Structural Idealism: A Theory of Social and Historical Explanation

Structural

Idealism A

Theory of Social and Historical Explanation

Douglas Mann

Structural Idealism A Theory of Social and Historical Explanation

Structural Idealism A Theory of Social and Historical Explanation

Douglas Mann

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Mann, Doug, 1955Structural idealism : a theory of social and historical explanation Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-88920-391-1 1. Social sciences—Philosophy. 2. History—Philosophy. 3. Idealism. 4. Culture—Philosophy. I. Title.

HM484.M35 2002

191

C2002-900748-8

© 2002 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5 www.wlupress.wlu.ca

Cover design by Leslie Macredie.

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

Printed in Canada All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical— without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping, or reproducing in information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to the Canadian Reprography Collective, 214 King Street West, Suite 312, Toronto, Ontario M5H 3S6.

Go, gentlemen, every man unto his charge: Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls: Conscience is but a word that cowards use, Devised at first to keep the strong in awe: Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law. March on, join bravely, let us to’t pell-mell; If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell. —Richard III, act 5, scene 3

Contents

List of Charts .................................................................................. x Acknowledgements ...................................................................... xi Introduction.................................................................................... 1 The Road Ahead............................................................................... 1 Definitions and Clarifications ........................................................... 5 Mapping Social Theory..................................................................... 8 Tilting Marx Sideways ................................................................... 13 The Structure of This Book ............................................................ 18 Chapter 1 The Nature of Social Consciousness: A Theory of Mind .......................................................................... The Sympathetic Social Mind ......................................................... Embodiment .................................................................................. Passionate Action........................................................................... Purposive Action ............................................................................ Intellectual Action ......................................................................... Language as Symbolic Social Action ............................................... Social Rules and the Creation of Social Roles .................................. Power, Hierarchy, and Social Structure...........................................

21 21 26 29 31 33 36 40 44

Chapter 2 Intention, Meaning, and Structure in Social Explanation ................................................................... 49 Prologue ........................................................................................ 49

vii

viii

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

The Varieties of Rationality ............................................................ Intention ....................................................................................... Meaning ........................................................................................ Structure .......................................................................................

51 55 61 70

Chapter 3 A Structural Idealist Interpretation of Theories of Deviance .................................................................... Labelling/Transactionalist Views of Deviance.................................. New Subcultural Theory ................................................................ A Structural Idealist Understanding of Deviance and the Question of Causality ......................................................

81 81 86 94

Chapter 4 Reconstructing the Past: A Structural Idealist Approach ......................................................................... 99 Collingwood’s Re-enactment Thesis .............................................. 100 Problems with the Thesis ............................................................. 106 Structuring Human Actions .......................................................... 117 The Centrality of Meaning in Historical Explanation .................... 121 The Reconstruction Thesis ........................................................... 125 Construction, Reconstruction, and Objectivity............................... 126

Chapter 5 The Search for Depth Meaning as the Essence of Late Modernity......................................................... A Cook’s Tour of Late Modernity ................................................... Nietzsche: From Morality to the Genealogy of Morals ................... Freud: From Mind to Psyche ........................................................ From Sociology to the Sociology of Knowledge ...............................

131 134 138 146 155

Chapter 6 The End of the Search for Depth Meaning as the Essence of Postmodernity .......................................................... The Basic Themes ........................................................................ Foucault: From Truth to Power/Knowledge ................................... Derrida: From Meaning to Play .................................................... Lyotard and Baudrillard: From an Incredulity to Metanarratives to Embracing Simulacra .................................... The Search for Meaning in Depth as a Disenchantment of the Social World ........................................... From the Unmasking Mind to the Liquid Body .............................

159 159 169 177 181 192 197

Contents

ix

Chapter 7 A Secret History of the Liquid Body: Image and Counter-Image in Twentieth-Century Culture ......................... A Theoretical Sketch .................................................................... Body Images, Power, and Levels of Meaning ................................. The Channels of Communication .................................................. A Periodization ............................................................................ A Case in Point: British Subcultural Styles, 1963-1978 ................. The Liquid Body and the Question of Freedom .............................

199 199 203 206 209 217 220

Chapter 8 The Contribution of Structural Idealism to Cultural Critique .................................................................... Prologue: What is Culture? .......................................................... Voices in the Wilderness: A Tour of Contemporary Cultural Criticism, 1978-1995 .................................................... Explorations in Contemporary Cultural Criticism ......................... A Sketch of a Structural Idealist Theory of Cultural Critique ................................................................... Towards a Unified Social Theory ..................................................

223 223 224 249 259 266

Notes ............................................................................................. 269 Bibliography ............................................................................... 289 Index ............................................................................................. 301

List of Charts

Chart 1

Mapping Social Theory ...............................................

Chart 2

A Model of Social Consciousness ................................ 26

Chart 3

The Varieties of Rationality........................................ 52

Chart 4

Mapping Deviance Theory .......................................... 93

Chart 5

The Canadian School of Cultural Critique: Points of Entry into the Nature/Culture/ Technology Triad ......................................................... 251

Chart 6

Mapping the Canadian School Triad onto My Triad of Social Explanation ......................... 252

Chart 7

David Cronenberg’s Films as Illustrations of the Unintended Consequences of Scientific Inventions.................................................... 258

x

9

Acknowledgements

This book can be traced back, through copious revisions and additions, to my doctoral thesis in philosophy at the University of Waterloo, itself in part the product of papers I wrote for various graduate courses. To this end I would like to thank James Van Evra, my thesis supervisor, and the rest of my thesis committee for making the process of writing my thesis as painless as possible. Further, I would like to thank Lorne Dawson and Rick Helmes-Hayes of Waterloo’s Sociology Department and Karin MacHardy of Waterloo’s History Department for providing a fertile ground in their graduate seminars for papers that eventually found their way into my book. I would also like to thank all my friends and colleagues from my Waterloo days who contributed in a less direct way to the ideas in this book, and Heidi Hochenedel for looking over my Introduction. Lastly, I want to thank the editors of the Critical Review and Clio for allowing me to reprint versions of articles that appeared in their journals: chapter 2 originally appeared as “The Limits of Instrumental Rationality in Social Explanation” in Critical Review 13 (1999), while chapter 4 originally appeared as “Reconstructing the Past, A Structural Idealist Approach” in Clio 27 (1998).

xi

Introduction

The Road Ahead One of the most enduring divisions within metaphysics and, in a more vague sense, within philosophy as a whole is that between those who posit mind and those who posit matter as ontological starting points. Idealists like Bishop Berkeley declared that all objects of the senses are mere ideas in our minds, or ultimately in the mind of God, while materialists today argue that there is only one substance in the cosmos, matter, and that the realm of spirit is an empty one, spun out of the hopeful illusions of folk psychology (to borrow Paul Churchland’s term). This division between idealists and materialists gets played out within sociology as the debate between agency—the focus on individual decision making, with the associated assumption of a relatively free, rational subject—and structure—the focus on the social, economic, and in general the material forces that shape, guide, or determine human behaviour. It also gets reflected in the philosophy of history and in historiography in the debate between historical idealists like Hegel, who argued that a conflict between ideas is propelling history toward the telos of the Absolute Idea, and historical materialists like Marx, who claimed that economic life and the structures it generates is the basic motive force in history. It may seem trivial to point out that both the idealists and the materialists have grasped but part of a larger truth. However, only Notes to introduction are on pp. 269-70.

1

2

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

a few social and historical theorists have attempted to put forward a position that encompasses both of these poles. One such exception is Anthony Giddens, the noted English social theorist, who attempts to do just this with his structuration theory, an approach similar to my own. This is precisely what I will do here: put forward structural idealism as a model for social theory (speaking synchronically), historiography (speaking diachronically), and cultural theory. “Structural idealism” is an expression I have coined to refer to the need to explain human actions simultaneously in terms of the ideas that human actors bring to the situation and to the way that previous actions have created social structures that condition the ideas of present actors. My goal will thus be to bring together idealist and materialist ways of explaining social action, to marry the spirits of Hegel and Marx in what I hope will be a happy union. At the core of my structural idealism are what I call “structural ideals,” which I take to be extensions of Max Weber’s ideal types. As an example, Weber delineated the ideal types of authority as traditional, legal, and charismatic forms of leadership. He didn’t think that these pure forms actually existed in real societies, but saw them as methodological tools that help us to understand real, mixed forms of authority. He did not, however, see them as ethical ideals. This is where I think Weber unfairly limits himself: my structural ideals will include all the ways in which values are applied by human actors to social interactions insofar as these interactions result in explicit or implicit forms of social structure. These values aren’t solely ethical: like Wittgenstein’s language games, they come in many varieties, perhaps without a single common foundation.1 Some concern classical moral dilemmas (“should I get an abortion?”); some are aesthetic (“this car is ugly, and I won’t buy it”); some are bureaucratic or legalistic (filling out a form, or waiting for the little green man to appear in a traffic light before crossing the street); some involve economic rationality (moving across the country to a strange new city in pursuit of a career). Yet all involve some sort of value judgment, even if it’s so deeply embedded in the social act as to appear transparent to the casual observer. My structural ideals echo Weber’s ideal types in another sense: they are the ideas that the theorist distills out of an analysis of concrete interactions, yet they are no more “real” than any other idea in an individual mind. This is a sore point for idealists of all stripes: too often their focus on the primacy of ideas is taken as evidence of

Introduction

3

a fuzzy spiritualism (although this suspicion was quite justified in Berkeley’s case). Ideas are not ghosts in the machine of the self: they permeate the conscious life of individuals. Indeed, insofar as you are reading and understanding this introduction, your mind is full of ideas. To say that we “understand” something, say a social act, is to apply what we take to be an appropriate idea to that act— otherwise, it’s just nonsense, or empty mechanical movements. So from one point of view, what I will call “methodological idealism” is just common sense: people act socially based on ideas they have in their minds. Now the tricky part comes when we go deeper and ask, “where do these ideas come from?” and “are we entirely conscious of them, or is there a separate realm of unconscious thought not entirely accessible to rational scrutiny?” It will take at least half of this book to answer these seemingly innocent questions, though as a first indication of my answers to these questions, my reply to the second is a resounding yes. I’ll return to this problem in the section entitled Definitions and Clarifications in this introduction. Structural ideals are the missing link between, on the one hand, the historical idealism of R. G. Collingwood, and the focus on agency and individual reasons for acting found in Peter Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science and in symbolic-interactionist theory (for example, the work of Herbert Blumer and Erving Goffman); and, on the other hand, the social-structuralist approach of the Marxist tradition (including its continuation in the twentieth century in the work of the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, and Sartre). Human beings are by reflex intentional (as the phenomenologists observe) and meaning and value creating (as Nietzsche made clear ad nauseam). This is true even if we conceal our baser intentions beneath mists of idealistic rhetoric. Further, the flowing of human intentions into meaning and values is not an isolated, solipsistic process carried out in private worlds of our own creation, but a social process. We produce and reproduce patterns of behaviour that are embodied in legal and moral codes, standard operating procedures (e.g., filing systems, timetables, stopping at a red light and going on a green, etc.), rules of etiquette and politeness, “rational” ways of attaining goals, and so forth. As I’ve already hinted, we can speak of all these patterns of behaviour as pointing towards ideals (e.g., perfect politeness, social order, ethical behaviour) that are seldom if ever attained, yet all the same inform our everyday thought at both the surface and at deeper psychological levels. The search for these ideals is the task

