Field Statement# 1: Communication, Culture, Social Formation

Sean Johnson Andrews Field Advisor: Tim Gibson Committee Chair: Paul Smith FINAL DRAFT 27 April 2006 Field Statement #1: Communication, Culture, Social Formation TABLE OF CONTENTS I. FOUNDATIONS II. MASS SOCIETY, MASS CULTURE, PROPAGANDA III. THE LIMITING EFFECTS OF AMERICAN PLURALISM IV. MEDIA ECOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM V. CRITICAL REVIVAL: POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COMMUNICATION AND CULTURAL STUDIES VI. AUDIENCE ANALYSIS, POST STRUCTURALISM, AND PLURALIST RETRENCHMENT VII. MANY HAPPY RETURNS VIII. BIBLIOGRAPHY JOHNSON ANDREWS - 2 - FIELD #1 “[I]f the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present—I am speaking of the ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be.” Karl Marx, 1843 1 “Certainty stimulates orthodoxy, the frozen rituals and intonations of already witnessed truth, and all the other attributes of a theory that is incapable of fresh insights. It represents the end of the process of theorizing, of the development and refinement of new concepts and explanations which, alone, is the sign of a living body of thought. Capable still of engaging and grasping something of the truth about new historical realities.” Stuart Hall, 1983 2 The purpose of this field is to explore some of the major theories of mass communication, society and culture that have led up to and departed from Cultural Studies as it was established in Birmingham in the 1970s. A secondary goal will be to position these theoretical legacies within the field to show the tensions that created between them in their struggle for the dominant definition of the field, a definition which creates symbolic capital and effects in the larger social field. It is my understanding that these different theoretical paradigms are only constituted in tension with other intellectual and social forces and are, thus, integrated into the very social and cultural object they purport to describe. This understanding is a result of my own intellectual, historical position, influenced by certain theories of marxism, Bourdieu and Cultural Studies that the field is building up to and out from. Thus, I am unable to claim complete objectivity myself, but must admit that I am working through similar social and cultural processes and assumptions. In a circular way, however, this points back to the main purpose of the field: my goal is to better understand the history of these assumptions and processes. For the purposes of this field, as stated in my proposal, I am looking at theories of the relationship between: material social relations, including economic and political realities and categories such as classes, race, gender, nations and nation-states; meaningful cultural practices and products, which this field will argue, in some way reflect and/or legitimate these material social relations; certain forms of communication, often mediated by technological innovations; and, in some cases, the consciousness of the individual subject. If this sounds too general, it is only because much of what is at stake in the field below is the ability to define the divisions and determinant position between these general categories. Most of the frameworks will not divide these categories as I have, but will see them as overlapping in significant ways and all will see one or another as having a more powerful effect on the others. 1 2 Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, Second ed. (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1972). Stuart Hall, "The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees," in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 3 - FIELD #1 I. FOUNDATIONS contents bibliography Following from the above outline, the theories of Mass Society and Mass Culture are rooted in an intellectual tradition of their own and are the result of an already present debate. They are also adapting these earlier paradigms in order to explain dramatic historical changes. Since the field is more concerned with the ideas leading up to cultural studies in the last third of the 20th century, I won’t be focusing much on these older paradigms, but it is worth noting the inflection given to the categories of the field by a few of these earlier models. Of Marx’s Capital, Louis Althusser says, “it is, in principle, the theory which ‘opens up’ to scientific knowledge the ‘continent’ of [the humanities and Social Sciences].” 3 Indeed Marx did play a key role in 19th century thinking on society. Although there is debate about Althusser’s placement of Marx at the center of classical sociological thought, 4 Marx’s attempt at drafting a science of social relations “exists in nineteenth century thought like a fish in water.” 5 It was a time of sweeping changes in Western Europe, wherein capitalist industrialization shifted demographics to urban areas and democratic challenges to absolutist rule shifted power, creating what Foucault calls “populations” 6 and leading to what Karl Polanyi calls “the discovery of society.” 7 Though there was fervent intellectual attention from a variety of perspectives trying to describe and contain this object, for Polanyi, political economists were crucial. Polanyi goes as far as saying that social scientists “should rank as the intellectual parents of the mechanical revolution:” “The discovery of economics was an astounding revelation which hastened greatly the transformation of society and the establishment of the market system, while the decisive machines had been inventions of uneducated artisans some of whom could hardly read or write. 8 Polanyi’s argument points to one of the central dilemmas of this field, namely whether ideas (as culture, communicated) or material relations are the dominant movers of history. His claim is that the ideas of political economists, in this case, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, their conceptions of society—and how best it could function—led to a conscious, state-led organization of society along utilitarian, free market lines which assisted the expansion of the industrial revolution. In other words, it wasn’t that the material conditions changed, as I indicated above, and ideas were offered to make sense of them; it was the ideas themselves that helped lead the 3 Louis Althusser, "Preface to Capital Volume One," in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).72. 4 George Ritzer, Classical Sociological Theory (New York, NY: McGraw Hill, 2000). Ritzer says that while Marx was an important catalyst to classical sociology it was mostly as a response against him. Nevertheless, he becomes more important in the mid twentieth century. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things; an Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1971). 262. I hope my feelings on the next line (“that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else”) will be implied below. 6 5 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), Michel Foucault and Colin Gordon, Power/Knowledge : Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, 1st American ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980). 7 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001). Ch. 10 Ibid, 125; for more on the lack of science in the technological innovations of Western Europe’s industrialization, see Andre Gunder Frank, Reorient : Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). It should also be noted that Frank’s central argument is that all of Western Social theory is wrong since it fails to place western economic development in a global context. Again, I disagree. 8 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 4 - FIELD #1 social, material changes. On the other hand, Polanyi felt (in distinction from Hayek) that it was not ideas which created the response to these changes: it was simply a spontaneous reaction to the material conditions. As the other field points out, defining which of these is spontaneous and which is planned becomes a key locus of struggle. Both Bentham and Mill, despite their paeans to democracy, were mostly concerned with having popular power get out of control. On some level, they agreed that, if the benefits of modernity (though they wouldn’t have called it this) were to be enjoyed and furthered, there had to be forces of control over the growing mass of people crowding into urban settings. Betham, who is infamous in Cultural Studies for Foucault’s discussion of his ideal prison, devised plans for factories which would create a material discipline of the working subjects; Mill wanted just enough democracy and no more. 9 But their ideas about how this would work inspired many at the time to help bring it about. Marx and Engles’ The German Ideology addresses this sort of argument as made by “The Young Hegelians.” Marx and Engles saw this group of idealist reformists as being “the staunchest conservatives” since “they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world.” 10 The most popular passage, which will become very important in the section on Cultural Studies and the Political Economy of Communication, appears in a section titled “On the production of consciousness:” The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas. 11 Likewise, “the existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class.” 12 In other words, ideas are not the movers of history, but instead the latter is rooted in the material relations of particular social formations and the consciousness that they create. These ideas may serve to reinforce the material relations, but they do not create them: the socioeconomic infrastructure determines the ideological superstructures. Countering the frantic anxiety about uncontrollable masses that pervaded his time, Marx saw one of the positive attributes of industrial society as being the communion of workers in the industrial setting. The communication that Marx saw as important to the change of social relations was not the mass mechanisms of ideology formation, but what might be called an extension of the model 9 cf: Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers : The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, Rev. 7th ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999). ch. V. Heilbroner, however, brackets any discussion of On Liberty, Mill’s most important work for libertarian philosophy. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Mineola, NY: Dover Thrift, 2002). Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader. Ibid, 172. Ibid, 173. 10 11 12 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 5 - FIELD #1 of the public sphere that had produced Bourgeois revolutions of the previous century. 13 By bringing together people from the surrounding rural areas and putting them in communication with one another, having them share common experiences, they would inevitably create a new understanding of the social formation—a working class culture—and their place in it. 14 Then, also like the earlier revolutions, they would work together to bring about change. The earlier revolutions would be extended to their logical conclusion: freedom should be universal, not, as Wood has called it, a “political freedom based on an economic unfreedom.” 15 In this way, Marx’s ideas rested firmly in the Enlightenment and he believed that, if these ideas and ways of being had both constituted and been constituted by certain inevitable changes in the material and social relations, then the logical conclusion was that this revolution would continue until it included all people as those relations continued to involve all people and the contradiction of this inequality at the heart of the liberal project was resolved into a true equality. Thus Marx was a firm believer in the need for capitalism to bring people together in order for it to lead to the next step in the evolution of social relations. This would be brought about simply by material conditions in the social formation itself. It would be the communion of the factory that would help instigate the communication among the workers would bring about a new set of intersubjective meanings, i.e. a culture, which would lead them recognize their role in the production process (i.e. class consciousness) and to believe in the necessity of working toward a new way of organizing themselves. In his purest moments, Marx saw the changing of ideas as being a sort of meiotic effect. Simply changing the ideas without the social process wouldn’t change much, and the ideas themselves would only be truly changed if the social process did. In many ways, Marx was not alone in his belief that this is the way things would progress. It was evident to most elites in industrializing nations that older cultural forms which led to cohesion of the social formation were no longer adequate and without them the newly industrialized workers would be likely to come up with a replacement. Since communism and socialism, of which Marx was only one of many thinkers, were in the air at the time, the hope was that there would be a way to contain the anarchy without it leading to the kind of thing that Marx predicted and, in part, had observed. The early sociologist August Comte, like Nietzsche, felt that modern society had, effectively, killed God—or at the very least, dissipated the power of organized religion, along with most other traditional forms of community identity. This was done through both the ideas of scientific rationality and the reorganization of society. But, believing that ideas were more important signifiers of progress than actual social relations, Compte felt that this was simply part of an 13 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere : An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). Though this is obviously abusing Habermas’ idea somewhat, I think it is a fair abuse: I am here referring in part to his discussion of the separation of the political and economic spheres which helped to produce the Public Sphere, and the tacit promise within the latter that there would be a way for people to gain both the economic property and political power to participate. The fact that it was the political sphere that became the focus of equality, instead of the economic, is the undercurrent of Habermas’ thought and leads me into the discussion from Wood below. This is more like the argument of Nancy Fraser in her discussion of the role of subaltern counterpublics in Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Ellen Meiksins Wood, "The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism," New Left Review 127, no. May/June (1981). 14 15 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 6 - FIELD #1 evolution to the highest form of rationality “positivism.” 16 He thought, like Mill and Bentham, that the idea of the free individual could only go so far when it was considered in reference to society as a positivist phenomenon: “true liberty is nothing else than the rational submission to the …laws of nature.” 17 The laws of nature were based on achieving order and, according to Ritzer, “ Comte sought a society based on what he viewed as the positive idea of duties rather than on individual rights. The idea of duties was seen as a positive notion both because it was more scientific [e.g. “precise”] and because it had a calming influence on people’s egoism as well as the rampant egoism of the day. Instead of focusing on their individual rights, people were urged to concentrate on their duties to the larger society. 18 According to Ritzer, Comte saw this as an ideology that would help the working class see their true role in society and keep them from being overly influenced by the ideology of Marxism. Comte, thus, believed that ideas would rule in producing and maintaining “order”—in other words, to keep the current liberal order intact. This meant staving off anyone asking for a continuation of the revolution: better that they recognize their place in society. Along these same lines, the question of how to organize the anarchy of industrial society, and the question of what was at stake, was often posed in terms of culture. In Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold posits the problem in optimistic terms: in the face of materialism and mechanization, with the democratization of society, there was much possibility for anarchy. But now the iron force of adhesion to the old routine—social, political, religious—has wonderfully yielded; the iron force of exclusion of all which is new has wonderfully yielded; the danger now is, not that people should obstinately refuse to allow anything but their old routine to pass for reason and the will of God, but either that they should allow some novelty or other to pass for these too easily, or else that they should underrate the importance of them altogether, and think it enough to follow action for its own sake, without troubling themselves to make reason and the will of God prevail therein. Now, then, is the moment for culture to be of service, culture which believes in making reason and the will of God prevail, believes in perfection, is the study and pursuit of perfection, and is no longer debarred, by a rigid invincible exclusion of whatever is new, from getting acceptance for its ideas, simply because they are new. 19 For Arnold, a common culture was needed to unify these newly minted social relations. What Arnold calls anarchy is not the necessary result of the material relations and cannot be reduced to ideology. Arnold believed that by reading and appreciating “the best which has been thought and said in the world” (“the world” aka “the English canon”), the “masses” would be inclined toward order, “sweetness and light.” This transcendental notion of culture was eventually enshrined in the notion of English literature that was promoted with the hopes of securing hegemony both domestically and in the increasingly intemperate peripheries of the British empire. In any case, it 16 17 18 19 Ritzer, Classical Sociological Theory. chapter 3 Ibid. p. 95 Ibid. p 101. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (http://www.classicauthors.net/Arnold/culture/: Great Literature Online). 10-11 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 7 - FIELD #1 supposes that culture can have an ideological effect that will help guide people to their proper place. An alternative to this construction (though several decades later), presented a compelling theory for later sociologists: Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 20 In this work, Weber notes the differences between the economic performance of nation-states that are predominantly Catholic and those that are predominantly Protestant and concludes that there is something peculiar to the Protestant religion that makes its practitioners inherently more successful economically. Attributing the Protestant work ethic to a combination of the democratization of the Catholic “calling”—such that, whatever you did, you were doing the work of God so you’d best do it well—and the increase of personal savings (which could later be invested) rooted in a Puritanical denial of material pleasures, Weber saw specific ideologies as assisting in the growth and maintenance of a certain social formation. Here Weber is actually arguing that not only does culture have a cohesive effect, but it actually leads to a different form of material development. In other words, cultural developments create effects within the social formation. Here Weber is like Polanyi in another way which opens up an important dynamic: the ideas that they claim to be responsible for the formation of material society are also the ideas of the ruling class. They may be right that Calvinist ministers and rational managers or Jeremy Benthem’s assistants led some sort of social change, but their dominance could have been a result of their legitimacy and position within the social formation. In other words, their observations don’t necessarily contradict the idea that, “ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,” but they also don’t explain how the ruling class got to be the rulers. It also assumes, as C.W. Mills later says of Parsons’s “grand theory” of Structural Functionalism, that these ideas were believed in a universal way, asking any questions of how—and how deeply—these ideas are legitimate in and of themselves. On the other hand, this shows another key difficulty in framing the field, one which Marx might be hard pressed to admit: that it is only through ideology that the empirical world can be represented. This gets closer to what Durkheim later saw as a connection between collective consciousness and collective representations, though with a significantly different derivation. Durkheim had a more materialist—or at least empirical—notion of how this was to develop. He saw the common culture as less important in creating order than the material relations themselves. Here he is linked more with Marx in his belief in the social constraints being naturally occurring, claiming that, although the society developed certain “social facts” that were of a non-material nature, these were first and foremost a result of, and only observable through, the material relations in society. 21 In modern society this meant looking at the “division of labor in society” and the kinds of “solidarity” it produced among people. In contrast to Marx, Durkheim believed that the division of labor helped to reduce the amount of conflict in its resultant social formation because it created interdependence; in contrast to Comte, he saw this reduction of conflict as an opportunity to develop, rather than stifle, the Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, 1930 ed. (New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 2001). 21 20 Emile Durkheim and Steven Lukes, The Rules of Sociological Method, 1st American ed. (New York: Free Press, 1982). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 8 - FIELD #1 consciousness of the individual qua individual. Also in contrast to Comte, Durkheim saw the ideological solidarity as being produced from the relations themselves rather than being external to them. In addition to contract law (e.g. private property) which underpinned modern society, the division of labor created an “organic solidarity” because the members are united by ties which extend deeper and far beyond the short moments during which the exchange is made. Each of the functions that they exercise is, in a fixed way, dependant upon others, and with them, forms a solidary system. Accordingly, from the nature of the chosen task permanent duties arise. Because we fill some certain domestic of social function, we are involved in a complex of obligations from which we have no right to free ourselves. There is, above all, an organ upon which we are tending to depend more and more; this is the State. 22 Included in this, maybe even central to it, is the notion that a social hierarchy is a necessary and natural state of affairs. Thus, though Durkheim is similar to Marx in deriving the ideology and culture from the social formation itself, he differs in where this will likely lead and what the failure of this process of structural enculturation might lead to: not a broad social revolution, but the individual experience of anomie. This is similar to Marx’s concept of alienation, but also very distinct; among other differences, anomie is an individual psychosis rather than a structural condition shared by everyone in a class. As Ritzer explains, Durkheim believed that the structural division of labor in modern society is a source of cohesion that compensates for the declining strength of the collective morality. However, the thrust of his argument is that the division of labor cannot entirely make up for the loosening of the common morality, with the result that anomie is a pathology associated with the rise of organic solidarity. Individuals can become isolated and be cut adrift in their highly specialized activities. They can more easily cease to feel a common bond with those who work and live around them. 23 Durkheim’s understanding of the problems of modern society was an early attempt to nullify the structural condition of alienation: it might have been related to the class structure or the loss of community, but the failure to be properly socialized was a condition of the individual consciousness not adapting to current conditions. This isolation of the individual experience in the division of labor and the structural conditions that it imposes on the consciousness of the individual is directly related to the ideas of Freudian psychoanalysis. Though often not understood in these terms, Terry Eagleton provides a succinct summary of this by saying, “If Marx looked at the consequences of our need to labor in terms of the social relations, social classes, and forms of politics which it entailed, Freud looks at its implications for the psychical life.” 24 I mention Freud here because his influence on theories of democracy and society as they develop in the early twentieth century, though his significance is Robert Bellah, ed., Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society: Selected Writings, The Heritage of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). p. 111. 23 24 22 Ritzer, Classical Sociological Theory. p. 190. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory : An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). p. 132. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 9 - FIELD #1 probably more in the way that he differs from Marx in his understanding of the individual. Whereas Marx, a product of the enlightenment, and believes in the inherent rationality of the individual, Freud sees the individual as inherently irrational, whose irrational drives were suppressed in order to function in society. Though he is not speaking to Freud at the time, Durkheim does say that this only works in one direction. In his Rules of the Sociological Method, he specifically rejects the psychological causality moving from the individual to the society, saying that the psychical element is too general to predetermine the course of social phenomenon. Since it does not imply one social form rather than another, it cannot explain such forms. 25 Freud basically agrees with this assessment in a 1922 study Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego where he says that “from the very first, individual psychology …is at the same time social psychology as well, 26 an assertion that had already become prevalent at the time he was writing in the Chicago School writings of George Herbert Mead on sociology, William James on psychology, and John Dewey in political philosophy, all of which will important for shaping this field as it develops in the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. Still Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, clearly believes that the role of society to make sure that it tames its individuals. He doesn’t see this as something that is morally right or ethically good but practically necessary. Freud sees religion and nationalism—to name a few—as ideologies that the state must promote in order to keep its subjects/citizens in line. By this, he doesn’t mean keeping them from overthrowing the state or revolutionizing the means of production, but simply keeping them from murdering one another or otherwise seeking “happiness” in some way. On the flipside, however, subjects/citizens submit to these common cultural norms because it gives them a sense of security: in the face of sweeping changes at the height of capitalist modernity—or at least at the moment when a generation still existed that could remember a time before the “Creative Destruction” of the market was in full swing—the average citizen of the US or Western Europe needed some form of solice and a common culture, even if imposed from above, was better than nothing. Or, in any case, that is what Freud hoped. The Chicago School, somewhat like Durkheim, saw this as a more organic process—seeing the process of adopting a culture (or for them, a meaning or symbol) as more interactive. Still the goal was the same: to have a system of shared understandings. The question became how to effect that. These various social theories, as well as more specific ideas about social psychology, were very influential in the early twentieth century as will be shown. Their connection to the ideas that are normally discussed in communication theory is not always highlighted as such, but the as becomes evident in the field as a whole, connection between social and cultural theories and ideas about the function of communication and the relevant technologies and the role they do, can, or should play in relation to the social formation. They also point to the importance of the concept of communication in directing the development and discipline of civil society. For alongside the increase in urban population, the nineteenth and 25 26 Durkheim and Lukes, The Rules of Sociological Method. p. 132. Quoted in Stuart Ewen, P R! : A Social History of Spin, 1st ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1996). p. 139. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 10 - FIELD #1 early twentieth centuries see a dramatic expansion of the means of transmitting goods and information; alongside the discovery of society, there is what Armand Mattelart has called The Invention of Communication. 27 In his introduction to the English edition Mattelart warns against a “mediacentric” perspective on communication and points to the way it has been constructed as an idea and a practice starting from the early Enlightenment. Mattelart’s extensive discussion of “communication” can’t be easily summarized, but in short, the tension has been between its potential for creating more widespread circulation of information, resulting in an increase in democratic participation, and, alternatively, its use to impose “social and productive order.” When communication is discussed in the context of social formation, it is often inflected with this “mediacentric” understanding which equates communication with communication technology and sees the latter as either an inevitable result of a certain social formation or vice versa. The former is most evident in traditions stemming from Marx while the latter is available in its most concentrated form in theories of Media Ecology. But the idea that society is—or can be— structured by a certain use or availability of communication technology is present at least since Carlyle discussed the power of the “fourth estate” and mused “Invent the printing press and democracy is inevitable.” 28 Of course this result is by no means assured, as illustrated by the tension Mattelart points to above; the potential that once media have social legitimacy as democratic means of communication, they can just as easily be used to spread propaganda and to control and monitor populations. The latter became a real concern among social theorists after WWI but then, mysteriously, began to recede at the very moment that broadcasting made it a much greater possibility. 29 This attempt to use communication technology as a force for ordering society is rooted in the longstanding concern of classical sociology—such as in Comte and Durkheim . This concern is less with the material differences or even ideological tensions within society, but instead speaks about what holds it together and makes it work—or, more importantly, what made it work in the past and what has changed that needs to be dealt with in order to reinstate that order. The rise of mass circulation and then broadcasting propose possible solutions to this problem even as they create new ones by increasing the flow of democratic information. If there is one common cultural value that informs much of the work in this field it is the concern over these anxieties: the possibility of expanding democratic participation versus giving control of society to “the herd;” the libratory role that forms of public communication have as they bring more people into the realm of the public and the oppressive possibilities of mass propaganda; increasing the amount, speed, and quality of information available versus the inability of any one human to make sense of it all. All of these, rooted in one way or another in the changes of 27 28 29 Armand Mattelart, The Invention of Communication (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Quoted in John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens: Swallow Press, 1991). p. 110. Here I am indebted to Gitlin’s opening statements regarding the effects paradigm discussed in section 3, Todd Gitlin, "Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm," Theory and Society 6, no. 2 (1979). Gitlin opens this artcle with a statement to this effect. As should be clearer from the sections below, he refers to the fact that the propaganda school of research was basically chased out of the university in the early 1930s. This was also, roughly, the same time that the national radio networks were consolidated and it became possible for one broadcaster to reach listeners throughout the country. Sufficed to say that though it might not have been a coordinated effort on the part of broadcasters and academic is clear that he doesn’t think they were asking the right questions. On the schools of propaganda research, cf: J. Michael Sproule, "Propaganda Studies in American Social Science: The Rise and Fall of the Critical Paradigm," Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987). Sproule’s book length intellectual history on this subject is discussed more below. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 11 - FIELD #1 western, industrial modernity, are present in the early twentieth century and will reappear periodically throughout it. II. MASS SOCIETY, MASS CULTURE, PROPAGANDA contents bibliography In the early 1900s, this anxiety was not just an academic issue, but entered the consciousness of the newly formed public as well as the political elites. Here commentators struggle with the value (ideological and real) of expanding democratic participation and the fear of “the revolt of the masses.” With the increase in urban populations, the rise of nationalism, technological advancements such as the telegraph and radio and their increasing monopoly, market orientation, and the rationalization of propaganda these anxieties became more pronounced. Though many of these factors exist in nascent form in the nineteenth century, it is the early twentieth century that informs the theories of José Ortega y Gasset, Gustave le Bon, Walter Lippman, John Dewey, Harold Lasswell, Edward Bernays, Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, and what would later be called the Frankfurt School. All of these theorists are analyzing what was considered a disturbing trend, a fascinating opportunity, a challenge for democracy, or all at once: namely, the possibility that emergent mass social formations could have their understanding of the world swayed by the powerful tools of propaganda and persuasion—or could resist any socialization at all and result in anarchy. Again, each set of theorists had a different force they saw as determinant. Alan Swingewood makes the understandable error of taking many of these historically based theories out of context in order to make comparisons between them 30 . Though several of these theories are similar, it behooves us to understand the changes that occurred in theories of the connection between culture, media and society and, especially, the real material changes on which they were based. José Ortega y Gasset and Gustave le Bon wrote their major works almost 40 years apart, but the sentiment that they express was not dominant throughout the intervening years. Each of them expresses the commonly held view that the rise of “The Masses” or “The Crowd” posed a threat to the social order and to “culture” in general. Laying the groundwork for this fear of the masses, especially in the United States, is the expansion of (white, male) populism following from the era of Jacksonian Democracy. As Michael Schudson argues, this early nineteenth century phenomenon gave rise to a variety of beliefs as well as new practices. Walter Lippmann argues something similar, in the later sections of his Public Opinion. He says that the kind of populism that Jackson promoted was not present in the original drafting of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Both documents reflect that the founding concern with giving too much control of the direction of the country to the passion of the masses and it was only the rearticulation of these founding documents by Jefferson that led people to believe they should have a more direct role in the democracy, preparing the tradition in which Andrew Jackson carried out his revolution. 31 30 31 I am perfectly aware of the contradiction of this statement after my previous section, but I am making it. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York,: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1922). 177-180. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 12 - FIELD #1 This change was also helped along by technological advances that made printing newspapers cheaper and, with the telegraph, collapsed space. The movement toward universal white male suffrage was met with a new product of public information: “news.” Penny papers “sold a product to a general readership and sold the readership to advertisers.” The unique product being sold tried to cater to a broad audience by claiming to represent “without partisan coloring, events in the world.” 32 This faith in the objectivity of news and the professionalization of journalists, along with the faith in the widespread distribution of facts as a way of creating a rational critical dialogue among a burgeoning bourgeoisie is the optimistic other to theorists of crowd psychology like Gustave Le Bon. Central to it is the rational individual that the Enlightenment posited, but which was already being questioned by those who had the platform to ask such broad social questions. As Swingewood observes, this questioning of the possibility of the Enlightenment project was often advanced in terms that “reject those democratic principles of government enshrined in bourgeois philosophy and revolution which they identify with cultural and social mediocrity.” 33 Nietzsche, T.S. Elliot and, eventually, José Ortega y Gasset all have the elite view that there are gradations in society and that the democratization of society leads the “mass man” to ignore the instructive moral and cultural leadership of the upper class. 34 The latter see the expansion of the democratic populous—not only in numbers, but in consciousness—as dangerous to social order. Ortega y Gasset is clear that he believes there should be a social division between the “minority” and the “masses” but unlike le Bon, he does not feel that these are essential categories. Le Bon, as Mattelart points out, clearly believes that there are differences between the races and the sexes—a prevalent idea among the social Darwinists and Phrenologist race scientists of his day 35 . Other observers of early twentieth century western democracies began to see something even more powerful: communication. Though there were changes in the function of the press at this point, as Schudson and others have pointed out, Gabriel Tarde is credited with changing the focus from the crowd to the “public.” As Mattelart summarizes, “the public (or publics), a product of the long history of the means of transport and dissemination ‘progresses along with sociability.’ People can only belong to one crowd at a time, but they can be part of several publics at the same time and this complexity requires examination of its effects on the evolution of groups.” 36 However, though Tarde points to a change in the consciousness, in part brought on by the change in the method of communication, 37 he still retains central assumptions of the psychology 32 Michael Schudson, Discovering the News : A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978). p. 28. Alan Swingewood, The Myth of Mass Culture (London: Macmillan Press, 1977). p. 3. Ibid. Ch. 1. 33 34 35 Mattelart, The Invention of Communication. p. 248-249; For more on the premises, evidence and cultural role of this science, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, Rev. and expanded. ed. (New York: Norton, 1996). Armand Mattelart and Michèle Mattelart, Theories of Communication : A Short Introduction (London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1998)., p.14. 36 An interesting aside is his connection with the media ecologists of the later twentieth century in statements like this: “The utilitarian terseness of telegrams and telephone conversations which are trespassing on the domains of correspondence, has repercussions on the style of the most intimate letters.” Quoted in Mattelart, The Invention of Communication., p. 253. 37 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 13 - FIELD #1 of crowds, namely that they are still subject to the powers of suggestion in the form of “imitation” as a “social bond.” These are the first hints of the possibility that facts themselves weren’t enough and that publicity could easily be co-opted by other powerful social forces. Stuart Ewen echoes the tension Mattelart points to in the idea of communication when he shows the way that the expansion of the social power of the press for the purposes of democracy helped, in some ways, to cement its legitimacy for purposes of control. Ewen tells of the muckrakers of the Progressive era who had a “liberal and materialist faith in the publicity of facts.” 38 Ewen observes the way that this era’s sensational publicity helped constitute a reading public; but he also notes that the public itself wasn’t “active in shaping the political life and social intercourse of the nation,” instead, “the new public was defined increasingly by its isolation and spectatorship:” 39 Unlike the public of the eighteenth century, which actualized itself in face-to-face conversation and inhabited the material locale of the marketplace, the modern public was, Tarde asserted, an essentially ‘spiritual collectivity, a dispersion of individuals who are physically separated and whose cohesion is entirely mental.” 40 This thread is picked up by German Sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies who makes a distinction between the Gemienschaft und Gesellschaft or “community” and “society,” saying that the former is being overrun by the latter. 41 The distinction between “community” and “society” recalls Durkheim’s differentiation of the somewhat paradoxically named mechanical society and organic society. The latter, explained above in terms of the division of labor, was supposed to replicate the bonds that were automatically significant (and hence mechanical) in earlier face to face communities. Tönnies, however, sees a dearth of any type of solidarity in modern society and believes that until a new form of integrative community is formed, chaos and irrationality will be bound to follow. The problem of turning the “Great Society” into the “Great Community” is a project that occupies the minds of most of the theorists in this era, though with starkly different understandings of how much participation individuals would have in shaping this transition. Thus at the turn of the twentieth century, in Western Europe and especially the United States, two dominant understandings of the role of communication emerge which are based on two understandings of the way that the individual consciousness, the social formation and common 38 Ewen, P R! : A Social History of Spin. p. 50. Ewen notes that “Publicity” and “public” used here are related to eighteenth-century notions which Habermas describes in his dissertation on the public sphere (p. 60); cf Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere : An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Ewen, P R! : A Social History of Spin. p. 59. Ewen is exaggerating a bit here, but seems to be staying true to the understanding of the era by people at the time. As to its unique insularity because it had a strong private sphere, this isn’t supported by Habermas who insists that the emergence of a public sphere was only possible with a strong private sphere. 39 Ibid. p. 68. As to his description of the role of the press in constituting a reading community, this is a process that Benedict Anderson argues is central to establishing the “Imagined Community” of the nation Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Rev. and extended ed. (London: Verso, 1991). Anderson, however, would point out that any “community” larger than a face to face community of a village (“and even those”) is imagined as a community and therefore mediated by some significant cultural technology or institution. This is especially true of the nation and thus there would be little opportunity for “the public” to “active in shaping the political life and social intercourse of the nation.” Nancy Fraser has a well-known critique of the limits on who was allowed to participate in what public sphere there was and Michael Schudson argues that there never was much of a participatory public sphere in the United States, even among the enfranchised. Both in Craig J. Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). 41 40 Ewen, P R! : A Social History of Spin. p. 71. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 14 - FIELD #1 culture coincide. These are, pace Lippmann in Public Opinion, inherent in the conversations about democracy in America 42 , but are given a new spin with contemporary developments. On the one hand, the anxiety about the expansion of civil society without a common consciousness (or, with the possibility of socialist or anarchist thought, the wrong kind of consciousness) and thus possibly undermining the social order; on the other a faith in the power of communication and democratic participation to keep powerful forces at bay by informing a rational public about their environment. In PR! Ewen chronicles the interesting theoretical reversal of these two trends in American political thought. He points to Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays as two bellwethers of this change. Namely, the rise of propaganda and public relations became the antidote to the anxiety about social order, but the already established legitimacy of “facts” and “news” was evacuated of any critical democratic potential as they became the tools of elite “consensus managers.” 43 These correspond to a paradigm shift mentioned about how the individual human consciousness works. The liberal tradition—which informs classical economics, Jacksonian Democracy and early 20th century Progressive politics in the US—assumes a rational, knowable self that is able to comprehend and base its understanding of the world through positivist, empirical facts. They are also fundamental to what Marx believes. These are in contrast to the understanding of the subject that emerges from the psychoanalytic theory of Freud or the social psychology of Le Bon and others. This tradition sees the individual as inherently irrational. Though there are rational elements to some decision making processes, the unconscious has far more influence on people’s decision making. Ewen cites Graham Wallas, an influence of Lippmann’s, as saying that, instead of “fact based appeals to reason,” “the empirical art of politics [. . .] consists largely in the creation of opinion, by the deliberate exploitation of subconscious, non-rational inference.” 44 In Public Opinion, Lippmann first tries to account for this—and retain his faith in something like a rationality—by saying that the problem isn’t that people are taken in by a lie, it is that there is a disconnect between what he terms “the world outside” and “the pictures in our heads. 45 ” In saying this, he is reading psychology as framed by William James. This understanding of the individual, and the effect of the social formation on the individual, does not deny the rationality of the human, but instead tries to explain the rationality by referencing the social conditions of its constitution. Lippmann tries to use this as an explanation of the problems he sees in the function of democracy. But he doesn’t make this an issue of class. He includes the powerful leaders of the world in this, saying, seemingly, that they can also have “patterns of apprehension” that cause them to (sometimes willfully) misunderstand the world. 42 Lippmann, Public Opinion. Lippmann actually says that he constitution of the US was more based on British monarchy in its attempt to “limit the sphere of popular rule,” but that Jefferson, during his presidency, “taught the American people to regard the Constitution as an instrument of democracy, and he stereotyped ideas, and even many of the phrases, in which Americans ever since have described politics to each other” (178). This led to a popular support for these ideas such that “in the course of twenty five years or so social conditions had changed so radically, that Andrew Jackson carried out the political revolution for which Jefferson had prepared the tradition” (179). [I just said this above] The same reversal occurs as we move to the next section, where the pragmatist demands of Dewey are basically enshrined in the scientific sociology of Parsons and Lazarsfeld. 44 45 43 Ewen, P R! : A Social History of Spin. p. 136. Lippmann, Public Opinion. esp. Ch. 1. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 15 - FIELD #1 So, in Lippmann’s defense of political leaders, they don’t always lie with the intent of deceiving: often they believe what they are saying. On the other hand, it becomes very difficult for people to correctly and comprehensively perceive the world in all its complexity, especially when distant events are often subject to propaganda (something Lippmann witnessed first hand during WWI.) What he ultimately suggests is that there should be a group of objective specialists who can distill the news and help direct both elites and “the public.” Their job would be to help define the situation and to give the public some means for democratic participation. However, in his more polemical sequel, The Phantom Public, Lippmann doubts that even this would solve the problem. Not only were the experts as likely to misconstrue the issues at hand, the entire idea of having a public was unworkable. Here he questions the idea of the public and critiques the nineteenth century notion of the organic community (pace Spenser and even Durkheim) at the same time that he accepts some of the more fundamental consequences of the division of labor. But first he re-emphasizes the practical problem he observed Public Opinion. In the book’s most colorful and oft quoted passages, he asserts that the ideal of democracy is unattainable in the current circumstances: It never occurs to this preceptor of civic duty to provide the student with a rule by which he can know whether on Thursday it is his duty to consider subways in Brooklyn or the Manchurian Railway, nor how, if he determines on Thursday to express his sovereign will on the subway question, he is to repair those gaps in his knowledge of that question which are due to his having been preoccupied the day before in expressing his sovereign will about rural credits in Montana and the rights of Britain in the Sudan. Yet he cannot know all about everything all the time, and while he is watching one thing a thousand others undergo great changes. Unless he can discover some rational ground for fixing his attention where it will do the most good, and in a way that suits his inherently amateurish equipment, he will be as bewildered as a puppy trying to lick three bones at once. 46 In other words it is an unattainable ideal to have a public readily informed on every issue that might now fall into the public’s purview. In part, he sees this as a sort of paradoxical problem of too wide a public and too concentrated a government. This is the ultimate result of the kind of organic solidarity Durkheim says corresponds to a highly evolved society with a hierarchical division of labor. Lippmann’s problem, however, is not with the division of labor itself. In fact, he takes his belief in the need for a specialized group even further and says that most technical questions should be left up to “insiders,” saying, “Only the insider can make decisions, not because he (sic) is a better man, but because he is so placed that he can understand and can act. The outsider is necessarily ignorant, usually irrelevant and often meddlesome, because he is trying to navigate the ship from dry land.” 47 In other words, there was a limit to the amount of intervention into “private” affairs the public should have. This is not a categorical imperative, however, as the public would be called upon only when there was a “crisis of maladjustment,” to intervene in order to quell a disturbance. 48 The latter, however, is vague and he offers few examples of when the public should intervene; his argument 46 47 48 Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York,: Transaction, 1993). p. 15. Ibid. p. 140. Ibid. p.188. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 16 - FIELD #1 for the cases when it shouldn’t show, roughly, where his loyalties lie. He takes issue with the growing dominance of the nation-state in the private affairs of individuals, especially its interventions in the business world. This also marks a shift for Lippmann. In his earlier writing, he had observed the way that private businesses were becoming more subject to the pressure of public opinion and, through public pressure, to regulatory measures by the government. 49 At that time, in 1914, he saw this as a reasonable result of the expansion of industry and recommended, roughly, that industry get used to it. As a liberal socialist, he thought there was a necessity in reform, but felt there were many questions left to be answered. But after World War I and the Russian Revolution, the “pictures in his head” no longer allowed for this assessment. By the time he wrote The Phantom Public he no longer had faith in anyone presuming to speak for the public interest nor did he believe that there was a public to have any interest in the first place: In practice, the organic theory of society means a concentration of power; that is, the way the notion of one purpose is actually embodied in affairs. And this, in turn means that men must either accept frustration of their own purposes or contrive somehow to frustrate that declared purpose of that central power which pretends it is the purpose of all. 50 The “men” in this scenario were not the “common men” or the “people,” but those insiders with a direct interest in the issues at hand. His apparent appeal to liberty and freedom, as most made in the US context, was basically an appeal to limit the government interference with the free market. But coupled with this, he sought to limit the amount of public pressure to which the government would be subjected. In other words, he sought to limit both civil society and state under the heading of the Public. At roughly the same time, the man known as “The Father of Spin,” Edward Bernays, was beginning to perfect the manipulation of news and publicity. 51 Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s nephew and believed first of all that people were irrational and could not be trusted to make reasonable decisions and that the answer to the dilemma was a there should be an elite manipulation of public opinion in order to maintain social order. So he set out to find a scientific way of doing so. While he was not alone in this endeavor, he was one of the most successful. Working for the US government’s Committee for Public Information during WWI and for various corporations and organizations before and after, Bernays contributed much to undermining any faith in the objectivity of facts and struck a blow to the theory of a rational critical public. He also helped to put into practice some of the ideas Lippmann had only thought about: telling people what they should care about and limiting their public participation to that of consumers. The latter was done through manipulating the very emotions and passions that political theorists like Lippmann saw as dangerous to decision making in politics. As Stuart Ewen makes clear in his book on Bernays and the history of PR!, Bernays thought this was necessary for a functioning democracy. But his understanding of democracy was roughly 49 50 51 Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (1914). Lippmann, The Phantom Public. p. 176. Ewen, P R! : A Social History of Spin, Larry Tye, The Father of Spin : Edward L. Bernays & the Birth of Public Relations, 1st ed. (New York: Crown Publishers, 1998). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 17 - FIELD #1 the same as Lippmann’s had become: that there should (and does) “exist an ‘intelligent few’ who have been charged with the responsibility of contemplating and influencing the tide of history.” 52 By the time Lippmann wrote The Phantom Public, propaganda had become the rule rather than the exception. Harold Lasswell, the same year, had published his treatise on Propaganda Technique in the World War which Michael Sproule describes as “less a handbook for critics wanting to spur grass-roots social change and more a theoretically informed treatise on how to manage the Great Society by means of symbols.” 53 Lasswell, Lippmann and many other communication professionals had accepted the “realist” notion that “governments had to control the opinions of their people.” 54 Part of this was due to the gathering force of propaganda in the interwar period and part to the gathering strength of the state and corporate interests relative to civil society. In addition to the dominant role of monopoly capitalism in western nations, this period, as Robert McChesney has shown in his recent historical work, was marked by an increase in the conglomeration of newspaper ownership and the nascent medium of radio was being quickly incorporated: what started out as a hobby for enthusiasts and held possibilities for educational or civic information, was quickly organized into a national broadcasting system. 55 This incorporation created the first nationwide mode of nearly instantaneous mass communication and, consequently, the first national audience. On the other hand, massive popular uprisings were occurring throughout western democratic countries and the pressure for the government to respond to perceived threats difficult to accept—as were the fascist movements springing up in supposedly democratic countries. 56 Thus, although Ortega y Gasset seems similar to people like Le Bon in his pessimism and elitism, by the time he was writing, in 1929, the ground had shifted significantly. In fact, where Le Bon’s observations are more speculative, Ortega y Gasset was witnessing some of the results of the theories of Le Bon coming to fruition. Even though a populist challenge to this elitism had been waged through muckraking campaigns, it had, in some ways, better prepared the “public” to become a “mass.” Not only were the institutional and social arrangements more cemented to control public opinion, but this became a joint goal of business, the state, and, eventually academia. He could be citing official state or corporate policy when he says that, “the stable, normal relation amongst men which is known as ‘rule’ never rests on force; on the contrary it is because a man or group exercises command [i.e. they have the consent of the governed] that they have at their disposition that social apparatus or machinery known as ‘force.’ [. . . .] Never 52 53 Ewen, P R! : A Social History of Spin. p. 9. J. Michael Sproule, Propaganda and Democracy : The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion, Cambridge Studies in the History of Mass Communications (Cambridge, U.K. ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997). p. 68. Harold Dwight Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in World War I, M.I.T. Studies in Comparative Politics (Cambridge, Mass.,: M.I.T. Press, 1971). 54 55 Sproule, Propaganda and Democracy : The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion. p. 69. Eric Barnouw, Tube of Plenty (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), Robert Waterman McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy : Communication Politics in Dubious Times, The History of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), Robert Waterman McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy : The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). In contrast to Polanyi’s focus on the primacy of ideas in the 19 century, he says that the rise of fascism is motivated by a type of widespread economic desperation that came from the over reliance on a free market. th 56 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 18 - FIELD #1 has anyone ruled on this earth by basing his rule on any other thing than public opinion” 57 . This is the real reason for the anxiety over the status of the public: namely that force alone couldn’t keep a ruler in power when faced with an angry mob. In other words, it was the possibility of direct democracy becoming a functioning reality that frightened them. The rise of propaganda—or as Bernays called it, Public Relations—led to a flourishing of social scientists who tried to document and investigate its effects. Though this represents a somewhat forgotten paradigm of communications research, Michael Sproule has carefully documented the aspects of this school of thought. Basically, the questions they were asking revolved around cataloging various instances of propaganda and trying to consider their efficacy. This is the dominant paradigm of communications research when Lazarsfeld and Katz enter the scene shortly afterwards. The important thing to note is that there was some empirical object these theorists were trying to grasp. 58 In addition to these communications scholars, another group of sociologists were trying to understand these changes and predict what could be done. These were already mentioned in reference to Lippmann, but their theories land up in quite different places than the latter, influenced as he was by the theories of Freud. The real difference between Freud and the Chicago School of sociology, ethnography and psychology is that the latter sees the psyche as largely a product of one’s environment and Freud sees the psyche as essential on some level. In addition to James’ discussion of the psyche, mentioned above, is the understanding of ethnography developed by Robert Ezra Park. This represents the Chicago School understanding of sociology by saying that the only way to truly understand the way that individuals perceive the world is to try to perceive the world from their position, i.e. through the participant observation method. I mention this only because it will have a great effect on later understandings of ethnography for Cultural Studies. More significant in the current debate was John Dewey, a contemporary of Lippmann, who was also a member of the Chicago School and saw things differently than Lippmann or Bernays. This was, in part, because he still retained the faith in a rational individual. But he also believed that everyone had a responsibility to make the democracy work: the idea of what was rational was contingent on the circumstances, and the circumstances were changing far faster than the rationality. In his assessment, “We have the physical tools of communication like never before. The thoughts and aspirations congruous with them are not communicated, and hence are not common;” and, recalling Tönnies earlier distinction: “Till the Great Society is converted into a Great Community, the Public will remain in eclipse. Communication can alone create a great 57 58 José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, trans. Anonymous (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1957). p. 92. Ellul, though writing much later, outlines many of the processes that Bernays used and propaganda researchers were trying to dissect from outside. In a way that somewhat justifies the critique as being hypodermic, he believes that there is a direct connection, a determinant relationship, between the cultural and political messages constructed by powerful people and the public. In his description of propaganda, he says it is less a process disinformation or specific moments of manipulation than it is a systemic and long term attempt to sway people’s attitudes. But his unequivocal subtitle shows the direction of the influence and power: the propagandists have the ability to change public opinion so that it is remains in favor of whatever policy or action being undertaken. Another somewhat quaint (i.e. analytically defunct) aspect of his theory in some way extends the dehumanizing effect of this process on the population subjected to it all the way to the top: just as there seems to be no agency for the audience, there isn’t really an agent constructing the propaganda. It is the result of a total process in which every producer of any form of mass communication seems to be implicated. In his understanding, not only is it difficult to resist the messages produced, but it is difficult not to produce them. Cf: Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (New York,: Knopf, 1972). See also discussion below of Sproule. