Ambitious Vehicles: Cultural Studies and/of "The Hummer"

I have struggled a long time with how to frame this paper about the Hummer such that it is definitely a cultural studies project, that it lives up to the high standard that should prevail in a context such as this. The first thing I realize is that I cannot seem to make myself continue on one methodological path for any length of time before I come to the conclusion that there is more to the story. This is, or should be, a fundamental reflex of Cultural Studies. However, it should not only be this reflex, but also a dialectical committment to framing a rigorous method of inquiry whose conclusions can be validated by some sort of claims to the authoritative production of knowledge. The commitment to the former often overshadows the obvious constitution of the latter, which claims to anti-disciplinarity often cover over. In other words, we are always already forming a disciplinary practice even if we never pause long enough to consider the logic of that practice.

This claim is made in the terms of Bourdieu, but it could just as easily be framed in terms of Saussurian linguistics: we tend to deny the langue that structures our prole or the way that our collective prole has indirectly constituted a prole. As Volosinov and Bourdieu point out at various points but in different contexts, it is not possible to examine the langue except through the performance of the prole. The lingustic allusion is pertinent because Cultural Studies has so far been resistant to its constitution in anything more than a performative linguistic sense. I mean performative here in both the sense of performance theory or role analysis of people like Erving Goffman--wherein the self we perform is a reaction to the audience we are performing for and the rules it has set for that performance--and in the sense of J.L. Austin--who talks about performative speech in which words "do something"--such as, in cultural studies, make implicit forms to truth via a certain narrative performance. And when it comes down to it, that is what I am doing here: writing a narrative which is supposed to pretend to be knowledge which will explore the elaborate history and context of the gas guzzling bohemeth that is the Hummer.

The first impulse of the Cultural Studies scholar is often to name the theory that one is going to use and justify its use. Or, in this part of the story, the narrator may substitute a theory that s/he will prove wrong as it interacts with superior logic, alternative interpretations, or a more acceptable set of theories. In the case that the narrator appeals to the elusive foil of emperical evidence, said narrator will also have to provide a reason, theory or interpretation of how that evidence can be accepted as real: this will, of course be the downfall of the entire argument once the post-structuralists unravel it starting at that point.

In my case, I am trying to figure out how to use some combination of Marx, Raymond Williams, Bourdieu, Regulationist economics, with a healthy sprinkling of early Boudrillard, Semiotics a la Hall and basic rhetorical critique while simultaneously avoiding the passionate definistration of everything I have to say in the post-structuralist black hole that rests in the middle of the practice of CS--starting with my primary assumption: the Hummer exists and there is a system of relationships which have evolved over time in both an immediate and a global context which have helped to bring it into material existence. This material existence in our contemporary moment can be seen to have aspects which are cultural, but which we should consider as material nonetheless because of the way that cultural matter exists in our society. I think that the goal of cultural studies should be to first understand these relationships--or start building an understanding of them which can be evolved--and the social determinations and institutions which help to structure them.

I use the term determination here in the fashion of Raymond Williams to mean the limitation of options and the application of pressures. Though I am certain there has been--or maybe should be--an intense critical conversation about this definition of determination, I am accepting it as an analytical concept and have faith that it will be borne out as I move to the concrete object of the study.

(if you've been paying attention, you'll see that I just did most of the things I am supposed to do--including leaving that trace for the deconstructionists to play with. The next part of the paper is where I brilliantly move from abstract to concrete (or from my theory to my object) and show that I can tell a story about my object that proves or is aided by my theory. I think this is an important step to take and I notice most people doing it on one level or another, but I also notice that there is often a bit too close of a fit, such that the object was chosen to prove the theory and the object can do little more than do that. In my view, the reflex of cultural studies should not be to prove a theory or to prove one's knowledge of a theory. Cultural Studies should be its own theory which can illuminate its object (i.e. culture) in as many ways as possible. It should be striving to build an image of the context and the relationships that exist within it and their determinations and it should do so in order to help explain, among other things, how the objects are made to mean and how we are asked to value them. Meanings and values are both highly relative notions--as semiotics and economics like to remind us. That is why it is important that we understand the social and material relations from the very beginning and, as we complexify our image of the context, we add in layers of related meanings and values so that we can see how those relationships work as well. This process should not primarily work the other way around, assuming the subterrainian levels or reading them symptomatically from the object itself, but this is perhaps a way to open up the right questions to ask about those levels so a more rigorous understanding can be developed before returning to the object.

