Cultural Studies Vol 01-02 (1987-05)

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Advertisements: Enquiries to David Polley, Methuen & Co Ltd, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE. Subscription Rates (calendar year only): UK and the rest of the world: individuals £18.00; institutions £35.00; single copies £6.95. North America: individuals $35.00; institutions $55.00; single copies $14.00. All rates include postage; airmail rates on application. Subscriptions to: Subscrip tions Department, Methuen & Co Ltd, North Way, Andover, Hants, SP1O 5BE. Subscribing to Cultural Studies in the USA: payments in US dollars may be sent to Associated Book Publishers’ account in New York: Account No. 051–70 700–4 at Barclays Bank (New York) Ltd, 300 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022 ISSN 0950–2386 © Methuen & Co Ltd., 1987

ISBN 0-203-98969-4 Master e-book ISBN

CULTURAL STUDIES Volume 1 Number 2 May 1987

CULTURAL STUDIES is a new international journal, dedicated to the notion that the study of cultural processes, and especially of popular culture, is important, complex, and both theoretically and politically rewarding. It is published three times a year, with issues being edited in rotation from Australia, the UK and the USA, though occasional issues will be edited from elsewhere (e.g. one from Italy in 1988). Its international editorial collective consists of scholars representing the range of the most influential disciplinary and theoretical approaches to cultural studies. CULTURAL STUDIES will be in the vanguard of developments in the area worldwide, putting academics, researchers, students and practitioners in different countries and from diverse intellectual traditions in touch with each other and each other’s work. Its lively international dialogue will take the form not only of scholarly research and discourse, but also of new forms of writing, photo essays, cultural reviews and political interventions. CULTURAL STUDIES will publish articles on those practices, texts and cultural domains within which the various social groups that constitute a late capitalist society negotiate patterns of power and meaning. It will engage with the interplay between the personal and the political, between strategies of domination and resistance, between meaning systems and social systems. CULTURAL STUDIES will seek to develop and transform those perspectives which have traditionally informed the field—structuralism and semiotics, Marxism, psychoanalysis and feminism. Theories of discourse, of power, of pleasure and of the institutionalization of meaning are crucial to its enterprise; so too are those which stress the ethnography of culture. Contributions should be sent to either the General Editor or one of the Associate Editors. They should be in duplicate and should conform to the reference system set out in the Notes for Contributors. They may take the form of articles of about 5000 words, of kites (short, provocative or exploratory pieces) of about 2000 words, or of reviews of books, other cultural texts or events.

CONTENTS

In praise of the illiterate Hans Magnus Enzensberger The star and the commodity: notes towards a performance theory of stardom Barry King

3

11

The ‘canon’ and Marxist theories of literature Bridget Fowler

29

The Flapper, the Housewife and the making of modernity Martin Pumphrey

47

The Girl: a rhetoric of desire Ann K.Clark

63

Consumerism and its contradictions Mica Nava

73

Gender relations and young people Andrew H.Ward

81

Radiator girls: the opinions and experiences of working-class girls in an East London comprehensive Anne Krisman

89

Women, words and power: a study of the language of magic in southern Italy Barbara Littlewood

101

The room, the city, the garden Mo White

115

Drive in Birmingham Martin Culverwell

121

REVIEW The politics of race Angela McRobbie

125

ARTICLES

IN PRAISE OF THE ILLITERATE HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER

Ladies and gentlemen, I should like to link the thanks that I owe you with a question that is prompted by this festive occasion. The question is: whether you, the taxpayers and elected representatives of the City of Cologne, have given this honour to a threatened species, whether you have honoured an anachronism. From the morning papers of recent months, I gather that what is called ‘reading culture’ or ‘written culture’ is threatened with extinction everywhere on the planet. As someone who lives from writing, and therefore from reading, this frightening news cannot leave me indifferent. But you too, as citizens of a city which is not only the home of Heinrich Böll but also of the WDR,1 the largest media establishment on the European mainland, will perhaps be concerned about such a prediction. If I am not mistaken, then a personal interest coincides here with a public one, a local with a universal interest. Are written words superfluous? That is the question. Anyone who raises it must talk about illiteracy. Only there’s a slight catch. The illiterate are never on the spot when discussion turns to them. They simply do not turn up, they take no notice of our arguments, they remain silent. For that reason, I should like to undertake their defence, even if they have by no means entrusted me with it. Every third inhabitant of our planet gets by without the arts of reading and writing. Approximately 850 million people find themselves in this position, and their numbers will almost certainly increase. That is a very impressive figure, but a misleading one, since the human race includes not only the living and the unborn but also the dead. Anyone who does not forget them must come to the conclusion that illiteracy is not the exception but the rule. It could only occur to us—that is, a tiny minority of people who read and write—to consider people who are not in the habit of doing so to be a tiny minority. This belief displays an ignorance which I do not find acceptable. However, when I think about it, those who are illiterate now appear to me to be admirable people. I envy them for their memory, their ability to concentrate,

This is a speech made on the occasion of the award of the Heinrich Böll Prize of the City of Cologne to Hans Magnus Enzensberger in 1985. The translation is by Martin Chalmers.

4 CULTURAL STUDIES

their cunning, their inventiveness, their tenacity and their accurate ear. Please do not accuse me of dreaming about the noble savage. I am not talking about a romantic phantom but about people I have met. I have no intention of idealizing them. I can also see the narrowness of their horizons, their illusions, their stubbornness, their eccentricity. You will perhaps wonder why a writer, of all people, is taking up the cause of those who cannot read. But the answer is quite obvious: it was the illiterate who invented literature. Its elementary forms, from the myth to the nursery rhyme, from the fairy-tale to the song, from the prayer to the riddle, are all older than writing. Without oral transmission there would be no poetry and without the illiterate no books. But the Enlightenment, you will object…Agreed!…The oppressiveness of a tradition which excluded the poor from all progress! You don’t need to tell me that social misfortune is based not only on the material but also on the immaterial privileges of the rulers. It was the great intellectuals of the eighteenth century who uncovered this state of affairs. They believed that the immaturity of the people was due not only to its political suppression and its economic exploitation but also to its ignorance. Later generations have drawn the conclusion from these premises that the ability to read and write is an essential part of a dignified human existence. In the course of time, however, this influential idea was subject to a series of noteworthy reinterpretations. Almost in the twinkling of an eye, the concept of Enlightenment was replaced by that of education. According to Ignaz Heinrich von Wessenberg, a German pedagogue of the Napoleonic period, ‘The second half of the eighteenth century began a new epoch in the education of the people. The knowledge of that which was accomplished gratifies the humanitarian, animates the priest of culture and is most instructive for the leaders of the community.’ Not all contemporaries agreed with him. Another educator of the people, Johann Rudolph Gottlieb Beyer, wrote of the reading of books, ‘Even if tumult and revolution do not always result, it nevertheless produces the dissatisfied and the malcontent who look suspiciously on legislative and executive authority, and do not abide by the constitution of their country.’ That sounds familiar. Fear of the Enlightenment has outlasted the Enlightenment itself. It survives not only in the dictatorships of the twentieth century but also in West German democracy. You can always find some parliamentary or government numskull who would like, best of all, to suspend the constitution in order to protect it from the pernicious effect of certain printed works. But conservative cultural criticism has learned few new tricks during the past two centuries. It never stops pointing the finger. ‘Why,’ Johann Georg Heinzmann was already asking in Goethe’s time, ‘why should the corrupted species of humanity which eternally wants to be diverted, eternally flattered, eternally deceived, be printed and written for before the rest?’ ‘The consequences of such tasteless and thoughtless reading are…foolish

IN PRAISE OF THE ILLITERATE 5

extravagance, insuperable aversion to every exertion, boundless proclivity to luxury, curbing of the voice of conscience, weariness of life and an early death,’ complains Johann Adam Bergk in his pamphlet ‘The Art of Reading Books’. I quote from these long-forgotten works because their arguments have remained to haunt us up to the present day. Anyone listening to our panel discussions must gain the impression that in the course of two hundred years virtually no new argument has occurred to us. Nevertheless, as far as the project of literacy itself is concerned, we have made great progress. Here, so it seems, the philanthropists, the priests of culture and the leaders of the community have achieved decisive successes. Who would want to contradict Joseph Meyer, one of the most industrious publishers of the nineteenth century, who invented the slogan ‘Education makes free!’ The Social Democratic Party elevated this slogan to a political demand. Knowledge is power! Culture for all! Up until the present day it fights indefatigably against educational privilege and for equality of opportunity. Since Bebel and Bismarck, one piece of good news has followed another. In Germany, the illiteracy rate had dropped below 1 per cent by 1880. In some other European countries it took a little longer. But the rest of the world has also made enormous advances since Unesco took up the cause of the struggle against illiteracy in 1951. In short, light has conquered darkness. Our joy at this triumph remains within bounds. The news is too good to be true. The people did not learn to read and write because they wanted to but because they were forced to. Their emancipation was, at the same time, a loss of voice. From now on, learning was subject to the control of the state and its agencies, the school, the army and the law. In 1811, when the children of Ravensburg2 took their places for a prizegiving, they could already sing a song about it: Hard work and obedience are the duties, Which sincerely to discharge Good citizens do endeavour: But to live according to duty, Only schools imprint Deep into the heart of youth. That we dedicate ourselves to virtue, And rejoice in so much knowledge, Thank we the school alone; Let us be forever grateful. Hail the King, Hail the State In which there are good schools!3 Making the population literate had nothing to do with Enlightenment. The philanthropists and priests of culture who championed it were only the

6 CULTURAL STUDIES

accomplices of a capitalist industry which demanded of the state that it make skilled labourers available to it. The good, the true and the beautiful, which the patriarchal Biedermeier publishers talked about, and which their descendants still like to quote today, was never the issue. It was never a question of breaking a path for ‘written culture’, still less of freeing people to speak for themselves. Quite another kind of progress was at stake. It consisted of taming the illiterate, this ‘lowest class of people’, driving out their imagination and their stubbornness, and from this time on exploiting not only their muscle power and their manual skills but their brains as well. However, before the illiterate can be got rid of, they must, first of all, be defined, located and exposed. The concept of illiteracy is not old. Its invention can be dated fairly precisely. The word appears for the first time in an English publication of 1876, and then spreads rapidly over the whole of Europe. At the same time, Edison invented the light bulb and the phonograph, Siemens the electric locomotive, Linde the refrigerating machine, Bell the telephone and Otto the petrol engine. The relationship is obvious. Moreover, the triumph of popular education in Europe coincided with the maximum expansion of colonialism. That too is not chance. In the encyclopedias of the period, one can look up the assertion that the number of the illiterate ‘compared with the total population of a country is indicative of the cultural state of a nation’. ‘It is lowest in the Slavic countries and among the Blacks of the United States…. On the highest rung stand the…Germanic countries, the Whites of the United States and the Finnish race.’ And the information that ‘men…on average’ stand ‘higher than women’ is not allowed to go unmentioned.4 Here it is not just a question of statistics, but of classifying and stigmatizing. It is already possible to discern the figure of the subhuman behind that of the illiterate. A small, radical minority has taken out an exclusive lease on civilization and is discriminating against all who don’t dance to its tune. The minority can be precisely defined. Men rule over women, whites over blacks, rich over poor, the living over the dead. What the Wilhelmine ‘leaders of the community’ did not suspect became clear to their grandchildren. Enlightenment can end in rabble-rousing, civilization turn into barbarism. You will ask yourselves why I am addressing you on problems that are now only of historical interest. Well, this prehistory has meanwhile caught up with us. The revenge of the excluded is not without a certain black irony. The illiteracy which we smoked out has, as you all know, returned, but in a form to which nothing admirable adheres any more. This figure, which has dominated the stage of society for some time, is the secondary illiterate. Secondary illiterates are lucky; their loss of memory causes them no suffering; if they do not have a mind of their own, then that relieves the pressure on them; they value their inability to concentrate on anything; they consider it an advantage that they do not know and do not understand what is happening to them. They are active. They are adaptable. They display considerable determination in getting their own way. So we do not need to worry about them.

IN PRAISE OF THE ILLITERATE 7

The fact that secondary illiterates have no idea that they are secondary illiterates contributes to their wellbeing. They consider themselves to be well informed, can decode instructions, pictograms and cheques, and move in a world which seals them off from every challenge to their confidence. It is unthinkable that they should be obstructed by their environment. It, after all, gave birth to them and formed them in order to guarantee its own trouble-free survival. The secondary illiterate is the product of a new phase of industrialization. An economy whose problem is no longer production, but selling, no longer needs a disciplined reserve army. It requires skilled consumers. As the classic production and office worker becomes superfluous, so does the rigid training to which they were subjected, and literacy becomes a fetter which must be cast off as quickly as possible. However, our technology has simultaneously developed the appropriate solution to this problem. The ideal medium for the secondary illiterate is television. Most theories which have been formulated about this phenomenon are probably wrong. I know what I’m talking about, for less than twenty years ago I attributed great emancipatory possibilities to the electronic media. Such a hope, even if it was unfounded, at least had the advantage of audacity. One cannot say the same of the reflections of the American sociologist Neil Postman which are much discussed at the moment: If a nation allows itself to be distracted by trivialities, if cultural life is reconstituted as an endless succession of entertainment shows, as a gigantic amusement business, if public discourse becomes indiscriminate babble, in short, if citizens become spectators and their public affairs are reduced to vaudeville numbers, then the nation is in danger—the extinction of culture becomes a real threat. Only the terminology has changed; otherwise the arguments of the American in 1985 are identical to those of the Swiss who in 1795 issued an ‘Appeal to his Nation’ in order to warn it against the impending collapse of culture. Of course, Postman’s central argument is correct: television is shit with gravy. It’s only curious that he appears to see this as an objection. Television owes its charm, its irresistibility, its success, precisely to its imbecility. Another quirk which can be observed in the apologists of reading culture is even stranger. The means by which the imbecility is produced seems to be all-important to them: if it appears printed black on white, then it’s obviously a cultural treasure; if it’s disseminated via antennae or cable, then ‘the nation is in danger’. Well, those who take cultural criticism at face value have only themselves to blame. I, at any rate, find it difficult to believe a Cassandra whose croaking warnings serve to defend her own turnover, and even more so if she is recklessly grabbing at new markets. Let us not forget that it was a printed product, the prophetic Bild Zeitung,5 which proved that it is possible to sell the abolition of reading as reading, and to manufacture a print medium for secondary illiterates. And of

8 CULTURAL STUDIES

course it is the publishers who are scrambling to hook up the nation by cable and swinging their satellite beams, in order to blanket the continent with television channels from which every trace of programming has been erased. And today, just as a hundred years ago, when it was a question of making the population literate, they can rely on the support of the state when that policy is to be reversed. The project of a compulsory cable hook-up corresponds exactly to the ‘compulsory education’ to which the laws of those days referred. It is most appropriate that industry has as its negotiating partner a minister6 who perfectly embodies all the characteristics of the secondary illiterate. Public education policy will also have to adapt to the new priorities. A first step has already been taken with the cutting of library budgets. Reforms have also been carried out in the schools. As is well known, today it is possible to go to school for eight years without learning German, and at the universities too this Germanic dialect is gradually becoming an only imperfectly mastered foreign language. You must not think that I am interested in polemicizing against a situation whose inevitability is obvious to me; I merely wish to describe it and, as far as I can, explain it. To challenge secondary illiterates’ raison d’être would be foolish, and far be it from me to begrudge them their place in the sun and their amusements. On the other hand, it is presumably possible to point out that the historic project of the Enlightenment has failed. In retrospect, the slogan ‘Culture for all’ appears quite laughable. Still less is a classless culture in sight. On the contrary, one can foresee a situation in which there are ever more sharply distinguished cultural milieux, which no longer share any common public. I would even like to risk the assertion that the population will break up into increasingly distinct cultural castes. (I use this term descriptively, of course, without any systematic claim.) These castes can no longer be described with the help of the traditional Marxist model, according to which the ruling culture is the culture of the ruling class. Economic class location and consciousness are drawing further and further apart. It will usually be the case that secondary illiterates occupy the top positions in politics and business. In this connection it is enough to refer to the current President of the United States and the current Federal Chancellor of West Germany. On the other hand, in this country, just as in the United States, one can find, without any effort, whole crowds of taxi-drivers, casual labourers, newspaper sellers and social security recipients who with their thoughtful awareness of problems, their cultural standards and their wide knowledge would have gone far in every other society. But even this contrast misses the real point—that any unambiguous attributions are no longer possible; because it is also possible to meet zombies among unemployed teachers, and also to meet people in the Office of the Federal President who can not only read and write but even think productively. But that also means that in questions of culture social determinism has had its day. So-called educational privilege has lost its terrors.

IN PRAISE OF THE ILLITERATE 9

If both parents are secondary illiterates, then the VIP’s child no longer has any cultural advantages over the worker’s son. In future, the cultural caste one belongs to will depend more on one’s personal choice than on one’s origins. I conclude from all this that culture in our country finds itself in a completely new situation. The claim to universal applicability, which it always raised but never met, can be forgotten. The rulers, the majority of them secondary illiterates, have lost all interest in it. The consequence is that it no longer has to serve and no longer can serve any ruling interest. Culture does not legitimate anything any more. It is outlawed; but that nevertheless is a kind of freedom too. Such a culture must rely on its own resources, and the sooner it understands that the better. Ah yes—the question of whether you have honoured an anachronism—we had almost forgotten that. As far as literature is concerned, I believe it is less affected by the changes I have sketched out than it might appear. In reality, it was always a minority affair. The number of those that have been devoted to it has probably remained constant in the course of the last two centuries. Only their make-up has changed. It is no longer a mark of class privilege but also no longer a compulsory badge of class to take an interest in it. The victory of secondary illiteracy can only radicalize literature. It produces a situation in which reading will be purely voluntary. Once it has stopped counting as a status symbol, as a social code, as an educational programme, then only those who can’t keep away from it will still become acquainted with literature. Those who wish to do so may deplore it. I have no desire to do so. Weeds are a minority too, after all, and every gardener knows how difficult it is to exterminate them. Literature will keep on proliferating, as long as it retains a degree of tenacity, a degree of cunning, the ability to concentrate, a degree of obstinacy and a good memory. You will remember that these are the very attributes of true illiterates. Perhaps they will have the last word. For they need no other medium than voice and ear. Hans Magnus Enzensberger is a poet and writer living in West Germany. Notes 1 Westdeutscher Rundfunk, a radio and television network based in Cologne. 2 In Württemberg, in southern Germany. 3 ‘Fleiss, Gehorsam sind die Pflichten, Welche redlich zu entrichten Gute Bürger sich bestreben: Aber so nach Pflicht zu leben, Prägen Schulen nur allein In das Herz der Jugend ein.

Dass wir uns der Tugend weih’n, Und so mancher Kenntnis freu’n,

10 CULTURAL STUDIES

Danken wir der Schul’ allein; Lasst uns ewig dankbar seyn. Heil dem König, Heil dem Staat, Wo man gute Schulen hat!’ 4 Meyers Grosses Konversationslexicon (1894; Brockhaus, 1905). 5 Cf. Murdoch’s Sun in Britain. 6 Christian Schwarz-Schilling, West German Federal Postal Minister.

THE STAR AND THE COMMODITY: NOTES TOWARDS A PERFORMANCE THEORY OF STARDOM BARRY KING

My purpose in what follows is to set the limits of a Marxist account of the star system in the popular cinema, which, in the West at least, is more or less coterminous with Hollywood. I take it that such an account must pay attention to the particularities of performance as a labour process, and the relations of production in which such a process occurs. This materialist thesis of the primacy of production relations over symbolic relations should not in itself be read as a denial of the particular effectivity of the symbolic, but I shall be unable to pursue such matters conclusively here. Evidently any consideration of the commodity form and the metabolism of exchange will be struck by the parallels between this process and signification proper. The work of Jean Baudrillard is a play on such parallelisms, which claims to show that the point of reference in the labour theory of value—use value—is in itself a social form, a signifier in the chain of signifiers imposed by bourgeois economy.1 The extent to which this reading of Marx is valid is a question that cannot be addressed here.2 Yet one can take consolation in the fact that the account offered limits itself very clearly to the terrain of political economy. If from the perspective of Baudrillard this constitutes a delineation of the ‘terroristic’ imposition of the illusion of reference on the ‘play’ of signifiers, this is precisely the spirit that animates the account here. Understanding the stars If the ever-proliferating literature on stardom and celebrity can be symptomatized by a single characteristic, it would be that writers on stardom are seemingly obsessed with matters of signification—in the narrow Saussurian sense of the relationship between the sign and its referent—to the detriment of representation.3 It is usual for those who wish to explain the‘meaning’ of stardom to catalogue the presence of existential themes in its discourses. Such an operation, which takes as its point of reference the sphere of consumption, is usually combined with a thoroughgoing populism, whereby allusions to the problems of everyday life, especially adolescent everyday life, are seen as the credentials of the star as a popular hero. Such a form of analysis, while not necessarily invalid, nevertheless tends to preclude a consideration of how the

12 CULTURAL STUDIES

discourses of stardom are constructed and activated in the first place. This emphasis, which is by no means the sole property of journalists, belletrists and vox-populizers but shows up in ‘serious’ writing, can be evidenced by a few citations. Marianne Sinclair, in her introduction to Those Who Died Young: Cult Heroes of the Twentieth Century, argues that for teenagers of her generation Montgomery Clift, James Dean and Marlon Brando were ‘living symbols of our rebellion, our scepticism, our yearning’. Such a profound indexicality—ever threatened, one takes it, by its implication in the specificities of time and place— finds its apotheosis when the bearer of meaning meets with an early death. ‘No star or entertainer, however popular and famous, can really be considered a “myth” if he lives to a ripe old age and dies at ninety. Basically, these terms are reserved for stars who die young and tragically.’4 Make what one will of these claims overall, it is nevertheless clearly the case that physical decease becomes a kind of excuse for installing signality into the discourse of stardom—endowing the luckless victims with the resonances of common fate—and, more important, installing the biography of the star as the basic axiom of the social relationship between star and fan.5 Such a formulation encapsulates one of the paradoxes of the populist view of stardom: sooner or later, the star as ‘reflex’ of audience needs becomes the archetype or the matrix of such needs. Such an exorbitation is doubtless forced upon those who wish to account for the ‘meaning’ of the star’s popularity by the presumption that this meaning must reside in the star’s ‘personality’. For such a narrow point of reference to cohere at all requires a powerful suppression of semiosis, the difficulty of which is only demonstrated when one asks for an exact definition of the meaning of, for example, Marilyn Monroe. Physical termination writes out at least the prospect of change from the side of the bearer of the image, but a more comprehensive resolution is to be found in postulating that the star embodies some deep-seated—i.e. transhistorical—human essence. Thus, for example, Pete Townshend, combining the insider’s authority with a few homely psychoanalyticisms, observes: Put more celestially, when we pursue perfection, in ourselves or in others, we are searching for God. A perfect father or mother, brother or sister, son or daughter—all are dreamed of in the demand for a psychotherapeutic placebo, often embodied in the image of a chosen star.6 But, as pointed out, such formulations are not exclusive to popular writers. For instance, Edgar Morin, arguably the first analyst to provide a systematic account of stardom, writes when dealing specifically with the ‘star and us’: The star is indeed a myth: not only a daydream but an idea-force. The characteristic of myth is to insert itself or incarnate itself somehow within life. If the myth of the stars incarnates itself so astonishingly within reality,

THE STAR AND THE COMMODITY 13

it is because myth is produced by that reality, i.e. the human history of the twentieth century. But it is also because the human reality nourishes itself on the imaginary to the point of being semi-imaginary itself.7 Evidently no one with the kind of sociological sensibility that Morin exhibits elsewhere in the same text—‘James Dean has invented nothing: he has canonized and codified an ensemble of sumptuary laws which allows age class to assert itself’—is likely fully to endorse the vision of personal transcendence that is found in popular accounts. But, even so, such a formulation, with all its reifying grandeur, is not too far removed from the foregoing in counterposing the concrete particularity of the star to an entire social formation. In recent times, as most readers will be aware, the main opportunity to explore the phenomenon of stardom has fallen to Richard Dyer. In Stars, Dyer is mainly concerned to detail the range of approaches to stardom and to set the limits of the field, but he does indicate clearly enough what his own position—to be laid out in greater length in a forthcoming book—would be.8 For Dyer, the ‘symbolic’ power of the star—charisma—rests on the fact that his or her persona constitutes a condensation (in the Freudian sense of an unstable combination of contradictory themes or images) of the conflict between everyday experience and the normative protocols of the dominant ideology. Dyer’s view of stardom amounts to a role-conflict theory, with certain categories of audience member— such as adolescents, blacks, women and gays—seen as particularly responsive to the contradictory play of meaning and identity implicit in the imagery of stars. Such responsiveness, Dyer argues, is based on the fact of exclusion—or, at least, the fact that inclusion is only at the cost of self-effacement—‘from the dominant articulacy…of adult, male, heterosexual culture’.9 The infirmities of personal identity in relation to the ‘official’ norms are by no means the exclusive property of the groups or categories identified, Dyer argues. These may experience such infirmities more intensely—hence their apparent ‘proneness’ to star-worship— but, overall, stardom serves to dramatize a central crisis in ‘bourgeois society’: the presence of widespread ‘uncertainty and anxiety concerning the definition of what a person is’.10 Even if one takes at face value the notion that bourgeois society ever posited a coherent definition of a person, there are a number of problems with Dyer’s arguments. It is not at all clear how the ‘subcultural’ account of stardom fits in with his general theory of the star as ‘charismatically’ embodying the general crisis of the personal. At the very least, the latter position suggests that the ‘dominant articulacy of adult, male, heterosexual culture’ is less solid and pervasive than the subcultural phase of his theory implies. Nor is it entirely clear that these two themes can be synthesized: if the official norms of valid human agency are truly problematic, then it is difficult to see why subcultural groups especially suffer a trial of identity in relation to it as opposed to those who have embraced (or were socialized into the text of) such a definition. The answer that Dyer would give, no doubt, is that subordinate groups experience such

14 CULTURAL STUDIES

contradictions as more oppressive. In view of the preponderant weight of institutional discrimination against women, blacks and gays, for example, there is a sense in which this is true. It is another matter to assume that there is a continuous problematic (not to mention a continuity of problem) of the personal between black and white, straight and gay, masculine and feminine experience. There is little doubt that Dyer would not radically disagree with this kind of qualification, but the substantial point remains: how is it possible, if one situates the meaning of stardom at the level of the content of audience response, to offer a general theory of stardom? There are relatively few accounts of what kinds of interpretation various sub-groups place upon stars. Consequently, such a procedure must infer meaning from the general social conditions of such groups, and this is Dyer’s procedure. The problem with this approach is that the specification of the star’s persona becomes subject to overload and a dissemination of meaning.11 Thus Jane Fonda’s charisma ‘can be accounted for not only in the reconciliation of radicalism and feminism with Americanness and ordinariness but also her ability to suggest (as a tomboy) redefinitions of sexuality while at the same time overtly reasserting heterosexuality’.12 This drift towards tautology—the star means nothing because she means everything—in my view results from the failure to define stardom as a form of agency deriving from the site of production. Thus, for example, Dyer details at some length some of the constitutive ingredients of a given star’s performance, but these elements are treated overall as channels for the realization of persona. At no point are the specificities of the social relations of production in which performances occur and personae are represented subject to scrutiny. At the most general level, such a result derives from the emphasis on consumption in Dyer’s analysis—an emphasis which willy-nilly mirrors the governing imperatives of the capitalist media anyway: that the moment of consumption (realization of value) has ontological priority over the moment of production. More immediately, the failure to address the full materiality of performance as a determinant of stardom, while in itself an evidential weakness— stars are performers (of some kind, at some level of competence) before they are public ‘symbols’—has a more serious consequence. It tends to erode the valuable contrast between subcultural readings of the star and the fact that there appears to be a residue of meaning that is never finally exhausted by such meanings. Such a residue points towards the need for a theorization of the impact of stardom at a level beyond wants and needs as content—a conception of the form of agency that stardom inscribes in re-presenting contents. It is because of Dyer’s failure to theorize the latter that his notion of the role of the stars in defining the personal is left in a state of unfocused generality. In what follows I want to preserve the contrast between the star as indicating something about the general form of social agency under capitalist social relations and the sphere of contents—essentially a sphere of experience in search of collectivizing embodiments.13 This stems from the need to recognize that identification with stars often takes the form of an identification with a specific

THE STAR AND THE COMMODITY 15

form of agency—with the star per se rather than with the narrative functions (characters) he or she re-presents. But, more specifically, I believe that there is a need to connect the form of the star more decisively with the capitalist relationships within which the star is ‘born’ and which he or she, by being born, sustains. A commodity among commodities It is a truism of the literature that the star system, whether in film, stage or the music business, develops out of and sustains capitalist relations of production and consumption. Not only is it possible to point to the fact that the star is central to the raising of finance, as the least problematic advance guarantee of a certain level of audience interest. It is also relatively easy to detail the various ways in which stars stabilize the process of representation itself by focusing a disparate range of specialisms and narrational inputs around a relatively fixed nucleus of meaning, which is given in advance of any specific instance of narration or, for that matter, context of production. Likewise the mobilization of publicity and advertising around the moment of consumption of film itself—not to mention the consumption of derived commodities such as fan magazines, fashions and consumer goods—relies on the star as the cybernetic monitor which returns all efforts to the same apparent core of meaning. Again, it is not difficult to cite instances of the efficacy of the star’s persona as a means towards the accumulation of capital on the part of actors, who emerge from a labour market marked by chronic unemployment and underemployment to become in effect the proprietors of their own image—for example, Clint Eastwood. Such a set of processes, not without its moments of breakdown and contradiction, can be held to constitute the star system. The further delineation of this system is not my concern here.14 Rather, I want to approach a more cellular aspect of this system: the formation of the performance commodity. As a matter of fact, it is far from unusual for commentators on stardom to refer to the star as a commodity, but this usage invariably has a metaphorical rather than a substantive reference—indicating, at best, that aspects of the star’s personality, or more exactly part of the star’s anatomy read as indices of his or her personality, enter into the process of exchange. Such a reference, while partially justified by the fact that stars have a key role in imparting significance to material objects, such as vinyl, tapes and video/film formats, nevertheless fails to distinguish clearly enough between things as commodities and labour power as a commodity. To make this clear it is necessary to enter into a brief exposition of value concepts as defined by Marx. It will be recalled that Marx defined the commodity as the ‘simplest social form in which the labour product is represented in…[capitalist] societ’.15 A commodity proves on analysis to be the articulation of three determinants:

16 CULTURAL STUDIES

1 Use values—which indicate in general the material content of wealth, regardless of the form that wealth takes, and, specifically, the physical property or quality of a thing, usually a product of human labour, as useful in relation to human needs. Only under specific circumstances, when the production of use values is oriented towards the needs of others, rather than the needs of the direct producers, do use values assume a commodity form. 2 Value—the general substance underlying the metabolism of the production and exchange of commodities which determines the possibility of the relationship of equivalence or comparability between one commodity and another, despite the presence of profound differences in the concrete qualities of the commodities as use values. Such a substance is identified in the first instance as labour, and its magnitude is shown to be the function of an abstraction from the particularities of any concrete act of labour. Accordingly, the measure of value is revealed to be the socially necessary labour time required to produce the commodity, as an average expression of the relation between the actual duration of a given act of labour and the conditions of production overall. 3 Exchange value—the phenomenal form that value assumes under capitalist relations of production. A commodity manifests its value only in relation to other commodities—that is, in so far as its value is equivalent to the use value of some other commodity which in expanded commodity exchange is part of an entire string of equivalences. The operation of such a string of equivalences in the metabolism of exchange, in which each commodity shrugs off its particularity (its qualities as a use value), is the process that demonstrates that there is some underlying substance—value—that renders all commodities equatable as quantities despite their sensuous concrete qualities. Ultimately the extension of the process of exchange renders value in the form of a universal equivalent—a substance which by social convention is excluded from the chain of equivalences and appears instead as the natural form in which the value of all other commodities is expressed, in short as money. With the derivation of the money form, the manifestation of value as exchange value is complete.16 The analysis of the development of the commodity form, which in the immediate context of the analysis of capitalist relations has two aspects—use value and exchange value—in fact already contains the outline of the social relationships governing labour power as a commodity among commodities. In the first place, under such a system all products of human labour enter the process of exchange (and hence become commodities) only in so far as they lose their distinctive concrete particularity as things or processes and become exchange values, i.e. undifferentiated quanta of human labour. In other words, the character of commodities as use values is made socially visible only in so far as they take on exchange value or assume in immediate terms a market price. For such a relationship to pertain, it follows that labour activities in general have assumed an immediate, private character. Not only are the direct producers divorced from the direct consumers, so that use values cease to regulate the general (as opposed to, say, the household) economy, but the social usefulness of

THE STAR AND THE COMMODITY 17

any concrete labour activity cannot be known in advance of the relation of exchange, wherein it only finds a reductive expression as an abstraction—a quantity of universal equivalent or money. The wage form constitutes from the side of consumption an expression of the same process whereby the use value of labour power as a commodity ‘finds’ expression, if at all, only as exchange value (the wage).17 The representational outcome of these processes is addressed by Marx in terms of the notion of commodity fetishism, which indicates the process whereby the social characteristics of human labour appear as the derivatives of the properties (some conventional, some material) of the products of labour. This is then characterized as producing a general framework of thought in which ‘the definite social relations between men…assumes…the fantastic form of a relation between things’. 18 Such a process of reification not only encompasses the world of things and objects—its objective aspect—but, reaching into the consciousness of agents, leads them to perceive themselves as parcelled out between units of socially significant activity (labour power as a commodity) and the comprehensive particularity of their own being (personality) which appears as having only a private significance. Personality becomes in the metabolism of exchange, and at the point of production, a thing to be suppressed or reductively functionalized (i.e. the charm of the salesman or the politeness of the shop assistant) in the sale of labour power.19 Finally, it is necessary to stress that fetishism is not based on a process of simple misrecognition or error but is a representational formation derived from the immediately given (empirical) surface of capitalist relations.20 It appears, in short, to be the ‘natural’ state of capitalist social relations. The key point I wish to draw from this synopsis is that the deployment of value concepts allows the identification of the manner in which labour power in general is represented under capitalism.21 As will be apparent, not all forms of labour power are subject to this process of reduction to the same extent, but I would stand by the assertion that it is the tendential centre of their ‘treatment’ under extended commodity production.22 Generally speaking, one might say that the social as opposed to the private destiny of the bearers of labour power under capitalism is to enter the process of exchange—find employment—and encounter a denial of their particularity. Such a denial is the individual expression, filtered through factors of race, class, gender, age and skill, of the twin reduction of private labour to general labour and concrete labour to abstract labour. With these markers of the anthropology of work under capitalism in place, I can now approach the question of the formation of the performance commodity as a process subtended in this general representational space.