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 19 - FIELD #1 community. Our Babel is not one of tongues but of signs and symbols without which shared experience is impossible.” 59 ] Dewey basically agrees with Lippmann in terms of the problems that modern society was up against. But he was adamant that Lippmann and other critics were approaching the problem in the wrong fashion. By critiquing liberalism as an idea, they overlook the historical development which took place to institute the forms of democracy they critique and, especially, the development of the state. He begins with this critique with a question of what the public is. Unlike Lippmann who defines the public in terms of interests, Dewey defines the public in terms of consequences. Lippmann says that the public is reconstituted around issues by the people who are merely interested. Dewey says that any time the consequences of a private interaction extend beyond those private actors, the effected parties constitute a public, whether they know it or not. The fact that they don’t know it, or that they aren’t informed enough about it, is a complicated problem. It is, in part, a result of the technological innovations in communications that had become mostly global through imperial powers (including the US). The ability to move this information quickly was useful, but the consciousness required to cope with it was underdeveloped. This was understood in the terms of the Chicago School sociology of William James, G.H. Mead and Robert Ezra Parks, among others, Addressing something like Durkhiem’s theory of the division of labor, Dewey claims that Combined activity happens among human beings; but when nothing else happens it passes as inevitably into some other mode of interconnected activity as does the interplay of iron and the oxygen of water. What takes place is wholly describable in terms of energy, or, as we say in the case of human interactions, of force. Only when there exist signs or symbols of activities and their outcome can the flux be viewed as from without, be arrested for consideration and esteem, and be regulated. 60 Along with calling for a new set of symbols, he chides scientists of his day for transmitting their results in esoteric language that citizens have a difficult time translating into information they can act upon. Here is where he parts ways most significantly with Lippmann: instead of recommending that only the people who already understand an issue be permitted to give input or political pressure, he issues a call to those “insiders” to make the issues they are involved with meaningful enough to the public for them to understand them. He ultimately dismisses Lippmann’s class of experts as being not only undemocratic, but unworkable because they would be illegitimate. This assessment is built on his understanding of the state as, basically, a tool of the society rather than a source of domination. Thus if there is a group of experts who claim to present objective knowledge would only be accepted if that knowledge could somehow be incorporated subjectively and critiqued therein. Due to his Chicago School position on symbolic interactionism, for Dewey it isn’t enough that science be accessible or that scientific concepts be activated and checked against the people who are 59 60 Dewey, The Public and Its Problems. p. 142. Ibid. p. 152. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 20 - FIELD #1 having the experience 61 , but even this would not result in scientific knowledge proper, as “a thing is fully known only when it is published, shared, socially accessible.”(176) In other words, it must be made public and the publicity must be directed towards informing the public of the truth of the matter. In some ways, this is not all that different than Lippmann’s specialized class of experts in terms of his vision of democracy: the world is now complex and not everyone will be able to understand everything (something Ortega y Gasset thought the average person unable to understand). And, like Lippmann, he thought the issues put before the public should help them be informed of what was at stake. But unlike Lippmann he still believed in the rationality of individuals and their capacity to learn, and, thus, he didn’t see the need to limit the number of social questions left up to them. Instead he thought that only when this knowledge was tested at the local level would it be true, legitimate and “known.” This, he thought, was especially true of knowledge produced regarding social phenomena and he was highly critical of what he called the “absolutist logic” of social science trying to masquerade as physical science. Instead, he says “The local is the ultimate universal and as near an absolute as exists;” thus, “Unless local community life can be restored, the public cannot adequately resolve its most urgent problem: to find and identify itself;” and, finally, to reiterate, his final paragraph meditates heavily on this theme, saying “publication is partial and the public which results is partially informed and formed until the meanings it purveys pass from mouth to mouth. [. . . .] We lie, as Emerson said, in the lap of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local community as its medium.” 62 This is, as mentioned before, precisely the mode of inquiry that Lazarsfeld takes in basing his universal theories of society on small scale, local semi-ethnographic research. Likewise, the investigations of Katz and others in the realm of the “diffusion of innovations” was based very much on making the use of propaganda ever more scientific in order to more greatly influence populations using precisely the two-step model proposed by Lazarsfeld and with an only slightly adapted understanding of the notions of symbolic interaction of the Chicago School, which helped them to better focus their efforts on creating true “communication.” Basically Dewey says that what is needed is communication and by communication he means not just technology but culture. Here he means the kind of interpersonal framework of communication that Grossberg discusses from a later Cultural Studies critique of the idea of “communication.” As Grossberg says, “‘Communication’ articulates the mediation in which the individuality of meaning is transcended in an experience of intersubjective meaning, and thus claims transcendental status for itself.” 63 Though Grossberg doesn’t name it as such, this is a basic tenet of what has been called the social behavioralism or Symbolic Interactionism of the Chicago School of American Sociology. As mentioned above, this theory states that that experiences are conditioned by both subjective and objective conditions, i.e. we can only really 61 In true populist style, here is Dewey’s formulation of this, “The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied. Popular government has at least created public spirit even if its success in informing that spirit has not been great.”(207) p. 215, 216, and 219. 62 63 Grossberg, L. (1997). The Ideology of Communication: Poststructuralism and the Limits of Communication. Bringing it All back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies. Durham, NC, Duke University Press: p49. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 21 - FIELD #1 experience something—and the object of science is only created—through “the world of common social experiences as symbolically formulated.” 64 This helps to inform participant observation social science of Park and others, in that, again, according to the next passage in the intro, “the basic datum for observation is a world in which other selves and objects have the same direct accessibility (though the completeness of the accessibility may vary) as the observer has of himself (sic).” This helps to justify the reasoning behind Park’s research as both a way of getting at a common social experience in subcultures, and as a way of conceiving experience in general. Of course these thoughts, assumptions, and concerns were by no means limited to thinkers in the liberal tradition. A thorough analysis of the Marxist inspired discussion of these issues is outside of my present concern and to be sure there is much that is unique (and varied) in the tack that Marxist inspired thinkers take on the questions of the relationship of politics, economics, and culture. But the same events were being observed by Marxists as liberals and, at least at this moment, they made many similar observations—particularly in regards to the way that meaning— and even individual consciousness—is created in and the product of certain material social relations. It is at this point that several of the most important theorists for the development of Cultural Studies are probing these questions, though from a slightly different perspective. Most examinations of theories of communication are limited to either “democratic” or “soviet” forms. But these are hardly separate realms, as is demonstrated by the many references to Leninist and Marxist understandings of society that come up in the US literature on the subject, if only as a contrast to what was presumed to be a more democratic formation. 65 Still critics of the manipulation of public opinion in the US often seem draw a line between these theorists as having starkly different goals. According to Perry Anderson, Marxist inspired thought attempts, during this period, to outline a political theory to accompany the more economic understanding of Marx 66 . This brought a different aspect to the ideas of Marx in that it wasn’t only the economic formation that would lead to a revolution which would change the culture and ideas: one also needed to promote political change and organization alongside the economic changes. For instance, Lenin felt that capitalist formation would inevitably lead to a different mindset, which would overcome the traditional cultures people found themselves in. This is evidenced in his critique of the Narodniks’ resistance to capitalism. 67 On the other hand he didn’t think that people themselves were willing to be subjected to this cultural degradation of their own volition and, thus, would hold up the progress of the revolution to socialism if they weren’t helped out of feudalism into capitalism—or at least industrialization. This was especially the case in the still semi-feudal society of pre-1917 Russia. This required a set of revolutionaries to help them understand and 64 George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, ed. Charles Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934). p. xix. This is, to be sure, a very partial description of my superficial understanding of this tradition. For a longer Cf: Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1984). 65 66 67 V. I. Lenin, "The Development of Capitalism in Russia," in Essential Works of Lenin: "What Is to Be Done?" And Other Writings, ed. Henry M. Christman (New York: Dover Publications, 1987). Most importantly, for Lenin was the way that it helped to reform patriarchal relationships between women and their fathers as the former were able to earn their own money through the industrialization of Russia. This perspective of Lenin and Marx of capitalism as a progressive force has recently been reiterated in reference to globalization in Meghnad Desai, Marx's Revenge : The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (London New York ;: Verso, 2002). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 22 - FIELD #1 undertake the revolution and, as he recommends in his essay, “what is to be done?” the founding of a newspaper to discuss and promote these issues. 68 Lukacs, in History and Class Consciousness, saw things surprisingly like the Chicago school, only from a much more philosophical perspective—and with an emphasis on structural (i.e. class) differences. Here he does much to refine the cruder distinctions made by Marx in The German Ideology and has an expansion of the discussion in Capital on the role of commodity production in producing a certain consciousness. But, writing shortly after the excitement of the Russian Revolution, there is a teleology to his belief in the inevitability of the continuation of this revolution. He sees the change in ideology as the result of a class coming into consciousness which is a result of a certain development of material relations and the level which they have attained. His discussion of reification is similar to that of Durkheim with regard to the uneven transition from “mechanical” to “organic” solidarity in so far as Lukacs sees social change—in this case, class revolution—as a dependent in the first instance on how developed the relations of production were and how fully they had replaced earlier forms of interconnection. He begins his discussion, as Marx in Capital Vol I, from the commodity as a form of social relations: “The distinction between a society where this form is dominant, permeating every expression of life, and a society where it only makes an episodic appearance is essentially one of quality. For depending on which is the case, all the subjective and objective phenomena in the societies concerned are objectified in qualitatively different ways.” 69 This argument, which Durkheim makes in a similar way when talking about the division of labor in society, is that the relations necessary for commodity production, and the fetishistic relationship that laborers have to their abstract labor embodied in commodities, have a deep effect on the subjective consciousness. Lukacs makes this clearer shortly after when he states, The commodity can only be understood in its undistorted essence when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole. Only in this context does the reification produced by commodity relations assume decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted by men towards it. Only then does the commodity become crucial for the subjugation of men’s consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expression and for their attempts to comprehend the process or rebel against its disastrous effects and liberate themselves from servitude to the ‘second nature’ so created. 70 Lukacs departs from the Chicago School, however, in a move that became important to both the Frankfurt School and, later Cultural Studies. He speculated on how the working class would become conscious of itself as a class and predicted that it would still be through a certain development of economic relations which would lead to a different mindset; but at the same time, the phenomenological aspects of the ontology of the working class was key to this transformation. Thus, through his studies of literature, he clearly saw the development of culture as important to this process. 68 69 Vladimir Il§ich Lenin and Henry M. Christman, Essential Works of Lenin (New York,: Bantam Books, 1966). György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness; Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971). p. 86. Ibid. p. 87. 70 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 23 - FIELD #1 Another Marxist scholar, who also seems to have faced Soviet censure, also had some views in common with those of the Chicago School, especially those of George Herbert Mead, was V.N Vološinov. 71 These are more coincidences than deep similarities, but they certainly agreed on the social nature of the individual consciousness and the process of language formation as a central component of social development. Here the direct target of Vološinov’s critique is Ferdinand Sassure, originator of structuralist linguistics, who claimed that the relation between signifiers and signifieds was arbitrary and that the only way to study language was by understanding its structure. Vološinov added to this a concern for class and control over the ideological refraction of utterances which Mead and the Chicago School mostly bracketed and Saussure was silent on. This concern for the use of power in forcing connotations in language was almost certainly based on some experiences in the Soviet setting, but it became quite relevant to later Cultural Studies scholars in their attempt to address structuralist linguistics. 72 Also influential and writing at this time was Antonio Gramsci. He is significant in this conversation because, holed up in an Italian prison, he came to many of the same conclusions that Bernays and Lippmann did about the way that the powerful had to acquire consent. But lurking behind his theory, and, unstated behind those of the USians was the admission that the need to use signs and symbols to inspire a community to action, the need to use propaganda to gain social control, was always backed up by the repressive apparatus of the state. Still, unlike Lukacs, he did not see the content of an ideology as necessarily based on the economic structure, but as more of a Neo-Machiavellian power play, of which economics was a key part. Still, because it was a power play, he saw it as being, necessarily, the precipitate of the interplay of forces, a negotiation between different interests for the broad approval of the public. 73 Here he was also developing a theory of what kind of strategies would be necessary in each particular circumstance—and the way in which one strategy would need to predominate in order for the revolution to succeed. Whereas Lippmann, to an extent, and certainly Bernays and Ortega y Gassett saw the need for some form of elite management of democracy in order to keep the masses from revolting, Gramsci was more interested in using similar methods to persuade them of their own class interest. Here the distinction of the Organic Intellectual is quite important, contrasted by both the elite class of Bernays and Lippmann and the professional revolutionaries of Lenin. 74 For Gramsci, the intellectual was not a universal category but was specific to the experience of (or had some connection with) a certain class. 75 Alongside 71 I will assume for the purposes of the field that this person existed and wrote this book: V. N. Voloshinov, Ladislav Matejka, and I. R. Titunik, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Studies in Language (New York,: Seminar Press, 1973). But I also realize that many people debate about whether his was actually just a pen name for Bahktin. The latter’s use of Vološinov was probably also inspired by his contemporaneous translation into English, which only occurred in 1973. Antonio Gramsci and Derek Boothman, Futher Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), Antonio Gramsci, Quintin Hoare, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, [1st ]. ed. (New York,: International Publishers, 1972), Antonio Gramsci and Louis Marks, The Modern Prince, and Other Writings (New York,: International Publishers, 1968). My interpretation of Gramsci is definitely indebted to Perry Anderson’s interpretation of Gramsci in Perry Anderson, "The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci," New Left Review I/100, no. Novermber-December (1976). 74 73 72 See section “The Intellectuals,” in Gramsci, Hoare, and Nowell-Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Anderson sees Gramsci as embodying the best of what the Western Marxist tradition has to offer because the latter was himself involved in agitation and activism. As the later scholars retreated further into the academy, their work became more disconnected from the experience and struggles of the working class. 75 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 24 - FIELD #1 Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, this meant that this group of organic intellectuals would be responsible for representing their particular class interest in the context of the struggle for legitimacy and state power. But the most influential scholars of this era—both in their own time and in the later revival in Cultural Studies—were those of the Frankfurt School. They are also a good way to cap off a discussion of the theories of the way communication and culture was seen in relation to both social formation and social change. The Frankfurt School (or what was initially called the Institute for Social Research), though it has a structuralist presupposition about the way that societies work, doesn’t hold the same views as either propaganda researchers or most in the tradition of the political economy of mass communication. The key difference is that, though they believe in a certain structuralism, it is not a top down structuralism. Much of the argument of, for instance, Horkheimer and Adorno in The Dialectic of Enlightmentment (especially the oft quoted chapter on the Culture Industry) hinges not on a completely top down understanding of propaganda (such as that of consciously being formed and promoted by the powerful. Nor was the danger only in the corporate ownership of the means of communication. The Frankfurt School was more concerned with what they might term “the social totality.” If they are influenced by any one of the theorists above, it is Lukacs. As Horkheimer said in his lecture (upon taking over as the director of the Institute) on the question that he felt needed to be addressed [P]resents an actualized version of some of the most ancient and important philosophical problems: the question of the connection between the economic life of society, the psychological development of its individuals and the changes within specific areas of culture to which belong not only the intellectual legacy of the sciences, art, and religion, but also law, customs, fashion, public opinion, sports, entertainment, lifestyles and so on. 76 The question of how these different levels of the society related and the assumption that they were related in determinant ways (i.e. as a social totality) led Horkheimer and Adorno to address the question of the “Culture Industries” as one of the social totality: the primary mode of production was corporate, monopoly capitalism and one could also observe that this was the major way of organizing cultural production at the moment thus, one could assume that this was having an effect on the organization of the individual consciousness.. Though the values represented in the culture industry were obviously ideologically limited, this was less because corporate CEOs had deemed it so than a direct result of their being produced in a certain set of social relationships. Likewise, it wasn’t necessarily conscious propaganda—the object of propaganda theorists, which, by this time, was a fully formed mode of cultural production; and the problems with its mode of production weren’t limited to its corporate character: it was simply the 76 Max Horkheimer, "The State of Contemporary Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research," in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner (New York, NY: Routledge, 1930). p. 33. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 25 - FIELD #1 natural outcome of the dominant capitalist mode of production throughout the society, a set of relations which powerful people, including the state, had an interest in supporting. 77 In other words, communication here has very little effect per se on social formation. On the contrary, the social formation determines both communication and the culture that is formed via mass communication. Of course, they expect that, once these cultural products become the dominant form of expression they also provide a sort of ideological buffer. Thus it made sense to focus, as many Frankfurt School theorists did, on the cultural as an important political issue. As Terry Eagleton has recently pointed out, this theory was, in itself, a result of a certain feeling of “political impotence and disenchantment:” Caught between capitalism and Stalinism, groups like the Frankfurt School could compensate for their political homelessness by turning to cultural and philosophical questions. Politically marooned, they could draw upon their formidable cultural resources to confront a capitalism in which the role of culture was becoming more and more vital, and thus prove themselves once more politically relevant. 78 This assessment overlooks, among other things, the importance of Marcuse’s later interventions and more general critiques of the “totally administered society” which, if it was concerned about culture, it was culture in a totality, and played a large part in the student movements in the United States. Still, if the Frankfurt School helped to elaborate a theory of how culture, communication and social formation functioned, they were only one of several theories being promoted in the US at the time. Their far more rigorous understanding of this process was countered by the early stages of the society Marcuse sees fully formed in One-Dimensional Man, which were being developed through scientific principles of mass persuasion and justified by elitist notions of democratic participation. The Frankfurt School was unique in the American scene by highlighting a concern for the relations of class and power from a perspective that didn’t assume the goal of study was to make sure current relations could be continued indefinitely. Their concern for class (and other forms of) domination isn’t as clear in the above statement of purpose as it is in one Horkheimer makes in the same piece: The issue is seen quite differently if we pose the question more precisely in the following manner: In a definite time frame and in some particular countries, what relations can we delineate between a particular social group and the role of this group in the economy, the changes in the psychical structure of its members, and the thoughts and institutions created by it which influence it as a whole through the social totality (34). 77 Certainly the Frankfurt School—and Dialectic of Enlighement in Particular—are meditating on more than just the economic or political organization of society. In many ways their real connection with the Marxist legacy is in their seeing the project of the Enlightenment as a false promise; the institutions of Modernity—not least of which was that of Science— meant to give us order, security and prosperity domestically, were being used against these goals. The chapter on the culture industry in this work is often taken out of this context by media studies scholars. I don’t mean to do that here, particularly since the history of communication studies coincides directly with this criticism. Not only does the next section outline the shift to a conservative (in the sense of resisting change in favor of order no matter the cost) positivist social science in media research, but sees Adorno himself attempting to work within the new dominant paradigm and finding it inadequate for just these reasons. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003). p. 31. 78 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 26 - FIELD #1 Though he is obviously highlighting the concern for differences in social position, he is also agreeing with some of the ideas about how to form a science of society that Dewey puts forth in his first chapter of The Public and It’s Problem—namely, that these problems can’t be approached with a hypothesis or, worse, a “dogmatic conviction” that an analyst intends to prove, but instead must be considered with a method that doesn’t take “the total identity of ideational and material processes for granted.” This is probably where the Chicago School and the Frankfurt school have the most in common with the pluralist effects researchers: their attention to method as an important ground of social science and their attempt to bring theory in to inform that method. Unfortunately for them, social science in communications and sociology was being shaped in a very different direction and many of the problems they were warning about in terms of both science and the “totally administered society” were the status quo in and outside of the academy: not only was critical theory out of fashion, the main role of the researcher was to help the social order remain as it was. III. LIMITING EFFECTS OF US PLURALISM contents bibliography These earlier schools of thought sought to establish their work as a science, and, in that they have much in common with the paradigms that follow them in this field. J. Michael Sproule has helped to resuscitate the most mainstream version of this science, which was a direct response to the propaganda activities of Bernays and others: "During the decades after the Great War, academic writers not only reprised the propagandas of the war, but began to apply the concept of propaganda widely as a framework for social analysis." 79 However, the fact that these interwar schools of thought have been somewhat forgotten says much about their fate in the post-war era. In another place, Sproule looks specifically at the displacement of Propaganda Research with what became known as Administrative or Effects Research: Academic social scientists of the 1930s were particularly receptive to the evolving [administrative] paradigm of communications research because of the rise in the twentieth century of two new notions of what academic social science properly entailed. The first of these conceptions was that science amounted to the use of the quantitative and experiential methods of the natural sciences. A related second rising assumption was that good social science was politically neutral, that is, unchallenging to the social status quo. 80 This atmosphere accompanied not only the dominance of what C.W. Mills calls Abstract Empiricism, but also to the Grand Theory of “structural functionalism” or “action theory” in the wider field of sociology. The same sort of project was being instantiated in sociology and psychology departments across the country; all of these were, in one way or another, a part of the post-war move to emphasize consensus over conflict. In this way, these theories were largely a combination of both Dewey and Lippmann’s desire for how to “integrate” people. The widespread 79 80 Sproule, "Propaganda Studies in American Social Science: The Rise and Fall of the Critical Paradigm." Ibid. p. 69. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 27 - FIELD #1 use of propaganda had become scientific 81 and it was not for nothing that the work of Lazarsfeld was discussed as “Administrative.” As Gitlin points out, much of effects research was funded by advertisers. Effects research comes into its own with Lazersfeld et. al.’s The People’s Choice, and is canonized by Lazarsfeld and Katz’s Personal Influence several years later. 82 In the introduction to Lazarsfeld and Katz, they are openly dismissive of propaganda research because of the assumptions they see informing it. In fact they are equally dismissive of most of the positions outlined in the previous section because of both the authority and the faith they put in the media: Their image, first of all, was of an atomistic mass of millions of readers, listeners and movie goers prepared to receive the Message; and secondly, they pictured every Message as a direct and powerful stimulus to action which would elicit immediate response. In short, the media of communication were looked upon as a new kind of unifying force—a simple kind of nervous system—reaching out to every eye and ear, in a society characterized by an amorphous social organization and a paucity of interpersonal relations. 83 This model of mass communication, often termed the “hypodermic model” rarely existed in complete purity (except in the theories of Shannon and Wiener’s cybernetic information model, which, being the product of Bell Laboratories, was mostly intended to speak to the technological process of sending and receiving messages.) And as Sproule points out in his book on the propaganda of this era, the necessity of using local authorities and interpersonal relationships in order to amplify and legitimate a message was a key strategy employed by people like Bernays even before he had adapted his “propaganda” to the peacetime “public relations.” 84 And from the start of the 1930s, public relations professionals have at their disposal massive, unprecedented institutional and technological means for spreading whatever “Message” they would like. As later historians 85 will point out, not only was the radio—one of the first means of broadcasting, whose audience was no longer limited to the literate—newly invented, but shortly after, the first national radio networks were licensed by the FCC. Todd Gitlin begins his critique of Lazarsfeld by noting the irony of the propaganda paradigm waning at the very moment that 81 Cf. the work of Harold Lasswel, a short summary of his accumulated expertise being Harold Dwight Lasswell, "The Theory of Political Propaganda," The American Political Science Review 21, no. 3 (1927). A longer version of his experience of promoting propaganda, mentioned above by Sproule, Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in World War I. Elihu Katz, Paul Felix Lazarsfeld, and Columbia University. Bureau of Applied Social Research., Personal Influence; the Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications (Glencoe, Ill.,: Free Press, 1955), Paul Felix Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, The People's Choice; How the Voter Makes up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign, [2nd ] ed. (New York,: Columbia univ. press, 1948). For more recent applications of this paradigm, see also Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillmann, Media Effects : Advances in Theory and Research, 2nd ed., Lea's Communication Series (Mahwah, N.J.: L. Elbaum Associates, 2002), Shearon Lowery and Melvin L. DeFleur, Milestones in Mass Communication Research : Media Effects, 3rd ed. (White Plains, N.Y.: Longman Publishers USA, 1995). 82 83 Katz, Lazarsfeld, and Columbia University. Bureau of Applied Social Research., Personal Influence; the Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications. p. 16. Sproule discusses Bernays’s work in the CPI during WWI and the use of local authorities in groups such as the “Four Minute Men” who would be sent talking points from the CPI to read in movie theatres before the film began. Sproule, Propaganda and Democracy : The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion. Ch. 1. On Bernays change of “propaganda” to “public relations” see his remarks in Adam Curtis, "Happiness Machines (Vol 1)," in The Century of the Self (UK: BBC4 (via bittorent), 2002). 8585 84 See below on Barnouw, Tube of Plenty, McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy : The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 28 - FIELD #1 national communications networks went online. 86 The way to understand the effects—whether of these massive communications networks or the institutionalized propaganda they were part of— however, was still somewhat speculative and Sproule argues that one of the reasons the propaganda paradigm was overturned was that it hadn’t outlined its theoretical underpinnings, in part because it was an interdisciplinary approach and each scholar simply took it on for their own purposes without basing it on any theory. Further, they were complacent and assumed their dominance was assured. 87 Against the paradigm of “speculative” communication studies, effects researchers propose a method that becomes ever more empirical and, regardless of whether it is focused on content analysis or audience analysis, is primarily concerned with the effects of communication on opinions and actions. Thus the emphasis of these studies shifts from theorizing the role of media or mass communications in society to one of verifying the validity of the methodologies through which evidence about the latter can be gathered. And to avoid any appearance of being speculative, they ground their observations in empirically verifiable effects. All of these factors lead them to narrow their focus significantly in order to design experiments that will provide data to test their hypotheses. Thus, though Lazarsfeld and Katz begin their text by considering a variety of “mediations” through which the media is churned their basic model is one which focuses on, as their subtitle suggests, the “part played by people in the flow of mass communication” and, in particular, the role that they play in reference to actual changes of opinion in response to isolated media campaigns. 88 This focus is not accidental and the final analysis, that mass communication was less effective at changing certain actions—particularly those dealing with changing one’s fashion or choice of dish soap—and that most people sill relied upon a “two step flow” of communication. In brief, the twostep flow is the major argument of both The People’s Choice and Personal Influence and tries to show through various questioning techniques, that there are certain members of a community that tend to take the information of mass communication and process it into recommendations for their fellow citizens. In other words, this looks at the process of legitimation through which new products or ideas are adopted. At the same time, the limits placed on what was studied made discussion of propagandistic effects all but impossible. Instead, the media are seen as fairly ineffective in themselves. In the studies, the data are presented contradicting the hypodermic model of “speculative” propaganda studies. The possibility of the “two-step flow” of opinion formation in certain cases is, in other words, proof that even if the Great Community doesn’t yet exist, at least the local community is still active in providing value structures for people. As Gitlin points out, this conclusion is not upheld in the book itself: when it deals with issues of politics or news (as opposed to home care products or fashion), over 58% of the people who changed their opinion 86 87 Gitlin, "Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm." p. 205. Sproule, "Propaganda Studies in American Social Science: The Rise and Fall of the Critical Paradigm." p. 70-71. It’s worth noting the similarity between Sproule’s account of the propaganda paradigm and early Cultural Studies in their institutional and theoretical ambiguities. 88 Katz, Lazarsfeld, and Columbia University. Bureau of Applied Social Research., Personal Influence; the Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications. see chapter 1 for most of this argument. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 29 - FIELD #1 on these matters did so as a direct effect of something they were presented with through the mass media. In other words, in the areas where it arguably mattered most, the hypodermic model seems the rule rather than the exception. Gitlin doesn’t attribute this significant oversight in the argument to the authors’ dishonesty, but to a methodological problem whereby effects in changes of fashion, purchase of dish soap and choices of politicians were all made commensurable. This he attributes to Lazarsfeld’s commitment to an Eastern European form of social democracy, not all that different than that of Bernays, which basically makes the marketplace, rather than the public sphere, the locale of citizen action. In other words, it imagines people as consumers before people as citizens. 89 The other image that is presented in this paradigm is basically one that fits squarely with Dewey’s demand for a pragmatic approach to socialization. That is, despite the fact that Dewey’s formulation gave much more of an active role for the local community in this process, the demand that meaning be made locally seems to be met according to these studies. And, certainly, the assumption that one can project the effects found in a particular social, cultural, and historical circumstance into a sort of universal assertion about the “effects of mass communication” seems a perfect bastardization of Dewey’s insistence that “The local is the ultimate universal and as near an absolute as exists.” 90 A much longer synthesis and summary of the effects research paradigm is provided by Joseph Klapper, which though it shies away from any definitive conclusion, seems to confirm this assertion. 91 Klapper—head of research for CBS television and one of Lazarsfeld’s foremost students 92 —concludes that the proof of these empirical studies is that mass communication largely functions as a reinforcing mechanism “among and through a nexus of mediating factors and influences” and/or that reinforcing mechanisms tend to focus the direction of people’s consumption of mass communication. Of course, there are certain instances—especially in the case of the introduction of new arguments or information—that there won’t be such mediating factors and/or the mediating factors themselves will be interested for one reason or another in advancing change in which the media can have a direct or contributory effect. For a series of conclusions, these studies prove to be fairly inconclusive as to how an opinion can be changed, how culture is created or destroyed, what effect mass communication or the social formation has and why any of these aspects work in a certain way at a certain time. But this, again, is why these empirical inquiries are so often discussed in terms of administrative research. For if there is a place where these studies find their most pragmatic counterpart, it is in theories of diffusion, again, cataloged neatly by one of its foremost practitioners. 93 Everett Rogers, whose work also begins at roughly mid-century, takes this type of research to the next level, usually 89 90 Gitlin, "Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm." Dewey, The Public and Its Problems. p. 215. This is obviously an manipulation of what Dewey meant. But on the other hand, it points to one of the lacunae in the Progressive assumptions Dewey was making at the time, namely that the ruling order could pay more attention to the local without being any more egalitarian in its decision making and the populous might just let them. Joseph T. Klapper, The Effects of Mass Communication (New York,: Free Press, 1965). The basic argument is laid out in five points in the Introduction. 92 93 91 Gitlin, "Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm." p. 217. Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th , Free Press trade pbk. ed. (New York: Free Press, 2003). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 30 - FIELD #1 along the lines of what comes later to be known as the Modernization theory of economic and social and economic development. 94 The latter was the dominant paradigm of the developmental policies established after World War II. It assumes, basically, that the social formation of western, capitalist, industrialized, democratic nation-states and the products of its science and commerce were the pinnacle of a long evolution of development and that they could (and should) be exported to the benefit of the newly-minted, post-colonial “underdeveloped” countries. 95 One of the key assumptions, not mentioned in Rogers as one of the critiques of diffusion, is the notion that these systems developed in the isolated context of an individual society, defined at its broadest in terms of a nation-state and thus can be transported and re-developed or deployed in another context, provided one understands, to use Lazarsfeld’s terms, the mechanisms of mediation and reinforcement and the individuals who are seen as opinion leaders. 96 In the words of Katz, one of Lazarsfeld’s collaborators quoted in Rogers and sometime practitioner of diffusion studies, “It is unthinkable to study diffusion without some knowledge of the social structures in which potential adopters are located.” 97 In this way, the goal of these studies, just as the studies about consumer/citizens in Erie County, Ohio, was never to consider the superiority of the product offered or to understand people’s opinions in relation to actual facts about the world: it was mainly a roadmap for people who wanted to change certain actions that people were taking without upsetting any of the social formations. For the most part, it depended on using those very social formations for the purposes of diffusing new ideas and practices. In other words, it is the pinnacle of the science of public relations devised by Bernays, but operating on a global scale and involving in-depth, empirical research from anthropological and sociological standpoints in order to better focus the propagandistic effort. But the assumption was that whatever was being promoted was better or more worthwhile, whether it was nylon stockings or the chemical fertilizers of the Green Revolution. 98 Though the politics of this theory will be discussed at greater length in my other field, it is worth noting that an important component of this, and of the embrace of pluralist notions on consensus alongside elitist notions of diffusion, was the Cold-War notion of the “end of ideology” promoted by the sociologist Daniel Bell which simultaneously pronounced the triumph of western capitalism over the ideas of Marx and reified the notion of a pluralistic society in which individual people— 94 95 This will be discussed at length in the other field, but it is neatly summarized by So (need citation) For one of the most influential W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth; a Non-Communist Manifesto, 2d ed. (Cambridge [Eng.]: University Press, 1971). Though he isn’t cited in Rogers, the idea of “take-off” which Rogers refers to is a basic tenet of Rostow’s theory, even if its meaning is slightly different. To be clear, Rogers doesn’t use Lazarsfeld often, but he does appear in the bibliography and he says that The People’s Choice and the “two step flow” were “the decisive end of the hypodermic needle model of communication.” Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations. p. 303-304. On the critiques of diffusion theory, see chapter 3. 97 98 96 Ibid. p. 25. Though Rogers might have had some critical edge to his understanding of what might qualify as an innovation, he was also a technician of persuasion and once those techniques were mastered and instrumentalized in the service of various institutions—whether US advertisers or US AID—the people using them could assume that whatever they were promoting was advantageous: in many ways they would have to in order to avoid cognitive dissonance in their job. In any case, the model includes within it some of these assumptions in that it only endeavors to understand local culture and practices in order to make sure the one-way communication from West to East, North to South, Madison Avenue to Main Street, is accepted and adopted. In some ways this is an early version of what George Yudice discusses in terms of “The Expediency of Culture,” though he is at least as interested in the way that “natives” are able to manipulate outsiders assumptions about their culture. George Yâudice, The Expediency of Culture : Uses of Culture in the Global Era, PostContemporary Interventions (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 31 - FIELD #1 not a “Power Elite”—were the ones making the decisions about the particular kind of social order we had. 99 That this set of ideas, should become dominant alongside Parsons’s notions of the social system is, therefore quite understandable, despite their very distinct differences in terms of the level of their observation. This gap is widely understood to be one of the major problems of sociology and social and political philosophy of this period of time. One of its most vociferous contemporary critics, C.W. Mills is referred to by Mattelart and Mattelart as “one of the founders of American cultural studies.” 100 Mills is often cited for his laborious account of The Power Elite, which is a rather polemical attempt to reintroduce the concept of power as well as to begin to consider the way that it was being reconfigured in terms of class in the US context. 101 But it is in his Sociological Imagination that he most clearly represents the critical goals of what finally becomes Cultural Studies at Birmingham. More on this work in a moment: first, Parsons. Talcott Parsons began working at roughly the same time that Lazarsfeld did and felt the same desire to create a scientific notion of his specialty. This was, in part, a result of the more starkly drawn lines of disciplinary boundaries in US universities, but it was also part of the push to have things based more on “factual observation and theoretical analysis on the empirical level.” 102 This is not to say that Parsons was ever particularly empirical in the sense that Lazarsfeld meant it: he often made statements in which he paid lip service to the value of this, but apologized for his lack of on-the-ground experience. 103 He argued, however, that one needed a grand theory towards which one could orient empirical study: In the first place our study of fact, however little we may be aware of it, is always guided by the logical structure of a theoretical scheme, even if it is entirely implicit. We never investigate "all the facts" which could be known about the phenomena in question, but only those which we think are "important." This involves a selection among the possible facts. Now if we investigate carefully, though few empiricists do, what is the basis of this selection, it will, I think, uniformly be found that among the criteria of importance and the only ones of strictly scientific status is that of their relevance to the logical structure of a theoretical scheme. 104 This could be seen as a foray into a sociology of knowledge along the lines of thinking that later developed into critiques of regimes of truth. But this is actually the opposite. Parsons lamented having an accepted “general theory” that could be assumed, even if it was reflected upon as a theory by its practitioners. In other words, he wanted to be the theorist who guided the empiricists in their investigations. 99 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology; on the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, Ill.,: Free Press, 1960). I will talk more in a moment about C.W. Mills notion of “The Power Elite.” Armand Mattelart and Michèle Mattelart, Rethinking Media Theory : Signposts and New Directions, Media & Society ; 5 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). p. 42. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (NY, NY: Oxford University Press, 1956). Talcott Parsons, "The Role of Ideas in Social Action," American Sociological Review 3, no. 5 (1938). 100 101 102 In his address Annual Institute of the Society for Social Research,in 1937 on empirical research, he excused himself by quoting Max Weber, saying, “In order to understand Ceasar it is not necessary to have been Ceasar.” Talcott Parsons, "The Role of Theory in Social Research," American Sociological Review 3, no. 1 (1938). It is this brand of speculation that seemed to be acceptable during this period. 104 Ibid. p. 15. 103 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 32 - FIELD #1 His most memorable and influential work was in synthesizing a careful sampling of the sociological thought that had come before, especially Durkheim and Weber into a “General Theory” which is most thoroughly laid out in his tomes The Structure of Social Action and The Social System. 105 In the first book, he argues, roughly, that there is a similar understanding of human action that runs through Durkheim, Weber, Pareto and the economist Alfred Marshall. 106 The argument that he sees running through all of these is that “ideas play an important role in the determination of social action.” 107 In making this argument he relies heavily on Weber’s comparative method and his investigation of the divergences between China, India and Western Europe in the development of capitalism, which Parsons says proves the determinant effect of Protestant ideas over those of Hinduism or Confucianism. 108 In saying this, Parsons often points out the shortcomings of “Marxists” in producing a comparable explanatory system based on “materialism” and makes it clear that, “whether in an ultimate, ontological sense these ideas are real, or only manifestations of some deeper metaphysical reality is a question outside the scope of this paper.” 109 Thus, the relation of ideas to reality is not important and, in fact, it is precisely the ideas which are “nonempirical existiential ideas” such as religion which are the focus of orienting action and goals within the social system. Interestingly, Parsons compares his attempt to create a science of ideas to the science of economics, “in which the role of valid empirical knowledge in this sense has been most highly elaborated and conceptually refined,” 110 yet finds religion to be the more compelling source of guiding people towards economic actions and finds ideas in general more of a motivation for action than any material circumstances. 111 But the issue here isn’t whether a certain idea motivates a certain person’s action. If religion is a motivation for orienting goals, it is in the sense that Freud discusses in Civilization and Its Discontents, where “love thy neighbor as thyself” is seen not as an inherently good moral value or even a reasonable request, but an attempt to keep people from killing one another. 112 Though it is more a response to Hobbes question of what creates order, it basically works from the concern, Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Ill.,: Free Press, 1951), Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action; a Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers, 1st ed. (New York,: McGraw-Hill Book Company, inc., 1937). It is worth noting that Parsons’s translation of Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which was likely the most widely read translation of Weber at the time, is still issued today by Routledge. I’m sure someone has looked into it, but it seems important that Parsons is still the key interpreter of Weber. There is a project there for an enterprising German in a comp lit department. On a critique of this thesis and an exchange between Parsons and his detractors, cf: Talcott Parsons, "On "DeParsonizing Weber"," American Sociological Review 40, no. 5 (1975), Whitney Pope, Jere Cohen, and Lawrence E. Hazelrigg, "On the Divergence of Weber and Durkheim: A Critique of Parson's Convergence Thesis," American Sociological Review 40, no. 4 (1975), Whitney Pope, Jere Cohen, and Lawrence E. Hazelrigg, "Reply to Parsons," American Sociological Review 40, no. 5 (1975). 107 108 106 105 Parsons, "The Role of Ideas in Social Action." p. 652. It would be important to note that Hinduism as a coherent religion is basically an invention of British imperialism and of the anti-imperial nationalism that sought to overthrow it Gavin D. Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996). cf: Ch. 1. The diversity of beliefs at the level of the village and community before this time are indicative of the kind of problem that even Weber has with assuming both the universal belief in a dominant ideology and a connection between action and ideology. More on this below. 109 110 111 Parsons, "The Role of Ideas in Social Action." p. 653. Ibid. p. 655. This is only true in a physical sense, he says that the ideas motivate action because of a promise of redemption and a promised land. Thus there is a sort of metaphysical “material” motivation which motivates the interest of the actor. 112 Sigmund Freud and James Strachey, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1989). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 33 - FIELD #1 dominant at the time, on order and consensus. As he articulates this into a more complete theory, Parsons’ emphasis on the normative rules of action is elaborated into a question of the function of the social structure for producing order. In the words of a contemporary observer, For Parsons, the social system is a system of action. It is made up of the interactions of individuals. Of special concern to sociology is the fact that such interactions are not random hut mediated by common standards of evaluation. Most important among these are moral standards, which may be called norms. Such norms "structure" action. Because individuals share the same "definition of the situation" in terms of such norms, their behaviour can be intermeshed to produce a "social structure . The regularity, or patterning, of interaction is made possible through the existence of norms which control the behaviour of actors. Indeed, a stabilized social system is one in which behaviour is regulated in this way, and, as such, is a major point of reference for the sociological analysis of the dynamics of social systems. It is necessary in sociology, as in biology, to single out relatively stable points of reference, or " structural " aspects of the system under consideration, and then to study the processes whereby such structures are maintained. This is the meaning of the " structural-functional " approach to social system analysis. Since the social system is a system of action, and its structural aspects are the relatively stable interactions of individuals around common norms, the dynamic processes with which the sociologist is concerned are those which function to maintain social structures, or, in other words, those processes whereby individuals come to be motivated to act in conformity with normative standards. 113 This summary points to many of the key assumptions of this paradigm, as well as some of its significant absences. Alongside the earlier discussions of ideas, the assumption first of all is that ideas are the prime movers of society. This presumes that actors can have perfect information 114 , despite its lack of concern for how these norms are communicated, and that when they act, if they act according to norms, they agree with those norms implicitly. In other words, it presumes, in its focus on ideas, that there is no further coercion involved in the adoption of certain norms, that people adopt the norms on the basis of the norms themselves and that the norms are seen as legitimate. It doesn’t concern itself with the possibility of competing “definitions of the situation” within society nor does it seem overly concerned with where a certain set of ideas came from or in whose interest they operate. The focus is on the way that ideas structure action so that order is produced and it is this structure that is the main focus of sociological inquiry. It is this that 113 114 David Lockwood, "Some Remarks On "The Social System"," The British Journal of Sociology 7, no. 2 (1956). p. 135. This may be more true of neo-classical economics, but Parsons has the same assumption implicit in his focus on action (which is similar to neo-classical focus on choice). Parsons lacks the microfoundations of the neoclassical (and especially neoliberal) theory but since both are, ironically, presuming aggregate behavior absent social strife is equivalent to proof of individual acquiescence, if not contentment, they also assume action is motivated by both a similar set of beliefs and a complete understanding of the context in which that action/choice takes place. In Parsons case, it is actually even more presumptious about information and communication because it assumes that because someone does something, they know why they are doing it and what it means in the social context they inhabit. This is one of Bourdieu’s main critiques of structuralist forms of sociology in The Logic of Practice. Basically the argument is that, when one investigates the practices of a people from the outside, the logic that one ascribes to that practice, which often takes into account a variety of macrosocial and transhistorical cultural factors, may be well informed and intentioned, but often has no bearing on what that practice means or does for the actual practitioners. Bourdieu doesn’t discuss this in terms of information per se, but certainly a key separation between the understanding of the macrosociological and practical understanding of the situation is the kind of information available to either. Cf: Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990). Especially ch. 1. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 34 - FIELD #1 leads Parsons to be seen as the major theorist of social consensus which comes to be the “general theory” of sociology at the time. It is this which makes its relation to Media Effects research clearer. For in the latter science the default position is on the maintenance of the earlier opinion. When role of the media is one which reinforces dominant beliefs, it is seen as one in which no effect is produced. 115 As Gitlin points out, when the argument is whether mass communication produces a long-run ideological atmosphere, not only was the study of short term effects unlikely to produce any evidence of the more important questions, but the assessment of these findings in Klapper and elsewhere which points to the reinforcement function is actually evidence of this more important type of effect. In other words, if the media play a role in reinforcing dominant beliefs and creating consensus on new issues, then there is obviously something more to be discussed. It is between these two pillars of the field of social science—what Mills calls the Abstracted Empiricism of Lazarsfeld and the General Theory of Parsons—that Cultural Studies emerges alongside critics of the political economy of communication, the economists of the Regulation School and the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. It would be a incorrect to claim C. Wright Mills as a founder of US Cultural Studies; it is more accurate to say that he is a predecessor of the concerns of British Cultural Studies, concerns which never quite make the journey across the Atlantic. Mills’s The Sociological Imagination, written shortly after Parsons The Social System was published, is critical of both schools of thought and highlights many of the concerns highlighted in early Cultural Studies scholarship, namely, the problems of disciplinary specialization along with the significant gap between the theoretical and empirical studies, especially the way that they avoid asking important questions. Lazarsfeld and the school of “Abstracted Empiricism” conducted disconnected, short term studies that did little more than perfect the ability of advertisers to target their preferred audiences; their desire to perfect a methodology for proving an effect resulted in an inability “to say anything about modern society unless it has been through the fine little mill of Statistical Ritual.” 116 In other words, it doesn’t really explain anything in the sociological sense. As for Parsons, Mills’s key critique is that the notion of ideas as an “autonomous realm within society” doesn’t seem to admit that “their social relevance lies in their use to justify or to oppose the arrangements of power and the positions within this arrangement of the powerful. Their psychological relevance lies in the fact that they become the basis for adherence to the structure of power or for opposing it.” 117 Mills sees both of these paradigms, but especially the work of Lazarsfeld, with whom he initially worked a decade or so before, as being part of a general “Bureaucratic Ethos” in which the production of knowledge is being directed towards the goal of being able to predict and control society. The US university had, in his estimation, been taken over by the production of this kind of “bureaucratic social science” whose “propaganda force [. . . ] is due to its philosophical claims to Scientific Method.” 118 This concern for the production of knowledge presages Althusser’s in 115 116 Klapper, The Effects of Mass Communication. ch. II. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, Fortieth Anniversary Edition ed. (NY,NY: Oxford University Press, 1959). p, 72. 117 118 Ibid. p. 37. He goes on to build this into the argument presented in The German Ideology. Ibid. p. 105. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 35 - FIELD #1 Reading Capital which is explicitly also related to the latter’s student Foucault, both of which had a clear effect on early Cultural Studies thinking. Further, Mills discusses the goal of social science as being one in which “its practicioners try to build up [from the concrete] and to deduce [from abstraction] at the same time, in the same process of study, and to do so by means an adequate formulation and reformulation of problems and of their adequate solutions” and in which “problems are formulated in such a way that their very statement incorporates a number of specific milieux and private troubles encountered there by a variety of individuals; these milieux, in turn, are located in terms of larger historical and social structures.” 119 These statements make it evident why Mattelart would attribute Mills as an early Cultural Studies scholar. On the other hand, Dallas Smythe reads Klapper (again a synthesis of effects and uses and gratifications written a year after Sociological Imagination and a year before Mills’s death) and the effects paradigm as providing a great deal of helpful information on the audience—most of which is somehow ignored by later audience theorists nominally involved with Cultural Studies. 120 Namely, it shows the way that audiences are produced and maintained within the corporate system of mass communication. Smythe also points to the connections mentioned above with diffusion theory and connects these to what has come to be known as uses and gratifications research. The latter is not that far removed from Cultural Studies audience research, but has key differences in the goals it sets for itself and, in effect, the uses to which it is put. Uses and Gratifications is one attempt to deepen the empirical knowledge of the role that the mass media plays in the everyday lives of the public. This branch of research is an extension of the effects research in its focus on empirical studies. It was also, explicitly concerned with an attempt to redress the lack of interest among effects researchers with why audiences engaged with mass media at all and to “treat audience requirements as intervening variables in the study of traditional communication effects.” 121 The concentration therefore moves from what effects the media have on people’s opinions to what they use various media for in their daily lives. It is obviously a direct antecedent to later ethnographic studies done by Cultural Studies—complete with an “active audience.” 122 The questions it asks are not interested probing broad social issues, however, and they are more interested in displaying the complexity of these uses. Therefore these studies are also related to a version of functionalism in that they assume a set of needs that the media are meeting for people. These studies focus on the media as a source of “need satisfaction” 123 or which serve other sorts of “audience functions.” The question of the social situation is important in so far as it might help to explain the “generation of media-related needs,” 124 but most of the studies focus on a set of possible psychological functions the media can play for the individual (and therefore in general) such as escapism, surveillance [i.e. finding out news] reinforcement, and social utility. 119 120 Ibid. p. 128, 129 Dallas Walker Smythe, Dependency Road : Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness and Canada (Norwood, N.J.: ABLEX Pub. Corp., 1981). ch. 11. This connection will be explored below. 121 Jay G. Blumler and Elihu Katz, The Uses of Mass Communications : Current Perspectives on Gratifications Research (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1974). p, 28. Ibid. p. 30. Ibid. p. 22. Ibid. p. 27. 122 123 124 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 36 - FIELD #1 However there is rarely a sense of why the media serve these functions. 125 Some studies hint at possible connections between “functions performed by the media for individuals and their function (or dysfunction) for other levels of society,” 126 but as a paradigm it is mostly focused on the individual subject/consumer. Still, it comes out with a conclusion couched in the notions of consensus pervading the theories of this period. In the words of James Carey and Albert Krieling uses and gratifications, which they term “functional analysis” “is a theory of personality that disguises as a theory of communication:” It takes the needs of the individual, the receiver, to be determinant of the effects realized in the communication process. While it may tell you something about the uses and gratifications of the receiver, it tells you little about the consequences of this use or even, except implicitly, about the motivations that lie behind it. To explain behavior, functional theory must assume a homeostatic system—one that tends toward an equilibrium. 127 By 1974, they are already in conflict with Cultural Studies or others who might consider the question of ideology. However, their dominance and relevance to media studies in the conjuncture of The Early Birmingham School is evident in the inclusion of several articles by writers of this persuasion—namely Gurevitch and Blumer—in the early Open University media studies readers to which Stuart Hall and Graham Murdock were also regular contributors. The irony of the adoption of many of the presumptions of this school in later audience research which is explicitly resistant to any power in terms of ideology was not lost on people like James Curren, who helped to edit some of these early volumes. 128 In summary, the theories of this section have a few ways of conceptualizing the relationship between communication, culture, and social formation. In attempting to formulate a science of these processes that would be useful to policy makers, advertisers and broadcasters, they all fit nicely together to help produce what Marcuse came to call “one-dimensional society. 129 ” The focus on consensus, diffusion, and equilibrium are all products of the triumphalist “end of ideology” pluralism of the (paradoxically?) centralized, planned model of economics, industrial relations and international politics that also prevailed at the time. Ultimately they each have a way of overlooking something fundamental. Effects research, in declaring that mass communications have few direct effects obscures its role in helping advertisers and politicians better direct their messages even as it reifies the notion that reinforcement of previously held beliefs is not an effect. As it was transformed into Diffusion research, the elitist notions of power and knowledge implicit in the paradigm became more explicit, putting the lie to its supposed pluralism. Uses and Gratifications was attempted to better understand the subjective needs of the viewer, but the focus on the psychological needs of 125 126 127 Both why the media instead of other social institutions serve them and why these functions/needs instead of others. Blumler and Katz, The Uses of Mass Communications : Current Perspectives on Gratifications Research. p, 29. James W. Carey and Albert L. Kreiling, "Popular Culture and Uses and Gratifications: Notes toward an Accomodation," in The Uses of Mass Communications: Current Perspectives on Gratifications Research, ed. Jay G. Blumer and Elihu Katz (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1974). p. 239. James Curran, "The 'New Revisionism' in Mass Communications Research," European Journal of Communications 5, no. 2-3 (1990). 129 128 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man : Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, 2nd. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 37 - FIELD #1 atomized viewers did little to illuminate the specific role that mass communication played in either the social structure or within a general hierarchy of needs. Structural Functionalism had few ways of conceiving of deviance, and, moreover, couldn’t explain where the structuring ideas came from, why a certain set of ideas became dominant, or prove that the action which helped to create the social structure was the result of functioning cultural norms to which everyone implicitly consented or if those norms were simply an ideological justification for the social structure. IV. MEDIA ECOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM contents bibliography The ideas of media ecology are a significant departure from the above forms of positing the relationships between the elements of the field. In brief, it argues that instead of a certain social formation or culture being the determinant factor, communication and especially the type of communication technology, results in a certain mindset (McLuhan) and/or distribution of power (Innis) among the members of a society. Marshall McLuhan is probably the theorist of media ecology who has been most influential as he became something of an icon of the very culture he was examining 130 . The germinal theorist of this set of theories is probably the least known: a Canadian Political Economist named Harold Innis. The important departure he makes from the dominant American paradigm is in its concern for history, power and the process of social change. Like Mills, he wrote most of his works in the final years of his life. It may be this urgency that gives his writing an epic and often impressionistic feel as to the role he feels a mode of communication plays in the development and continuation of a society. Yet Innis is still a political economist with a complex sense of historical development and the role that power and money play in it. In Empire and Communication he gives a sweeping overview of what is appears to be a history of world civilization, but which gives far more emphasis to the west, Chinese, Middle Eastern and African developments are discussed mostly in terms of their supportive or catalytic role for the west. Still, he doesn’t shy away from trying to posit a global, comparative argument. The difference in his analysis and other forms of historical sociology is in the emphasis of communication on the development of culture and society. As he puts it, “A medium of communication has an important influence over space and over time and it becomes necessary to study its characteristics in order to appraise its influence in its cultural setting.” 131 In Empire and Communication, the earlier, longer work, there is some slippage between his discussion of communication technology and technology per se. Still, the difference between Innis and a more Marxist informed scholar is that, instead of placing the control over production or ideas as the prime mover of history, Innis highlights the mode of communication. But throughout his surveys, and despite what might be a deep desire on his part to make a definite break with his earlier studies in political economy, he rarely makes communication or media the sole determinant. The most he can do is point out patterns in the way that it operates—and in the effect that changes in the medium of communication seem to E.g. David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) has a major character based on McLuhen and whose theories make up much of the framework for the film’s absurd logic. 131 130 Harold Adams Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951). p. 33. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 38 - FIELD #1 have on the maintenance of power and the continuity of a civilization. He has less concern for addressing phenomenological effects or proposing a certain type of consciousness as a result of media, though both of these become the focus of later media ecology scholars—particularly McLuhan. In one of his most definitive statements, in the title essay “The Bias of Communication” to the eponymous volume, he peppers his thesis with equivocations: We can perhaps assume that the use of a medium of communication over a long period will to some extent determine the character of knowledge to be communicated and suggest that its pervasive influence will eventually create a civilization in which life and flexibility will become exceedingly difficult to maintain and that the advantages of a new medium will become such as to lead to the emergence of a new civilization. 132 Along with presenting communication or media as only one factor among many, his analysis also admits the way a medium’s bias is enhanced or subverted depending on the needs and desires of a culture or civilization. Thus the theory of media ecology—though he doesn’t, to my knowledge, ever call it that—is based on a further premise: that a medium has a bias. Broadly, media are biased according to whether they are time-binding or space-binding. 133 The argument about “bias” is, at its most general, that some forms of media are better than others at doing some things: oral cultures are time biased (or time-binding) because they favor the long term comprehension of their members and their history; cultures dominated by forms of print are more easily transported, thus are space binding, or biased towards the extension of control over terrority. These distinctions don’t hold very strongly for Innis as he is usually more concerned with the way that they function in a given society. For instance, the elaborate system of Chinese characters secured the position of a scholarly class and “in turn a wide gap between a limited governing class and the mass of the people led to the spread of Buddhism from India.” 134 The latter, unable to secure a strong foothold in India because of a time-biased oral tradition, was able to travel and spread because of its block printing and vernacular forms of written communication. Though he isn’t very clear on who makes these decisions or how they get made, he still makes it possible for there to be some agency in the direction of the bias. The goal is simply to uncover the role of media in civilization, and to show the way that new technologies, in the hands of a resistant or ascendant social group can exact a powerful blow to the previous value system. He is, it seems, simply correcting an elision in the narrative of history. Thus the sweeping portrayals of history don’t attempt to give a comprehensive story, but simply fill in some gaps in the dominant narrative. He rarely argues with others narratives or tries to challenge other theories of history: he is just working in the theory of media ecology among other periodizations. 132 133 Ibid. p. 34. A good summary of this is found in the chapter on McLuhan and Innis in James W. Carey, Communication as Culture : Essays on Media and Society, Media and Popular Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). Innis, The Bias of Communication. p. 50. 134 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 39 - FIELD #1 So Innis foregrounds communication in the diffusion and formation of knowledge in a society. He attributes the effects not only to the medium, however, but to the way a civilization (and implicitly the people with a monopoly of some sort on the production of knowledge) shaped a certain medium to fit its needs—and specifically the political needs, thus one form of communication would be used because it fit with the space binding necessities of an empire. On the other hand, a hint of the Hegelian dialectic is present in this understanding because the way that the earlier mode of communication is overturned, along with its resultant civilization, is by the introduction of a new form of communication that emphasizes another aspect of the society. He gives much attention to the way that power struggles are waged in the space of technological innovation. This is where the idea of an inherent bias of communication seems to become a more tenuous argument to uphold. For instance, Chinese characters and the introduction of writing in society does change the earlier civilization, but not in the direction writing usually does: a highly specialized class of people who are trained in the method of writing are able to monopolize this knowledge. Something similar happens with the transfer of religious writings from papyrus rolls to parchment books, namely, in the copying of this, anything that didn’t fit in the dominant Christian worldview was edited out. On the other hand, the Greeks, he says, modified their writing system to emphasize their oral tradition (something he feels every civilization should strive to mimic) and many writing systems, in emphasizing local vernaculars, created something quite distinct from the bias presumed to exist in the medium of writing. In other words, in his examination, he is often at pains to say that the inherent bias of a medium is what creates these “ecological” effects. His essays, which were all written in an enthusiastic rush over the course of 3 or 4 years right before he died, are attempting to make an argument for a way of thinking about media and the way that it is used in the service of power. Here his main purpose seems to be summed up as an attempt to show that “The relation of monopolies of knowledge to organized force is evident in the political and military histories of civilization.” 135 That he also laments the problem of disciplinarity in the university—what that division and specialization misses—shows that it was knowledge production at large he was concerned with and especially the way that the diffusion of information in a certain way was capable of making it seem true. He was, in other words, attributing an ideological effect to the media, but discussing it in terms of a historical tendency which is still present today rather than a mere speculation on the present and future based around essentialized notions of media bias. I make these points because they are most of what gets lost when Innis’s ideas are taken up by his fellow Canadian, Marshal McLuhan. The latter takes much of the excited, sweeping rhetoric of Innis and adopts a more philosophical approach to talking about media. Only instead of any attentive historical arguments, instead of focusing on the institutional or socio-political contexts of communication, both of which were fundamental to Innis’s argument, McLuhan can simply be summed up in his argument that “the medium is the message.” In doing this, he took the sexiest notion of Innis’ argument and was able to trumpet it through the very media he was discussing. In many ways, he was his own best example for the effect that electronic communication had on people’s consciousness. 135 Ibid. p. 4. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 40 - FIELD #1 If Innis was concerned with the effect of communication on social formation and vice versa, McLuhan was more concerned with the phenomenological effect of media, its shaping of our consciousness, and this, in a society, leading to a certain perspective of the world. If Innis is attuned to the changes in power that render a medium of communication more or less effective in maintaining or subverting the status quo, McLuhan reduces this idea to its most reified articulation: “’the medium is the message’ because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association.” 136 In other words, if Innis is interested in highlighting the place of technology and communication in the total process of social change, McLuhan reduces that process to one completely dictated by a given technology’s bias: it doesn’t matter what people do with it (Uses and Gratifications) or the content of the messages (Content Analysis) once it is invented, a technology leads to a certain form consciousness (the extension of man) and this to a certain form of society. 137 Moreover, if Innis is concerned with the larger socio-political uses and functions of communication technology, of the possibilities inherent in them and those that are emphasized or downplayed depending on what is needed, McLuhan attributes all these changes to a phenomenological change that a form of media produces in the individuals and they way they experience the world: The Greeks had the notion of a consensus or faculty of “common sense” that translated each sense into every other sense, and conferred consciousness on man. Today, when we have extended all parts of our bodies and senses by technology, we are haunted by the need for an outer consensus of technology and experience that would raise our communal lives to the level of a world-wide consensus. When we have achieved a world-wide fragmentation, it is not unnatural to think about a world-wide integration. 138 Though McLuhan didn’t think people had arrived at the “Global Village” he becomes known for, the faith that technology would help people catch up to the flow of events unfolding around them is present from the start. 139 Electronic communication had the potential to help people adjust to what Alvin Toffler called “Future Shock” shortly after McLuhan published Understanding Media. 140 Here, although McLuhan has many valuable reflections on the relationship between media, technological communication, and society, there is an inevitability to the direction of this relationship and there is no systematic theory of how these relationships developed. In other words, although it uses history as a trope for the enormity of social change, it doesn’t seem to have much sense of history or society. In one sense, McLuhan and the media ecology is not alone in attributing vast social changes to television or electronic communication in general. Even Perry Anderson, usually a fairly nuanced theorist, claims that one of the origins of what we now call postmodernism television, “the 136 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man, 1st MIT Press ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). p. 9. In other words, while he explores the totality in almost as thorough and eloquent fashion as some of the Frankfurt School theorists, he shifts the causality significantly to an area which people have less obvious agency: the adoption of seemingly superior technology. 138 139 137 McLuhan, Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man. p. 108. Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, The Global Village : Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 140 Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York,: Random House, 1970). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 41 - FIELD #1 development that changed everything.” 141 And certainly the discourse of McLuhen’s media ecology is of a piece with later theorists of globalization and postmodernism in its passion and energy. Like the latter, however, he is less interested in what has brought this about than in predicting what it means. Then again, it shouldn’t be surprising that his considerations on space are primary: he is, after all, writing in during the very moment of the change he describes. Neil Postman, a later, more academic theorist who frames his own ideas on communication in terms of “Media Ecology”, does a better job of periodizing the changes he sees and makes an even more compelling and coherent argument for the bias of certain media framed in almost identical terms to those of postmodernism and globalization: namely that the change is in the reordering of priorities from privileging time to collapsing space. In his Amusing Ourselves to Death, the break he sees between a classical era of the public sphere and the current TV dominated media ecology is with the introduction of the telegraph and the photograph. In contrast to the era of the “typographic man” when the book was the dominant technology and the well reasoned argument the stock and trade of social legitimacy, electronic communication made it possible to transmit any information and thus began the process of degrading public discourse. 142 In his argument, the medium is not only a technology of communication, but also “the social and intellectual environment a machine creates.” 143 Here, though he often references the bias of a medium, he is careful to specify how a medium (as opposed to a technology) becomes biased. In this, he is closer to the kind of argument that Innis hoped to make, with one important exception: he still doesn’t overtly consider what the determinations were that might have caused the change he discusses in the discourse of USian culture. In this, though the changes he discusses are often considered in other schools of thought as being part of the postmodern, many others would note that many of the changes are actually quite similar to the laments of the modern and especially the rise of modern, industrial capitalism. 144 Though, for instance, he laments the way that “the television commercial has embedded in it certain assumptions about the nature of communication that run counter to those of other media, especially the printed word,” 145 he simply attributes this to the form of the commercial and its voluminous presence, not overly interested in what makes its volume and form necessary. His reasoning is quite different than other critics, mostly of European decent even if working in the US, who also saw the changes in public discourse, but attributed it to a deeper social pattern and problem. The work of two later Frankfurt School theorists is noteworthy, though only one would be widely read at the time. Both of these will be mentioned below, but it is worth noting that, 141 142 Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London ; New York: Verso, 1998). p. 86. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death : Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin Books, 1986). Ibid. p. 85. See section 1 above. 143 144 145 Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death : Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. p. 131. It should also be pointed out that he cites the Lincoln-Douglas debates as the pinnacle of US public discourse but sees the downward spiral beginning roughly with the invention of the telegraph, which was already used widely when L-D were touring the country. Michael Schudson, in addition to critiquing Habermas’s utopian memories of the New England town hall, also chides people who think the Lincoln Douglas debates were either widely attended or deeply understood by those who did attend. Cf. Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 42 - FIELD #1 though he certainly wouldn’t be counted among media ecology theorists, Herbert Marcuse had a powerful argument for the dominance of technology and science being something that changed people’s possible outlooks, making them one-dimensional. However, he attributed this to the deeper dominance of a form of militarized industrialization and social control in which that technology and science was embedded. Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere also considered many of the changes that Postman mentions, only with a far more rigorous understanding of their development and less of an emphasis on technology. He would attribute most of these changes to a breakdown in the division between public and private with the rise of state capitalism (a position not that unlike Marcuse). However, he also makes the original public sphere a utopia founded by the rise of liberal, free-market capitalism and the ideologies which supported the division of society into classes. In both cases, however, there is a very different reason for the changes that seemed to be happening. Still there is some continuity between these theorists and the media ecology paradigm: though they have very different narratives about what brought about the changes in the relationship between communication and society, they both assume a certain connection between the structure and the subject which they don’t evaluate fully. In this, Marcuse and, especially, Habermas are better at presenting evidence for these connections. For instance, Habermas illustrates the “privatized consciousness” he argues emerges in early liberal capitalism by noting changes in the architecture of the household, the growing popularity of letter writing 146 and the development of public coffeehouses and salons 147 . Still, though there is a thorough understanding of the larger social systems that structure technology and discourse, there is less attention to theorizing how this could be connected to the subjective consciousness. The latter question is obviously leading up to the intervention made by, among others, Birmingham School Cultural Studies James Carey is the practitioner from Media Ecology that is most credited with making the jump to Cultural Studies, 148 but Joshua Meyrowitz is one theorist who tried to flesh out the media ecology theory in that direction. Not surprisingly, he ends up using one of the more important scholars of the later Chicago School who also became important to Cultural Studies. Meyrowitz combines McLuhan with Erving Goffman (of Presentation of Self in Everyday Life) in order to get at the way that communication systems can change behavior. On a certain level, it is strange that Meyrowitz thought he was doing anything unique in 1984, considering the use of Goffman in certain strains of Cultural Studies and sociology roughly 10-15 years before, but his approach has the distinction of asking fewer of the broader socio-political questions posed by early Cultural Studies in favor of focusing on the ethnographic and psychological (or as he puts it “the structure of social ‘situations’”. 149 The social formation is a given, but alterations in the way people gather information about it, due to the collapse and interpenetration of private and public space, (along the lines of McLuhen) creates a confusion 146 147 In the American context this is mirrored by the original emergence of the genre of the novel in an epistolary form. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere : An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. esp. ch. 2. 148 149 Cf. Carey, Communication as Culture : Essays on Media and Society. Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place : The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). p. 4. This distinction seems to have been common of people who posed these questions in the USian context around this time, even those nominally affiliated with Cultural Studies. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 43 - FIELD #1 about how to act out social roles in response to an audience (along the lines of Goffman.) Meyrowitz focuses on a variety of boundaries that are collapsed by the media, but some of the key ones are those of gender and age: as members of groups that used to have separate spheres are exposed to the norms and roles of their other, it creates some confusion about which roles one should perform. 150 If there is cultural anomie, as Durkhiem might put it, it is due to a mismatch between technology and society, which have, at most, a mutually constitutive relationship with political economy as a possible foundation of the social formation. In the appendix of his book, he addresses Raymond Williams’ critique of McLuhan and other forms of technological determinism as presented in Television Technology and Cultural Form in 1975. Williams’s argument, addressed more thoroughly below, is that technology shapes and is shaped by the political-economic structures and social needs present at its development. This, recall, is the dialectical tension that runs through Innis’ work, abandoned for the most part in McLuhan. Meyrowitz counters these claims by saying, Regardless of the reasons for its development, the particular combination of a communication technology and a configuration for its use (a combination that might be called a “techno/use”) often has many social consequences that are not directly related to the intentions of powerful political and economic forces. Indeed, new media have profound effects on the economic and political structures that bore them. In order to look beyond the dominant research interest in media messages and to offer a new approach to the study of media as they have existed, I try to show how we can predict behavioral changes by examining how the use of new communication technology affects the ‘situational geography’ of social relations.” 151 The first thing to note is that, though he is basically engaging in the same philosophical speculation of propaganda theorists, he frames his theory in terms of the administrative goal of being able to “predict” behavior. Further, regardless of the accuracy of his depiction of the role users play in developing a technology, his assumption is that, once the technology is invented and used, it is unaffected by political and economic forces and, regardless of the initial causality, the force change is then in favor of the technology and the users themselves. The questions he asks aren’t uninteresting—and they are basically the same sort of questions being asked by many ethnographic audience researchers at the time. It is important to understand the way people are using technology and how that is affecting their behavior and self perception. However, he carefully avoids addressing the issue of whether a medium can change or be changed from above even after it is integrated into people’s lives and if this doesn’t put a damper on the possibility of predicting social change based essentialized notions of what turn out to be extremely malleable media technologies. Questions of broadcast policy, the ownership of media outlets, and the competition between different forms of media fall out of the picture. These are questions that are taken up in the next section—and the questions that begin to return to the fore in communication studies at the same moment that Cultural Studies emerges as an intellectual project. I admit to not giving Meyrowitz a very close reading, on this point, but much of this argument seems rather essentialized 151 150 Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place : The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. p. 332. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 44 - FIELD #1 V. CRITICAL REVIVAL: POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COMMUNICATION AND CULTURAL STUDIES contents bibliography In March 1995, the journal Critical Studies of Mass Communication featured a short interchange between Nicholas Garnham and Lawrence Grossberg on the relationship of political economy and cultural studies. Garnham argues that “cultural studies as an enterprise came out of a set of assumptions about political economy” and that “the project of cultural studies can only be successfully pursued if the bridge with political economy is rebuilt.” 152 Grossberg, in response, says that “cultural studies and political economy were never so intimate,” and that “they have always been divided over the terms of an adequate theory of culture and power.” 153 This antagonism between these two positions has become so legendary that some people in each camp might find serious intellectual flaws with the implicit argument I am making by including them in the same section. But the way I see the field, Garnham’s statement is much more accurate, and, in the context of the field, these two paradigms—in so far as a distinction can be made—begin from a place that has much more in common with one another than with the rest of the work being done at the time. However, I also see that, flawed as I find Grossberg’s comments, it now represents part of the official discourse of the (anti)discipline. Raymond Williams’ Television: Technology and Cultural Form is representative. First, it is suggestive to look at the text to see the way that Williams, an early influence of Cultural Studies and still, perhaps, one of its most important early thinkers, went about his work. Second, it is telling what later cultural studies scholars see as significant in this early work. Williams methodically divides his object into what he saw as its most component parts, strategically considering the conventional wisdom produced by other theorists. The first section is a discussion of the historical development of television in which he critiques simplistic technological determinism (technology creates social change) and symptomatic technology (technology is symptomatic of a certain social change), neither of which allow for any understanding of power or intention in the development of new technologies. Chapter two engages in a straight institutional examination of the way television has been integrated into the national policy and bureaucratic frameworks of England and the US—as well as the way it is being used to further foreign policy goals. Here Williams relies significantly on the work of one of the more prominent scholars in the field of Political Economy of Communication, Herbert Schiller. Williams summarizes and accepts wholesale many of the arguments and evidence presented five years earlier in Schiller’s Mass Communication and American Empire. 154 Following this, Williams tries to categorize the forms of television and describe the major attributes of these forms. The longest section, due to his inclusion of many lists and diagrams to make his argument, is where he talks about the idea of “televisual flow.” Basically, he says that the text is not the individual program, but the flow from Nicholas Garnham, "Political Economy and Cultural Studies: Reconciliation of Divorce?," Critical Studies in Mass Communication March (1995). p. 62. Lawrence Grossberg, "Cultural Studies Vs. Political Economy: Is Anybody Else Bored with This Debate?," Critical Studies in Mass Communication March (1995). p. 72. Raymond Williams, Television : Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken Books, 1975). see footnote #1, p. 39. 154 153 152 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 45 - FIELD #1 program to commercial to preview to program and that looking at this text holistically can show the critic “the flow of meanings and values of a specific culture.” 155 The next two parts are the most significant and, it seems, are meant to be the core argument of the book, which all the other sections are meant to support. It is a critique of different effects models, especially those of Blumer and Halloran, and of Marshall McLuhan’s arguments in Understanding Media. It has already informed much of my understanding of these theories as I’ve stated above so I won’t re-hash them, but this is definitely the place where he feels he is making the intervention. He sees both of these trends as preserving the status quo because they miss important ways that television as a technology has been determined and, therefore, overlook alternative configurations. In the final chapter, he suggests some of these alternatives, especially the possibilities VCRs, home video recorders and satellites hold and the need to reconsider the value of public programming. I focus on the components of this short work because it is indicative, I think, of the goal of cultural studies in its early years, before it was constituted as such. And, clearly, the role of political economic analysis is important to this work. Nevertheless, when later scholars of the cultural studies tradition pick up this book, for instance John Fiske in Television Culture, it is primarily the discussion of the indeterminacy of the television text aka “flow” that is considered. 156 Like Grossberg’s comments, Fiske’s focus on the textual over the institutional and historical analysis is indicative of the different direction later Cultural Studies has gone. On the other hand, Garnham’s critique—from the Political Economy of Communication perspective—is one that has stayed pretty much the same since the mid-1970s. In a piece written roughly at that time, Graham Murdock and Peter Golding level a similar critique against Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and the Frankfurt School saying that they have an “underdeveloped analysis of the economic bases of [cultural] production:” 157 “Instead of starting from a concrete analysis of economic relations and the ways in which they structure both the processes and results of cultural production, they start by analysing the form and content of cultural artifacts and then working backwards to describe their economic base.” 158 Their ultimate argument is that “ideological reproduction cannot be fully understood without an economic analysis of the context in which it takes place.” 159 Golding and Murdock engage in an extensive institutional critique of ownership structures and market imperatives and ultimately argue that: “Given the insistent pressure to maximize audiences and revenues, there is not surprisingly a consistent tendency for the commercial media to avoid the unpopular and tendentious and to draw instead on the values and assumptions which are most familiar and most widely legitimated.” 160 Thus the place the economic is determinant in 155 156 Ibid. p. 118.. cf. John Fiske, Television Culture (New York: Routledge, 1987). pp. 99-105. Fiske adds to the indeterminacy of the text by discussing viewers’ “zapping” through channels with the remote control. 157 Graham Murdock and Peter Golding, "Capitalism, Communication and Class Relations," in Mass Communication and Society, ed. James Curran, Michael Gurevitch, and Janet Woollacott (London: Sage Publications, 1977). p. 19. Ibid. p. 17. Ibid. p. 19. Ibid. p.. 37. 158 159 160 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 46 - FIELD #1 creating the ideological effect of capitalist communications. Golding and Murdock, however, provide little evidence of any actual ideological effect, they simply point to the economics of the media industry as a probable cause for ideology and a “lacunae” in the studies of the media like those in early Birmingham. Stuart Hall’s piece in the same collection examines how the “rediscovery of ideology” effected the study of media and culture. 161 Starting from Marx’s German Ideology, Hall employs theories of Marx, Vološinov, Poulantzes, Gramsci, Althusser and others to articulate an elegant description of the processes that lead to the ideological effect. He doesn’t engage much in empirical content analysis, but his framework allows for the interpretive faculties of the audience as he incorporates his argument on encoding/decoding 162 . His dependence on theory in this instance, however, is illustrative of what Garnham and others call the “Althusserian/Lacanian current” of idealism which ultimately privileges the perspective of the subject. 163 Though taking ideological structures into account, Hall is concerned for the importance of material experience in making the dominant ideology stick. This idea was not foreign to the discussion of The German Ideology, and is considered more fully in Lukacs History and Class Consciousness where he discusses the necessary conflict in perception of the proletariat in order for it to reach consciousness. 164 It should be evident, then, that although political economy and cultural studies are not engaged in the same kind of critique, they share fundamental assumptions about the relationship between communication and social formation. Namely, they both begin (or began) with Marx’s The German Ideology and the question of how social relations are reproduced. Although each sees these relationships, at least at this point, as part of an “expressive totality,” they choose to look at different levels or, as Yochai Benkler has called them, layers of the communication environment for evidence of dominance in social relations. 165 Benkler makes distinctions, which have become important to current communication policy scholars, such as Lawrence Lessig 166 , between the policies that govern the physical infrastructure, the code (software or other forms of technological encryption) and the content layer of media. The focus of Benkler’s argument is on the need to create more opportunities for the audience to be users instead of just consumers of media. In this, his concern connects directly with Political Economy and Cultural Studies approaches, both of which would like to shift what is seen as an imbalance in the way control over the mass media is distributed or created. Of course, each of these approaches is less concerned with the control itself than with the ideological ends to which that control is used. Stuart Hall, "Culture, the Media and the 'Ideological Effect'," in Mass Communication and Society, ed. James Curran, Michael Gurevitch, and Janet Woollacott (London: Sage Publications, 1977). 162 161 Stuart Hall, "Encoding/Decoding," in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-1979, ed. Stuart Hall, et al. (London: Hutchinson, 1980). Nicholas Garnham, Capitalism and Communication : Global Culture and the Economics of Information, Media, Culture, and Society Series (London ; Newbury Park: Sage, 1990). p. 21. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness; Studies in Marxist Dialectics. It is also, as mentioned above, a part of Lippmann’s understanding of perception. 165 164 163 Yochai Benkler, "From Consumers to Users: Shifting the Deeper Structures of Regulation toward Sustainable Commons and User Access," Federal Communications Law Journal 52, no. 3 (2000). Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas : The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, 1st ed. (New York: Vintage, 2001). 166 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 47 - FIELD #1 Murdock and Golding are fairly representative of Political Economy of communication approaches in the concerns they express over media ownership. They note the vast media conglomerations that are being formed and point to the structural inevitability of the ideological effect simply because of the control of the infrastructure. 167 They don’t concern themselves with looking at the content itself to prove that this ideological effect exists at the level of the text or consider the way that the audience receives the text. The aren’t all that concerned with the efficacy of the structure as with its inherent tendencies and contradictions. Herbert Schiller’s classic work Mass Communications and American Empire is a good entry point to the field in this regard 168 . Here he is concerned not only with the control of the media by conglomerates, but with the explicit intentions of the policy makers, military planners, and corporate executives to use that control at the level of the infrastructure to promote a certain agenda. It is, of course, this set of stated intentions that Raymond Williams found compelling, troubling, and essential to understanding television. Whether they were successful in this endeavor is not Schiller’s concern, or, rather, as Grossberg has criticized other communication scholars, he assumes communication as a given. 169 John Tomlinson, writing from a position more closely identified with later Cultural Studies Audience research, presents his own evidence of the impossibility of the seamless communication of arguments and ideas from the first world to the third. 170 But this is not the level of determination with which Schiller is concerned. The indisputable potential and officially stated desire for corporate and government officials to use their control over the infrastructure to fashion content and influence domestic and foreign ideas is enough to alarm him—just as it was for the propaganda theorists of the 1930s. In a later work, Culture, Inc., some of the concern for producer intentionality becomes more implicit. In this work, he looks not only at the traditional mass media, but also a variety of other cultural and information institutions such as databases and museums and brandishes the old tocsin of the increasing corporate control (or just involvement) over infrastructure as well as code (especially in the first amendment protection of corporate speech) and content. 171 He provides selective examples of texts or moments where the effects of this corporate control can be seen and judged, but for the most part his argument rests on the premise that corporate involvement is, in itself, antithetical to the production democratic discussion and rich cultural tradition. This methodological mainstay of political economy of communication has found a rich empirical landscape to survey. Ben Bagdikian’s The Media Monopoly has gone through six editions and with each edition his argument for the growing consolidation of mass media becomes more compelling: in the first edition, he warns about the fifty major corporations that own all media; in the sixth edition, these fifty have been concentrated, via cross ownerships and mergers, into six. 172 Though Bagdikian provides many more examples of the ways this ownership limits the 167 168 Murdock and Golding, "Capitalism, Communication and Class Relations." Herbert I. Schiller, Mass Communications and American Empire, 2nd , updat ed., Critical Studies in Communication and in the Cultural Industries (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992). 169 Lawrence Grossberg, "The Ideology of Communication: Poststructuralism and the Limits of Communication.," in Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). p. 51. John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism : A Critical Introduction (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 170 171 Herbert I. Schiller, Culture, Inc. : The Corporate Takeover of American Expression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 172 Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 6th ed. (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2000). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 48 - FIELD #1 conversation, it is the “excessive bigness” of the media industry that is at the heart of his argument. Likewise, analysts like Janet Wasko often forego concrete investigation of the effects of media conglomeration on the news itself, but are more concerned with, for instance, showing the sublime of synergy and assuming that readers share their horror at the extent of cross promotion arrangements. 173 Wasko is concerned to look at the way that these production arrangements effect the final product of “Disney’s brand of fantasy,” but the texts are only significant as evidence of the effect of the institutional production relations. This is not to say that content isn’t important or that media texts don’t fit into the discussion. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky do a great deal of comparative content analysis of the media coverage of certain issues. 174 However, as in the above, the texts are used as evidence of their argument about the control of information via certain socioeconomic, institutional filters—and most importantly, the corporate control of the media infrastructure. This is ultimately informed by the assertions present in the Marx of the German Ideology about the control of the means of mental production by what C. Wright Mills later referred to as “The Power Elite.” Though there is some concern for the method of communication, and the focus is on the control of the physical infrastructure, Political Economy of Communication implicitly, if not explicitly, sees domination and determination as stemming from the power structure of society. Like Frankfurt School critiques, much of the evidence they marshal in the argument of the cultural efficacy of these controls is precisely in the lack of any social tension. In other words, in opposition to the behaviorist focus of Lazarsfeld and Katz on small, incremental changes of opinion, 175 these scholars see the most powerful evidence of their claims in the lack of any significant change of social norms. As Todd Gitlin said of effects theorists, “no change is a significant effect.” 176 This outlook is informed by the faith that progressive muckrakers had in the effect that a critical, objective communication system and a greater distribution of facts would ignite social change. 177 If the media was doing its job, if it was reporting and representing reality, people would be more upset. In the best cases, these analyses are also accompanied by some social history. This is part of Schiller’s argument in his landmark work and gives much of the value to Robert McChesney’s work. 178 Here, as with Williams’ use of Schiller in Television, the emphasis on the long development of this control of the infrastructure is exemplary of the historical materialism of these approaches. In these accounts, the social tensions that arose around moments of consolidation are important for de-reifying the status quo and suggesting alternatives. This is the value of the 173 174 Janet Wasko, Understanding Disney : The Manufacture of Fantasy (Cambridge: Polity, 2001). Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent : The Political Economy of the Mass Media, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). Katz, Lazarsfeld, and Columbia University. Bureau of Applied Social Research., Personal Influence; the Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications, Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet, The People's Choice; How the Voter Makes up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. 176 175 Quote mentioned above; see also Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching : Mass Media in the Making & Unmaking of the New Left, [2003 ]. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Here, as in his 1979 article, he argues that the work of Cultural Studies scholars represents the best corrective to both the dominant paradigm of media studies and the institutional status quo of the commercial media. See Section 2 above. 177 178 Cf: McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy : The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935.; McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy : Communication Politics in Dubious Times. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 49 - FIELD #1 last chapter of McChesney’s latest work, which chronicles current resistance to media consolidation. 179 The argument of the preceding chapters, on the other hand, often rests on clichéd premises, equating “bigness” with “badness” and suggest that placing more public qua government control would be preferable to the current regime of “market regulation.” In other words, it represents the same lack of attention at the level of the subject. In this tradition of historical materialism, many recent works on the internet and new media focus on making the history of control over infrastructure understood. The opening that the internet seems to provide could be brief if there isn’t popular pressure to expand its democratic potential. Lawrence Lessig’s work on this takes a somewhat libertarian perspective, focusing on the freedom at the level of the physical infrastructure and code that helped to make the internet successful at all 180 . Dan Schiller’s Digital Capitalism is one of the many accounts which emphasizes the emergence and maintenance of the internet as a tool of the military-industrial complex. 181 Mattelart’s Networking the World builds on his past work to argue that the internet, like every other communication technology which has promised democratic liberation, is likely to be incorporated into the dominant systems of global capitalist control. 182 Springing from the desire to resist the control over the internet—and from the very “Saint-Simonism” Mattelart rejects—Nick Dyer-Witheford and McKenzie Wark are just two of the recent calls to mobilize “forces that could produce a different future based on the common sharing of wealth—a twentyfirst-century communism” using the new means of communication 183 From the perspective of the field that exists between Cultural Studies and Political Economy of communication, some of these claims and goals seem somewhat fevered and even oldfashioned. But much of this can be accounted for by considering the parallel changes in the field of political economy as such. According to Vincent Mosco, “Every generation of political economists has been influenced by the perceived need to create alternatives to orthodox economics, and, following from this, to develop media policies based on these alternatives.” 184 Seen in the context of the changes in orthodox economics—and in the telecommunications industry itself—over the past few decades, the sometimes slavish devotion to scrutinizing synergy 179 Robert Waterman McChesney, The Problem of the Media : U.S. Communication Politics in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004). Lawrence Lessig, Code : And Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1999), Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture : How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), Lessig, The Future of Ideas : The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. Siva Vaidhyanathan— despite the radicalism implied in his title—also presents some interesting arguments on intellectual property in a sort of libertarian direction in Anarchist in the Library. His earlier Copyrights and Copywrongs is part intellectual history and part historical materialism. Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Anarchist in the Library : How the Clash between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (New York: Basic Books, 2004), Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs : The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (New York: New York University Press, 2001). 181 182 180 Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism : Networking the Global Market System (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). Armand Mattelart, Networking the World, 1794-2000, English language ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). It should be said that, as mentioned above, Mattelart would also include the very narrative of “Communication” in this version of “the Dialectic of Enlightment.” 183 Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx : Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). p. 2; cf. McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Vincent Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication : Rethinking and Renewal (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE Publications, 1996). p. 76. 184 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 50 - FIELD #1 and consolidation seems very reasonable. Likewise, as mentioned above, the further consolidation that deregulation has wrought casts little doubt about the importance of their work. If Marxian inspired, institutional analysis in political economy seems short on evidence of the effects of conglomeration (or at least evidence that would convince a neo-liberal), Neo-liberal political economists, or as they are called in the United States, “Economists,” usually rely on far more idealistic arguments. In place of a knee-jerk vilification of corporate control, they see market interventions by the state as abhorrent no matter what the goal. More specifically, they insist that goal oriented policies are inefficient and that matters are better left to the “free hand” of the marketplace. If Marxian scholars see the free exchange of information as an issue of a free press, Neo-liberal and libertarian economists see it as an issue best left to market. From a perspective at least as radical as Marx’s, F. A. Hayek sees this “extended moral order” as being the ultimate communication mechanism 185 : Indeed, maintaining communication within the order requires that dispersed information be utilized by many different individuals, unknown to one another, in a way that allows the different knowledges of millions to form an exosomatic or material pattern. Every individual becomes a link in many chains of transmission through which he receives signals enabling him to adapt his plans to circumstances he does not know. The overall order thus becomes infinitely expansible, spontaneously supplying information about an increasing range of means without exclusively serving particular ends. 186 This sort of inspiring description of the power and elegance of the market system makes state meddling sacrilegious and, more importantly, detrimental to the functioning of society 187 . Though Hayek is completely upfront with (a version of) the materialist history of market society, and though he and other neo-liberals clearly believe the government is absolutely necessary in setting up this order and protecting property rights, the rhetoric they employ often equates the free market with a force of nature, inherently and essentially existing at the center of every uninhibited human consciousness. Bruce Owen, in what is otherwise a policy report meant to prove that “there is no longer a rational basis for the [FCC] to regulate media ownership, 188 employs the following reasoning: “In a business with such rapidly changing strategies and technologies, in which consumers have demonstrated their willingness to adopt new media, it makes no more sense to legislate market definitions in quasi-permanent rules than for King Canute to order away the ocean’s waves.” 189 185 Though he doesn’t mention Hayek, Mattelart would certainly allow the inclusion of this narrative of Communication among those he investigates. Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Fatal Conceit : The Errors of Socialism, ed. William Warren Bartley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). p. 84. 187 186 Hayek basically means “society” or “social formation” when he talks about an “extended moral order” but he refuses to use those terms because he thinks the socialists have “poisoned” it. Chief among the culprits is Raymond Williams, whose entry in Keywords for “society” Hayek finds inadequate. Hayek is also generally upset by the “unfortunate fact that many words that we apply to various aspects of the extended order of human cooperation carry misleading connotations of an earlier kind of community.” Ibid. p. 109. For a review of some of these earlier connotations cf. Raymond Williams, Keywords : A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). pp. 291-295. Bruce M. Owen, "Statement on Media Ownership Rules," (Washington DC: Economists Incorporated, 2003). p. 2. Ibid. p. 3. 188 189 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 51 - FIELD #1 This belief in the market as the most natural of institutions leads Neo-liberal economists of communication to believe strongly in “deregulation,” or what Mosco calls “market regulation.” 190 More importantly, they see the market itself as the superlative mechanism of communication so reject any attempt to regulate it in order to facilitate another kind of communication—such as one “in the public interest.” They see the possibility of bureaucratic waste or “rent seeking” activities as a much greater problem than any other social ill. Therefore, since at least the late 1950s, proponents of market regulation have advocating for an FCC auction of broadcast spectrum licenses. 191 Unconcerned with media consolidation, and only able to point to relatively benign examples of regulations that are unable to strike a balance between market freedom and protecting the public interest as evidence of regulation’s intrinsic disfunctionality, 192 this paradigm of economic thought has become dominant in policy circles, leading to the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This policy change resulted in an unprecedented consolidation in the radio industry and promised changes to TV ownership as well. Further deregulation was scheduled for late 2003, but, as McChesney chronicles, a public outcry has slowed this process somewhat 193 . Nevertheless, understanding these material and ideological circumstances makes it clear why scholars concerned with the protection of “the public interest” would continue to harp on the fact of conglomeration, rather than moving to more nuanced approaches: as Stuart Hall says of the original argument about ideology in Marx (paraphrasing Engels), “the simplifications developed [. . . ] because Marx was in contestation with the speculative idealism of his day. They were onesided distortions, the necessary exaggerations of polemic.” 194 In the case of political economy of communication, the idealist pressures were seen from a variety of positions, from neo-liberal economists, to communications scholars still working with effects model assumptions, to the emergent field of Cultural Studies which began with certain idealist impulses and, as we will see below, made influential arguments, which, “view the media as more subject to audience preferences than to its own material interests and imperatives.” 