But here I've gotten off track and need to get back in my High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or Hummer, or Humvee and move forward with my story. The controversial notion of determinism--clearly a problematic notion when we are talking about determining meanings or even values simply because we should all now realize the unfinished, non-linear and overdetermined relationship that those aspects have. But when I start with the material, political economic relationships which eventually produced the Hummer, I feel confident that determinism is the correct word to use.

This is because, from the beginning, the hummer, or more correctly the series of military and civilian vehicles made by the verious permutations of the corporate entity which eventually produced it, have always been determined AND had a determining effect on the funding and regulation of an entire class of vehicles.

In a much longer version of this discussion, I would go into all the facts of the case--assuming as I do that facts can be named. But in this limited time period I will have to give you the quick, dirty, impressionistic version of the events of the past sixty and more years that have made both the SUV and the HUMMER materially, legally and politically possible. In short, this narrative really begins to at the close of World War I, when the British and American military asked for contractors to come up with a new design for a lightweight, four-wheel drive vehicle that could carry men and a heavy machine gun (6). After some competition from Ford and another company, Willys-Overland came up with the design for the Jeep and won produced “the bulk of the Jeeps made for World War II”—making sure to trademark the name so they could sell the design on the civilian market afterwards.

Promptly after the war, the Jeep was converted to a family vehicle, producing the Jeep Station Wagon in 1946. While still not obviously a marketable property, in 1953 Willys-Overland was bought and renamed Willys Motors by Henry J. Kaiser, an industrialist who made his fortune building ships during World War II. The 1950s saw competition from the Land Rover, Toyota’s Land Cruiser, and the Harvester Scout, but Willys still retained a small consumer market in America in addition to its large military contracts.

Renamed Kaiser Jeep in 1963, it still relied on its military heritage, and had a close relationship with the US military and government, producing trucks, jeeps and delivery vans for the Armed Forces and the Postal service alongside its meager civilian offerings such as the new Jeep Wagoneer.

Thoughout this period, and into the 1970s, Kiaser Jeep enjoyed an ambivalent relationship wherein, its lack of a consumer market was used as an excuse to excuse it from a variety of new governmental regulations being applied to cars. I will address more of these in a moment. I have learned from a few years of experience that this is the best way to do what I am supposed to do, rhetorically, to make my point valid and intelligible within a CS context.

In 1970, Kaiser Jeep was bought by the American Motors Corporation. Under AMC, the civilian and military functions of the organization were partitioned. AMC continued to produce the various civilian versions of the Jeep while a separate division, AM General continued to build vehicles for the US Government along with adding new contracts for transit buses. This arrangement worked well for a few years and AM General was usually in good financial standing. However AMC, its parent company, was in and out of bankruptcy for several years.

In 1981, the Army declared it was retiring the Jeep and publicly asked for companies to compete for a contract which would design its antecedent. AM General had already been designing the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled vehicle for two years, so it had a leg up on the other two corporations that officially competed for the bid. Thus it should come as no surprise that they beat Chrysler and Teldyne for the 5-year, $1.5 billion contract to deliver 55,000 Hummers to the Army. As AM General press releases of the time liked to taut. "It was the “largest multiyear contract for tactical wheeled vehicles ever awarded by the U.S. Army.”

The day after AM General won the contract from the Army, AMC announced that it would be selling the hot new property to LTV—an Aerospace and Defense company from Dallas. AMC used the spoils from that sale to design and market the Jeep Cherokee. This has further cultural implications in terms of the marketing of this vehicle and its success. Again, something I will have to touch on again later. I can't overly interrupt this historical narrative.