4

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

of the social and cultural theorist and the philosopher of history, just as the task of the empirical sociologist and the working historian is to describe the way that these ideals manifest themselves in practice in specific temporal and spatial locations. Yet all this intentionality flowing into values and into the production of meaningful social objects does not come from perfectly free, unrestrained, and creative individual human spirits. Instead, the social structures bequeathed to us by past efforts at the creation and preservation of social meaning and values loom up before us, to no small degree like those ancient Mayan pyramids that emerged from the jungle of the Yucatan to startle the nineteenth-century explorer, covered with obscure hieroglyphs that at first seemed indecipherable to their discoverers. We know, more or less, what these structures are, but few of us question where they come from, how they affect our social actions, or whether they have any value for us in the present. Like those Mayan pyramids, social structures have solid material bases, in the way that economic arrangements are constituted in the society in question—an observation long familiar to historians and sociologists, but one that is all too often forgotten by philosophers in their almost single-minded preoccupation with the argument itself divorced from the social and historical context from which it came.2 Thus, in arguing for a structural underpinning for social rules I am at the same time arguing (in part) for a historicist foundation for philosophical argumentation. Too often professional philosophers blithely ignore the social foundation of an argument in favour of its purely rational peak. Yet having said all of this, I believe that Collingwoodian idealism, and its allies in social theory (e.g., Weber, Winch, and the symbolic interactionists), have something important to say to social structuralism. “All history is the history of thought” is Collingwood’s famous dictum: we can understand the past only by rethinking the thoughts of past actors, of the agents of history, by telling the story of past acts, not just of events.3 Of course, these thoughts must leave behind them palpable evidence for us to rethink them, such as documents, buildings, art, coins, etc. We think through these objects to the thought behind them. So far, so good. But too many interpreters of Collingwood’s method (if indeed it is a method and not just a description of the a priori conditions of history in general, as interpreters like William Dray have suggested) have claimed that it closes the door to social and economic interpretations of the past

Introduction

5

due to its methodological individualism, its ignorance of the role of unintended consequences, and its excessive rationalism. I would like to suggest instead that if we are prepared to play somewhat roughly with Collingwood’s central doctrines, and to do a bit of extending and reshaping, we can indeed tie his idealism to a social structural interpretation of human behaviour. This is, and will remain to the end, the basic telos of this work, although it may seem at times forgotten in my sideways explorations of a number of connected issues over the next few hundred pages.

Definitions and Clarifications Let me now define a few key terms and clarify where I think structural idealism stands in the broad terrain of social theory (in the next section I will be more specific on its location in this terrain). The point of social theory is the understanding and explanation of social life. I take it as evident that social theory (and history for that matter) is what Wilhelm Windleband called an “idiographic” science, one that focuses on values and meaning (as opposed to a “nomothetic” science like chemistry, which uses causal, law-like explanations). Yet such an idiographic science must explain not only the ideas, reasons, or motives we have for acting in the social world, but also the structures that result from these actions, and which in turn shape future ideas and actions. To do this, I want to argue that social and historical explanation has to be both structuralist and idealist at the same time. When we try to understand an individual social act, or a collection of such acts, it’s not enough just to give an account of the intentions of the actor. Nor is it enough to list the external factors, whether economic, political, or biological, that influenced or caused that act. A full account of a social act requires an explanation that shows how individual intentions are related or shaped by structural factors, and how in turn these structural actors are instantiated and sustained by individual acts (without this sustenance, they would cease to exist). So we need a notion of how deep structures “produce” action. The way these structures operate is through our structural ideals, which social theorists bring to light by understanding and explaining the social meaning of actions. What is idealism? On the most basic level, it is the notion that ideas are primary in whatever field is being explained—whether

6

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

that field is history, social action, or external reality. There are several distinct types of idealism that should be sorted out before we move ahead. Firstly, there is the largely discredited metaphysical idealism of Bishop Berkeley: things are real if and only if one can perceive them. All things are just ideas in someone’s mind. Needless to say, this is not the sort of idealism I have in mind here—I have no intention of arguing that we have to go through a process of Cartesian angst over the reality of the external world before being able to explain social action or write history. To act in the world we have to assume that physical things are really “out there,” and separate from the human mind. Secondly, we have the historical or teleological idealism of Hegel and his followers (including Francis Fukuyama in our own day). Such an idealist argues that not only is history propelled forward by a dialectic of ideas, but this dialectic is going somewhere: it has a telos. Although this sort of idealism sounds more promising, the notion that history has a telos is an unprovable hypothesis that asks too much of us, metaphysically speaking. The problem with such a notion is simple: it assumes some sort of ideal ontological realm where such teloi live, independent of individual human consciousnesses. Put this way, it seems absurd, akin to Hume’s occult qualities. Lastly, there is the methodological idealism I want to defend as one of the two major components in my structural idealist hybrid. This is Collingwood’s idealism. Simply put, it is the notion that we understand a social, cultural, political, or any other act largely in terms of the ideas in the mind of the actor. This is what I take Collingwood to mean by his dictum that “all history is the history of thought”: we can know the past only insofar as we can think it. He’s not denying that the ruins of Knossos or the Parthenon or Hadrian’s Wall don’t really exist—of course they do. The same can be said of ancient texts, coins, and other evidence. But their meaning can be understood only insofar as one can discern the thoughts of their builders and users. Staring at a moss-covered brick in an ancient wall in the English countryside—or even submitting samples of it for a detailed chemical analysis—won’t help us very much to explain the wall’s purpose, nor the events that took place on and around it. To do so, we must apply our analytical and critical faculties to the evidence at hand, and to construct a narrative of events based on that evidence. On the other side we find structuralism. To speak once again in the simplest terms, a structuralist is someone who believes that to

Introduction

7

furnish an explanation in a given field of inquiry—whether it’s language, history, anthropology, psychology, or economics—we have to discover the structures that shape and dominate that field. Ferdinand de Saussure is the founder of structural linguistics. He argued that we have to see language as governed by structural relationships between its signifiers and the things they signify, and that we need a “semiology,” a science of the signs, to understand how language works. Roland Barthes later applied de Saussure’s semiology to literature and culture. Claude Lévi-Strauss moved structuralism into anthropology, finding similarities in the structures of ritual and myth across widely divergent cultures. He found a number of binary pairs, like the raw and the cooked, or the sacred and the profane, at work in cultures all around the world, concluding that the myths held by these divergent cultures shared structural similarities. Yet the dean of structuralists for the purposes of social theory is undoubtedly Karl Marx. His historical materialism laid out a structuralist model of social action in its starkest and most enticing form. I will try to show how Marxism can be integrated into my structural idealism at greater length in the section entitled Tilting Marx Sideways in this introduction. Suffice it to note here that Marx’s basic premise that economic life results in social structures—most importantly competing classes—that determine human consciousness and action resulted in a model of social and historical explanation that remains highly influential down to this day. Why the need for a structural element in social explanation? Because the ideas a person can discursively express as the reasons for their action are only a part of what shapes that action. Many other factors—class, gender, social notions of morality, economic common sense, aesthetic values, and so on—combine to influence action, sometimes in ways that the actor is only dimly aware of, if at all. Social structure is real insofar as people choose to act in ways that can be seen as expressive of preconscious and unconscious social assumptions and values they had little hand in creating. I will come back to this point time and time again in this book. So social structure is deeply embedded in the unconscious and preconscious ideas we bring to the social world. For social theory to be an idiographic inquiry and still be able to offer a comprehensive account of social action, we need some sort of bridging concept between individual conscious human intentions and these deep structures. This bridging concept is social meaning, which is usually

8

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

expressed in the form of a description and narrative of what I’ve termed structural ideals. This is how sociologists, historians, cultural theorists, and others actually explain the social world: not as a bundle of individual intentions, nor as a collection of impersonal deterministic forces (except in the case of the most reductionist works), but as meaningful descriptions of how various ideals shaped, prodded, seduced, and cajoled people to do what they did. The fact that social actors don’t always know what they’re doing, or how things will turn out, or whether their actions will have unintended consequences merely goes to show that there is more to a social act than the subjective meaning ascribed to it by the actor. One last point. I want to make it clear that the “idealist” moment of explanation is not just synchronic, and the structuralist moment diachronic. We must think of each mode of explanation as sharing synchronous and diachrononous attributes. Notably, our structural ideals are not static entities, but dynamic, dialectical things, always in flux. They survive only insofar as they are sustained by daily interactions between real social actors. For example, the structural ideal of private property survives only insofar as the majority of citizens believe in the abstract ideal of the individual ownership of things, the validity of the law against theft, and the authority of the police to enforce that law. If everyone woke up tomorrow firmly convinced that private property was evil, and communicated that conviction, it would very quickly cease to exist.4

Mapping Social Theory Now that I’ve defined some basic terms, I want to provide a road map through the expansive territory of social theory, and to situate my structural idealism on this map. This will give us an even clearer idea of the road ahead. We can map much of modern social theory on a two-dimensional matrix, as illustrated in Chart 1. This matrix shows us where the emphasis of each theorist or school of social theory lies along two distinct continua: one that stretches between human agency and social structure, another that connects consensus and conflict. This map of social theory is painted in broad strokes, so it should be seen as a useful sketch of a very large theoretical field, and not the last word on such things. The first continuum is the methodological one that features social explanation in terms of individual human agency (with its associ-

9

Introduction

ated emphasis on human freedom) at one pole, and social explanation in terms of social structure at the other. This is the continuum mentioned at the start of this introduction, and it is a continuum that has driven debates in sociological theory for over a century. The second continuum lies between an emphasis on consensus as “natural” to social life at one pole, and an emphasis on conflict at the other. Again, this division has been at the centre of debates in social theory since its inception in the Enlightenment. The result of this mapping of social theory is four possible theoretical positions on social life. In the bottom right corner we find Marxism, with its emphasis on the way that deep economic structures control human action and thought. Marx famously noted that it is not our consciousness that shapes our social being, but our social being that shapes our consciousness.5 Since this shaping takes place in the context of struggles between economic classes, we can characterize Marxism (including its twentieth-century variants) as a structural conflict theory. Chart 1. Mapping Social Theory The explanatory emphasis is placed on…

Social Consensus

Social Conflict

Individual Agency

Social Structure

Herbert Blumer and Symbolic Interactionism

Emile Durkheim’s Social Facts

Erving Goffman’s Dramaturgy [leaning
]

Talcott Parsons’s Structural Functionalism

Max Webster’s Vershtehen Sociology

Marx and Engels’s Dialectical Materialism

Gramsci’s Theory of R. G. Collingwood’s Methodological Idealism Hegemony Peter Winch Anthony Giddens’s Structuration Theory [although leaning] Early Jean-Paul Sartre