18 CULTURAL STUDIES

The performance commodity At first sight, the star seems to constitute an exception to the process of fetishism. Contrary to the proposition that the representation of labour under capitalism is reduced to a state of depersonalized objectivity, the star stands as the resplendent, full centre of a personalized teleology, a place where the distinction between role and person is meaningless. Thus the very presence of the star within the heartland of cultural capitalism can be seen as a refutation of the pervasiveness of commodity fetishism. It is relatively easy to cite counter-instances which undermine this appearance of autonomy, which is the stuff of insider journalism.23 But these accounts will not explain the persistence, the eternal recurrence of a notion of a realm of freedom centred on stardom and, by extension, celebrity. If one is to remain faithful to the premises of commodity fetishism, it follows that one cannot dismiss this example of counter-fetishism as a mere illusion. On the contrary, it must be regarded as a reality at the level of appearance which provides the concrete material of the operations of advertising and promotion, not to mention its material effects at the point of sale. At a first approximation, let us note that Marx in fact holds two apparently opposing views on the representational effects of commodity production: fetishism and personification, which is the reverse process whereby individuals become the embodiments of social relations. But the contrast between fetishism and personification is not a fundamental difficulty because on Marx’s account the latter, personification, arises only where individuals have a place in the social division of labour as owners or managers of the reified moments of capitalist production—capital and land—and, in the case of trade-union leaders, as monopolists of labour power.24 The ‘thing-like’ facticity of capitalist productive relations is in fact the precondition for those placed in positions of agency to invest such positions with an ‘aura’ of personality—always bearing in mind that such an aura has its objective limits set by the subjectivity inscribed in the role. At first sight, such a process might be held to account for the phenomenon of stardom. Stars, after all, especially in contemporary times, have functioned as capitalists, setting up production companies and profiting from the sale of their own personae. As such they function as the ‘happy inheritors’ of the fruits of the collective labour power mobilized around the capital deployed in film production, much the same as managers in industry. One problem with this assimilation is that, certainly in the past and even today, many stars still retain an employee status, selling their services on a ‘freelance’ basis to production companies within or contractually linked to the major producers. More decisively, perhaps, it is still the case that, where a star is an owner of a production company, the rationale of such ownership, or indeed the basic reason why the star is in such a position in the first place, rests on his or her role in the actual process of production. Clint Eastwood is both the proprietor of his persona and the seller of the services that this persona represents. Whereas, in the former

THE STAR AND THE COMMODITY 19

capacity, he and his fellow investors in Malpaso Productions might wish to maximize short-term returns by flooding the market with Dirty Harry clones, as a star, Eastwood the actor is concerned with preserving the long-term flexibility of the services he offers: in short, in avoiding overexposure. Such considerations suggest caution in seeing the star as a personification of capitalist agency. In the first place, the sustenance of the role of the star depends on the endorsement, however mediated, of mass opinion. This reliance, with its associated populisms, means that the general image of stardom is as a ‘powerless élite’—a cadre of prominent personalities whose effectivity is based on a necessary severance from the power structure.25 This severance of the ‘expressive’ and the ‘instrumental’ may be more conventional than real, but the presence of such a constraint, even if exceeded, is not in doubt. Ronald Reagan may use actorly skills as President, but he cannot carry the instrumental burden of that office and admit that he uses them. But of more immediate concern than a need to court mass opinion is the fact that the star is, in real terms, ambiguously located between capital and labour. As a freelance employee active in a casual labour market reminiscent of manual trades, the star maintains his or her position less through the exercise of aboveaverage skills than through a personal monopoly over his or her persona. It is from this position, I suggest, that the star can offer not a metaphor but a metonymy for labour power in general. To understand this requires a consideration of the performance commodity. Cultural commodities in general can be distinguished from highly functionalized commodities by the stress on prototypicality and uniqueness that marks even their mass production. Obviously even highly functionalized commodities are culturally determined, but these do not occupy a specific place in the division of labour where uniqueness and ‘creativity’ are prioritized or, obversely, serve a market where use values are more generalized, rather than truncated within the confines of strict functionality. Cultural commodities have three broad forms: as unique objects, as reproducible objects and as non-material performances. The key feature of performance as a labour process is its potential for a high level of diversity, since as an unmediated event it does not materialize into a commodity with a delimited content or form before reception. As is well known, transcription technologies operate to stabilize performance and render it as a material object, freed from the time and place of the original event. But, before I consider the effects of the latter further, it is worth identifying what features of performance carry through from its basis in live events. One of the features of performance is that the distinction between the process of labour and the product of labour is hard to make—and this is so even when the event is transcribed. Strictly speaking, a performance is a labour process, exhibited for consumption regardless of whether the performers have a direct or mediated relationship with the audience. Another way to put this is to say that performance is not the production of a product but a service; and even then not a specific act of service as given by, say, a hairdresser, but a flow of services built around various

20 CULTURAL STUDIES

values—spectacle, pleasure in physical and vocal mastery, social involvement, identification, communication of meaning, aesthetic and emotional patterns of affect, and so on.26 Obversely, when productive activities which do result in definite material products are ‘aestheticized’ (e.g. basket-weaving and pottery), the labour process itself becomes as great if not a greater source of use values (delight in the craft process, etc.). Such factors indicate that in the case of performance the reduction of concrete acts of labour to abstract general labour cannot have the same progressive effect as labour processes (whether skilled or unskilled) that produce a definite commodity or part of a commodity. As Baumol and Bowen observe, labour intensity, itself an expression of the complexity of the skills involved, remains a persistent feature of the performing arts.27 Likewise the reduction of private labour to general labour cannot have the same progressive character as that which affects labour power in general, if only because performance qua performance never has a private character. The private labour of a dancer, musician or actor is not performance but practice. The elements of such an anterior activity clearly enter into the performance, but only as elements of signification in relation to the performance itself. Indeed, signs of practice— automatisms of movement, phrasing and speech—are generally regarded as a sign of deficiency in a performer, unless these have assumed some nostalgic value or entered into a performance context in which the performer is more important than the performance. These observations, which strictly speaking rest on an individualistic model of performance, are only intensified in their grip if one considers that performance is invariably a collective event. This means that the concrete particularity of the labour process ramifies through a diversity of skill inputs, since each element of the performance is an ingredient of the whole and hence, in ideal circumstances, must achieve its particularity in order to function as a part of the totality. But matters go further than this, because obviously all performances involve a range of labour activities which are strictly speaking ‘non-creative’—ticket selling, theatre cleaning, and so on. These latter take as their rationale the objectives of the performance and to that extent have an aesthetic context of application. This is to say nothing of general skills, like carpentry, that are developed for aesthetic purposes in set and props design, or the fact that in fringe productions many routine tasks are undertaken by the cast. At first sight, therefore, the material properties of performance (it is a process rather than a thing, a service rather than a material production) mark it off from the general processes of commodity production. Viewed against the backdrop of labour in general, it exhibits a paradoxical nature: the labour power exercised in performance is concrete and yet social, in contrast to labour power in general, which remains private in its execution and loses all concrete particularity at the moment of its exchange. Yet, as it stands, this argument from the material features of performance is misleading to the extent that it considers the labour

THE STAR AND THE COMMODITY 21

process of performance outside the social relationships imposed on performance by capitalism. Marx’s position on the extent to which the material specificity of the labour process in areas of ‘aesthetic’ labour determines the commodification process would seem at first sight to deny that it does. When such matters are addressed, it is mainly in respect of the issue of productive and unproductive labour— productive, that is, from the point of view of capital, as a contribution to the accumulation process. Such an issue, which essentially turns on the question whether or not services are paid for out of revenue as fees or occur as wage labour, renders the question whether labour is of a special kind at best irrelevant or, at worst, a lever for the denial that capitalist production relations can operate in the sphere of culture.28 On the other hand, as the famous metaphor of the architect and the bee shows, Marx was fully aware of the ‘creative conceptual’ capacity of human labour power in general, of which aesthetic labour is a specialization. The point I wish to preserve from all this is that the materiality of performance imposes a limit on the extent to which capitalist relations can be imposed on aesthetic labour. What this means at its most fundamental is, as Michael Chanan puts it, that ‘the full resources of real control over the labour process cannot be applied. Something, however slight, escapes mechanization and automation, and capital has to resort to formal and ideological controls which induce a subjective automatism in the worker’s exercise of judgement.’29 But it is in the play-off between the real control and the formal control of the labour process that the performance commodity, the star, is formed, and the armature of that formation is transcription technology. To exemplify these processes here, it is useful to deploy the perspective of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’. According to Benjamin, the effect of film as a technology on the actor is to produce a ‘shrivelling’ of the ‘aura’ of his or her presence as a person, which is, on stage, inseparable from the aura of the character (e.g. Macbeth) that the actor represents. It is an effect of the capitalist organization of film production that the labour process of acting is both fragmented and automatized—rendered as an effect derived from the apparatus rather than from the actor—at the same time as the direct link with an audience is severed and the actor becomes more dependent on the camera as the point of address of his or her performance: ‘While facing the camera he knows that ultimately he will face the public, the consumers who constitute the market. This market where he offers not only his labour, but also his whole self, his heart and soul, is beyond his reach.’ 30 This shrivelling of the aura of the person prompts the development of the cult of the movie star which offers instead ‘the spell of the personality, the phony spell of the commodity’.31 However one assesses the final validity of Benjamin’s claims about the inherently demystificatory potential of film as technology, it is nevertheless clear that the basic impact of the standardized uses of film technology and technique is as he defines it. Yet it is by no means clear that the

22 CULTURAL STUDIES

effects of the cinematic apparatus necessarily lead to the shrivelling of aura— unless, of course, one holds on to some metaphysics of presence. The filmed image of the actor, especially the leading player, and its insertion in an articulation of filmic time and space that prioritizes a person-centred schema of causality, can be argued to increase the massivity of the actor’s presence in terms of both significance and cynosure.32 More substantially, perhaps, Benjamin’s connection between the process of ‘shrivelling’ and commodification, an obvious allusion to the reduction of concrete labour to abstract labour, is rendered as a straight contrast between the actor qua character and the persona. There are reasons to conclude, as I have argued elsewhere, that such relationships should be seen as triangulated around the contradictory positionalities of character as a notational entity, personality as the private biographical reality of the actor as a person pre-given in the host culture, and persona as the public image of the actor as a concrete person that is inferred from his or her screen presence and associated publicity.33 The insertion of the persona into the interplay between the actor and the character is, as Benjamin perceives, the moment of commodification. However, he does not specify clearly enough that this occurs via the equation of persona with character at the point of casting, in the case of the star, and that off screen the actor’s private personality is sedulously adapted to the screen persona. More decisive for our account is the process whereby this prioritization of the persona is achieved in performance. One of the key features of film as a technology is that by means of editing (which is a pre- and post-shooting process mediated through the shooting script and the editing table) it facilitates a detailed control over performance. Such a facility, also found in video and sound recording, can be applied while still preserving the capacity to reinterpolate edited fragments back into a more compact, highresolution form of the original. The original (a process, not a thing) can be, of itself, a concrete act of labour of some duration and complexity, or it can be a series of minimal units of verbal or physical behaviour. In either case it is possible within the limits of the material to effect a concerted reassembly which either imparts a new meaning to the performance or brings to greater effectivity the conception that was prioritized in its original execution. The overriding tendency in the Hollywood film has been to favour a mode of performance (not to mention a style of filming performances) that favours small units of behaviour—reacting rather than enacting—whose principle of coherence, in terms of narrative causality, time or space, is exterior to the process of performance itself. Such a process is most apparent, of course, in the vehicle wherein the principle of coherence is the persona of the star. But even actors in general find that in such circumstances the execution of a part is rendered motivationally meaningful (if at all) only in terms of the paradigmatic space of his or her private conception of character—the dynamics of portrayal becoming, primarily, the mobilization of the psychological and physical resources of the actor’s private personality. This is why, if actors remain committed to the norm of impersonation, the techniques of Method acting are so in evidence.

THE STAR AND THE COMMODITY 23

By contrast—and in part this is also a function of the professional ideology of acting—the stage actor’s execution of character is doubly articulated around, on the one hand, a conception of its place in the totality of the text, visible as unfolding alongside and through his or her performance, and, on the other, his or her private conception of character. One might say that for the stage actor the character remains a pars totalis—a moment of the whole—whereas for the Hollywood film actor it becomes the totality itself. The fact that film acting often occurs in isolation from the ensemble of performances, which are manifested only in post-production, merely compounds this tendency. To this extent it is misleading to see the impact of film technology as leading to a shrivelling of the aura of the person, since its basic effect is to open up the discursive range of the personal within the context of commodity production. The expression of these relationships within acting—and others besides, such as the labour market for actors, the routines of casting and the requirement of a stable ‘biographical’ entity on which to hang publicity and the like—manifests itself as a discursive prioritization within performance. This prioritization emphasizes an approach to character portrayal in which the biographical resources of the actor are to be mobilized, rather than differentially suppressed. This approach I have called personification, which, by no happy accident, refers to the same mechanism on the side of labour power that Marx identified in relation to agents of capital. In personification—and let us not forget that the actor is very often a willing party to such arrangements, but not necessarily so—the actor’s exchange value is prioritized over his or her use value. An actor’s use value is in general terms identified by the social division of labour—as a sign vehicle that can shed, suppress or articulate personal characteristics in order to materialize a narrational signified, a character. Naturally, it is possible to conceive of uses of non-actors that satisfy the requirements of signification without requiring impersonation. But such uses are clearly not a refutation of the social function of acting per se. Nor, for that matter, would they exhaust the requirements of versatility and skill acquisition implicit in pursuing acting as a full-time occupation. Viewed in the context of an actor’s use value, personification represents the reduction of the concrete particularity of craft skills to a fetishized linearity of function. To this extent it conforms to the reductive rendering of all forms of labour under commodity production. However, as a process located within performance and articulated under the effectivity of Hollywood’s use of film technology, this reduction, so far as leading players are concerned, does not occur as an anonymizing process that submerges personality under function. Rather, it constitutes a selective application of the techniques of body maintenance, grooming, self-presentation, sedulous cultivation of mannerisms, and so on, which at any given moment constitute the cultural ground of the specific skills of actors, a ground which is articulated and modified by their practices. Such a selection is based on validating the star (or the would-be star) as the proprietorial centre of his or her image on screen. The dialogic process, wherein

24 CULTURAL STUDIES

the actor develops a range of behaviours off screen to complement the sedulous use of techniques before the camera that ensure his or her place in the centre of filmic space as an attractive, luminous cinematic object, constitutes the performance strategy of the Hollywood star. What needs to be emphasized here is that this process, which relates to an ostensive mode of sign production, represents the projection, always a contractually and institutionally guaranteed process, of the personal qualities of one of the direct producers on to the material form taken by the totality of the performance itself. If it is recalled that this ‘fix’ (always a proactive and retroactive result of the deployment of the technology) is always occurring at the intersection of a multiplicity of diverse concrete labours, then its reductiveness is plain. In sum, the formation of the persona of the star accomplishes, from the side of labour power, the same suppression of the fundamentally collective character of all productive activity that enables the capitalist to appear as the demiurge of production. But the place of the star is on the side of labour, as visibly an employee within the process of representation, even if the star is also his or her own employer (not forgetting that the celebrity of the star always rests in the last analysis on popular approval). These conditions mean that stardom can be seen as returning to the level of the collective account as a signifier of the potency of labour. In reality, the persona of the star is the moment of the performance commodity. Back to appearances, briefly The thrust of the foregoing was to establish the outline of a formal theory of stardom. Such a formal theory is in the last analysis resolved into a relationship of representation: the star, before all contents, can function as a metonymy for labour power and for what stands behind this connection—that is, the sensuous, creative capacity of human labour power. Such a theorization, if it can be sustained, will tell us why the star system finds a place in popular consciousness, but not what the specific content of a star’s popularity will be. Again, the theorization offered here has confined itself to film stardom, though I believe it is possible to discern how such an analysis might be applied, for example, to the rock star. Indeed, it seems likely that the rock star, because he or she is involved more obviously in a discourse marked by personal forms of address, represents an intensification of the process identified here. I take it as relatively unproblematic to detail some of the reasons, at the level of content, why the stars are popular: they occupy the centres of collective attention which impart a scale of importance to what the star represents against the anonymous mass of consumers; they are presented in an environment which, if demeaning as opposed to glamorous, is none the less full of a decidedly human schema of causality arising from their interest as characters; they are glamorous and accomplished individuals who are highly rewarded and much admired, despite lowly or disparaged social origins in some cases; they carry the burden,

THE STAR AND THE COMMODITY 25

given the powerful mimetic thrust of popular culture, of representing a seemingly more comprehensive view of everyday (or not so everyday) life than is available to those of us who remain within the confines of work and locales; they are very often beautiful human artefacts. None of the foregoing is intended to subvert the validity of such insights. Rather, it would claim that these effects are based on the manner in which stars enter popular consciousness—their as it were ontological threshold as public figures. It is not difficult to see a connection between stardom as a form of labour that prioritizes personality and certain grades of employment (e.g. routine whitecollar work, unskilled service work such as bar keeping and waiting) which require a ‘scripted’ personality for their execution.34 Such a connection is only compounded by the fact that it is precisely in such areas of work that actors often find employment. Again, it is not difficult to see that the image of the star would have an attraction—as an assertion of denied experiences and values—for those in routine manual occupations. Such connections are in need of serious empirical study, but if confirmed might lead towards an occupational or class-related anthropology of stardom. The advantage of the account offered here is that it does ground itself in the materiality of performance and yet offers a way towards making such connections. Lastly, it is worth emphasizing again that the anonymous subjects of this analysis, the lower middle class and working class of Western capitalism and beyond, are themselves not fully integrated into the market economy because of the nature of the commodity production. As Offe and Wiesenthal put it: workers can neither fully submit to the logic of the market (first of all, because what they ‘sell’ on the market is not a ‘genuine’ commodity) nor can they escape from the market (because they are forced to participate, for the sake of their subsistence).35 From this angle of comparison, the star system can be seen as a recuperative play on what eludes commodification. Dept. of Sociology, Ealing College of Higher Education Notes 1 J.Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St Louis: Telos Press, 1981), p. 131. 2 See E.Preteceille and J.-P.Terrail, Capitalism, Consumption and Needs (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), pp. 30 ff. 3 See the relevant entries in T.O’Sullivan, J.Hartley, D.Saunders and J.Fiske, Key Concepts in Communication (London: Methuen, 1983). 4 M.Sinclair, Those Who Died Young: Cult Heroes of the Twentieth Century (London: Plexus, 1979), p. 13.

26 CULTURAL STUDIES

5 I take the term ‘signality’ from Volosinov; it denotes the imposition of an invariant, univocal meaning on the multi-accentuality of the sign. See V.N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (London: Seminar Press, 1973), p. 23. 6 F. and J.Vermorel, Starlust: The Secret Fantasies of Fans (London: Comet, 1985), p. 7. This text is mainly about fantasies of sexual possession and rock stars. It nevertheless reveals the extent to which fans do not distinguish between star image and real person. 7 E.Morin, The Stars: An Account of the Star System in Motion Pictures (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 183. Morin was the first to underline the connection between stars and commodity merchandising. Lately this has been proffered as a brave new insight. See C.G.Herzog, ‘Puffed sleeves before teatime’, Wide Angle, 6, 4 (1985), pp. 24–33. 8 R.Dyer, Stars (London: BFI Publications, 1979). The second edition of this text has been published as a ‘classic’ in the field. Macmillan are shortly to publish Dyer’s latest work on the subject, to be entitled Heavenly Bodies. 9 Dyer, op. cit., p. 37. Dyer also suggests, but without giving any indication how, that race and class should be included in the account. For an account of a black perception of Hollywood, see J.Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (London: Corgi, 1976). 10 Dyer, op. cit., p. 183. 11 For an account based on form, see D.Robins and P.Cohen, Knuckle Sandwich (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), pp. 96 ff. 12 Dyer, op. cit., p. 98. 13 Cf. E.Knoedler-Bunte, ‘The proletarian public sphere and political organization’, New German Critique, 4 (Winter 1974), p. 67. 14 For a further delineation, see, for example, B.King, ‘The Hollywood star system’, PhD thesis (University of London, 1984), or G.Kindem, The American Movie Industry (Southern Illinois University Press, 1982). 15 K.Marx, ‘Marginal notes on Adolph Wagner’s Lehrbuch der politischen Ökonomie’, Theoretical Practice, 5 (1972), p. 50. 16 K.Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 126–64. A very useful exposition can be found in D.Sayer, Marx’s Method (Brighton: Harvester, 1979), and D.Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982). For a different account, see J.Roemer’s article in J.Roemer (ed.), Analytical Marxism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Since the account I offer here is, ultimately, based on a model of class struggle at the point of production, value concepts are appropriate, as Roemer points out (see pp. 100–2). 17 See Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 19, and H.Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Brighton: Harvester, 1979), pp. 71 ff. 18 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 165. 19 See C.Wright Mills, White Collar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), especially ch. 8. 20 J.Mepham, ‘The theory of ideology in Capital’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 6 (1974). See also G.Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin, 1971). 21 See D.Elson, Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism (London: C.S.E. Books, 1980), pp. 123 ff.

THE STAR AND THE COMMODITY 27

22 Essentially, this entails the analysis of deskilling. For a recent summary of the debates, see P.Thompson, The Nature of Work (London: Macmillan, 1983). 23 Cf. T.W.Adorno, ‘The culture industry reconsidered’, New German Critique, 6 (Fall 1975), p. 14. For a recent account, see S.Garfield, Expensive Habits: The Dark Side of the Music Industry (London: Faber, 1986). 24 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 1003. Also Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), pp. 797 ff. 25 F.Alberoni, ‘The powerless élite’, in D.McQuail (ed.), Sociology of Mass Communications (London: Collier Macmillan, 1969). 26 The best account is still R.Dyer, ‘The meaning of Tom Jones’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies. 27 W.Baumol and W.Bowen, ‘On the performing arts: the anatomy of their economic problems’, in M.Blaug (ed.), The Economics of the Arts (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1976). 28 K.Marx, Theories of Surplus Value (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1964), pt 1, pp. 164 ff. 29 M.Chanan, ‘Labour power and aesthetic labour in film and television in Britain’, Media, Culture and Society, 2 (1980), pp. 120–1. 30 W.Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 233. 31 Ibid. 32 See D.Bordwell et al., The Classic Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985). The formulation here assumes, of course, that the actor has learnt the skills of playing to the camera. 33 B.King, ‘Articulating stardom’, Screen, 26, 5 (September-October 1985), which fills out in greater detail the relationships explored here. 34 Cf. E.Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). 35 Cited in Z.Bauman, Memories of Class (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 15. Bauman’s discussion of the place of labour overall is useful.

