aristocracy had developed a very intricate set of nuanced courtly manners, much concerned with power, status and seduction, the growing bourgeois developed manners more attuned to rationalized market relations—and moral propriety as an indication of commercial honesty. The self-presentations and social rituals described by Goffman (1961, 1967) emerged to establish the seeming veracity of the other and facilitate the various types of interactions required for commerce.30 Church membership was often one sign of a person’s trustworthiness. (Imagine Cotton Mather selling weekend holidays in Colonial Jesusland!). In the bifurcated social world of late capital, it is the effectiveness of frontstage performances in the public spheres that is needed to sell objects, services and ultimately the self. The ceremonial rituals of deference and demeanor, facework and teamwork are necessary for sales or management, securing compliance—or feigning it. The ‘appropriate’ interactions and framework in the public sphere may provide rewards of tips, sales, tenure, promotions, power and deference as Goffman (1967) argued. Status, social success and selfesteem are problematic and in need of constant recognition and


renewal.31 This, then, fosters those expressive features of behavior to elicit the various intrinsic and extrinsic social, psychological and emotional rewards (below) that accrue from interaction, love, power, supplication, admiration, etc. Goffman provides a microscopic analysis of the many nuances of self-presentation, facework and ritual, how people feign involvement and concern or distance themselves from their roles, collude with teams to define situations, give the other deference and confidence in their presentations, and convince audiences that one’s own performance is genuine, etc. Many sociologists criticize his analysis for ignoring structural influences on interpersonal behavior. Others see his work as suggesting that people are cynical, disingenuous, and out to con one another. What is important to note is that in many of his analyses of social and institutional life in commodified Anglo-American society, Goffman is describing the forms of alienated interaction and selfhood generated and required by a commodified social order. Read differently, the expressive features of interaction can be seen as the productions of commodified spectacles at the interpersonal level.32 This is the essential feature of modern life. As a commodity social interaction is appropriated by the market. But what that means is that in an amusement society, self-presentations as dramaturgy are the simulacra of social life and the ultimate reality.

Capitalism and the Commodification of Culture Cultural expressions consist of myth, song, epic, story and book in those cultures with a written language. Popular culture as cultural expression in late capitalism differs from previous forms in at least three ways. In depends on technology for mass production, it is produced for a profit and becomes part of a general process of commodification that shapes the contents and genres of its mass marketed production so that the consumption of mass produced goods, images and experiences serve to gratify affective desires.33 This, together with the fact that so much time is spent consuming entertainment means that this popular culture is an intrinsic feature of contemporary life. I will later suggest that this is the essence of an amusement society in which everyday life is bombarded by cultural productions, various forms of amusing entertainments from publishing to journalism to theater, religion and sports. The early critique of the culture industries, a left expression of mass culture theory, emphasized its authoritarian manipulation and control


to secure uniformity and obeisance. In an amusement society, the culture provides a variety of distorted images and forms of privatized hedonism to suit every segment of the fragmented society. There was even left wing critique of television that included Todd Gitlin and Stuart Ewen on PBS. Indeed, the vast array of choices for the consumer, freedoms of interpretation, and even limited political choice, serve as what can be termed microspheres of empowerment or wiggle rooms of freedom that mystify the reality of contemporary hegemonic process and its dependence on feeling good.34 While Brave New World was the anticipation of hegemony as fun, it is not so much a drug (soma), but commodified culture that acts like a drug and produces an insatiable addiction to consumption, visual or material (cf. Postman, 1985, see also Delattre, 1988). The traditional critique of the culture industries as fostering deception was a bit of an oversimplification, true but for the wrong reasons. That argument, based in part on the Fascist experience, underplays the role of the active person. The critique of the CCCS, mass culture manipulating the ‘cultural dupes’, ignores the extent to which microspheres of empowerment and gratification serve to sustain a social order not by coercive control and manipulation, but the appropriation of desire that produces willing participation. But these simulations of reality to gain audience obliterates differences between truth and deception (cf. Baudrillard, 1983). Thus the Frankfurt critique of commodified deception anticipated that at the levels of self, interaction and culture the ersatz is real or hyperreal. Material reality and fantasy become one while the ‘public sphere’ is amusement called ‘news’. Popular culture is not simply an economic production, it has developed into a seemingly autonomous realm in which traditional notions of causality and linkage of economy and culture are no longer valid (Baudrillard, 1975).35 This society is dominated by the commodified codes of signification. Meanings, desires and images stand at the intersection of affective endowment and historical variations of elicitation and interpretation which is now largely a function of the sign system. Baudrillard’s nihilistic critical semiotics argues that simulacra with symbolic exchange value requires a post-Marxian understanding. Marxism is obsolete and its puritanical attitudes toward work critiqued only the ownership of tools.36 The symbols and events of the postmodern world are not reducible to ideological reifications of the infrastructure. Rather, he argues that there has been an implosion in which the technological culture shapes the social (Baudrillard, 1977). Ultimate reality is the proliferation of commodified images and spec-


tacles (1983).37 To distort by summary, I will suggest that his work explicates symbolic value, the meanings of signification, as Marx did exchange value. For Baudrillard, the qualities of meaning and gratification can only be understood by recourse to semiotics. If the windmill was the symbolic structure of the feudal era and the factory of the industrial, the essence of today is the amusement park, the Beaubourg (Pompidou) of Paris and Disneyland of the US (Baudrillard, 1988; 1977) (Postman nominates Las Vegas). If America was the first new nation, and the land where mass media, its culture and advertising would first flourish, it would become the first national simulacra of paradise with Disneyland, the world of pure illusion and inauthenticity as the capital of the hyperreal (Baudrillard, 1988). In other, perhaps premodern, societies, mythologies reflected underlying structures, heroes were embodiments of cultural ideals. In America, mythology became reality, heroes were mass produced and one was even elected president. Contemporary society can be seen in a variety of ways. Boorstin (1962) saw the production of pseudo events and images as its central feature. For LeFebvre (1971) it is the ‘bureaucratic society of mass consumption’, for DeBord (1966) the society of the spectacle, or following Baudrillard (1983), the triumph of the ‘hyperreal’, and for Bennis and Mintroff (1989) the ‘unreality industry’. I would like simply to call it an amusement society by which I mean that imaginoaffective production is the dominant socio-cultural force that shapes the society.38 If religion held that function in earlier times, today it is the culture industry.39 By imagino-affective I mean many things. An amusement culture is primarily expressed in a never-ending production of mass produced visual images in which photos, movies and television are the primary media of cultural expression. The secondary media are the consumer choices as self-expressions that stand as communications to an audience: clothes, cars, lawns, underwear, etc. (It’s curious that at one time underwear was very private and once even called ‘unmentionables’). These are moments of the fragmented totality. This culture has a magical quality to it in that traditional forms of logic and causality are no longer dominant, and indeed, much of its expression, whether in entertainment or politics, is better understood as magical thinking in the Piagetian sense joined with affective gratifications. There is a quality of dreamlike unreality, a ‘primary process’ which is perhaps clearest in the growth of bourgeois art beginning with the French impressionists who painted what they felt, to the various portrayals of imagination in Klee, Miro and Picasso. This art both


affirmed and critiqued. By the time of its realization in the postmodern world, the distinction of reality and unreality, truth and lie, dream and waking have little meaning. As reality gets more complex, explanations, especially in mass mediated visual forms, become simpler. The illusion, the simulacra, has more meaning than what produced it. There is a systematic production of events, ‘pseudo-events’ that are designed to produce consumers. As Gitlin puts it, television rents eyeballs to advertisers and must provide amusements to do so. This process has shaped politics as television converts citizenship to audience. Politics has become a game show in which manufactured personalities use canned ‘soundbites’ and ‘photoops’ to beat the ratings. Finally, it is an affective culture that emphasizes feelings and gratifications. But whereas Sorokin (1937–41) saw this as a quality of ‘sensate’ cultures, modern culture commodifies feelings and the primary emphasis is on feeling good. Hendlin (1975) suggested that the use of drugs by the young in the ‘age of sensation’ was an attempt to find pleasure in an increasingly joyless society. But I would offer a slightly different interpretation, it is a sign of membership in an amusement society which is increasingly autonomous from the rationalized system that produces it.40 In the amusement society consumption, especially in cultural realms, becomes self-expression. Yes, he and the Frankfurt tradition were right that the instrumental features of the political economy were increasingly devoid of feeling and humanity. But people no longer find authentic selfhood in the society as system, that subject has died to be reincarnated as self-produced amusements and ‘spectacles’. Unfortunately as I conclude, this fails to provide the desired gratification. This transition to an amusement society is clearly seen in the kinds of heroes whose qualities are seen as ideals from the saints and noble warriors of feudalism, to the captains of capitalism and to the semicoherent superstars of today’s amusement industry. Consider only that superstars of mass media, whose stardom and fame are commodified simulacra of achievement, are among the world’s best paid people and are easily the best known. Many of these creations can command millions for their performances, directing, writing, etc. (There are some who wonder why American youth do so poorly on standardized tests. Just ask them about Maddona’s latest hit, Tyson’s fall or NFL line ups). But what is central, is that sports, politics, religion and entertainment are increasingly intertwined elements of cultural productions to amuse. The final point that must be noted is the colonization of childhood by the culture of commodification. By the age of 2 most children can


operate a television, by 4 a VCR and by 5 all but the truly deviant know about He Man and She-Ra, Teenage Ninja Turtles or whatever clone is current at the time of this reading. These creations initiate the child into the consumption culture. From the earliest stages of development, the society of consumption and self as spectacle becomes interiorized via technology. In an often repeated theme in science fiction, an electronic control device is implanted into the person’s brain and controls their behavior. This is in fact how television operates and controls, not via coercion, but by the allocation of ‘freedom’ as choices of consumer gratification, tastes, lifestyles, etc.

Part III Affect, Character and Social Reproduction Character is the totality of the personality structure, the various aspects of socialized selfhood that are the products of internalization of the parents and other socializers, his/her transformed desires, repression based defenses and distorted forms of self-awareness. The Frankfurt School considered character a critical moment of the political economy.41 Despite many limitations, this approach to character can yet inform the critique of late capital as it has been transformed into an amusement society and ‘character’ now appears as fragmented self-presentations. This can show how the past remains alive in the historically located individual, how socialization in a particular class location acts to reproduce social arrangements and how hegemony embedded within those social arrangements is mystified. How could a highly civilized people, heirs to Goethe, Bach and Beethoven, often kind and gentle, sanction, commit and even deny the barbaric atrocities of the Final Solution. For the Frankfurt School, the socialization of character shaped the expressions of drives, feelings and defenses for the sake of the political economy. But certain character patterns, in face of social stress, were prone to intense feelings of rage, humiliation and hatred that could be mobilized by particular types of leaders. But even today, long after Hitler’s genocide, political assassination and torture endure as testaments that the power to define enemies as targets for rage can unleash the most savage emotions and barbaric mass atrocities.42 Understanding Fascism required a more complex psychology than a simple frustration-aggression model. Freud’s theory of innate erotic and hostile drives requiring (early) renunciations offered an explanation of the irrationality, passion and even cruelty of humanity. At particular junctures, the drives could be mustered in the service of politi-


cal or economic ends, or conversely, system crises could be displaced to personal realms.43 For Marcuse, particular epochs fostered different ‘reality principles’ that led to various degrees of repression, from what was required for social life to what was ‘surplus’, and required to sustain particular power arrangements. He maintained an orthodox position on drives insofar as he needed a biological basis for his early theory of emancipation (polymorphous perversion). The theory also explained how drives could ‘detour’ from satisfaction. As such, they could be manipulated by late capital to find gratifications in consumerism that would legitimate and reproduce the system. Jacoby (1975) has argued that such a psychology retains a dialectical tension between the person and the society that is essential for critique in face of the sanitized conformist revisionist psychologies of the neoFreudians. Such psychologies of adjustment render blameless the social structure and individualize suffering so as to ‘blame the victim’ (Ryan, 1976). Nothwithstanding, a number of objections remain. Drive theory is a-historical; for example, Freud universalized historical features of sexual repression. ‘Human nature’ and desire cannot be located outside history. The classical drive theory located domination in sexual repression as a condition of civilization, not its specific bourgeois forms. Its theory of sexuality as a libidinal drive that needed control must be located in the context of capitalism, a privatized family life and Victorian bourgeois patriarchy.44 The theory individualizes action and leads to a male bias (Chodorow, 1989). It would seem as if for the founders of the Frankfurt School the nature of their fathers, successful businessmen in an Anti-Semitic society when the power of the father was being weakened, may have disposed an affinity for the patriarchy inherent in early psychoanalytic theory (Jay, 1973). The waning patriarchy of their society was reproduced in their theory.45 Further, drives considered as energies violate all known laws of physics. The drive theory, modeled after hydraulics or male urination, is ultimately a rationalized mechanistic model of behavior that critical theory in fact rejects. Finally, drive theory is focused almost wholly within the person and places less attention on the nature of everyday life, utterances and daily struggles.46 Acceptance of the drive theory is today quite untenable. While there are a myriad of reasons why this is so and few of even the most orthodox would defend it, for critical purposes several points must be made. To retain the classical insights I would like to suggest that recent research on affects offers a more adequate perspective to inform a critical theory of character formation and social reproduction in an amusement society.


However, this consideration of affects rather that drives needs to be located within a number of changes and revisions of classical psychoanalytic theory that have similarly moved from drive theory to theories of feelings.47 Perhaps the most important point as noted has been the discarding of the drive theory. The most basic fact of infancy is anxiety and limited ability to cope with it. For the object relations school, people seek affective satisfactions that include anxiety reduction in attachments to other people rather than gratifications of sexual desires. This is seen in Chodorow’s (1978) understanding of mothering and gender differences in symbiosis-differentiation. Similarly, Benjamin (1988) sees the dynamics of recognition of self under conditions of domination as the salient quality of gender. Various approaches loosely called self-psychology that explore the origins and expressions of pathological narcissism stress the role of empathic recognition of emerging selfhood as basic to character. If the person fails to receive this early confirmation of self, a distorted, fragmented self-formation follows in which attempts for power, wealth, fame or sexuality become compensatory substitutes and palliatives for earlier hurts and insults. These more recent approaches suggest that failures of recognition of emerging selfhood are painfully experienced and dispose later attempts to secure substitutes. It would be beyond the scope of this chapter to spell out in any detail a theory of character based on affect rather than drives; a few suggestions can be made relevant to a contemporary critical social psychology.

Embodied Affects Biology is crucial for understanding the affective basis of hegemonic process as well as its discontents. Considering the feelings that maintain everyday routines, interactions and the development of character to produce active willing assent avoids simplistic ‘oversocialized’ robotic concepts of humanity. And yet this embodiment locates a realm apart from political economy that is not so easily or completely ‘colonized’. Beneath the surface pleasures of transitory relationships, recognitions of self and the manipulated consumption of amusement capital, is an underlying malaise from sadness to anxiety to pathos and now panic.48 In an amusement society there is no better symbol than Paliacci the ‘fictional’ clown laughing on the outside, crying within. Considerations of biology are not an endorsement of ‘biosociology’ which posits a ‘human nature’ outside of history. Rather, what is sug-


gested is that humans evolved from lower mammals and retained affective dispositions that are independent of a particular culture. These include a capacity for attachments, especially at critical periods of development.49 Further, we are born with brains and nervous systems (the autonomic) that give us inherent capacities for symbolic thought and affective response. Finally, we are each endowed with different temperaments that influence patterns of interaction. In a complex society, this may also influence the selection of and performances in various interpersonal routines. Thus we can consider personal motivations and habituations without recourse to an antiquated drive theory. Instead, understanding the nature of human affects and their socialized meanings offers a more heuristic approach.50 It was Darwin who first observed the fact that emotional expressions long antedated humanity. They were inherent physiological responses to various events. Legacies of evolution, they had served adaptive functions directly in survival activities, (fear and autonomic arousal) and indirectly through the social patterns of particular species that enabled their survival, e.g., bonding, dominance, etc. Affects are the earliest forms of communication and to this day remain part of interpersonal discourse;51 fear is found in most of the higher species. Anger, fear, joy, surprise, sadness, disgust, etc., are found in every society. In humans, utterances join with body language and communicate feelings—independently of awareness.52 The evidence suggests that affective responses, based on biological legacies, are universal (cf. Ekman, 1984). But in human societies, the cues that arouse affective responses are primarily symbolic, they may come from without, e.g., the interpretations of another’s behavior, or from within, e.g., evaluations of one’s success or failure (self-esteem), or through external events/issues that have come to be meaningful, e.g., the devotion to a cause, the hatred of an idea, etc. In humans, fear may be evoked without a clear awareness of its cause, indeed the ‘causes’ may be repressed or mystified. Fear without awareness of cause is anxiety. Tompkins (1984) has suggested that drives are really too weak to motivate most behavior, he claims the penis is a paper tiger. Rather, he suggests that affects are amplifiers or suppressors of drives. They act as the primary motivational system, e.g., people seek or avoid various affective states rather than gratification per se. The affect system is more general than highly specific and time limited drives such as breathing, eating, etc. Further, he suggests that the human affect system is not only far more subject to social control, (and therefore potentially appropriated) but there are affective predispositions to


particular ideologies. Thus, as will be argued, the ‘gratifications’ that are sought or avoided in everyday life are experiences, not the gratification of drives. Affective responses become subject to cultural codes, and interpersonal rules that elicit responses give nuance and precision to the response, sanction the overt expressions and construct the experience. Affects so transformed through processes of negotiation and construction can be termed emotions; accordingly, they are social (McCarthy, 1989). This is not the place to debate how many affects there are, but simply note that the intersection of biological and social gives rise to a far wider range of emotions, their cues and modes of expression than is possible by considerations of biology alone (cf. Kemper, 1987). Emotions come to be experienced and expressed in a variety of ways. The experiential aspects of emotions are feelings.53 These are themselves subject to cultural rules of ceremony, e.g., the hysterical grief at a funeral, especially among Jews or Italians. At the other extreme is the withdrawal into self-experience—the quiet Scandinavian anxiety of Kierkegaard which Bergmann turned into an art form. There are class and gender codes for feelings. Societies can be seen as differing in the cues for expression/ repression of feelings, the experiential or self-referential aspect of affects, the ways affects are expressed, and the ways they impact on social relations. Social life has certain everyday routines, values, goals and standards of conduct, it evolves certain cues for emotion, feeling rules for interaction (typically gendered) and interpretations of the experience. In the modern world, there are occupational codes for elicitation, modes of experiencing and dealing with the feelings of others, what Hochschild (1983) calls ‘feeling rules’. (She argues that in the service sector typical of an amusement society where most interactions are commodified spectacles, feelings have been commodified). Her point that the occupations of a modern society alienate the worker from his/ her feelings does not go far enough; it is not simply the job, but the entire range of everyday life and interactions that needs to be considered. The appropriation and commercialization of the affects is a moment of the totality of an amusement society.

