Cultural Studies Journal Vol 07-03 October 1993

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. Advertisements: Enquiries to David Polley, Routledge, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE. Subscription Rates (calendar year only): UK individuals: £28; institutions £56; rest of the world: individuals £30; institutions £58; North America: individuals $40; institutions $88. All rates include postage. Subscriptions to: Subscriptions Department, Routledge, Cheriton House, North Way, Andover, Hants, SP10 5BE. Single copies available on request. ISSN 0950–2386 © Routledge, 1993 ISBN 0-203-98974-0 Master e-book ISBN

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CULTURAL STUDIES Volume 7 Number 3 October 1993

EDITORIAL STATEMENT Cultural Studies seeks to foster more open analytic, critical and political conversations by encouraging people to push the dialogue into fresh, uncharted territory. It is devoted to understanding the specific ways cultural practices operate in everyday social formations. But it is also devoted to intervening in the processes by which the existing techniques, institutions and structures of power are reproduced, resisted and transformed. Although focused in some sense on culture, we understand the term inclusively rather than exclusively. We are interested in work that explores the relations between cultural practices and everyday life, economic relations, the material world, the State, and historical forces and contexts. The journal is not committed to any single theoretical or political position; rather, we assume that questions of power organized around differences of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, nationality, colonial relations, etc., are all necessary to an adequate analysis of the contemporary world. We assume as well that different questions, different contexts and different institutional positions may bring with them a wide range of critical practices and theoretical frameworks. ‘Cultural studies’ as a fluid set of critical practices has moved rapidly into the mainstream of contemporary intellectual and academic life in a variety of political, national and intellectual contexts. Those of us working in cultural studies find ourselves caught between the need to define and defend its specificity and the desire to resist closure of the ongoing history of cultural studies by any such act of definition. We would like to suggest that cultural studies is most vital politically and intellectually when it refuses to construct itself as a fixed or unified theoretical position that can move freely across historical and political contexts. Cultural studies is in fact constantly reconstructing itself in the light of changing historical projects and intellectual resources. It is propelled less by a theoretical agenda than by its desire to construct possibilities, both immediate and imaginary, out of historical circumstances; it seeks to give a better understanding of where we are so that we can create new historical contexts and formations which are based on more just principles of freedom, equality, and the distribution of wealth and power. But it is, at the same time, committed to the importance of the ‘detour through theory’ as the crucial moment of critical intellectual work. Moreover, cultural studies is always interdisciplinary; it does not seek to explain everything from a cultural point of view or to reduce reality to culture. Rather it attempts to explore the specific effects of cultural practices using whatever resources are intellectually and politically available and/or necessary. This is, of course, always partly determined by the form and place of its institutionalization. To this end, cultural studies is committed to the radically contextual, historically specific character not only of cultural practices but also of the production of knowledge within cultural studies itself. It assumes

that history, including the history of critical thought, is never guaranteed in advance, that the relations and possibilities of social life and power are never necessarily stitched into place, once and for all. Recognizing that ‘people make history in conditions not of their own making’, it seeks to identify and examine those moments when people are manipulated and deceived as well as those moments when they are active, struggling and even resisting. In that sense cultural studies is committed to the popular as a cultural terrain and a political force. Cultural Studies will publish essays covering a wide range of topics and styles. We hope to encourage significant intellectual and political experimentation, intervention and dialogue. At least half the issues will focus on special topics, often not traditionally associated with cultural studies. Occasionally, we will make space to present a body of work representing a specific national, ethnic or social tradition. Whenever possible, we intend to represent the truly international nature of contemporary work, without ignoring the significant differences that are the result of speaking from and to specific contexts. We invite articles, reviews, critiques, photographs and other forms of ‘artistic’ production, and suggestions for special issues. And we invite readers to comment on the strengths and weaknesses, not only of the project and progress of cultural studies, but of the project and progress of Cultural Studies as well. Larry Grossberg Janice Radway *** Contributions should be sent to Professor Lawrence Grossberg, Dept. of Speech Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 244 Lincoln Hall, 702 S. Wright St., Urbana, 111. 61801, USA. They should be in triplicate and should conform to the reference system set out in the Notes for Contributors, available from the Editors or Publishers. Submissions undergo blind peer review. The author’s name should not appear anywhere in the manuscript except on a detachable cover page along with an address and the title of the piece. Reviews, and books for review, should be sent to Tim O’Sullivan, School of Arts, de Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH; or to John Frow, Dept. of English, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Queensland 4072, Australia; or to Jennifer Daryl Slack, Dept. of Humanities, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI 49931, USA.

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CONTENTS

ARTICLES Culture, community, nation Stuart Hall African-American political desire and the seductions of contemporary cultural politics Herman Gray The popular pleasures of female revenge (or rage bursting in a blaze of gunfire) Kirsten Marthe Lentz Shut up and dance: youth culture and changing modes of femininity Angela McRobbie The right to manage: a second managerial revolution? John Clarke and Janet Newman Photography, epistemology and the body Suren Lalvani Looking for the Holy Grail: publishing and advertising strategies and contemporary men’s magazines Sean Nixon Media, meaning and everyday life Joke Hermes

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373 404 424 439 464

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REVIEWS Where has postmodernism gone? Norman K.Denzin On women’s screens Christine Geraghty Vox populi Michael Green Roger Bartra’s The Cage of Melancholy: Identity and Metamorphosis in the Mexican Character Mauricio Tenorio

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Notes on contributors Index—Volume 7

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511 515 519

Gendered Narratives Aspects of cultural identity in Ireland Friday 19th, Saturday 20th & Sunday 21st November 1993 University of Ulster at Magee, Derry, Northern Ireland. Call for papers Conference aims; It is the aim of the conference to gather together feminist practitioners and theorists from different disciplines (arts,social sciences, historians etc.) to facilitate a cross disciplinary discussion on gender, cultural identity and women s lived experience in Ireland both North and South. It will explore the political and discursive implications of the formation of gendered identities and will present discursive and social analyses of cultural representations of gender. For more information Contact; Gendered Narratives. G.Honor Fagan. Sociology Department University of Ulster At Magee, Derry, Northern Ireland.

ARTICLES STUART HALL

CULTURE, COMMUNITY, NATION Though I was never taught by Raymond Williams, and worked with him only in an informal capacity from time to time, he had a major influence on my intellectual and political formation.1 We met in Oxford in the mid 1950s—he as a lecturer in adult education while I was an undergraduate and, later, a graduate student. At a key moment in the formation of the first New Left, some of us read Culture and Society in draft; and it helped to give a decisive shape to the concern with ‘cultural politics’ which has characterized the thinking and practice of an independent critical ‘New Left’ ever since. Thereafter, our paths crossed continually—on the Board of New Left Review, which I edited for a time; in the drafting of the May Day Manifesto; everywhere in the development of Cultural Studies, with which I was directly connected through the Birmingham Centre from 1964 onwards; and in anguished conversation in the eighties, as we all tried in different ways to make sense of the disorientation of the left under the impact of Thatcherism and the forces it unleashed, until his untimely death in 1988. As I have tried to say elsewhere, this is to put his formative influence too weakly. I did not, of course, always agree with him; and nothing was more foreign to his dialogic mode of thinking than any hint of discipleship. Nevertheless, as I put it, the fact is that, ‘in a broader intellectual sense, I often had, at different times in my life, the uncanny experience of hesitantly and confusedly beginning a line of thought, only to find that, apparently coincidentally, Raymond had not only been travelling much the same road but had given it a clearer, more forceful, clarifying formulation than I ever could’ (Hall, 1993:305). There was another ‘elective affinity’ which made me feel close to him, despite our enormous differences in temperament, character, background, ages, generation and formation: our responses as ‘scholarship boys’ from the peripheries of English culture to our first encounter with the institutions which were at its very centre as a dominant cultural system: Oxbridge. I still recall the shock of recognition which I experienced on reading his response to his interviewers’ questions in Politics and Letters, about the impact of Cambridge on him when he first went ‘up’ in October 1939: ‘I was’, he said, ‘wholly unprepared for it. I knew nothing about it’ (1979:40). As he later wrote in ‘My

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Cambridge’: ‘It was not my Cambridge. That was clear from the beginning… I have now spent 18 years in the university in three distinct periods. In each of them I have started by being surprised to be there and then, in time, made some kind of settlement. But this has always, even in the longest period, felt temporary… Cambridge can break you up, to no good purpose; confuse you, sicken you, wring you dry’ (1989b:5). Having spent six years in Oxford, I thought I knew immediately what he meant. What was even more striking was the confidence with which Raymond Williams was able to measure the so-called ‘civilization’ of Cambridge against another civility, another set of standards, drawn from his experience of an alternative, and different, ‘knowable community’—his Welsh ‘Border Country’—against which he found Cambridge sadly wanting: I was reminded of a conversation my father had reported to me from his advance visit [to Trinity]. The porter had asked him, rather haughtily, whether my name was already down, ‘Yes, since last autumn’. ‘Last autumn? Many of them, you know, are put down at birth’. I try to be charitable and find it easier now. But I remember sitting on the benches in hall surrounded by these people and wishing they had been put down at birth…. The myth of the working-class boy arriving at Cambridge…is that he is an awkward misfit and has to learn new manners. It may depend on where you come from. Out of rural Wales it didn’t feel like that. The class which has dominated Cambridge is given to describing itself as well-mannered and polite, sensitive. It continually contrasts itself favourably with the rougher and coarser others. When it turns to the arts it congratulates itself overtly on its taste and its sensibility; speaks of its poise and tone. If I then say that what I found was an extraordinarily coarse, pushing, name-ridden group, I shall be told I am showing class-feeling, class envy, class resentment. That I showed class feeling is not in any doubt. All I would insist on is that nobody fortunate enough to grow up in a good home in a genuinely wellmannered and sensitive community, could for a moment envy these loud, competitive, deprived people. All I did not know then was how cold that class is. That comes with experience’ (1989b:7–8). What made Raymond Williams capable of, as he put it later, ‘hitting Cambridge and being extraordinarily unafraid of it’? It was his ‘placing’ within another culture; his access to a different, ‘knowable’ community, indeed another national culture, a different ‘structure of feeling’. Though subordinated to and displaced in its peripheral relationship to the dominant English culture, and with the culture of the educated, metropolitan, upper middle classes, this other ‘knowable community’ provided him with certain cultural resources, which enabled him to live and feel, and later to write and think, according to a different grain from that of ‘Cambridge’. It was this, in turn, which influenced the way he thought about, and gave an experiential, ‘lived’, dimension to, such ‘key ideas’ as ‘culture’ and ‘community’, and indeed Wales as a nation and ‘being Welsh’ as a cultural identity, when later he came to reflect on this cluster of concepts. It is the strengths and limitations of his ideas on these subjects, and their value in helping us to think through

Articles 351 the complexities of these formations now, in the very altered context of the 1990s and beyond, which forms the substance of these reflections. But the story properly starts here, with the idea of a ‘knowable community’ in the Welsh border country of his early years, and how it gave rise to and informed his theoretical work. As he said, recalling the way the Welsh writer, Emyr Humphreys, once introduced a reading from Williams’ novel: ‘not Border Country by Raymond Williams, but Raymond Williams by Border Country’. In his discussion of ‘culture’, in the famous chapter on ‘The analysis of culture’ in The Long Revolution, his pathbreaking attempt to break with the literary-moral discourse of Culture and Society into a more sustained effort of general theorizing, the key conceptual move he makes is from an ‘abstract’ definition of culture—‘a state or process of human perfection’—to culture as ‘a description of a particular way of life which expresses certain meanings and values, not only in art and learning, but in institutions and ordinary behaviour.’ Culture, he insisted, with his characteristic inflection on ‘our common life’, is ‘ordinary’. The analysis of culture, from such a definition, he argued, ‘is the clarification of the meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture’. Characteristic here is not only the movement from abstract ideal to concrete, from texts to their contexts of institutional life and ordinary behaviour; but also the breaking down of artificial distinctions between art and literature—the signifiers of ‘culture’ in the first, as it were ‘Cambridge’ sense—and what he called ‘the general social organization’. The art is there, as an activity, with the production, the trading, the politics, the raising of families. To study the relations adequately we must study them actively, seeing all the activities as particular and contemporary forms of human energy’ (1961:61). Later he was to insist that the more specialized forms and conventions of what Cambridge knew as ‘literature’ were most valuably to be understood as different kinds of ‘writing’, all related in different ways and forms to wider ‘structures of feeling’, the way meanings and values were lived in real lives, in actual communities. ‘The most difficult thing to get hold of, in studying any past period is this felt sense of the quality of life at any particular place and time; a sense of the ways in which the particular activities combined into a way of thinking and living… I think we can best understand this if we think of any similar analysis of a way of life that we ourselves share.’ (1961:80) He called this ‘most delicate and least tangible’ of structures the ‘structure of feeling’ of a period. Edward Said, the 1989 Williams Memorial lecturer, thought this concept, which enabled him to move beyond the ‘the ideological capture of the text into the life of the communities beyond it’, his ‘most famous contribution to literary study’ (1990). Incidentally, few people know that one of the first, considered formulations of this central idea in Williams’s work first appeared in a little book entitled Preface To Film, which he wrote and published (in 1954) with Michael Orrom, a film director who worked with Paul Rotha and whom Raymond met at Cambridge: All the products of a community in a given period are, we now commonly believe, essentially related, although in practice and in detail this is not always easy to see. In the study of a period, we may be able to reconstruct with more or

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less accuracy the material life, the general social organization and, to a larger extent, the dominant ideas. It is not necessary to discuss here which, if any, of these aspects is, in the whole complex, determining…. But while we may, in the study of a past period, separate out particular aspects of life, and treat them as if they were self-contained, it is obvious that this is only how they may be studied, not how they are experienced (1954:9). Even when, in The Long Revolution, his rather ‘organicist’ stress on culture as ‘a whole way of life’ moves in a more dialogic direction, to an emphasis on the giving and taking of meanings within a set of lived relations, this new emphasis on ‘communication’ is immediately linked back to and informs the idea of ‘community’: Human community grows by the discovery of common meanings and common means of communication…. Thus our descriptions of our experience come to compose a network of relationships, and all our communication systems, including the arts, are literally parts of our social organization. The selection and interpretation involved in our descriptions embody our attitudes, needs and interests, which we seek to validate by making them clear to others. At the same time the descriptions we receive from others embody their attitudes, needs and interests, and the long process of comparison and interaction is our vital associative life. Since our way of seeing things is literally our ways of living, the process of communication is in fact the process of community: the sharing of common meanings, and thence common activities and purposes; the offering, reception and comparison of new meanings, leading to the tensions and achievements of growth and change (1961:10). Theoretically, Williams’s formulations grew over the years in both complexity and confidence—Marxism and Literature is a powerfully condensed statement of his more mature reflections on these topics. But the emphases we have identified in the early work remain active to the end. What does his difficult wrestling with these questions of culture, community, shared experience and national identity have to tell us now in the more highly charged era of revived nationalisms in big and small societies, and the aspirations of marginalized peoples to nationhood, which have become so unexpectedly a feature of the late-modern world of the 1990s and are transforming the cultural life of modernity? How useful are they in helping us to decipher the unpredicted ‘return’ of nationalism as a major historical force, and the efforts to restore national cultures as the primordial source of cultural identity as these tendencies are manifesting themselves today, well beyond the limits of the national-liberation struggles that marked the decolonizing moment of the immediate post-war decades? How much can we learn from him in negotiating the shoals and currents of these confusing and dangerous waters? We have, first, to set the context by trying, however sketchily, to characterize this ‘new’ situation. The great discourses of modernity—in this respect Marxism no less than liberalism, both in their different ways, Enlightenment ‘grand narratives’—led us to

Articles 353 expect, not the revival but the gradual disappearance of the nationalist passion. Attachments to nation, like those to tribe, region, place, religion, were thought to be archaic particularisms which capitalist modernity would, gradually or violently, dissolve or supercede. Socialism, the ‘counter-culture of modernity’ in Zygmunt Bauman’s phrase, was equally predicated on the subsumption of these particularisms into a more cosmopolitan or internationalist consciousness. Globalization, drawing more and more of the globe into the net of the global capitalist market, is, of course, no recent, post-‘Big Bang’ phenomenon. It has been going on since the Spanish and the Portuguese initiated the West’s ‘encounter’ with the Rest at the end of the fifteenth century. The recent integration of financial systems, the internationalization of production and consumption, the spread of global communications networks, is only the latest—albeit distinctive— phase in a long, historical process. However, this latest phase of capitalist globalization, with its brutal compressions and reorderings across time and space, has not necessarily resulted in the destruction of those specific structures and particularistic attachments and identifications which go with the more localized communities which a homogenizing modernity was supposed to replace. Of course, the forces of capitalist modernity, in their combined and uneven development, have radically dislocated the societies into which they penetrated (though this distinctive history of capitalist development has, classically, been subordinated in its narrativization to the quite different story of how capitalism peacefully ‘evolved’ from the womb of feudal Europe). But the so-called ‘logic of capital’ has operated as much through difference—preserving and transforming difference (including sexual difference)—not by undermining it. The engine of this expansionist history was the European nation-state, with its welldefined territorial boundaries, national economies and increasingly national cultures. Of course, side by side with this, were the flows—of capital, goods, labour—between and across national frontiers. As Immanuel Wallerstein has observed, ‘At the very moment that one has been creating national cultures, each distinct from the other, these flows have been breaking down national distinctions’ (1991:19). This tension between the tendency of capitalism to develop the nation-state and national cultures and its transnational imperatives is a contradiction at the heart of modernity which has tended to give nationalism and its particularisms a peculiar significance and force at the heart of the socalled new transnational global order. Negotiating this tension was one of the key conjuring tricks of Thatcherism; and it was its failure to resolve this tension—the illusion that Britain could snatch the goodies of a ‘single market’ without sacrificing an inch of national sovereignty or ‘Englishness’ as a cultural identity to the European idea—which finally destroyed Mrs Thatcher and which has brought her successors, Mr Major and Mr Lamont, to the brink of the post-Maastricht abyss. Nevertheless, the present intensified phase of globalization has favoured the tendencies pushing nation-states towards supranational integration—economic, and more reluctantly, political and cultural: weakening without destroying the nation-state and thereby opening up local and regional economies both to new dislocations and to new relationships. Paradoxically, globalization seems also to have led to a strengthening of

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‘local’ allegiances and identities within nation-states; though this may be deceptive, since the strengthening of ‘the local’ is probably less the revival of the stable identities of ‘locally settled communities’ of the past, and more that tricky version of ‘the local’ which operates within, and has been thoroughly reshaped by ‘the global’ and operates largely within its logic. One result has been a slow, if uneven, erosion of the ‘centred’ nationalisms of the Western European nation-state and the strengthening of both transnational relations and local identities—as it were, simultaneously ‘above’ and ‘below’ the level of the nationstate. Two features of this very uneven process have been the re-valorization of smaller, subordinate nationalisms and movements for national and regional autonomy by precisely those groups whose identities were swallowed up by or subsumed under what Ernest Gellner calls the ‘political roof’ of the big nation-states, and the parallel growth of a defensive reaction by those national cultures which see themselves threatened from their peripheries. We can see this not only in the strengthening of regional and national identities within the UK (or, as Raymond Williams calls it, ‘the Yookay’) but also in the growing efforts of local centres attempting to by-pass blockages of various kinds at the national level—Scotland’s dream of breaking the English connection and restoring its Enlightenment links with Europe; the possibility of subsuming Northern Ireland’s intractable problems in some sort of ‘European’ solution. Williams himself reflects the ambivalence of identification produced by these two tendencies when he referred to himself as feeling like a ‘Welsh-European’. But there are similar signs elsewhere in Europe, the growth of the Northern League in Italy, as a way of dissociating the industrial (and, as it turns out, corrupt) Milan from the ‘backward’ (and, of course, equally corrupt) South, being only the most recent example. At the same time as this has been going on in Western Europe, we have seen the breakup of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the revival of ethnic nationalisms amongst peoples submerged for decades within the supernationalism of the Soviet sphere of influence. This seems to reflect a complicated double-movement—the attempt to reconstitute themselves as a nation representing both the reaction against the Soviet and state-socialist past and the hope for the future—which may turn out to be illusory—that ‘nationhood’ is the only passport or entry-ticket left for backward East Europeans to the new Western European prosperity. Hence the confusing spectacle of what we may call ascending and descending nationalisms, locked in a sort of combined-and-uneven double helix. It seems clear that, despite the often over-rationalist expectations favoured by the internationalist perspectives of the left, nationalism is not only not a spent force; it isn’t necessarily either a reactionary or a progressive force, politically. We have seen plenty of both varieties in recent years—even supposing that it is easy to establish the criteria by which they can be easily distinguished (is Iraqi nationalism progressive because it opposes the West or reactionary because it holds its people in a crude and violent dictatorial grip ?). To coin one of Ernesto Laclau’s phrases, nationalism ‘has no necessary political belongingness’. It is capable of being inflected to very different political positions, at different historical moments and its character depends very much on the other traditions, discourses and

Articles 355 forces with which it is articulated. The nationalisms of, say, ‘Third World’ countries in the era of decolonization, which were produced as the counter-discourses to exploitation and cultural colonization and linked with critical cultures and political traditions, had a very different political meaning and trajectory from those which have been generated as the historical reaction against imposed state socialism but which have reappeared in political cultures with strong ethnic and religious absolutist traditions. The nation-state was never simply a political entity. It was always also a symbolic formation—a ‘system of representation’—which produced an ‘idea’ of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, with whose meanings we could identify and which, through this imaginary identification, constituted its citizens as ‘subjects’ (in both of Foucault’s sense of ‘subjection’—subject of and subjected to the nation). There is no question, then, that the relative decline of the centralized nation-states, with their incorporating cultures and national identities, implanted and secured by strong cultural institutions, which claimed to be able to subsume all differences and diversity into their imagined unity, opens up profound ambivalences and fissures within the discourse of the nation-state and thus presents unprecedented opportunities for smaller nationalisms to realize their aspirations for autonomy in new, more effectively self-governing arrangements. This is the perspective which Raymond Williams addressed, with increasing frequency and urgency, in his writing about Wales and other struggles for ‘actual social identities’, especially in Towards 2000, but of course also, in a different register, in his fiction. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that the drive to nationhood in many of the ‘ascending’ small nationalisms can often take the form of trying to construct ethnically (or culturally, religiously or racially) closed or ‘pure’ formations in the place of the older, corporate nation-states or imperial formations; a closure which comes, in Gellner’s terms, from trying to realize the aspiration, which they see as the secret of success of the great, modernizing nation-states of Western modernity, of gathering one people, one ethnicity, gathered under one political roof. But the history of the nation-states of the West has never been of this ethnically pure kind. Without exception, as Daffyd Ellis Thomas, the former Playd Cwmry MP, pointed out again recently, they are without exception ethnically hybrid—the product of conquests, absorbtions of one peoples by another. It has been the main function of national cultures which, as we argued, are systems of representation, to represent what is in fact the ethnic hotch-potch of modern nationality as the primordial unity of ‘one people’; and of their invented traditions to project the ruptures and conquests, which are their real history, backwards in an apparently seamless and unbroken continuity towards pure, mythic time. What’s more, this ‘hybridity’ of the modern nation-state is now, in the present phase of globalization, being compounded by one of the largest forced and unforced mass migrations of recent times. So that, one after another, Western nationstates, already ‘diaspora-ized’ beyond repair, are becoming inextricably ‘multicultural’— ‘mixed’ ethnically, religiously, culturally, linguistically, etc. Despite this, many of the new nationalisms are busy trying, often on the basis of extremely dubious myths of origin and other spurious claims, to produce a purified ‘folk’ and to play the highly dangerous game of ‘ethnic cleansing’—to use the charming phrase

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which the Serbs have returned to the postmodern European vocabulary. Here, real dislocated histories and hybridized ethnicities of Europe, which have been made and remade across the tortured and violent history of Europe’s march to modernity, are subsumed by some essentialist conception of national identity, by the surreptitious return to ‘tradition’—often of the ‘invented’ kind, as Hobsbawm and Ranger define it—which recasts cultural identity as an unfolding essence, moving apparently without change, from past to future. Lest we think that this kind of ethnic absolutism is restricted to the Balkans—which Western Europeans have always thought unfit to govern themselves—we must remember that versions of it are alive and well in the old ‘modern’ nation-states, especially in the wake of the multicultural diversity which the dislocations of globalization are pushing along. We can now see Thatcherism’s question—‘Are you one of us’?—as not only a search for true converts to the Gospel of Market Forces, but as only the latest effort, still continuing, to resurrect that rapidly vanishing species, the late-twentieth-century ‘true born Englishman’ (the gendered form is deliberate) and to rediscover, by a virulent form of regressive modernization (an attempt to capture the future by a determined long detour through the past) those discursive forms of manly and entrepreneurial ‘greatness’ which could restore ‘Englishness’ as a beleagured national identity: that cultural identity into which all the other diverse cultures of the British Isles and, at its peripheries, the colonized societies, were so often and so brutally collapsed. In the face of the proliferation of cultural difference ‘at home’, and the multiethnic character of the ‘new Britain’, and threatened on the other side by the encroaching trauma of an emerging ‘European’ identity, we have seen in Britain, over the past decade, the construction of a particularly defensive, closed and exclusive definition of ‘Englishness’ being advanced as a way of warding off or refusing to live with difference—a retreat from modernity which no exercise in managerial newspeak or ‘the new entrepreneurialism’ can disguise or deflect. One slip of the Danish pen, and it has come pouring out—in different forms, as much from the left as the right. Confronted by an openly racist far-right in France or Germany, the British are apt to be smoothly superior and complacent. Nevertheless, the particular forms of cultural racism which have grown up under Thatcherism’s shadow bring together and condense into a single discourse questions of race and ethnicity with questions of nation, national and cultural belonging: ‘Cultural belongingness’ (redefined as an old, exclusive form of ethnicity) has replaced genetic purity and functions as the coded language for race and colour. As Paul Gilroy observed in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: A form of cultural racism which has taken a necessary distance from crude ideas of biological inferiority now seeks to present an imaginary definition of the nation as a unified cultural community. It constructs and defends an image of national-culture, homogeneous in its whiteness yet precarious and perpetually vulnerable to attack from enemies within and without (1987:49–50). Something of the same fear of difference and diversity can be seen, in different forms, everywhere in the ‘New Europe’, as the most heterogeneous peoples hastily cobble

Articles 357 together some new unitary cultural identity as a shield, not only against neighbours with whom they have peacefully dwelled for centuries, but also against Muslim, North African, Turkish and other migrants drawn to Europe from its peripheries. We can see it reflected in the consciously ‘Little England’ schemes drawn up for teaching literature and history—the key discourses in the construction of national identity—in the new English National Curriculum for schools. We can also see it in the violent backlash against multiculturalism in schools and universities in the US. These tendencies have their respectable allies and supporters in Britain and their not-so-respectable shock-troops elsewhere in Europe, as those displaced by the destruction of indigenous economies, the pricing out of crops and the crippling weight of debt as well as by poverty, drought and warfare, pursued with the help of the international arms trade, buy a one-way ticket and head across borders to ‘Paradise’ or The American Way’. Raymond Williams has, in fact, written eloquently about this trend in an earlier historical form, particularly as it affected rural Wales: As production and trading advantages shifted, vast numbers had to move again or be left stranded in the debris of a worked-out economy. Massive movements of this kind are still occurring in thousands of authorized and unauthorized emigrations and immigrations and in the desperate trails from land dispossessed by agri-business to the shanty-towns on the edges of densely populated cities (1983:186). The responses to these massive unplanned movements of populations from the declining ‘South’ to the overfed ed ‘North’ under the impact of globalization, powered as they are by polite and other forms of ethnic absolutism, are a species of fundamentalism every bit as backward-looking as those to be found in some sections of the Islamic world. These have replaced Communism in the demonology of the West and are superficially portrayed as the sign of a retreat from modernity by backward peoples, when they are often ambiguous responses by those either left out of ‘modernity’ or ambiguously and partially incorporated in one of its many forms, whereas the fundamentalisms which are afflicting ‘modern’ national cultures are not only arising from the very heart of modernity but are a continuing reminder of the dark shadow which has persistently accompanied modernity and the European Enlightenment from its inception. In the face of these dislocations, it is easy to understand why Raymond Williams again and again affirms what he calls the ‘rooted settlements’, ‘lived, worked and placeable social identities’, to set off against what he persistently characterizes as the ‘abstractions’ of modern national cultural identities. With unerring accuracy, he places who or what is responsible for these dislocations, against which national identity has so frequently in the past been summoned as a reliable defence: ‘It is, in the modern epoch, capitalism which has disrupted and over-ridden natural communities and imposed artificial orders. It is then a savage irony that capitalist states have again and again succeeded in mobilizing patriotic feelings in their own forms and interests’ (1983:184). The persistent emphasis in Williams on ‘actual lives’ in ‘knowable communities’ is salutary in the current post-Maastricht confusion. For, much as one may support the shift

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from a narrow little Englandism to a broader European perspective, welcoming this enlarging and diversification of ‘English’ perspectives, one has also to acknowledge that the idea that, overnight, something called a ‘European identity’ or culture could be willed into being at the behest of a single market or the requirements of the European banking system, represents a conception of culture and an understanding of the mechanisms of social identification so shallow and ‘abstract’, in Raymond Williams’s terms, that it deserves the comeuppance which the Danish have so tellingly delivered to the European Community in their referendum. The more one ‘believes in Europe’ or, to put it more accurately, the more the question of Europe appears to be a contested concept worth struggling over and around, the more important are the questions of ‘which Europe?’, and of ‘what is European culture?’ and ‘whose European identity?’ and ‘which version of European modernity?’ and indeed of how and whether it might ever be possible to be both ‘Black and European’. Williams certainly appreciated the complexities of trying to restore an already unified Welsh identity around any single notion of Wales as a national community. Despite the wonderful work he did in his novels in imaginatively recreating it as an ‘imagined community’, he often acknowledged his problematic relationship to Wales. His family, after all, were not Welsh-speaking, though they learned Welsh poems and songs for special occasions. His early ‘hostility to the norms of Welsh nonconformist community’ resulted initially in ‘a rejection of my Welshness which I did not work through until well into my thirties, when I began to read the history and understand it’. Again and again, as we might expect, he insists that ‘I have to emphasize great complexity in Wales and England’. Welshmen are always asking what Wales actually was, ‘The problematic element is characteristic’ (1989c:68). He fully understood the essentially mythic and constructed discourse of ‘essential cultural continuity’ with which the Welsh sometimes console themselves for what has happened to them. He knows from the inside the complexity of the ethnic history of ‘what is now Wales from earliest times.’ He acknowledges the complexity of the linguistic heritage where the already complicated Welsh/English language differential is cross-cut by another significant differential—‘how that majority of the Welsh who have lost their native language now speak and write English’. He sees both the dangers of reconstructing a spuriously unified cultural identity and a falsely continuous national history when the real history is one of ruptures and discontinuities—‘industrial conflict within rapid economic development and agrarian conflict within impoverishment, depopulation and marginalization’—and even the resistance to cultural colonization was itself a deeply differentiated response, governed as much by what it was responding to as what it was in itself. The Welsh national cultural revival, he insists, requires ‘the working through of a history among now radically dislocated and subordinated people, rather than the fortunate resurgence of a subdued essence’ (1989c:68). Nevertheless, the emphasis on ‘actual and sustained social relationships’ as the principal basis of identification and cultural ‘belongingness’ presents many real difficulties which take us back to that original stress, in Williams’s work, on culture and community as a ‘whole way of life’. Whose way? Which life? One way or several? Isn’t

Articles 359 it the case that, in the modern world, the more we examine ‘whole ways of life’ the more internally diversified, the more cut through by complex patterns of similarity and difference, they appear to be? Modern people of all sorts and conditions, it seems, have had, increasingly, as a condition of survival, to be members, simultaneously, of several, overlapping ‘imagined communities’; and the negotiations between and across these complex ‘borderlines’ are characteristic of modernity itself. Lest one think that this capacity to live in and negotiate several ‘worlds’ at once is a sign of the modern alienated condition, a burden laid on the postmodern, Western nomadic subject alone, it is worth recalling that the burden of ‘double consciousness’ which W.E.B.DuBois identified, was the burden of consciousness, not of the Master but the Slave, and his/her descendants, who—as C.L.R.James observed—are ‘in western civilization, who have grown up in it but yet are not completely a part of it’.2 In Towards 2000, Williams discusses the response of the white working-class man to what he calls—too euphemistically by half—‘the most recent. immigrations of more visibly different peoples’ and the angry confusions and prejudices which are triggered when, as he puts it, the blacks (for it is them—us—who are the ‘visibly different peoples’) ‘intersect with the most selective forms of identity’. He acknowledges that the reaction to the presence of foreigners easily slides into specifying this ‘otherness’ as black. But he objects to this always being labelled ‘racism’ and especially to what he calls the ‘standard liberal reply’, ‘But they are as British as you are’, which, he argues, is to employ ‘a merely legal definition of what it is to be British’. It is a serious misunderstanding when full social relations are in question to suppose that the problems of social identity are resolved by formal definitions. For unevenly and at times precariously but always through long experience substantially, an effective awareness of social identity depends on actual and sustained social relationships. To reduce social identity to formal legal definitions at the level of the state, is to collude with the alienated superficialities of ‘the nation’…which are the limited functional terms of the modern ruling class (1983:195). This passage seems to me to contain a series of powerful truncations and ellipses and it is therefore no surprise that, in a now famous exchange in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, Paul Gilroy, quite correctly, fastened on it as representing in its implications a racially exclusive form of social identity, and a sign of the degree to which Williams’s work, like so much other thinking on the left, remains both blind to questions of race and framed by certain unexamined ‘national’ cultural assumptions. As Gilroy asked, How ‘full’ must ‘full social relations’ be? How ‘actual’ are the social relationships between blacks and whites in many inner-city communities and how ‘sustained’ do they have to be to include equality of respect? It is true that social identity cannot be reduced to formal legal definitions. But it is a serious misjudgement to ascribe it exclusively to ‘the alienated superficialities of “the nation” and the functional terms of the modern ruling class.’ If you are a black woman trying to secure rights of citizenship from the local DHS office or an Asian family with British residence running the gauntlet of the immigration

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authorities at Heathrow, ‘formal legal definitions’ matter profoundly. They cannot be made conditional on cultural assimilation. It should not be necessary to look, walk, feel, think, speak exactly like a paid-up member of the buttoned-up, stiff-upper-lipped, fully corsetted ‘free-born Englishman’ culturally to be accorded either the informal courtesy and respect of civilized social intercourse or the rights of entitlement and citizenship. This is to apply the Tebbit-test cricket test (i.e., which cricket team do Afro-Caribbeans support when the West Indies is touring Britain?) with a vengeance—subsuming cultural allegiance to the vagaries of the batting form of the England cricket team (a slender reed indeed), as the price of drawing the family allowance. In the matter of citizenship, of course, there are minimal responsibilities to those others with whom one shares a political community, just as there are ‘rights’. But, far from collapsing the complex questions of cultural identity and issues of social and political rights, what we need now is greater distance between them. We need to be able to insist that rights of citizenship and the incommensurabilities of cultural difference are respected and that the one is not made a condition of the other. In this sense, unless the universalistic language of citizenship, derived from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution (but long denied both women in Europe and black slaves in Hispaniola) is transformed in the light of the proliferation of cultural difference, the idea cannot and does not deserve to survive in the transformed conditions of late-modernity in which it is required to become substantively operable. Since cultural diversity is, increasingly, the fate of the modern world, and ethnic absolutism a regressive feature of late-modernity, the greatest danger now arises from forms of national and cultural identity—new or old—which attempt to secure their identity by adopting closed versions of culture or community and by the refusal to engage—in the name of an ‘oppressed white minority’ (sic)—with the difficult problems that arise from trying to live with difference. The capacity to live with difference is, in my view, the coming question of the twenty-first century. New national movements that, in their struggle against old closures, reach for too closed, unitary, homogeneous and essentialist a reading of ‘culture’ and ‘community’ will have succeeded in overcoming one terrible historical hurdle only to fall at the second. This is also the challenge confronting the difficult question for the left, of how to adapt and transform the language of citizenship to new historical circumstanes—I mean, of course, a substantive conception of citizenship for our times, not that phoney, ‘active’ one being promoted by Mr Major’s Citizen’s Charter, which redefines citizens as ‘customers’ and ‘consumers’— about which, see the devastating critique advanced by Williams in the ‘Culture of nations’ Chapter in Towards 2000. ‘For now from the other side of its mouth it speaks of the consumer: the satisfied, ever stuffed, the sovereign consumer’ (1983:32). I began by speaking of how Raymond Williams and myself, coming from such very different backgrounds and formations, often found ourselves in the same places, making some of the same kinds of response from the ‘margins’ to the encounter with the exclusive and excluding redoubts of the dominant national culture, the seed-bed and nursery of English national cultural identity. I have been profoundly influenced by the stubborness with which, throughout his life and writing, Williams held to and honoured

Articles 361 those ‘actual, lived relationships’ of place, culture and community which did not figure in an exalted way in the hierarchy of conventionally valued English things. I honoured the sympathy he expressed for the struggles of the peoples and cultures—I stress the plurals—of Wales and his determination to hold on to his two emphases: ‘the cultural struggle for actual social identities and the political redefinition of effective selfgoverning societies’. But, in honouring him—in order to honour him—I feel compelled to close, as it were, from another place. From the place of the millions of displaced peoples and dislocated cultures and fractured communities of the ‘South’, who have been moved from their ‘settled communities’, their ‘actual lived relations’, their ‘placeable feelings’, their ‘whole ways of life’. They have had to learn other skills, other lessons. They are the products of the new diasporas which are forming across the world. They are obliged to inhabit at least two identities, to speak at least two cultural languages, to negotiate and ‘translate’ between them. In this way, though they are struggling in one sense at the margins of modernity, they are at the leading edge of what is destined to become the truly representative ‘late-modern’ experience. They are the products of the cultures of hybridity. This notion of hybridity is very different from the old internationalist grand narrative, from the superficiality of old style pluralism where no boundaries are crossed, and from the trendy nomadic voyaging of the postmodern or simplistic versions of global homogenization—one damn thing after another or the difference that doesn’t make a difference. These ‘hybrids’ retain strong links to and identifications with the traditions and places of their ‘origin’. But they are without the illusion of any actual ‘return’ to the past. Either they will never, in any literal sense, return or the places to which they return will have been transformed out of all recognition by the remorseless processes of modern transformation. In that sense, there is no going ‘home’ again. That is why they speak and sing and write so eloquently within the metaphorical languages of ‘voyaging’, travelling and ‘return’. They bear the traces of particular cultures, traditions, languages, systems of belief, texts and histories which have shaped them. But they are also obliged to come to terms with and to make something new of the cultures they inhabit, without simply assimilating to them. They are not and will never be unified culturally in the old sense, because they are inevitably the products of several interlocking histories and cultures, belonging at the same time to several ‘homes’—and thus to no one particular home. As Salman Rushdie, who should know, has remarked, ‘having been bourne across the world…they are translated men [and women].’ They are the product of a diasporic consciousness. They have come to terms with the fact that in the modern world, and I believe irrevocably, identity is always an open, complex, unfinished game—always under construction. As I remarked elsewhere, it always moves into the future through a symbolic detour through the past (Hall, 1990). It produces new subjects who bear the traces of the specific discourses which not only formed them but enable them to produce themselves anew and differently. I sometimes think Raymond Williams may have seen them as ‘lost souls’. But I want to end with a different reading of their condition, from Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands:

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The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and that, is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for changeby-fusion, change-by-co-joining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves’ (1992). Notes 1 Versions of this paper were given in Cardiff (‘The 1992 Raymond Williams Lecture’, The Welsh Open University and the National Institute for Adult and Continuing Education); in Birmingham (‘The Raymond Williams Lecture’, The Centre for Cultural Studies and the Birmingham International Film and Television Festival); and in Oxford (‘Cultural Theory at the Fin-de-Siècle Conference’, The R.Williams Memorial Trust). 2 The idea of ‘Double consciousness’ is from W.E.B.DuBois (1989). References DuBois, W.E.B. (1989) The Souls of Black Folks, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gilroy, Paul (1987) There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, London: Hutchinson. Hall, Stuart (1990) ‘Cultural identity and diaspora’, in Rutherford, Jonathan (1990) editor, Identity. London: Lawrence & Wishart. ——(1993) ‘The Raymond Williams interviews’, Screen Education 34. Reprinted in Alverado, M., Buscombe, E., and Collins, R. (1993) editors, The Screen Education Reader, London: Macmillan. Rushdie, Salman (1992) Imaginary Homelands, London: Granta Books. Said, Edward (1990) ‘Narrative, geography and interpretation’, New Left Review, 180. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1991) ‘The national and the universal’, in King, A. (1991) editor, Culture, Globalization and the World System, London: Macmillan. Williams, Raymond (1961) The Long Revolution, Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——(1979) Politics and Letters, London: New Left Books. ——(1983) Towards 2000, London: Chatto & Windus. ——(1989a) What I Came to Say, London: Radius. ——(1989b) ‘My Cambridge’, in Williams, R. (1989a). ——(1989c) ‘Wales and England’, in Williams, R. (1989a). Williams, Raymond and Orrom, Michael (1954) Preface to Film, London: Film Drama Limited.

HERMAN GRAY

AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLITICAL DESIRE AND THE SEDUCTIONS OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL POLITICS1 Within contemporary African-American cultural and political discourse, identity politics in general and disputes about ‘Blackness in particular have become the site of stimulating and sometimes acrimonious debate—among the focal points of many of these debates are the positions articulated around the issues of diversity, affirmative action and political correctness on university campuses around the country, the efficacy of the liberal welfare state, the behavioral and moral fitness of the so called urban ‘underclass’ and more recently the appeal of Afrocentric discourses and nationalism.2 What does all of this have to do with the minority discourse in general and black selfrepresentation in particular? I am less interested in developing a definite response as much as I want to explore the consequence of this situation in terms of theorizing and understanding the present condition of black Americans. I am also less concerned with directly taking up the issues of nationalism, post-modernism, anti-essentialism and identity politics than understanding how they and the discourses in which they are embedded have had important consequences for our present circumstance, especially the conceptualization and representation of that circumstance. Indeed, it seems to me that for all of the poststructuralist insights and theorization about multiple subject positions and transgressive identities, we are experiencing something of a return to so-called essentialist ways of constructing and imaging ourselves (as black people). These days territorial imperatives, especially in the United States, seem stronger than ever. There seem to be greater racial, sexual, class-based suspicions and assaults on vast sectors of the black community in the United States. Statistics about death, destruction, immiseration, poverty and powerlessness continue to indicate that in many respects, large sectors of black Americans, especially the poor, continue to experience the very worst that this society has to offer (Hacker, 1992; Johnson and Oliver, 1991). And as we are well aware these assaults do not only come from outside black communities; antagonisms and conflicts between blacks are also as intense as ever.3 In the face of this kind of assault, suspicion, and antagonism, Afrocentric perspectives and nationalist constructions of identity are increasingly attractive to various sectors of the black community. For an increasing number of blacks these perspectives serve as compelling guides for action, as utopian visions of possibility, and as ways of making sense of the world and their experience of it. Ironically then, the very possibilities that discourses and debates about essentialism, postmodernism and identity opened have also produced this ‘return’ or turn if you will,

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toward essentialism. I think that this ‘return’ or turn represents the very contingency to which Stuart Hall alludes when he suggests that we cannot have a politics of guarantees. In the face of debates and discourses about essentialism, postmodernism, and identity on the one hand and the appeals and expressions of nationalism in black communities (especially among significant segments of black students on university campuses) on the other, how are we to think about these developments and the political difficulties as well as possibilities they pose? As Cornel West (1990a) so cogently put it, as critical black intellectuals how do we theorize and build political strategies across and within racial, sexual, class, and gender difference? That is to say, one of the possibilities of any kind of politics forged at the site of contradictory cultural practice, which sees ideology as lived and culture as a site of struggle, is precisely that those whom one seeks to organize and direct may in fact constitute themselves and be drawn to other ways of making sense of their lives and circumstance (Hall, 1985, 1986, 1988). It seems to me that discursively we have moved quite a way to revealing and specifying the complex terms and articulations of difference within blacks communities (hooks, 1990; West, 1990a; White, 1990). In these ways postmodernism, antiessentialism, and poststructuralism have provided key insights. Conceptions that emphasize the centrality of images, the power of the mass media, the fragmentary and constructed nature of reality, have provided signal contributions from these quarters. These notions have challenged and exposed totalizing discourses and their hegemonic power. In the best instances, critical black intellectuals use these insights to open up and examine the rich and often contradictory construction and self-representation of blacks (West, 1990a). At the same time I want to argue that in many instances these insights have been misapplied and misdirected. We have too often remained at and needlessly confined our analysis to the level of textual representation and taken too little account of the material locations and practices of different sectors of the black community as well as the cultural desires through which they are constructed. For I believe that no small part of the attraction and persistence of essentialized constructions like nationalism for large numbers of blacks rests in part with the material and social conditions they face. Thus, for example, while the recent interventions of Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1991, 1992) on the question of inaccuracies, silences, and anti-Semitism in certain strains of nationalist and Afrocentric discourses, is if nothing else bold, it does, nevertheless, illustrate my central point. The totalizing impulses, mythological constructions of an African past and scapegoating of Jews described by Gates are to be sure elements which underwrite this discourse. And, like others, he is quite right to name these and expose the empirical and historical fallacies on which they are built.4 This is an important part of the critical labors of cultural politics to be sure, but far from the only part since, as Cornel West (1991, 1992) points out, these impulses and the resonance they signal have deep and enduring histories and produce different political effects within and outside African-American communities. And they are histories built on and circumscribed by unequal power relationships expressed through race and ethnicity, culture, class, neighborhood, patronage and so on. (The relationships through which such

African-american political desire and the seductions of contemporary cultural politics 365 antagonisms are expressed are built on histories of co-operation and alliance against oppression as well.) Attention alone to the discursive manifestations, inaccuracies, and myths of the nationalist and Afrocentric discourse of Afrocentrism (especially the volatile antagonisms between Blacks and Jews) without contextualizing, historicizing or attending to the material conditions and political desires from which they spring and to which they are directed, as a political project, simply forces a choosing of sides from two equally unappealing options. Moreover, it is not the political ground on which to forge new alliances, articulations and progressive politics. However factually inaccurate and culturally romantic, these discourses continue to have resonance for different sectors of African-American people. And that resonance cannot be effectively contested or explained away by deconstructing and discrediting the work of its leading figures or by casting its adherents as simple-minded, untutored or misguided. We must own up to the hard fact that in certain progressive quarters of African-American counter-discourse, important political ground has been ceded and too often been absorbed into a privileged and often narrow network of academic discourse. The persistence and pervasiveness of certain versions of nationalism says as much about the discourses and (class) locations of progressive critical intellectuals as it does about the people who desire it (West, 1990a). In other words, to account for the appeal and persistence of various forms and expressions of nationalism, we must carefully attend to social locations and material circumstances of African Americans as well as the character, orbit and terms of these debates within black America. Hence, I want to signal and try to specify the localities and relationships of critical black intellectual engagements with postmodernism and especially essentialism (e.g., the university and the academy), the social locations of those involved, and the tensions, gulfs and focus of the objects of these debates (West, 1990b). It seems to me that part of what has occurred is that the object of postmodernist debates, anti-essentialist discourses and identity politics has been and remains in large measure divorced and disarticulated from the experiences, practices, and locations of significant segments of blacks in the United States. Consequently, the strategic appeal of discourses such as nationalism and Afrocentricity, remain compelling insofar as they fill significant voids created by the desire, indeed imperative, to make sense of daily encounters, suspicions and hostilities experienced by blacks in the United States. My position on this point is not a move to tolerate or excuse the silence, marginalization, and policing of these totalizing discourses (especially their renderings in popular culture). Rather it is to suggest that we carefully interrogate and critically understand the force of such attractions and the circumstances in which they find resonance. Similarly, I am not ready to completely abandon some of the key insights suggested by postmodernism and anti-essentialism for understanding identity within African-American cultural discourse. I do want to suggest, however, that we put these insights to more strategic use (Gramsci, 1971); that we deploy them more directly in terms of the material conditions and social locations of people’s lives; that we see culture and representation as both an important site within which our struggles take place and as an object over which we struggle (Lipsitz, 1990:16–17).5 Such strategic and critical

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engagement perhaps would help avoid confusing and misusing the relevant insights of these discourses. African-American identity and the material condition(s) of black life in modern America No matter how strong the temptation to make them so, the attraction to and desire for nationalist and Afrocentric discourses (including the critiques they generate) do not exist in isolation. Even if figured this way these discourses and the desires to which they respond are not generated and sustained out of a simple longing for some golden moment of a rich African past. That is a serious misreading and underestimation of both the discourse and the material conditions and strategies out of which they emerge and in which they circulate. Even the most cursory reading of any daily newspaper or weekly news magazine in the United States would indicate that in the current moment there are zones in the social and cultural landscape of American society that remain deeply inflected and characterized by racial inequality, suspicion and hostility. These conflicts and inequalities, which are expressed at the intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality, are experienced at various levels and sites of everyday life.6 Expressions of these conflicts and their policing and containment by the state are evident everywhere: in the data on prison populations and police brutality; in family violence, abandonment and sexual abuse of children; in violence against women; in racial violence and confrontations such as those evidenced by recent incidents in New York City (painting Latino children white) and Denver (the confrontations at a MLK rally between the Klan and King supporters); in the local and national fallout of the David Duke candidacy for governor of Louisiana; in the salience of race in the 1980, 1984, 1988 and 1992 presidential campaigns (the Willie Horton phenomena); in failed and abandoned public educational systems in urban communities across the country, and in the attacks on and attempts to de-legitimate affirmative-action policies in general and blacks who are their beneficiaries in particular (Edsall and Edsall, 1991; Hacker, 1992; Tagaki, 1993). Exacerbating these expressions of a racialized American society are the broad, but surely no less significant, transformations and crises in capitalism, especially the damaging consequences for blacks and other communities of color in the recessionplagued US economy. National economic restructuring, dismantling of the welfare state and unemployment, all of which constantly threaten middle- and working-class stability, have served to exacerbate racial hostilities and suspicion (Davis, 1991; Edsall and Edsall, 1991; Johnson and Oliver 1989,1991). To this state of affairs we might also add the social and political construction of immigration and its material effects—reconfigurations of neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and public space (Davis, 1989, 1991; Miles 1992). Together these constructions and their effects have increased resentment and competition over access and entitlements to public services. Such demographic and economic shifts, especially their representation by politicians and the press, have heightened intraracial suspicions

African-american political desire and the seductions of contemporary cultural politics 367 and hostilities between Blacks and Latinos, Blacks and Koreans, blacks and other recent immigrants who compete for already scarce resources and rewards (Johnson and Oliver, 1989). As the Los Angeles riots of April 1992 demonstrate territorial boundaries such as neighborhood, sites of economic exchange and so on become the material site and cultural expression of struggle over community and identity (Davis, 1989; Johnson et al., 1992; Miles, 1992). In short, these material, social and cultural conditions have heightened the appeal and resonance of nationalist identities among various sectors of the black community.7 Essentialism, nationalism and black self-representation Across the United States, African Americans, especially the youth, are explicitly walking, wearing and speaking their blackness. The most general and cursory survey of recent popular self-representations of blacks in film, popular music and television easily reveals persistent and pervasive nationalist constructions of self and community. As Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991), Marlon Riggs (1991), bell hooks (1990), Francis White (1990) and others have argued, these nationalist and masculinist representations in film, popular music and television are contradictory and come with the hidden but consequential costs of silencing, policing, marginalization and violation of the voices and experiences of women and gays and lesbians within black communities. In some of the most notable and commercially successful television shows, music videos and films the construction of blackness and community is mobilized through various emblems of the imagined black nation, a mythic African past, and heroic black masculinity. These are expressed in the dress, hairstyles, language, bodies of young black (mostly) males who wear, speak and look the part of ‘real brothers’. From Do the Right Thing to Boyz’n the Hood, such self-constructions and representations are impossible to miss. Where internal differences of social class, social location, sexuality and gender are represented in many contemporary black self-representations, they have nevertheless been criticized because such differences are the objects rather than the subjects of cinematic representation.8 Perhaps the most controversial and pervasive example of this contemporary black selfrepresentation is rap music.9 Expressed with a compelling (and for some disturbing) ‘in your face’ immediacy and urgency and cleverly rooted in the rich tradition of AfricanAmerican oral vernacular practice, rap has become one of the most contested and influential contemporary sites of black self-representation and identity. Explicit about its symbolic (and for some literal) call to arms in defense of the nation, hip-hop’s most forceful and articulate (male) practitioners continue to seize upon and speak about the(ir) ‘realities’ of being black in America in the 1990s. Such contradictions and policing notwithstanding, these conceptions and representations of the black nation seem to strike a resonant cord for many black youth.10 These expressive self-representations and critiques of white racism are by no means confined to the popular culture and mass media. Indeed, many of these same impulses