THE ‘CANON’ AND MARXIST THEORIES OF LITERATURE BRIDGET FOWLER

Leavis once wrote: Without the sensitizing familiarity with the subtleties of language, and the insight into the relationships between abstract or generalizing thought and the concrete of human experience that the trained frequentation of literature alone can bring, the thinking that attends social and political studies will not have the edge and force it should.1 It is important to recall the significance Leavis attributes here to literature as the master discipline in the social sciences, and it is necessary to bear in mind too the weight of allusion that lay beneath that innocent phrase ‘the trained frequentation of literature’. For buried within the ostensibly neutral reference to ‘training’ was the full force of the Scrutiny school’s disciplinary attack on academic dilettantism in literary criticism, an attack that is now, a generation later, spent in a rearguard movement. Indeed, a profound crisis is apparent in virtually all areas of cultural studies, provoking an intense defensive campaign by the unreconstructed traditionalists against the formidable enemies of Marxism, feminism and the fissiparous schools of structuralism. As Raymond Williams remarked in a magisterial survey, those who were once considered ‘untidy’ and ‘unruly guests’ but tolerated in the name of liberal ‘pluralism’ are now being openly vilified in the interests of the preservation of the old paradigm and, more generally, for the protection ‘of Englishness, of values, of tradition’.2 The Althusserian wing of this radical challenge has some family resemblances to older Marxist aesthetic theories. Yet in the process of elaborating their distinctive conception of the ‘literary mode of production’ certain breaks with earlier Marxist theories have also been formulated. I want to discuss some recent contributions: Tony Davies’s ‘Education, ideology and literature’, Tony Bennett’s Formalism and Marxism and ‘Marxism and popular fiction’, Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory and Alan Sinfield’s ‘Four ways with a reactionary text’.3 All these are welcome in so far as they unmask the political reality behind the rhetoric of the old discipline—especially in its hypostatizing of ‘intelligence’, its celebration of a ‘disinterested’ technology for the ‘trained’ literary response, its appeal to a fallaciously consensual sensitivity. Nevertheless, in the impasse of the old, certain positions within Marxist aesthetics are simultaneously being swept away. Their initial aim was to specify and locate the

30 CULTURAL STUDIES

modern category of ‘literature’ as the product of the bourgeois epoch, and thus to reveal that, far from being eternal and natural, it is a socially constructed discourse inserted within precise ideological boundaries. This is acceptable. The contextual analysis of literature has then led dramatically to questions concerning the status of the literary texts, in a way unforeseen by earlier workers in the field, such as Goldmann. One ‘historicist’ presupposition sometimes favoured by the writers referred to above is that literary texts should be reduced to a status undifferentiated from other writing, such as government reports, diaries or the average mass of commercial novels. Thus proposals for period studies explicitly advocate the abandonment of aesthetic assessments and recommend instead the historical and sociological analysis of all written records in terms of the evolution, competition and provenance of different ideas. The aesthetic politics of opposition to ‘high culture’ results here in a form of agnosticism or nihilism which rejects any attempt to form a non-subjectivist theory of artistic value.4 This response to the conflicting ideological definitions of the terrain of literature does not resolve seminal issues but merely buries them deeper. Additionally, it has a close resemblance to the ‘historicist’ deformations of Marxism in which literature is seen as a passive superstructure, trailing after the base. An approach such as this typically misrepresents historical tendencies as absolute laws, underestimates the creative role of consciousness and fails to recognize the significance of literary form in mediating class ideologies. Alternatively, recent radical writers often equate world literature with the institutionalized canonical ‘literature’ of universities and colleges. This ‘literature’ is in turn seen as serving ideological purposes, and Eagleton’s irony is not uncharacteristic: ‘If the masses are not thrown a few novels they may react by throwing up a few barricades.’5 There can be detected, I think, a neoProletkult6 element implicit in such new readings of culture, which is often accompanied by a linked historicism. In this article I shall seek to expose these and raise critical doubts about this tendency. The decline of positivism in the sociology of literature and art First we must note that the unusual ferment in literary theory in the last couple of decades has its counterpart in the end of the era of positivist innocence in the sociology of literature. Once it could be assumed that philosophers and critics would delineate what ‘art’ and ‘literature’ were and that sociologists could then analyse objectively the social origins of artists and writers, the institutions of patronage and the market, the class, gender and ethnic composition of the readership. This myth is happily buried. Just as deviance theory has criticized, correctly, the fallacies in using official criminal statistics as the basis for the study of crime, so there is now a parallel critique in cultural studies of the naïve use of literary criticism or the curriculum as the objective basis for denotations of literature. It is no longer possible for sociologists simply to accept the

THE ‘CANON’ AND MARXIST THEORIES OF LITERATURE 31

judgements of such ‘experts’. Indeed, Elizabeth Bird has reasonably pointed out that it is impossible to be ‘neutral’ or ‘impartial’ about what to select as art, given the purpose, for example, of describing the social determinants of a certain style.7 This is so because the grounds for that choice depend upon interpretations of meaning. Thus, to illustrate, the term ‘Glasgow style’ is used of the 1890–1920 period to connote the innovations of the group around MacIntosh, but in fact there were still many of the older generation of academic ‘glue-pot’ artists around in Glasgow at the time. She concludes that ‘it is unavoidable that in the construction of significant styles the sociologist must necessarily look at the works of art and come to some judgement about them…here the task of the sociologist is essentially similar to the art historian or art critic and will depend upon developments in the analysis of the image.’ The awareness of literary and artistic politics is central to the analysis of the interactionist, Howard Becker. His Art Worlds revolves around a classificatory grid of artists and art styles in terms of the contrasting perspectives of ‘professionals’, naïve artists, folk artists, craftsmen and mavericks.8 This theory seeks both to elaborate the diversity of artistic judgements among different groups and to place the professionals’ dominant and emergent styles in a wider context by reference to the whole universe of symbolizing activity. Thus his sphere of reference sweeps from the bizarre assemblages of untutored and unsung naïve artists like the Postman, Ferdinand Cheval, whose idiosyncratic pebbled sculptures belatedly became celebrated, to the ‘shock of the new’, now long since recuperated, in Duchamp’s elegant lavatory or Picabia’s automatist collages. Becker’s book is a brilliant attack on a thesis nobody in the 1980s now holds, namely the individualistic theory of artistic genius. Part of his assertion of art’s social character lies in his mustering the works of critics and philosophers as guarantees of the works’ artistic status. Becker self-effacingly presents his objective as merely the neutral reportage of the struggles between different schools of ‘professionals’, of wars to upgrade craftsmen as artists and invasive attacks by ‘professionals’ aiming to colonize a traditional craft. But he cannot really wriggle off the hook of the contentious debates within cultural studies quite so easily. Wider historical conflicts provide the arenas within which labels are pinned, aesthetic rationales are elaborated and class or gender perspectives adopted or occluded. There is, however, a failure to step beyond the ‘conventionalist’ focus on competing discourses of art to explain why some groups can set the agendas for artistic issues and others cannot, which is absent from Becker’s otherwise valuable book. Marxism, British culturalism and aesthetic populism Problems of method conceal problems of theory. These difficulties have been focused more sharply in the context of the developments of British culturalism, notably in the crop of studies produced under the auspices of the Birmingham

32 CULTURAL STUDIES

Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. The seeds for the present harvest were sown by the two major left Leavisite works, Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy and Williams’s Culture and Society.9 Both threw out a challenge to the dominant Leavisite axiom that it was only through English literature that a grasp of ethics and an understanding of the complexity of experience might be achieved. Hoggart’s reading of traditional working-class culture accentuated its remoteness from middle-class ‘bourgeois’ consciousness and identified a body of stories and songs as the repository of distinctive values about ‘how life should be lived’, as well as the arena of an entirely different aesthetic.10 Williams’s much more ambitious historical study of the linguistic currents eddying round the island of culture in a sea of exchange values made a similar crucial step to Hoggart’s, in seeing the culture of the working class as embodied less in a ‘handful’ of proletarian novels than in the creation of the institutions and ideas of the labour movement—unionism, co-operatives, the Labour Party. These now classic assessments were important achievements in the critique of Leavis. Nevertheless they raise problematic issues within the context of Marxist theories of cultural needs which have not been fully resolved. Essentially these concern the conditions for the construction by the working class of its distinctive culture, oral, written and visual, emerging from its collective experiences. It also requires specification of the conditions for the non-degrading assimilation of earlier and initially alien cultural forms to which it has indirectly contributed by its own exploitation, a tribute which permitted the provision of leisure and education for intellectuals and culturally creative groups. As writers such as Amilcar Cabral suggested in the parallel case of decolonization, cultural forms in this category, such as the novel, will be enduringly adopted only when developed as vehicles to transmit the struggles of, say, peasant farmers in Africa, not when they merely convey an honorific association with dominant nations. It was, and is, easy to dismiss the paternalism in the Leavisite view that workers or peasants ignorant of the great English tradition of novels were therefore morally impoverished. But Leavisites and Marxists have been united in seeing a class alienated from world literature as being cognitively impoverished. In rejecting this, the dominant note in new theories of mass culture has been an aesthetic populism. Taking anthropological relativism for their starting point, these assume that each group produces cultures good enough for its own needs, including its own conceptions of dignity, pleasure and style (souped-up cars as art objects or Dada collages; Tarzan or King Lear). On this reading, the texts of English literature are seen as the creation of artistic élites lacking organic connections with the working class. Their cultural production, by that token, is viewed as derived from distinctive problems and purposes outside the concerns of the working class. The teaching of this literature as a secondary culture is therefore akin to psychic imperialism, engendering deference and servility. There are certain attractions in this position, particularly given the way in which culture is actively linked to the allocation of positions in the class structure. First, aesthetic populism has correctly rejected the blanket dismissal of

THE ‘CANON’ AND MARXIST THEORIES OF LITERATURE 33

popular culture by élitists in the Eliot tradition, a dismissal which effectively stigmatized all current forms of popular art. Such anathemas have, of course, accentuated the inaccessibility of (to use Bourdieu’s term) ‘cultural capital’ to the working class. Bourdieu has conclusively shown, by massive empirical studies, how cultural capital is metamorphized into economic capital, or economic privileges on the market.11 Thus we can agree that conservative theories of culture collude with a form of symbolic violence to the culturally disinherited by which the reproduction of class is accomplished in late capitalism. The possession of cultural capital is the accompanying mode of regulation for the post-war European regimes of accumulation, if we are to use Lipietz’s helpful conceptual devices for linking norms, laws, routines, and so on, to capital’s ‘needs’. Aesthetic populism has justly been sceptical of the illusory meritocracy of the educational structure. Secondly, aesthetic populism could also be credited with reminding us of the long history of popular forms which have been recuperated by élite culture, from thirteenth-century stonemasons’ carvings to nineteenth-century popular novelists like Dickens and Wilkie Collins, or Hollywood film directors (such as Douglas Sirk) once disdained by the literati. The theory of such interchanges has still to be elaborated, although again Bourdieu is helpful in suggesting that a veneration of the old underlies much consecrated ‘literary taste’. However, in my view, aesthetic populism has certain crucial defects. Its suspicion of Zhdanovist literary commissars or puritan killjoys extends to a general mistrust of all minority culture. Its strength is in its celebration of democracy, autonomy and sensuous enjoyment; its weakness lies in its refusal to see culture as linked to theory, education and organization in providing tools for demystification. This view, then, ultimately leads to a rupture with classical Marxism and, more fundamentally, with a realist theory of knowledge. The current trend in cultural theory can be summarized, then, in its own crass analogy with material capital as ‘the valorization of the popular’. This is acceptable if it means applying to popular fiction methods developed within ideological structuralism, as in the work of Fredric Jameson12 or the Eagleton of the earlier The Rape of Clarissa.13 However, it is important not to adopt the superficial theories of pleasure in popular writing which divorce the latter from knowledge, and which have their origin in Barthes’s Le Plaisir du texte.14 It is also mistaken to invert received values by turning the canon on its head, as in Sinfield’s deliberations on how to teach a ‘reactionary’ text. This remoteness from all the texts of legitimate culture is a recurrent tendency within radical cultural studies. Typically Marxists have operated with a different, dual view of literature. Against idealism and ‘art for art’s sake’ theories they have denied formalist theories of literature’s autonomy. Against mechanical materialism they have argued that literature feeds on an enduring international culture of resistance to oppression and inequality and furnishes a source of models for understanding continuities in human action, for revealing parody, comedy and tragedy in history.15

34 CULTURAL STUDIES

Recent developments in radical theories of literature The impact of recent developments from McCabe to Foucault16 is to displace attention from the critical, detached vision inherent in great literature and to fasten instead on the deeper points of cognitive agreement with dominant discourses. Thus the novel form is said to share with bourgeois thought a sense of progressive movement in time which ends with the present. Classic realism is held to operate with literary devices of narration and hierarchically ordered discourses, the effect of which is to console and reconcile rather than to disorientate and question. In effect, Marx’s view of world literature has now been rejected as a ‘humanist’ theory. Outside the parameters of modernism, ‘literature’ is to be assimilated to religion as a form of consciousness which subtly delivers the oppressed to their class enemies, bound by the unseen fetters tying their hearts and minds. All that the critic or sociologist of literature can do is to look at literature as merely representative of the ‘discursive practices’ of a period and its consciousness. But is this not a return to historicism of the most undiluted kind? Are we not witnessing a revival of mechanical theories of literary determinism, a disregard for and underemphasis of the role of the writer in consciously exploring contradictions at the deepest levels?17 Tony Bennett’s Formalism and Marxism, with his ‘Marxism and popular fiction’, signals one of the first major confrontations with ‘humanist’ uses of literature by Marxists. Bennett overturns the Althusserian triad, ideology, literature and science, in which a precarious impermeability to ideology had been offered as a tribute to literature and science, at the cost of a pervasiveness of ideology elsewhere. Bennett joins a number of modern Marxists, such as Swingewood,18 in an iconoclastic attack on traditional Marxist aesthetics for apparently being polluted by bourgeois ideas. In his view, the great works of world literature are as much the instrument of reactionary theories as popular fiction. Just as some popular fiction can be saved on progressive criteria, but much is mere dross, so some literature will be preserved but a great deal jettisoned. It will not do, says Bennett, to hit popular-fiction writers over the heads with all three volumes of Capital, because major writers are as guilty as popular writers of seeing the world upside-down, and of being entrapped within phenomenal appearances, notably in their confinement, in early capitalist industrialization, within the parameters of classic bourgeois realism.19 Thus ‘in speaking of literature in this way [the Althusserian formulation] we are in no sense speaking of a fixed body of texts which naturally and spontaneously exists in some objective, socially available space between science and ideology as equally natural and pre-given forms of cognition.’20 Of course we should not fossilize our categories of analysis so that we fail to grasp the flux and diversity of cultural production, nor should we neglect conventions such as those of sixteenth-century country-house poetry, which bind it within the perspectives of dominant groups and their political interests. But have Marxists usually been unaware of this? The Paris Manuscripts and The

THE ‘CANON’ AND MARXIST THEORIES OF LITERATURE 35

Holy Family21 demonstrate Marx’s awareness that literature could become incorporated within the psychological orbit of the ruling class or, as in his reference to the bourgeois drama of Lillo’s Merchant of London, betray the limited vision of classical political economy. Marx was resolutely detached from aestheticism, and in his later years wrote with hostility of those Romantic poets and dramatists who drew a delicate veil over social reality. Nevertheless he consistently saw literature as the measure of unalienated production and a diagnosis of corruption and deformation in human societies. Attempts to foist a bourgeois canon on Marxist aesthetics just will not do. It would be impossible to explain Lukács’s preference for Balzac over Flaubert in these terms: none of the detailed critique of Flaubert’s method of working, which detached psychological from historical awareness, could have been possible with the presuppositions of a bourgeois canon. Again, Lukács’s divergence from orthodox scholarly opinion is shown in his readiness to include popular writers such as Gorky in his canon, writers hardly venerated by the bourgeoisie. In this he followed the earlier example of Marx, who included artistically adequate popular culture in his category of literature, such as the Silesian weavers’ songs or the fairy-tales collected by Grimm, but who rejected commercially successful writing resorting to myths, rather than sharp observation and feasible political solutions. The key text here is still the immensely rewarding dissection of Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris, which Marx criticized in The Holy Family for offering impracticable Fourierist solutions to capitalist conflicts, replicating stereotyped images of women as madonnas or whores, disguising aristocratic heroes as working men and indulging in sadistic fantasies of revenge. Louis Althusser22 may have failed to elaborate on how individual works were to be classified as either ‘literature’ or ‘ideology’, or on what were the transformative elements that allow us to feel the constrictions of ideology. It does not follow that these gaps render Marxist aesthetics collaborationist either with scholastic élites’ or with ruling-class views on the purposes of cultural production. This mistake appears to be the basis for Bennett’s view: What is at issue is not just the dismantling of this category of literature or the ways in which the texts thus labelled have usually been studied, but a study and critique of the bourgeois literary formation. It also involves an attempt to think outside that formation, to construe the internal economy of the field of writing in terms which bypass the distinctions posited by the concept of literature.23 This is more bluntly put a paragraph later: ‘As a prelude…it will be necessary to indicate that Marxist criticism has, for the greater part of its history, been an essentially bourgeois enterprise at the level of its founding theoretical assumptions.’

36 CULTURAL STUDIES

The decline of religion and the construction of a ‘canon’ Let us now turn to the work to which Bennett alludes, Davies’s article ‘Education, ideology and literature’, which initiated the new direction for British cultural analysis with its conception of a literary ideology. This article represents one of the more influential transfusions into British cultural work of the ‘new blood’ of French structuralism and has therefore contributed to the present conflict in literary studies. Davies starts from the widely held view that mass schooling was in part a response to the cultural crisis of the mid-nineteenth century. After the failure of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie to provide an ideological rationale for popular subordination, a mantle of leadership which would evoke proletarian respect, educationists such as Matthew Arnold, Sidgewick and Dean Farrar pondered the implicit consequences for the stability of the state. Davies quotes strikingly from Culture and Anarchy to indicate the peculiar problems posed by the middle class with ‘their harsh, unintelligent and unattractive spirit and culture’. Davies then proceeds to identify the central role of literature in the educational curriculum as a response to the crisis. The present sense of ‘literature’ as a body of writings distinguished by ‘beauty of form or emotional effect’ is traced to the mid-1860s and 1870s, when English was being championed as a university subject. The earlier conception of literature as a body of writings inclusive of imaginative, legal, theological and philosophical works was narrowed at this period to a corpus of lyric poems and novels, chosen on grounds of beauty of form and refined morality. The selective tradition of works that was foregrounded by this aesthetic can be viewed as an ideological category, the ‘canon’, which both radiated an aura of bourgeois rectitude and instilled the desired sense of national unity. The suitability of literature for this role was bestowed, in Davies’s view, by its unique expression of contradictions. Canonical novels, such as The Mill on the Floss, reveal conflicts over gender, class and styles of speech, only to resolve these within an overarching social unity, distinguished in part by the associated linguistic dominance of Standard English. Literature, in all the variety of its texts, is grounded in the ideological unity of ‘Standard English’, which itself reflects the imaginary ideological unity of the social formation as ‘the nation’. Literature both reflects and reproduces that unity not in spite of but because of its capacity to ‘see’ the contradictions.24 The view that the English realist novel was steeped in bourgeois structures of thought depends, unsatisfactorily, on attributing unique significance to the closure devices of these writers. A contrasting view would stress the ‘ghostly texts’, the salient absences and the figurative moulding of language to bear a critical discourse. In particular, feminist criticism has convincingly decoded the hidden resentment at women’s oppression and propertylessness in Eliot,

THE ‘CANON’ AND MARXIST THEORIES OF LITERATURE 37

Charlotte and Emily Brontë and, less obviously, Mrs Gaskell, and this sense of distance from patriarchal power often struck the women concerned as analogous to the powerlessness of slaves or the proletariat. Despite Davies’s assessment of the effects of these novels, the contemporary response was often different. Jane Eyre, for example, was seen as a profound act of defiance to all authority, while cryptic expressions of resentment and registers of alienation run through all these novels. The attempt to reduce the meaning of the text to a single moment of optimistic class conciliation is mistaken: the sense of an ending does represent a continued faith in bourgeois progress, but it is a tattered and torn flag of progress that is unfurled. Davies’s article also highlights the role of language within the canonical texts in a theoretical stance characteristic of Renée Balibar and Jacques Lacan. There are, in my view, disquieting questions at issue in assuming an automatic affinity between language and a bourgeois morality and worldview. Does this not conflate the use of language as a technology with a narrow set of interests historically identified with the class that ‘bears’ that language? The implications are disturbing. William Morris and Robert Tressell, for example, both use Standard English in narration. Do they thereby become bourgeois writers? If a writer such as Tolstoy uses aristocratic Russian to express his profound disaffection from the institutions of property and the law, is he neutralized and contaminated merely by his vehicle of expression? It must be said in Davies’s favour that he has fruitfully established the connection between certain formalist aesthetic ideas and the deep crisis of the Victorian state. His account of the bowdlerization of British poetry which appeared in anthologies such as Palgrave’s serves to alert us to the ways in which literature can be castrated for the benefit of ‘la structure a dominante’. However, his theory of the canon has both internal difficulties and unacceptable consequences. I shall delay elaborating on these points until I have introduced the recent work of Terry Eagleton, which orchestrates the iconoclastic voices raised against ‘the canon’. The abolition of ‘literature’ Eagleton’s project is none other than the abolition of literature, and the sighting, pursuit and destruction of literary theory as a preparation for that event. The parallel is Marx’s critique of the illusory character of religion. If literary theory presses its own implications so far then it has argued itself out of existence. This I would suggest is the best possible thing for it to do. The final logical move in a process which began by recognizing that literature is an illusion is to recognize that literary theory is an illusion too…. It is an illusion, first, in the sense that literary theory is really no more than a branch of social ideologies, utterly without any unity or identity which

38 CULTURAL STUDIES

would adequately distinguish it from philosophy, linguistics, psychology, cultural and sociological thought; and secondly in the sense that the one hope it has of distinguishing itself—clinging to an object named literature—is misplaced. We must conclude then that this book is less an introduction than an obituary, and that we have ended by burying the object we sought to unearth. Let us clear the ground by discovering points of agreement. First, despite the strictures against historicism mentioned above, few now would dispute that a historical analysis of writing is essential—no literature is entirely autonomous. Second, such writing is only one element of a wider field of ‘discursive practices’ embracing also the Daily Record and beer-mats or, we might add, bestselling romantic fiction. Since these are the cultural objects used by the vast majority, they are as entitled to intellectual attention as the novels, plays and poetry read by the educated minority. Finally, we can agree with Eagleton about the continued relevance of the old-fashioned study of rhetoric, the teasing out from writing of devices of persuasion or incitement and the delineation of the forms of power and desire associated with these. Eagleton’s book is a brilliant polemic particularly on two fronts. First, it is a polemic against liberal humanist ‘sensitivity’, which he sees as an accomplishment bestowed by the study of literature in university English departments, a sensitivity blemished by its narrowed conception of personal moral choices, by its collusive silence with preparations for total war and by its complicity with international inequality. Secondly, it is a polemic against the relativist and nihilist logic of the dominant tendency within post-structuralism, which has vigorously disembarrassed itself of general theory and indeed of any non-discourse-dependent understanding of reality and truth, as of so much metaphysical baggage. Nevertheless there are central ambiguities. These cluster round three areas: the unresolved problems of method if the ‘canon’ were to disappear; the question of incongruity between eighteenth-century formalist aesthetic theory and the contemporary practice of literature; and finally the clashes over ‘manifestos’ for literature—the history of anti-formalism versus formalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or ‘their canons and ours’. First, the alternative study of ‘rhetoric’ proposed appears to indicate that the canon should disappear. Indeed, Eagleton digs up a long-forgotten English professor to indicate his essential agreement with Davies that ‘literature’ is that body of works sanctified by—and only by—the imprimatur of English departments, and that by this means any incipient attack in these places on ‘the tradition’ is easily quelled: ‘it is at this point that the canon is trundled out to blast offenders out of the literary arena.’26 What follows from abolishing literature is unclear. In the absence of a canon, literary critics would presumably undertake an ideological structuralist analysis of cultural items. But how? Will there not be methodological and evaluative issues underlying the vast and inchoate subjects for such a study? Will a Marxist

THE ‘CANON’ AND MARXIST THEORIES OF LITERATURE 39

cultural analysis not assert its own ‘tradition’? Eagleton never resolves this question. Second, Eagleton, Davies, Sinfield and others have neglected the constantly contested character of literature. In their zeal to unmask its role in relations of power and status, they deny literature’s concern for truth, its display of the essential relations of social reality. Williams is surely right that, despite the origins of ‘literature’ in the restricted eighteenth-century sense, much valuable work was done under that label. Moreover, he has convincingly shown that in the whole body of writing of 1848 it was the now canonical and allegedly ideological works—Dickens’s Hard Times, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton—that issued much more devastating attacks on industrial capitalism than were contained in the more popular bestsellers. Craig and Egan have recently reiterated this important point, aiming to prise apart the close identification of the novel with the bourgeoisie. They emphasize that the novel had its roots in the radical sectarians’ sermons of the Civil War, the multiplying newspapers, and the growth of a bureaucratic style of dispassionate objectivity typical of the new civil service of the seventeenth century. It was not just a product of the market consciousness of the new bourgeoisie. Of course the novel is a ‘bourgeois form’ inseparable from the rise of the middle classes and of course artistic ingredients went into the mix, for example, epic and the picaresque. But to explain and account for the novel only by referring to the ascent of the bourgeoisie—as if that were all that needed to be said—or to talk only about existing forms—which were both exotic and dated—is insufficient. By themselves these cannot explain the power and complexity of the form. And in defence of the canon of novels they make the simple point: People coming new to our literature and history would not be misled if they inferred the shape of British social development and its political and moral implications from this particular sequence of novels. On the contrary, and this is our point, they would be remarkably well informed.27 This is not to imply that Marxist aesthetics can simply use wholesale the bourgeoisie’s canonical works. But it does serve to indicate that, because of the particular nature of literature and its habitual distance from ruling-class apologetics, the extent of overlap will be great. Eagleton’s own position should be distinguished from that of Davies and Sinfield. Davies adopts the view that deep structures of literary texts are permeated with ideological content, particularly in their conjunction of specific linguistic forms and endings. Eagleton seems sometimes to accept this idea.28 At other times he adopts the view that it is not the texts as such which are ideological but what is done with them—their place in a set of pedagogic

40 CULTURAL STUDIES

practices associated with professional power and status rites, the primacy of assessment and the rigid inculcation of discursive ‘manners’ in student literary apprenticeships. He alludes to the abolition of English departments as a condition for the liberation of texts. It would appear here that he is operating with a real canon, analogous to Marx’s conception of ‘world literature’, which is opposed to a ‘false’ canon, false because of its deployment by those trapped within liberal individualism and hostile to the labour movement. His presentation in Literary Theory is over-compressed and therefore unclear. Literary politics as an arena of conflict Sweeping criticisms of ‘the canon’, I want to argue, have substituted a theoretically deduced view of history for the more complex character of historical reality. This weakness I would attribute to the lingering effects of Althusser on the writers under review, leading to the emergence of crude overestimations of the role of ideology and substituting a neat, dogmatically unified set of theoretical deductions in place of the more demanding historical labour of exploring archives. First, there is the little matter (already raised) of competing canons. Once we distance ourselves from the privileged views of the ‘traditional intellectuals’ (Arnold, Sidgewick and all those newly appointed English professors), so that their domain assumptions are juxtaposed to other contemporary conceptions of literature, the picture becomes different. In other words, Eagleton and the others assume that a definitional monopoly in literary politics was maintained, when in fact both writers and a multiplicity of readership groups defined literature differently. Eagleton does recognize the existence of conflict between ‘canons’, but analyses these only as one might the competing bids of legitimate descendants and pretenders to the throne. Once pretenders have been successful, they must efface all irregularity in the line so as to protect their own descendants. Thus the literary ‘tradition’ is presented as a reified, suprapersonal force or spirit which embraces works nominated from the ill-assorted ideologies of, respectively, Eliot’s aristocratic organicism and Leavis’s dissenting radicalism. Eagleton’s concern is to challenge the rules of this game rather than to examine in detail the negotiations involved in setting it in place, the hidden agendas of literature which conflicting groups possessed. In fact, it must be said, the formalist definition of aesthetics and the restricted view of literature of Mr Palgrave and his epigones was a constantly embattled position. Unconsecrated canons existed, championed by those who saw literature not as merely beauty of form but as a particular kind of truth, concerned with relaying the experience of the nature of the historical process itself and educating desire by means of various utopias. To ignore these cultural movements and the vital role that literature played in their social action is equivalent to restricting ‘religion’ to the Anglican church or the Oxford movement, and ignoring the Paineite Methodists. This is not to suggest that literature is equivalent to religion in its ideological character

THE ‘CANON’ AND MARXIST THEORIES OF LITERATURE 41

but is intended to underline the diversity, historically, of definitions of ‘literature’. Second, these deviant interpretations of literature were not the work of ‘freefloating’ intellectuals but were tied to popular movements. Contrary to popular myth and Eagleton, the Romantics were not initially in a marginalized artistic ghetto. The poetry of Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley was better known and liked among working-class readers than it was among the bourgeoisie, who distrusted the poets’ support of foreign revolutions.29 Owenism and Chartism, moreover, stimulated a mass rank and file to build New Moral Orders, creating a totally restructured set of alternative social institutions. In this connection, the turn to fiction in the form of the Chartist novel, as well as the concern to produce an education that would meet popular needs, were both logical developments from narrower political and industrial struggles. Thus in the 1830s and 1840s the radical political melodrama flourished, while even within commercial publishing organizations novelists such as Dickens, G.W.M.Reynolds and Thomas Frost held massive readerships.30 The Chartist newspapers sponsored the exploratory new forms of working-class fiction: Thomas Frost’s The Secret appeared in The National Instructor (1850), Thomas Wheeler’s Sunshine and Shadows in The Northern Star (1849–50) and Ernest Jones’s unfinished De Brassier: A Democratic Romance in Notes to the People (1851–2). It is hardly surprising, then, that the ‘moral disinfectants’ of the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge—the production lines of tract-producing evangelical Hannah Mores and utilitarian popular encyclopedists—were pressed into service against ‘the plague’ of the cultural revolution. These facts suggest that the scope and connotations of ‘literature’ were not the subjects of a consensus. Indeed, the hegemony of aesthetic formalism and narrow liberal humanism was always only spasmodic and partial, achieved after the collapse of Chartism in the 1850s, continually undermined by successive novelists (canonized and other), and irrevocably distanced from the working class by their turning to new genres, such as the much more seductive aesthetic of the commercial music halls (1880s). Spokesmen for ‘literature’ may have sought to use English studies for their mission of social unity; that they were largely unsuccessful is ultimately to be explained in terms of the new ‘defensive culture’ of the working class and the much more potent appeal of ‘sub-literature’ and the music halls. We need mention only Rhymer’s Ada the Betrayed, Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan and Florence Barclay’s The Rosary.31 Here lay the real comparison with the opiates of religion. Proletkult revived I shall sum up with quotations from the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Here is Mayakovsky:

42 CULTURAL STUDIES

A White Army Officer When you catch him You beat him And what about Raphael

It’s time to make museum Walls a target Let the mouths of big guns Shoot the old rags of the past! The Proletkultists, especially Bogdanov and Bukharin, argued for a distinctive proletarian culture and rejected the ‘bourgeois’ canon. They cried ‘Down with Pushkin!’, and Bukharin claimed in Pravda: In the days of this greatest of revolutions, to enjoy The Cherry Orchard (not even The Cherry Factory) is the most supernatural stupidity. It is just barbarianism which becomes simply sad and ridiculous. The working class public which comes to such plays and yawns with boredom steels itself to understand the ‘Value’ of these nice things—that is to adapt its militant psychology to the psychology of our grandmothers. The remnants of… respect for aristocratic culture are deepened by the preaching of some of our ideologists who support this corruption of the proletariat.32 There is a growing revival of Proletkult ideas resuscitated by the French left in 1968 (e.g. Claudin-Urondo’s critique of Lenin for being over-enamoured of bourgeois Western technology, management structures and culture33). This is implicit in the attack on ‘the canon’ today. To these people it needs to be pointed out that art cannot be simplistically reduced, as they claim, to the ideology of a class. In 1924 Trotsky made a speech in which he quoted Labriola on this issue. The published text still makes telling reading as he reasserts the view that, whatever the material dependence of artists on a given class, their artistic creativity cannot be reduced to the ideas of that class nor our pleasure in their work be restricted to a historical or scholarly interest: ‘…To reduce all problems of ethics or aesthetics, philology, historical criticism and philosophy to a single problem, and in this way save oneself all difficulties! By this method fools could reduce the whole of history to the level of commercial arithmetic, and, finally, a new original interpretation of Dante’s work would show us The Divine Comedy in the light of calculations regarding pieces of cloth which crafty Florentine merchants sold for their maximum profit.’ There’s one in the eye for certain people!34

THE ‘CANON’ AND MARXIST THEORIES OF LITERATURE 43

Labriola’s trenchant criticism of vulgar materialist tendencies is still as relevant in 1987 as it was for Trotsky in 1924. In brief, Eagleton and the others must be commended for directing our attention to non-artistic uses to which the canon has been fettered in institutions— shoring up the professionalism of university teachers, an avenue for upward social mobility, a means of assessment. But these latent consequences of the canon should not lead us in a mad rush to reject, Proletkult-fashion, the texts themselves. Dept. of Sociology, University of Glasgow Notes I should like to thank John Fowler, Barbara Littlewood and Michael Scott for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. 1 F.R.Leavis, The Common Pursuit (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 194. 2 R.Williams, ‘Crisis in English studies’, New Left Review, 129 (September-October 1981), pp. 51–66. 3 T.Davies, ‘Education, ideology and literature’, in T.Bennett, C.Mercer and J. Woollacott (eds), Culture, Ideology and Social Process (London: Batsford, 1981); T.Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1979) and ‘Marxism and popular fiction’, Literature and History, 7, 2 (Autumn 1981), pp. 138–65; T.Eagleton, Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); A. Sinfield, ‘Four ways with a reactionary text’, Journal of Literature, Teaching and Politics, 2 (1984). 4 See, for example, C.Snee, ‘Period studies’, in P.Widdowson (ed.), Rereading English (London: Methuen, 1982). 5 Eagleton, op. cit., p. 25. 6 Proletkult was the name for the Vpered group of artists, writers and theorists, formed under the leadership of Bogdanov at the Capri Conference of 1912. Its influence was contained in the early years of the Russian Revolution but became effectively dominant in the Communist Party with the rise of Stalin. Its main plank was the view that each class created its own class culture and that the consecrated art of the past simply legitimated the power of the dominant class. The working class could neither seek solace nor find critical representations of oppression in consecrated art. It followed that the only art that the workers and peasants could identify with was revolutionary art that broke decisively with the productive techniques of earlier artistic styles. With its exaltation in party circles from 1927 onwards, Proletkultists increasingly abandoned the productivist aesthetic and espoused the classical style of ‘socialist realism’. See S.Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), and M.A.Rose, Marx’s Lost Aesthetic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 7 E.Bird, ‘Aesthetic neutrality and the sociology of art’, in M.Barrett, P. Corrigan, A.Kuhn and J.Wolff, Ideology and Cultural Production (London: Croom Helm, 1979). 8 H.Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1982).

