Tuesday, June 15, 2004
though Jane mag isn't evidently interested in entering the digital age and thus I can't link to the story, the latest issue ("Summer"?) has an article on Dov Charney of American Apparel. The article is provocative and maybe even a bit disturbing from a certain perspective due to the way sex operates in the marketing of his product. In my understanding of the most dominant strain of feminist politics, his playful sexuality which seems to sort of blend sex and work (i.e. he has relationships at work with subordinates). He is also one of the chief photographers of these young girls. While the business is more ethical in terms of labor practices--and it is obvious that not *everyone* who works there is some sort of sleazy fodder for "the boss"--there is certainly a definite political issue with this.
On the other hand, much of the way I feel about this could be some lurking puritanical fantasy about the place for sex in society. It is interesting to consider the way Charney frames it in the article: "I think sex motivates everything [...] It motivates my work, too. You don't want something that's sexually driven, like panties, but then have them made in a horrible sweatshop. Like, I know my workers have a good time. They drink beer, they have relationships, they have girlfriends and boyfriends. [. . . .] It's fun to make money and pay people well."
First of, Charney is certainly not the only clothes manufacturer using sex to sell his wares, the only difference is that he is pointing to the fact that the places where these products are made--these products like the new Gap sundresses with those wildly sexual ads on TV--are made in very unsexy working conditions. Though there is certainly much to be unpacked in the way that sex is so wrapped up with consumerism, it is certainly an important appropriation (even if it is ultimately motivated by market concerns.) On the other hand, sex and consumption are certainly not all that foreign to one another and, according to Weber anyway, they would have been wrapped up with the protestant ethic in the early days of the most successful cultures of capitalism. That they have both become rampant (and interrelated) shouldn't come as a surprise, but it should make us ask how that pattern arose.
Second, the sort of appropriation that he is making--along with the various muses who work for him--seems to be picking up steam. Jane itself this month features a photo of Drew Barrymore with a t-shirt that says "politics is like sex: protect yourself...vote." Not sure how the metaphor (or is that a similie?) works, but this shirt is the subject of another article in the issue. Not very familair with the magazine itself, but it has its own thing going on which I don't really understand. In addition, sites such as http://www.beaverpower.com/ seem to be trying to tap into something like this. Their site features photos of young women wearing their t-shirts and proclaiming BEAVER POWER IS MAKING ENVIRONMENTALISM FUN AND SEXY! The site also features a quote by media and social critic Sut Jhally: "The imperative task for those who want to stress a different set of values is to make the struggle for social change fun and sexy."
To me this is a good idea--and one that is certainly not limited to the politics on the left. Last year when the Lysistrata movement was advocating an end to the war, a popular (in social location not in its mass appeal) right wing group of bloggers started a "f*ck for freedom" movement that was using the same appropriation of sex to sell the war on Iraq. Though I can't seem to find the original poster who created the graphics and started some of the movement, this particular blogger--who even got a couple of bones thrown by Sully at the time--was instrumental in spreading the word
http://www.asparagirl.com/blog/2003_03_02_archives.html
Likewise, aspiragirl launched another obscure artist into the public eye who used a similar sexualized image--this time also including a certain amount of matriachal imagery--to promote a sexy sort of violence that helped create a place for women who didn't identify with the "code pink" stance on the war--a movement which was certainly a bit old fashioned in its gender politics and was a bit overzealous in saying that all women have that peace and love stance. It, in fact, practically asked for this opposing movement.
So, to return to charney, it seems that, despite its blatent appeal to the market--and the fact that it seems the entire company runs in part on his charisma and thus would be hard to duplicate or expand too very far--american apparel is an important alternative to the much more exploitative practices of just about every other clothing manufacturer in the country. I would be interested hearing what a more feminist-minded person might say about this (which is not to say that I don't think about feminism, but that I don't think about it nearly enough to know what current trends of thought are--likewise with race studies, which would also have much to say about this particular case since most of his workforce is latino and many of the women (who also have key roles in running the company--even if they are also models for the ads) are non-white to one degree or another.) Finally, it will be interesting, now that the company is picking up steam, to see how they handle success and how they age: for instance, right now, many of these young women in charge of the company are models as well. As they get older and become both more embedded in the corporate structure and perhaps, less able to represent that young, carefree sexiness of their late 20s, will they simply hire more models giving them little stake in the company? I suppose it is something they will have to decide when they get there.