Socialized Character For Aries the modern conception of childhood as a distinct phase in the life course emerged with the growth of the bourgeois class, the


separation of household and economy within that household, and children having their own rooms. These conditions fostered individualism and a sense of privacy. Socialization of children became a concern shortly after the printing press was invented and manuals of childrearing advice appeared. The various post-Enlightenment conceptions of childhood as clay to be molded, evil to be tamed or innocence to be nurtured, and the value of children as economically useful or emotionally gratifying are historically variable constructions. The development of character cannot be thought of apart from specific historical circumstances and class locations of the family structure, socialization values and practices which are already constituted in the everyday life routines of the parental generation. During the prolonged dependency and helplessness of infancy, which is required for acquisition of the culture and socialization into social networks, the socialization practices and personalities of the caretakers begin to have a profound influence, shaping the subsequent character of the person.54 It is only in the context of a socially constructed childhood located in the privatized households of an affluent society, and the personal duress endured despite that affluence, that a theory of character development and pathology could emerge—as well as the actual characters explained by the theory. One of the most important contributions of psychoanalysis was its theory of socialization.55 Three intertwined aspects of this theory are relevant for the present purpose. The internalization of parental normative codes, the development of the ego with its capacities for language, self-reflection and self-deception (defenses), and the transformation of desire that enables the person to participate in the everyday life routines of the society and, in enacting the same, reproduce the social order. These processes, however, are better understood within an affective framework that, as will be argued, makes it possible to understand how hegemony within everyday life practice is affectively secured.

Identification The affective endowment of humans, like most other mammals, includes capacities for attachments to caretakers.56 These may be somewhat diffuse as in the cases where children are raised by a large number of adults and often other siblings. On the other hand, when there are only a few caretakers, the attachment is usually more intense. In more traditional societies, children are often in physical


contact if not close proximity to adults for several of their first years. When children sleep in separate quarters, fears of separation, abandonment and feelings of helplessness are more likely to intensify. These conditions, in turn, are more likely to foster greater identification with specific caretakers (what has been termed ‘anaclitic’ identification). They are also more likely to foster individualized selfhood and repressions of frustrated infantile yearnings for dependency (see Slater, 1970). (Note: Freudian theory makes much more sense read as feelings rather than drives). Identification is initially a defensive operation, one of the earliest ways an infant deals with unpleasant affective states such as fear, anxiety, tensions, etc., when a caretaker is absent; ‘the precipitate of abandoned cathexes’ in Freud’s words. In later development, the (male) superego was a defense against the feared retaliation (castration) of the jealous father, Hans remains the prototype.57 The Frankfurt critique of the superego showed how ideology became a material force and the basis for modern domination in face of seemingly greater freedom and autonomy.58 Identification was the means by which the social norms and codes for the control of erotic or hostile desires of parents became internalized components of subsequent character, controlling/regulating behavior for the sake of the society. In the German character this internalization of ideology predisposed submission to powerful leaders.59 In American society, beliefs in freedom, equality and classlessness sustain domination, hierarchy and public indifference. For our purposes, this model is too limited in scope and perhaps more suitable for an earlier time in which bourgeois mothers or nannies were the primary caretaker and the father a professional or businessman with some power rather than an organizational careerist. It seems as if childrearing has become less harsh, especially with regards to eroticism. The oppressive rigid superego is today an historic relic found only in some rural fundamentalists. Accordingly, for our purposes, internalization is a more global process based more on volitional pursuits of desirable affective states.60 The internalization of aspects of parents, parental behavior and norms is anxiety reducing, but it also provides other affective responses: pride, joy and interest.61 Thus values are not simply ‘rational’ choices, but definitions of self and reality, and affective investments that provide the person with meaning and gratifying experiences. The parent-child interaction is embedded in a variety of everyday routines. The internalization process becomes one of the means by which the values and qualities of caretakers and their everyday life practices become enduring aspects


of the person. Hegemonic values embedded in these practices thus become internalized as typifications of everyday life, interaction rituals and ‘stocks of knowledge’, ultimately secured on the affective level. Social reproduction begins with deeply held convictions that were internalized early in life on the basis of love and fear.62 Many of these values are acquired in the earliest pre-Oedipal period. Thus certain values are an integral part of the self and secured by powerful affects and repressions. What is being suggested is that the beginnings of hegemonic process, as willing assent, first to caretakers and later to the social order, are acquired in the earliest stages of infancy.63 Affective gratification has now become one of the major dimensions of parenting (cf. Zelizer, 1985). This is now one of the means of value internalization. In this way identification is one of the first means by which personality development is socially anchored which in turn influences cognitive development, motivation, values, and modes of self-reflection and constitution that give rise to judgments, actions and discourse.64 As the infant matures to childhood, language and reflexivity, which allow for conscious self-awareness and social understandings, also mask hegemonic processes that link the person to the larger society, that is, other socializers and transmitters of discourse begin to have more and more of a role in socialization. School attendance, teachers and peers, and the infiltration of media become subtle means by which everyday practices of other institutions supplement the familial socialization to socialize everyday life and selfunderstandings. (At this point the ‘colonization’ of childhood becomes evident). Modern socialization emphasizes affection and stimulation (often via TV). This understanding of identification based on fun (affective gratification) and acquired in childhood becomes one of the major means of enjoining the person to the commodified culture of the amusement society. In later life, this enables consumption via identification with celebrities and vicarious gratifications observing what others may have or do. (This may also cause envy). Identification in a consumer society becomes increasingly based on the possessions and displays of the model(s) that promise gratification.

The Affective Self Freud’s theory of the ego saw it as a psychic structure, an internalization of parents that subdued the drives, dealt with reality, and allowed symbolic capacities (secondary process). But the relation of the ego to the self was often unclear. As his theories evolved, mean-


ings changed. But his structural theory was always based on drives and their satisfaction. Since we rely on affective endowments rather than drives, much of that framework falls apart. Instead, I would suggest the notion of the ‘affective self, as a locus of experience that becomes self-aware. Long before a child can use language, she or he has the capacity to experience intense affects. As the earliest cognitive development proceeds, the elaboration of sensori-motor operations soon affords the capacity for intentional behavior. From these various affective states, intentional acts and awarenesses of other beings, emerges a locus of experience that can be loosely termed a primordial self. In various modern psychoanalytic theories such as Winnicott, Balint, Fairburn, Mahler, Kohut, etc., the self emerges prior to its capacities for selfreflection.65 Its origins are found in early self feelings and relations to others, based not on drives, but on primary love, object seeking, etc.66 Threats to the emergent self or its desired gratifications such as abandonment, deprivations of love, failures of recognitions, intolerance of differentiation or insults to self-esteem, evoke fears and anxieties. The desire for recognition of self has become domination, as Hegel argued. This struggle for recognition in childhood leads to a dominated self (Gottlieb, 1987, Benjamin, 1988). In early childhood, as we have seen, this can foster identification. But it can also foster enduring distortions of self as compensatory or reparative efforts. Deprivations and frustrations at this stage of development can become the basis for later psychopathology,67 the result being an enfeeblement of self with tenuous anchorings, problematic attachments albeit with transitory partial gratifications. Compensations for deficits in self include exaggerated needs for recognition (exhibitionism), power, wealth or sexuality. Such pathologies reproduce the society that engenders them. And, as Freud showed, pathology is just an extreme manifestation of the normal. The capacity for language and symbolic capacities that enable reflection and anticipation have major consequences. The sense of self as narrative is a synthesis of personal history, social history (that is not usually conscious) and current realities. As the child learns language, she or he can be told the stories, discourses and legends that incorporate him or her into an historic community (cf. MacIntyre, 1981).68 These stories also allow the child to deal with strong affects at the level of fantasy where life, death and evil can be more easily dealt with (Bettelheim, 1976). The various discourses and utterances are also ideological texts that begin defining reality. Thus while the origins of domination are in the preverbal stages, the learning of lan-


guages of reflection and interaction that distort self-understandings, becomes another element of hegemonic process. As Bellah (1985) argues, within the American tradition is a language of individualism that motivates the person and sustains the economy—but with nefarious consequences for the preservation of community. As noted though, the stories of childhood are increasingly products of a commodified culture and are themselves often little more than extended commercials. Cognition allows affects to be conceptualized and controlled in certain situations, or conversely, the person may engage in activities that will bring or avoid certain feelings. Cultural discourses can mediate affective experience. Language allows self-reflection and appraisal, and this in turn allows selection of aspects of self to be expressed in rituals that reproduce everyday life (see below). One of the consequences of the plurality of social worlds is the requirement for multiple self-expressions. While particular expressions of self will differ in various situations, and at different times in those situations, there is an underlying constancy of affectivity. To be sure, responses can be subject to social controls or ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild, 1983). In formal organizations as well as families, one only expresses anger to subordinates. (This appropriation of feelings and fragmentation of selfpresentation contributes to the enfeeblement of self). Cognition influences choice of current activities for the sake of future feelings, to anticipate pleasure in sex or consumption, fear in failure or sadness in parting. While certain affective experiences may be sought or avoided on the basis of early experience, the ways these affective legacies are experienced and expressed in everyday life practices become subject to reflections and appraisals that shape our notions of self and the behaviors displayed to the audience. What is important to note is that in an amusement society, patterns of consumption as presentations of display in public or private realms are statements of self and self-worth. For the Frankfurt School defenses were to the individual what reification was to the society. In his later theory of anxiety, Freud began to move from defenses as drive substitutes, a dubious idea at best, to ways of coping with anxiety. The extent to which sexual feelings/ gratifications might have aroused anxiety in his day perhaps led him to confuse cause and effect. Understanding the affective nature of defense leads to two conclusions that are relevant for the critique of capitalism. Firstly, defenses may motivate work; intellectualization and rationalization, for example, are the ideal means to motivate intellectual/professional work in an information society. Similarly, con-


sumption can act as a defense and provide compensatory gratifications. When the going gets tough the tough go shopping. But this can easily become an addiction in which compulsive consumption as a compensation for other deprivations becomes an addiction that is less to bring pleasure than assuage pain (Delattre, 1988). It should finally be noted that defenses further secure social arrangements in such ways as targeting scapegoats for system failure or even individualizing discontent, e.g., the mystification of personal duress. The context in which selfhood emerges is such then that certain interpersonal styles and modes of self-reflection, together with societal norms and discourses, become more or less enduring aspects of selfhood that in particular situations become disposed to reproduce the necessary everyday routines and social arrangements. These practices provide enough affective gratifications to be sustained, seen and experienced as ‘normal’. When this fails, defensive operations mystify the sources of malaise.

The Socialization of Desire When the initial growth of a rationalized market economy began, childhood was created in such a way that certain affective legacies would result. Whether considered repression/sublimation, or the ‘Protestant ethic’, childhood was constructed and infiltrated, and ‘required’ affective habituations were established. Elias (1978) argued that the growth of civilization required a sense of shame over bodily functions. Freud showed the power of early affective experiences in shaping character. But, as he used the language of sexual drives, the language of greatest emotional intensity for adults, his theory obscured infantile affectivity.69 Freud’s drive theory argued that repression was necessary for civilization to insure that people would work. ‘It was not a matter of indifference that men needed to work’; repression of Eros served two important functions, motivation to work and the maintenance of social bonds.70 The theory argues that drives were repressed and/or constrained by the ego and superego. How indeed can we explain motivation without this antiquated mechanistic theory. In the course of development the child learns that certain cues or actions elicit affects. She or he also learns how they are responded to. Do the caretakers encourage fear, respect and emotional control, or love and expressivity?71 Emotional communication between infant and caretaker can be seen in the first month or so. A wealth of clinical


and experimental evidence attests to the range and intensity of infantile emotional experience. Insofar as many of these experiences are associated with early dialogues between an emerging sense of self and caretakers, certain forms of interactions and/or self expressions become associated with affective responses. In the earliest years, if not months, children learn to seek certain pleasurable affective responses from the world and shun, if possible, others. In later life, much of our behavior attempts either to recreate pleasures or seek alternative compensations. Long before selfreflection and verbal communication, a basic lesson is learned; affective experiences, whether fear or anger, or the more desirable ones such as joy, surprise, etc., are often dependent on the presence or actions of others and one must be or do what they demand. This begins the process by which the political economy starts to construct motivation. Everyday life begins to infiltrate the family to secure the ‘motivations’ that will be required in later life. The emotional regulation of later interactions, subject to social negotiations and constructions as to the cues and ‘proper’ modes of expression/experience, depends in part on the nature of the earliest affective experiences of fear, anxiety and gratification that occur in conjunction with the caretaker. Considerations of the socialization of affectivity allows consideration of a much broader role for feelings and emotions in the regulation of everyday life, without the need to regard every desire a deeply repressed unconscious motive. We get to work on time because discrepancies from everyday life arouse discomforts, not to prove something to a parent. What is being suggested is that affects turned emotions, once established as habituations, become cues and signals which subtly regulate everyday behavior.72 Insofar as affects become subject to social cues and controls in early socialization and current interaction, and insofar as these patterns become felt experiences, to be sought or avoided, society elicits as well as controls feelings and modes of emotional self-presentation, and we can talk about affective habituations.73 But these habituations are not simply the result of prior experience, but given the symbolic capacities that afford self-reflection and anticipation of the future, we can act in certain ways that bring affective gratifications in the here and now, often without awareness, and plan for future gratifications in work, family, or leisure. Thus a theory of motivation does not require a theory of drives. Finally, locating motivation in affectivity clarifies the appropriation of desire. As argued above, somewhere between the rise of nineteenth century department store and catalog (Sears, Wards), and the early


twentieth century growth of advertising, there was a shift to a consumer economy that was realized at the end of WWII (albeit not for all). The rise of industrialization, growth of cities, and mechanization of farming had a number of consequences—exploitation of labor, urban squalor, surplus labor on the farm. It was at this point in history that we also saw the growth of mass media and merchandising of the increasing number of consumer goods. The ‘needs’ for many of the products or entertainments were a fortuitous mixture of the inadvertent adverse consequences of industrialization and the intentional creation of desires by the sellers and advertisers of goods and shows (see, for example, Ewen, 1976; Ewen and Ewen, 1982). While the display of wealth had long been an artifact of élite status and social placement, it had now become an integral feature of capitalist production. Consumption increasingly became a form of self-expression whose recognition brought desired gratifications and compensations. For many, work would become a means to such ends.

Character and Everyday Life The concept of character in a theory of affects rather than drives, retains many of the insights of Freudian depth psychology, but locates them in a more comprehensive hierarchical framework in which not all everyday behavior is the product of early childhood. Sometimes a cigar is just an archaic sign of bourgeois male economic status. But at the same time, this perspective clarifies how affects become emotions which in turn become feelings. The affective underpinnings of social life clarify modern hegemony insofar as it exists at several levels—in the consumption of objects used or desired, the interactional routines of the quotidian, the historical shaping of character and the cultural expressions of the social order. In the modern capitalist amusement societies, each and every one of these moments has been transformed into hedonistic gratifications of appropriated desire that are intrinsic parts of everyday routines and spectacles. I have argued that these produce affective satisfactions and in turn engender active assent to and reproduction of the social system. The ways of dealing with affects are appropriated as a result of both inadvertent structural conditions and the intentional socialization by media, marketeers and producers to find gratifications in the use of objects, in self-presentations and interaction rituals which become routinized aspects of ‘normal’ everyday life. When this happens, these habituations sustain and reproduce hegemony.


The dominant logic of personal life is now gratification and feeling good, what some call a therapeutic orientation (Bellah, et al., 1985; Reiff, 1966). But the amusement society fails to deliver its promise. In the commodified culture, I noted that the purchasing and use of many of the objects of daily life provide gratifications, to the owner/user, meanings, and statements about the user’s social status and personal identity. What I called ‘recognition props’ are used by the self to be noticed via thing possession or having certain purchased experiences. Indeed many of the products and experiences of a consumption society are primarily loaded with this affective symbolic value. Notice how many ads promise that the person will be noticed, others will be jealous. This way of understanding everyday life, as part of hegemonic process, requires considerations of the commercialization of feelings to encourage consumption and reproduce the society of consumption. While the affective realm was not spelled out by Gramsci, ‘normality’ is comfortable, indeed it often provides many partial gratifications to sustain itself and ward off the unpleasant. And to totally reject these is to bring back the puritans. (There are some who want to do just that). The mass mediated consumption of objects, images and experiences, has the qualities of an addiction (Delattre, 1988). Addictions can be seen as affective compensations for personal, social or psychological deficiencies. I noted that Tocqueville’s insights, informed by depth psychology, suggest that a number of features of American socialization and social structure foster anxiety and malaise. This understanding allows us to see that the consumption of images or goods is a form of socially induced means of allaying anxiety or securing gratifications that sustain the now dominant forms of hegemony. In late capitalism, fear and anxiety come from the uncertainty of daily life, the overwhelming of the senses, the probable nature of status, weakness of social ties, etc. The reduction of fear and even ecstasy comes through consumption of objects or mediated experiences.

The Presentation of Self in Commodified Ritual Socialization culminates in learning the rules and rituals of everyday social interactions, negotiations and relationships. Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to the expressive features of social life was seen as the way social rituals under capital are both self-serving and reproducing of the social order. The traditions of Schutz and Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology complimented this approach by articulating the


various implicit meanings, anticipations, stocks of knowledge and social negotiations of reality. (See also Berger and Luckmann, 1967). But lacking in these analyses was the motivation for self-presentation. Further, most such discourses posit a disembodied self.74 But these activities are performed by living people in a social world that is not devoid of feelings.75 The emotions that come to regulate interactions and lead people to seek certain outcomes and avoid others are rooted in the body.76 Seduction may require flattery, manipulation, props and insincerity as well as love and devotion, but there is an orgasm to be sought as well. Thus, it was suggested that the performances of interaction rituals provided positive feelings or avoided negative ones. Goffman (1967) noted that the ritualization of interaction, segregation of front and back, rules of deference and demeanor, etc., are constructed to make social life easy and gratifying while the person attempts to avoid shame and embarrassment. Facework’ tries to retain a sanctity of the selves of the interactants. The essence of everyday life and its rituals of social interaction, is that more often than not, it does not arouse intense feelings. In most cases the internal controls, social cues and established rituals facilitate social life. Interaction rituals are designed to make day-to-day relationships easier and without intense emotions, especially the disruptive ones (Goffman, 1967). The more intense emotions are generally only seen in the private realms of the home or as parts of a performance. It is only when the atypical replaces the customary, when habituations are questioned, when the usual frustrations of life overwhelm and become stressors, that feelings are especially evident.77 Giddens (1984) and J.Turner (1988) suggest that diffuse anxiety functions as a generalized motive for a variety of interactions. But this anxiety and other affective underpinnings that influence interaction are located in history. Manipulation and deceit, impressive fronts and teamwork serve capitalist organization well. Further, while the fearanxiety response may well be universal, certain features of late capitalism in general and American character in particular are perhaps more conducive to its elicitation.78 The rituals of daily life as socialized habituations are facilitated by the affective cues of each party; this is what Goffman called ‘facework’. This includes the very ways affects are elicited, emotions handled and feelings experienced. Thus people differentially respond to others’ emotional cues without conscious awareness. We feel better in the presence of smiles than frowns.79 In the world of interpersonal service, the expressions of feeling are increasingly appropriated as per-


sonal spectacles to provide gratification to the other (Hochschild, 1983). The attempt to find an affective basis for character to understand its appropriation finds its realization in the ‘affective self—a more or less constant locus of experience that has the capacity for selfreflection and constitution. But in modern life there is an increasing disjunction between these aspects. Some go so far as to question the very possibility of selfhood in face of its appropriation and domination. For Freud the ego was the weak slave of three masters. For Goffman it is annihilated and all that is left is a situational reality that emerges in social rituals. It is like the smile of the Cheshire cat. There are a number of others who take a similar view. Secord and Bachman suggest its constancy is due to similar social milieus, Zurcher sees it as mutable and Gergen also sees it as a situational reality. The self is ephemeral. It exists only when observed in performance, or as will later be suggested, when observing other. (This is the Master-Slave contest for recognition which is now the plight of everyman, and everyman is losing the struggle, cf. Horkhiemer and Adorno, 1972; Wexler, 1987). If Nietszche announced the death of God, Goffman’s text announces the death of the soul, or at least the terms of its sale. But the corpse doesn’t know it’s dead and stays on stage seeking confirmation and recognition from its audience, and failing that, seeks some other kind of affective experience to confirm itself in its own existence. The nature of selfhood has shifted its locus of experience inward, to feelings and personal qualities (R.Turner, 1976). This is due to factors such as greater mobility and transitory memberships in institutions, the fragmentation inherent in a plurality of social worlds, escape from the colonization of the life world by impersonal forces, the diffusion of a popular psychology with a ‘jargon of authenticity’ and selfrealization, and greater expectations of affective gratifications in the private realm, etc. It is for these reasons that self has become enfeebled by the multiple and often contradictory practices of everyday life. One of the most important, that links depth psychology to the notions of interaction, is to suggest that affective recognition by others is a basic human motive. Therefore, as late capitalism has become an amusement society, personal conduct becomes itself increasingly a spectacle, a performance that brings attention to the person for the sake of gratification. These are the pseudo events or simulacra at the personal level, the 15 minutes of fame everyone deserves. The fundamental nature of self-hood is the dialect of spectator-spectacle.


