September 25th: Postmodernism, Part 3

Plan for the Day

• “Postmodern Architecture” (4:30)
  • Quick video that mentions movements in architecture that fit within postmodernism
• Finish Malpas
• Marx and Engels, “The Ruling Class and the Ruling Ideas”

After cutting a pasting, I realized I’d defined hegemony three different (yet related) ways…that word’s coming back on an exam, huh?

Simon Malpas, The Postmodern (2005)

Let’s separate the last two chapters: Ch. 4 “History” and Ch. 5 “Politics.”

Ch. 4 “History”

• p. 81: “challenging the received meanings of the past.”
• p. 84: “Hegel‘s speculative dialectic describes a process of perpetual overturning of the relations between ideas and material reality that he identifies in every human endeavour.”
  • p. 85: “…the world must always already be subject to the laws of reason, and therefore capable of being understood dialectically.”
  • p. 87: “According to Hegel, however, even the most terrible and vicious injustices, wars and atrocities will lead in the end, through the resolution of the conflicts that give rise to them, to a better world and a more rational understanding of humanity and its interactions.”
    “…modern thought as a grand narrative of progress.”
• If history is inevitable…
  • p. 89: “As the idea of history as progress implies, if there is a goal to development there must necessarily be the possibility that this goal will one day be reached and history will come to an end.”
  • p. 90: “Francis Fukuyama, sees modern history as having achieved its goal of universal freedom in the market-orientated liberal democracy of the United States.”
  • p. 91: Fukuyama claims, “Technology makes possible the limitless accumulation of wealth, and thus the satisfaction of an ever-expanding set of human desires.”
    “What he is suggesting here is that the development of new technologies is a cumulative process which confers both a military and an economic advantage on the society that generates them.”
• Hyperreality
  • p. 94: “Humanity has become lost in a realm of hyperreality that refuses us the distance to stand back from our experiences and question them; refuses us, in other words, a sense of historical perspective. If this is the end of history, it marks a particularly bleak denouement.”
  • p. 95: “The stuff of history has become another commodity to be bought by the spectator…”
  • Although in Ch. 5, it makes sense here:
    • p. 125: “‘Hyperreality’…identifies a culture in which the fantastical creations of media, film and computer technologies have come to be more real for us, and to interact more fundamentally with our experiences and desires, than the hitherto predominant realities of nature or spiritual life.”
    • “There is no longer any access to reality within American culture, but only the continual clash of simulations that form part of the infinitely seductive code of hyperreality.”
• Historical Narratives
  • p. 98: “What becomes important on this account is the way in which a particular history is written, the story it tells.”
  • p. 99: “…the task of the postmodern historian or writer of finite history is not simply to make up new stories but to interrogate the universal assumptions of our contemporary power structures, to challenge their explanatory schemes and make room for different voices to emerge.”
  • p. 101: “…postmodern fiction frequently treats history ironically as a site of fragmentation rather than a progressive structure.”

Ch 5 “Politics”

• p. 108: “…the East–West split between communism and capitalism that shaped the immediate post-Second World War era and the Cold War is being refigured in the face of new threats and challenges to generate a world that seems much more complex and fragmented.”
• p. 109: “…the conditions that hold in a given society are always open to critique and transformation.”
• (N/neo)M/marxism
  • p. 110: “Marx’s critique of capitalism….is [not] the only form of critical modernity.”
  • “Marxism is, however, one of the most sustained, rigorous and revolutionary political analyses of modern society, and is also perhaps the most influential on postmodern thought.”
  • p. 111: “…consciousness…is determined by the social context from which it emerges.”
  • “Like Hegel, then, Marx’s argument is that consciousness is culturally and historically determined.”
  • p. 112: “…the consciousness of a given society and the identities of the subjects that make it up are founded on the ways in which that society produces the means by which it survives, or, in other words, on the basis of its economic organisation.”
  • “base and superstructure”
  • p. 114: “History and social organisation are based on the struggle for power between the different social classes and proceed by a series of revolutionary conflicts as one set of relations is replaced by another.”
  • p. 115: “the aim of Marx’s philosophy is that class is abolished entirely in a free and equal society in which all are allowed to flourish,…’from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ (2000: 615).”
• Everything is political
  • p. 118: “What Jameson is identifying here is the increase in the rapidity of changes of fashion that accompanies the development of advertising and makes consumption a matter not just of useful products but also of images and lifestyle choices.”
  • p. 120: “We become no more than the sum total of our purchases, and the feeling associated with this is one of a ‘heightened intensity’ of experience suffused with a ‘mystical charge’ as it veers schizophrenically between intoxication and anxiety.”
  • p. 122: “When one desires or purchases a commodity, one is not simply buying the object itself, but also the signs, images and identities that go along with it.”
  • p. 123: via Baudrillard–“…the most central aspect of postmodernity: the ubiquity of the messages produced by advertising in the communications media and the subsequent annihilation of reality.”
• Pluralism…Relativism
  • p. 130: Quoting Laclau–“The consequence of this is that the disruption of the foundational totalities of modern thought makes way for a ‘plurality of contexts that redefine them in unpredictable ways’.”
  • p. 131: “…the postmodern exists in a problematic entanglement with a continuing modernity, the certainties and totalising gestures of which it attempts to disrupt from within.”
• The last word…(being ironic here)
  • p. 132: “What the different forms of postmodern art, culture and theory do seem to share, however, is the desire to disturb, to challenge and to disrupt the totalising gestures that continually threaten to consume us.”