Monday, June 14, 2004
reading Lukacs "history and class consciousness"
One of the points he makes often in the 1967 preface is the problem that he had early on of having two contradictory strains of thought which he believed and of how to reconcile these--particularly with regard to the division between theory and praxis, that is, he believed something as a theorist, but in his praxis, he could see gaping holes or clear paradoxes that existed. While I sympathize with this--and have a first hand experience with it working in the SOC--I also find myself feeling this way about his theory itself.
Much of what he says about the totality and the method of marxist knowledge production is familiar to me and the way he elucidates it is striking in its clarity and logic. However, underlying all of this is a deep belief that he has in the coming revolution--no doubt inspired by the events of 1917 which were fresh on his mind in the early 20s when he wrote this. Much of what he says here sounds a bit ridiculous in its teleology. I will try to find a good example, but for now let me just present my own paradoxical position: I find the description he gives of a method important. it seems to be a clear predecessor to the position of cultural studies and I can see ways in which it also foretells althusser and the regulationist economists. On the other hand, it seems to be informed or underpinned by this firm belief in the coming upheaval and seems to largely overlook the ideological power of capitalism as a sort of elysian field that draws people to it even as it exploits and alienates them. The promise of capital has been far more powerful a force on people's consciousnesses than history--or any particular understanding of history--has been thus far. Perhaps he is saying more than this, but at this stage I feel like there is this contradiction I am trying to resolve: if this method is based on the assunption that the knowledge produced by the "ruthless criticism of everything existing" qua the totality is both linked to an a causal force in a form of social revolution that seems doomed to fail because it can't form a bulwark against a capitalist world without becoming ruthlessly capitalist itself. In other words, if this theory is rooted in this practice, can I consider one viable even as I think the other somewhat laughable in the form he presents it? This will be the question I seek to answer as I move onward in this text.
One of the points he makes often in the 1967 preface is the problem that he had early on of having two contradictory strains of thought which he believed and of how to reconcile these--particularly with regard to the division between theory and praxis, that is, he believed something as a theorist, but in his praxis, he could see gaping holes or clear paradoxes that existed. While I sympathize with this--and have a first hand experience with it working in the SOC--I also find myself feeling this way about his theory itself.
Much of what he says about the totality and the method of marxist knowledge production is familiar to me and the way he elucidates it is striking in its clarity and logic. However, underlying all of this is a deep belief that he has in the coming revolution--no doubt inspired by the events of 1917 which were fresh on his mind in the early 20s when he wrote this. Much of what he says here sounds a bit ridiculous in its teleology. I will try to find a good example, but for now let me just present my own paradoxical position: I find the description he gives of a method important. it seems to be a clear predecessor to the position of cultural studies and I can see ways in which it also foretells althusser and the regulationist economists. On the other hand, it seems to be informed or underpinned by this firm belief in the coming upheaval and seems to largely overlook the ideological power of capitalism as a sort of elysian field that draws people to it even as it exploits and alienates them. The promise of capital has been far more powerful a force on people's consciousnesses than history--or any particular understanding of history--has been thus far. Perhaps he is saying more than this, but at this stage I feel like there is this contradiction I am trying to resolve: if this method is based on the assunption that the knowledge produced by the "ruthless criticism of everything existing" qua the totality is both linked to an a causal force in a form of social revolution that seems doomed to fail because it can't form a bulwark against a capitalist world without becoming ruthlessly capitalist itself. In other words, if this theory is rooted in this practice, can I consider one viable even as I think the other somewhat laughable in the form he presents it? This will be the question I seek to answer as I move onward in this text.
Friday, June 11, 2004
ABC news is using coverage commentary to assure americans that the rest of the world is feeling our patriotism with us because they are seeing our ceremony. There are some really money quotes here that are exceptional in their nationalism: that people around the world are watching our state funeral and experiencing our grief with us (qua 9/11) and therefore improving our tarnished image abroad is stunning in its ideological coherence. It is an absurd line of reasoning, but one that they parrot willingly--along with Terry Moran who claims that the affinity people have for the US in eastern europe is the result of reagan's policy. Within just a few minutes, all of the talking heads said just this, over and over. It may have a certain reasonableness in the context, but that doesn't make it any more laughable--especially because they seem to believe it. It is a strange way to reassure people to claim the continued love of America around the world is inspired by someone as controversial as Reagan. On the other hand, he was far less blunt an instrument than the current president. It is odd to think of reagan as nuanced, but I guess everything is relative.