The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Marcuse) The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies Late Jean-Paul Sartre

At the opposite corner of our matrix, we find theorists such as Herbert Blumer and Erving Goffman, who see social life as a collection of symbols and social roles created in everyday interaction. These symbols and roles can’t be sustained without continuous individual social interactions. I don’t want to suggest that the symbolic

10

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

interactionists were hidebound conservatives hostile to social change. Instead, I situate them in the “agency-consensus” intersection simply because they see the social roles we inhabit in our everyday interactions as working together to create a stable flow. Indeed, Goffman explicitly maintains that social actors don’t come to their performances free to improvise their roles as they see fit: they must adapt their performative talents to the roles already in place on the stage of everyday life. Small improvisations may be permissible. Yet it is painfully evident when actors make mistakes, or fail to play their roles appropriately. This is true because the rules that define a “mistake” are largely established at any given point in time. In the upper right corner of the matrix we find the largely discredited schools of Durkheim and the functionalists. When one thinks of the cultural capital exercised by structural functionalism in North American sociology in the 1940s and 1950s, when it was the dominant theoretical paradigm, one is reminded of lines from Shelley’s “Ozymandias”: And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away. Talcott Parsons was the high priest of functionalism in those days. His mighty tomes outlined in detail the structure of the American social system. Parsons and other functionalists said that the point of social life is for individuals to fulfill the essential functions of the social system: control, stratification, leadership, the provision of reigning beliefs, stable family life, and the reproduction of the species. Yet as C. Wright Mills and other critics of the 1950s and 1960s pointed out, structural functionalism was a static picture of a self-satisfied American society run by interlocking power elites, suppressing outsiders such as blacks, women, the poor, and the artistic avant-garde. The monuments of structural functionalism now stand abandoned and uncared for, like Shelley’s “vast and legless trunks of stone” lying alongside Ozymandias’s shattered visage. As testimonies to a highly artificial ideological status quo dreamed up in the American academy in the mid-twentieth century, they are best left that way.

Introduction

11

Lastly, in the bottom left corner we find those theorists who focus on individual agency, yet don’t back away from the reality of social conflict. Thinkers such as Max Weber and R. G. Collingwood emphasize the need to start any social and historical explanation with an account of individual subjective meaning. The common theoretical source for this way of thinking is the German/Idealism of the early nineteenth century, especially Hegel. Yet this genealogy must be taken with a grain of salt. Hegel was no doubt an idealist in the sense that he believed that ideas shape human development. Further, he clearly believed that conflict drove the development of ideas: hence his famous dialectic. But Hegel’s idealism wandered from the methodological notion that ideas shape action to the metaphysical notion that ideas are somehow more “real” than individual people and the material objects they encounter. This tied into his teleological idealism, his notion that history was a sort of march toward a predetermined goal. We find evidence of these latter two varieties of idealism in Hegel’s claim that the real is rational, and the rational is real (i.e., that what has happened had to have happened), and in his application of the “cunning of reason” to history. Both imply detachment of ideas from the minds of individual actors, a detachment that Marx and others rightly castigated as so much metaphysical fog. Ultimately, what I want to do in this book is to transcend both of these continua. First, I want to show how social and historical explanation must comprise the poles of agency and structure at the same time. The only way we can make sense of social structure as a factor that shapes or influences action is by seeing it as instantiated in individual acts.6 Yet it is real all the same. We see it operating in the clothes people wear, in the way they speak to each other, in the things they buy and use, the cars they drive, the books they read (or don’t read). Social structure is a permanent and durable social reality. What I hope to show in this book is how this durable social reality finds its way into individual consciousness by way of structural ideals that channel and shape our social actions. These ideals parallel Max Weber’s ideal types, and often rely on semi-conscious and unconscious ports of entry to find their way into our lives. So we need a layered model of the social mind alongside, or preceding, an account of social theory. I should confess right at the start that my initial base of operations in my effort at transcendence of this matrix will be the

12

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Weber/Collingwood/Giddens camp of social and historical explanation. Ultimately, social life is made up of individual social interactions, themselves governed by our ideas about social reality (as Peter Winch makes clear). In addition, it seems equally evident that conflict drives social life: economic resources, political power, personal status, fame, and so forth are fought over by pretty well everyone, saving the odd hermit or withdrawn mystic. That there may be no specific battles being fought right now in no way disproves the fact that la lutta continua: real wars are usually made up of short bursts of extreme violence interrupting long periods of boredom. Social life is no different, though the conflict there is less likely to involve overt violent acts, and is usually repressed to allow for civilized interactions. Two bridges must be built out of this camp to allow for a complete model of social explanation. The first bridge is the one I’ve already hinted at above, that between individualist and structuralist accounts of social life. I believe that the social theorist has to understand how and why individual human action can produce social structure, and how this social structure feeds back into individual thinking to influence future action. So we need to build a bridge from a voluntaristic idealism to a structuralist account of social conflict. Secondly, we need to build a bridge from the conflict side of social explanation to the consensus camp. This will be considerably less difficult to construct than the previous one: there’s nothing inherent in an account that centres on human agency that biases it toward a conflictual view of social life. Indeed, since much of everyday interaction takes place through rituals and customs conducted in a relatively peaceful atmosphere, it’s easy enough to believe that fairly stable ideas about the social roles we inhabit or perform shape our actions. Everyday life may be deeply conflictual, but on its surface, it appears quite calm. Battles between opposed parties rarely flare up in everyday life, but when they do, they are probably portents of deeper conflicts. For the most part, our social struggles take place in our repressed frustrations and barely stated bitternesses.7 Like all good maps, this one might seem to be overly complex to the casual reader, full of names and symbols they don’t fully grasp. Yet as I move through the chapters of this book, I hope to explore most of the locations indicated on it, notably the ideas of the thinkers and schools of thought listed on the human-agency side of the matrix. All the same, I must admit that the great figure whose pres-

Introduction

13

ence will be discerned only in fleeting shadows throughout this book is that of Marx. The Marxist notion of social life as tied to economic conflict is a powerful one, one that goes a long way to explaining why we do what we do. So yet another theme in this book will be how to account for the way that economic and cultural capital, and the structures they generate, influence our ideas and thus our actions, without losing sight of a methodological idealist understanding of social life. One way that this balancing act can be accomplished is by seeing these structures as expressed in interests, whether economic or otherwise. We shape our social interactions with others partly in terms of how we perceive they will affect these interests. Where Marx went wrong was to reduce these interests to purely material things, independent of concrete intentions, and to see them as operating automatically on human consciousness. This led less reflective Marxists to describe human actors as the puppets of abstract economic forces, to fall into the positivist trap of worshipping the false idol of the Naturwissenschaften as the principal deity of social theory.8 In the following section I’ll show how we can tilt Marx sideways by dematerializing his account of social action, and thus accommodate Marxism to my structural idealism.

Tilting Marx Sideways Karl Marx declared in an afterword to the German edition of Das Kapital that his historical materialism was in effect a turning of Hegel on his head, an extraction of the rational kernel of his thought from its mystical shell (Marx and Engels 1978: 301-302). I wish to return the favour by trying to show how my structural idealism is in effect a tilting of Marxism sideways, an attempt to take Marx’s structural conflict theory seriously as a methodological tool by showing how it would actually work if Marx had thought things through on the level of everyday social interactions. As already noted, Marx saw human consciousness as causally determined by the social reality that individuals found themselves in. In other words, he saw our economic relationships as forming the foundations of human life, with our ideas about politics, art, philosophy, and religion being so much ideological smoke generated by the engines of these primary interactions. He does see ideas as the product of human interactions, but only of those involved with “material” life.

14

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Marx’s historical materialism took it to be a basic fact that our ideas have little or no independence from these material interactions. Here is Marx and Engels’s account of their materialism in The German Ideology: We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. (1978: 154-55) Further, not only are ideas the product of material life, but they are used by the ruling class in all societies to enforce their domination— in part by inducing a false consciousness amongst the oppressed classes about the reasons for their subjection and thus naturalizing this oppression: The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. (Marx and Engels 1978: 172) What sense can we make of Marx’s historical materialism? First of all, it hardly seems supportable that ideas are merely the phantoms of one’s brain, or the sort of theory that Marx himself developed wouldn’t be possible. After all, how could these revolutionary phantoms develop in the brain of a petty bourgeois intellectual? More generally, even if much of human conflict is generated by dis-

Introduction

15

putes about economic resources, if we can find a handful of cases where people transcend or ignore economic questions in their ideas about social life, the status of Marx’s historical materialism as a universal theory is thrown into question. And there is lots of evidence that such transcendence takes place.9 It seems eminently more reasonable to claim that ideas or consciousness and life interpenetrate each other. In fact, to claim that either constitutes separate categories is to engage in reification. To make our “material life” the ontological ground of our ideas about social life is to assume that there is a clear boundary between it and other forms of life: some things are part of material life, some things are not. It won’t do any good to draw a circle around material objects here and claim that these constitute “material life”: obviously, it’s our interactions with these objects that Marx had in mind when he said that social life conditions consciousness. Yet if material life is a matter of interactions with objects and other people engaged in economic activities, when does it end, and other forms of life begin? This isn’t to deny the reality of economic interactions. It is, however, to deny the notion that we can reify economic interactions as an ontologically distinct form of life that acts as the sole wellspring for our ideas. In short, ideas emerge out of life, yet in turn shape that life. If they didn’t, we would be mindless automatons, or at best mere reflections of whatever economic activities we engage in. None of this disputes a vaguer version of Marx’s claim that economic life influences our ideas. Our interests, or at least what we take to be our interests, are for the most part connected to our economic concerns. We often defend these interests tooth and nail, so much so that ideological notions connected to them seep into our preconscious and unconscious assumptions about other parts of life (e.g., politics, intellectual life, even religion). Yet, like every other social relationship, these interests involve notions of value, at least the value of property—that certain things are “mine.” They involve ideals. If ideas were merely epiphenomena of economic structures, they would have a hard time operating diachronically. The synchronic operation of such heavily conditioned ideas would tend to generate a series of identical sets of social relationships. Things would never change, unless natural disasters intervened to destroy a culture, or an oppressed group turned to violence to end their oppression. Yet even in the latter case they would have to “change their minds”

16

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

about how to conduct themselves with regard to their rulers. In short, social change seems to imply the irruption of an idealist moment into the life of economic structures. Even more strongly, I would argue that structure itself requires ideals (as opposed to ideology) to operate. When we tilt Marx sideways, we find that ideas are indeed the product of human social interactions, of which economic life is obviously central. Yet the structures that result from these interactions have force only insofar as they are value-laden ideals, notions about the right or most pleasant or most beautiful way to act. People act socially because they want something in the social world. Now, as I’ll show in chapters 1 and 4, there are some desires—such as those for food and sex—that are so primitive that social theory has a hard time reconstructing them. They have to do with the body and its needs. Yet even these take place according to cultural and economic notions of value, notions that can be reconstructed meaningfully. If we move up the ladder of desire somewhat, we find actors entering the social world in pursuit of other things—money, cultural capital, refinement, entertainment, political power, friendships, marriage, etc. All of these fields are governed by ideals about how to proceed. For example, successful capitalists seek to make their customers happy; successful politicians don’t alienate large portions of the electorate with racist remarks; brides wear white. Admittedly, some of these structuring ideals have a practical value too. Yet even practical success is a value in and of itself (not to mention the fact that “success” is defined socially, and is not just a “phantom” in the individual’s brain). The structures of everyday life require ideals to keep them alive. Values are the fuel that keeps the fire of social structure burning. This critique of Marx also applies to the notion that the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas of an epoch. The ruling class rules in part through the control of culture and communication; for one thing, it controls the media and cultural industries: newspapers, radio, film, and television. Yet there are cracks in this wall of corporate control of modern means of communication: alternative papers, non-profit radio, democratic state-sponsored radio and television networks such as the BBC and CBC, and the Internet. All these taken together are less enthusiastic about acting as mouthpieces for the ruling class, and often express views at odds with their ideologies. The attack on the globalized economy in our own day is a case in point.