In the private sphere, intimate relations attempt to provide warmth, affective gratifications and recognition of authentic selfhood. In this realm, the more private intimate aspects of self are expressed, especially the various feelings of personal doubt, joy and sadness that come from the public aspects of life but would undermine the self if these ‘private’ forms of self-presentation were known to the audience. This is especially the case for men for whom most feelings, save anger, aggression and pride in competition, are disavowed. But emotional intimacy is, however, especially difficult as the family is increasingly under assault. As the family becomes the retreat from the pressures of the public world, it becomes more subject to its pressures. Thus, even the haven is progressively enfeebled and recognition of the remnants of fragmented selfhood increasingly problematic. Then, what has been ‘backstage’ becomes increasingly overt, indeed the talk show or gossip magazine is now the realm of what might have been limited to the priest or therapist.

The Affective Habitus In everyday life, allocated objects, routines and discourse intersect with the socialized person. Society requires the transformation of affects into regulated emotions and feelings for its existence and reproduction. Emotions are functional in that they are constituted and prescribed in such ways as to sustain and endorse cultural systems of belief and value. In particular, emotions are alleged to involve internalized social values so that the agent capable of feeling the appropriate emotion provides an autonomous and reliable adherent to the values marked by the emotion. (Armon-Jones, 1986:57) These typical patterns of emotionality, typifications of experiencing feelings, when combined with the subculture’s feeling rules, were termed ‘affective habituations’. Social routines for affective control and experience are both regulative and constructive to secure the ‘normality’ that sustains hegemony. Society establishes certain patterns of emotional response and feelings in the person, affective controls, and at the same time, certain rules for expressing feelings and influencing the feelings of others. Interaction is guided by subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, emotional cues. The learning of these cues


and feeling rules are established informally? yet serve to routinize everyday life and sustain a social order. But in modern society, feelings have become appropriated and subject to conscious manipulation by the culture of consumption, its mass media, politicians and advertisers. The outcome of socialization is a character structure that makes predictable the quotidian that in turn secures social reproduction. The tenacity and persistence of certain beliefs and practices that often do not bring gratifications cannot be understood without depth psychological considerations. Just as the neurotic cannot easily give up selfdefeating beliefs or practices, societies often maintain beliefs or practices that bring them misery. But socialization is far broader than depth psychological considerations; it includes modes of seeking affective satisfaction in everyday life routines, interactions and selfexpressions. As a result of the socialization processes, character in the larger sense can be thought of as a means by which thoughts, feelings and activities are channeled or limited to certain ranges of variation; these limited trajectories, habitus, are such that the various objects used or desired, activities, relationships and spaces take on qualities of regularity (Bourdieu, 1977). The routines of everyday life become part and parcel of the individual who feels these arrangements are normal insofar as she or he has been socialized in a household, acquires an education (not always formal as in modern societies), interacts and plays with friends and relatives, enjoys the spectacles of mass culture and finally becomes incorporated into the adult world and its interpretive schemas. Thus socialized, the person ‘naturally’ carries out the routines of everyday life. In the course of personal development and social change, some are discarded, some are acquired. While age may lead to entries and exits into or from certain ‘performances’, stages and props, newly socialized cohorts assume and reproduce the daily routines. But insofar as these routine ‘habituations’ provide some desired affective experiences, and the stresses that accrue from these practices are either mystified or individualized, hegemony is secured over time.

Part IV National Character I can now suggest that while the site of social reproduction is at the level of everyday practices, these are secured by socialized ‘affective habituations’ which include sustained shared discourses, assumptions, stocks of knowledge and interactional patterns that are legacies of the


past as well as current adaptations. The totality of these habituations and investments, together with symbolic capacities for discourse and reflexivity, constitute a working definition of national character of which certain patterns are distinctive of a society and found in large segments of the adult population. This modal pattern and distinctive variants constitute national character.80 Most approaches to national character have looked at shared values, personality typologies, childrearing practices and values, even interpretations of myths. But the consideration of character as patterned tendencies of feelings toward self, other and objects, together with affective investments in particular values, will allow understanding of the paradox of despair in the midst of seeming plenty.81 The emotional investments in national values and goals are among the primary influences on thoughts, judgments and actions.82 Character, then, secures not only the allocated typifications of everyday life routines and interactions, but, recalling Horkheimer, the legacies of generations past. Tradition informs like a wish fulfillment dream, often disguised, often forgotten. (And if remembrance is a source of emancipation or community as some suggest, ‘communities of memory’, are preserved in character yet often defended against).

American Character American character was the product of many factors, beginning with English cultural traditions. This included rights of property ownership and marital choice. With their Puritan religious inspiration, the settlers saw themselves as a lost tribe coming to the promised land in which hard labor and devotion would realize God’s kingdom on Earth. The philosophical legacies of Hobbes and Locke, what MacPherson (1962) calls possessive individualism, would follow the colonials across the sea to influence government, childrearing and education. Lastly, capitalism and the unique requirements of adaptation to this new and verdant land without limit of expanding frontiers forged the basis for a set of everyday practices and collective values that would, in time, shape a distinct national character (see Hawke, 1988).83 This combination of character, religious legitimation and opportunity structure enabled the colonies to prosper. Within a hundred years, whaling, shipbuilding, trade, and the expansion of cash agriculture, e.g., cotton and tobacco, made the colonials relatively wealthy. The hegemonic bloc that emerged under these conditions was influ-


enced by Enlightenment thought. This resulted in the revolution that, informed by Biblical and Republican traditions, would give fine hues and shading to a new and distinct character type that was evident when Tocqueville came in 1830. Despite the intervening changes since that portrait was first drawn, from its cradle in the patriarchy of ‘little commonwealth’ (Demos, 1970), to the egalitarian consumerism of today’s ‘yuppies’ (Ehrenreich, 1989), the basic outlines endure.84 And despite contemporary pluralism, the characterological domination by the early Puritan (males) endures. Today the expressions of character are more likely to be expressed in hedonic consumerism than religious piety.85 As Schnieder (1968) once observed, while the suburban commuter may look quite different from his Puritan forebear, there is far more persistence of core values than it seems. Hsu (1983) has also argued for this general continuity. And those who would be kings, or at least captains and presidents, somehow come to resemble them in values, motives, and even feelings. As noted, the individual character is, in part, the legacy of prior generations. This psychological transmission was a product of identification, inclusion into Cultural discourses from nursery rhymes to history texts, ideology ceremonialized, and the incremental nature of change at the level of everyday life. In this way, character can be said to have both genotypic and phenotypic expressions, that is, its particular expressions will vary by historical epochs, class and gender. Further, national character is seen in term of affective investments in four basic value polarities. These legacies of earlier generations endure over the years in myth, ritual and character that show greater resiliency over time than can be explained individually by motives and specific requirements for their repression. But at the same time that American character thus considered persists and sustains reproduction, there also endures a long-noted underlying malaise. There has seemed something inherent about American character that has left it especially prone to pathos, the tragedy of abundance, the poverty of affluence (Wachtel, 1989). Tocqueville himself suggested that the values that fostered equality and prosperity, had also produced a most unhappy society.86 Despite their abundance, freedom and equality, he saw Americans as a very sad and anxious people. Anecdotal evidence of nineteenth century psychiatrists suggested that Americans were far more likely to suffer mental illness than Europeans. Perhaps Beard’s nineteenth century treatise on American Nervousness saw ‘neurasthenia’, a mixture of tiredness, vague psychic discontent and depression, as the malady of Americans which


remains the archetypical expression of linking their civilization to feelings of discontent. (See Langman and Richman, 1987).87 The basic values of the colonials enabled them to survive in the new and abundant land. But the conditions of everyday life, greater dispersal and freedom from central authority, what has been called ‘modular’ (Blair, 1988), would slowly engender a distinct hegemonic bloc and qualities of everyday life that would become more and more unlike those of England. Within a few generations the value differences, irresolvable, would be evident. Soon this same combination of values enacted in everyday life practices would foster a dynamic and prosperous new nation. It would also make possible a number of technologies that would further accelerate the rate of change. The conditions of isolation and individualism would encourage Americans to develop communication networks, from the quilting bee to the fiber optic phone (Abott, 1987). But while technologies would emerge to satisfy certain social needs, at the same time they would frustrate others and create further frustrations, e.g., cars plus motels would end the chastity of middleclass maidens, cars plus expressways would lead to the suburbanization of America. As Freud once put, if the train didn’t carry my son so far away, I wouldn’t need a phone to talk to him. So while the values of America would make possible its prosperity, they would also become the basis of its underlying pathos.

Individualism-Community Perhaps the two most powerful universal human desires are the strivings for agency, self determination, differentiation from others and freedom from control on the one hand, and the wish for community, involvement, embeddedness and meaningful ties on the other (Bakan, 1966; see also Cancian, 1987). This polarity has been seen as differentiation and embeddedness (Kegan, 1982) and individualism vs. dependency and engagement (Slater, 1970). Every society provides means for the fulfillment of these strivings, and in the course of years most have worked out stable balances. America however, has always valued the individualistic side of the polarity. The most obvious expression of American values has been individualism and independence as seen in freedom from constraint, the pursuit of liberty, economic achievement, etc.88 For Bellah (1975), independence was long constrained by religious communities and Biblical and Republican traditions that held the people together. But the


growth of capitalism eroded communal ties and unrestrained individualism now threatens the very existence of society.89 A number of other critics, Nisbet, MacIntyre and Sennet, for example, have decried the breakdown of society because of its economic individualism.90 (The traditional cohesion is probably more of a myth). Independence, however, is not just a legitimation of self-interested market behavior, but an affective posture towards others that depends in part on fear as a repressed desire toward a love object. American childhood has long been observed as being somewhat permissive. Tocqueville deplored the conditions of equality in which 5year-olds talked back to their parents. (Now it begins at 3). These were the most spoiled, unruly children in the world (see also Wishy, 1968). But under the conditions of independence, the many demands on caretakers and shortness of life, secure attachments were problematic until perhaps the end of the nineteenth century.91 The masculine stance toward independence, which is more salient at shaping a society, associates the desire for closeness and dependency with weakness and vulnerability. But this weakness and vulnerability are in fact the conditions of infancy and symbiotic attachment to the mother which must be repudiated for the male self to become individuated (cf. Chodorow, 1978, Mahler, 1975). Wilkinson (1988) sees the fear of being owned and controlled as one of the central fears of Americans. Infancy is a time of being without control, and in later life, the need for control may take a variety of forms. Perhaps one of Freud’s keenest observations was that money, fame and power never provide genuine gratifications of unfulfilled childhood desires. Rather, these external signs of worth, the results of an aggressive individualism, were compensations for emotional deprivations and hence were insatiable. The dialectical paradox of individualism is a thwarting and truncating of the desire for community attachments, what Slater (1970) called the ‘pursuit of loneliness’, the substitution of wealth for commitment (Wachtel, 1989). Individualism, as a desire for freedom from dependency, rooted in childhood, extolled in ideology, is at the same time based on repressed desires for gratifications of dependency and social attachments. These desires are expressed in anxieties about attachments, or fear of control by external agents and fear of communal engagement. It is in intimate relationships that American individualism creates the greatest problems. We saw above that the family haven was one of the last refuges for enfeebled selfhood. It is now a sociological truism that men need women more than women need men, that in marriage males gain, females lose, etc. (see Cancian, 1987). But the ulti-


mate irony of this stance is that by defending against the attachments to women, men suffer an inner emptiness (see also Rubin, 1983). Cancian (1987) has argued that with the growth of market capitalism and separation of public and private spheres, the emphasis on selfrealization and disdain of dependency, as implicit rules and plans for heterosexual relations, fosters a dual alienation. Each sex becomes alienated from his or her own potential and from a fuller, more meaningful, relation with the other. Since mythology often reveals the deep structures of a culture, as well as its frustrated desires, we might note that one of the most typical American heroes is the boy who runs away from women (read emotional closeness), to find adventure (see toughness, below). Consider only Huck Finn, Captains Ahab, Kirk and Picard, and all boys who run away on ships and escape the clutches of women. The male flight from women has been a staple of the hearts of American men (cf. Ehrenreich, 1983; Fiedler, 1960). Many students of American character since Tocqueville, have noted the relationship of individualism and conformity that are seemingly opposed. Tocqueville noted that the conditions of equality led to a homogeneity of belief and practice.92 Uncertainty over status led to a sensitivity to other’s cues as to how to behave. In the extreme, this became the tyranny of the majority. Americans generally disdain controversial ideas, art, sex or politics (at least in the public realms). Hsu (1983) has suggested that the fragility of social bonds leads to an insecurity about attachments, and conformity to others allays that anxiety. Beneath the facade of self-sufficiency lies a fear of abandonment and a deep loneliness. The conformity, often intolerance long typical of Americans, is ultimately a fear of abandonment. We might finally note that the technology that American love so well has also been a catalyst for social fragmentation. One of the unintended consequences of a television culture is that it further isolates in an already privatized society. As Habermas, Sennett and Bellah have already argued, public concerns and ‘civic virtue’ have declined for a number of reasons. Capitalism, the separation of public and private, the mobility and transience of modern communities, the automobile, fast food/microwave dinners, each in their own way attenuate the social bonds.

Toughness-compassion English traditions of knightly valor, the conditions of colonial life and


the westward expansion of that life, also fostered a certain aggressive style. Toughness, dishing it out or taking it, actually more expressing anger and aggression, has thus been an intrinsic component of the American psyche from the days of the colonies to entrepreneurial industrialism, through WWII to the highly bureaucratized ‘iron cage’ which typifies contemporary American society (Wilkinson, 1988). Notwithstanding the organizational nature of the modern economy, or perhaps because so much of social life is routinized, and outlets for emotional frustrations are needed, there is an emotional facilitation for tough ‘derring do’ leardership, punitive treatment of criminals, and lean and mean are in.93 Aggression and toughness were transformed, glorified, and mythologized in the legends of the West, the cowboy, the 49er, and cavalryman. Later the entrepreneur, the GI, the detective, and of late, the star trekker would continue that theme. From Daniel Boone to Rambo to Jean-Luc Picard, the distinctive American hero is the sexually repressed loner, an outsider free of communal or erotic ties who comes to the salvation of an Edenic community whose peace and harmony are threatened when the usual social controls fail (see Jewitt and Lawrence, 1988). He, and today on occasion she, as in Sigourney Weaver’s role as Ripley in Alien(s), has special skills in the use of redemptive violence that restores the communal harmony without the hero ever becoming a commited member of that community. Hsu (1983) notes that Christianity has an inherent expansionary tendency that converts infidels or dispatches them, with violence, to God’s judgment. May (1988) suggests that the Lockean tradition has its American legacy in an adversarial stance. By the early nineteenth century, toughness as a virtue was a firmly ingrained quality of the American character, seen in its political speeches, foreign policies, and its literature, high brow and low—this was ‘American tough’ (Wilkinson, 1984). This toughness has given the previously described individualism a distinctive flair. One result is a fairly violent version of industrial society (Wilkinson, 1988). While the general rates of crime are not actually as great as often perceived compared to other industrial societies, the rates of truly aggressive violent crime are astronomical, with, for example, more murders in a typical large American city than in entire countries with larger populations. But the important fact is not just the actual amounts of violent crime, but the general fear of it, especially by the affluent who are the least likely victims. In other words, while Americans prize toughness and aggression, spend a major part of their lives


watching it in cartoons, ‘slice and dice’ horror, cops, soldiers, etc., and vote for its personifications, the price we pay is a chronic fear of being victimized. But just as it can be tough, America can be compassionate. Americans donate much to charity, easily rally to the aid of the unfortunate and give much of their time to philanthropic causes. Tocqueville noted the emergence of voluntary organizations for philanthropic ends. This is especially true in the cases where the unfortunate are seen within the group’s limits of sympathy, for example, the various religious and ethnic organizations of today are rooted in the early traditions of community support for the poor or sick. However, compassion becomes associated with being vulnerable, weak, perhaps feminine and impotent. Never give a sucker an even break. While toughness is the dominant cultural theme, it is at the same time emotionally secured by the same family constellations that promote individualism. The socialization of this form of toughness is not so much based on the actual treatment of the child by punitive aggressive parents, although this often happens, but through the encouragement of early self-reliance and emotional control that strains the attachments. Toughness and compassion, personal qualities and social characteristics are each rooted in the most archaic of emotional responses; anger that becomes hate and aggression on the one hand, love that becomes caring on the other. This is the essence of the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos, to use Freud’s mythology. It is clear which side of the dialectic the American character has embraced.

Moralism-Pragmatism Puritanism as a moral force was not simply a reified form of political economy. It provided the major source of cohesion to the New England colonists and even gave justification to their ‘mission’. The settlers saw themselves as a lost tribe of Israel coming to the promised land (Bellah, 1975). From John Winthrop to Ronald Reagan, American leaders have seen that God saw America as something special, ‘exceptional’, the last great hope for mankind. Three hundred years after its founding, the citizens of Yankee City celebrated its birth as if it were a religious ceremony integrating the community with its history (Warner, 1961). While many sociologists see today as a secular age, and in many parts of Europe it may well be, Protestant moralism is alive and well in the US. (It’s been a bit quieter as some of its more overt figures have gone to jail, been proven hypocrites, or both.).