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and attractions are evident in the university, professional associations, and conferences.11 The interventions of Molefi Asante, Ron Karenga, and others, the adoption of Afrocentric school curricula in public schools and universities around the country, together indicate that as political visions Afrocentrism and nationalism gathered a certain discursive force as an intellectual formation (Newsweek, 1991). Similarly, the anti-essentialist challenge to unifying categories of identification and identity such as race, gender, and heterosexuality have produced forceful critiques of essentialist and totalizing versions of nationalism. These critiques which have come from black feminist theorists, literary critics and other critical intellectuals concerned with the totalizing dimensions of identity rooted in ‘blackness’, ‘heterosexuality’ and ‘masculinity’ have gained wide circulation in universities, professional organizations and conferences. Such critiques have produced an impressive body of critical scholarship, especially criticism concerned with black self-representation in texts and cultural practices such as films, novels, and popular music, and television. Curiously, unlike some of the essentialist and nationalist impulses that circulate across various segments of black communities, much of this critical writing and commentary remains confined to academic and professional communities. As a political issue, this circulation and confinement to the locality of the professions and academy raises the question of where these discourses circulate, to whom they are directed and their efficacy for social transformation. Essentialist discourses, expressed most powerfully in totalizing forms of nationalism, have aggressively sought out and intervened in those zones and public arenas, especially mass mediated expressive culture, where black men and women do not enjoy the material privilege or the social space to construct themselves differently. Critiques of essentialism and the debates around difference in black self-representation, remain for the most part confined to very specific discursive sites, especially the publishing industry, the university, conferences, and other alternative spaces of cultural production. Conceptualizing cultural struggles and identity politics in terms of differentially positioned and enabled zones helps in part to explain the persistence and attraction for many African Americans of nationalist discourses in the popular media, everyday life and, increasingly, the academy. It is not just that the large number of blacks for whom nationalism remains attractive are incapable of imagining themselves or living their lives differently: rather I contend that the social and material conditions of their lives may not permit them to. In contrast, critical black intellectuals may, indeed often do, live and work in worlds where such possibilities are not constrained in the same way.12 Hence all of these localities constitute important sites of contestation and struggle. But they remain one among many such sites of contestation. Essentialism, postmodernism and (identity) politics It is fair to say that we are all differently positioned and constrained by the circumstance of our locations and the discourses in which we are positioned. Moreover, we experience and negotiate these positions differently. Theoretically, both essentialist and anti-

African-american political desire and the seductions of contemporary cultural politics 369 essentialist categories for constructing ourselves and perceiving the world are available to all of us; however our discursive as well as institutional access to these categories and material sites are not always evenly distributed and available to each of us in the same way. If this is indeed the case, as critical black intellectuals we must take up, in very serious and urgent ways, the desires and circumstances that make the various forms and expressions of nationalism appealing and resonant. We must not simply read on to those desires the arrogance and privilege of our own location. As Gramsci’s insights and Hall’s extensions of them show, politically, it is important to concretely specify those zones and circuits of social life and practice where anti-essentialist and postmodern possibilities and impulses are possible and those where they are not (at least in the current material, political and social condition) (Gramsci, 1971; Hall, 1988). For example, the university as a social and political site where many critical black intellectuals work and form friendships, professional relationships and circulate is, under certain social conditions, perhaps a site of greater transgressive possibilities (West, 1990b). It is, indeed, often possible for those of us operating in these spaces to experience ourselves and others more fully in terms of the multiple and complex subject positions that characterize all of our lives. Just as often, of course, many of us experience (and struggle against) the confinements, rigidities, and inequalities of these institutions. Social and cultural life (and the discourses of identity which circulate) within black communities are characterized by multiple and intersecting cultural zones and social sites. Within these conditions, black self-representations and the political desires they express are contingent, uneven and contradictory: often they are totalizing, closed, constrained, oppressive and fortified at the borders; at other times they are open, fluid and transgressive. Of course this kind of theoretical and political specification implicates critical black intellectuals in our own critical practice. The point is that, whatever their manifestations and circuits, we as critical intellectuals must specify these (and our own) as sites of everyday life and not just read political identifications and desire from our privileged locations. Our critical concepts and the labors they produce must specify and interrogate more carefully where and under what conditions the expressions of essentialist thinking operates as well as those possibilities for antiessential thinking. I think the work of Francis White, Patricia Hill-Collins, Robin D.G.Kelly, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cornel West and John Brown Childs among others are exemplary in this respect. These critical black intellectuals do not excuse or justify the resonance of these categories and constructions so much as they open discursive spaces for strategic interventions (political and analytic) that allow us to struggle in and over such sites. Totalizing conceptions and condemnations rather than critical and strategic interventions and deployment simply up the ante without actively moving the debates into those zones where they enlist and mobilize complexly positioned African-American subjects and subjectivities. This means that we too have to remain aware of our own locations and relationships to others. We must be prepared to make critical examinations and interventions across multiple sites of struggle, to struggle in and over culture and to articulate (and dis-articulate) those

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discursive struggles with the material conditions of people’s lives. Notes 1 Thanks to Rosa Linda Fregoso, John Brown Childs, Tommy Lott, Ruth Frankenberg, Richard Yarborough, Kobena Mercer, Lata Mani, Lawrence Grossberg, and Melvin Oliver. Many of the ideas discussed in this paper were clarified through their lively discussion and critical insights. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a 1992 UCLA conference entitled ‘Speaking for the Subject’. My thanks also to the organizers and participants in this conference. 2 Here I refer to recent publications such as Tenured Radicals, The Closing of the American Mind, and Illiberal Education. I also have in mind media coverage of these debates in weekly news magazines such as Newsweek, Time, The Village Voice, The New York Times and news shows such as Nightline and The McNeil/Leher Newshour. 3 For example, recent press reports abound about the escalating homicide rates and violent crimes in urban black communities throughout the nation. In particular, cities like Washington DC, Oakland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Houston, and Miami are rapidly surpassing record highs for homicide rates and violent crimes. 4 In an interesting and slightly different intervention into this debate, legal scholar Derrick Bell notes, ‘[W]ere I a Jew, I would be damned concerned about the latent—and often active—anti-semitism in this country. But to leap with a vengence on inflamatory comments by Blacks is a misguided effort to vent justified fears on black targets of opportunity who are the society’s least powerful influences and—I might add—the most likely to be made the scapegoats for deeply rooted antisemitism that they didn’t create and that will not be cured by their destruction.’ See Bell (1992:121) 5 See Lipsitz (1990:16–17). 6 Here I refer to the public and personal sites such as the state and corporations as well as family and interpersonal relations. 7 For example, the imperatives of territoriality and nationalism is evident in the black and Korean struggles that occured in New York and Los Angeles. 8 On the other hand, where such differences are the subjects of black film representation in projects such as Looking for Langston, Tongues Untied, Paris is Burning, to name only three films that address the issue of sexuality and race, the issue of the subordination of race is usually the object of criticism. 9 In television one finds this badge of blackness from across a wide range of genres and programs: from television talk, sports events and advertisements to music television, to situation comedy (e.g., True Colors, Family Matters, It’s a Different World, The Cosby Show) similar codes and emblems of membership in the nation are abundant, clearly identifiable and available to real and imagined members of the nation. In addition, given the circuits of television (e.g., music television, sports and

African-american political desire and the seductions of contemporary cultural politics 371 advertisement) the nationalist sensibilities of rap are also found in television. 10 Both at Northeastern in Boston, my former university, and UCSC, my current one, I have found a number of graduate and undergraduate students interested in pursuing papers, thesis and dissertations on nationalism and rap. 11 I think particularly of the activities and controversies at City College in New and San Francisco State in California. 12 Thanks to John Brown Childs for his clear insights on this issue. References Bell, Derrick (1992) Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism, New York: Basic. Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1991) ‘Beyond racism and misogyny: Black feminism and 2 Live Crew’, Boston Review, 16:6. Davis, Mike (1989) ‘Homeowners and homeboys: urban restructuring in LA’, Enclitic, 9–16. ——(1991) City of Quartz, London: Verso. ——(1992) ‘In LA, burning all illusions’, The Nation, 1 June:743. Edsall, Thomas Byrne and Edsall, Mary (1991) Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, New York: Norton. Gates, Henry Louis (1991) ‘Beware of the new pharaohs’, Newsweek, 23 September:47. ——(1992) ‘Black demagogues and pseudo-scholars’, New York Times, 20 July:A15. Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections From The Prison Notebooks, trans. Q.Hoare and G.Nowell Smith, New York: International Publishers. Hacker, Andrew (1992) Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, and Unequal, New York: Scribner’s Sons. Hall, Stuart (1985) ‘Signification, ideology, and representation: Althusser and the poststructuralist debates’ Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 2:91–114. ——(1986) ‘On postmodernism and articulation: an interview’, Journal of Communication, 10:45–60. ——(1988) ‘Toad in the garden: Thatcherism among the theorists’, in Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (1988) editors, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois: 35–57. hooks, bell (1990) Yearnings: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, Boston: South End Press. Johnson, James H.Jr and Oliver Melvin (1989) ‘Inter-ethnic minority conflict in urban America: The effects of economic and social dislocations’, Urban Geography 10:449– 63. ——(1991) ‘Economic restructuring and black male joblessness in U.S. metropolitan areas’, Urban Geography, 12:542–62. Johnson, James H.Jr. et al. (1992) ‘The Los Angeles rebellion, 1992: a preliminary assessment from ground zero’, UCLA Center for the Study of Urban Poverty, Occasional Working Paper Series. Institute for Social Science Research, Los Angeles: UCLA. Lipsitz, George (1990) Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular

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Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Miles, Jack (1992) ‘Blacks vs. Browns’ The Atlantic, October:41–70. Newsweek (1991) 23 September. Riggs, Marlon (1991) ‘Black macho revisited: reflections of a snap queen’, Black American Literature Forum, 25:389–95. Tagaki, Dana (1993) The Retreat From Race: The Asian American Admissions Controversy, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. West, Cornel (1990a) ‘The new cultural politics of difference’, pp. 19–39. Ferguson, Russell, Gever, Martha, Minh-ha, Trinh T. and West, Cornel (1990) editors, Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, Cambridge: MIT Press. ——(1990b) ‘Theory, pragmatism, and politics’ in Johnson, Barbara and Arac, Jonathan (1990) editors, The Consequence of Theory, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ——(1991) ‘Black anti-semitism and the rhetoric of resentment’, Tikkun 7:15–17. ——(1992) ‘Learning to talk of race’ The New York Times Magazine, 2 August:24–6. White, E.Francis (1990) ‘Africa on my mind: gender, counter discourse and African American nationalism’, Journal of Women’s History, 2:73–97.

KIRSTEN MARTHE LENTZ

THE POPULAR PLEASURES OF FEMALE REVENGE (OR RAGE BURSTING IN A BLAZE OF GUNFIRE) ‘You are a beautiful woman… Why would you want to become a cop?’ ‘Because I like to slam people’s heads up against walls.’ (Kathryn Bigelow, Blue Steel, 1989) ‘Women are seething with repressed anger and rage, feelings that could well burst to the surface in a blaze of gunfire.’ (Sonny Jones, editor of Women & Guns, 1991a:15) The women of Hollywood’s contemporary cinematic imagination are armed and dangerous. Everywhere they take up weapons heroically in the name of justice (Silence of the Lambs, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Thelma and Louise, Blue Steel, etc.), or hysterically in the name of jealousy or sexual promiscuity (Single White Female, Basic Instinct). Admittedly, the place most often occupied by women in Hollywood cinema is that of the victim; in fact, the ‘action’ of the ‘action film’ may often be defined by a sequence of events in which a male character heroically ‘frees’ a female character from her position of victimization (or, if he’s too late, he must avenge her death).1 However, a growing number of films which I will discuss in this essay construct female characters as the subjects of violence as they seek justice or revenge.2 Thelma and Louise (1991), Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), VI Warshawski (1991), Eve of Destruction (1991) and Blue Steel (1989)3 all position the white woman as (respectively) an outlaw, a revolutionary warrior, a private detective, a cybernetic military weapon and a cop. In so doing, these films create an opportunity to read sexual ‘difference’ as women take up this new relationship to violence.4 Central to the construction of women as the subjects of violence is the relationship between ‘woman’ and that technology which removes her from her more common positioning as ‘victim’: her gun. Women’s knowledge of, aptitude with and willingess to use guns affords a pleasure familiar to feminists: the female subject masters with utter competence a ‘masculine’ practice, attitude and/or domain. (Perhaps one could say that guns are one of the most overdetermined, almost comically obvious signifiers of ‘masculinity’: they are long, hard, dangerous, deadly and essentially serve the function of discharge.)5 This pleasure clearly participates in the liberal narrative of ‘gender role’ transgression. But the fact of the deadliness of guns and the evocation of a specifically

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female revenge which motivates their use complicates this liberalism; this paper will explore the complex representations of women’s use of guns which allow us to stage an imaginary and violent revolution against the forms of gender oppression we face as women. (Specifically, in these texts the oppression against which women struggle often takes the form of rape.) The pleasures of female revenge are specific to the particular historical moment in which late twentieth-century feminism has been popularized. The nature and historical context of these popular mobilizations of feminism will become a primary focus of this paper as I move beyond the film texts in order to explore two related discourses which attempt to define female victimization, pleasure and revenge: I will discuss women’s positions within pro-gun discourses, especially as they exist in a specialty magazine for women entitled Women & Guns. And I will introduce the terms of a feminist discussion which similarly struggles to define the positions of pleasure and danger for women: the pornography debates of the 1980s. I want to demonstrate that the constructions of women with guns in popular cultural texts and the pleasures which they enable for their audiences bear residual traces of the two opposing discursive strategies of the feminist porn debates. The porn debates— otherwise known as the ‘sex wars’—have had a profound impact upon cultural understandings of feminist and female ‘rage’. In addition, it was in the context of these debates that a shift occurred in constructions of women more generally: many feminists challenged the overdeterminedly victimized subject of the antiporn faction, and instead began to theorize a subject for whom victimhood, danger and pleasure exist in profoundly complex ways. Thus, the sexual ‘bad girls’ of the sex wars interestingly serve as ancestors to the violent ‘bad girls’ of the texts I explore here. The films I discuss in the first section will serve as a point of departure for this analysis since they provide such powerful examples of the pleasures of female revenge. After having laid the narrative terrain in this manner, I will explore the ‘real life’ discourses about real guns and real women. This will provide a sense of how these pleasures have come to be articulated to conservative politics. And, finally, I will suggest some of the political implications of these strange articulations through a discussion of the history of feminist discourses and their movement into the realm of the popular. Both ends of the gun While filmic representations of women using guns enable particular pleasures for the audiences which consume them, these representations simultaneously produce tensions which operate on the terrain of sexual difference. In other words, a woman (as opposed to a man) with a gun is not an entirely unproblematic cinematic image. Films problematize representations of armed women through the ambivalent way they position women vis-àvis danger. A woman’s use of guns does distance her (albeit only slightly most of the time) from her overdetermined position of victimhood, but often this distance is tenuous or obviously temporary. It is this tension between being in danger and being dangerous

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which supplies both the pleasure of her deadly power and the problem of her defeat. Thelma and Louise provides an example: early in the film, a man attempts to rape Thelma. Once Louise shoots and kills the rapist, the thrill of the movie involves the expansive distance the two women achieve from victimization through the relationship that develops between the women and their gun(s). This film is very specific about this distance: it is a form of freedom from the mundane danger and oppression imposed by men upon women in daily life. So after J.D.steals their life savings, Thelma robs a convenience store. Thelma and Louise lock a quivering police officer in the trunk of his car (with air holes). They gleefully blow up a sexual harasser’s semi. But the end of the film again collapses the distance established by these daring actions as the two women literally become the target of a hundred men’s loaded guns.6 Blue Steel intensifies this tension because its plot lacks the period of temporary ‘freedom’ from danger achieved in Thelma and Louise. Police officer Megan Turner’s relationship to her gun—and to danger—becomes problematic immediately when she shoots and kills (with six bullets to the chest) an armed burglar in a grocery store. When a psychotic customer who witnesses the shooting makes off with the burglar’s gun, Turner temporarily loses her badge due to her ‘excessive use of force’. Making use of the stolen gun, the psychotic customer/witness then initiates a complicated series of crimes which pointedly victimize Turner. Turner therefore simultaneously acts as an object of violent attack (the witness eventually rapes her) and as its perpetrator. Like Thelma and Louise, Megan Turner understands the gun from both of its ends.7 But one would only need to have seen Harrison Ford in any of his many ‘action’ roles to note that the dialectics of being the subject and the object of violence are a major component of many action films, including those that heroize male characters. William Warner (1991) makes a similar observation in his article, ‘Spectacular action: Rambo and the popular pleasures of pain’. He argues that the pleasure of watching these ‘spectacular’ action films involves the two-part structure of the films’ narratives. In the first part, the pleasure is dependent upon the depiction of the ‘masochism’ of the protagonist: ‘The appeal of these films depends upon subjecting hero and audience to a certain masochistic scenario—the pleasure of intensely felt pain, and crippling incapacity, as it is written into the action, and onto the body of the hero’ (1991:673). The suffering of the hero then becomes the logical justification and pleasurable release afforded by the sadistic second part of the narrative: The final cascade of spectacular action achieves its ‘liberation effect’ by oscillating from a passive, ‘feminine’ masochistic position to an active, ‘masculine’ sadistic one. Now Rambo can channel all his righteous, vengeful fury into an attack upon the enemy (1991:680). Clearly, these gendered positions have different implications depending on whether or not the ‘spectacular action’ is embodied by a male or female agent. But in order to discuss women’s relationship to violence and violent action, one must first shift the terms of the argument from Warner’s masochism-to-sadism progression, which are clearly tied up in definitions of masculinity, to the ones I’ve already been employing: a movement

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from being the object of violence (victimization) to being its subject (aggression). I make this shift because, while it is appropriate to understand the Rambo films in terms of the psychology of the male hero/Vietnam vet and his tortured relationship to killing, this scenario does not serve to describe the psychology of women’s relationship to violence, which, as I have argued, resonates most strongly as abuse committed against them. In other words, since ‘masochism’ suggests that one subjects oneself-however involuntarily—to pain (instead of being subjected to it by others), this term cannot account accurately for women’s relationship to the pain resulting from battery and rape. By turning away from the internal, psychological masochism/sadism distinction towards the victimization/aggression binary, I am attempting to foreground the historical forces, external to women’s psychologies, which oppress them. Doing so provides a more accurate understanding of these filmic constructions of women with guns. ‘Spectacular action’ narratives construct a position for women which capitalizes upon their real, material experiences of a tenuous relationship to danger. With heroes like Rambo, the ‘pleasure of pain’, exists because the audience narratively understands that pay-back is near and that this painful interlude is a temporary form of victimization/masochism. However, for the heroine, this is not always the case. In fact, as I’ve already shown, the dynamic reverses so as to create the sense that it is her agency/freedom which is only temporary and that she will soon return to her normally victimized, compromised position. However, some films which feature women as the subjects of ‘spectacular action’ manage to circumvent this dynamic altogether, thus producing pleasures in the way that Warner describes (they construct a temporary pleasure in pain and a liberatory pleasure when the time for pay-back arrives). A skeletal narrative summary of V.I.Warshawski (focusing upon Warshawski’s movements) provides an example: (1) thugs beat up Warshawski; (2) Warshawski arms herself; and (3) Warshawski becomes literally castrating as she violates the main thug: she clamps his balls in a nutcracker. Likewise, T2 loosely follows Warner’s formula. The film intertextually depends upon the first Terminator film in which Sarah Connor’s initial ‘victimization’ occurs. Then, with the beginning of T2, she endures the torture chambers of an institution for the criminally insane before she breaks out, arms herself and the violence of her actions begins.8 The attitude a film betrays about the brutality it represents is an important component of ‘action’ narratives. Action films often construct the power and agency of a male protagonist simultaneously with his ‘victimization’: I call it nonchalance. Harrison Ford always has a wry smile and a one-liner despite the bloody swelling of his face. V.I.Warshawski, for what must be the first time in film history, allows its female protagonist to occupy this position: as the members of organized crime deal numerous unrestrained blows to Warshawski’s face, she sarcastically wise-cracks her own blows to their masculine egos (after having managed to physically bruise their bodies). Meanwhile, she complains that the blood will stain her cashmere jacket. The absolute lack of fear in the character, combined with her snide remarks, establishes a new subject position for women in film, one which ironically foregrounds her agency through the obviousness of her status as a temporary victim. (One might similarly describe the hard-

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bodied determination of T2’s Sarah Connor—played by Linda Hamilton—as she becomes increasingly bullet-ridden.) These narratives produce the potential for a specifically feminist, popular pleasure (or a pleasure which turns on the production of a popular feminism). It is thrilling to see a character, male or female, break into action against what the individual film defines as oppressive and unjust. But it can be doubly thrilling to see the woman act fearlessly, independently, even violently against that which oppresses her (or those she seeks to protect). The context of the cultural overdetermination of woman as the passive, masochistic, silent (or shrieking), and powerless victim she has often been in the film, fiction, television and everywhere else her representations appear (even, as I will argue later, in some manifestations of feminism) can intensify the ‘liberation effect’ of the ‘sadistic’ shower of bullets the protagonist may vengefully produce in the ‘final cascade’. In other words, the oppressive conditions which women must endure as women offer a powerful narrative justification for the ‘spectacular action’ of their violence. These films thus capitalize two-fold on the transgression of a woman stepping into the perpetrator’s shoes.9 Though many of the films I discuss here appeal to a (popularized) feminist discourse to provide a ‘justification’ for female violence, that justification is often problematized by a pervasive ideology which insists upon ‘woman’s’ special relationship to moral purity. All action films which represent deadly brutality must set up a ‘moral alibi’ in order to ensure that the viewer will experience the killing with pleasure. However, the immorality of killing doesn’t seem to be a preoccupation of action films which feature men as heros. Although morality does become a general issue in T2, rarely is there a moral anxiety produced by the image of Arnold Schwarzenegger as he ritualistically dresses and arms himself before he embarks for the mass kill. (I am thinking here in particular about Commando). One could make the same argument about the Rambo films, the Steven Segal films, and many Rutger Hauer films (remember ‘fuck the bonus’ in Wanted Dead or Alive?). In contrast, the moral problem of killing does pose something of a hindrance for female characters. All of the films I discuss in this paper problematize women’s relationships to killing in some significant way. T2 is perhaps the most obvious example. The film problematizes killing in general, not only as it relates to Connor: the Terminator receives a lesson in morality from young John Connor who stops him from killing a man, screaming, ‘Jesus, you were going to kill that guy!’ The cyborg responds: ‘Of course. I’m a terminator.’ Connor manages to ‘reprogram’ the Terminator by arguing that ‘you just can’t go around killing people.’ However, despite the general message about killing that T2 seeks to advance, the film articulates the immorality of killing to Sarah Connor in a way which foregrounds her maternity and her feminine purity. After having ritualistically prepared for the kill in the tradition of Commando, Connor collapses midway through the sequence, breaks into tears and berates herself for having ‘almost done it’. Shortly thereafter, having quickly learned from her mistake (so much so that she can disavow her own implication in acts of violence), she produces a global criticism of men for their intimate relationship with the creation of things that destroy and a global affirmation of

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women’s relationship to the creation of life. In an expression of utter disgust she says: Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb. Men like you thought it up. You think you’re so creative. You don’t know what it’s like to really create a life. To feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death! Clearly, female moral obligation in matters of life and death is an important ideological strand in the construction of women with guns. Here, the feminist critique becomes a means of articulating the feminine nature of moral purity and of reinforcing the assumption that moral purity is women’s—and not men’s—job. Eve of Destruction continues this theme: this film provides an explicit example of what happens when armed and dangerous women lack the superior moral rectitude which nature normally affords them. The narrative of this film constructs a difference between a cyborg woman/killer who has no moral conscience, no repressions and no inhibitions and the real, flesh-and-blood, female doctor who created her. In constructing this difference, the film speaks volumes about the relationship between woman and the specificity of her revenge. Dr Eve Simmons creates Eve 8, a cyborg commissioned by the US Defense Department to serve as an assassin. Eve 8 not only has superhuman strength, but she also has nuclear capabilities if she is so activated. (Significantly, the nuclear bomb is located in her uterus. When she does ‘become activated’ we seen a tiny beam of electricity shooting down her Fallopian tubes.) Dr Simmons programmed Eve 8 so that the cyborg shares all of her own physical and emotional attributes, including the memories of her life experiences. One day Eve 8, who has been sent out on a ‘test run’, gets stuck in the midst of a bank robbery and is shot. The bullet triggers an emotional (uterine?) transformation and she therefore starts to act on her own volition, causing the military to lose control of her. Her inventor explains that as a result of the ‘violence she’s sustained’ in the bank, Eve 8 has ‘lost her inhibitions’. Subsequently, Eve 8 haunted by her memories acts out her (the doctor’s) anger by shooting men who sexually harass her: throughout the film, men who call her ‘bitch’ quickly bite the dust. The cyborg also responds to the (formerly) repressed sexual fantasies of the doctor who explains that Eve 8 ‘is doing things I might think about doing but would never dare to do or have the courage to do.’ So the ‘damage she’s sustained’ does not only allude to Eve’s bullet-ridden body, it is also a reference to Eve’s emotional history which is replete with experiences of abusive men. Eve 8 bears the doctor’s memories of Eve’s father who battered and emotionally abused Eve and her mother, and who eventually killed the mother in the presence of the child. Because these are the memories stored in her banks, Eve 8 behaves accordingly; when men abuse her verbally in the film, Eve 8’s reaction against them is a reaction against the ‘damage she’s sustained’ as a women in a misogynist world. And, in the ultimate gesture of feminist revenge, Eve 8 kills the Father. Given the hardened, disciplined, serious and, above all, ethical character of the doctor, Eve 8 demonstrates what would happen if that ‘feminine’ moral rectitude disintegrated: women would (1) be sexually potent, desirous, just plain horny, and (2) pose a perilous danger to men, who, in this scenario, have been the abusers, murderers and harassers of women. In this film and in many others I’ve mentioned (Thelma and Louise, Blue Steel,

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and even, more subtly, V.I.Warshawski), female revenge becomes an issue defined along the embattled lines of gender and sexuality. The pleasures of the film may thus be connected to particular forms of pleasure active within the broadly defined field of feminism; that is, the pleasures of acting in accordance with feminist rage. Eve of Destruction dramatizes—at a safely sci-fi distance—what might happen were women to act out violently—and with guns—against that which oppresses them as women: men. It is therefore a film about a not-so-latent male anxiety about feminism (that its logical conclusion will lead women to kill sexist men). It is also a film about the pleasures that women may experience through the production of that very anxiety. The films I’ve discussed in this section all negotiate these male anxieties and female pleasures in various ways. In the following section, I will locate these narrative pleasures in a historical context which has placed real guns into the hands of an increasingly large number of women. The narrative pleasures of female revenge thus transcend the cinematic context; they also organize a set of material practices. These pleasures therefore have real material implications for women (and men) as women take up weapons. I have spoken in particular and at length about Eve of Destruction because it provides an excellent segue into the broader cultural terrain which constructs a relationship between women and guns in ways consistent with these narrative pleasures. Within this terrain, one might say that Eve 8 serves as a dominant metaphor. Locked in battlefield mode ‘How dangerous is she?’ ‘She could be really dangerous if she’s locked in battlefield mode.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘Battlefield mode is Eve 8’s highest state of readiness. It means she’s a split second away from using force to protect herself against what she perceives as terminal harm’ (Eve of Destruction, Gibbens, 1991).

The ‘pleasures’ enabled by images of women taking up arms to protect themselves from (or to vengefully attack) men have a counterpart in material conditions. The National Rifle Association has long been advocating the use of handguns by women for selfdefense. Over the past ten years, the number of women who purchase handguns has steadily risen. According to a 1988 Gallup poll, 15.6 million American women own a handgun, shotgun or rifle (Time, 14 October 1991:33). For Smith and Wesson, a manufacturer of weapons, this statistic represents a solid market in guns for women: in 1989, Smith and Wesson began to market a handgun called the ‘LadySmith’. Their decision to carve out a market for women at this particular moment appears to be related to their steadily decreasing sales (to largely male consumers). Letty Pogrebin, a writer for The Nation, argues:

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The LadySmith and other guns designed expressly for women may also …be the industry’s last resort for improving sales. Since 1982 overall gun production is down and sales have dropped 30 percent, yet over the same period the number of woman gun owners has increased by at least 2 million. S & W’s ad campaign accompanied the biggest push into the women’s market that the industry has seen (1989:668). Like the filmic narratives of Thelma and Louise, Blue Steel, Eve of Destruction, and V.I.Warshawski which rely upon ‘feminist’ renderings of men’s victimization of women to justify the deadly sensibilities of their heroines, the marketing discourses which seek to sell guns to women similarly employ feminist discourses to motivate and justify weapons ownership. The articulation of guns to feminism in the films is, among other things, a ploy to ‘freshen’ the narrative film product (through an innovation which alters the typical action film formula) and an attempt to adapt to the ever-changing pleasures of the audience/consumers. Similarly, corporations that sell guns capitalize on the existence (and insist upon the necessity) of a deadly feminist sensibility. Once a potential ‘need’ is established (in this case, women protecting themselves from dangerous men), the advertiser attempts to tap the most popular and powerful discursive reservoir which will most persuasively construct that need. In this way, it becomes possible to connect a real problem—shared in the imaginary (and often in the life experiences) of a particular audience—to the solution provided by the product. This strategy, employed by both advertisers and proponents of gun ownership, cemented a popular version of liberal feminism to the women-and-guns equation. As Pogrebin demonstrates, ads for weapons and the related paraphernalia rely on a construction of women as self-sufficient, independent, fearless and level-headed people. Women don’t need the protection of men. The gun (and sometimes a specially designed purseholster) is the ‘only backup you’ll need’.10 Likewise a Smith and Wesson brochure reads: ‘Independence…. As more women have entered the job market, become heads of households, purchased their own homes, they’ve taken on a whole new set of responsibilities. For their own decisions. For their own lives. For their own and their families’ security’ (Pogrebin, 1989:668). On the other hand, while advertisers clearly must rely on images of fearless, levelheaded, independent women who can use guns to successfully avoid victimization, they must simultaneously employ another image of woman as well: the rape victim. An ad for the Second Amendment Rights Foundation, a group which opposes handgun regulation, depicts an attractive woman with a bruised face saying, ‘Last night I was raped… Where were the police?’ This type of appeal to fear shifts the construction of women back to the helpless, victimized girls who need guns because their male protectors are imperfect. Therefore, the narrative contradiction between women’s proximity to and distance from victimization which plays out in the cinematic images of women with guns, is likewise deployed in promotional/advertising discourses. Literally ‘arming’ oneself means accepting the call of liberal feminism by adopting the role of the independent, aggressive woman. Remaining unarmed consigns women to a pathetic and regressive victimhood

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antithetical to modern American feminism. However, the advertising discourses which construct a need for female consumption of guns require that that need never be entirely fulfilled. The promise of safety provided by the product—guns—must never be satisfied if the continued consumption of that product is to be encouraged. Therefore, the contradictory construction of women (as both victims and non-victims) and of ‘the times’ (as both safe and unsafe) is symptomatic of advertising strategies generally which seek to establish the use value of a product but never actually deliver it. The sweetness of revenge can be sold, but never supplied. Nevertheless, one may wonder about the location of the ‘male anxiety’ dramatized by Eve of Destruction as these ads and advocacy groups construct women as violent feminist subjects for the purpose of selling revenge. While evidence of that anxiety is not always immediately apparent, there does exist an ambivalence about feminism which characterizes some discourses about women with guns. For example, Paxton Quigley, author of Armed and Female and a well-known proponent of armed self-defense for women, describes ‘the moment’ she realized the need for her book in the following terms: The next thing I knew, I was holding a compact, stainless-steel revolver and Mr. Clayton was commending me on having the good sense to recognize the need for a woman to protect herself these days—wife and daughter, he said, both had handguns and knew how to shoot them well—because a woman should never depend on any man to always be there to protect her. Mr. Clayton wasn’t much of a women’s libber, he said, but he had taught his daughter early on that she shouldn’t ever trust men to do anything she should be able to do herself (1989:xiv, emphasis mine). This is a strange statement in more ways than one. For someone about to embark on the writing of a 223-page volume, Quigley seems uncomfortable that her project might be interpreted as a matter of ‘women’s lib’. She therefore evokes the argument that men can’t always be there and that therefore, out of necessity, women must learn to act outside the bounds of their properly defined womanly capabilities. Quigley abandons the charged trajectory of female self-sufficiency, opting for a safer line. Thus, for her, the resonant element of Mr Clayton’s advice was his reference to the dangerous present: ‘His words “These Days” echoed in my ears. He was right: these days were far more dangerous than those days’ (1989:xiv). The focus of her polemic assumes a mythical, (and largely untheorized) ‘safe’ past which in turn produces an ‘obviously’ dangerous contemporary moment. In this way, she avoids a reliance upon the assumption that women have changed (much less become revolutionary subjects). Instead, the change which has necessitated this unsavory and aggressive behavior is ‘the times’. The futuristic, dystopic present, much like that presented by Terminator 2, necessitates a change in women’s behavior, a change in the bodies of women like ‘Sarah Connor’. Since ‘times have changed’, women can no longer push their babies on swings in playgrounds (as Connor imagines they have), but must train for battle instead. For Quigley, Mr Clayton, ‘Sarah Connor’, and in many other texts across the terrain of

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women-and-guns, this imaginary ‘change’ is a matter of common sense. Despite the contradictions which would seem to impede the intersection of these two ideological trajectories—feminism and gun advocacy—they nevertheless do merge. And despite the masculine fears documented by films like Eve of Destruction, a bland construction of ‘feminist revolution’ can be evoked in order to service the ‘changing times’ and therefore also the need for armed women. Consider the following passage: There are many other women who…are armed. They represent a growing movement. In fact it is a quiet drive that began in the late 1960s, with more women living alone and working outside of the home and having more disposable income. In turn, women have become accessible targets, not only for rape, but for robbery and assault, and the need for personal protection has become more acute. (Quigley, 1989:7) This passage suggests a special affinity between the feminist movement and the increasing use of guns by women. One might interpret that affinity as a simple matter of an increasingly popular feminist sensibility which inundates North American culture and which has produced in women the desire to protect themselves. But the passage also suggests that it was feminism which initially caused the problem: feminism made women more vulnerable to attack in the first place. Thus, in the imaginary present, women occupy a dangerous position created by feminism.11 Guns promise to move them back into safety again. A powerful aspect of Quigley’s book and of most discussions of women’s ownership and use of guns for self-defense lies in the way they construct women’s vulnerability to attack, especially to rape. Terrifying ‘success’ stories in which women face attack/nearrape and shoot (or at least point the gun in the direction of the assailant) fill the pages of Quigley’s book. In a chapter entitled ‘Rape and consequences’, the author equates the effects of rape with death. Her construction of the women who survive rape contains the strong implication that, given its deadening effects, they would be better off dead. She recounts many stories which depict exuberant, virginal, church-going, young women who become lifeless, one-dimensional and immobile after the attack. While I do not wish to deny the horror of rape experienced by women who become the victims of men, it does seem important to avoid compounding their powerlessness with such a stock denial of their capacity to overcome, resist and survive. But, of course, Quigley’s polemic requires that in a world in which rape is so horrifically common, the only possibility for women’s agency whatsoever is to buy a gun and to be ready and willing to use it to kill.12 Therefore, the narratives which fill Quigley’s pages depict the woman who gloriously transcends her essential vulnerability as she moves up into the little-populated territory of female independence. In others words, she wields her gun. While Quigley reduces women to vulnerable creatures who really need men’s protection but who will just have to buy guns instead, a new, woman-controlled publication entitled Women & Guns produces a more irreverent image of women. The magazine has been around since 1989, but recently made its controversial debut on newsstands in August 1991. Published by a gun lobby, the Second Amendment Rights

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Foundation, this magazine articulates ‘cultural feminist’ discourse13 to an extremely patriotic, conservative position on the possession of weapons. Although the magazine does deal with shooting for sport, it mostly concentrates upon the use of guns for selfprotection. Rape is its central preoccupation. Women & Guns is a magazine designed specifically by white women and for white women. But there are elements of racism and classism implicit in the politics of this magazine which transcend the more obvious fact that it does not market itself to women of color or the lower/under classes. This racism/classism lies in its reliance upon the ultra-conservative politics of weapons possession, a politics which pits itself against the ‘welfare state’, and the ‘lazy’ poor who supposedly threaten to rise in rebellion against the government when public aid funds inevitably run out. Thus, the paranoid logic goes, ‘we’ need guns to protect ‘ourselves’ on that fateful day. Although this line of thinking is not an overt concern in Women & Guns, it is an implicit anxiety. In the February 1990 edition, Sonny Jones writes: while the anti-gun, pro-crime liberals study human nature and the political machine sucks up our hard-earned money like a vacuum cleaner possessed, only to disgorge it directly into the hands of poor unfortunates who quickly convert it to drugs and alcohol, we the people are supposed to be good workers during the day and willing victims at night (1990:6). ‘Here, we the people’ works to exclude women (and men) of color as well as the poor from its platform, instead defining ‘us’, the supposedly upstanding, white, and middle class, in opposition. I will return to the issue of race as it relates to feminist constructions of rape shortly.

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The white female subjects of Women & Guns are, without apology, ‘locked in battlefield mode’, the battlefield being the territory upon which ‘the sexes’ (to the exclusion of ‘the races’ and ‘the classes’) are at war. The tone of the magazine, set largely by its outspoken former editor, Sonny Jones, establishes the sense that these women intend to be calm, prepared and enthusiastic not only in the event of an attack by the random rapist, but also more generally in order to ‘preemptively strike’ against ‘male power’ (Jones, 1991a:14–16). The magazine confronts arguments for gun control, as they relate to women, as acts of sexism, and as ‘common ploy[s] used to perpetuate women’s status as victims’ (Jones, 1991c:7). According to Jones, such arguments ‘dismiss our need to take responsibility for our safety as unnecessary, ineffective, and down-right socially unacceptable’ (1991c:7). Jones moves closer to an explicitly feminist critique by aligning the gun cause with other typically feminist battles. In this passage, Jones attacks the opponents of Women & Guns: Their message is that women should drift along in a fantasy land where nothing bad happens to nice ladies who behave appropriately, and if the unthinkable does befall them, they should dial the magic 911 number so the nice policeman can come save them. Sadly, such sociological dinosaurs believe in fighting for women’s equality in the work place and often even support women’s right to reproductive freedom. But, ironically, they draw the line at approving of women who exercise the right to protect themselves from bodily harm in the form of rape, assault, or murder (Jones, 1991c:7). The white woman, as she is constructed in Women & Guns, acts in reaction against rape, against victimization, against sexism and, simultaneously, against gun control. She is not a ‘good girl’ and she knows it. She fights against ‘a system’ which is abstractly construed, but which she knows does not work to her advantage. Unlike Paxton Quigley who tiptoes around the issue of female self-sufficiency, she does not ‘need’ men for anything and she gets a charge out of their fear of her competence with guns. Like Eve 8, she is at the ‘highest state of readiness’, just a ‘split second away from using force to protect herself against what she perceives to be terminal harm.’14 The attitudes about women’s ownership of guns in the popular magazines that reach a more general audience are, of course, very different. Women’s magazines almost exclusively advocate gun control, discouraging women from entertaining the fantasy that guns will ‘redress the balance of physical power between men and women’ (Harrison, 1985:148). But perhaps because the use of guns for self-defense (in both cinematic

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representation and in gun advocacy) has been so strongly associated with women’s rights, many female writers demonstrate an ambivalence about guns and gun control. After all, no one wants to be a ‘good girl’ because in the feminist context ‘goodness’ symbolically consigns ‘girls’ to obedience and victimhood. Therefore, many women writing about guns argue strongly for gun control, but only after they betray a certain amount of pleasure in and fascination with the power, sexuality and independence which guns seemingly signify. For example, before she denounces the ownership of guns, a writer in Mademoiselle allows herself to observe: Whenever I see a cop with a gun, I want the gun… For years I used to break out in a cold sweat whenever (in a subway car, for example) a cop with a gun in his holster stood with his back to me; I had to restrain myself from easing his gun out of his holster… I didn’t have any plans for the gun. I just wanted it (Harrison, 1985:140). Similarly, Letty Pogrebin argues compellingly against the Smith and Wesson advertising campaign, concluding that ‘fantasies of female power and revenge may be seductive, but the answer to the escalating climate of violence in America is not to arm women but to disarm men’ (1989:668). But on the way to this conclusion she articulates a similar type of ambivalence. When I first heard about the LadySmith revolver, my reaction surprised me. I’m for gun control and nonviolent conflict resolution, yet suddenly I imagined every woman armed, powerful and instantly equalized—not as an aggressor but as a confident defender of her safety and physical integrity. Wait until some guy attacks us on an empty street: POW—one less pervert; BANG—another rapist blown away. And instead of four women being killed by their batterers every day in the United States, pistol-packin’ mamas will fight back: ZAP—victims no more (1989:668)15. In emphasizing the existence of ambivalence in women’s arguments against the ownership of guns, I do not mean to deny their own emphases or efface the contexts in which they appear. But I do think it’s important to trace the boundaries of a sensibility which has become a source of pleasure and fascination for women of many different political affiliations and which is the source that advertisers, movie producers, gun lobbyists, self-defense instructors, and the manufacturers of guns have been discursively attempting to tap.16 The ‘BANG—another rapist blown away, ZAP—victims no more’ narrative encapsulates precisely this guilty (or not-so-guilty) pleasure which Women & Guns seeks to employ in order to build a constituency and a market for weapons. Therefore, the evocation of rape revenge narratives is central strategy in this publication. There are several primary attitudes about rape in Women & Guns which come to be more than a little repetitive. Two of the primary assumptions at work are that (1) men rape women alarmingly often, and (2) with proper training, discipline, and ‘values’, women can

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effectively protect themselves against men who rape. The idea which bridges the discursive gap between these two statements is typical of conservative arguments on the possession of weapons: the legal system is corrupt and inept (making it a further offense to women who are the victims of violent assault). Karen MacNutt, a consulting attorney for the Second Amendment Rights Foundation, the National Rifle Association, and the Gun Owners Action League writes regularly in Women & Guns on legal issues. She provides an example of the ultra-conservative position which holds that the government has too much power and that therefore individuals are losing the freedom to protect themselves against ‘political oppression’. She writes: ‘We are becoming more and more dependent upon professional bodies of armed men for our protection. In that dependence, we render ourselves helpless to those abuses that the arrogance of power leads to’ (1991:11).17 Here, one can begin to discern the way in which conservative ‘freedoms’ and feminist ‘freedoms’ have become (purposefully) conflated. The acquisition of ‘independence’ from central government can easily slide into a feminist demand: the acquisition of ‘independence’ from men (and from a sexist, patriarchal state). Women’s dependence upon men in this scenario ‘renders them helpless’, not to the ‘arrogance’ of central governmental abuses of power, but to men’s abuses of power. The simple replacement of ‘men’ for ‘strong central government’ creates a familiar cultural feminist critique. Women & Guns capitalizes upon this twist of logic, strategically connecting the position against central government to the feminist critique of the sexism of the legal system, thereby producing a position with a powerful unifying force. Many articles from Women & Guns describe the terrifying way in which the police collude with the rapists and assailants who commit crimes against women. The magazine also persistently recounts the strategies used in the courtroom to blame women for the rapes men commit against them. This strong, important and well-supported feminist argument which is typically advanced to enable critiques of a male-powered world here comes to be wedded to an ultraconservative position which typically produces a very different theory of power, one which places white (usually middle-class) men in the victimized position. I have suggested that Women & Guns, like many of the gun lobbies and weapons manufacturers, appeals strongly to what might be thought of as a popular feminist sensibility, an appeal which contains a social critique (men rape women) and which addresses women as independent. But, as I’ve said, Women & Guns contains a more irreverent and spirited construction of women; its social critique is far more pointed. I’d like to argue that, in highly contradictory ways, the discourse of Women & Guns bears the distinctive marks of a precursive sequence of events within the history of feminism: the feminist pornography debates (aka the ‘sex wars’) of the early 1980s. Pleasure and danger I have thus far explored issues of pleasure and danger taking weapons discourses as my point of departure. Now I shift the ground of this critique to look at the ways that these

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issues have become central to feminist discourses proper. I have chosen to situate the ‘women and guns’ phenomenon with regard to the sex wars because these debates allow me to look at other historic practices in which feminist and conservative discourses have merged in the interests of protecting women against rape and violence. The feminist pornography debates of the 1980s provide a compelling historical precedent through which one might understand this phenomenon. Moreover, the terms of the porn debate and the positions it created for the feminist/female subject have had an incredibly powerful influence over the terms of any ‘feminist’ utterance, no matter how unrelated that utterance may be to the topic of pornography. In short, the pornography issue ‘popularized’ feminism. Therefore, it is useful to look at the way that the sex wars have been re-enacted within the cultural terrain of ‘women and guns’. While there are rarely only two opposing positions on any issue, the porn debates did polarize their feminist participants into two general groups: roughly speaking these can be designated as ‘women against pornography’ and ‘feminists against censorship’ (a group which advocates an attention to both pleasure and danger). These two groups generated two particular discursive strategies over a long period of time which have now come to inform the issue of women and guns. Many subgroups fit under the historically complex rubric of ‘women against porn’. The anti-porn groups grew directly out of an anti-rape movement which rapidly proliferated in the early 1970s. In 1971, the first rape crisis centers and hotlines opened across the country. By 1974, when the Feminist Alliance Against Rape arose, feminists felt the need to go beyond the band-aid solution provided by the crisis centers to confront the cultural attitudes about women that perpetuate rape. Feminist attention to representations of women, especially sexual representations, thus originated from the anti-rape perspective. In 1976, Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) arose in Los Angeles. That same year this group defaced and protested the now-famous Rolling Stones billboard (‘I’m black and blue from the Rolling Stones and I love it’), thus causing Warner Brothers to remove it. Consequently, when the more specifically mediaoriented feminist groups such as Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPM) arose, they were able to define their project as the eradication of rape. (WAVPM grew directly out of the 1976 Conference on Violence Against Women in San Francisco.)18 Feminist anti-pornography groups became an increasingly powerful political force after 1976 when they sprang up across the country. The Women Against Violence in Pornography national conference in New York and the Women Against Pornography group (which also arose in New York) provide further evidence of feminism’s increasing conviction that representations of women in the popular media and in pornography cause rape. The shift in the meaning of ‘Take Back the Night’ marches also exemplifies this new attention to ‘negative’ images. According to Nan Hunter, ‘Take Back the Night’ marches originated with an anti-rape/anti-violence theme. The march sought to ‘dramatize women’s insistence on the right to enjoy public space in safety’ (Hunter, 1986:27). But later, anti-porn groups appropriated the Take Back the Night’ theme: in 1978, 5,000 feminists attending a conference on ‘Feminist Perspectives on Pornography’

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marched through San Francisco’s porn district. In a collection of essays entitled Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography, Laura Lederer writes about this event: ‘Take Back the Night was a profound symbolic statement of our commitment to stopping the tide of violence against women in all arenas, and our demand that the perpetrators of such violence—from rapists to batterers to pornographers—be held responsible for their actions and made to change’ (1980:5).19 For many subsequent years, the ‘pornographers’ received the loudest and most public criticism by feminists, who made the porn issue central, not only to the issue of rape, but in a larger sense to feminism as an ideological and political force.20 Thus the anti-porn position became one of the most pervasive and popular feminist discourses available. Despite its many critics, this logically weak, but emotionally powerful position united huge numbers of women against pornography with a life-and-death urgency. The anti-porn position which arose from this historical context constructs ‘men’, ‘women’, ‘sexuality’, and ‘male power’ in static, reified ways. Andrea Dworkin, one of the best-known speakers for this movement, writes: Pornography reveals that male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting; that sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history (1979:69). Here, sex and violence are utterly inextricable; ‘women’ and ‘men’ are respectively consigned to the categories of victims and brutalizers. Proponents of the anti-porn position characterize male brutality as a transhistorical, unchanging and monolithic force which operates as the causal element in every anti-porn argument. ‘Male brutality’ is therefore the source of the representations which ‘objectify’ women, representations which in turn perpetuate and ensure their victimization in everyday life. The concept of ‘objectification’ is central to this theorization of male brutality. In the following passage, another well-known figure in this debate, Catharine MacKinnon, discusses this key concept: To be sexually objectified means having a social meaning imposed on your being that defines you as to be sexually used, according to your desired uses, and then using you that way. Doing this is sex in the male system… If sex is a social construct of sexism, men have sex with their image of a woman. Pornography creates an accessible sexual object, the possession and consumption of which is male sexuality, to be possessed and consumed as which is female sexuality (1989:140). Here, the use of the term ‘objectification’ to explain the oppression of women and to locate the source of male brutality conflates representations, their uses and reception, people, and their sexual practices and fantasies, pressing these complex and nebulous phenomena into one static interpretive framework. Simply put, the fact of rape pre-empts the possibility of a more complex, more permissive, theory and politics of sexual pleasure.

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Given these two bits of testimony, one can begin to understand how the terms of the anti-porn discourse come into play. In its attempt to unveil the pernicious essence of the pornographic, it disallows female agency within sexual representation. She is always already consumed by the forces of male power and definition. She cannot have a healthy sexuality within a heterosexual system, only one which is already co-opted by men. Men, on the other hand, are always already corrupted by the sadism of their culturally inscribed sexualities. Like ‘cultural feminist’ arguments in general, the ease with which anti-porn proponents characterized the categories of ‘women’ and ‘men’ as unproblematic monoliths signals the most devastating problem with their position: its absolute erasure of the complex cultural and political experiences of women of color. Many women of color criticized this feminist position because its construction of victimization and power took white women’s experiences as its implicit and unacknowledged referent. It therefore refused to allow for the multidimensionality of Black women’s lives. Kimberlé Crenshaw describes this problem for African-American women as follows: The singular focus on rape as a manifestation of male power over female sexuality tends to eclipse the use of rape as a weapon of racial terror. When Black women were raped by white males, they were being raped not as women generally, but as Black women specifically: Their femaleness made them sexually vulnerable to racist domination, while their Blackness effectively denied them any protection. This white male power was reinforced by a judicial system in which the successful conviction of a white man for raping a Black woman was virtually unthinkable (1989:158–9). This observation becomes all the more devastating for these anti-rape discourses when one considers how often the rapes of Black women by white men (and, to a much lesser extent, black men) get ‘disappeared’ by the courts, the press and by apologists for rape. Patricia Williams describes, for example, how the terrifying violence inflicted upon Tawana Brawley, a fifteen-year-old Black woman brutally raped and tortured by racist white men in 1988, came to be doubted and finally negated in the mainstream press. Williams observes that in this context, ‘untruth becomes truth through belief, and disbelief untruths the truth’ (1991:176). One then must conclude with Williams and Crenshaw that some ‘belief must allow the rape of white women to be amplified (to such an extent that rage about the rape of white women was once used to falsely legitimate the murder of Black men). Therefore, the continued omission of Black women from feminist anti-rape discourses has profoundly devastating implications: it is a form of racist ‘disbelief’ which plagues the rape narratives of feminist anti-porn discourse, of Women & Guns, and of the Hollywood (and made-for-television) action films which take rape as a central theme. In other words, dominant rape narratives systematically structure this absence.21 Another related point of opposition to the anti-porn position is the criticism that it relies heavily upon conservative, essentialized and constraining notions of what is clearly a white female moral purity. Alice Echols, describing this ‘purity’ as one of the central

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tropes of cultural feminism, writes: Cultural feminist sexual politics really offer us nothing more than women’s traditional sexual values disguised as radical feminist sexual values… On one level, the anti-pornography campaign represents a calculated attempt to unify and fortify a movement seriously divided by the issues of race, class and sexual preference and badly demoralized by the anti-feminist backlash. In their desperate efforts to construct a mass women’s movement to combat male lust, anti-pornography feminists abandon feminism for female moral outrage… Unfortunately, in advocating sexual repression as a solution to violence against women, cultural feminists resort to mobilizing women around their fears rather than their visions (1984:65). And, I would argue, cultural feminists rely on images of white female moral purity so as to render mute the very ‘differences’ which characterize the broad category of ‘women’ and therefore also the women’s movement. Many of the texts I’ve dealt with rely upon these images of white female purity in one way or another: Sarah Connor gives a speech about it (significantly, to a Black man). Paxton Quigley and the editors of Women & Guns similarly evoke church-going, virginal white women. The rape of the woman of color cannot seemingly mobilize the kind of rage which encourages people to buy guns—or to ban pornography and other sexual practices.22 The discursive resurrection of white female purity was, of course, highly suited to a right-wing ideology. Dworkin and MacKinnon publicly allied themselves to the right with the introduction of an amendment to the Minneapolis Civil Rights Ordinance which the two women drafted in 1983. This amendment would have included pornography as sex discrimination on the grounds that pornography promotes violence against women, inhibits access to equal opportunity in education and employment, and, more generally, keeps women subordinate.23 The Minneapolis city council passed the amended ordinance and Mayor Donald Fraser later vetoed it. Different versions of this ordinance were subsequently introduced in cities around the country. In Indianapolis, Beulah Coughenour, a council member who built her political career on anti-ERA work, introduced such a revised version (Hunter, 1986:29). Although the Indianapolis ordinance was passed and signed into law, the American Booksellers Association later challenged it and the ordinance was finally declared unconstitutional.24 In an effort to elucidate the nature of the conservative support for this legislation, Lisa Duggan explains: Right-wing moralists see pornography as representative of social disorder. Its depictions of nonmarital, nonreproductive sex invoke the threatening social changes associated, for them, with divorce, birth control, abortion, miscegenation, and homosexuality. Pornography is understood as a threat to the sanctity and authority of the patriarchal family, and it is made to stand for gender confusion and sexual chaos (1986:68).