Introduction

17

The ruling class does have the power to structure our lives according to the values that it holds dearest, one of which is forms of property, and thus control over the material goods and forms of interaction associated with those goods (e.g., power structures within corporate hierarchies, and sometimes even government). This power works basically on two levels: rarely, by means of brute force, as when the police assault strikers or protestors against some aspect of the ruling class’s power; more commonly, by means of our ideals, our values and perceived interests. If I decide that I have no desire to pursue a career in private enterprise, and I further decide that my needs are quite limited and that I can avoid buying expensive consumer goods, I can largely avoid being engaged with modern corporate life. Yet few people in Western societies are able to make such a decision: they take these needs as such basic values that they become naturalized.10 Marx was right about ideas flowing out of real life, and not out of some Hegelian heaven, but wrong—or too limited—to characterize “real life” as purely and simply economic. We need to dematerialize Marx to make him relevant to social theory today. One way to do this is to reform his notion of “real life” or “social life” so that it includes all types of value, all sorts of capital: economic, cultural, and political. Secondly, and more difficult for Marxists to swallow, social theory has to account for the obvious fact that the ideals that flow out of social life influence that social life in the future—they operate diachronically, over time. My social actions today shape my social actions in the future by means of the ideas that my past social actions created or sustained. As a postscript to my discussion of Marxism, I would like to bring to light a second spectre that will periodically haunt my work, that of postmodernism. Although a many-layered social, cultural, and intellectual phenomenon, the specific spectre I have in mind here is that which whispers to social and historical theorists that there is no truth, that all values are equally valid, that metanarratives are ailing, that the author is dead, and that the individual human subject is an illusion. Although I will address postmodernism as a social phenomenon in chapter 6, it is important to note early on how postmodernist doubts about our capacity to either understand the social present or to reconstruct the historical past lurks phantom-like in the wings of this intellectual production. I see this book very much as an attempt to navigate, Odysseus-like, between the Scylla of a law-governed “objectivist” social science à la Marx and the Charybdis of postmodern relativism.

18

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

The Structure of This Book The first half of this book is largely methodological. In it I present a theory of the social mind, then offer my account of social explanation, apply this account to a subfield of social theory (deviance and subcultures), and finally connect my ideas about social explanation to Collingwood’s philosophy of history. In my first chapter I sketch out a theory of social consciousness that will feed into the broader model of social and historical explanation I wish to put forward in this book. My theory of social consciousness provides a phenomenology of mind for the historical and social theory to come. Part of this involves taking seriously R. G. Collingwood’s suggestion, at the beginning of Speculum Mentis, that all thought exists for the sake of action. Drawing on Collingwood’s, Freud’s, and Gilbert Ryle’s philosophies of mind, Anthony Giddens’s social theory, and the Scottish Enlightenment’s notion of moral sentiments as the ground of ethical life, I suggest a four-part division of our social consciousness between embodiment, passionate action, purposive action, and intellectual action. In addition, I look at theories of rhetoric and language provided by Kenneth Burke and Pierre Bourdieu to suggest that social consciousness involves the use of language as a symbolic form of social action, which produces social rules, social roles, and hierarchical structures. In chapter 2 I outline what I take to be the basic elements of my structural idealism by presenting a tripartite model of social explanation. This model encompasses the intentions of the actor, the (social) meaning of the act, and the social structures implicating and implicated in that act. Overall, I argue that social explanation requires an account of each of these three elements—intention, meaning, and social structure—to be complete. Further, I lay out here a detailed account of the various types of rationality in social explanation, and go on to claim that a social science that pretends to explain human action solely or mainly in terms of instrumental rationality is fundamentally flawed. In chapter 3 I apply this intention/meaning/structure model to two theories of deviance: the labelling or transactionalist view of deviance found in the work of Howard Becker and Stan Cohen, which sees deviance as the product of a “labelling” process undertaken by various “moral entrepreneurs” (i.e., the state, the church, the media) that control most of public discourse, and what I term “New Subcultural Theory,” the Birmingham School of Stuart Hall,

Introduction

19

Dick Hebdige, and others, which sees deviance, especially as found in subcultural groups like the mods and the punks in Britain, as the product of an attempt by largely working-class youths to resist the ideological hegemony of the ruling classes. By matching up these two approaches to the template of my structural idealism, I show how they are each only partial theories that blend into each other at their methodological edges, i.e., they fit somewhere within the “meaning” band of my intention/meaning/structure theoretical spectrum. Chapter 4 is my central historiographical chapter. In it I “rehabilitate” Collingwood’s philosophy of history by reshaping it into my structural idealist framework. The basic focus of this chapter is Collingwood’s re-enactment thesis, taken both as an a priori condition for historical knowledge and as a concrete methodological tool. This thesis says that in order for historians to explain the past, they have to re-enact the thoughts of the relevant historical actors in their own minds. I argue that Collingwood’s reenactment thesis can be modified so that it fits into my structural idealist framework. In the second half of the book I shift to applications. In chapters 5 and 6 I look at intellectual history, specifically, Continental philosophy and its shaping by modern and postmodern economic, cultural, and technological forces. In chapters 7 and 8 I look at modern culture. First, I apply structural idealism to the dialectical development of body images in the twentieth century. Lastly, I survey a number of developments in grand theories of culture over the last forty years, using these as raw materials in the forging of a general outline of a structural idealist grand theory of culture. In chapters 5 and 6 I attempt to do some large-scale sociology of knowledge within the spirit of my structural idealism. In chapter 5 I look at the general social and intellectual contours of modernity, claiming that the “essence” of modernity (roughly speaking, most of the last hundred or so years) is the search for meaning in depth, taking Nietzsche, Freud, and the sociology of knowledge as case studies of this search. I show how this search for depth meaning is connected to the structural meta-ideal of rationality. I go on in chapter 6 to show how the essence of the postmodern condition is the abandonment of the search for meaning in depth, speculating on the social and economic conditions that gave rise to this abandonment, looking at Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Baudrillard as cases in point. This chapter ends with a glance at four of the “selves” that dominate

20

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

the contemporary social/intellectual landscape: the performing self, the cynical self, the narcissistic self, and the private self. In chapter 7 I move away from grounding recent intellectual history in a dialectical development of structural ideals to show how we can see twentieth-century consumer culture as presenting body images to the consuming masses in terms of a dialectic of image and counter-image, once again grounded in these shifting ideals. Starting from this basic premise, I go on to discuss how these images are transmitted by the principal channels of communication of the last hundred years, and then periodize the century in terms of changes in these channels. Lastly, I talk about how body images relate to the question of freedom. In chapter 8 I look at the potential of my structural idealist model as a springboard into cultural critique by examining the social critics Christopher Lasch, Frederic Jameson, Albert Borgmann, Charles Taylor, and John Ralston Saul. I also look at critical discourse analysis and at what I call the “Canadian School of Cultural Critique.” I believe that the dualistic and fluid nature of my model, one that gives credence to the reality of both the material basis and the intellectual and ideological aspects of social consciousness, opens the door to wider possibilities of cultural critique than are possible in more monistic and rigid modes of social and historical understanding, without opening the door to an empty relativism. I end by making some suggestions of what a unified social theory might look like, calling for a revival of the expansive eighteenthcentury use of the term morals. I will now turn my attention to a theory of social consciousness, of the human mind acting socially and historically, that will act as the “metaphysical” foundation for my structural idealism. I begin by asking the question, “how do we approach the social mind?” I thus echo Hobbes’s Leviathan and Hume’s Treatise in giving the reader an account of the mind before moving on to more substantive moral and political questions.

1 The Nature of Social Consciousness A Theory of Mind

The Sympathetic Social Mind At the end of Book I of what is perhaps the greatest single philosophical work in the English language, Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, the author expresses his frustration at his failure to reach the comforting port of certainty after his circuitous voyage through the rough waters of a skeptical metaphysics: But before I launch out into those immense depths of philosophy, which lie before me, I find myself inclin’d to stop a moment in my present station, and to ponder that voyage, which I have undertaken, and which undoubtedly requires the utmost art and industry to be brought to a happy conclusion. Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap’d ship-wreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances. My memory of past errors and perplexities, makes me diffident for the future. The wretched condition, weakness, and disorder of the faculties, I must employ in my enquiries, encrease my apprehensions. And the impossibility of amending or correcting these faculNotes to chapter 1 are on pp. 271-72.