195 Though, in recent years, many policy minded scholars have used different ways to define media concentration, searching for ways which might be fit more closely to the assumptions of the dominant paradigm 196 the struggle to limit the monopoly control of the physical infrastructure continues to inform much of this work. While this strain of Political economy of communications, which I am arguing is informed by or analogous to Marx’s in The German Ideology has stayed somewhat consistent throughout the past two decades, another paradigm did poke its head briefly, even if its argument has been 190 191 Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication : Rethinking and Renewal. p. 200. R. H. Coase, "The Federal Communications Commission," Journal of Law and Economics 2 (1959), Thomas W. Hazlett, "Assigning Property Rights to Radio Spectrum: Why Did F C C License Auctions Take 67 Years?," Journal of Law and Economics 41, no. 2 (1998). Thomas W. Hazlett, "The Rationality of the Us Regulation of the Broadcast Spectrm," Journal of Law and Economics 33, no. April (1990). Thomas W. Hazlett, "Station Brakes: The Government's Campaign against Cable Television," Reason, Feb 1995. McChesney, The Problem of the Media : U.S. Communication Politics in the Twenty-First Century. ch. 7. Hall, "The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees." p. 30. Schiller, Culture, Inc. : The Corporate Takeover of American Expression. p. 136. 192 193 194 195 196 Mark Cooper, "Promoting the Public Interest through Media Ownership Limits: A Critique of the Fcc's Draft Order Based on Rigorous Market Structure Analysis and First Amendement Principles," (Washington DC: Consumer Federation of America, 2003). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 52 - FIELD #1 somewhat less influential. I am speaking here of Dallas Smythe and, particularly, his article “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism” which inaugurated what came to be known as the “blindspot debate” in the Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory. 197 Smythe’s inquiry is different from the rest of the political economy of communication literature because, in the blindspot debate anyway, his inquiry is informed by the analysis that Marx begins in Capital, Vol 1. In that tome, Marx begins with the commodity and the way that value is created through the commodity and the exploitation of labor. Though Smythe doesn’t elaborate in the kind of detail that Marx does, his criticism in the field of communications is quite significant not only for what it does to the field of political economy but for the effects it has—or could have—for the understanding of political economy that could be used in Cultural Studies. As it happens, the debate and its after effects also offer some linkages to cultural studies, which I will turn to shortly. Following from the discussion at the beginning of the chapter, with the statements Murdock and Golding made about the inadequacies of economic analysis in many of the main thinkers in what came to be seen as cultural studies and, incidentally, Grossberg’s later statements on the simple toleration of political economy by Cultural Studies, Smythe’s criticism of all of the above is telling. He says that none of them have really understood the nature of the way the communications industry is operating because they haven’t updated their understanding of the communications industry as an industry—and hence of the subject as subject to that industry—since the time of Marx. This has led them to focus to narrowly on these as ideological apparatuses rather than considering “what economic function for capital do they serve,” attempting to understand their role in the reproduction of capitalist relations of production.” 198 By this, he means that the communications industries not only produce ideology, but are central in the production of a very important commodity: the audience. What do advertisers buy with their advertising expenditures? As hardnosed businessmen they are not paying for advertising for nothing, nor from altruism . I suggest that what they buy are the services of audiences with predictable specifications who will pay attention in predictable numbers and at particular times to particular means of communication (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards, and third-class mail). As collectivities these audiences are commodities. As commodities they are dealt with in markets by producers and buyers (the latter being advertisers). 199 This is the commodity that Smythe endeavors to examine. By looking at this commodity, he is able to consider the unique work done by the audience. Although it isn’t completely without Dallas Walker Smythe, "Communications: Blindspots of Western Marxism," Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 1, no. 3 (1977). Sut Jhally, "Probing the Blindspot: The Audience Commodity," Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 6, no. 1-2 (1982), Bill Livant, "The Audience Commodity: On the Blindspots Debate," Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 3, no. 1 (1979), Bill Livant, "Working at Watching: A Reply to Sut Jhally," Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 6, no. 1-2 (1982), Graham Murdock, "Blindspots About Western Marxism: A Reply to Dallas Smythe," Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 2, no. 2 (1978), Smythe, "Communications: Blindspots of Western Marxism.", Dallas Walker Smythe, "Rejoinder to Graham Murdock," Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 2, no. 2 (1978). Cf. also Smythe, Dependency Road : Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness and Canada. especially chs. 2-11. 198 199 197 Smythe, "Communications: Blindspots of Western Marxism." p. 1. Ibid. p. 4. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 53 - FIELD #1 contradictions, the idea itself is something that is connected to a much bigger field of theory and activism that emerges right around this time. One of Smythe’s key interests is one that has inspired other scholars in the political economy of communications as well as the effects model analysts of mainstream communication scholarship. Namely, how is demand managed? How does persuasion work? As discussed above, Klapper’s analysis of how persuasion works emphasizes the internal group dynamics of people’s local context, as well as a variety of other “mediating” factors which help to dictate how or if a message causes any change of opinion 200 . In the “western marxism” tradition that Smythe criticized, also discussed above, it has more to do with the control of the means of mental production, i.e. control of the communications infrastructure. About the latter, it is clear where Smythe stands. Though he sees their work—and, incidentally, most of his previous work, also in that tradition—as necessary but incomplete: “it is arguable that knowledge of the process by which one is dominated is necessary before the consciousness of the domination is prepared to go on the offensive. The work on this line has served to describe and anatomize the process of domination and thus clear the way for the work on the other factor in the principle contradiction: people.” 201 Of the effects research he says something relatively similar. He mostly sees this strain of thought as being part of the process of creating demand. Klapper doesn’t comment on market research saying that the effects models he looked at were focused on what Smythe calls the “free lunch” of the media: the programs that happen between advertisements. Not only does Smythe think this focus is misguided, but he also doubts Klapper’s claim, saying that, among other factors, “Market researchers come from academic institutions and take the knowledge of free lunch research with them and market researchers draw on academic research.” 202 Thus, Smythe concludes, “in principle all his findings are applicable to some degree to market research.” Smythe expands on these findings and also points to their significant flaws, such as their basic inability to consider the participation in market society and commodity consumption with any critical eye. Smythe synthesizes the two paradigms by looking at the way that the audience is dialectically created in the process whereby they learn 1) what it is that they need and 2) what are the commodities to satisfy that need through interaction with the market in their daily lives and specific messages of advertising. Smythe sees this as a certain form of cultural work done by the audience that thereby constitutes it as an audience. In addition to watching the advertisements, which help to reinforce these notions of new needs, Smythe calls this more general “creation of consumer consciousness” a part of the work of the audience. 203 This understanding of the role of consumer society and advertising in the creation of use vales is quite related to other, more philosophical critics of the role of the media in the creation of values. Jean Baudrillard, in particular, and around the same time, was also looking through the lens of Marx’s Capital and the way that consumer society began to upset one of the fundamental 200 201 202 203 Klapper, The Effects of Mass Communication. Smythe, Dependency Road : Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness and Canada. p. 269. Ibid. p. 255. Ibid. p. 266. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 54 - FIELD #1 assumptions of that work: that there is a given amount of stuff that people need to survive 204 . With the rise of post-war consumer oriented societies in the U.S. and, eventually, in Western Europe, this conception was unsettled and the merely maieutic nature of Marx’s category became more apparent. 205 The attempt by the Regulationist School of political economy to reintegrate this new social totality with Marx’s understanding of labor as the source of value, as well as explain the persistence of capitalism despite its internal contradictions, was inspired in some part by Althusser’s reading of Capital and the ideas Baudrillard was discussing 206 . In his A Theory of Capitalist Regulation, Michel Aglietta refers specifically to Baudrillard when he talks about the key component of their theory: that with each mode of accumulation there is a mode of regulation; that in the post war United States, part of this process was to produce a new “social consumption norm” 207 that acted as a “mode of regulation” 208 to integrate people into the habitus of post war consumer capitalism. Though this has a significant material component, the resurgence of semiotics/semiology and structuralist linguistics, both of which helped Baudrillard make his argument, made its discursive components more compelling for some cultural critics and activists. Guy Dubord and the Situationist movement inspired by his book The Society of the Spectacle, Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations and Simulacra and Roland Barthes Mythologies all began looking at the relationship between symbolic structures, their correspondence to reality, and their manipulation by powerful forces. 209 These new innovations recall the ideological structures of the political economy theorists above but the role of the audience in creating this value, central in Smythe’s later work, is absent. The tension between these two that Smythe tries to reconcile through a “political economy of the audience,” is analogous to the central tensions that develop in the Birmingham school—the tension between ethnographic attention to viewers’ understandings, analysis of texts as ideological, and the place of each in a political-economic structure of a social formation. These works, along with the earlier studies of effects and uses, form the intellectual backdrop to the (always only) emergent field of Cultural Studies. The latter continues to flounder for a method. To return to the text that framed the beginning of this section, Williams’s Television: Technology and Cultural Form mentions semiotic analysis as an important avenue for critical exploration of the media. Still, in the study of media, the political economy of media production is as central to early cultural studies scholarship as it is in that book. Ethnography, however, is not championed. The latter is probably more a result of the sociological inflection of other early practitioners. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis, MO.: Telos Press, 1981), Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London ; New York: Verso, 1996). 205 206 204 Props to Paul Smith Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation : The Us Experience, New ed., Verso Classics ; 28. (London: Verso, 2000). 207 208 209 Ibid. p. 71. Alain Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles : The Crisis in Global Fordism (London: Verso, 1987). p. 33. Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, [1st American ] ed. (New York,: Hill and Wang, 1968), Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Body, in Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 55 - FIELD #1 On the other hand, this depends in a large part on how one periodizes Cultural Studies. The Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham was concerned with broader questions than just the media and questions of communication were a central but not solitary focus. If we go back to the “founding texts” of Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams, it is clear that their focus is on culture as a lived experience, on the subjective side of this equation. The intervention made by these early texts was more in the discipline of literary studies than sociology or communication studies. This is particularly the case for Hoggart, usually remembered in this context for his Uses of Literacy, which was both a thick description of working class culture and an argument for the importance of looking at what was later known as popular or mass culture. 210 This more empirical, “culturalist” bias is something Perry Anderson would attribute to a longer, British tradition of empiricism. Its relation to the emergent forms of Structuralist Marxism of Althusser was obviously—and in the case of E.P. Thompson’s Poverty of Theory, famously—one of opposition. However, this didn’t mean that they had no engagement with Marxism, it just points to the kinds of concerns that animated this earlier discussion—and the critical traditions they were mostly contesting, which weren’t in sociology or communication studies, but in the disciplines of Literature and History. E.P. Thompson was engaged in a project similar to that of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, except that unlike the latter work, which, though obviously influenced by a New Left outlook, assumes pluralism as its primary target, 211 Thompson wants to show the way that the English working class, and class as a concept, is not “a ‘structure’ or even a ‘category,’ but [is] something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.” 212 Like Zinn, Thompson focuses on the agency that this class has in history, though for him, tellingly, it is defined more in terms of a coherent culture related to production than as a political movement. Thompson is antagonistic to Marxism as a theory of how classes are formed, but he is closer to the latter in his characterization of history than with the other theory of class he criticizes, that of Parsons. Here he doesn’t see classes as formed in antagonism to a certain aspect of the social formation, a view he attributes to Parsons but could just as easily be directed at Marx, but his consideration of the importance of history in forming class as a lived experience puts him much more on the side of Marx, who would basically agree with this materialist interpretation of culture. Hoggart is also interested in critiquing the notion of class discussed by “middle class Marxists.” 213 His first chapter offers many explanations of what sort of practices he thinks define the working class as a class, as opposed to the more structural understanding of them in relation to production. He takes this as his starting point and then hopes to see the way that new, “more generally diffused appeals of the mass publications connect with commonly accepted attitudes, Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, Classics in Communication and Mass Culture Series (New Brunswick, N.J., U.S.A.: Transation Publishers, 1998). Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States : 1492-Present, [New ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). By this I mean he is, in part trying to argue that classes actually exist in American Society whereas Thompson could sort of assume this as an accepted truth of the empirical situation in England. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1st Vintage ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1966). Quote from E. P. Thompson and Dorothy Thompson, The Essential E.P. Thompson (New York: New Press : Distributed by W.W. Norton & Co., 2001). p. 3. 213 212 211 210 Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy. p. 3. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 56 - FIELD #1 how they are altering those attitudes and how they are meeting resistance.” 214 This is big change from the traditional mode of literary scholarship practiced at the time—that of New Criticism— which assumes an insularity to the process of criticism and a reified notion of its object. 215 Hoggart looks at range of texts, not just classical literature, especially those of mass culture, and his concern, in the tradition of F.R. Leavis and the journal Scrutiny, is with the social and moral effects of these on a certain group of people. The important thing to note, however, for his argument is not just that he begins to look at aspects of popular culture or that he is concerned with the reception and resistance of its readers, but, as Andrew Goodwin points out in his introduction to the Transaction edition of Uses of Literacy, “its worth is to be found every bit as much in the fact that his book takes class as its focus.” 216 Though he employs what will later be called a “culturalist” 217 as opposed to “structuralist” understanding of what forms that class, it is unique in comparison with later Cultural Studies that takes neither of these approaches but instead denies class as a structurally determined category with a definite and essential consciousness and takes the popular cultural text itself as the constituting object. 218 Williams, though he is most often considered a literary critic, is also, as my earlier discussions show, more engaged with the wider intellectual discussion in communications, sociology and political theory, and, in the words of Graeme Turner, “Williams’ theoretical influence over the development of cultural studies has arguably been more profound than any other.” 219 This influence, however, does not sprout fully grown out of his early works like Culture and Society and The Long Revolution, both of which employ more culturalist notions of what constitutes a class, but develops over the course of several decades, eventually coalescing in what Turner calls “his conversion” in Marxism and Literature. 220 This is the result of Williams’ engagement with various forms of what Perry Anderson has termed “Western Marxism,” This engagement is not limited to Williams, but is arguably even more crucial to the development of what becomes Cultural Studies than the interventions it tries to stage with other forms of literary theory, history, sociology, political science and criticism of popular culture. I say arguably, because it is difficult to make any universal claims about the early history. Stuart Hall has said that the engagement with Marxism and political economy was, for him anyway, always conflicted. Even from the inside, Cultural Studies often seems inchoate, simultaneously under erasure and in a state of becoming. This is often touted as its greatest strength, its antidisciplinarity, its always heterodoxical intervention being one of its few defining features. Even the object it is meant to study, culture, remains bracketed, assumed and undefined. But from the 214 215 216 217 218 Ibid. p. 5. For more on New Criticism see ch. 2, Eagleton, Literary Theory : An Introduction. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy. p. xiii. Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms," in What Is Cultural Studies?, ed. John Storey (London: Arnold, 1996). On this distinction, see ch. 1 Virginia Nightingale, Studying Audiences : The Shock of the Real (London ; New York: Routledge, 1996). Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies : An Introduction, 2nd ed. (London ; New York: Routledge, 1996). p. 48. For the different ways that Williams considers both culture and determination, cf: Williams, Keywords : A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, Rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Marxist Introductions (Oxford [Eng.]: Oxford University Press, 1977), Raymond Williams, The Sociology of Culture, 1st American ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), Williams, Television : Technology and Cultural Form. 220 219 Turner, British Cultural Studies : An Introduction. p. 59. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 57 - FIELD #1 outside, it is clear that the practitioners work was informed in some way by Marxism and, therefore, by political economy. In a way, the denial by Grossberg at the beginning of this section, the claim that Cultural Studies and political economy “simply tolerated” each other, is a somewhat reactionary position. While Stuart Hall, the unathoritative authority of Birmingham’s history, has a similar recollection at round the same time, 221 in earlier days it is fairly clear that he, himself at least, was engaging with Marxist thought directly. In an earlier article, titled “Cultural Studies and the Centre,” published in the collection of working papers from 1973-1979, as mentioned above, Hall attempts to make a new kind of “General Theory” of the role of communication and culture in the formation and the determination of society. Though he uses a variety of theorists to make this case, many of them are useful in terms of the arguments they make about the constitution of classes or class consciousness 222 as well as the role of structural differences in power helping to constitute knowledge 223 and, as mentioned above, the redefinition of ideology and the introduction of the concept of hegemony. 224 In another article, written at the same time, he meditates on the way that the Birminham School scholars like himself had reframed the conception of the media using, among others, Althusser’s conception of ideology, and Hall’s own most noted article on encoding and decoding, despite its semiotic and sociological aspects, framed his discussion in explicitly Marxist terms of class relations. 225 Still the question of determination—the problem of mediating between the structure and the subject—was difficult to resolve completely. 226 I mention all of this simply to point out the original engagement with Marxism and the serious consideration of structural concerns such as political economy, both of which were a response to the domination of Parsons and Lazarsfeld in much of the social sciences. A deeper consideration of the Birmingham attempt at a general theory makes this explicit. It is closely related to the ethnographic challenge to the dominant paradigm of sociology and media effects research, which, as stated above, was one of the primary intentions of Cultural Studies. Stuart Hall, in his article “The Rediscovery of Ideology: The Return of the Repressed in Media “There never was a prior moment when cultural studies and marxism represented a perfect theoretical fit.” Stuart Hall, David Morley, and Kuan-Hsing Chen, Stuart Hall : Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, Comedia (London ; New York: Routledge, 1996). p. 265. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness; Studies in Marxist Dialectics, Nicos Ar Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, 3d impression. ed. (London: Nlb, 1976), Nicos Ar Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Nlb, 1978). Though the structural aspect is more present in the work of Althusser, he discusses directly his pupil’s notions: Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading "Capital" (London,: Nlb, 1970), Louis Althusser and Ben Brewster, For Marx, 1st American edition. ed. (New York,: Pantheon Books, 1969), Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison, 2nd Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), Foucault, The Order of Things; an Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Foucault and Gordon, Power/Knowledge : Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. All of the above figure in to Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York,: Monthly Review Press, 1972). Hall cites the “Ideology and the State” conception of ideology which draws on both Gramsci and Lacan as being a key text in early formulations of hegemony. 225 226 224 223 222 221 Hall, "Culture, the Media and the 'Ideological Effect'.", Hall, "Encoding/Decoding." For a truly determinant variation of Althusser’s appropriation on Lacan, the various considerations of the “cinematic apparatus” appear collected (in part) in Philip Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology : A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).; for a summary and assessment, including work by Birmingham School ethnography, see Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London ; New York: Routledge, 1993). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 58 - FIELD #1 Studies” 227 explicitly frames the intervention in these terms. In short, the sociology of deviance, a social fact which dominant, consensus-obsessed Parsonian sociology was ill equipped to deal with in any rigorous sense, helped to alert social scientists to something Marxists had been saying for many years: “in short, matters of cultural and social power—the power to define the rules of the game to which everyone was required to ascribe—were involved in the transaction between those who were considered consensus-subscribers and those who were labeled as deviant.” 228 The irony is that, according to Hall, it was the presence of sub-cultures which helped alert sociologists to the role of ideology once again—and it was through the emphasis of subcultures that Cultural Studies eventually leads to a disavowal of one of the few concepts it helped to innovate. I say helped because there were several other sociological theorists who were speculating on these ideas at the time. Two that are explicitly mentioned in various Cultural Studies or related texts are Erving Goffman (especially his Frame Analysis and The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life) and Pierre Bourdieu (at this point, the most important being his Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture) 229 . Both of these in one way or another, try to help mediate between what Hall calls “the monopoly of power and the diffusion of consent” and the role that “media and other signifying institutions” were no longer conceived “as the institutions which merely reflected and sustained the consensus, but as the institutions which helped to produce consensus and which manufactured consent.” 230 Bourdieu, especially, was concerned with revising the dominant theory of society and to find a way of mediating between structure and subject. His research eventually led him to come up with the concepts of “field,” “capital,” and “habitus” to explain certain social interactions. 231 All of these theories tried to frame an understanding of society and communication that could account for the reproduction of social relations in ways that Parsons could not because they allowed for agency on the part of subjects—even if that agency, in fact, worked towards reproduction. The goal was to figure out why these structures of domination appeared legitimate. The most well known example of ethnographic research is Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour. Though it doesn’t deal much with the media or communication aspects of these theories, it does deal with the education system and the reproduction of class relations. In Willis’ research 227 Stuart Hall, "The Rediscovery of 'Ideology': Return of the Repressed in Media Studies," ed. Michael Gurevitch, et al. (London: Methuen, 1982). Ibid. p. 62-63. For more on the sociological and ethnographic exploration of deviance, see Howard Saul Becker, Outsiders; Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (London,: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963). 228 Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, Sage Studies in Social and Educational Change ; V. 5 (London ; Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1977), Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis : An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Doubleday Anchor Books ; A174 (Garden City, N.Y.,: Doubleday, 1959). For a work of media studies that is often cited in the same breath as early Birmingham School work, an which uses Goffman’s Frame Analysis explicitly in its ethnography and content analysis of two London news broadcasts, see Glasgow University Media Group., Bad News (London ; Boston: Routledge & K. Paul, 1976). 230 231 229 Hall, "The Rediscovery of 'Ideology': Return of the Repressed in Media Studies." p. 86. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology ; 16 (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). The only one of these concepts that consistently appears in Cultural Studies work is the concept of capital, but almost only in terms of “cultural capital” as it appears in Distinction. A few places include “habitus,” also usually drawn from that work. Rarely is the more important term field considered and they are almost never used in the integrated fashion which Bourdieu insists they should be. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 59 - FIELD #1 he finds that the kinds of deviant behaviors he observes in the working class youth of his study are an example of “self-damnation in the taking on of subordinate roles in western capitalism,” but that, “this damnation is experienced, paradoxically, as true learning, affirmation, appropriation, and as a form of resistance.” 232 In the field, this early Birmingham School work develops alongside several other interventions and in each case there is an insistence that there is both a structure with powerful interests and effects that this, in some way mediates the kind of positions open to social actors, though never totally, never with complete predictability, and often with the very real possibility that it can be overturned by a heterodoxical hegemonic challenge. Early Cultural Studies work, though often ambivalent on the role economics per se plays in determining both the positions and dispositions of actors within the social formation, is more certain of the role of power and of cultural cohesion. Still, even when Richard Johnson is considering “the circuit of culture” in his essay “What is Cultural Studies Anyway?” his notion owes a great debt to Marx’s “foundation” text on political economy, The Grundrisse, which posits production, distribution, exchange and consumption as mutually constituting moments within the cycle of capitalism, all of which are in one way or another determined by production. 233 In this way, though it added some nuance to the process, many early cultural studies scholars had more similarities with political economy of communication scholars in terms of their political commitments, the sense of the intervention that they were making, and their conception of how power and production had important ways of determining both the social formation and the communication and culture that developed as both a support and a response. Even ethnographic work was importantly involved with discussing this process and framing these issues in much the same way. VI. AUDIENCE ANALYSIS, POSTSTRUCTURALISM, AND PLURALIST RETRENCHMENT contents bibliography As Cultural Studies developed, the ethnographic school—especially in the form of audience response studies—became more prominent, though with very different assumptions. Most notably, as described by Nightingale, most of the early ethnographic research, as noted above in regards to Hoggart, assumed the coherence of the group as a given, usually in terms of class or an existing community. 234 Dorothy Hobson’s Crossroads: The Drama of the Soap Opera is one such study. 235 As Charlotte Brundson describes it as, “emerging from earlier research on the Paul E. Willis, Learning to Labour : How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Farnborough, Eng.: Saxon House, 1977). p. 3. Willis’ use of participant observation, another common practice in early Birmingham School work, is also evidence of the legacy of Chicago School Sociology, particular the sub-culture studies of Park. For another “seminal” study of subcultures, which is, by even the author’s later admission, undertheorized, cf: Dick Hebdige, Subculture : The Meaning of Style (London ; New York: Routledge, 1991). Both of these studies were later criticized by McRobbie for their masculine assumption about subcultures. For an approach that mixes textual and ethnographic methods along with an emphasis on feminist concerns, Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000).. 233 234 235 232 Richard Johnson, "What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?," Social Text, no. 6 (1987). Nightingale discusses this in chapter 1, Nightingale, Studying Audiences : The Shock of the Real. It is worth noting that Hobson is almost equally interested in looking at the production side, spending much of the book discussing what the actors, producers, etc. as well as the broader circulation of the texts—considered through examples JOHNSON ANDREWS - 60 - FIELD #1 daily culture of young-working class women at home.” 236 However, as audience studies progressed, and as the concepts of class and gender came under fire as essentialist notions by post-structuralist and feminist theorists, this initial focus on the interpretations of communities gave way to a focus on what Janice Radway might call “interpretive communities.” 237 In this case, though it is not overtly discussed in these terms, the focus shifts to the community as it is articulated around a text, rather than as a given entity. This is a shift from earlier cultural studies work, which posited not only an existent community, but also a particular social class within that community 238 ; but it also is separate from earlier research by Lazarsfeld and Katz where community was discussed as existing before its interaction with a text. On the other hand, the pluralist assumptions of the former again become more important, especially with the focus on “active audiences” which begins to emerge from this strain of theory. 239 John Fiske is often credited with this category, as mentioned above. His book is indicative of the way it is both similar and different than earlier effects models. First of all, it goes through a range of analysis inspired by semiotic and structuralist considerations of the determination of the text. This is different than Administrative Research because the latter paid little attention to the determination of these messages per se. It also has a characterization of the audience that is inspired by a populist view of the public rather than an elitist view of the “crowd.” A problematic way it is also different is that, in place of seeing no change in opinion as no effect, research tauting the “active audience” sees various forms of what Klapper would call “selective perception” as evidence of a powerful tool of resistance to media messages. But in its substance, it upholds one of the most problematic assumptions of the effects paradigm as critiqued by Gitlin fifteen years before. Namely, it makes all texts commensurable. The initial focus on news broadcasts by Hall, the Glasgow Media Group, John Hartley, David Morley and Charlotte Brunsdon, and even Fiske, shifted more towards looking at what Smythe called “the free lunch” of television and movies, debating about the way these representations could or might affect consciousness. 240 On the other hand, Morley, who often retains the earlier focus on an already constituted community, also finds something like the twostep flow, seeing that people are helped along in their interpretations of news programs by their membership in certain groups. 241 In other words, he finds that there is a mediation of effects by other factors. Morley and audience researchers also find that there are a variety of things that can be done with media, which, in some ways simply continues in the “uses and gratifications” of tributary media—and the form of the soap opera as a genre. Dorothy Hobson, Crossroads : The Drama of a Soap Opera (London: Methuen, 1982). 236 Charlotte Brunsdon, The Feminist, the Housewife, and the Soap Opera, Oxford Television Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). p. 30 Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance : Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). p. 15. 237 238 This was true not only of early audience/ethnographic research but of theories like that of Hall’s encoding/decoding which posited social class as the locus of competing meanings. Hall, "Encoding/Decoding." The “active audience” is often credited to Fiske from Fiske, Television Culture. Cf: Glasgow University Media Group., Bad News, John Hartley, Understanding News, Methuen Studies in Communication (London ; New York: Methuen, 1982), David Morley and Charlotte Brunsdon, The Nationwide Television Studies, Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies ; 6 (London ; New York: Routledge, 1999). 239 240 Morley also tries to correct misreadings of his work that have led to some of the reductionist notions about audiences power to resist in David Morley, Television, Audiences, and Cultural Studies (London ; New York: Routledge, 1992). 241 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 61 - FIELD #1 model. One of the arguments Morley makes, for instance, is that people aren’t always watching the TV even if it is on—a compelling reason to doubt the efficacy of ideological propaganda at the level of content, but an observation which doesn’t get at why they might have it on at all. All of this led James Curran, as mentioned above, to criticize it as a “new revisionism:” 242 “old pluralist dishes being reheated and presented as new cuisine [. . . .] [revisionists are presenting] as innovation what is in reality a process of rediscovery.” 243 Morley’s response to this is that “this is a particular history which could not have been written (by Curran or anyone else) fifteen years ago, before the impact of the ‘new revisionism’ (of which Curran is so critical) transformed our understanding of the field of audience research, and thus transformed our understanding of the field of who and what was important in its history.” 244 This may be so (though articles speaking against these paradigms by Hall and Williams in the early 1970s seem pretty clear on that history) but, for the purposes of this field, it begins to make this work less relevant. This trend in scholarship does little in the way of positing an explanation as to why a social formation works in the way that it does or what role, if any, communication or culture play in that process. Thus, while it fully dissolves the Structural Functionalist assumption that society is constituted by a similarly held definition of the situation, it also duplicates the conclusions of “abstract empiricism” as Mills called it. Any vestiges of structural analysis centers around the diffusion and indeterminacy of meaning and the resistance the individual can have to a articulations of dominant ideology. This is a response to earlier works like the Screen apparatus theory. But in focusing on “meaning” in place of action, and not providing any other explanation, ethnographic studies of the audience often ignore the original intervention Cultural Studies was intended to make. In critiquing functionalist notions, the purpose was to say that the system didn’t just work because everyone believed the same thing, action wasn’t just oriented by certain commonly held beliefs, but that there was some form of determination that led action and ideas to be legitimate and to allow a social structure to cohere. In focusing on meaning’s indeterminacy, they recall this first step, but neglect the second, more important question of what it is that makes all these disparate groups fit together—of what makes action seem stable even if certain groups are able to rearticulate dominant meanings through the practice of bricolage. On this question, post-structuralist critiques (and, perhaps, a more postmodern reality, discussed below) make constituting any social entity at all as an object of study near to impossible, hence the move to look less at class or gender groups as viewers to seeing the self-selecting fan subculture in which consumption defines one as a member—but consumption framed as a type of production—as the one of the few viable objectification of active subjects. 245 On the other hand, many such studies begin to ask questions such as these in a global context in response to cries of “cultural imperialism.” Mentioned above, is John Tomlinson, who has one of the most directed attacks on that thesis using ethnographic methods, but Ien Ang has, perhaps, the most famous study, trying to show the dynamics of interpretation as the television program 242 243 244 245 Curran, "The 'New Revisionism' in Mass Communications Research." Cited in Morley, Television, Audiences, and Cultural Studies. p.22. Ibid. p. 23. For a longer meditation on what constitutes an audience from a more thoroughly communication studies perspective— which takes into account several of the outlooks considered in the political economy of communication section, see also, Ien Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience (London ; New York: Routledge, 1991). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 62 - FIELD #1 Dallas, presumed to be a vessel for US values, is decoded in a variety of ways as it travels across the globe. 246 The goal here is to apply ethnographic audience research to contest the assumption that “everybody understands [American television programs] in the same way. 247 In some ways, once it moves to the world stage, this work begins to intersect with the concerns of Post-Colonial theory and its desire to “Unthink Eurocentrism,” in both media products and in the criticism of them by Western based scholars. 248 On the other hand, most critics in post-colonial studies were interested in the projection of the “Other,” even in an attempt to help better their lives, as a continuation of the same sort of imperialist gaze that was present, and justified, colonial oppression. 249 The similarity here is that the issue of representation takes precedence and is presumed to cause and/or perpetuate certain forms of material effects. The latter trend in postcolonial theory is one of the few ways it intersected with postmodernism and poststructuralism. 250 Otherwise, the denial of master-narratives—such as those of religion or nation—seems somewhat quaint. The adoption of the notion of a nation as an “Imagined Community,” taken from Benedict Anderson, was often misread as an explication of its discursive formation. But Anderson only begins with this notion: the real thrust of that work was to specify what combination of cultural “survivals 251 ,” social forces, technological change, and economic necessity led to its adoption and integration into people’s lived experience. In other words, it both identified a master-narrative and tried to figure out how and why it was effective. The shift to the reader as the site of meaning and consideration of texts as indeterminate objects was already present in the Birmingham school to a certain extent. For instance, though Johnson can’t quite give up on production as a determinant moment, he tries to make the text and the moment of reception as equally important in undermining that determination. This focus on texts became even more prominent with the move to the US which happened only shortly after the arrival of post-colonial studies, deconstruction and Post-structuralism in US English departments. Further, notions of the coherence of the objects of race, gender, and sexuality seemed to build on 246 Ien Ang, Watching Dallas : Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (London ; New York: Methuen, 1985). Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism : A Critical Introduction. Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz, The Export of Meaning : Cross-Cultural Readings of Dallas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Katz, remember, was one of the key scholars in the Administrative Reseach paradigm. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism : Multiculturalism and the Media (London ; New York: Routledge, 1994). Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak” is certainly one of the pivotal texts in this tradition of scholarship, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). But her later Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason : Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). expands this critique to include even postcolonial studies itself. Other scholars have pointed out the difficulties in ethnographic work once the problem of power differentials and the issues of representing “the Other” are introduced and the issue of western theorists interpreting postcolonial issues through their own assumptions. Jayati Lal, "Situating Locations: The Politics of Self, Identity and 'Other' in Living and Writing the Text," in Feminist Approaches to Theory and Methodology: An Interdisciplinary Reader, ed. Sharlene HesseBiber, Christina Gilmartin, and Robin Lydenberg (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999). Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Though some of the most famous postcolonial critics, coming of age during the era of deconstruction, took these arguments to great heights, arguing that a celebration of the new, borderless world and the denial of the validity of nationalism as a construct would bring a discursive liberation: Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). For a reply to this intellectual fashion Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World, Cultural Margins ; 6 (Cambridge [England] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). ch. 3. 251 250 249 248 247 From Althusser on “Contradiction and Overdetermination”—my usage, not Anderson’s. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 63 - FIELD #1 the original “culturalist” description of class, which, in the transfer to the US, was played down significantly, perhaps because, as Mike Davis has pointed out, one of the great difficulties in creating a working class movement in that context was precisely in fostering a working class culture. 252 The simultaneous attack on the working class and the ascendance of the neo-liberal discourse of militant pluralism and a denial of structural determinations (alongside an ironic attack on “Big Government”) made this transformation a bit more complete. In addition, the culturalist interpretation of social categories was able to accommodate the various strains of social critique that were competing for relevance, especially in English departments. In addition to gender, race, and sexuality, issues of nation and postcolonial theory all converged with the already ascendant deconstruction of the text and post-structuralist critique of institutional knowledges. 253 Several of these had already been central to early critiques in Birmingham. I won’t spend as much time discussing all of them because, usually as a rule, they do not attempt to understand the social formation as such, at least without relying on some other theory. Likewise, though power figures into all of them, the assumption of its diffusion among society, while giving much opportunity to resistors themselves, basically makes a pluralist claim about who gets to be in charge. Also, the notion that no knowledge is innocent helps make every kind of knowledge equally suspect: every claim to truth has the trace of the truth denied lurking behind it. At its purest, the goal was to develop tools for criticism based on some social, philosophical and/or historical necessity, apply those tools to texts in order to constitute both the tools and the interpretations they provide as valid—at the same time proving the original point about the social, political and historical necessity. One of the tool sets, other than deconstruction, that was sharpened with great precision was that of Foucault. Though different scholars have looked to different areas of his work, its trajectory has been important to many moments in the history of Cultural Studies and if there is a theorist that has taken the place of Marx and Gramsci in the early years of the Birmingham School, Foucault is definitely in the top ten. On the other hand, it isn’t quite correct to separate him from the Althusserian current mentioned above—particularly the question of the relationship of knowledge and power and the concept of discourse which he elaborated in his early texts on clinics, prisons and mental institutions. 254 Several of these were written before Althusser wrote his contributions to Reading Capital and several of the early working papers are already relying on his concepts of discourse in relationship to the production of knowledge. His theory of the nature of power in relation to resistance in History of Sexuality: Vol. I seems to have the greatest resonance for this section of the field. In this work, he focuses on the transition to modern systems of authority and discipline through an examination of discourses around sexuality and mental health. In elaborating what he calls a new system of “bio-power,” he makes 252 Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream : Politics and Economy in the History of the Us Working Class (London: Verso, 1986). Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Corrected ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Foucault and Gordon, Power/Knowledge : Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. 254 253 Foucault, Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison, Foucault, The Order of Things; an Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Foucault and Gordon, Power/Knowledge : Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. I would also note my own reliance on him in the early portions of the field. I have used him there in a precarious way: as a historian. Que sera, sera. In any case, much of what he JOHNSON ANDREWS - 64 - FIELD #1 several claims about power: that it is diffuse, not possessed, only exercised, and that it inspires resistance that can undermine its authority, but only through an equally diffuse network such that, “strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible, somewhat similar to the way in which the state relies on the institutional integration of power relationships.” 255 Though Foucault says material relations and social institutions figure into the constitution of these power relations, they are not contingent on them. They are, he says, tiptoeing around Marxism, “not superstructural” but “have a directly productive role, wherever they come into play.” 256 In saying this, Foucault is arguing specifically against the notion that the deployment of discourses around sexuality during the 19th century is indicative of that era being sexually repressive. For him, the extensive discussion and the creation of new categories—for instance that of “the Homosexual”—is actually evidence of the era being very productive of sexuality. By productive he means that, whatever its repressive effects at the time, it created a category of identity that could then be claimed and appropriated as a site of empowerment and resistance. Though Foucault spends far more time in this work developing the notion of biopower, the discussion of power (even this new biopower) as diffuse and in a sense up for grabs and discourse the battleground on which this struggle for power took place, resonated the most with the moment in which he was writing. Regardless of whether this is a line of reasoning in Foucault was inspired by the new social movements around identity politics that was taking place at the time, the ideas were very useful to cultural critics in discussing the struggles taking place around them. It signaled one a new way of discussing power and social struggle released from all but a taint of historical materialism. In other words, the use of race, class, gender, and, to a lesser extent, nation and sexuality as the menu of “themes” of cultural theory began to overshadow the possibility of critiques, like Policing the Crisis, which tried to focus on a variety of social and cultural levels to discover the material social relations driving a certain discourse or transformation. If there is a general theory that emerges around these new themes, it focuses on discourse and representation as the most important aspect of constituting truth in the service of the powerful—and hence the primary locus of struggle. The implication was that if one could change the representations of race, gender, and sexuality (class was often included, but its conception falters) then one could alter the material relations. Perhaps this is the original trajectory on which Cultural Studies was headed, but there are often glimpses of something more being at stake for early theorists like Hall. Hall, however, was one of the major engines behind this later movement, making hegemony less about a certain relation to production or to a certain actual social grouping. 257 In this regard, though there are a many relevant theories that emerge during this time, the arguments of Laclau and Mouffe, are often cited as the closest thing to a general theory of how culture and society interact. Their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, represents the most thorough attempt to elaborate this new theory about representation and discourse constituting 255 256 257 Foucault, The History of Sexuality. p. 94-96. Ibid. p. 94. Cf: Hall, “The Relevance of Gramsci for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” in Hall, Morley, and Chen, Stuart Hall : Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 65 - FIELD #1 reality. 258 The concept of class, especially at the hands of Laclau and Mouffe is evacuated of any reference to or dependence on a material position, as is any social grouping assumed to be constituted by any essential similarity. The way that any of these are constituted is through antagonism to an agreed upon object. This negative constitution is basically an attempt to elaborate a “post-Marxist” celebration of identity politics and the New Social Movements, though it contains only fragmentary discussions of the biggest winners of that generation—the New Right. This is, of course, ironic since that movement is the best example of what they are calling for: a coalition of various interests articulated around a central goal. On the other hand, it is fairly understandable since the latter also had a grand narrative that explained the world in terms of a neo-liberal, neo-conservative theology. The efficacy of the latter is seen only as the ability to gain hegemony using the discursive re-articulation of the Leftist movements of the 1960s. 259 Thus the new notion of how society is constituted became purely political and the goal simply one of “petitioning the state” 260 for more democratic involvement, the latter seen as the only barrier to socialism. Strangely enough, while written in an era when Hayek’s became the most influential masternarrative, the object of most of their scorn is Marx and Marxism, which they claim is overly totalizing and essentialist. On the other hand, perhaps the fact that neo-liberalism became the dominant ideology makes Marx becoming the object of scorn a fairly understandable result of the historical moment they were writing. It doesn’t make much sense, however, in terms of the intellectual tradition of the intervention of Cultural Studies (if we can claim there is one). As Nicos Mouzelis points out, Parsons is much more deterministic in his understanding of the agency available to actors in a system: in contrast to Parsonian functionalism, Marxism does not conceptualize agents as mere puppets of the system. Its conceptual apparatus is such that it leads one to look at collective actors not only as products but also as producers of their social world. Since Parsonian sociology, particularly in its macro-sociological dimensions, is based on a conceptual framework which encourages closure, it will be useful to develop further the comparison between Marxism and this highly influential paradigm in the non-Marxist social sciences. This will make clearer in what sense Marxist conceptual tools lead necessarily neither to monistic nor to dualist types of empirical analysis. 261 Perhaps this point should have been made more clearly two decades earlier—especially since two decades hence there seems to be a dearth of understanding about just what kind of intervention Cultural Studies was intending to make and the reason that, from the very beginning, there was an intimate connection with Marxist scholarship. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy : Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed. (London ; New York: Verso, 2001). 259 260 258 Ibid. p. 172-174. Paul Smith, Millennial Dreams : Contemporary Culture and Capital in the North, Haymarket Series (London ; New York: Verso, 1997). p. 55. I will speak more about the idea of the state in the other field. Needless to say, any concept of the relationship of subjects, society and the state are mostly ignored in the work of this section of the field. 261 Nicos Mouzelis, "Marxism or Post-Marxism," New Left Review 167, no. January-February (1988). p.110. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 66 - FIELD #1 None of this is to deny the importance of these later interventions. Deconstruction and poststructuralist critiques are very useful for unpacking texts and for exposing underlying ideological assumptions. But the original questions Hall says Cultural Studies set out to answer were “what type of social formation is now in the making? Such transformations [as post-war capitalism] in the past had entailed profound cultural shifts and upheavals. [. . . .] What did such cultural changes amount to now? [. . . .] Were there new, emergent cultural forces and tendencies? Above all, how were these historical processes to be qualitatively understood and assessed?” 262 When the answer to this question is “Logocentrism: as always” it leaves one wanting more and wondering how the earlier paradigm got labeled reductive. And if Deconstruction and post-structuralism are a product of their time, as Jameson says they are, then certainly the same could be said of the original cultural studies work—though neither are likely to be acceptable conclusions for a purely post-structuralist critique. 263 Perhaps this is the real issue: not the insight itself, but how it is arrived at by Jameson. In his Origins of Postmodernity, Perry Anderson sees Jameson as someone who has considered these theoretical changes through the lens of a more materialist understanding of their development. His account of Jameson’s thought, as being both a climactic finale to the Western Marxist tradition and a useful renewal of classical Marxism in looking at economic foundations, gives the impression of Jameson as a true practitioner of cultural studies. Yet in an important contemporary collection on Cultural Studies, which focuses much on the postmodern turn, Jameson’s contribution to this debate—which is far more representative of the kind of work Cultural Studies should have been doing on these changes—barely gets mentioned. 264 Lyotard and Habermas are featured far more prominently as the key points in the debate and, when he is mentioned in reference to discussions of the Postmodern, he is most often considered as simply another theorist of the change, even being listed alongside Lyotard as one of its celebrants by Hall 265 . Lyotard and Habermas, as Anderson evaluates them, are part of a trajectory of the ideas about the postmodern that existed directly before Jameson made his interventions. The thing these theorists have in common—including Lyotard and Habermas—is that they are, “ideologically consistent. The idea of the postmodern, as it took hold in this conjuncture, was in one way or another an appanage of the Right.” 266 As the combination of poststructuralist applications of theory and reader response criticism has taken the place of deeper discussions of the totality in Cultural Studies, it has mostly remained an insular force within the academy. Though it still likes to talk about the role of theory as Althusser defended it in Reading Capital, 267 it has mostly abandoned any pretense of being a serious 262 Stuart Hall et al., eds., Culture, Media, Language : Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79 (London: Hutchinson, 1980). p. 17. 263 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Post-Contemporary Interventions. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). In the introduction and other versions of this introduction, Jameson counts poststructuralism as one of the cultural attributes of the economic changes of late capitalism. Hall, Morley, and Chen, Stuart Hall : Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies.. Alongside this probing of the postmodern, there is a constant drumbeat in almost every other article denying, as Grossberg does, the role of Marxism in the original Cultural Studies work. 265 264 Though to be fair, this is in the piece by Hebdige and I have absolutely no idea what his argument is in that article—not because I haven’t tried to read it, mind you. p.45 266 267 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 67 - FIELD #1 methodology that might challenge the dominant paradigm on its own grounds. Even the call for an articulation around a common antagonism as presented by Laclau and Mouffe has failed to provide any coherence. Though it is quickly becoming a discipline per se, in terms of its institutional integration, the many diverse interests and perspectives that are taking shelter under the Cultural Studies umbrella refuse to discuss the possibility of a more concrete consolidation of even the kind recommended by Laclau and Mouffe. To refer backwards once again to the history of theory in this field, this is basically the situation of the propaganda paradigm when it was overtaken by Parsons and Lazarsfeld. VII. MANY HAPPY RETURNS contents bibliography It would be hard to sum up the most current work being done as it is a fairly wide mix—and since this field is more a compendium of concerns leading up to CS. Much of what has been discussed still exists in some form. Since the departmentalization at mid century, most of these paradigms can probably be found in work of one sort or another. As mentioned above, political economy of communication has continued apace, watching the expansion of privatized systems and increasing monopolization on a global scale. Effects research, though more fully integrated into the system of mass polling, still retains the most legitimacy in the wider social field. People are still finding uses for “Uses and gratifications” research and even if it wasn’t useful, after doing it for forty years, it would be hard to get them to do anything else. But in addition to some of the continuities, there have also been many returns. Chris Barker has recommended, for instance, a return to the pragmatism of the early 20th century as a possible path for Cultural Studies. 268 Manuel Castells, in one of the more widely discussed bodies of research in the waning years of the twentieth century produced a three volume work on “The Information Age,” which explicitly draws upon Marshall McLuhan as an inspiration. 