American ‘civil religion’ as a fusion of commercial success and personal salvation, and America as the fulfillment of God’s plan shows the profound emotional basis of religious moralism and its persistence, divorced from any specific denominations or specific religious practices. Schlessinger (1987) suggested that American history oscillates between moralistic (utopian) and pragmatic considerations. But much of America’s history was determined by men who acted as if its policy was God ordained. Consider only the support for military and financial aid given to ‘our bastards’, often Christian, to fight against the ungodly heathens of communism. One of the peculiar qualities of American moralism is the preoccupation with sexuality, whether in licence or repression (Hsu, 1963). The reasons how and why a culture chooses to control sexual desires are many and complex. Many have suggested that Victorian prudery was an indication of moral worth in business for men, and marital value for women (see Degler, 1980). For the Puritans, control of sexuality by individual constraint rather than social control served a number of functions, not the least of which was to minimize conflict in small communities. Such self-control, this ‘ worldly asceticism’ in Weber’s term, was not only an indication of moral worth, but a predisposition to the transformed meaning of work in capitalist society, from a means of survival to a sign of salvation.94 Morgan (1944) saw that while the Puritans accepted the importance of sex within marriage, it was seen as sinful before and with anyone but one’s spouse. Notwithstanding, there were many breeches, especially when there was an abundance of single men or married men whose spouses were still in England. What is important for the present purposes, is the profound influence of a repressive sexual morality based on the self-control of desire, on the American character (see also Lei tes, 1986). Regardless of actual behavior, there is a degree of Puritan moralism that shapes national policies. Sometimes this takes the form of lifestyle politics and conflicts over such matters as temperance and evolution in the past, and today over state support for abortion, sex education, population control, and artistic merit. Just as there has been a theme of God-ordained moralism that ebbs and flows throughout American history, there have been the conditions for pragmatism and this dialectic has had profound consequences. Pragmatism has been a major American contribution to ideas. The polarity of moralism, action guided by religious virtue, is pragmatism, action guided by results. The Pilgrims were far from sources of supply, manufacture, etc. Refugees in a New World, determined to remain and conquer the wilderness and Indians, their sur-


vival tactics were those that necessarily required industriousness, resourcefulness, courage, and practical ability. Such intense effort was expended upon physical survival in the founding years, that the settlers gave precious little importance to the creation of a cultural aesthetic or to intellectual ideas. Their time was occupied by allconsuming efforts to survive a harsh physical environment where they were forced to figure how to do things on their own. Practicality became as much an adaptive strategy as a social value. Bercovitch (1975) suggests that for those whose practical ability granted them the opportunity to be self-made in America, it meant more than finding fortune, it meant the embodiment of a cultural metaphysics, or a national character. The pragmatism of America subverts its moralism as God-given and absolute. But there is then a tension as the pragmatic requirements of a changing social life conflict with morality. These competing values are passionately held dimensions of selfhood whose challenges evoke rage, anger and mobilizations. These cosmologies are themselves value investments regarding motives and feelings. This dialectic can be seen in such diverse forms as the women’s movement, civil rights, and what is often called the psychologization of society. One sees virtue in hierarchy, gender differentiation, obedience and the control of desire and feeling. The other sees virtue in egalitarianism, androgyny, self-determination and openness to desire and feeling.95

Utopian-Nostalgia The American self was seen as the embodiment of a prophetic universal design (Bercovitch, 1975; see also Bellah, 1975). From its inception, there has been this utopian/millenarianist theme of the restoration of a religious paradise for the Puritans.96 The New World was the new Israel, a promised land to realize a religious utopia, at least somewhere where they could practice their dissenting beliefs. But the initial years of settlement were quite precarious. The original Jamestown is a case in point. New England would be quite stark. But as has been shown repeatedly, within a short time, there would be a selective recall and glorification of the past, without the pains and hardships (cf. Davis, 1979). Soon the immigrants had forged a viable, indeed prosperous society, although from the beginning, there was a commercial attitude which led to this prosperity. But the price of this prosperity, the very sign of it, was growth, mobility, the weakening of social ties and


social stresses and strains. But we also begin to see a particular form of collective nostalgia, a yearning for the simpler, more orderly life.97 Indeed, the nineteenth century psychiatrists saw insanity as a consequence of social change, the moral order of the asylum was an attempt to restore what had been already glorified as a simpler more orderly time. This was the mythic Edenic paradise where needs were gratified and fears allayed. Many of the social mobilizations in American history can be seen as ‘symbolic crusades’ in Gusfield’s sense to restore a pristine past of Protestant decency that never was. Wilkinson (1988) sees the fear of falling away from the virtue of a more moral time as one of the central fears of Americans and the basis of nostalgic yearnings. Nostalgia in America takes a peculiar form; there is a Utopian element that is still part and parcel of character. This is rooted in the Puritan notion that America was a blessed land with a prosperous future. Tocqueville would see America and its democracy as the wave of the future. This utopian vision, rooted in religion, would encourage technological innovation as a means to a better world in which the virtues of the mythic past were restored. Innovations of manufacture from interchangeable parts to composite materials, innovations of communication from the telegraph to the videophone, of media from the movies to holographic imaging, were each in their own way manifestations of a utopian thrust in which technology would turn this land into a heaven on earth. Utopianism and nostalgia, while taking particular cultural forms, are, however, deeply rooted in the human psyche and its defenses, namely the capacity to symbolize time to provide fantasies of happiness in the past or in the future. Both represent the attachments of feelings to symbolic forms of memory or anticipation. Nostalgia is a form of regression to earlier stages, with fantasies of greater satisfactions than were most likely the case. The pain is repressed while the satisfactions imputed. Similarly, utopia often consists of fantasies of how good things may someday be; it is a particular form of wish fulfillment through anticipating pleasures. But nostalgia and utopia are as antagonistic as they are complimentary. The utopian wish is to use technology to create a society to restore the lost virtues of the past. Thus the advances in transportation, from the steamship to the airplane to the superhighway, all contribute to the more rapid dispersal of people that attenuates social bonds and in turn the wish for communities. At the same time, the media has destroyed the insularity of the imaginary tranquility of communities and led to social transformations and cultural conflicts


such as in the civil rights movement or reactionary protest as in the anti-pornography campaigns. Neither can be understood without considerations of the feelings evoked and the Utopian-nostalgic thrust. As the greed of the Reagan 1980s ends, the 1990s elicit a nostalgia for the 1960s when sex was safe-sans considerations of civic unrest or Vietnam.

Between Pathos and Panic: Traditional Character and the Simulated Self In the amusement society of unending disconnected simulacra, the presentations of self and interaction rituals that are regulated by affective cues are surface manifestations of a socialized national character enacting the routines of everyday life. The more basic polarities of character, desire and value dialectics are the strings regulating the puppet show of self. Beneath the dialectic of recognitionobjectification in self presentations, are the uneasy psychological truces between past and future, between opposing investments and desires. The pursuit of wealth obliterates communal practices that are intrinsically good (MacIntyre, 1981). What is left is the longing for attachment gratified in movies, soaps, even the commercials. Technological change undermines traditional morality. When the characterological legacy of past generations confronts the realities of the amusement society, disempowered self and appropriated desire find everyday routines, rituals and interactions sources of partial satisfaction that co-exist with and in part assuage the more fundamental alienation (Deegan, 1988). In an amusement society cultural requirements of repression as propriety in work wane, while the promises of gratifications in private consumption grow. But ironically, exposure of private life, what civilization had made secret, can become a source of recognition. At the same time the failure of the many simulacra to provide lasting compensations and gratifications, leads to an oscillation between pathos as a legacy of unresolved ambivalence of desires rooted in the past, and panic from the oscillations of ecstasy and fear from the sequential spectacles of the modern amusement culture (cf. Kroker and Cook, 1989). In the early years of the republic, virtue and recognition accrued from work or political service, at least for the privileged classes. But in the amusement society, commodities provide gratifications as compensations to the private self that are not available in the realms of


institutional life.98 These commodities also constitute forms of selfexpressions that are striving for recognition and confirmation by other (s). The promise of the private realm as a locus of intimate warmth and gratification has been shown to be hollow.99 Commodified selfhood can never find gratification from consumption more than temporary. The very ownership of what is durable becomes a reminder of what was, and is now obsolete. A new model, fashion, place, fad or lover is always available. The high wears off and larger doses are needed. This is the Faustian bargain. The objects, images and experiences of a commodified lifeworld provide only intermittent satisfaction. The commodification of the self that perhaps began with the transition to a consumer society was a reflection of the success of the market and the mass production of goods and images and goods that were associated with images of health, beauty, sophistication, etc. (cf. Ewen, 1988). Caught between a colonial legacy and a postmodern culture, decentered from the body politic to the body erotic, however ambivalently, the enfeebled self attempts to find confirmation and recognition. It oscillates between spectator and spectacle, voyeurism and exhibitionism to find experiences and gratification that confirm its very existence. But the self-presentations are not just productions of a social structure. They are not performed only for the sake of the other. They provide characterologically-based affective gratifications, perhaps the most important of which is assuaging the most basic anxieties of annihilation and abandonment that accrue from a commodified culture. It is here that recent psychoanalytic theory, having discarded the antiquated drive-object model, is most useful. Motivation is object seeking, the self desires love and recognition of its selfhood; failing that, there emerges a false self, defense against internal emptiness and external insignificance. Benjamin (1988) offered what may be perhaps one of the more astute analyses of gender identity. She suggests that selfhood emerges in pre-Oedipal life when the infant seeks love and recognition. As Hegel noted, self-consciousness emerges under conditions of domination. For girls, this results in an appropriation of desire and subjectivity by the other. The desire for recognition by a love object takes the form of masochism as a willing pursuit of pain to deny deeper emptiness. As Fromm once put it, it’s better to be beaten by someone than to be all alone. But I would suggest that in the amusement society, her argument applies to all (woman as everyman). The desire for recognition becomes more intense as the self is increasingly fragmented and sub-


ject to ever more assaults of unending spectacles. It becomes itself another spectacle. One will do anything for recognition. The clearest expression of this ‘masochism’ is the addiction to consumption in which the possession and/or use of what was earlier termed a recognition prop or ‘self object’ provides a compensatory satisfaction for tenuous self-hood (cf. Kohut, 1971). This self-serving use of things, for example, a designer label, Rolex watch or BMW for the affluent, a Nike shoe for the poor, or weed-free lawn for the middle, provides a moment of recognition, excitement and gratification that punctuates the frustration, emptiness and panic of the quotidian. But the use of such objects makes the person such an object. Perhaps its ultimate expression is the frantic pursuit of self-objectification in which many struggle for visual perfection of body image. This takes many forms, from body-building and steroid use, to liposuction, face lifts, silicon implants and miracle diets. Alienation is no longer due to the harshness of capital and the exploitation of labor (though that still exists), but to the success of its logic of production and the universalization of the amusement culture it generated. The production and appropriations of desires and selfpresentations in their alienated forms provide enough gratification to secure the modern forms of hegemony as fun. The amusement society has appropriated feeling and increasingly requires ritualized spectacles in the world of work (Hochschild, 1983). But I would add, this process of self as spectacle is gratified in the images and appearances of fashion, media, etc. Finally, these spectacles are not just increasingly a part of ‘private’ life, but the hyperreality of selfhood in the amusement society. The desire to see and be seen, dialectically creates its own amusement industry. This is the meaning of the Gong Show, Oprah, Phil and Heraldo. The hiding of shameful acts made modern society possible, their public display makes the amusement society possible.100 Hester Prine wore her ‘A’ in quiet remorse, Jessica Hahn not only told all, but bared all, proudly showing the world her new implants, and made a career of being famous.101 At the time of writing she has gone on to a successful career hosting mud wrestling. Madonna sings in her underwear, Cher doesn’t wear any—and it’s obvious. There is nothing left that is too shameful, bizarre or repulsive for which practitioners would shun prime time exposure. At present, one of the most popular TV shows is the showing of America’s funniest home videos which show millions your foolishness. To be on network TV is to achieve immortality. The exposure of backstage or backside are attempts for recognition of an enfeebled self. Necrophilic pedophiles


today, coprophilics tomorrow at the same time. What used to be called immorality has been transformed into another form of selfpresentation. Some of the famous use their ‘transgressions’ in the service of fame (or tell tales of the misdeeds of others). The Reagans admitted to Barbara Walters that they had pre-mar…well, they were in love and the marriage plans had been made. Media celebrities stand in an ambivalent relationship to their audience which can be called an empire of voyeurs held together by the titillation of sex and death (Kroker and Cook, 1988). On the one hand the manufactured stars personify and embody the desirable standards of spectacular presentation of self in consumption. But they also foster self-comparison and a bit of envy. (I will suggest below that this is the emotion of today). But at the same time, We are not those figures on the TV or movie screen… Interesting, beautiful, seductive. We do not have such good friends… nor are we (men) so athletic or good looking. We (women) know we are not those beautiful, well dressed, perfectly put together persons meeting handsome men at expensive restaurants…. Mass culture has a reality that preempts our own boring, shabby, tired existence. Our family holidays never move with the satisfaction and the perfect love of the ones in Hallmark ads… There is a persistent feeling that this is not what it should be. (Gottlieb, 1987:156–7) Thus the celebrity lives out a fantasy which we can identify and vicariously find emotional satisfaction in, but, at the same time, we know they are not what they seem. If our own lives are empty though, we can borrow the excitement of others and at the same time see that the rich and famous aren’t all that well off. Gossip, once a means of social cohesion, is now a commercial activity that tells us the ‘real’ story of celebrity divorce, alcoholism, affairs or alien sex slave chained in the basement. This is a multibillion dollar industry, so even fame is not always so great. Self-presentation is increasingly a commodified recognition-seeking spectacle. The business man must dress for success, the star create a public personality and everyman have his or her moment of fame, or at least vicarious identification with it. But these can never satisfy in a world of such rapidly changing style, fame and fashion that provides gratifications in the world of objects and images, interspersed between fear and ecstasy, terror and desire (cf. Langman and Kaplan, 1981). As Lasch (1984:30) puts it:


He learns that the self-image he projects counts for more than accumulated skills and experience. Since he will be judged by his colleagues and superiors at work and by the strangers he encounters on the street, according to his possessions, his clothes and personality—not as in the nineteenth century, by his character—he adopts a theatrical view of his own performance—off and on the job. And it matters little whether the affective gratifications come from observing others or self-presentations that are increasingly alienated from more genuine gratifications. What is important is that its behavior gives a sense of confirmation in the recognition of its everyday spectacles. Viewer-doer, voyeur-exhibitionist are aspects of each other, of the breakdown of self as subject or object. It really doesn’t matter if the gratification spectacle is one’s own dramaturgy or seen on cable TV. Now the camcorder breaks down all such distinctions as everyone can write, direct, produce, and act in one’s very own vacation fantasy, record one’s biography and star in one’s own pornography.102 The reality of selfhood, or even the very world, apart from audiences, momentary recognitions or recorded tapes, is problematic. Regardless of its ontology, which doesn’t matter very much in a society of simulacra, the presentations of self and qualities of its relationships, have become commodified spectacles in which tradition is manifested in self-presentation.

Shopping Mall Selfhood Expressions of self take many forms. The descriptions of Goffman of the office, restaurant, asylum and that famous Shetland Inn, were located at the end of the era in which the political economy of work was central. But, at the same time, he was the first postmodern social psychologist to anticipate the ‘coming of amusement society’. Not only is all the world a stage for the sequential production of spectacles, but the legacies of American character inform many of the performances of everyday life as experienced or observed. What is central for my conclusion, however, is the extent to which the self-production of recognition-seeking spectacles is informed by tradition but expressed in the language and forms of commodities. The presentations of self that served utilitarian purposes in commerce and trade, hospitals and offices, and even universities, gratify socially patterned desire and affirm heritage. But they can only do so in the


ways allocated by the society, that is within the codes of signification as located in consumption-based lifestyle. The extent to which the first and second languages that express American character have influenced it, and still inform and shape its cultural life, interaction rituals and conceptions of self, has long been evident.103 These languages can be seen, singly or in combination, as the essence of most American literature. Today, this character is seen in the mass mediated spectacles of television, movies or politics. (This was clearly evident when Reagan became president and articulated a scripted version of that character). Desires shaped in prior eras are first appropriated and then gratified by a commodified culture shaped by a past that is destroyed by simulation. The real America is no longer that of troubled record but recordings, not of pictures but broadcast images. History and memory have now become commodified amusements/theme parks from Williamsburg to Disneyland. It was noted that individualized selfhood at the cultural level was an historical product or myth, reflecting the rise of a market.104 But whatever was the case, in an amusement society where the self has been commodified and enfeebled, its feelings and desires appropriated, and its very existence questioned, it has withdrawn from its social roles to personal realms. But while selfhood has migrated to the private and the personal, it has progressively become more hollow. With this withdrawal to a ‘small circle of friends and family’ (Tocqueville), to ‘lifestyle enclaves’ (Bellah, 1985) as the stages for personal spectacles, its presentations express the legacy of the past in postmodern forms of commodified amusements for today. (Everyman a Disneyland). The individualism that has so long been part of our culture is alive and well. But since most people work in conformity-demanding organizations, its expressions are more likely seen in private worlds, in amusement and leisure, and the myraid forms of self-display or media fantasy, the two becoming less clear. (Perhaps the Madonna or Godzilla look-alike contests that draw thousands of teenagers are simply honest expressions of gaining a self and recognition by imitation of the ersatz manufactured identities of the famous).105 The typical ways of expressing individuality, and perhaps simulations of freedom, have long been in consumer tastes, self as a blip of lifestyle demographics (cf. Mitchell, 1983). One of the more typical of these expressions of commodified personhood is becoming, or at least wearing, the advertisement and becoming a billboard.106 After all, that is public, contrived and therefore real. This is, of course, the era of T-shirt self-expression when people


seek recognition for where they have been (Atlantic City… Samarkand), the causes they hold dear (Save whales…Keep guns), or for the products they use (Pennzoil…Pepsi). Increasingly, most clothes are advertisements of self and product, increasingly intertwined, that vary by class from the blue collar hat from FMC or Bardahl, to the designer labels of everyone and the L.L.Bean sweater that shouts yuppie. (These are what Lurie, 1983, calls legible clothes). Some attempts to express uniqueness and gain recognition are seen in the messages of shock. Here, of course, is the gendering of disgust especially frequent in adolescent T-shirts such as the female with BOUNCE across her chest or male shirt that proclaims ‘fuck you’. In the age of clothing based ‘individualism’ that seeks recognition, its simulacra includes expressions in bumper stickers from the ads for morality, ‘Honk if you love Jesus’ to the aggressive displays of ‘If you don’t like my driving, dial 1–800 EAT SHIT’. It is, of course, difficult for a social critic to suggest that ours is a less civil more violent era; the reading of history shows otherwise. Much of the traditional aggressivity is more likely to be found in the self-constructed discourses of business, a killing in the market, bringing home the bacon, ‘beating’ the competition, it’s a ‘jungle’ out there, etc. Thus, the ever more routinized world of commerce and management becomes psychologically transformed into OK Coral, I wo Jima and Gettysburg. Each day, men show how much they are men, and in these days of greater equality, so do women. What is being suggested is that the legacy of ‘toughness’ is expressed in a variety of adversarial stances in everyday life. While in its extreme form, this is seen in the fact that Americans are more likely to sue or be sued than any other people in the world, everyday life spectacles are infused with a ‘pseudo macho’ toughness and aggressivity. (This is, of course, more typically male than female). The morality of conviction has been largely replaced by spectacles of conviction and its opposite, hypocrisy as amusement. Thus understood, much of the rightward shift of judicial attitudes, support for harsher penalties, death sentence, etc., and citing the Bible for validation, are as much expressions of an aggressive, righteous indignation in spectacular form as a response to panic (see below). And like most such self presentations, the performance has more value for selfconfirmation, recognition and social solidarity than dealing with the reality of criminal behavior. This is the meaning of televangelism; believable performances are now more important than moral actions, not simply their appeal to a limited segment of older, rural Protestants. This is the meaning of Joe Isuzu, he is not lying, rather the simu-


lation of conviction is universalized. Nixon is reborn an elder statesman. Reagan was actually seen as a leader rather than a script. As the reality of the present is ever more stressful, there is a retreat to the dialectic of nostalgia-utopia. Styles of dress, decor, and the rush to buy antiques are not simply the purchase of status, but the attempt to find authentic selfhood in the distorted past of mass mediated nostalgia that glorifies the world of pre-amusement society and presents it as commodified simulacrum. Ralph Lauren and Laura Ashley provide shells to transport an empty self to a mythical past when selfhood was imagined secure. This is the appeal of jeans as the linkage to the cowboy and miner. But only the upper echelon consumers can afford the designer jean outfits, the plebs get theirs at K-mart. The various products and services that promise a ‘return to elegance’ promise salvation to the self. While this dialectic was central to the religious foundations of the colonies, today, via technology, utopia is fulfilled. If life today is frustrating, one can escape to the future as well as the past. This is the response of the ‘Trekkies’ and fans of ‘techno’ thrillers (Clancy). Gadgets will restore the lost Eden, if not in space or the battle field, then the private sphere. A number of companies, like Sharper Image (how appropriately named) exist just to produce/distribute useless forms of hi-tech that primarily provide sci-fi self-expressions. But what is it about nostalgia that relieves us of psychological pain? Nostalgia allows us to recreate a history and envision a utopia that never was. Through the manipulation of nostalgia we can imagine a perfect world of benevolent families and happy selves without the current frustrations and assaults to status, income, and self-image. We can regress to a perfect time and place. Betty Crocker, and Aunt Jemimah…are regressive symbols, simulations of good mothers, that take us back to the ‘good ol’ days’ when the pace was slower, prices were cheaper and selfhood embedded. Americans long for slowerpaced, less sophisticated times when present troubles were neither felt nor imagined, ‘regression’ in the service of the ego. Today, this regression is expressed in commodified self-presentations that simulate a past or future. And, of course, one can always visit the recreations of history in Colonial Williamsburg or the Alamo, or visit the future at the Epcot Center. This is shopping mall selfhood, lonely, voyeuristic, ‘a whole microcircuitry of desire, ideology and expenditure for processed bodies drifting through the cyber-space of ultra-capitalism…where what is truly fascinating is expenditure, loss and exhaustion’ (Kroker, 1989:208). In the serial moments of spectacular presentation-recognition, in the


possession of commodified objects that express national character, in participating in its sanitized traditions, existence is given momentary confirmation.