Ambivalence in Former 'Evil Empire' (washingtonpost.com): "But Russia under President Vladimir Putin is hardly the free society that Reagan once envisioned. Instead, it is a country deeply ambivalent about democracy, where many "
Clearly a story that will get lost in all the hubbub. certainly there is more to the collapse of the USSR than the narrative of reagan's life can illuminate. It's kind of absurd to wrap up the disintegration of a country and a culture, a complete transformation of the world as something one guy did. It shows the fetishistic desire of people to have a clearly understandable, manichean vision of history. this is even more clearly illustrated by the fact that people seem to have no idea what is going on in Russia today--the only important point is that we ended it as a communist country. This certainly foretells the way we will think about Afghanistan and Iraq: it ultimately won't matter what happens in those countries after attention is shifted, but what "we" did to end the "evil" inside of them. Another interesting parallel is visible in this quote from the article:
Sergei Karaganov, a foreign policy expert, said that for most Russians, Reagan's name is indelibly associated with his denunciation of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," and "he was not loved for it."
Karaganov added, "At that time people were insulted, they thought it was unfair to them. It was not an empire already, it was an empty shell, so people believed he was insincere, an old-time Cold Warrior. Looking from the other side of the fence, knowing the emptiness of the system and seeing the leader of a powerful country lambasting the Soviet Union as a powerful threat seemed like a bad joke."
this last quote is utterly reminescent of the empty shell of a country we attacked last year--something that was done with some obvious awareness that it would be an easy fight.
watching the funeral...
bush's speech a ridiculous charicature of the story, myth about reagan. Yet it is obvious that he really believes this.
the battle hymn of the republic followed--arranged to sound like some sort of chorale.
then a speech from some minister in which he ties reagan to 9/11--or more says that reagan was already battling that force and saw clearly the threat even then. "a triumph of light," reagan was spreading the freedom qua a gift of god. In this case, Reagan is like jesus or something. Just the kind of thing the country needs to renew its nationalistic, jingoistic pride and its desire to carry on with world domination regardless of the consequences.
followed by "amazing grace"
more prayers, etc.
8 pallbearers each from a different branch of the military doing their thing to some sort of theme that is strangely reminescent of something from a jerry bruckhiemer movie
Here is something that is also interesting from Gorbechev
All of this is followed by a lot of footage with the bells in the background of the coffin going into the hearse, dignitaries trickling out of the national cathedral (such as nancy, the queen and prince of England, etc.) and a lot of really quiet, seamless footage of the cathedral. I can't figure out how they are positioned or where, but there are a lot of semi-aerial shots and many that move from a ground shot of these people leaving to a shot about ten or fifteen feet off the ground to this sort of wierd perspective shot of the cathedral towers (wish I could remember what those are called). There are also all kinds of soldiers and sailors carrying their rifles.
finally everyone if filing out of the cathedral, talking so that occasionally the mike picks up random snippets of conversation--just saw kucinich (is that possible?).
now moved to a silent shot of air force one--which is supposed to carry the coffin from DC back to CA for the interment. It's a rather strange, boring shot to move to, except that we can see the press corps and the Howitzers--both set to go off when the coffin arrives. My sense is that this is one of the only feeds allowed--the government camera or something.
Now a helicoptor arrives presumedly carrying the body which I suppose they transferred from the motorcade--something that only seems necessary if we're concerned with TV time rather than ceremonial time--it wouldn't take more than 15 minutes or so to drive to national but a helicoptor--even with the transfer time, would probably take a third of the time. This concern would probably only happen b/c of TV.
Now the helicoptor has landed and they've let the pleb out onto the tarmac to watch the transfer/create the massive crowd.
Upon second thought, this is probably not national airport but Andrews AFB--maybe making the helicoptor a bit more necessary.
honor guard is out; camera moves to follow them. low drum beat begins; band takes their positions--looks like a very big band--around the doors of the plane. Probably all musicians from Fort Meyer.
10 minutes after helicoptor landed with still no sign of the coffin. perhaps that's not where it was after all.