44 CULTURAL STUDIES

9 R.Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), and R. Williams, Culture and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963). 10 Hoggart’s detailed argument suffers from the defects of any organic community theory in that the only thing we can be sure about it is that it has always been lost. He makes an untenable distinction between an older authentic or organic community of the working class in industrial cities and the post-1950s circulation of cultural commodities on the mass market. Attacked by commercial interests battening on its naïve pleasure in spontaneous enjoyment, the candyfloss world promised by such post-1950s mass culture as ‘sex and violence’ novels beckoned attention away from the seriousness, solidarity and mutual aid of the earlier culture. Unfortunately for the simple thesis, historical evidence shows that this earlier community culture was itself commercially produced (Hollywood, women’s magazine stories, the music halls from the 1860s on), and that in many respects it offered models of labour discipline and individualism rather than images of the distinctive moral economy of the working class. 11 P.Bourdieu, La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Minuit, 1979). 12 F.Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971) and The Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, 1981). 13 T.Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982). 14 R.Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. R.Miller (London: Cape, 1975). 15 See, for example, S.S.Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1976). 16 C.McCabe, ‘Realism and the cinema’, Screen, 15, 2 (1974), pp. 7–27; M. Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970). 17 Terry Eagleton flirts with this historicism and its undifferentiating gaze: ‘But it should not be taken as an a priori assumption that what is currently termed “literature” will always and everywhere be the most important focus of attention. Such dogmatism has no place in the field of cultural study. Nor are the texts now dubbed as “literature” likely to be perceived and defined as they are now, once they are returned to the broader and deeper discursive formations of which they are part. They will be inevitably “rewritten”, recycled, put to different uses, inserted into different relations and practices’ (Eagleton, Literary Theory, p. 213). This iconoclastic unmasking of the arbitrary manner in which heterogeneous cultural materials are fused together by the architects of cultural distinction has some merit. Nevertheless, it conceals the vital aesthetic questions fought over by Lukács, Benjamin and Adorno, while failing to elaborate on the Foucauldian shorthand of ‘discursive formations’. Eagleton is primarily concerned to divorce literature from the coils of academic formalism and sterility, to reinvigorate the reading and production of cultural texts as political documents. It is a pity that Literary Theory did not incorporate some of the crucial points made in a later dialogue with Peter Fuller (reported in New Left Review, 142 (1983)), in which he clarifies his cryptic proposal for the ‘liberation’ of Shakespeare and Proust from ‘literature’ by arguing for a more detailed historical materialist theory of artistic value. 18 A.Swingewood, The Myth of Mass Culture (London: Macmillan, 1977). 19 Bennett, ‘Marxism and popular fiction’, Literature and History, 7, 2 (Autumn 1981), p. 154. 20 Bennett, Formalism and Marxism, p. 141.

THE ‘CANON’ AND MARXIST THEORIES OF LITERATURE 45

21 K.Marx and F.Engels, Collected Works, vol. 4 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975). 22 L.Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, trans. B.Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971). 23 Bennett, ‘Marxism and popular fiction’, p. 139. 24 Davies, op. cit., p. 260. 25 Eagleton, Literary Theory, p. 204. 26 Ibid., p. 214. 27 D.Craig and M.Egan, ‘Historicist criticism’, in P.Widdowson, ed., Re-Reading English, (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 207–22. 28 T.Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso/New Left Books, 1976). 29 M.Vicinus, The Industrial Muse (London: Croom Helm, 1974). 30 L.James, Fiction for the Working Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) and Print and the People 1819–1851 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). 31 See R.Anderson, The Purple Heart Throbs: The Subliterature of Love (London: Hodder, 1974); Q.D.Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). 32 Quoted in Fitzpatrick, op. cit., p. 147. 33 C.Claudin-Urondo, Lenin and the Cultural Revolution (Brighton: Harvester, 1977). 34 L.Trotsky, Class and Art: Problems of Culture under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1924; London: New Park, 1974).

THE FLAPPER, THE HOUSEWIFE AND THE MAKING OF MODERNITY MARTIN PUMPHREY

Image 1: Vogue, 15 March 1927 The Flapper’s face, high cheekbones, clear-blue, wide-set eyes and full, lipsticked mouth fill the magazine’s front cover. She stares straight at us with an indifferent and introspective gaze. Perhaps the curl of her lips is about to break into a laugh; perhaps the poise and firm set of her jaw suggest contempt. A blue felt cloche clasps her head tightly, and just visible beneath its rim are the short edges of her gold hair. An extravagant white fur wrap about her shoulders matches a string of pearls carelessly knotted about her strong neck. Behind her the lights of a modern skyscraper city—doubtless New York—stretch away in darkness. The lights of offices, movie houses, electric signs and streetlamps create a shimmering backdrop to her startling, disturbing presence. She is very much there, young, chic, sophisticated, a woman of her time. Image 2: Air-Way advertisement, 1930 Ten women sit for the advertiser’s camera. They are talking among themselves but their glances are oddly uncoordinated and they seem ill at ease. The caption tells us they are members of a women’s club discussing the new ‘Air-Way Sanitary System’, a domestic cleaner fitted with ‘labor-saving and efficiency’ features that ‘differs radically in design…from any other cleaning device’. No woman wants to push a heavy weight around…. No woman wants to fuss with a lot of cumbersome attachments…. Take advantage of this new and better method of complete home sanitation which Air-Way leadership has brought into the world for your benefit.1 These are smart, unaggressively modern housewives. Like the Flapper, they wear tight cloche hats and short bobbed hair, but by 1930 the fashion is no longer contentious. They are intent, the ad implies, on keeping their houses clean, children healthy and husbands happy and successful.

48 CULTURAL STUDIES

I The Flapper and the Housewife—for all their familiarity, the two images are difficult to read. What do they ‘represent’? How were they understood? What processes produced them? Their transitoriness ridicules our desire to probe. Like the media images that endlessly renew the décor of our own contemporary world, they obscure the history of their own making. Then and now, consumer culture directs attention to the present moment. Thus George LePape’s Flapper conjures up associations of parties and gangsters, bootleggers and movie stars, while the housewives evoke the familiar world of modern domesticity. For us the Jazz Age is a necessary myth, a moment between holocausts that promises a time when change and rebellion were fun. For us too, the household gadgets generated by electrification and the 1920s revolution in the home affirm the safety of technology and its endless ability to improve (if also more ambiguously shape) our lives. In fact, the history of these images is not easy to retrieve. Both talk elliptically about our own world, about the modernness of modern life; both gesture indistinctly towards the massive economic shift that transformed America in the half-century before the First World War from a society still rooted in its predominantly agricultural, small-town past into the world’s foremost industrialized, urban nation, shaped by corporate capitalism, mass production, mass consumption and the processes of the new mass media. Though strategically the two images make no mention of it, that change inevitably involved conflict. The new America to which they allude challenged the traditional, nineteenth-century cultural values around which Americans had constituted their lives. In the opening years of the twentieth century the growth of America’s cities, the development of mass production and mass consumption, and the advance of science and technology into all areas of American life were deeply divisive, deeply contentious issues. Their effects were the subject of intense public debate, not least—and this is the starting point for the discussion that follows—because they gave new forms of public freedom to women that were seen to challenge traditional conceptions of femininity and the family. Over the past fifteen years, a good deal of cultural studies research has been devoted to analysing how mass-media images and narratives generate and reproduce our ideas about gender. Because, historically, the impetus for this has come from feminism, particular attention has been paid to the ways in which advertising, film and popular fiction (attempt to) structure female identity and direct female desire.2 In the pages that follow, I have drawn heavily on this work, not so much to present new conclusions about the advertising images I look at, but to review my own reading of 1920s American history—of consumer culture and modernism. In the past, like others perhaps, because of the processes that shaped my perceptions, I assumed without much question the validity of the version of modernity formed by the debate over Modernism. What interests me now are the ways in which those advertising images of the 1920s—reframed and

THE FLAPPER, THE HOUSEWIFE AND THE MAKING OF MODERNITY 49

reread—challenge that assumption and redirect attention to a different, and differently gendered, account. Approached from the perspective of women’s history, they expose the rhetorical manœuvrings out of which our own present understanding of the modern world, consumer culture and gender have been constructed. Any adequate reading of the modern period, that is, must take account of the fact that the debates over women’s public freedom, over fashion and femininity, cosmetics and home cleaning were as essential to the fabrication of modernity as cubism, Dada or futurism, as symbolism, fragmented form or the stream-of-consciousness narrative. II Late nineteenth-century American cities not only became larger and more numerous but were reshaped and reorganized by economic change and decentralization. Recognizably, ‘downtown’ became an area given over to business and commerce, as city dwellers began to move out. While poverty and dispossession wedged the ghettos of the immigrants who fuelled industrial expansion at the cramped margins of the new city centres, the wealth they helped to create solidified into the European-style town houses and mansions of the rich that sprang up wherever clean air could be found. It was the skyscrapers, however, that caught the eyes of the image makers. During the late nineteenth century, steel-structure architecture pioneered in Chicago began the upward movement that distinctively marked off the new business districts. Offering a visual focus for the energies and conflicts transforming American life, the new, towering buildings of downtown came to symbolize the dynamic modernness of modern America. Downtown streets were widened and surfaced, local electric and cable transport built and electric lighting installed. In Chicago, the Burnham plan of 1906 formally articulated the reconstruction that had begun after the fire in 1871 and made the Loop a model of inner-city planning. Elsewhere too, however, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and other cities across America, modern city centres appeared, shaped by the new architecture and electrification—well lit, open, easy of access and relatively safe.3 How they came to be represented fundamentally influenced how modernity has been understood. Alfred Stieglitz focused attention with his photographs of New York in the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century. When he photographed the Flat Iron Building on 23rd Street, at the junction of Fifth Avenue and Broadway, in the early months of 1903, it was, at twenty-two storeys, the highest steelstructure building in existence, and he conceived of it, he later said, as ‘a picture of new America in the making’.4 The artists and photographers connected with Camera Work and the 291 Gallery and the Europeans who followed them took his lead. As Georgia O’Keefe, Abraham Walkowitz, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp and others contemplated the cultural changes in motion around them, they transformed the city into abstract shapes. Crucially, because their images of

50 CULTURAL STUDIES

the Manhattan skyline and the modern skyscraper city have come to occupy a central place in the iconography of modernity, they for the most part ignored life at street level. In their photographs and paintings, skyscrapers loom over darkened, empty streets. Contemptuous as they were of America’s materialism, they effectively ignored the conflicts actually shaping the lives of Americans. However, by the early twentieth century, downtown city streets were neither empty nor dark. As a result of city planning and electrification, they were alive with advertising signs, lights, posters, shop window displays. What those familiar modernist images fail to record is that modern city space was in the process of being colonized by consumer culture. The deployment of the new technologies and new architecture was in no sense neutral. On the contrary, it echoed the imperative of America’s expanding economy that Americans be educated in the possibilities and attractions of mass consumption. Ironically, although those modernists recorded the technological reshaping of the city, they gave no clue of how, through consumer values and consumption, technology was invading personal and domestic space. In reality, it was not the aesthetic geometry of the skyscrapers that deserved their attention but the economic and social forces represented by the new phenomenon of the department store. As a cultural form, it represented not the rise of the self-made man so much as the complex interdependence of the growth of the consumer economy and the development of women’s public freedoms. Historically, ‘shopping’ has both practical and symbolic significance. From the start, as it was generated by the coming of the department stores, it was an activity for women that cut across social divisions. When Aristide Boucicaut began to develop his Bon Marché store in Paris in the 1850s to exploit the potential of the new, urban mass market, his idea seemed outlandish. His partner left in panic, but his profits proved him right. Between 1852 and 1870, his sales multiplied from 0.5 to 20 million francs. Others immediately copied his initiative. In America came Macy’s, Wanamakers and Marshall Field’s, in England, Harrods, Liberty’s and Selfridges. Shopping was transformed from a simple, economic necessity to an attractive cultural activity. It was this—not some abstract aesthetic principle—that prompted the reorganization of America’s inner cities and attracted the investment needed to finance the new, extravagant forms of shop design and display that characterized the department stores. Quite intentionally, shopping was linked with individual choice and pleasure. In welllit, airy stores, goods of all descriptions were displayed for inspection. Prices were fixed. There was no obligation to buy. Where traditionally retail had been men’s business, the department stores became downtown women’s clubs with restaurants, rest rooms and polite personal attention. Their opulence and displays of luxury made them ‘schools for consumption’, and indeed their need for high turnover required that Americans learned to consume as never before. That requirement was the source of far-reaching conflict and change.5 The links between the development of business and consumer culture and the growth of women’s public freedoms are complex and, from our own later

THE FLAPPER, THE HOUSEWIFE AND THE MAKING OF MODERNITY 51

perspective, ambiguous. Unquestionably, however, for women from different status groups, the electrification and reshaping of the inner- city business districts, the new electric city transport, the expansion of office work (particularly after the widespread adoption of the typewriter during the 1880s) and the immense success of the department stores all had particular significance. As shopping legitimated a new ease of access to public space for women, stenography, clerical work, telephone switchboards, light-goods production (of fashion accessories like hats and stockings and electrical goods, watches, lenses, etc.), packing and shop sales all offered new areas of employment. In addition, in different ways for women of more affluent families, the breaking down of the social constraints that had kept women out of public life created greater possibilities for education, careers and independent life. Taking advantage of the New Freedom, such women became involved in welfare and social work, in women’s clubs, reform movements, politics and the struggle for the vote.6 It is crucial to stress that these new freedoms were often more apparent than real. Women’s unionization was slow, and women were often employed to fill new low-skilled jobs or to deskill jobs formerly occupied by men—in offices, for example, or the ready-to-wear clothing trade. Women’s independence was at best limited. While for working-class and immigrant women employment almost certainly meant money to support a family income rather than money for personal pleasure, the majority of middle-class women gave up employment when they got married. None the less, economic independence (if only the

52 CULTURAL STUDIES

promise of it) began to create new patterns of behaviour and expectation for both single and married women. Women’s involvement in politics in the workplace was minimal, but in 1899, when the General Federation of Women’s Clubs was established, it drew together 495 local clubs and 20 state federations whose reformist interests were felt at both the state and the federal levels. Similarly, the fight for the vote that succeeded finally in 1919 drew together a complex and farranging coalition of radical and reform-minded women from across the states. To use the words of the historian Mary Ryan: ‘Between 1890 and 1920 women built a rationalized organizational network that was nearly as sophisticated in its own way as the corporate business world.’ By 1920, 8 million women were employed outside the home.7 These changes did not go unopposed. Conservative resistance came to focus most obviously on the question of the vote. At issue, however, was far more than the worry that, as voters, women might support reforms that would challenge the laissez-faire practices around which America’s economic expansion had grown. The New Freedom was identified from the beginning as a product of modern city life and perceived as a threat to the traditional, patriarchal concept of the family, to the nineteenth century’s (middle-class) ideal of the chaste, passive young woman and the self-denying wife and mother. While advocates of women’s social freedom, education and suffrage tried strategically to argue that their aim was simply to extend women’s maternal and caring duties into the public sphere, their opponents predicted the collapse of the family, of society and of civilization itself if ‘natural sexual distinctions’ were ignored. The debate was never concluded. Rather, it was overtaken and its terms redefined by America’s emerging consumer economy which required women to play a more active part in public life. As a new breed of American boosters and advertisers set out to make this palatable to the majority of Americans, they co-opted and redirected the arguments of both sides in order to turn their debates and even the conflicts themselves into consumer behaviour. It was in the context of these complex manœuvrings that the Flapper and the American Housewife were born. III The question of the New Woman faced advertisers in the 1920s with particular problems. With their brief to appeal to (and in effect create) a national audience of consumers, they could not simply reject traditional gender assumptions. Rather, without giving offence, they had to subtly transform popular conceptions of femininity and the family to make them triggers for consumer behaviour. Much of this was undoubtedly an unconscious manœuvre prompted by the invisible logic of consumerism. It is clear, however, that many of the new theorists of advertising were fully aware of their task—which is not surprising, given that by the end of the 1920s advertising accounted for between 2 and 4 per cent of the American national income, and its success was central to the functioning of the economy.8 By their own estimation, the vast majority of consumers were

THE FLAPPER, THE HOUSEWIFE AND THE MAKING OF MODERNITY 53

women. Of the eight American mass-circulation magazines of the 1920s with circulations of over a million, six were women’s magazines.9 By 1928, according to one advertising executive, 97 per cent of all advertising was directed at women and 67 per cent of all consumer items were purchased by women.10 Though the threat to the American home and the American family might seem to conservatives in the 1920s to be the work of feminists, modernists, socialists and alien infiltration, the implications of the advertisers’ own figures are clear. The task of the advertising executives, PR men, copywriters and photographers was at once to legitimate and mask the implications of the fact that as consumers women were being given a central and active role in modern society. Their success depended on and in turn fuelled the growth of the mass-media technologies of film, radio and publishing. It also inevitably confronted women with highly ambiguous and contradictory directives. The power of the American government’s propaganda during the First World War convinced many American advertisers that emotions could mobilize mass action more effectively than rational or practical appeals. As they began to consider the possible uses of social psychology for understanding and directing consumer behaviour, they turned in particular to contemporary research into human association and motivation (later formulated by John B.Watson as behaviourism) and to the new popular psychology that created the decade’s cult of personality and the vogue for self-analysis. Probing for the irrational processes that would trigger consumer response, they began to develop forms of lifestyle advertising that went far beyond simple statements of a product’s properties or uses. In often quite lengthy narratives, they encouraged consumers to associate a particular commodity with a whole (desirable) way of life and to see not owning that commodity as the cause of personal failure and catastrophe. Unpopularity and loneliness, disappointment in romance and threats to marriage, worry over a husband’s career or a child’s health were invoked to guide consumers’ reactions. In contrast, images of the good life made possible by consumption promised happiness, security, pleasure. Though its claims in retrospect often seem ludicrous, the success of lifestyle advertising was remarkable. It drew Americans into the modern world.11 The idea of ‘fashion’—twentieth-century democratized fashion—is of key rhetorical importance here. The point is nicely illustrated by an article in Vogue for 1 July 1924, which flatteringly contrasts its present reader with her counterpart in 1904. While the modern young woman is portrayed as up to date, independent, chic and sophisticated, her counterpart of twenty years earlier is fussily dressed, outmoded and tied to the past. Vogue’s version of women’s history is questionable, but the piece illustrates quite clearly not only how women’s freedom had been redefined but also how fashion and fashionableness had been used to effect a major transformation of cultural attitudes and social conduct. By associating Youth, Change and the Absolutely New with positive rather than negative values, the idea of ‘fashion’ undermined those traditional attitudes that only a generation earlier had made thrift, self-sufficiency, home

54 CULTURAL STUDIES

cooking, family entertainment, hand-made and hand-me-down clothes evidence of civic and moral virtue. Fashion, that is, encouraged women to become involved in modernity not in abstract theoretical ways but in terms of image and lifestyle. It is far less important in this sense to note the precise details of particular fashions from the 1920s (the precise length of skirts or hair, for example, or the shape of hats and hemlines) than to recognize that the idea of fashion itself (of being up to date) was made not merely acceptable to the majority of Americans by the end of the 1920s but a cultural norm that could constantly regenerate consumer desire.12 It is as a symbol of modern fashion that the Flapper has meaning. Her story, carefully worked out in the advertisers’ narratives, focuses her life very precisely. Young, with no future or past, existing in many media, angular and poised yet always in motion, she is an ironic realization of modernist principles. Inhabiting the eternal present, she lives only to consume. Certainly, in contrast to the Gibson Girl, whose outdoor activities enhanced her traditional appeal, the Flapper, with her unencumbered simplified clothing, short hair and boyish figure, rebellious lifestyle andpursuit of pleasure, did genuinely challenge nineteenth-century constructions of femininity. Far more importantly, however, her hectic social life and quest for individuality required clothes for innumerable occasions: travelling, shopping, lunching, weddings, outdoor amusements, tea, dining, theatre, dancing. The author of ‘A catechism in chic’, an article in Vogue for 1 June 1925, estimated that the modern woman needed a minimum of fourteen dresses, six hats, six coats, eleven pairs of shoes, plus underwear and accessories. Constantly in movement, the Flapper required cars, trains and planes at her disposal. Enjoying sport and the healthy life, she needed outfits for driving, golf and tennis. Looking for a suntan in summer and skiing in winter, she took advantage of the summer cruises and winter holidays being offered by the new tour companies. Seeking nightlife, she frequented places of luxury and expense.

THE FLAPPER, THE HOUSEWIFE AND THE MAKING OF MODERNITY 55

There are important silences in her narrative. Though crucially she is neither a vamp nor a tramp, we never see her at work, nor do we have any idea how she earns the money she spends. She enjoys the New Freedom not in terms of a career or political action but in terms of a carefree leisure, a leisure without consequences. Her image beckons to others to follow—to be essentially themselves—but evades the question how they are to gain the money to do so or how they should deal with the social conflicts they (but apparently not she) must inevitably encounter. Her expression of individuality and personality is wholly constructed around a powerful consumer fantasy that excludes economic limitations, class restraints and conflict. Produced by 1920s popular psychology rather than nineteenth-century repression, she expresses desire and seeks to

56 CULTURAL STUDIES

realize her true self. She does so, however, in specific, controlled and predictable ways that respond in reality not to her needs but to the needs of the consumer economy. The integration of freedom and consumption, desire and voluntarily chosen restraint, ultimately links the Flapper and the Housewife in a single ideological construction. Though obvious elsewhere, the verbal manœuvrings by which it was achieved are particularly evident in the advertising that created the fashion for cosmetics and sustained the massive growth of the cosmetics industry in the 1920s. Up to the First World War, cosmetics were still used with circumspection. Though beauty salons for women had become more common, and commercially produced cosmetics (soap, shampoo, perfume, powder, etc.) had begun to be advertised, the vast majority of women continued to use homemade cosmetics, and those sparingly. Excessive rouge, lipstick and eyebrow liner were still clear evidence of bad taste and loose morals. In sharp contrast, by the end of the 1920s, as the historian Richard Corson notes, an advertising agency could estimate that American women were using three thousand miles of lipstick a year, 375,000,000 boxes of face powder, and 240,000,000 cakes of dry rouge. American cosmetics manufacturers, in 1928, spent more than 16 million dollars…in advertising their products, making them the third largest industry in the country in volume of magazine advertising…. The cosmetics produced had risen in value…to $191,039,469…a year. This does not include imported cosmetics, which in 1920 were valued at more than six million dollars, exclusive of toilet soap.13 Conservative opposition to cosmetics continued through the decade. Corson records, for example, an attempt in the New Hampshire legislature to ban the use of cosmetics in the state in 1925. The point is none the less clear. By the end of the 1920s, cosmetics, specifically face make-up, had become the norm rather than the exception, a sign of youth and up-to-dateness, a gauge of a modern woman’s independence. Two contradictory appeals are evident, however, in 1920s cosmetics advertising. On one hand, cosmetics were associated with European (French) sophistication—something recognized both by the cosmetics producers who exploited the link and by conservatives for whom it signified immorality, foreign decadence and un-Americanness. On the other hand, they were associated with being young, being natural and clean and with ‘being yourself. What resolved this contradiction was the advertisers’ embellishment of the concept of ‘female hygiene’. Elsewhere, of course, ‘hygiene’ was mobilized extensively in 1920s advertising. It created, for example, the demand for ‘The Modern American Bathroom’ and a national boom in the plumbing and fittings industry. Directed at women, however, it linked science and nature, cleanliness and the true self, to make cosmetics ‘natural’, even necessary, because part of the process of both

THE FLAPPER, THE HOUSEWIFE AND THE MAKING OF MODERNITY 57

self-realization and social accommodation (‘You must be clean to be yourself’ and ‘You must be clean to please others’). Most importantly, it created the female self-surveillance that was the key to the advertisers’ transformation of the New Freedom from political and social action to consumer behaviour. Just as fashionableness, cleanliness and cosmetics seemed to promise access to the gay, free life of the Flapper, the gadgets of the new domestic technology

58 CULTURAL STUDIES

promised the Housewife that with their help she could be both efficient and more personally fulfilled. ‘Why drown your soul in a greasy dishpan?’ asks a Conover electric dishwasher advertisement from 1927, implying that the Housewife has far more important personal things to do.14 In fact, women’s housework did not decline with the coming of household gadgets. If anything, it increased—boosted by the responsibilities and duties that advertisers were able to discover for the Housewife to be aware of.15 Guilt and fear were constantly summoned to guide her. Already educated in self-surveillance, the young wife was enjoined to take responsibility for the surveillance of a whole household. ‘Why will so many married women consider themselves so safe?’ an Odo-Ro-No ad knowingly asks, and goes on to warn there is no such ‘thing as being safely married’.16 An Everready flashlight advert tells the story of a child falling into the cellar. ‘If a flashlight had been hanging on a hook at the head of the stairs…this little tragedy would have been averted.’17 Likewise, germs lurk in every nook and cranny: Health authorities tell us that disease germs are everywhere. Door-knobs, chair-arms, banisters—a hundred places around the home that big and little hands must touch daily—carry the germs of illness. 3,000,000 people in the United States are sick every day. And yet much of this illness is preventable. 18 Approached from the point of view of how it constructs the modern American Housewife and her duties, the Air-Way advertisement with which this discussion

THE FLAPPER, THE HOUSEWIFE AND THE MAKING OF MODERNITY 59

began becomes an interestingly complex text. The advert invokes first the rhetoric of the New Freedom. It offers the cleaner as a labour-saving device that presumably, by implication, will allow the Housewife to develop personal interests and become involved in a women’s group like the one it pictures. It also underscores the cleaner’s attraction by claiming it has been approved by ‘hundreds of thousands of American women’. The context of the language has changed, however. Where, twenty years earlier, women’s groups had represented a political force to be reckoned with, now they are martialled in the service of the consumer economy. How can the individual reader disregard what ‘women everywhere have recognized’ and ‘women themselves said they wanted’? There is more. The advert stresses the cleaner’s efficiency and radical new design as well as its convenience. Not only does it save labour, but it connects the Housewife with the technological advances of the age. With its ‘sanitary cellulose filler fibre container’ and ‘first practical moth control feature incorporated into a cleaning system’, it will make the Housewife a more efficient soldier in the war against dirt. Supported by the specialized medical advice the advert offers in the form of Dr Royal S.Copeland’s Dangerous Housework, she cannot fail.19 As one probes the advert, there is no missing its ambiguities and contradictions. The cleaner both sympathizes with and intimidates the Housewife. While the gadget has apparently been ‘brought into the world’ for her benefit, there is obvious coercion in the idea that American women ‘everywhere’ are so committed to hygiene and housework that they are constantly involved in the pursuit of more efficient cleaning methods. Thus, while the advert gives value to women’s opinions, it also asserts Air-Way leadership and the superiority of expert knowledge. For all its apparent innocence, it has built into it—indeed, it actively constructs—a particular redefinition of ‘the wife and mother’, of the family and social organization. The modern American Housewife is not bound to the past or tradition; she is neither fussy nor old-fashioned. She is efficient, up to date, knowledgeable about domestic technology and an expert consumer. She inhabits a world organized by brand names and made coherent by patterns of consumption. While her duties focus on the home, she occupies both the public and the private spheres. Imperceptibly, effortlessly, the advert transforms the rhetoric of women’s freedom into consumer discourse. Home cleaning, hygiene and efficiency, modernity and women’s desire, technology and the family are drawn together by the advertisers’ myth-making to form a series of imperatives around which the Housewife must shape her life. Like the Flapper, she is modern in very particular ways. IV The juxtaposition of the American modernists’ cityscapes and the 1920s advertisers’ redefinitions of femininity challenges conventional readings of

60 CULTURAL STUDIES

modernity—particularly those formulated within the debates over modernism. While the skyscraper city implies a modern world neither built to human scale nor responsive to human needs, 1920s lifestyle advertising offers a vision of an integrated and human contemporary environment. The modernists’ city, sciencefiction metropolis and mad technocrat’s dream, divides public and private, the technologically fabricated and the naturally real, civic identity and intimacy. In contrast, the advertisers’ images record very precisely (and, crucially, record as invitingly unproblematic) the integration of personal and domestic life with the processes of the consumer economy. Their great achievement was not that they sold particular commodities but that they made this version of modernity seem natural, logical, coherent and vital, and thus isolated as perversely pessimistic the modernist, Waste Land view of modern life. In effect, the modernists’ contempt for consumer culture allowed the advertisers’ myth-making to pass into popular cultural currency unopposed. The ironies in all this are clear. While on one hand 1920s lifestyle advertising projected a humanized version of modernity, it also used the frightening modernist vision of modern public life to encourage that retreat into privacy, into pastoral suburbia, introspective romance and the inward-gazing nuclear family that has come to have such power in twentieth-century consumer consciousness. ‘Privacy’, ‘intimacy’, ‘romance’, ‘the happy family’, ‘naturalness’ and ‘natural living’ then and now are words on which advertising has depended heavily. That historically, in the 1920s, the growth of the consumer economy was in the process of detaching those words from their traditional meanings was obscured by promises of improvement, up-to-dateness, progress and success. Like the New Freedom, those words, cleaned of historical meanings, became essential markers in the fabric of consumer culture. It is here that the reading of images I have offered itself breaks down. If the complex connection between women’s history and the development of consumer culture offers alternative ways of reading modernity and our own contemporary world, it also makes clear that the process by which advertising feeds on and in turn feeds the lives of individual consumers (as opposed to the advertisers’ categories) is at best ambiguous. While consumer choice and consumer individualism are carefully manufactured and packaged illusions, the consumer is never simply passive. Emptied of intrinsic meanings, words and signs (femininity, romance, freedom) are not necessarily the sole possession of the advertisers. Undeniably the image makers remain powerful, and their ability to co-opt, redefine and redeploy history constantly evades challenge. At the same time, images can be wrongly received, abused, cut up, and reintegrated in unintended patterns to produce ridicule and parody. The spiralling diversification of consumer desire and the ever faster recycling of images makes the frontier where public and private meet ever harder to control. Thus the private transformations of mass images to make street style and unprogrammed rereadings of public space become acts of re-co-option and resistance.20 Reread now, those historical images of the Flapper and the Housewife suggest

THE FLAPPER, THE HOUSEWIFE AND THE MAKING OF MODERNITY 61

62 CULTURAL STUDIES

ambiguities, contradictions and alternative possibilities that can usefully inform our present. Dept. of English, University of Birmingham Notes 1 E.R.Jones, Those Were the Good Old Days: A Happy Look at American Advertising 1880–1930 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959), p. 426. 2 See, for example, R.Coward, Female Desire (London: Paladin, 1984), and Women’s Studies Group, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Women Take Issue (London: Hutchinson, 1978). 3 H.D.Duncan, Culture and Democracy (Totowa, NJ: Bedminster Press, 1965); A.M.Schlesinger, The Rise of the City 1878–1898 (New York: Macmillan, 1933). 4 D.Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (New York: Aperture, 1960). For the European and American modernists and New York, see P.Conrad, The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 5 S.P.Benson, ‘Palace of consumption and machine for selling: the American department store, 1880–1940’, Radical History Review, 21 (Fall 1979), pp. 199–221; H.Pasdermadjian, The Department Store: Its Origins, Evolution and Economics (New York: Arno Press, 1976). 6 M.Ryan, Womanhood in America (London: New Viewpoints, 1979); S. Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1982). 7 Ryan, op. cit., p. 232; Schlesinger, op. cit., ch. 5. 8 Ryan, op. cit., p. 260. 9 F.L.Mott, A History of American Magazines, vol. 3 (repr. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957). 10 C.Naether, Advertising to Women (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1928), p. xiii. 11 S.Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Roots of Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976); A.M.McMahon, ‘An American courtship: psychologists and advertising theory in the progressive era’, American Studies (Fall 1972), pp. 5–18; O.Pease, The Responsibilities of American Advertising (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958). 12 J.Robinson, The Golden Age of Style (London: Orbis, 976). 13 R.Corson, Fashions in Makeup (New York: Universe Books, 1972), p. 491. 14 Jones, op. cit., p. 381. 15 R.S.Cowan, ‘The industrial revolution in the home’, Technology and Culture, 17 (January 1976), pp. 1–23. 16 Vogue, 1 May 1924, p. 119. 17 Jones, op. cit., p. 386. 18 Ibid., p. 437. 19 Ibid., p. 426. 20 My thanks are due here to Erica Carter for suggestions and critical comments. See, in particular, her ‘Alice in Consumer Wonderland’, in A.McRobbie and M.Nava (eds), Gender and Generation (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 185–214.