Panic and the End of the Dream The fervent embrace of the simulacrum of selfhood in general, and spectacles of commodified traditions in particular, are indications of panic as the dominant mood of the postmodern culture and envy as its expression. Panic lies between ecstasy and fear, delirium and anxiety, between the triumph of cyberpunk and the political reality of cultural exhaustion…the oscillating fin-de-millennium mood of deep euphoria and deep anxiety. It is a response to the breakdown of standards of public conduct and the loss of the internal self (Kroker, 1989).107 The inner life and its reality of overt momentary rituals and purchases in an ever more fragmented plurality of social worlds, is ever more anxiety evoking. The private sphere that promised so much, has been so colonized and infiltrated that it ill serves as a refuge for even an empowered self. But this panic at the level of self and culture at the same time reflects political-economic crisis. Contemporary panic is also based on the awareness of diminishing expectations. As the first amusement society confronts its own ‘backstage’ of lower productivity, decaying infrastructure, in-surmountable debt, declining academic performance and a growing underclass, the gratifications derived from tradition affirming spectacles become ever more problematic. It’s like dancing in the ballroom of the Titanic. At the first sign of ‘trouble’, the band plays louder and the dancers up the tempo. The lifestyles of the rich, famous and infamous are avidly consumed as compensations by multitudes increasingly unable to stay financially even. The self finds momentary empowerment and gratifications in vicarious identifications which, however, further contribute to its own enfeeblement. This in turn increases anxiety and recursively fosters even more spectacles of signification, understood not unlike the dynamics of addiction. Panic is not just a response to a potential decline in the standard of living, but insofar as the existence of self depends on consumption, the anxiety is the most primordial affectfear of annihilation. Lasch (1984) claims all we can do is embrace a survivalist strategy. We have seen that as early as the writings of John Winthrop and Cotton Mather, God’s kingdom would be realized and prosperity ensue. The promise of heaven on Earth was realized as America


became the ultimate shopping mall without spending limits on the credit cards. After all, in the amusement society, a) there is no real tomorrow, or b) things always work out and people can buy happily every after. (Reader may choose). But when the fun hits the fan, that is when the realities of market competition and fragility in the global economy become evident, contemporary self-comparisons elicit primitive envy, a form of socialized anger. Many observers, from novelists to political scientists, have seen envy as the emotion of today.108 Whether the goal is affluence, happy marriage, perfect children, or career success, realization is ever more difficult. Envy is a social transformation of aggression in which selfcomparisons elicit the desire to have or destroy that which is other’s.109 The intensity of envy, not often considered by sociologists, is rooted in earliest childhood experiences. For Melanie Klein, the infant envies the mother’s power to gratify and wishes to destroy her. Lasch (1984) suggested that the dependency on commodities whose affordibility is now more problematic, recreates the infantile helplessness and becomes envy-rage in a stagnant if not declining economy. But it is not just economic goals that are ever more problematic. The envy-based desire to be someone else, appropriate their selfhood, especially a commodified hero/star, and deny whatever selfhood is our own, to have what someone else has in this competitive world leads to revenge by the self and life becomes miserable (Ulanov and Ulanov, 1983).110 Similarly, the desire for recognition in love seems ever more problematic while others seem to have it all. Today, the Cosby Show as a hyperreal family of warmth and gratification is the biggest moneymaker in TV history while actual family life is ever more problematic.

Conclusion The Frankfurt tradition informed critique by considering the psychic dimensions of post-Enlightenment social arrangements. If a neurotic has his or her own unique form of suffering, each historical epoch has its own form of characterological malaise. While there is an element of nostalgia in philosophies of melancholy, this does not suggest that once upon a time there was a pre-alienated state of fulfillment. That belief is part of American character—a yearning for a more gratifying time of stable, social arrangement, a secure selfhood. The affective investments in the values, everyday life practices, interaction rituals and self-presentations that sustain a social order and make possible its


reproduction by willing assent, are now expressed in the spectacles of everyday life. And while many express the legacy of tradition articulated through character, traditional pathos endures and becomes intertwined with the panic of an excremental culture in which the selfproduction of spectacles as commodities, destroys not only tradition, but the very possibilities of self. I have argued that the contradictions of enduring values secured at the affective level (ambivalence in psychoanalytic terms) and enacted in everyday life routines gave Americans the sadness and anxiety that Tocqueville noted as the cost of its affluence and democracy. This is pathos based on characterological ambivalence, investment in one side of a value dialectic and repression of the other; desire denied is expressed as fear and longing. In the society dominated by the sign we have seen that this traditional pathos coexists with, and indeed shades into, panic when enfeebled selfhood feels its very existence is problematic. Few of its own spectacles in the plurality of social worlds brings either satisfaction or confirmation of self. Freud called this panic ‘signal anxiety’. The deconstruction of the amusement society shows this to be one of the major themes of the intertwined production of selfspectacles and consumption of experiences. But when the inexorable proliferation of goods and services becomes problematic, anger turned to envy begins to shape the rituals of selfhood, emphasizing individualism, aggressivity, moralism and nostalgic yearnings. This is also seen as an ideological shift to the right. But, of course, this dialectic is self-negating and its contradiction can only result in a shift back to the left, in simulated forms. The foundations of critical theory began at such a time of economic contraction. Fascism offered a set of gratifying amusements as well as the authoritarian state. In an amusement society, Fascism is no longer necessary. Simulated leadership, in amusing photo-ops, which is increasingly indistinguishable from its own satire, is sufficient.111 But what comic book leadership of feel-good panaceas or pandering to panic offers, is authoritarianism without authority, what Gross (1980) called Friendly Fascism.112 Despite the rightward shift of the academy, Alan Bloom as the Attila of education, or the attempts by many to lose track of political economy, the emancipatory project endures in critical thought.113 Indeed Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) feared the possibility of bourgeois panic ushering in a new barbarism. In these times, their critical project, the preservation of the enlightened thought that enables social freedom, remains unfulfilled. How does the commodity transform the self, appropriate the heart, and


destroy both tradition and critical thought? This is the project of American critical theory.

Notes 1 Conflicts between proclaimed ideals and actual life can become a source of strain and even social mobilizations. 2 The consolidation of this character would, however, need to await the Civil war that would end the neo-feudalism of the plantation states. By WWI the characterological legacy of the Puritans would achieve hegemony. 3 Jameson (1988) notes for example in his critique of Habits of the Heart that the Marxian perspective is not usually considered germaine and most such analyses thus remain at cultural levels and not the underlying political economy. Thus, for example, while Bellah (1985) consider instrumental and expressive individualism, the more basic ‘possessive individualism’ of capitalist political economy is ignored (McPherson, 1962). 4 Weber feared socialism would become an oppressive bureaucracy; Simmel saw it as unworkable in groups so large that everyone was not personally known to the other. 5 This would seem to anticipate the death of the subject. As will be suggested later, this began in the realm of work, but was completed by the commodified culture of consumption that was already nascent at this time. The subjects the Gods would destroy must first watch MTV. 6 The events in Eastern Europe at the time of this writing would seem to make Weber the more astute prophet than Marx. It should be noted that critical theory, while a critique of capital, has not suggested that bureaucratic socialism, especially in authoritarian societies, would be preferable. 7 While there have been other attempts, perhaps Wilhiem Reich as the best known, they have not been very well grounded in either philosophy or sociology to have stood the tests of scrutiny over time (cf. Brown, 1974; Ollman, 1979). 8 The male bias of the theory has been well noted by various feminists whose critiques will be considered later. 9 As would be noted later, the early studies of authoritarianism often failed to differentiate right wing from left wing variants. 10 Adorno had read Freud before he read Marx. 11 Many students of communication theory have inferred that the Frankfurt School had an image of humanity as cultural dupes or dopes that were ‘cheerful robots’, zombies controlled by radio and television programming and advertising. This view is, of course, naive and distorted. Rather, they suggested that people were active agents who chose their entertainments. These various entertainments, however, needed to provide certain gratifications within the general limits of the culture and the more specific aspects of the individual’s personality and class location. Thus, people enjoy television. It is fun. There is something for everyone, including intellectuals who decry it. But as I will show, that is the point! It is the plethora of gratifications that sustains the culture. 12 As Jameson (1988) notes, the critiques of American culture and character have located that critique within intellectual traditions that uphold the political economy rather than the Marxian tradition that has generally been ignored. It should be noted that what Marxian analyses have been offered, were largely concerned with political economy.


13 Marcuse (1958) had already shown the fraudulence of tyranny dressed as humanism. 14 The echoes of Parsons are loud and clear, indeed Habermas has often been accused of left functionalism. 15 Others have critiqued his abandonment of the commodity form, the hegemony of the state, and Utopian praxis of communicative competence. For the purposes of the present inquiry, it is his abandonment of affectivity as integral to the ‘melancholy science’ (Rose, 1978) that is problematic. 16 Insofar as everyday life is predictable and without severe stress, the stability of society is insured. When, however, everyday life becomes highly stressful, for a variety of reasons, hegemony becomes problematic. 17 In the last two decades, far more people have become millionaires via entertainment, movies, television, popular novels, rock music, professional sports, and even religion, than in the traditional forms of capitalist endeavors such as innovations in technology, production, etc. This has not been adequately conceptualized by the various power élite theories. But, as will be argued later, celebrity and fame are the highest virtues of today, replacing chastity of yesteryear and public duty of even earlier days. 18 Smelser (1988) offers an excellent discussion of the various meanings of social structure. Various ‘coercive theories’, classical Marxism as well as psychoanalysis, legacies of rationalism, become deterministic and create what Wrong called oversocialized views of humanity. What the present author suggests is that the allocation of choices and ranges of freedom and empowerment, like ‘repressive toleration’ for dissent, generally sustain power arrangements. If the reproduction processes were as deterministic as certain theories suggest, major social changes such as the transition to amusement capitalism or the decay of Eastern Socialism could not occur. What is being suggested is that we have two processes that converge and often conflict, the current realities that may change hegemonic blocs, and the persistence of character patterns despite such changes. 19 This is clear in the work of Baudrillard whose analyses of signification are informed by depth psychological concerns, but at the same time, his work has progressively detached itself from the concerns with political economy. It is interesting to note that in the work of Giddens, Collins and J.Turner, affectivity is crucial for reproduction. Since Marcuse, however, feelings have been ignored. 20 Adorno (1973) critiqued phenomenology from Husserl to Schutz for a number of reasons, e.g., mystifying ideology, reproducing positivism, and individualizing the political in a ‘jargon of authenticicy’. 21 In the tradition of Schutz, the lifeworld is seen as almost separate and uncoupled from the institutional realms, gemeinschaft in an organized gesellschaft. This author, following Heller (1984), prefers the notion of everyday life to lifeworld in its usage by Schutz. 22 Part of the cultural awakening included the ‘discovery’ of Greek and Roman science and mathematics preserved in Arabic scholarship. But in the context of this discovery, there was added an experimental approach that made modern science possible. 23 The debate between the power of advertising and its limitations, ignores the basic point that it presents a series of gratifying spectacles and images which in microcosm reflect the culture of amusement and sustain it. Whether or not advertising has the manipulative consequences often attributed to it, is the consumer a pawn or power, is not the important question, Rather, advertising expresses ‘capitalist realism’ in which use or possession of consumer goods in general becomes inherent to self-expression and linkages to social groups (Schudson, 1984). The ads are the collective theologies and mythologies that have replaced traditional religion to maintain a society. The notion of ‘civil religion’ represents the transi-


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tional phase of the transition from frugal Puritanism to the sanctification of the American way of life to the amusement society of disconnected spectacles. This history of privatized family life constitutes a rich and often contradictory literature, from Aries who noted how privatized households fostered individualism, privacy and above all, childhood as a discrete stage, to Zaretsky who looked at the creation of a personal realm. One of the best histories of this process is Coontz, 1988. She shows how the current form of privatized family life was a product of the nineteenth century middle class. (See also Degler, 1980; Poster, 1978). Social conservatives, little informed by social history, have considered this bifurcation and its gendering, not only ‘natural’, but God ordained. There are, of course, various agencies from the Federal Reserve of the US to MITI of Japan that control investment, interest rates, exchange rates, etc., to more or less stabilize the economy and protect it from chaos for the sake of capital accumulation. Others have noted the growing contradiction between what American capitalisim promises and what is increasingly unavailable, e.g., the growing inequality and decline of the middle class, most going downward. See for instance Rubin (1976) and Sennett and Cobb (1972). Critique of wage labor and surplus value would be outside the current scope. Goffman (1967) argues that the process of what Turner (1969) has called ‘ritual making’ takes place to facilitate social life, each party already has a set of understandings and expectations that reduce the possible friction in daily encounters. (These are generally lost in rush hour traffic). Those who fail to observe these social graces are judged deviant, and often insane. I will argue later that this need for recognition of self is the primary dimension of modern personal life, the basis of the pursuit of fame. This reading is similar to Collins (1988) who sees Goffman as an heir of Durkheim: solidarity emerges from the millions of ritualized performances that characterize everyday life. He further notes the affective side of these rituals and how they sustain ‘interaction chains’. But what the critical reading adds is that these ritualizations have been shaped by the commodity form and are part of the hegemonic process. Baudrillard notes the irony of the desire for artifacts from premodern societies as part of bourgeois interior decor. There is a symbolic tie to such societies and an escape from the troubles of modern life. Curiously, in Brazil, the bourgeois decorate their homes with Indian artifacts and the Indians, who move to the city, buy plastic flowers as a sign of adaptation to modernity. One irony is the recent skyrocketing of prices for antiques from premodern societies. (By the way, this author has a large collection of Latin American pottery). The failure of Eastern socialism was to provide neither the affective gratifications of consumerism as television transmission has become universalized nor spheres of freedom, repressive toleration, so that the more onerous aspects of domination were clearly visible. This issue is similar to the question of the autonomy of the state; Baudrillard has moved steadily from political economy to an independent realm of commodified signification. From the Marxian tradition of the Frankfurt School, it is necessary to retain the understanding of class domination and ideological mystification that endures behind the sign (cf. Kellner, 1989). Indeed, as will be argued in the conclusion, one factor in the panic of today’s world is the combination of economic decline and a problematic financial future. As will be suggested later, the downfall of Eastern communism was the inability to stop the globalization of televised amusement of the West. In brief, commu-


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nism, as a source of goods and images, was neither fun, nor justification for renunciation. There are many who might suggest that Baudrillard, coming from a tradition based on Saussure’s linguistics, Lévi-Strauss’ anthropology and Barthes’ structuralism, represent the product of a different tradition. I would suggest the following. Firstly, while the Frankfurt School was one of the earliest to examine the relation of mass media and domination, the basic outlines of their work were finished before the transition from a literate to a visual culture was complete. The analyses of modern media and symbolism, perhaps beginning with Boorstin’s (1962) Image and McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964) were products of a different generation of scholarship, one more influenced by the rise of a visual amusement society. The worst thing that can happen to any explanatory framework is to become ossified in its own context and stagnate, as did Marxism and psychoanalysis, which leads to irrelevance. While this understanding was clear to Postman (1985), his critique ignores the relation of amusement to late capital. It is at this moment of capitalism that economistic Marxism is least useful (cf. Baudrillard, 1975). For Habermas, economic causality is most likely at moments of transition, but I would add that even that formulation is a bit dated. As was often said about the pen being mightier than the sword, today we might go so far as to say, the videocamera and VCR are mightier than the tank. As this chapter is being written, the much discredited domino theory is being shown correct, that is one communist bloc government is falling after another, largely based on a combination of economic failure, more educated populations and an inability to censure the information that capitalism offers much more fun. Perhaps the demise of Eastern Europe’s old guard was due to the fact that its leaders had the charisma of dead fish and failed to understand that the media itself makes viewers want to see Kojak or Roseanne rather than the increased bearing manufacture of Factory 112. Perhaps some historian of the future will see that the seeds of dissent were fertilized by exposure to American television and its images of abundance. But as the current President of Czechoslovakia, Havel, has warned, democracy should not be a means toward consumer decadence. Becker argued that marihuana use and interpretation as euphoric requires socialization into a subculture and accepting their norms, definitions of reality and interpretations of experience. There were others, such as Reich and Fenichel, who made similar observations; see for example Jaccoby, 1983, and Ollman, 1979). One of the most radical departures of Habermas has been the shift from the psychodynamics of character to language and its distortions, which while valuable, leave repressed those very memories of passion, rage and despair whose recollection must precede emancipation. For Habermas the cybernetic regulation of the economy to eliminate crises has shifted these tendencies to either the political (legitimacy) or personal (motivation/identity) realms. There was a number of reasons why the Victorian period came to be highly repressive sexually, especially for bourgeois women. Patriarchal control of the ‘woman’s sphere’, an indication of virtue and worth as a wife and mother, increasing value in the ‘marriage market’, etc. But it also seems as if this period saw the flourishing of prostitution, pornography and even, strangely enough, a huge market for condoms by bourgeois couples. This patriarchal bias was also reproduced in the work of Habermas. While he desexualized the Frankfurt School, he replaced its patriarchal theory of sexuality with Kohlberg’s equally patriarchal theory of moral development (see Gilligan, 1982).