Now, for some reason, one of the air force one (or two?) 747s is in motion--the one that was closest to the helicoptor that landed. Now it takes off, I guess carrying the body. the cameras follow it into the overcast sky. Then focus in on the howitzers, the soldiers, the crowd, the Honor guard in front of the other plane...everything is quiet except for the sound of the plane engines...notably, it seems like all of the soldiers and musicians are men. Now they are standing almost perfectly still, at attention
more helicoptors seem to be arriving and they look more like the secret service crafts reserved for the president. But the television says that there is definitely a motorcade taking the body so I am not sure who or what took off in AF1 earlier.
TV also having an extensive conversation about Reagan...mostly about his "faith" his religion, etc.
Clearly a story that will get lost in all the hubbub. certainly there is more to the collapse of the USSR than the narrative of reagan's life can illuminate. It's kind of absurd to wrap up the disintegration of a country and a culture, a complete transformation of the world as something one guy did. It shows the fetishistic desire of people to have a clearly understandable, manichean vision of history. this is even more clearly illustrated by the fact that people seem to have no idea what is going on in Russia today--the only important point is that we ended it as a communist country. This certainly foretells the way we will think about Afghanistan and Iraq: it ultimately won't matter what happens in those countries after attention is shifted, but what "we" did to end the "evil" inside of them. Another interesting parallel is visible in this quote from the article:
Sergei Karaganov, a foreign policy expert, said that for most Russians, Reagan's name is indelibly associated with his denunciation of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," and "he was not loved for it."
Karaganov added, "At that time people were insulted, they thought it was unfair to them. It was not an empire already, it was an empty shell, so people believed he was insincere, an old-time Cold Warrior. Looking from the other side of the fence, knowing the emptiness of the system and seeing the leader of a powerful country lambasting the Soviet Union as a powerful threat seemed like a bad joke."
this last quote is utterly reminescent of the empty shell of a country we attacked last year--something that was done with some obvious awareness that it would be an easy fight.
watching the funeral...
bush's speech a ridiculous charicature of the story, myth about reagan. Yet it is obvious that he really believes this.
the battle hymn of the republic followed--arranged to sound like some sort of chorale.
then a speech from some minister in which he ties reagan to 9/11--or more says that reagan was already battling that force and saw clearly the threat even then. "a triumph of light," reagan was spreading the freedom qua a gift of god. In this case, Reagan is like jesus or something. Just the kind of thing the country needs to renew its nationalistic, jingoistic pride and its desire to carry on with world domination regardless of the consequences.
followed by "amazing grace"
more prayers, etc.
8 pallbearers each from a different branch of the military doing their thing to some sort of theme that is strangely reminescent of something from a jerry bruckhiemer movie
Here is something that is also interesting from Gorbechev
All of this is followed by a lot of footage with the bells in the background of the coffin going into the hearse, dignitaries trickling out of the national cathedral (such as nancy, the queen and prince of England, etc.) and a lot of really quiet, seamless footage of the cathedral. I can't figure out how they are positioned or where, but there are a lot of semi-aerial shots and many that move from a ground shot of these people leaving to a shot about ten or fifteen feet off the ground to this sort of wierd perspective shot of the cathedral towers (wish I could remember what those are called). There are also all kinds of soldiers and sailors carrying their rifles.
finally everyone if filing out of the cathedral, talking so that occasionally the mike picks up random snippets of conversation--just saw kucinich (is that possible?).
now moved to a silent shot of air force one--which is supposed to carry the coffin from DC back to CA for the interment. It's a rather strange, boring shot to move to, except that we can see the press corps and the Howitzers--both set to go off when the coffin arrives. My sense is that this is one of the only feeds allowed--the government camera or something.
Now a helicoptor arrives presumedly carrying the body which I suppose they transferred from the motorcade--something that only seems necessary if we're concerned with TV time rather than ceremonial time--it wouldn't take more than 15 minutes or so to drive to national but a helicoptor--even with the transfer time, would probably take a third of the time. This concern would probably only happen b/c of TV.
Now the helicoptor has landed and they've let the pleb out onto the tarmac to watch the transfer/create the massive crowd.