THE GIRL: A RHETORIC OF DESIRE ANN K.CLARK

The following reflections emerged in the context of teaching women’s studies students, who, encountering themselves surrounded by midwestern America, were also experiencing themselves as contested terrain. Here I am attempting, not to argue or to lay out facts, but to engage in some practical rhetoric aimed at an understanding and perhaps a sort of exorcism of what I have called The Girl. The Girl is a paradigm, what used to be called a picture of human nature. But she is now nourished by a very modern kitchen: the heavy investments of corporate capitalism. Surprisingly, The Girl is not gender-specific. In a way, any of us may see ourselves through her. She takes many forms in 1987, only some of which will be named here. But I think we shall recognize her, since being recognized is particularly her forte. Let’s take a look at her. What is she like? Blue skies, blond hair in the wind, jeans, running across a field strewn with wild flowers, The Girl is free. She is able to do, be and choose anything whatsoever, whatever she is offered: Swiss Formula, Helene Curtis, L’Oréal. She lives anywhere—anywhere, that is, in a democracy. This allows her democratic choice: any kind of cheeseburger, says the American Dairy Association. So she can be anyone. Her home is the context of no context,1 promising us happiness if only we join her there. Her history is to have no history so that anything is possible. That enables her, being formless, to be infinitely free. Thumb hooked in her diaper to reveal the pink-tanned baby bottom, sundrenched by Coppertone, The Girl is an ersatz child. Because she is unmarked by any adventures or by any passage through the world, she is a virtual child, pure, untouched. Because she might have appeared here as well as there, there as well as anywhere else, she bears no marks of any encounter with any particular space or time. Because she is not formed (or deformed) by history, there is nothing of her definite enough, or particular enough, to serve as the basis for her judgement. Her choices are mere acts of preference according to what seems attractive. This is called her freedom, especially her ‘freedom of choice’, for it appears that nothing is required of her, since nothing is requisite to her. The Girl considers herself privileged in this pure freedom. What she picks is all up to her. And there

64 CULTURAL STUDIES

are so many choices. But she wants to choose what is fitting, what fits her, what makes her fit. It has to be something just a little unique. Here is a problem, but also the answer. She cannot fit choices to herself, since, but for the choices, she is empty. Hence the only alternative is agreement, to choose what promises inclusion. So, like the child, she chooses and looks to see the response. Gazing thoughtfully at the cherry table, worrying a little about the colour coordinates of the six place settings, The Girl is both homeless and always at home. She is homeless in order to be comforted, in order to have things put right. Then she will be at home in/with her choices—of blue, of cherry, even of bathing suit. She needs comfort. Why? We’ll see that later. The point is, she likes the things that comfort her, she likes the shimmer of that trivial choice. It’s electric. ‘A little mist of energy, rather like love but trivial, rather like a sense of home but apt to disappear.’2 Otherwise she has no attention, affection or aspiration, for her personality is altogether a matter of where she fits—in the demography of the U.S.—in the demography of 200 million. She appears always…either at the moment of intensity when she has just been made to sparkle: ‘Adriana in her Pierre Cardin, so personal, so unique’…or, just before, but we know it’s coming: ‘Adriana felt so dull, but…’ Knowing that she belongs to the group of all those who choose what is appropriate gives her energy, a sense of confidence. She knows who she is. These choices must be made carefully because, for her, they are literally all important. They are all she is. Because she is bare/pure/free/empty, there is no weighing of already established needs; there are no layered desires to be integrated in a complex deliberation. This is the reason her choices can only be trivial, for they can only be arbitrary. As she chooses, her choices establish her home by setting out her demographic environment. Thus her attention is attracted by the merest glint, any iridescence promising satisfaction. Flitting here and there, she focuses on the surfaces of things, taking their sparkle as the attractiveness of something essential. She is full of the flickering tiny abilities of the romanticized child. This will endear her. She knows she will be appreciated because she is so bright and earnest, because she is so attractive. She will draw an environment to her, she will make a home. In love with mauve, preoccupied by squared shoulders, ‘addicted’ to black raspberry Frozen Yoghurt, The Girl is entirely perceptual. What she attends to, what is real for her and hence what she exposes to us are the aesthetic surfaces of things. Differentiation, distinctions have to do with colour, shape, taste and feel. Percepts are her reality, atomic and without history. They do not have to do, for example, with the origins or causes of objects. Like the kitten, her familiar, her eye cannot help but follow the kaleidoscopic movement of the objects surrounding her. She works at concentrating in order to make the choice that is right for her: blue or green, peach or lavender. Doing this, she is such a surprise to herself. She can never tell what she will do next because she is unique, an individual. This unpredictability is a source of delight to her. It too shows her

THE GIRL: A RHETORIC OF DESIRE 65

freedom. She is so unrepressed, irrepressible! Her newness, freshness, naïvety, shows everywhere. The Girl incorporates an ontological vision. She represents the object as sheer appearance, as only whatever it seems. From her perspective the question whether an object will live up to its appearance can never be asked, because for her it has no other dimension. If it sparkles, it is lovely, and that loveliness is all she needs. Dressed in ‘softest celanese’, her face set in the steely expression of a vicepresident of New York Bank and Trust, The Girl is sexual but she is cold. Both sexual and asexual, she is the talisman which, conquered or possessed, confers potency. On the other hand, emulated, she activates ‘the power of the weak’3 —a whole series of exchange values. Her love is the emotional dimension of her perceptuality. She loves her rugby shorts, her cuisinart, those objects whose shapes articulate her dependent (demographic) self-definition. Her vulnerability is her emptiness, potentially resolvable into abstract, infinitely iterable attachment. As herself the appearance of an object, The Girl is the abstract representation of flesh and blood without the idiosyncrasy, the marks of history that make a body. There are no universal bodies, but that is what The Girl is. So she must be, because her intimacy occurs in ‘the grid of 200 million’. It is there for all of us to share; she is there for all of us. But, of course, that is impossible. Therefore she is also innocent. She smiles: ‘Look at The Girl smile. The more she smiles, the more certain it is that she represents something trivial, something shocking, or something failed.’4 Sexuality as asexuality is all of these. Sometimes she does not smile, but, seeing that she is voluptuous under the translucent fabric, we know she doesn’t mean it. Her coldness lies not in her expression but in what she is, innocent or guilty, both and so neither—qualities mutually cancelled to make an abstract surface free to be painted by Revlon but not touched by individual hands. What’s going on What I have called The Girl is, like the unicorn, a particular design with an institutional history. The unicorn unites a complex set of interpretations and is communicated in many contexts. We find it in tapestries, in poems, in fable, in medieval bestiaries, and now in window medallions and stuffed toys. It has a long history of meanings which we might come to understand by describing its features in these various contexts, then coming to see what they signify. ‘The Girl’ is my name for one among many diverse threads in the representation of women by late twentieth-century corporate media. I want to look at her to see what she represents and then, perhaps, what she might be working on us. Lastly, I want to say something about why just this sort of model, defining just this realm of possibilities, should exist.

66 CULTURAL STUDIES

The context of no context is where The Girl invites us to live. It is the source of the freedom she represents. And I think it is also the legacy of the destruction of history as part of our lives. George Trow describes a change in the form and rhetorical structure of history as it is represented for us in television, a change from narratives of ‘growth, conflict and destruction’ to records of ‘demographically significant preferences’.5 But this change affects the relationship between persons and their history. Where history is the charting of changes in common characteristics, the person becomes a unit of a class rather than an actor in the adventures of a community. Beginning with 200 million, ‘New History’ taxonomizes to characterize the vulnerability of groups. How many Saab owners, how many Honda owners? How many runners, how many skiers, how many drinkers of imported beer, of wine, how many with parents who went to high school, how many not—and, most importantly, how do these crucial characteristics interact? Trow calls this non-history New History because history is always the way we bring our personal experience into continuity with the past: ‘the interpretation of history and the mode of writing it are always methods of making history.’6 What New History does is to remake history by denying continuity with the past. It is peculiar in that its synchronic taxonomy explicitly denies any continuities of motivation, intention or causality. Paul Ricœur writes about the connection between persons and history: A human being discovers his finitude in the fact that, first of all, he finds himself within a tradition or traditions. Because history precedes me and my reflection, because I belong to history before I belong to myself, prejudgment also precedes judgment and submission to tradition precedes their examination.7 To discover one’s finitude is to discover one’s boundaries and hence one’s character and shape. Knowing that shape, the person one is, supplies the foundation for judgement, even for a critique of the tradition which is its source. But suppose Trow were right, that history has disappeared, has given way to a series of demographic maps emerging from national interest research. In that case the hermeneutic task of self-understanding, the development of awareness of elements of our history internalized in our subjectivity,8 would not occur. We would remain as if children, secure in the belief that we were unique and new. Empty of self-definition, we would feel infinitely free and we would be infinitely malleable. This is the freedom endorsed in the image of The Girl. Wherever she occurs (in the advertisements in your department store account, on your car radio or in the magazines at the doctor’s surgery), she promises that it is possible to be anyone. She has the freedom of ‘no-history’ which enables her, being formless, to be any form; enables her, without prejudgement, to choose anything. She is infinitely free.

THE GIRL: A RHETORIC OF DESIRE 67

But it is the freedom of a child—of preference rather than judgement—because its activity is detached from reflective action and aimed instead at agreement in and with the moment of choice. That agreement provides the comfort The Girl needs. She needs comfort partly in order to represent the possibility of our fulfilment and partly because we find in her an echo of our own unease at the increasing difficulty of choosing—a job, for example, or a partner. As the difficulty increases, the importance of these things is transferred to the realm of trivial choices. The Girl represents this possibility as comforting. ‘How should we live together?’ is replaced by ‘What should we look like?’ Trow writes: important forces that fell outside the new scale of national life (which was the life of television) began to find a home in the exercise of preference concerning trivial matters, so that attention, aspiration, even affection came to adhere to shimmers thrown up by the demography in trivial matters.9 In The Girl, this transformation is affirmed for us. She is the epitome of its accomplishment. Here we begin to see why this structure has been feminine. In order to work on us, in order to offer itself for us to think ourselves through, it must invite without seeming to limit us. It must represent an infinitely receding object (we can never be just like her, for she is always changing), which can then be infinitely appealing. But passive invitation always just beyond reach has been the central structure of sexual purity, of female innnocence in Western culture. That structure has been the condition of being potentially possessable and yet wholly unformed, so wholly malleable. In a Judaeo-Christian culture, such an image is most easily feminine: it needs to be in order to do its job. The rhetorical echo of the femininity of the representation is the structure of sexual purity, resonating under capitalism, in the bare, free object. What does The Girl represent? In her history of American housework, Never Done, Susan Strasser points out that the change from consumption perceived as wastefulness performed by the idle, to consumption as a necessary profession requiring dedication, efficiency and large amounts of time, was engineered by mass marketing, and that its primary locus was the lives of women. Massive industrialization tended to break apart the bonds of family and community both by means of the practical demands of the mobile workplace and by means of the self-identity it projected: ‘corporate products were established as solutions for fearful individuals in a hostile world’, which translates, as Strasser says, into the cornerstone of consumerism: ‘Money CAN buy love.’10 Unlovable in a hostile environment, the person becomes an atomized particle of need, feeling, as Trow says, that ‘The background is distant, the sense of protection is distant. People are so frightened. There is so much

68 CULTURAL STUDIES

distance between them and their protection. They reward anyone who can persuade them that there is no distance.’11 In the face of this separation, which is really a separation from oneself, The Girl is projected as the image of normality and hence as the image characterizing the group. She is offered to us by the media as a representation of the possibility of belonging. As both the abstract consumable and the abstract consumer, she holds out to us both the end and the way. Marx wrote that money allowed every value to be replaced by its negation in the social economy. As money is to the social economy, so also The Girl is to the desire that must motivate a consumer society. In her abstraction, she transmutes every need into an attribute which she can supply. Because in her impotence she stands for power, she is ‘The image which taps the wells of need and desire’.12 She is the ‘magic and wishfulfillment’ that the market may bring.13 She represents the promise of ecstatic delight with which commodities must be clothed in order to be felt as needs. She represents the perceived and perceptual need, the aesthetic surface felt as need; she is the aesthetic object which we want—bearing no marks of the history of its production, revealing no clues about the lives used to make it. Now, in a post-need culture, the aesthetic surface has become the only feature of the object. Nothing else distinguishes one cereal from another. Foucault writes: Now there is a trait which is common to the economy of pleasures as it functions in the West, namely that sex acts as a principle of measure and intelligibility. For millennia, the tendency has been to give us to believe that in sex, secretly at least, there was to be found the law of all pleasure, and that this is what justifies the need to regulate sex and makes its control possible.14 Ironically, history is what allows The Girl to function as an ahistorical ‘law of all pleasure’. Because The Girl is the Paris yard of desire, she is the measure of need. She makes desire intelligible by giving it form and she does this by establishing and controlling what is acceptable as pleasure (the feel of a Schicksmooth leg) or as exchange for sexuality (‘Give her diamonds. For all the ways they make a woman feel…’). She is the standard in the social construct of the economy of pleasure/sexuality. And so she is also the representation of freedom as control: ‘only on satin…’, ‘only with Harvey’s Bristol Cream…’ The freedom represented by The Girl is the freedom of choosing among trivial options which offer her a controlled self, one which is constructed and yet available to everyone. Her self is removed from her, then offered back to her at a price.15 Her childishness mutes the triviality of her choosing and accentuates her availability for us. Available as an option (so easy to be like her), available as a possession (the Grecian bend, the lowered eyes), in her sexuality, she represents freedom as confinement. The fanny proffered, but moulded and bound, compressed into the safety of abstract curves by jeans, size 10. Her availability is empty, since it is not

THE GIRL: A RHETORIC OF DESIRE 69

animate sexuality, urgently present, but only one or another brand of jeans. Sex becomes, in the metaphor of The Girl, the jeans or any surrogate, and so, safely, comfortingly, its energy can be harnessed, confined, engineered, marketed and exchanged. The Girl represents the goodness of naïvety; she is ‘apolitical’. She has no opinions except about herself. This is what makes her normal and normative. She represents little bits of information as interesting: in the ‘Life Style’ section of the Tribune we can learn how to frame our own pictures. Complex or systematic explanations are unintelligible: ‘so intense’, ‘too dull’. Her salvation lies not in understanding where she is but in the proper presentation of herself. She is the epitome of self-concentration as virtue. In the narcissism of this structure, The Girl reproduces and affirms a wider social narcissism, the underside of which is a dependence on authority. In The Girl, Vietnam became interesting as an inexplicable American psychosis, not the state-authorized destruction of another land and people. And, in The Girl, Nicaragua cannot yet exist. Nourished by consumer media, The Girl personifies the containment policy which is directed against any systematic discussion of national political activities. The fragmentation and involvement with trivia endorsed by The Girl recapitulates the maxim that ‘the relation of power is reaffirmed in the structuring of information’.16 She is the figure of our dependence on the authority of those who know, representing it as appealing at the same time as it defines her. She holds out to us the comfort of leaving the decisions affecting our economic and political life to others, and, more than that, she offers the goodness of our dependence upon ‘the wisdom and restraint of those in power’.17 In her, politics becomes aesthetic. Her aesthetic choices are represented as if they were political ones; style and colour substitute for political choice: the reds, the greens, black and white punk, earth-mother browns, the rainbow T-shirt. At the same time the virtue of her dependence is underlined. She is a team player, she wears the badge of her team, but she does not coach it. She specifies her narcissism in her style, which, we now see, is at the same time a sort of self-effacement. She needs direction; in doing this she stands for goodness as vulnerability. She needs protection. She is the figure and product of those ‘legitimate American interests’ requiring protection. In so far as she represents what we fight to defend, it is clear that that has the real vulnerability of an aesthetic surface. Where democracy is red, white and blue, a Coca Cola in tennis shorts, it needs protection. Sheer surface, infinitely changeable and therefore empty, it cannot stand as its own security. As social values are exchanged for an aesthetic, the structure which they legitimate becomes less and less secure. ‘All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war,’ said Walter Benjamin.18 The Girl is a figure of that tendency.

70 CULTURAL STUDIES

Why? The Girl is a trick. She is the coin in the exchange of desires. For she is the badge of potency that we all are to want—either immediately (she’ll be mine with the car) or mediately (with the car she’ll be me). In her operation she increases the impotence that makes us need her. For, as we enter that structure, we relinquish our history and ourselves. The more we reach for her, the more impotent, alone and fragmented we are and then the more we need her. Thus, the more she sells us, the more she works. If all of our self-concept were up to her, she could sell us anything, endlessly. The ideal circumstance for the market-place would be that the whole context of our self-identification were entirely open. But, for all of us, the context of no context is intolerable. It produces aimlessness and a constant need of comfort. We look to some version of The Girl to provide that complete environment which, reflecting inward, will identify its inhabitants to us as ourselves. In the void left by the loss of history, The Girl promises power, community and self-control. If only we have her or look like her we will be validated, included, unified. More than that, we will survive, for ‘in a world of strangers, survival is a matter of appearance and surface impressions.’19 In her femininity, The Girl offers herself to us as salvation; she is so available if only we will reach out. In a society in which power is the prerogative, defining characteristic and source of self-validation for men, but a society in which that power, even over one’s daily life, is increasingly closed to all of us, what else could the trick be but the ever open, ever nice, infinitely available and always deferred sexuality of The Girl. As we take her, as we learn to perceive ourselves through her, we affirm that fear and money can buy love. Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen write: The goal of the advertising industry is to link the isolated experience of the spectator with the collectivized impulses and priorities of the corporation. The contingencies of the self will be thwarted by the unity of the commodity and the facts of the market place. In the commodity lies a newly realized self, the promise of community.20 The Girl is currency for this exchange: self for commodity. Without her, or something which could do what she does, the exchange could not take place. Through The Girl, corporate priorities are inserted into the smallest recesses of our lives. From sexual habits to cereal, the standards for ‘normal’ life become the channels of our desire. The mechanism for controlling this flow is the structure of The Girl. As it succeeds, the ideal that she represents becomes part of us. Her homelessness becomes our history. Her childishness becomes our maturity. Her distance transforms our sexuality. Her passivity becomes our authority. Her narcissism appears as our virtue and her freedom becomes our confinement. In

THE GIRL: A RHETORIC OF DESIRE 71

her, war appears in the guise of peace, and appearance is reality—the necessary shape of consumer capitalism. St Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

G.Trow, Within the Context of No Context (Boston, Mass.: Little Brown, 1981). Ibid., p. 7. E.Janeway, Powers of the Weak (New York: Knopf, 1981). Trow, op. cit., p. 19. Ibid., pp. 3–4. M.Janssen-Jurreit, Sexism: The Male Monopoly on History and Thought (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1982), p. 33. Quoted in T.McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 180. Ibid. Ibid., p. 7. S.Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1982), p. 253. Trow, op. cit., p. 74. S. and E.Ewen, Channels of Desire (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), p. 74. Ibid., p. 62. M.Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 190–1. J.Berger, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 134. S. and E.Ewen, op. cit., p. 251. Ibid., p. 270. W.Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 243. S. and E.Ewen, op. cit., p. 263. Ibid.

CONSUMERISM AND ITS CONTRADICTIONS MICA NAVA

Over the last year or two a number of articles about the dilemmas raised by the buying of things, by style, self-adornment and the consumption of images, have appeared in the pages of magazines like Marxism Today, New Socialist and Women’s Review, as well as in a range of less well-known academic journals and anthologies. Broadly, the debates have been concerned to establish whether an acknowledgement of the stubborn and complex pleasures afforded by these phenomena is evidence of a more sensitive and progressive analysis than hitherto—capable ultimately of providing the groundwork for a more popular political appeal to both men and women—or whether, as has also been argued, these preoccupations are diversionary, evidence merely of a mid-1980s capitulation to the right, an obfuscation of the stark reality of capitalism’s uncompromising hunger for new markets. These questions clearly have political as well as theoretical implications; indeed, they combine in quite a unique fashion some of the major concerns of socialists and feminists. What I intend to do in this brief article is to clarify some of the substantive issues at stake here by placing them in their historical context. In this way we may be able to put into perspective and refine evaluations of some of the more recent developments in the debate. It was the intellectual and political climate of the United States during the 1950s which provided the conditions for the emergence of some of the most virulent critiques of consumerism in the post-war period. This was the moment of the expansion of domestic markets, of the suburban housewife, ‘consensus’ and McCarthyism. It was a period of political conservatism in which the ‘free choice’ of goods came to symbolize the ‘freedom’ of the Free World. The consumer society, as a distinctive form of advanced capitalism, relies to an unprecedented degree for its perpetuation upon the media, advertising, spectacle, fashion and the image. Although a critical analysis of these aspects of mass culture was initiated by the Frankfurt school in the 1930s, it was not until the fifties and sixties that it really gained momentum. Herbert Marcuse, European Marxist and author of the seminal counter-culture text One-Dimensional Man (1964), and Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique (1965), were two of the most influential contributors to the radical critique in the United States.1 Both operated with the conviction that cultural forms have the power to construct

74 CULTURAL STUDIES

‘false needs’, to indoctrinate and manipulate men and women into social conformity and subordination. Friedan, one of the first to focus on the significance of consumerism in perpetuating the particularities of women’s oppression in post-war America, quotes an executive of the hidden-persuasion business: ‘Properly manipulated…American housewives can be given the sense of identity, purpose, creativity, the self-realization, even the sexual joy they lack—by the buying of things.’2 The notion expressed here of the individual as passive victim is also reflected in other more mainstream discourses of that moment. The plausibility of the idea of ‘brainwashing’—by communists and advertisers alike—gained considerable ground in the course of the fifties and sixties, and continues to have purchase to this day. It is in the context of this conservative climate that we must understand the emergence in the late sixties of the new feminist, socialist and black politics of style. Patched and second-hand clothes represented a rejection of the dominant ethos of consumerism and propriety. Peasant garments marked a display of solidarity with the poor and the Third World. Afro haircuts were a symbol of black American political consciousness; and the feminist appropriation of male workclothes has its own coherence when placed historically as a sequel to the excesses of early sixties sartorial imagery in which woman was cast as helpless yet seductive child, doll, bird, baby, and so on. Thus what we begin to see, as the post-war era pans out behind us, is a period of intense struggle and engagement played out on the terrain of cultural forms and signs; Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen put it thus: ‘In a society predicated upon the marketing of images, images become a weapon of resistance.’3 However, many of these new images, imagined in the first instance in the explosive climate of 1968—the politicizing conjuncture for an international generation of young dissidents: war veterans, women, blacks and students—and developed during the seventies, have over the last fifteen years in turn become current socialist and feminist orthodoxies. And with the emergence of municipal socialism in Britain in the eighties, these orthodoxies have acquired a new power base to add to the influence already exercised through other cultural and political forms. Thus we see the consolidation—indeed, the institutionalization in some instances—of some of the moral and stylistic precepts formed by the generation of 1968, the ‘old youth’ as Frank Mort has recently dubbed them.4 And, as this new left-feminist consensus gains ground, so it in turn produces its own resistances both within and beyond its immediate sphere of influence. These critical resistances take a range of forms (see, for example, Posy Simmonds’s cartoons in the Guardian5) and cannot, of course, be understood merely as a kind of inevitable generational revolt. They have been partially, and very importantly, fuelled by a keen sense of the failure of the left and feminism, despite considerable gains, to capture popular consciousness as effectively as the right. All the same, it does seem to be the case that the specificity and significance of a cultural form or cultural analysis is substantially determined by the historical context of its production and reception—by prevailing discourses. This

CONSUMERISM AND ITS CONTRADICTIONS 75

implies that we can attribute no inherent meanings to fashions or to particular styles of masculinity and femininity. Codes are immensely plastic and are constantly being reworked. Whether make-up renders women respectable or deviant, whether muscular bodies are in or out, whether streamlining is good or bad design,6 indeed whether form is considered relevant at all—and here I am talking not only about appearances and commodities but also about fashions in language, ideas and morality—is to a large extent consequent upon combinations of existing meanings and the historical moment in which they come into being. This is not to suggest that epiphenomena of this order are therefore politically unimportant. On the contrary, they clearly manage to address—and hence (potentially) to mobilize—popular imagination and desires in a more profound and all-encompassing way than do some of the classical material issues. Yet we must ask how far the different theoretical and political positions taken up in relation to consumerism have been able to advance the terms of the debate. It could be argued that by continuing to allocate such a central place to the issues involved—to images and commodities—we are not only interrogating but are also contributing to the explosion of discourses on consumerism as a late twentieth-century phenomenon. Zygmunt Bauman, in an important article on the genealogy of consumerism, has argued that the contemporary focus on the body—on adornment, food, fitness and sport—represents a popular struggle for the reassertion of control, a response to the historical deployment of individualizing techniques of power: Disciplinary power…was first and foremost about bodily control. It was the human body which for the first time in history was made, on such a massive scale, an object of drill and regimentation. Later consumerism was a product of failed resistance to such drill and regimentation. But what was negated could not but determine the substance and the form of its negation.7 The negation—the refutation—of bodily control and regulation is fought out on a predetermined battleground: the body itself. But in Bauman’s account the chances of subversion are limited, in that, historically, consumerism has constituted a form of compensation gained in a trade-off against the encroachment of disciplinary power. Consumerism is theorized here as, at most, a form of displaced resistance, and not, as I would argue, as an ever-expanding discursive apparatus. In addition, despite taking on aspects of Michel Foucault’s method, and in the process offering some riveting insights, Bauman seems ultimately to deny the implications of Foucault’s own insistence that where there is power, however diffuse or pervasive, there is the potential for its resistance. In my opinion Foucault’s theoretical framework can be pushed further and made to yield more productive questions and observations; its potential remains relatively unexplored. Thus, drawing on Foucault’s model of sexuality,8 which is neither reductive nor celebratory, consumerism can be argued to exercise control through the incitement and proliferation of increasingly detailed and

76 CULTURAL STUDIES

comprehensive discourses. Yet because of the diffuse nature of this control, because it operates from such a multiplicity of points and is not unitary, it is also vulnerable. If this is the case, then contemporary preoccupations with imagery and the buying of things can be understood not only as part of this new technology of power, but as, variably (sometimes simultaneously), both a form of subjection to it and a form of resistance. They are not inherently one thing or the other, since, if consuming objects and images is potentially subversive, this potential is countered always by its potential reappropriation and transformation into yet another mode of regulation. Our task, then, must be to detect those developments in consumer discourses (that is to say, modes of thinking as well as modes of operating) which constitute more than mere resistances to previous orthodoxies. Are there contemporary phenomena in the sphere of consumption which could be defined as an advance, as capable of acting upon vulnerable points and hence pushing back the networks of disciplinary power? There are two broad contemporary theoretical and political developments which I think may fall into this category and which are worth exploring to see whether or not they can be made to reveal progressive possibilities. The first of these is the new, more nuanced understanding of subjectivity. This appears also in recent critical refutations of the notion that the media and advertising have the power to manipulate in a coherent and unfractured fashion9 and represents a move away from the notion of mass man and woman as duped and passive recipients of conspiratorial messages designed to inhibit true consciousness. Interestingly, in symbiotic relation to this position—the daughter of it, as it were—is the apparently progressive polemical pursuit of ‘positive images’, a still widely current feminist and socialist convention, which, in addition to embodying rather simple notions of the good and the true, recalls and confirms the idea that images are able to persuade (to brainwash) in an unproblematic manner. The theoretical challenge to this kind of ‘old youth’ orthodoxy has come from an analysis which insists that the way in which any particular message is interpreted cannot be simply deduced from the intentions of its author/producer or from an examination of the product itself—or even from its context. Individual responses and criteria of assessment are forged out of and mediated by a range of experiences which pre-empt easy conclusions about meaning and appropriation and which are simultaneously rational and irrational. Current theories of culture and subjectivity take much more seriously notions of personal agency, discrimination and resistance, as well as (drawing on psychoanalysis) the contradictory and fragmented nature of fantasy and desire. Feminists of the eighties have argued, for example, that women can read glossy magazines critically and selectively yet not disavow more traditional feminine identities and pleasures. In this respect, Suzanne Moore emphasizes the need to ‘separate pleasure from the text and commitment to the text’;10 while Douglas Kellner, from a different perspective, has argued forcefully that the desire for

CONSUMERISM AND ITS CONTRADICTIONS 77

commodities is not in itself evidence of duping and indoctrination.11 Mass man and woman are treated here more respectfully than they used to be. The second aspect of contemporary consumer discourse which seems to represent a radical break, yet which in terms of its political implications is also open to conflicting interpretations, is played out variously in the arena of sexual politics. Conventionally consumerism has been seen to confirm women in their subordination. A good deal of feminist intellectual work has documented the ways in which women have both been targeted as consumers and done a major part of the labour involved (approximately 80 per cent of purchasing power in the Western world is wielded by women12). Another body of work has focused on the crucial part played in this process by advertising and women’s magazines. Rather less attention has been paid to the contradictory way in which the relative status and power of women has paradoxically been enhanced by consumer society. Consumption (as a feature of modern capitalism) has offered women new areas of authority and expertise, new sources of income, a new sense of consumer rights; and one of the consequences of these developments has been a heightened awareness of entitlement outside the sphere of consumption (which may well have contributed to the conditions for the emergence of modern feminism13). Jacques Donzelot identifies a similar contradictory singling out of women as experts in relation to the family.14 Thus the buying of commodities and images can be understood both as a source of power and pleasure for women (it has indeed given them a ‘sense of identity, purpose and creativity’) and simultaneously as an instrument which secures their subordination. Consumerism as gendered practice has, however, shifted somewhat since the post-war decades examined by Janice Winship.15 More recently there has been a blurring of the conventional distinctions in the advertising address to men and women; constructions of masculinity and femininity are less fixed; shopping and self-adornment have become less gendered—less specifically female— activities.16 A cruising of the text of Arena, the new fashion magazine for men (‘for the Porsche driver with the designer stubble’17), reveals men represented in many of the erotic and frivolous ways that feminists have traditionally found so objectionable when deployed in representations of women. (See also the recent Observer colour supplement cover with the dreamy male nude.) What we begin to observe, then, is not only a shift in practice, but also a destabilization of the positioning of men and women in fantasy. At the same time, girls’ and women’s magazines today, like Mizz and Seventeen,18 Cosmopolitan, even Vogue, and television programmes like Brookside, have increasingly become vehicles for the dissemination of ideas and the popularization of issues (among both men and women) placed initially on the political agenda by feminism. So what are we to make of these developments? How are we to evaluate their significance? I think it is possible to argue that these disparate theories and practices constitute an advance on the cruder certainties of the immediate past precisely because of their more nuanced, complex and contradictory nature. Consumerism is here split from its historic one-to-one relation with production.