46 Just as Habermas suggests that economic determinism may be relevant only at particular periods, depth psychology may be relevant only at certain strategic points in either personal development or social reproduction. 47 The limiting points between developments that maintain and broaden and revisions that reject and start anew would itself constitute another chapter. It would be interesting to explore the social bases of changes in theoretical paradigms. To speculate for a moment, the conditions of an amusement society foster a ‘fun morality’ of more indulgent childrearing, greater toleration for dependency, infantile sexuality, etc. This was traced in a classical study by Wolfenstein (1955). More recently, Zelizer (1985) has called this the emergence of the useless child. In such a society, few if any adults practice pre-marital restraint. In so many words, as the social realities of sexual repression have waned, so has the theory of drive frustration. But at the same time, this is not to suggest that there are not serious deprivations of love, affection and attention in childhood that affect later character. 48 I am not trying to set up some imaginary society past or future that is without discomfort. Rather, each type of society has its historically specific forms of pleasure and pain. 49 This is one aspect where it is clear that certain cultures may act in a variety of ways. Political economy may frustrate attachment behavior or it may encourage it. 50 The attempt to understand feelings was clear to Keirkegaard about whom Adorno has written, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, for instance. But it was only the critical theorists who began the attempt to consider feelings as part of the critique of capitalism rather than an abstract human condition, modernity or dasien, etc. 51 While Goffman does not consider Darwin, he clearly saw the importance of emotions in communication, a perspective lost in Habermas. 52 This is not to ignore the increasingly important role of insincerity, the affective form of inauthenticity, that characterizes much of modern social life, especially in selling, managing and seduction. 53 This is not to suggest that all feelings come into consciousness; this legacy of Freud of unconscious feelings remains central. 54 As noted, childhood was not socially recognized until children were removed from the labor force to attend school and became objects of affection. 55 As Sartre noted, the human being does begin life the moment she or he fills out an employment form. 56 There are wide variations, however, in the extent to which the culture encourages or frustrates attachment. 57 It is worth noting that in many of his clinical papers, Freud wrote as if anxiety had the properties he attributed to drives, motivating behaviors, symptoms or defenses. For more recent social theory such as Turner, Giddens or the more anthropological theories of Ernst Becker, anxiety and its avoidance is a more useful approach. 58 This theory also retained a notion of agency in the ego, that while weak, warns against a structuralist argument in which character is simply the text through which the political economy speaks. There are times in history when some people become aware of contradictions and their causes and tell the political economy to go to hell. 59 More recently, Todd (1985) has suggested that the family structure has significant effects on personality and later ideologies. He argues that the German family structure yet disposes authoritarianism. 60 A long tradition in socialization research has suggested that warm, indulgent parents who use psychological techniques of socialization are more likely to foster


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identification, higher levels of moral development, honesty, etc. See, for example, Gecas, 1979. Fear and joy are among the earliest observable emotions. See, for example, Emde, 1984; Sroufe, 1984; and Trevarthen, 1984 for summaries of infantile emotional development and expression which influenced this discussion. In what is now classical research, Bandura argued that the reason children imitated the aggressive models hitting the Bobo doll was not so much to release aggression as to enjoy novel stimulating behavior. This is a distinct point of difference between the perspective of this chapter and that of Habermas. The present analysis, while rejecting the drive theory, nevertheless locates the affective basis of values in the relation to the parents. Reams of empirical evidence in the child development literature, as well as the studies of progressive activists, show that authoritarian parents usually raise authoritarian children who join Green Berets while democratic parents raise socially sensitive children who protest apartheid, save whales and teach sociology. A number of psychoanalysts have made this clear, see, for example, Fenichel, 1945; Miller, 1981. This is not to imply that economic determinism is being replaced by childhood determinism, what anthropologists once called the pisspot theory of culture. Rather, socialization is one aspect of the means of social reproduction. One of the most important consequences is to prepare the person for subsequent influences such as socialization into a delinquent gang, corporate ladder or protest movement. This is long before the Meadian ‘social self emerges, it is more an affective than cognitive process/structure. Further, the Meadian view lacks a dialectical tension between society and the drives in the classical model or embodied affects in this model. Chodorow (1989) has an excellent critique of drive theory, especially in the work of Norman O.Brown and Marcuse. Further, she sees in these newer theories a basis for gender reproduction which is one moment of social reproduction. With the exceptions of some scattered observations by Kohut and Alice Miller, few of the psychoanalytic clinicians trace these deprivations to the nature of family life in late capitalism. This is the psychological origin of dominated selfhood (Gottlieb, 1987; see also Benjamin, 1988). The characters of mass media daily cartoons are without a history compared to the stories of Mother Goose, the Grimm fairy tales, etc. This becomes a significant determinant of the collective amnesia that inhibits recollection and dialogue with tradition. Some Freudians argued that he intentionally used a mechanistic language to secure ‘scientific’ legitimacy for his theory that in fact was a humanistic perspective on desire, intentionality and feeling. These functions of repression would later be called ‘instrumental’ and ‘socioemotional’ in the Parsonian cosmology. Tompkins (1984) has suggested that this early toleration for control vs. expressivity fosters dispositions for humanistic or authoritarian ideologies in later life. As Giddens (1984) notes, to accept unconscious motivation is not to reduce all behavior to ‘unconscious roots’. But properly understood, it can reveal certain fault lines of greater likelihood for certain political affinities or consumer tastes. As noted, affects may well be aroused but not directly experienced, e.g., isolation of affect, denial, physical symptoms, may express anxiety, depression, rage, etc., while not evident directly to the person’s awareness. This is the reason why a social psychology of reproduction must include a role for the seeming paradox of unfelt feelings. American social psychology in general has located the person outside of history


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and has often eliminated if not the whole body, at least the genitals. Perhaps these writings do stand as a text of self-annihilation and desire coopted. Wexler (1983) has noted the tendencies of reification that typify social psychology, while Jacoby (1975) has chastised the conformist psychologies that castrate the subject. While commodified culture destroys the subject, at least it preserves his or her genitals by appropriating them as inducements for consumption and incentives for adornment. Victoria’s secret is public knowledge. The importance of this affective aspect of everyday interaction was obscured by Parsons who focused on action, while the interactionists lost sight of the social order. The discussion of this chapter follows Giddens (1984), or more recently J. Turner (1988), and differs primarily in locating interaction in a capitalist society turned amusement park. Further, while Giddens sees that anxiety reduction plays a role in everyday behavior, the critical tradition sees that anxiety is historically variable and more intense in a society in which attachments are fragile, status problematic and anxiety reduction is utilized to encourage consumption. Chapple (1970) has outlined a theory of behavioral regulation that sees conduct regulated by the autonomic nervous system on the one hand, e.g., people seek parasympathetic arousal, but at the same time, the interpersonal means by which they attain or avoid certain emotional states is prescribed by the cultural tradition. His work did not address the issues of life in an amusement society, but is nevertheless quite compatible with the present perspective. This is not to ignore the role of ideologies, discourses and social expectations in experiencing and interpreting feelings. Consider how many people exist at the margins without seeing themselves as poor until exposed to certain ideologies or images. Most social movements begin with people having certain feelings that are then interpreted and mobilized for action. Some may feel killing whales an outrage, others feel their status is undermined by abortion, pornography, etc. The extent to which self-esteem is problematic and based on competition in either work or consumption; work is increasingly without dignity; the fragility of social bonds; and gender differences that stifle relationships might be good for starters. Below, I will suggest that the nature of the American character disposed malaise long before the emergence of the amusement society that both soothes and frustrates. The anxiety of American life became appropriated to inspire consumption. It would be too far afield from the present analysis to document fully the role of temperament, the autonomic nervous system, hormonal influences on behavior, etc. While most social critique, especially of the left, sees such research as reifications, and sociobiology may well be a conservative ideology, concern with embodiness shows how important social influences are in the way behaviors and feelings are elicited, stress has physiological components, etc. This premise is central for most theories that attempt to link social structure to individual personality. In this sense, the position of Inkeles and Levinson (1969), of modal and multimodal variations remains valid. However, for the critical purposes of this chapter, national character is located historically, seen in terms of affective dispositions rather than drives or structures, and is an integral part of hegemonic process, especially today in its hyperreal forms of self-expression in an amusement society. It seems as if some of the early anthropologists such as Mead, Malinowski and Benedict understood this but the early Freudian theory influenced and evolved toward a more mechanistic model as in Hartmann, while anthropological interest shifted to language and cognition. Ironically enough, Parsons understood that values had a cathectic component or in our language, emotional investment. Perhaps the values of Western rationalism and masculine practice stress logic over feelings, as in affected social research it has led us to underplay the affective.


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Recently, Levy (1989) has noted the role of the mother as the mediator between culture and affect. Hochschild (1983) has suggested that the socialization practices of the middle classes, as well as their linguistic styles, are more conducive to the interpersonal service occupations of the modern world. See also Langman (1986). This creates a conflict between historial legacies and current requirements of work. Some historians argue that America was a land where European seed blossomed, others argue that American exceptionalism was unique and cannot be understood in European terms; see, for example, Blair (1988) who sees decentralization as unique and giving rise to a distinct character. This chapter takes an intermediate position: the seeds of English traditions, laws, Puritanism, printing, etc., when transplanted to colonial soil, took on new forms. A number of critics suggest that the major change over time has been the greater propensity for hedonism, as would be expected in an amusement society. The dominant social influence of one era, whether political economy, religion, or even consumerism, does not always have the same or as much influence in other times. Thus, for example, Inkeles, whose approach to character informs this chapter, argues for the continuity of character but notes that the major change in American character has been a relaxation of constraint and greater hedonism— read sex. What must be added to his analysis is the understanding that this change was due to the changes in American capitalism in which advertising and marketing, against a backdrop of increasing education, affluence, and weaker social bonds, became the dominant social force. This much is agreed to by Bell (1976). Tocqueville suggested that despite its general affluence, in a ‘democratic’ society, rank still conveys a degree of worth and social value. But without clear indications of status such as lineage, there will be much ambiguity, uncertainty and anxiety about status. Lipset has thus argued that status anxiety fosters the embrace of political extremism. While this seems the case, I would suggest that these adult manifestations must still be considered in relation to culturally variable earlier socialization experiences in which love and esteem are problematic. Thus in our culture aggressive individualism leads to accomplishments that are rewarded by income and status as substitutes for love, while in others, one’s status is secured by linkages to family or tribe. But, as will be concluded, the fundamental characterological conflicts of the tradition are played out in the realm of hyperreal selfhood. Today this syndrome is sometimes diagnosed as mono, Epstein Barr and a number of other designations including yuppie flu, which change periodically. No clear diagnosis exists but seems to attach primarily those with lifestyles associated with high stress and few social supports. It has been suggested that today’s politics of the symbolic favor Republicans for president in that their rhetoric and policies more often than not praise unlimited freedom qua personal greed rather than social obligation. Bellah, as one of our foremost sociologists of religion, should know that this theme was long a favorite of nineteenth century preachers and moralists. Ehrenreich suggests that academic critique of the business or professional classes has a note of resentment that others with as much education, or often far less, make so much more than they. Consider that in some African societies, the infant is in physical contact with caretakers for most of its early life. Most of the communication is through kicks and wiggles. In contrast, American children receive far less physical contact, but on the other hand, are given much more verbal stimulation. These African mothers rarely talk to their infants especially in the forms of incessant chatter typical of American parents who for hours ask tiny infants questions, ‘what the matter’,


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comment on the child’s limited assets, ‘poor baby’, or speak in tongues like some of the snake handler cults, ‘aga ga boo boo’. The adult results are clear. The Africans are securely integrated into their groups, but read poorly. Americans are more independent, and better readers. This may be in decline. They are looking at different aspects of the same condition; most observers have long seen these qualities as not only co-existing, but inherently part of the same dynamic. At the time of this writing, the Republican primary in Texas, naturally, is a contest of who will execute the most prisoners. Only recently have Protestant countries been tolerant of sexuality; prostitution was more open in Catholic societies. This typology has been seen in the work of many, for example, deficiency vs. growth motivation for Maslow, post-individuated selfhood for Kegan, or androgynous marriage in Cancian. What is common to such views, is the affective affinity of the person’s stance for particular world views. This is true even within classes. Mitchell, for example, sees consumers in a psychological hierarchy rather than by class. His central theme is the difference in consumer choices between outer directed types, what we see as more traditional affective factions, and inner directed types who place more value on personal feelings. As has been clear a long time, utopian movements are almost always dangerous since the means justifies the end. Consider only what has happened in Germany, Russia, Iran and Cambodia. Davis (1979), however, argues that nostalgia can only be based on one’s own experience, not that of other generations. But just as one distorts one’s own past to suit the present, so too is the imagined past of others likely to represent the intersection of tradition and reality in a distorted form. This collective regression, like the individual form, is a wish fulfillment to avoid a current frustration. This is reflected in the changing nature of stratification, from placement in the occupational hierarchies to membership in consumption-based lifestyles and taste cultures. It is, of course, interesting that in some of the epidemiological literature, the extent to which families are highly embedded in social or kinship networks which provide support, seems to have positive effects on every measure including aspects of physical health, recovery from alcoholism, truancy, etc. For Meyrowitz (1985), television opens the backstage secrets to the world. I previously noted that for Elias (1978), shame over exposure of what used to be called private parts made civilization possible while the exposure of all body parts and acts is now commodified amusement. At the time of writing a small network has developed for couples or other combinations to trade their homemade porn. This is a post-modern version of baseball cards. But here the most private self and personal of gratifications becomes part of public life. The entymological root of public is pubic. One could well argue that this chapter has done little more than locate the tradition from Tocqueville to Bellah within the critique of political economy. Jameson (1989) suggests that the powerful autonomous bourgeois self that has now been eroded, may have been a myth, that the exalting of individualism may have been only a philosophical mystification to persuade people they had a unique personal identity and this uniqueness enabled their status. One of the best critiques of appropriated identity, not often realized, was Invasion of the Body Snatchers in which the aliens appropriated the bodies of the small town Californians, archetypical simulacrum, who still maintained their usual jobs, lifestyles, and suburban mentalities complete with shopping malls (cf. Kroker and Cook, 1989). After appropriation by the pods, there was no real difference in self or consumption! Think of the aliens only as advertisers and marke-


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teers. We might also note that in Dawn of the Dead, the born-again Zombies find that to live means to shop at the mall. I shop, buy recognition, therefore I am. Cf. Barthes (1983) and Lurie (1983). The problem of the breakdown of outer and inner authority, and the disposition to Fascism, was central for Horkheimer and Adorno (1972). The decline in living standards was a factor of the shifting support for social benefits. Never a strong point in America, but the notion that many poor had benefits the working classes couldn’t afford led to envy, anger and Republican votes. Scheler (1961) and Schoek (1969) have each seen resentment and envy as major factors of social action. See Sabatini and Silver, 1986. Indeed, this envy is not just adolescent materialism, it is found in every niche and corner of our society; in business, professions and even the academy. There is always someone who does better and more of it, whether wheeling and dealing, transplanting hearts, getting grants or even writing critical theory. Indeed, a number of ‘celebrities’ have achieved fame in their satirical personification of presidents. Rick Little as Nixon, Chevy Chase as Ford, Dan Akroyd as Carter, Kevin Neelan as Reagan and Dana Carvey as Bush. Of course the best remains Dan Quayle as Dan Quayle. See also Kroker and Clark (1989), ‘Panic Encylopaedia’, for a concise review of Frankfurt School literature on the panic-driven rightward shift of the state in the 1980s. This was not just an American pattern: consider Thatcher and Kohl. But only in America could a simulated leader simulate leadership. The work of Habermas has shifted away from the tragic vision; see, for example, Kroker and Cook (1988).

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8 Afterword. Collective/Self/Collective: A Short Chapter in the Professional Middle Class Story Philip Wexler

Mise-en-Scène I always thought of first person narratives (or even edited volumes) in social theory as self-mythology or sentimentality. But the routinized abstraction of social theory has now become so far removed from the experience of being that even historicization is inadequate to the task of recouping anything real from the current ritualism of discourse. Putting oneself back into theory is a way to reclaim what has otherwise become an alienated attempt to hold on to meaning by surplus discourse production. Bringing together exemplary voices from a new generation in critical theory is a way to announce and mobilize a new shared political voice. I say this as someone who has spent a good deal of time and effort with the faith that all understanding is mediated through discourses, and that a critical understanding of the world has first always to ‘clear the ground’, to work through the ideological and historical character of hegemonic discourses in order to create the possibility for an alternative understanding. Now there is a danger that collective energies will become locked into discourses and fully displace social analysis with textualism. The papers in this book show that it is still possible to do this discursive work and to realize the integration of social analysis and political action that is critical theory.

Sublimation and Desublimation If, as Baudrillard insists, the social has disappeared, then there need be no social analysis. But the social has not disappeared, anymore than human beings are fictions of Enlightenment discourse. We are, 241


however, now less interested and attuned to social analysis. The social has been sublimated into discourse at the same time that there is a desublimation (Marcuse, 1964:72 ‘replacing mediated by immediate gratification’) of the impulse for social analysis. Freud’s original definition of sublimation (quoted in Ricoueur, 1970:128) emphasized the displacement of sexual drive: ‘Sublimation is a process that concerns object-libido and consists in the instinct’s directing itself towards an aim other than and remote from that of sexual satisfaction; in this process the accent falls upon deflection from sexuality’. But, a sublimation can also be sublimated. The drive to understand and shape the world can itself become sublimated: from analysis and practice to discourse and theory. The social fraction to which I belong, the critical segment of the professional middle class, has for a long time been engaged in this process of a second degree, double sublimation of social analysis into discourse and the sublimation of its practical dilemmas and possibilities into ‘theory’. Marcuse (1964) may have believed that sublimation into high culture—in this case, theory—offers the grounds (or heights) for transcendental reflective negation. There can be (Marcuse, 1955:154) a ‘non-repressive mode of sublimation’. Art, while it may later be seen as succumbing (Marcuse, 1964:65) to technological repressive rationality, is the liberatory Orphic and Narcissistic moment of a transcendant, ‘reality’-negating, aesthetic dimension. My view is that current social theorizing, in elaborating the discourse (including high textualism) is not liberatory. It is a regressive sublimation. Our class segment used theory ‘fantastically’, to avoid a less mediated encounter with everyday social reality. That sublimation is now well institutionalized in the current accommodation of critical theory to postmodernism, poststructuralism and textualism, generally. There is a dialectic of high culture. But negation of the socially taken for granted, the staus quo, is only one side; the other is avoidance and escape into elaborately sublimated fantasies as theory, discourse and text. While the institutionalization of the regressive sublimation as theory now continues in the surplus production of discourse, there are new historical conditions that lead to a desublimation of the encounters with social reality that were formerly avoided. One effect of such desublimation will surely be an increase in the repressive desublimation that Marcuse described: a ‘controlled desublimation’ that is ‘nowhere (society’s) negation’. Instead of a mediated culture of critique, there is a release and absorption of libidinal energies into commodities and the administered total society.