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Cultural feminists, whose ideas about patriarchal power and sexuality set them far apart from these conservatives, joined ranks with them, thus allying themselves to a position which defines obscenity and (proper) sexuality in divergent ways. However, the implications of both the conservative and the feminist arguments are equally as repressive and prescriptive (especially with regard to lesbians and sex workers). This problematic coalition arose again in 1985 when feminists (Dworkin and MacKinnon among them) participated in the production of the Attorney-General’s Commission Report on Pornography, which similarly recommended a repressive agenda for controlling sexual images and texts. The chief supporters of the commission’s findings were conservative fundamentalists who see pornography as offensive because it depicts sex outside of marriage and procreation. However, as Carole Vance explains: the Justice Department knew that this position would no longer sell outside the right wing. The attack on sexually explicit material had to be modernized by couching it in more contemporary and persuasive arguments, drawn chiefly from social science and feminism. So the preeminent harm that pornography was said to cause was not sin and immorality but violence (1986:78). Thus, the terms of the Meese Commission’s arguments about pornography became those of feminist discourse: they spoke of porn as ‘degrading to women’, and as ‘violently harmful’. In this way they rearticulated their need to regulate the sexualities of which they disapprove to the feminist need to regulate white, male, heterosexual, violent sexuality, and thus to protect women. An energetic resistance to the anti-porn position began early in the 1970s when many lesbians found that their sexual practices (the practice of S/M in particular) were one of the targets of the anti-porn proponents.25 Feminists continued to develop the terms of this critique during (and after) the 1982 Barnard College conference entitled ‘Towards A Politics of Sexuality’. The conference papers appear in a volume entitled Pleasure and Danger. In its introduction, editor Carole Vance writes: To focus only on pleasure and gratification ignores the patriarchal structure in which women act, yet to speak only of sexual violence and oppression ignores women’s experience with sexual agency and choice and unwittingly increases the sexual terror and despair in which women live (1984:1). Thus, this body of work embarked upon the contested and emotionally wrought project of articulating female sexual pleasure within the context of oppressive conditions for women. It attempted to mediate the battle between female sexual agency and pleasure long denied women and the sociopolitical dangers imposed upon them. It offered a radically new way of perceiving pornography, not as essentially masculine (or essentially heterosexual) and therefore necessarily corrupt, but as an opportunity for women to explore sexual naughtiness (in representational and non-representational practices), and more importantly, to take its production out of the hands of men in order to define it for themselves.

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In the fall of 1984, a group called the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task-force (FACT) was formed by a group of activists/scholars (many of whom had organized the Barnard conference) to oppose the Dworkin/ MacKinnon ordinances. They emphasized the muchignored fact that the ordinances were a serious abridgement of first-amendment rights and a continuation of the oppressive silence imposed upon sexual minorities. They argued that ‘a true concern with violence against women would be expressed in support for such demands as the public funding of battered women’s shelters, the rigorous enforcement of the laws against rape, and economic equality for women’ (Ellis et. al., 1986:8). Like Pleasure and Danger, their book, Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and Censorship, published in 1986, discourages censorship and encourages women’s appropriation of pornographic materials. The volume is filled with pornographic images in historical sequence. FACT designed the book around these images because they felt that part of the problem of pornography for women is that they have had so few opportunities to see it in the first place, much less see it in an unthreatening context. They suggest that women’s exclusion from the consumption and production of sexual images (and, more generally, sexual meanings) have contributed to the intensity of the debate (Ellis et al., 1986:6). While the anti-porn contingent attempted to consolidate support for feminism through a disavowal of (sexual, racial, ethnic, class and religious) differences among women, the feminists who opposed them sought precisely to emphasize those differences. Similarly, these opponents wanted to discontinue the tradition of constructing white female sexuality as innocent—or even as an absence. The anti-porn position attempted to convince us that women have nothing to do with violence; that they have no access to violent practice—whether that ‘violence’ be consensual and playful (as in S/M practices),26 actual, physical brutality, or discursive violence directed towards others (as in the elision of women of color from critiques of rape). But as I have shown, the feminist critiques of the anti-porn position have had a profound and positive effect upon the politics of feminist theory and practice precisely because they have shown us that women cannot be conveniently removed from positions of violence by virtue of being women. In a blaze of gunfire The terms of the two conversations I’ve been describing in which women either talk about sex (and sexual pleasure) or about guns may be extremely different, but they do share the goal of appropriating a historically and culturally overdetermined, masculine terrain and articulating it to their own, explicitly gendered purposes. Similarly, the two political coalitions I’ve discussed—one uniting gun advocates with feminist issues and the other uniting (a more broadly defined group of) fundamentalist conservatives with feminist issues—share the focus upon women’s safety and men’s violence, a focus which foregrounds the emotionally charged issue of rape. Given these similarities, it is not surprising that Women & Guns has adopted the same discursive strategies as did the cultural feminist anti-porn group and, after them, the fundamentalist right. B.Ruby Rich

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predicted in 1986 that the alliance between anti-porn feminists and the religious right would have future repercussions: ‘the recent report from Edward Meese’s pornography commission may provoke manifestations of Right agendas on new feminist fronts’ (1986:554). While I wouldn’t say that the terrain of ‘women and guns’ constitutes a ‘new feminist front’, all of the cultural texts I have described in this paper (which belong to that terrain) together form a variety of slightly varying intersections with the anti-porn discourse, thus producing new articulations of the problem of women as victims and men as rapists/victimizers. apists/victimizer s. If I haven’t already demonstrated the magazine’s dependence upon feminist discourses, one need only turn to the discussion of the Thelma and Louise controversy in Women & Guns to become convinced of it. In defense of the film, an article by Sonny Jones entitled, ‘Thelma and Louise: reality meets movie myth’, argues that most Hollywood films depict ‘violence against women’ on a regular basis. She therefore concludes that the film is refreshing in its novel representation of the female protagonists’ ‘daring and resourceful acts of survival’ (1991a: 13). Jones uses a distinctively cultural feminist rhetoric to address the wild panic with which male film critics attacked Thelma and Louise. Relying upon the notion of objectification, she writes: ‘Critics don’t seem too worried that most male action heroes treat female characters like fast food conveyances— rip open, remove goodies, then crumple and discard the container, or like particularly fine statues—decorative but lifeless’ (1991a:15). Jones similarly employs the notion of ‘male power’ as she describes the film as replete with ‘male power symbols’ and celebrates the ‘rage’ with which Thelma and Louise take action ‘against a male-dominated, corrupt social system’ (1991a:15).27 These representations of men, power, patriarchy and dominant images of women in the media are identical to those employed by women in the anti-porn movement. The only major departure in the representational system of Women & Guns from the cultural feminist, anti-porn discourse would be the representation of women. While the anti-porn discourse presents women as thoroughly dominated victims, the rhetoric of Women & Guns most certainly does not. The ‘woman’ in this discourse may be victimized by men, but she is not ‘a victim’. She is a fighter, a survivor; she kicks ass. Her gun makes her a non-victim.28 And in important ways, her gun pre-empts the possibility of a more overtly politicized feminist theory of women’s subordination. Since the woman has a gun with which to protect herself, she needs no social critique. While the rage of the anti-rape/anti-porn discourse can be located in the pages of Women & Guns, so can a pleasurable fantasy of perfect agency in which women achieve an expansive distance from victimization (as Thelma and Louise do momentarily). This pleasure arises from the reactionary nature of the magazine: the white female subject created by Women & Guns is one which is defined in resistance against men who rape, and against all those who would deny women the ability to kill to protect themselves— whether they be defined as sexist men or gun-control ‘liberals’ (or both). Thus, the pleasures of the magazine’s discourse arise out of a sense of the transgression of gender boundaries, a revolt against sexism, and a refusal of the ‘politically correct’. This is the multilayered, problematic sense in which one might say that the magazine constructs its

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community’s members as ‘bad girls’. Given the nature of some of these pleasures, it seems to me that there are some important similarities between the ‘guns’ discourse here and that of the pro-pron/anticensorship, feminist discourse of the sex debates. Both positions seek to restore agency to women with regard to their sexualities and with regard to rape. Both speak the language of rights: one seeks to protect second amendment rights and the other, first amendment rights. Both discourses explore the taboo realm of a masculine ‘vice’—guns and porn— with an eye to its repercussions on and uses for women. And finally, both establish a pleasurable ‘outlaw’ status for women. The sense of agency produced by these discourses arises from their construction of female rebelliousness, the next of kin to revenge. Upholding the status of the ‘bad girl’ is common to both discourses because it means transgressing gender (and in the pro-porn discourse, it also means transgressing the boundaries of ‘normal’ sexuality). The ‘bad girl’, while she may not always be immune to the dangerous reality of rape (this depends upon whether you speak in the language of guns or porn), nevertheless focuses her eyes sharply upon the potential of her own lethal or sexual power. The pleasures attached to women’s involvement with guns surface in an interestingly fetishistic way in a Women & Guns feature about Linda Hamilton’s ‘mastery’ of the ‘exotic weapons’ of Terminator 2. Editor Sonny Jones writes: ‘Connor puts her hands on the Remington pumpgun. She used the 12 gauge, with its shortened barrel and sidesaddle ammo carrier, to considerable dramatic effect during the scenes where she pumped the slide action repeatedly, using only her weak hand’ (1991b: 14). The pleasure implicit in this statement comes not only from the ‘sexiness’ of the technologically able language; clearly there is a fetishistic voyeurism here which finds a sensual pleasure in Hamilton’s injured, supposedly ‘weak’, but nevertheless powerful body as it skillfully manipulates the ‘machinery’. But Jones doesn’t stop here; she also describes Hamilton’s own pleasure as a virgin to shooting. She quotes Hamilton as saying: There is a certain challenge in getting past [disliking guns], and I actually enjoyed working with the weapons after a while—really enjoyed it’ (1991b:14).29 Whatever that last ‘really’ means is up for grabs. But clearly the pleasures made possible here (and in the films) arise out of the production of woman as powerful (and perhaps sexually powerful). The central narrative which guides this publication (i.e., ‘woman shoots rapist thus saving herself and all of the other women who would have otherwise fallen “prey” to him’) creates a form of agency which has no bounds. ‘Woman’ needn’t drive her car over any canyon cliffs as did Thelma and Louise. She simply lives, knowingly awaiting and preparing for the next unsuspecting rapist who deserves to die (or at least quake beneath her discerning gaze and loaded gun). This seamless narrative constructs a world emptied of dangerous men. Instead, it is women who have become dangerous. The discourse that brings women together with guns has strangely borrowed the most powerful aspects of both of the two political positions which comprised the pornography debates. In so doing, it is a discourse capable of wielding a unifying form of female moral rage, a rage which powerfully attracts women from across the political spectrum despite

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(or perhaps because of) its elision of racial, ethnic and class differences. They become engaged in the revolutionary spirit of the anti-porn warriors, only this time they are armed with more than just a highly problematic ideology; they have real bullets and see their own (formerly) repressed rage ‘bursting to the surface in a blaze of gunfire’ (Jones, 1991a:15). Simultaneously, it is a discourse which avoids the biggest pitfalls of the antiporn position: its reliance on the construction of women as pure, innocent, duped victims. This was a position which was too sexually moralistic, too terrifying, too stultifying and too boring for many women who rejected feminism—or at least that version of it— fearing they wouldn’t be ‘allowed’ to fuck (whomever they want, however they want) anymore. And, finally, as has happened in the past, a conservative discourse once again adopts the terms of a feminist discourse about rape in order that it might further another, somewhat unrelated and certainly dangerous, political end. There is no easy and truly satisfying way to politically organize around the issue of rape. Rapists prove to be elusive targets against which to mobilize a clearly focused political movement. The powerful attraction of the anti-porn movement for so many feminists resided in its ability to funnel women’s anger about rape into and against a more concrete target. ‘[Porn] provides a vehicle for expressing anger, not at an abstract “system” or an economy out of our control,’ (Pally, 1985:795) but at the tangible ‘straw man’ of male sexuality as it is reified in and through pornography.30 Guns operate similarly in relation to the issue of rape. While guns don’t provide an analytical framework for understanding, they do provide a concrete solution to the abstract problem: in other words, ‘protect yourself; kill rapists’. This is another very problematic but emotionally satisfying response. And as I’ve demonstrated, revenge itself, whatever its nature, has an deliciously powerful appeal. In these ways, I have to admit, the magazine Women & Guns is compelling, empowering, and (dare I say?) sexy. Unlike the ambivalent treatment of women in recent action films (in which they are simultaneously victims and also vengeful and dangerous heroines), the women of Women & Guns’ narratives never fail; their dangerousness is seductively absolute. The magazine thus seeks to undo that ambivalence—which is produced by women’s experiences of both pleasure and danger—through a certain political attitude, a way of life, a disciplined body and a conservative set of values. Therefore the magazine’s loyalties are ultimately disturbing as it tries to weave the fantasy of its narrative into the lives of women who don’t only exist as representations, but as people who are just as likely to end up at the other end of the gun. But I prefer to end with a bit of my own ambivalence. Since the anti-porn position insists upon the construction of victimized women and Women & Guns insists upon the construction of dangerous women, it is tempting to blindly celebrate that ‘danger’. However, both positions centralize white female experience in a way which irrevocably pollutes our understandings of danger and victimization alike. Therefore, the cultural terrain of ‘women and guns’ may be criticized on the same grounds that feminists (who fight for a politics of sexual and racial diversity) have waged against the cultural feminist, anti-porn/anti-rape position. But we need not throw out the pleasure engendered by the cultural narratives which

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allow us a powerful fantasy about rape: that is, revenge. In whatever way it is engendered, revenge is an integral element of the pleasurable action of the texts I’ve discussed. Within the context of the televised spectacles of the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings and the trial of William Kennedy Smith, spectacles which have shown us in tortured detail that the justice system does not serve women of all racial and sexual categories, revenge does strongly resonate for its female and feminist audiences. We have not yet found a form of political activism against rape which is both emotionally satisfying and which avoids a dangerous reliance upon the fantasy of perfect agency, sexual panic and a centralized white experience. We need to be critical of rape revenge narratives which privilege the horror of white female victimization over (and to the exclusion of) the horrible victimization of women of color. But by now we’ve learned something from the mistakes of the anti-porn movement: that is, in order to have a successful political movement, we must not only mobilize theories of women’s oppression, but we must also mobilize women’s pleasures. Political subjects cannot find the necessary and sufficient motivation and optimism to effect political change without them.31 Therefore, we can happily come away from the imaginary revolution staged in these texts with a newly earned status as dangerous women, a status which we can appropriate, manipulate, revise and define any way we choose. As empowering fantasies which engage an emergent, popular, feminist sensibility, these embattled texts thus carve out new possibilities for female subjectivity which, if nothing else, make the ‘bad girl’ a little bit worse. Notes I would like to thank the following people for helping me to think through the issues of this essay, for having read and commented on drafts, for calling films and articles to my attention, and for just being so downright encouraging: Lisa Duggan, Kris Straub, Lawrence Grossberg and Paula Treichler. Mostly, though, I owe thanks to Bob Steltman, whose enthusiasm for this topic, whose cinematic expertise, and whose analysis of these issues are heavily represented in this paper. 1 Recent examples of the pervasive ‘boy saves girl’ formula include: Die Hard, Die Hard 2, Lethal Weapon 2 (Riggs avenges his wife’s death), Narrow Margin, Commando, Someone to Watch Over Me, Cape Fear, Desperate Hours and Dead Calm. 2 In this paper I will discuss a particular kind of deadly role that women play in action films: in some more or less conflicted ways these women appear ‘heroic’ in their pain, strength and moral rectitude. Therefore, it is important to separate from my analysis those films that construct women as simultaneously violent and (sexually) pathological as do Basic Instinct and Single White Female (among others). 3 There are other recent Hollywood films which construct their female characters in the same ways I will describe here, but which position them peripherally in the

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narrative: Robocop, Robocop 2 and Predator 2 are recent examples. 4 All of the films I will be discussing involve the representations of white women who shoot at white men. (Except for blaxploitation films, I cannot think of any movies which allow black women to shoot white men.) I will be contextualizing these films within the history of feminism, which has often excluded black women and racial issues and which has been historically dominated by white women. Though one might therefore say that the ‘pleasures’ I deal with here are more central to white women’s experience and history, I would not want to essentialize such experiences and pleasures so strictly along racial lines. I will discuss the implications of these narratives for racial politics shortly. 5 Throughout this paper, it will be evident that one could very easily do a psychoanalytic reading of the ‘women and guns’ domain (e.g., woman moving from a position of ‘being’ the phallus to a position of ‘having’ the phallus). I have opted for a more materialist/discursive analysis. I do not feel that the psychoanalytic framework is necessarily the best way to achieve an understanding of the popular pleasures I will discuss here. Furthermore, I believe that we lack scholarship which attempts to articulate female pleasure—sexual or otherwise—outside the terms of a psychoanalytic theory. While it is clear that in some important ways psychoanalysis enables my own critique, I do not attempt to remain within its confines. It seems to me that psychoanalytic theory often reduces cultural analyses to a narrative which does not always adequately account for the complexity and historical specificity of pleasures, especially those of women. 6 The narrative theme of women killing rapists has a history that would prove to be an interesting topic for another paper. Consider the implications of the Clint Eastwood film Sudden Impact (1983) in which a woman who has been gang-raped travels around killing the rapists. Harry Callahan, a ‘bad’ cop who regularly breaks the rules, lets her off after she gives him a speech about failed justice. In addition, there exist many, many low-budget films with the rape revenge theme (most of which seem to have been made in the 1980s). And rape revenge appears to be a consistent theme in made-for-television movies, especially on the ‘women’s channel’, Lifetime. 7 Similarly, Silence of the Lambs places FBI agent-in-training, Clarice Starling, in the terrifying blindness of a dark basement and positions the audience so that we share the infra-red enhanced sight of the serial killer who stalks her until she shoots him/us. 8 The T2 plot is very complex with regard to violence because it consistently tries to undermine the violent scenes upon which the action of the film depends. Word has it that Schwarzenegger felt that he was not providing a ‘good role model’ for children. Since most of the roles he’s ever played require him to kill more people than one can count (I’ve tried), Schwarzenegger reformed his own character by making a movie which explicitly advertises its ‘zero’ body count (unless you count shattered knee caps). 9 As problematic as this fantasy might be, this is the sense in which I broadly speak of a feminist popular pleasure. In my argument that elements of feminism exist in

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popular cultural texts, I do not wish to imply that there is one feminism, that ‘feminists’ would necessarily celebrate these images or that female viewers will necessarily ‘read’ feminism into the film. I merely wish to demonstrate that in important ways this female pleasure is dependent upon the discursive strategies of certain North American feminisms. 10 See Pogrebin’s (1989) essay for details about the Construction of women Smith and Wesson campaign. I am referring here to an ad for Desantis Gunhide holsters found in Women & Guns. 11 Note here that the omission of wife abuse, male violence within the home, and date rape is crucial to this polemic. Unlike the films, all of the texts that I will talk about—texts which encourage women’s ownership of guns—rely upon this omission. 12 The book Guns for Women: The Complete Handgun Buying Guide for Women, by George Flynn and Alan Gottlieb (1988), similarly appeals to female vulnerability. One section of the book contains 102 narratives describing near rapes/attacks in which the woman successfully wards off her attacker with a gun. 13 I am using Alice Echols’s definition of ‘cultural feminism’ which she presents in her book, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975. She dates ‘cultural feminism’ from about 1973 when it became a hegemonic form of feminist thinking in the United States, displacing ‘radical feminism’. While it is impossible to encapsulate the whole of Echols’ complex argument about cultural feminism adequately here, suffice it to say that cultural feminism insists upon ‘women’s essential sameness to each other and their fundamental difference from men’ (1984:244). What will become important to me for the purposes of my argument is the way that this colonizing, ‘sisterly’ version of feminism gets adopted and put to work towards conservative ends in the name of resistance to rape. 14 The editorial staff—or at least the (now former) senior editor, Sonny Jones—would strongly deny being associated with the term ‘feminism’. The magazine’s writers rarely addresses the issue of feminism, but when they do, they hedge on it, implying that feminism is not an issue for them. They have argued that they are not members of a ‘sub-culture’. Instead, they are ‘normal’ or ‘average’ women. The issue for them is not whether a woman might be considered feminist or not, but rather whether or not she falls under the category of the ‘panty-waist’ (whatever that means). See the review of Thelma and Louise in the September 1991 issue for an idea of how Jones employs this strange distinction. 15 It is important to note here how problematic Pogrebin’s use of the word ‘pervert’ is here since it is a word which is regularly used to denote members of sexual minorities, groups which I (and probably she) would not include in this scenario. Pogrebin’s surprisingly unconscious dud unproblematized ‘pervert’ slip reveals one of the weaknesses of the revenge fantasy. 16 A left-identified, pro-gun example of an articulation of women to guns may be found in the May/June 1991 issue of the Utne Reader where a woman who identifies herself as a ‘pacifist’ argues in favor of handgun possession. After recounting many

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instances of near-attack close to her home in western South Dakota (a ranch 25 miles from the nearest large town), Linda Hasselstrom concludes that ‘my pistol just changes the balance of power with men.’ She revises the old Colt slogan saying, ‘God made men and women, but Sam Colt made them equal.’ (1991:92). 17 Clearly, the argument that the legal system is corrupt and does not serve the needs of rape victims is not solely, or even primarily, a conservative one. Neither is the argument that central government is ‘corrupt’; almost everyone agrees about that. The ultra-conservative argument for ‘freedom’ from central government usually has little to do with the government guaranteeing civil rights. In fact, civil rights is a moot point for the weapons proponents precisely because of their hyperindividualism; one doesn’t need governmentally imposed rights for protection if one can protect oneself—in this case, with guns. After all, ‘Sam Colt makes us equal.’ Perhaps this line of argument seems absurd. But it is the source of the most fundamental contradiction for those who work to unite the explicitly politicizing discourse of feminism with the pro-gun discourse which seeks to de-politicize ‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’. 18 This historical account borrows heavily from the chronology published by Nan Hunter in Caught Looking (1986:26–9). 19 In fact, Lederer incorrectly argues that the slogan ‘“Take Back the Night” was first used in the United States as a theme for a national protest march down San Francisco’s pornography strip.’ (1980:5). Thus, she completely displaces the antirape politic with that of anti-porn. 20 For me and for many of the women I know who were introduced to feminism during this time, the porn issue served as the gateway through which we gained entry to the broader terrain of feminist issues. Being anti-porn was one of the main emotional/ideological positions which identified one as a member of the feminist community. 21 For an excellent discussion of the ways that rape narratives and lynching narratives (or more broadly, the way feminism and anti-racism) exclude one another, see Kimberlé Crenshaw’s essay about Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas in the Toni Morrison anthology, Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power (1992). 22 In one of the few ‘action films’ I can think of in which an African-American woman gets raped by white men, one can see a significant difference between the treatment of the rape of Black women and the representation of rapes committed against white women. Foxy Brown, a film which may significantly be found in the ‘Wild Action’ section of Blockbuster Video, was made in the early 1970s and belongs to the genre of ‘Blaxploitation’ films created by Hollywood producers for Black audiences. It features Pam Grier, a well-known actress of this genre, who plays a vigilante detective out to combat the drug ring plaguing her community and her family. Rich, white drug lords capture her and ship her to Haiti where she spends days being brutally drugged and raped by a group of white men. Foxy escapes this situation and does not appear to have ‘sustained any damage’ nor feel anger as a result of it. In fact, the rape is treated as an inconsequential nuisance, an

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occupational hazard. And Foxy’s ‘revenge’ has nothing to do with the way she’s been brutalized at all. The implication of the incidental treatment of the rape of Black women is clear: they’re sexualities are decidedly ‘impure’, even ‘wild’ so as to justify their victimization (as well as their placement in ‘wild action’ films). 23 For a thorough examination of this legislation, see ‘False promises: feminist antipornography legislation’ by Lisa Duggan, Nan D.Hunter and Carole S. Vance (1986). 24 Part of this ordinance was used in a Senate bill called the Pornography Victims Protection Act introduced in a 1985 Congressional Session by Senator Arlen Specter (R.-Pa.). 25 Though it’s not central to my argument here, many of the lesbians who opposed the anti-porn position argued that it was extremely repressive of sexual minorities. Pat Califia, who has written much on the subject of the censorship of lesbian S/M texts by feminists, writes: ‘I think that WAVPM, WAP and similar groups are being used by much more powerful segments of our society to create a sex-negative social climate that will facilitate the suppression of all forms of sexual dissent’ (1986:24). 26 I do not wish to imply here that S/M practices are actually instances of real violence. They are not. I simply mean to argue that S/M practices locate women outside of their prescribed roles as nurturers, placing them instead in some relationship to the cultural signifiers of violent behavior. 27 All of the typical elements of the conservative pro-gun position are here in this article right alongside its feminist elements. The article constructs the plot of the movie as centrally involving the ‘failure of the legal system’ which necessitates an armed citizenry. It also emphasizes the importance of Louise’s vigilantism, arguing that ‘Louise’s act doubtless saves other potential victims from an accomplished sexual predator’ (1991a:13). 28 A must-see, low-budget movie entitled Deep in the Heart (1983) is one which perfectly duplicates the conservative/feminist, pro-gun/anti-rape ideological union of Women & Guns. However, its plot deeply complicates the pro-gun position for its female protagonist in a very revealing, and, to me, satisfying way. Briefly, the plot involves a virginal, church-going, childlike, young, white woman living in Texas who is raped at gunpoint by a ‘Texas-style’ male chauvinist. She immediately cut all her hair off, adorns herself in black and learns to shoot better than any of the ‘old boys’ at the gun club. In the final scene, she lures the rapist to the shooting range. She holds a gun to his head repeating the coercive words he uttered when he raped her (e.g., ‘you are really going to enjoy this’). Then she leads him through a complicated maze of traps, shooting him once in the arm. Later, as he stands on the range with the cardboard targets, she shoots him in the stomach with a tranquilizer gun. The final scene depicts a doctor inspecting the rapist in his hospital bed. The doctor marvels at the skill with which his wounds were inflicted, telling him that ‘someone must have had a sense of humor.’ 29 Women & Guns is replete with explicitly sexual imagery. The magazine features many ads and articles which demonstrate the use of bags and holsters to conceal

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weapons. For example, a specially designed bra positions a gun between a woman’s breasts. Another depicts a gun penetrating the folds of a purse which has a slit down the middle. Another image, the most amazing of them all to my mind, displays the insides of the same purse as a woman’s hands spread it apart to display the gun hidden inside. (This one is so lifelike, one really has to see it to believe it.) And finally, in a spread of photographs of women at a ‘Shot Show’, a woman holds two pistols up to her breasts (which are unconcealed by her low-cut dress). The caption below reads ‘Elizabeth Saunders, V.P. of Sales, shows off this attractive pair of American Derringers’ (February 1990:17). I would argue that the sexual pleasure women achieve from looking at other women presents itself here. Jones certainly wasn’t the only one who appreciated the ease of Hamilton’s ‘slide action’. But the connection between the violence implied by the use of guns and the homoerotic sexual pleasure suggested here deserves far more thought. 30 Despite the subsequent weakening and dispersal of the anti-porn movement, the anti-rape movement (in the form of institutionalized rape crisis centers) is thriving. Its health can be understood as a result of its response to a real, concrete and tangible problem (battered women) who benefit from the services rendered by these institutions. While the anti-porn position constructed the solution to the problem of rape in concrete, tangible ways (rid the world of porn), it did not really respond to a concrete, tangible, or at least, easily defined problem. Therefore, the dissolution of the anti-porn movement can be understood symptomatically. The movement to arm women, on the one hand, is strongly bolstered by weapons corporations and will no doubt proceed very differently than did the grass-roots political groups. I must credit Lisa Duggan and Kris Straub for significantly contributing to my thoughts on this historical issue. 31 I owe thanks here to Lisa Duggan who helped me to understand the political importance of pleasure. References Basic Instinct (1992) Dir Paul Verhoeven, Carolco/Le Studio Canal. Bladerunner (1982) Dir Ridley Scott, Warner Bros. Blue Steel (1989) Dir Kathryn Bigelow, MGM/UA. Califia, Pat (1986) ‘Among us, against us: the new puritans’, in Ellis, Hunter, Jaker, O’Dair and Tallmer (1986) 20–5. Cape Fear (1992) Dir Martin Scorsese, Universal Studios. Commando (1985) Dir Mark L.Lester, Fox. Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1989) ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination law, feminist theory, and antiracist politics’, The University of Chicago Legal Forum, 139:139–67. ——(1992) ‘Whose story is it, anyway? Feminist and antiracist appropriations of Anita Hill’, in Morrison, Toni (1992) editor, Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, New York: Pantheon Books: 402–40).

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Dead Calm (1989) Dir Phillip Noyce, Warner Bros. Deep in the Heart (1983) Dir Tony Garnett, Touchstone Pictures. Desperate Hours (1990) Dir Michael Cimino, MGM/UA. Die Hard (1988) Dir John McTiernan, Fox. Die Hard 2 (1990) Dir Renny Harlin, Fox. Duggan, Lisa (1986) ‘Censorship in the name of feminism’, in Ellis, Hunter, Jaker, O’Dair and Tallmer (1986) 62–9. Duggan, Lisa, Hunter, Nan D., and Vance, Carole S. (1986) ‘False promises: feminist antipornography legislation’, in Ellis, Hunter, Jaker, O’Dair, and Tallmer (1986) 72– 88. Dworkin, Andrea (1979) Pornography: Men Possessing Women, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Echols, Alice (1984) ‘The taming of the Id: feminist sexual politics, 1968–1983’, in Vance (1984) 1–27. ——(1989) Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1975, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ellis, Kate, Hunter, Nan D., Jaker, Beth, O’Dair, Barbara and Tallmer, Abby (1986) editors, Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and Censorship, New York: Caught Looking Inc. Ellis, Kate, O’Dair, Barbara and Tallmer, Abby (1986) ‘Introduction’, in Ellis, Hunter, Jaker, O’Dair and Tallmer (1986) 4–8. Eve of Destruction (1991) Dir Duncan Gibbens, New Line Home Video. Flynn, George and Gottlieb, Alan (1988) Guns for Women: The Complete Buying Guide for Women, Bellevue, Washington: Merril Press. Foxy Brown (1974) Dir Jack Hill, American International Productions. Harrison, Barbara Grizzuti (1985) ‘You can get a girl with a gun’, Mademoiselle, 91, July 1985:148. Hasselstrom, Linda (1991) ‘A peaceful woman explains why she carries a gun’, Utne Reader May/June 1991:88–92. Hunter, Nan (1986) ְ‘The pornography debate in context’, in Ellis, Hunter, Jaker, O’Dair and Tallmer (1986) 26–9. Jones, Sonny (1990) ‘From the Editor’, Women & Guns February, 1990:6. ——(1991a) ‘Thelma and Louise: reality meets movie myth’, Women & Guns, September 1991:12–16. ——(1991b) ‘Linda Hamilton gets tough in Terminator 2: Judgement Day’, Women & Guns, October 1991:12–15. ——(1991c) ‘From the Editor’, Women & Guns, November 1991:7. Lederer, Laura (1980) ‘Introduction’, Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography, New York: Bantam Books: 1–6. Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) Dir Richard Donner, Warner Communications Company. MacKinnon, Catharine A. (1989) Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. MacNutt, Karen (1991) ‘Protecting human rights’, Women & Guns, October 1991:10–11. Narrow Margin (1990) Dir Peter Hyams, Carolco Pictures Inc. Pally, Marcia (1985) ‘Ban sexism, not pornography’, The Nation, 240, 29 June 1985:794–7. Pogrebin, Letty Cottin (1989) ‘Neither pink nor cute: pistols for the women of America’,

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The Nation, 248, 15 May 1989:658, 666–8. Predator 2 (1990) Dir Stephan Hopkins, Fox. Quigley, Paxton (1989) Armed and Female, New York: E.P.Dutton. Rich, B.Ruby (1986) ‘Review essay: feminism and sexuality in the 1980s’, Feminist Studies, 12(3), Fall 1986:525–61. Robocop (1987) Dir Paul Verhoeven, Orion Pictures. Robocop 2 (1990) Dir Irvin Kershner, Orion Pictures. Silence of the Lambs (1990) Dir Johnathan Demme, Orion Pictures. Single White Female (1992) Dir Barbet Schroeder, Columbia Pictures. Someone to Watch Over Me (1987) Dir Ridley Scott, RCA. Sudden Impact (1983) Dir Clint Eastwood, Warner. Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) Dir James Cameron, Carolco Pictures Inc. Thelma and Louise (1991) Dir Ridley Scott, MGM-Pathe Communications Co. Vance, Carole (1984a) editor, Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, London: Pandora. ——(1984b) ‘Pleasure and Danger: Toward a Politics of Sexuality’. In Vance (1984) 1– 27. ——(1986) ‘Porn in the U.S.A.: the Meese Commission on the road’, The Nation, 243, 2–9 August 1986:65, 76–82. V.Warshawski (1991) Dir Jeff Kanew, Hollywood Pictures. Wanted Dead or Alive (1986) Dir Gary Sherman, New World Video. Warner, William (1991) ‘Spectacular action: Rambo and the popular pleasures of pain’, in Grossberg, Lawrence, Nelson, Cary and Treichler, Paula (1991) editors, Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge: 672–88. Williams, Patricia (1991) The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.

ANGELA McROBBIE

SHUT UP AND DANCE: YOUTH CULTURE AND CHANGING MODES OF FEMININITY1 As Helmut Hartwig (1992) has described, I too feel a sense of acute anxiety at the thought of writing about youth. It is at once too close and too far away. I am too old. I have a daughter of fifteen who lives these experiences and in talking or writing about them I feel I am encroaching on her private space. Frequently, the difference between being a sociologist interested in youth, and being the parent of a teenage girl reaches a crisis point. Sometimes this entails the simple recognition of the huge gap between the loose and tentative sociological observations of my own early work carried out in Birmingham in the late 1970s, and the terrible psychological complexity of growing up, a process which now, as I see it happening on a day-to-day basis, causes me to question almost everything I ever wrote about teenage girls (McRobbie, 1991). At other moments, the crisis is of a different nature, more like that described by Dick Hebdige (1987) when he too is given cause to ponder his earlier writing on youth and his position now as somebody who, when kept awake for nights at a time by the loud music played by his young neighbours, eventually gets dressed and goes out in the middle of the night and angrily complains. Getting dressed and going out in the middle of the night and sometimes in the early hours of the morning to pick up my daughter from ‘raves’ held in empty warehouses on trading estates on the outskirts of north London precipitates the same kind of reaction in myself, though this time it is extreme anxiety rather than anger and frustration which I feel, driving out into the early light looking for the appointed spot at which I wait, as the sweat-drenched, pale-faced youths come out in straggly bunches. In the final part of this paper I will return to the question of rave, bringing to bear on my analysis some of these new contradictions which emerge from this uncomfortable overlap of roles. Despite the acute feelings of anxiety verging on terror which I experience in my capacity as mother it still seems important to stand back and to ask the question of what is going on and why. How young people, male and female, experience the society around them and how they in turn express this experience, continue to be immensely important questions. Youth remains a major point of symbolic investment for the society as a whole. What I will be doing in this paper is selecting out, from an immensely rich and complicated landscape of social change in Britain through the Thatcher years and beyond, a few critical examples in the field of youth culture and the youth mass media, where it seems to me that there has been a direct engagement with change, and where these changes are also indicative of new emergent modes of femininity, which in turn tell us something of real significance about the society in which we now live. I will also argue that these changes must prompt a revision of some of the

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ways in which cultural studies has defined itself in recent years. It is not that social change alone forces such a revision but that by returning, for instance, to the category of youth as I am doing here, one is also in a sense returning to those frameworks for analysis which came to characterize the field from the mid 1970s onwards, and as a result it is possible to see more clearly how these now need to be amended. What I will be arguing is that in recent youth culture what can be seen is not just a response to some of the more oppressive aspects of life in Britain for young people in the 1980s and into the 1990s, for example the frightening reality of AIDS, but also that it is here that new and unanticipated social meanings are actively produced. This symbolic and aesthetic material is developed in what often seems like a frenzy of cultural production. It marks, in my view, an absolute engagement with the social. Youth cultures, in whatever shape they take, represent to me a staking out of an investment in society. It is in this sense that they are political. One rather clichéd way of putting this is to say that they make ‘statements’. But these statements take different shapes under different historical conditions and they keep on being made. It is this activity which has of course provided the raw material for the study of subcultures, but it seems to me worth both repeating the exercise of looking at subcultures and also worth taking this analysis further and also in a slightly different direction. Of course, it is also the case that the intensity of the subcultural activity means that it almost immediately spills out of its youth cultural ‘home’, becoming part of a wider popular culture which is continually looking to the innovative elements in youth culture so that it can claim a dynamism for itself. While it was important, in the early days of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) subcultural theory, to draw a line between youth culture and pop culture, crediting the former with a form of symbolic class authenticity and the latter with all the marks of the consumer culture, in reality the two were always merged, always in an ongoing relationship with each other (see Hall and Jefferson, 1976). But now that the search for the fundamental class meaning underpinning these formations is no longer the rationale for their cultural analysis, we can also afford to be more speculative, more open to reflecting on the meanings other than those of class. It is not so much that these meanings can now also be recognized as including questions of gender, sexuality, race and identity, but rather that what is significant is how in different youth cultural ‘venues’ there are different permutations of class, gender and racial meanings being explored. In each of the examples I look at in this paper, some or other of these will be recognized as occupying a position of prominence. For example, in relation to changing modes of femininity, I will not be saying, here we can simply see evidence of progress, i.e., girls are more independent than they were in the late 1970s when I first started working in this field. But neither do I endorse that argument put forward recently by the American feminist Susan Faludi, that after a short period of gains, women (and by implication young women) are now experiencing the full force of a backlash led by the emergent ‘new right’ and moral majority movements (Faludi, 1992). I will be offering here neither a narrative of progress nor one of backlash. Instead I will be suggesting that there has been a dramatic ‘unfixing’ of young women in British society over the last fifteen years which has been effected in the social institutions

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and can be seen in the field of commercial mass culture and in the various youth subcultures. There is now a greater degree of fluidity about what femininity means and how exactly it is anchored in social reality. I know of no major study which has assessed with any precision how things have actually changed for girls and young women in and across the main social institutions of the family, education and employment. As is often the case for cultural studies, where there is a complete absence of sociological material which would in effect do the work of illustrating or acting as evidence in support of an argument, it has to be a question of relying more loosely on less hard evidence and of looking to some of the most widely available ‘texts’ of youth culture for the clearest expression of these changes. My use of the phrase ‘changing modes of femininity’ will be used here as a reminder of just how fluid gender practices and meaning structures are. Even in adverse political circumstances (i.e., throughout the Thatcher years) it can by no means be assumed that, for example, the position of women, and young women, simply worsened. Despite the hostility of the tabloid press, feminism has had a dramatic impact on almost every level of social life in Britain. It has made issues around sexual inequality part of the political agenda in both the private sphere of the home and in domestic relations, and in the more public world of work. Likewise, the institutions themselves (particularly education) have been alerted to the question of women and young women as economic agents, participants in the economy for the greater part of their lives. Altogether this kind of heightened activity around questions of gender has had the effect of radically undermining what might be described as the old domestic settlement which tied women (and young women’s future) primarily to the family and to only low-paid or part-time work. There is, as a result, a greater degree of uncertainty in society as a whole about what it is to be a woman. This filters down to how young women exist within this new habitus of gender relations (Bordieu, 1984). It might even be suggested that, in Britain, girls both black and white have been ‘unhinged’ from their traditional gender position while the gender and class destiny of their male counterparts has remained more stable.2 This state of flux in relation to what now constitutes feminine identity can certainly be detected in the new girls’ magazines as well as in the whole expansive field of the mass media. It is in culture, above all, that there has been a discursive explosion around what constitutes femininity and its ambiguous relationship with feminism. Feminist issues are now firmly implanted in those traditional spheres of femininity, e.g., women’s magazines, radio programmes like Women’s Hour, but also in other less gender-specific areas of radio and broadcasting, in arts programmes and drama in particular. Nor is such a shift restricted to culture for a middle-class female audience or readership. In mainstream television, thanks to writers like Carla Lane and others, feminist topics are now a standard part of the staple of ‘sit com’ material, soap opera, plays and series. But this does not mean that younger women now identify themselves as feminist. They are more likely to resist such a label and assert for themselves, at least as an image, an excessively conventional femininity. At the same time they frequently express strongly feminist views in their day-to-day discussions. What they are rejecting is a particular image of the feminist which they associate either with an older generation or else with a

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stereotypically unfeminine image. In other words, the old binary opposition which put femininity at one end of the political spectrum and feminism at the other, is no longer an accurate way of conceptualizing young female experience. Maybe it never was. It is no longer a question of those who know (the feminists, the academics) against those who do not, or who are the Victims’ of ideology. As Charlotte Brunsdon (1991) has recently argued, a quite dramatic realignment between feminism and the lived experience of femininity (and its textual representations), has taken place. As feminist ideas have slowly worked their way into the material and ideological structures of society, and have become part of the general culture of femininity, so also has the fragile unity of feminism (or feminist theory) itself been challenged and disputed from within as black women, for instance, ask the question of what the women’s movement or the feminist theory of the 1970s meant for them. While it is as yet impossible to predict whether a new ‘sexual settlement’ will emerge from this fragmentation and realignment, what is clear is that there is a good deal more noise, there are many more voices eager to participate in this postfeminist cultural field, and anxious to be listened to. Charlotte Brunsdon (1991) has pointed out how these shifts have real consequences for what we, as feminist academics, teach, for how we engage with our students, male and female, and for how we define and pursue our chosen objects of study. How should youth culture in Britain in the 1990s be approached, bearing in mind not only the late 1970s’ feminist critique of subcultural theory (McRobbie, 1990), but also those shifts in gender relations outlined above which have traversed the whole society? One way of proceeding is to look to a number of particular examples and to draw from them those elements and developments which seem to be most significant. Now that class no longer underwrites the critical project of cultural analysis, and with ideology also recognized as too monolithic a category, too focused round the explanation of social passivity and conformity to be usefully alert to the more micrological level of dispute and contestation, space becomes available to scale down the field of study and to relinquish the claim on unity or totality in preference for pursuing what Laclau (quoted in McRobbie, 1992) has called the ‘dignity of the specific’. With this in mind I will offer here three snapshot studies, all of which illuminate some feature of my own chosen problematic of femininity and youth culture. Girls, cultural production and youth culture Let us start by saying that there have been some key changes in youth culture in the last decade. In fact, things were never the same after punk. The turning point it marked was one where youth subcultures, in whatever guise they had taken, no longer could be seen as occupying only a ‘folk devil’ position in society. There were too many of them, they were increasingly able to counter whatever charges were made against them by the mass media since they had at their own disposal, partly as a result of the availability of cheaper technology, the means to defend themselves and to discuss the issue with at least a wider audience than themselves. These means of communication were not restricted solely to

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fanzines and to the self-generated style magazines, since spaces were opened up for ‘youth TV’, first in Channel Four and more recently in BBC2’s DEF II programmes. With a clear commitment to employing young people on these programmes, they continue to reflect a different image of youth than that found, for example in the Daily Mail.3 The increasing interest among a wider selection of the population in style, and then in ‘design’ in the 1980s, saw a situation develop where youthfulness became virtually synonymous with subculture. Earlier subcultures were revived for the umpteenth time. Some, like heavy metal, remained unchanged in appearance but continued to recruit new followers from boys aged thirteen upwards. Hippie culture, with the new interest in vegetarianism, the environment and peace, proved ready for not just revival but for a permanent place in this ‘endless’ youth culture, with a black inflection too as the connection was celebrated by musicians like De La Soul in the US, and Soul II Soul in the UK, between mid sixties black liberation and civil rights, and the language of radical politics it spawned for white students and hippies soon after. Out of punk, goth, hippie and reggae, ‘crusties’ (white, palid Crass fans with ‘dreadlocks’ literally encrusted on to their own unkempt hair) emerged, marking the place of the underdog, the right to the streets or the common land, the desire for disenfranchisement from the legacy of Thatcherist values, the rejection of clean consumer culture in favour of ‘ecological’ dirt. Accompanied by decrepit but much-loved mongrel dogs, these ‘convoys’ continue to occupy key spaces (with a can of beer in hand and dog in tow) in the urban environment, like outside the Sainsbury store at Camden in north London for example, a building celebrated as an example of the best of postmodern architecture. Crusties often merge with squatters, young anarchists and with homeless young people, and with such a dramatically ‘dirty’ visual style they stage ‘homelessness’ or ‘the end of welfare’. These groups continue to make an extraordinarily strong impression on the urban landscape. They contribute directly to our experience of social reality. They play back a particular version of that reality, and they function as strong social texts, signs of response which indicate an active registering of broad social changes over which groupings otherwise have no control. Despite the longevity of subcultures like these in the British urban landscape, none the less, even during the heyday of subcultural theory in the late 1970s, there were quite straightforward questions which for some reason were never asked. For instance, who was doing what? Where did the style come from? Where was it purchased, who was selling it to whom? More abstractly, what were the social relations which informed the production of the subculture? What pre-existing skills were called upon to produce the graphics and the posters and even the music itself? In my own earlier work so much effort was put into attempting to problematize the marginalized experience of girls in youth culture, that it never struck me to explore this further, and find out what exactly they were doing on a day-to-day basis. Likewise in Dick Hebdige’s (1978) work, so much attention was put on the final signifying products of the subculture and the permutations of meaning produced by these images, that the cultural work involved in their making did not figure in the analysis.

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In my article ‘Second hand dresses and the role of the ragmarket’ (McRobbie, 1990), I argued that subcultural theory was resistant to investigating some of these processes because they brought an analysis, which itself was dependent on notions of class and resistance, directly up against a set of practices which seemed far removed from the politics of class and resistance. Buying and selling and participating in subcultures as consumers represented to subcultural theorists only the moment of diffusion, the point at which the oppositional force is incorporated or ‘recuperated’ back into society through the processes of commodification. As the subculture is commodified for a mass market so also is it de-politicized and made palatable for popular consumption. The problems with this model have now become a familiar strand in cultural studies with contributions from Erica Carter (1984), Frank Mort (forthcoming), Mica Nava (1992) and myself (McRobbie, 1984), each of whom have in different ways confronted the complex pleasures and the politics of consumption. But introducing the practices of selling clothes and records and other items to those involved in the subculture was also to bring to bear to the analysis the reality of an infrastructure in the subculture which involved both production and marketing. The assumption implicit in subcultural theory was that those who did this sort of thing were simply ‘hustlers’ who pushed their way into the subculture from outside, making a profit from something which in reality had no interest in or connection to commerce. The music and style and other related activities as a result sprang on to the subcultural theory stage as though from nowhere. It soon became clear, particularly after punk, that this kind of romanticism of authenticity was a false and idealized view. Not just Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, but the whole punk phenomena used the predatory, easily exploited and above all open-ended mass media for publicity, and actually set itself up, right from the start, in a string of shops selling clothes direct to young people.4 Since then the old model which divided the pure subculture from the contaminated outside world eager to transform anything it could get its hands on into a sellable item, has collapsed, even though there still remains an ideology of authenticity which provides young people in youth cultures with a way of achieving social subjectivity and therefore identity through the subcultural experience. However, my concern here is with the way in which the magazines produced by fans, the music produced by DJs, the clothes bought, sold and worn by subcultural ‘stylists’, do more than just publicize the subculture. They also provide the opportunity of learning and sharing skills, practising them, making a small amount of money and more importantly they provide pathways for future ‘life-skills’ in the form of work or self-employment. To ignore the intense activity of cultural production as well as its strongly aesthetic dimension (in graphics, in fashion design, in retail and in music production) is to miss what is a key part of subcultural life, that is the creation of a whole way of life, an alternative to higher education, (though often a ‘foundation’ for art school), a hedonistic job creation scheme for the culture industries. The point is then that far from being merely the commercial, low ebb of the subculture, as far removed from resistance as it is possible to imagine, these activities can be seen as central to them. They are also expressions of change and of social transformation. De-industrialization, class re-

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alignment, the changing place of women, and the consolidation of black people at the bottom end of the labour hierarchy, have all affected young people during the 1980s. The turn to fashion and music as career rather than consumer choices (no matter how shaky these careers might be) represents a strong preference for the cultural sphere. My suggestion is that this involvement can be an empowering experience, particularly for young people with no access to the skills and qualifications acquired as a matter of course by those other young people destined for university and for the professions. Subcultures are often ways of creating job opportunities as undocumented, unrecorded and largely ‘hidden economy’ sector subcultures stand at one end of the spectrum of the culture industries, and the glamorous world of the star system and the entertainment business at the other. This whole area requires a good deal more attention. But if, for the moment, we deconstruct the notion of resistance by removing its meta-political status (even when this exists in some disguised, magical or imaginary form, as it did in CCCS theory), and if we re-insert resistance at the more mundane, micrological level of everyday practices and choices about how to live, then it becomes possible to see the sustaining, publicizing and extending of the subcultural enterprise as a way of attempting to earn a living within what has been described as the aestheticization of culture (against a backdrop of industrial decline) and to do so in a way which directly expresses the character of its producers in a way which is frequently in opposition to those available, received or encouraged images or identities (see Hall and Jefferson, 1976). The buying, selling and producing do not take place in a vacuum. They are integrally connected to much longer chains of meaning and value systems. Second-hand clothes and the recycling ethic which goes with them, for example, produce not just ‘retro’ images on the streets, they also provide a counterpoint to over-priced high-street fashion. Selling such clothes requires organizational skills as well as imagination. Selling usually exists alongside designing and making up new clothes as well as restoring and selling old ones. The shop assistant is also therefore a fashion designer. Involvement often develops into a proper career choice. At the same time the interconnection in the subculture between fashion, image and music can be seen as reflecting more generally what Helmut Hartwig (1992) has described as a ‘longing for art’. This can also be understood as a preference which exists against the provided ‘training’ pathways for young people in Britain today. While self-or semi-employment in the world of subcultures could be interpreted as examples of the enterprise culture of the Thatcher era at work, they are, in my view, better considered as angry ripostes to the rhetoric of Thatcher. If she said be enterprising then their enterprise was pursued in precisely those ‘soft’ art areas, relatively unprofitable but personally rewarding, which have always found little favour with the Conservatives. If she abandoned substantial sectors of the youth population to the forces of the free market and thus to unemployment, they refused such subordination and carved out spaces for themselves in the interstices of the hidden cultural economy, by setting up a stall selling retro clothes, for example at Camden Lock in London. Or by setting up at home with a turntable and learning the skills of DJ’ing. Alternately, they stayed on at school or at college on BTec fashion and design courses.