78 CULTURAL STUDIES

And, of course, these theorizations have themselves had practical experiential consequences in that they have acted as a form of permission entitling members of today’s left intelligentsia19 to enjoy consuming images and commodities (which of course does not necessarily mean spending lots of money) without having to feel anxious about whether these activities are good and correct. The optimists might argue in addition that, by reacting against the insularity and moralism of much left-feminist thought over recent years, these conceptual and behavioural changes amount to progress in that they are able to lay the groundwork for a less guilt-ridden, more popular politics of resistance which effectively seeks out vulnerable points. But the cynics would respond by insisting on a sharper distinction between what is oppositional and innovative and what is progressive. Judith Williamson has argued forcefully that popular culture must not be exempted from political criticism and exonerated merely because it is new and fun.20 The cynics might continue by claiming that the optimists’ theories are a rationalization of their desires; an accommodative response to the new generation; a way of keeping up; in sum, a cop-out which, particularly during this period of recession, most brutally ignores the material injuries of class. Which brings us to consumerism as economic activity. Although I have hardly touched on the relationship of consumption to production in this short piece, the crucial existence of such a relationship is largely responsible for shaping commonsense socialist and feminist understanding of the issues involved. Marx himself paid little attention to consumption, but his materialist method has provided the framework for those analyses which focus on the financial and motivational investment of capital (controlled predominantly by men) in the expansion of markets for its commodities—in popular consumption. Capitalism’s pursuit of profit means that consumers as well as producers are exploited. It is this kind of approach which underlies so much condemnation of consumerism as practice. Without denying the significance of this, it is at the same time important to recognize the limitations of a neo-Marxist analysis which is not capable of offering us all we need to know about the question. Consumerism does not simply mirror production. Cultural forms and meanings are not reducible to class and the economic. Consumerism is far more than just economic activity: it is also about dreams and consolation, communication and confrontation, image and identity. Like sexuality, it consists of a multiplicity of fragmented and contradictory discourses. Bauman, like Foucault, has argued that production is not a privileged force but merely one site on which the surveillance of populations is carried out;21 likewise with consumption. If this is indeed the case, then the implications of any particular consumer practice or argument cannot be anticipated in advance. Consumerism is a discourse through which disciplinary power is both exercised and contested. While not negating its relation to capitalism, we must refuse to return it always to questions of production. Department of Cultural Studies, North-East London Polytechnic

CONSUMERISM AND ITS CONTRADICTIONS 79

Notes Thanks to Mitra Tabrizian and Angela McRobbie for support and comments. 1 H.Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1964); B. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965). 2 Friedan, op. cit., p. 182. 3 S.Ewen and E.Ewen, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), p. 244. See also, of course, D.Hebdige, Subcultures: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979), and, more recently, E.Carter, ‘Alice in Consumer Wonderland’, in A. McRobbie and M.Nava (eds), Gender and Generation (London: Macmillan, 1984). 4 F.Mort, ‘Image change: High Street style and the New Man’, New Socialist, 43 (November 1986). 5 See also R.Elms, ‘Ditching the drabbles: a style for socialism’, New Socialist, 38 (May 1986). 6 D.Hebdige, ‘Towards a cartography of taste 1935–1962’, Block, 4 (1981). 7 Z.Bauman, ‘Industrialism, consumerism and power’, Theory, Culture and Society, 1, 3 (1983), p. 40. 8 M.Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (London: Allen Lane, 1979). 9 See, for example, J.Root, Open the Box—About Television (London: Comedia, 1986), and K.Myers, Understains: The Sense and Seduction of Advertising (London: Comedia, 1986); see also C.Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (London: Virago, 1986). 10 S.Moore, ‘Permitted pleasures’, Women’s Review, 10 (1986), p. 10. 11 D.Kellner, ‘Critical theory, commodities and the consumer society’, Theory, Culture and Society, 1, 3 (1983). 12 R.Scott, The Female Consumer (London: Associated Business Programmes, 1976). 13 J.Winship, Woman Becomes an ‘Individual’: Femininity and Consumption in Women’s Magazines 1954–1969, Occasional Paper no. 65, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1981. 14 J.Donzelot, The Policing of Families (London: Hutchinson, 1980). 15 Winship, op. cit. 16 Mort, op. cit. 17 Reported by Marek Kohn at Left Unlimited, November 1986. 18 J.Winship, ‘“A girl needs to get streetwise”: magazines for the 1980s’, Feminist Review, 21 (1985). 19 A.Barnett, ‘Ideas in search of a home’, The Guardian, 17 November 1986. 20 J.Williamson, ‘The problems of being popular’, New Socialist, 41 (September 1986). 21 Bauman, op. cit.

GENDER RELATIONS AND YOUNG PEOPLE ANDREW H.WARD

What I should like to do is to introduce some of the issues concerning gender relations between young people. These relations depend, of course, on young people’s perceptions of gender. Straight away I need to point out that all academic research into the views and perceptions of young people faces a huge and seemingly insurmountable problem. This is the very obvious point that the researcher, by virtue of being an adult, will not be able to enter into the lifeworld of young people as a young person. She or he will definitionally be an outsider. Virtually all research to some degree faces this problem. But it becomes particularly acute when those being researched are the young. This is so primarily because of the issue of language. The researcher who interviews teachers or records verbal interactions between teachers will not find any drastic discontinuity between their mode of speech and her or his own. But the rhetoric—i.e. the way of speaking—of young people will be radically discontinuous with that of the researcher, no matter how prepared she or he is to seek entry into the child’s world. In all adult-child interactions a different verbal gear is engaged. So, just as teachers can forge relaxed, affective and supportive links with those they teach, researchers can do the same (and perhaps even more so) without ever dissolving the particular social boundaries which delineate adult—youth/child relationships. This is probably a significant reason why there have been relatively few studies conducted from the pupils’ point of view. But another major reason may be the attitudes of teachers and educationists themselves. Researchers often experience some resistance to child’s-eye studies. To take just one example, Roland Meighan reports that, when seeking to begin a research project on ‘the pupils’ point of view’, he found in his consultation with headteachers that the following views were characteristic:

This is a transcription of a talk given with Angela McRobbie at Ealing College as part of the ‘Gender on the agenda’ programme organized by the London Borough of Ealing.

82 CULTURAL STUDIES

Discipline would be adversely affected by this kind of exercise. It is bad for classroom relationships. It is dangerous to involve children in this kind of comment on their teachers. Children are not competent to judge these matters.1 There would seem to be two substantive objections expressed in these views—one intellectual, the other behavioural. The intellectual objection—that children are not competent to judge these matters (i.e. their school experience)— can be quickly dispensed with. Reputable research of this kind seeks the child’s view not as a remedy for other, mistaken views but as a view in its own right, for itself. So whether the child’s judgements are ‘incompetent’, whatever this might mean (indeed, the notion of competence here would require examination), is not directly relevant to the research process. The behavioural objection—that the effects of this kind of exercise are adverse and dangerous—poses a more serious challenge to the researcher. What right has any academic to disrupt the situation she or he is researching? Can it be justified if teachers are picking up the pieces long after the researcher has returned to the sheltered corridors of academia? There are two points which can be made in response to these questions. The first is a purely empirical point. Meighan argues that there simply is no established evidence to support the behavioural objections of headteachers. Schools have not been left with a legacy of anarchy following the researcher’s departure. The institutional order of schools has not proved to be as fragile as that. The second point is in a sense a reverse of the original question. What price institutional order, we might ask, if it becomes challenged when those for whom this order has been formally developed express their views? If this order cannot survive when those who are its subjects talk about it to ‘outsiders’, then perhaps this order does not deserve to survive! However, as we shall see, there are teachers who have been happy to entertain pupil-oriented studies, and research does get done. Indeed, let us look at a very substantial piece of research: the Department of Education and Science report Young People in the 80s. This is a traditionally organized statistical survey into the attitudes of 14–19-year-olds. What does this survey tell us about our subject, gender relations? Consider the data in table 1. For those with any concern for equal opportunities (or anti-sexism), these results may seem to offer some hope. Do they not indicate, we might ask, a fundamental shift in attitudes on the part of the young and, in particular, on the part of adolescent boys? Maybe; but let us look at some more data from the same survey (table 2), which suggest a rather different picture from that indicated by the figures in table 1. But there is more. Table 3 shows that (in 1983) the proportions of boys and girls who occasionally did those tasks that might conventionally be seen as male were very much within the same range.

GENDER RELATIONS AND YOUNG PEOPLE 83

Table 1 Adolescents’ views on work, pay and housework (percentages)

Source: Department of Education and Science, Young People in the 80s (London: HMSO, 1983), p. 70, table 1.42a

What can we conclude from these data? Perhaps not a lot; but in their own terms they would suggest that, rather than there having been a fundamental shift in behaviour patterns with regard to gender and domestic work among young people, we have seen—if anything—an extension of girls’ domestic labour into those areas that were traditionally male, even though nominally the attitudinal positions of boys and girls suggest more ‘liberated’ attitudes. (Incidentally, research for the company Polycell has suggested a similar pattern with regard to domestic self-provisioning, or DIY. That is, with the undoubted extension of DIY in recent years, what has taken place is not so much that men are doing significantly more but rather that more women are acquiring the skills and spending more time in domestic self-provisioning.2 ) I suspect that many of you will be aware that this kind of survey raises serious methodological questions—that is, questions concerning the validity of its results. One objection might be that the results are seemingly contradictory because they are measuring different things. Asking people what they do is qualitatively different from asking what they think. The implication here is that reports of what people do are somehow more ‘accurate’, ‘valid’, ‘realistic’ or ‘informational’ than the results obtained when you ask people what they think, and that young people say what they think they are supposed to think (rather than what they ‘really’ think). However, even if this were the case, this in itself provides important sociological data; for what people believe they are supposed to think is as important in understanding the society as the ways in which they concretely behave. Nevertheless, this does bring to our attention the question of what happens in the field, so to speak. That is, how do girls and boys relate to one another (how do they concretely behave?)? I have already said that there are relatively few studies focusing on the views of the young. There are even fewer which are specifically pupil-oriented; and very few indeed which deal directly, rather than in passing, with gender relations. Until recently, the literature has been clearly dominated by studies which are fixated with boys’ view of the world, to the extent that a debate was opened up regarding the invisibility of girls. We find, for example, in one of the best known of several studies of working-class boys in school—Paul Corrigan’s

84 CULTURAL STUDIES

Table 2 The proportion of adolescents who help in the home (percentages)

Source: Department of Education and Science, Young People in the 80s (London: HMSO, 1983), p. 14

Schooling the Smash Street Kids (1979)3—that the text is peppered with terms such as ‘working-class kids’, ‘young people’ and ‘teenage culture’; yet these terms are only ever used to apply to boys. The debate concerning girls’ ‘invisibility’ has two principal (and related) aspects: (1) the purely academic question of the absence of attention to girls within these studies; and (2) the question of whether, indeed, girls play any part in the youth subcultures which were so eagerly described and discussed in the 1960s and 1970s. This lack of attention to girls, and the cultures of girls, gives these studies (and I have in mind here Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1982), Geoff Mungham and Geoff Pearson’s Working Class Youth Culture (1976), Dave Robbins and Phil Cohen’s Knuckle Sandwich (1978), Paul Corrigan’s Schooling the Smash Street Kids (1979), Dave Robbins’s We Hate Humans (1984) and E. Ellis Cashmore’s No Future (1984)4) a curiously abstract or lopsided feel, in that what they all have in common is an emphasis on machismo as the absolutely pivotal key to boys’ behaviour. But machismo is a dialectical concept. That is, on its own it can have no clear meaning; rather, its meaning derives from the relation it has with its opposite: femininity. Thus machismatic behaviour makes sense only if we first grasp what this behaviour is pitched against—the feminine. Therefore, no matter how persuasively these studies are written (and some are extremely well written), they inevitably have an essential incompleteness, or open- endedness, about them. They imply a presence which is never (or hardly ever) revealed. Why is it, then, that these studies have made girls invisible? Well, first of all, these surveys have all been carried out by men. But also we must understand that it is not only girls who are absent from these studies. As Mike Brake has pointed out5, gay boys were absent. And we can add to this list: black kids were absent (with the exception of Cashmore’s book); middle-class boys were (largely) absent; suburban and rural middle- and working-class young males were absent. In other words, these researchers have all been somehow irresistibly drawn to the hard cultures of adolescent boys in inner-city, working-class areas. Their work has rightly been described as a celebration of these cultures.

GENDER RELATIONS AND YOUNG PEOPLE 85

Table 3 The proportion of adolescents occasionally performing certain domestic tasks (percentages)

Source: Department of Education and Science, Young People in the 80s (London: HMSO, 1983), p. 14

But we also have to take seriously the question whether girls are indeed absent from youth cultures. Are they invisible to the researchers because they are absent from the social world that belongs to the young? Of course, this depends entirely on how you define youth culture or the social world that belongs to the young. If it is decided to draw the boundaries around only specific activities, then clearly other activities will be excluded. And if this boundary drawing is enforced by a strong interest in—or attraction to—those activities typically carried out by males the result is obvious: girls come to be excluded. In other words, male researchers have decided that what boys do is of greater sociological interest than what girls do. However, there are (feminist) writers who have begun to redress this imbalance. Books such as Sue Sharpe’s Just Like a Girl (1976), Angela McRobbie and Mica Nava’s Gender and Generation (1984), Michelle Stanworth’s Gender and Schooling (1983) and Dale Spender’s Invisible Women (1982) are just part of a growing body of literature oriented towards girls’ point of view.6 This work has a number of crucial themes. First, of course, it is oriented emphatically to girls’ view of the world, recognizing their traditional ‘invisibility’. Second, it identifies girls’ behaviour very much as a response to a subjugating, patriarchal order (which means that boys are not absent or invisible in these studies). Third, it recognizes the domestic arena as being where girls are still primarily located. Fourth, it looks to consumerism as a key to understanding girls’ culture—e.g. the ‘culture of the bedroom’. Fifth, some writers reject the notion that girls’ activities are essentially passive, seeing them rather as active resistance to male domination—i.e. the creation of a distinct culture that allows the bypassing of male perspectives. Given these debates and views, it would seem beholden upon researchers to look at gender relations in sites which are common to both girls and boys— which is to say, in schools. The body of feminist work has looked at issues such as pupil-teacher relations, the curriculum and single-sex schooling. Gender relations between girls and boys have received less attention.

86 CULTURAL STUDIES

However, in the context of primary schools, writers such as K. Clarricoates (‘The importance of being Ernest…Emma…’) and S.Shave (Ten Ways to Counter Sexism in Junior Schools) 7 have noted a hostility between boys and girls, a hostility that is, interestingly, asymmetrical. The boys’ hostility appears to derive from some sense of being polluted by contact with girls; the girls’ hostility arises from fear of being ‘in love’ with boys if they get too close to them. Later on, it seems, this hostility takes a different form. That is, the literature reports that the relation between secondary school boys and girls becomes dominated by the boys’ sexism. The conventional wisdom here is that boys are concerned only with girls as objects with ‘which’ (i.e. with whom), through sex, they can establish their identities, whereas girls are oriented to boys romantically as potential ‘boyfriends’, and their status and identity are assured through being a girlfriend. The situation here is clearly complex: these roles seem incompatible. But it becomes even more complex, since it has frequently been recorded that, although boys want to gather a stock of sexual experience, when they decide to ‘get serious’ with a girl she must ideally be a virgin, or at least monogamous. This seemingly contradictory set of relations has been vividly documented by Paul Willis, in his Learning to Labour (1977).8 We might call this the ‘Barbara Cartland syndrome’; for it appears that working-class adolescent males share the same view of sex roles as that expressed within Cartland’s miles of rosy prose. It is interesting here to contrast Willis’s (and indeed Corrigan’s) view of boys’ sexism with that of women writers such as Michelle Stanworth and Dale Spender, who equally identify the sexism of boys but notably look to a very different focus in their interpretations of sexism. Willis and Corrigan identify sex and sexual desire as the key focus of attention. Stanworth and Spender look to academic performance as their key focus. In particular, they note that boys systematically underestimate the abilities of the girls in their classes. It seems that boys in general cannot entertain the idea that girls could be their intellectual equals—and, moreover, that girls themselves share this view. Part and parcel of this attitude is the invisibility of girls (once more!). Stanworth, for example, reported that one of the boys she studied talked of the ‘faceless bunch’, in reference to some of the girls in his class. These were ‘silent’ girls who sat at the ‘back of the class’ and who were presumed to be ‘stupid’. But, interestingly, at other times, the same girls are referred to by the same boy as ‘gaggling’. Of course, it doesn’t matter to this and similar boys whether these girls are literally silent or not; they remain effectively invisible or—to use another term the boys used—anonymous. And this anonymity has a loud echo within Willis’s study. For, although in his discussion of sexism the focus is on sex rather than on classroom performance, he shows frequently that in the recounting of their sexual exploits boys condemn girls to utter anonymity—‘there was this bird’, ‘this scrubber’ or simply ‘her’—and even the girlfriends have no identity, being referred to collectively and highly significantly as ‘the missus’. We have seen one central point of difference and one similarity between the male and female researchers mentioned. Let me point to another difference. The

GENDER RELATIONS AND YOUNG PEOPLE 87

dominant concern of Willis and Corrigan is with those who do not succeed within the education system (the ‘lads’, as Willis calls them), but they also refer to those who conform to the school’s culture and succeed. Spender and Stanworth make no distinction between girls. They see them as being unified in the face not of boys who reject the system (as is the case with Willis and Corrigan) but of those who do well within the system at the expense of girls. We might say that the male approach here pays effectively no attention to girls, divides up the boys and concentrates on those whose culture (their counterculture) ensures that they will fail within the system, whereas the feminist approach treats the girls as one category in the face of the institutional sexism of the school system and the boys themselves which ensures that the girls do systematically less well than they ought. At the beginning I said there was a fundamental problem with research into the young person’s viewpoint, and this was the inability of the researcher to become young—which was reflected most importantly in the different modes of speech employed by each. How, then, we can ask, have researchers overcome this problem? One of the characteristics of studies of youth cultures is their reliance upon transcribed sections of young people’s speech. The language difference is countered by using these examples to make the points the researcher wishes to have made. What is remarkable is that, within the writings of both male and female researchers, it is boys who have by far the largest say. It seems that, even for those who are deeply opposed to sexism, girls must often remain unheard. Dept. of Sociology, Ealing College of Higher Education Notes 1 R.Meighan, ‘The pupils’ point of view’, in Perspectives on Sociology (Walton-onThames: Nelson, 1979), pp. 96–7. 2 Taylor, Nelson and Associates Ltd, Survey for Polycell (September 1980). 3 P.Corrigan, Schooling the Smash Street Kids (London: Paladin, 1979). 4 S.Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 2nd edn (London: Paladin, 1982); G. Mungham and G.Pearson (eds), Working Class Youth Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976); D.Robbins and P.Cohen, Knuckle Sandwich (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978); Corrigan, op. cit.; D.Robbins, We Hate Humans (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984); E.Ellis Cashmore, No Future (London: Heinemann Educational, 1984). 5 M.Brake, Comparative Youth Cultures (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985). 6 S.Sharpe, Just Like a Girl (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976); A.McRobbie and M. Nava (eds), Gender and Generation (London: Macmillan, 1984); M. Stanworth, Gender and Schooling (London: Hutchinson, 1983); D.Spender, Invisible Women (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Co-operative Society, 1982). 7 K.Clarricoates, ‘The importance of being Ernest…Emma…’, in R.Deem (ed.), Schooling for Women’s Work (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); S.Shave,

88 CULTURAL STUDIES

Ten Ways to Counter Sexism in Junior Schools (Spare Rib Issue: 75, October 1978). 8 P.Willis, Learning to Labour (Farnborough: Saxon House, 1977).

RADIATOR GIRLS: THE OPINIONS AND EXPERIENCES OF WORKING-CLASS GIRLS IN AN EAST LONDON COMPREHENSIVE ANNE KRISMAN

This article was written for part of my MA course at Sussex University, and was researched during 1984–5. It evolved from a germ of an idea about ‘doing something on working-class kids’ into a study of a group of fourth-year girls who used to hang around at the beginning of the day and at break-times by the radiators at the foot of my staircase. When they first agreed to do regular tape recordings for me, I was not sure what I wanted to find out. Previous research on workingclass adolescents seemed to be predominantly about tough male gangs, their authors perceiving themselves as anthropologists divorced from their subjects. This was very different from my own reality. I was a teacher who had built up good relationships with the girls during lessons. In the same way, the girls’ group did not exist to make trouble or to be anti-authoritarian; it worked primarily as a school support group, where they joined together to discuss teachers, boyfriends, family and problems with homework. The study of a particular group became for me the celebration of a collection of strong-minded, developing individuals who had a clear perception about their lives and future. And, while the study is now crystallized on paper, my relationship with the girls continues as they go into the sixth form or out to look for work. The institution and authority I was interested to discover the girls’ perception of school and the meaning it had for them. It was common practice to have assemblies with the message ‘This is your school—don’t ask what it will do for you, ask what you will do for it.’ This type of appeal to their loyalty seemed to leave them unconvinced. They were quick to reject the façade of school life, the aura constructed by senior staff and delivered to them in its purest form in assemblies. The headmaster comes out with ridiculous things. If he had his way this would be a prim and proper school, you’d go around talking like a load of snobs and that. He moans at you all the time…‘Walk in the corridor’…‘When I was young and at school’…To my mind his school has to be perfect, his school has to be the first to have life skills…it’s got to be ‘everyone’s talking about our school’. He worries about the reputation, but

90 CULTURAL STUDIES

it’s not our kids, it’s the other schools too. If he had his way, it’d be a boarding school where people pay, not a school we’d go to. (Laura) I don’t think the head does enough for his pupils. He certainly doesn’t communicate well with them. In fact we don’t hardly ever see him apart from assemblies and everyone falls asleep then. He’s trying to change things for himself and just upsetting the pupils. (Rebecca) Both Rebecca and Laura see the headmaster as representing their school as a figurehead, but not as representing their interests or themselves as individuals. Laura points to the class differences; the school is full of working-class children, not ‘snobs’. He does not seem to understand them—it is ‘his school’—and she immediately points to the boarding school as an image for everything their school is not. Rebecca sees the pupils as a strong group diametrically opposed to the head, who appears only at assemblies and who tries to change the practices they have become accustomed to. She gave as examples the introduction of ‘life skills’ and the threat of compulsory school uniform. Both of the girls’ comments echo John Clarke’s description of the local school, which manages to serve the community yet at the same time stands for ‘kinds of learning, types of discipline and authority relations…quite at variance with the local culture’.1 Two ideas of the same institution operate together and can clash. The observations expressed by the girls may seem to point to an anti-teacher attitude. However, this did not happen to be the case; there was no blanket condemnation of teachers as a group, only for them as individuals. I don’t like teachers who once they’ve got a grudge for you carry it on. They call you ‘girl’, or ‘Robbins’. ‘Come here, girl.’ I don’t like teachers who don’t explain the work to you. (Anna) I respect the ones I can talk to, the ones that show interest in trying to teach kids. If they’re bitchy to me I’m right bitchy. I shall be polite to them, but that’s as far as it will go. (Rebecca) There was no sense of open war, as there is in Paul Willis’s work. In that study, one of the boys says about teachers: ‘They’re bigger than us, they stand for bigger things and you try to get your own back. Instead, there is an understanding of teachers as individuals, who are assessed on their ability to teach and on their response to them inside and outside the classroom. Teachers who did not say ‘hello’ to them in the corridor or street were particularly criticized, since it seemed they did not care for the pupils outside a working relationship. Laura’s comment that some teachers try ‘to be someone else and can’t’ seemed to sum up the girls’ disregard for the mantle of authority. Displays of strictness did not impress them. Teachers who knew how to ‘handle’ the class—Maria’s term, which seemed to replace ‘control’—were appreciated as good teachers.

RADIATOR GIRLS 91

Qualifications Qualifications were of key importance to the girls—as Maria stated, ‘Qualifications is the only reason for coming here.’ Despite the high level of youth unemployment, the idea of working hard for their exam results held a strong pull on the girls. This was obviously drilled into them as they went through the school. Choosing exam options in the third year marked a passage of transition from the lower school to the upper school, heralded by teachers’ taking more interest in them (in order to get more pupils to opt for their subject and thus avoid cuts in staff) and by special privileges (sometimes being allowed to buy hot chocolate in the canteen at break-times). The most anger was caused by the institution’s not fulfilling its part of the bargain: emphasizing the importance of options, yet removing one to replace it with ‘life skills’; underlining the necessity of getting good exam results, yet sending them home when there was no teacher to cover their lesson. (Both of these led to the production of petitions by the fourth-year pupils.) Maria—who was the most ‘difficult’ of the group, having truanted for long periods, had confrontations with teachers and been in several fights—managed to win against the institution. Her regular maths teacher was replaced in a timetable reshuffle by a supply teacher. Within a few days, Maria had approached the replaced teacher for support, got her mother to write a letter of complaint to the head of maths, had started a petition and had booked an appointment to see the headmaster. She was successful in getting her old teacher back. Rather than using classroom-based disruption, which would have been the short-lived alternative, she used all the forms of legitimate official protest—even as far as a face-to-face interview with the head of school. ‘We’re the exam class,’ she explained, playing back the school’s messages and getting what she and her classmates wanted. It was inevitable that exam classes in the fourth year would carry the same types of problems as classes in the lower school. The only difference seemed to be the promise of more qualifications at the end of the course. Laura talked about her maths teacher: Miss Patrick always has a go at me and I always backchat her. I used to be able to get on with her. Now I can’t. She always expects too much of me, like my work isn’t neat. I always feel it’s just me she’s having a go at. Everyone else can talk, but when I open my mouth, ‘Laura, I don’t like your attitude.’ I wanted to move out, but I couldn’t go. When I go in there, I get fed up. That attitude goes in. I do things to annoy her. If I don’t backchat her I feel I’m being bullied into doing her work instead of doing it of my own free will. Laura is stuck with this teacher, having tried to change and been unsuccessful. She does not play truant, since maths is known to be important (one pupil said to me when he got his report, ‘My parents only care about what I get for English

92 CULTURAL STUDIES

and maths’), and she is working for an exam. However, she has discovered ways of saving her self-respect—being rude to her teacher so that it is clear that she is working on her own behalf and not because the teacher says so. This underlines the girls’ emphasis on working for the individual teacher; as Laura said later in the interview, ‘I get that attitude, why should I bother if I can never please you?’ When asked about other forms of opposition inside the classroom, Lesley mentioned talking loudly about video films, writing notes, or ‘winding up’ the teacher by saying she felt sick. However, this was always as an accompaniment to doing some work, even if it was ‘deliberately slack’ to confirm the teacher’s expectations of her. It was still an exam subject. She did just enough work to get by. Confrontations When the incentive of exams was removed, there were more confrontations. Rebecca described an incident when a teacher ‘lost face’ with her. We were going to have a general knowledge quiz between his form and mine. We had to file in there and half our class didn’t want to do it. I definitely didn’t want to do it, so I thought: Right. My name got called out first as I’m bottom of the list. I thought: Great, I’ll get a chance to stand up. I said, ‘I’m not doing it.’ He says, ‘Yes you are.’ We went on with this for ten minutes, eye contact, and I out-stared him, which is a major achievement. He doesn’t dare come near me after that. It might sound arrogant, but he doesn’t dare have a go at me now. This out-and-out confrontation is different from the knife-edge techniques used by Laura and her friends. Its context is different; it takes place within registration time, an empty space rarely occupied by tutorial work and understood to be the pupils’ time for informal talk and catching up on homework. As Rebecca said later, ‘It was our registration time. He could just go and jump.’ This was different from Laura’s experiences, which took place in a formal, exam lesson. The strict teacher broke the rules established by their past tutorials and refused to be flexible, forcing ‘school’ in its formal, authoritarian sense on the class. A general knowledge quiz is something offered at the end of term by benevolent teachers to signify a relaxation of rules—when the children have no say in what questions are set or whether they want to participate in the first place. The way in which the teacher was made to ‘lose face’, by being shown to be coercing the pupils into an activity they did not want, was obviously a personal triumph for Rebecca. It is assumed by teachers that children refuse to follow orders to ‘show off’ in front of friends. Rebecca’s story indicates that this is too simplistic: ‘I don’t like being pushed around. He wasn’t going to tell me what to do, because my form tutor had said, if we didn’t want to do it, we didn’t have to…and here was someone saying we had to do it.’