AFTERWORD. COLLECTIVE/SELF/COLLECTIVE 243

The question that I want to raise is whether there is a critical moment to desublimation in which the process of theory and discourse as avoidance that characterized an earlier moment is now reversed. In such circumstances, a less mediated relation between self and society would lead to renewed interest in social analysis rather than discourse and to an investment in practically transformative activity rather than theory. This possibility, of a progressive desublimation is a narrow path, fraught with the danger that it really signals the end of critical reflection on society. The bet, however, is that only by getting out of the discursive fantasy can the direct object of social life ever again be critically appropriated. The current ‘desublimation’, which importantly includes a reengagement of libidinal energies in performance or reality principle activities rather than transformation of virtually all energies into ‘culture’, artistic or transcendental reflection among critics in the professional middle class, is the result of several processes. First, there is in postmodern culture a new ‘end of ideology’. Not affluence or consensus obviates the need for critical grand theories; rather, the willing incorporation of transcendental, autonomous (Habermas, 1981) cultural realms into mundane social life and the inversion of critical distance into participatory parody makes superfluous the need for a theoretical ‘outside’, or Archimedes point. In the same postmodern vein, the diffraction of a unified subject diminishes desire for a subjective origin to any critical gaze, no less systematic articulation. Postmodernism (Lyotard, 1984) hails the passing of the ‘grand narratives’, as the earlier epigones of cultural/theoretical desublimation applauded the ‘end of ideology’. Paralogy, after all, is a principle of performance, however local or randomized. Within this larger shift, cohort histories of producers and consumers help create the turn away from discourse and theory to analysis and practice that I am calling a potentially progressive desublimation. The professional middle-class carriers of the rationalized, academicized ideologies of the youth movement are now middleaged. Foss and Larkin (1986:137) in their analysis of postmovement phenomena write: ‘…the psychic consequences of a social movement become denatured in the forms of psychic healing and upward mobility of former members of dissident collectivities…movement sensibilities are effaced by the necessity to return to the production of the material necessities of existence’. Or (133):’…society moves from periods of quiescence to movement, with a transitional phase following the movement, whereby former movement participants are forced to accommodate themselves to the recrudescence of dominant struc-


tures. Dissidence during the postmovement period is fragmented, ritualized, and isolated’. At the same time, there is no mass local economy of critical ideology consumers. From an historical, movement analysis, the socially structured forms of domination and oppression during the transitional period are not yet collectively articulated into a new ideal definition of reality. Accommodation and assimilation pervades consciousness, while changing forms of domination make earlier movement world-views into irrelevant ideologies. ‘The next Left’, Foss and Larkin observed (1986:158),’…will laugh at us’. Meanwhile, the sluggish local market for critical theory is bolstered by the globalization of the economy and an attendant importation of ‘offshore’ students. Likewise, discursively elaborated critical theories are exported and circulated in the ideologically fertile Pacific-rim countries. Marcuse’s discussion of ‘repressive desublimation’ (1955; 1964) in the one-dimensional society makes clear how freed energies are directly incorporated into a commodity system that blocks their use for liberation. Sexualization of society is accomplished at the cost of eroticism, and the satisfactions achieved by lifting of complete instinctual repression are ‘controlled satisfaction’. It is an ‘adjusted desublimation’ that fuels a ‘happy consciousness’ of the advanced capitalist form of totalitarianism. Such a desublimation, like contemporary ‘busyness’, is a practical and effective ideology. The dangers of a current desublimation, whose development I ascribe to postmodernism’s version of end of ideology by death of the grand narratives, postmovement accommodation, and prematurity of the ‘next Left’ among youth, go beyond repressive desublimation by sexualization for commodity cathexis. The flattening out of transcendance also occurs by excessive absorption in the performance or reality principle. Repressive desublimation is a characteristic of production as well as consumption. The release from theoretical avoidance and escapism does not have a straight path to social analysis and transformative practice. The first step of practicality is instrumentalism and the routinization of engagement with the real world that is internalized as obsession. If fetishism is the defense of the consumptive sphere, mediated by commodities, then obsessive and ritual thought and action is the defense of the productive sphere. The apparatus of bureaucratic rationality does not crumble before the inquiring mind. Rather, inquiry is first channeled, tamed to the immediacy (unmediated) of ‘problem-solving’ within questions generated by the criterion of smooth-functioning. Both types of repressive desublimation—the fetishism of commodi-


ties and the obsessive instrumentalism of performance—block the emergence of critical, reflexive, transcendental possibilities. What is especially dangerous about the present is not simply the successful elaboration of commodity fetishism into mass neurotic addiction (Slater, 1980) or the dissolution of the self into a spectacular nodal mirror trying to catch glimmers of recognition, as Langman so vividly describes. The ‘deeper dynamic’ (postmodernism forbids the imagery of levels or depth) is the simultaneity or combination of the repressive desublimations or collective neuroses of both consumption and production. Foss and Larkin recognize this new condition (1986:146) as the ‘generalization of repressive desublimation’ on the one side, and on the other, an ‘apparatus of social discipline’ that is based on ‘scarcity-stimulation’. Both commodified instinctual substitution satisfaction, and ‘surviving’ in the corporate production apparatus by ritualized adaptation and problem-solving, act to inhibit the successful passing through of desublimated energy into critical social analysis of production and consumption and of development of a collectively enacted, subjective authentic organization of transformative practical action. This is no longer a question of ‘discursive blockages’ to historically appropriate forms of critical theory, but of the internalization of social character—fetishism, addiction, obsession—that inhibits the subjective realignments (Alberoni, 1984) which are a prerequisite for the historical break of a ‘nascent state’; the moment or rebirth that precedes historical, collective, transformative actions. My view is that these characterological blockages, and especially the contradictory relation between them, is what sets the stage for the next historical round of social movement. By movement, I follow the understanding of Alberoni (1984) as well as Foss and Larkin (1986) for whom a social movement is revolutionary. Foss and Larkin (1986:132) distinguish social movements from protest or episodic dissidence: ‘So long as these three aspects of a social movement are a mutually reinforcing totality—intensification of conflict, reinterpretation of social reality, and redefinition of the self and its capacities—a social movement is ongoing’. For Alberoni (1984) the ‘nascent state’, the transition to a new social order, represents a failure of existing forms of social solidarity and a ‘consciousness’ (p. 58) in which ‘what appears to be’ is contingent and incomplete. ‘The nascent state (p. 84) …corresponds to an abrupt alteration of the preceding order of social solidarity and to the birth of a new solidarity’. The break with everyday, institutional life and the failure of solidarity is necessarily accompanied by a change in the self, or as Alberoni puts it (p. 95) a ‘restructuring of the subject’s field of experience’. A social movement is


defined by a revolutionary moment in which the old institutional order fails to work either in social solidarity or in self definition, investment and experience. The ‘next great shift’, as Ehrenreich (1989) puts it, for the professional middle class, will require not only a ‘shift in consciousness’, (p. 257) but an attendant subjective or self transformation that is not ideological or fantastic. Rather, it will build on the historical structural conditions that set the collective terms of self-definition, realignment, and transformation.

Critical Theory Now I am calling attention here to only one type of critical theory: a critical theory oriented to historical transformation by means of a simultaneous alteration of self, culture and society. Nancy Fraser’s pragmatic critique of feminist discourse theory points also to the collective/ self or identity relation. Both Lauren Langman and Serafina Bathrick historicize its transformation. The prevailing mode of critical theory, however, is an institutionalized, ‘postmovement’ phenomenon. The discovery of discourse has broadened at least the academic appeal of critical theory, but also enabled the sublimation of impulses toward self and societal transformation into textualism. Agger is right to observe a ‘decline’ of discourse. Textualist ritualism, in the medium of critical theory and postmodernism, is another harbinger of the disappearance of a ‘true’ dialogical or social relational discourse. This ritualism is largely bibliographical. Critical theory becomes routine rather than disruptive. Not all critical theory is routinized. Luke, Morrow, Fraser and Bathrick show how concrete historical movements of ecology, Third World people, and feminism encompass, in their analytical aspects, criticism of apparently transcendental discourse. Postmodernism, as Ashley and Luke describe it, is a discourse within an historical society. These examples notwithstanding, postmodernism is the most contemporary medium of sublimation. It elevates to slogans the denial of both self and society, and so makes it impossible to understand how self and social transformation interact. Culture is not anymore a mediation, but the alienated new idol that precludes thinking about dynamics by its form and also by its theses of cultural diffusion, fractionation and, as Baudrillard (1988) repeats, ‘implosion’. What then is the character of a non-incorporated desublimation; one that sneaks through postmodernism to recapture an analytical, practically grounded glimpse at the historical dynamic of self and soci-


ety—a dynamic that begins and ends in collective social life, through the revolution in individual lives? What are the social bases of ‘the next great shift’ or ‘the next Left’ or the new social movement?

Collective/Self/Collective: Self Dialectics The primary social basis of a movement that works through the process of self transformation is the contradiction between the subjective demands of consumption and production. I think that the initial youth movement of the professional middle class, like historical movements generally (Alberoni, 1984; Foss and Larkin, 1986), required the sense of a new and other world, that included a radical reorganization of the self or ego. A new movement is possible that is created from contradictory socially structured, subjectively experienced demands experienced as ambivalence. Social contradictions are the precondition for the sort of ego ambivalence that Alberoni (1984:84–125) describes as the core of the ‘nascent state’. Ambivalence of love and violence that is normatively controlled under conditions of everyday institutional life reaches a threshold where attachments, cathexes, social relations or investments require a reorganization to reduce ambivalence to tolerable levels. The moment of reorganization or subjective realignment, the nascent state, is (p. 102) where’…one, eros, violently seizing new objects in its grasp, and the other destroying the structures that imprison the former and investing the old love objects. Compared to the obsessive constraint that preceded it, the experience is one of liberation’. There is ‘an economy of eros and violence’ in which intensified ambivalence is the trigger for a collective, socially shared and communicated self transformation. Durkheim’s ‘collective effervescence’ is the theoretical precursor to the nascent state. Ambivalence or internal conflict can be contained by patterned methods of ego defense. Cultural mediation of the self/society relation now performs that function. Ashley’s, Langman’s, Luke’s and others’ (Schneider, 1975; Slater, 1980) analyses describe postmodern forms of commodity fetishism. How the socially patterned defenses that contain ambivalence work from the mass culture to the organizational level (Hirschhorn, 1988; Laßier, 1986) still requires a good deal more description. The collective/self relation is mediated by culturally reinforced and represented obsession and compulsion as weD as fetishism and addiction. The study of collective neurosis that postmodernism and its critics describe, corresponds to typical self dynamics in the


consumption relation. The ‘spectacular self is television’s self (Kroker and Cook, 1986). Self limitation and neurosis is, however, also created for the ‘working wounded’ (Laßier, 1986) in the postindustrial workplace (Hirschhorn, 1988). Postmodernism sublimates necessity and performance as well as sexual desire. Yet its representation, even critically, is of the culture of consumption. The career is no less powerful a determinant of the life-world among the professional middle class than is its free-time commodified fetishism of visual imagination. While the self is spectacular or even imploded, it is simultaneously over-instrumentalized. If self-reflection is absorbed in pervasive media image and sound, practical action is rationalized into increasingly informationalized decision nodes. What Noble (1990) describes in the genesis of the ‘man-machine symbiosis’ paradigm in military/educational research is the end point of a more self-invested and self-mediated process of worklife. The consumer self is diffused while the producer self is condensed. One is attached to its object fetishistically, while the other is tied by disembodied performance obsession. The forms of social bonding are contradictory: between idolization and subsumption of the ego versus enmeshment (Connell, 1990) and channeling. The contradiction is socially structured, between production and consumption, and subjectively experienced, between the happily dissolute and seriously retentive (Langman’s historical differences live on, contemporaneously, in the life of the professional middle class) self. The intense press toward self-reorganization will occur when the now protected boundaries of the institutionally split self give way to integrative forces. The press for integration is economic; rationalization for a more efficient subjectivity. Ultimately, the quest for greater performance and productivity, under the intermediate guise of healthfulness, demands an end to defensive ego-wastefulness. There is a way out of the iron cage: rationalization destroys the internal defenses that help reproduce it. The new movement is a deformed, revised holism, one that will have to redevelop self and social integration from the residues of the historic contradiction of an agonized leading class. Critical theory now is the social analysis and practice of this time in history.

References ALBERONI, F. (1984) Movement and Institution, (trans. ARDEN DELMORO, P.C.) New York, Columbia University Press.


BAUDRILLARD, J. (1988) Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, (ed. POSTER, M.) Stanford, Stanford University Press. CONNELL, J. (1990) ‘Context, Self and Action’ (forthcoming) in CICCHETTI, D. (Ed.) The Self in Transition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. EHRENREICH, B. (1989) The Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, New York, Pantheon Books. Foss, D. and LARKIN, R. (1986) Beyond Revolution: A New Theory of Social Movements, Massachusetts, Bergin and Garvey. HABERMAS, J. (1981) ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’, New German Critique, 22 Winter, 3–14. HIRSCHHORN, L. (1988) The Workplace Within, Massachusetts, MIT Press. KROKER, A. and COOK, D. (1986) The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyer-aesthetics, New York, St Martins Press. LAßIER, D. (1986) Modem Madness, New York, Simon and Schuster. LYOTARD, J.-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. MARCUSE, 174. (1955) Eros and Civilization, Boston, Beacon Press. —(1964) One-Dimensional Man, Boston, Beacon Press. NOBLE, D. (1990) ‘Military Research and the Development of Computer-Based Education’, unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Rochester. RICOEUR, P. (1970) Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, (trans. SAVAGE, D.) New Haven, Yale University Press. SCHNEIDER, M. (1975) Neurosis and Civilization: A Marxist/ Freudian Synthesis, (trans. ROLOFF, M.) New York, Continuum. SLATER, P. (1980) Wealth Addiction, New York, E.P. Dutton Press.

Notes on Contributors

Ben Agger is Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His research interests are in critical theory, poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminist theory and cultural studies. His recent publications include The Decline of Discourse, A Critical Theory of Public Life, and Discipline, Discourse and Power. David Ashley is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wyoming. His primary interests lie in social theory, critical theory, and postmodernism. His recent publications include ‘Postmodernism and Anti-foundationalism’ in Postmodernism and Social Inquiry, edited by David R.Dickens and Andréa Fontana, and ‘Habermas and the Completion of the Project of Modernity’, in Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity, edited by Bryan S.Turner. Serafina K.Bathrick teaches at Hunter College, New York and is chair of the Department of Communications. Her research interests are in feminist approaches to the mass media. Nancy Fraser teaches philosophy at Northwestern University. She is the author of Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. She works at the intersection of feminist theory, critical theory and poststructuralism. She is currently working on a book with Linda Gordon entitled Keywords of the Welfare State. Lauren Langman is Professor of Sociology at Loyola University of Chicago, Illinois. His research interests are the integration of depth social psychology to a critical perspective on the social order. His most recent publications include ‘Social Class and Family’ in the Handbook on Marriage and Family, and ‘Psychiatry as a Vocation’ in Current Research on Occupations and Professions. He is now working on a book on a critique of citizenship. Timothy W.Luke is Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia. His most recent books are Social Theory and Modernity: Critique, Dis250

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 251

sent, and Revolution and Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination and Resistance in Informational Society. Raymond A.Morrow is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. His research interests include critical theory, cultural studies, communication and education. He is presently co-editing a special issue of the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology on cultural studies in Canada. His publications include, Toward a Critical Theory of Methodology’, in Current Perspectives in Social Theory (forthcoming), and ‘The Developmental Subject: Habermas and the Reproduction of the Lifeworld’, in Discours Social/Social Discourse, 2, 1 and 2. Philip Wexler is Professor of Sociology and Education at the University of Rochester, New York. His publications include Social Analysis of Education: After the New Sociology of Education, Critical Social Psychology, The Sociology of Education: Beyond Equality. He is the Editor of Sociology of Education. He is currently completing a book on a comparative ethnographic study of three high schools entitled Becoming Somebody.

Index

academic obscurantism, 117, 119, 126 access: and television, 150, 151 to information through, 157–158 Adorno, Theodor, 167 aesthetic theory, 125, 126, 128 and culture industry, 145–161 passim and dialectical allusion, 119 and modernity, 90 theory of ‘total administration’, 34 advanced capitalism: see under capitalism aesthetic: commodification, 125 resistance, 126 theory, 124–125 affective: experiences, 193 gratification, 191, 216 habituations, 200–201 responses, 187 self, 191–194, 199 affects: and character, 185–186, 196–197 embodied, 186–188 agencies: political, 105 subject as, 34, 35 alienation, 165, 214 interaction, 180 Althusser, L., structuralism, 32, 34 theory of cultural apparatuses, 29, 51 decline of, 37, 39 American society: capitalist, 165 character, 202–205 compassion in, 208 facade of self-sufficiency, 206

individualism, 205–206 language of, 217 nostalgia, 211–212, 219, 222 pragmatism of, 210–210 and Puritanism, 202–203, 208–210 sadness of, 203, 222 toughness in, 206–208, 218 utopia, 210–212, 219 violence in, 207–208 amusement culture, 173, 174, 177, 177, 180–184, 199 affects, 186 failure, in gratification, 197, 212–216 and self-worth, 193 anti-humanism, 46 anti-logocentrism, 46 anxiety: as affect, 195 and character, 186, 222 in enfeeblement of self, 220 and fear, 187, 198 Freud’s theory of, 193 and gratifications, 197 as motive, 198 signal, 222 argumentation: thoery of, 57 Aronowitz, Stanley, 53, 124 artificial negativity, 18 authoritarianism, 222 German, 171 internalization of, 167 studies of, 167–168 Band-Aid style solidarity image, 19 Baudrillard, Jean: commodified objects, 177 postmodernism, 70, 83–85 passim and semiotics, 181–182 252

INDEX 253

Benjamin, Walter, 169 and media emancipatory role, 145, 149–150 Berlin Wall: as protection of social capital, 81 Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, 37 Bourdieu, Pierre: cultural-reproductive model of, 34 bourgeois political economy, 75 British cultural studies: neo-Gramscian, 37–40, 50 Buddhism, 73 Bush, George: ‘kinder, gentlerAmerica’ image, 19 capital: spheres of, 175–177 capitalism, 137 advanced, societal change in, 27 crisis tendencies, 58, 169 critical reflection on, 57 cunning of, 75 development, and Marxism, 70 and economic theory training, 117 ethic, 173–174 evolution of, 173–174 as expert culture, 131 fast, 47, 132 global consumer, 82 and individual character, 168 late, 124–125, 177, 184, 197, 199 reproduction of, 171 signs and images, 81 stages in, 89 triumph, as Pyrrhic victory, 82 see also under American society; hypercapitalism character: and affects, 184–186 and capitalism, 168 development, theory of, 189 formation, 165 individual, in everyday life, 171 national, 165, 201–221 role of, 167 socialization of, 188–189, 201 see also under American society children: activities, and television, 145–146, 154, 160, 161 affectivity responses, 194–195 and American permissiveness, 205 commodification of, 184

subjectivity in, 105 civic privatism, 177, 206 class: and hegemony, 54 and social groups, 99 clichés: and public voice, 135 clothes: and self-expression, 218 code circulation, 14 Cold War, 80, 81 and transnational corporate capitalism, 1 collective consciousness, 19 commodification: aesthetic, 125 and children, 184 codes of, 14 17 compensations of, 172 of corporate capital, 8 cycles of, 6 of everyday life, 172–173 of human life, 1 hyperreal, 6 of literary activity, 120 objects, in everyday life, 177–177 process, 173, 180 of reality, 88 of sign, 86, 88 89 of urban spaces, 8 commodified: images, 181 objects, 177–178 commodity production: and fetishism, 72 post-Marxist critique of, 22, 70–70 and sign-value, 75 communications discourse, 45 rationalization of, 86 community, 179 decrease in American society, 205 consciousness raising: in political education, 119 consumerism: as family way of life, 155 consumer society: evolution of, 174 consumption: addiction to, 197, 214, 244, 247 as compensatory gratification, 194, 212, 213 conspicuous, and children, 184 as form of self-expression, 196 language of, 177


as sign of group membership, 177 theory of, 40 control: codes of, 15 corporate capital: coding system, 17 commodification of, 8 transnational, 1 counterfeit: sign, 72–73 critical theory: and commodity, production, 22 cultural theory of, 36, 40 and emancipation and, enlightenment 20 as expert culture, 131 fantasies in, 21 generic sociological versions, 52 historical tradition, 58 and proletarian evolution, 36 as radical critique of society, 21 scope of, 171 245–246 and semiotic thinking, 20 and social analysis, 247 and social relations, 20 written, in new voice, 139–140 culturalism, 37 cultural reproduction, 32 cultural space and time, 13 cultural studies: analysis, four phases of, 28–29, 32 critical theory’s relation to, 27–58 as literary political economy, 133 politics of, 29, 123 radical, 132–134 theory, 27–28, 31, 36 see also British cultural studies, culture industry, 120, 122, 124, 133, 138, 139, 169 authoritarian manipulation of, 180 and deception, 181 expressions of, 180, 245–246 high and low, 133 home made, and industrial programming, 156 mechanical reproduction of, 174 and television, 149–161 passim decentring, 46 deception: commodified, 181 deconstructionism, 29, 42, 46, 53, 56 124, 133

of theory, 135 demand, production of, 5 Derrida, Jacques: and deconstructionism, 42, 43 desire, 181 affective, 180 assent of, 172 creation of, 196 repression of, 168 and simulation, 217 socialization of, 189, 194–196 desublimation, 241 non-incorporated, 246 progressive, 242 repressive, 242–244 determinism, 102 deterrence: politics of, 74, 76, 78 development-in-time concepts, 11 development: unconscious, 165 dialectics, negative, 126 dialogue chances, 117, 118 difference: as principle of integration, 120 disciplinary: deconstructions, vii, 44–47 society, 125 disciplines, 12 discourses: analysis of, 44 conceptions of, 33, 241, 245 cultural, 193 decline of, 117, 119, 128 elements of, 45 in everyday life, 178 and feminism, 98–116 postmodern non-technical, 135 of power, 12 theory of, 44, 117 discursive: discontinuity, 50 repositioning, 56–58 dissimulation: sign, 73, 88 domination, 33, 34–35, 165, 167 as aspect of character, 169 class, 166 code of, 75 and everyday life, 171–172 and Marxism, 165 see also hegemony drive theory, 194 and character, 185–186, 196