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In education and in the art colleges, far from finding an outright rejection of these subcultural ideas, young people experienced instead reinforcement, since, as Frith and Horne (1987) have argued, the British art schools, despite the lingering influence of the great traditions, have shown themselves in the post-war period to be at least open to pop and to the blurring of the distinction between high art and low culture. Art-student culture itself, often as a result of access to the art colleges in the post-war years, in contrast to other institutions of higher education, of working-class, particularly male working-class students, meant that there was a direct line between adolescent youth cultures pursued in leisure and what these students brought with them to their art education. Where this overlapped with the interests of the younger teachers and lecturers in the institutions (perhaps from the same background and experience themselves) there often emerged a rich output incorporating music, graphics, magazines and fashion as well as ‘fine art’ pop art. I focus at length on buying and selling clothes because it is here that girls and young women have been more active. The male bias of subcultural analysis has relegated these activities to the margins, just as it has elevated style to a special place while locating fashion at some lower level. But when we look at these activities we can see not just their key importance to youth culture, but also their lasting contribution to the particular integration of fashion and subcultural style which exists in Britain. Fashion in Britain, because of its roots in youth subcultures (rather than in haute couture) is a more popular form. It is in the ‘designs’ and in the ‘fancy dress’ often inspired by what once again Helmut Hartwig (1992) calls the ‘crazy fantasies’ of youth culture, that we see those ideas which find their way into the vocabulary of high-street fashion. That these images have no clear-cut point of origin, that they belong to no one person, that they emerge from the space of the subculture, tells us something important about the creative process itself and about the rich aesthetic opportunities afforded by subcultural involvement. (For black people whose expressive cultures have been so consistently marginalized and disregarded by the art establishment, this is a particularly intense struggle, which once again is carried out all the more insistently in popular black youth culture.) Coding the feminine in the 1990s Where subcultural theory concentrated on the final signifying product (the punk, the mod, the hippie, the bike boy, the new romantic, etc.) rather than on the material processes of cultural production involved in the creation of subculture, feminist readings of girls magazines, including my own, concentrated on the seamless text of oppressive meanings held together by ideology, rather than on the disruptions and inconsistencies and spaces for negotiation within the magazines. Where an emphasis on cultural production (and on ethnography) can reveal a much greater level of involvement on the part of young women in subcultures, i.e., in fashion and style and in other creative processes, so also can a more open-ended reading, particularly of the new girls’ magazines like Just Seventeen, reveal a whole world of changes in the construction of femininity. Let me summarize

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both new ways of conceptualizing these popular texts and the new ways they themselves have found of coding the feminine. As I describe at greater length in the chapter, ‘From Jackie to Just Seventeen: girls’ magazines in the 1980s’ (McRobbie, 1991), Just Seventeen has replaced Jackie as the top-selling magazine among a female readership aged approximately between twelve and sixteen. If we look closely at the magazine, it is immediately clear how different it is from its predecessor. Most strikingly, the girl is no longer the victim of romance. She is no longer a slave to love. She no longer waits miserably outside the cinema knowing that she has been ‘stood up’. She no longer distrusts all girls including her best friend because they represent a threat and might steal her ‘fella’. She no longer lives in absolute terror of being dumped. She is no longer terrified of being without a ‘steady’. In fact, she no longer exists because the narrative mode in which she appeared three or four times over every week, i.e., the picture love story, no longer exists. Romance is an absent category in Just Seventeen. There is love and there is sex and there are boys, but the conventionally coded meta-narratives of romance which, I argued in my earlier work on Jackie, could hardly do anything other than create a neurotically dependent female subject, have gone for good. Launched in the early 1980s, Just Seventeen took a risk in doing away with the stories. But they did it because they detected a new climate of confidence and self-esteem among their potential readers. They commissioned a detailed market research study which confirmed these feelings that the readership of popular girls’ magazines no longer wanted to be ‘talked down to’. They did not want ‘silly’ love stories and they did not want to be portrayed as ‘boy mad’. The editors and staff, themselves young graduates, many of them familiar with debates around feminism and representation and the politics of pop, attempted therefore to create a publication which was highly commercial, exciting to look at, easy to read, but which also confronted ‘real issues’ and which abandoned the patronizing and condescending tone which had characterized girls’ magazines in the past. We can stop here for a moment and make a couple of points. Judging from the evidence of the market research, it seems that girls have changed. They do not want to be represented in a humiliating way. They are not dependent on boys for their own sense of identity and well-being. Magazines (like Jackie) which continue to offer this passive stereotype of femininity will simply lose their readers. As young consumers girls are therefore able to exert some power in the marketplace. They will buy a magazine as long as it presents an image of themselves which is compatible with those selves which exist outside the text. These other changing modes of femininity, in the school, in the family and in other leisure spaces, would therefore have to be considered in relation to the changing textual representations in the magazines and in pop culture, if we were to be able to build up a more coherent account of changes in femininity. While a single piece of market research can hardly be relied upon as a guide to social change and transformation, what is important are the social relations of cultural production inside the magazine which see such a survey as a necessary part of the process of creating a popular product. The second point is that this dimension of cultural analysis lies outside the sphere of

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textuality. Looking at a magazine only as an inter-related series of texts can produce a ‘reading’ which does indeed pick up and respond to new and emergent modes of femininity, in the image or in the written text, but what it cannot do is to understand the complex and contested social processes which accompany the construction of new images. Looking not only at the finished products, the visual and verbal texts, but also at the professional ideologies which create the conditions of their existence, which are their prerequisite, alerts us to wider social changes, to social connections across otherwise conceptually separate spheres like the media and higher education, and to the magazine form itself as a non-homogenous entity, a system which ‘openings’. Helen Pleasance has recently described this non-monolithic approach to popular magazines in the following terms: There are all sorts of people involved in making meaning out of Smash Hits and Just Seventeen. Even within the company of EMAP Metro there are different kinds of producers, different kinds of power, which might not sit easily together, and are, at best, in contingent alliance…. Theirs is only one of the many relationships which are played out across the magazines’ pages. Journalists, photographers, advertisers, the music industry (with all its own groupings and differences), and for Just Seventeen the fashion and beauty industries all contribute to the final product (Pleasance, 1992:79–80). In Just Seventeen, femininity does indeed emerge as an altogether less rigid category. It is still predicated round the pursuit of identity (in beauty), the achievement of success (through fashion consumption) and the search for some harmony or stability (through happiness). There is more of the self in this new vocabulary of femininity, much more self-esteem, more autonomy, but still the pressure to adhere to the perfect body image as a prerequisite for the success in love which is equated with happiness. However, even here prettiness has given way to strikingness, models are chosen from the world of real readers, they are no longer all excessively tall and exceptionally thin. There are black, mixed-race and Asian models appearing on the front cover as well as on the fashion and beauty pages. There is also a redefinition of the feminine self. It can be endlessly constructed, reconstructed and customized. No longer lavishing attention on the male partner, the girl is free to lavish attention on herself and she is helped in this task by the world of consumer goods which is at her disposal. In love, the new female subject can expect to be treated like an equal or else feel quite entitled to ‘dump him’. Pictures of boys, from real life and from the world of entertainment, are found on many of the pages of the magazine, but the self-mocking tone of the accompanying copy indicates a playful attitude. How complicated and ironic this all is. The enslavement of romance is escaped partly, though not exclusively, through the freedom of the commodity. Images of bold, assertive and ambitious girls leap out in their Doc Marten boots from the pages of the magazine. Far from having to relinquish their femininity to achieve ‘equality’ these girls have demanded their right to hold on to it intact, even excessively (take note of the new love of cleavage in Kylie Minogue’s pop video for her hit single ‘Give Me Just a Little More

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Time’ and in the sudden rising sales of the Gossard Wonder Bra). The chains of meaning which emerge from these bold, confident and strongly sexualized images interact with all the other new modes of femininity found beyond the world of the text or of popular culture. The more general meaning of these hyper-sexual modes of femininity will be something I look at in more depth in the concluding section of this paper. But focusing for the moment on the magazines, it would be impossible to ignore the presence of various of the strands of postmodern culture on the pages of Just Seventeen, and this too is relevant to the construction of femininity in the 1990s. If the metanarratives of romance have gone, they have been replaced by an avalanche of information. Fragments of ‘info’ about favourite pop stars, film stars and TV celebrities are now the raw material of fantasy. They to can now be customized to fit the reader’s own unique desires. She no longer needs the story format when she can simply be given the information. There is an absolute excess of information and ‘gossip’ about the stars in Just Seventeen. But even here, in this ecstasy of communication, there is a detached ironic tone. The reader is expected not to take it all too seriously. ‘We know it’s silly’ is what the editors seem to be saying, when they announce this week’s celebrity pin up, ‘but it’s fun and it’s harmless’. In this sense, superficiality and pastiche allow readers to position themselves at a distance from the subordination of being ‘just’ a fan or just a silly girl. Trivia presented in a knowing guise, seems to mark an advance on the awful cloying claustrophobia of conventional romance. Just Seventeen is not anti-love or antisex but it does express a new horizon of possibilities in the field of sexual and social relationships for its readers. Girls are encouraged to think clearly about whether or not they want to have sex with their partners. They are given all the available information about contraception, protection from AIDS, and about how to make sense of love. Having friends of both sexes is given a prominent place however, and it is this new, more equal climate of sexual relations which girls are encouraged to enjoy. This begs a final question which I will return to in the final section because it has clear repercussions for feminists and academics working in the field of Cultural Studies. If feminist academics have done a great deal to restore the status of romance by reclaiming it as a hidden pleasure of femininity, how historically specific is this pleasure? (See, for example, Radway, 1984; and Modleski, 1985.) Do girls now simply have to look elsewhere for romantic narratives? Or do they no longer need them? Do they no longer serve a useful as well as a pleasurable function? My feeling is that romance has indeed been dislodged from its place of cultural pre-eminence. The pleasures of popular narrative are now found in TV soap operas like Brookside, Neighbours or Home and Away. But these are hardly romances. There seems to be a shift away from the fixity of gender relations inscribed in the romance. It may well be that young women today prefer the quirky postmodern subjectivities offered to them in films like Heathers and in Twin Peaks. While the TV series deployed an intensely heightened sexuality in its cast of exceptionally beautiful female characters and good-looking men, it was sex, danger, terror and ‘strangeness’ rather than love or romance which held the fragmented structure of the programmes together. Yet for all the weirdness and the violence, the postmodern style of Twin Peaks seemed to address its audience adventurously, as knowing, intelligent

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consumers of postmodern culture rather than as hostages to the realist text. Perhaps one of the problems with romance in the 1990s is that its subjectpositions of masculinity and femininity no longer tally either with the more fluid subjectivities of the postmodern mass media, or with the ways of making sense of sexuality now required by young people in the post-AIDS era. Rave, gender and cultural studies In the first part of this paper I advocated an approach to youth culture which emphasized the role of cultural production. Not only would such a perspective offer a more active picture of the involvement of girls and young women, particularly in relation to fashion and style, so also would it encourage a more longitudinal dimension which would connect being in a subculture with what happens next especially in the world of education, training or employment. It was also my intention to emphasize the aesthetic element in youth cultures, particularly the creative interplay between music, dance, fashion, graphic designer and other forms of visual image-making. While it would be unwise to suggest that involvement in these spheres alone facilitates a shift from being a consumer to a producer of culture on the part of the young person, that transition into culture-related areas has been and continues to be (perhaps at an accelerated rate) part of a broader social trend which has gone relatively unrecorded in the sociological literature on young people. In the second section I argued for an analysis of those cultural forms associated in this instance with young girls (i.e., magazines) which was open to extra-textual factors including both the views and ideas which young editorial staff brought to the magazines and to the tensions inside the magazines between the various different departments and sections. This was a way, I argued, of allowing for the changing views and experiences which do find expression in culture (in this case in the magazines) to be recognized and understood. It was therefore a way of gauging the parameters of change in the popular representations of femininity. When it comes to my third example, rave culture, both of these arguments, first about the aesthetics of subculture and second about changing modes of femininity, are less easily reached. Indeed, rave seems to overturn many of the expectations and assumptions we might now have about youth subcultures and for this reason reminds us of the dangers of looking for linear development or ‘progression’ in, let us say, the sexual politics of youth. Girls appear, for example, to be less involved in the cultural production of rave, from the flyers, to the events, to the DJ’ing, than their male counterparts. We can be in no way certain, therefore, that the broader changing climate of sexual politics is automatically reflected in rave. It is precisely the unexpected social relations and cultural practices which give the subculture its distinctive character. For example, just at the point at which class has receded as the conceptual key for understanding what subcultures are really about, and as questions of race and gender as well as those about cultural and aesthetic practice have come to the forefront, as they have done in this context, suddenly

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there appears from some unspecified site in the symbolic landscape of youth a subculture which rescues working-class youth from the distant memories of the sociologists and provocatively stages working-class masculinity shirtless, sweating, en masse, in the vast hangars of the rave party. The scale is huge and ever increasing, the atmosphere is one of unity, of dissolving difference in the peace and harmony haze of the drug Ecstasy. The trope of masculinity is visually one of largely white, unadorned, anti-stylish ‘normality’. But laddishness has been replaced by friendliness. Indeed, the second irony of this present social moment is that working-class boys lose their ‘aggro’ and become ‘new men’ not through the critique of masculinity which accompanies the changing modes of femininity I referred to above, but through the use of Ecstasy they undergo a conversion to the soft, the malleable, and the sociable rather than the antisocial, and through the most addictive pleasure of dance they also enter into a different relationship with their own bodies, more tactile, more sensuous, less focused round sexual gratification. The orgiastic frenzy of dance culture also hints at the fear of AIDS among young people. Rave dance legitimates pure physical abandon in the company of others without requiring the narrative of sex or romance. Rave favours groups and friends rather than couples or those in search of a partner. The culture is one of childhood, of a pre-sexual stage, pre-Oedipal stage. Dancing provides the rationale for rave. Where other youth subcultures have focused on street appearances, or have chosen live rock performances for providing the emblematic opportunity for the display of style, in rave everything happens within the space of the party. There is always something arbitrary and almost absurd about the objects or favoured ritualistic practices of subcultural choice. The spray of spit which showered on those standing near the stage at punk performances was as obviously ‘meaningful’ as it was shocking. Likewise the sight of rave girls in hot pants and bra tops dancing with a ‘dummy’ in their mouths, and a whistle round their necks, is as unexpected as it is unprecedented in the visual repertoire of stylish femininity. (The rave equivalent perhaps to the laddered fish-net tights and suspenders of punk.) This is a drug culture which masquerades its innocence in the language of childhood. Ice lollies help the ‘revellers’ to chill out or cool down. Whistles and babies’ dummies hang round the necks of the participants. All three of these objects also mediate between the drug E and its absorption by the physical body. The symbols and imagery are self-consciously childlike and direct. Primary colours, psychedelic doodles, images taken from familiar advertisements, phrases and tunes lifted from children’s TV programmes like the Magic Roundabout, Sesame Street and others; all of these along with electronically produced music with a dance-defying beats-per-minute ratio are crafted together, creating a rapturous response on the part of the ‘revellers’. Some features of rave are of particular significance in relation to the questions I have posed above. What kind of image of femininity, for example, is being pursued as female ravers strip down and sweat out? Dance is where girls were always found in subcultures. It was their only entitlement. Now in rave it becomes the motivating force for the entire subculture. This gives girls a new-found confidence and a prominence. Bra tops, leggings and trainers provide a basic (aerobic) wardrobe. In rave (and in the club culture with

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which it often overlaps) girls are highly sexual in their dress and appearance, with sixties TV stars like Emma Peel as their style models. The tension in rave for girls comes, it seems, from remaining in control, and at the same time losing themselves in dance and music. Abandon in dance must now, post-AIDS, be balanced by caution and the exercise of control in sex. One solution might lie in cultivating a hyper-sexual appearance which is, however, symbolically sealed or ‘closed off’ through the dummy, the whistle, or the ice lolly. This idea of insulating the body from ‘invasion’ is even more apparent in the heavy-duty industrial protective clothing worn by both male and female fans of German techno music, a European variant of rave. In both cases the body signifies sociability and self-sufficiency. The communality of the massive rave crowd is balanced by the singularity of the person. Subcultural style is in this instance a metaphor for sexual protection. The attraction of rave can partly be explained through the way in which in the 1980s club culture (which itself emerged out of black culture, the gay scene, and punk, and was symbolized in this country in the figure of Boy George) had become exclusive in terms of ‘in’ clubs, places, people and other ‘insider’ knowledge. Getting into clubs had become so difficult that many dance and music fans ended up staying away. At the same time the other club scenes had fragmented into so many specialist interests around music, race and sexual preference, that choosing where to go in this segmented dance market depended on an already stable cultural identity. You had to know exactly what you liked and who you wanted to be with and then you had to know where to look for it. But for sixteenyear-olds, growing up and going out is at least partly about exploring what sort of person you are, and who you want to become. In rave, even though it too, as it grew out of acid house, had developed its own ‘underground of authenticity’ and as Sarah Thornton (1990) described, its own VIP culture, this cultural foreknowledge was never a precondition of entry. Likewise, the selective door policies which had characterized the club culture of the late 1980s were also swept away in favour of the ‘mass rave’. As the venues grew bigger, so did the crowd and so also the takings at the door and behind the bar. Rave promoters have become wealthy businessmen employing large numbers of people, including DJs, technicians, security staff, bar staff and professional dancers. This kind of level of organization put rave alongside the mainstream of club and concert promotion and removed it from the kind of small-scale entrepreneurialism associated with youth subcultures and with the level of cultural production which has allowed young people to play a more participative role in music. For raves to succeed they have to attract a large number of people. Rave organizers as a result tend to be older, male and already have had some experience in club promotion, often starting as DJs in smaller clubs and in illegal radio stations. Girlfriends help on the till, behind the bar or else do ‘PR’ by going round pubs distributing flyers. The rave culture industry thereby reproduces the same sexual division of labour which exists not just in the pop music industry but in most other types of work and employment. Who supplies this market with clothes? Is this where young women might be found? Once again the answer to this lies in the ‘mass subcultural’ market for rave. The kind of outrageous styles which have in the past been linked with subcultures and therefore

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emphasized the line between subculture and mainstream, now reflect the disappearance of this divide. Rave style is the style of the moment, neither mainstream nor marginal, but both. Catsuits, leggings, bodies, ‘playsuits’ and trainers are available on the rails in Miss Selfridge or in Pineapple. Rave style for girls is provided at every level of the fashion chain. It can be purchased in Camden Market and in other similar new and second-hand markets around the country, it can also be found in the high-fashion stores as well as in the small designer outlets. Pam Hogg, for example, designs largely for club and dance culture. Her clothes are worn by pop stars like Shakespeare’s Sister. Helen Storey’s bestselling beaded bra tops were also bought for wearing in the sweated atmosphere of the club. What this means is that as dance culture has expanded so also have the variety of activities involved in the production of fashion and style. There is still space for setting up a stall and selling new and second-hand clothes, but there is less of a gulf between the items found in the markets and what is available on the high street.5 The scale of rave applies not, however, just to the hugeness of the events and parties but also to the scale of cultural plundering which makes it so expansive. From black culture here and in the US it takes over two fundamental forms and practices, the dance party and the pre-eminent role of the DJ. These supply, with the help of new music and sound technology and pirate radio, a huge world of possibilities. The DJ with all of this at his (and nine out of ten are male) disposal becomes a kind of magician, creating a ‘total experience’, a controlled exercise in crowd excitement. The music generates this effect through combining an accelerating but monotone beat with a much lighter, often highly melodic fragment (taken from TV soundtracks like Twin Peaks, or else from a Phil Collins record, or even from a James Bond soundtrack) ‘laced’ on to the underlying beats-per-minute. Just as some strands of the drug culture of the late sixties enjoyed bringing into its musical repertoire ‘silly’ children’s theme tunes and strains of popular ‘ditties’, this drug culture eschews social or political comment in favour of a kind of simple, happy music (happy hard core) which articulates with the ‘smiley’ logo of the early phase of Acid House. This in turn raises the question of the politics of youth culture in a post-Thatcher but also seemingly post-socialist moment. The other attraction of rave is that, unlike the concert or ‘gig’, it goes on, it doesn’t stop. This hyper-reality of pleasure, this extension of media (one which is found also in 24-hour TV and radio) produces a new social state, a new relationship between the body, the pleasures of music and dance, and the new technologies of the mass media. Rave takes pleasures which have sustained black and gay cultures and makes them available to a predominantly white, working-class and middle-class audience. It also transports this dance, drugs and music ‘cocktail’ into a distinctively British landscape, one which uses and celebrates a geography of small towns, new towns, motorways, and rural ‘beauty spots’, for not just all night or all day but for up to three days at a time. Not surprisingly, these raves, especially during the summer, begin to look like the hippie gatherings, or festivals of the late sixties. The sight, in summer 1992, of working-class male football fans converging in secret rural locations to dance out of doors and sleep in their cars before returning, after this saturnalia of mind and body experiences, to Liverpool, Leeds or wherever, is a strong statement about the appropriation of pleasure and the ‘right to

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party’ on the part of this particular (but expansive) group of young people. I would suggest in conclusion that in rave there can be seen a series of social tensions (including those around gender and sexuality) which are manifest in the particular aesthetics of dance, music and drugs which come to characterize the phenomena. If there is, as Maria Pini (1993) argues, a ‘text of excitement’, an intense and relentless desire for pleasure which finds gratification in the combination of the sociability of the event, the ‘friendliness’ of the drug and the individual physical pleasure of its effects, there is also not just a ‘text of anxiety’, one which, out of fear of AIDS, results in the downgrading of sexual pleasure in favour of a childlike body pleasure (polymorphous perversity) but also a ‘text of avoidance’. There is nothing like the aggressive political culture found in punk music. It is as though young ravers simply cannot bear the burden of the responsibility they are being expected to carry. There are so many dangers (drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, unprotected sex, sexual violence and rape, ecological disaster) so many social and political issues which have a direct bearing on their lives and so many demands being made of them, to be fully responsible in their sexual activity, to become good citizens, to find a job and earn a living, and find a partner and have a family in a world where marriage has become a ‘temporary contract’, that rave turns away from this heavy load and dips headlong into a culture of avoidance and almost pure abandonment. It does this in as visible and as spectacular a way as many of its subcultural predecessors and thereby provokes a strong social reaction. As a result, a dialogue is established, one which, as in the past, includes the intensification of policing and social control. The question then is the extent to which a subcultural aesthetic which asks of its fans that they ‘shut up and dance’ produces in the haze of pleasure and enjoyment a cultural politics of any sort? But just how possible is it to talk about a cultural politics of youth in the 1990s? While I have insisted throughout this paper on the importance of positioning young people as active negotiators and producers of culture rather than simply its consumers, the very notion of a cultural politics implies a unity of focus and a direction which it is difficult to find in youth culture and which perhaps is not what we should be looking for in any case. Youth is not a stable undifferentiated category. Instead, it is cut across by ethnic, gender, class and other differences. What, therefore, it is more realistic to look for are cultural forms and expressions which seem to suggest new or emergent ‘structures of feeling’ on the part of sections of the young population, for example among young girls.6 Such a confluence of change can be seen, I have argued, in a magazine like Just Seventeen, where patterns of meaning which were once emblematic of the experience of teenage femininity, i.e., romance, have disappeared and have been replaced by a more diffuse femininity, one which has been set loose from the firm underpinning provided by romance. What results from this process of detachment from the poles of identity provided by romance is that femininity is constructed as the product of a number of less stable, emergent subject positions. Femininity is no longer the ‘other’ of feminism, instead it incorporates many of those ‘structures of feeling’ which emerged from the political discourse of feminism in the 1970s. But it also, and perhaps most powerfully, exists as the product of a highly charged consumer culture which in turn provides subject positions for girls and personal identities for them through consumption. Finally, the

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subject of the new femininity also enters into social and sexual relationships from a different position than she occupied ten or fifteen years ago. Here too there has been contestation and change. Friendship, equality and difference are all now part of the vocabulary of relationships, alongside love, sex and pleasure. What remains to be explored is the way in which being ‘emancipated’ from romance co-exists, however, with new anxieties and fears from AIDS and through a clearer understanding of the dangers which young women confront in a world where they no longer look for or believe in the prince who will come riding by and protect them from such dangers. Perhaps the most appropriate way to conclude this paper is to return to the ‘micrological’ level and to the subject position of parent which I hesitantly took up in the opening paragraphs. What, for example, are the debates and dilemmas which go through my head as I wait anxiously for my daughter to return from all-night raves? I find that the pleasure and excitement which my daughter and her friends experience as they discover new clubs and locations for raves, as they get to know new people inside the raves and as they uncover places and spaces where raves carry on and wind down when the clubs shut, are all clouded by my own fears and even panic about a number of things including drugs (‘Is it possible to enjoy the music without the drugs?); the people (i.e., men or boys) they meet; the dangers of being in cars driven by boys who have taken E; the dangers of being in such large crowds of people (‘Do they have fire and safety regulations, I ask, nervously?’); and in fact almost every conceivable part of rave which contributes to its attraction, and to the threshold of thrill and excitement it provides. And yet, of course, I am both interested in and pleased by her absorption in culture, by her coming home telling me she wished she had had a camera with her to show me what it was like in the car park after ‘Coast to Coast’ in Birmingham.7 had also forgotten the wide range of knowledge about music which such involvement in a subculture produces. Television fades in interest as Kiss FM and many of the other illegal radio stations take over, broadcasting direct to this audience. Subcultural novels and video films, usually mythologizing some earlier subcultural or underground moment, like On The Road or Ciao Manhattan, begin to circulate among the group of friends. The first and only time I have witnessed my daughter interested in translating from her school German into English was when she came across a lengthy piece of reportage in a German newspaper about ‘German techno music’. The cultural politics which emerges for these middle-class girls and their friends from the experience of rave fixes them in a space of identity which knows first and foremost what it is not. It is not ‘square’ and conventionally middle class. It is not too tightly bound to the ‘parent culture’. Instead, this is a cultural space dominated by the experience of mostly working-class young people, black and white, and it is their culture and language as well as their creativity and work which establishes the subculture in the first place. It is also a place of spectacle and display, as one club or rave tries to outdo the other in the special effects or theme-park attractions or videos it offers. (‘At this point in the song’, my daughter tells me, ‘the lasers sweep down across the floor and the professional dancers also do this wide kind of sweeping movement’.) This interplay of dance, music and image produces a powerful popular aesthetic. Immersion in rave also influences patterns of love and friendship. Despite being ostensibly open to all,

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the codes of ‘rave authenticity’ which include ‘white label’ tracks, fanzines, flyers as collector’s items, well-known DJs, famous clubs, legendary raves, double meanings in music lyrics, argot, ritual and special items of clothes, are continuously drawn upon as resources for constructing who the raver is, or in this case who my daughter and her friends are and who they are likely to get to know. Perhaps the emphasis on authenticity is a pre-condition for acquiring subjectivity and identity in adolescence, one of the attractions of subculture being precisely that it offers strong subjectivity through the collective meanings which emerge from the distinctive combination of signs, symbols, objects, styles and other ‘signifying texts’. These are not experienced in isolation from other more commercial teenage texts such as those of TV soap opera or series like Twin Peaks or films like Flatliners or other ‘brat pack’ movies. But the subculture far outstrips other forms of youth entertainment because of where it takes place. Outside the regulatory space of the home or school, the more autonomous space of the subculture contributes directly to the weakening of these other institutional ties. For this reason the attraction to subcultures lies partly in the modes of empowerment they offer. It is the extent to which such cultural forms and practices exist and take shape outside the controlling and defining gaze of otherwise more powerful others, including parents, which also accounts for the feelings of anxiety, fear and powerlessness experienced by conventional ‘moral guardians’ and also by parents. Sociologists have described and explained the power of youth subcultures as resistance, and the social reaction to these phenomena as ‘moral panics’. These often nebulous terms find clarification and confirmation when the positionality of the parent, or mother, is taken into account.8 Notes 1 Thanks to Sarah Thornton for discussing this paper. See Thornton (1993) for a much fuller account of club culture. 2 Only a detailed research study would reveal the precise shifts and changes in the youth labour market along the lines of sex, class and race. What evidence there is shows that black working-class young women are more likely to return to further and higher education than their male counterparts. While middle-class girls continue to move into professional fields like law, dentistry and medicine, it is more difficult to find material on white working-class young women’s training and employment. 3 See, for example, TV programmes like BBC DEF II’s Reportage series, edited by Janet Street Porter, which addresses the question of drugs seriously while avoiding the sensationalist reporting of the tabloid press. 4 There has always been a direct link between small shops and boutiques selling specifically youth-culture styles before they get into the high street and the club scene. For example, flyers and publicity leaflets for clubs and raves list these shops as the places where tickets can be purchased. Clothes shops like these, as well as record stores, will also supply information about local clubs and raves.

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5 For example, the Revive Clothing shop in Coventry sells rave-style clothes which include new designer club clothes in rubber, lycra and cotton, but also ‘restored’ second-hand items, as well as new, ‘perfect’ copies of old classics, e.g., American silk bomber jackets. 6 Raymond Williams (1961) used the term ‘structure of feeling’ in his best-known writings on culture. 7 In this instance National Car Parks in Birmingham, along with the local constabulary, turned a blind eye to hundreds of ravers using their car sound systems to keep the party going for up to three hours after the club above the car park had ended. 8 Drawing on the work of Foucault, E.Carter (1984) uses the term ‘micrological’ to describe exactly this interface of power and powerlessness between mother and adolescent daughter. Carter is referring to conflicts over particular items of clothing, and in so doing offers a more local and contextual description of ‘resistance’. Far from reducing the scope of the term, Carter’s analysis brings into play questions of gender and the family, both of which were conspicuously missing in the model of ‘resistance through rituals’ developed by CCCS (Hall and Jefferson, 1976). References Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge (or Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Brunsdon, C. (1991) ‘Pedagogies of the feminine: feminist teaching and women’s genres’, Screen, 32, No. 4. Carter, E. (1984) ‘Alice in consumer Wonderland’, in Angela McRobbie and M.Nava (1984) editors, Gender and Generation, London: Macmillan. Faludi, Susan (1992) Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, New York: Doubleday. Frith, Simon and H.Horne (1987) Art Into Pop, London: Methuen. Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson (1976) editors, Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post War Britain, London: Hutchinson. Hartwig, H. (1992) ‘Youth culture forever’, paper presented at the Nordic Youth Research Conference. Hebdige, Dick (1978) Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London: Methuen. ——(1987) ‘The impossible object: toward a sociology of the sublime’, New Formations, 1. McRobbie, Angela (1990) ‘Second hand dresses and the role of the ragmarket’, in Angela McRobbie (1990) editor, Zootsuits and Second-Hand Dresses: An Anthology of Fashion and Music, London: Macmillan. ——(1991) Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen, London: Macmillan. ——(1992) ‘Post Marxism in Cultural Studies’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (1992) editors, Cultural Studies, New York and London: Routledge. McRobbie, Angela and Mica Nava (1984) editors, Gender and Generation, London:

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Macmillan. Modleski, Tania (1985) Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women, New York: Routledge. Mort, F. (forthcoming) For What It Is Worth, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Nava, Mica (1992) Changing Cultures: Feminism, Youth and Consumerism, Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage. Pini, M. (1993) ‘Rave, dance and women’, unpublished MA Dissertation, Thames Valley University. Pleasance, H. (1992) ‘Open or closed: popular magazines and dominant culture’ in S.Franklin, C.Lury and J.Stacey (1992) editors, Off Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies, London: HarperCollins. Radway, Janice (1984) Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Thornton, Sarah (1990) ‘Club Class’, The New Statesman and Society, 16 November. ——(1993) ‘From Record Hops to Raves: Cultural Studies of Youth, Music & Media’, Doctoral thesis, John Logie Baird Centre, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Williams, Raymond (1961) The Long Revolution, North Pomfret, Vermont: Chatto & Windus.

JOHN CLARKE AND JANET NEWMAN

THE RIGHT TO MANAGE: A SECOND MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION?1 A measure of the success of our first ten years is that we have restored management to its proper place in society. (Kenneth Clarke, Secretary of State for Education, interviewed on the Today programme, BBC Radio 4, 12.3.92)

This article links two personal concerns—the practice of cultural studies and the experience of doing management development work in the public sector in Britain—and attempts to make connections between the two. Its starting point is the sense of a strange conjunction between something missing in cultural studies and something appearing in the field of management. The missing component in cultural studies is the disappearance of economic relations and work cultures as objects of enquiry, such that cultural studies has become increasingly focused on the texts and practices of ‘free time’ with the realm of the economy appearing only as a backdrop to the real action. That absence would be significant in its own right, but it is juxtaposed with the discovery of culture in managerial discourses as a domain of working life which needs to be actively managed. This article explores the proposition that discussions of economic and social change during the 1980s have missed or at least underestimated one of the key dimensions of restructuring. This dimension—the articulation of ‘the right to manage’—has resonances with different assessments of the restructuring process but is not reducible to the strategy of building enterprise cultures (e.g., Keat and Abercrombie, 1991) or the new regime of accumulation of post-Fordism (e.g., Aglietta, 1979). It is a phenomenon which has had major impacts on the restructuring of both private and public sectors through the 1980s and has profound connections with wider economic, cultural and political changes but which has been little discussed outside the pages of management journals. The huge stress on remaking management as a social practice— management development and management education as growth fields—have aimed to rescue it from its low public and political valuation and to grant it respectability through a growing certification process. There is also a broader agenda of managerialization which aims to make management the driving force of a competitively successful society. At the core of this second managerial revolution are the concerns with management as a social force embodying commitments to ‘excellence’ and ‘quality’ and as an organizational force providing ‘leadership’ which is committed to transforming organizations through the medium of culture (exemplified in Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence,

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(1982) which is reputed to be the best-selling management text of all time). The new man(ager) ? Drawing on a growing inspirational literature (led by Peters and Waterman), the new managerialism aims to break away from traditional conceptions of managers as organizational functionaries/bureaucrats and from the imagery of those who have sold their soul to the corporation and are trapped by an organizational culture which values rule-following above innovation (Whyte’s ‘organization man’, 1957). By contrast, the new manager is expansive, dynamic, creative—in charge of his/her own destiny (Rose, 1989: ch. 10). New managers embody the commitment to ‘transformational’ rather than ‘transactional’ leadership (Hunt, 1991). The ideal type of the new manager is distinguished by the following traits: Managers must have a ‘visionary’ quality. They lead through ideals and by example, articulating a sense of purpose or mission for the organization which enthuses and inspires its staff. Pre-revolutionary management, by contrast, was locked into uninspiring modes of rationality and control which focused on repressing rather than releasing the human potential of the organization. Tom Peters, as usual, provides an eloquent statement of visionary leadership: The boss with a vision is political in the very best and purest sense of that word. He or she…is constantly out ‘campaigning’—campaigning for the support, energy and wholehearted participation of everyone in the organization (Peters, 1989:406). The objective of inspirational leadership is to replace control with commitment, creating the motivational conditions which will mobilize all staff in the enterprise. This stress on the participation of everyone links the visionary or missionary style to the second strand of the new managerialism. Management must be ‘people-centred’. Old-style management was obsessed with status and, as a result, wasted human potential by devaluing lower grades of staff in particular. The new manager must be attentive to the potential contribution of everyone in the organization and create a climate in which they feel their contributions will be valued and welcome. The new managerialism is especially associated with the idea of ‘honouring the front line’ as vital to business success or failure. One sign of the new sort of organization is a perceptible change in the language we use to talk about them. Organizations used to be perceived as gigantic pieces of engineering, with largely interchangeable human parts. We talked of structures and their systems, of inputs and outputs, of control devices and of managing them, as if the whole was one large factory. Today the language is not that of engineering but of politics, with talk of cultures and networks of teams and coalitions, of influences and power rather than control, of leadership not

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management. It is as if we had suddenly woken up to the fact that organisations were made up of people after all, not just ‘hands’ or ‘role occupants’ (Handy, 1989:71). As the quotation from Handy suggests, the new managerialism marks a shift from mechanistic to organic models of organizational life. This shift is based on a double rationale. On the one hand, it argues that staff motivation is not solely an instrumental equation but involves other less rational components—a sense of recognition, ‘belonging’ and self-actualization, for example. On the other hand, it argues that organizational cultures can be created by managers such that an integrative community, encouraging participation, can be built: All of life is show-business. Our life, to each of us, is a spell-binding drama, and we play, day in and day out, the lead role. Time and again, we are put upon, not fully appreciated or loved, are misunderstood. Thus we would argue that the specialness of…is that each allows (encourages) humaneness, the very essence of it, to pervade his organization. Each creates ‘places to go’, ‘places to be’. Commitment, passion, zest, energy, care, love and enthusiasm can be readily expressed (Peters and Austin, 1985:292). This people-centredness is, as others have remarked, a combination of older threads drawn from neo-human relations approaches to management with a more insistent sense of the responsibility of managers for both being and enabling the ‘enterprising self (Rose, 1989). Management must be customer-centred. The organization must be externally focused, paying attention to changing markets and customer demands in order to achieve the dynamic and flexible orientation necessary to competitive survival. This is the basis of a fundamental criticism of the characteristics of the American corporation which had typically learnt to exploit monopoly or quasi-monopoly market positions and had lost the ability to react to changing market conditions and the rise of new competition. This had links with the concern to ‘honour the front line’, since it is likely to be their work which determines the quality of the customer experience. It also connects to the more general point about the importance of people-centred management, since it requires organizations to recognize that customers are people, too. One of Peters and Austin’s section headings refers to ‘the irreducible humanness of customers’ (Peters and Austin, 1985: s.6). This combination of being both people-centred and market-oriented is elegantly expressed in Peters and Austin’s comment on the source of visions: ‘[The vision] must come from the market and the soul simultaneously. It must be passionately felt before it is published’ (Peters and Austin, 1985:286). The vision thus combines the first three conditions for the new managerialism which we have discussed—articulating leadership with passion (the human organization) and the market, forming a unity of internal and external orientations. Visions also lead to the final focal concern—that of corporate cultures. Management must manage culture. The old management was rule-focused, attempting

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to control everything and everyone by external regulation. Its assumptions about organizational behaviour rested on an essentially negative or pessimistic calculus of human motivation, anticipating that people would behave badly if not subject to direct control (either by rules or supervisors). As a consequence, organizations created elaborate structures of command to police staff, involving demeaning rules, elaborate systems of control, and rigidly stratified lines of communication and reward. Such systems produced bureaucratic or corporate ossification which run counter to the needs for flexibility and adaptability in new conditions. By contrast, the new managerialism assumes an optimistic calculus of motivation— that people are ‘essentially’ creative and enterprising. As a consequence, the new management must break up systems of imposed control (as in Peters’ enthusiasm for ‘bashing bureaucracy’) and instead create conditions which harness, rather than repress, creativity. These conditions are the symbolic environment of the organizational world— the corporate culture. Integration is to happen through belief and commitment (processes internal to the individual) rather than through external constraint. This stress on managing culture combines the emphasis on enterprising selves with a recognition that changing organizational forms (towards greater devolution, decentralization and divisionalization) make traditional modes of corporate strategic management even less likely to succeed than before. It is this view which underpins Peters’ observations about the ‘loose-tight’ organization—where structures are ‘looser’ but there is ‘tight’ integration through commitment to the corporate mission. Visions, missions, leadership by example, intensive communication processes and thorough attention to the realm of symbols are the mechanisms for creating the cultural conditions which mobilize and harness enterprising energy. This is the core role of the manager as leader: Leaders articulate and define what has previously remained implicit or unsaid; then they invent images, metaphors and models that provide a focus for new attention. By doing so, they consolidate or challenge existing wisdom. In short, an essential factor in leadership is the capacity to influence and organize meaning for the members of the organization (Bennis and Nanus, 1985, quoted in Peters, 1989:399.) The last sentence of this quotation highlights precisely the concern of the new managerialism with the formulation, framing and control of culture as the key to the recurrent problems of organizational integration. The discourse is not solely about a more human, or people-centred, style of management, nor even about the construction of enterprising selves. It takes, almost as if its authors had been reading cultural theory, the proposition that identities are formed in and through culture. Its proponents are clear that struggles (though they might not recognize the word) to articulate subjects to specific and would-be hegemonic cultural formations are of central importance.2 It is, we think, difficult not to be struck by the centrality of the concept of culture and the role of managers as cultural practitioners in this reformulation of management (Newman, forthcoming a). We want to draw attention to one further dimension of the new managerialism that

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results from the themes which it stresses. It is associated with a fairly complex reframing of what, for want of a better phrase, we might call the gender typification of management. Historically, of course, management has been archetypally masculine, associated with both behaviour and predispositions which resembled loosely packaged testosterone. Studies of managers have, for the most part, revealed the extent to which management has been the site of gendered exclusionary practices and the object of fear and loathing for women positioned on its margins. The new managerial discourse is conterminous with both the real (if small) movement of more women into managerial positions and legislative and corporate initiatives to increase women’s participation in management (e.g., Opportunity 2000 in the UK). What links these two processes is a complex of arguments about the feminization of management. There are arguments that management needs the ‘feminine qualities’ which women can bring: essentially a greater concern with process over product, people over things and values over objectives. Management, such arguments suggest, needs to develop a more ‘sensitive’ approach to people management (although phrases like manpower and man management hang on fairly stubbornly). Nevertheless, arguments about what women can bring meet the views of the new managerialism about what management needs to become in an apparently perfect conjunction. What women have to offer seems to match the stress on people, cultures and enabling style of the new management. (Newman, forthcoming b). Such a conjunction is more apparent than real. Recent research on women becoming managers suggests that the exclusionary practices are stubbornly resistant to change. As women gain access to positions of power, power mysteriously moves elsewhere, such that the ‘glass ceiling’ shifts one floor further up (Cockburn, 1991). At the same time, the feminization of management is not necessarily an objective to be accomplished by recruiting more women, since (as we all know) men can learn to be sensitive too.3 Furthermore, the new management remains framed by some of the same imperatives as the old management—particularly the presumption of competitive success. Such imperatives continue to feed a masculine culture of management, requiring ruthless attention to the ‘bottom line’ and career advancement, while building normative expectations about long hours of work as demonstrating corporate commitment. Rosabeth Moss Kanter has provided an elegant depiction of the contradictory demands of the new managerialism and discussed the emphasis on short-termism or the ‘slash and burn’ approach to competitive success as features eatures of what she described as the ‘cowboy’ style of management (Moss Kanter, 1990). The new manager may prove, like his social counterpart the new man, to be a more ambiguous and elusive figure than at first appears. In the meantime, let’s not forget the salience of all that testosterone: ‘All over British manufacturing industry, managers are celebrating their return to life and power, like eunuchs miraculously restored to wholeness and potency.’ (Graham Turner, The Daily Telegraph, 13.2.81, quoted in MacInnes, 1987:92). The nature of the magic potion which restored managerial virility will be the subject of further attention in a later section. Before that we want to examine some other features of the new managerialism.

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Born-again management: cowboys to the rescue Like all good discourses, the new managerialism announced the conditions of its own necessity—elaborating a tale of the failings of the old management and their dire consequences. The new manager was born out of a climate of crisis and disillusionment—located in the start of a long-drawn-out crisis of US capitalism in the late 1970s and more specifically in its competitive failure in the face of the industrializing Pacific rim. Peters’ (1989) discussion of ‘The accelerating American decline’ notes among other things: • declining business productivity as a feature of the US economy (3% p.a. growth 1950– 65; 2% 1965–75; 1% 1975–85) and especially manufacturing productivity: growth at 2.5% p.a. between 1950–85 compared to Japan at 8.4%, Germany and Italy at 5.5%; France at 5.3% and even Britain at 3.1%; • the USA’s per capita GNP slipped below Japan in 1986 (also below West Germany, Sweden and Denmark); while the average wage for 25–34-year-old white males declined by 26% in real terms between 1973–814; • the national savings rate (already the lowest in the industrial world) continued to decline—savings as share of personal income down from 7.5% to 3.9% between 1981 and 1986; • the period featured a growing number of bank failures (138 in 1986); • up to 30 million jobs were lost between 1976–86. Since 1980 the Fortune 500 companies alone shed 2.8 million jobs and there was a growing US trade deficit: $152 million by April 1987. This climate of American failure was the precondition for the new managerial literature’s promise of salvation. It announced the possibility of a way forward which linked the fortunes of the individual manager, the corporation and the nation. The born-again manager could rescue the situation brought about by the failure of the old corporate mentality: the playing-safe organization man; the ossified corporation; and the overregulatory state produced by the politics of corporate liberalism. (Swann, 1988; Clarke, 1991: ch. 5). As Rose notes of the new managerialism’s promise: ‘Economic progress, career progress and personal development intersected upon this new psycho-therapeutic territory’ (Rose, 1989:115). There are very strong connections between the views of the relationship between human nature and work in the new managerialism and the relationship between human nature and economic activity in neo-liberal economics.5 Both identify the self as essentially enterprising and regret the imposition of restraint or control which inhibits the full expression of enterprise. Both also articulate a homology between the self, the corporation and the national economy, such that ‘over-regulation’ inhibits enterprise in all three domains and the desire to ‘free enterprise’ involves a unity of interest between the individual, corporation and nation. The new managerialism promises liberation for managers (at least those who keep the

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faith) from their current oppressions. It is expressed in an inspirational literature whose rhetoric proclaims that success is achievable through self-transformation from bureaucratic time-server to inspirational leader. This liberation is echoed in the transformation of corporations from top-heavy and ossified structures to dynamic and flexible entities driven by values, missions, visions and charismatic personal example. The literature is, as a consequence, awash with tales of managerial heroism and the tranformational miracles which such heroes have performed in ‘turning round’ troubled or failing enterprises. Leadership (wherever it is exercised) itself must be inspirational— binding others to the vision: A man enters the room, assured and confident. A wry smile plays on his lips. He casts an indulgent eye over his audience… The scene which is about to unfold is not unfamiliar to those who attend management training courses with large organizations. What is about to take place is the reading of the corporate gospel, the ‘Hear, O Israel’, the sursum corda. What we are about to hear is how much the company loves, cherishes and needs these poor, unworthy servants; how, if they will only give their heart, soul and mind to the company, they can take their place with the chosen ones, the elect. The language is thick with quasireligious imagery, eclectic and all-embracing. It speaks to the Humanist, to the Christian, to the Jew, to the Muslim. It is unashamedly sentimental. It offers fear and comfort in equal measure. No reasonable person could object to these platitudes. If the company be for us, who can be against us? So hearts are uplifted, the symbolic response is made—a metaphorical et cum spiritu tuo—and there is rapturous applause. The man stands, arms uplifted, in the gesture of the priest. The offering is made. He is transfigured. He is the multiplicity of their hopes and aspirations held in the oneness of his being. Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. In recent years, I have seen this performance enacted on numerous occasions. The management prophet descends from Mount Sinai, either as a missionary from the Board Room or a bought in corporate evangelist. His message is simple. It is the Gospel of the Sunday School and it says ‘God Lives. He Loves you. If you want to enjoy his favours, he must be obeyed.’ Like the missionaries of the Christian church, he seeks conversion, a common credo, allegiance to a declared mission statement. He comes like an Angel of Light. And so he is, for he is Lucifer come to offer Faust his contract (Hopfl, 1992:23–4). This quotation from Hopfl captures the quasi-theological character of the new managerialism. Like all theologies it is dogmatic and sectarian, requiring the existence of unbelievers (bureaucrats) and heretics or dissenters (those who fail to see the vision). It also presents its own version of damnation—the fires of business failure. But however inspiring the rhetoric and however dramatic the individual conversion/rebirth processes have been, the success of the new managerialism (as a movement rather than a balance sheet) owes much to external changes which have shifted the conditions in which management operates.6 The following section explores the particular combination of

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economic, social and political restructurings of the 1980s which created a situation in which the appeal of the new managerialism makes sense. The conditions of rebirth: enforcing the right to manage The new managerialism appears in the context of processes of economic restructuring under way from the mid 1970s which had the effect of changing the social composition, place and shape of labour forces. To some extent, this may be about what has been called ‘flexible specialisation’ (Piore and Sabel, 1984), registering the impact of new technologies, new patterns of work and new systems of control. But it is also about deunionization, the greening of labour, the feminization of labour, the casualization of labour, the reorganizing of core/peripheral labour and the mobility of the enterprise in national and international terms (see, for example, Bluestone and Harrison, 1982; Hudson, 1988; Sayer and Walker, 1992). These restructurings of labour are both more and less than is represented in the concepts of flexible specialization or post-Fordism. Such concepts overestimate the significance of the particular forms of co-ordination which they describe, and underestimate the salience of other strategies deployed in the remaking of both capital and labour in the 1970s and 1980s. Getting ‘lean and mean’ is not just an imperative of the new managerialism but an economic requirement of capital recomposition in face of declining profitability, represented in the continual concern with ‘overmanning’ and the need to ‘shake out’ excess capacity and excess labour. Such economic processes have also had political articulations in the various incarnations of what Kim Moody (1987) has called the ‘business agenda’. Moody argues that in the late 1970s and 1980s, corporate capital elaborated a set of demands about the conditions which need to be established by both local and national states in order to attract capital investment and to ensure the success of such investment. These demands focus on the need to liberate capital from the shackles of the post-war settlements. The business agenda sought capital’s release from the state in the form of over-taxation and over-regulation; from the unions in the form of restrictive practices, and from corporate deadweight. Both in Britain and the USA, the expanded state resulting from the post-war settlement was identified as a major inhibition to continued or renewed capital accumulation. Its actions ‘interfered with’ the free market, producing distortions in labour markets, capital markets and the exercise of managerial discretion within the enterprise through excessive regulatory activity (see, for example, Friedman and Friedman, 1984: ch. 6). Such concerns underpinned the commitments of the Atlantic new right to ‘roll back the state’ in pursuit of greater freedom and led to programmes of extensive state disestablishment in both Britain and the USA through both ‘privatization’ and ‘deregulation’ (Swann, 1988). At the same time, the business agenda involved targeting the patterns of corporate and personal taxation used to fund the activities of the expanded state, arguing that these had anti-enterprise effects by reducing the rewards for initiative and hard work (Cronin and Radtke, 1987; Adams, 1984). As elsewhere, the tax revolt involved the articulation of

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a unity of interest between the individual, corporation and nation and ‘delivered the goods’ in terms of changing tax regimes, especially those for corporate taxation. The other feature of the post-war settlements identified as requiring structural change was the place of organized labour. Although there were significant transatlantic differences, the business agenda in both Britain and the USA saw the position of unionized labour as a major blockage to the proper workings of the free market and effective corporate management. Organized labour prevented the efficient operation of ‘free’ labour markets through disrupting pricing mechanisms and labour mobility (the extra-organizational dimensions of union power). Trades unions also interfered with managerial discretion within the organization of labour process, in particular through such phenomena as demarcation agreements and shop-floor power (see, for example, MacInnes, 1987). As well as being left stranded by capital flight, organized labour has been the subject of an elaborate battery of attacks: new industrial relations legislation; displacement from national corporatist institutions; single or non-union workplace deals; the surrender of workplace negotiating rights; ‘give-back’ deals, and more. The growing ‘flexibility’ (or volatility) of capital has also exposed the vulnerability of ossified corporations to both external competition and predatory stock markets. The 1980s saw the rise of ‘takeover mania’ or what Reich (1984) termed ‘paper entrepreneurship’ in the activities of the corporate raiders. The heightened competition and the insecurity which came in its wake was seen as breaking the complacency of corporations made comfortable by their monopolistic and near-monopolistic trading positions and bolstered by a view of management as a stabilizing rather than dynamic process: On balance, the raiders are, along with the Japanese, the most effective force now terrorizing inert corporate managements into making at least some of the moves, such as downsizing, that should have been made years ago (Peters, 1989:32.)7. Whatever rhetorical form these demands of the business agenda have taken (and they variously speak in the names of ‘the market’, ‘the customer’, ‘the nation’ and ‘the spirit of enterprise’), their object has been to remove the ‘shackles’ from the processes of capital accumulation. They have sought to affect both the extra-organizational and intraorganizational conditions limiting those processes. In this way, they articulated a particular affinity between the ‘free market’ and the ‘free manager’ as the practical embodiment of capital within the enterprise.8 Consequently the central effect they sought was that of re-establishing the ‘right of managers to manage’, freed from unreasonable restrictions and impediments. As a revolution, it is—in Gramsci’s terms—a revolution from above, concerned with the recomposition of economic and organizational power. It is a transformation undertaken to secure control where it properly belongs: in the hands of managers. The recomposition of organizational power: ‘almost vengeance’?

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Managers for twenty years have had a buffeting and beating from government and unions and we have been put in a can’t win situation. We have an opportunity now that will last for two or three years. Then the unions will get themselves together again; and the government, like all governments, will run out of steam. So grab it now. We have had a pounding and we are all fed up with it. I think it would be fair to say that it’s almost vengeance (Len Collinson, The Financial Times, 5.1.81, quoted in MacInnes, 1987:92)9.