Upon second thought, this is probably not national airport but Andrews AFB--maybe making the helicoptor a bit more necessary.
honor guard is out; camera moves to follow them. low drum beat begins; band takes their positions--looks like a very big band--around the doors of the plane. Probably all musicians from Fort Meyer.
10 minutes after helicoptor landed with still no sign of the coffin. perhaps that's not where it was after all.
Now, for some reason, one of the air force one (or two?) 747s is in motion--the one that was closest to the helicoptor that landed. Now it takes off, I guess carrying the body. the cameras follow it into the overcast sky. Then focus in on the howitzers, the soldiers, the crowd, the Honor guard in front of the other plane...everything is quiet except for the sound of the plane engines...notably, it seems like all of the soldiers and musicians are men. Now they are standing almost perfectly still, at attention
more helicoptors seem to be arriving and they look more like the secret service crafts reserved for the president. But the television says that there is definitely a motorcade taking the body so I am not sure who or what took off in AF1 earlier.
TV also having an extensive conversation about Reagan...mostly about his "faith" his religion, etc.
Thursday, June 10, 2004
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
Friday, June 04, 2004
Comparative Urban Studies Project @ the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
An interesting book (it sounds like) by two world bank folks that presented at the program Karen is working at on Urban Development. The writers are using much of the terminology of cultural studies and sociology--especially of Bourdieu (though it could also be coined somewhere else)-- to talk about some of the problems of international development. Though I am not sure what the true thrust of the work is, this is a much more practical application of these ideas than I usually see. I appreciate this use of the language and ideas and I think it shows an inportant trajectory to follow--especially if it retains a critical edge and doesn't become instrumentalized (though the latter is all but inevitable.)
An interesting book (it sounds like) by two world bank folks that presented at the program Karen is working at on Urban Development. The writers are using much of the terminology of cultural studies and sociology--especially of Bourdieu (though it could also be coined somewhere else)-- to talk about some of the problems of international development. Though I am not sure what the true thrust of the work is, this is a much more practical application of these ideas than I usually see. I appreciate this use of the language and ideas and I think it shows an inportant trajectory to follow--especially if it retains a critical edge and doesn't become instrumentalized (though the latter is all but inevitable.)
After a nigth out with Pablo-always a good time--talking about global finance, it occurs to me that another logical project that would have just as much of a connection between the two fields (maybe even more so) would be to talk about the debit card in the US and the way that it and the credit card have been framed in the terms of the millennial discourse of globalization ("it's everywhere you want to be...") they aren't necessarily unique in their use of this marketing, but the global reach of finance capital and the habitus created by these two instruments (both embodied in the ubiquitous "card") which helps to create both a dematerialized notion of money, reifying fictitous capital, and to instill a natural feeling to racking up tremendous debt. Viewing the change over time in advertisements for credit cards vs. the global finance regimes being implanted would be a fairly concrete project. It would also eliminate the need to discuss determination in any causal sense for both would be products of the same producers. There could be a chapter on the way that people use cards and it would be very interesting to see the generational differences between people who opened bank accounts for the first time in the 90s (and hence see debit cards and ATM cards as natural and normal) and those who were mostly writing checks for thirty or more years before that. A very good other option--which would have a much more doable research agenda within the time allowed.
Thursday, May 20, 2004
The Village Voice: Features: The Jesus Landing Pad by Rick Perlstein
Here's a story. I am worknig on the adjective to describe it because it would be funny or kooky if these people didn't have so much power; since it is regarding a top Bush administration official (and sort of sleazy Iran Contra guy) it is between scary and disgusting. But I guess all of this is about religion even if it is also about ethnicity. Obviously these things will get worse before they get better.
Here's a story. I am worknig on the adjective to describe it because it would be funny or kooky if these people didn't have so much power; since it is regarding a top Bush administration official (and sort of sleazy Iran Contra guy) it is between scary and disgusting. But I guess all of this is about religion even if it is also about ethnicity. Obviously these things will get worse before they get better.