INDEX 255

ecological crisis, 58 economic determinism, 32, 44 economism, 33, 34 education: as collective discursive practice, 46 critical theories of, 35 discourse, 45–47 research in, 39 ego, 194 ambivalence, 246 development of, 189 electronic media, 16 and hyperreality, 4 emotions: as affects, 187, 188, 200 and national character, 202 and selfhood, 198 Enlightenment, 129, 149, 165, 174, 202 optimism of, 166 envy: as expression of panic, 220–221, 222 essentialism, 32, 52, 113 gynocentric-maternalist, 112 postfeminist anti-, 112 Eurocentrism, 58 Eurocommunism, 36 European humanism, vii everyday life: see under life, everyday evolution, 11 exchange-value, 79 Existentialism, 137 expert culture, 131, 134, 135 democratization of, 136, 138 ‘facework’: and self-presentation, 198 false consciousness, 6, 51 family life: and American individualism, 205–206 and consumerism, 155 enfeebled, 200 fun, and application of reason, 151–153 and mass media, vii, 146 problematic, and envy, 221 relationship with public, and, television, 148, 161 structure, 167 and television-time management, 158–159 Fascism, 134, 165, 168–169, 184 and amusement society, 222

Friendly, 222 fatalism, 84 ‘Father’s Law’, 102, 109 father: figure, 167–168 power of, 185 fear: as affect, 187, 195, 197, 198 feeling, 200 in amusement society, 214 as emotions, 188 and national character, 202 rules, 188, 193, 200 and selfhood, 198 feminism, 47, 55, 56, 127 American, and television, 147–148, 157–158 gynocentric, 111 movement, 111 as social theory, 98, 245 fetishism, 72, 123, 243 and addiction, 244 commodity, 72, 75, 244, 246–247 holistic, 72 of textuality, 123 Final Solution, the, 184 Finlay, Mark: and communication, discourse, 45 Foucault, Michel, 125 anti-positivism, 43 and theory of power, 42–43 France: poststructuralism in, 41 Frankfurt School theory, 6, vii 27, 34, 39, 44, 47, 52, 57, 84, 117, 121, 122, 165, 221 aesthetic theory, 125 and character, 184 and cultural theory, 27–29, 32 defenses, 193 formation of, 167–169 revisited, 169–171 Freud, Sigmund, 84, 104 anxiety theory, 193 drive theory, 184–185 repression of desire, 168 theory of ego, 191 and workings of the unconscious, 74 Fukuyama, Francis: and end of history, 82 functionalism, 169 gender identity, 102, 213 phallic conception of, 104


quality of, 186 Giroux, Henry: educational and cultural theory, 53 Goffman, Erving, 198 and the amusement society, 216 and social rituals, 179–180 Gramsci, Antonio, 29, 38, 39 and British cultural studies, 27, 29 and critical theory, 38–40 limits of theory, 53 neo-Marxism, 57 philosophy of praxis, 129 and popular culture, 38 and poststructuralist cultural studies, 47–55 theory of hegemony, 32, 99, 120 gratifications: as affects, 188, 195 commodification of, 183 and compulsive consumption, 194 in everyday life, 197, 220 hedonistic, 196 insatiable, 205 personal, 177 qualities of, 182 see also under consumption guilt: of modern man, 166 gynocentrism, 111 Habermas, Jürgen, 44, 85, 118, 169 bilevel model of society, 34 ideal speech situation, 126–127 as modernist, 129 and poststructuralism, 41 theory of communicative action, 43, 47, 49 theory of reproduction, 171 Hall, Stuart: and Gramsci, 51–53 Hansen, Miriam: and TV spectatorship, 158 hedonism: privatized, 181 Hegel, Christian name: self-realization, 165 hegemony: American, 169, 205 and class, 54 concept of, 52 cultural, 105 and literary political economy, 120 mystification of, 184 and power, 51

problem of, 40 theory of, 32, 33, 34, 49–50, 55, 99–100 hermeneutics: and critical theory, 35 historical: bloc, 54, 56 contextualization, 106 historicism, 32 history: end of, 82, 122, 137 Hitler, 169, 184 and nihilism, 168 Horkheimer, Max, 27, 167 and culture industry, 145–161 passim humanism: and Althusser, 39 and cultural analysis, 32 human suffering: nature of, 165 hyperabstraction, 76 hypercapitalism: logic of, 84, 85 hyperontology, 2 hyperreality, vii, 1–25, 70, 88, 182 and informational societies, 13 limits of, 19 practical logic of, 5 and practices of democracy, 6 of urban revitalization, 9 see also mediascapes hyperstructuralism, 33 id, 75 idealism, 47 ideal speech situation, 45, 126–127 identification: anaclitic, 190 and parental internalization, 189–191, 192 identity, 104 collective, individualized, 47 ideologies, 12, 44 critique of, 138 end of, 242, 243 end of man’s evolution in, 82 Marx’s model of, 120 modern understanding of, 53 multi accentual, 51 theory of, 32, 33, 35 writing of, 136–137 illusions: and hyperreality, 19 image-driven power, 17

INDEX 257

images, 181, 217 commodified, 181 and hyperreality, 19 mass produced visual, 182 implosion: sign, 72, 89 individualism, 179 and character development, 189 and character structure, 167 end of, 166 language of, 193 permissive, 17 possessive, 202 self-expression, 85 and selfhood, 217 self-manage, 17 textual-experience, 86 and transnational capital, 19 versus community, 205–206 individual subjectivity, 102 Industrial Revolution: and capitalism, 174 and creation of desires, 196 inequality: in pragmatic model, 107 information: modes of, 15 reproduction, 18 information society, 46 and hyperreality, 13, 19 and the masses, 19 power in, 14 rise of, 20 social analyses of, vii for women, through television, 157–158 innovative practice, 107–108 insignificance: vacuum of, 5 issue groups, 17 instinct: repression of, 166 instrumentalism, 33 intellectuality: politics of, 119, 123, 126 see also postmodern intellectual; textual politics, interaction rituals, 179–180 internalization: of parental normative codes, 189–191 Interregnum, 6 justice: attitudes, in American character, 218

theory of, 87 Kristeva, Julia: theory of, and feminism, 98, 106–112 labor: as sign, 79 theory of value, 75 wage, and commodity production, 177 Lacan, Jacques: theory of, and feminism, 98, 100–106 language: and academic obscurantism, 118 and affective self, 192 of American character, 217 in cultural studies, 55 democratization of, 131 136 difficult, and decline of discourse, 128 first 179 phallocentric, 109 of possibility, 54 and public voice, 135 reinvention of, 136 and structural model, 100 langue, 101 Left: American, 138–139 fascism, 134 inflexibility of, 138 next-, 243, 246 unified discourse of, 50 legitimation: crisis, 36, 56 problem of, 40 Leland, Dorothy, 102 liberalism: Western, alternatives to, 82 life, everyday: American values in, 205 anxiety of, 172, 197 and character, 196–197 and commodification of objects, 177–177 and commodified culture, 172–173 discourses of, 178 examination of, 171–184 historical context, 172 inner, and anxiety, 220 as part of hegemonic process, 197 rituals, and self-presentation, 198, 201 spectacles in, 222 lifestyle, 173 consumption based, 217


linguistics: and philosophy and social, theory, 30 literary: commodification, 121 and culture studies, 133 political economy, 117, 119 theory of, 121 Lukács, Georg, 34 conception of totality, 34 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 80, 86, 87, 90 and postmodernism, 120 Marcuse, Herbert, 167, 171, 185 one-dimensional society, 34 market: rationality of, 179 Marxism, 27, 73, 84, 167 British, and Thatcherism, 53 collapse, 57–58, 84 of East bloc, 36, 57 as communication theory, 47 and concept of social time, 52 crisis of, 27 and culture industry, 117 decline of, 41 and domination, 165 economistic reductionism of, 168 and hidden source of value, 74 ideological guarantees, 52 marginalization of, 70, 81, 90 model of ideology, 120 as modernist intellectual, 128 and self-doubt, 52 structuralist, 27, 29, 30, 32 mass culture, 28 145, 150, 169 and critical response, 145, 149 feminist theory of, 145–145 and lack of spontaneity, 145 masses, the, 5, 83, 84, 130 meanings, 181 qualities of, 182 media, mass, vii, 196 and children’s participatory activities, 145–146, 154, 160, 161 critical analysis of, 145 images, impact on women at home, 157 power of, 161 role of, 145, 169 mediascapes, 1–25 changing, 13 electronic, 16 methodology, 132 and public voice, 137

Meyrowitz, Joshua: and feminist movement, 157 micro-electronic revolution, 46 Mills, C.Wright: and academic obscurantism, 117, 118 modernism, 43, 70, 77, 84, 121 aesthetic, 85 as era of productivity, 71 modernist intellectual, 128 modernity, 90, 121, 166 narratives of, 78–80 pessimism of, 166 mothering: contradictory ideologies of, 161 motivation: and object seeking, 213 theory of, 194–196 motivational crisis, 171 and self-presentation, 198 Mueller, Claus, 169 mystification: of hegemony, 184 process of, 76 narratives: end of, 242, 243 of modernity, 78–80, 86, 88, 121–122 self as, 192 Nazi propaganda, 169 negative dialectics, 126 neo-conservatism, 36, 85 and plain language, 118 neo-Gramscian, 55 cultural studies, 37–38 methods, 27 neo-Marxism, 27 and Gramsci, 57 and threat of poststructuralism, 42 New Criticism, 123 New Left politics, 6, 28, 29, 127 New Right, 51, 56 nihilism: as sign, 72, 89, 90, 168 nominalism, 113 North American Restoration, 6 nostalgia: in American society, 211–212, 219, 221 obscurantism: see academic obscurantism obsessive instrumentalism of performance, 243–244 Oedipus complex, 104, 109

INDEX 259

one-dimensional society, 28 American, 171 ontology, 138 optimism: of Enlightenment, 166 political, 125 of the will, 50–55 panic: as sign, 74, 78 in American society, 165, 220, 222 panoptic linear space, 15 parental codes: internalization of, 189–191 Parents’ Magazine: mass media, and mother’s role, 145–161 parents’ responsibility: in mass media, 145 parole, 101 performative principle, 86 personal: life, and capitalism, 177 style, and hyperreality, 18 pessimism: of the intellectual, 49–50 of modernity, 166 political, 125 play: as fun, 151–153 poetic: interaction, 56 practice, 108 political economy, 169 political education: and public discourse, 119 popular culture, 38, 40, 119, 180, 181 commodified, 172 and expert language, 136 and postmodern intellectual, 132, 133 positivism, 27 postindustrialism, 1, 46 cybernetic, 1 post-Marxist critique: of commodity production, 42 postmodern intellectual, as writer, 126–132 post-elite, 128 post-specialist, 128 postmodernity, 121 postmodernism, 6, vii, vii, 43, 70, 83, 85, 121, 242, 245 affirmative, 122

and cool communicational obscenity, 80–81 dialectic, 122 nihilism of, 90 panic, 49 and science, 87 and transformation of social theory, 87 poststructuralism, vii, 27, 27, 29, 30, 31, 40–44, 46, 123 discourse theory, 44 and Gramsci, 47–55 lack of representational theory of culture, 30 power: end of, 71 and hegemony, 51, 99 in hyperreality, 14 image driven, 17 limited, 77 as negative and positive force, 54 organized, 1, 14 political, and hyperreality, 11 preinformational, 11 and rebellion, 14 screens of, 16 and seduction, 77–78 state, and Gramsci, 38 theory of, 42–43, 107 pragmatic model, 100, 106–112 prefiguration, 117 private life: as sphere of capitalism, 175–177, 220 and gratification, 213 production: cycle of, 76, 89 end of, 78, 84 and simulation, 87 productionism, vii productive forces, 5 programmatism, 132 progress, 11 pseudo-events: and reality, 183 psychoanalysis, 73, 165 psychologism, 103, 110 public discourse: character of, vii, 129 and consciousness raising, 119 writing, 119 public sphere: decline of, 34 public voice, 134–140 and clichés, 135


and language, 135 loss of, 117 reading, 117 Reaganism, 29 reality, 1–2, 183, 185 absence of, 74 commodification of, 88 definition, in everyday life, 178–179 of present, and stress, 219 of selfhood, 216 and simulation, 6 ultimate, 181 see also hyperreality, reason: and self-realization, 165 triumph of, 166 recognition, 212, 213 props, 178, 197, 214 reflexivity: concept of, 47 relationships: and interaction rituals, 179–180 representation: systems of, 4 repressive: desublimation, 121, 167 reproduction, theories of, 46, 171 social, 191 resistance: and hyperreality, 18 and mass culture, 149 strategies of, 83–87 theories, 34, 35, 46 rituals, commodified: and presentation of self, 197–200 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 101, 102 science: as form of writing, 47 and postmodernism, 87 ‘screen’ tradition, 33 of reality, as sign, 73 seduction: and power, 77–78 self: commodification of, 213 enfeebled, 177, 192, 193, 199, 214, 220, 222 false, 213 recognition of, 192, 247 self-disclosure, 20 self-esteem, 179, 187 self-expression:

and possession ofobjects, 177–178, 212 T-shirt, 217–218 selfhood: emerging, 194 nature of, 199 private, 200 ‘shopping mall’, 216–220 as spectator-spectacle, 199, 214 self-objects, 178, 214 self-presentation, 179–180, 212–216 in commodified ritual, 197–200, 212–216 motivation for, 198 and spectacles, 222 see also affective self self-psychology: and character, 186 self-transformation, 245, 246 semiotic thinking, 46 and critical theory, 20 subject, 108, 110 sexuality: repressiv morality, American, 210 theory of, 185 sign, 72–78 code, 76 commodification of, 86, 88, 89 and production of the real, 72 universalization and abstraction of, 81 value, explosion of, 78 significance: vacuum of, 5 signification: codes of, 181, 217 Simmel, George: analysis of aesthetic modernism, 85 simulacra: precession of, 71 simulation, 71 dynamics of, 4 and hyperreality, 2, 3 and informational order, 2 interpretive treatment of, 11 nuclear deterrence as epitome of, 7 as organizing principle, 6 and production, 87 and reality, 6 and urban revitalization, 7–8 social analysis, 46, 241, 247 social awareness: and television, 150 social control, 15

INDEX 261

new mode of, 149 social groups: formation of, 98–99, 104 social identities, 98, 104, 111, 112–113 social order: reproduction of, 165 social relations: and critical theory, 20 social rituals, 179–180 social success, 179 social theory: in historical context, 169 social values: and mass media, 146–147 social whole: self-expression of, 85 socialization: theory of, 189 society: contemporary, 182 movement in, 243–245 one-dimensional, 243 radical critique of, 21 revolutionary, 244–245 unhappy American, 203 ‘society of the spectacle’, 17 Society for Women in Philosophy, 99 speaking subject: concept of, 107, 110 species-being, 70 state: nascent, 246 policy, 40 regulatory agencies, 12 and structures of hegemony, 12 status, 179 structural model, 100–101 structuralism, vii, 27, 30, 31, 37, 42, 107 challenges of, 33–35 limits of, and feminism, 100–106 program of, 31–33 and reproduction of society, 30 structuralist Marxism: see under Marxism, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 118 subject: agencies, 34, 35 sublimation: death of, 177 regressive, 241 suffering: individualization of, 185 superego, 168, 190, 194

see also ego, symbolic: order, 104, 105, 109, 110 system, 106, 108 symbolicism, 103 televangelism, 218 television: as coercive mechanism, 149 corner, 160 dangers of, 161 etiquette, 156 and fading authority of women at home, 147, 155 and hyperreality, 13 impact on women, 145 isolation by, 206 position of, 156 resistance to, 153 and role of mother in families, 145–161 social uses, debate on, 160 substitution of mother’s role, 155 -time management, 158–159 time, primacy of, 156 textualism, 46, 47, 241, 245 Thatcherism, 29, 51, 52 shock of, 53 theory: as academic specialty, 131 deconstruction of, 135 and political education, 130 as public speech, 117–119 Third World: crisis of, 57, 58 influence on culture of capitalist societies, 89 time, 15 cultural, 13 total administration theory, 28 totality, vii, 34, 136, 167 of amusement society, 188 fragmented, 182 relational nature of, 30 theory of, 33, 84, 88 trade: and capitalism, 173–174 tradition: and national character, 202, 203, 222 transnational: corporate capitalism, 1, 17 and individuals, 19 forces, global, 21 informational capitalism, 18


zone-regimes, 1 unconscious: role of, 167 unreality: dreamlike, 182 urban revitalization: and central business district, 7 fakes, 9 gentrified simulation, 8 hyperreality of, 9 architecture of, 10 as an illusion, 8, 10 and image-driven simulations of city life, 7 use-value, 75, 79, 89 utopia: in American society, 210–212, 219 value: and American character, 203–205 hidden source of, 74 structural law of, 79 see also exchange-value; use-value vanguardism, 130 video-age, 46 Weber, Max: and rationality of modern society, 166, 179 Weimar Republic, 28 West, Cornell: theories of, 54–55 Wexler, Philip: and educational discourse, 45–47 women: isolation of, 158 in political world, 151 subordination of, 102 as victims of male dominance, 100 see also mother’s role in family under television Woodstock nation image, 19 working class: consciousness in Weimar Republic, 28 ‘lads’, Willis’s, 39 writing, 117, 132 as public speech, 137 universality of, 139

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