Throughout the 1980s, AM General and its parent corporation were almost continuously in Chapter 11 proceedings, but this didn’t hinder their ability to win lucrative government contracts for more Hummers, mail trucks, and personnel and cargo trucks for the US Government. Unfortunately, it did hinder AM General’s ability to keep its plants open and its workers happy. It laid off thousands of workers at various points, rehiring other workers to fill new contracts and renegotiate labor agreements. A more sincerely Marxist perspective would investigate these movements more carefully. I am obviously not sincerely Marxist enough at this moment.

By the end of the decade AM General had stopped building anything other than the Hummer and a few mail trucks. The next big milestone in the life of the company was January 16, 1991, the day the US started its last war on Iraq. While the war coverage itself was its own commercial, solidifying CNN as a news organization as well as making the 24 hour news channel a viable alternative to the networks, the star of that commercial was the Humvee. Although it had already been deployed in Panama and throughout the world in US Military operations and sold—with government permission of course—to other military contractors as well as “friendly foreign nations” for almost a decade, the saturation coverage given to the 20,000 or so Hummers deployed during Desert Shield and Storm raised their profile significantly. Along with Schwarzenegger’s pressure on the company to sell a civilian version (the company custom made one for him before the civilian version was available), AM General officials said that the war raised demand for a civilian version of the Hummer by a factor of 300.

The popularity and status of the Hummer—now, in practice, the name for the civilian version which was opposed to the, in practice, military version, The Humvee—continued to increase throughout the 1990s, but the sales of the vehicle were rarely more than 1000 a year (much like the Jeep of the early 1960s). Nevertheless, the brand had a lot of unexploited cultural capital that General Motors felt it could capitalize on—hence its purchase of the brand name in July 1999.

Here, we have come just about full circle in reviewing the corporate history of the Hummer. I feel that this is an important place to start with an examination of the object, but it doesn’t nearly begin to explore the wider context—or contexts if we are being correctly analytical. For as a commodity the Hummer has an ambivalent history in its relationship to other similar commodities.

A recent Public Affairs book by Keith Bradsher looks at these overlapping histories and pays particularly close attention to the political, economic and cultural background of these large military crossover vehicles. In between the more polemical moments of High and Mighty: SUVs—the World’s Most dangerous Vehicles and How Thy Got That Way, Bradsher reveals some of the seemingly mundane moments in the history of US regulations of the auto industry to point to the determining effect they have had on the development of the SUV as the popular commodity it is today.

He also inadvertently exposes what we might call the shifting vector of the Hummer stretching all the way back to the government contracts awarded to Willys-Overland and its post-war move to the civilian market. Though the commodity is not the same and the name on the corporation is different, the relationship exists—and is proudly displayed on the Corporate History of AM general’s homepage.

In a nutshell, Bradsher’s key point is that the allowances the various government regulatory commissions made on behalf of the manufacturer of the Jeep—from trade agreements and safety standards, to emissions and bumper height—have been exploited in the 1990s to create the vast market for SUVs that the Hummer has entered as the once and future king. Ironically, Bradsher sees this as the government protecting a company with a small, vulnerable market. In a typical passage he says:

American Motors was the smallest and weakest of the Detroit automakers. While it had bright sales staff and an extensive network of dealers, it lacked the financial and engineering resources of its rivals. American Motors struggled even during the 1960s, a golden age for the American automobile industry. When gasoline prices soared, the United States economy stumbled and auto regulations became more stringent in the 1970s. American Motors would barely survive. It would look to Washington for relief again and again. Too often, that relief would take the form of exempting Jeeps from rules aimed at making highways safer, making the air cleaner and making the American economy les dependent on foreign oil.(17)

Bradsher seems correct when he attributes most of the regulatory loopholes to the Hummer vector, but seems to overlook the fairly obvious other connection; the government wasn’t just being interventionist with regard to the market, overlooking the unsightly externalities its policies created in favor of protecting a small company and the small business owners it claimed to serve: it was also giving itself a break. Though American Motors might have been the weakest civilian manufacturer in Detroit, it was, and is, one of the largest contractors of government vehicles. By its own estimate, AM General (in its various permutations) has produced 90% of all Army tactical trucks. Thus, a regulatory loophole would not only save money in terms of designing civilian vehicles, but would also cut down on R&D for government contracts.