The new managerialism is the beneficiary of these wider economic and political transformations. It promises a management equipped to take advantage of the changing internal and external environments of organizations, ready to match the pace of external change with internal dynamism. Its prescriptions for management style and strategy make sense within the context of these restructurings because of the way they open up the internal domain of the enterprise for the exercise of managerial discretion. It presents an approach to managing which offers to fill the gap created by the dismantling of other forms of organizational power, especially the limitations imposed by organized labour. In place of such intra-organizational defences the new managerialism promises a ‘climate of trust’: a corporate culture of mutual commitment to the overriding values and mission of the organization. It aims to create a homogeneous and shared culture which binds all workers to the pursuit of corporate objectives, although it is clear that extraorganizational factors like rates of national and local unemployment have a significant loyalty-inducing effect (see Morgan and Sayer, 1988). The new managerialism places great stress on giving up traditional bureaucratic modes of managerial control and seeks to bridge the motivation gap by vision+purpose+performance through devolved processes (what Peters has, called the loose-tight organizational structure). It stresses reduced supervisory control to achieve enhanced integration, moving from compliance to commitment. The objective is to work on the cultural or attitudinal dimensions of work experience to produce behavioural compliance in middle managers as well as frontline workers: the mission must not be betrayed by word or deed (Hopfl, 1992). The aim is to create the ‘transparent’ organization where everyone is ‘responsible’ for achieving corporate objectives and everyone is ‘enterprising’ in pursuit of them: The new vocabulary of teamwork, quality consciousness, flexibility and quality circles thus reconciles the autonomous aspirations of the employee with the collective entrepreneurialism of the corporate culture (Rose, 1989:117). It should be noted that the practice is considerably more complex than the inspirational rhetoric of the new managerialism might suggest.10 The ‘old’ control systems do not just simply wither away. Indeed, Peters and Waterman are explicit about the difficulties which managers face in ‘letting go’, although they are perhaps rather more reticent about

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the struggles over organizational power which may make managers more reluctant to take their hands off the known systems and sources of power. More importantly, the new managerialism is also associated with new control systems concerned with attitudinal and behavioural compliance among staff whose operation suggests something other than harmonious integration. New approaches to performance measurement, the use of invisible monitoring systems through information technology (Garson, 1989) and the use of customer surveys to discipline frontline workers (Fuller and Smith, 1991) point to a continued effort to regulate labour processes and hint at the continued intractability of labour forces.11 None the less, there are problems about taking the new managerialism too seriously.12 It has certainly provided a legitimating discourse for a variety of organizational transformations and may indeed have been practised in some of those changes. But, despite its visibility, it is by no means the only version of managerialism. It may be practised rhetorically even though forms of control being exercised change superficially or do not change at all. In some settings the new management may extend no further than the introduction of customer-care training for frontline staff or issuing mission statements. It is more likely that many organizations are relatively untouched by the new managerialism, even though they are exercising the managers’s right to manage in other ways: extending controls, exploiting greater powers over hiring and firing, changing working conditions, creating new contractual arrangements and finding other ways of exploiting the flexibility of labour. This flexibility is not just the new flexible or multiskilled worker, but rests on the enhanced power of management to make labour flexible in a variety of ways. MacInnes, for example, argues that the shift in the balance of power has revitalized traditional managerial approaches as much as, if not more than, creating ‘new’ managers (MacInnes, 1987; see also Hakim, 1990, on labour-force strategies). In this respect, what is most significant is not what particular managements do—what style or strategy they adopt—but the more generalized conditions of the enhanced freedom in which they make choices. The stripping of defences from employees both within and outside the organization has created the possibility of the right to manage and exposed employees more directly to the exercise of managerial discretion. The bottom line? We have traced the main elements of the new managerialism as a specific discursive strategy for the reconstruction of enterprises and tried to show how it is dependent on processes of economic and political restructuring which have shifted both extra- and intra-organizational balances of power towards the managerial prerogative. Viewed narrowly, the new managerialism resembles the ‘practical theory’ of post-Fordism. It theorizes how to manage the flexible firm and the flexible worker through the practice of symbolic management. In these terms, it is subject to the same sort of empirical objections as post-Fordism itself—that it is unrepresentative and atypical in terms of the global patterns capital accumulation and the practice of management within them (see

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Sayer and Walker, 1992). Just as post-Fordism might better be viewed as one of an expanded range of strategies now available for the organization of capital accumulation, so the new managerialism takes its place as part of an expanded array of strategies for the exercise of enhanced managerial power within organizations. But the new managerialism needs to be seen as having contributed to these processes of restructuring in two ways. It has contributed to some changes in management practice (however unevenly) and forms of organizational transformation. It has also provided a new and distinctive language of management which has played a significant role in legitimating claims to both organizational and social leadership. Such claims concern not only the exercise of power in the enterprise but form an essential component of the greater involvement of ‘business in the community’ through expanded corporate intervention in the voluntary and state sectors. Both in Britain and the USA there is evidence of a variety of expanded roles for business: as expert advisers to governments and state institutions; as sponsors of initiatives; as an interest whose needs must be taken account of; as consultants on public-sector restructuring and as partners in a range of service provision.13 The new managerialism has had a crucial ideological role to play in the greater dispersal of corporate power, unlocking the apparent separation of business and other social and political domains through its articulation of enterprise and excellence. Managers have been granted a vision and have pursued it beyond the corporation. Notes 1 This article is part of a larger programme of work concerned with the impact of managerial regimes on the public sector in Britain. It first saw the light of day in seminars given at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Madison-Wisconsin in April, 1992. We would like to thank those who took part for their constructive contributions to the paper’s development and Mike Apple and Larry Grossberg both for the invitations and their support in pursuing these themes. 2 There is a parallel to be drawn with the greater attention simultaneously being paid to the management of the organization’s external representations registered in the increased salience of corporate design and advertising during the 1980s. 3 Indeed, one might go so far as to suggest that it is widely believed that it is easier for men to tack on a bit of sensitivity (after all they’re nothing if not adaptable) than it is for women to learn to be ‘hard-nosed’ and ‘competitive’. It is apparent that men have been more than willing to ‘reclaim the right’ to have feelings as their contribution to the equalization of opportunities. 4 The selection of this particular indicator is justified by Peters as follows: ‘Given the increase in work force participation by women, overall family income has slowly risen. But the economic fate of the individual white male remains the bellwether indicator of progress (or lack of it) (1989:4). 5 There is a significant difference here from other strands of New Right ideology, e.g.,

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the more pessimistic view propounded in neo-conservative analyses (see, e.g., Murray, 1984). In practice, such differences have been resolved by distributing ‘human natures’ to different sections of the population: enterprising selves tend to be found among the ‘economically active’, while ‘pain avoiders’ or the less dynamic ‘satisficers’ tend to be located among welfare ‘dependants’. The object of much New Right concern with welfare policy has been to foster the conditions which will create enterprising selves in the latter group. 6 Contained here is what might be described as a methodological argument: that in studying specific discourses it is important to explore the connections between their internal discursive logic and the conditions of existence which permit or enable their development. Otherwise, there are problems of dealing with issues of timing (why specific discourses are propagated within particular historical conjunctures) and success (why some discourses take root). 7 It is worth noting the echoes of these tyrannies and the equivalent demands for liberation in relation to the British public sector which aimed at supplanting bureauprofessionalism by managerialism as the internal regime of state institutions (Newman and Clarke, forthcoming; and Pollitt, 1990). 8 This relationship rests on the structural separation of ownership and control which was, of course, the basis of Burnham’s thesis about the first ‘managerial revolution’. Where Burnham assumed that the separation provided the foundation for a transcendence of capitalism, nobody engaged in promoting the second revolution would wish to be associated with such socialistic sentiments. Now we are all just trying to get back to ‘business as usual’. 9 There are reasons for thinking that Collinson was being unduly pessimistic in his estimate of the time available for vengeance. 10 There is another methodological point here. The practices associated with a particular discourse cannot simply be ‘read off’ or deduced from the statements in which the discourse is formulated. For example, Rose’s discussion of the new managerialism (1989: ch. 10) tends to treat it as if its formulations effectively prescribed and described managerial practices. 11 The new managerialism resembles other ‘managerialisms’ in its promise to be the mode of management which overcomes such intractability. Each identifies the nonintegration of the worker as a problem, and then claims to be able to resolve it. For one striking example, see Analoui and Kakabadse (1992) which promises that the introduction of Total Quality Management will do away with the problem of recalcitrant or disaffected labour forces. 12 There are also problems in assuming that those subjected to the discourse take it seriously too. This applies to both managers and workers. Managers now know that they should ‘talk management’ but may still encounter problems in maintaining their corporate commitment (see Hopfl, 1992). For workers, it may be the focus of renewed scepticism, even though their dissent may be passive rather than active: a condition enforced by factors other than their enthusiasm for the corporate vision. This may be viewed as a third methodological point about the analysis of discourses.

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They clearly attempt subjection, but should not be assumed to achieve it. 13 Although this is not the place to go into it in detail, the 1980s saw a much greater subjection of the public realm to the ethos of ‘good business practices’ and to drawing on the ‘experience’ of managing businesses. Alongside this was the encouragement of ‘partnership’ between the public and private sectors in everything ranging from economic development to education. See, inter alia, Cochrane, 1991, Apple, 1992 and McLaughlin, Cochrane and Clarke (eds) forthcoming. References Adams, J.R. (1984) Secrets of the Tax Revolt, Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Aglietta, M. (1979) A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience, London: Verso. Analoui, F. and Kakabadse, A. (1992) Sabotage: How to Recognise and Manage Employee Defiance, London: Mercury. Apple, M. (1992) ‘Constructing the captive audience: Channel One and the political economy of the text’, mimeo, School of Education, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Bennis, W. and Nanus, B. (1985) Leaders, New York: Harper & Row. Bluestone, B. and Harrison, B. (1982) The Deindustrialization of America, New York: Basic Books. Clarke, J. (1991) New Times and Old Enemies: Essays on Cultural Studies and America, London: Harper Collins. Cochrane, A. (1991) ‘The changing state of local government: restructuring for the 1990s’, Public Administration, 69(3) 281–302. Cockburn, C. (1991) In the Way of Women: Men’s Resistance to Sex Equality in Organisations, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Cronin, J.E. and Radtke, T.G. (1987) ‘The old and new politics of taxation’, in Miliband et al. (1987). Friedman, M. and Friedman, R. (1984) The Tyranny of the Status Quo, Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Fuller, L. and Smith, V. (1991) ‘Consumers’ reports: management by customers in a changing economy’, Work, Employment and Society, 5(1), 1–16. Garson, B. (1989) The Electronic Sweatshop, New York: Penguin. Hakim, C. (1990) ‘Core and periphery in employers’ workforce strategies: evidence from the 1987 E.L.U.S. survey’, Work, Employment and Society, 4(2), 157–88. Handy, C. (1989) The Age of Unreason, London: Arrow. Hopfl, H. (1992) ‘The making of the corporate acolyte: some thoughts on charismatic leadership and the reality of organisational commitment’, Journal of Management Studies, 29(1), 23–34. Hudson, R. (1988) ‘Labour markets and new forms of work in “old” industrial regions’, in Massey and Allen (1988). Hunt, J.G. (1991) Leadership: A New Synthesis, Newbury Park, Ca. and London: Sage. Keat, R. and Abercrombie, N. (1991) editors, Enterprise Culture, London: Routledge. MacInnes, J. (1987) Thatcherism at Work: Industrial Relations and Economic Change, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

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McLaughlin, E., Cochrane, A. and Clarke, J. (forthcoming) editors, Managing Social Policy, London: Sage. Massey, D. and Allen, J. (1988) editors, Uneven Development: Cities and Regions in Transition, London: Hodder and Stoughton. Miliband, R. et al. (1987) editors, The Socialist Register 1987, London: Merlin. Moody, K. (1987) ‘Reagan, the business agenda and the collapse of labour’, in Miliband et al. (1987). Morgan, K. and Sayer, A. (1988) ‘A “modern” industry in a “mature” region: the remaking of management-labour relations’, in Massey and Allen (1988). Moss Kanter, R. (1990) When Giants Learn to Dance, London: Unwin. Murray, C. (1984) Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980, New York: Basic Books. Newman, J. (forthcoming a) ‘Culture, what culture? Working on organisational change’, Journal of Public Money and Management. Newman, J. (forthcoming b) ‘Women and the new managerialism’, in McLaughlin, Cochrane and Clarke (forthcoming). Newman, J. and Clarke, J. (forthcoming) ‘Going about our business: the managerialization of social welfare’, in McLaughlin, Cochrane and Clarke (forthcoming). Peters, T. (1989) Thriving on Chaos, London: Pan. Peters, T. and Austin, N. (1985) A Passion for Excellence: the Leadership Difference, London: Fontana. Peters, T. and Waterman, R. (1982) In Search of Excellence, New York: Harper & Row. Piore, M.J. and Sabel, C.F. (1984) The Second Industrial Divide, New York: Basic Books. Pollitt, C. (1990) Managerialism and the Public Services, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Reich, R. (1984) The Next American Frontier, New York: Penguin. Rose, N. (1989) Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, London: Routledge. Sayer, A. and Walker, D. (1992) The New Social Economy: Reworking the Division of Labour, Oxford: Blackwell. Swann, D. (1988) The Retreat of the State: Deregulation and Privatisation in the UK and the US, New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Whyte, W. (1957) The Organization Man, London: Cape.

SUREN LALVANI

PHOTOGRAPHY, EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE BODY Introduction In the summer of 1827, Joseph Nicephore Niepce of Chalon-sur-Saône, France, succeeded in developing a primitive form of the photographic process by exposing a bitumen-coated pewter plate to direct sunlight (Rosenblum, 1984:194); it took eight hours for the plate to record the indistinct image of a dovecote on Niepce’s estate. Niepce was joined in his efforts by Louis Mandé Daguerre, a one-time painter of stage sets and owner of a Diorama.1 Daguerre continued to work on the problem following Niepce’s death in 1833, and in 1837 he managed to finally arrest the action of light by inserting the silver halides plates in a bath of silver chloride. The rapid acceptance of the daguerreotype—a delicate, unique image, not reproducible, is not surprising, given both the nature of a public imbued with a fascination for the pleasures of the visual and a period fundamentally characterized by a liberal faith in the idea of progress. The French physicist Gay Lussac’s own presentation in support of Daguerre’s invention made to the Chamber of Peers during that period is typical of the liberal sentiment of the times: ‘Everything that leads to the progress of civilization, to the physical and moral well-being of man, ought to be the continual goal of enlightened government’ (Freund, 1980:25). In his own laudatory evocation of the scientific uses of photography, François Arago, one of the most popular French politicians of the period, observed that in addition to the benefits to science, photography would also democratize art (Freund, 1980:26). Thus the basic themes of the liberal canon—democratization through technological and scientific progress—were encompassed by Arago’s statement, and have been no less the canonical themes characterizing the histories of photography since then. However, what conventional histories of photography neglect is that the camera played a significant role within discourses and practices which reconstructed the somatic and public domains of bourgeois consciousness in the nineteenth century. In order to understand the manner in which the body was constituted by nineteenth-century photographic practices operating within certain discourses, it is necessary to consult the alternative histories of photography developed by Allan Sekula and John Tagg. With this in mind, I have sought to synthesize and integrate their insights into a comprehensive analysis of photographic practices and their relation to the body, at three crucial sites of nineteenth-century bourgeois society. In this context, I shall examine: (i) how photography operated within a certain set of discourses and practices to socially

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constitute the body, providing it with meaning within an established hierarchy of values; (ii) how photography operated within a set of discourses and practices at the ‘biopolitical’ level, in order to surveil, regulate and discipline the movement of criminals across the social; and how it also simultaneously sought to identify and constitute the criminal body itself; finally, (iii) the nature of photography’s functioning at an ‘anatomopolitical’2 level in certain discourses and practices operating within the capitalist mode of production, so that ‘what is most material and most vital in bodies is invested in them’ (Foucault, 1979b: 152). My intent is to describe how photography—by both representing the ‘exterior’ body and effecting the discipline of the ‘interior’ body— assisted in producing both knowledge and power. Finally, I shall conclude my examination of photography and its relations with the body in the nineteenth century by locating its practices within the larger conception of seeing or, to use Foucault’s term, the prevailing ‘positive unconscious of vision’ of the period. Epistemological profile of the camera The particular function that would be bestowed upon photography within disciplinary apparatuses is to a great extent anticipated by the epistemological nature of photography. What then is the nature of knowing established by the camera? What is the nature of its gaze and how does it constitute the subject in relation to what is seen? The genesis of the daguerreotype camera is to be discovered in linear perspective. The daguerreotype camera was essentially a mechanized expression of the model of vision ushered in by the invention of linear perspective and it is in artificial perspective that we first get a glimpse of the nature of the camera’s gaze. In linear perspective, since artists relate to the objectified field from a single vantage point, their representation of the scene is such that viewers can apprehend it as if they were standing in the same spot. Thus perspective provided for a modernist vision in which the object is rendered inert and the subject transcendental. It signalled the incipient creation of a metasubject, which the discourses of the sciences would subsequently legislate into place by a systematized set of logical rules and technical practices involving empirical observation. The abstracted gaze of this new visual order which confronts a systematic, infinite, homogenous and isotropic space, signalled a radical shift from medieval vision (Panofsky, 1927:271). For the medieval artist ‘paid little attention to…a systematic spatial relationship between objects’, and as such, medieval vision was an incarnated vision, a vision that was both tactile and kinaesthetic. It did not privilege a single point of view (Edgerton, 1975:21). In the perspectival gaze, on the other hand, ‘(t)he moment of erotic projection in vision…was lost as the bodies of the painter and viewer were forgotten in the name of an allegedly disincarnated absolute eye’ (Jay, 1988:8). While the medieval artist sought to convince the viewer of the validity of his experience and the legitimacy of the representation by projecting a multilevelled and multisensuous rendition of what he saw, the perspectival artist sought to convince the viewer by means of a polarization of subject and object. But the absolute nature of this disincarnate eye became the means of establishing a new

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rational order wherein the observer, delineated within a fixed set of relations, could claim the veridicality of his impressions. Inherent in both this privileging of the real solely by sight and the emergent visual order fundamental to the advancement of the descriptive sciences is a mind-body dualism. This dualism is evident when one considers that the paradigmatic model on which this visual analogue of knowing was based was the optical and structural principles of that predecessor of the camera—the camera obscura (Crary, 1988:31). As Jonathon Crary observes, ‘the camera obscura was simultaneously and inseparably a central epistemological figure within a discursive order, as in Descartes’s Dioptrics, Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, and Leibniz’s critique of Locke’ (Crary, 1988:31). In a similar vein, W.J.T.Mitchell notes, ‘the camera obscura had been synonymous…with a direct reproduction of natural vision ever since Locke employed it as a metaphor’ for ‘discerning knowledge as direct impressions of sensory experience’ (Mitchell, 1986:168). However, as Merleau-Ponty has observed, Locke’s conception of knowledge was derived from Descartes. Unlike the Greeks who had provided for an identity of the subject with the object by refusing to define knowledge as the possession of accurate representations, Descartes was the first to view the mind as an inner chamber in which ‘clear and distinct ideas (as representations) passed in review before a single Inner Eye’ (Rorty, 1979:50). It is in this inner space of the mind, not unlike the camera obscura, that ‘the intellect inspects entities modelled on retinal images’ (Rorty, 1979:45). For Descartes, the camera obscura was a demonstration of how an observer can know the world ‘uniquely by perception of the mind.’ The secure positioning of the self within this empty interior space was a precondition for knowing the outer world. Its enclosedness, its darkness, its categorical separation from an exterior incarnates Descartes’s announcement in the Third Meditation, ‘I will now shut my eyes, I shall stop my ears, I shall disregard my senses’ (Crary, 1988:32). Hence the camera obscura appeared to provide for an escape from the vagaries of human sensation and to locate the observer at a privileged vantage point of objectivity. With its operation based on geometrical optics and an aperture with a fixed point of view, the camera obscura appeared to Descartes and others as the embodiment of how the mind should objectively represent the world. ‘Sensory evidence that depended in any way on the body was rejected in favor of the representations of this mechanical and monocular apparatus, whose authenticity was placed beyond doubt’ (Crary, 1988:32). Significantly, the binocular disparity common to the natural functions of the eye was ignored in favor of a monocular model which artificial perspective had underwritten into the culture of seeing (Crary, 1988:33). Furthermore, the camera obscura helped put into place ‘a metaphysics of interiority’ (Crary, 1988:33). For what the camera obscura represents is the visual possession of the world by a sovereign, privatized subject who is enclosed and isolated in an observation space separate from the exterior world.

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The visual world could be appropriated by an autonomous subject but only as a private unitary consciousness detached from any active relation with an exterior. The monadic viewpoint of the individual is legitimised by the camera obscura, but his or her sensory experience is subordinated to an external and pre-given world of objective truth (Crary, 1988:33). If the camera obscura functioned as the visual analogue for a knowing based on a disembodied gaze and a transcendental subjectivity, ignoring the embeddedness of our experience, the mechanically and chemically subtended camera legislated that model into everyday seeing. In recognizing the role of Cartesianism and its sciences in spawning such technologies of sight as the camera, we must begin to realize the extent to which our bodies, made visible to power by photography, are subverted and construed submissively into political spaces. At the same time however, because of the objectifying logic of the camera, the privatized subject is also capable of exteriorizing the self-as-body for the purposes of reconstructive display and the subsequent appropriation of symbolic value. Power, visibility and the body Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology provided a new and powerful understanding of the incarnate nature of existence; of the body not as instrumental and biological facticity but as the very embodiment of expressive intentionality in conscious mediation with reality. For example, in arguing against Descartes’s view in La Dioptrique of the mind as an inner chamber where sense impressions received from the outer world are subject to the cogitations of a cyclopean eye seeking certainty from differences, Merleau-Ponty called the seer to abandon the inner chamber and enter into the ‘flesh’ of the world. Thus, in what Marc Richir has referred to as Merleau-Ponty’s ‘defenestration of the cogito’, the living body itself becomes the ‘milieu’ or ‘chiasme’ of intersecting opposites such as interiority and exteriority and is neither subject nor object, nor ‘res extensa’ or ‘res cogita’ (Schmidt, 1985:99, 100). However, having successfully argued for the ontological centrality of the body, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological perspective is inadequate for an understanding of the historical and social construction of the body and of the body’s entry, as a site, in the nineteenth century, where the most local and minute practices linked the body with the large-scale organization of power. And contrary to conventional histories of the technology, photography played an important role at the very center of these discourses and practices. It is thus necessary to turn to Michel Foucault, whose genealogical or diagnostic account of the relations of power, knowledge and the body in the nineteenth century provides us with the necessary framework for understanding the impact of photographic practices on the body. The presence of an anti-visual discourse in Foucault’s writings is evident even as early as Madness and Civilization, where he argued that madness took on its modern form— insanity—when, in the classical age (1650–1800), the Renaissance unity between word and image dissolved, with the consequence that madness was depicted as a spectacle devoid of eschatological significance (Jay, 1986:180). In Birth of the Clinic the principle

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of visibility is essential to the overseeing anatomical gaze of medicine and is symptomatic of a general culture that, in Heidegger’s words, makes of all life ‘a standing reserve’ (Heidegger, 1977). What is significant about Foucault’s anti-visual, antiocularcentric discourse, is that he speaks of the practices of power and their materialization in terms of the spaces they frame, their visibilities, their evidences, and so forth (Rajchman, 1988:91). For example, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1979b) discusses how crime is made visible on the body initially through punishment as a spectacle but later, in panoptical surveillance, the criminal body is permeated with a powerful and insidious visibility. ‘In both instances Foucault links the two techniques of making things visible to a larger conception of seeing in the period’ (Rajchman, 1988:91). In this manner Foucault’s methodological scheme of visualization provides ‘visibilities’—ways in which things were made visible during a particular period by the dynamic of knowledge and power. Foucault’s hypothesis was that there exists a sort of ‘positive unconscious’ of vision which determines not what is seen, but what can be seen. His idea is that not all ways of visualizing or rendering visible are possible at once. A period only lets some things be seen and not others…. There is much more constraint in what we can see than we suppose. To see is always to think, since what is seeable is part of what ‘structures thought in advance.’ And conversely to think is always to see (Rajchman, 1988:92). And ‘visibilities’ are linked to ‘evidences,’ for at the core of Foucault’s enterprise is the attempt to ‘eventalize’ history (as in his account of the birth of the prison) so that, in seeing how events structure things (for example, annular construction) and make our seeing of them self-evident, we see how those events can be made unacceptable or intolerable. After all, as Foucault argues, power makes its evidences acceptable and tolerable. To free ourselves from practices we are captive to, we must cease being prisoners of a certain way of seeing (Rajchman, 1988:98). In this regard, Deleuze has rightly referred to Foucault as a great ‘voyant’ or seer (Deleuze, 1988:57). Foucault’s history of the concepts of visualization and their insertion into institutional practices, and his materialistic conception of power, enable us in turn to deconstruct conventional histories of photography and to reconstruct the processes by which the ‘spatial and temporal’ schema of photography—embedded in the new disciplinary apparatuses (Foucault, 1979b), not only showed what was deviant and pathological, but what was normal and efficient, and transformed the spaces of visibility through which knowledge and power would exercise its impact on the body. And photography itself, as we have already seen, was embedded in a ‘positive unconscious vision’—an ocularcentric regime identified with perspectival pictorialism and Cartesian rationality (Cartesian perspectivalism)—which was Valorized by the scientific world view’ (Jay, 1986:5). The bourgeois body as icon

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Traditional accounts of photography would have us believe that nineteenth-century photography functioned to democratize portraiture. Photography appeared to expand the traditional function of ceremonial reification and display which was once only the privilege of the aristocracy. In time, with the reduction of exposure times and lower printing costs, even the working classes could buy representations of themselves. But this is where a certain complexity in the argument must be acknowledged if we are to avoid a naive linear model of progress or a blind conviction in the democratic outcomes of technological developments. For even while the liberalization of the economy of selfrepresentations made possible by photography enabled those previously excluded to participate, it simultaneously ushered them into a representational system whose structure, composition, codes of operation and internal means of making meaning bound them securely into a dominant discourse. Thus if the particular power of nineteenthcentury bourgeois portraiture is to be understood, it must be comprehended in terms of its ability to constitute the subject within a discursive field. Specifically it becomes necessary to understand the particular technical, political and cultural discourses within which photographic portraiture addressed the body. If, as Foucault notes, power enters deeply into the gestures, actions and discourses of everyday lives, then photography itself, existing within a set of ideological discourses and constraints, invests the body in power relations within which it is forced to emit signs. The practices of nineteenth-century portraiture were strongly embedded in the powerfully woven discourses of the two pseudo-sciences of the nineteenth century— physiognomy and phrenology. These materialist hermeneutics of the self unified the nineteenth-century archive of images. As Naomi Rosenblum observes: Approaches to camera likenesses, whether made for amateur or commercial purposes, ranged from documentary to artistic, from ‘materialistic’ to ‘atmospheric’, but whatever their underlying mode photographic portraits reflected from their origin the conviction that an individual’s personality, intellect and character can be revealed through the depiction of facial configuration and expression (Rosenblum, 1984:39). In America we may observe that the introduction of the camera coincided with ‘Emerson’s ocular concern for spiritual insight through perceiving nature’ (Rudisill, 1971:233). Emerson’s philosophy presumed that by keenly observing its surface one could see beyond the physiognomy of nature. This was no different from Lavater analyzing various features of the face and the hand and ascribing a characterological significance to each, or Gall’s attempt to construct correspondences between cranial topography and specific cerebral functions. Judith Wechsler (1982), John Davies (1955) and Walter Benjamin (1971) have all documented the extensive influence and broad appeal that the general paradigm of physiognomy had on the arts and culture of the nineteenth century. Benjamin, for instance, has argued that in nineteenth-century Europe, where societies were undergoing rapid transformation and were characterized by impersonal market interactions in an anonymous urban environment, the paradigm offered a convenient hermeneutic for assessing character (1971:35).

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And it was this belief—that surfaces by themselves could reveal moral depths—which was ideally the same concern that motivated the daguerreotypists’ search to reveal the character of their subjects by a searching likeness of the subject’s features. In the reminiscences of James F.Ryder, a nineteenth-century daguerreotypist, we see the conviction of the camera as insight machine borne out: ‘The box was the body, the lens was the soul, with an all-seeing eye, and the gift of carrying the image to the plate’ (Ryder, 1902:16). The camera is personified as ‘truth itself. What he told me was as gospel…. He could read and prove character in a man’s face at sight. To his eye a rogue was a rogue; the honest man, when found, was recognized and properly estimated’ (Ryder, 1902:xi). But it was not simply a matter of surfaces disclosing rectitude and character; rather it was a case of surfaces being discursively constructed to provide characterological significances and moral depths. In nineteenth-century America, an archive of images began its trajectory across the social scape with the publication of John Plumbe’s engravings entitled, The National Plumbeotype Gallery, which consisted of daguerreotype portraits of national figures. Not to be outdone, Mathew Brady issued his own Gallery of Illustrious Americans. In both publications, the implicit assumption that the character of an individual’s contribution to public life can be seen in physical features and stance (Rosenblum, 1984:47–8) testified to the continuing power of physiognomy. In effect a moral icon is being cultivated, due less to the special characteristics of the camera as insight machine than to photographers operating within discourses of physiognomy which gave them a set of typologies by which to orchestrate and adjust posture, expression and lighting (Trachtenberg, 1984:245). Thus the arrangements of heads and hands in nineteenth-century bourgeois portraiture are traversed by a physiognomic intention: the need to convey the notion of manifest destiny central to bourgeois ideology: that the world may be civilized by the appropriate combination of head and hand. If, as Richard Rudisill has observed, ‘there were attempts to display the nation in her ideal character as defined by the images of men who determined it’ (Rudisill, 1971:233), then the political implications of a moral play of deterministic physiognomic typologies is not to be underestimated. In fact, at the heart of these images lurks an epistemology of experience, to inspire and discipline. For as Marcus Aurelius Root, writing in 1864, argues, in addition to the cultural enlightenment of the masses, photography, by displaying a pantheon of bourgeois moral exemplars, provides both an inspirational source and a moral standard to which the working classes can aspire: ‘The pure, the high, the noble traits beaming from these faces—who shall measure the greatness of their effect on the impressionable minds of those who catch sight of them at every turn?’ (Root, 1864:149). That such a public imagery, in ‘making ideals and qualities accessible to direct experience’ (Rudisill, 1971:231), would create a moral economy of the sign which, in turn, would serve the continuing reproduction of the relations of production on which capitalist expansion is dependent, is undoubtedly due to the particular power which discourses of visual empiricism were able to exert, thus legitimating both the epistemological validity of the camera in representing the real and the paradigmatic moral

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power of physiognomy. The process itself constitutes, in Foucault’s terms, a multiplication of the effects of power as a result of the formation and legitimation of new forms of knowledge production. Thus photography, by assisting in the taxonomic intent of phrenology and physiognomy, perpetuated a hierarchical ordering of the social realm along moral lines. Besides the discourses of physiognomy and phrenology informing the practices of photographic portraiture, aesthetic and technical practices were pursued, and their consequences were no less political and hierarchical. Photographs are not simply representations but are representational in that they are permeated by a system of values and an intelligibility which provide their subjects with meaning. Lest we forget, the camera image is a deliberately cropped, framed and mediated piece of reality. Are we surprised then that in nineteenth-century portraiture, the camera does not address its bourgeois subjects with the blunt frontal force with which the criminal, the insane and the poor (as for example, in Jacob Riis’ photographs) are forced to confront the camera’s gaze? As John Tagg has remarked, rigid frontality signified the bluntness and ‘naturalness’ of a culturally unsophisticated class, and had a history, in the satire of Hogarth and Daumier, that predated photographic portraiture (Tagg, 1988:35). The headon stare in such cases was to be read in direct contrast to the cultivated asymmetries of aristocratic pose, for pose is a function of leisure, and frontality signifies its lack. Leisure or that which signifies freedom from the necessity of reproducing the body makes possible not only conspicuous consumption but representation of the body as symbolic text. Freed from its brute facticity, the body is reconstituted and mediated by the photograph as text and posed as cultural value at some distance from itself. The preparedness and display of the body in general, signalled a heightened awareness among even the middle class that the body, appropriately attired and arrayed, was definitely a cultural and class signifier, especially in an urban society increasingly mediated by visual interaction (Sennett, 1978). The portrait, then, in conveying pose, becomes both an inscription of class and a manifestation of social identity, and is simultaneously a commodity which speaks of ownership and exchange relations. Hence, if we are to really understand the nature of the democratization at work in photographic portraiture, it must be comprehended, not only in terms of granting to an increasing number of the middle and lower classes the opportunity to make representations of themselves but, more importantly, as the means by which an increasing number of people could objectify and materialize the self via the production and display of the body as public symbol. Portraiture is always about public display even if the photograph is limited to private consumption. There is an attending to the social that is implicit in the portrait. And the portrait as record registers both social situatedness and cultural intentionality which, communicated by way of the disposition and display of the represented body, always occurs within a particular ideological form and is, at the same time, mediated by photographic practices and discourses. The photograph, we are told, acts as bridge between interior world and external presentation. Subjects, we assume, stare out of their interior worlds. The ideology of nineteenth-century photography professionals confirms this viewpoint of photographic art as psychological revelation. In

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all likelihood, however, the self is presented as other for a public economy of the gaze. Furthermore, social attentiveness and cultural intentionality, which are both communicated via the represented body, are ideological elements and precursors to ideological practice. For instance, the family photograph demonstrates an attentiveness to that ideological construct and institutional formation—the family. Drawing on Clifford Geertz’s description of the function of art, one may say that the photograph ‘materialize (s) a way of experiencing’; it ‘brings a particular cast of mind into the world of objects where men can look at it’ (Geertz, 1976:1478). Thus, for example, photographs of individual subjects ‘materialize a way of experiencing’ the notion of the individual as autonomous construct and validate the presence of a personal psycho-materially bounded space. The photo-text evokes the idea of the individual as consisting of socially sanctioned rights and obligations, and all of this, silently written into the musculature and topos of the textualized body, manifests itself simply in the self-governance of rationalized display. The photograph does not however function simply to transmit ideology. The camera as textual machine takes its place in a set of discursive networks through which pre-existing ideological structures are interwoven, layered and filtered. In the photo-text, the self as body is socially constituted within the normative registers of a discursively constructed representation system. At the very least, we can say that the camera as textual technology, by providing a normative representation of the family, through pose, lighting and a set of typologies, typifies and idealizes the family and helps renew a whole train of commitments to the institution itself. On the other hand, one may presume that it engendered an awareness that the body appropriately constituted and made visible in an expanding economy of the gaze accrues to itself symbolic value, and that such symbolic value is potentially translatable into exchange value. In our own media-saturated environment the production of the body as simultaneously sign value and exchange value is easy to comprehend. In the nineteenth century we get a sense of that logic in its incipient form, when, as Richard Sennett points out, personality immanent in appearances became a social category (Sennett, 1978:150–2). In addition, nineteenth-century photography makes possible a regulation of images. In the family photograph as portrait, the collective experiences of the family are structured in a tableau; the family is instantiated in a frozen hyper-ritualized display, a gestural signifier; as cliché or aphorism, it is a quotation oddly superficial in content; and as an image it is seemingly reticent but that, no doubt, is because it is so firmly anchored to the ideological density of an institution. In representation after representation, the family appears ‘as an autonomous emotional unit (that) cuts across class and power relations to imply that (everyone) share(s) the same experience’ (Williamson, 1985:116); the regulation of imagery provides for ‘a common sexual and economic goal’ (Williamson, 1985:116). A univocal text, the family portrait allows for very little in the way of semiotic incursions. In a text in which closure becomes the operative dynamic, the gaze is rendered both complicitous and reproductive. In general, the regulation of imagery enables ideological oversight to permeate the private realm and photography consequently plays ‘a central role in the development of the contemporary ideology of

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the family’ (Williamson, 1985:118). Thus, on the one hand, the camera, by democratizing the image, provides those previously invisible with the opportunity to be visible as subjects of their own representations. On the other hand, however, the representational system discursively produces them as objects of that visibility, for that visibility is at one and the same time ideologically binding. But there are pleasures to be had in conforming to dominant ideology and the subjectivity proposed by representational adherence (‘plaisir’). And there are other pleasures too; for the photographer’s studio with its props and the resulting photo-text with its typologies, soon available to all classes, enables individuals to conceal their working-class backgrounds and be made visible in the light of their aspirations. Hence lived differences are subsumed in the homogenous syntax of an idealized typology functioning as bourgeois icon. Even with the sudden explosion of the scopic economy brought about by the arrival of the carte-de-visite and the consequent onset of scopophilia in the nineteenth century, the irony is that the visible geography of the self in all its expressible variety and difference arrives in the structured sameness of the bourgeois portrait. Finally, what can we say or should we say about the photographer’s studio as the apparatus for producing visibility? The photographer’s studio is a space malleable to a cultivated set of shorthand signs; in positioning the subject in a particular milieu, it evokes the necessary impressions and experiences. By definition a synecdochically organized space, the studio space savours the hegemony and presence of a particular class; these are spaces in which bodies strike poses, lie in repose or inhabit esplanades, drawing rooms, pavilions and promenades, anchored in social time, space and class; and through their use of Grecian columns and voluminous drapes, they secrete a civilizing and civilized air. It is a space where industriousness and cunning come to roost in their domesticated other—respectability. And where the familial body is sat four square and solid in its center, respectability moored in the twin pillars of husband and wife, he the pinnacle, she the support, with signs of their conjoining arranged in decorative intervals about them. Beneath the coded expressions in these photographs lurk the connotational verbosity of the dominant culture they inhabit. Power emanates from a unified, determinate space: the privileged site in front of the camera and the system of differences that constitutes it is, at one and the same time, the textured fabric of its constituted social relations. Outside the studio space the reception room is a space embellished with photographs of ‘the leading types of characters which might be expected among the sitters, and to be calculated to call into vivid action the feelings pertaining to these characters’ (Trachtenberg, 1984:245). And concealed behind the studio space is the factory of production, with its polishers, coaters and mercuralizers busily at work processing commodities for distribution to those eagerly waiting to be ushered into a transaction with a community of images, transcribed and circumscribed by a moral icon of representative character. Bio-politics

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But in addition to its honorific operations, photographic portraiture is invested with a new and rigorous function, that of motioning and delimiting the pathological and deviant body within the regulatory and reformatory axes of the new technologies of disciplinary power. Thus in order to provide for a comprehensive moral economy of the sign, this double operation of photography functions so that the honorific conventions of portrait photography are defined and secured in relation to its pathological other—the mug shot (Sekula, 1986:6). The criminal archive then becomes part of a tentative construction of a larger universal archive that demarcates the zones of respectability and deviance within nineteenth-century bourgeois society (Sekula, 1986:10). Hence, even while photography took its place as an interpretive art form in honorific portraiture, especially in the practice of such gifted photographers as Felix Nadar and Margaret Cameron, the signification of ‘realism’ as photographic proof was fundamental to the disciplinary apparatuses of such juridico-political institutions as the police. That power to guarantee the identity between signifier and a pre-existent signified ‘was not the power of the camera but the power of apparatuses of the local state which deploy it and guarantee the authority of the images it constructs to stand as evidence or register a truth’ (Tagg, 1988:64). The power is also the product of a coded intertextuality of realism in photography and ‘works by the controlled and limited recall of a reservoir of similar “texts”, by a constant repetition, a constant cross-echoing’ of the brute frontality and neutrality of the body that is common to the objectifying aesthetics of anatomical and medical illustrations (Tagg, 1988:99). More importantly, the transparency of the signifier in the photograph is a consequence of the fact that the camera became a model in the empirical sciences for how observations made possible truthful inferences about an external world. Furthermore, according to Bernard Edelman, the ideological contradiction between the two domains of photographic practice was negotiated so that the law, by granting recognition to the creative artist, could provide for the ownership of images and their commodification (Edelman, 1979:44). Photographic classification of the criminal body took two different directions: one represented a technical-bureaucratic mode of surveillance: ‘criminalistics’, and the other involved the criminological survey of the physiognomy and phrenology of the criminal body (Sekula, 1986:18). ‘Criminology hunted “the” criminal body. Criminalistics hunted “this” or “that” criminal body’ (Sekula, 1986:18). Both photographic practices must be understood in the context of what Foucault has identified as the emergence of a new regime of power in the nineteenth century. This new regime of power, which evolved in Western Europe throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during a period of great demographic changes and general urbanization, constituted itself in the institutional formation of a scientific and legal complex whose discourses implicated the body in a returning cycle of knowledge and power, even as it integrated the body within the scientific claims of social engineering and the humanistic rhetoric of reform to comprise a disciplinary bio-politics. A political rationality, which considered the state as an end in itself and embraced ‘the idea that man is the true object of the state’ (Foucault, 1979a:138), resulted in the emergence of a burgeoning administrative apparatus and the statistical appropriation of the body-public by the new professional order of ‘specific intellectuals’—disciplinary technicians and social scientists.

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Within this set of problems, the ‘body’—the body of individuals and the body of populations—appears as the bearer of new variables, not merely as between the scarce and the numerous, the submissive and the restive, rich and poor, healthy and sick, strong and weak, but also as between the more or less amenable to profitable investment…and with more or less capacity for being usefully trained. The biological traits of a population became relevant factors for economic management (Foucault, 1980:172). Moral science as it came to be called—this fetishistic control of data, in which ‘life itself, the life of the species, the size of the population, the modes of procreation’ (Hacking, 1982:279) became the object of focus—was directly aimed at the preservation of the state: ‘Find out more about your citizens cried the conservative enthusiasts and you will ameliorate their conditions, diminish their restlessness, and strengthen their character’ (Hacking, 1982:281). In their bio-political understanding of the body politic, some of the studies sought to make visible simultaneously, along a number of correlative statistical axes, recidivism, pathology, deviancy, etc. As Sekula has indicated, photographic identification of the criminal body in both criminalistics and criminology turned on the same theoretical ground: statistics (Sekula, 1986:18). In particular, both systems relied on the conceptual construct of ‘l’homme moyen’ (the ‘average man’) invented by the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet, who was also the first to establish actuarial tables in his country (Haskins, 1908:53). Having discovered the presence of statistical regularities, for example, in his study of the disposition to crime, Quetelet elevated the regularities to the status of social laws, the causality of which depended on social conditions, thus grounding moral statistics in social science (Haskins, 1908:38). But, more significantly, he gave his own particular unique interpretation to the normal law of error by introducing his concept of the average man which represented perfection in terms of both physical characteristics and moral goodness (Haskins, 1908:67). As Haskins points out, Quetelet’s study (Anthropometrie, 1871) of the physical proportions of the average man at each age ‘were the precursors of the physical measurements of criminals as a means of identification, and of the measurement of head forms and other bodily parts by physical anthropologists as a means of racial discrimination’ (Haskins, 1908:69). Also, it must be noted that during the first half of the nineteenth century, a disciplinary apparatus for the constant surveillance of the population took its rationalized, modern expression in the institutionalization of a uniformed police force. The emerging structures of capital, with property at stake and the productive exploitation of accumulated bodies as its goal, required an institution of omnipresent surveillance to enforce a new era of social discipline (Tagg, 1988:72). In urban, industrial centers, the break-up of traditional social patterns and the awareness that common-law conceptions of social order and responsibility were no longer effective in an age of rambunctious capitalism, made this need particularly acute (Bunyan, 1976:58–9). In general, the increasing regulation of behavior by depersonalized and rational legal forms (Spitzer, 1979:187–206), which in this instance also represented a not so neutral but cleverly erected buffer in the class

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struggle (Bunyan, 1976:62), pointed to the larger trend of the socialization of the costs associated with the reproduction of labor and capital, as evinced in such areas as street construction and public health (Harring, 1983:8). Clearly the demand for a full-time police force originated from a multiplicity of sources—owners of manufacturing units calling for discipline, reformists for proprietary respect, and humanitarians for the reduction of vice—and circled a social space increasingly highlighted and chronicled by sensationalist criminological studies, crime reporting and, in time, even the crime novel, all seeking to subdue and regulate the growing urban presence of a dangerous criminaland sub-class of unemployed (Tagg, 1988:72). The power acquired through the surveillance of this disciplinary apparatus produced new knowledge about its subjects and in turn required systematic procedures of documentation within which photographic evidence would play a prominent role. In 1883, Alphonse Bertillon, a minor French bureaucrat, utilized Quetelet’s concept of the average man in a discursive apparatus which combined and organized, by means of a filing system he had invented, photographs of criminals, anthropometric descriptions and physiognomic details to successfully classify the criminal (Rhodes, 1956:90–3; Sekula, 1986:18). Between 1883 and 1893, Bertillon processed 120,000 prisoners and identified 4,364 recidivists (Bertillon, 1893:29). In Bertillon’s ‘anthropometrical signalment’, each criminal body was subjected to eleven measurements (Bertillon had calculated that the probability that any two criminals would share the same eleven measurements was one in four) and the series of measurements were accompanied by a brief description of identifying marks and two photographs—frontal and profile images of the criminal’s head (Rhodes, 1956:99, 103; Sekula, 1986:28). A profile view neutralized the effects of expression and the frontal view enabled detection on the streets by police personnel (Rhodes, 1956:106; Sekula, 1986:30). Finally, using Quetelet’s concept of the average man, the anthropometrical signalment was organized by below average, average and above average measurements into the grid of the filing system. Furthermore, Bertillon transcribed the semantic value of the photograph into a verbal register—a ‘portrait parle’ or ‘speaking likeness’. Essentially using sectional or componential views of the features of the human head, he created a physiognomic grid to which shorthand descriptions and measurements were attached (Rhodes, 1956:105). In this manner the signs of the criminal body were transformed into a textual practice. The body was objectified, divided, analyzed and organized into a cellular structure of space (the file index)—the representative architecture of surveillance. The criminal body was individuated and forced to yield its signs, transformed into a subject and subjected, a discursive object within a disciplinary apparatus. While Bertillon’s system was a practical attempt at identifying and permanently isolating the recidivistic criminal, Francis Galton, a Britisher, sought to identify, by means of the camera, a genetically determined criminal type. The ideology of social Darwinism, which combined the ideas of evolutionary theory with that of a liberal political economy, is the epistemological site within which Galton began his experiments. Galton’s socio-political program of ‘eugenics’ (the term was first introduced by him), intended to establish measures that, on the one hand, would inhibit the rate of

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reproduction among eugenically inferior groups in society, while, at the same time, encouraging groups endowed with superior moral, physical and intellectual characteristics. Galton introduced his eugenics program in 1883, at a time when assumptions concerning the effectiveness of strategies utilized to moralize and control that ‘residuum’ of criminals, prostitutes, the casual poor and, in general, the unproductive in society (which also included lunatics), were brought into question by a series of reports and revelations (Jones, 1971:283). Suddenly the upper-class bourgeoisie viewed itself under the threat of being socially levelled and engulfed by an underclass which was slowly being swelled by the ranks of the ‘respectable working class,’ now chronically unemployed (Jones, 1971:289). It is in the context of the fears regarding this ‘residuum’, viewed as ‘dangerous not only because of its degenerate nature but also because its existence served to contaminate the classes immediately above it’ (Jones, 1971:289), that Galton’s eugenics program must be understood. As David Green has appropriately noted, ‘To eugenics the paupers, the unemployed, the criminal, the insane and the inveterately ill were considered not as social categories but entirely as natural ones’ (Green, 1984:9). In order to identify hereditary characteristics, Galton turned to phrenology and physiognomy, and like Cesare Lombroso and Havelock Ellis before him, he made use of anthropometrical measurements and emphasized the examination of the head and facial features to identify a distinct criminal type whose physiology would correlate with an immoral and atavistic state. In need of finding a way to document the physical particularities that would summon forth the criminal type, Galton turned to photography. In 1878, utilizing identification photographs of convicts, Galton created a composite of the criminal type—a hybrid of super-imposition fabricated by a rudimentary combination of optical and statistical procedures. The process consisted of simply taking successive images of the subjects; each image was superimposed on the previous ones, on a single plate. Each image provided a fractional exposure depending on the number of subjects to be photographed. In the case that thirty subjects were photographed, then each subject photographed was provided one-thirtieth of the required total exposure (Galton, 1883:17; Sekula, 1986:47). As Galton noted in his article ‘Generic images’, The process…of pictorial statistics [provides] generic pictures of man, such as Quetelet obtained in outline by the ordinary methods of statistics, as described in his work on “Anthropometrie”…. By the process of composites we obtain a picture and not a mere outline’ (Galton, 1879:162). This was clearly a tautological pursuit, assuming what it set out to prove: at its illogical center ‘the symmetrical bell curve now wore a human face’ (Sekula, 1986:18). Hence with the emergence in the nineteenth century of disciplinary institutions functioning within the juridico-legal apparatus of the state and the discourses that clustered and proliferated around this site, photographic practices were deployed to produce a bio-politics of the body-politic which engendered new knowledge of the very suspects it produced and correspondingly expanded the power of a centralized state. Thus photographic practices functioned, on the one hand, in the anthropometrical and statistically based operations of a surveillance technology, to exhaustively catalogue and apprehend individual criminals. On the other hand, it operated within a constellation of

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overlapping discourses, comprised of criminology, statistics, phrenology, physiognomy and eugenics, that sought to identify the biology of the criminal, in order to intervene in the demographic reproduction of the deviant and the generally unfit. Anatomo-politics Finally, attention must be directed to photography’s role in the instrumental objectification and mechanization of the worker’s body along an axis of productive oriented efficiencies. For in the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century, photography—operating wholly within the confines of a capitalist logic and within the analytical space of a panoptical apparatus (the factory)—became an effective instrument of the technician-engineer’s attempt to wrest control of the processes of production from labour, to strip such labour as possessed skills of the value and bargaining power of those skills, and significantly to fracture the very body of the worker along an axis of time and motion. Photography became part and parcel of a managerial discourse in ‘anatomopolitics’, that envisioned an engineering of the body of the worker in terms of the efficient concerns of capitalist enterprise. The severance of conception from execution made possible by photography’s seizure of work functioned, on the one hand, to enhance the forces of the body in terms of economic utility, while, on the other hand, it sought to diminish the body’s political forces by reversing such energies and transforming them into ‘a relation of strict subjection’ (Foucault, 1979b:138). As Foucault points out, a body that is docile is at once a useful body becoming obedient as it becomes more useful (Foucault, 1979b:137), and the methods which make possible the detailed control of the operations of the body according to a codification that organizes the body in terms of time, space and movement, may be referred to as ‘disciplines’ (Foucault, 1979b:137–8). The insertion of photography into the discursive field of management and the capitalist process of production, as a mechanism of objectification and as an instrument of subjection, is within the broader parameters of the desire of capital to know and control labor in its own image. It functions as ‘an epistemological thaw through a refinement of power relations; a multiplication of the effects of power through the formation and accumulation of new forms of knowledge’ (Foucault, 1979b:224). Prior to 18 80, during the early phases of capitalist production as it evolved through the decentralized ‘domestic system’ to a variety of relatively centralized subcontracting systems, capitalists in emphasizing their cost structure and resorting to intermediaries for the management of labour (Pollard, 1965:31, 39, 46), disregarded ‘the difference between labor power and labor that can be gotten out of it’ (Braverman, 1974:60). The reluctance of manufacturers to bring skilled workers under their direct supervision and reorganize the process of work meant that workers not only controlled the manner of their working but also that their labor embodied a unified expression of conception and execution. Even with the centralization of control ushered in by the panoptical architecture of the new factory system and the intensive use of salaried foremen to discipline skilled workers and supervise the pace at which they worked, especially through control over the wage rate

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for piece work (Nelson, 1975:41–3), manufacturers seeking optimum productivity were stymied by the skilled worker’s ability to restrict production (‘soldiering’) by virtue of his (the worker’s) knowledge and ultimate control of the processes of production. However, all of this changed with the introduction of F.W.Taylor’s ‘scientific management’, which signalled the emergence of a new technical élite—the engineer. The engineer not only embodied the instrumental reasoning necessary for solving the technical problems besetting the capitalist but provided the methods for rationalized management of a refractory artisanal labor force (Noble, 1977:33–4), which was increasingly striking after the 1880s. According to Merkle, The formal goal of the Taylor system’ represented no less than an attempted ‘re-conciliation of capital and labor’ (Merkle, 1980:21). But as a reconciliation formed in the neutral language of technical expertise and celebrative of efficiency as an end in itself, scientific management only sought to better disguise behind its positivist pseudo-scientific reasoning the terms of its new-found exploitation and ‘reconciliation’ of labor to the capitalist mode of production (Braverman, 1974:86). Unified by an ideology of science (Merkle, 1980:11), it represented in essence, an ambition to realize Bentham’s panopticon principle: that a good design could supersede supervision (Bell, 1980:226–7). In order to put an end to ‘soldiering’ and extract from labor the maximum output from a working day’s labor power, Taylor’s scientific management directed its disciplinary gaze to ‘the deliberate gathering in on the part of those on the management’s side of all the great mass of traditional knowledge, which in the past has been in the heads of the workman, which he has acquired through years of experience’ (Taylor, 1972:36). In keeping with his intentions, Taylor began systematically observing one of the most important and skilled trades of the time, that of the machinist, considered “the sine qua non of modern industry” (Noble, 1977:36). He reduced and systematized the metalcutting process into twelve variables, which he then represented in a practical ‘slide rule’ that could be used by a worker of little skill and no mathematical training. Rather than relying on knowledge, experience and skill, workers had to work from a quantified list of sequential movements provided by the planning department (Taylor, 1906:5). Thus by rendering skilled workers dependent on management, Taylor instituted the ‘dissociation of the labor process from the skills of the workers’ (Braverman, 1974:113), and in turn enhanced the disciplinary apparatus’ capability to produce ‘docile bodies’. In this scheme, conception is extracted from the worker’s body and instituted in the planning department which becomes the central gaze of the disciplinary apparatus, constituting bodies in terms of days and tasks, as it analyzes all orders, provides step-by-step instructions by which each casting is to be made, maintains time cards on a daily basis, maps the route each piece takes in production and generally co-ordinates the flow of work even as it standardizes representations of its own organizational processes (Taylor, 1972:110, 117). ‘In discipline it is the subjects who have to be seen’ (Foucault, 1979b:187), and Taylorism makes for an economy of visibility and correspondingly for an economy of power by fixing, arresting, regulating and maintaining calculated distributions. It is into this disciplinary apparatus of the capitalist mode of production that