269 Though his work is definitely more reminiscent of Innis in its somewhat careful negotiation of power—and he at least admits an important role for the state in the directing of technological change—the title of the first volume, “The Rise of Network Society,” is a nod to McLuhan, updated for the internet age. It is hard to pin down the general direction of the scholarship, but Castells’s focus on the internet and globalization certainly stand out, even if his work isn’t as well known yet as some of the other people working in this field. Still, his argument seems to be a popular one, if only because it seems so obvious. Namely, that the changes in the global economy, made possible by more rapid communication are leading to a different kind of society and resulting in a different kind of individual. In other words, an argument that could have been made in the 19th century. 268 269 Need Chris Barker cite. Manuel Castells, End of Millennium, ed. Manuel Castells, Information Age ; V. 3. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity, ed. Manuel Castells, 2nd ed., Information Age ; V. 2. (Malden, Mass. Blackwell,: 2003), Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, ed. Manuel Castells, Information Age ; V. 1. (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 68 - FIELD #1 However, instead of this leading to anomic individuals or to forms of organic solidarity, Castells sees these changes leading to a reinvigoration of what Durkhiem might have called “mechanical solidarity” or what Castells calls “Primary Group Identities.” However, this is only among people who are left out of the network, an obvious problem, but one that could possibly be solved if the network continued with its current biases and was extended to include everyone—both of which are doubtful. Still, the consciousness he attributes to these periods are more the result of either previously held group identities or of participation in a new, globally connected form of society. Castells also addresses the resurgence of place in another context—somewhat in the vein of Saskia Sassen’s Global Cities. He looks at the way that, despite the new forms of communication, certain cities become important nodes simply because there are some things that businesses need done in person. Here, Castells doesn’t seem theoretically wedded to any particular paradigm of economic or communication determinism, he is simply trying to explain the expansion of the service sector in certain geographic locations. 270 This seems to be more in line with the emergence of critical geography as an important discipline. 271 David Harvey is one of the most well known practitioners (at least from within Cultural Studies) and his evaluation of the “Condition of Postmodernity” is, like Castells, based on a broad swath of sources and historical research, but his theory about the relationship between culture and political economy is far more straightforward. His research, despite its innovations, is probably one of the most significant returns. Though his most significant work, The Limits to Capital, hasn’t received as much as his more culturally focused work, it is the foundation on which the latter rests and that foundation is basically an attempt to revise Marxist theory for the present day. Another re-visioning of the way communication, culture and social formation interact, and the last one I’ll discuss in this field, is that of Hardt and Negri in Empire. It is an impressive work and it claims intellectual roots in a many of the theorists that are influential in the history of Cultural Studies. Their attempt to re-write notions of sovereignty would seem to find a more comfortable home in the field that follows, but their use of Foucault, Frederic Jameson, Deluze and Guattari, and Marx make them amenable to either field. It is a sweeping work that begins with the changes of modernity that frame this field, pointing to the new forms of identity, civic participation, and national sovereignty that emerge during this period and tracing their evolution to the notions of power outlined by Foucault above in terms of biopower. These intellectual trajectories are synthesized through the lens of Negri’s own theories of autonomist Marxism. Along with some 270 This resurgence of place also appears in two other Latin American scholars of culture and the media. Nestor Garcia Caclini and Jesús Martin-Barbero both have worked on the effects of the expansion of Northern culture and communication into the global south. Though both of them have much to recommend in their work, they are basically in agreement that the communication of ideas is not enough to transform society. For Canclini, the first section in Hybrid Cultures is quite interested in the process whereby Latin America (or certain classes within it) had became modern in its philosophy and aesthetics, but had not yet been modernized. In this, he discusses an interesting disconnect between the material and the ideological. Barbero on the other hand, looks to the concept of mediation to explain the process through which foreign customs or ideas become integrated into Latin American culture and society. His project outlines the development of media studies theories, but lands up with the notion that is similar to other critiques of cultural imperialism: that there is a mediation of effects. Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures : Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), Jesús Martín Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony : From the Media to Mediations (London ; Newbury Park: SAGE Publications, 1993). Most important from this field for cultural studies has been David Harvey, especially his David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity : An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford England ; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990). 271 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 69 - FIELD #1 close attention to geo-politics and global political economy, the book feels like—and was announced as a revision of the Communist Manifesto for the twentieth century. The basic argument, made in the 1990s, at the height of globalization theory, was that sovereignty had been fundamentally transformed and that, though the US was currently hegemonic, it was merely occupying a major spot in a new, network style of power. This power is the result of, and therefore could be appropriated by a social group known as “the multitude.” In their theory, the act of being together helps to generate a new ontology—an argument that Hard has made about some of the alter-globalization movements influenced by his book. This ontology, in the terms of the field, is not really the result of a relationship to any material relation or social formation. In fact, in so far as laborers are involved, particularly in the first world, it is workers involved in “immaterial labor.” To this extent it is basically the culture that creates the solidarity, a culture based on certain key forms of communication. Though they don’t discuss them in this book, as the social movements around the Seattly WTO meetings got more press, they became a common referent for the group Hardt and Negri discussed. But if the agent of changing the system seemed to be materializing, their understanding of power in the world (and particularly the diffuse nature of the US hegemony) seemed to be very passé with the start of the US-led war on terror: it seemed that, even if the network was a good way to describe the economic power and political resistance, the state was making a comeback in terms of the source of power in the system. In this regard, the evaluation of the current moment made in David Harvey’s The New Imperialism seems more reasonable and responsible. He doesn’t discuss many of the areas for resisting this model, but seems pretty confident it’s going to burn itself out soon. He also tries to consider the very real cultural movement of neo-conservatism as a fix for the bankrupt economic model promoted on the domestic and international level. This sounds like a good old fashioned ideological critique. And sometimes, that’s what the conjuncture requires. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 70 - FIELD #1 BIBLIOGRAPHY contents Aglietta, Michel. A Theory of Capitalist Regulation : The Us Experience. New ed, Verso Classics ; 28. London: Verso, 2000. Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. New York,: Monthly Review Press, 1972. ———. "Preface to Capital Volume One." In Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972. Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Reading "Capital". 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Cambridge, U.K. ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. "Propaganda Studies in American Social Science: The Rise and Fall of the Critical Paradigm." Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 60-78. Swingewood, Alan. The Myth of Mass Culture. London: Macmillan Press, 1977. Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. 1st Vintage ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1966. Thompson, E. P., and Dorothy Thompson. The Essential E.P. Thompson. New York: New Press : Distributed by W.W. Norton & Co., 2001. Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. New York,: Random House, 1970. Tomlinson, John. Cultural Imperialism : A Critical Introduction. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Tucker, Robert, ed. The Marx-Engels Reader. Second ed. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1972. Turner, Graeme. British Cultural Studies : An Introduction. 2nd ed. London ; New York: Routledge, 1996. Tye, Larry. The Father of Spin : Edward L. Bernays & the Birth of Public Relations. 1st ed. New York: Crown Publishers, 1998. Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Anarchist in the Library : How the Clash between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System. New York: Basic Books, 2004. ———. Copyrights and Copywrongs : The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Voloshinov, V. N., Ladislav Matejka, and I. R. Titunik. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Studies in Language. New York,: Seminar Press, 1973. Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Wasko, Janet. Understanding Disney : The Manufacture of Fantasy. Cambridge: Polity, 2001. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. 1930 ed. New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 2001. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 77 - FIELD #1 Williams, Raymond. Keywords : A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. ———. The Long Revolution. 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New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Sean Johnson Andrews Field Advisor: Peter Mandaville Committee Chair: Paul Smith FINAL DRAFT 27 April 2006 Field Statement #2: Global Political Economy and Culture TABLE OF CONTENTS I. AN OPENING…ON CULTURAL THEORY AND “GLOBALIZATION” II. FOUNDATIONS III. POST-WAR HEGEMONY: MODERNIZATION AND REALISM IV. FRACTURES V. “GLOBALIZATION THEORY,” “IRRATIONAL EXUBERANCE,” “HEGEMONY UNRAVELLING?” VI. BIBLIOGRAPHY JOHNSON ANDREWS - 2 - FIELD #2 I. — An opening…On Cultural Theory and “Globalization” CONTENTS BIBLIOGRAPHY This field is meant to meditate on the relationship of culture and the global political economy. In preparing it, I have realized anew the importance of this relationship as well as the way it has often been a bit clouded in discussions of it by cultural studies scholars. This seems to be because, despite their claims to creating interdisciplinary critique, these scholars have a very narrow understanding of what is meant by culture. In some ways this is understandable. The first discussions in the Birmingham tradition which could be seen as relating to this field are contained in some of the early interventions on the subject of race and its relation to the changing conditions in Britain, known as the “New Times.” 1 As Thatcher applied the neo-liberal model to the British state, many of the old understandings of the relation of race, class and nation were questioned, but this basically reflected and reinforced the evacuation of politics based on materialist or macroeconomic understandings of geo-politics, a consequence of scholars doing an incomplete version of Gramsci’s notion of conjunctural analysis. 2 This amounted to seeing the issues of identity and representation as the key instruments of domination and subversion—a belief which the resistance of the US “Culture Wars” seemed to confirm. This focus on representation and discourse in either popular culture or “literature” was, at once, projected backwards into the history of colonial domination, and reified as the proper location of cultural critique. This probably had much to do with the institutional location of Cultural Studies especially in the US, where the very productive (in the Foucauldian sense) postcolonial, poststructuralist focus on discourse and language was intersecting with film and media studies. Edward Said’s Orientalism is often seen as a landmark work in this field with his focus on the relationship between Orientalist scholarship as an ideological support for the colonial project. 3 Gayatri Spivak infused the discussion with the philosophical linguistics of Derrida, filtered through Stuart Hall, Policing the Crisis : Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978). The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, ed. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (London: Hutchinson, 1982). See also Hall’s article “The Importance of Gramsci for the Study of Race and Ethnicity” in Stuart Hall, David Morley, and Kuan-Hsing Chen, Stuart Hall : Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, Comedia (London ; New York: Routledge, 1996). 2 1 Cf. Gramsci’s discussion of the difference between organic and conjunctural phenomena Antonio Gramsci, Quintin Hoare, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, [1st ]. ed. (New York,: International Publishers, 1972). p. 177-187. 3 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). See also, Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1993). In Said’s defense, he was explicit in his intention to look at the literary and cultural field as being in addition to the forms of “political knowledge” that might normally be the topic of investigation for someone like Chomsky who “has studied the instrumental connection between the Vietnam War and the notion of objective scholarship as it was applied to cover state sponsored military research” (Orientalism, p. 11). His argument is, therefore, for the validity of studying these discourses as politically significant in addition to the more obviously political implications of the policy intellectuals in this field. However, the way his work gets taken up—primarily by the literature and Cultural Studies disciplines—instrumentalized Said’s approach and argument to focus on these fields as the most significant areas of research exclusive of the more plebian kinds of scholarship found elsewhere. On a certain level this is understandable, and even defensible, as it was taken up in literature departments: they too are competing for institutional support and legitimacy of various kinds. But it is a significant retrenchment when it appears in the 1980s mainstream of Cultural Studies who abandon earlier, more developed understandings of the social totality and cultural politics to focus on one narrow area of scholarship as the only real legitimate object of their discipline. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 3 - FIELD #2 her legacy in subaltern studies, and the idea of the Other became a hinge for a generation of scholars committed to exposing racism, sexism, and various other forms of what seemed to be politically motivated misrepresentation in the texts of popular culture. 4 These discussions were important contributions to cultural critique and they rightly pointed to the Eurocentric bias of the production of knowledge. But once this became the capital of the field, as Bourdieu might say, it was self perpetuating. The practice of seeing various forms of Eurocentrism, logocentrism, or white, male, heteronormative presumption in fellow travelers discourse became an important measure of one’s position in the field, heterodoxical challenges being mostly focused on ever finer distinctions within this autonomous field. Most reference to work outside of this autonomous field was done with the presumption that the driving factor behind forms of domination was the representation within culture. It seemed to assumed that many of the nineteenth century practices uncovered by Said—those in literature, in popular culture, in cultural scholarship--were being replicated in the present. Surely there was much fodder for these claims, but the critique of political economy—and especially the critique of the present hegemonic discourses—was either dismissed outright because of the seeming irrelevance of class within the nation-state, or it was left to one side, the analysis basically lifted from older situations or performing no organic function in the criticism. It is no wonder that, as Bruce Robbins relates in a symposium on Said’s work, that it “has not had the sort of public influence he desired. American policy towards the Middle East has remained grimly consistent, as has the quality of discourse about the world of nations. Where Said’s influence has been overwhelming, is among academic disciplines—a domain that he has often been tempted to dismiss as specialized, professionalized, politically unpromising.” 5 When Hall, in the late 1980s, appropriates Gramsci for the purpose of focusing on “race and ethnicity” he points to a section where Gramsci denounces “economism. 6 ” The irony, in retrospect, is that Gramsci, in that section, is actually finding fault with the homology of the economism of laissez-faire liberalism and theoretical syndicalism. 7 Instead of focusing at all in this article on the present rise of a similar form of economism, Hall’s focus is, basically, on others in the left who focus on class hegemony instead of a more freestanding notion of hegemony which could consider the other cultural aspects of the current moment. As in Laclau and Mouffe, this was seen as both a strategic accommodation to present ideological conditions and a theoretical necessity given the argument that, In the words of Gilroy, another student of the Birmingham school, popular struggles “somehow encompass class and are in the process of moving beyond the challenge to the mode of production which defines class politics,” and that New types of class relations are being shaped and reproduced in the novel economic conditions we inhabit. The scale of these changes, which can be glimpsed through the Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds : Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988). Probably her most cited essay, with a great deal of discussion on the notion of what it means to “represent” is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 5 4 Bruce Robbins, "Introduction - Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism: A Symposium," Social Text 40, no. Autumn, 1994 (1994). p. 1. Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” p. 418. Cf: Gramsci, Hoare, and Nowell-Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. p. 160-168, 6 7 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 4 - FIELD #2 populist politics of ‘race’ and nation, is such that it calls the vocabulary and analytical framework of class analysis into question. It emphasizes the fact that class is not something given in economic antagonisms which can be expressed straightforwardly in political formations. It no longer has a monopoly on the political stage, if indeed it ever had one. 8 Thus any focus on organic tendencies of capital or the function of the dominant narratives about economic and political development which this field intends to cover, were usually subverted to the more important issues of identity and representation. Gilroy goes on in his book The Black Atlantic to question forms of cultural nationalism by showing the involvement of “the Other” in its constitution; Homi Bhabha and others meditate on the hybridity of subjects and the idea of nationalism is questioned as a source of identity; but at no point do either of them reference the IMF and World Bank imposed reversal of the narrative of national development in the early 1970s. 9 This is not to discount the work of cultural scholars in the 1980s and early 1990s. Hall, at least in the very early 1980s, was committed to seeing these changes in as total an understanding as possible. 10 As these “New Times” progressed, however, the conjunctural observations had morphed into a new historical metanarrative about the new type of politics (and analysis) necessary. 11 Further, the focus on a narrowly defined notion of culture, productive as it might have been for literary and film criticism, didn’t usually note any of the ways which their own discourse was part of a certain moment. 12 Not only were these conjunctural changes taken to be 8 Paul Gilroy, "There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack" : The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Hutchinson, 1987). p. 34. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1993). Two noteworthy exceptions to this trend, though not appearing until the early 1990s, were Arturo Escobar, an anthropologist who will be mentioned extensively below, and Anne McClintock, a student of Said whose essay “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term Postcolonial” riffs off of chapter titles in Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth to make an argument similar to his own about the continuity of economic domination by other means. Anne McClintock, "The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term Postcolonial," Social Text 31/32 (1992). In a further note on this, when McClintock’s essay was reprinted in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York, New York: Columbia UP, 1994). hers is the only article out of 30 others to even mention the IMF or World Bank. For a critique of this insularity from the other direction—of development studies failure to consider problems of discourse, cf: Christine Sylvester, "Development Studies and Postcolonial Studies: Disparate Tales of the 'Third World'," Third World Quarterly 20, no. 4 (1999). The work most often cited as being indicative of his commitment to rigor, even long after its publication, is the volume he edited with several other members of the Birmingham CCCS, Hall, Policing the Crisis : Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. For some reactions to this from other theorists of the state, and an eloquent defense by Hall of the work’s strengths, cf. Stuart Hall, "Authoritarian Population: A Reply," New Left Review I, no. 151 (1985), Tom Ling et al., "Authoritarian Populism, Two Nations, and Thatcherism," New Left Review I, no. 147 (1985), Tom Ling et al., "Thatcherism and the Politics of Hegemony: A Reply to Stuart Hall," New Left Review I, no. 153 (1985). For the paradigmatic work on this Cf. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy : Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed. (London ; New York: Verso, 2001). For the reaction to it from the Left cf: Norman Geras, "Ex-Marxism without Substance: Being a Real Reply Ro Laclau and Mouffe," New Left Review I, no. 169 (1988), Norman Geras, "Post-Marxism?," New Left Review I, no. 163 (1987), Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, "Post-Marxism without Apologies," New Left Review I, no. 166 (1987), Nicos Mouzelis, "Marxism or Post-Marxism," New Left Review 167, no. January-February (1988). 12 11 10 9 One of the more interesting sections of Hardt and Negri’s Empire is where they discuss the “Ideology of the World Market,” drawing on Jameson and Harvey’s work. Here they mention the way that identity politics are aligned precisely with the target market orientation of Multinational Capitalism. Later, they discuss this in terms of how essentialist ideas about culture replace biological forms of racism so that the new mode of white supremacy is one of culture. This is certainly evident in the development projects discussed below, but I question how new it is. Naomi Klein has an JOHNSON ANDREWS - 5 - FIELD #2 organic, but the narratives and discourses with the most potent effects on the material lives of the people of the Global South were overlooked. The cultural discourses to which I refer are those of International Relations and Economic Development—discourses which are mutually constituted by the major global institutions of the post war era: the IMF, World Bank, UN, NATO and now the WTO and TRIPS along with the various regional political treaties, trade agreements and financial accords that have risen and fallen in the past 60 or so years. Not only were these discourses cultural, but very much like the discourses considered by Said and others, they took culture and identity to be their primary object. Thus both the modernization theory of Rostow and the realism of Mogenthau admit early on that they recognize their ideal subjects—rational, calculating, coherent and westernized—may not exist, but they expect their theories to guide policies such that people, individuals and whole societies, will adopt their cultural outlook. 13 This was far less than a merely politically incorrect, offensive, or even oppressive assumption: it was also based on a very conjunctural perspective which took the dominant understanding of politics and economics to be transhistorical and universal and, through this, recommended vast international policies that affected millions of people. Though they were certainly influenced by certain of the narratives deconstructed by the cultural critics of the 1980s and 90s, it was the narratives they built themselves, with scientific rhetoric and wonky specificity, that represent the more dangerous form of cultural authority. Justin Rosenberg has recently written on the more recent configuration of these discourses (most of which were largely accepted by mainstream cultural and social critics 14 He discusses the way that globalization was mistaken as an organic change in the social configuration when it was really just a short term re-alignment brought on by the rise of neo-liberalism and the fall of the Soviet Union: “in the longer historical view, the social and political change [called globalization] geographically vast as it was, was clearly conjunctural, not epochal. No new form of society was emerging – rather, the organic tendencies of the old were now reasserting themselves, in a new situation, and on an historically unprecedented scale.” 15 In other words, it is only in the light of the era Eric Hobsbawm called “The Golden Years 16 ”—when states and state led economies were the norm, that free market capitalism (or at least its triumphalist pronouncement) could appear to be something new. It is to the cultural dominants 17 and institutional arrangements that reflected and interesting personal recollection of being involved in some of the identity politics movements in her undergraduate days and only subsequently realizing that “The backlash against identity politics inspired did a pretty good job of masking for us the fact that many of our demands for better representation were quickly accommodated by marketers, media makers and pop-culture producers alike – though perhaps not for the reasons we had hoped.” Naomi Klein, No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, No Logo (New York, New York: Picador, 2002). p. 110. Cf: Michael Hardt and Negri. Antonio, Empire (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 2000). pp. 151-154, 190-195. W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth; a Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1960). Hans Joachim Morgenthau, Politics among Nations : The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1978). Justin Rosenberg, "Globalisation Theory: A Post-Mortem," International Politics 42, no. 1 (2005). NOTE: My citations are from a manuscript version of this with slightly different pagination. 15 16 17 14 13 Ibid. p. 48. Cf: E. J. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes : The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (New York, New York: Vintage, 1994). On the notion of a cultural dominant, riffing off of Williams, Cf Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review I, no. 146 (1984). pp. 55-59. It is somewhat controversial to see these discourses as cultural in the way that Jameson means it, but I think the analysis below will bear out the notion that what is defined as “culture” in this scenario should be widened. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 6 - FIELD #2 facilitated this expansion and which shaped (and were shaped by) many of the structural realities postcolonial nations had to navigate, whatever their goals. II – Foundations CONTENTS BIBLIOGRAPHY “[This] method of approach [. . .] very much depends upon whether we select our point of departure in order to tell at the terminus what the state ought to be or what it is. If we are too concerned with the former, there is a likelihood that we shall unwittingly have doctored the facts selected in order to come out at a predetermined point.” John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 1927 18 This sentiment resonates with the first discourses of Realism, which were being articulated at roughly the same moment as Dewey wrote these words. Dewey is often seen as a critic that would have been sympathetic with what would later be Cultural Studies. His questions of how education should function in a democracy inform many of the discussions on the subject in CS. But more pertinent to this field is his intervention in The Public and Its Problems. Though the other field focused on what might be seen as more traditionally cultural aspects of the relationship between state, society, media and individual consciousness, this field is no less cultural. This quote from Dewey points to another key debate happening at roughly the same moment. The previous field’s discussion intersects directly with it and it is merely an analytical distinction which would separate them. Thus, the concepts and debates of the previous field were more focused on what might be called ideological apparatuses, the primary debates being whether society or the [capitalist] state played the determinant role in those apparatuses and whether the efficacy of a certain discourse was the result of the power and legitimacy of a certain actor over other actors or just exemplary of its evolutionary superiority. In so far as the issues of this field were considered by later Cultural and Postcolonial critics, it was more with these issues in mind. This field, however, looks more at the functioning of the state and society itself, particularly the somewhat banal but ever controversial debate over whether the state or the market is the best mechanism for peace and economic development. 19 Dewey is clearly referring to this debate— which was central to the US Progressive movement’s antagonism with the domestic results of the British version of free-market hegemony in the years running up to World War I. This brings me to the other key change in focus between this field and the first: closer attention to the global environment of both discussions. 18 19 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens: Swallow Press, 1991). p. 9. As this field should make clear, this debate is really not a debate at all since the upshot is that the only way the free market can be preserved is with a very powerful state that does not bend to the demands of democratic insurgency which the other field saw as being a the threat the masses posed to, in the words of J.S. Mill, “those real and important classes in European society to whose real or supposed interests democracy is adverse.” John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Mineola, NY: Dover Thrift, 2002). p. 3-4. In other words, as Harvey and others discuss below, this debate about state vs. markets is really a debate over which class interest should dominate the state. I feel hopelessly Marxist in seeing the debate this way; it is an interpretation which my white, middle-class, protestant, Southern US, suburban upbringing prepared me to reject completely. Nevertheless, the results, domestically and internationally, of the institution and reversal of policies this field (hopefully) catalogs, are difficult to deny, even if they aren’t necessarily the cause of all the world’s strife. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 7 - FIELD #2 Were there world enough and time, I would do more to highlight this in the previous field but hopefully this note about the other key debate in this field will indicate the lacunae in the other. In both the issue of how society (included here are market and state) developed is central, but as theories intersect with events in this field, the question of what the container of these developments was. Namely, in the atmosphere of the Enlightenment, one which informs much of the questions and answered offered in Field #1, the state was seen as both an actual entity and as the locus of social, political, economic, and cultural development. In some ways, it is precisely the issue that the cultural critics at the opening of the field were attempting to consider, though their debate became more concerned with a search for a pure position from which their own observations and criticisms could emanate and their focus on what was seen as the only cultural aspect—that of nationalism—made it difficult for them to discuss the others as social facts (and, in their transnational export, as cultural artifacts in themselves. 20 I recognized this in trying to use, for instance, Raymond William’s distinctions of Dominant, Emergent and Residual (along with Oppositional, Alternative) in my Globalization and Culture class. Though they have some use, it is striking how much they depend on a bounded system like a nation state. I have no doubt this has to do with the fairly strong state system which he and the Birmingham School critics lived under—and which, as the other field catalogs, the early New Left (particularly those influenced by Marcuse) was rejecting. This is not to say that there wasn’t plenty of international cultural interactions during this time. In addition to the development projects like modernization that this field will discuss, the influx of former colonial subjects into the metropolitan cores of France and Britain in particular has remained one of the central social tensions of the post war era in these countries. This says nothing of the global media systems which, though the previous field highlights, doesn’t always get at the nuances of transculturation 21 and always assumes that, I culture is to be adopted or if subjects feel they are being forced to do so, it will always be the geopolitical core forcing its culture on the periphery. Certainly history has born out this pattern, and the previous field outlines the attempt by the core to ensure its continued hegemony: this field will evaluate a related set of policy initiatives. The criticism leveled at those modernization theories—that they assume economic development happens in an isolated state environment—could therefore be leveled just as easily at the concepts of Williams and other early critics 22 . I wouldn’t go anywhere close to supporting Andre Though I risk overusing a theoretical shorthand that may not be understood by all on the committee, I would refer again here to Bertrand Badie’s The Imported State on this subject. I can’t claim to have absorbed all of the nuances of his analysis, but his discussion of the way domestic legitimacy is secured through international legitimacy based on the observation of “western” normalization of state practices is certainly relevant to this question. Bertrand Badie, The Imported State : The Westernization of the Political Order (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000). The concept is from Mary Louise Pratt and refers to the selective appropriation of the discourses and symbols of the colonizing culture by the (members of) the colonized culture such that the former is integrated into the latter in a way that is meaningful to the subaltern culture. In having this implied power differential, however, the concept is still inadequate for discussing appropriations in the other direction, as in the case of immigrant cultural practices becoming mainstream. Likewise, even this concept assumes two basically steady, bounded, empirical cultures that are interacting. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (NY, NY: Routledge, 1992). On the other hand, just as World Systems theorists often adopt too stringent a division between core and periphery, most of the concepts developed by postcolonial critics (and CS critics who adopt their concepts) already assume a sort of authentic and laudatory quality to certain indigenous positions and practices (or what are seen as such) and, as with Pratt above, include an understanding of this process in which power is already implicated in a definite direction in the terms used to describe this process, such that new terms would be required to describe, for instance, “popular” movements which were nevertheless reactionary and repressive in their own right. This is one criticism of cultural studies and 22 21 20 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 8 - FIELD #2 Gunder Frank’s belief that this makes deficiency makes all of Western social theory irrelevant, 23 but it does make some refinement necessary. In any case, the second set of questions that inform debates in this field is whether these developments are the result of changes on the domestic or global field. Related to this set is then the more theoretical set of questions about how development and peace happen. In this, the tension, possibly not highlighted as such often enough, is similar to the question of whether ideas or material relations are the prime movers of history. Again this question is slightly more concrete than in the last field in that it is concerned with what made the international peace and, for the ruling class of many countries (even some of those being colonized) relative prosperity of the nineteenth century possible. The question of whether this was because of domestic developments or international consensus is included under the previous set of issues above, but the issue of where ideas fit into that animates a third set of inquiries which, in many ways underpins both of the above, especially for the purposes of the field. This is because though these questions were primarily about development at the level of the state and market, in the international system of states, the debate was, from a very early stage, a debate about ideas. Though the issue of ideas as seen through the lens of postcolonial critics was certainly there—their being used as the ideological part of a hegemonic project—but since they were also the tools of a vast network of diplomats and technocrats, they were far from merely ideological in the literary sense. Further, the key question here is in whether there was a teleological process of economic and political development—where, for instance, political liberty and democracy were either the ultimate cause or result of the social relations of private property that prevailed under capitalism. At the postwar moment when US hegemony was being established under the two flags of state centered political democracy and capitalist social relations—eventually in opposition to the Soviet bloc—the coin of the realm, to hint towards Bourdieu, was the authority to define the order and process of these developments. A good way of opening up this set of issues is to look at the interwar debate which Dewey was engaging with the quote above and which a few theorists provide some useful points of departure—particularly since they are the same points of contention that are still hotly debated. The first section of the field comprises this early moment of the debate. Here the question of the relationships between society and state, culture and material life, politics and legitimacy are treated using three prominent thinkers of the moment: Edward Carr, F.A. Hayek and Karl Polanyi. Hayek sees society in a basically Hegelian fashion—as being the equivalent of the marketplace of civil society—and considers the state as intrinsically tending towards the repression of this freedom. Almost by definition, anyone asking for the state to intercede on the freedoms of the market place would be antisocial. Otherwise, their material interests would prevent them from taking this risk. Hayek presumes that the promise of equality in state and market will be enough to make such a state legitimate. Polanyi has a broader definition of society, and thus sees the state as something encompassing a variety of interests which must be balanced in order to give it postcolonial criticism made by Aijaz Ahmad In the first chapter of In Theory and is one of the recurrent themes in the work of Canclini, as George Yudice describes in the introduction to the latter’s Consumers and Citizens. Ahmad Aijaz, In Theory : Classes, Nations, Literatures (London ; New York: Verso, 1992). Néstor García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens : Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 23 As mentioned below, this is a central claim of one of his last books, Andre Gunder Frank, Reorient : Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 9 - FIELD #2 legitimacy. Carr takes this one step further, finding presumptions like Hayek’s dangerously naïve in that they deny the struggle of interests that goes on and are therefore unrealistic in how they anticipate a coordination of interests which will, inevitably, favor the powerful at the expense of the less powerful. Ultimately, whether in political Realism or Keynesian economics, it was this final understanding, hardened through the experience of WWII, which won out. The second section concentrates on these discourses after their separation into disciplinse—a result of the post-war push for positivist social science—and as they are refined and deployed in the service of various domestic and foreign policy initiatives, particularly in corre As I observe in the previous field about Parsons and mid-century social theory, the first way culture figures into these equations is in assumptions about the superiority of western culture. Though this is arguably an ideological cover—and certainly Arrighi and others see the development project as inseparable from the US hegemonic project—that does not mean they were functionally deployed for this purpose. In so far as this worked, it helped not only to offer a different set of cultural norms to the developing world, but it also made the so-called developed world feel, following Parsons, that the attributes that had won them their place in the world were not coercive or exploitative. Thus it was a cultural narrative in itself. In so far as Keynesians believed the sovereign state was the locus of economic development and that cultural changes (like changing the rate of savings relative to investment) were mostly based on the domestic history, it overlooked a variety of external factors in order to promote their success as a sort of evolutionary triumph—and, by extension defined and explained the backwardness of periphery. Critics of this model like Frank, were quick to note the cultural racism being practiced here and later critics like Escobar find the discursive construction of the “underdeveloped” world as itself problematic. The resistance to this model was basically an affirmation of the dominant realist paradigm: if the nation state was the proper container for politics and economics, it was becoming clear that political sovereignty could only be accomplished fully with economic sovereignty—and both would be necessary to have cultural sovereignty. The next section charts the breakdown of the Keynesian model—though only arguably, from a certain perspective, and as the result of a variety of external factors. On the one hand, the very existence of external factors unaccounted for in the model might challenge the legitimacy of its state-centered tools and assumptions. But the challenge made against this model, were largely, as at mid-century, a matter of defining the causes of the crisis 24 and struggling to project a new dominant model. At the same time many countries of the developing world continued with the previous development project. This and the skyrocketing prices for energy that was endangering first world development pushed developing countries further into debt. The triumph of the narrative that inflation was something that hurt everyone equally and should be avoided at all costs was the first aspect of the forthcoming economic model. The revaluation of the dollar multiplied the already existing debt of third world countries to exponential levels and the economic sovereignty of the 1970s was blamed for these crises. A new narrative of what led to development was promoted and indebted poor countries were 24 And, in most cases, re-defining what caused the previous crises. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 10 - FIELD #2 strongarmed into accepting this new narrative and the practices it proscribed: the patrimonial state, in so far as it had existed, was now outlawed and the strong state was banned from the economy (at least in theory). The final sections of the field evaluate the process of redefining development and politics in an age when the assumed object of both—the nation state—seemed to be melting away or at least “retreating.” If there were no irony to history, moving from the end of this brief introduction to the moment the story begins might be a rough transition. But since it seems that many of the same arguments continue and, according to most sources, the current moment has much in common with the world before the First World War and, more importantly, the global economic depression. Hopefully we won’t be forced to re-live another version of that or its successor: towards that end, it is perfectly natural to turn to the rival arguments about what exactly caused those cataclysms. Edward Hallett Carr’s The Twenty Years Crisis, which is often credited as the starting point of the modern science of International Relations, 25 begins his book by distinguishing between idealism (or “utopia”) and realism. For him, this wasn’t just an analytical distinction, but one that had made the difference between peace and war in years after the First World Warm leading up to the second. A similar conversation takes up a significant portion of F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, who is now credited with being one of the key thinkers to inspire the neoliberal policies of Reagan and Thatcher. However, though they have some disagreement about what, exactly, constitutes a utopian idea, they were pretty clear on what was at stake. A third book, less noted at the time, but certainly significant in retrospect, was Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. 26 Polanyi provides a nice bridge to this section because many of his arguments square with the ones just mentioned above. His observations on liberalism are also quite similar to Carr’s and his conclusions are analogous to those that underpin the Fordist world economy of Keynesian capitalism. The heresy of Polanyi as read from the perspective of today’s monetarists is his disdain for the gold standard, which, although he admitted it fostered international peace, he saw as making it impossible for national governments to respond to the needs of their domestic constituents. The latter then built up political pressure on the domestic side that would easily accommodate a nationalist or even fascist leader bent on war in order to restore the glory of the nation. 27 This is a version of one of Polanyi’s most memorable concepts, that of the “double movement.” This is a I say modern science here since many of the people following this field claim that it has been studied since at least Thucydides and many would say it hasn’t changed much since. Carr himself makes a distinction in his chapter on “The Realist Critique.” He says modern realism differs from the earlier versions because it has been grafted with the utopianism of the Enlightenment, such that, “Progress became part of the inner essence of the historical process.” E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis: 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (NY, NY: Harper, 1964). p. 65. This is quite a distinct understanding from the more absolute statements of Morgenthau below. 26 25 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001). 27 Important to note at this point is the way that the nation as an institution was mutually constitutive of the previous order, especially in the case of Germany, which was a nascent nation when it rose to challenge England as the hegemonic power. Hobsbawn even goes so far as to argue that, all the economic benefits aside, the imperial project was much more about building national solidarity and reducing political pressure at home. Cf the eponymous chapter in E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875-1914, History of Civilization (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 11 - FIELD #2 mechanism he develops in the context of nineteenth century England, but he first (and finally) deploys it as an explanation for the rise of fascism. His argument is based, somewhat like Marx’s at various points, on a complex, sociological understanding of the history of economic relations. The other oft cited concept of his the “embedded economy” in which “the economic system is, in effect, a mere function of social organization.” 28 In contrast to this, he posits the liberal order of a “market society” in which was made doctrine by Adam Smith’s notion of the self-regulating market, in which, to cite another Polanyi standard, the “fictitious commodities” of land, labor and money were subject to the same rules as any other commodities. The latter system, according to Polanyi, was not something that Adam Smith discovered, but was a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself and whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way. 29 Not only had this “stark utopia” never really existed, but in so far as it had, it was the product of public servants who had set out to make it manifest in nineteenth century England. These ideas, in the hands of people like Bentham and John Stewart Mill, were used to reorganize life around these principles. Exhibit one for Polanyi is that, in the area of England which Smith made most of his pronouncements about the free market, labor wasn’t really a commodity—and remained so until the mid 1830s. Once government protections were lifted and regulations in place to make the market free, a “double movement” arose—not according to some plan, but as a violent reaction to the exposure of this liberal system. In a passage prescient of present day discussions of WTO meetings: The road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism [. . . .] Thus even those whose whole philosophy demanded the restriction of state activities, could not but entrust the self-same state with the new powers, organs, and instruments required for the establishment of laissez faire. This paradox was topped by another. While laissez-faire economy was the product of deliberate state action, subsequent restrictions on laissezfaire started in a spontaneous way. Laissez-faire was planned: planning was not. 30 Though he explicitly denies alliance with Marxism in this analysis (and tries hard, possibly for political reasons, to distance himself from the ideas of Marx) Polanyi agrees with some of the basic problems of Marx finds in his analysis of capitalism; like Marx, he was greatly inspired by 28 29 30 Polanyi, The Great Transformation. p. 52. Ibid. p. 3-4. Ibid. p. 147. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 12 - FIELD #2 Robert Owen and the other “utopian socialists” 31 of the nineteenth century. However, far from hoping it will collapse on itself, Polanyi, indicative of the times, believed in the importance of state planning to re-embed the market mechanism, powerful as it might be, in society. In doing this, consciously, before the counter-movement and collapse, the enormous power of the industrial capitalism could be harnessed for the freedom of all. For Polanyi, the failure to understand this and to allow for the proper social protections on the national level before it reached a crisis level that necessitated spreading the problems to the world scale, was, in fact what led to the rise of fascism and the Second World War. “Fascism” for Polanyi, however, isn’t just limited to the Axis powers: The fascist solution of the impasse reached by liberal capitalism can be described as a reform of market economy achieved at the price of the extirpation of all democratic institutions, both in the industrial and in the political realm. [….] The appearance of such a movement in the industrial countries of the globe, and even a number of only slightly industrialized ones, should never have been ascribed to local causes, national mentalities, or historical backgrounds as was so consistently done by contemporaries. 32 Included in this list of countries that fell to fascism, he includes the usual suspects, but also a good portion of the Allied powers as well, including France, England and the United States. He claims, “there was no type of background—of religious, cultural, or national tradition—that made a country immune to fascism, once the conditions for its emergence were given.” 33 By this, he meant that the conditions in which the disembedded free market prevailed on the international level were the root cause of the rise of fascism, which was a “move” that began in the early 1930s with the failure of the gold standard. To prevent a similar scenario, in Polanyi’s argument, would mean being aware of this history and establishing a system which was more responsive, even if this also meant compromising some of the benefits of growth. Thus, in the midst of the run up to the second world war, on the heels of the global recession and bearing witness to the twin spectres of communism and fascism (at least in the Allied Parlance of the time), the main dilemma was whether, in a rare understatement on the part of Hayek, “the pursuit of some of our most cherished ideals has apparently produced results utterly different from those which we expected.” 34 Where Polanyi saw the rise of fascism as a global political movement in spontaneous response to the imposition of the market society that had already enveloped a number of western countries, Hayek saw it mostly in its German guise, and considered the true root of the causes of fascism “German ideas.” In so far as western countries were adopting some of those measures, they were simply asking for trouble, but they weren’t fascist yet. Thus, for Hayek, it was the defense of the ideas of liberalism that was most important—and fascism wasn’t the result of following them too dogmatically, but the consequence 31 Cf: Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers : The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, Rev. 7th ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999). Polanyi, The Great Transformation. p. 245. Ibid. p. 246. 32 33 34 Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 50th anniversary / with a new introd. by Milton Friedman. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). p. 14. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 13 - FIELD #2 of giving any state too much power. Fascism is the ultimate, though unintended, consequence of any move towards socialism: the promise of more freedom under the system Polanyi advocates is ultimately a Road to Serfdom. 35 This is a predictable line of liberal thinking that will recur throughout the field. Hayek, like Mill and Von Mises before him, sees the question of what society can use the state for: the more functions allowed to the state, the more power it is given over people’s lives, the more likely that power will be abused—most heinously in the appropriation of or limitations on the uses of property. On the other hand, despite his insistence that the true agent of change is society instead of the state, he too readily overlooks the constitution of the state by society and, in particular, the necessity of social legitimacy for the state to function. For him, the idea of liberty he ascribes to is so self evidently superior that there can be no rational resistance to it. Ironically, therefore, in his foregrounding of the promotion of this idea of market society, he basically affirms some of Polanyi’s observations about the idealistic foundations of liberalism. Further, his resistance to any notion placating possible insurgents through market reform (which, whatever the economic consequences, would have an ideological effect) makes the use of the repressive apparatuses of the state (whether financial, legal, or military/police) the only other option. Hayek is therefore just the kind of critic Polanyi was referring to in discussing the liberal creed. The conclusions of Road to Serfdom are, in some ways, a reversal of Polanyi’s in The Great Transformation. Like Polanyi, Hayek sees the significance of the separation of the political from the economic, but finds the real determining force in the free market, which leads to the freedoms of the political through making use of “the spontaneous forces of society.” 36 Where Polanyi speaks of the “double movement” as being just such a spontaneous reaction (citing studies in the 19th century failing to find the ideological conspiracy Hayek assumes), Hayek avoids discussing the validity of popular discontent: if popular discontent exists it is mostly the result of politicians believing (or cynically employing) socialist propaganda for political gain: it is misguided and it is wrong. 37 Polanyi sees the free market as “a stark utopia,” whereas, for Hayek, it is socialism (or planning of any kind) that is the utopian belief system. This charge is leveled, though not explicitly, at the planners who seemed to have won the socialist calculation debates of the late 19th and early twentieth century. Here the balance of supply and demand that neo-classical economists claimed was necessary to have the market mechanism run properly was substituted by the central planners watching the levels of their inventory. 38 But Hayek, following Mises, says that they had overlooked the importance of competition, “the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority.” 39 For Hayek, there is explicitly no “Third Way” as 35 36 37 Ibid. p. 31. Ibid. p. 21. “it is socialist propaganda for planning which has restored to respectability among liberal minded people opposition to competition and which has effectively lulled the healthy suspicion which any attempt to smother competition used to arouse” (45) Timothy Taylor, Legacies of the Great Economists. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom. p 41. 38 39 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 14 - FIELD #2 “both competition and central direction become poor and inefficient tools if they are incomplete.” 40 Thus Keynes’s mixed economy (discussed more below) is also a very bad idea. It is important for the later development of the field that Hayek’s treatise is both implicitly and in several places explicitly geared towards what would be called developed countries at the time, especially in Western Europe. Though at one point he makes the argument that “freedom” has its beginning there and has been spreading East, he is not advocating this as a policy of development. His main concern is with maintaining what he sees as the source of “our” civilization; the only way that “the rest” figure into the equation is as a source of the propaganda in favor of state planning seeping in from the East—and, for obvious rhetorical reasons, he frames all ideas of this sort as originating in Germany. 41 The only way that his theory could be seen as a theory of development, is in its periodization of the ideas that led to the economic growth of the nineteenth century. But this is less a blueprint for other developing nations to follow than a historical foundation on which he can set up his polemic to defend what he calls the liberal tradition. It is also this narrative of the foundation that Polanyi is most interested in undermining. Even this, however, Hayek hedges on, at least in Road to Serfdom. One of the ironic statements in light of later events is, “Probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals to certain rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez faire.” 42 Further, in his discussion of socialism as a utopia, he is careful to state that he is basically one of those people “who value the ultimate ends of socialism no less than the socialists [but] refuse to support socialism because of the dangers to other values they see in the methods proposed by the socialists.” 43 Nevertheless, he is careful to frame these socialist values as outside of the enlightenment tradition which he sees peaking (in about 1870) with liberalism. This more in line with his descriptions of socialism written at the height of his popularity in The Fatal Conceit. 44 The argument in the 1944 book is significant, but it was not an unusual statement at the time. Many of the ideas—at least about the dangers of state intervention in the market—were fairly widespread among business leaders. In fact, Daniel Bell says that it was because Hayek’s work was used so ideologically by the business community at the time that his legitimacy as a theorist would not be affirmed for another generation. 45 It was no less utopian when it became dominant then, but during the mid-century battle for ideas, the 19th century political economy was no longer palatable. 40 41 Ibid. p. 48. Importantly, one of the more significant sections is a long accusation of Carr’s thought being of German pedigree. Cf. ch 13 “The Totalitarians in Our Midst.” Hayek, The Road to Serfdom. p. 21. Ibid. p. 38. 42 43 44 Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Fatal Conceit : The Errors of Socialism, ed. William Warren Bartley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). esp. chapters 4 and 5 where he discusses any feeling of charity as being primitive, unenlightened and, in fact, amoral in contrast with the “extended moral order” of market dominated, capitalist social relations. 45 Cf. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology; on the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, Ill.,: Free Press, 1960). Harvey says that is exactly what Hayek thought would be necessary—regardless of what happened in the world economy.David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). p. 21. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 15 - FIELD #2 E.H. Carr tries very hard to make this clear—using many of the same arguments as Polanyi, but informed by the immediate interwar period and, especially, the toothless international institutions established to secure the peace. His book The Twenty Years Crisis figures into one of the few direct engagements with a named theorist which Hayek makes in Road to Serfdom. 46 This is understandable since it was people like Hayek that Carr saw as most problematic and vice versa. This has everything to do with Hayek’s implicit assumption that he has discovered the key to human nature and that the only thing necessary for the spontaneous coordination of interests is to have a set of institutions based on a commonly held set of moral principles. As Carr says, “the view that nineteenth-century liberal democracy was based, not on a balance of forces peculiar to the economic development of the period and the countries concerned, but on certain a priori rational principles which had only to be applied in other contexts to produce similar results, was essentially utopian.” 