21

22

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

ties, reduces me almost to despair, and makes me resolve to perish on the barren rock, on which I am at present, rather than venture myself upon that boundless ocean, which runs out into immensity. (Hume 1888: 263-64) Hume would have to try another route to reach that port, through an analysis of the human passions, eventually ending up in moral waters (taking morals in the expansive, Enlightenment sense of the term). When navigating through these waters his guiding sextant is the concept of sympathy. He took it as obvious that in all creatures, that prey not upon others, and are not agitated with violent passions, there appears a remarkable desire of company, which associates them together, without any advantages they can ever propose to reap from their union. This is still more conspicuous in man, as being the creature of the universe, who has the most ardent desire of society, and is fitted for it by the most advantages. We can form no wish, which has not a reference to society. A perfect solitude is, perhaps, the greatest punishment we can suffer. Every pleasure languishes when enjoy’d a-part from company, and every pain becomes more cruel and intolerable. Whatever other passions we may be actuated by; pride, ambition, avarice, curiosity, revenge or lust; the soul or animating principle of them all is sympathy; nor wou’d they have any force, were we to abstract entirely from the thoughts and sentiments of others. Let all the powers and elements of nature conspire to serve and obey one man: Let the sun rise and set at his command: The sea and rivers roll as he pleases, and the earth furnish spontaneously whatever may be useful or agreeable to him: He will still be miserable, till you give him some one person at least, with whom he may share his happiness, and whose esteem and friendship he may enjoy. (1888: 363) Without getting into Aristotelian teleology, it seems fairly obvious that we human beings are social animals and that we have some awareness of what can be done and cannot done as social animals. We may not always be sociable, but we are always social, insofar as we share ideas about how to behave with others. The power these

The Nature of Social Consciousness

23

shared ideas have over us is not due to their logical clarity or distinctness, but to their capacity to move our passions, including not only our egos and interests, but also our sense of responsibility (however attenuated) to other people. The seas and rivers may indeed roll as we please, but the first step on the long road towards a complete explanation of human social behaviour must be the assumption of shared sentiments. There was a methodological side to Hume’s view of the power of sympathy: we can explain the similarity of manners and customs within a nation or people in terms of the principle of sympathy. In his Treatise, Hume observes that “the minds of men are mirrors to one another”: we reflect each other’s emotions, passions, and sentiments, presumably through discourse (1888: 365).1 Indeed, Hume finds there to be no quality of human nature “more remarkable…than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own.” To this principle “we ought to ascribe the great uniformity we may observe in the humours and turn of thinking of those of the same nation,” even over the influence of soil and climate (1888: 316-17). Here Hume uses the principle of sympathy more or less in a “methodological idealist” way—people’s actions are determined by ideas, not material circumstances—to account for the uniformity of social behaviour within a specific country or time. Adam Smith agreed with Hume wholeheartedly in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Even in the case of the self-interested egoist, there is a principle of sympathy that moves us to be concerned with the plight of others: How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.…That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it. (Smith 1908: 3)

24

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Like Hume, Smith moves his discussion of sympathy from seeing it as a salutary psychological principle to seeing it as a means by which moral and other social beliefs are communicated. According to Smith, moral approval and disapproval are based on the degree of synchronicity of sentiments between the actor and the person judging them: “If, upon bringing the case home to our own breast, we find that the sentiments which it gives occasion to coincide and tally with our own, we necessarily approve of them, as proportioned and suitable to their objects; if otherwise, we necessarily disapprove of them, as extravagant and out of proportion” (1908: 18). So in judging others, we try their words and actions in the court of our own sympathetic minds. The principal concern of social theory is to sort out the best theoretical methods to try these words and actions, including sorting out what counts as evidence in this courtroom. Society is grounded in the communication of moral, political, aesthetic, and other sentiments in pre-rational ways to other people. Without supposing sympathy to be the foundation of social action, the theorist would have a very hard time explaining how “society “ comes into existence, being left solely with the rational calculations of Hobbesian human atoms as his or her starting point. The social mind is structured in many ways.2 But to even begin to understand this structure, we must assume that Hume and Smith were largely right in seeing social consciousness (part of what Hume would term “human nature” or “morals”) as founded on sympathy. By “sympathy” I do not mean a sort of weepy hand-holding of a friend in pain, but the social-psychological connection with others and a communication of sentiments by means of this connection. Indeed, this connection may communicate entirely antagonistic sentiments. This connection, as we will soon see, is effected by and large by means of language as a symbolic form of social action. Thus by sympathy I mean simply a pre-rational communication of sentiments of judgment. It is the basis of our individual human consciousness of ourselves as social beings. As Collingwood puts it, the relations “between sentient organisms as such are constituted by the various modes of sympathy which arise out of psychical expression of their feelings.” We can understand the words of others only by attributing to them the idea or ideas which these words arouse in ourselves, by treating them as our own words (1938: 248, 250). To understand the words or actions of others, we must first “sympathize” with the motives, reasons, feelings, and so on affecting the person being judged, and make

The Nature of Social Consciousness

25

judgments based on this constellation of prior factors. It is all too easy to withhold this understanding by refusing to enter the psychological universe of the Other. In short, judgment abhors a vacuum: it requires a network of shared social meanings between judges and judged. Social life is constituted by this network of shared meanings. Social consciousness involves the sympathetic communication of sentiments of judgment. This communication is at the heart of the social mind. Consciousness can be defined as “social” (as opposed to personal) insofar as it intends, or points toward, shared objects, objects that are social in the sense that they are shared. To intend purely private objects is to be non-social, if not anti-social. This intending of shared objects, if mixed up with sentiments of some sort, points toward some sort of action. So thought and action in the social realm cannot be clearly separated. I will use the term thought/action to refer to the various ways of acting socially. Isolated thinking may either intend nothing, or not seek to “act” socially in any way. But all social consciousness, to be social, is both intentional and active. We point toward objects with our thoughts, and attach sentiments of value to these objects. And, as previously argued, social consciousness is sympathetic in Smith’s and Hume’s sense: our minds reflect our collective judgments back and forth in an endless swirl that acts as the raw material out of which is constructed social rules, roles, structures, and hierarchies. My model of social consciousness can be represented as a sliding scale of forms, with each form linked in an equilibrial flow with the forms before and after it. So my model will present an organic, layered model of the social mind, one full of ebbs and flows, unlike the models of the mind coming of out contemporary cognitive science, which appeal to the machine-like logic of the computer. We start with the individual sympathetic social mind, which acts in the social world by interacting with other people. This interaction produces meaning through discourse, chiefly by means of using language as a symbolic form of social action. The social world exists in part due to our creation of mutually comprehensible symbols, through a sharing of values (or at least an understanding of how our values differ). Discourse produces social rules of many varieties, some of which flow together into constellations we call social roles, sets of fairly stable rules which define a person’s lot in life (e.g., in terms of their profession, their being a husband or wife, a friend or an enemy, etc.). Finally, some of these constellations of rules issue

26

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

in uneven relationships between one type of role and another, where a person in role A can act as the author of the social rules for persons in roles X, Y, and Z. In this case we see how some people have power over others. And when power comes into play, it is inevitable that hierarchies are constructed. And these hierarchies cycle back, reshaping the various forms of action of the individual social mind. The model of social consciousness I will defend in this chapter appears in diagrammatic form in Chart 2. It should be seen as a fluid and interlocking series of concepts whose highest level turns back on its lowest, like the proverbial snake eating its tail. I’ve indicated the sections of this chapter that each level of the model correspond to, and the principal theorists I rely on to describe each level. Chart 2. A Model of Social Consciousness (The sections in this chapter where each element is discussed in greater detail are indicated in parentheses, along with the principal theorists discussed there) ➣ The individual Sympathetic Social Mind [Bodily, Passionate, Purposive, and

Intellectual Thought/Action] (2-5/Smith, Hume, Freud, Collingwood) <----> ➣ Interactive Discourse, which creates social meaning; including Language

as Symbolic Social Action (6/Gadamer, Burke, Bourdieu) <----> ➣ Social Rules (7/Ricoeur, Ryle, Collingwood) <----> ➣ Social Roles, which are semi-stable, spatio-temporally

situated collections of rules followed by a social agent (7/Goffman) <----> ➣ Power (8/Van Dijk, Bourdieu) <----> ➣ Hierarchy, and other forms of

social structure (8) <----> [back to the individual mind]

Embodiment The phenomenological starting point of any model of human consciousness is the body. As James put it, the “sense of my bodily existence, however obscurely recognized as such, may then be the absolute original of my conscious selfhood, the fundamental perception that I am” (1904: 41). Embodiment is the basic level of social interaction. We exist as a body in a space filled with other bodies. We are a body, regardless of what else we are. We are, to use religious language, “incarnated” into the world.

The Nature of Social Consciousness

27

We can speak of bodily thought/action insofar as our body has basic needs and drives, such as hunger, thirst, sexual desire, security, and so on, and seeks to fulfill these needs and drives in its social interactions. Of course, the nature of social interaction drives us almost instantaneously beyond the unsullied pursuit of physical satisfaction alone in all but the most extreme cases (e.g., the man dying of thirst who stumbles half-dead into a bar in the desert and gropes for a glass of water), leading us to express our bodily drives in passions and purposes that embody these drives in more complex forms of discourse. We do not, under normal conditions, simply lunge at objects of sexual desire, hunger, or thirst without plan, purpose, or etiquette. Indeed, there are usually elaborate social conventions and rules surrounding the pursuit and consumption of these objects. On this level we are directly aware of our body and its surrounding environment. In this state of awareness, we feel the sensuous and perceptive flux immediately around us, considered in and of itself. Freud’s tripartite division of levels of consciousness comes in handy here. Bodily action straddles the psychic dimensions of the unconscious (that which is not before the mind but is operative all the same), the preconscious (that which is not before the mind but is recoverable by “paying attention”), and the conscious (that which is before the mind), but excludes self-consciousness (being aware of something that is before the mind).3 Awareness of body is not reflective, but immediate. Once it becomes reflective, we become aware of a self with bodily drives, and move up the ladder to higher forms of thought/action. The closest we could come to understanding what pure bodily awareness would be like is to imagine a wild animal held in the vice grip of a primitive instinct, like a hungry wolf on the hunt, or an angry lion defending its pride. As Collingwood points out, it is probably most useful to see mind and body as the same “thing,” expressed in two different ways (1971: 11). This parallels the point that Ryle makes in his Concept of Mind about mind and body belonging to different logical categories, categories that we use different types of language to describe. Mental categories are distinct from physical ones: there is indeed no point in looking for universities or team spirit in academic buildings or cricket bats. Both mentalistic and physicalistic language can be used to describe the same human action and neither be mistaken, or at least not be mistaken in the same way. Yet to do

28

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

social theory, we have to leave Ryle’s quibbles about category errors behind. Social actions are performed by incarnated selves saturated with ideas about what they’re doing. I won’t even attempt to solve the mind/body problem here. My point is simply that it doesn’t need to be solved for us to suppose that the body and its drives can be examined as a separate theoretical category from other levels of thinking and action. If we isolate bodily action from other levels of thought/action, we find that it is unwilled and pre-purposive. On its most primitive level, the psychical expression of feelings is uncontrollable. A grimace, physiologically speaking, is indeed an action, but it simply comes and overwhelms us (Collingwood 1938: 234). Our embodied selves exist prior to reason, intention, or purpose. In terms of distinguishing feeling from thought (this distinction being yet another useful analytic fiction), we can follow Collingwood (1938: 159) in comparing the flux of feeling to the flow of a river, and thought to the relative solidity and permanence of the soil and rocks that make up the channel. Similarly, in terms of distinguishing our incarnated from our passionate, purposive, and intellectual selves, the separation is no clearer than that between the watery flux of our bodily drives and the sandy banks of the passions and purposes that they give birth to (not to mention the rocky islands of the intellectual apparatus that we invent to glorify, excuse, or justify them). Analytical thought, including logic, gives us the power to separate different types of feeling, bodily drives from mathematical calculations, premeditated crimes from crimes of passion. Yet these separations come into being largely after the fact: in their primitive form, we feel them all mixed together, our attention allowing us to pick out one from all the others (as when we concentrate on a mathematical equation and ignore the hunger calling us to lunch). When we write the “history” of embodiment as a pure and separate form of human experience, we cannot do anything more than record what Benedetto Croce called a “chronicle,” a recitation of various states without any conceptual or narrative structure to tie them together. This chronicle would consist of a list of statements like “hunger pang X was caused by the firing of neuron 9234 in Y’s brain,” without any information about how they are connected to Y’s emotions, reasons, or plans. To move to a true narrative, we need to connect physical events to the inner acts of human minds across bridges of time. We need to postulate passions or purposes on the