RADIATOR GIRLS 93

Maria played the school at its own game when she canvassed for her ‘exam class’ teacher, using adult forms of protest. Rebecca risked refusal, knowing that she had back-up from her form tutor and that this support made her powerful— one teacher would have had to back down. It is important to underline that the girls were not submissive, ‘sweet and docile’ inside school.3 They may not have thrown chairs out of the window, carved their names into desks or sworn at teachers, but they were prepared to take on certain individuals and to see their protests through. There was almost a sense of a planned campaign. Life skills ‘Life skills’ was the official name for the non-exam course that was introduced in the girls’ fourth year. Teachers complained about the subject and taught it halfheartedly, illustrating the ‘coping strategy’ of staff who ‘off-load educational objectives when under pressure to ensure personal survival’.4 One media studies class let the pupils watch films all afternoon, at odds with the objective To increase awareness and understanding of the concept of broadcasting’. Pupils voted with their feet. Laura’s views were typical of the girls’ attitudes: Most things in it we’ve done already. You pick child development, you know it already, you get bored with it. It’s stupid. You picked your options so you didn’t get the ones you didn’t want, you had that choice, and now you’ve got to do them options you picked to get away from. She is obviously not convinced by the promise of learning useful skills which will help her in her adult life. Life skills is a re-run of her present timetable, except that it offers no choice. Maria was critical of the skills it claimed to teach: ‘If you want to wire a plug you do it. You don’t need a lesson to teach you. It takes you five minutes to learn it.’ Rebecca’s petition about life skills had failed, as had teachers’ opposition to its introduction. The pupils found that the subject was taught by many who broadly sympathized with their views. The only opposition was through truancy, and teachers colluded with this. Maria was angry when the new deputy head called her to his office to enquire why she had not attended his subject. It seemed to have broken the understanding between teacher and taught. It was not surprising that the girls were always enthusiastic to tape-record in their life skills lessons, particularly when it was ‘fitness and recreation’—‘We’ve only got PE,’ they said, not misled by the jargon. ‘Bunking’ and choosing I expected truancy to be a dark area to deal with, but the girls were willing to talk about it—from Joanne, who had never ‘bunked’, to Maria, who was known for

94 CULTURAL STUDIES

her bad attendance. Laura admitted ‘going over the park’ as an alternative to school and explained the lessons she missed: I bunked off PE life skills. Sometimes I miss the mornings too. In maths, she’s hardly ever there, so it ain’t worth going. English is good when you see videos, but when you do work it’s boring because you have to do it. Like we’re doing American literature and it’s about gangsters and I don’t particularly want to finish it. We’re also reading a book about the war and it’s getting to a boring stage so I didn’t go. None of the girls seemed to exert group pressure on each other to ‘bunk off’. It usually seemed to be a personal response to the content of the lesson, rather than an opportunity to go somewhere exciting with friends. However, Laura described an afternoon where she went to the park and, while playing on the swings, spotted a deputy head on lookout. She laughingly described how she ‘belted it’ around the corner, and spent the rest of the afternoon watching pop videos and Gems on TV. This perception of ‘bunking off’ as illicit and wicked was not shared by the others. Maria missed a week of school and came back to announce that she had filled up three maths books with work and that she was going to maths club that night. (In her week off she had done some painting and decorating for an old neighbour.) ‘You’re no good at maths. Why are you going to the club?’ asked Anna. ‘That’s why I’m going,’ said Maria. Rebecca spent several days standing outside the BBC for autographs, but came back with a thousand-word English essay which she had been working on in the evenings. She also riled her English teacher by asking for her notes from the lessons she had missed, copying them straight from the teacher’s notebook and missing the time-consuming intermediary stage of blackboard copying. It seemed that the girls were not full-bloodedly rejecting school and academic work but were using their interpretations of it. School had refused to change for them, so they took the aspects of it that they wanted and rejected the rest. They missed the chaotic lessons and substituted them with after-school clubs which offered quietness and private attention; they bypassed the time-consuming frippery of listening to lectures and copying off the board through study at home and catching up in odd moments; they spent some time with some work they wanted to do (Rebecca’s long essay on her estate, Maria’s maths books) and the rest with their own interests (labouring, chasing pop stars, watching TV). It was interesting to note that Maria rarely bunked her college-run building studies course, where they allowed students to smoke and ‘treated you like adults’. School was rigid and uncompromising by comparison, selling itself on the importance of academic work and failing to provide the goods: Academically this school is absolutely rubbish. We’re not getting taught a thing, especially in French. And Vicky who was here in the first year went

RADIATOR GIRLS 95

to a private school and even in the second year she was doing French plays. We can’t even say a French sentence at the moment. (Rebecca) They don’t push us enough…they don’t give us enough work to do…they don’t really care. The teachers are too soft. In Mrs Reed’s lesson they write stories, throw stuff—they even had whisky in there once. They got drunk and she never even noticed. (Anna) The girls had developed their own survival strategy. They did not work against school but alongside it. Maria completed her autobiography in ‘empty’ parts of lessons, when there were discipline problems or when she had finished her work. No one seemed to notice because she looked busy. The meaning of school Yvonne Beecham’s 1980 study of working-class girls underlined the importance of school as a ‘social event’.5 This was mentioned by the radiator girls; Anna explained how ‘you meet new people in the fourth year’ through the option choices. However, socializing with friends seemed not to be the major aspect of school. They were convinced of the importance of qualifications in order to get a proper ‘career’. Paul Willis describes how for his ‘lads’ ‘the idea of qualifications constitutes the practical arm of the power of knowledge as it is institutionally defined.’6 Yet the girls’ acceptance of qualifications did not make them conformists to ‘the official idea of schooling’.7 They were particularly critical of any practice that misrepresented their school or the pupils in it (one assembly, about ambition, was criticized for its message, ‘Some of you want to be doctors, some of you want to work in your father’s business and some of you just want to be layabouts’). They were perceptive observers of the formal aspects of school; its mechanism was transparent for them. Rebecca and Nita once helped out on a ‘progressive’ alternative school magazine but noted that most of it was written by the teachers organizing the project and decided that it was not worth producing another one. None of the girls was interested in school councils, or in most school-run events—it was an annual event for the school disco to be cancelled through lack of support. The girls took what they wanted from school, they ignored the irrelevant, and most teachers fitted into their plans. Teachers were pleased to see Maria showing interest at maths club, and Rebecca was streets ahead in English, even though her attendance was poor—besides which, she always went on the trips to the National Theatre. The girls’ degree of personal initiative would have made them model graduates from the life skills course—except that that was one lesson they always missed.

96 CULTURAL STUDIES

Work The primary aim of Life Skills is to give students a better chance of employment in the area that interests them. (Life skills school literature) All the girls had a cool, realistic commitment to what they wanted to do after leaving school. Most had some work experience. Maria had had babysitting jobs, had worked in a garage, and had painted and decorated for neighbours. She helped her father edit ragged videotapes from his shop, for which she received £5 when he was feeling generous. She also ‘helped out’ people, which meant gardening or shopping for old people, or generally helping her ‘nan’. Her babysitting jobs came from a postcard in the newsagent’s window, but most others came from family networks—friends of her grandmother or father. She did not envisage herself being unemployed after leaving school: ‘I know I can always manage. My uncles have work and places for school leavers, so that’s no worry.’ Rebecca, who had come from Portsmouth with her mother and brother, had no family networks. However, she explained how she talked her way into a job: I worked in a chemist’s when I was eleven. I was a first-year and I told them I was thirteen. I had to sweep floors, stock shelves, serve and generally help out. It lasted about four months and I got £5 for four nights a week from 4 to 6 p.m. They kept asking me what O levels I was taking. I didn’t know a thing about O levels. I gave it up when people I knew threatened to tell them I was under age. Dan Finn has pointed out that the types of part-time paid employment held by young people reflect their different destinies in the sexual division of labour. Girls are involved in ‘casual home-based tasks’ like babysitting and light shopwork, while the boys do paper rounds or help run market stalls.8 However, the girls were drawn to these types of jobs because they were familiar with the skills from their everyday lives; ‘helping out’ was something they were expected to do at home without payment, and most were used to looking after younger brothers and sisters. They took jobs for money, but most had a different idea of what they wanted to do as a ‘career’. For example, Maria hoped to go into engineering, and Rebecca planned to go to university and then work in television production. They had been offered a week on school-organized ‘work experience’. Laura was cynical about this: I call it slave labour. You’re working nine to five flogging your guts out. You’re working their hours for a week and not getting paid for it. Say they send you up a record shop in London, they don’t pay your fare or dinner. That can work out dear. I can’t see why so many people put their names down.

RADIATOR GIRLS 97

These comments illustrate a good knowledge of the ‘world of work’. Finn states: ‘The implicit suggestion that the youngsters are ignorant of the operations and practices of the labour market denigrates the real skills and competences they obviously display while looking for and finding work still at school.’9 Maria’s diversity of work experience, Rebecca’s willingness to talk her way into a job at the age of 11 and Laura’s ability to see through job-experience schemes illustrates the futility of MSC programmes which offer social and life skills to young people. Many young people have established skills before leaving school which point them towards and prepare them for ‘the world of work’. Finn’s message is that it is opportunities for real jobs that are needed. It was significant that many girls used the word ‘career’ when talking about future aspirations. This emphasis contradicts the findings of other studies; for example, Yvonne Beecham found that her working-class girls ‘saw their futures very much in terms of marriage and raising a family and therefore work was of secondary importance’.10 Laura’s comments are relevant: I want to work in a bank as a copy typist working with the computers. I think a career comes before getting married. If you’re married and your husband’s only got a petty job then your marriage ain’t gonna be much. Careers were seen as something that offered skills, status and financial independence, as opposed to a ‘petty job’. Laura underlined the importance of good pay and conditions—‘I know someone who gets £80 a week but he has to work till 9 p.m. to earn that’—and the opportunity to better yourself: ‘These YOP schemes make me laugh. They say they’ll train you. Well, a good job, like in a bank, will always train you in typing.’ Laura’s mother was a council cleaner, but her sister had made the step to white-collar work and had a job in a bank herself. Laura was clear on what she would be working for, and it was obviously freedom rather than status: If I do get a job at eighteen in the bank, then I’m gonna look round for a place to share with someone. I don’t want to live with my mum. I’d rather share with a girl or a couple of girls. Mum will want to see the place first, but I’ll have the money. A career seemed to offer independence from parents and the ability to assert your own identity; contrasted with this were her earlier comments on the nightmare of being in a strained marriage with the pressures of no work and no money. This is no idealized, romantic perception, and it contradicts Dale Spender’s statement: Almost no other possibility except the fulfilment of the romantic dream is entertained, let alone planned for…. Paid employment (or life without

98 CULTURAL STUDIES

men) does not figure as a viable alternative—not even if combined with marriage and motherhood—in the minds of most young women.11 For the girls, marriage seemed to be something that would be entered into at a certain age—most agreed 25 was about right—but a career seemed their main motivation. Their ambitions were always discussed: everyone knew about Rebecca and television, or Joanne and ‘the building trade’, or Maria and her engineering; it had become part of their identity. Joanne fought severe parental pressure to take her building studies, technical drawing and woodwork options, since they had wanted her to do ‘girl’s subjects’ like typing and languages. As she put it, ‘I had to fight until the end.’ Both Maria and Joanne’s building studies courses were college-run. They were the only girls in the classes and had received the highest marks in the entry exam. Their grades in the course were excellent. Joanne was going to specialize in painting and decorating for most of the year, while Maria was doing plastering. I asked them about sexism in the school: I don’t think this school is sexist, because a friend of mine from another school wanted to do woodwork. They wouldn’t let her take it. They said if there’s a space you can take it. They put all the boys in there. (Joanne) I think the boys in this school are sexist because they think you’re not as good at your work than them. It’s different in college because you work with them on something, you work in groups together and you get something done as a group. (Maria) While studies of gender concentrate primarily on classroom interaction between male and female pupils12 and the amount of attention and teacher concern they receive, Joanne was quick to point out an example of sexism which was enforced by the institution, and which affected her friend’s option choice. Inequality of treatment within the classroom was noticed (it was interesting that a few of the girls felt that the girls got away with more in the lessons), but the key issue for them was the freedom to choose the subjects they wanted. Yet what would happen when they left school and looked for jobs in building? I want to be a roofer but I don’t think I could carry so many tiles. Some people might want a man because he can get the work done quicker. (Joanne) I’ve done part-time labouring and painting and decorating and I reckon old people would rather have me than a bloke. (Maria) Joanne and Maria were aware of the problems that they might face outside school, but also were conscious of some positive assets they would have, and the

RADIATOR GIRLS 99

demand that there would be for them outside. They were already aware of market forces. Out of the girls, Anna’s parents were among the few who were unemployed. This was reflected in her comments: she saw unemployment as a real possibility and not something that happens to your friend’s parents. Anna moved from talking about doing a ‘feminine’ sort of job that did not suit her, to unemployment, and then to getting married in order to save herself from this. She thus perceived marriage as a job in itself, replacing other possibilities. There was still no sense of the ‘romantic dream’ of wedded bliss and maternal fulfilment. As I talked to the girls about their work aspirations and ambitions, it seemed important to ask where these came from. Laura seemed surprised at the question, stressing her individuality: ‘If you want to know where my ideas come from, they come from me.’ The school literature on life skills claimed to offer the key to success in life: The ‘employability’ of a young person may not only depend on he or she having a number of academic qualifications or ‘job specific’ knowledge or skills. It might also depend on their own personal confidence, in their ability to communicate, in their appreciation of the wider world of work, and in a basic appreciation of the technologies applied. Robert Moore has stated that the social skills required in work are ‘primarily developed in the home and community and not at school’.13 This seemed confirmed by the girls’ stories of part-time job hunting, the evidence of their assertiveness within school, and their general confidence about future career prospects. ‘Changes in educational practices’, states Moore, ‘relate to the needs of schools to “cope” with pupils and have little to do with the needs of pupils to “cope” with life.’ The institution, like many others, specified a new area of control, and, like a bad advertisement, suggested that the consumers would be lost without it. The girls certainly did not buy the goods, for they already had them. Anne Krisman teaches film studies in a London comprehensive All proper names in this article have been changed. Notes 1 J.Clarke, in I.Bates et al., Schooling for the Dole? (London: Macmillan, 1984). 2 P.Willis, Learning to Labour (Farnborough: Saxon House, 1977), p. 11. 3 D.Spender, Invisible Women (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative Society, 1982), p. 59.

100 CULTURAL STUDIES

4 A.Hargreaves, ‘The significance of classroom coping strategies’, in L.Benton and R.Meighan, Sociological Interpretations of Schooling and Classroom: A Reappraisal ( : Nafferton Books, 1978). 5 Y.Beecham, ‘What girls think of school, teachers and work’, Schooling and Culture, 7 (1980). 6 Willis, op. cit., p. 94. 7 Ibid., p. 14. 8 D.Finn, ‘Leaving school and growing up: work experience in the juvenile labour market’, in Bates et al., op. cit. 9 Ibid., p. 39. 10 Beecham, op. cit. 11 Spender, op. cit., p. 111. 12 M.Stanworth, Gender and Schooling (London: Hutchinson, 1983). 13 R.Moore, ‘Schooling and the world of work’, in Bates et al., op. cit.

WOMEN, WORDS AND POWER: A STUDY OF THE LANGUAGE OF MAGIC IN SOUTHERN ITALY BARBARA LITTLEWOOD

The perception that knowledge, codified in a discourse, is power is one that has been principally used to analyse dominant discourses such as medicine, psychiatry, law and schooling, and the institutions and practices in which they are located. Such discourses, though, take the form they do only because they emerge out of struggle with others, which are also shaped by this shifting conflict. This article is an examination of one of these others, what one might call a discourse of the dominated: magic. It is based on my own fieldwork, carried out in southern Italy, beginning in 1969 in the region of Apulia, and will focus on three phenomena within this discourse: the evil eye, love magic and tarantismo. In the article I shall argue that magic in this area is one available language, or narrative, in which to think about and act upon a crisis. That those who do so use it are predominantly women from the classes of peasants, artisans and casual labourers needs explanation, and this will be explored through an examination of three of the dominant discourses, and the strategies they recommend. These, I shall argue, both set up the terms in which personal crisis is understood and offer strategies to resolve it, one of which largely excludes women. Magic, in contrast, though it is on the one hand a discourse about victimization, is on the other also about empowerment. It is itself, therefore, an ambiguous—and hence dangerous—discourse. Before looking at this local situation, however, something needs to be said more generally about magic and its study in contemporary Europe. Three studies of European magic The topic of magic has been almost completely neglected by Anglo-Saxon anthropologists working in Europe,1 until the publication in 1977 and its translation in 1980 of Jeanne Favret-Saada’s study of witchcraft in western France, which managed to shift the topic away from the concerns of folklorists and back into the mainstream of anthropology.2 It cannot be claimed, of course, that the data

Part of this research was made possible by grants from the SSRC and the Fleck Bequest.

102 CULTURAL STUDIES

were ‘there’ in every community studied, if only the anthropologist had asked, but Favret-Saada’s book demonstrates that there are a number of factors working against its easy uncovering, even when it is ‘there’. To begin with, there are the assumptions of the researcher about what is interesting, but there is also the question of secrecy. And magic is, in Europe, just such a secret. Occasionally it does come to light, not because of the work of the anthropologist, but, for example, because of media publicity over scandals and trials, as in the Bocage. Here, for example, in the mid-1970s in two court cases, the defendants, accused of arson and murder, claimed in their defence that they had been avenging themselves on witches. But this, as Favret-Saada found, only made the local people more determined to keep their mouths shut. The problem, though, was not only that they wanted to avoid derision, which in time could have been overcome by the anthropologist demonstrating good faith; there was a deeper problem relating to the very discourse of witchcraft and the power of its words. As Favret-Saada explains, it is impossible to speak of this discourse except in a condescending way; but, if one speaks in it, then one takes up a position in it as bewitched or unwitcher (never as witch). And so it was only after she had (unwittingly) identified herself as an unwitcher that Favret-Saada was able to hear someone speaking in the discourse, as she says ‘in order to engage me in his own fight to the death against a witch and not just to give me information’.3 Long before Foucault demonstrated the links between power and knowledge, the peasants of the Bocage knew this. The spells and charms which an ethnographer might try to collect have no meaning in themselves; this is produced only when they are used to defend someone against attack or turn an attack back on a witch. So a proper knowledge of witchcraft is gained only when one recognizes and uses its power. One apparent flaw in Favret-Saada’s analysis is that she was able to write a book about it. Participation in the discourse does not seem to mean silence about it to others, nor is the only position available for speech about it that of the disparaging rationalist. However, Favret-Saada’s words themselves become deadly weapons, but what they attack is the power of ‘objective’ ethnographic discourse. Though it was the impossibility of maintaining a distance, if she wanted to find out anything about witchcraft, that first prompted Favret-Saada’s scepticism, she came to question whether that objectivity could ever be an account of the ethnographic experience. Classic ethnography she describes as ‘a strange dialogue between two fantastical beings’;4 the ethnographer disappears behind the statements she or he makes about subjects, who themselves never appear as occupying either the ‘I’ or the ‘you’ position, but only as the objects of the discourse. Systems of magic, as Favret-Saada sees, are all too often dismissed as superstitious, even embarrassing evidence of the political immaturity of European peasants. Two other studies of magic, this time in southern Italy, are worth examining for their differing perspectives on this question. The first is Appel’s study of evil eye beliefs,5 which draws extensively on data collected by

WOMEN, WORDS AND POWER 103

an Italian historian, de Martino,6 though he advanced a very different account of them. Appel claims that these beliefs were once shared by members of the dominant class, the intellectuals of the Neapolitan Enlightenment. With ‘modernization’, ‘the myth drops from usage by these classes. It is picked up and retained by the class of society that to this day occupies an ambivalent position in Italian society…peasants.’ And, she concludes, ‘the evil eye belief is politically conservative; it provides an explanation of social disorder based on the nature of the human condition…there is no way to alter the situation. Man must resign himself to his fate, and can only try and protect himself against the evil eye.’7 Here, then, we are back with an ethnography as a science of cultural difference. Appel’s conclusions, though, are in contrast to those of de Martino.8 The conflicts which de Martino diagnosed as underlying the phenomena he investigated (among which were evil eye beliefs) were, he saw, ultimately unresolvable in a class society, and these related to the difficulties, for members of an oppressed class, of making effective choices. But, far from using his research to pathologize the peasantry, he used it to argue that the desire and potential for resistance exist even within this apparently most ‘backward’ class. And, by contrast with Appel, de Martino also used it to reflect on his own role and motivation. He states, for example, that his meetings with the southern Italian peasantry forced him to become, as well, ‘the ethnologist of himself’9 De Martino was aware, in a way Appel was not, that dominant classes were elaborating forms of exploitation and ideological domination in which both he and the peasants were caught. But he argued that these forms were not totalizing. Both his own work, which he saw as a political intervention, and the tenacity of the popular customs he documented marked the limits of this hegemonic project. I do not believe, however, that the answer is quite so neat, that we can say ‘here domination stops’. These ‘folk’ discourses have their own contradictions; they are not simply authentic oppositional alternatives but have been deeply shaped by having to exist as subordinated alternatives. And this brings me to my own research and analysis, which also draws on another of de Martino’s accounts. Apulia in the 1970s Unlike Favret-Saada, I stumbled on the topic of magic, though the recent collapse of my focused project meant that I was in the mood to follow up unexpected leads. One day a young woman, Anna, who was becoming a good friend, told me that she had been suffering from severe headaches, exhaustion and depression for a number of days and that her maternal grandmother had suggested that this might well be due to the evil eye.10 The grandmother said she would test for it and if (as it turned out) she was correct would try to cure Anna. I accompanied Anna on one of her visits, and watched and made careful notes of the ritual. Nobody seemed particularly bothered by my presence or questions, once it was established that I was a friend who was not going to ridicule them. Later we talked of other magical afflictions and cures, and I began to find that

104 CULTURAL STUDIES

other women also had stories of their experience to tell me, and were including me in discussions about yet others. At the time I simply thought that this was a demonstration of my anthropological competence and general acceptability, but looking back now I see it rather differently. Anna was involved in one of those situations from which she could see no escape. Unpleasant rumours were circulating about her and the man in whose office she worked (started, she believed, by his wife). Anna herself was married to a man whose small carpentry business was on the point of collapse, and she felt, therefore, she had to continue working and earning. She also believed, probably correctly, that if she resigned she would find no other work, since her boss was quite influential politically, and would block any application she made. Like Favret-Saada’s neighbour, therefore, Anna was assuming that I was involved, on her side, in her struggle with her enemies, and it was with this awareness that other women began also to involve me in their struggles. One of the differences, though, between my and Favret-Saada’s experiences was that I found there were other positions for speech available than the ones she refers to. In particular, there were discussions, in which I was included and not always expected to speak, about the issues involved in individual cases in the absence of the protagonists. At first I saw these as leads to follow up to find out whether magic was ‘really’ being practised, but later came to see them as significant in their own right. It was in such groups that I first heard the expression ha bevuto (‘he has drunk something’) used of young men who appear to be madly in love with ‘unsuitable’ young women, and meaning ‘he has been given a love potion’. And, later, another young woman I knew, Claudia, involved me in her crisis. Claudia had, she told me, been secretly engaged to a young man, Mario, who was now proposing to marry someone else in a few months’ time. This might have remained a private disappointment, but Mario was boasting he had seduced Claudia. She therefore asked me to give Mario (an acquaintance of my husband) the next time he visited us a love potion she had prepared after consultation with a mago (magician) in another town. I have to admit that I refused, out of a misplaced belief that it was possible and desirable to remain uninvolved, though, to her credit, Claudia did not seem to hold it against me. Anyway, another friend of Claudia’s agreed. The potion, however, did not prevent the marriage from going ahead, but Claudia claimed that it would be an unhappy one, that she would remain the love of Mario’s life and that he would return to her. Certainly it was widely recognized that Mario was marrying for ambition, and he did later try to resume his relationship with Claudia. But Claudia declined, and much enjoyed Mario’s chagrin at her rebuff. This and several other instances were all regularly discussed among women in the neighbourhood, but though the apparent topic was magic the discussions were, at another level, about love. Talking of love magic, then, was a way of framing arguments about types of love and their place in relationships. And it was also a way of talking about what women could do to influence their lives.

WOMEN, WORDS AND POWER 105

Marriage was, for the women, the major event in their lives. On this hung their chances of security, respect and happiness, but these depended not only on the labour and care the women invested but on the less controllable behaviour of their husbands. So the women constantly turned over problems. How important is emotional satisfaction in marriage compared with material security? Should women trust their hearts or listen to what their parents say? Can you tie a man to you by arousing his sexual passion? Even if you can, is this a good basis for marriage? Does it matter if he is unfaithful? There were no fixed answers to these questions, but, rather, it was a continuing debate in which the stories of love magic were used to illuminate and reflect on the issues. The conversations, therefore, acted as a forum in which the women tried to resolve in words, as they might be unable to in deed, the sometimes contradictory pulls of love and duty, and explore just what was open to them to do about it. Interestingly, in these discussions I also learned that though, in principle, magic can be used aggressively, the women only admit to using it defensively. Favret-Saada makes the same point when she discusses alternative views of Bocage cases. She notes that from the point of view of the defeated witch the revenging unwitcher could be seen as the aggressor, and the witch as bewitched. And this is why it is impossible to meet a witch, only the bewitched and the unwitcher. Someone else always starts it, even when someone admits they were the first (as was Claudia) to use magic. Claudia saw herself simply as trying to restore the order (significantly she had no father or brother to intervene on her behalf) which had been disrupted by Mario’s broken promise. If she had succeeded, however, she would have created a new disruption, in the view of the official fiancée. Order and disorder lie in the eye of the beholder. So aggressive witches are always others; no one recognizes herself as such; there is no position from which to speak; they can only be spoken of. The ‘I’speaking position is ‘I as victim/I as revenger’. And this is what I mean by saying the discourse of magic is one both of victimization and of empowerment, though some types of magic are more empowering than others. I did also hear disparaging tales of other people’s credulity or stupidity, often heard by anthropologists about ‘a town down the road’, which, on approach, disappears over the next hill. But, in one case at least, I discovered a real town, which brings me on to the third type, tarantismo. Unlike the previous kinds of magic, I was unable to do anything but observe this, and had to rely instead on the details collected by de Martino.11 Tarantismo afflicts certain people who, it is said, have been bitten by a tarantula (or, occasionally, a scorpion, snake or ant). The victims fall into states of lethargy or trances, from which they can be roused only by a special kind of therapy involving colours and rhythmic music and continuing with the dance of the little tarantula—a tarantella. So the victim dances sometimes as the spider, sometimes miming his/her struggles against it, until s/he announces that s/he has obtained grace from St Paul, which means relief from the crisis. The significance of St Paul is that he is believed to offer immunity to or cures for tarantismo, and

106 CULTURAL STUDIES

the chapel of St Peter and St Paul in Galatina is the site of a pilgrimage for victims, on his feast day of 29 June. It was here that de Martino made his contacts with tarantati, investigating twenty-one cases in detail out of a population he estimated at around one hundred. One of the peculiar characteristics of tarantismo is its recurrence; the victim, on the anniversary of the first bite, goes through the same crisis and has to undergo the same temporary cure. This can continue for years, until the spider and even its ‘children’ and ‘grandchildren’ die. One woman had been a victim for sixty years. The cures are carried out in the victim’s home. The first stage is the identification of the victim as a tarantato. Sometimes the victim knows at once, sometimes the diagnosis is made by a relative or neighbour, and sometimes overhearing and responding to a tarantella played on the radio prompts the diagnosis. The next stage is the identification of the spider. There are, it appears, different types which afflict the victim in different ways; spiders may be lascivious, or romantic, angry, sad or vain. The spiders also have sensual preferences, for certain tunes, colours and aromatic plants, and so identification usually proceeds by testing various combinations until the victim responds by beginning to dance. The music is provided by local amateur musicians, who play, usually, guitars, violins, accordians or mouth organs and small drums, and who know a large repertoire of tarantellas. What, then, is de Martino’s account of tarantismo? His main contention is that it is a kind of religion of the oppressed—more particularly, a religion of remorse. De Martino’s account deals with it both as a cultural phenomenon with its own history, and as a cultural phenomenon with profound significance for individuals. Dominant forces, especially Christianity and natural science, have had a changing understanding of tarantismo, and this has affected both its form and its destiny as it appropriates elements of its symbolism and rituals from these and other dominant systems. But, in order to understand tarantismo’s tenacity (the core features of tarantula bite and therapy through music and dance have been reported since the mid-fourteenth century), de Martino suggests we have also to understand that it has met some need which nothing else could quite match. Understanding this involves examining the significance of the term rimorso, used of the annual recurrences, which, in Italian, means both ‘remorse’ and ‘bitten again’. Tarantismo offers a way in which morbid symptoms engendered by a personal conflict can be rescued from neurotic isolation by their shaping and treatment through tarantismo’s mytho-ritual complex. The tarantula which bites and poisons is the symbol of this recurring unconscious conflict, and so the tarantula, as the projection of this conflict, becomes the way in which the victim is enabled at once to think about the crisis and also to attempt to resolve it through the communal therapeutic rites. Tarantismo is both the affliction and its remedy. De Martino also emphasizes that the power of this mytho-ritual complex lies in its particular ethos—as he calls it, a will to history. Tarantismo enforces on its

WOMEN, WORDS AND POWER 107

victims and the other participants ‘a duty to leave their neurotic isolation in order to participate in a system of cultural loyalties and an order of interpersonal communication which is traditionally honoured and socially shared’.12 When he observed tarantismo in 1959, however, de Martino believed he was seeing it in the final stages of disintegration. Compared with that of its heyday in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its range appeared far narrower; there were fewer musicians who knew fewer tarantellas, fewer props and stimuli and less dramatization in the dances. Indeed, by 1969, when I was present in Galatina, it was seen by the crowds outside the chapel as a spectacle worthy only of amusement. In 1978, when Italian state television made a series of programmes about de Martino’s work and visited the area, they found that new cases were still occurring each year, but that the tarantati were reluctant to be interviewed (no doubt remembering the publicity the area received after the publication of de Martino’s book, much of which presented them as mad or superstitious southern animals). Tarantismo, then, is losing its subcultural strength, not only in the sense of the impoverishment of its symbolic apparatus, but perhaps more importantly in its removal from a supportive local community with an understanding of its traditional ritual significance. More and more, then, tarantismo appears as individual neurosis or psychosis. The female world of magic One of the features of tarantismo which struck me when I first read de Martino’s book and was in part my motivation for pursuing similar enquiries, but which is relatively unexplored by him, was its overwhelmingly female character. There are, in passing, remarks about the cloistered lives led by southern Italian women and the denial to them of sexual expression for which the varying dramas of tarantismo permitted them to find a symbolic outlet. But there is little attempt to explore, systematically, why this phenomenon and others studied by him in other works seem implicated in a particularly female set of experiences. It is true, certainly, that within the general experience of class exploitation peasant women’s oppression is particularly marked, but this in itself provides no link with tarantismo, or magic more generally. To understand this, some account of dominant belief systems in southern Italy is necessary. Two dominant systems are Catholicism and clientelism.13 Both, in general terms, suggest that misfortune is an inevitable part of the human condition, though some individuals, not obviously more sinful or less deserving, have more than their fair share of it. Catholicism offers an over- generalized, ahistorical account of misfortune, while clientelism offers an over-personalized and also ahistorical account. Both, though, promise that relief may be obtained by individualistic strategies, confession, absolution, penance and prayers on the one hand, or finding a powerful patron on the other. Both, then, imply that what I can do is try to find a more powerful other who will intervene on my behalf. Both inhibit the formation of horizontal links between ‘victims’ and self-organization