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Z Magazine Online, May 2004 Table of Contents
ashlee says she's reading z-mag. haven't been follownig the pub, but it is interesting enough to keep attention. Hopefully we can tweak that attention so that it is a little more academic of an enthusiasm, but at this point I'm just glad to know that someone in Texas has a conscience and a consciousness of how it should be used. She's also reading Chomsky, who is also a good starting point though often a sort of cartoon version of himself. I would like him more if he admitted the long line of people who have been doing what he is doing in an academic sense, but he is nonetheless useful in blowing the minds of young people who are hungry for that interaction and experience. It would be even more useful if he didn't make most of his arguments on the basis of flimsy moralisms and focused more on the way that, for instance, neo-liberalism undermines itself. However, it is incomparably important to instill a popular understanding of the moral compass of a system in which every socially positive aspect of economic development is basically an externality--i.e. the main goal of all exchange is simply between those two "individuals" (be they corporate or otherwise) and if it results in other more public consequences like quality education, a healthy environment, strong families, modern medical care, or their polar opposites, well then that is just "external" to the exchange. We shouldn't expect any of this from the exchange and neither does capitalism; all of this, if it happens, comprises a vast realm of externalities which the market is almost totally unconcerned with except in so far as they begin to affect the market itself by making more or less educated, healthy workers, etc. Even then, the market isn't concerned with making more or less of them--or with having a more or less clean environment: it is only concerned with the price of those resources as commodities (i.e. people, land, resources.) That these are, as Polanyi calls them, false commodities, is beside the point. Once capital has created the instruments to make them so, everything is for sale. Therefore, to compain about "Profits over people" is in some ways irrelevant and fanciful. However, it certainly flies in the face of all the rhetoric which claims that this system inherently functions to "raise all boats." And, perhaps this is the most useful thing about these popular leftist diatribes: they provide a striking dissonance to the accepted order which generates a critical distance from the status quo and an alternative subject position. If this position can then be developed more fully into a reflexivly nuanced understanding of the ideas being contested, seeing the problems and possibilities of both, understanding the "other side" is equally convinced of their morality and thus unable to be contested on those grounds except in all out ideological warfare (or direct action) in which the goal is basically to have "our side" win. This I see as equally dangerous for democratic participation in the long run, but as the hegemonic forces seem to gather all the cards for themselves, as Paul Smith quotes Baudrillard on 9/11: "It was the system itself which created the objective conditions for this retaliation. By seizing all the cards for itself, it forced the Other to change the rules" (p.9). Or, in another context, a more popular voice once claimed:
Those who make peacful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. - John F. Kennedy
ashlee says she's reading z-mag. haven't been follownig the pub, but it is interesting enough to keep attention. Hopefully we can tweak that attention so that it is a little more academic of an enthusiasm, but at this point I'm just glad to know that someone in Texas has a conscience and a consciousness of how it should be used. She's also reading Chomsky, who is also a good starting point though often a sort of cartoon version of himself. I would like him more if he admitted the long line of people who have been doing what he is doing in an academic sense, but he is nonetheless useful in blowing the minds of young people who are hungry for that interaction and experience. It would be even more useful if he didn't make most of his arguments on the basis of flimsy moralisms and focused more on the way that, for instance, neo-liberalism undermines itself. However, it is incomparably important to instill a popular understanding of the moral compass of a system in which every socially positive aspect of economic development is basically an externality--i.e. the main goal of all exchange is simply between those two "individuals" (be they corporate or otherwise) and if it results in other more public consequences like quality education, a healthy environment, strong families, modern medical care, or their polar opposites, well then that is just "external" to the exchange. We shouldn't expect any of this from the exchange and neither does capitalism; all of this, if it happens, comprises a vast realm of externalities which the market is almost totally unconcerned with except in so far as they begin to affect the market itself by making more or less educated, healthy workers, etc. Even then, the market isn't concerned with making more or less of them--or with having a more or less clean environment: it is only concerned with the price of those resources as commodities (i.e. people, land, resources.) That these are, as Polanyi calls them, false commodities, is beside the point. Once capital has created the instruments to make them so, everything is for sale. Therefore, to compain about "Profits over people" is in some ways irrelevant and fanciful. However, it certainly flies in the face of all the rhetoric which claims that this system inherently functions to "raise all boats." And, perhaps this is the most useful thing about these popular leftist diatribes: they provide a striking dissonance to the accepted order which generates a critical distance from the status quo and an alternative subject position. If this position can then be developed more fully into a reflexivly nuanced understanding of the ideas being contested, seeing the problems and possibilities of both, understanding the "other side" is equally convinced of their morality and thus unable to be contested on those grounds except in all out ideological warfare (or direct action) in which the goal is basically to have "our side" win. This I see as equally dangerous for democratic participation in the long run, but as the hegemonic forces seem to gather all the cards for themselves, as Paul Smith quotes Baudrillard on 9/11: "It was the system itself which created the objective conditions for this retaliation. By seizing all the cards for itself, it forced the Other to change the rules" (p.9). Or, in another context, a more popular voice once claimed:
Those who make peacful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. - John F. Kennedy
Monday, May 17, 2004
Theories of communication--Mattelart and Mattelart
good intro that starts with Adam Smith and Quesnay and moves from there...good breakdown of the field into seven components that might be useful to my field and have a key organizing understanding of the field as being non-chronological, i.e. a circularity of these theories. Nevertheless, they still root all the theories of communication in the sociological theories (and the logic of the social) of the time. A good resource for a bibliography of Communication starting with "the social organism" and coming almost full circle to concepts of the network (perhaps fortelling Armand's later work "networking the world" which links this same sort of intellectual development (qua ideological development) to the technological development of communcation networks.