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photography is invested. Its effects are as deconstructive of the body as they are powerful. Frank Gilbreth was one of Frederick Taylor’s disciples and his work in photographing motion was essentially a product of the investigations conducted in the last quarter of the nineteenth century by both Etienne Jules Marey and Edweard Muybridge into the physiology of animal and human locomotion. Gilbreth, however, refined their methods between 1911 and 1912, and directed his efforts towards an efficient re-engineering of the worker’s body in pursuit of what he called a ‘motion economy’. In his micromotion studies, Gilbreth used a hand-cranked motion-picture camera and a microchronometer (a speed clock) in order to record even smaller units of motion than Taylor had done in his stopwatch studies (Gilbreth and Gilbreth, 1917:64). At the New England Butt Company, employees were ushered into what was referred to as ‘the betterment room’, which resembled a typical workshop organized for the manufacture of dress-braid machines, except that the walls had a grid pattern on them similar to the backdrops Muybridge had used. The camera recorded the worker’s initial performance which was then played back to the worker while Gilbreth, pointer in hand, instructed the worker on how to minimize certain motions and how to do away with others altogether. After this reorganizing of the worker’s body, the worker’s performance on the task was once again recorded to register the improvements. Work is here reconstructed according to the efficiency demands of the capitalist disciplinary apparatus, and the camera itself served a double purpose: as an empirical instrument yielding ‘scientific proof, and as a pedagogical instrument for readjusting the worker’s body against a standardized grid which visually aided in the measurement of the duration and distance of the work movement. Despite the comprehensiveness of these records, Gilbreth discovered that it was difficult to visualize the path of a motion and that it was not possible to measure the length with precision (Gilbreth and Gilbreth, 1917:67). He turned to photography to solve these problems and invented the ‘chronocyclegraph’ method which modified Marey’s own invention, the geometrical chrono-photograph. However, photography itself posed a problem insofar as complex motions registered as blurred images. Ingeniously, Gilbreth solved the difficulty by attaching tiny electric light-bulbs to the particular limbs being studied. Thus the motion paths registered as linear shapes on the photographic plate, not unlike white wires, and were dubbed ‘cyclegraphs’ (Gilbreth and Gilbreth, 1917:67). Furthermore, in order to account for the relative time, relative speed and duration of the motion, Gilbreth introduced a properly timed, pulsating interrupter so that the motion or cyclegraph was depicted as a series of dashes. Directional arrowheads were subsequently added to pedagogically indicate the path of the motion to the worker. Finally a more accurate measurement of the distance traversed by a particular motion was provided by introducing a cross-sectional screen into the photograph through multi-exposure models. In this manner, photography makes it possible to bring to the surface new visibilities; visibilities that help propose a machine analogue for the worker’s body, a body redesigned to synchronize with the machine rhythms of industry, that is automaticity. It thus makes for a cybernetic disciplining of the body, according to a machine norm of

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efficiency—the standard by which each body must measure its productivity. We have passed…to a web that constrains them (gestures). A sort of anatomochronological schema of behavior is defined. The act is broken down into its elements; the position of the body, limbs, articulations is defined; to each movement are assigned a direction, an aptitude; a duration; their order of succession is prescribed. Time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power (Foucault, 1979b: 152). Thus, as Foucault has noted, ‘Over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles, power is introduced, fastening them to one another’ (Foucault, 1979b:153). Discipline seeks out the body in its most intimate details. From the reduction through photography of individual bodies into electro-visual graphs and then from an aggregate of such graphs, the normative working body is constituted to express the efficiency principle. Through the study of the motion path…and through a comparison of such graphs or models showing the paths of different operators doing the same kind of work, it is possible to deduce the most efficient method and to make this the standard’ (Gilbreth and Gilbreth, 1917:91). Moreover, in the case of skilled work, the standard is to be established, according to Gilbreth, by the observation of skilled workers (Gilbreth and Gilbreth, 1917:184). This would enable the subsequent employment of unskilled workers for the same work because time-motion standards would result in these workers being quickly taught the standardized motions (Gilbreth and Gilbreth, 1917:82). Furthermore, the Gilbreths (husband and wife) observed: Through a comparison of the motions used in different lines of work, in the industries, in surgery and in other kinds of activity, it can be shown that the same identical motions are used in doing what are usually considered widely different types of work’ (Gilbreth and Gilbreth, 1917:91). Thus in 1916, they identified twenty-two elementary units of motion, the building blocks of all work activity. They referred to these elements or units as therbligs (the Gilbreths’ name spelled backwards). The elementary units consisted of motions such as pre-position (pp), position (p), grasp (g), select (st), search (sh), assemble (a), transport loaded (tl), transport empty (te), inspect (i), etc. According to their schematic taxonomy of motion, ‘To pick up a pencil, therefore, would involve the proper categories of Transport Empty, Pinch Grasp, and Transport Loaded, each with a standard time value, and the sum of the time categories of these three therbligs, given in ten-thousandths of a minute, constitutes the time for the complete motion’ (Braverman, 1974:174). As Braverman points out, The therblig was only the first of a series of standard data systems, which are now constructed by many large corporations for their internal use’ (Braverman, 1974:175). Through the use of a stereoscope, the Gilbreths also created three-dimensional wire models of a standard motion for the worker’s edification. The pedagogical value inherent in three-dimensional wire models of this nature, was apparent to them, and would, they supposed, be apparent to the worker too: Through its use he [the worker] can see what he is to do, learn about it through his eye, follow the wire with his fingers, and thus accustom his muscles to the activity that they are expected to perform’ (Gilbreth and Gilbreth, 1917:89). Here we find the worker considering and examining his own labor,

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which lies before him abstracted, a signifier whose signified has been preconceived, and which awaits the material receptacle of his body. Their function outside of them, workers must do their best to simulate it; since their function is standardized, it has become more important than they are (Kaiper, 1981:62). Disciplinary power constitutes ‘the individual as a describable, analyzable object…in order to maintain him in his individual features, in his particular evolution, in his own aptitudes or abilities, under the gaze of a permanent corpus of knowledge’ (Foucault 1979b: 190). In this regard it is not surprising that the Gilbreths boldly declare that ‘Under scientific management the individual is the unit to be measured’ (Gilbreth, 1918:27). Under scientific management the work of each man is arranged so that his output shows up separately and on the individual records…. The primary purpose of separating the output is to see what the man can do, to record this, and to reward the man according to his work, but this separating of output has also an individual result, which is even more important than the result aimed at, and that is the development of individuality (Gilbreth, 1918:33). These individual records were the basis by which workers were to be hired or promoted, and generally classified and related to a norm. And not unlike the criminal record, they exerted a disciplinary pressure by their very existence. And if the photograph operating in a disciplinary apparatus fractured the worker’s body, it also had its honorific function: ‘The photographs of the “high priced men”, copies of which may be given to the workers themselves, allow the worker to carry home a record and thus impress his family with what he has done’ (Gilbreth, 1918:42). Thus it may be said that photographic practices operating inside the disciplinary apparatus of scientific management, by making the body legible, also made it docile; that the mutually enhancing configuration of knowledge and power fractured the worker’s body along an axis of conception and execution. Consequently the subject-object dichotomy of an ocularcentric science was, and is no less today, writ large into the body of the worker. The nineteenth-century visual order As Foucault has argued, with the emergence of the modern human sciences— criminology, demographics, statistics, and we may add, scientific management—‘Man appears in his ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and as a subject that knows; enslaved sovereign, observed spectator’ (Foucault, 1970:312). In the emergence of this ‘strange empirico-transcendental doublet’ (Foucault, 1970:318), human beings are both isolated objects made visible by the ocularcentric discourses of the sciences and neutral metasubjects of knowledge engaging the visible field of the social. Thus ‘the veritable technological take-off in the productivity of power’ (Foucault, 1980:119) represented a constitution of human beings as both subjects and objects of knowledge. In this context, the disciplinary apparatuses situated in discourses of criminalistics and

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criminology, sought through the utilization of photography to make visible and constitute the criminal’s body, thereby ensuring knowledge through identification, which, in turn, enabled the increasing regulation and permeation of power in and across the social body. The case of the skilled worker was no different, for the disciplinary apparatus of scientific management utilized photography to isolate, make visible, appropriate and divest skilled workers of the knowledge they embodied, so that the same knowledge could be transferred in standardized, efficient models of work-motion to hundreds of untrained, unskilled, poorly paid workers. These then are bodies isolated, enframed and made visible in photographic space. And whether it is the case of the worker or the prisoner, each arrives in an apparatus of writing, examined and individuated in a record or file. Furthermore, photography simultaneously and in overlapping fashion, operating on an axis delineated by the inverse trajectories of honorific and repressive portraiture, assisted in making visible and constituting the bourgeois body as subject of moral value and social meaning. In all these cases, the body isolated, made visible and individuated, is in turn transformed into an object or subject of knowledge and power. Photography in the nineteenth century was thus embedded in the larger visual discourse—‘a positive unconscious vision’—of the period, characterized by practices which sought, in their specificity, to make visible the social order through the isolation and individuation of bodies for the purposes of deterrence, discipline, regulation, rationalization and display. Power operating in the grids of photographic space produced iconic bodies, analyzed bodies, disciplined bodies and regulated bodies, eliciting and disseminating knowledge with each frame of space. In each case, individuals were constituted either as isolated subjects or isolated objects, enjoying greater visibilities or being made more visible to the dynamic of power and knowledge as it traverses the space of the ‘empiricotranscendental doublet’. In this process of isolation and individuation, of visibilities and being made visible, discourses proliferate, knowledge is informed and power is produced correlatively. Thus what Richard Sennett has referred to as the emergence into the public domain of the nineteenth century of the paradox of isolation and visibility (Sennett, 1978), is no paradox at all, but is the real basis on which the dynamic of power and knowledge comes into play. Simultaneously, it is the very same site that is haunted by the lamentations of a mind-body dualism. Enslaved sovereign, observed spectator, this empirico-transcendental doublet produced by ocularcentric knowing, creates lines of great visibility across social spaces increasingly mediated and reticulated by conjoining grids of knowledge and power, which capillarylike reaches deep into the social body. Human beings as both metasubjects and objects, simultaneously invested and divested, now occupy the same position as the viewer in front of a sixteenth-century perspectival painting by Raphael, who discovers that the sovereign point of view, at one and the same time, isolates and decenters itself from what is viewed and, eventually, one may surmise, obliterates the social. In one sense all of the architectural spaces turn towards the viewer, displaying their advertent aspects to one who stands at the place of masterly overview, with every line of flight across the cornices, flagstones, and arcades travelling in towards the sovereign

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spectator. But in another sense the architecture of the piazza turns towards a place where the viewer does not and cannot exist. The moment the viewer appears and takes up position at the viewpoint, he or she comes face to face with another term that is the negative counterpart to the viewing position: the vanishing point (Bryson, 1988:89). Notes 1 The ‘Diorama’ consisted of three prosceniums, on which were placed 45.5×71.5 ft paintings. The intent was to surround the audience with circular painted views, and through the effect of lights and other atmospheric effects to provide a threedimensional, illusionary view of storms and sunsets (Rosenblum, 1984:17, 36, 96; Newhall, 1964:14). 2 As Michel Foucault (1979b) defines these terms, ‘bio-politics’ relates to the regulation of populations and ‘anatomo-politics’ to the disciplining of individual bodies. References

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Rudisill, Richard (1971) Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Ryder, James (1902) Voigtlander & I, Cleveland: Cleveland Printing & Publishing Co. Schmidt, James (1985) Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Between Phenomenology and Structuralism, New York: St Martin’s Press. Sekula, Allan (1986) ‘The body and the archive’, October, (36–9) 1–67. Sennett, Richard (1978) The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism, New York: Vintage Books. Spitzer, Steven (1979) ‘The rationalization of crime control in capital society’, Contemporary Crisis, 3:187–206. Tagg, John (1988) The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, Amerst: University of Massachusetts Press. Taylor, Frederick Winslow (1906) On the Art of Cutting Metals, New York: The American Society of Mechanical Engineers. ——(1972) reprint, Scientific Management, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. Trachtenberg, Allan (1984) ‘Brady’s portraits’, The Yale Review, Winter, 73(2) 230–53. Wechsler, Judith (1982) A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in Nineteenth Century Paris, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Williamson, Judith (1985) Consuming Passions: The Dynamics of Popular Culture, London: Marion Boyars.

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LOOKING FOR THE HOLY GRAIL: PUBLISHING AND ADVERTISING STRATEGIES AND CONTEMPORARY MEN’S MAGAZINES I want to raise, in this essay, some questions about the methodologies of cultural analysis that we bring to bear on media texts; questions that come out of my own work on contemporary men’s magazines.1 We are currently within a particularly rich seam of productive rethinking concerning these research methodologies, and I want to briefly frame my argument in relation to what I think are the more important ambitions of this work. I want to suggest that although recent interventions have been important, there remains a domain of knowledges and practices that are still too marginal in the priorities of media studies/cultural studies and which need foregrounding more assertively in our methodological concerns. These are the professional knowledges and practices of media practitioners. Texts, lived experience and professional culture We can map the approaches that now occupy important ground within media studies/cultural studies on to a still useful model of the passage of cultural forms, suggested by Stuart Hall (1980): that is, the passage of cultural forms through the moments of production—circulation—consumption. As Richard Johnson has suggested in his comments on Hall’s model, each of these instances in the passage of a cultural form has its own specificity and conditions of existence; notably, the institutions, techniques and procedures of production; the dynamics of circulation; and the practices of consumption (Johnson, 1983). These specificities cannot be inferred from the other moments of the cycle (‘Processes disappear into results’ (Johnson, 1983:12)), yet each moment is dependent on the other moments of the cycle. From this model it is clear— when we come to think about media texts—that the textual embodiment of a cultural form is only one part of its lifecycle. Or rather, that abstracted figure of the text is always—as I argue later—interrupted and hounded by its imbrication in conditions of production and consumption; always caught in relations of dependency with these moments of its existence as a ‘text-as-produced’ and as a ‘text-as-consumed’. Using Hall’s model of the passage of a cultural form and its distinction between the three nodal moments within this lifecycle, I suggest that much media analysis has been

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primarily concerned with the moment of production of the cultural form. Marxist paradigms have clearly occupied a central place within this approach. The ‘Political Economy’ of the media found in the work of Nicholas Garnham is exemplary here, as is the more nuanced work of Murdock and Golding on ownership and control (Garnham, 1979; Golding and Murdock, 1979; Murdock, 1982). There is a concern within these and other writings with the big, structural factors that shape the production of media forms. The emphasis is on the determining, contextual ‘conditions of existence’ of media forms: the structures of what Morley has recently called ‘power, politics and policy’ 1991:12). Effects on media texts are often implicitly inferred from these contextual determinants, with relations of causality between text and context assumed a priori more often than satisfactorily mapped in process. One clear consequence of this particular set of production-based approaches is to produce a very thin account of media texts. They become simply the bearers of large contextual structures of determination. It was precisely against this kind of reductionism that text-based methodologies sought to free the media text. This is where those arguments from semiotics carried real weight. The productive or performative role of the text in shaping meaning could give a much thicker account of the text. Bracketing off other possible determinants in favour of a close attention to the internal textual mechanics opened up an immensely important methodological space.2 Few studies applied a purely semiotic analysis, however. ‘Screen Theory’ perhaps went furthest down that road with its mixture of semiotics and psychoanalysis in the analysis of the internal textual processes of narrative cinema. This represented a further cranking-up of the ‘autonomy’ of the text: the shift from a concern with the semiotic moment of the text to the wholly productive work of textuality (Heath, 1977; Barthes, 1981). More often than not, however, some reference to context—of either the production or consumption of the signifying text—was made. At its most ambitious—and ‘Policing the Crisis’ is the magisterial exemplar here—attention to texts (popular and official discourses on ‘law ’n’order’) was worked with an analysis of moments of their production (the microprocesses of media campaigns and political orchestration, and larger relations of force within an historical conjuncture) (Hall et al., 1978). More typically—and the work of Rosalind Coward, Angela McRobbie and Janice Winship are good examples—inferences and assertions about the context of consumption were mobilized to situate the textual analysis: the culture of femininity, in the work of the above writers, that was both the subject of the texts (women’s magazines, popular fiction, etc.) and in turn shaped the consumption of those texts (Coward, 1984; McRobbie, 1978, 1984, 1989; Winship, 1985, 1987). The limits of an emphasis on the textual moment of a cultural form has been subject to a particular and sustained critique for some time now. Attention to the moment of the consumption of the media texts—has been the most proliferating body of work in media studies. There are a number of important studies that deserve attention: Dave Morley’s Family Television (1986), Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984) and Ien Ang’s Watching Dallas (1984) have perhaps been most widely cited. These ethnographies of the text have been concerned to elucidate the details of the moment of consumption and its

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differentiated outcomes. Decentring the media text at the moments of reading, viewing, scanning or flicking, these studies have attempted to locate the reading of texts within the appropriating activities of everyday life; to tilt the modality of the analysis towards everyday practices and the take-up and embroidering of texts by their consumers. Some attempt is on occasions then made to link these detailed practices of consumption back to the big, contextual structures (Morley, 1991). Other suggestive work on the moment of reading has begun to take seriously the impact of the unequal distribution of cultural capital on the moment of reading: that is, to foreground the specific technologies of reading or viewing open to different readers. Bourdieu’s influence looms large here, particularly his notion of the ‘pure’ gaze and the popular aesthetic (Bourdieu, 1984:9–97). Colin Mercer has also suggestively argued for the need to historicize the practice of reading and to distinguish between academic and popular technologies of reading. (Mercer, 1991) A number of studies have attempted to develop attention to the practices of reading by locating and foregrounding the social position of the researcher in the practices of analysis. Most suggestive here would be Carolyn Steadman’s Landscape for a Good Woman (1986) with its attention to the interaction of historical and autobiographical narrative—histories and stories—that shape the production of an understanding of a ‘life story’. Valerie Walkerdine’s (1985) work on Video Replays and Cora Kaplan’s (1984) analysis of The Thorn Birds begin to mobilize similar methodologies. These developments mark out familiar terrain then. I have briefly rehearsed them, however, because I think all of these methodologies have something useful to offer in understanding contemporary media texts. My concern, though, is to bring into the picture more fully a series of determinants on the texts that have remained underdeveloped (if not unacknowledged) in these methodologies: that is, the professional knowledges and practices of media practitioners. I suggest that we need to attend more fully to these knowledges and practices as they are formative in the shaping of media texts; that is, to the shaping of the media texts-as-produced. The ‘text-as-produced’ is—in this sense—the site of a series of interconnecting practices. I outline, below—in relation to popular magazines—some of the salient practices involved. This approach has the effect of fundamentally decentring or disaggregating the text as guarantor of the analysis. The unity of the text that recurs in many of the methodologies that I have noted—and especially in both the semiotic and ‘political economy’ traditions—is profoundly disturbed by this methodological reframing. One consequence is that we now have to start our analysis in some different places from those we have been used to doing; points of departure that will include the professional cultures of media practitioners and ‘cultural workers’ in the consumer industries. I offer, in what follows, an example of what this kind of approach can yield through an analysis of contemporary men’s magazines. One pay-off from this kind of analysis of professional discourses and practices, developed here, is a better picture of the interplay of ‘economic’ and ‘cultural’ practices and techniques in the production and regulation of commodified cultural forms like popular magazines.

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UK men’s magazines in the 1980s The 1980s saw the opening up of a new sector of the consumer magazine market in the UK with the launch of a handful of ‘general-interest men’s magazines’.3 The key launches were Wagodan’s Arena in November 1986 and Condé Nast’s GQ in November 1988. Imbricated in a series of commentaries—both academic and popular—about the ‘new man’, and in some wider transformations in the consumer and leisure industries, these magazines were the result of prolonged trade debates. These debates were indicative of the coming into play of a distinctive nexus of knowledge and practice that interdiscursively shaped the contours of the magazines’ development. I suggest, in particular, that it is the intersection of the concerns of groups of advertisers interested in some specific male markets and certain magazine publishers interested in opening up a new sector of the magazine market, that seminally shape the terms on which men’s magazines develop as a new media product. This advertising/publishing nexus formed an important set of determinants on the magazines, along with—and in interaction with—the distinct practices of the designers, photographers, stylists and writers of the magazines. The commentaries and practices that I chart are organized around the figure of the ‘general-interest men’s magazine’. This is the figure around which certain advertising practitioners and publishing folk—between 1984–6—begin to shape a new type of magazine for men. Magazine publishing: some brief comments on women’s general titles and teenage magazines The concern from certain sections of magazine publishing to produce a ‘general-interest men’s magazine’ extended through a turbulent period in magazine publishing more generally. For Media Week ‘this [the 1980s] has proved to be one of the most volatile periods for consumer magazines’. (Media Week, 8.12.89:28) The industry was experiencing significant changes on the back of developments like the expansion of free newspapers, inserts, the sectionalization of newspapers and supplements, newspapers-onthe run colour, the broadening out of televisual media (C4, cable and satellite), new production technologies, new working practices and forms of wholesaling and distribution (especially the rise of supermarket retail), successful foreign interventions in the UK consumer market (Gruner, and Jahr and Bauer, notably) and the circulation of free magazines. These transformations were complemented by talk in trade circles of falling advertising revenues, of market saturation (in the women’s titles), and of demographic time-bombs. Women’s general titles (e.g., Prima, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan) remained the significant market for the big publishers with thirty-nine launches through the decade, despite some significant failures. The 1980s also saw the teenage magazine market booming, with the high profile debates in the trade press through 1984–6 concerned with this market. Both the women’s market and teenage

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magazines were significant to the formulation of men’s magazines. Inflected through the wider industry developments, the men’s general-interest magazine was in part galvanized into life by the continued potential of the women’s generals market, while both some notable successes (the ‘style press’) and failures (The Hit) in the teenage sector also shaped the genesis of men’s magazines. A brief gloss of these debates and developments is necessary. The women’s generals market exerted a troubling presence on the trade discussions of men’s magazines. The monthly women’s titles, along with the women’s weeklies, dominated the consumer-magazine sector in terms of circulation figures and display revenue (income from display advertising). If you whispered—not too loudly—the sort of figures achieved by women’s magazines in the mid 1980s to a publishing practitioner, you prompted the rehearsal of an imagined scenario of the equivalent male general title. The thinking, as it began to be formulated in the early to mid 1980s, went like this, as Zed Zawada, art director at EMAP Metro, succinctly put it: ‘Publishers look at women’s magazines, their circulation figures and bottom line and they think, ‘If we could put together a road test of a new Porsche with an in-depth interview with Giorgio Armani and some stuff about personal finance, then we’ve hit some sort of composite male who has all those interests.’ (Campaign, 29.8.86:41) The women’s generals market, then, played an important injunctive role to publishers regarding the possibility of opening up a new section of the magazine market. The shaping-up of the teenage magazine markets, as I suggested, also broadly frames the debates on men’s magazines. The sector had traditionally been dominated by girls’ and mixed-readership magazines. In the eighties these markets showed significant, if unevenly spread, growth. The total circulation figures for teenage magazines in 1984 showed an 11 per cent increase on the previous year (Media Week, 6.9.85:20), at a time when magazine circulation as a whole dropped by 2 per cent (Media Week, 16.8.85). EMAP, along with IPC and DC Thompson, were the significant players in this field. It was EMAP, a small publisher new to youth publishing in the late seventies, that was primarily responsible for energizing this market. The success of its innovative and market leading Smash Hits and Just Seventeen came in part from a distinctive editorial format and tone of voice that successfully registered changing elements in, particularly, young women’s lives.4 Professionals were troubled, amidst the successes, however, by a recurrent figure that precariously underpinned this boom: the fickle, teenage consumer. Susan Holder put this clearly when she said that the teenager represented a ‘high risk market with more potential minefields than any other’ (Media Week, 19.4.85:22). This risk, for Holder, could be formulated in a number of ways. As a general point she conjures an image of each new generation of teenagers as particular and as obstinate in their tastes as their predecessors. Holder takes to task publishers and advertisers for misreading this ‘difficult market’. While painting a picture of the lucrative financial potential of this market—both in terms of its immediate spending power and as future customers whose loyalties could be won at an early stage—she argued that a more complex picture of the teenage market be put together. ‘To be successful we must precisely identify the target market. It’s not enough to say “I want to reach teenagers”.

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Advertisers need to define their core market, because within that 13–19 year old group there are individuals who are in school, in Higher Education, living at home, single and independent, married or even parents’ (Media Week, 19.4.85:22–3). Her comments were addressed to both publishers and advertisers, with good reason. If teenagers, within these trade assessments, were generally a fickle group, obsessed with the minutiae of fashion and trends, they did at least, it was argued, read magazines. As Media Week put it, They [teenagers] go out often and, after the age of 15, watch considerably less TV.[…] They tend to use the cinema, radio as a source of the latest music, and magazines (though there is less choice of publications for boys).’ (19.4.85:22– 3) The importance of this finding registered in both the calculations of publishers of magazines for teenagers and in the calculations of advertisers wishing to service these markets. It is from within the advertising/publishing nexus of teenage magazines— pivotally around the finding that elusive teenage consumers can (potentially) be best reached through popular magazines—that the debate on young men’s magazines takes off. The injunction to publishers hinges on advertisers’ concern, at this moment, to better reach young men. Alex Byrne, Media Executive of the advertising agency Yellowhammer, put it succinctly as follows: ‘The 15–19 year olds [men] are extremely difficult to reach and many advertisers would dearly love to be able to do that’ (Media Week, 23.8.85:6). Popular magazines and the young male reader A number of options were available to advertisers in the early 1980s through which to reach these young men through print media. One strategy was to try and reach them via the hobbies, specialist or music press. Newsfield, publishers of magazines like Bike and ZZapp, sold themselves to advertisers as offering, precisely, good coverage of young men. The soccer comic strips and sci-fi press represented other potential ‘media opportunities’. For Simon Ludate of Glasshouse Productions, however, all these products ‘offer little potential for advertising’ (Campaign, 16.3.84:54). The reasoning here needs some elaboration. It is based around two assertions. Firstly, the use of newsprint by some of these products, as against glossy paper, was seen as old-fashioned and downmarket by both readers and advertisers. Secondly, the core advertisers in the pivotal teenage markets—that is, the 15–17-year-old segment—were focused around the identifiable purchasing preferences of that consumer: clothes, followed by sweets, records and savings (Campaign, 16.3.84:63). These products were not editorially the focus of the specialist or hobbies press. As Wranglers, the jeans manufacturer complained at the time: ‘It’s difficult and expensive to reach young men. They’re light television viewers and they read a range of specialist magazines. There are all sorts of magazines you’d have to advertise in if you wanted to reach 80 or 90 per cent of young males.’ (Media Week, 23.8.85:6). Developing an effective way of reaching this young male market—and a felt sense on the part of publishers that some shifts were afoot in these markets—intensified the search

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for what was termed the ‘next rich publishing seam’, the ‘general-interest boys’ magazine’ (Media Week, 16.8.85:10). It is within precisely this context that IPC launched The Hit in September 1985. THE HIT The Hit is a significant phenomenon in this account. It explicitly connects the debates on teenage magazines with those of the ‘general-interest men’s magazines’. The discussion provoked in the trade press by The Hit’s brief flowering also throws further light on the range of opinion that existed within the industry concerning the prospects of a men’s magazine. The Hit served for many commentators as conclusive proof of the impossibility of a ‘general-interest men’s magazine’. The Hit was launched in September 1985 amidst optimistic proclamations from publishers IPC. The magazine was positioned in the crowded popular music section of the market with titles like New Musical Express (NME), Melody Maker (MM), Sounds, Smash Hits, I-D, The Face and Record Mirror (Media Week, 6.9.85:20). It aimed, in the words of IPC Chairman Ron Chilton, to ‘over the years replac(e) newspaper type magazines like Sounds, MM and NME’ (Campaign, 15.11.85:15). Editor Phil McNeill expanded on the magazine’s precise address to The Hit’s 15–19-year-old male reader. He stated, ‘With The Hit we aim to open up a new kind of market in the way Smash Hits did for girls’ (Media Week, 6.9.85:20). IPC were confident. Research they had undertaken suggested that a firm, identifiable market was there for the magazine. Jane Reed, Managing Director of Holborn (the youth publishing section of IPC) argued that ‘current magazine trends show that men are changing their attitudes towards magazines’ (Media Week, 16.8.85:10), going on to say, ‘there is a growing need amongst young men in particular for a magazine to express their own tastes in the eighties away from the committed rock press, the élitist monthlies and the pop glossies’ (Media Week, 17.5.85:12). The ‘general interest’ features of the magazine were seen to capture this shift in young men’s tastes. As Alyn de Casembroot, group marketing controller of Holborn, suggested, ‘Music obviously plays a major role in their lives, but to a 16-year-old today it can be as important to know about the latest Nike shoes as the latest Prince single’ (Media Week, 17.5.85:2). The pre-publication response to The Hit from influential advertising voices was also favourable. Rehearsing elements of the commentaries we have already encountered, Dave Porter of Yellowhammer, was enthusiastic: From an ad viewpoint there is, without a doubt, a niche for a magazine like The Hit because in publishing terms it is the least developed part of the youth market. It is possible to reach 15–19-year-old men in volume through the pages of Fleet Street papers, given time through cinema, and fairly effectively through radio. But there is no opportunity to reach them through magazines, through the placing of an ad next to an editorial which screams ‘this is for you’. And within the youth market in particular, advertisers are becoming more and more susceptible to that sort of qualitative argument (Campaign, 15.11.85:15).

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On the back of this kind of response, IPC launched The Hit in September 1985 with a £650,000 ad spend on ITV, Channel 4, commercial radio and cinema, and aiming for a 190,000 circulation. The omens for the magazine that proclaimed itself ‘Harder than the rest’ looked promising. Six weeks later, however, with confirmed sales of 80,000– 100,000, IPC moved to close down The Hit. In the post-mortem that ensued we get a further sense of the competing industry investments in the development of a generalist male title. At root the key arguments reprised doubts raised prior to the launch of The Hit. Both Mike Penfold and Simon Dodds of The Record Advertising Partnership, for example, had expressed cynicism with The Hit’s profile pre-launch: They said, ‘Girls will buy magazines until they’re coming out of their ears, but I have my doubts as to whether boys will buy this type of product… With teenage boys it’s a volatile, confused market.’ (Media Week, 6.9.85:20) Mark Ellan, of EMAP, took further the implications of these comments. Commenting after The Hit’s failure, and comparing The Hit with the phenomenal success of Just Seventeen, Ellan said: One of the reasons why Just Seventeen has been so successful is that its readers need a great deal of reassurance that other young women are going through the same physical and emotional problems. Men at that age are much more preoccupied with self and self-image. They might like BMX bikes, waterskiing and The Jesus and Mary Chain, but they don’t like a magazine that suggests other men within their age group feel the same way. There simply isn’t the same motivation to buy a general magazine (Campaign, 15.11.85:15). Ellan’s comments invoked some real limit positions for young men in the taking up of gender identifications. To be too preoccupied with the acquisition of your maleness as a shared experience (as part of a community of men) or to foreground too much the relative, gendered dimensions of your tastes and aspirations, was seen—in this analysis— as quite disruptive. The commercial inference from this diagnosis was clear: a magazine that followed the approach of The Hit would fail to attract the necessary circulation figures among young men: young men’s tastes and values may have appeared to be changing, but the apparent self-consciousness of The Hit’s address bad misread the nature of these developments. Ellan’s comments offered a more conceptual gloss to assertions about the impossibility of a general-interest boys’ title loosely based on the format of girls’ magazines. Significantly, amidst the doubting noises made in the debates around the ‘general-interest men’s magazine’, we will hear an almost identical argument set out. What has this brief recounting of The Hit’s story told us? Point one is that, importantly, it has allowed us to delineate the relationship between different strategies that shape the magazines from within the publishing/advertising nexus. I want to conceptualize the interplay of these strategies in the following manner. The first, obvious, assertion is that the magazines operate, develop and are produced at the intersection of advertising and publishing concerns. This was clear from the assumptions of Susan Holder’s and Dave Porter’s comments and the Media Week findings. These comments further suggested that this is an intersection strongly shaped by an advertising-led calculus: the ambition of

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advertisers to target ‘elusive’ teenage consumer constituents (in this case). Again, this determinant on the magazines shouldn’t surprise us: it is the sine qua non of commodified media production; to wit, in the development and running of commercial magazines, publishers have to maintain the confidence of advertisers—the linked generation of adequate revenue through cover sales and ad sales constitutes an economic bottom line. This ‘necessary condition of existence’, then, governs and regulates these cultural forms. I want to float, however, a particular reading of this economic relation between advertisers and publishers; one that sees this relation as not simply the product and realization of an unproblematic economic logic. (A kind of majestic unfolding of the ‘logic of capital’). I want to suggest that this economic relation between publishers and advertisers is discursively rendered. In other words, the seminal economic relation that regulates magazines like The Hit as cultural forms doesn’t take an abstract form. It is inscribed within particular languages; languages or discursive practices that are a necessary condition of the economic relations existence. Amongst the practices that interweave in the production of popular magazines, the economic relation between publishers and advertisers is principally formed between certain professionals: those commentators who have populated our account to date, advertising agency media planners and media buyers, and magazine advertising managers (and perhaps editors). This relationship is stitched together through shared consumer representations; that is both formal and informal knowledge about the consumer constituents that are of interest to both parties. In the debate that we have been charting, this was a certain segment of the teenage market. These representations of consumers, then, act as interdiscursive elements in linking the discourses of advertising practitioners and publishing folk. As such, they are an essential element of the economic relation between publishers and advertisers. They are part of its conditions of existence. This discursive production of the economic relation within the advertising/publishing nexus is particularly clear in the case of declining or fast-changing markets, when the relationship to readers is most problematic and where the definition of audiences needs to be more explicit. Teenage magazines—as we have seen from the flurry of activity they generated in the 1980s—were exemplary in this sense; and teenage magazines targeted at young men, as we have seen with the saga around The Hit, particularly incited this production of knowledge. The irony of The Hit saga, of course, is that while it has allowed us to glimpse some of the processes at work in the production of a popular magazine in terms of exploring and conceptualizing the economic relation between advertisers and publishers, it was the economic relation between readers and the magazine that ultimately proved more problematic for The Hit. Point two is that the project of The Hit is a symptom of the concern amongst certain publishers to formulate new products (and within them new modes of address) to young men. These initiatives were responses to the perceived flux around masculine identities on the part of these media practitioners, and an attempt by these players to gauge the nature of that flux in order to harness it commercially. Point three is more speculative. None the less, I suggest that the appeal of a general title like The Hit to influential sections of advertising opinion gives us an insight into the

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cultural preferences of these professionals. The specialist press, with its generally less innovative formats and modes of writing, send out the wrong cues to excite the professionals. What these titles lack—and what they are generally untouched by in trade perceptions—is ‘style’. Magazines like The Face, I-D and Blitz (and we develop this point more fully later) were beginning to turn the terms of what a magazine for young people should be like. The Hit plainly engaged with these magazines, bringing the preoccupations of ‘style’ to a younger, more mainstream audience. The subtitle of The Hit is an important clue in this process: ‘Harder than the rest’ clearly references The Face’s Buffalo stylings with their ‘hard’ emphasis on ‘street style’ and ‘attitude’. It is to this segment of the young publishing market that we now want to turn. THE TEENAGE MARKET: THE ‘STYLE PRESS’ Our inclusion of the ‘style press’ within the category of teenage magazines acknowledges their positioning in trade commentaries and in the media lists of advertising media buyers/media planners. The positioning (and focusing) of the magazines is however ‘upwards’ from The Hit’s 16–19-year-old readership. The label—the ‘style press’—was first applied to the three magazines launched in 1980: The Face, I-D and Blitz. It is currently extended to include, in addition, Sky magazine. The assignation itself was in part derived from the use of ‘style’ in The Face from 1982. The magazine began to use the term as a feature mast-head in place of ‘fashion’, to signify its particular approach to the detailing of urban dress codes. The term stuck as a form of trade and journalistic shorthand for the particular mix of concerns and format that characterized the magazines. Significantly, unlike The Hit, the ‘style press’ represents a publishing success story and, as we’ll see, profoundly informed the debate on the generalist men’s magazine. Amongst the elevated company of other publishers in these youth markets like IPC, National Magazines, Condé Nast and even EMAP, the style press are shoestring enterprises. Published respectively by Wagadon (The Face), Jigsaw (Blitz), and Time Out (I-D), the magazines come out of a committed—if not exactly radicalized—form of cultural entrepreneurialism, and are each deeply shaped by a small group of individuals working on the magazines. All owe much—at least in their inception—to the do-ityourself ethos of post-punk youth culture, and were part of a broader, explicit engagement in commercial networks (albeit on a small peripheral scale) as spaces where innovative (avant-garde) work could be done.5 The Face was the most successful in pulling off this strategy, while in the process transforming the idea of what a popular magazine should look like. Publisher and editor Nick Logan developed the initial idea of the magazine in the late seventies while editing IPC’s flagship music paper New Musical Express (NME). It was while at EMAP, guiding the early days of Smash Hits, that Logan eventually launched The Face with a £4,500 loan from the Halifax Building Society. Such is the stuff of publishing folklore! Logan’s original concept for The Face was loosely built around the notion of a well-written magazine that, he says, he would have liked to have read when he was eighteen—a magazine that cast its net quite wide to comment on a diverse range of subjects. The Face’s ‘independence’ was important to this

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project. Putting it somewhat prosaically, Logan said, The only reason that I’m an entrepreneur, if I am, is because that’s the only way you can have the freedom to follow your own instincts. My period of working for publishing corporations (was) depressing and frustrating.’ (Direction, September 1988) The space to develop the format of the magazine outside the strictures of a big publishers—cushioned a little in the first year by Logan’s job at Smash Hits—allowed The Face’s distinctive style to grow. ‘When I started it’, Logan said, ‘I believed people like IPC, who told me that there was no market for a general title. Therefore I made it music based and gradually brought in the other stuff to make it, after a couple of years, what I had wanted it to be in the first place.’ (Campaign, 29.6.86:42) It is the shaping-up of a general title—organized around a distinctive set of ‘style’ concerns—that is absolutely pivotal to my argument regarding the genesis of a general-interest men’s magazine. It is this ‘generalist’ nature of the style mags that deeply informs the shape of the men’s magazines. The Face’s circulation began to take off in 1983/4. In the second half of 1984 sales rose by 20 per cent from 66,500 to 80,000 (Media Week, 3.5.85:22). Logan’s strong sense of the ‘look’ of the magazine led to a somewhat idiosyncratic advertising policy. Logan had said, ‘Initially I planned that there would be no advertising at all because I didn’t have an ad manager and I couldn’t afford one. My experience was…that advertising spoiled the magazine. It would be just full-page ads, no halves or anything with ugly shapes spoiling pages.’ (Direction, September 1988)6 Rod Sopp’s arrival as ad manager in 1984 was significant, marking a more engaged, if still disingenuous, view of advertising. Sopp, as ad manager, drew upon advertising vocabularies to present The Face as the perfect vehicle for advertisers to reach key consumers. When I spoke to him in August 1989, he talked of the magazine in the language of a ‘Hierarchy of Needs’, seeing The Face as speaking to innovators or opinion formers. This conception drew on Abram Maslow’s developmental pyschological schema of motivational categories. The model has proved seductive to advertising and market-research intellectuals since the 1960s and has appeared in a number of forms in the trade. Translated into advertising vocabularies, Maslow’s work underpins the psychographic segmentation of consumers— of which innovators are one example—that, since the 1960s, have supplemented (and increasingly supplanted) demographic consumer segmentations. A more descriptive reworking of psychographics—emphasizing Values’ and consumer behaviour rather than deeper ‘motivational’ economies—is found in the ‘lifestyles’ typologies produced by agencies and research companies in increasing numbers during the 1980s.7 For Sopp, in his mobilization of this psychographic vocabulary, the innovators who read The Face reside at the top of a pyramid made up of, in addition, a larger segment of early adopters, with the broad base of the pyramid consisting of late adopters. Sopp, in a deliberate piece of excessive chauvinism, spoke of this latter segment as ‘the cretins’. More interestingly, he characterized the innovators who read The Face as taste-shaping individuals; individuals who—and he gave this example—shape taste by ‘wearing a plain white Tshirt with [Levis] 501s, white socks and bass weejuns’. This indexing of innovators through the figure of the stylish young man is important. Attention to male style was increasingly significant (up to 1987) to The Face’s profile.

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As Logan himself acknowledged in what is a significant passage: One area where we are particularly strong is in men’s fashions, which is pretty badly represented generally. I keep reading about the need for a men’s mag, but I think we’re closer to that than anyone. Two-thirds of our readers are men. At the moment I’m caught between trying to attract more women readers, or expanding the trend towards men (Media Week, 16.3.84:56). Other commentators, such as Jane Reed, affirmed this, seeing The Face as shaping up a market of young male readers: ‘the 16–18-year-old male is more than ever a seriousminded, style-conscious consumerist—magazines like… The Face are marking out new territory for young men as well as women.’ (Campaign, 26.7.85:37) Even detractors, like publisher Peter Jackson, castigated The Face for being ‘narrow, mannered and obsessed with males.’ (Campaign, 27.3.87:20) It was this consumer subject—opinion-leading and male—that appealed to keen-eyed advertising media planners. Media Week summarized this thinking succinctly when it said, ‘The Face’s 63% NRS male readership (NRS to July 87) is used by “hapless” media planners stuck with the perennial problem of reaching the young male through the colour press.’ (Media Week, 12.2.88) The positioning of The Face by advertising media planners had important implications for the advertising profile of The Face. It stitched the magazine into a particular regime of advertising knowledge—principally that of media buyers and planners. How we understand this intersecting of publishing and advertising knowledge is again important. It is worth repeating my earlier conceptualization of this process. The magazine is not simply positioned by the advertising practitioners—the media planners and buyers— within their representation of the magazine. Those advertising-derived conceptions of the consumer—such as innovators—are themselves used by publishing practitioners like Sopp to sell the magazine back to advertisers. There is an engagement by the magazine with the advertising professionals. Part of The Face’s success and Sopp’s skill, lay in their ability to persuade advertisers that The Face represented the perfect vehicle through which to speak to these ‘opinion formers’; and further, that The Face really knew this avant-garde audience and was firmly meshed with its cultural preferences and sensibilities. The example of three high-profile advertising campaigns that ran from 1985 through to 1987 brings this publishing-advertising nexus out clearly, and give us a picture of the relations of cultural authority woven into it. The Zone, Way In and Levis 501s campaigns evidence in exemplary fashion the operation of advertising strategies—both creatively (in terms of their textual languages) and in terms of planning and media buying—that were shaped, in turn, by the cultural authority of The Face’s practitioners. We can take the Way In and Zone campaigns together. Between the beginning of September 1985 and the end of October 1985, both Harvey Nichols and Harrods, ‘the Twin Towers of Knightsbridge retailing’, as Media Week dubbed them, launched (or actually relaunched in the case of Way In) ‘young street-led fashion’ stores within stores aiming at a similar audience. The thinking behind Zone was to cash in on the potential of the store’s young fashion department which, it was argued, had tended to be swamped by the nearby presence of the ‘cashmere—Jaeger—Alexon department’. A radically

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revamped space in the store was put together, combining mid-range products with smallscale ranges by young designers. Pam Hogg, for example, appeared next to French Connection. Sections for men’s and women’s clothes also jostled with a Virgin Records section, cosmetics elements and accessories units. A key target in the revamp of Zone were ‘people who don’t like department stores or think they’re boring and prefer shopping at Hyper-Hyper or Warehouse.’ (Media Week, 8.11.85:23) This exercise in store repositioning and targeting required an effective ad campaign that both reached and appropriately spoke to the desired consumers. Leagas Delaney, the agency that put together the campaign, took some time researching Zone’s potential target market: We wanted to make the ads intriguing and provocative, which is why [they] only give a glimpse of the things you can buy in Zone. The campaign had to be unlike any we had done before for Harvey Nichols and we gave it a more raw look because we were aiming for people in their twenties (Susan Holliday, Leagas Delaney, Media Week, 8.11.85:23). The choice of the media in executing this campaign was important. A large part of the budget went on poster ads, especially on the London Underground. Significantly, doublepage spreads also appeared in The Face: ‘The media was carefully chosen as it was a localised campaign targeted very specifically at fashion-conscious people between 17–30 who work or live in London’ (Media Week, 8.11.85:23). Harrods’ Way In campaign, undertaken by the store and Lynne Franks PR, mobilized a similar strategy. An entirely redesigned interior—produced by the acclaimed designer Eva Jiricna (well known for her influential work in the early eighties with Joseph shops)—attempted to give Way In a stronger identity and to reposition it as a retail outlet. Harrods researched the market carefully, identifying their core target consumer in the following terms: People who buy at Next go there because they want to be helped to co-ordinate their clothes. That is the last thing we’re trying to do. We believe that our customers have their own style and know how to put it together. Our market is not commercial. It’s a boutique market. Coming to Way In is like shopping in the whole of South Molton Street. (Fenella Walsh, Harrods, Media Week, 8.11.85:23) The advert that was produced around this brief used what Media Week called, ‘deliberately pretentious and arty b & w ads’ (Media Week, 8.11.85:23)—Op Art inspired high contrast black and white images, with arch copy—a quote from Barthes on photography and from the singer Stephen ‘Tintin’ Duffy on provincial shopping and Parisian arcades. And the media chosen as most appropriate a context for these ads was the ‘style press’—including The Face. The campaigns are particularly important to our argument then as both visually—in terms of the creative execution—they drew on the visual idioms of The Face, and through placement they evidence the trade conception of The Face as the perfect vehicle

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to reach key young male (also in this case female) consumers. The development of the Levis 501s campaign through 1985/6 is an even clearer example of some of these strategies at work. There are a number of facets to the new phase of advertising undertaken by Levis from Boxing Day 1985, but here we’re only interested in a couple of features of the campaigns. Importantly, these new initiatives marked a significant change of strategy on the part of the company, with emphasis being laid on a ‘back to basics’ policy; that is emphasizing the heritage of the ‘classic’ denim ‘we’ve always known’. Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), the agency that had won the account in 1982, took this basic client brief as its starting point and produced an advertising and marketing strategy that was to transform the fortunes of Levis, especially its 501s, and reinvigorated the jeans market as a whole. Central to the initial formulation of the strategy were two television commercials—‘Bath’ and ‘Launderette’. We’ll leave to one side here these (highly influential) ads and focus on the press work. The relationship between the use of the two media forms, however, was crucial to BBH’s strategy and marked an attempt to target both a mass market (via TV) and a segmented market (via the press). In beginning to put together their strategy, BBH was deeply attentive to the ‘adoption of [501s] by opinion leading “cognoscenti” in small but interesting numbers in London, Paris, Hamburg, Berlin, Rome and Milan’ (Broadbent, 1990:184). The take-up of the ‘fifties’ look in street-style and the reverance for a certain repertoire of classic objects (Zippo lighters, Ray Bans, etc.), offered the potential of a neat fit with Levis’ ‘back to basics’ turn. BBH’s aim was to produce a campaign that would hike the product into the arena of mass fashion (conceived of as early adopters in BBH’s terminology). As the agency themselves put it, We wanted to make 501s compulsory equipment for anyone who cared about the way they looked. We wished to persuade 15–19-year-old males who represent the core jeans market that 501s were the right look, and the only label; the right look because ‘anti-fit’ was the way jeans were being worn by those in the know; the only label because only Levis 501s had laid genuine claim to the heady jeans heritage that was rooted in 50s America (Broadbent, 1990:185). In the move to ‘pump up the volume’ of Levis sales, BBH were aware of a potential pitfall. They stated this problem in the following way: We feared that as 501s went ‘public’, the opinion leaders who had discovered the product without the aid of advertising would abandon the brand. We had to reassure this small (but very important) group that 501s were the great classic that they had always believed them to be…and personal to them (Broadbent, 1990:88). The tone here is important. It evidences a fairly developed sense of the target market and its tastes and sensibilities, and from that, more strategically, a concern to retain the crucial association of the jeans with that group. BBH’s solution was to run an

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accompanying campaign to the TV ads in other media, to maintain this cognoscenti association of the jeans. This is where BBH’s strategy clearly evidences the trade positioning of the ‘style press’. Through 1986, BBH put together a series of press ads which displayed the Levis 501s immaculately styled and accessorized by major British fashion designers—Crolla, Wendy Dagworthy, Jasper Conran. The media vehicle for these ads was the style press, and especially The Face. The success of the style press, in particular The Face, is important then for two central reasons. For the trade, they offered both a media form through which to target prestigious (opinion-forming) young male consumers, and were seen to have ‘educated’ a generation of young men into reading a generalist magazine. And, in terms of our argument, they provide us with clear examples of the advertising/publishing nexus at work and suggest the cultural authority of the magazine practitioners in delimiting the parameters of the consumer address. The general-interest men’s magazine: Arena and GQ The trade debates I have sketched out around The Hit and The Face mark out a concern from certain sections of publishing and advertising opinion to (re-)formulate magazines for men. In the process they establish some of the precepts that underscore the formation of ‘the general-interest men’s magazine’. Through the period of 1984–6 on the pages of the trade press we see these concerns about a ‘general-interest men’s magazine’ coming together with a certain urgency. They extend the debates I’ve just sketched, significantly turning the focus towards older male markets (24–40 years). Arena and GQ, the two launches that come in the period 1984–9, testify to this shift of emphasis. One dimension of the debates through 1984–6, prior to the launch of Arena in November 1986, took its cue from the boom in ‘men’s lifestyle titles’ (Media Week) in the United States. Looking across the Atlantic, Campaign pondered whether this boom would trigger a string of British launches. The diagnosis Campaign offered of the US boom focused on the way in which it saw these mags as ‘touch(ing) the interest of the marketplace, an interest not around ten years ago’ (Campaign, 29.6.84:12). For Campaign this suggested the emergence of what it termed ‘more self-focused readers’. Interrogatively, it pondered whether a similar shift had occurred in this country. A little later Media Week turned to the US men’s magazines, to try and characterize this phenomenon. The US success was borne principally by two titles—Esquire and GQ. For Art Cooper, editor-in-chief of GQ, the rise and rise of the magazines was down to the way, ‘Men have become far more conscious of style and fashion and all these mags have benefited from that. I think more and more men are discovering that it feels good to look good, so part of it is a result of the fitness mania in this country’ (Media Week, 2.5.86:14– 17). Lee Eisenberg, editor of Esquire, added to this that, ‘in the wake of the women’s movement, a different kind of male came about. Their interests have changed and become more mature’ (Media Week, 2.5.86:14–17). The significance of these commentaries is that they are in part replayed in other, UK-focused pieces. Significantly

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in the UK debate proper, the influence of feminism on forming a market for men’s magazines is less assertively cited. What is more to the fore are questions of men’s changing relations to forms of consumption around, notably though not exclusively, clothes and grooming products. The American debates and launches point us to another history to be written here. These magazines do influence the launching of the British magazines—most directly through the international strategies of the publishers Condé Nast and National Magazines. My insistence, however, is that the specific developments of men’s magazines in Britain were more seminally shaped by the influence of the ‘style press’ than by these American influences. Campaign’s trans-Atlantic glance is, however, indicative of the way the US magazines did provide grist to the British debate. At the end of 1984, the first publishing response came. Tentatively, both Options and Cosmopolitan launched male supplements. These highly irregular supplements (three per year) did, however, give Paul Keers—a key protagonist for us—a platform from which to carry forward the debate. Keers, editor of Cosmo Man and future first editor of British GQ, put the case for a generalist men’s magazine that drew its confidence from the American examples, in a letter to Campaign. His comments are worth quoting at length: The reason why the US men’s magazines have been so successful is not to do with the size of the audience, nor with any differences in social or sexual attitudes, but simply because they have worked on isolating the male yuppie audience. And that audience has reading and lifestyle habits distinct from those of earlier generations of men. So the men’s magazine I and others would like to see would be aimed specifically at this yuppie male audience… By isolating the interests of this specific, large, wealthy and image-conscious demographic bulge in the male market, a UK men’s magazine could succeed (Campaign, 2.5.85:20). His comments identify an ‘emerging image-conscious’ group of men (in his phrase) committed to conspicuous consumption. Using more cautious language, Simon Marquis comes to similar conclusions in an extended ‘state-of-play’ article in Campaign (26.7.85:37–9). The general implication of Marquis’ piece is that it is the aspiration of advertisers—especially of men’s toiletries and clothing—for a magazine that is editorially sympathetic and produces good access to groups of men, that fuels the debate on men’s magazines. Marquis sees ‘the seedlings of new attitudes and behaviour in 1985, that may give publishers hope’, and evidences this by pointing to the expansion of male toiletries ranges, and the wider range of colours and styles in men’s clothing. Style, he suggests, was beginning to edge its way into male vocabulary. The men most implicated in these ‘attitudinal and behavioural’ shifts, for Marquis, correspond to the group identified as ‘Avant Guardians’ in the advertising agency McCann-Erickson’s ‘Man Track’ study. These are men, the report suggests, ‘who have an optimistic outlook on life and a strongly contemporary view of masculinity.’ Interestingly, Marquis highlights the finding that the ‘Avant Guardians’ are interested in clothes without, in his phrase, ‘the approbation of their women’. Unlike Keers, however, Marquis ultimately is pessimistic