47 Further, he chided liberals for thinking that their moral posturing about other countries moving towards autarky and nationized industrialization made any difference to the countries pursuing these policies—nor was it in their interest to accede to the morality of Darwin-inflected “harmony of interests:” “Laissez-faire, in international relations as in those between capital and labour, is the paradise of the economically strong. State control, whether in the form of protective legislation or of protective tariffs, is the weapon of self-defence invoked by the economically weak. The clash of interests is real and inevitable; and the whole nature of the problem is distorted by an attempt to disguise it.” 48 For Carr, the League of Nations was based on just this kind of faulty moral proposition, yet liberal backers of the institution had so much faith in it that it was unthinkable it would be disobeyed once it was in place. The assumed a moral order without having the power to defend it. Carr’s theory has many nuances, but his understanding of the interwar period was basically that there was no one enforcing the rules being promulgated through the League of Nations (and a moral is only as valuable as it is able to be enforced). On the other hand, it was the assumption that the British led economic and political order of the nineteenth century had supported and been supported by a certain set of morals which were right because Britain was in charge (and vice versa). In other words, the power and the morality were, in no small part, mutually constituted. Though he doesn’t use the term hegemony, his basic understanding of what is necessary for international peace and coordination is the combination of coercion and consent that Gramsci was promoting a few years earlier. Like Gramsci, Carr also saw a legacy in Machiavelli, even if it needed to be updated for today. 49 Most importantly for the field, however, are his final comments on the historical pattern of political order: namely, that “every approach in the past to a world society has been the product of the 46 Cf note 29 above: On a side note, it is interesting that Hayek’s book on economics and state planning ends with a discussion of international relations and Carr’s book on International relations ends with a section on economics and state planning. Further evidence of the understanding developed during these years that these two elements had to be controlled in some way if another crisis was to be avoided. Carr, Twenty Years' Crisis. p. 27. Ibid. p. 60. Cf. ch. 5. He also mentions Marx and the notion of the ruling ideology corresponding to the ruling class several times. 47 48 49 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 16 - FIELD #2 ascendancy of a single power.” 50 He then cites the political, military, financial, commercial, and cultural ascendancy of Britain in the late nineteenth century. The failure of this power was, in part, what led to the disorder of the interwar period and the cataclysm of WWII. He surveys the field and finds only the US as a possible successor. However, he doesn’t see its material and political might as the only thing that would secure the peace. Though he was realist in his understanding of the necessity of power, like the other important theorist of hegemony at this time, he notes that “just as within the state every government, though it needs power as a basis of its authority, also needs a moral basis of the consent of the governed, so an international order cannot be based on power alone, for the simple reason that mankind will in the long run always revolt against naked power.” 51 Here Carr balances Hayek even more than Polanyi. Hayek closes his treatise with the recommendation for something like the UN—an international enforcement organization which would set up “the rule of law” on the international scale. However, as in his later work on the law, he has a very specific understanding of the law, namely that it should only be understood as a negative restriction: “the need is for an international political authority which, without the power to direct the different people in what they must do, must be able to restrain them from action which will damage others.” 52 This strict separation of the political and economic powers, as Rosenberg and Wood will later point out, is, indeed a tenet of the traditional liberalism he advocates. But Hayek, as mentioned above, assumes first of all that everyone will agree to the legitimacy of this law, that the morality of it will be the first source of its support and the use of “restraint” only when that morality is compromised. The structural contradiction of this liberal order for anyone who isn’t a property owner and sees no prospect of being one is mostly overlooked by Hayek. He is, despite later populist leaders appropriation of him, directing his comments to policy makers and statesmen. 53 Jurgen Habermas, however, in his inquiry into this version of liberalism, which began with “the assumption of the inherent justice of the market mechanism,” saw the continuity between even Hayek’s negative determination of the law in order to secure its political legitimacy: "As soon as the state itself came to the fore as the bearer of the societal order, it had to go beyond the negative determinations of basic rights and draw upon a positive directive notion as to how 'justice' was to be realized through the interventions that characterize the social-welfare state." 54 It was, in part, with this more realist understanding on which the institutions of the post war order were constructed. For in addition to seeming to be an economic necessity, state led development in its postwar form had a powerful ideological effect—or at least potentially so. It promised a more equitable and secure distribution of resources, an a future of economic growth and peace on both the national and international levels. As for the state as the primary actor on the world stage, this was an assumption made by all the theorists in this section. 50 51 52 53 54 Carr, Twenty Years' Crisis. p. 232. Ibid. p. 236. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom. p. 254. Yes, most of them were men. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere : An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). 224-225. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 17 - FIELD #2 III – Post-War hegemony: Modernization and Realism CONTENTS BIBLIOGRAPHY “Whether such a thing as state capitalism exists or can exist is open to serious doubt. It refers here to a model that can be constructed from elements long visible in Europe and, to a certain degree, even in America. Social and economic developments in Europe since the end of the First World War are interpreted [in this study] as transitional processes transforming private capitalism into state capitalism. [. . . .] On of our basic assumptions is that nineteenth-century free trade and free enterprise are on the way out. Their restoration is doomed for similar reasons as was the attempt to restore feudalism in post-Napoleonic France.” Fredrick Pollock, “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations,” 1941 55 Like most of the other Frankfurt School scholars, Pollock did not find this development particularly hopeful or beneficial. Yet he was not alone in his assumption that the “Free Market Imperialism 56 ”(Arrighi 1994)” of the previous era was no longer tenable. Certainly business leaders, theorists like Hayek, and a good many others saw the interventions of the post-war era as a rejection of some valuable tenets of the liberal order. On the other hand, those involved in Western socialist or communist movements as well as many in the US labor movement, certainly saw the post-war compromise as a sort of scandal. 57 Still, immediate post-war consensus was based on the perceived need to establish a world order to prevent the joint specters of economic depression and imperial rivalry which had ultimately led to world economic collapse, popular fascist movements, and total war. These were perceived as being caused by the inability of the international order to manage three important aspects of the global political economy: the political and military enforcement of international laws and treaties, the financial fluctuations from the international movements of capital and the resulting domestic liquidity crunches, and what Marxists might refer to as the problem of uneven development, exacerbated in the post war moment by the relative condition of ruin that prevailed in most of Europe. The goal of the postwar consensus was to create a scientifically supported regime that would ensure its orderly expansion. This emphasis on order and on positivist social science in general, of course, served a normative function. As Nuefeld says, riffing off Marcuse, “The conduct of scientific inquiry conceived as an Fredrick Pollock, "State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations," in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. Douglas Kellner and Stephen Eric Bronner (NY, NY: Routledge, 1989). p. 95. 56 55 This is Arrighi’s formulation of the period of British Hegemony. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century : Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London ; New York: Verso, 1994). It is interesting to see the homology between some of the critiques of the Frankfurt School—especially the later theorists like Marcuse—and those of Hayek, especially in their absolute praise of the individual. The comparison is not lost on Harvey or, indeed, even on Laclau and Mouffe. Cf: Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man : Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, 2nd. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991). Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. pp. 41-43; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony & Socialist Strategy : Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). pp. 171-175. L&M are also with Hayek in their mutual denial of “the positivity of the social” (ch. 3)—though Hayek is less post-structuralist, he still attacks it on the grounds that the word “society” is without an exact meaning, calling it a “weasel word” and lamenting the way that words are made to have this flexibility of meaning in “our poisoned language.” cf. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit. ch. 7. They further agree on the impossibility of social justice, both writing at about the same moment in the mid 1980s. For an account of the more radical CIO compromise with the AFL, and the removal of the ability of isolated groups of strikers to have work stoppage and “wildcatting” as part of the new AFL-CIO cooperation with FDR, cf: Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream : Politics and Economy in the History of the Us Working Class (London: Verso, 1986). ch. 2-3. 57 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 18 - FIELD #2 interest in control in the social world has definite normative content. For these objects of technical control in the case of a ‘science of society’ are neither atoms nor molecules—they are human beings.” 58 This observation is more true of International Relations, Development Economics and Sociology at this moment than of Keynesian economics, but all have the effect of creating a dominant discourse which sets the terms for the debate and with which every argument with or within that field will have to contend. In the words of Bourdieu, The definition of what is at stake in the scientific struggle is thus one of the issues at stake in the scientific struggle, and the dominant are those who manage to impose the definition of science which says that the most accomplished realization of science consists in having, being, and doing what they have, are or do. 59 This is true of any science claiming to be a science—or any social field for that matter—but the key aspect of these normative theories is that they also happened to be in widespread use in the US and each of them was, in one way or another, established as a powerful institutional voice, shaping policies and outlooks, limiting the terms in which questions were posed, and producing a wider cultural understanding of diplomacy, modernization, and modernity. The norm that was set up here was distinctly different from the one that prevailed in the 19th century during the hegemony of the British empire. Though in principle free trade was supported, it was seen as only one portion of a package of development options available to states. Thus, as mentioned above, it is also quite different than the ideas of Hayek, especially with regard to the notion of economic development. 60 As the epigraph by Pollack indicates, in the years immediately after WWII, the belief was that the state led or, at the very least, “mixed” economy was necessary to have a stable domestic economy in the face of international trade and financial markets. This program was advocated for both developed and “underdeveloped” and the main container of this development was to be the sovereign state. 61 On the other hand, Arrighi argues that the ultimate manifestation of this was quite different than, for instance, Roosevelt’s original plan when setting up the Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks institutions. The IMF and World Bank were to be the central bank and welfare system of “one world” led by the supranational UN, “Roosevelt original vision of the post-war world order [. . .] amounted to nothing less than a complete supersession of the very notion of sovereignty.” 62 However, with Roosevelt’s death and the Truman Doctrine of containment, 58 Mark A. Neufeld, The Restructuring of International Relations Theory, Cambridge Studies in International Relations ; 43 (New York, N.Y: Cambridge University Press, 1995). p. 103. Pierre Bourdieu, "The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason," in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli (N Y, N Y: Routledge, 1999). p. 35. 59 In Road to Serfdom, he explicitly denies the possibility of some states helping other states along the path to economic development, for many quite prescient reasons, one of which that the developing state will eventually blame any of its problems on its patron state. This is not, of course, to deny the possibility that this blame was not, in the end, entirely warranted. This point is important, and often lost in the development studies work: development was something that was advocated for all countries. This point is iterated by Gilbert Rist, The History of Development : From Western Origins to Global Faith (London ; New York: Zed Books, 1997). p. 3-4. 62 61 60 Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century. p. 66. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 19 - FIELD #2 Roosevelt’s revolutionary idealism, which saw the institutionalization of the idea of world government the primary instrument through which the US New Deal would be extended to the world as a whole [including the USSR], was displaced by the reformist realism of his successors, who institutionalized US control over world money and over global military power as the primary instruments of US hegemony. 63 By hegemony Arrighi means something more than pure dominance, but takes a Gramscian notion of hegemony as “the power associated with dominance expanded by the exercise of ‘intellectual and moral leadership.’” 64 Though this leadership had several dimensions, the ideological/cultural apparatus of the Cold War had a powerful effect of shaping the direction of the dominant political and economic theories. As mentioned above, the post-war understanding is unique in that it assumes the need to win consent and, at least in effect, used economic policy to secure that consent. In a more recent piece, Arrighi discusses the way that various historical events were used as lynchpins to secure domestic and then international consent for the use of American power. The threat of communism, during the Truman era and after, was the administration’s way of justifying American interventions abroad, whether for military defense against a growing threat or economic development of a vulnerable post-colonial state. 65 Though I will resist ascribing a completely functionalist agenda to the enterprise, it is probably not a coincidence that Truman helped articulate both the doctrine of containment of the Soviet threat—based in no small part on realist principles—and the imperative of the development agenda. As Arturo Escobar says, “The confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union thus lent legitimacy to the enterprise of modernization and development; to extend the sphere of political and cultural influence became an end in itself. [. . . .] It was commonly accepted in the early 1950s that if poor countries were not rescued from their poverty, they would succumb to communism.” 66 Both of the main paradigms of thought here were, therefore shaped by this reality. For instance Realism, beginning in its purest form with Morganthau was gradually reshaped depending on the course of events to the point that, in the late 1970s, one of its most respected proponents would say that the best system of international relations was created by the bi-polar balance of power. 67 Though there is certainly a scholarly air to these theories, they are not the product of the autonomous scientific field of which Bourdieu is speaking. Part of what counted as science for them was what got noticed and raised to the level of policy by the political and military establishment. 63 64 65 Ibid. p. 68. Ibid. p. 28. Note the similarity with Carr above. Here he quotes a Truman administration official “Arthur Vandenburg’s notorious advice to ‘scare the hell out of the American people’ by inflating the notion of a global Communist menace.” Giovanni Arrighi, "Hegemony Unraveling - Ii," New Left Review II, no. 33 (2005). p. 24. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development : The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). p. 34. It is interesting to see the replaying of this discourse in regards to terrorism at the current moment. See the story on Jeff Sachs in Esquire, Dec. 2005. 67 66 Cf: Kenneth Neal Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 1st ed. (Boston, Mass.: McGraw-Hill, 1979). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 20 - FIELD #2 The theories in this section of the field, therefore, represent the work of social scientists and, (more often) what Callinicos refers to as “Policy Intellectuals” 68 whose focus is different than the “specific intellectuals” of the former group. As Robert Cox put it, these are “problem solving theories” not “critical theory.” Callinicos’s division is somewhat analytical and depends on whether one sees the intellectuals as having their political interests established before or after their work is instrumentalized by the economic and political needs of the existing order; Cox’s more general perspective looks not only at the history of the theory, but asks broader questions as well. From a certain perspective, it may not matter what the intentions of the author are if they are eventually used in service of power: on the other hand, approaching it from what Lipietz calls “pessimistic functionalism,” seeing the examination of these disciplinary discourses only useful in so far as they are then dismissed as ideological supports for a hegemonic project, misunderstands the cultural process at work in making them fit. 69 This means understanding them as cultural projects themselves, embedded in social institutions and ideological frameworks, which inevitably affect their understanding of the reality they attempt to explain and the assertions they make about it. In other words, though there is certainly reason to be cynical and critical about the discursive function these theories played and have played in, for instance, the “making and unmaking of the Third World,” it is also important to address them with a full understanding of their theoretical stance and internal logic. 70 The context in which these ideas gained traction was dominated, as I’ve discussed before, by the post-war US sociology of Parsonian Structural-Functionalism. 71 It might seem irrelevant to this field, but Parsons had a particularly useful way of understanding what made capitalist countries unique (i.e. his focus on culture as the differentiating factor) which led to a fairly simple strategy of what developing countries would need to do to “catch up:” be more like us—not just economically and socially, but in individual thought and practice. Here, incidentally, is one of the key ways that culture appears specifically in this field. 72 More on this in a moment. Related to this, in economics, Keynesianism had just produced an interpretation of what the main problem was in creating the economic downturn of the 1930s. Though Mark Blyth argues that there were a few other ideas that FDR’s administration had cycled through before settling on the underconsumption theories of Keynes and others, by the end of the war, Keynes was a key player, leading the British contingent to the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. 73 The crux of this 68 Alex Callinicos, "Social Theory Put to the Test of Politics: Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens," New Left Review I, no. 236 (1999). Alain Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles : The Crisis in Global Fordism (London: Verso, 1987). I won’t have much time to look at this process as a whole, but this is only to say that a complete cultural studies approach would need to do this. 69 Escobar, Encountering Development : The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. I quote Escobar here not only because of his handy phrasing, but also because I think he does a fine job of this in considering the discourse of development. 71 70 For more on this paradigm of sociology, as well as the early Birmingham School critique of it, look at my other field statement. For a discussion of this combination of funtionalist and evolutionary bias of early Modernization studies, cf: Alvin Y. So, Social Change and Development : Modernization, Dependency, and World-Systems Theories, Sage Library of Social Research ; V. 178 (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1990). ch. 2. and Richard Peet and Elaine R. Hartwick, Theories of Development (New York: Guilford Press, 1999). ch. 3. 73 72 Cf Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2002). ch. 3. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 21 - FIELD #2 theory was that, among other things, the Protestant Ethic (although essential for development up to this point) had worked too well: sometimes people saved too much and didn’t take a risk on investment: no investment meant no new jobs which meant less money being spent, less goods being sold, less need for new investment, etc. This created a downward spiral that, spurred along by the “animal spirits” of the stock market, led to an unusually deep economic crisis. 74 What was needed, especially in a time of crisis, was for the state to step in and channel investment into productive labor—such as building infrastructure, making emergency loans available, and so forth. On the other hand, there was an evolutionary (and teleological) assumption that becomes even more evident in Modernization theories discussed below such that the earlier stage of development is seen as necessary: thus emulating the protestant ethic is seen as essential to future development because it supposedly creates a certain economic organization. If western society was really more advanced and this was really just because of an earlier, state bounded social ethic (rather than imperial expansion and primitive accumulation), and the goal was to become more like the western/northern states, there was little question of what should be done. Though the previous field points to the vast array of propagandistic enterprises deployed to spread this doctrine, ultimately it would be the responsibility of individual, usually post-colonial, states to help their citizens adapt to this new cultural framework. This field is mostly focused on the First World version of this rather than the Second World, but many of the same evolutionary assumptions existed in the Soviet model—some would argue that in some ways it began there. Thus, the understanding of the process of economic development adopted placed the agency of the state above society, in some cases even at the expense of society. This was the new, orthodox role of the national government on the domestic side and it was also the reason for establishing what have come to be known as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank—the former as a source of short term, emergency loans and the latter to support economic development. 75 As mentioned before, this idea of national development was meant for every nation, thus post war US society welcomed a new culture (its next stage) of mass consumption and a normalization of consumer debt—which was, as Aglietta and others point out, a necessary aspect for the functioning the Fordist industrial expansion. 76 Here Aglietta’s concept of the “mode of regulation” is important in discussing the cultural side of this expansion. 77 In the 74 My understanding of Keynes here is mostly gleaned from Taylor, Legacies of the Great Economists, Bell, The End of Ideology; on the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers : The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers. 75 As I should have time to mention later, Stiglitz felt these institutions took on very different roles in the post 1980 era, the IMF operating in areas that should have been subject to more long term development loans rather than the short term, shock therapy of the IMF. Then again, he headed the World Bank so he would say that. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (London: Allen Lane, 2002). Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation : The Us Experience, New ed., Verso Classics ; 28. (London: Verso, 2000). 76 77 Aglietta mentions this as the thing which separates Regulationist theory from a variety of other theories of PostKeynesian and even Neo-Marxian economics: here his critique is somewhat similar to Dallas Smythe’s in the communication field. Though they are technically talking about different objects, what they are effectively criticizing— especially in the dominant Neo-Marxian paradigm of Baran and Sweezy—is the failure of it to understand the economic function of ideology and ideological apparatuses. In other words, it isn’t just that these are superstructural elements or institutions which keep people placated or happy with the status quo. The social consumption norm and the communications industry also contribute to the process of valorization in their own right. For Aglietta, this means ensuring the final step in the circuit of capital—M-C-M’—which is the least predictable from the perspective of the capitalist. For JOHNSON ANDREWS - 22 - FIELD #2 US, it meant making it safer for individual workers to take on debt by presenting the welfare state as a safeguard of the unpredictability of unemployment. The rhetoric, though still somewhat administered (as later cultural critics would argue) still deployed the rhetoric of democracy. In contrast to this, the key discourses of modernization were predicated on the presence of a domestic elite that would lead the “underdeveloped” country on the path to Modernity. 78 This was related to the dominant paradigm in administered communication research—only on a much grander scale. 79 As in Rogers’s discussions of how an innovation would be diffused, the assumption was that one needed to find the “opinion leaders” of the country that would help bring the rest of the community or country along with them. 80 This, of course, assumed that the innovations were a way of moving the country or community towards progress—and that this progress was self evident and a good thing. When these were joined together into a development model, such as the Modernization and Dual Economy theories discussed below, they rest upon fundamental assertions about how modern economies had developed, namely, that they had developed by a transformation in which “traditional society” and traditional agricultural practices were abandoned, a more complex division of labor established from above, and the wonders of western science (the keystone, it was argued, to the earlier transformation of the West) were applied. All of this, in turn, implied a certain mindset among the citizens of the country such that, “the horizon of expectations must lift; and men must become prepared for a life of change and specialized function.” Though the other aspects of the development process were important, this was seen as the part which had separated Western civilization from the rest. It was the job of the elite in the country to help make this cultural change happen as well and one of the key tools for drawing people into this project was the cultural glue of nationalism, “the most important and powerful motive force in the transition from traditional to modern societies, at least as important as the profit motive.” 81 Thus, despite the perceived divide between the First and Second World, Philip McMichael notes that “they shared the same modernist paradigm. National Industrialization would be the vehicle of development in each.” 82 By mentioning “modernism” as a paradigm, McMichael is pointing to an assumption made about the cultural entity of the nation alongside a particular understanding of its relationship to about Western political economic development, based on a triumphalist narrative him, this is the goal of the Keynesian regime of intensive capitalist accumulation and, judging from the role of the US consumer in the world economy, it has been expanded on a global scale, even if the producers and consumers are no longer the same people. Cf. Ibid. p. 153-156. For the premier Neo-Marxian work he cites, Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1966). 78 I should point out, in reference to my other field, that this rhetorical commitment to democracy masked a presumption on the part of US elites that assumed democracy needed to be managed alongside the economy. For discussions of this paradigm, see sections on Lazarsfeld and Rogers in my other field. 79 80 Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th , Free Press trade pbk. ed. (New York: Free Press, 2003). On the other hand, as the US interventions of this period show, if it was necessary to use repression to ensure the model was adopted, a state could be supported in that endeavor as well. This was particularly the case in Latin American countries seen as being at risk of adopting somewhat socialist policies, even if, as in the case of Arbenz in Guatemala, the reformers were actually inspired by the US (in this case, FDR). For a general overview of US interventions in Latin America, Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle : Dynamics of U.S.-Latin American Relations, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). For information specific to Guatemala cf. Stephen C. Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit : The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, 2nd ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983). 81 82 Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth; a Non-Communist Manifesto. p. 26. Philip McMichael, Development and Social Change : A Global Perspective, 2nd ed., Sociology for a New Century (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 2000). p. 31. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 23 - FIELD #2 of endogenous, linear progress. It is the equivalent, in McMichael’s mind of a latter-day whiteman’s burden which started from a position of claiming the superiority of Western Civilization, this time couched in Truman’s obligation of “making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.” 83 Here, also, it is easy to see the Realist assumptions of this paradigm, both in terms of the political functions and cultural constructs seen as required for a state in the modern system of states. A key “policy intellectual” 84 of this paradigm in the US was W.W. Rostow, whose The Stages of Economic Growth outlines the basic argument of what became known as the “modernization” school of economic development. 85 Here the use of history is less focused on the international, except in terms of comparing endogenous national growth. Like the Keynesian Economic model it relies upon, it assumes the nation state to be at least as central to development as Realists see it to world politics. However, where the Realist theory is mostly concerned with the few leading countries, Stages focuses mostly on a project for the newly hewn postcolonial nation-states. Then again, the very notion of them being post-colonial is mostly ignored—they are, as Hegel saw the entire continent of Africa, “dark” and “without History.” 86 Though post-colonial theorists would find the Hegelian notion the most problematic—likely insisting on the importance and value of pre-contact history—the more damaging and enduring problem with Modernization theory (as it was unwound by later theorists) was not that it overlooked the colonial relationship in the former colonies, but that it overlooked the previous history of colonialism in the “development” of “developed” economies.” 87 This model was supposed to be based on the industrial development of Western countries, but, as McMichael points out, “the new development paradigm ignored the contribution of the colonies to European development.” 88 This oversight made it possible to conceive of the nation-state as the primary framework of the Development Project and gave the Development State a key role in this process. With the substitution of capital intensive for labor intensive agriculture and the imperative of state-led industrialization in the direction of import substitution, the need for outside funding was key; the latter, it was presumed, required a bureaucratic infrastructure and a sovereign state government. Sovereignty in this case was more an indication of the state as the paramount authority of a territorial jurisdiction, and this because of its international recognition 83 84 Ibid. p. 23. Here I think this designation is particularly relevant since Rostow spent more time in the service of various government positions—most notably as a key advisor in the promotion of the Marshall Plan and as Johnson’s National Security Advisor—than in any academic position. For a discussion of his role in escalating Vietnam, cf: Robert S. McNamara and Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect : The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, 1st ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). 85 86 Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth; a Non-Communist Manifesto. Cf: the section from Hegel’s Philosophy of History on “Africa” Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter, eds., Imperialism & Orienatalism: A Documentary Sourcebook (Malden, MA: Blackwells, 1999). pp. 246-250. 87 For the sake of not seeming like a pedant, please assume scare quotes (or for the Brits, inverted commas) at appropriate times from here on out. McMichael, Development and Social Change : A Global Perspective. p. 24. Critiquing this development paradigm from the perspective of the World Systems approach, it makes sense that McMichael would find this problematic. 88 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 24 - FIELD #2 rather than its internal, public legitimation or its autonomy. Still the state was the primary actor in development and part of the ostensible goal of development was to help develop the state itself. 89 Development via modernization, according to McMichael, was modeled in part on the post-Bellum US with “the displacement of agrarian civilization by an urban-industrial society.” In the “underdeveloped” world, this meant agriculture would be “technified” and the resources freed by that technification 90 —especially labor—would be moved into the industrial and service sector. 91 McMichael is critical of this—mostly because he is coming from the later perspective of World Systems and sees this earlier model as proffered with the intent of continuing the colonial division of labor. 92 Rostow, who was one of the main proponents of Modernization theory, argued that the application of capital intensive agriculture would move the society from the “traditional” phase to the “preconditions for take-off” phase by creating more food, releasing labor, and, most importantly, stimulating one of the key demands for the nascent industrial sector: the need for farming equipment and chemical fertilizers. In other words, the import substitution model concentrated first on expanding the production of agriculture, but the full blown modernization would come because this production would also create a demand—initially met by outside manufacturers but eventually, and reasonably, this demand would help national industry get off the ground. 93 And get off the ground it would—to the stage that Rostow calls “take off:” “where the mixed blessings of compound interest can be attained.” 94 This two-sector problem, as Rostow calls it, was expanded into a full blown theory of dual economy, discussed in Escobar among others, as it was presented by W. Arthur Lewis. In many ways this is simply a meditation on the themes elaborated in Rostow, but it was more a more specific outline of how development would progress: “The pivotal discursive operation of this model was the division of the country’s economy into two sectors: one modern and one traditional. Development would consist of the progressive encroachment of the modern upon the traditional, the steady extension of the money economy on the vast world of subsistence or near subsistence.” 95 This model, like Rostow’s, was based on the problem of how to get the financial element of development off the ground—in Marxist terms, it was a question of how to get the country from a common agricultural community to a system in which capital intensive manufacturing was able to extract surplus labor from the population. Though this model made the nation the container for 89 This is, in part, what Badie claims—saying that, contra McMichael and other dependency and World Systems theorists who give primacy to the economic relationship, the real dependency is political in nature. Badie, Imported State. Not sure this is a word. Sounds like something George W. Bush would say. I’m keeping it just because of that. McMichael, Development and Social Change : A Global Perspective. 31. 90 91 92 For McMichael, the colonial division of labor had the core countries of the colony producing certain industrial products and relying on the colonies for raw materials and markets for their industrial products. 93 94 Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth; a Non-Communist Manifesto. 22-23. Ibid. p. 18. The important qualification to this model is that the original suppliers (i.e. the external chemical companies) would have to be politically restricted from the market for a certain time through tariffs or other protectionist measures. For McMichael, the latter were never part of the plan. Either way, Rostow gives this process 60 years to work. Escobar, Encountering Development : The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. 77-78. 95 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 25 - FIELD #2 development, however, the M-C-M’ circuit of capitalist accumulation was still dependent on an external market in order to complete the process and provide capital to the developing country. Likewise, the accumulation of “capital goods” was hindered “since investments depend to a large extent on domestic savings, the modernizing pressure of consumption can act also as a break on development: it may stimulate the importation of consumer goods orienting the utilization of savings to the payment of external producers, as well as induce investments in sectors that are not basic to the economy.” 96 This observation by Cardoso and Faletto was part of the first critique of modernization theory. Incidentally, many dependency theorists—whether inspired by Lenin’s more stringent state centered model or simply taking seriously the model modernization model—adopted most of Rostow’s assumptions about the role of the state in the process of economic and social development even as they seem more aware of the actual interstate relationships that prevailed for developed countries during the stage in question. Still they were critiquing not only the Northern version of modernization theory, but its Southern equivalent, as promoted in the 1950s by Raul Prebisch. Prebisch was a member of the ECLA, a group of economists from Latin America who felt that there were structural disadvantages to their development, manifested in poor terms of trade with industrial nations. He saw this as part of a more general problem of, as indicated by McMichael above, of the continuation of a colonial division of labor. Setting up the categories of core and periphery, these theorists argued that the colonial relations of dominance, particularly in Latin America, had continued well into the period of independence. Prebisch therefore, recognized an international dimension to development which is absent in some ways from that of Rostow—who assumes a pluralistic, endogenous enterprise. Thus his major difference is that he recognizes this. This leads him to recommend a more centralized, protected growth strategy, where the capital goods needed for “take off” are developed through the combination of exporting primary products and encouraging foreign investment in local businesses. 97 In effect, this meant the support of the local bourgeoisie by subsidizing inefficient and confiscatory domestic practices. 98 The latter, according to Cardoso and Faletto, kept the social relations from moving forward by the cynical combination of populism and totalitarian rule. The condition of “underdevelopment” identified by Truman in the late 1940s was therefore not just an evolutionary difference, but a structurally enforced inequality: The situation of underdevelopment came about when commercial capitalism and then industrial capitalism expanded and linked to the world market nonindustrial economies that went on to occupy different positions in the overall structure of the capitalist system. Thus, there exists among developed and underdeveloped countries a difference, not only of the stage or state of the production system, but also of function or position within the international economic structure of production and distribution: some produce industrial 96 Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). p. 12. 97 On Prebisch, cf: Peet and Hartwick, Theories of Development, Rist, The History of Development : From Western Origins to Global Faith, So, Social Change and Development : Modernization, Dependency, and World-Systems Theories. Cf: Peet, p. 108-109. 98 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 26 - FIELD #2 goods; others raw material. This requires a definite structure of relations of domination to assure an international trade based on merchandise produced at unequal levels of technology and cost of labor force. 99 The problem seen here in the terms of what Samir Amin later refers to as “extroversion” (“the distortion towards export activities”) was not necessarily something maleficent on the part of the core countries nor the result of an underdeveloped home market, but was the result of the exceptional productivity of the center “which compels the periphery to confine itself to the role of a complementary supplier of products for the production of which it possesses: exotic agricultural produce and minerals.” 100 This, along with the kinds of consumption patterns proffered by international organizations 101 which make importing manufactured goods cheaper than making them at home, keeps the country from ever moving past the second stage of Rostow’s design to the third: from the technification of agriculture to the preconditions of the take off created by nascent industrialization. This, in effect, transfers any possibility of capital accumulation in the periphery back to the center. It makes the peripheral country dependent on the core for its imports, for its export market, and for its capital goods: this condition is named “dependency.” Important in the examination of dependency is that the theorists don’t simply extrapolate from current data to consider the development of capitalism in Latin America but look closely at the social relations over the period of development. Important in this is the orthodox understanding of economic and social development proffered by Marx and underlying Rostow—though the latter has his understanding of this process warped by Parsonian pluralism. 102 Here the assumption is that a certain level of capitalist production will help to produce a domestic bourgeoisie which will then create the social pressures on the state to reform it into a democracy. Cardoso, Amin and other dependency theorists, far from completely blaming the condition of dependency on former colonial relations or the world system, therefore ask the question of what the domestic social relations are that have stymied both of these processes and produced the dependent relationship. They also consider what countries within Latin America seem to have progressed further down the path to development and consider what patterns they have followed that could possibly be repeated. They have a mixed conclusion about both causes and solutions, 99 Cardoso and Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America. p. 17. 100 Samir Amin, Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1976). p. 200. A wealth of examples, from the introduction of peanut butter to the replacement of domestic materials with Western food and manufacturing improvements that must be bought instead of made, are presented throughout McMichael’s book. Cf. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth; a Non-Communist Manifesto. It is the “non-communist” part of the “manifesto” in the last chapter to which I refer. Though he basically agrees with most of Marx, his dismissal of him could be summed up, in retrospect, with the statement that Keynes saved capitalism from its crises and organized labor was able to secure some basic rights while agreeing to give up most of its ability to express its conflict with the capitalist class. That both of these settlements were the result of catastrophic conflict is, as in most consensus theories of social relations, simply folded into the theory, ex post facto, as a predictable part of its progress. It could be argued that Marx has a similar progressive vein in his thinking—and certainly Lenin does—on the relation between economic and social development. It is also worth pointing out that, Rostow is unknowingly on board with Lenin in terms of his domestic elite leading the way, but this progressive assumption leads him to overlook that some folks might not be into what he’s selling. Finally, it’s worth noting that Cardoso is more influenced by Lenin than Rostow on this, as is evidenced in this article Fernando Henrique Cardoso, "Dependent Capitalist Development in Latin America," New Left Review I, no. 74 (1972). In this, discussing dependency in the context of Lenin’s Imperialism, he is most interested in explaining the external relations of core with periphery, but he is implicitly speaking about what is necessary to overcome this structural impasse. 102 101 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 27 - FIELD #2 but, on balance, they continue to assume that modernization via de-linking is one possibility. In any case, the point that they come to in their analysis is that, even if the description of earlier development in the core countries, the endogenous process on offer has not prevailed in peripheral countries which were forced into a relationship of “combined and uneven capitalist” development. 103 Even if the state was nominally sovereign, the combination of internal and international class relations prevented peripheral countries from progressing as promised. Andre Gunder Frank takes this argument to a polemical extreme, making a more sweeping, iconoclastic gesture that contests pre-suppositions in all three schools and promoting arguments that are soon picked up by World Systems theorists like Wallerstein. 104 Frank begins by working from the neo-Marxist premises of Paul Baran which claim that “it is capitalism, both world and national, which produced underdevelopment in the past and which still produces underdevelopment in the present.” 105 This conclusion he backs up with similar social histories of the development of capitalism Latin America in Capitalism and Underdevelopment which show that, far from being able to develop their economies through interactions with the center, peripheral economies are better off when they have weak connections to central economies. But far from supporting the local bourgeoisie through the development of a dual economy or any form of de-linked capitalism, Frank argues that 1) peripheral economies were already capitalist and 2) they can, therefore, move directly into socialism and it is in their best interest to do so. 106 These two contentious claims are meant to undermine all of the previous models of development. The first is aimed at modernization theorists whom he dubs the “Neo-Weberians.” Here he aims at Rostow and other Modernization theorists such as B.F. Hoselitz and David McClelland who make the cultural aspect of development the most central impediment. 107 Their argument, as Frank sees it, is that Latin America (and, implicitly, all “traditional” societies in the underdeveloped world) are that way because they haven’t internalized the protestant ethic and moved beyond their feudal past. 108 For Frank, quite to the contrary, these countries have been capitalist from the moment they were involved in the capitalist trading relations of the colonial countries and it is this that has led to their underdevelopment. Thus the path suggested by modernization theorists (and, incidentally, most of the sociological enterprise of the US) of the need for “a reorientation of 103 104 The phrase is actually Trotsky’s, for more on this see Rosenberg’s discussion of it below. Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil, Revised and Enlarged ed. (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1969), Andre Gunder Frank, "Development and Underdevelopment in the New World: Smith and Marx Vs. The Weberians," Theory and Society 2, no. 4 (1975), Andre Gunder Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1969). For Wallerstein’s use of Frank cf: Immanuel M. Wallerstein, "The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis," Comparative Studies in Society and History 16, no. 4 (1974). 105 106 107 Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment. p. xi. Cf: Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution. On McClelland, cf: So, Social Change and Development : Modernization, Dependency, and World-Systems Theories. ch. 3; see also, Bert F. Hoselitz, "Non-Economic Barriers to Economic Development," Economic Development and Cultural Change 1, no. 1 (1952). 108 “The essence of their arguments has been graphically summarized by cartoonists, who, sharing the scholars' ideological convictions, though not their scientific pretensions, depict a lazy Mexican taking a long siesta in the tropical sun while leaning against the (Catholic) church wall. That is "underdevelopment," if only he had the Puritan spirit, his country would be developed like theirs, so runs the argument.” Frank, "Development and Underdevelopment in the New World: Smith and Marx Vs. The Weberians." p. 434. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 28 - FIELD #2 social norms and values” 109 is misguided on two counts. Not only is the cultural aspect of development less important than the economic one, but underdevelopment is already the result of this economic relationship of capitalism. It also refutes both the dualist theory and “dependant development” theories in that both of these argue for a continuation and deepening of capitalist social relationships which, as far as Frank is concerned, “Latin America is and has always been capitalist.” 110 As mentioned above, this thesis is spun into the more general theory of Wallerstein and world systems theorists. That these two theories emerge at relatively the same moment, independent of one another, is interesting in itself and is arguably indicative, as I will also argue below, of a more general theoretical crisis also visible in the change from Realism to neo-Realism in the theory of International Relations, among others. Wallerstein’s theory, which grows more out of the historical scholarship of Fernand Braudel 111 and the latter’s emphasis on the “longue duree” of capitalist development, argues explicitly against all notions of the isolated development of capitalism, through a series of stages, at the national level. “If we are to talk of stages, then-and we should talk of stages-it must be stages of social systems, that is, of totalities. And the only totalities that exist or have historically existed are mini-systems and world-systems, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there has been only one world-system in existence, the capitalist world-economy.” 112 This redefinition of both capitalism and development as superceding the nation state and being the result of a set of “production” relationships visible in the “international division of labor” therefore defines all of the patterns of development as being the result of this system rather than of any domestic pattern of the economic mode of production or any political or social relationships. This break with all previous theories of development and, consequently, the resultant debate over how capitalism developed at the national or international level is an important bellwether of many other changes happening in the global political economy. I won’t ascribe a direct causal relationship to it, but I will break off from the discussion of economic development and move briefly to the less dynamic discourse of international political relationships. I say these are less dynamic because many of the assumptions of political realism are, as mentioned above, implicit in the discourse of economic development as well as in the international institutions set up in the post-war era. 109 110 Hoselitz, "Non-Economic Barriers to Economic Development." p. 8. In this, it is important that Frank, as well as Wallerstien, are able to see capitalism as merely economic rather than a cultural system. Here their affinity to the kinds of microfoundations present in neo-liberals is evident. Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World, Civilization and Capitalism ; V.3 (London: Collins, 1984), Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, Civilization and Capitalism ; V.2 (London: Collins, 1982), Fernand Braudel and Siân Reynolds, The Structures of Everyday Life : The Limits of the Possible, New ed., Civilisation and Capitalism ; V.1 (London: Collins, 1981). Immanuel M. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, Studies in Social Discontinuity (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989), Wallerstein, "The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis." p. 390. 112 111 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 29 - FIELD #2 The primacy of the state is elemental to the field of International relations where, as noted above, the dominant theory among leading theorists and policy makers was that of Realism. 113 Carr had revived realism to some extent, though in a much more nuanced and careful way. In the post-war moment, Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations (now in its 7th edition) is a more authoritative, positivist, and concise definition of the tenets of Realism (in his first 20 pages or so), which he then elaborates into a variety of other contexts such as diplomacy, peace, and the “struggle for power” in the international scene (for another 500). Realism, as was indicated above, attempts to outline a scientific enunciation of political thought and action in an international context. However, Morgenthau doesn’t begin from the international context, but from “objective laws that have their root in human nature. 114 ” Though he says the theory deals with a “pluralistic conception of human nature” in which people are equal parts economic, political, moral, religious, etc. (sic.), he defends the focus on politics alone as the sole rationale for action because “one has to deal with it in its own terms in order to understand it.” 115 This isolation of the political becomes total when applied to the state such that “statesmen think and act in terms of interest defined as power, and the evidence of history bears that assumption out.” 116 It is possible that “not all foreign policies have always followed [a] rational, objective and unemotional course”—especially when democratically elected politicians have to pander to the domestic audience 117 —but “a theory of foreign policy [i.e. realism] which aims at rationality must [. . .] abstract from these irrational elements.” 118 Thus begins Realism’s long association with the theories of neoclassical economics, even as it attempts to provide a separate disciplinary account of political science. As in the Marginalist Revolution in economics, which eventually helped guide Keynes to his General Theory (which, of course, eventually guided Rostow and others to their understanding of the current functioning of the economy of the modern nation state), Realism brackets other “contingent deviations from rationality” where reason is limited to its political aspect. Thus, also like the “want satisfaction” of the rational actor neo-classical economics, the upshot is that the political aspect of “human nature” becomes the only reasonable motivation. And, like the equilibrium of the Marginalists, the “countervailing power” of Keynesianism, and the “selfmaintaining” order of Parson’s sociology, the “system of states” tends towards a balance of power—not because of the system per se, but because of the individual characteristic of the actors. 119 From the foundation of the instinctual political interest of the individual actor, Morgenthau and other realists posit a theory of the state in which, “the aspiration for power on the part of several nations, each trying either to maintain or overthrow the status quo, leads of 113 John Baylis and Steve Smith, The Globalization of World Politics : An Introduction to International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). p. 110. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations : The Struggle for Power and Peace. p. 5. Note that this is the early version of the rational actor theories that will eventually overtake the field, even if focused on a different level of analysis. 115 116 117 118 119 114 Ibid. p. 14. Ibid. p. 5. I’m paraphrasing here, but this is certainly his attitude about this inconvenient obstacle. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations : The Struggle for Power and Peace. p. 7. Baylis and Smith, The Globalization of World Politics : An Introduction to International Relations. p. 174. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 30 - FIELD #2 necessity to a configuration that is called the balance of power and to policies that aim to preserve it.” 120 Rosenberg calls Morgenthau’s particular brand of realism an “axiomatic” realism. 121 This is evident in Morganthau’s principles of realism in his defense of “the autonomy of the political sphere” which, for him, is a self evident requirement for anyone claiming to be scientific. Framing this question from the perspective of the diplomat himself, 122 he compares realism to the disciplinary focus of economists, lawyers, and “moralists” wherein they maintain the autonomy of their own fields and observe the “conformity of action” through their singular lenses. The question that he says the political realist asks is, “How does this policy affect the power of the nation?” Here is the key difference between the earlier discussions of economic development and a link to later theories of the international political economy. Morgenthau sees the economic policy of the nation—especially in its external economic relations as primarily political. In contrast to this is the Leninist understanding of Imperialism. The latter inspires Baran and eventually Frank to consider the operation of the US state (or any state) as primarily serving the economic interests of a certain class. Thus, the development policies recommended in the early post-war era, using mass consumption and capital intensive agriculture supplied by the center to the periphery, were mostly (though never only) meant to serve the needs of the large monopoly interests of the US capitalist class. The Cold War was simply the ideological cover for this primarily economic motivation; the US used its political, military, and economic might to further these goals. Morgenthau on the other hand, says these are reductive theories, whether they are propounded by capitalists who claim the expansion of the system will result in the mutual coordination of interests or in the critics of that system who still sum all of politics up to its functioning. 123 Since his main goal was to give instruction to the diplomat, writing in the early years of the Cold War, Morgenthau sees the national development policies primarily in terms of politics, not economics. Since early definitions of Imperialism dealt with a combination of the two (regardless of what he claims), he also must re-define Imperialism as being judged by whether a state’s foreign policy, “seek[s] to overthrow the existing distribution of power, or does it only contemplate adjustments within the general framework of the existing status quo.” 124 In other words, the maintenance of the status quo, whatever that status quo might be, is not imperialistic. In this way, strengthening economic and cultural ties—especially with the countries in Latin America—would basically be an attempt to maintain the status quo of the US as laid out by the Monroe Doctrine and, later, by the Truman Doctrine. They are not changing the balance of power so they aren’t imperialistic. 120 121 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations : The Struggle for Power and Peace. p. 174. Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society : A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London ; New York: Verso, 1994). p. 17. An observation by Sylvester, not to be construed as an endorsement: “From Machiavelli to the late twentieth century, the qualities ‘men’ have ascribed to ‘women’—such as irrationality, intuition, temptation—have been regarded as a danger to international affairs. For this reason, historical realists argue that statecraft should remain ‘mancraft.’” From Christine Sylvester, Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994). Quoted in: Baylis and Smith, The Globalization of World Politics : An Introduction to International Relations. p. 122. 123 124 122 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations : The Struggle for Power and Peace. ch. 5. Ibid. p. 67. On the other hand, Morgenthau is saying that these economic interventions are also ideological ones that are meant to promote US interests, a point similar to the one made by Arrighi near the beginning of the section. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 31 - FIELD #2 Despite the obviously conservative, 125 Cold War ideology imbued through this understanding, Morgenthau sees these axioms of international politics as a timeless given. Seen in evidence from at least the Ancient Greek city-states, with theoretical ancestors from Thucydides to Machiavelli to Henry Kissinger, this is a transhistorical truth of “human nature.” Though he doesn’t challenge the universalism of Morgenthau’s doctrine, Kenneth Watz challenges the idea that we can explain world politics by appealing to some essence rooted in the psychology of human beings. In this, he reinforces the “scientific” foundations of realism by appealing to the structure in which the states are immersed. He advocates understanding this process by moving beyond the “first image” thinking advanced by Morgenthau, i.e. that which asserts human nature as the driver of world politics: “So fundamental are man, the state and the state system in any attempt to understand international relations that seldom does an analyst, however wedded to one image, entirely overlook the other two.” 126 As a correction, he settles on the focus of the Third Image as the primary level of analysis. His inspiration comes from the dominant behaviorist paradigm in the social sciences and from the game theory being advanced in economics. The theory of the “third image” is his shorthand for the balance of power mechanism wherein the structural anarchy among states leads them to create alliances and agreements—or undertake unilateral action—in order to secure their nation’s self interest. The only real difference between Morgenthau and Waltz is the latter’s appeal to philosophy, his complication of Morgenthau’s sole emphasis on human nature, and his recommendation understanding of cooperation between states to fulfill their own interests as “only contingently rational.” 