So far it has helped me to make a distinction between a pragmatist and a funcitonalist approach--which should be completely obvious but which I had not made before. I.e. the pragmatist approach has a certain set of goals it sees as necessary or desirable to accomplish--e.g. Dewey--while the functionalist approach claims to be non-partisan in its development of the facts of communication but, as Elias says at one point, had an implicit set of assumptions in the way that it defined things like a non-function or a disfunction (30).
good intro that starts with Adam Smith and Quesnay and moves from there...good breakdown of the field into seven components that might be useful to my field and have a key organizing understanding of the field as being non-chronological, i.e. a circularity of these theories. Nevertheless, they still root all the theories of communication in the sociological theories (and the logic of the social) of the time. A good resource for a bibliography of Communication starting with "the social organism" and coming almost full circle to concepts of the network (perhaps fortelling Armand's later work "networking the world" which links this same sort of intellectual development (qua ideological development) to the technological development of communcation networks.
So far it has helped me to make a distinction between a pragmatist and a funcitonalist approach--which should be completely obvious but which I had not made before. I.e. the pragmatist approach has a certain set of goals it sees as necessary or desirable to accomplish--e.g. Dewey--while the functionalist approach claims to be non-partisan in its development of the facts of communication but, as Elias says at one point, had an implicit set of assumptions in the way that it defined things like a non-function or a disfunction (30).
Wednesday, May 05, 2004
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.
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.
Friday, April 23, 2004
For the paper...A good ending I am thinking about--in terms of the narrative, is to speak some about the Robert Kaplan aticle on "the coming anarchy" (i will have already mentioned this to some extent, but will return to make these final points.) his argument is, roughly, that by looking at the problems in Africa and the way that they are handled, we can see a good example of the way that the world will look in the coming century. I will have already discussed the metaphor of riding in the limo (and the new pattern of its being bulletproofed to protect elites from threats of terror) and his recommendation that we watch nigeria to see what happens there...I will then bring up the recent ruling by the Benue assembly that denied the request of the Akume family for a convoy of bulletproof vehicles after they were attacked by a group of armed rebels. The assembly denied their request, saying: "The Benue State House of Assembly Speaker, Mr Mzenda Iho and the House unanimously agreed that the rising insecurity in the country must be fought through means that could benefit every Nigerian, not a select group. [. . . .] He said that the frequent attacks on top political offices was a manifestation that "the common man on the street has nowhere to run to", and asked the House to pass the resolution of the House that President Olusegun Obasanjo should take measures to protect all Nigerians, saying, "we can't fold our arms and watch sundry criminals place the nation under siege.""
This appeared on the african news service march 7, 2004.
Of course, in following the story further, I find that Akume ended up buying himself one of the bulletproof cars anyway--and the assembly dispassionately approved the purchase after the fact. this makes the scenario a buit more ambiguous, but still and interesting anecdote to note in the context. In this case, Nigeria might be a good example for us in that people were initially concerned that the general lawlessness would not be addressed by the government. and instead the people should be lifted to safety as well.
This appeared on the african news service march 7, 2004.