108 CULTURAL STUDIES

to change things. Neither of these systems provides a way in which ‘victims’ could forge a collective consciousness of themselves; there is only the universal category of ‘sinners’, or the particularized category of ‘client’. There is, in principle, the political language of Marxism, which might seem to offer the basis for collective identification and strategy for action, but this for various reasons remains, especially in the rural south, a subordinate system. One other system, to which I shall return, which does have a more significant role, and which does to some extent set up oppositional categories, is that of the honour-shame complex. In particular, the system distinguishes men and women as by nature different, if (ideally) complementary, categories. It does not, however, appear to offer an explanation of misfortune in the way in which the others mentioned do, though it does suggest strategies by which families can defend or restore their honour. So far, however, what has been said is building up a picture of southern Italian peasants as virtually lacking even a rudimentary collective consciousness and, far from engaging in collective action, competing with each other in futile and damaging ways. And this is the classic picture of the atomistic peasant society, from Marx’s ‘sack of potatoes’ to Banfield’s ‘amoral familists’. But there are other aspects to such societies (the first mistake is to assume they are all of one type); there are collective institutions and numerous instances of collective action which it is no longer possible to dismiss as pre-political jacqueries.14 What is the case, though, is that such action and consciousness develop with difficulty, in struggle. Such a remark has tended to become a Marxist platitude, of course, but the struggles I have in mind are not the great clashes of classes but the little everyday struggles to make ends meet, to find some security and happiness, to overcome a crisis and to make sense of what is happening to one. However, with regard to the dominant systems, it might be seen how there are parallels between them and the language of magic. For example, clientelism is often supposed to be the way in which southern Italian men (try to) get things done. The language of magic represents something as one problem—mine— which I might be able to solve by, say, getting that man to marry me, just as clientelism promises to solve my problem by getting me a job, rather than recognizing and tackling unemployment as a societal phenomenon. One could, perhaps, see a neat parallel between the men’s ways of getting things done via clientelism, and the women’s via magic. Southern Italian women are, after all, virtually excluded from independent access to the world of political friends, and many of the crises they face would, in any case, be insoluble through patronage. One could also go on to suggest that there are features in the way the women’s working lives are organized, along lines of influence and favours,15 which would predispose them to think and act in individualistic ways when confronted by crises. Indeed, Garrison and Arensberg have argued that patronage relations and evil eye beliefs are homologous, that the latter are a symbolic enactment or evocation of the former: ‘both witchcraft and the evil eye beliefs persist in the lower strata of the modern nation state, where advantage and disadvantage are

WOMEN, WORDS AND POWER 109

still controlled by conceptual superiors and mediated through personalismo and patronage.’16 Seen thus, magic could be said to be a way of representing the world and acting in it that is partial and inadequate and even serves to mask the real causes of misfortune and oppression, thereby blocking the development of a radical collective consciousness which alone would transform the world for the oppressed. But, in line with what I have said about collective institutions, in magic too there are forms of co-operation and resistance. For magic also teaches its victims and practitioners that there are things they can do to transform their lives. I would argue that the magical dramas, rituals and discussions around them have a number of features in common: the subject (especially the speaking subject) is a victim, but not a powerless victim. As de Martino argues, the local term fascinazione, for bewitching, has as a key feature the experience of subjugation, of being bound by circumstances beyond one’s control.17 But the recourse to magic, or a cure by the victim, is itself a demonstration of resistance to that subjugation. And if, from one point of view, the problem and the remedy are individualized, from another point of view these are collective dramas. Importantly, then, magic provides a language through which problems can be recognized and dealt with; it offers a way out to people who feel themselves to be victims. This can best be illustrated by returning to Claudia’s crisis. The women I met were not in the situation of the Bocage peasants who could discuss their dramas only with someone else who had been ‘caught’, though it was the case that there was a certain initial reticence in talking-about magic with outsiders. But in the cases of the evil eye and love magic there are enough insiders who, even if they are sceptical or disapproving of magic, share a belief in the reality of the crisis. And here I return to what I said earlier about the importance of the discussions provoked by hearing about or participating in one particular crisis. For example, just about all the women who knew of Claudia’s betrayal disapproved of her attempt to enchant Mario, or at least thought it a piece of ineffective nonsense. But they sympathized intensely with her dilemma and condemned Mario, even if some also said she had been rather foolish to trust him. The loss of virginity, unredeemed by a subsequent marriage, can still be a disaster for a young woman like Claudia with a poor dowry, especially when Mario was openly boasting of his conquest. But numbers of women began to rally round Claudia, to defend her to men, and tried to put some extra work her way (she worked as a dressmaker). They were not willing to share the official view of her as a woman who had lost her honour, or to stop associating with her, and, though their support could not resolve the crisis, it was important to Claudia in just living through it. In a sense, then, the power of magic lies in the support which, ideally, it mobilizes around the protagonist, during and/or after the ritual itself. Claudia’s attempt to bewitch Mario was significant in that it dramatized her distress and desperation and also

110 CULTURAL STUDIES

signalled that she was not a woman who would remain passive in the face of crisis. And these signals were heeded by some other women, at least, and served to reunite her with a community of respectable women from whom she was in danger of being separated by her seduction. In the women’s response, then, we see an expression both of female solidarity and of a resistance to men’s power to name Claudia as a ‘shameless’ woman. The women’s resistance is, though, only partial: they do not dispute, fundamentally, that women can be divided up principally on the basis of their sexual conduct; they are only disputing Claudia’s allocation to the category of ‘shameless’. Nor do they question the characteristic portrayals of men as predators and of women as prey; they only shift the emphasis and responsibility somewhat. The men like to see themselves as highly sexed creatures who will ‘naturally’ take advantage of women’s carelessness or foolishness or vanity, without any particular fault accruing to them. The women see men more as calculating seducers, deliberately out to take advantage of (relatively) innocent victims, and they blame men for this. The price, in a sense, which Claudia had to pay for the women’s acceptance was to go along with the naming of herself as a victim, rather than, say, as an active partner in premarital sexual activity. And thus, in the end, the drama might be said to have conservative implications. There is, it is generally supposed, very little solidarity among southern Italian women. Structurally, the women are separated from one another and tied to men —husbands and fathers whose interests are supposed to be paramount. Class divides them too, as do the reputational categories of honour, and the living and working arrangements of the nuclear families of petty commodity producers. But at the same time there are forces, less often remarked, structural and ideological, which draw them together in opposition to the category ‘men’. In this case, it is their common positioning in a discourse relating to their sexuality. If men, then, insist on repeating, as they do, that women are all the same, and that ‘good’ women are only good because of lack of opportunity, then it is not surprising if women should, sometimes, act in solidarity with each other. Much has been written negatively about women’s policing each other, especially by gossip,18 and certainly the same women who defended Claudia had previously commented adversely on her careless behaviour.19 But in the crisis they preferred to see her as victim rather than culpable, and one of the reasons for this may well have been Claudia’s recourse to love magic, which is a language of victimization and righteous self-defence. And some of the women responded to the men’s totalizing categorization of women with one of their own: men, they replied, are all the same; they try to take advantage of us and then deny their responsibility. Looked at in this way, women’s policing of each other is actually an act of self-defence, an assertion that a woman’s honour is not only her family’s concern but of interest to other women too. I myself experienced this sisterly policing quite early in my first stay in the town. Naïvely, I invited a young man into our house one day when I was alone. Within a few minutes a neighbour sent her little

WOMEN, WORDS AND POWER 111

daughter over to sit with us, drawing us out on to the balcony, until my husband returned. And later my neighbour gave me a kindly lecture on the dangers I had run, which at the time both irritated and amused me. So, although the gossip does have the effect of policing a system which appears to oppress women, it also acts to defend women against men. The language of honour therefore does victimize women, but women resist it not by direct challenge so much as by protecting themselves and others against the risk of victimization, and on this they rest their reputations. It is worth remarking on this because, in the voluminous literature on the honour-shame complex, surprisingly little attention has been paid to differing versions of the model which men and women might hold, compared with differing class versions.20 In relation to the general theme of my argument, however, what I want to draw out is that at least at times women appear to be willing to take action to defend women whose possible loss of reputation is not, officially, their concern. They work within the system, therefore, to promote or safeguard not only narrow family interest but, more broadly, the interests of women. The three types of magic I have discussed all share the same language of victimization, and could be seen as exemplars of Althusser’s claim that ‘there are no subjects except by and for their subjection’.21 It remains, though, to explore why women, in particular, recognize themselves as subjects of this discourse, and to look at the institutions and practices in which the discourse is located. Many of the crises which magic addresses relate to matters which are already culturally identified as being women’s concerns: personal relationships, sexuality and reproduction, health and sickness. For the regulation of these, women bear primary responsibility, but they also consider that they have little control over the confining situation in which they try to meet this responsibility. Unlike the dominant discourses, the discourse of magic is not reproduced in any distinctive institution or apparatus. This does not mean that it is freefloating. It is located, of course, in the practice of the rituals, but it also exists as one available discourse or strategy among others, reproduced in the stories passed around among women. It is possible to see magic’s relation to other discourses—religion, science or politics—as one of opposition and struggle. And certainly, at times, religion (for example) has seen itself as challenged by and having to destroy or accommodate magic. However, I would also suggest that in the process of struggle each to a greater or lesser extent takes on aspects of the other, so that to the subjects the discourses present themselves not as mutually exclusive alternatives but as a range of possibly complementary alternatives. There is no contradiction, so far as the subject sees it, in consulting a doctor and praying and seeking a cure for the evil eye.

112 CULTURAL STUDIES

Conclusion What I have been arguing is that the language of magic, existing in a subordinate relation of opposition to other, dominant languages, takes on a contradictory character—of individualism, fatalism and victimization, but also of collectivity, determination and empowerment. Through the discourse of magic, women, in particular, struggle to resolve crises, many of which have been defined as peculiarly their province. In the three phenomena of the evil eye, love magic and tarantismo we can hear women (predominantly) ‘speaking’ about their situation. Such speech is by no means always coherent or necessarily quite different from that of men; but neither can it simply be seen as part of the dominant model. It is, in fact, a language of the subordinated which speaks at once their victimization and their struggle against it. By saying this I am not implying that there is a simple relation between a reality of oppression and a language mirroring this; for the discourse itself, from another point of view, is the reality which speaks its subjects. From this perspective it is the discourse of magic which reproduces the oppositions around which its promises of resolution revolve. But, as I have argued in relation to the honour-shame complex, with its opposing categories of men and women, these oppositions are manifest in other, dominant discourses. In a sense, then, magic works on oppositions set up, primarily, elsewhere. The discourse of magic offers only certain positions from which to speak, notably ‘I as victim’, which in the case of love magic, for example, reproduces as much as reflects a conception of women as the victims of men. In this sense one can also see how the discourse of magic takes the form it does as a counter to the discourse of the dominant group, how it only exists as an opposition to the dominant model, while remaining unable to transcend the categories set up by the latter. Dept. of Sociology, Glasgow University Notes 1 Exceptions to this are studies by Pitt-Rivers and du Boulay. 2 J.Favret-Saada, Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 3 Ibid., p. 25. 4 Ibid., p. 28. 5 W.Appel, ‘The myth of jettatura’, in C.Maloney (ed.), The Evil Eye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976). 6 E. de Martino, Sud e Magia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1959). 7 Appel, op. cit., pp. 26, 27. 8 De Martino (1908–65) was a quite remarkable figure, whose work has been little appreciated outside Italy. A member of the Italian Communist Party and Professor of History at Cagliari, he was an early part of the post-war project to give a voice to those people (in this case the southern peasantry) whose story had been neglected. It is, then, perhaps surprising that his work did not take the form of documenting

WOMEN, WORDS AND POWER 113

9

10

11 12 13

14

15

the strikes and land occupations which were occurring throughout the south in the years in which he was writing. But his contribution was to demonstrate that the aspects of peasant culture (including magic) that he studied were also records of their struggles to achieve control over their lives. De Martino, op. cit., p. 120. De Martino wrote of this process of self-examination: ‘I am not free because they [the southern peasantry] are not free; I am not emancipated because they are in chains. If bourgeois democracy has allowed me not to be as they are, but to dress and nourish myself and enjoy constitutional freedoms, this has a neglected importance. I also feel ashamed of the permission granted me not to be like them, and it almost seems to me as if I have stolen for myself alone what is also theirs. As well as a sense of guilt there is also anger. My anger is historic, because my guilt is totally historic, as is the guilt of my class. Precisely because of this, my anger is just the same as these people’s, who are fighting to come out of the shadows of Rabata [a poor peasant quarter of an Apulian town], and my struggle is their struggle. I give thanks to the people of Rabata for having helped me understand both myself and my task better.’ (E.de Martino, Furore, Simbolo, Valore (1962), quoted in C.Barbati, G.Mingozzi and A. Rossi (eds), Profondo Sud (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978).) (My translation.) The evil eye is caused by envious thoughts, words or desires that are not checked. It is recognized that such thoughts are common and may not be intended to cause harm, in which case the thinker can neutralize them by invoking the name of San Vito. Or people may protect themselves by wearing his medallion. Children and young mothers are those most at risk of becoming its victims. The force with which the evil eye affects one varies with the strength of the thoughts and will take more or less time to remove. I was told that it was impossible to discover who was responsible, though the victim may have a pretty good idea. E. de Martino, La Terra del Rimorso (Milan: II Saggiatore, 1961). Ibid., p. 179; my translation. Clientelism is the system, particularly characteristic of the ruling Christian Democrat Party’s mobilization, in which political support is exchanged for (the promise of) favours. More than this, it is expressed in the common and not inaccurate belief that you can’t get anything done, including getting something that is yours by right, without the intervention of someone more powerful. Its pervasiveness in southern Italy has, like magic, been seen as evidence of southerners’ ‘backward’ mentality, whereas it has in fact been utilized by the ruling class as part of their strategy of class rule. And political bosses have even managed to ensure that few of the goods and services they distribute trickle down very far. Clientelism therefore teaches those at the bottom that their poverty is the result of their bad luck in not finding a powerful patron. See, for example, P.Bevilacqua, Le Campagne del Mezzogiorno tra Fascismoe Dopoguerra (Milan: Einaudi, 1980); M.Petrantoni et al., ‘Movimento sindacale e lavoro a domicilio’, Quaderni di Rassegna Sindacale, 44–5 (1973); F.Snowden, Violence and Great Estates in the South of Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); B.Littlewood and P.Littlewood, ‘Favoritismi e mancanza di potere: la politica nell’ Italia meridionale’, Studi Ricerche, 6 (1987). V.Goddard, ‘The leather trade in the Bassi of Naples’, IDS Bulletin (Summer 1981).

114 CULTURAL STUDIES

16 V.Garrison and C.Arensberg, ‘The evil eye: envy or risk of seizure?’, in Maloney (ed.), op. cit., p. 326. 17 De Martino, Sud e Magia. 18 R.Hirschon, ‘Open body/closed space’, in S.Ardener (ed.), Defining Females (London: Croom Helm, 1978); S.Harding, ‘Women and words in a Spanish village’, in R.Reiter (ed.), Towards an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975). 19 B.Littlewood, ‘South Italian couples’, in M.Corbin (ed.), The Couple (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978). 20 See, for example, J.G.Peristiany (ed.), Honour and Shame (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965). 21 L.Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: New Left Books, 1971), p. 169.

THE CITY THE ROOM THE GARDEN MO WHITE

A woman walking in the city—a photo-text The first space, the room; how we are defined. The second space, the city; how the city has been represented. The third space, the garden; how we define ourselves. The city more recently has become the critical site of a dialogue about itself, not only as a lived experience but as its own subject. The following expresses a desire to find contentious the walk as male-defined, so constructing a visual and textual narrative in which the female is present within a discourse which allays fear. A fiction is suggested, so rendering the phantasy1 embedded in itself, in the real. The room. The private space in which she is defined, of having no country. She cleans the surface of the room, she scrubs, she wipes, she (re)presents this definition of herself. She is the angel in the house. (‘The Angel in the House’, a poem by Coventry Patmore, was published in 1854–6. It was a celebration of married love.) How she has been defined by the room, by the objects therein; how she is reflected in the room, how the room is a reflection of herself. She does not and cannot possess it, only be possessed by it. ‘I see Isabelle Granger as a prisoner of this house, prisoner of herself, of her life, if you like…it’s as though when she strolls there, in the house, it’s as though she’s going around herself, as though she’s circling around her body. Isabelle Granger appears to me as living completely in the house,…as though the house itself takes on the shape of a woman—if you like, I feel this equation so strongly between a woman and her dwelling.’2 walking between (besides) structure(s); below and above structure(s) The city (once landscape) as seen aesthetically through a framework of the arts of painting and photography; that which has (in)formed our visual—which is not ungendered, ahistorical, apolitical— perception. How those values have become part of the canon of ideas through transformations taking place in and around modernism. ‘The public as an immoral domain meant rather different things to women and men. For women, it was where one risked losing virtue, dirtying oneself, being

116 CULTURAL STUDIES

swept into a “disorderly and heady swirl” (Thackeray). The public and the idea of disgrace were closely allied. The public for the bourgeois man had a different moral tone. By going out in public, or “losing yourself in public”, as the phrase occurred in ordinary speech a century ago, a man was able to withdraw from these very repressive and authoritarian features of respectability which were supposed to be incarnate in his person, as father and husband, in the home.’3 walking between (besides) structure(s); below and above structure(s) The only world to be experienced is the ‘public’ world; the only way to gain experience is in ‘public’; the only experience of any value is to be gained in ‘public’, and in so saying the third space is wiped out. ‘I felt the great power that certain places, certain sights exercised over me without discovering the principle of this enchantment. Some everyday objects unquestionably contained for me, part of that mystery, plunged me into that mystery. The way I saw it, an object became transfigured: it took on neither the allegorical aspect nor the character of the symbol, it did not so much manifest an idea as constitute the very idea. Thus it extended deeply into the world’s mass.’4 walking between (besides) structure(s); below and above structure(s)

THE CITY; THE ROOM; THE GARDEN 117

118 CULTURAL STUDIES

The garden, the third space into which she walks and wherein are meanings she herself has made. Within whose walls are laid a space determined, behind whose walls a separate world is formed—within another—of difference. ‘Isabelle Granger is in the park, instead of being elsewhere, she is there. She is walking very slowly in the park, and that appears to be perfectly natural. If a man did that, if a man was walking across the park at that pace, with that air of calm and tranquillity, it wouldn’t be believed. One would say, he’s pacing up and down. One wouldn’t say that he was walking.’5 walking between (besides) structure(s); below and above structure(s) Mo White is a freelance artist/photographer Notes My thanks to Michele Fuirer for advice and support, and for the translation of the Marguerite Duras texts; also to Angela McRobbie for support, advice and encouragement throughout. 1 I use this spelling of phantasy (fantasy) to draw attention to the origin of the word: phantasy, n., train of thought; fancy; whim; illusion. (Greek phantasma— phantazō, to make visible; phainō, to bring light; pha-ō , to shine.)

THE CITY; THE ROOM; THE GARDEN 119

2 M.Duras, Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras (Paris: Minuit, 1977): interviews with Marguerite Duras for a television programme broadcast by Télé-France (May 1976). 3 R.Sennet, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 4 L.Aragon, Paris peasant (Paris, Picador, 1924). 5 Duras, op. cit.

DRIVE IN BIRMINGHAM MARTIN CULVERWELL

I was a pedestrian in Birmingham for six years before learning to drive. It was not until that moment, when I was behind the steering wheel of a car and no longer a passenger, that travelling through the centre of Birmingham finally made sense and became pleasurable. Cities were originally designed for stopping. Birmingham is designed for passing through. You enter and leave a town or city, and the moment of entry is marked by a halting of the flow of travel, the moment where transportation becomes traffic. In the pre-industrial city this point was marked by the edifice of the city gate, the barrier between inside and out where exchange and trade took place. With industrialization the walls and gates disappeared and the point of entry and exit was marked by a new edifice, an imposing building that is still important to the identities of modern cities—the railway station. Birmingham used to have two railway stations; the redesigned car city has none, just a series of platforms at one end of a huge shopping centre—the Bullring. Instead the motorways and flyovers continue right through the heart of the city and the city gates have reappeared, multiplied and mobilized. The car driver is someone who has obtained their own city gate and transports it to wherever they drive.1 For the pedestrian, deprived of the key to the city, the experience of Birmingham city centre is a very different one. The supremacy of the car, the need for uninterrupted passage and modernist architecture have combined in Birmingham to redefine urban space and experience, which are traditionally organized around the building. In Birmingham’s redesigned centre the building has lost its importance and, as a discrete structure, has ceased to exist. The difference between inside and outside is eroded, as subways and passageways become the arcades and shops of the Bullring. This concrete continuity between interior and exterior can disorientate even the experienced frequenter of the Bullring. Faced with over a score of apparent exits, some of which turn into entrances to shops, and deprived of external landmarks, Birmingham city centre appears as a city turned outside in. Virilio asks whether the city can still be said to face us, whether it has a façade any longer.2 He goes on to suggest a new urban order based not on construction and substance (buildings and highways) but on communication and time (information technology), where today’s monuments ‘are no longer visible but

122 CULTURAL STUDIES

inscribed in the [computer] terminal’s obscure luminosity’ and ‘Idleness—the monumental wait for services in front of machinery, everyone waiting for (tele) communication’. Virilio’s urban order requires a new temporal map of the city, where ‘the urgency of work time plays the part of a time centre while unemployment and vacation time play the part of the periphery—the suburb of time.’ The other facet of this is that everyone has their own map of the city, and the factors differentiating them are far more diverse than that between employed or unemployed or drivers and pedestrians. Gender, race, class, disability and age will all determine different experiential maps of the city centre, which continues to be the site of struggles against exclusion and for space. The city centre is not just a place to visit; it is still lived in, and redevelopment has clearly had a profound impact on homes and communities laid waste to facilitate the uninterrupted passage of cars.3 After the Second World War, cities throughout the Western world were transformed by building programmes based on the prediction that every home would own a car by the 1980s. The other aspect of this vision was a death warrant for the street. The street, which, as Berman has recounted,3 had been a symbol of modernity, energy, creativity, now came to represent the impediment to progress. The street as a space in which work, recreation, consumption, shops, homes and traffic all combine in an unorganized fashion had no place in the new order. And so ‘for the next 20 years streets everywhere were at best passively abandoned and often (as in the Bronx) actively destroyed. Money and energy were re-channelled to the new high roads and to the vast system of industrial

DRIVE IN BIRMINGHAM 123

parks, shopping centres and dormitory suburbs that the highways were opening up.’4 This applies to Birmingham as much as to the Bronx, and to Birmingham more even than to the European cities most devastated by the Second World War—Dresden, Hamburg, Rotterdam or Coventry. However, Birmingham could not be completely rebuilt from scratch; the planners’ vision was never completely realized, and for this we can be grateful. Milton Keynes was built from scratch and stands as a stark monument to the vision of a city without streets. There is a total separation between living areas—the dormitory suburb estates—and the centre, a vast car park containing one shopping centre and offices where, and only where, people work, buy and sell. The estates are each sealed by perimeter dual carriageways from which there is only one access road on and off the estate. We can be grateful that the planners’ vision was both flawed (the number of cars never reached the figures they predicted) and never completed. For it is precisely those areas of the inner city, in Birmingham and elsewhere, that survived demolition and reconstruction—where streets still exist—that are now contributing a new vitality and creativity to the flagging culture of this country. Martin Culverwell is a sound technician and music promoter Notes 1 Daidalos, West Berlin. 2 P.Virilio, essay in Zone, Baltimore, (Johns Hopkins University Press). 3 The 1986 Birmingham Road Race put its under-used inner-city ring road to spectacular good use but added insult to injury to those still living in the city centre. Some 5000 people living within the enclosed area not only had to endure two days of motor racing with a noise level equivalent to a major airport, but needed a pass to enter and leave the area during that weekend. They were allowed one guest each. 4 M.Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air (London: Verso, 1982).

THE POLITICS OF RACE ANGELA McROBBIE

■ Paul Gilroy, There Aint no Black in the Union Jack (London: Hutchinson, 1987), 272 pp., £7.95 Paul Gilroy’s There Aint no Black in the Union Jack is a relentless and exhaustive account of what the term ‘race’ has come to mean in contemporary British society. The axis along which the argument is presented locates racism, on the one hand, as deeply impregnated into the fabric of British life—including, surprisingly perhaps, the field of vision occupied by several leading left-wing intellectuals. On the other hand, racism is a response to, and therefore a recognition of, the powerful expressive culture which is the product of black resistance and protest, and which has also come to serve as the major political arena for black people. Despite a tendency to leave unanswered a few key questions, Gilroy’s account is one of the most impressive to date. The first section embraces, from the viewpoint of race, a head-on confrontation with Marxist and neo-Marxist readings of class, a blistering attack on those who talk positively of the ‘national popular’ without considering its imperialist and post-imperialist connotations, and a sophisticated, critical decoding of the (now abolished) GLC anti-racist poster campaign. The engagement with class deserves more detailed attention, partly, perhaps, because of the degree of hesitancy and inconsistency in the path Gilroy follows. First there is the way in which race disrupts the old models of working-class unity, as either scientifically inevitable or politically desirable. This unity is inconceivable when most black people who are employed in production, and technically members of the working class, are and have been marginalized, if not excluded from those organizations which officially represent the working class. Black people are, as a result, disaffected from both the trade unions and the Labour Party, but also from class identity in the traditional sense. The irony is, however, that while protecting their own membership and thereby acting against the interests of women and blacks, the trade unions are themselves being thrown into crisis as a result of long-term shifts in the labour process, which increasingly relies upon the very kind of labour power which the

126 CULTURAL STUDIES

unions are least representative of. Gilroy reminds the reader that production in the nineteenth-century sense, and the social relations which it brings into being, are now things of the past. The extraction of surplus value through the exploitation of labour continues, but is slowly giving way to de-industrialization (and with it mass unemployment) and a set of production processes based on micro-technology, information technology and all of the paraphernalia needed to survey and control those restless populations pushed out on to the streets. At the same time, those employed in both skilled and unskilled work are increasingly made up of women on part-time contracts, trainees on YTS schemes and lowpaid black labourers. Class therefore occupies a less central place in terms of changing people’s consciousness than it once did. The social movements which have grown up over the last twenty years have shown, however, that identities other than those of class can play a dynamic role in radical politics. Outside the sphere of work, class plays a lesser role in determining the formation of left-wing politics. And, inside work, it is being put into crisis as a result of the increasingly diverse and non-homogeneous social groupings employed in production. It follows that socialist politics will, in the future, be altogether more fragmented and less consensual than was once envisaged. Unlike Gorz, Paul Gilroy is not bidding a definitive farewell to the working class. And this is where an element of uncertainty creeps in. There is a shift throughout this chapter from class as an abstract relation, a social product emerging from the conditions of labour and entailing exploitation and subordination, to class as a concrete empirical category inhabited largely by white males employed in certain traditional fields of labour, to class, finally, as a crucial resource and rallying point for political identification and mobilization. Gilroy’s comments about the relation between race and class slides, sometimes unevenly, between all three of these. First he argues, correctly, that the workplace is only one of many sites of exploitation for black people. As a result there is often an organic relation connecting the politics of the shop floor with those of the community. Race is therefore ‘the modality in which class is lived’. It also, on many occasions, eclipses class altogether, particularly in the politics which comes into being around the question of policing. In this sense, Gilroy suggests, much of black politics reflects Craig Calhoun’s claim that class action is frequently a lot less radical than the populist community struggles waged around housing, welfare, schooling and the environment. But, having said all this, Gilroy none the less ends the chapter by proposing that black resistance and struggle must be seen, now, as a new kind of class struggle. The logic of this proposition certainly follows from what has gone before it, but it still needs clearer theoretical marking. It is not so much theory which weakens Gilroy’s analysis of nation and nationality as an unwillingness really to grapple with feelings of national belonging, or imagined national belonging. Equally there is no engagement with

THE POLITICS OF RACE 127

the notion of difference and how it is perceived. These omissions do not, however, detract substantially from the force of the argument. First Gilroy looks at the role that ‘Little Englandisms’ play in the current vocabulary of a number of wellknown figures on the left. Their emphasis on Britishness and the British character (and only very recently Raphael Samuels, in a piece on the ‘Selbourne affair’, referred to his preference for a strategy which reflected a very ‘British way of doing things’) is at once disconnected comment, and at the same time part of a more general, and serious, attempt within the left to come to grips with that aspect of popular ideology which finds expression in patriotism, nationalism and the kind of rampant jingoism found continually in the popular press. (The Sun, for example, in the week ending 3 January 1987 ran a headline ‘Get Pete the Pole’ in connection with the abduction of a young female student.) The eagerness with which the left has, following Gramsci, attempted to develop an alternative ‘national popular’ leaves much to be desired. In many cases this has slid into an uncritical populist endorsement of a set of beliefs which offer comfort and the illusion of national greatness in the midst of transparent national decline. Following another track, E.P.Thompson reclaims aspects of Britishness proudly, on the grounds of that strong radical tradition which came to be expressed in the figure of the freeborn Englishman. Raymond Williams defends a residual working-class chauvinism as being one feature among other, more positive qualities, such as a rootedness in tradition and an unwillingness to surrender easily to the consequences of rapid change. These, along with Colin Mercer’s coyly expressed admiration for Enoch Powell’s prose and for the pleasures of Englishness, and finally Neil Kinnock’s piece of amazingly purple prose (‘a confident and generous patriotism of freedom and fairness’) contribute to a wider collusion on the part of the left with those nationalist sentiments which eight years of a Thatcher government have managed to sustain and which cannot be disentangled from racism, and the resurrected spectacle of Britain’s earlier colonial greatness. Gilroy rightly questions the extent to which Britishness does indeed offer solace to a disconsolate population. Regional or local solidarities have often proved a great deal more effective in forging either cultural or political identities. This is mentioned more or less as an aside, and it is one, of course, which could be countered by many examples wherein local attachments have produced narrow, sectionalist and sectarian sentiments instead of the more radical loyalties which Gilroy implies. Equally there are many other, much more nebulous and less sociological questions which this national question gives rise to. Is it possible, for example, to identify with a certain place, its streets, houses, fields and spaces, and its people, and not transpose these feelings into the realm of one’s country, or the nation? And what does it mean, anyway, to come from somewhere, so much so that its features figure not just in the present, in everyday life, and in politics and political attachments, but in the past, in popular and private memory, in dreams, daydreams and desires? Surely, in the case of Britain, the

128 CULTURAL STUDIES

various cultural artefacts including novels, poems, films and plays which engage with these questions are characterized as much by discontinuity, disaffiliation and detachment from Great Britain as they are by unequivocal national pride? This is particularly true of Scottish, Irish and Welsh culture. Gilroy’s point is that an unambiguous sense of belonging has been denied to black people, while at the same time they have been expected somehow magically to assimilate or integrate. Although they are profoundly and decisively excluded from the national ‘we’, it has none the less been demanded of black people that they merge into the crowd and lose any distinguishing marks of difference save those that it is expedient for white society to hold on to. In this context, black culture has wilfully refused to sit down and be reasonable. In the very substantial chapter on black music and the whole cultural milieu within which it comes into being, Gilroy provides a detailed analysis of the themes which appear and reappear and which express precisely these everyday exclusions, injustices, intimidations and threats which deny black people the luxury of inclusion. If the black body instead is monitored, checked, computerized, stereotyped and pathologized, it in turn is reappropriated and transformed in culture into an instrument of resistance, a raw material, an irrevocable resource. In music, for example, Gilroy argues that black sexuality represents a reclamation of rights in the private sphere, and a playing out of many of those themes which menace white patriarchal society (well documented by Fanon in Black Skin, White Mask and more recently in the writings of Homi Bhabha). If the black body, or the image of the black body, remains to whites somehow untouchable and beyond the pale, then it is these very reactions which black culture subverts and celebrates (‘Reach Out and Touch…Move Closer…’) and indeed, as Gilroy points out, in the case of James Brown transposes into a sublime metalanguage of sexual desire. Finally, this is by no means unconnected to the centrality of the body in slavery, the punishments meted out upon it since then, and the way in which, for white racist society, the black body is rendered simultaneously visible and invisible. Even when offered some notional place of belonging within the national body, this very access is predicated on difference. Dept. of Sociology, Ealing College of Higher Education