127 This is so because one can never trust what anyone else is going to do. So the state(sman) cannot assume that the harmony in anarchy of balance power will always hold: at any moment one’s allies could become enemies: “States [unlike citizens in a state] do not enjoy even an imperfect guarantee of their security unless they set out to provide it for themselves.” 128 (Waltz 1954) The implication of this outlook is, roughly, that the “ends justify the means.” During the Cold War, this was certainly the outlook of the dominant world powers. During the 1950s, 60s and 70s, this realist “system of states” and the development model state led industrialization got a workout, but they maintained their dominance even as their coherence seemed strained. Though the Keynesian model of state-led growth seemed to contradict the Realist notion that the national was subverted to the international, as the former broke down empirically, Realism became less coherent. For though it was based on the sovereign state, it had little notion of what the state itself would or should look like on the inside. Whether it defined the system in terms of a liberal institutional model or a hegemonic stability, Realism assumed the analytical concreteness of the state and a transhistorical notion of sovereignty. Though there is more of a delayed reaction to the economic crisis of the early 1970s on the part of realism, the effects of the change are evident even as it unfolds. 125 126 127 128 In the sense that it is less interested in change than continuity- a feature of many post-war social theories. Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State, and War (NY, NY: Columbia UP, 1954). p. 160. Rosenberg, Empire of Civil Society. p. 25. Waltz, Man, the State, and War. p. 201. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 32 - FIELD #2 To return, briefly, to my earlier discussion of world system’s theory of Wallerstein, Ruggie notes the similarity in Wallerstein and Waltz’s conceptions. 129 Both, he notes, see something like the “world system” as being the appropriate unit of analysis. He also notes the structural functionalist assumptions that bind their theories together. Though Wallerstein makes politics both the result and condition of economic necessities and Waltz produces the “mirror image” each happens upon a notion that the international set of relations is the level on which decisive action is taking place, determining in some way the role or position of states. In Wallerstein, the division of labor of the capitalist world system becomes the level on which the class struggle is taking place, with the center and periphery performing the roles of bourgeois and proletariat; for Waltz, the “structure of anarchy” acts as “a constraining and disposing force on the interacting units within it.” 130 In both, the internal dynamics of these “interacting units” becomes less important than their external relations—Waltz even goes so far as to claim the internal dynamics are only of concern in so far as “they show how the units of the system are positioned or arranged.” 131 And both, to varying degrees, posit a system, like its Parsonian counterpart, which is characterized as surprisingly consistent and unchanging despite what appear to be dramatic changes over the course of history they purport to explain. However defensible these abstractions and problematics may be, it seems interesting to me that they should both emerge at roughly the moment of the breakdown of the post-war hegemony, the reversal of the development model, and the beginning of the “New International Division of Labor.” In other words, though both of these theories project their explanatory usefulness far into the past (World Systems eventually being considered 5000 years old; realism at least 3000) they become prominent at the very moment that capitalism is re-released on the global scale through the internationalization of financial markets, the renewal of the doctrine of free trade and the slow reassertion of monetarist understandings of domestic economic goals (namely, they are mostly international). Likewise, it is often seen as the moment of the collapse of the traditional class struggle between industrial labor and the middle class in US culture. In spite of their following and refining earlier paradigms, the innovations of Waltz and Wallerstein could also be seen as resulting from very real changes in the global political economy. In the same way, therefore, that Jameson sees post-structural theory as a signal theory of the postmodern moment, these emerge from a crucible of dynamic social, political and economic change in which many of the assumptions about states, markets and the history of their development are coming under fire in both core and periphery. Culture may not figure directly into their theories, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t cultural in at least a symptomatic way. IV – Fractures CONTENTS BIBLIOGRAPHY The breakdown of the Bretton Woods exchange rate mechamism in the early 1970s and the early signs of persistent stagnation in the Keynesian model are usually discussed as economic crises. John Gerald Ruggie, "Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neo-Realist Synthesis," in Neorealism and Its Critics, ed. Robert O. Keohane (New York, NY: Columbia, UP, 1986). p. 133. 130 131 129 Ibid. p. 133. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1979). Reprinted in Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics (New York, NY: Columbia UP, 1986). p. 74. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 33 - FIELD #2 However accompanying these crises, or, depending on how you punctuate it, causing these crises 132 there were a variety of social and intellectual movements that began to challenge to the dominant order. In world politics, the war in Vietnam prompted many questions about the validity (and even actuality) of US dominance and brought under attack many of the key assumptions that had framed the first twenty-five or so years of the Cold War. This inspired fierce debate about not only the future of the global political economy, but also its origins and, like the postDepression and post-war debates, what was the cause, extent and nature of the crisis. Some of the economic problems were long forecast (at least in their broad outlines if not the actual mechanics) by neo-liberal economists like Milton Friedman. On the other hand, it was also no mystery that Keynesianism was somewhat ineffective in dealing with inflation, but this had, in the past, been seen as a minor problem. 133 Therefore defining the crisis in a certain way—i.e. making it about inflation rather than profitability, productivity or international industrial pressure— was a central concern. 134 Friedman, who, in his economic theory, is most well known for making the quantity theory of money more respectable, had been hacking away at the Keynesian paradigm since it was instituted at mid century. With the economic problems of the 1970s, the monetary interpretations he and his colleagues had provided for the major economic problems 135 could gain some traction. This was particularly the case at this moment because of the nature of the problem being faced in the US—where the growth of the previous era promised by Keynes In line with Negri’s version of Italian autonomist Marxism, the international political movements of the 1960s—whether in Vietnam, the US or France are all painted as being struggles against the previous regime of Fordism, which they may have been—Empire argues that it is the political movements that create the crisis of Fordism not the economic. Cf. Hardt and Antonio, Empire. As I mention in the previous field, Hardt and Negri’s periodization is reductive in that it brands all the conflicts with the same opposition, ignoring the possibility of a variety of subjective reasons for these conflicts. I don’t mean to do that here, but merely to say that, whatever the consciousness of the resistance might be, its existence was not a vote of confidence for the political and economic status quo. 133 134 132 As Desai tells it, the question of unemployment relative to inflation was assumed to be answered by the Phillips Curve. I would say that this transition would be ripe for a cultural studies approach, particularly in the discourse advanced in order to convince people (or at least make intelligible statements proclaiming) that inflation was the prime problem of the capitalist economy. Further, it would be interesting to see how inflation as an index changed in this period, at least in the USA. It is supposedly based on the CPI, which is the consumer price index (an index that, itself has been recently questioned by the BLS itself, cf: http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpigm697.htm) But Austrians seem to have a different definition of inflation that has more to do with the actual value of a currency which should be an indication of the quantity of money in circulation. Thus instead of looking at the effect productivity has on raising or lowering the price of goods on the market, they assume inflation at the CPI level is actually an effect, not of the production of consumable commodities, but of commodity money, the value of which, it might be noted, can currently only be compared to the value of other currencies. It is this latter value, commodity money in one market compared to other countries’ currencies, that is their preferred indicator of inflation. As mentioned below, this definition has a very particular class orientation and, thus, the discourse involved in promoting it as the more significant index of the health of an economy would be interesting to study, if it hasn’t been done already. Blyth does some work on this—especially with the conflation of inflation, which generally has no real short or even significant long term effects, with hyperinflation. Blyth, Great Transformations. Ch. 6. On this, I would also note that, in the pro-neoliberal account of the period given in the PBS documentary The Commanding Heights, one of the key moments leading up to the adoption of the model in North America is hyperinflation in Latin America, as if the two cases were commensurable (and yet unrelated) Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights : The Battle for the World Economy, [Rev. and updated ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002). 135 Important here is that political and social problems are only significant at a secondary level for this policy. Its primary goal is the functioning of the system of finance which is seen as the primary circulatory system of the economy. Thus, in 1957, when he provides his account of what monetary policy can and cannot do, implicit in the critique is the idea that, if it can’t be done through monetary policy then it can’t (and probably shouldn’t) be done. Milton Friedman, "The Role of Monetary Policy," The American Economic Review 58, no. 1 (1957). Following from this are his more social, political arguments about the role of government in regards the economy which he presents in more popular books like Milton Friedman, There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1975), Milton Friedman, Rose D. Friedman, and NetLibrary Inc., Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 34 - FIELD #2 had stalled and the inflation that was earlier accepted as a consequence of growth was getting out of hand. 136 As inflation became the key problem for economic policy, fiscal instruments were laid aside and monetary ones became more prominent, strengthening the role of central bankers and, particularly, the US Federal Reserve. This didn’t happen overnight, but, as Harvey argues, piloted in several peripheral settings, most notably Chile, before it became the model of choice. 137 I use choice here ironically since, though the model is supposedly based upon choice, the state has few choices in the model not already made for it: it is not supposed to provide social programs, but in order to shore up capital markets or bail out investors, billions upon billions can be spent in order to prevent a monetary crisis. 138 Though Blyth has a very complex understanding of the way this transition occurred—in terms of the interests involved and the agents who effected the change via propaganda and policy papers—the key for the field is that, at this point ideas which could be associated with Hayek, earlier discredited because of the instabilities of the “Twenty Years Crisis” and the answers to that crisis provided by Keynesianism and Realism, were slowly becoming more acceptable. 139 These discourses are often referred to under the general heading of “neo-liberalism,” after Milton Friedman claimed that monetarists and small-government conservatives were the true liberals and, thus, would be resuscitating those ideas. Blyth puts monetarism alongside Public Choice economics of (George Mason’s own) Buchanan, supply side, anti-tax philosophies like those of Laffer, and “rational expectations” theory. 140 On the whole, this meant a push for tax cuts for the holders of capital, deregulation in financial markets, privatization where possible and, all of the above, under the banner of diffusing an inflationary crisis and expanding growth. This, incidentally, as Blyth also points out, meant defining inflation and growth in a certain way. 141 136 137 138 For a fuller account of the struggles around this transition, cf: Blyth, Great Transformations. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. As Harvey, Stiglitz, Henwood, and many others, point out, this applies in both the domestic US market and in other domestic markets. The US Treasury bailed out many financial collapses in the domestic sphere—savings and loans crisis in the late 1980s and LTCM in the late 1990s—and in other markets—such as in Russia and East Asia in the 1990s. In each case, the people who are actually bailed out are the creditors who leant money to the borrowers in order to fund bad investments. Stiglitz calls this a form of “Moral Hazard”—a clever turnabout considering that this is the charge Hayek and other libertarians make about the inefficiencies of collective ownership. In the latter, the argument is also known as the Hazard of the Commons. In this case it is that, “creditors, anticipating an IMF bailout, have weakened incentives to ensure that borrowers will be able to repay.” Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents. p. 201. Well played, even if it technically confirms moral hazard theory—a problem in itself, since it relies on a neo-classical, self-interested maximizer. Blyth, Great Transformations. chs. 5-6. 139 140 The latter is interesting in its similarity to both the general Cultural Studies critique of Parsonian Structural Functionalism (and, incidentally, later critiques of Marxism) and is, in some ways, the reverse of Waltz’s critique in his Neo-realism. As Blyth describes the “microfoundations critique:” States that causal accounts of behavior in aggregates [ . . . ] must be grounded in convincing causal accounts of the behavior of individuals. More specifically credible theories must be supported by models that are generated from the main assumptions of neoclassical economics: that individuals are self-interested maximizers and that markets clear. Given this critique, the assumptions underpinning embedded liberal ideas were attacked because they treated aggregates as if they had an independent existence.” Ibid. p. 142. Blyth also notes that the tenets of Keynesian theory most criticized by rational expectations –namely, the role of adaptive expectations—is central to Friedman’s explication of monetary policy, “the monetarist’s useage,however, seems to have gone unnoticed.” (p. 141, n.56). Cf: Note 126; as Brenner, Harvey, Pollin and anyone honest who has looked at the period notes, it was the equivalent of class warfare since it focused on the capital values of financers, not debtors or consumers, as the real index of inflation. 141 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 35 - FIELD #2 In terms of the political acceptance, the landmarks usually offered for this shift—as both a popular movement and a political, economic agenda—are the election of Thatcher in Britain, Carter’s appointment of Volcker as Federal Reserve Chair, and the election of Ronald Reagan. The more memorable actions of the three—Thatcher’s privatizing of the coal industry, Volcker’s unprecedented “slaying” of inflation, and Reagan’s breaking the strike of the Air Traffic controllers—not only signaled this new order, but they also correspond to the primary roles of the state (because it still has some) under neo-liberalism. 142 Likewise, what is also seen as the first rebellion against this order—Mexico’s default of its debt payment in 1982—not only points to the new power this order had, but also its limitation. 143 That is, the ability to impose austerity programs, internally and externally, in an attempt to rein in inflation often had severe effects and there were few progressive options available to combat these effects. Inflation was, in any case, made worse by the US government’s attempt to retain hegemony over the global system, consorting with Saudi Arabia to keep oil flowing, sold in dollars and recycled in American banks. 144 Were these backroom deals known at the time, International Relations theorists who relied on a Realist theory of hegemony would not have been so concerned. 145 They believed that the international system—and especially the Western world—were guaranteed by the leadership, as Carr had posited many years before, of a single, powerful state. This leadership is posited. The weakening of the US’s position in the world economy and the removal of the exchangeability of the dollar for gold in 1971 opened up the question of whether it was exemplary of the waning of this hegemonic system in which the US was the most powerful state—mostly defined in macroeconomic terms, but related to military force. This led to endless speculation on what would happen “After Hegemony” and what the possibilities were for creating Harvey says that the model was first deployed in Chile in 1973 (something most commentators agree with) and then was brought home for a test run in mid-seventies New York. Cf. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. 143 142 As noted above, this period is seen by Brenner as a moment when the policy is actually reversed in favor of a more Keynesian bout of deficit spending, i.e fiscal measures. It is worth noting, however, that from here on out, most fiscal measures are, in effect, oriented towards the same class. Brenner contends that the 1970s were more or less a period when the US was trying another round of Keynesianism in terms of deficit financing. He also says that, despite Reagan’s brief use of these models for his first few years, he shifts back to a military Keynesianism, which, through the Plaza Accord and reinstitution of protectionist measures in 1985, is eventually funded by Japanese and German central banks in order to prop up US consumption. Many currently argue that this is the role China and Japan are playing in the US economy currently. Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble : The Us in the World Economy (London ; New York: Verso, 2002). p 60. Notably, despite his broad perspective in terms of industrial capacity, innovation and productivity and their effect on corporate profits, his focus is almost solely on Monetary issues and he seems to argue that much of the financial policies of these periods were basically staving off an important round of what Schumpeter called “Creative Destruction.” He also has little to say about what more popular accounts see as the defining feature of the period (and of the expansion of financial markets in general), namely petrodollar recycling. For Kissenger’s role in making this happen, cf. David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets, Cornell Studies in Political Economy (Ithica, NY: Cornell UP, 1999). It should also be noted that Spiro disagrees with the proposition that the loans made to developing countries were primarily to pay for excess costs of oil. Also, there are a variety of other mechanisms used to retain US global supremacy—namely the US military, which I will discuss below. Further, I am not suggesting that the inflation caused by the recycling was part of a plan to institute austerity programs based on reducing inflation. But all of these worked together to make the it seem better for the US to remain in power, despite the unequal system it created. Finally, I think that most subsequent readings of this moment—even those that see it as a downturn in US power—still agree that there was a hegemon and it was the US. In this, I see most of the debates about institutions and regimes as limited in their explanatory power. [maybe more here on Strange’s contribution to that volume] Gilpin mentions this in passing in Robert Gilpin and Jean M. Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). 145 144 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 36 - FIELD #2 “international regimes” that would ensure the tenuous peace established after the war. 146 But since the US government had effectively established a “petrodollar” standard for the world economy, its hegemony, secured mostly by the dollar seignorage rather than its industrial capacity, was somewhat ensured. By removing the gold exchangeability (1971) and settling on a floating system of exchange rates (1973), the US government set the stage for the increased inflation of the 1970s—over and above what might have been caused by “stagflation” alone. In 1973 oil shocks and stagflation took the shine off protected trade and nationalized economies, but it didn’t stop the practice: latedeveloping countries were still carrying on with expensive industrialization projects financed through private capital markets—now flush with petrodollars 147 . At the same time, industrialization was far more costly because of increased oil prices making the need for loans all the more pressing. Arrighi points to this moment as the beginning of the latest cycle of financial expansion. 148 It was made possible not only by an instrumental “cyclical cycle of accumulation” but was also the result of improved communications systems in financial markets and was exacerbated by international banks pumping these markets by loaning up to 150% of their holdings, effectively acting like central banks, and assuming “countries don’t go bankrupt. 149 Robert Brenner has recently discussed the economic aspects of this with the benefit of hindsight. For one thing, he looks at the uniqueness of the earlier expansion, the ability of certain factors of the global marketplace that each sector was able to take advantage of—often in ways that were somewhat accurately depicted by Rostow and other Modernization theorists, with the crucial exception that the dynamics of development were only made possible due to their various positions within the international capitalist system. For instance, he says that developing countries were, indeed, able to take advantage of coming late to the game by using their own cheap labor and “adopting cheap but advanced US technology, while succeeding, in many cases, in innovating so as to forge ahead, especially by the means of the learning-by-doing and the economies of scale that they secured in the process of laying down huge quantities of new capital stock.” 150 On the other hand, the dependency relation was exacerbated in the same period by the dramatic increase of the debt burden. This seems to be confirmed by other authors like Lipietz writing nearer to the time who argues that debates in the developing world begin to break down since neither the narrative of dependency or modernization (much less World Systems) seemed Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984), Stephen Krasner, ed., International Regimes: A Special Issue of International Organization, vol. 36, 2 Spring 1982, International Organization (Cambridge. MA: MIT Press Journals, 1982). As many recent commentators note, this was also accompanied with the US’s refusal to let the IMF recycle petrodollars through the mechanism of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) which left the surpluses to be recycled on the private finance markets, in this case, controlled in dollars. I find these geo-political moves best explained as Harvey paraphrases Peter Gowan, “a series of desparate gambles on the part of the United States to maintain its hegemonic position.” So far, they seem to have paid off. Cf. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2005). p. 128. Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble: Washington's Faustian Bid for World Dominance (London: Verso, 1999). 148 149 150 147 146 Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century. Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles : The Crisis in Global Fordism. Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble : The Us in the World Economy. p. 12. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 37 - FIELD #2 to fully explain the events as they were unfolding: as he puts it “it was as if each of them was wearing a watch that had stopped.” 151 In the “early developing world,” especially the US, on the other hand, the stopped watch was a very large and expensive one and manufacturers had no intention of buying a new one. As Brenner tells it, the attempt to keep producing with the same sunk capital at the same level of profit in the manufacturing sector was made impossible by the lower cost products of competitors abroad. For Brenner. the sclerotic growth of the 1970s less about regulations, central banks, or labor costs (the three causes usually cited) than the reluctance of capitalists to reinvest in an already saturated manufacturing sector. 152 At the same time, Brenner is also clear on the inconsistency of the neo-liberal model in the US. He says that, despite Reagan’s rhetoric, he was forced to revert often to fiscal and protectionist measures, and it is only with Clinton that neoliberalism is instituted more consistently in US policy. What this says about economic development becomes clear as the 90s move into the new millennium. At the time of the crisis in the 70s, however, Brenner was involved in a vigorous debate over the origins of capitalist development. This conversation had really begun in the mid-century but was largely ignored by the disciplines of history and economics. 153 The stakes were over the so-called “prime mover” of the transition. Instigated by Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism and leading to what became known as the “Brenner Debate,” 154 the question was really over the possibility of the next transition (i.e. the one from capitalism to socialism/communism). In a debate that mirrors somewhat the positions on development taken 151 Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles : The Crisis in Global Fordism. p. 3. Lipietz also agrees with Brenner that the crisis of Fordism was only in core economies and that it was the success of what Brenner calls late developing countries which put the pressure on the profitability of the core—and that it was monetarism in the core that eventually stifled and reversed some of the progress made in peripheral development, particularly through the use of debt. Cf: Alain Lipietz, "Towards Global Fordism?," New Left Review I, no. 132 (1982). Alain Lipietz, "How Monetarism Has Choked Third World Industrialization," New Left Review I, no. 145 (1984). Importantly, he makes some of the same arguments as Stiglitz (15 years earlier!) with regard to the use of bankruptcy as a way of making both debtor nations and creditors more honest. Brenner focuses only on the issues of fixed, or sunk, capital, making a compelling argument about the insignificance of labor and tax costs due to the fact that over the next three decades real wage changes were mostly negative and corporate taxes were shaved to nearly half of their pre-1970s level. On the other hand, despite his focus on the “world economy” it is hard to tell where the practice of outsourcing fits into his account of the corporate strategy of this era since he mainly focuses on macroeconomic policy. I only mention this because the effect of outsourcing (or the threat of outsourcing) accounts for much of the discussion around labor, taxes and regulations. Thus although some of these costs might have been reduced in real terms in the US during this period, the far lower costs abroad (or perceived lower costs abroad) make it difficult to discount these as motivating factors, especially when he puts international pressure on profitability in the forefront of his examination. Still, I don’t mean to give credence to the neo-liberal argument that it was because of labor costs that stagnation happened, nor to the idea that “globalization” is responsible for lost jobs or pay. Hilton (and Anderson) rightly point out that this was a debate about the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism that was largely framed in terms of a Marxist problematic, even if the goal was, in Hilton’s words “to back up these ideas with research which would match that of the established schools of non-Marxist historiography which they were, in effect, challenging.” R. H. Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1976). p. 11. 154 153 152 Guy Bois, "Against the Neo-Malthusian Orthodoxy," Past and Present 78, no. May (1978), Robert Brenner, "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe," Past and Present 70, no. Feb (1976), Robert Brenner, "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism," Past and Present 97, no. Nov (1982), J.P. Cooper, "In Search of Agrarian Capitalism," Past and Present 80, no. Aug (1978), Patricia Croot and David Parker, "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development," Past and Present 78, no. Feb (1978), R. H. Hilton, "A Crisis in Feudalism," Past and Present 78, no. Aug. (1978), Arnost Klima, "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Bohemia," Past and Present 85, no. Nov (1979), Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, "A Reply to Professor Brenner," Past and Present 79, no. May (1978), M. M. Postan and John Hatcher, "Population and Class Relations in Feudal Society," Past and Present 78, no. Feb (1978), Heide Wunder, "Peasant Organization and Class Conflict in East and West Germany," Past and Present 78, no. Feb (1978). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 38 - FIELD #2 by Rostow and Wallerstein, scholars compared conditions around the world—but mainly in Europe—to discover (or at least argue) over whether what Polanyi called the “Great Transformation” was the effect local social struggles, property and class relations in feudal Europe or was the result of the greater participation in the world market, which some also argued was largely the result of silver acquired in North American mines. 155 Though much of the debate takes place within more disciplinary historical journals, when Wallerstein and Frank’s theories of capitalist development emerge, they are judged within the context of these debates. 156 During the same period, Braudel published his most central works of historical longue duree and historical scholarship was vibrant in the attempt to trace the economic, political and cultural development that led to modern, capitalist society. In addition to the historical re-thinking done by other scholars involved in the Brenner Debate (notably Rodney Hilton), this moment also saw Perry Anderson’s historical materialist sociology in his encyclopedic look at the different developments in various parts of Europe despite a common origin in Classical Antiquity; 157 from a political perspective, Barrington Moore tried to outline the Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy; 158 and, as the other field has mentioned, a variety of scholars within the Cultural Studies tradition and among the New Left began questioning previous theoretical paradigms and writing new histories that told a fuller account than was usually possible. 159 These debates were not, on the other hand, just academic, but pointed to the political and social question of what had just happened and what should be done next. While we know that neoliberal, monetary policy ultimately become the hegemonic ideology (even if they were somewhat It should be noted, of course, that none of these questions were ever completely answered to everyone’s satisfaction. On some level this is to be expected in the course of academic debate. The lesson I take from looking at the debate (other than a few points of fact) is twofold. First, I think it is important that this debate ramps up at this moment—and that a similar round of scholarship occurs in the early to mid 1990s, much of the latter synthesizing or contesting these arguments. I also find it revealing that, despite much theoretical agreement in whatever school of social science of what brings about a certain change, when a variety of scholars really look closely, giving one or another of these myriad factors more or less weight, it becomes impossible to make a definitive conclusion, even if more nuanced ones can emerge. 156 155 Most notable is Brenner’s response to them (and to Sweezy, a key scholar in the earlier debate cataloged by Hilton) in the New Left Review in which he marshals much of the work he did for his historical arguments. Though Brenner never really denies the basic dependence of core economies on the periphery, I find his assessment of the central problem of their theories instructive, particularly in light of the contemporary reinvigoration of neo-liberal argument of capitalist development: Like Smith, both Sweezy and Wallerstein, implicitly or explicitly equate capitalism with a trade-based division of labor. They thus understand its special dynamic of accumulation through innovation as a function of the imperatives of exchange on the market and the productive effects of specialization. As a result, their accounts of the transition from feudalism to capitalism end up by assuming away the fundamental problem of the transformation of class relations—the class struggles this entailed—so that the rise of distinctively capitalist class relations of production are no longer seen as the basis for capitalist development, but as its result. Addressing this lack of attention to the social and institutional development that made capitalism (and democracy) possible is a common theme in most of the work of this era (including some of the dependency theorists) and, incidentally, is the most common critique of Wallerstein and Frank’s work. I think the impasse here has much to do with the statecentric understanding of both approaches which is only ultimately overcome by Robert Cox’s projecting class relations— not capitalist markets—onto a global scale. Robert Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of NeoSmithian Marxism," New Left Review I/104 (1977). Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso Editions, 1979), Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: Verso, 1996). Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1967). 159 158 157 Of course E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class is the most notable of these histories, but I include here several other theorists that will be outlined below, particularly Poulantzes and Althusser. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 39 - FIELD #2 uneven in their application 160 ) the moment of its adoption showed a wealth of theories regarding both the state and the economy under capitalism. In the realm of economic science, Ernest Mandel provides one of the more comprehensive examples of the Marxist explanation of both the postwar expansion and the seemingly eminent crisis. 161 Mandel’s work, pointing to the structural changes of international capitalism, presented an argument which was, in some ways, the Marxian variant of Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post Industrial Society, with one (increasingly typical) difference. 162 Although Bell’s work is much more particular and nuanced than later commentators give him credit, 163 its “venture in social forecasting” is, like many inquiries into the “social,” based on making society equivalent with the state and, thus, social evolution as the product of some endogenous changes within a single nation state. Whereas Mandel is aware of both the internal and external elements, for Bell, the emergence of the Post-Industrial society has many causes, but it all amounts to a simple continuation of the evolutionary development model with no awareness of the international context. All of the pressures and outlets to this political and economic development are endogenous to American society and represent the final stage in the process of our development. Charts of this development, reminiscent of the graphics in Rostow, make it seem as if the United States—the only Post-Industrial society in Bell’s book—created and will experience this status in isolation. Regardless of the historiographic oversight involved, it also seems to be a pragmatic one: namely, if the US was no longer industrial, where would it get its industrial goods and who would produce the items conceived by these new, post-industrial workers? This omission, along with others, makes the process of setting up such an international order seem, as later globalization theorists will experience it, like a force of nature instead of a willed, conscious, if not planned and directed, project. In this way, Bell’s work itself (along with that of popular social theorists like Alvin Toffler) made the “postmodern” transition a social and cultural inevitability rather than the latest way citizens were being asked to accommodate themselves to the latest necessities of capital accumulation on a world scale (as Mandel would have it.) 164 Robert Pollin, Contours of Descent : U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity (London ; New York: Verso, 2003). Pollin is a believer in most of the theories of liberal economics but says the way this was implemented was “to support the interests of business and financial markets, even as these same groups still benefit greatly from many forms of government support, including subsidies, tax concessions and rescue operations when financial crises get out of hand [while implementing] the most powerful regulatory mechanism limiting the demands of workers” by increasing the reserve army of labor worldwide and decreasing the “capacity of national governments to implement full employment macroeconomic policies” (18). He outlines some ways what he calls the “Marx and Keynes” problems could be considered under liberal capitalism later in the book, but the point here is that the beneficial elements of this economic model, whatever they may be, were stifled in the manner it was implemented by governments. 161 162 160 Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975). Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society : A Venture in Social Forecasting, Special anniversary ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1999). For instance his great attention to class relations and his prediction of the further decline in Union membership. 163 164 Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York,: Random House, 1970). Not that I need to remind anyone, but just so I mention it, Mandel is the author who inspired Jameson’s critique of the notion of Postmodernism—which reinscribes a base/superstructure understanding for the latter as the “Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” thus resuscitating a Marxian perspective of cultural critique in the face of the general disavowal of all master narratives associated with the Postmodern. Cf: the early essays collected in Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn : Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (London ; New York: Verso, 1998). and the extended introduction to that collection published as Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London ; New York: Verso, 1998). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 40 - FIELD #2 In Bourdieuian terms, this was a critical moment to define what was at stake in the field. Monetarists along with many of the Marxian economists and historians above and below, realized that there was an opening, if not a crisis. Each of these were opposed in one way or another to the current order, but the difference lay in the originality of the approaches. For Monetarists, the argument was that free market capitalism was a more efficient allocator of values, even if it was viciously unequal. Mark Blyth argues the monetarist ideas which gained dominance in the 1970s and 80s were “not organic responses to an immediate crisis,” but were “in many cases, simply a warmed over version of the ideas embedded liberalism had seemingly defeated back in the 1930s:” “Although these ideas found their opening in the inflationary environment of the late 1960s, most of these ideas had, in fact been around in some form since the 1950s or even earlier.” 165 On the other hand, Marxist scholarship had, itself, been in a continuous crisis since nearly the early 1950s, trying to better understand not only the origins of capitalism, its rugged persistence, and the direction of the struggle against it, but on the method and foundation of its scholarship. Thus, these more leftist attempts at economic or political theory were far more reflexive and critical in their approach, usually highlighting method as a sticking point in their own research. For Marxists, although the downturn and social struggles were important, even these were mitigated by an uncomfortable awareness of the strength of capitalist social relations, regardless of its obvious tendencies towards instability and inequality. 166 Though both Terry Eagleton and Perry Anderson attribute the cultural focus of Western Marxism to a political disengagement, 167 some of the best adoptions of this tradition, as indicated elsewhere in the field, have been in the re-focusing of other disciplinary perspectives. In particular, I refer to the economic and social theories of Louis Althusser, particularly his For Marx and the edited volume of Reading Capital and the theories of the capitalist state and society advanced by (and recently translated into English for the first time) Gramsci 168 Though each of 165 166 Blyth, Great Transformations. p. 126-127. Another key text written during this era, but not often discussed until much later is Negri’s Marx Beyond Marx which is an autonomist interpretation of the Grundrisse. As I’ve already indicated above, Negri’s contribution is in considering, as Michael Ryan puts it in the Epilogue to the text, “The concept of productive labor [as opposed to the forms of labor hemmed in by Keynesian corporatism and the “crisis and … stagnation” which result and are “a condition of the permanence of capital] as the immanent possibility of communism (defined as the full realization and reappropriation of human wealth) and as, in consequence, a political threat to the law of value and to capital, is essential to the theory of autonomy.” Antonio Negri and Jim Fleming, Marx Beyond Marx : Lessons on the Grundrisse (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1991). p. 184. The point here is to see the working class as the ultimate producer of value and its antagonism to the capitalist class as the greatest threat to that same value. Cf. Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1984). Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003). Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading "Capital" (London,: Nlb, 1970), Louis Althusser and Ben Brewster, For Marx, 1st American edition. ed. (New York,: Pantheon Books, 1969). Gramsci, Hoare, and Nowell-Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Another important theorist of the state under capitalism—and of its transition into socialism was Poulantzes, Nicos Ar Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, 3d impression. ed. (London: Nlb, 1976), Nicos Ar Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Nlb, 1978). Here it is important to note the power invested to the state by most of the New Left’s use of these theories—its centrality as a disciplinary apparatus. As subsequent observers have noted, and as mentioned above [need to locate that footnote] this anti-statist formula made certain factions of the New Right and New Left virtually indestiguishble, even as both sides petitioned to place new roles on the state. On the one hand, this seems to be a simple philosophical convergence that would be realized whatever the circumstances; but as this was the tail end of not only the ideology of state-managed economics and democracy, but also of the actual ability of many states to do either, the convergence seems to be more of a reaction to this technicalbureaucratic use of the state during the preceding era; the result of this convergence, and, incidentally, the ceding of most of the central tenets of orthodox Leftist thought to a more liberal, negative version of rights, has not only prevented the 168 167 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 41 - FIELD #2 these scholars was influential in cultural studies, it was their use in considering theories of economic development and international relations that have the most significant implications for the field—especially in terms of how these disciplines were able to consider the dramatic changes in both the global political economy itself and in the ideological discourses that explained it. 169 A caveat is probably necessary here, particularly in the context of the discussions of these two theorists. In Cultural Studies, the tendency to set them apart on separate sides of a divide is, perhaps, evidence of its often narrow view of the variety of perspectives available. This is to say that, although it is probably true that Althusser is more focused on economic and Gramsci on political aspects of capitalist society, there is far more of a continuity between the two. One would think that Althusser’s crediting of Gramsci in his delineation of the difference between the Ideological and Repressive State Apparatuses in the essay most commonly read in contemporary Cultural Studies courses would limit this ambiguity. Yet the concept of ideology and hegemony are often credited to Althusser and Gramsci, respectively, as if the continuity wasn’t more pronounced. 170 This is, I think, in part due to the more powerful ideological apparatuses of the US culture which make the “consent” aspect of Gramsci’s hegemony seem more accurate than the seemingly bifurcated aspects of Althusser’s model—especially for those American students and academics who haven’t had the pleasure of being overtly repressed. 171 As Perry Anderson has pointed out Gramsci was well aware of the RSA and, despite some waffling, was ultimately quite clear that, though hegemony was always a contingent, conjunctural articulation of consent, it was always with the understanding of the predominance of force being on one side—thus hegemony was always a combination of coercion and consent. 172 Admittedly, Althusser’s model is more structuralist, and possibly giving less ability for the “cuturalist” paradigm to fully flower, Gramsci hardly affords full agency to every subject within a limitless social field, even if his focus on strategy seems to suggest such an interpretation. Further, Althusser’s notions of contradiction and overdetermination, central to early discussions of his work, is obviously an attempt to challenge the very determinism of which he is accused—and which the historical sociologists above were dealing with in more empirical terms. 173 All of this is to say that, in separating their influence, it is more because of the subjects on which they focus rather than a fundamental difference in their thinking. Althusser, in this field, becomes more important to theorists of economic development whereas Gramsci finds his way into the political science of international relations. But it is the interdependence of each of these fields, the “overdetermination” which both are most concerned with. Though they were relevant to a emergence of a truly powerful counterbalance to the neo-liberal consensus, but has also produced many of the later homologies with the Right on the direction of state action as well as the role of civil society. I would also note the already mentioned work by Arturo Escobar as a productive use of discourse analysis along the lines of Foucault and Said. Though it neglects discussing the mediation of development discourses from international organizations that promoted them, i.e. he doesn’t evaluate the “decoding” of these discourses, it is nevertheless a very useful example of what post-colonial and post-structuralist theory could be used for in this field. Escobar, Encountering Development : The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. 170 169 Cf: Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York,: Monthly Review Press, 1972). Reference to Gramsci is in the oft quoted “ISA” essay, p. 142, n. 7. I’m sure some of them/us have, but it seems like something Anderson would observe. Hilton makes this point in his intro to the Feudalism to Capitalism volume, p. 12. Perry Anderson, "The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci," New Left Review I/100, no. Novermber-December (1976). 171 172 173 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 42 - FIELD #2 variety of fields, Regulationist Economics and the intervention into international relations made by Robert Cox are influenced by the recognition that the political and economic cannot be isolated (qua Morgenthau) as factors without losing the important components of their relationship. 174 The Regulationist (or French) School of economic development finds its origins in the late 1960s. Alain Lipietz, one of the most visible members of this school, 175 says Althusser, along with Poulantzes and Bourdieu, helped to bring about a change in Marxist theories of the relationship between economics and society. 176 Fundamental to this is the notion that is developed early on in Althusser’s Reading Capital that one of the key interventions of Marx’s later work, particularly in Capital is a critique of the production of knowledge. 177 He doesn’t see Marx’s key critique in Capital being of classical economics in particular (though it is that) but of how knowledge about the world is limited by ideological understandings of reality: “it can only pose problems on the terrain and within the horizon of a definite theoretical structure, its problematic, which constitutes its absolute and definite condition of possibility and hence the absolute determination of the forms which all problems must be posed, at any given moment in the science.” 178 This philosophy of the politics and limits of the formation of science intersects specifically at several points with the genealogical studies of Foucault, Althusser’s pupil, and has a deep intellectual history. Sufficed to say, Regulationists began with the premise that earlier economic models, with which they were familiar 179 could not account for the political aspects of economics nor for the potential and actuality of change. 180 Althusser was also important in helping them think through what it was that could account for both stability and change in political economic social formations. For Lipietz, as for many people who adopt Althusser for social theory, there is a sense that the theories he (and Balibar) espoused had a certain flexibility that later became more rigid. 181 In this, though there are many theoretical As Rosenberg would argue later, this is particularly true under capitalist dominated international relations. This is not to say that these components can’t be separated out or that they are determined in the same way. For Althusser, this relates to the notion of the autonomy and difference between distinctive practices, even if they are in some way “related to one another in the complex unity of social practice which is the social formation.” Norman Geras, "Althusser's Marxism: An Account and an Assessment," New Left Review I, no. 71 (1978). p. 62. 175 176 174 In addition to his economic writings, he has served as an MP for the Green Party of France since 1999. Alain Lipietz, "From Althusserianism To "Regulation Theory"," in The Althusserian Legacy, ed. E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1993). Althusser and Balibar, Reading "Capital". Especially “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy.” 177 178 Ibid. p. 25. Notion of Generalities II as something similar to the department I of macroeconomic production is what Althusser would say generates the concepts and theories for Generalities III—the latter then seem to be natural and reified with no sense of where they came from or their historical specificity. Though I am sure someone has applied this to Realist notions of International Relations, it is interesting that, at this point, Realism is actually becoming more completely obsessed with model building—much on the scale of neo-classical economics and rational choice theory. Waltz is clearly indebted to this kind of model building and, despite his appeals to reflexivity, when actually set in motion, these reified concepts tend, as Rosenberg later contends, to explain very little, however accurate they may be in the analysis of the isolated issues it attempts to explain. More on this below. All of the early theorists were in one way or anther involved with the macroeconomic policy of the French state as, in the words of Lipietz, “polytechnicians [that is, many were a] part of that group of French high civil servants who, from within the state apparatus, implemented the Fordist model in France” This, in turn, made their critique less from an ideological resistance to capitalism than from a sense that the models they were using were both historically and structurally particular and inadequate to account fully for what Fordism was. Jane Jenson and Alain Lipietz, "Rebel Sons: The Regulation School," French Politics and Society 5, no. 4 (1987). 180 181 179 The most succinct version of this critique is found on the first few pages of Aglietta’s 1974 book. Cf: Lipietz, "From Althusserianism To "Regulation Theory"." JOHNSON ANDREWS - 43 - FIELD #2 twists and turns, the general argument has to do with the separation of political, economic and ideological levels of the social formation and eliminating what seemed to be a teleological determination between them. For instance, Althusser speaks (like Gramsci) of the social forces leading to the Russian revolution and concludes that there is no way to consider this a simple, economically determined revolt (as Marx might have hoped [though admittedly Marx never would have expected it to happen in “backwards” Russia]) but was overdetermined by a number of other social and political factors. This leads to the idea of a variety of social levels of production that are only determined by the economy “in the last instance.” To the Regulationists, this innovation in thought was useful for thinking through the way that capitalism was able to change and adapt through wildly different crises without dooming it. For this, they come up with the idea of a mode of regulation. On a certain level, this could be seen simply as am ideological state apparatus, following Althusser. But it depends on what kind of regime of accumulation exists. Though this isn’t a functional fix (for the Regulationists) the mode of regulation works to secure the conditions of reproduction of the regime of accumulation. 182 In other words, their focus is on the way that politics and ideology are able to ensure the valorization of capital—or, when this fails, to understand why. Thus, in addition to the possibility that certain regimes of accumulation (such as Lipietz’s description of “Bloody Taylorism” in developing countries) might use the repressive state apparatus as often as the ideological, there is also the sense that, although these might be determined in some way by the economic level of the social formation, they often serve an economic function. This is especially clear in the rise in the social consumption norm attributed to Keynesian programs. Thus the political and economic are interpenetrated and the political and ideological serve an economic function. For Robert Cox, coming from International Relations, the dominant paradigm is usually less concerned with economics. Though theorists like Robert Gilpin had made some important arguments about the role of economic power, most of his theories assume a neo-liberal, rational choice model to explain this factor. 183 Gilpin is also more concerned with economics on an international basis, assuming, as realists are like to do, that these economies are colliding and competing. 184 Cox introduces the notion that control over production within a certain country as a source of power (thus the interpenetration of the economic into the political) and, using Gramsci, discusses the interconnection of an international class that is able to establish a historical bloc. In addition to the notions of class and power he introduces into the discussion of IR, he also is unique in trying to account for Soviet and communist economic development within the same system as capitalist, privileging neither. Though she is writing much more recently, Ankie Hoogvelt combines these two paradigms with great effect to produce a history of capitalist development which takes into account the divergent 182 Aglietta differentiates between an intensive and extensive mode of accumulation, but Lipietz goes furthering looking at these on a global scale, speaking about “Bloody Taylorism” and other permutations which don’t just adhere to the American model. Cf: Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation : The Us Experience, Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles : The Crisis in Global Fordism. 183 Cf: Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003). Ch 1. This is not to say that he doesn’t discuss the notion of a larger order, but he is mostly concerned with the interactions between states. 184 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 44 - FIELD #2 paths it has taken within the development of the world system, but also with close attention to regimes of accumulation, class relations, and the most recent trends in financialization. She ends her account by dividing the global south into four sectors to discuss the historical, economic, social, political and sometimes even cultural factors that have led to the development of these areas in the particular directions they have gone. It is an impressive achievement and, though it is cited by Rosenberg as one of the offending texts of Globalization Theory, she is one of the most careful offenders, particularly in that she doesn’t cede much to the inevitability of the system, but also doesn’t make it’s overturn certain. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 45 - FIELD #2 V – Globalization theory and current intellectual fashion CONTENTS BIBLIOGRAPHY “The indigenous movement, since its inception, is not exclusive; it’s inclusive. This is what we live by. Through our government, we will end discrimination. Xenophobia will end, hate will end, and so will the scorn to which we have been submitted historically. We want to live together in socalled diversity, changing the neo-liberal model and finishing off the colonial state.” Evo Morales, president elect of Bolivia, Dec. 19, 2005. http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/19/1515216 The stagflation of the 1970s created a crisis in the dominant post-war theory of how economies are developed. It is still debatable how much neo-liberalism actually changed the practices of its American adherents, but it undoubtedly changed—i.e. inverted—the paradigm of development offered to the Global South and narrowed the discursive and material possibilities for the continued development of states in need of capital: nationalized economic development, in strong, protected states was no longer an option; in fact, the economic doctrine asks for the state to be as laissez faire as possible. Ostensibly, the effect of this was supposed to be mitigated by the proliferation of global capital markets, the extension of global sourcing procedures by Multinational Corporations, and the private provision of basic social services. 185 With the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the incorporation of China, a similar (and very productive) crisis appeared in the field of International Relations. Since the world economy had long been “globalized”—or, for skeptics, had been the way that it was for a while—and theories of international political economy 186 had already been trying to account for this, the dearth of writing on the subject in International Relations led many in the field to move to incorporate some of 185 Really, the economic doctrine of neo-liberalism has no such promises to offer and Hayek and Mises would be appalled to see this incorporated into global institutions (or at least, theoretically should have been.) Hayek especially is quite adamant that the imposition of economic development on other countries would be an offense to the freedom of “small states.” Granted, he is speaking from a perspective that simply assumes the clear rational and political superiority of his own economic doctrine—thus would recommend just as much effort to promote it abroad as the IMF/WB now provide. Still, couching these doctrines as creating the possibility of more equitable or just development on a global scale would be unacceptable: like the monetarist policy of Friedman, there are only so many things a government can do under this model and those are the only things government should be allowed to do. Having this presented as a development model —all paeans to “Neo-Smithian” development aside—in the same way as Keynesian inspired balanced growth or state led were at the post war moment is therefore disingenuous as these have very different objectives. On the other hand, the fact that they are still couched in these terms is a blatantly ideological assertion that can really only be explained as either a misunderstanding or an intentional falsification meant to quell resistance. This points back to the more general point, made often in the course of the field, of the political threat from below as well as the need to secure consent horizontally for a unipolar hegemony (if I can be allowed this description for what is generally agreed to be a contradictory configuration.) In other words, the repackaging of neo-liberalism as a development model is indicative of the presumption that this is a goal the hegemon should be working towards—whether through redistribution, aid, or direct development. In other words, it points to the basic contradiction of a hegemonic order built on free-market ideology post-Bretton Woods. Especially notable in this regard is the work of Robert Gilpin, who attempted at around the same time as Cox was writing his masterworks, to present a Realist interpretation of the way economics and politics were intertwined—as well as making clearer distinctions of concept of economic power in the realm of International Relations. Gilpin and Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations. His most recent work looks closely at many of the changes in thought and policy in the field, and, though he ultimately has a more conservative goal, has no illusions about both the contingent, constructed nature of free-market capitalism and its potential to be overturned. For him, the regional trade agreements present the greatest threat to globalization since they are piecemeal and end up creating alliances which disturb the uniformity necessary for a truly global form of capitalism. Cf: Robert Gilpin and Jean M. Gilpin, The Challenge of Global Capitalism : The World Economy in the 21st Century (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000). 