We’ll pick up on the idea there’s no alternative to capitalism next week with Mark Fisher. Malpas notes, “For many postmodern theorists, capitalism marks the new globalised horizon of contemporary culture: there is no longer anywhere outside it where one can stand, no straightforward alternative to it that one can champion” (p. 107).

The Ruling Class and the Ruling Ideas

This is an often-used essay from Marx & Engels’s The German Ideology (1846 but not published until 1932). Here’s a copy online. The values of the ruling class make the dominant ideology of the era. Let’s see what they say:

• p. 39: “[30] The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the meas of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it.”
  • Friedrich Engels would later (1880) define a central tenet of Marxism related to the above passage:
    The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, III. Historical Materialism)
• pp. 39-40: “The division of labour, which we already saw above as one of the chief forces of history up till now, manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division of mental and [31] material labour, so that inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists, who make the formation of the illusions of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood), while the others’ attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive, because they are in reality the active members of this class and have less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves.”
  • Who makes up the illusions of class and, in general, culture today?
  • Did you know Hollywood is called the Dream Factory?
• p. 40: “[32]…the phenomenon that ever more abstract ideas hold sway, i.e. ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality….to present its interest as the common interest of all the members of society….it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and present them as the only rational, universally valid ones.”
• p. 41: “…the successive ruling ideas…managed by regarding them ‘as forms of self-determination of the concept…”
  • hegemony: influence of a dominant group, often could hegemons.
  • Consider this as those in power who have a sphere of influence over a society or region as opposed to a military force imposing their will. Historically, the United States is the hegemon of NATO.
• p. 42: “…our histotiography….takes every epoch at its word and believes that everything it says and imagines about itself is true.”

Marxist Theory (cultural analysis)

As I said before, the theories we’ll examine this week are not going to be exhaustive explorations. There are volumes upon volumes of analysis devoted to Marxism and Marxist Theory. Entire semesters could be devoted to its study. We will concern ourselves with a few broad factors or tenets of Marxism.

Charles E. Bressler offers the following as “core principles of Marxist thought” (p. 192):

• Reality itself can be defined and understood
• Society shapes our consciousness
• Social and economic conditions directly influence how and what we believe and value.
• Marxism details a plan for changing the world from a place of bigotry, hatred, and conflict because of class struggle to a classless society in which wealth, opportunity, and education are accessible for everyone.

…Of course, the above are the theories of marxism (just as capitalism has theories of salvation and prosperity). An ongoing philosophical question is “can we ever have a pure capitalist or marxist society, economy, government?”

The last point is important to focus on because American cultural bias against Marxism stems from issues about Marxism’s utopian perception. The following are often the immediate associations/responses to Marxism:

• Soviet Union (the Evil Empire): The Cold War enemy of America and the American way.
  • Communism was a Devil Term during the Cold War. Labeling something or (worse) someone “communist” was similar to the contemporary labeling of terrorist.
  • The Soviets under Stalin were seen as oppressive and anti-freedom. While Stalin’s atrocities are no secret and he was a communist, neither Stalin nor the Soviet Union (or other communist states for that matter) stand as the sole examples of the theoretical framework or cultural critique of Marxist Theory.
• Utopian economic system that cannot exist. People will not work harder unless they have incentives to do so.
• Massive government control and no private property/ownership…definitely a hard “sell” for capitalists and capitalist states.

Marxist Theory — Texts and Contexts are Social Constructions

As a literary theory, Marxism is a 20th-Century development influenced by the writings of the 19th-Century philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. At a basic level (again, we could go into more detail), Marxist analysis “focus[es] on the study of the relationship between a text and the society that reads it” (Bressler, p. 193). Another core Marxist principle is the idea of reality or consciousness: cultural analysis, our focus in this course, is intertwined with the idea that “[a] person’s consciousness is not shaped by any spiritual entity; through daily living and interacting with each other, humans define themselves” (Bressler, p. 193). Marx and Engels, products of newly industrialized/ing cultures, critique industrial society and theorize the following two tenets of industrial society: base and superstructure.

• Base: “the economic means of production within a society” (Bressler, p. 193); think capital, land, wealth, etc.
• Superstructure: the institutions and ideologies of a society that “develop as a direct result of the economic means of production, not the other way around” (Bressler, p. 193).