The Nature of Social Consciousness

29

part of the agent that can be reconstructed by third parties. The reconstruction of these passions and purposes moves us beyond pure incarnation, to my second and third levels of thought/action.4

Passionate Action On this level of action, which subsumes embodied drives at the same time as it points ahead to purpose and the intellect, people act on the basis of their passions. This is not to suggest that purposive and intellectual action, contra Hume, is not driven in some way by the passions, but instead that we can analytically separate the passionate aspect of purposive and intellectual action from its other components. All the same, there would be no human acts at all if it were not for the passions that drive us to act (whether it is to court an object of desire, conquer a province, or invent the atomic bomb), just as there would be no human passions if it were not for the living body that serves as their locus. Once again, we have to remember that the individual social actor always exists as an organic whole, on all four levels of consciousness at the same time. At its most basic level, we can speak of a feeling as having two elements: a physiological or sensuous element, such as sensing a colour, or the twitch that causes one to grimace, and the affective charge attached to that element, e.g., the unpleasant sense that accompanies the grimace (Collingwood 1971: 18) When we have a “feeling,” there is something within us that responds to our physiological change emotively. We can also speak of feelings as radiating out from a central focal region, where they are more precise and intense, toward an outer zone of dimness and confusion (Collingwood 1971: 21-22). This regionalization of feeling is both spatial and temporal: one’s hatred of a despised enemy decreases as he or she leaves the room and walks away; it also fades as time passes, unless he or she reappears to excite it once again. When a given feeling, whether of cheerfulness, whimsy, or depression, invades our consciousness and colours our entire present experience, we can speak of a meta-feeling, or mood, as dominating us. Yet moods, like feelings, eventually fade away too, although unlike feelings they are usually nonspatial, i.e., not continuously dependent on any physically immediate cause (although they can certainly be triggered by such a cause). A person emerges from a state of simple feeling by an act of conceptual and practical consciousness: they identify the feeling that is

30

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

affecting them, and decide to do something about it (Collingwood 1971: 48). This leads to action taken in its more traditional sense: i.e., doing something of a physical nature that can be observed (at least potentially) by others. Collingwood says that appetite “is what thought makes out of feeling when thought develops by its own activity from mere consciousness to conceptual thinking” (1971: 52). We can call an unreflective practical decision to act on an appetite or bodily drive a passionate decision, and its result a passionate action. At this level we see human beings passionately acting on embodied drives in the social world. It is here that we can speak of desire, of projecting onto some object—the “object of desire”—some passion or other, whether it is love, hate, possessiveness, hunger, or even indifference. The difference between appetite and desire is that whereas appetite is a mere wanting X, desire is knowing that you want X (Collingwood 1971: 74). Borrowing from Freud, passionate action is where cathexis takes place, where the amoeba-like arms of the human passions reach out into the world to embrace the desired object over some period of time. Again, as with embodiment, passionate social consciousness straddles the mental spectrum unconscious/preconscious/conscious. It would be lax at this point not to address one of the central issues of psychoanalytic theory, as it is of great importance to the way that passionate and purposive thought/action interface with each other. In his passing salute to psychoanalysis, Collingwood speaks of its value in exposing the various ways in which consciousness can be corrupted. Specifically, he mentions the disowning of experiences, which we call repression; the ascription of our experiences to others, or projection; their consolidation into a homogeneous mass, or dissociation; and the building up of a bowdlerized experience that we take for our own, or fantasy-building (1938: 218-19). We can see these corruptions of consciousness as cases of our unconscious passions distorting our purposive and intellectual thought/action. The classic case of a corruption of consciousness is the first, repression, a forced return of our basic sexual and aggressive drives to their home in the underworld of the id. In his view of the psyche, Freud saw the conscious and perceptual part of the mind, the ego, acting as a constitutional monarch over the psyche as a whole, “without whose sanction no law can be passed but who hesitates long before imposing his veto on any measure put forward by

The Nature of Social Consciousness

31

Parliament” (Freud 1962: 45). It is a psychic figurehead as far as repression goes: it has to use borrowed forces (aided by the internalized punishing father, the superego) to keep in hand the reins of psychic power and hold in check the id. The result of repression on a social level is a discontented civilization, one where our incarnate drives, especially our sexual ones, are frustrated by social mores. As Freud says, it is easy for a barbarian to be happy, but much harder for a civilized person (1969: 58, 42). Purely passionate actors would be free and happy social agents if they could avoid worrying about the consequences of their actions. They would wear, in spirit, the Ring of Gyges. Yet a society of such actors would, no doubt, be full of nasty, brutish, and short lives. When we leave the state of nature of our unrepressed childhood, we leave behind our unregulated passions, picking and choosing which of these we will pursue. We turn some of them into purposes, suppressing or repressing the rest. By adopting purposes, we allow those passions to be satisfied in a social environment full of other actors seeking to fulfill their own passions.5

Purposive Action So human beings are incarnated things who desire various objects to satisfy their bodily drives. Most people who desire objects form plans to obtain them. We act according to preconceived notions about the point of our actions. When we act by forming plans to attain an object of desire, whether we successfully carry out the plan or not, we can say that we are acting purposively, or, more simply, that we are doing something on purpose. This purposiveness can be either conscious or self-conscious. Needless to say, not all acts are purposive (e.g., the unconscious swatting of a fly that lands on the back of your neck), and not all purposes are clearly thought out before we take action. But once we decide to formulate a plan that involves one or more future actions directed towards an object of desire, we can say that we have a purpose in mind. This object could be anything: food, a sexual partner, a job, or the solution of a mathematical equation. To be an object of desire, it’s enough that we want it. Indeed, once we get to the level of purpose we can speak of an action being moral or immoral, for we can identify a prior state of mind (whether we call it a reason, a cause, or a purpose) that led to the action and which can be judged as fair or foul.

32

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

“Goodness” is a thing of the mind bestowed upon whatever possesses it by the mind’s practical activity in the form of a desire, and discovered by the mind’s reflective activity acting purposively. Collingwood suggests that we can answer the question “why did you do that?” three ways: (a) because it is useful, (b) because it is right, or (c) because it is my duty (Collingwood 1971: 82). Whether this list is exhaustive of all possible descriptions of human purposes is hard to say. Yet we can say that social consciousness is easiest to understand and reconstruct as rule-governed, involving people collectively doing or not doing “the right thing”; while personal or biographical consciousness is more easily described in terms of people acting according to utility or duty.6 Social roles are very much constituted by groups of actors who chose to do “the right thing.” In general, there is an important sense in which past human acts must have a purposive component to be fully reconstructible at a later date. This is obviously of crucial importance to the historian, who must assume some sort of teleological component in human acts if these acts are to be understood. Although we can certainly understand goals based on personal utility or a sense of duty, it seems to be a reasonable first hypothesis that actions done out of a sense of their “rightness” (taking this rightness as a social thing) are of the most interest to social theorists who look at purposive action. We can explain human purposes either in terms of reasons or causes. Even when we explain an action in terms of a person’s character or motives, we are identifying a reason for the action (Ryle 1949: 89). On the level of purposes, we must look first to the reasons stated by the relevant actors as our starting point in social explanation. Collingwood prefers rational to causal explanations of action, partly on the ground that the point of history and philosophy is to study the mind in its logical and rational mode, leaving to psychology a study of its irrational, sensuous elements. This preference for rational explanations is tied to his re-enactment thesis, as we’ll see in chapter 4: for history to be scientifically rigorous, it must be able to reconstruct the past in convincing fashion. It cannot do this with human passions and physical drives, claims Collingwood, so it’s best to limit our claims to “knowing” the history of these. Yet just as purposes cannot be reduced to purely physical processes, we cannot understand them purely in term of reasons either. As Ricoeur suggests, “one can see how fluid the border is between reason-for-acting, forward-looking motive, mental cause,

The Nature of Social Consciousness

33

and cause as such (a grimacing face made me jump). The criterion of the question why? is therefore firm; its application surprisingly flexible” (1992: 69). Indeed, the grammar of notions like “drive,” “affect,” “disposition,” and “emotion” can force us to articulate the rational and intentional character of an action into a type of causal explanation: the teleological (Ricoeur 1992: 78). Perhaps it is better to echo what Ryle and Collingwood have said about the mind/body split: that rational and causal explanations of human purposes are just two different ways of describing the same thing. Or better still, to realize that the divisions between the body and our passions, purposes, and intellect I’ve set out in this chapter are purely heuristic, and in real life fade into each other at their edges. Only when we have got to the level of purposive thought/action in our journey through the levels of the social mind can we speak of choosing reasons for an action at all, for only here does a judging consciousness first appear. Our passionate consciousness does not reason, but grasps, gropes, or lunges. Our intellectual consciousness only reasons, from time to time recording these reasonings on paper or a computer file (as I am doing right now). It is our purposive consciousness that chooses to accept one or several reasons to act over others, although only the most dogged defender of free will would suggest that this choice is undetermined by physical and psychological background factors. Purposive consciousness is the lynchpin of social theory written in the mode of Weber, Collingwood, and Winch. We can only verstehe (understand), in Weber’s sense, an action done for a subjective reason. Yet there is more to said by social theory.

Intellectual Action Last but not least, we come to intellectual action, or thinking abstractly. Intellectual action is at least conscious, if not self-conscious (as it should always be within the realm of philosophy). It is usually associated with theorizing about the world in some sense, as when a sociologist theorizes about society, a psychologist about the mind, or a historian about the past. So this is “reason” taken in the good old rationalist sense, the sort of reason that Hume tried to deconstruct in the Treatise. Hume was right in saying that our reason is the slave of our passions, but wrong in thinking that this was the end of the story. It is best to see reason as a sort of travel guide for our passions and purposes: the tourist (i.e., the person of pas-

34

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

sions and purposes) decides what province or country to visit, the guide (i.e., our reason) makes the travel arrangements and chooses the most interesting local sites to visit. More generally, intellectual action, “reason” in the traditional sense, is an analytically separable form of thought/action, but one that very much rests on the foundations of our incarnate selves guided by passions and purposes. How does rationality enter into individual social consciousness? We can sum this up in terms of a “rubric of rationality,” which follows: “Given purpose X motivated or driven by passion Y, what is the best, i.e., the most rational, means to fulfill this purpose and therefore satisfy this passion?” I believe that, outside perhaps of someone contemplating an abstract theoretical problem “in one’s closet,” as Hume would say, this rubric governs all human intellectual thought/action, and is thus the principal way that rationality enters into social consciousness. The problem that arises in debates over social rationality comes when we try to define the word “best” in the rubric above: do we mean by “best” that which is instrumentally efficient? or that which tends to produce a whole and authentic self? or aims at some sense of communal organic good? or at a transcendent religious sense of the good? These are questions concerning the moral content of rational decision making, a content that varies, but all of which can be theoretically contained within the structure suggested by my rubric of rationality. We can here follow Collingwood’s distinction (1971: 100) between theoretical reason, which involves making up your mind that, e.g., a given proposition is true or false, and practical reason, which involves making up your mind to, e.g., fly a kite, invent a perpetual motion machine, etc. Intellectual action can be conveniently fitted into Collingwood’s category of theoretical reason, while practical reason neatly covers purposive action (and perhaps the fringes of passionate action). Theoretical reasoning, whether or not it’s oriented to immediate movements in physical space, is a form of action and is directed towards purposes, motivated by passions, and takes place, in a curious way, “within” a body. The failure to see human beings as either integrated wholes or as fields where our various psychic and physical forces do battle led to Descartes’s famous dualist dilemma, and Ryle’s somewhat less famous attack on the Cartesian solution as a category mistake. Just as idealism and structuralism each paint only an element of a larger picture with respect to social and historical theory, dualism and physicalist