186 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 46 - FIELD #2 these changes as well. Two dominant themes emerged. One was that it was obvious that international relations couldn’t be limited to the interactions of states. Markets, social movements, cultural exchange and NGOs were just some of transactions that took place above or below or simply without the complete control of the state apparatus. The other was that the interactions across national borders could not be explained by a solitary focus on power—or, more specifically, power had to be redefined and broadened. The limits that had been placed on the investigation and observation IR which prevented it from fully exploring the realm of the international were seen as a methodological problem that could only be accounted for through an interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary perspective. Two other emergent intellectual figures influence the field: Robert Cox, mentioned above, whose Power, Production and World Order articulates a Gramscian corrective to the understanding of the state system which tries to incorporate production and control of production as a correlative to state power, thus bringing class back into the analysis 187 ; and Anthony Giddens whose structuration theory allows for an alternative to the behaviorist and positivist assumptions of realism and whose Consequences of Modernity provides an early explication of globalization. 188 Anthony Giddens is a particularly important theorist in the social sciences of the 1980s and 90s, which is not to say that he is wholly unique. Though he has a rich body of early study on classical sociology—particularly on Marx and Weber—his most significant works for the field are The Consequences of Modernity, which draws upon his earlier work outlining structuration, and The Third Way, which will be discussed below. The general trend in all of these works is a progressive (or regressive) move away from materialist understandings of society and towards what he calls “co-determination.” Here he is often compared to Bourdieu in his attempt to solve the structure/subject problem. 189 The difference is that, Giddens lands up with a much more pluralist and, at the same time, conformist notion of what is necessary which almost harkens back to the old days of Parsons. His series of diagrams in Consequences, despite some nods to new social movements, have no sense of how they fit together or how to move from the diagrams of the present to those of the “Post-modern.” 190 Robert W. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order : Social Forces in the Making of History, ed. Robert W. Cox, Political Economy of International Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). 188 187 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society : Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). For a comparison of Bourdieu and Giddens ideas on structure, cf: William Hamilton Sewell, "A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation," The American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 1 (1992). For Bourdieu’s most concise version of his theory, Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology ; 16 (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977). For a more thorough, elaborated version Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Diagrams are throughout but especially those on p. 59 and 71 are indicative as are the future oriented ones in part V. Important for his argument in dismissing Marxism as an adequate description is his argument that there are other dimensions of Modernity than the economic, which limits Marx to being a theorist of only economic relevance. The latter is a strange argument for him to make judging from his earlier work on Marx and Weber, as observed by Rosenberg’s critique of Consequences in Justin Rosenberg, The Follies of Globalisation Theory : Polemical Essays (London ; New York: Verso, 2000). I should also note here that Giddens reference to the post-modern is meant to pose what could come after the present period, which he sees as “radically modern.” 190 189 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 47 - FIELD #2 Jan Aart Scholte’s International Relations of Social Change draws on the work of the latter in critiquing the still dominant realist understanding of international relations. 191 He uses Giddens to consider the concept of social change and explores a variety of other disciplinary perspectives in trying to flesh out a more nuanced version of international relations. In doing this, he argues for the co-determination of social change between the different dimensions (local, national, international) and facets (ecological, psychological, cultural, economic and political forces) and argues for a “World-systemic” understanding in which “social transformation is a process with multifaceted causation and multifaceted effects” and “local, national, and international circumstances are simultaneously cause and effect of one another.” 192 Though he is probably inspired to some extent by the changes listed above, his argument is not that there has been a qualitative shift in the nature of social relations as a response, but that the world has largely always been this way. It is notable in this regard that one of his critiques of most IR is that it posits its theories as transhistorical. In introducing evidence of cross border social relations throughout the book, it is clear that he is intending to undermine this transhistorical notion of Realism. But he also instantiates his own sort of universal theory. However, like the non-hierarchical notions of Giddens that Scholte relies upon, there is no sense of what drives or determines any of these relations. Also like the latter, the result is mostly a schematic of relations, similar to the first page of an instruction manual, which offers only a rough sketch of the object in question but little sense of how it works. Still, it provides a good counterpoint to state-centered accounts of social change. Susan Strange, in her book The Retreat of the State, on the other hand offers a much more trenchant critique of both Realist international relations and Neo-classical economics—namely the need to end the “trench warfare” between economics and politics and show both “that it is all just the same one field over which they have dug their opposing trenches.” 193 Drawing on Cox’s understanding of historical blocs, world order and the power of control over production, Strange produces an understanding of structural power that directly challenges the division between economics and politics that prevails in the two fields. She also directs attention “to the power of non-state authorities over the structures and therefore over some of the outcomes of the system.” 194 From this general conception of power, she argues that, contrary to what might seem reasonable, the hegemony of the US as the most potent force of structural power in the international political economy has led to “a shift in the balance of power from states to markets.” 195 Thus she allows for the structure that many Realists in the tradition of Morgenthau and Waltz describe, but shows that it is not possible to separate the political authority from economic power because they have effects on one another. Using potent examples such as telecoms, organized crime, and accounting firms, she ultimately argues that some form of governance is necessary to put the system in check—and not just for 191 192 193 Jan Aart Scholte, International Relations of Social Change (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993). Ibid. p. 118; p. 32. Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State : The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy, Cambridge Studies in International Relations ; 49 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). p. 31. 194 195 Ibid. p. 25. Ibid. p. 29. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 48 - FIELD #2 some ethical reason. Here she addresses directly the expectation of Fukuyama that economic and political Liberalism has won the day and all that is needed is to spread more of it, 196 reminding him of the origins of this liberal system: The framework for the market economy could only be legitimized by making it accountable to national democratic institutions of government. [. . . .] Without world elections, there can be no set of alternative authorities ready to take over the direction of the system in the way an opposition takes over from a government. 197 The framework of global governance, she says, is needed to stabilize the power of financial markets, but it cannot be ruled by a US run organization like the IMF or it will be ineffective as a countervailing power. 198 This is a direct challenge to both Realism and Neo-Classicism, disciplines that would see the loss of sovereignty as unconscionable. On the other hand, it is also a challenge to Institutionalist IR in that it challenges the notion that the prevailing institutions are adequate. This harkens back to E.H. Carr’s original critique of liberal theories of international relations which presumed morals could have authority of their own without some mechanism for enforcement, even as it points to the way the power of nations over their sovereignty—and hence to supposed role of a single hegemon in unifying that system—overlooks significant international actors that don’t seem beholden to any one state. Unlike Strange, Justin Rosenberg’s The Empire of Civil Society doesn’t seem to be responding to current events, but like her, his analysis centers on the problem of the separation of politics from economics. He is focused solely on the way this artificial divide functions in Realist International relations. He argues for a method of historical materialism in its place and demonstrates its value by examining several of the totalizing assumptions of IR with regard to history. Rosenberg isn’t making the same argument as Strange, however. He allows for—even insists upon—an understanding of international relations based on the separation of politics from economics. This is because he argues that the modern state system should be seen in its historical context: as a unique product of capitalist modernity. Following Wood, Rosenberg characterizes capitalist modernity as establishing this separation such that it creates political freedom (or sovereignty) but is able to enforce power relations through economic unfreedom. 199 In terms of IR this means that the notion of political sovereignty within the nation state masks the transnational economic power that capitalism makes possible (and vice versa) 200 : “The state of nature of IR theory,” he says, “for all its elemental appearance, is in fact the historical outcome of determinate processes of change.” 201 196 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). I hope I can squeeze by without too much commentary on Fukuyama. What I will note is that Strange, The Retreat of the State : The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy. p. 197, 198. Ibid. p. 196. 197 198 199 Ellen Meiksins Wood, "The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism," New Left Review 127, no. May/June (1981). Here it would make sense for Rosenberg to discuss Cox, as they approach the problem from a similar angle. Rosenberg, Empire of Civil Society. p. 163. 200 201 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 49 - FIELD #2 By this he means that, whatever the state of the state at the moment, the concept of the sovereign state cannot be projected into antiquity. It only emerges with the separation of the public (state) from the private (market) in the process of capitalist industrialization and the democratic challenge to absolutism. 202 And with this, the creation of formal equality in the political is undermined by a substantive inequality in the market which made sovereign state—at least conceptually--possible. Rosenberg shows a correspondence in the concept of sovereignty from the sovereign individual to the sovereign state, in both cases this sovereignty is constituted by the anarchy of the market created by the commodification of labor. He finds this a fitting analogy to the work that the modern nation state actually does within the system of states and merely hints at the continuities he sees in the explanans of globalization: 203 The formal shift from territorial empire to sovereign states-system does not mean that direct political command over persons no longer extends across borders. Rather it means that this extension of command assumes a different form as a result of the disaggregation of political functions between public and private spheres, coupled with the organization of material relations between persons through social relations between things. 204 This disaggregation is something that Strange points to as well, only she argues there is a unique disaggregation between these spheres in the current conjuncture which is taking some of the “countervailing” power away from the state. As mentioned near the start of the paper, Rosenberg says that this belief in their being something unique about the moment is understandable, based on what had just come before and the historical context of Realism’s enunciation, but it is actually more of a continuity with the earlier era of free market capitalism. 205 In this, Rosenberg is most similar to Cox, though this relationship is unacknowledged. This is due to his understanding of the function of class in this and the role that class plays in the international realm. Rosenberg’s later work, though relying on a somewhat suspect teleology of Marxist social theory, draws on Trotsky’s notion of “combined and uneven development” to discuss the spread of capitalist social relations. I say it is a suspect teleology because it returns to the tradition of understanding this spread as beginning in Western Europe and spreading outward such that, “development would proceed from many different starting points and in each Teschke, cited as an authority in Rosenberg’s “Post-Mortem,” argues, roughly that modern notions of sovereignty are not only a result of capitalist development, but are in some ways, rooted in the social property relations of feudal Europe as described by Brenner in his work of the 1970s. cf: Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations. A reference to his Follies of Globalization Theory, discussed below, where he criticizes the use of globalization as an explanation for globalization. Rosenberg, Empire of Civil Society. p. 172. Immediately before this, he makes an observation that is reminiscent of Regulationist Economists concept of mode of regulation: “Every episode of imperialist expansion elaborates its own distinctive ideological legitimation according to the specific forms of domination and surplus appropriation involved in its reproduction [. . . .] For the United States it means the liberal idea of freedom, and a discipline of IR which concentrates on the purely political world of sovereign equality and anarchical competition in which the imperial character of American world power is least visible.” 205 204 203 202 Rosenberg, "Globalisation Theory: A Post-Mortem." JOHNSON ANDREWS - 50 - FIELD #2 case find different cultural obstacles to overcome.” 206 The nugget of this understanding is similar to some dependency theorists and was widely criticized by World Systems theorists. However, the focus of Rosenberg here, though relying on neither of these paradigms, is on the political consequences for international relations within what Wallerstein might call the capitalist world system. For instance, he points out that, the three forms of state observed by Barrington Moore (liberalism, fascism, and Stalinism) in his landmark examination of the Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, can be understood as part of the same process of expanding capitalist relations, a perspective that troubles many of the assumptions of postwar realism: If this is so, then the full meaning of the Second World War itself cannot be grasped in terms of an interstate conflict over the balance of power, nor in terms of a contest between separate political ideologies. Rather it was a struggle over the future of the international system between three antagonistic forms of state, all of which had been thrown up within the same process of capitalist world development. It was, in this respect, an ironing out through war of the accumulated political contradictions which that process had built up within the social structure of humanity—an ironing out which cost humanity over fifty million lives. 207 In this, he somewhat confirms the notions of Wallerstein even as he adopts an approach more fitting with the analyses of later dependency theorists such as Cardoso who interpret the development of capitalism with attention to its cultural and social attributes. On the other hand, it is a unique interpretation of the field thus far that makes the role of capitalism in the system more important than any of the ideological or political causes that have usually been cited. His connection of international relations, economic development, and historical sociology finds its most useful synthesis in his most recent work, but his defense of historical materialism as the best approach for understanding international relations remains central. Though he doesn’t really have an ethical recommendation based on this modification in method and theory, Rosenberg would seem to agree with Strange on the fundamental problem of international relations at the current moment, insinuated as they are with capitalist social relations. This is, as mentioned above, part of a much broader crisis in the theory of IR that occurs with the demise of the Soviet Union. In this, there is a renewed interest in understanding of exactly what those social relations consist of and in describing what it means for the future. In many ways, this means revisiting the debates that animated the beginning of this field. Hayek’s ideas, like the period in which he lived, were a part of the common sense. In fact, though not stated with reference to Hayek, this was what Fukuyama meant when discussing the “End of History.” For him, the fall of communism makes the idea that some social and political organization could be imagined beyond liberal, capitalist democracy is evident. 208 This is because he sees the latter system as the only one that could be seen as reliably legitimate, an assessment which leads him to critique the focus on power central to Realism. By 206 Justin Rosenberg, "Isaac Deutscher and the Lost History of International Relations," New Left Review I, no. 215 (1996). p.7. Ibid. p. 12. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. 207 208 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 51 - FIELD #2 realism, Fukuyama means the Kissinger version (sometimes attributable to even Morgenthau or Waltz) that would balance power between ideological enemies based on their material and military potential. 209 This understanding of realpolitik has certainly existed, but as most of the actual foreign policy was based in large part on the morality Carr said was unique to modern realism, Fukuyama is sort of drawing a straw man. 210 His further claim that some states are seeking recognition rather than a redistribution of power is interesting from a certain perspective, 211 but ultimately seems inadequate to explain things any better than realism. This is particularly the case when he makes the same sorts of presumptions that Carr chides nineteenth century liberals for making: assuming, for instance, that economic interests would keep the peace among the “post-historical” states. On this point, though he provides some compelling evidence that liberalism (as he defines it) is becoming more widespread, and though many of his critiques of Realism are apt, his assumption of liberalism’s continued legitimacy seems to suffer the same fate as he Realism: “it does not take account of history.” 212 His own account of the fall of the Soviet Union is that it collapsed under an inferior morality, an interpretation which makes realist arguments of the economic or political kind less compelling. On the other hand, it is fairly weak in itself and even he has moved back from this interpretation—especially as a foreign policy recommendation—after the debacle in Iraq. 213 Here his understanding of the limited perspective of the vacuum of the early 1990s is similar to what Rosenberg describes animating most political and economic discussion of the time. To be sure, Fukuyama was not alone in asserting that a new “End of Ideology” had been reached. 209 Ibid. ch. 23-24. In its most concise form, his refutation consists of the statement: “States therefore do not simply pursue power; they pursue a variety of ends that are dictated by concepts of legitimacy” (257). 210 On the other hand, his involvement with the megalothymic Project for the New American Century, at least shows he’s consistent: though this could be seen in terms of realpolitik, it is largely conceived as being a moral project. Fukuyama has recently distanced himself from other neo-conservatives, echoing Carr in saying, “A Wilsonian policy that pays attention to how rulers treat their citizens is therefore right, but it needs to be informed by a certain realism that was missing from the thinking of the Bush administration in its first term and of its neoconservative allies.” Francis Fukuyama, "After Neoconservatism," New York Times, Feb. 19 2006. It is, on the other hand, arguable just how concerned most of the signatories of PNAC were with these moral values. Much of the statement of principles seems founded as much on retaining hegemony in the military-strategic sense. In some ways this squares with Badie’s description of the process of “The westernization of the political order” wherein the political legitimacy (as well as the form) of the developing state was initially secured from the outside in that the institutions of the state were dependent on external as well as internal recognition. Thus the things done by the state for external recognition have more to do with domestic legitimacy (in place of the power of the powerless which Fukuyama supposes as its root) than with some actual jingoistic belief on the part of the domestic agents: the latter—a form of international identity politics—is what Fukuyama sees animating these struggles. But in the context of Badie, Fukuyama’s claim is contradicted completely as the historical cases being examined were precisely during the era of realpolitik and the major players were, it would seem, only concerned with recognition in so far as it was an anchor to maintaining or changing the balance of political economic forces. Cf: Badie, Imported State.. It is also worth noting that Fukuyama explains contemporary movements for Identity Politics (i.e. in the words of Fraser, the struggle of “rights vs. redistribution”) as being evidence that the liberal order works—most people are not too concerned with redistribution and liberalism can’t concern itself too much with making people equal because nature basically hands out its gifts unequally and there is no way for the state to make it right. On this, cf. Fukuyama ch. 27-28. 212 213 211 Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. p. 258. Good quote chiding Neo-cons: “The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq war, including younger neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside. The model for this was Romania under the Ceausescus: once the wicked witch was dead, the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation. [. . . .]This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration's incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. The war's supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform. Cf: Fukuyama, "After Neoconservatism." JOHNSON ANDREWS - 52 - FIELD #2 Other than the predictable chorus in agreement from the popular press, 214 there were also significant intellectual attempts to justify not only the predominance of capitalist social relations, but their benefits and innocuously praiseworthy origins. There are a couple of relevant streams to this intellectual trajectory. In some ways, each can be found in (though not necessarily traced back to) Fukuyama’s text. The first is best represented by Anthony Giddens’ Third Way. The position Giddens stakes is, as Alex Callinicos points out, a bit of a misnomer: like Fukuyama, he dismisses the possibility of Socialism so it is really just “another way,” and a bit of a fuzzy one at that. 215 In this, his complete acceptance of free-market capitalism as a model of development is tempered only with some of the aspects of liberal democracy Fukuyama claims are now integral (i.e. the welfare state 216 ) and with the values that animated social democracy in the past. 217 Along with Giddens, there were more rigorous attempts at articulating an alternative to the hegemonic version of free-market euphoria, but, like Giddens, many of these simply adopted the assumptions of libertarian economists of the time to make them more palatable to leftists and/or the mainstream. In addition to the IR theorists such as Gilpin and Waltz who adopted almost wholesale this notion to explain international relations, one such tendency became known as “rational choice Marxism” or “Analytical Marxism.” 218 The general argument here was that the historical narrative of Marxism was overly teleological but that the Marxist notion of class struggle could still be conceived and used in terms of the microfoundations of rational choice economics Here I’d throw in the requisite cite for Thomas Friedman, who argued that globalization was a force of nature, unstoppable even if it generated resistance, Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Rev. ed. (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2000). 215 216 214 Alex Callinicos, Against the Third Way : An Anti-Capitalist Critique (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2001). Though he says that “the problem of inequality will continue to preoccupy liberal societies for generations to come because they are, in a certain sense, unresolvable within the context of liberalism” he claims that “all liberal societies are in principle dedicated to the elimination of conventional sources of inequality” via regulations, redistribution, and social welfare which are “accepted by conservatives” and “largely invulnerable to rollback” (289-291). On the other hand, his purpose in saying this is related to his claim about Nietzsche’s last man. The latter is the political and moral version of what Schumpeter said about capitalism: namely, that the benefits of the system will be its ultimate threat. In Schumpeter’s case, he saw the threat in intellectuals who didn’t recognize the way capitalism had helped them and/or expected to have limitless expansion of its gifts who would eventually ask for the intervention of the state to redistribute. For Fukuyama, it is even more conservative and Hobbesian. He sees the greatest threat to liberal democracy an over abundance of tolerance such that it will eventually tolerate even ideas that threaten its very foundations. In actual political rhetoric, neoliberals would see even the ideas of Giddens as being a threat to “liberty,” which is another way of saying difference or inequality. These ideas are central, as well, to the arguments below for what makes the US system unique.Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1950). His position could be seen as either, in the words of Perry Anderson, “the best ideological shell of neoliberalism” or as a poor attempt to navigate the more general problem of the left at the time of "what to call communism now that it no longer exists, but is still necessary." Either way, it is telling that the only real necessity for intervention he sees in the market throughout the book is on behalf of the environment. The latter, like most of the ideas animating Giddens version of the left, are obviously more focused on political strategy for gaining votes rather than a rigorous attempt to found a new ideology. Cf: Perry Anderson, "Renewals," New Left Review II, no. 1 (2000), Paul Smith, "A Memory of Marxism," Polygraph 6, no. 7 (1993). On the debate over this in the pages of the New Left Review in the late 1980s and early 90s, cf. Alex Callinicos, "The Limits Of "Political Marxism"," New Left Review 1, no. 184 (1990), Alan Carling, "In Defense of Rational Choice: A Reply to Ellen Meiksins Wood," New Left Review I, no. 184 (1990), Alan Carling, "Liberty, Equality, Community," New Left Review I, no. 171 (1988), Ellen Meiksins Wood, "Explaining Everything or Nothing?," New Left Review I, no. 184 (1990), Ellen Meiksins Wood, "Rational Choice Marxism: Is the Game Worth the Candle?," New Left Review I, no. 177 (1989). For a more recent critique of this tradition, cf” Daniel Bensaïd, Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2002). 218 217 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 53 - FIELD #2 and a methodological individualism. 219 Even more recently, Indian Marxian economist has articulated an alternative history of Marx’s Theory starting with Adam Smith and going through Hayek, which argues that Marx would have been more of a fan of globalization and free trade than contemporary anti-capitalists give him credit. 220 In this, Desai takes the opposite tack, arguing for the correctness of Marx’s economic and historical theory but questioning the notion that the class struggle would be at all relevant to this process. All of these revisions of socialism in light of current events focused, for the most part, on the renewal of an old model of economic development and are of a piece with free market capitalism being adopted as the chosen (or at least recommended) development model by key countries and international institutions. This turnabout in theory, as mentioned above, was difficult to square with existing socialism or social democratic institutions. It also necessitated a new understanding of how the core countries had developed which would make the development model now proscribed sensible as a hegemonic proscription. World System’s theory became a good way of framing this discussion. Born as it was at the moment of neoliberalism, its definition of capitalism as being the same thing as trade was incredibly useful in thinking through economic development in those terms. The conclusions, of course, were not necessarily glowing. Janet Abu Lughod provided one of the preliminary accounts in this tradition which looks at the world system “before European hegemony” and argues that “there was no inherent historical necessity that shifted the system to the favor of the West rather than the East, nor was there any historical necessity that would have prevented cultures in the eastern region from becoming the progenitors of a modern world system.” 221 Frank agrees with Abu-Lughod’s argument, but goes on to refine his earlier arguments about the development of underdevelopment in that context and, in particular, the assertion that Western Europe would have remained a backwater of the World System if it hadn’t had silver from South American mines. 222 Pomerantz fleshes these arguments out a bit more and discusses further similarities in the institutions of east and west, addressing arguments about the domestic increase of surplus already present in the west by noting a similar trend in the east: still, he agrees the dynamic of colonial expansion gave the West its advantage in broadening its exploits and deepening its profits. 223 Finally, John Hobson takes to this debate in a sporting attempt to show Wright and Levine critique the notion of methodological individualism, though the former is often seen as arguing for it in his earlier work on classes, and consider a variety of other possible microfoundations that could be used which would be more in keeping with Marx Erik Olin Wright and Andrew Levine, "Marxism and Methodological Individualism," New Left Review I, no. 162 (1987). Meghnad Desai, Marx's Revenge : The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (London New York ;: Verso, 2002). World enough and time, I’ll get to a more thorough reading of this one—though Henwood claims it would be better to just read Hayek. 221 222 220 219 Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989). p. 12. It’s a subtle difference from his earlier arguments but is enough for him to declare it nullifying all of Western Social science, especially Marx and Weber, because of their endogenous understandings of capitalist development. In place of Marxist or even Smithian economic models, he uses various contemporary economic sciences. The most memorable for me—one which I can only hope is meant to be a farce—is his providing monetary explanations for the political revolutions th in America, France and the Netherlands in the late 18 century. These, he claims, were predictably (and merely) popular reactions to a worldwide recession. Frank, Reorient : Global Economy in the Asian Age. Ch. 5, pp 254-55. 223 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000). For an example of Robert Brenner’s use of something like rational choice model of analysis, see his critique of Pomeranz which focuses on the subtle differences between the institutions which limited the choices of JOHNSON ANDREWS - 54 - FIELD #2 that all of the earlier debates are better understood—or should be transformed—into being “conducted not between Marxist/World-Systems theory, liberalism and Weberianism into a new one of ‘Eurocentrism versus anti-Eurocentrism.” 224 In his account, he focuses on the technological and institutional dynamism dominant in the East and argues that much of what is taken for granted as Western is largely a product of the East. In this account, Hobson is explicitly responding to contemporary trend in historical scholarship. This trend can be explained as a combination of a backlash against much of the historical sociology of the 1970s, which had made economic development more a result of political coercion or social relations, and the attempts above to place Western development in a global perspective. On the other hand, it likely became popular because these new versions of history reinstated the earlier hypothesis which claimed a cultural superiority for the West along Weberian lines. Here, a reference to Fukuyama is suggestive. The latter argues in End of History that, counter to dependency theory or other “leftist” accounts, history (that is the past thirty years) had proven there were two reasons countries remained underdeveloped. One is a throwback to midcentury accounts based on Parsonian structural functionalism already hinted at above: namely, that there may be “significant cultural obstacles to making markets work in certain societies.” 225 The flipside of this is to explain the rise of the west in terms of an exceptional set of cultural traits, also not a new tactic, but a sort of retrenchant . Though always shrouded in historical overdeterminations, the balance of works like Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty of Nations is certainly to argue for a cultural explanation. 226 The ideological usefulness of this line of argument is shown in Thomas Friedman’s adoption of it in his latest explanation of how there could be differences between levels of development despite the objective fact that The World is Flat: “Islam, down through the years, has thrived when it fostered a culture of tolerance, as in Moorish Spain. But in its modern form, in too many cases Islam has been captured by spiritual leaders who do not embrace a culture of tolerance, change, or innovation [which] surely has contributed to lagging economic growth in many Muslim lands.” 227 Chinese vs. English peasants, Robert Brenner and Christopher Isett, "England's Divergence from China's Yangzi Delta: Property Relations, Microeconomics, and Patterns of Development," The Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 2 (2002). 224 225 226 John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2004). p. 3. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. p. 103. David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations : Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999). A more obfuscatory account which is explicitly right wing, but doesn’t necessarily argue for a unicausal kind of development, is William Sowell’s trilogy. The strategy here is to basically project the current resurgence of nineteenth century Hobbesian utopia into a longue duree that makes intrinsic cultural (i.e. not race—a good example of the “Imperial Racism mentioned in note 12) differences, economic inequality and brutality permanent features of the human condition, of which, we are only now beginning to mitigate. He is, in other words the philistine American version of Toynbee, with all the implications for supporting the hegemonic order. Cf: Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures : An International History, 1st ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1998), Thomas Sowell, Migrations and Cultures: A Worldview (New York: NY: Basic Books, 1997), Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture : A World View (New York: Basic Books, 1994). Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). p. 328. Friedman refers to Landes a few pages earlier as arging that, in the Arab-Muslim world “certain cultural attitudes have in many ways become a barrier to development, particularly the tendency to still treat women as a source of danger or pollution to be cut off from the public space and denied entry into economic activities. When a culture believes that, it loses a large portion of potential productivity in society” (326). A good book for Friedman to read to help him work through this theory of European particularity more soundly, might be Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale : Women in the International Division of Labour, Third World Books (London: Zed Books, 1998). Here she traces the relationship between patriarchy and capitalist development that undermines the essentialist arguments that animated much of the history of patriarchy in the west conveniently overlooked here by Landes and Freidman. 227 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 55 - FIELD #2 The renewal of this line of thinking is not accompanied by a belief in the role of the state in leading development nor of the role of science and technology 228 . In fact the argument for state involvement was quite the opposite. Here the second constriction of “policy” mentioned by Fukuyama points to legal institutions of private property and government policies as being proof that “capitalism has never worked in Latin America and other parts of the Third World because it has never been seriously tried.” 229 In Landes account, cultural heritage (oddly, though in some ways predictably, derived from Judeo-Christian heritage) is also behind the institution of private property and democracy. 230 The ironically named Hernando De Soto on the other hand, denies cultural arguments but points to the burdensome or non-existent rules of contract and private property: I humbly suggest that before any Brahmin who lives in [an elite enclave] tries to convince us that succeeding at capitalism requires certain cultural traits, we should first try to see how what happens when developing and formerly communist countries establish property rights systems that can create capital for everyone.” 231 Here he is actually making a cultural argument, but makes it on the basis of the universal correctness of the western capitalist model and legal institutions. This also requires that he attempt to present an argument about what helped capitalism thrive in the west. In this, de Soto makes an interesting argument about what capital requires and discusses property rights in terms of systems of representation which can “travel through time and space.” 232 He hits on most of the aspects of modernity that sociologists from Durkheim to Simmel to Giddens have made 233 , but frames it a compact, passionately argued, and colloquially written book which makes the answer to capitalist development elegantly simple: create ways for people to represent their assets and they will be able to trade on them to reap the “surplus value” that their capital will produce. 234 In the argument, despite his insistence on understanding the origins of capitalist development in the West, it is interesting how teleological his account is 235 . On the one hand, he is obviously correct about the origins of capitalist development having to do with certain notions of property rights. This isn’t a great discovery, of course, since this was obvious to Marx (and much of the One notable exception is the account provided by Castells which, despite its technologically deterministic moments, makes the role of the state central in the innovation and adoption of technology. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, ed. Manuel Castells, Information Age ; V. 1. (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). 229 230 228 Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. p. 103. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations : Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. p. 34-35. Here an interesting moment in my scholarship: the first time I’ve seen an academic historian cite the bible as proof for an argument about economic development. Notably, in both cases, this is not property of land but of an “ass.” Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital : Why Captitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000). P. 224. 232 233 231 Ibid. p 219. He mentions the ability for people to develop themselves as individuals once their assets can be represented in a virtual form, making arguments that recall Simmel on the role of money and Durkhiem on the separation of the Note that he is very aware of Marx’s arguments but slyly avoids to frontal an interaction with them, save near the end when he says that Marx saw a lot of bad things about property rights but that it was before western nations had really developed those systems so that everyone had access. I’ll leave that argument with you for a moment. Needless to say, he appropriates the term surplus value to mean profit of any kind and claims that little surplus value comes from exploited labor, but is instead found in the creative exploitation of property rights and good ideas. Isn’t that sweet. 235 234 Property rights will lead to social responsibility, networking people, creation of knowledge JOHNSON ANDREWS - 56 - FIELD #2 communist and socialist movement of the nineteenth century) and was central to Hayek’s argument. For the historical sociologists of the 1970s, from Perry Anderson in Lineages of the Absolutist State to the participants of the Brenner debate, the question of property was central to the transition from feudalism to capitalism. 236 Still, de Soto is coming at the problem from ten years after the “New World Order” and is presenting this as an important innovation in development that he sees being helpful to the world’s poor. One assumption of his argument is that the people who have worked to produce these assets will be given the deed to the property they’ve helped create. Here he argues that the equivalent of a homesteading act should apply, what he calls “the people’s law.” 237 The more fundamental assumption he makes is that these systems do not currently work—and that the corruption and class division he sees now will not continue through the institution of the system of property rights. 238 In this, though he is explicitly aware of the earlier theorists—especially Marx— who saw the effect of private property (particularly in means of production) as inevitably creating classes, he doesn’t really provide a mechanism for keeping a vast expropriation from occurring again. Though he discusses agreements made by government officials, he doesn’t offer much in the way of a positive notion of legal restraint: just clear ownership at the end of whatever process occurs. In this, de Soto is actually representative of a much broader movement. Throughout his book, he cites favorably some of Marx’s energetic passages on commodification; he also finds the idea of commodifying anything as being undoubtedly good, even naming anything that doesn’t have clear property rights “dead capital.” Though he doesn’t mention it, the push for international codification of intellectual property rights is clearly defended by the same set of rationale. 239 Further, his emphasis on commodification as being the conversion of physical assets into knowledge and educating people about these is similar—though obviously not identical—to arguments about the Knowledge Economy. 240 236 Teschke also argues that this not only created capitalism, but also the modern states system—here he follows, to a certain extent, a combination of Brenner and Rosenberg. Cf: Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations. 237 Soto, The Mystery of Capital : Why Captitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. p. 163. He often invokes US pioneers in the West as the model of what this would look like. That, also, is a bit of a problem. He does concede some of the pitfalls of his suggestions, but has a charming faith it will all be okay. I don’t mean to belittle him, but I am also reminded of the discussion in Hoogvelt about the attempts to eliminate corruption in the political system and how this created such instability because of the World Bank and IMF’s sweeping approach to the problem made it much worse. This is not to say that his changes would absolutely bad—they would be capitalist and, if that is the goal of IMF and WB structural adjustment reforms (as he points out) there should at least be clear ways for everyone to exploit that system. I’ll get to the first question below with Badie, Inyatullah and Blaney. Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite, Information Feudalism : Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? (New York: New Press, 2003). In this it is mostly policy intellectuals involved in either urban planning focused towards first world cities—like Richard Florida—or in other forms of development on a more global level. As misguided as Florida may be (claims that cities should spend money trying to attract a certain kind of person rather than investing in infrastructure or giving tax incentives to get businesses to relocate; most recent book is on how government policies post 9/11 are chasing away said class— most of his policy recommendations at least are focused on one type of location. Venturelli’s claim is that all countries should adopt a similar focus. Though they are likely both wrong (as Henwood says, new economy=bunk) Venturelli seems positioned in an especially problematic set of arguments in that, when read a certain way, they basically support all of the kinds of programs proposed by TRIPS and other agreements which, at best, promise to legitimize the already vast appropriation of cultural property in the hands of a relatively small group of people. In this, to me, she seems as naïve as de Soto about the way power tends to work. Shalini Venturelli, "From the Information Economy to the Creative Economy: 240 239 238 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 57 - FIELD #2 This set of discourses is fast becoming a new narrative of development—alongside sustainable development. It is, like past narratives, based on patently false notions of how the development of copyright was linked to capitalist growth in the first world—or cultural production. That they are being marketed by the organizations who control most of the mouthpieces of mass culture promises to make that process of commodification a fairly fast one. Though de Soto doesn’t have any sign of seeing the possibility of the notion of a false commodity, in Polanyi’s sense, he mentions both Polanyi and Marx in relation to the growing counter movement against globalization. For him the answer is clear rules that allow for commodification. But Polanyi would say that this is precisely what will produce the most vehement counter movement. As I elaborated in the first section, Polanyi also wanted to show the history of the institution of the free market—and the “counter movement” that attempts to re-embed the self-regulating market into a social system. The most common recognition of Polanyi’s relevance is exemplified by James Mittelman, in his book The Globalization Syndrome: Transformation and Resistance, whose subtitle is a reference to Polanyi: “Perhaps similar to the global economy of the 1930s contemporary globalization appears to be approaching a conjuncture in which renewed liberaleconomic structures will generate large scale political, social, and economic disruptions, as well as sustained pressure for self-protection.” 241 In a way, Polanyi is made most useful by his not being Marx as he makes many of the points that a Marxist analysis would, but without the stigma of the label. At the same time, however, he is also an updated version of Marx, having lived through the early twentieth century, he was able to witness the direction of popular responses to the commodification of labor. Unlike Marx, who assumed that the class would use their political power to organize together and create something more democratic in the realms of both politics and economics, Polanyi witnessed the turn to fascism, and saw this as a state response to the crisis which got rid of freedom in both. He saw the counter-movement to protect society from the self-regulated market something to which politicians—and the state—would be forced to respond. And totalitarianism—whether of the German, Japanese or American variety 242 seemed the inevitable result. Thus, far from being unsympathetic to Hayek’s understanding of freedom, Polanyi felt that freedom had to be defined more broadly. Much like the definition of freedom proposed by Amartya Sen in his Development as Freedom 243 , but inspired, like Marx, by the philosophies of Robert Owen, Polanyi wanted people to have “the Moving Culture to the Center of International Public Policy," (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Arts and Culture, 2003). Richard L. Florida, Cities and the Creative Class (New York: Routledge, 2005), Richard L. Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class : The New Global Competition for Talent, 1st ed. (New York: HarperBusiness, 2005), Richard L. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class : And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2004). 241 James H. Mittelman, The Globalization Syndrome : Transformation and Resistance, Princeton Paperbacks (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). p. 8. For a collection of analyses from this perspective, see also Yoshikazu Sakamoto, Global Transformation : Challenges to the State System (Tokyo ; New York: United Nations University Press, 1994). Polanyi also shows up in Pollin (2003) alongside Marx and Keynes and Harvey (2005) not to mention Blyth (2002). Though he might have admired some of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, Polanyi was under no illusion of what was happening to political freedom during that period of American history. Amartya Kumar Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999). Sen’s basic arguments, while supported by a variety of evidence, are not all that different from the argument of new deal liberalism, i.e. including positive and negative notions of rights, save for the fact that there isn’t really any way to pay for it. 243 242 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 58 - FIELD #2 right of the individual to a job under approved conditions, irrespective of his or her political or religious views, or of color or race,” which implies “guarantees against victimization however subtle it be;” this he thought was possible because “industrial society can afford to be free. 244 ” He basically advocates a sort of Keynesianism, but with more of an emphasis on the political ramifications Hayek would invoke. Recently, this inspired many International Relations and economic development theorists. 245 In addition to positing itself as an account of the “Great Transformation,” it is tainted by Stalin or stagflation, and offers a pragmatic narrative about the important social role of the state relative to the economy. Here he would have parted ways with Marx, who would have preferred there be no need for a state (and, as Desai points out, who would might have had different feelings about the expansion of capitalist social relations.) The other aspect of Polanyi’s work, and which he seems to feel he differed with Marx, intersects with the new importance given to the cultural—and particularly cultural differences. Here, Polanyi chides “economistic” understandings of the problem of capitalism and alienation, saying, “Not economic exploitation, as often assumed, but the disintegration of the cultural environment of the victim is then the cause of the degradation.” 246 This concern with the degradation of culture, reminiscent in some ways of the late nineteenth century concern about the “horde mentality” among recently urbanized “masses,” is echoed in other quarters as the organizing principle of the Cold War is removed from world politics—and, more importantly, from the people who try to look at contemporary world politics. 247 The most influential of these is Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis which says that the Cold War divisions are no longer relevant and that “It is far more meaningful to group countries not in terms of their political or economic systems or in terms of their level of economic development but rather in terms of their culture and civilization.” 248 At first glance, this doesn’t seem to be of a piece with Polanyi’s concern for the cultural degradation. But the real crisis that Huntington is pointing to is found as the third reason for the change: “The processes of economic modernization and social change throughout the world are separating people from longstanding local identities. The also weaken the nation state as a source of identity.” 249 He says that this opens the door for more fundamentalist beliefs to emerge and replace this identity. However, many of the countries that he is talking about, if Rosenberg is correct in his analysis, are not run by sovereign states in the modern sense of the word—whatever the status recognized in the UN. To become such they would have to have a distinct separation between the public and the private and have more than a purely juridical control over the state. They are much more of a 244 245 246 247 Polanyi, The Great Transformation. p. 264. In addition to Inyatullah and Blaney below and many other IR theorists Harvey, Pollin, and Blyth also use him.. Polanyi, The Great Transformation. p. 164. It’s also worth noting the similarity here with Fukuyama, Bell and even Durkhiem and Nietzsche on this. On the other hand, when Polanyi speaks of culture, he means it less in the Matthew Arnold sense and more in the anthropological sense. Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?," Foreign Affairs 71, no. 3 (1993). p. 23. Ibid. p. 26. 248 249 JOHNSON ANDREWS - 59 - FIELD #2 piece with absolutism—as in the case of Saudi Arabia “and other countries” whom he says are receiving more pressure from “fundamentalist groups in their own societies.” 250 In the case of Saudi Arabia, it seems likely that these fundamentalist groups (which are the local forms of identity) are the only reason the state has any control over the society at all—the House of Saud has never had the kind of power over people’s identities as the modern nation-state. 251 At the same time, though there isn’t a separation between the spheres that would allow for modern sovereignty, the people in the developing world are subjected to the global market and the weakened state gives them few local options to contest this. Huntington’s Realist suppositions hinder him from making his argument coherent because he inevitably equates civilization with a set of states and overlooks what Hoogvelt discusses as “the first world in the third and the third world in the first” referring directly to Cox’s notion of a global capitalist class. He also sees the answer to solving the problem more “modernization” within the state. This is basically a rehash of Durkheim who, facing the problem of disaggregating society, claimed that industrialization would help to socialize people as they became dependent on one another through the division of labor. 252 But at the same time, he says that the problem with “Non-Western” civilizations is that they have tried to “become modern without becoming Western” so “they will also attempt to reconcile this modernity with their traditional values.” 253 Other than referring to a difference in religion—which despite its centrality in Huntington’s narrative, and however US fundamentalist Christians want to spin it, isn’t a product of modernization—it is unclear what he could mean when he makes the distinction between “Western” and “modern.” Here he is obviously of a piece with de Soto, who also sees capitalism as a neutral institution. It also seems to assume is that there is a way that the “modern” institution of capitalism has been embedded in a cultural formation that we understand as “Western” and the developing world needs to figure out a way to adjust their culture in order to re-embed the course of “modernization.” Of course, to return to Polanyi’s argument, the free market that has been released from embedded liberalism has little to offer in the way of culture. In this way, though Huntington tries to focus on cultural aspects as the problem, it seems more likely that the political and especially economic forces are the problem and the solution is some sort of social, economic and cultural counter-movement. Despite some of these inconsistencies, Huntington’s thesis was very influential and became an Ur text after 9/11, seen now by many as having predicted the conflict at hand. 254 The idea of a 250 251 252 Ibid. p. 37. Though I’ll admit that most of my understanding of the state is based on a Frontline documentary. Notably, this is also what Fukuyama claims his theory was really about, in hindsight: ''The End of History'' is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern -- that is, technologically advanced and prosperous -- society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.” Fukuyama, "After Neoconservatism." Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?." p. 49. 253 254 This and Manuel Castells’s emphasis throughout his volumes on the Information Society—the latter book also very influential in the notion of the knowledge society, though, to be fair, he is much more nuanced. Still Callinicos has some choice critiques of him alongside theorists of “The Third Way.” Cf Callinicos, Against the Third Way : An Anti-Capitalist Critique, Manuel Castells, End of Millennium, ed. Manuel Castells, Information Age ; V. 3. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity, ed. Manuel Castells, 2nd ed., Information Age ; V. 2. (Malden, Mass. Blackwell,: 2003), Castells, The Rise of the Network Society. JOHNSON ANDREWS - 60 - FIELD #2 clash between cultures had obviously become very important, but it became reified in ways that permitted no possibility of reflection on what culture might mean in this context. In this, though Polanyi might have something to say, it was clear that he had something very specific in mind when he discussed culture. Naeem Inyattullah and David Blaney take up Polanyi’s attention to economic anthropology and attempt to make an important argument which most of the most recent theorists are unable—or unwilling—to express. 255 To come full circle, Inyatullah and Blaney though adopting Polanyi as a primary inspiration, do some very useful work with the notion of difference which might be said to inform the cultural theorists of the first section. However, like Escobar, they focus on the theorists who end up, eventually affecting policy. In a work not easily summarized, they focus on the inability of theories of International relations or economic development to deal with difference. In a damning critique of ethnocentric views on modernization (present in IR theories of both political and economic development), competition (in Hayek and in several IR theorists) and other notions central to these discourses. Even the seemingly progressive notion of global civil society (to which we could extend notions of cosmopolitan democracy) is seen as “showing an aversion to cultural difference even as they embrace diversity and dialogue.” 256 Point by point they make it evident how difficult it is to escape notions about the supremacy of Western forms of knowledge or economic organization within the confines of these western paradigms of thought. At the same time, they explore earlier political and economic forms within the Western context to show both the continuity of these assumptions and examples of ideas and events that contradict or redirect the presumption that contemporary theories represent transhistorical truths. In so doing, they manage to create some space for a way forward through the notions of an “Ethnological IPA” inspired by Polanyi’s other work on economic anthropology, and the concept of “Multiple and Overlapping Sovereignties.” The work of Inyatullah and Blaney represents the kind of theoretical and cultural critique that, if considered, could possibly make a difference reconsidering the dominance of western thought in designing global policies and institutions. It—along with work of people like Escobar—also focuses on a more important (if slightly less interesting) target for the kind of cultural critique developed in Cultural Studies and other areas. Though it is more focused on other policy considerations, George Yúdice’s latest book The Expediency of Culture seems to be a very promising work in this regard. 257 Though I admit at this point I have only been able to browse through it, the topics he is looking at—the role of culture in notions of development along with the new discourses about intellectual property—seems promising. CLOSING…the state of the Global Political Economy The two accounts of the Global Political Economy which I haven’t mentioned much in the paper are those recently presented by Giovanni Arrighi and David Harvey. These elisions aren’t Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference (New York: Routledge, 2004). 256 257 255 Ibid. p. 118. George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era, ed. Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson, Post Contemporary Interventions (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004). JOHNSON ANDREWS - 61 - FIELD #2 necessarily defensible in terms of the field, but I left them out with the intention of addressing them in this coda. This is because, personally, they seem to me to be coming up with some of the more coherent explanations of what is happening in the capitalist global economy. It goes without saying that these two theorists have little to say about the problems Inyatullah and Blaney mention, but Harvey’s The New Imperialism and A Brief History of Neoliberalism provide excellent accounts of current trends which make use of Harvey’s earlier work on critical geography and make no claims to describe anything but the function of capitalism and the progress of the neoliberal retrenchment. 258 Arrighi, whose work almost a decade ago provides some of the inspiration for Harvey’s understanding of The New Imperialism has also been prolific in his responses to the latter. 259 While they are far more structural than many cultural studies scholars would usually prefer, there seems to have been a fairly clear resurgence of structure lately and their work seems to provide an important way of thinking about structure. The challenge would be to consider how agency fit into their accounts—which are otherwise quite illuminating. 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