Of course there are certainly more issues at play than just economics in keeping standards where they are: as Bradsher contends, “the real secret of the auto industry’s political power lies […] in its vast and well-organized workforce” residing mostly in regions of unusual political influence—especially Michigan and Ohio which have been key “battleground in every presidential election for the last four decades” (60). But regardless of these various social relations or the speculation of what motivated the dearth of regulation on the category of “light truck,” the fact remains that the organization, positioned between the government and the market, which has produced the Hummer or its equivalent has been a unique beneficiary of this process and an important vector which made possible its eventual emergence as a high profile commodity in the early twentieth century in material cultural ways.

These regulatory loopholes, left open for an ostensibly minor player in the auto industry, were exploited to their full potential throughout the 1980s and early nineties, leading to the ubiquitous presence of the Jeep Cherokee and the Dodge Caravan throughout the latter part of that decade. In addition, the government support of AM General through lucrative military contracts was a boon to the development of this industry in that it was the sale of AM General--made possible by the value added to it through the Hummer contract--made possible the design and successful design and marketing of the Jeep Cherokee, which resulted in a revived notion of the Bourgeois frontierism already being proffered by the Militaristic, neo-liberal culture and economics of the early years of Reagan's presidency.

It is here where I am supposed to rationalize my approach and show the way I have proven my evidence has confirmed my theory. However, I have no choice to admit that the problem is ultimately that we have only this rhetorical kind of methodology to underpin our endeavor. For my colleagues more interested in the aesthetic, the argument is or will be made that the current marketing of the Hummer denies even this military industrial history.

What I find interesting is that even the Corporation AM General itself proudly displays this history--though without mention of the various regulatory snafus that have become enshrined as reasonable and rational. Yet without any ability to claim knowledge outside of our own narrow context, that is without a methodology that can claim some sort of truth, without a hegemonic version of CS--which, though it exists, we are unwilling to admit--we can have little effect on the larger culture except by pronouncing already digested truths about the outstanding militarism or monumental excess of the Hummer, truths which are easily dismissed by the dominant culture of neo-liberal, market oriented truth, exemplified by a GM lobbyist who shares the disdain of the SUV, saying, "It just annoys the hell out of me when I get behind one, I can't see anything, but I'd still, like they say about free speech, fight like hell for the right of people to buy one." This is not an outstanding example of free market ideology, but a sincerely hegemonic version of truth which we will be hard pressed to argue with outside of the terms of externalities and the social contract--niether of which are immune from a similar reappropriation.

In other words, though there is obviously a way that Cultural Studies makes a claim to truth as a social science, though we have a wealth of methods which would allow for a clear enunciation of authoritative integrity, we remain unreflexively committed to a pseudo-reflexivity which either refuses to dismiss certain uses of theory as truly banal or is committed to using whatever theory necessary to prove an already digested, pragmatic goal based on a tenuous and ideologically liberal understanding of the world which, as Bourdieu says of any autonomous field of productiondoesn't see any reason to prove itself to anyone other than itself. The fields he discusses most often as autonomous are those of science and art--which, coincidentally are the two fields which most resemble the practice of cultural studies. In niether case is there an absence of claims to truth or beauty but, like in our own field, the claims to truth or beauty promoted are simply ideologically inscribed by the performative authority of the people with the most symbolic capital. Normally, we have obsessed about the latter, stressing always the heretical intervention within our autonomous field--or any field for that matter. But, at the same time, we have come a long way and it is time that we started acting like it and figure out what it is that we are supposed to be doing.

This is, of course, the final necessity of any Cultural Studies project worth its name: one is supposed to attempt to make some sort of intervention in the field. A successful intervention, a way of defining it authoritatively, after all, has become a much more lucrative possibility. As I witness the continued commodification of the field I wonder when we will begin to truly police its borders rather than, as Lawrence Grossberg recently suggested to me, abandoning it altogether and starting all over with the original intervention but with a different name. This seems to be because most people have forgotton where we came from muchless where we were going. To this end, I make a provocation: any cultural study, no matter how fashionably theorized, of the Hummer which doesn't contain an understanding of its cultural, political and economic history, which doesn't consider it in terms of, as Raymond Williams called "Cultural Materialism" in more than an opportunistic way, is not Cultural Studies but something else.