It’s important to understand the difficulty of critiquing a culture that one belongs to because there’s little chance for critical distance. We (humans in general) like to believe culture is absolute and not relative to the social conditions in which we interact or, in Marxist terms, the economic system in which we exist. For example, capitalism is pervasive in American culture and the “free” market is seen as the only appropriate way to organize or distribute resources. Therefore, the means of production and who owns those means influence the ways in which institutions form.

Questions for Class Conflict Discussion

Of course, Marxism points to the idea that the base of capitalism (or other structures) divides citizens into classes, and these classes, well, they clash. Marx and Engels show the following divisions: the bourgeoisie (capitalists) and the proletariat (workers). What gets confusing in this system is the concept of the middle class…didn’t Habermas portray the bourgeoisie as the middle class? Where does the middle class fit into Marxist theory?

The ruling class sets the culture’s ideology, and the working class stays in line because they assume that the system under which they live is the only appropriate system in which to live. What are some American ideologies related to this?

Other Marxist Theories (After Marx and Engels)

• Georg Lukacs, a prominent genre theorist, advocates “that a text directly reflects a society’s consciousness” (Bressler, p. 197).
  • What cultural work do the following genres do?
    Science Fiction, Romance, Detective Fiction, Mysteries, Self Help…
• Antonio Gramsci theorizes that the bourgeoisie, the ruling class, “establish and maintain what he calls hegemony, which is the assumptions, values, and meanings that shape meaning and define reality for the majority of people in a given culture” (Bressler, p. 198). This hegemonic relationship between the rulers and the ruled is “a kind of deception whereby the majority of people forget about or abandon their own interests and desires and accept the dominant values and beliefs as their own” (Bressler, p. 198).
  • For a contemporary analysis of Gramsci’s theory that the ruled allow themselves to be duped by the rulers, check out What’s the Matter with Kansas by Thomas Frank, who discusses why Kansans vote against their self interests. Frank does not invoke Gramsci in any way, but the analysis has a Gramsci-leaning aura.
• Pierre Macherey argues “what authors mean to say [in their writings] and what they actually write and say are different. The various meanings of their texts continuously escape writers because they themselves do not recognize the multiple ideologies at work in them and their text” (Bressler, p. 200).
• Joseph Schumpeter predicted a slow decline of capitalism as corporate interests (special interests) influenced government, and intellectuals (or elites) attempted to advocate for a working class from which they were disassociated. {The previous is a simplified paraphrasing of Schumpeter’s rich analysis of economics in the Western world.}
  • Curran, Fenton, and Freedman refer to his “Cycles and Long Wave Theory” in Ch. 1 of Misunderstanding the Internet (p. 3). More on this later in the semester.
• Raymond Williams is credited as a major contributor to what we today regard as cultural studies criticism, which is concerned with “the relationship between ideology and culture” (Bressler, p. 200).
• Terry Eagleton, more closely connected to the cultural studies lens through which we’re examining new media, “[b]eliv[es] that literature is neither a product of pure inspiration nor the product of the author’s feelings…literature is a product of an ideology that is itself a product of history” (Bressler, p. 201).
  • Any text–digital or print–is also a product of history and ideology.

What’s missing from the summaries above is the fact that those adhering to Marxism advocate revolution or changing the status quo structure that they claim has the capitalists rule and the workers oppressed. While using a Marxist lens does not necessarily mean one has to adhere to such an idea, it’s important to note that Marxist thought stems from the desire to make visible the conditions people find themselves in, and those conditions are not favorable to workers. The new media texts we examine are different from literary texts (to some extent), but they are still cultural products and reify the ideologies of the cultures from which they come.

Of course, technologies can be read just like texts.

• “Texts, like all elements of social life, cannot be analyzed in isolation because they do not exist as isolated entities; rather, they are part of a complex web of social forces and structures” (Bressler, p. 205).

Next Week

You have short, short book to read for Monday: Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? 2nd ed. We’ll also discuss Fisher’s “What Is Hauntology?” on Wednesday, 10/02. Don’t forget to do Weekly Discussion Post #6, which is due, Friday, 9/27, 11:00pm.

---

Terms for Discussion

Ideology: prevailing cultural/institutional attitudes, beliefs, norms, attributes, practices, and myths that are said to drive a society.

Hegemony: the ways or results of a dominant group’s (the hegemon) influence over other groups in a society or region. The dominant group dictates, consciously or unconsciously, how society must be structured and how other groups must “buy into” the structure. For example, the former Soviet Union was the hegemonic power influencing the communist countries of Eastern Europe during the Cold War.

Systemic: (adjective) pertaining to an entire system, institution, or object; something ‘systemic’ cannot be removed from the system.

Genre: literary or other textual products “with certain conventions and patterns that, through repetition, have become so familiar that [audiences] expect similar elements in the works of the same type” (Dick, p. 112).

---

Works Cited

Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. (4th ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2007.

Dick, Bernard F. Anatomy of Film. (5th ed.). Boston: Bedford, 2005.