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about the possibilities for a successful launch of such a title, suggesting—conservatively as it turned out—that only by the mid 1990s would ‘the discernible attitudinal trends of today’ have moved beyond a minority audience. Other voices also began talking more clearly of an older-age targeted magazine. The formula here, as we noted earlier on in our comments on women’s magazines, drew upon the success of women’s titles, and saw the success of men’s magazines as potentially loosely grounded in a similar format. The flow of the debate, however, was by no means all one way. Earlier we saw that the diagnosis of The Hit’s failure was the occasion for some extended arguments on young men’s propensity to buy a general title aimed exclusively at them. These commentaries formed the basis for a rehearsal, in some instances, of similar arguments and the reassertion of stock-in-trade wisdoms concerning men and general-interest titles. At its least sophisticated and most doctrinal level, these pessimistic commentaries saw men as difficult and elusive media targets, as highly discerning, and as unwilling to pay out for a glossy magazine. (Campaign: 4–44, 29.8.86) A more conceptual rendering of the argument was also given. This raised a question mark over the viability of the ‘generalist men’s magazine’ in terms of the limit positions of certain established masculine identities. This was the registering of an argument that we encountered in the debate about The Hit, put then by Mark Ellan. Simon Marquis here takes up the argument: ‘While women become “friends” with their mags there is an inbuilt male resistance to the idea of a magazine that makes public and shares ideas about being a man. To men it is an unacceptable contradiction. Self-consciousness is permissible, even attractive, in a woman; it is perceived as weak and unmanly in a man.’ Men, he goes on to say, don’t need the kind of club provided for women by their magazines. For men ‘contact with other men has been their historical prerogative’ (Campaign, 26.7.85:37–9). Zed Zawada also invokes this analysis: ‘Men don’t define themselves as men in what they read, they define themselves as people who are into cars, who play golf or fish… Successfully launching a general-interest men’s magazine would be like finding the Holy Grail’ (Campaign, 29.8.86:41). EMAP’s entry into the men’s glossy market in 1986 was built on precisely this kind of cautious analysis. Its ‘new route’, as Campaign dubbed it, was through Q magazine. Commenting further on the approach that underpinned Q, Zawada says, ‘If you produce something with articles on Giorgio Armani suits, aftershaves and hang-gliding, not many men are going to read it on a regular basis. But we know that millions of men are interested in music, so if you launch something along those lines you have a men’s magazine without actually calling it that.’ (Campaign, 23.5.86:7) Advertisers responded favourably to this particular strategy. Q’s negotiation of the terms of the debate established around a general men’s magazine does however throw further light on the importance of the debate at this point in time. It indicates the strong marking of the general male title around the constitutive parts of a high-profile fashion component and ‘lifestyle’ focus (the suits, aftershaves and hang-gliders). The pertinent influence here on this format is—as we have already suggested—that of the style press. The forms of consumption addressed by the magazines also marked the extension into an older market

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of classic teenage consumption—clothes and music especially. The period immediately prior to Arena’s launch also saw Condé Nast make some moves in the direction of a generalist magazine for men. Dummy preparations of a freestanding Vogue Men were announced in September 1986. This marked a long-standing project on the part of Condé Nast to cover all the territories it operated in with a product of this type (Nixon, 1989a). In France and Italy, Vogue Hommes and L’Uomo Vogue, respectively, were successful magazines. The decision to begin dummying at this point, again, drew on an identification of shifts in men’s attitudes to fashion. Richard Hill, Condé Nast’s Deputy Managing Director, put it in the following terms: ‘People are always saying that men are becoming peacocks and while that is certainly true in Europe, I’m not sure whether we’ve Ve got the full plumage here yet. But we are almost there and what we want to find out is whether it’s enough to make a separate Vogue Men viable.’ (Campaign, 26.9.86:7) Condé Nast’s nervous testings were overshadowed by Nick Logan’s announcement in August 1986 of the launch of Arena. The magazine, produced by the same team as The Face doubling up, was to be ‘a 132-page perfect bound bi-monthly glossy, pitched at the 25–35-year-old male, with a circulation of 45,000–50,000’ (Campaign, 8.8.86:6). For Campaign, in a telling characterization, this was to be the magazine ‘really liberated males will leave lying around their hi-tech studios’ (Campaign, 15.8.86:18). Logan saw Arena as occupying a more precise cultural niche. I only decided a couple of months ago that I will do a magazine with fashion and good articles that will look great. I am still inventing it. I don’t have any big philosophy of the new man… Take people like myself who became interested in fashion as mods in the sixties, or the soul boys and Bowie fans of the seventies and eighties. If you become involved in fashion with that intensity I think it stays with you (Campaign, 15.8.86:18). This ‘subcultural’ undertow to Arena’s project was targeted closely to the cognoscenti readership of The Face who had matured into their twenties. The immediate reaction in terms of sales was good. ‘It’s going like a train’, announced ad manager Rod Sopp, two weeks after the launch (first audited circulation of 65,000). Importantly, the magazine also found favour with media professionals. Media Week awarded it with a commendation in its ‘Launch of the Year’ category. The words of the judges, in making this award, are worth noting: ‘Arena has increased the advertisers’ ability to target an extremely elusive consumer. Before its launch, young male fashion magazines were taboo. Its success is a credit to the judgement and nerve of a small publishing team which really knows its readers.’ (Media Week Awards. Consumer Magazines, 1987) Others corroborated this assessment. ‘We like it. (It’s) a healthy addition for products such as lagers, as well as for fashions and records.’ (Mark Cranmer, media director, Lowe-Howard Spink Merchalk, Observer, 26.4.87:29). While Steve Buckley, editor of Media Week, reasserted this, emphasizing Arena’s importance in opening up a market: Arena is tiny but significant. It has dispelled the taboo on publishing mags for men whose interest and income stretch beyond sensible cars’ (The

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Independent, 26.10.88:15). Arena’s standing in the trade press was built around these kinds of assessments. Again, as with The Face, Arena was characterized in terms of offering a media form through which to reach ‘opinion formers’. Rod Sopp steered Arena’s advertising position along similar lines to The Face’s. Part of this strategy for Arena meant refusing to enter the National Readership Survey (NRS). For Sopp, placing the magazine on the NRS—which produces a breakdown of magazine readership in terms of the JICNARS definition of social class—‘puts the magazine on the media shopping list at the less clued-up agencies. Clearly, there are ABCIs and ABCIs, and a planner who fails to look beyond this data is doing considerable disservice to the title.’ (Media Week, 12.2.88) The ability to claim coverage of ‘opinion leaders’, ‘innovators’ or ‘those at the forefront of social trends’; or to be positioned by advertising planners as offering a handle on this kind of audience, inscribed Arena in the trajectory of these advertising discourses. Arena, in fact, clearly played a cat-and-mouse game with advertisers. Strategies like always providing a hundred pages of editorial with advertising being added on top (Campaign, 14.10.88:50), admonishing agencies for not being clued up enough to recognize the readers the magazine spoke to, all reinforced the magazines cognoscenti-orientated appeal, titillating advertisers with the prospect of reaching what was constructed as a highly desirable audience to reach. We need to say a bit more about the advertising in Arena to pull out again, explicitly, evidence of the ad/ publishing nexus. A brief comment on four campaigns from 1987/8 should illuminate: Levis Chinos, Clarks Desert Boots, Croft Original and Technics Hi-Fi. The Clarks Desert Boots campaign ran from the summer of 1987. It owed much in strategic terms to the success of BBH’s 501s campaign. Paul Jeeves, joint creative director of BMP, the agency responsible for the campaign, acknowledged this when he said, ‘The 501s ads are saying “these are real jeans”. What we are saying with our ads is “these are the real desert boots”’ (Campaign, 15.6.87). This attempt to reposition the brand in the UK as a ‘classic’ and fashionable item, had to start from a static sales picture and low distribution levels. With a small budget, BMP’s first move was to tightly define its target audience. Their account of this process reveals something significant (if not unexpected). The key comments are as follows: ‘We need to talk to young style-conscious men without spending money. Fortunately we realized that a reasonable sample of our perceived target audience was working for the agency in the creative department. They became the guinea pigs on which our hypothesis was tested.’ (Media Week, 29.4.88) This comment reveals both a particular set of cultural identifications on the part of certain sections of the ad profession—and I’ve made reference to this in a different context earlier—and, from this, the way the cultural identifications of the professionals are close to or are shared with the target audience. In this case the formulation of the target audience is significantly abstracted from the concerns of selected professionals, although this is put in the vocabulary of consumer hierarchies—to wit, ‘male style leaders who were at the forefront of fashion’. (Broadbent: 1990, 236) Having identified this target audience, attitudinally, and within the constraints of a low budget, BMP put together the media-buying strategy. Again, this is where the

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positioning of the magazines is revealed most clearly. It is worth hearing BMP’s own account of this process: Given a media budget of £30,000 and a sparse but nationally distributed target audience, the media department was given the task of finding a medium that would allow us to reach as many of the target audience as possible whilst providing an environment that gave our style claims credibility… Whilst lacking readership research and having quite low circulations, the style mags (including Arena) were qualitatively the strongest contenders for our target audience. They provide precisely the young style leaders we were aiming for. (Broadbent, 1990 236) We can be briefer with the Levis Chinos campaign. BBH undertook the work and mobilized similar strategies to those we outlined earlier when considering the 501s campaign. The key points for us come through in BBH’s framing of the consumer target and the media planning of the ad. An ‘attitudinal’ conception of the consumer was mobilized, again: ‘Our audience was difficult to define—broadly speaking we were looking for ABCI 15–25-year-old men. But the “style leaders” definition transcended traditional demographic categories… They have a major desire to lead rather than be led, they are opinion formers.’ (Media Week 29.4.88:28) With this conception in place, BBH’s concern was to execute the ad and then place it in the appropriate media. The Levis Chinos press ads were again like those for Levis 501s, visually stylish, and sat well with the overall visual language of Arena. The development of the campaign through choice of media more importantly confirms the ad/publishing nexus we’ve been charting. As BBH said, ‘In order to fulfil the advertising strategy for the brand, media choice for Chinos set out to reflect elements of youth culture itself, and attempted to influence the target group through a number of identifiable components… We set out to identify the titles which were held to be most credible by the youth élite.’ (Media Week 29.4.88:28) Arena was seen to fulfil these requirements. The agency Young and Rubican (Y & R) positioned Arena in similar terms, when repositioning Croft Particular Sherry. We can be very summary here. Y & R’s brief was to ‘reach a younger drinker and present sherry, and Croft Particular in particular, as a fashionable drink.’ (Media Week, 27.11.87) A press campaign was chosen and ads put together featuring Stephen Berkoff, Jasper Conran and Anne Pigalle in black and white self-portraits. The vehicle for the campaign was the style and fashion press, with Arena prominently included. The agency FCO’s choice of media for their work with Technics, again, corroborates Arena’s profile in media planning/buying terms. A number of features of the campaign— ‘Technics—for Music lovers’, that ran from 1987–9—are worth highlighting. Firstly, if we look at the ad itself, we can see that it is very different from what FCO themselves called ‘the mass of technologically intensive, boring black box ads.’ Glossing it, the ad consists of three clearly marked ‘new men’/‘yuppies’ relaxing together in a high-tec mattblack dream apartment. The image is tonally washed-out and degraded. The hi-fi nestles in the foreground, while prominent in the top left-hand corner of the frame is a cream

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block containing a woodcut-like image and a lyrical quote from David Bowie’s 1971 ‘All the Young Dudes’. All the signifiers here are carefully chosen. The Bowie lyrics speak very precisely to a moment within British pop culture and the generation who were formed at that moment; that mix of exquisite glamour and ambivalence from Bowie’s early seventies incarnations that forms a reference point in the cultural landscape of certain groups of men, as Dylan Jones’s recent testimony makes clear. As he put it, ‘Bowie owns a piece of all our pasts.’ (Arena, 30,1991) The new home, if a little too adland imagination in its qualities, draws on stylish metropolitan taste, and so on. I don’t want, here, to really pursue these visual dimensions. They spring from the attempt to target the ad at what FCO called ‘Men aged between 18–34, upmarket… [who would understand] a quirky, intriguing “tone of voice”’. Although FCO don’t use the language of social needs in these comments on the campaign, their formulations of the target audience have much in common with those of BBH, BMP and Y & R, and reinforce the trade profile of Arena evident in those other campaigns. The sector of ad revenue Arena was able to attract gave the trade debate on men’s magazines a more tangible urgency. Condé Nast in particular renewed their efforts. Their first moves in 1986, which I noted earlier, had not proved very hopeful. Two formats had been tested with market research: one version based on the US GQ format, the other ‘a quirkier, harder version’. The results from this preliminary foray were summed up by the research company in the following terms: ‘[You] would have great difficulty in achieving 50,000 and [you] shouldn’t go ahead unless [you] felt the mag could be made viable at circulations between 25,000–30,000. (Campaign, 5.6.87:19) Mark Boxer, then editorial director at Condé Nast, commenting in the spring of 1987, remained troubled by the whole concept of a generalist male title and the fashion route that appeared (and was reaffirmed with Arena’s launch) the clearest pathway: I think there’s a problem with men’s magazines. Men are already well served for sport, the City and politics by newspapers… They’re now getting freebies sent to Diners Club and American Express card holders. There is too much to read already. The one area there might be a gap is for a style magazine—but in that area Englishmen are uneasy, they don’t admit to taking fashion seriously (Observer, 26.4.87:29). Boxer has in mind a different group of men from those Logan saw himself as speaking to, although Boxer’s formulation of this market isn’t clear. Stephen Quinn’s move to Condé Nast provided the necessary clarity and personal commitment to energize the project. Quinn was something of an evangelist for generalinterest men’s magazines through the mid to late eighties. His own background gives some clue to the shape of the sort of magazine he envisaged. Quinn worked for Nova in the late sixties, before moving to National Magazines to publish Harpers & Queen. ‘I began my love affair [then] with rather clever, intelligentsia type magazines, and it has never ended.’ While at Harpers & Queen it is clear that he began to identify a market of male consumers he wanted to reach, and attempted to integrate some elements into Harpers & Queen that might have attracted these readers. This process was partly fuelled

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by advertising: ‘Advertisers such as Harrods, Harvey Nichols, Jaeger, Yves Saint-Laurent and Estée Lauder have often told me that they long for a clever, sharp and witty magazine aimed at men’ (The Times, 24.6.87:28). In 1983 he proposed such a title (what elsewhere he has called a ‘classy men’s magazine’, Media Week, 4.11.88:47) to the board of National Magazines. They turned the idea down. A second proposal in 1987, producing the same reaction, precipitated Quinn’s move to Condé Nast. With a certain relish, Quinn noted in June 1990, following National Magazines’ decision to launch Esquire: ‘In 1987 it feared that launching Esquire here would bankrupt the company. Everyone on the board voted against it, and it’s the same board.’ (Campaign, 1.6.90:42) Quinn’s arrival at Condé Nast coincided with Paul Keers’ arrival fresh from editing the Sunday Telegraph magazine and Cosmo Man. This combination of two such strong advocates of a general male title formed the guiding hands behind Condé Nast entry into this market—and their first independent British launch for thirty years (Campaign, 13.5.88:33). Further market research was undertaken. Working with a narrower base of upmarket (i.e., AB) male audience (four groups of AB men in London, 8 per group in West End, Chelsea and Fulham), the decision on the magazine’s name was worked out, its pitch to readers and its shelf life. The name GQ was favoured over Vogue Men because of the feminine connotations of the latter, and the sense that it implied a derivative magazine (Daily Telegraph, 27.7.88:10; Nixon, 1989a). More importantly, the research suggested that ‘cautious conservative professionals, including lawyers, accountants and estate agents, were very unsympathetic to the idea of a men’s fashion mag per se. The more contemporary professional men—architects, designers and ad agency executives—on the other hand, found the idea no problem at all’ (Campaign, 1.4.88:19). Advertising demand, as Quinn’s earlier comments testified, was also significant in setting some parameters to the magazine, and GQ tailored itself quite precisely to the sort of advertising it courted (fashion and luxury brands like Tuscany, BMW, Champion, Rolex and Porsche (Campaign, 7.7.89:27). Leaving the ‘trendy young Londoner to Logan’ (Campaign, 13.5.88:33), GQ pitched itself at the rising ‘40 per centers, successdriven men’. Drawing on figures from the boom in High Street spending and, more importantly, the sales of premier suits—Armani, Hugo Boss and YSL—GQ was positioned to become ‘the essential reading for a particular kind of man—a lifestyle manual for the professional who has achieved success with style.’ (Daily Telegraph, 27.7.88:10) Nigel Lawson’s tax-cutting budget of 1988 also provided GQ with a further point of identification for its putative reader: ‘Our readers will be 40 per centers aged between 25–45’, purred Mark Connoly, GQ assistant fashion editor (Observer, 30.10.88). The response to GQ from media and account planner was to generally greet the magazine enthusiastically. As Campaign put it, here at last was someone from the (publishing) Establishment who had understood the new importance of style. Anxieties did surface, however. Jonathon Durden of the ad agency WCRS Mathews Marcantio, in a comment that took to task not only GQ, but also Arena, The Face and their advocates in advertising, suggested The so-called style mags appeal only to certain types of men. GQ is a specialist interest. It’s a lovely market but its just not important yet. As yet the whole

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thing is still embryonic’ (Campaign, 7.7.89:27). Durden’s comments go right to the heart of the whole debate on the ‘general-interest men’s magazine’. They touch on—with their reference to the sensitive question of circulation figures and their elision of the differences between the men’s magazines— some deep anxieties within publishing and advertising media-buying practices. They bring to the surface questions like, ‘Is there, really, a big enough market for these types of magazines? Is this market developing and sustainable? These questions were seemingly answered in February 1991 with National Magazines’ launch of a British Esquire. The ‘bridgehead’, to use Campaign’s mixed metaphors, had become a ‘counter-reformation’. The commentaries that surrounded Esquire’s launch, again, rehearsed similar concerns to those I have set out in covering the formative debates on British men’s magazines from 1984–9. Esquire’s launch, however, also represents a further turning of the terms of the debate on men’s magazines. The development of GQ, in particular, increasingly worked with Esquire in its sights. Significantly, in the jostling amongst the magazines prompted by Esquire’s launch, there is a determined effort from GQ in particular to sever the ‘general-interest men’s magazine’ from the debate on the ‘new man’ that has been so important in the formation of this sector of magazines. This conservative turn was evidenced by the reworking of both the dominant visual languages of the magazines and their modes of address to their readers. This is to take us, however, beyond the moment that I have been charting. We need to take stock at this point and reflect on what our narrative has delivered. The first point that needs emphasizing is that the commentaries I have charted indicate extended attention within publishing and sections of advertising to ‘men’s magazines’. This needs stating quite loudly and clearly; the period between 1984–9 sees the investment of developed formulations, energies and money on the ‘general-interest men’s magazine’. We don’t see the same formation of strategies prior to this (1980–3). I have argued throughout that these trade strategies form an identifiable advertising/publishing nexus. I have further suggested that this nexus is the site of the discursive formulation of these magazines and organizes a set of professional practices and identities. Intersecting in the figure of the ‘general interest men’s magazine’ we find the practices of advertising account and media planners and publishing editors and ad managers, especially. My claim, additionally, was that these relations—these commercial or economic relations—are discursively rendered; a discursive rendering that is established through not only the formula of the ‘general-interest men’s magazine’ but more importantly through the associated figure of the reader: that imagined new male consumer. These representations of the reader derived, as I showed, from advertising segementations of male consumers into discrete attitudinal or motivational types (Avant Guardians or Innovators). As such they are the lynchpin of the discursive practices within the advertising/publishing nexus. In the shaping-up of this new sector of men’s magazines, it is clear that the ‘avantgarde’ practitioners at The Face/Arena had—for a period at least—considerable authority in fleshing out these consumer representations. The success of The Face in reaching those prestigious (in advertising terms) young, male consumers—the innovators—meant that it

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could set some of the terms in the trade debate for what a generalist magazine for men should be like. It was able to command cultural authority over this market; offering a set of visual languages and modes of address that provided the necessary starting points for other publishing and especially advertising practitioners. As was clear from the advertising that ran in The Face and Arena—and I would argue in other ads from 1985–9 that addressed the young ‘stylish’ male—the creative decisions taken by advertisers on the ads drew many of their elements from the visual languages established in these magazines; in particular the styling, photography and design techniques deployed in the magazine. The magazine practitioners were able, then, to command a dominant definition of this cultural space. In other words, an independent cultural entrepreneur like Logan and the team around The Face and Arena was able to set some of the precepts taken up by sections of advertising and wider publishing, It is precisely the necessary discursive rendering of economic relations between advertisers and publishers that gives the practitioners at The Face/Arena the possibility of commanding cultural authority over the ‘imagining’ of new male readers; the ability to offer the most authoritative language through which to reach these new male consumers. So although the formation of this sector of magazines is strongly driven and regulated by advertising interest in a new magazine through which to reach groups of ‘prestigious’ male consumers, the cultural form that emerges is the result of a more complex negotiation. My contention is that this negotiation occurs, not because the ‘cultural’ components of the magazines are somehow ‘relatively autonomous’ from their economic kernal, but because the economic determinants on the magazines have specific conditions of existence that are discursive; that is, they are produced by specific discursive practices. This forces on to the table another model of determination than that inherited from post-Althusserian theories of ideology/culture or found in the return to earlier models of economic determinism, such as Jameson or Harvey’s accounts of ‘postmodern’ cultural production.8 I have tried, then, to open out in some detail a particular field of professional knowledges and practices, and to put together an argument about their determining influence on the production of a cultural form—popular magazines for men. This has forced the analysis to hold together—in the same analytical frame—both the ‘economic’ and the ‘cultural’ logics that govern commodified cultural products. I have tried to show that this can be done without reducing the one to the other. Both these concerns need to be placed higher up the methodological agenda of media studies/cultural studies. Notes Special thanks to Stuart Hall and Frank Mort for being such exemplary and generous interlocutors. 1 This work, initially funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, will appear as Hard Looks: Masculinities, the Visual and Practices of Consumption in the 1980s, Ph.D., Milton Keynes: The Open University, forthcoming.

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2 This work also, importantly, offered a more complex sense of the media message and the communication of meaning than was prevalent in mass communication research with its behavioural, stimulus and flow models of the message. 3 Men’s ‘general-interest magazines’ were not, strictly speaking, a new media product. The most important precursor to the eighties magazines was Town magazine. The magazine was founded in 1953 as a ‘gentlemen’s tailoring magazine’, Man About Town. In 1960 the magazine was bought by Michael Heseltine and Clive Labovitch. The new owners radically restyled the magazine and abbreviated the title to About Town (later to Town). The format was mixed in a highly visual style that drew heavily on photo-journalism, politics, fashions, theatre, films, opera, ballet, music, jazz, books and ‘profiles of interesting people’. It achieved circulation figures of around 60,000, until its closure in 1968 under its last editor Julien Critchley. The term—‘general-interest men’s magazine’—was primarily used in the trade to signify the distinction between these magazines for men and both the ‘specialist’ (automotive magazines, photography magazines, sports magazines, etc.) and the ‘soft porn’ men’s magazine market. 4 See Winship (1985) and McRobbie (1990). 5 For further brief comments on these dynamics see Frith and Horne (1987); McRobbie (1989); Nixon (1990). 6 Logan also expounds on his approach to advertising in Campaign, 16.3.84:54–6. 7 For a more developed account of these consumer technologies, see chapter four of Nixon (forthcoming). 8 These comments on Jameson and Harvey owe much to Angela McRobbie’s perceptive arguments in McRobbie (1991). For an outlining of a different model of determination—in theoretical terms—see Laclau (1990:3–84). References Ang, Ien (1984) Watching Dallas, New York: Methuen. Barthes, Roland (1977) ‘From work to text’ in Heath (1977). ——(1981) ‘Theory of the text’, in Young, Robert (1981) editor, Untying the Text: The Post-Structuralist Reader, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Originally published in 1973) Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction: Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge. (Originally published 1979) Broadbent, Simon (1990) Advertising Works 5, London: IPA. Burgin, V. et al. (1985) editors, Formations of Fantasy, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Caplan, Cora (1985) ‘The Thorn Birds: fiction, fantasy, femininity’, in Burgin, V. et al. (1985). Coward, Rosalind (1984) Female Desire: Women’s Sexuality Today, London: Paladin. Frith, Simon and Horne, Howard (1987) Art into Pop, London: Routledge. Garnham, Nicholas (1979) ‘Contribution to a political economy of mass communication’, Media, Culture and Society, 1(2).

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Golding, Peter and Murdoch, Graham (1977) ‘Capitalism, communication and class relations’, in Curran et al. (1977) Mass Communication and Society, London: Edward Arnold. Hall, Stuart (1980) ‘Encoding/decoding’, in Hall et al. (1980) Culture, Media, Language, London: Hutchinson. Hall, Stuart et al. (1978) Policing the Crisis, London: Macmillan. Harvey, David (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity, London: Blackwell. Heath, S. (1977) editor, Image Music Text, London: Fontana. (Originally published 1971.) Jameson, Fredric (1984) ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, in New Left Review, 146. Johnson, Richard (1983) What is Cultural Studies Anyway?, Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies stencilled paper. Laclau, Ernesto (1990) New Thoughts on the Revolution in Our Time, London: Verso. McRobbie, Angela (1978) ‘Jackie: an Ideology of Adolescent Femininity’, Birmingham: CCCS stencilled paper. ——(1984) ‘Dance and social fantasy’, in McRobbie, A. and Nava, H. (1984) editors, Gender and Generation, London: Macmillan. ——(1989) editor, Zootsuits and Second-Hand Dresses, London: Macmillan. ——(1990) Feminism and Youth Culture, London: Macmillan. ——(1991) ‘New times in cultural studies’, New Formations, Spring. Mercer, Colin (1991) ‘Never ending stories—the problem of reading in cultural studies’, New Formations, No. 13. Morley, David (1986) Family Television, London: Comedia. ——(1991) ‘Where the global meets the local: notes from the sitting room’, Screen, 32:1. Murdock, Graham (1982) ‘Control in the communications industries’, in Bennett, T. et al. (1982) Culture, Society and the Media, London: Methuen. Nixon, Sean (1989a) Unpublished interview with Paul Keers. ——(1989b) Unpublished interview with Rod Sopp. ——(1990) ‘Mix and match’, New Formations, No. 11. ——(forthcoming) Hard Looks: Masculinities, the Visual and Practices of Consumption in the 1980s, Milton Keynes: The Open University. (Ph.D. thesis) Radway, Janice (1984) Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, London: Verso. ——(1988) ‘Reception study: ethnography and the problems of dispersed audiences and nomadic subjects’, Cultural Studies, 2:3. Steadman, Carolyn (1986) Landscape for a Good Woman, London: Virago. Walkerdine, Valerie (1985) ‘Video Replays’, in Burgin, V. et al. (1985). Winship, Janice (1985) ‘A girl needs to get street-wise’, Feminist Review, No. 21. ——(1987) Inside Women’s Magazines, London: Pandora.

JOKE HERMES

MEDIA, MEANING AND EVERYDAY LIFE Stuart Hall’s ‘We are all in our heads different audiences at once’, for me marks the definitive move away from a paradigm that was organized around texts producing subjectivies. Even though Hall related the different audiences we are to the text, he also said: ‘We have the capacity to deploy different levels and modes of attention, to mobilise different competences in our viewing. At different times of the day, for different family members, different patterns of viewing have different “saliences”.’ (1986:10) The departing point for this paper exactly is the question of salience. Or, more to the point, given the shift in media studies towards the audience and contexts of viewing, how and when everyday media use becomes meaningful needs to be carefully thought through. One of David Morley’s respondents in Family Television, who has a habit of putting the television on in the early morning, says: ‘Sometimes I intend to look at it…but…at the end of it I’ve seen everything but I’ve heard nothing. You know what I mean?’ (1986:56) Do we know what she means? I suggest that from time to time, all of us (some perhaps more often than others), engage in virtually meaningless media use. In this paper I will argue that the consequences of such a point of departure, of radically decentring the media text in favour of an understanding of the specific routines of the everyday that media use is part of, are a challenge epistemologically and will constitute more space politically than a number of recent audience studies have done. I will draw upon my own research on women’s magazines, based on seventy-five lengthy interviews with readers; upon David Morley’s work on families watching television and a small number of texts addressing the issues involved in studying media use and/or everyday life. The interviews I held were long; they usually took 1.5 hours of tape, often more. I asked respondents to tell me about their reading histories (which magazines do you read?; did you read magazines as a girl?; how did this change?); about their use of other media (television, radio, newspapers); their life stories. I asked them to evaluate: which magazines did they like best, are the most satisfactory? When would they usually read; which articles or parts of the magazine did they dislike? Emancipation and the women’s movement were standard issues, as were the ambitions respondents had for themselves and for their children and partners. They were asked to name and/or describe someone they admired and to envisage themselves in fifteen years’ time. Virtually all of my seventy-five interviews were a success in the sense that my respondents had enjoyed being interviewed and thanked me while I was thanking them for having had ‘a good chat’ or ‘that they were surprised that they had had so much to say’. In most cases I felt they had said all there was to say about women’s magazines. The problem was and is: that isn’t much. Reading the interview transcripts, time and time again, I am struck by the

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superficiality of the text and the fragmentedness of my research material. I know how magazines are read and when, what some will enjoy and like; what others dislike or are bored by. But what does such knowledge amount to? Given the enormous personal investment interviewing requires (it very much resembles counselling, one legitimizes and encourages, one voices one’s criticism very carefully and, on top of that, one smiles, and smiles, and smiles), I felt cheated, somehow. I had never expected it to be like this. Bearing a slight grudge, I went back to the texts that had initially set me off on this course of action: Herman Bausinger’s ‘Media, technology and daily life’ (1984) and David Morley’s Family Television (1986). Morley’s and Bausinger’s texts mark the radical challenge to the central position of the media text in how the audience was researched and theorized. The text was to be dethroned, no longer the centre that generates meanings or subject positions but an object that becomes meaningful given specific surroundings, specific contexts. Media research, they both argue, cannot stop short of analyzing reception in its broad contents. Bausinger relates his argument to theories of everyday life. Media consumption, he says, functions as a mark of confirmation. A newspaper not delivered isn’t missed because of its content but because it disrupts the structure of everyday life. Despite its seeming irrationality everyday life consists of ritualized structures of perceptions and expectations that shouldn’t be read in terms of a ‘mystique of immediacy’ but rather in terms of the capacity of such structures to naturalize and stabilize. The main example in the article concerns Mr Meier and the weekend sport coverage. Mr Meier makes a series of conscious, tactical decisions in order to maximize his pleasure in following events in the soccer league (i.e., not to listen to the radio but to wait for the late evening sports programme on television). These tactical decisions are interfered with because of such mundane things as the weather, irritation over his son sleeping late and his wife coming down for a glass of water when he thought she had gone to bed. Bausinger uses the example to make six (related) points about researching media consumption. Meaningful study of media use, he argues, has to take into account the different media available; the fact that they aren’t used completely or with full concentration; that media use is an integral part of everyday life and thus not an isolated, individual process but a collective process. Media communication cannot be separated from personal communication: media messages have to compete with other messages. Lastly, the average synthetic viewer needs to be put overboard given that media reception consists of multiple processes and media content of more than one meaning (1984:349– 50). In Family Television David Morley draws upon a number of disciplines (ranging from family studies to social uses approaches) in order to frame his empirical material: interviews with eighteen white, working-class and lower middle-class London families. He aims to understand the changing patterns of television viewing in the context of family leisure (1986:13). His interpretation of the interviews at the end of the book, that gender/power relations in the household are of overriding importance as regards what households will watch on television, has become a landmark in discussion on media consumption. Morley’s study, too, powerfully makes the point that text-based analysis of

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media culture can never be sufficient on its own. The texts by Morley and Bausinger were part of an emerging tradition, of the changing landscape of media and cultural studies towards study of the audience and reception, shifting attention from text to context. To this shift from text to reception and context, there seems to be a political as well as an epistemological dimension. Politically speaking, the move towards the reader had the advantage of being ‘politically correct’. Academics liberated the audience and some went so far as to interpret the vicissitudes of audience behaviour in terms of carnival and celebration. Since then, they have been accused of overly romanticizing how audiences resist dominant meaning and therefore subvert the system. 1 Epistemologically, there seemed to be new hope of finally laying a hand on meaningwhile-it-was-produced, signification-in-action, so to speak, the real (of course beneficial) meanings of texts as opposed to their (detrimental) effects. My interviews disappointed me on both scores. The emancipated audience didn’t strike me as all that active and celebrating. Nor did the interviews, at first sight, make any clearer how women’s magazines or other media are made meaningful. It is virtually impossible to draw the line between text and context, to distinguish between commonsense explanation of reading women’s magazines and how leading a particular kind of life is described. Bausinger’s admonitions at the end of his article have quite radical implications as regards whether we can analyze and understand media use as a separate phenomenon at all. Unfortunately, Bausinger doesn’t address this problematic. Going back to his text and to Morley’s, I remember feeling disappointed as well as challenged. Bausinger’s example has a fictitious quality: it is far too detailed in its information and suggests that reconstructing media use as a rationalist practice prey to the fickles of everyday life is no problem at all. Morley’s descriptions of the family interviews I found boring, I have to admit, mainly because he chose not to systematize and iron out the creases in his material (that is to say, not to the extent that it would make a good story) or to account for why he had written up his interviews the way he did. Neither addresses the problem of text and context or the problem of the superficiality of interview transcripts and everyday talk. Morley’s descriptions of his interviews make quite clear that his material bespeaks the same superficiality mine does. His interview abstracts mainly state which programmes are watched and how they are watched (attentively or inattentively). Morley’s interpretation I find interesting but also problematic. He relates viewing style to power and gender and labour relations in the household. Because, for women, he argues, the domestic is their workspace, while for men it is a space of leisure, women tend to feel guilty when they aren’t doing anything productive, such as watching television, while men will not. Thus, the women will knit or peel potatoes while watching television, or watch the black and white set in the kitchen while cooking. Implicitly it is assumed that we all would be attentive viewers if we were in a position of power in the household. I doubt that. I agree with Brunsdon (quoted by Morley, 1986:148) that attentive viewing is a mode of power rather than a masculine attribute, especially when it takes the form of forbidding others to talk during specific programmes and thus dominating relations in the living

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room. Also, I do not intend to argue with the women in Morley’s book who claim to usually watch inattentively except when a favorite soap opera or a romantic film is on. What I do want to argue is that there may be other explanations than just gendered power relations in the household which are more obvious the moment one steps out of the ‘model families’ Morley interviewed. A number of women told me they like to watch television with a magazine in their lap. Sometimes I read magazines when I’m watching television. Not when I’m watching Derrick (a police series) but when I watch Behind the News (a current affairs programme) or something else, and it’s dull, then I’ll read. (Elizabeth) She is a woman in her thirties who lives with her husband and three children; her husband doesn’t seem to be around much. Another respondent said: ‘I often have the television on but I’ll have a magazine or a textbook in my lap.’ She lives with her five-year-old son, is on social security and was trying to do a mail-order course on publicity and public relations. One of the men I interviewed works on a drilling rig, he’ll work for a week and then be home for a week. At home, he’ll read the women’s magazines his wife buys. In the mornings, when I get up, I usually make myself comfortable, have coffee and a fag, and then I might get a Libelle2 and I’ll browse a bit. (If you had a morning newspaper, you’d never read it?) I don’t know, I might, there are dead moments in a day, just before dinner, like now, when you get a magazine. Not that I would ever make myself tea and prepare for a thorough read, like some people would. (Paul) Some men will read inattentively, some women, even those who do not live with a husband and children, will read or watch television as a secondary activity. What I miss in Morley’s descriptions and analysis is that he so focuses on family dynamics and gender/power relations, that the particularities of everyday life and everyday interaction are lost sight of and aren’t related back to how media use is sometimes meaningful and interesting but at other times doesn’t mean much in its own right or is boring; and probably is related to specific pleasures each way. Reducing everyday life to power relations means skipping over the particularities of everyday routines that also, partly explain media use. My respondents described their everyday lives as singularly stable and set routines. Routine easily associated with daily drag. But built into the routines was potential pleasure, too. It ranged, indeed, from sitting down with a cup of tea and a magazine that has just been bought, or in the summer going to a trailer that has been rented year after year with a shopping bag, passed on by a sister or a neighbour, crammed full with romances. There also was potential boredom: watching television is more rewarding if one is prepared for the occasional uninteresting items. And, only occasionally acknowledged, there is danger of the routines and pleasures breaking up. Some of my respondents I interviewed more than once. In the second interview we did, Lauren was in a rotten mood. The man who had fathered her child but who doesn’t live with them

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suddenly had turned up, the night before, for a night on the town. No amount of stability and security could protect her from feeling lower than a hangover would warrant. She could see no merit at all in her simple lifestyle. Contrary to the first interview, in which she had told me how much she enjoyed reading magazines, she now told me that women’s magazines didn’t mean all that much to her. I still read Libelle, Viva, Margriet, the magazines Elizabeth gives me (Elizabeth is a good friend). But the last time we talked, I bought Flair every week. I don’t do that anymore. It palls on me. I notice I don’t read the magazines from A to Z anymore. I just browse…. I don’t really enjoy them anymore…. What’s the use reading all this? It’s always the same thing. Every year they’ll have the same topics. Reading them for five years, you’ve seen it all. I find it all a bit empty these days. (Lauren) Everyday life is something of an enigma. Bausinger stresses its stability. Schutz (1973) defines everyday life by its taken-for-grantedness. Birte Bech Jørgensen, in her research on female youth employment, found that such a perspective didn’t fit her interview material, nor does it fit mine. Modern everyday life is created as doubleness on the one hand of continuity, of trust and certainty, made possible by the norms, rules and routines of everyday life. And, on the other hand, change and a more or less frightening and joyful urge for autonomy (Bech Jørgensen, 1990:22). Bech Jørgensen feels that the ways of handling the conditions of everyday life are basically repetitive, intuitive and inventive (1990:22). Lodged deep within the everyday there is also transformative power, perceptible especially in the case of ruptures and dramas when the taken-for-grantedness is broken (1990:23). Routines may fall short of their reassuring function, because of tensions in a relationship, unemployment or chance happenings. The point is to recognize that the everyday, on the one hand, is the site of the utterly superficial and repetitive that we need to respect for the sense of security it gives and, on the other hand, potentially is the site of major personal and societal change. (The women’s movement is a case in point. In the early seventies women were mobilized on their feelings of dissatisfaction regarding their everyday routines.) Both sides to the everyday need to be part of media research.3 Before I turn to the question of how to recognize routines, the boredom, the pleasures and the faultlines, the account needs to be settled regarding the issue of superficiality and everyday taken-for-grantedness. The superficiality of accounts of media use partly is real, in the sense that it reflects taken-for-grantedness and pleasure derived from things being the way they are. Repetitiveness, knowing where to find what in a magazine or being familiar with the routines of a quiz show, or the formula of a popular genre can be reassuring, a guarantee one’s viewing or reading pleasures will not be interfered with or uprooted. As one women’s magazine reader put it: ‘Reading those tips, you are reminded of all sorts of things that you knew already but kind of had forgotten.’ In a sense then, media use may

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quite often be relatively meaningless. The superficiality of interview transcripts also needs to be understood as an academic artefact, however. Media texts have been invested with so much meaning, anyone would be hard put to come up with an interesting reading. The audiences that have been researched, have, more often than not, been fans. Knowledgeable, ardent readers and television viewers have come to be confused with ‘average’ viewers and readers.4 In other cases researchers switch from a reader perspective to a text-based perspective which saves them from engaging with questions regarding how media ordinarily become meaningful in everyday life. For example Lull’s Inside Family Viewing (1990) is written from a social uses/ethnographic perspective on television use. When media use in the People’s Republic of China is described, it is given depth by analyzing New Star, a television serial that had had great impact. While according to me it is more usual for TV programmes and magazine articles to have hardly any impact and to be less important as a text than as ‘having something to do’, as part of people’s daily rhythms and domestic routines. Since we have some knowledge of how fans experience their favourite texts as meaningful and pleasurable5 and also of how choice, use and pleasure are caught up in specific arrangements of the domestic6 the issue is: how to deal with media use as a secondary, relatively meaningless activity; how to understand people’s descriptions of such media use? How are all those texts one is not a ‘fan’ of, but that are used regularly, made sense of? In my own research project I have tried to foreground that a major part of media use is routine triggered behaviour that isn’t meaningful in itself but as part of how (everyday) life is organized. Not all media use is meaningless. Meaninglessness, I believe, is part of media use in the sense that one simply cannot stop and think about every single thing one does during a normal day’s work and leisure, in and outside of the home. Life is largely organized around routines that do not allow for elaborate selfreflection. To use the word ‘meaninglessness’ is to dive headlong into a sea full of mines. The least one can do is defuse a number of them. No, I am not writing up yet another way of putting down not just everyday media use but also the quintessential everyday media consumer: someone supposedly lacking in cultural capital, or lacking in ambition to make her surroundings meaningful. This is not about different types of readers but about different ways of reading that all of us engage in. And no, I don’t think that in this case the relative ‘meaninglessness’ of media use must be understood to mean that it is unresearchable. To clarify the position I take here, I will briefly turn to the work of Michel de Certeau, widely read expert on everyday life and how/whether it becomes meaningful. De Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) suggests we need to differentiate between tactics, (ways of making-do, arts de faire) and strategies. Strategies are used by such total institutions as armies, cities or supermarket chains to create and delimit their own place. Tactics, calculated actions determined by the absence of a proper locus, tend to insert themselves in these spaces that are created for the maintenance of power (De Certeau, 1984:36–7). Reading, in the framework sketched by de Certeau, like poaching,

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strolling, cooking or dwelling is ‘to wander through an imposed system (that of the text, analogous to the constructed order of a city or a supermarket)’ (1984:169). Wanderers don’t acquire status or build their memories and pleasures into recollectable structures, monuments so to speak. Writing accumulates, stocks up, resists time by the establishment of a place and multiplies its production through the expansionism of reproduction. Reading takes no measures against the erosion of time (one forgets oneself and also forgets), it does not keep what it acquires, or it does so poorly, and each of the places through which it passes is a repetition of the lost paradise (1984:174). Theoretically, I couldn’t agree more with the point put forward. Texts cannot impose upon readers how they are to be read. But, the nomadic imagery de Certeau offers is in fact a description (or so I believe) of having to serve your family meals seven days per week; or go to work every day; of going to the shops to find bargains in order to stretch a limited budget. Not only does de Certeau romanticize everyday life to an unacceptable extent; he also closes off all possibilities of change using a polar model of domination that is strengthened rather than changed by the tactics ‘ordinary’ people use and, thirdly, theorizing everyday life along these lines amounts to saying that the meanings and doings (one hesitates to say ‘pleasures’) of ordinary people can only be understood by actually doing it. As Frow points out: In the absence of realized texts which can be subject to determinate analysis—in the absence of a definite and graspable object—the analyst will inevitably reconstruct such an object…. [The result of which]…is a politically fraught substitution of the voice of a middle-class intellectual for that of the users of popular culture; and it is characteristically in the space of this substitution that the category of the popular is constructed’ (1991:60). De Certeau’s polar model of domination has high romantic quality. But it totally discounts that viewers will try to explain and legitimize their media use. It might well be the case that we have to do without academic understanding of the transient and fleeting qualities of media use, and that using ‘meaninglessness’ as a descriptive label is an act of power that delimits a proper space for academic knowledge. But for a researcher there is more to be found in interview transcripts, be it fragmented and in bits and pieces here and there, than either de Certeau or Frow would give one reason to believe. The issue is to understand the relative importance of the media text and media use. Relative, that is, to other practices people engage in at the same time. These other practices, in the case of such media use as reading women’s magazines or viewing television, will quite often be routines that can be described; for the practices themselves exists widely spread legitimatory discourse. The two together, descriptions of routines and legitimatory discourse, add up to a strong description of how media are used, that put ‘meaninglessness’ in perspective and make it researchable by default as it were, as a residue. The superficiality of interview transcripts that deal with the most ordinary of

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media use is a warning sign but not an impregnable barrier. It is my point of view that people are rational, social actors who within the limited space and means available to them will have good reasons for doing the things they do, even if these ‘good reasons’ cannot always be clearly stated or articulated. Going back to the interview transcripts, there seem to be two sources of knowledge that one may draw on to come to an understanding of everyday media use. In the accounts people gave me they explained about their daily routines (which is one source), superimposed on these routines, specific legitimatory discourse, schemata that explain and justify media use, can be recognized. These schemata I will call interpretive repertoires. To analyze how media texts are made sense of, I propose that one has to make these repertoires explicit. Secondly, one has to map the sedimented, everyday routines readers give accounts of, on to how they have come to understand themselves as readers and viewers over the years, bearing in mind that for most this is accepted knowledge, not something to question or reflect upon. During the course of my peregrinations I taped interviews with about sixty women, fifteen men and the occasional child. The men and women I interviewed were very different in terms of where and how they lived, their occupations and class backgrounds. It must, by the way, be noted that class in Holland is less of an instrument of social distinction than in Britain, where I also interviewed a small number of readers. I approached my respondents using a snowball technique (asking friends and acquaintances to find readers and also a small number of non-readers to compare to one another); through specialized market research bureaux and by means of personal ads in the newspapers. Among these men and women were feminists, housewives—ranging from those who described themselves as emancipated to those who said, ‘I have never thought about these things’—conventionally and unconventionally occupied males; a small number of students and unemployed. There were women of colour, most of them born in Holland and Britain’s former colonies, some of them here. There also were white women who had lived in what were then the colonies (Indonesia, Surinam and the West Indies) or were born there. I asked these readers to tell me about their ‘reading histories’, their everyday lives, their ambitions and their use of women’s magazines and other mass media. The interviews were modelled on everyday lengthy conversation, as between friends. Most of the interview usually wasn’t taken up with women’s magazines but with my respondents describing themselves, their lives and their specific vantage points on life. While trying to explain how they read and chose particular magazines, apart from wandering off to tell me about themselves (encouraged, usually, by me—as these stories provided me with much needed background information that made other things that were said more comprehensible), readers would in a pragmatic and functionalist way use different interpretive repertoires. Interpretive repertoires are defined by Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell as common interpretations or ‘recurrently used systems of terms, used for characterizing and evaluating actions, events and other phenomena’ (1987:149). Potter and Wetherell’s functionalist perspective highlights people’s need to adequately communicate: if one kind of explanation or way of telling a story doesn’t work, one has

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to use other repertoires or other styles. This perspective pre-eminently suits my interviews which were modelled on lengthy everyday conversation and had the distinctive style of such conversations. Speakers often switched from one series of arguments (leaving them unfinished) to another, in fact using them to perform different sorts of accounting tasks (Potter and Wetherell, 1987:156). Repertoire analysis is a form of discourse analysis that, on the one hand, has the advantage of directly addressing the messy character of everyday talk, and, on the other hand, of stressing everyday creativity. It provides a way to conceptualize social actors as more than the arbitrary products of intersecting discourses while not reverting to individualist and voluntarist notions of the subject. Reconstructing the repertoires readers use resembles simultaneously doing a series of jigsaw puzzles. In the interviews one will find bits and pieces of different repertoires. Combined, the interviews will allow a number of repertoires, or regularities really, to emerge. The repertoires are an explanatory and justificatory discursive system. As Western culture is a class-based culture, justificatory systems come in hierarchies. (See Bourdieu, 1980). Some ways of describing why and how one views television or reads women’s magazines are more legitimate than others: a few examples. In Morley’s interviews most of his respondents had the television on quite a lot, which they acknowledged ‘guiltily’. The father in this family begins by guiltily describing his family as “telemaniacs, I admit”’ (1986:62). Another respondent ‘clearly feels some guilt about the extent to which he spends time watching television at all’ (1986:142). Family 12 are described as follows: This couple seems to have a seemingly contradictory set of attitudes and behaviours in relation to television. On the one hand, their set is ‘on all night, regardless of what is on’, but they are still careful to distinguish themselves from ‘some people who’ll watch anything’ (1986:95). According to Morley, the resolution of these contradictions has to be understood in terms of how they view, and what else they do while viewing. Though the set is on, they do not think of themselves as very involved in it. (Morley, 1986:95) The way these families talk stresses that watching television is bad for people, definitely a second-rate non-activity. As one man explains when his wife goes out to work and he is left with the kids, the set will go off. ‘I’ve got a book and a crossword lined up for when she goes out—rather than just watch TV’ (1986:137). Counter to this, a stronghold can be created by being proud of doing something that is ‘wrong’, not in line with what is ‘correct’ or ‘good’. Thus, some of Morley’s respondents will say things like: ‘We are great television addicts’ (1986:74). Both ways of talking relate to how legitimate spending of leisure time is hierarchically structured. Morley’s families will draw upon other kinds of arguments as well in talking about television viewing, such as being a responsible parent (the video as a means to get children to go to bed at a reasonable hour and watch programmes ‘all their friends are allowed to see’, in the morning). As regards women’s magazines, repertoires that underline the practical use of women’s magazines and that one can learn from them (about human nature, relationships, oneself)

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are clearly the most legitimate. I get a lot out of them. I’ll cut out all that has to do with sewing, gardening, plant care, the medical things and recipes. The recipes are systematically filed…. And I like to read things like ‘Mother and daughter’, that’s a column in Libelle. I like to know how others get on with their children. I think that’s important. Couple in therapy, because of a divorce or sickness. I read about that, especially about illnesses. They give a doctor’s opinion and questions from people. I like to read the answers they give, you can learn from it. Maybe, later on you’ll be able to use it, or you can help people near you. (Mary) Reading women’s magazines these repertoires say, is not wasting your time on drivel, or, taking time for yourself. One is keeping up with the trade journals to do the best possible job caring and providing for one’s family. Again, a repertoire running counter to this one is mentioned as well, although it is much less clear or articulate. It mainly describes reading as a very pleasurable and relaxing activity; what is actually read may vary. Some respondents had a clear order in which they’d read what was available. One of the men I interviewed would read the free broadsheets with local news that are financed by advertising revenue after he had finished the newspaper and then read Viva, a magazine his wife buys occasionally, when he comes home from work and makes himself a cup of tea. Another much used and legitimate repertoire to talk about magazines ranging from feminist magazines and glossies to traditional and gossip magazines was the therapeutical repertoire: a way to stress how one may learn about oneself by reading about the experiences of others. Opzij (a feminist magazine) was an eye-opener when I was in trouble. It taught me to be a big, strong woman. On the other hand, I’m glad with their interviews with famous women, they can be surprisingly small. I’m not the only one to have woman’s doubts and anxieties. (Renée) It’s like this: you read something in a magazine and you think about it, whether you agree or not, or maybe you’ll think I would never do it like that. It’s the same thing if you look at other people…. It influences how you do things. (Joan) Remarkably, the only repertoire that counters outright ‘legitimate’ reasons for reading, is a repertoire voiced usually by men. It is rooted in camp readings of popular culture. It presents the reader as one who has set out to ‘rise below the vulgar’.7 This is a repertoire strongly tied to gay subculture which bespeaks a totally different relation vis-à-vis the cultural spectrum. Do I have to be perfectly honest with you? The first magazine I’ll get out of the magazine portfolio8 (the gym where he works out subscribes to one) is Privé. Because I tremendously like gossip. (Which articles do you like best?)