The Nature of Social Consciousness

35

monism each capture only an element of a larger truth with respect to being human. The former sees consciousness as autonomous, but overestimates the degree of its ontological independence; the latter too quickly reduces the mental to the physical, failing to account for the qualia that constitute most of what is interesting in our social lives. The ghosts in the machine of life, art, and culture are real, productive of things that are both great and horrible. We have no need to believe in detached Cartesian egos floating around us to know this to be true. Intellectual action takes place through various forms of discourse, the most important of which is symbolic language. Spoken or written languages are the most important cases of such symbolism, although not everything within a spoken or written language is symbolic. Symbolism is intellectualized language (speaking figuratively, the “expression” of intellectual emotions). Intellectual language has both expressiveness and meaning: as language, it expresses emotion; as symbolism, it refers to the thought whose emotional charge it is (Collingwood 1938: 269). And we must not forget that there are many activities that display qualities of the mind, but are not intellectual operations, e.g., playing a sport (which can display a sense of physical space) or singing a song (which displays emotional depth) (Ryle 1949: 26). Having said all this, intellectual action refers to the level of social consciousness that involves theorizing, in Collingwood’s sense of knowing that something is the case. It is the symbolic expression of feelings, passions, purposes, and facts, and of the relations between them. In Speculum Mentis, Collingwood speculated that the map of the mind could be divided into five provinces of knowledge: art, religion, science, history, and philosophy. He saw these five provinces as distinct concrete forms of experience and activities of the cognitive mind, but at the same time as not autonomous or mutually exclusive, but as dialectically linked together (1924: 39, 306). To bring together my discussion of the social mind, I will mirror Collingwood’s dialectical scale of the forms of knowledge by suggesting that we see the four levels of social consciousness as a dialectically linked scale of forms that interpenetrate each other in real human actions. Contra Sartre’s rigid division of the in-itself (inert and determined physical things) from the for-itself (free human consciousness) as a description of being-in-the-world, social consciousness is a continuum of these four levels dialectically linked

36

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

to each other. I separate them only because I believe this separation to be heuristically useful when one is trying to build either a social theory or a philosophy of history. The main reason I want to separate these four levels of thought/action is to sort out which elements of human action can be described, explained, and/or reconstructed, and which ones cannot. Analytic separations in the philosophy of mind are only useful against the background of the realization that human thought/action takes place within an arena where physical, psychic, and spiritual forces are constantly warring, where even sleeping, and perchance dreaming, offers no escape from the conflicting drives of being human. Be that as it may, they can help the theorist to understand how human beings behave and should be at the core of any truly persuasive social or historical hermeneutic. Action is that aspect of human doing that calls for narration or storytelling. And it is the function of narration to determine the “who of action,” to construct a self. When we write a narrative, the internal dialectic of character transmutes chance into fate, constructing the identity of the character (Ricouer 1992: 147).7 The fate of individual characters, or social actors, is constructed out of speculations on and reconstructions of their goals, purposes, and ideals. Life plans take shape “thanks to a back-and-forth movement between more or less distant ideals, which must now be specified, and the weighing of advantages and disadvantages of the choice of a particular life plan on the level of practices” (Ricouer 1992: 157-58). These ideals are partly individual and intentional, and partly structural, as we will see in the next chapter. They are mostly expressed in language as a symbolic form of social action, to which I now turn.

Language as Symbolic Social Action At it most basic level, language is an imaginative activity that expresses emotion by means of some bodily organ (Collingwood 1938: 225, 235). If we engage in a bit of whimsical archaeology surrounding the origins of language, we might guess that the first attempts at regularized communication between proto-humans involved physical gestures accompanied perhaps by grunts and squeals. It is in this sense that Collingwood might not be too far off the mark in calling dance the mother of all languages (1938: 244), insofar as dance expresses emotion through purely physical ges-

The Nature of Social Consciousness

37

tures. As we move from practical to theoretical consciousness, language becomes more and more symbolic, torn from the somatic and passionate foundations that fuel this expressiveness. Symbolic, intellectual language presupposes imaginative language. But those who call for a purely symbolic language, where each symbol has a single invariant meaning or use (as in symbolic logic), tend to forget this: without a significant emotion to express, even the most pristinely perfect symbolic language is pointless, an empty shell.8 “The grammatical and logical articulations of intellectualized language are no more fundamental to language as such than the articulations of bone and limb are fundamental to living tissue” (Collingwood 1938: 236). In this sense, I believe that an analytic philosophy uninformed by phenomenology and the findings of the social sciences (especially sociological and political theorists) can never provide us with an adequate social theory, for it seems incapable of understanding the meanings behind human action, meanings tied up with emotions and values. If we call any attempt to communicate meaning to other living beings, by whatever means, “discourse,” we can call “language” any attempt to formulate discourse into a formal code of marks, sounds, or gestures with which diverse people can communicate with each other. It might sound almost trivial to make this claim, but human thought/action becomes meaningful, generally speaking, only when it expresses passions and purposes by means of some form of symbolic language. As Wittgenstein observed, the meanings of words and phrases uttered or written in everyday life vary with their use. They are not rigorously invariant (as in formal symbolic languages such as logic and computer codes). Yet their use shares family resemblances to the degree necessary for others to comprehend our actions as the expressions of passions and purposes.9 We can establish a link here with Gadamer’s hermeneutics, taken with a grain of salt. He suggests that language “is the fundamental mode of operation of our being-in-the-world and the allembracing form of the constitution of the world” (1976: 3). If we mean by “world” our social world as constituted by symbolic and expressive language, then our being-in-the-world is indeed constituted by language. He further suggests that it is not our judgments but our prejudices that constitute our being, and that language is a reservoir of tradition whereby we exist and perceive our world (1976: 9, 29). I believe that Gadamer is half right here: it would be

38

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

more proper to say that our judgments and our prejudices (which come from tradition) are indissolubly interconnected, assuming we take the word prejudice not in its English sense of “unfair bias,” but in the German sense of Vorurteil, or in French préjugé (prejudgment). Our prejudgments, our basic presuppositions, affect our judgments, and vice versa.10 When we make a judgment we do not make it in a vacuum, but draw from a reservoir of past judgments that have congealed into social rules and norms. Judgments are ontologically grounded in this reservoir, but they can also transform it (or else social changes would never take place). Another useful way of seeing language as a form of symbolic action is through rhetorical theory. Kenneth Burke, who originated the notion of language as symbolic action, has put forward a rich set of theoretical notions that have significance outside his ostensible subject matter of rhetoric. For Burke, “Man, qua man, is a symbol user. In this respect, every aspect of his reality is likely to be seen through a fog of symbols” (Burke 1969: 136). Our being-in-the-world, to engage in some Gadamerian excess, is thus both linguistic and symbolic. Within a symbolic system, we transcend animality and become human, entering the realm of symbolic action. Within this system we often attempt to persuade others to do things. And wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, just as wherever there is meaning, there is persuasion (Foss, Foss, and Trapp 1985: 166, 160). Burke’s definition of rhetoric combines the classical notion of rhetoric with modern social-scientific ideas: rhetoric is “the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or induce actions in other human agents.” It is “rooted in an essential function of language itself…the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” (qtd. in Foss, Foss, and Trapp 1985: 157). Social consciousness is not entirely symbolic, although insofar as we can understand it, it is. Symbols constitute the realm of the social for all human beings. Given that most social action isn’t conducted under a direct threat of violence, we can see how important persuasion, and thus rhetoric, is in creating the ideals that we intuit and use to shape our lives. Persuasion in the social realm makes use of symbols that the persuader hopes we share. We see this process at work in family life, in television commercials, in political campaigns, and in romantic relationships. The “outsider” is someone who explicitly rejects the symbols common to the collectivity in question, who says, “these things mean nothing to me!”

The Nature of Social Consciousness

39

Burke suggests that a complete understanding of the motive of a given rhetorical act, a given act of persuasion, can be given only in terms of his pentad, which consists of act, scene, agent, agency, purpose. The “act” is any conscious, purposive action; the “scene” is the ground, location, or situation where the act takes place; the “agent” is the group or individual who acts; “agency” refers to the means or instruments used to accomplish the act; and the “purpose” is the overt or covert purpose the agent has for performing the act (Foss, Foss, and Trapp 1985: 168-70). Burke is describing rhetorical acts with his pentad. But it could be adapted quite neatly to social and historical explanation, especially a Collingwoodian or Winchian sort of explanation that emphasizes conscious and rational action. Similarly, it could be used to explain at least what I call purposive thought/action along the structural idealist lines I’m arguing for in this book. His pentad gives us the structure of a purposive act, from both external and internal points of view. Burke’s pentad offers the social theorist a rhetorical model to explain human motivation. Yet human beings for Burke are not only symbol-using animals, but also beings that aspire towards perfection in word and deed. We have ideals. In fact, we are haunted by these ideals in our everyday actions, only rarely living up to them. Burke’s definition of a human being incorporates this striving for perfection: Man is the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative) separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order) and rotten with perfection. (Burke, qtd. in Foss, Foss, and Trapp 1985: 182) The fact of our being rotten with perfection, through the use of the “negative” in judgment, plays a structuring role in social consciousness. We negate the bad, the ugly, the inappropriate, the inefficient, and affirm their opposites. These negations create the ideals that collectively guide human action. Pierre Bourdieu expands on Burke’s notion of language as symbolic action by pointing out how this action, by creating a symbolic capital that gives different weight to the linguistic actions of different agents, creates a symbolic domination (1991: 72). Bourdieu points out that from a strictly linguistic point of view, anyone can

40

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

say anything. But from a sociological point of view, they cannot, except at their peril. A private in the armed forces cannot order a general to attack, nor students correct their own tests, nor children tell their parents that they cannot have dessert if they do not behave. One cannot separate an act of speech from its conditions of execution, from the social world that it is part of. The claim to act on this world “through words, i.e., magically, is more or less crazy or reasonable depending on whether it is more or less based on the objectivity of the social world” (Bourdieu 1991: 74-75). So the use of language as symbolic action is not just a freely willed, spontaneous, creative act, but also a tapping into already existing rules to express an emotion or achieve a purpose, which (as we will see) produces hierarchical structures.11 But before we leave this discussion of language, it is important to take note of Ricoeur’s ontological vehemence in favour of the priority of the flesh as a mediator between the self and the external world. It is upon a prelinguistic relation “between my flesh localized by the self, and a world accessible or inaccessible to the ‘I can’ that a semantics of action is finally to be constructed which will not lose its way in the endless exchange of language games” (Ricoeur 1992: 325). Our embodied selves are always “there,” at the core of social interaction and consciousness. The body always returns, in the form of embodied drives and the passions they support. The most sublime mathematical thinking is quickly interrupted by a sexually attractive passing body; the deepest metaphysical speculations are dissolved by a pang of hunger at lunchtime. Indeed, symbolic language is often merely a sophisticated means by which the flesh seeks out its objects of desire. The psychic wheel constantly spins back from intellectual thought/action to its corporeal ground.