Of course, in following the story further, I find that Akume ended up buying himself one of the bulletproof cars anyway--and the assembly dispassionately approved the purchase after the fact. this makes the scenario a buit more ambiguous, but still and interesting anecdote to note in the context. In this case, Nigeria might be a good example for us in that people were initially concerned that the general lawlessness would not be addressed by the government. and instead the people should be lifted to safety as well.
Thursday, April 22, 2004
SuicideGirls > Pin-Up Punk Rock and Goth Girls: Pictures, Journals and Videos.
In looking for military contractors, happened upon this site cmolpetely unrelated to it (from a comment on one of the boards.) Interesting site though. In addition to the regular features of an online community (save the addition of erotic photographs of selected members) they have a touring burlesque show, clothing/merchandise and magazine--along with other celebrity interviews. The members (both men and women--though the women are obviously central) seem to have a diversity of conversations--but most of them seem really tapped into various forms of public life, almost all of which is outside of the mainstream, yet they seem equally involved with pop culture at large. Maybe it is a product of the metropolitan/cosmopolitan location of the site and its photographers (LA, NY) and editors.
Speaking of that, unlike other sites like meta filter or plastic which are basically just community weblogs, this site also has someone pulling some of the strings--an editor or group of editors who arrange some of these outside media events. It is also unique--though I'm not sure how I feel about it--in encouraging women to send them nude/erotic photos--which can then only be viewed by members who have paid a fee to see them. This is simultaneously liberative and exploitative or, more fittingly, it is very commercial, but in a sense quite outside of the mainstream. It also has the effect of creating an air of celebrity to these "ordinary" members so that other members choose their "favorite suicide girls"--presumedly people they've never met but who they might have spoken with over the chat rooms (so it is far more personal than celebrity in the mainstream, but still there is something going on there.) At the same time, one way or another, the women who do this, become more eligible to also take part in offline events--there is a music video on the site which evidently features the "suicide girls" as set dressing. In this sense, becoming a fully invested member is also a sort of alternative resume process (or is presented as such.) To look at this alongside the astronomical explosion of amatuer p-sites--and especially the young ages of these women--I am curious what is going on with sexuality at this time. Then again, to look at the number of hits this site gets (or at least the comments left-- a little under four million) it isn't all that large of a community (though they did get nominated for a webby ward.)
In looking for military contractors, happened upon this site cmolpetely unrelated to it (from a comment on one of the boards.) Interesting site though. In addition to the regular features of an online community (save the addition of erotic photographs of selected members) they have a touring burlesque show, clothing/merchandise and magazine--along with other celebrity interviews. The members (both men and women--though the women are obviously central) seem to have a diversity of conversations--but most of them seem really tapped into various forms of public life, almost all of which is outside of the mainstream, yet they seem equally involved with pop culture at large. Maybe it is a product of the metropolitan/cosmopolitan location of the site and its photographers (LA, NY) and editors.
Speaking of that, unlike other sites like meta filter or plastic which are basically just community weblogs, this site also has someone pulling some of the strings--an editor or group of editors who arrange some of these outside media events. It is also unique--though I'm not sure how I feel about it--in encouraging women to send them nude/erotic photos--which can then only be viewed by members who have paid a fee to see them. This is simultaneously liberative and exploitative or, more fittingly, it is very commercial, but in a sense quite outside of the mainstream. It also has the effect of creating an air of celebrity to these "ordinary" members so that other members choose their "favorite suicide girls"--presumedly people they've never met but who they might have spoken with over the chat rooms (so it is far more personal than celebrity in the mainstream, but still there is something going on there.) At the same time, one way or another, the women who do this, become more eligible to also take part in offline events--there is a music video on the site which evidently features the "suicide girls" as set dressing. In this sense, becoming a fully invested member is also a sort of alternative resume process (or is presented as such.) To look at this alongside the astronomical explosion of amatuer p-sites--and especially the young ages of these women--I am curious what is going on with sexuality at this time. Then again, to look at the number of hits this site gets (or at least the comments left-- a little under four million) it isn't all that large of a community (though they did get nominated for a webby ward.)
War Profiteers
page from corpwatch (who are often a bit over the top--but then so are appeals to leave the market alone.)
page from corpwatch (who are often a bit over the top--but then so are appeals to leave the market alone.)
Monday, April 19, 2004
FOXNews.com - Politics - Military Contractors Shoulder Heavy Burden in Iraq
recent fox article on the subject
recent fox article on the subject
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)