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Hmmmm, the misery, the misery stories that you know cannot possibly be true…. It’s like Dynasty, more things happen in one person’s life than could happen in six lives…. It is really intrigues me, must be my unsavoury side that forces me to read such things, the lustful me. (Ronald) To reconstruct these repertoires from the interview transcripts involved a considerable tour de force that would make any self-respecting researcher slightly suspicious of the value of such a reconstruction. To understand these repertoires as what reading women’s magazines is about, is to grossly misread the interview transcripts. The repertoires are available cultural sources to explain and justify reading women’s magazines and a range of other cultural practices. More important to understanding how women’s magazines become meaningful are the everyday routines that over the years constitute specific reading histories, the historical counterpart to the contemporary repertoires. Reading histories offer a different kind of understanding of how women’s magazines become meaningful than do simple accounts of where, when and how magazines are read or than mapping available interpretative repertoires does. Reading histories evaluate routines and reading magazines or watching television in their own way, closely related to personal histories, to periods of uncomplicated making-do as well as to rupture and change, encompassing a series of understandings of the self. Going back and forth between everyday routines and understandings of the self, one is given a picture of how life for people is structured by having to go out to work, taking care of children, or pursuing education. Thus, a link can be forged between reading women’s magazines, living one’s life the way one does and how society is structured. Obviously, most of the stories one is told are safe stories to tell. Only occasionally and usually by chance one gets an inkling of the unfinished business people have to find ways to deal with: feeling unhappy in a marriage, having post-natal depression. Such things will be of some importance in what one will read and how. A historical perspective on daily life and routines, I expect, is the closest social research will come to understanding how everyday life is a mixture of being much the same from year to year and sudden, radical changes. Every day talk is not self-reflective. It is pragmatic, it is used to explain and to justify and therefore is no easy way to come to understand how women’s magazines (or other media) are made sense of. Solely understanding how people come to love texts that offer spellbinding escape, a learning experience, suspense, moral outrage or good melodrama that carries one off, is equivalent to understanding the media landscape to be Nepal: nothing but peaks. Such a view easily confuses the ordinary viewer with a media critic: someone who has built up a specific knowledge of a particular kind of text. Media use is also a fleeting, transient experience that doesn’t leave much trace except in how everyday practices are structured. There seems to be a gradual slope along which media use will slowly change from an intense, well-defined experience into an inextricable part of everyday life, in which the media text as such has no meaning of its own. I can see no other way to understand such media use, than by reconstructing how routines have led to specific ways of understanding the self and how this informs how a reader will feel about the magazines she reads, the television programmes she watches and by making explicit

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the repertoires that are used to describe and legitimate media use. An analysis that, on the one hand, starts from everyday routines and, on the other, from repertoires, politically and epistemologically enriches our understanding of media use. Politically, by recognizing the double-edgedness of everyday life, i.e., by recognizing the repetitiveness and the legitimatory force of everyday life as well as its being a site of personal and social change, the image of ordinary viewers as being cultural dupes is undermined. The repertoires, politically, can be used to criticise dominant interpretations; despite their hierarchical organization repertoires will change over time. Epistemologically, recognizing the importance of routines for media use, means that text and context cannot always be distinguished from one another, consequently the media text as such never becomes fully meaningful. Furthermore, the two sides to routines entails recognizing their internal dynamic which underlines that there is no essential meaning that can be actualized nor is there an essential viewing mode or practice of media use. A repertoire approach, last but not least, has the invaluable advantage of not imposing academic standards on everyday discourse; it doesn’t require closure or consistency. It works with rather than against the contradictions no one in an everyday context feels are necessary to sort out. Notes This paper was presented at the International Television Studies Conference, London, 1991. I would like to thank Pieter Hilhorst for his insightful comment. 1 Cf. Ang and Hermes (1991) on concepts of the female audience and its academic emancipation; see Fiske (1990) as an example of celebrating the audience. 2 Dutch women’s magazine with a broad class appeal. 3 They may be less represented in Morley’s interviews because he interviewed a group of families who for all of their lives had been living in the same area. (1986:53) The point is that he did not choose to read them that way. 4 Examples are Livingstone (1990) on soap opera viewers; Ang (1985) on watching Dallas; Walkerdine (1986) on a family’s use of a Rocky video; Radway (1984) on romance reading. 5 E.g., Livingstone (1990); Schrøder (1988); Ang (1985); Radway (1984). 6 Gray (1992 and 1987); Morley (1986). 7 As Mel Brooks put it, quoted in Ross (1989:153). 8 As far as I can tell, magazine portfolios are uniquely Dutch. A portfolio will contain magazines that are all, when the subscriber gets it, a set number of weeks old, ranging from 1 week to half a year. Doctors, cafés, snackbars and families will subscribe, get a portfolio for a week, then turn in the old magazines and get a new portfolio. References

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Ang, Ien (1985) Watching Dallas. Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination, London and New York: Methuen. Ang, Ien and Joke Hermes (1991) ‘Gender and/in media consumption’, in James Curran and Michael Gurevitch (1991) editors, Mass Communication and Society, London: Edward Arnold: 307–28. Bausinger, Herman (1984) ‘Media, technology and daily life’, Media, Culture and Society, 6 (1984) 343–51. Bech Jørgensen, Birte (1990) ‘The impossibility of everyday life’, in Every Cloud has a Silver Lining. Lectures on Everyday Life, Cultural Production and Race, Flemming Røgilds (1990) editor, Studies in Cultural Sociology, No. 28, Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag: 20–8. Bourdieu, Pierre (1980) ‘The aristocracy of culture’, Media, Culture and Society 2(3) 225–54. Certeau, Michel de (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life trans. Steven Randall, Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Fiske, John (1990) ‘Women and quiz shows: consumerism, patriarchy and resisting pleasures’, in Mary Ellen Brown (1990) editor, Television and Women’s Culture: The Politics of the Popular, London and Newbury Park: Sage: 134–43. Frow, John (1991) ‘Michel de Certeau and the practice of representation’, Cultural Studies 5 (1) 52–60. Gray, Ann (1987) ‘Behind closed doors: video recorders in the home’, in Helen Baehr and Gillian Dyer (1987) editors, Boxed In: Women and Television, New York and London: Pandora: 38–54. ——(1992) Video Playtime: The Gendering of a Leisure Technology, London: Comedia/Routledge. Hall, Stuart (1986) ‘Introduction’ in Morley (1986) 7–10. Livingstone, Sonia (1990) Making Sense of Television, Oxford: Pergamon. Lull, James (1990) Inside family viewing. Ethnographic research on television audiences, London and New York: Comedia/Routledge. Morley, David (1986) Family Television, Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure, London: Comedia. Potter, Jonathan and Margaret Wetherell (1987) Discourse and Social Psychology, London: Sage. Radway, Janice (1984) Reading the Romance, Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press. Ross, Andrew (1989) No Respect. Intellectuals and Popular Culture, New York and London: Routledge. Schrøder, Kim Christian (1988) ‘The pleasure of Dynasty: the weekly reconstruction of self-confidence’, in Philip Drummond and Richard Paterson (1988) editors, Television and its Audience. London: BFI: 61–82. Schutz, Alfred (1973) ‘On multiple realities’ in Collected Papers I, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff: 207–59. Walkerdine, Valerie (1986) ‘Video Replay: families, films and fantasy’ in Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (1986) editors, Formations of Fantasy, London and New York: Methuen: 167–99.

REVIEWS NORMAN K.DENZIN

WHERE HAS POSTMODERNISM GONE? ■ John Frow, What Was Postmodernism? (Sydney, Australia: Local Consumption Publications, 1991) 62pp., Pbk. Last boat for Postmodernism? In an end-of-the-year summary of the architectural twists and turns of 1992, the Sunday New York Times (27 December 1992, Section 2:1, 37) announced that ‘Post-modern is out and Post-industrial is in’. The editors of the New York Times used a single picture, and two announcements to make their point. The first announcement accompanied a photograph of the award-winning design for the Staten Island ferry terminal building in Manhattan by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, the architects ‘whose ideas launched the “now-capsized post-modern movement'” (Muschamp, 1992:37). The design in question resembles a Roman coliseum, with three huge arches, atop of which sits a huge clock showing the time to be 5:50. The photo suggests it is ten minutes to six in the evening. Immediately above the description of the Venturi and Brown announcement sat the following statement: ‘The New York City [1992] Planning Commission’s Comprehensive Waterfront Plan, which outlines development along the 578-mile shoreline, highlighted the city’s continuing transformation into a post-industrial metropolis (Muschamp, 1992:37). ‘Postmodern is out and Post-industrial is in’. These architectural referents are intended as a lead-in to John Frow’s brilliant and furious attempt to wrestle postmodernism to the ground. After all, architectural theory and practice made the term postmodern popular, and gave it meaning in terms of a series of stunning sites (e.g., the Westin Bonventure Hotels in Los Angeles and Portland, the Peachtree Center in Atlanta, the Renaissance Center in Detroit). Architectural theorists, from Venturi, to Moore, Graves and Gehry developed a spatial and populist language that stood in sharp contrast to the austere, élitist and utopian industrial projects of the high modernists (Le Corbusier). These new buildings attempted to speak the language of the everyday, to fit themselves to the cities that surrounded them (Jameson, 1991:39), to learn from Las Vegas that the past could be plundered for new meanings in the present. But more than this was learned from Las Vegas. A new nostalgia was afoot and the architects sensed it. Eclecticism, pastiche and parody worked because they reflected a

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longing for a past that had gone by too fast, a desire to anchor the self in the objects, signs and scenes from the past so the present could be made more sense of. Only recently have social theorists begun to learn these lessons, and the term ‘postmodern’ has become the magnet that has consolidated these diverse and contradictory lessons. What Was Postmodernism? charts the complex and uneven history of this strange word, ‘postmodernism’, showing it to be perhaps nothing more than a’genre of theoretical writing that is impervious to intellectual critique’ (Frow, 1991:41); a highly problematic, logically incoherent concept that has little, if any reality value (4,9); a term which depends for its existence on ‘historico-spirtual fictions’ (35); a product of the fusion of a series of crises which are ‘unfamiliar within the history [of]…“modern” or “capitalist” societies’ (42); a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy of its own impossible autonomy’ (41); a term which, once spoken, bespeaks its own ‘prescriptive network which loosely specifies a limited number of possible moves’ (3); a ‘spectre haunting Europe (or America, or the world!)’ (3). After all, anything and anyone can be postmodern (Eliot, Joyce, Pound, MTV, Doctorow, Blake, De Lillo, Warhol, Miami Vice, Roth, Kathy Acker, Bill and Hillary Clinton), high modernist (Eliot, Roth, Joyce, Doctorow, the Clintons), pro-postmodernist, but anti-modernist (Jencks), a pro-modernist and pro-postmodernist (Lyotard), antipostmodernist and anti-modernist (Tafuri), anti-postmodernist and pro-modernist (Habermas) (Jameson, 1991:61). Postmodernism is a slippery term, an unstable word with no clear referents. The industry which churns out postmodern texts, including endless attempts to distinguish the modern from the postmodern, makes it clear that theoretical pollution is rampant. In Frow’s words, ‘industrial [and theoretical] poison is a crucial component of the postmodern aesthetic’ (Frow, 1991:1). Thus, in a double sense (architectural and textual) a postindustrial imagery envelopes the postmodern impulse. Everywhere and nowhere postmodernism rears its ugly head: Jameson’s periodization of history which locates the postmodern in capitalism’s multinational phase, calling it the dominant cultural logic of late capitalism; Lyotard’s postmodern aesthetic which signals the death of the grand metanarratives of the modernist Enlightenment and the birth of local narratives grounded in Foucault’s call for a politics of resistance; Baudrillard and Eco’s America with its multiple hyper-realities; Grossberg’s postmodern sensibilities (ironic nihilism, authentic inauthenticity); Linda Hutcheon’s and Laurel Richardson’s reflexive postmodernist texts; Jameson’s pastiche and parody; Meaghan Morris’s claim that feminists did postmodern theory before it was called such; Huyssen’s (1986) lists contrasting modernism and postmodernism; Martin’s (1992) Derridian, postsecular, postmodern social theory; Griffin’s (1993) constructive [Whiteheadian] postmodern philosophy; Seidman’s (1991) anti-foundational postmodern social theory, and so on. Elsewhere (Denzin, 1991: vii, ix–x) I have suggested that the postmodern is that which follows the modern, after World War II, calling it a sequence of historical moments, a phase of capitalism, a movement in the arts, and a form of social theory. This is an example of the theoretical pollution that Frow objects to, for I make the term do not just one or two things at the same time. I make it refer to at least four things at once! Such

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forms of theorizing are, in Frow’s analysis, just what postmodernism was [and is]; a theoretical term without referents, a concept whose day and time have come and past, but a term, for better or worse, which remains, because while it is difficult to take it seriously, ‘it is not easily dismissed’ (41). In the remainder of this essay I will show why Frow is wrong and why we need a term called postmodernism, why (and how) its day has not passed. I must begin by showing how Frow’s argument is both right and wrong. Frow’s deconstruction of postmodernism Frow’s all too brief little book (42 pages of actual text) follows the ‘prescriptive network’ now all too familiar in the genre that describes writings about and on postmodernism. This genre is shaped by three logics, or grids, which endeavor to specify a logic of differences between the modern and the postmodern, while assigning distinct historical moments or periods to these two terms, and attempting to identify a cultural logic or grid unique to the postmodern. These grids contain (depending on the theorist), a focus on a series of crises that are read as being endemic to an ‘obsolescent modernism’ (41). These are the crises surrounding political representation, the commodification of everyday life, the aesthetic displacement of ethical values in the everyday, the clash between high and popular culture values, the crisis surrounding the social function of the intellectual, and a crisis connected to the production, proliferation, control and distribution of knowledge and information (41–2). Frow unravels this logic of lists, oppositions, dates and historical periods, noting how a variety of terms and moments have occupied a central place in postmodernist discourse, terms such as: modern, modernism, modernity, modernization, traditional, posttraditional, postmodern, postmodernism, postmodernity, fifth century AD, twelfth century, the humanistic Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 1800, 1900, 1912, 1914, 1960, 1970. He shows how the logic of postmodern writing argues that the writer assert a historical shift in sensibility called the postmodern, a shift defined by its opposition to what is called the modern. The content of this shift is defined in terms of this opposition. In one brilliant thrust after another Frow shows how this discourse allows theorists to make assertions like ‘postmodernism is the expression of postmodernity’ (7). Frow is quite straightforward. The term is logically incoherent and every theory (historical, cultural logic, economic production, aesthetic, narrative) that has been brought to it is fatally flawed. This is so for several reasons. First, nobody can agree on the examples that distinguish the modern and postmodern (pro and anti) positions from one another. Second, the historical and contextual markers that designate and separate the modern from the postmodern keep slipping from sight. ‘The chronological concept of the modern lacks all chronological content’ (14). There is neither a singular modernism, nor a singular correlation of modernist culture with a bordered strip of time or with a coherent socioeconomic formation contained by such a strip’ (14). Depending on the theorist, the postmodern is set against the modernity of the nineteenth century, the use of

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the word modernus in the fifith century AD, the cultural renaissances of the twelfth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the passing of modernity in 1800, or 1912, and so on. In other historicizing versions (Lyotard) postmodernism is seen as a rupture from modernism, but a recurring rupture which actually institutes the modern. Here postmodernism is not modernism at its end ‘but modernism at its very beginning’ (36). Such a model, of course, is tautological for what is effect is cause, and what is cause is effect. History is driven by history, by the imperative to break from itself (Morris, 1988:235–6). The term’s third logical flaw is revealed in those attempts to derive its cultural elements from the logic of a single historical moment. Jameson, Berman, Schulte-Sasse, Habermas, Jencks, and Lyotard offer cultural logic theories. The problems of such formulations are well known. Everything is either absorbed into the cultural realm, or the cultural realm is excluded from the socio-economic sphere and an argument for cultural logics is left suspended between the two systems. In which case the cultural logics of capitalism as postmodernism rest on economic, not cultural processes (e.g., commodification). Such theories will then merge the cultural with the economic through the aesthetic argument (the instrumentalization of culture, commodity fetishism). A tautological system is thus put into place. A fourth flaw is revealed in those attempts to salvage the cultural logic argument through recourse to various theories of capitalist production (post-Fordisms, Harvey’s theory of flexible accumulation, Lash and Urry’s disorganized capitalism). These formulations suffer from the date (history) problem (Harvey locates the shift in 1972), and the proposition that a single economic system will account for the wide diversity in economic, technological, informational and exchange systems that now circulate in the world economy. These epochal models are doubly flawed. They presuppose an untenable essentializing, global historicist framework, and they do not permit the deduction of ‘postmodernist cultural practice[s] from the economic categories’ (30) they rest upon. A fifth flaw flows from the aesthetic theories (Lyotard, Jameson). This argument is also familar. Late-capitalist production has accelerated the aesthetic commodification of everyday life, erasing the distinction between high and low culture, reducing the cultural and aesthetic spheres to the level of the popular. Video, cinema, MTV: these are the key postmodern cultural sites. They, along with architecture, display the ‘increasing integration of the aesthetic (in the form of advertising, design…music and Muzak…) into the marketing of commodities’ (30). Yet the aesthetic argument cannot be untangled from the cultural logic or the economic theories, and thereby shares their basic flaws. However, a single and pivotal insight is produced by this formulation. Call it the ‘postmodern dilemma’ (39). Late capitalism has taught us how to ‘absorb Novelty simply as a variation on Tradition’ (39). It is more and more difficult today ‘to break through and remain “at the limit of what is unacceptable”’ (39). Put slightly differently, to parody Walter Benjamin, after Scruton (1992:4), postmodernism is ‘the state of human existence in an age of mechanical reproduction where nothing any longer is an original.’

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Back to the postmodern In each of the above cases, arguments for the postmodern emerge out of a narrative necessity to make sense out of a historical moment that bears the cultural, economic and political traces of the moment it has replaced. Underneath all of this discourse, all of these messy and flawed theories was an attempt, Frow argues, to respond to ‘an interlocking set of genuine but inchoate theoretical problems.’ (41) These theoretical problems (for social not architectural theorists) arose out of the conjunctions that brought cultural studies, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, Frankfurt critical theory, neo-Gramscian paradigms, and post-Althusserian Marxism together into a fractured, multi-centered discursive system. These theories met on the cultural and political terrains of the popular (Eagleton, 1992:5). They confronted and attempted to make sense of a popular world-wide political conservatism that would undo the politics of liberation and freedom launched at the end of the 1960s. Postmodernism became the term within social theory, a manifesto and a commitment (Scruton, 1992:4), that would describe the repressive cultural politics and aesthetic practices of the right. The problems that postmodernism responded to were simultaneously political and theoretical: how to address the crises of modernism, the rhetorics of freedom and democracy in a political climate that seemed bent on destroying these systems. Such destruction was seen as occurring at all levels of social and cultural life. Habermas’s crises of legitimation were everywhere and these crises were being experienced in ways that were.novel and unique; in ways that had not previously been experienced in the history of the modern or capitalist societies. Out of this conceptual vacuum emerged postmodernism, a term that was stolen from architecture. It became a term that would not go away, even if no one could agree on what it meant, for what it meant was ‘Something different is going on here and we don’t understand what it is.’ In order to make it meaningful, the old (and new) theories were brought back into place, especially Marxism and poststructuralism. And in the end what was postmodernism became a series of traces and lines, words and shapes, voices and images, recorded on pieces of paper, steel, brick, celluloid and vinyl; testimonies to a crisis that was in part self-fulfilling, and never separated, or autonomous from the crisis itself. The fatally flawed, self-referential theories of the postmodern never had a chance of being otherwise. We were and are in a cage and we can’t get out. That’s what postmodernism is all about. Weber’s Iron Cage has turned to celluloid, plastic and vinyl; a velvet glove that crushes and destroys while it produces pleasure. Cultural studies through the postmodern looking glass Lest there be confusion, I am not reducing cultural studies to postmodernism, although each are unstable words with no clear references, except location in the same historical moment. Indeed, as Jennifer Slack points out, while cultural studies is not identical to

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postmodernism, ‘it can be read, like postmodernism, as a series of traces and lines, voices and images responsive to and part of the crisis in Anglo-American social sciences’, an interventionist commitment (which is indeed becoming depoliticized), and a sensitivity to a ‘new configuration of the real and the imaginary’. Although there are some who would erase the differences between the two movements, there are many for whom ‘the traces and lines, the trajectory of cultural studies is (was, can or should be) different’ (Slack, 1993). And they are different. Cultural studies, which has never been one thing, theorizes and studies, in its conjunctural, contextual and interventionist versions (Grossberg, 1992:21) the ground on which the postmodern, in its multiple forms, stands. Taking the ‘post’ of postmodernism as a reference point (Hall, 1986:59), cultural studies’ interest in ‘postmodernism is not a matter of accepting that the history of the modern has come to an end; it is rather that postmodernism poses a new project for cultural studies’ own articulation: that it must critically examine and hopefully delink itself from some of its complicities with the modern’ (Grossberg, 1992:24–5). The postmodern thus poses a problematic for cultural studies, a problematic that turns on the cultural logics of this historical moment, and its effects on the politics of everyday life. A postmodern sensibility (Grossberg, 1992:224–34), grounded in the conservative, postmodern politics of the 1980s, articulates new configurations of self and other. A new politics of emotionality has emerged. It turns on race, class, nation and gender and their enactment in the situated worlds the postmodern makes available to its members. Authentic inauthentic identities, of ironic, sentimental, hyper-real and grotesque varieties (Grossberg, 1992:227), are constructed and negotiated. In and on multiple terrains, interacting individuals attempt to stake out their own claim to politically correct personal and social identities. Culture is the ground on which these struggles occur. It is also the site and object of study, critique and intervention (Nelson, Treichler and Grossberg, 1992:5). So conceived, a conjunctural cultural studies confronts this postmodern moment as a cultural crisis in its own right. A new kind of culture is being created ‘in the midst of the restructuring of the capitalist international order’ (West, 1992:690), and this new culture, with its nostalgic traces of the past, threatens to annihilate all of us in the name of a new politics of freedom and choice. So conceived, cultural studies’ challenge is clear. It must confront Frow’s deconstructive reading of the postmodern, as it theorizes its own relationship to this historical formulation. In conclusion In the end, then, Lyotard and Frow are wrong and right. We need this deadly term called the postmodern to remind us that we have yet to make sense out of the present for the keys to its meanings are not in the modernist past. They are in the present, the here and now. As long as theorists attempt to make sense of this moment we have hope, even if their theories are flawed. And this moment, call it, following Lyotard, ‘the pastmodern’.

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The ‘pastmodern’ is that which comes back on the present from the standpoint of the past. But this past is filtered through the present, a present that is littered with the past (Jameson’s pastiche and parody), so that the boundaries between the past, the present and the future are now obliterated. An inauthentic (commodified) Heideggerian temporality defines the present. Post and past, before and after, modern and postmodern, now slide alongside one another, each longing for a nostalgic footing in a past that no longer is. Each seeks a firmly bounded present with certain meanings. Firm footings are no longer available and the postmodernism that was will remain as a pastmodern moment that has yet to understand itself. There is still time to catch the last boat for postmodernism. It remains to be seen how cultural studies will locate itself on this Titanic vessel. References Denzin, Norman K. (1991) Images of Postmodern Society: Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema, London: Sage. Eagleton, Terry (1992) ‘Review-essay: Post, punk, or both: how ought we to value popular culture?, Times Literary Supplement, 18 December: 5–6. Griffen, David Ray (1993) ‘Introduction: Constructive postmodern philosophy’, in David Ray Griffen, et al. (1993) Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy: Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne, Albany: SUNY Press: 1–42. Grossberg, Lawrence (1988) It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics and Culture, Sidney: Power Publications. ——(1992) We Gotta Get Out of This Place, New York: Routledge. Grossberg, Lawrence, Nelson, Cary and Treichler, Paula (1992) editors, Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge. Hall, Stuart (1986) ‘On postmodernism and articulation: an interview with Stuart Hall’, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10:45–60. Huyssen, Andreas (1986) After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism. London: Macmillan. Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press. Martin, Bill (1992) Matrix and Line: Derrida and the Possibilities of Postmodern Social Theory, Albany: SUNY Press. Morris, Meaghan (1988) The Pirate’s Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism, London: Verso. Muschamp, Herbert (1992) ‘Architecture/1992’, New York Times, 27 December (Section 2, ‘Arts & Leisure’) 1, 37. Nelson, Cary, Paula A.Treichler, and Lawrence Grossberg (1992) ‘Cultural studies: an introduction’, in Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler (1992):1–16. New York Times (1992) 27 December (Section 2, ‘Arts & Leisure’) 1, 37. Scruton, Roger (1992) ‘Review-essay: In inverted commas: the faint sarcastic smile on the face of the postmodernist’, Times Literary Supplement, 18 December:3–4. Seidman, Steven (1991) ‘The end of sociological theory: the postmodern hope’, Sociological Theory, 9:131–46.

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Slack, Jennifer (1993) Personal correspondence to Assistant Editor, Cultural Studies. West, Cornel (1992) ‘The postmodern crisis of the black intellectuals,’ in Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler (1992) 689–705.

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ON WOMEN’S SCREENS ■ Janet Thumim, Celluloid Sisters: Women and Popular Cinema (London: MacMillan, 1992 247 pp. Pbk £15.99, Hbk £42.50). Janet Thumim’s book Celluloid Sisters sets out to examine two of the most important issues in current film studies, the representation of women and the means by which audiences understand and use media texts. Thumim poses herself and the reader the primary question: ‘How far can popular cinema be understood to have contributed to the continuing subjection of women in the post-war period?’ (35) and proceeds to an answer, through a detailed examination of a number of the most popular films of the period. In the process, she necessarily raises numerous other questions about the role of popular culture, the nature of women’s engagement with the female models offered to them, the researcher’s problematic access to past audiences and the way in which characters and narrative understanding are established in popular forms. Thumim’s task is a large one and in order to make it manageable she focuses on three key moments in the period 1945–65. (After that she suggests that television largely takes over and that cinema ceases to be a genuinely popular form for mass audiences.) From each moment—the mid forties, the mid fifties and the mid sixties—she takes the six most popular films in terms of British box-office success and analyses their narrative themes, the construction and narrative development of their female characters and the way in which they present to women in the British audience a reworking of their own social experience. The films thus chosen range from Gainsborough and other melodramas of the forties through British war films and American auteurs in the fifties to Bond and British pop stars in the sixties. There can be no suggestion that Thumim is choosing her examples to fit her theory and the method offers a legitimate reminder to those of us more likely to cite films which are interesting to the critic now rather than demonstrably popular at the time. Across these moments, Thumim charts a steady decline in the centrality of women to both the plots of the films and their moral dilemmas. In the forties, the films focus on the way in which the female characters make choices about the kind of women they are going to be. Films like Brief Encounter, The Wicked Lady and The Bells of Saint Mary’s (the only US film in this group) offer different models of rebellion and sacrifice, including Celia Johnson’s troubled retreat from adultery, Ingrid Bergman’s celibate and idealistic nun and Margaret Lockwood’s bold highwayman with a beauty spot. In the fifties, the British war film (Reach for the Sky, The Dambusters) and American successes such as East of Eden and The Searchers are more concerned with definitions of masculinity and the need for it to be contained within a cohesive society. The female

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characters, when present, act as a pretext for male behaviour but do not develop in their own right. The sixties films, Tom Jones, Summer Holiday and Mary Poppins among them, emphasize personal liberation and freedom but this, it is argued, is skewed towards men, and young men in particular, and female characters tend to act as helpers or impediments to the progress of the youthful male whether it be the bawdy Tom Jones, the rakish James Bond or a swinging pop-star. This decline in the number of women as the central characters in popular films is paralleled by the diminishing number of female stars in the period, an ‘imbalance between the genders’ which leads to what Thumim describes as a ‘most striking decline in the overall visibility of women in popular film which raises important questions both about the audience and about the social positioning of women during our period.’ (50) Within this framework, Thumim provides a careful and detailed reading of a number of the chosen films, paying particular attention to the way in which the female characters are constructed and their goals defined. This work on character would provide a model for teaching in this area and offers a useful method for distinguishing the different means by which both central characters and more minor roles are constructed through visual and narrative organization. Thumim stresses the importance of the narrative resolution (most commonly marriage or the resumption of family life, sometimes—for difficult women— death) in determining the audience’s understanding of the female character’s fate and emphasizes that ‘the endings of films are important in revealing the preferred social codes’ (119). In this, she sets herself against the practices of reading ‘against the grain’ of the text for absences and incoherences and argues that the questions (and pleasures) generated for women by, for instance, the outrageous behaviour of Barbara in The Wicked Lady are closed down by the punishment meted out to her in the final reel. She maintains that these popular films from three different social periods show a remarkable consistency in their endings in that ‘it seems that the denouement, for female characters, must always turn on the degree to which they can be shown to have conformed to specific meanings of the signifier “woman” in patriarchial discourse’ (146). Given this emphasis on narrative resolution, Thumim’s conclusion that these popular films worked against women seems inevitable. The readings offered of somewhat disparate films is one of the book’s strengths. Films which are normally ignored or considered in the context of genre or the star system take on a fresh life from the unusual juxtapositions generated by Thumim’s choice. A film like Mary Poppins, for instance, can be rewardingly read in the context of other sixties films with their emphasis on liberation and play in both their thematics and their visual style; there is something pleasing about the notion of Julie Andrews’ nanny presiding over what Thumim describes as ‘the numerous unmistakable references to youth culture of the sixties with its emphases not only on personal liberation but also on instant fulfilment as a kind of hedonistic birthright of all who care to claim it’ (77). It has to be said that the method causes problems with some of the other films which do not quite fit the thesis and either drop from sight or have to be vigorously pummelled into position. Doctor at Sea, one of the fifties group, falls into the first category while the discussion of Hitchcock’s Marnie, a notoriously difficult film, is interesting but ultimately one-dimensional.

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But Thumim is not only concerned with providing her own readings but also reaching some understanding of the readings which might have been made by women in contemporary audiences. As she recognizes, this is a difficult area and her arguments rest on a number of propositions. She assumes for instance that ‘the gender balance of all the audiences for the performances for all the films bears some resemblance to national demographic profiles of the period’ (154) and is unable to comment on whether the more female-orientated films of the forties attracted a different proportion of women than the mainly male dramas of the fifties. She also makes quite heavy use of film reviewers and women’s magazines to ‘stand for’ the now silent female audience, a problem, as Thumim acknowledges, when class and gender bias markedly affect critics’ conclusions. Less well signposted is a series of assumptions about what women audiences like—central female characters, a female viewpoint, representation on the screen of their own social experience. Thumim’s argument is based on a view that female audience members use their own experience to make sense of a film and use films to value (or otherwise) their own experience. This leads her legitimately to question the very limited goals offered to women in the audience through the female characters in these films, the surprisingly negative view of motherhood, the denial of the existence of divorce, the narrow range of jobs held by female characters and the absence of happily single women. Thumim describes female characters in the films and women in the audience as being inevitably caught up in patriarchal snares; ‘there seems to be one overriding proposition linking both fictional women and female audience members. That is that female autonomy ends at marriage and that preferably this should take place as early as possible in adult life’ (176). She concludes that the films cited, and by implication other popular films in the period, failed to represent the social and political changes that were occurring in women’s lives and that, by the sixties, treatments of social reforms connected with the women’s movement were ‘so reactionary that it is hard to escape the conclusion that they must have been fuelled by deep seated fears (probably on the part of women as well as men) about the long term social consequences of true gender equality’ (209). These arguments carry considerable conviction but there is perhaps too little discussion of other ways in which women might have been engaged with these films. The reference to women’s fears in the quotation cited above suggests a kind of masochism and disavowal involved in women’s visits to popular cinema, particularly in the sixties, which the book half suggests but does not follow up. In this context, the terms of the original question look too restrictive. The fifties and sixties saw considerable changes in the way in which women began to think about their roles in the family, in employment and in education. Patriarchy was not overthrown but some of its terms were questioned in ways which have yet to be worked through. Is it possible to say that popular film played an entirely negative part in these developments if we have no means of measuring its effects and, if, as Thumim assumes, women continued to be present in the mass cinema audience into the 1960s, what was it that kept them going into the foyer? The possible pleasures of fantasy, glamour and spectacle, of male stars and male anxieties on display, of identification with heroines who challenged the social order regardless of the narrative resolution, might have been worth greater exploration.

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The fact that the book raises such questions does not diminish its contribution to work on British cinema nor its significance in testing out its methodology so carefully. Less than ten years ago, when, for instance, the British Film Institute published its monograph, Gainsborough Melodramas (edited by Sue Aspinall and Robert Murphy, 1983), British cinema hardly existed as an object of study. That situation has changed dramatically and Celluloid Sisters will be a further valuable addition to teachers and students in this field.

MICHAEL GREEN

VOX POPULI ■ Peter Dahlgren and Colin Sparks (eds.) Journalism and Popular Culture (London: Sage, 1992 Pbk. 210 pp. £11.95); Jim McGuigan, Cultural Populism (London: Routledge, 1992 Pbk. 290 pp. £11.99). As publications under ‘cultural studies’ series titles proliferate, various attempts are being made to make some welcome and urgently needed sense of what the whole area is about, assuming that can any longer be done, and that it is desirable to try. Such books as Ben Agger’s cogent and bracing Cultural Studies as Critical Theory (1992), following work by Brantlinger and others, try to make general sense of a cultural-studies project beginning to take off in remarkable if still contested and relatively unmapped ways in the States. By comparison, the two books under review re-address a particular engagement with forms of ‘popular culture’ within a (presumably) larger field of work in cultural studies. Both try to take stock amid giddying changes both in cultural forms and in the growth of the academic area itself. Indeed, for McGuigan the one is symptomatic of the other. He quotes Nowell-Smith commenting that ‘modern culture takes the form of a single intertextual field’ and remarks that given ‘an interaction of forms and meanings across once heavily policed borders of cultural value and politics…the rediscovery of popular culture is not so daring after all’. The two books represent the considerable amount of work done already but, at least in one case intentionally, bring into question its value and its coherence. Journalism and Popular Culture begins with an essay by Peter Dahlgren which argues that a prevailing consensus about what constitutes good journalism is tied to ‘Fourth Estate’ conceptions of the responsible provision of information, and leaves many journalistic genres ‘at loose ends’ by ignoring journalism’s intersections with advertising, entertainment and in particular ‘storytelling as a key link which unites journalism and popular culture’. In view of this ‘the central distinctions between good journalism and bad journalism’ become fluid. Whether such definitions of good journalism are worth maintaining against imperatives of ownership, sales and the need to entertain is a question left trailing through what follows: an enlarged view of journalistic practice ‘need not necessarily signal the demise of the public sphere (and may well point to its renewal)’. ‘May well’ would for McGuigan undoubtedly constitute a question worth asking, now begged. If the collection opens with an unresolved question, it proceeds to flat contradiction by printing side by side as its two other general reflections on the field arguments by Colin Sparks and John Fiske which, as later contributors in the book acknowledge, are absolutely and irreconcilably at odds about the concept of popular culture itself.

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Both take off from Stuart Hall’s remarks on ‘the people versus the power-bloc: this rather than “class against class”’, but in familiar vein their essays build on this in opposite directions. For Sparks, the popular is a ‘necessarily reactionary category’ since in many treatments of popular culture ‘the people themselves have no activity and no productivity’, while many mobilizations of the ‘concerns of the people’ do so in ways that prevent them ‘becoming aware of their status as members of social classes’. About the possibility of such identifications as class members and agents, Sparks concedes no doubts. By contrast, for Fiske popular knowledges, products and cultures are set against ‘official’ knowledges of the power-bloc, and are characterized by unresolved contradictions, belief mixed with disbelief, ‘pleasurable scepticism’. The task of cultural theory is to ‘contribute to progressive politics’ by enlarging understanding of popular tastes and pleasures, attempting to ‘understand and legitimate’ instances of sensed differences from identities proposed by the hegemonic order though also seeking to ‘expose the origins in the strategies of power’ of cases where ‘the popular voice or practice is reactionary, or complicit with the interests of the power-bloc’. About the tactical possibility of judging such ‘reactionary’ or ‘progressive’ instances and about the feasibility of bringing ‘certain formations within academia, journalism and politics closer to the people’ Fiske in turn provides no details and concedes no doubts. Later essays in the book are invariably interesting and informative on a variety of aspects of popular journalism. Well written and structured, they virtually ignore or bypass the general claims from Part One, in order to sympathize in particular instances with the stances and forms of writing (and photography) examined. Individually and overall the writers do justice to diverse materials and indicate only briefly, almost only to suppress, very different opinions on the state of popular journalism. Affection for, and absorption in the material leaves little space for returning to issues about popular culture, the ‘proper’ roles of journalism and whether the present state of journalism is inevitable, even satisfactory in its roles for readers (there is however no reference to any readership study) in the present state of ‘society-and-all-its-media’ (Gripsrud). In that respect, the bulk of this collection might be said to show that ‘anti-moralistic, anti-judgemental stance…cool, detached and irreverent’ which McGuigan wants to attack as ‘a new revisionism rooted in populist sentiments of an increasingly slippery kind’. He himself supports the study of everyday life and of ‘ordinary’ culture, but his book is a critique of a slide into a ‘cultural populism’ which gives analytic and political priority to ‘the symbolic experiences and practices of ordinary people’, but has degenerated into a ‘sentimental’ solidarity and a one-sided celebration of the meaningful uses of symbolic resources in daily life. He remarks sardonically that ‘the exploited, estranged cope…very well indeed, making valid sense of the world and obtaining grateful pleasure from what they receive. Apparently, there is so much action in the micro-politics of everyday life that the Utopian promises of a better future, which were once so enticing for critics of popular culture, have lost all credibility’ (171). His interpretation is pursued in three different ways in the book. First, through an historical account of the emergence of (largely) British cultural studies and of shifts within it. Second, through examinations of bodies of writing on youth culture and on

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popular television. Third, through McGuigan’s own ‘exemplary’ though very undeveloped case-studies of ways in which to approach The Sun, pornography and the Rushdie affair. In a final chapter he relates what he sees as current confusions to an insufficiently sceptical engagement with postmodern theorists. The book thus reviews an enormous amount of writing on popular culture in the last thirty years, often with telling comments and asides, though with a brevity that in most cases represents very partially the arguments discussed and may not make sense in all cases without a careful prior knowledge of the authors and positions in question. The book’s own argument instead is for a ‘critical populism’ (though why still flying under the usually pejorative populist flag is not clear), which will be rooted in two areas perceived as absent from much current work. One of these concerns, unfashionably, issues of ‘quality’: ‘the study of culture is nothing if it is not about values’. The other, more developed, concerns the separation of textual and audience studies from political economy, so lacking the double force of work which should account for ‘both ordinary people’s everyday culture and its material construction by powerful forces beyond the immediate comprehension and control of ordinary people’. Cultural Populism has a wide, possibly excessive range of reference and makes a number of palpable hits in a brave evaluation of other work and in its own statement of a distinctive position. Yet it seems unable to confront more than sketchily the issues at the heart of its own case. What informs the judgements of quality which have rightly been made so problematic and so often shown to be about more and other than at first appears? How does the study of political economy and of ideologies such as racism in texts relate to what little we know so far of how readers perceive, ‘read’ and make use of such texts? Here it would have helped to have McGuigan’s account of The Sun at much greater length. Also troubling is the speed with which the work of Janice Radway, of Mike Davis, of Paul Willis and team are dealt with when each body of writing represents an extended and thoughtful working-through of exactly those areas and issues the book would like to confront. Why do Reading the Romance or City of Quartz not represent what McGuigan is after? Or is the problem rather one of ‘British’ cultural studies? On the last page of his book Jim McGuigan quotes Davis’s tantalizing remark, spanning much of the theoretical legacy and its contradictions sedimented in these texts, that ‘somewhere between… Gramscian optimism and Frankfurtian pessimism lies the real possibility of an oppositional culture’—one of the few moments in either book where ‘oppositional’ rather than popular culture is spoken of. Perhaps developments in this area, beyond the endless for or against, or for and against stances towards popular culture, need to involve extended and grounded political reflection at a time of high confusion, political fragmentation doubling as the discovery of difference. Perhaps we should strive for conditions in which to write developed, argued, concretely-informed, book-length studies as well as essays and reviews of the field. Perhaps, too, the increasing and increasingly diverse body of students to whom, for whom and through whom such work exists and circulates, to whom cultural studies itself is ordinary, need to be more strongly represented in the accounting for ‘popular tastes and pleasures’. Cultural Populism is well worth reading, for all the baffling deployment of Paul Klee,

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MAURICIO TENORIO ■ Roger Bartra, The Cage of Melancholy: Identity and Metamorphosis in the Mexican Character, (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992) 199pp. $38.00 Hbk. Roger Bartra’s The Cage of Melancholy, originally published in Spanish in 1987, is an examination of the notion of Mexican identity as it has been defined by sundry intellectuals and official discourses. The Cage of Melancholy is, however, much more than a critique of an identity characterized by the desire to incorporate Mexico into the modern Western world. Indeed, it is also a study of the emergence of modernity; as such, The Cage of Melancholy is both a historical analysis and a vivid denunciation of the dynamics of power involved in the delineation of a modern ‘Mexican identity’. And yet, Bartra’s study also constitutes yet another moment in the long process of the definition of such an identity. For The Cage of Melancholy contains echoes of the common search for a pristine identity. Nonetheless, its newness and import reside in its self-consciousness of the contingency of its own argument. Consequently, Bartra’s book hesitates to answer the often addressed question: ‘What is a Mexican?’ Bartra deals with issues of interest to those studying Mexican culture and society in the US: lo mexicano and related meanings—machismo, la fiesta, la siesta1 nationalism, tradition, and all such commonplaces. As the field of ‘American Studies’ in the 1950s tiredly reproduced and consumed the symbols related to the ‘American character and exceptionalism’, Mexican studies in the US constructed the Mexican identity, making commonsensical the idea of an homogeneous psychopathological Mexican. In Mexico, the equivalent of the ‘people of plenty’, was the people of ‘solitude’, commonly understood as a labyrinth. For Bartra, rather than a labyrinth, it is a cage, not of solitude, but of melancholy which is not a national singularity but the despair of modernity tout court. However, the significance of Bartra’s argument derives precisely from showing the historicity and contingency of all the various aspects of the so-called Mexican identity. Bartra has scrutinized the twentieth-century construction of a nationalist discourse in Mexico which, as he demonstrates, homogenized, manipulated, and invented Mexican cultures and traditions. Furthermore, Bartra explains how this construction is indeed a part of the development of Western modernity and nationalism. And yet, the English-speaking audience may find The Cage of Melancholy to be a rather bizarre discussion of these questions. For in order to inspect the biases and tactics of power involved in the creation of stereotypes, Bartra has made use of a variety of narrative techniques, several of which are not commonly sanctioned by the academy’s tight corset. In fact, Bartra merges short historico-literary vignettes—which are almost personal diversions bordering on irony and sarcasm—with profound historical and anthropological analysis. Bartra does so without taking the opportunity to debate the hierarchy of, or distinction between, history and fiction. Personally aware of the highly

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discursive nature of the issues he deals with, he shifts from one realm to the other underlining both the complex historical temper of the Mexican ‘identity’ and the irony inherent in it. For instance, in a vignette (‘Simulacrum’) Bartra combines two pieces of Latin American literature: on the one hand, Julio Cortazar’s short story ‘Axolotl’; on the other, the essay ‘La X en la Frente’ (The X in the Face) by one of the leading Mexican essayists of the twentieth century, Alfonso Reyes. In Bartra’s vignette, Cortazar is the visitor of Paris’s aquarium who observes the amphibious creature axolotl which in turn impersonates Reyes himself. In Cortazar’s original tale, the observer of the axolotl becomes the axolotl itself. In Bartra’s version, Cortazar becomes the axolotl, whereby Reyes frees himself from the axolotl’s identity only to attend to Cortazar’s burial in Montparnasse. ‘Time seems less evident if we stay motionless,’ says the Cortazar of Bartra’s story. With this vignette, Bartra demonstrates the consequences of an hybrid identity: this identity seems to have an endless endurance because it is not an identity at all, but a modern strategy for creating pragmatic and contingent discourses of selfbelonging. Hence, in a Borges-like fashion, Bartra completes the irony by telling us that both Cortazar in the cage of the axolotl and Reyes in Cortazar’s burial, are delighted to know that eventually a pen will write this fictitious transmutation. Bartra holds that pen, and he makes the reader believe that the cycle continues with one’s own reading. Bartra’s metaphor of Mexicanness is the amphibious creature axolotl—a native Mexican species of hybrid nature between a reptile and a fish. In it, not Mexicans per se, but the notion of Mexicanness appears incarcerated in a’Cage of Melancholy’. In the assembling of such a notion, the customary differences between tradition and modernity (or particularism-universalism) seem to vanish. Following Bartra, one can argue that in order to create the image of Mexico’s uniqueness, Mexican intellectuals made use of universal (i.e., European) concepts. Diego Rivera, for example, painted the face of exotic Mexico with his French-trained gaze. In turn, France’s longing for exoticism demanded from its Diego what it taught him how to do. The opposition between modernity and tradition thus breaks down, because to be modern one must have a unique (traditional) face. Modernity is elusive and the notion of a fixed identity is an illusion; the relentless pursuit of these absolutes is what has defined Mexican modernity. The international product presented as the ‘Mexican tradition’ is indeed a product of modernity and exists thanks to the language furnished by the modern Western world. Rather than a monographic narrative, The Cage of Melancholy is a compilation of various essays which deal with the demystification of particular aspects of Mexicanness. First, in ‘Paradise subverted’, Bartra deals with the issue of tradition and the common understanding of Mexicans as ‘archaic souls whose tragic relationship with the modern age obliges them to reproduce their primitivism permanently.’ (20) With this understanding of tradition, Mexicans were condemned to perpetual exoticism. Second, the author examines the ‘Primordial mourning’: the commonplace of the Mexicans’ love of death, sadness and melancholy, internationally recognized either in a Rivera mural or in a fashionable Frida Kahlo canvas. Here, Bartra shows that the discourse of sadness is one of the ‘fundamental axes of Western culture’, and hence, ‘when Mexican culture adopts melancholy as one of its distinctive, special symbols, it is in fact connecting itself

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with and diluting itself in the huge whirlpool of Western history’ (35). In another essay ‘Ambiguities’, Bartra deals with what he calls the axolotls’ ability to resist transformation: they display a ‘resistance to undergo metamorphosis into salamanders’, and this ‘obliges them to undergo a marvelous revolution: eternally to reproduce their larval primitivism.’ (41) In fact, Bartra tries to show that it is in the very notion of time (i.e., modern and primitive senses of time) where one can see how modernity itself required the establishment of the dichotomy ‘tradition vs. modernity’. Therefore, the definition of Mexican identity, with its primitivism and traditionalism, was but an inherent part of modernity: To create the myth of the modern man it is necessary to reconstruct the primordial original, to generate a tragic sense of the opposition between the barbarian and the civilized man, and to create for modern man a mythical past, so that this very modernity can, apparently, shed such myths and confront rationally the construction of the future’. (53) In the chapter ‘Toward metamorphosis’, Bartra also treats the image of el pelado,2 a commonplace in the philosophy of lo Mexicano which was very fashionable in the 1950s. El pelado constituted the stereotyped inhabitant of an amorphous modernity who never became completely modern. Bartra argues that el pelado is the main character of an amphibious culture. And this definition of the Mexican contributes to the twentieth century what the nineteenth-century Mexican intellectuals could not furnish, namely, a Mexican version of the surmenages of the Modern world. The amphibious culture, Bartra believes, is ‘offered as a role model; it has the additional attraction of permitting the Mexican to peer out of the abyss of the existential drama and feel the vertigo of the modern age’ (94). In addition, the image of el pelado was eventually transformed into institutionalized melancholy and nostalgia within a nationalistic ideology, as was the case in José Vasconcelos’ thought in the 1920s and 1930s—a Mexican philosopher and politician who, through traditional Hispanism, articulated the ideology of the ‘cosmic Latin race’. He ‘wanted to be universal, while at the same time Hispanic, and followed José Enrique Rodó (Ariel) in rejecting not classical culture, but the rationalism and positivism of the Anglo-Saxon Caliban.’ Thus, Bartra argues, in Vasconcelos el pelado becomes the new hero of aggressive emotions, ‘capable of resisting immersion in the cold technology …of modern industrial society.’ (104) Thus, Bartra’s The Cage of Melancholy is a lucid and original critique of Mexican culture and nationalism, as well as of the process whereby both became stereotyped by the official Mexican post-1910 revolutionary ideology, and by the requirements of international orientalism. In fact, in the Mexican environment, Bartra’s criticism ought to be read as an expansion of Jorge Cuesta’s angle of analysis regarding modernity and nationalism. This unique Mexican writer, in the middle of a dogmatic consensus in an official nationalism during the 1930s, criticized both the historical manipulations performed in constructing a nationalistic homogenous discourse, and the official postrevolutionary nationalism then in the making. He contended in 1938: ‘One who follows blindly in a past generations’ footsteps plunders that generation. One who creates a doctrine to be followed plunders future generations. Revolutionaries plunder the revolution. Nationalists plunder the nation. The avant-garde artists plunder their epoch.

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The exoticists from abroad, and the Mexicans among them, plunder what they find picturesque.’ Moreover in the international cultural scenario, Bartra adds richness to the sort of analysis of culture made by Walter Benjamin who once dreamed he was a member of an exploring party in Mexico and he imagined seeing true Mexican gods repudiating false Christian divinities. Indeed Benjamin’s focus on ‘which reality is inwardly convergent with truth?’ and ‘which truth is inwardly preparing itself to converge with the real?’ is also Bartra’s. Bartra’s book is available in English in a rather carefully produced edition; Christopher J.Hall’s translation is remarkable, especially considering the challenge of Bartra’s prose; the Rutgers University Press edition is handsome and full of illustrations. The publisher also took great care in the marketing of the book. The book jacket includes a blurb by Carlos Fuentes who praises Bartra for ‘dissecting the idea of being Mexican’. Ironically, the idea of being Mexican is one that Fuentes himself helped to crystallize in his role of the great global promoter of all things Mexican. In sum, The Cage of Melancholy will serve internationally to demystify the issue of Mexicanness and to transgress the borders of academic ghettos by breaking into the current widespread debates regarding modernity, identity and nationalism. Its availability in English will contribute both to those who study Mexico and to the entire discussion on modernism and nationalism in our fin-de-siècle in which these issues acquired novel and astonishing actuality. Notes 1 Small wonder, these are two of the few Spanish neologisms accepted in American English. 2 According to Christopher J.Hall’s translation, ‘lit. shorn one’. ‘Refers to a Mexican social type from the working class noted for his coarse, uneducated, uncouth language and behavior.’

Notes on contributors JOHN CLARKE is on the Faculty of Social Sciences, the Open University, UK… NORMAN K.DENZIN is Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign, USA…CHRISTINE GERAGHTY is a full-time officer for NALGO and lectures in Film Studies for the BFI and Birkbeck College, London, UK…HERMAN GRAY teaches in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA…MICHAEL GREEN is head of the Department of Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, UK…STUART HALL is Professor of Sociology at the Open University, UK. He has most recently co-edited two of the four volumes of the Open University’s Sociology Course on Modernity and a special issue of the journal Ten-8… JOKE HERMES is in the Department of Communication at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands…SUREN LALVANI teaches in the Humanities Division of PennState University, Harrisburg, PA, USA…KIRSTEN MARTHE LENTZ is a doctoral student in the American Civilization Program at Brown University, USA… ANGELA McROBBIE lectures in Sociology at Ealing College of Higher Education. Her latest book is Feminism and Youth Culture…JANET NEWMAN teaches in the Department of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham, UK…SEAN NIXON is a Lecturer in Communication and Cultural Studies at the University of North London, UK…MAURICIO TENORIO teaches at Stanford University, USA. Books Received from Publishers Winter–Spring 1993 Alvarado, Manuel, Buscombe, Edward and Collins, Richard (1993) editors, The Screen Education Reader: Cinema, Television, Culture, New York: Columbia University Press. Borjas, George J. and Freeman, Richard B. (1992) editors, Immigration and the Work Force: Economic Consequences for the United States and Source Areas, A National Bureau of Economic Research Project Report, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brock, Peter (1992) ‘Folk Cultures and Little People: Aspects of National Awakening in East Central Europe’, East European Quarterly, New York: Columbia University Press. Dean, Kenneth and Massumi, Brian (1992) First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot, Brooklyn: Autonomedia. Debouzy, Marianne (1992) editor, In the Shadow of the Statue of Liberty: Immigrants, Workers, and Citizens in the American Republic, 1880—1920, Urbana: University of Illinois. Docherty, Thomas (1993) editor, Postmodernism: A Reader, New York: Columbia University Press. Goodwin, Andrew (1992) Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and

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Popular Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Hays, Michael (1992) editor, Critical Conditions: Regarding the Historical Moment, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jara, Rene and Spadaccini, Nicholas (1992) editors, Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus, Hispanic Issues Volume 9, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jenkins, Henry (1992) What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic, New York: Columbia University Press. Lamont, Michele and Fournier, Marcel (1992) editors, Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lieven, Dominic (1992) The Aristocracy in Europe, 1815–1914, New York: Columbia University Press. Noriega, Chon A. (1992) editor, Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rapping, Elayne (1992) The Movie of the Week: Private Stories/Public Events, American Culture, Volume 5, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schwichtenberg, Cathy (1993) editor, The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Culture Theory, Boulder: Westview Press. Spanos, William V. (1993) The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism, Pedagogy and Cultural Practice, Volume 1, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wetherell, Margaret and Potter, Jonathan (1992) Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation, New York: Columbia University Press.

INDEX VOLUME 7 Articles Carol Becker The education of young artists and the issue of audience p. 46 Scott Bravmann Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston: Hughes, biography and queer(ed) history p. 311 John Clarke and Janet Newman The right to manage: a second managerial revolution? p. 76 Ava Collins Intellectuals, power and quality television p. 28 Michael Eric Dyson Be like Mike?: Michael Jordan and the pedagogy of desire p. 64 Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani Crosscurrents, crosstalk: race, ‘postcoloniality’ and the politics of location p. 292 John Frow Knowledge and class p. 240 Henry A.Giroux Living dangerously: identity politics and the new cultural racism: towards a critical pedagogy of representation p. 1 Herman Gray African-American political desire and the seductions of contemporary cultural politics p. 15 Stuart Hall Culture, community and nation p. 1 Dick Hebdige Redeeming witness: in the tracks of the Homeless Vehicle Project p. 173 Joke Hermes Media, meaning and everyday life p. 142 bell hooks Eros, eroticism and the pedagogical process p. 58 Abdul R.JanMohamed Some implications of Paulo Freire’s border pedagogy p. 107 Suren Lalvani Photography, epistemology and the body p. 91 Kirsten Marthe Lentz The popular pleasures of female revenge (or rage bursting in a blaze of gunfire) p. 25 Peter McLaren Multiculturalism and the postmodern critique: towards a pedagogy of resistance and transformation p. 118 Angela McRobbie Shut up and dance: youth culture and changing modes of femininity p. 56 Stephen Muecke Studying the Other: a dialogue with a postgrad p. 324 Sean Nixon Looking for the Holy Grail: publishing and advertising strategies and contemporary men’s magazines p. 116 Tony Schirato My space or yours? De Certeau, Frow and the meanings of popular culture p. 282 Roger I.Simon Forms of insurgency in the production of popular memories: the Columbus quincentenary and the pedagogy of counter-commemoration p. 73 David Trend Nationalities, pedagogies and media p. 89 Janet Wolff On the road again: metaphors of travel in cultural criticism p. 224

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Pilar Bellver Fernández Retamar p. 336 Ian Buchanan Reading the writing on the wall: Moscow Graffiti: Language and Subculture by John Bushnell p. 158 Norman K.Denzin Where has postmodernism gone? p. 156 Tim Dwyer The value of realpolitik in ‘Blandsville’ p. 330 Christine Geraghty On women’s screens p. 164 Michael Green Vox populi p. 168 Robert Harvey Rimbaud and the Paris Commune p. 339 Mauricio Tenorio Roger Bartra’s The Cage of Melancholy: Identity and Metamorphosis in the Mexican Character p. 172 Janet Thumim Marginal matters: Television and Women’s Culture: The Politics of the Popular edited by Mary Ellen Brown p. 147 Ian Ward A new media age: The Media and Democracy by John Keane p. 153