Social Rules and the Creation of Social Roles Language games move us to another level of social interaction, where conscious and unconscious social rules are constructed, obeyed, or violated. Social action is governed by what Ricoeur calls “constitutive rules,” rules that turn what in itself is a meaningless physical or linguistic act into a social meaningful one. An example is the gesture of shifting the position of a pawn on a chessboard: it would not count as a “move” without a constitutive rule that gives the gesture its meaning as a move. Constitutive rules are not moral

The Nature of Social Consciousness

41

rules in themselves; they simply rule over the meaning of particular gestures, making them “count as” waving hello, hailing a taxi, etc. But they point towards moral rules (Ricoeur 1992: 154-55). Constitutive rules constitute the meaning of a given act as a social act. Without constitutive rules, no one could use language as a symbolic form of social action, nor could the social theorist reconstruct such actions as meaningful. We can observe many intelligent performances in social life without their involving explicitly formulated rules or criteria (Ryle 1949: 30). Indeed, the following of rules often becomes second nature in a skilled performer: we know that someone understands the game of chess and is a good player by observing the moves he or she makes and avoids. This is equally true of political leadership, economic wheeling and dealing, or barroom flirtation. Yet there is more to social action than the mere following of rules. In the chess example, we can follow Ryle in noting there is a great difference between following the rules of the game and applying tactical principles to the game to achieve victory: we cannot reduce chess strategy to a mere following of rules (1949: 41, 78). Skilled performance involves an intuitive, aesthetic, or strategic grasp of the ebb and flow of the activity under question, especially if it has game-like qualities. Most social action is not merely the following of rules, although it in some sense instantiates these rules. Also, we aren’t always able to explicitly formulate the rules underlying social action in the same way as we can lay out, point by point, the rules of a game like chess or a sport like hockey. Social action also instantiates what Giddens calls “practical consciousness,” which refers to “the tacit knowledge that is skilfully employed in the enactment of courses of conduct, but which the actor is not able to formulate discursively” (1982: 31). Every day of our lives we instantiate this practical consciousness in a hundred little ways—how do deal with one’s boss or underlings, how to talk to a stranger, how to cross a busy street, how to interact with clerks in a grocery market, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Indeed, imagine the cultural outsider (perhaps the “Martian” of philosophical speculation) who arrives in our city one day bereft of this tacit knowledge, but aware of English vocabulary and grammar. The outsider might wind up starving to death (being unaware how and where to purchase food), being arrested for theft (growing hungry and just stealing some food), or getting run over by a car while crossing the street. So social life is an interlocking web of rules of

42

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

both types: ones we can explicitly formulate, like that a green stoplight means “go,” and ones we’re only implicitly aware of, like how to interact with a person in a given social role. Rule-governed social action, the product of practical consciousness, can be contrasted with other sorts of action. As Collingwood observes, regularian explanations are partial ones: they never explain why someone does this specific act, just why they do an act of this kind (1971: 115-16). We can speak of regularian social action when a person in situation X decides to perform action Y because it is the right thing to do, given these circumstances. One contrast to regularian thinking is a consciousness of duty, where one might think of oneself as an individual, unique agent in an individual, unique situation performing an individual, unique action because one is compelled by duty (Collingwood 1971: 128). We can still attempt to understand this way of thinking as a case of a person acting purposively without ever reaching the level of instantiating a social rule in his or her acts. Yet even dutiful actions take place against a social background of rule-following actors and acts. It would not be too hyperbolic to metaphorically describe social consciousness as a web of social rules that we agents have spun for ourselves, over time, only to find ourselves (or later generations of actors) caught in this web, circumscribed by seemingly independent structures not of our own making.12 Social roles are more or less stable collections of rules situated in specific spaces and times followed by individual social agents, for the most part only semi-consciously. One can play the role of a student, a professor, a mother, father, chess player, artist, and so on by following the rules associated with each social game (e.g., the artist by living in a garret, painting, and trying to sell the work; the mother by caring for her children, etc.). How one follows these rules varies, just as how different chess players play the game varies. Yet these rules roughly define the social roles that define mothers from non-mothers, artists from non-artists, as so on. Most people’s lives are interlocking constellations of these roles, like links in a chain. Erving Goffman’s sociology is helpful here in showing how social roles are constituted. For Goffman, when actors take on a social role, they find that a particular front has already been established for it. The actors must both perform the task they aim at and maintain the front at the same time (Goffman 1959: 27). Actors also project a definition of the situation

The Nature of Social Consciousness

43

that attempts to buttress the legitimacy of their front/role. This projection involves an implicit or explicit claim on a person of a specific kind, which “automatically exerts a moral demand upon others, obliging them to value and treat him in the manner that persons of his kind have a right to expect” (13). In other words, a person performing a social role is making a moral claim that others respect this role and obey the rules associated with it (e.g., in the case of the teacher, listening attentively to her lecture; in the case of the policeman, according him the respect formally associated with an agent of law enforcement). The performances of social roles, in Burke’s sense, are rotten with perfection: they project idealized versions of agents and their acts. But they also invoke the negative, again in Burke’s sense, by concealing or underplaying those activities, facts, and motives that are incompatible with this idealized version of the agents and their products (Goffman: 48). Through the arts of impression management, social agents construct a series of roles by which they constitute themselves, in large part by using language as a symbolic means of social action. And those around the agents engage in similar attempts at self-constitution through impression management. Through this impression management, communicative acts are translated into moral ones: the “impressions that the others give tend to be treated as claims and promises they have implicitly made, and claims and promises tend to have a moral character” (Goffman 1959: 249). These claims are claims to some degree of perfection, to an ideal or ideals embodied in the agent’s social acts. The result of all this rule following and role creation is social consciousness. In its simplest terms, we can see social consciousness as a will to exist socially, as a form of practical consciousness to become a member and to go on being a member of that society (Collingwood 1971: 139). I don’t want to imply here that social agents sign some sort of social contract, either really or tacitly, but simply that insofar as their actions involve the following of social rules or the cooperation with others, they embody a social consciousness. If all we mean by “social contract” is a preconscious or unconscious acceptance of a collections of social rules, then the contract theorists are right. But the social contract is not primarily the product of the rational deliberation of a group of independent agents. It is embodied in symbolic language, inherited rules and roles, and the passive acceptance of certain regulatory ideals as natural.

44

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

As Ricoeur notes, to a large extent “the identity of a person or a community is made up of these identifications with values, norms, ideals, models, and heroes, in which the person or community recognizes itself” (1992: 121). Social practices can be seen as moments when the character of the individual and the roles and structures of that individual’s society mesh together in a multitude of ways. The result is social consciousness, as evidenced in social rules and roles. But these roles do not exist on a level playing field. Inevitably, some roles are constituted as having power over others, and hierarchies of roles (and thus of social agents) are formed.

Power, Hierarchy, and Social Structure When we attempt to link together discourse, rules, roles, and domination in social interactions, we need some sort of theoretical interface. Van Dijk, a critical discourse analyst,13 suggests that such an interface can be provided by what he calls “social cognition.” The exercise of power involves control of the public mind, of these social cognitions: Socially shared representations of societal arrangements, groups and relations, as well as mental operations such as interpretation, thinking, and arguing, inferencing and learning, among others, together define what we understand by social cognition. [They] mediate between microand macro-levels of society, between discourse and action, between the individual and the group. Although embodied in the minds of individuals, social cognitions are social because they are shared and presupposed by group members, monitor social action and interaction, and because they underlie the social and cultural organization of society as a whole. (van Dijk 257) One of the major functions of a dominant discourse is to manufacture consensus, the acceptance by the relatively powerless of the legitimacy of the dominance of the powerful. We can speak of “hegemony” when the minds of the dominated are influenced through political ideology and mass culture to accept the interests of the powerful as their own. In the present day one could say (with John Ralston Saul) that a corporatist ideology has achieved a par-

The Nature of Social Consciousness

45

tial hegemony. This is not to claim that there are not many people who oppose this hegemony. Simply put, to claim that corporatism has achieved a hegemonic status in our society is to claim that it is pushed as political “common sense” in the media and educational institutions, and assumed as the starting point of casual conversations and over coffee and toasted bagels in local diners. Van Dijk’s definition of social cognitions and his description of how these contribute to hierarchies of the dominant and the dominated plays neatly into what I term structural ideals, the collection of ideal social types that structure everyday life. Like van Dijk’s social cognitions, my structural ideals structure social consciousness and thus social action by providing actors with a series of presuppositions (usually in the form of social rules and roles) that they take for granted when engaging in social interactions. They also contribute to the formation of social hierarchies. Kenneth Burke suggests that in using rhetoric, we inevitably invoke the principle of hierarchy: the “hierarchic principle is inevitable in systematic thought. It is embodied in the mere process of growth, which is synonymous with the class divisions of youth and age, stronger and weaker, male and female, or the stages of learning, from apprentice to journeyman to master.” The “naturalness” of the hierarchy’s grades rhetorically reinforces the protection of privilege, these grades often being transformed into rigid social classifications (Burke 1969: 141). Inasmuch as a rhetorical act can be defined as an attempt to use language to persuade others to act, then these acts are a core element of social action, and contribute largely to the formation of social structures and hierarchies. Bourdieu attempts to link language, social rules, social structure, and hegemony in his theory of practice in a way that echoes both van Dijk’s critical discourse analysis and Burke’s theory of rhetoric. His ontological premise is that the whole social structure is present in each linguistic interaction (1991: 67). Bourdieu sees this social structure as transmitted by means of habitus and doxa, roughly social habits and ideological beliefs (I will discuss these in greater detail in chapter 2). Bourdieu rejects the idea that interpersonal relations are ever purely individual. Echoing Ryle (probably unconsciously), he concludes that “it is their present and past positions in the social structure that biological individuals carry with them, at all times and in all places, in the form of dispositions which are so many marks of social position and hence of the social distance between objective positions” (Bourdieu 1991: 82).14

46

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Bourdieu envisages a sort of “linguistic market” wherein social agents attempt to exercise their linguistic competences in a competitive struggle for profits of distinction. Extending the Marxist analysis of capitalist economic competition to social interaction, these profits of distinction cause linguistic capital to accrue to successful competitors (Bourdieu 1991: 55). Once established as dominant, the linguistic practices of the upper classes are deemed “legitimate,” against which are measured all other practices.15 This acceptance of the linguistic dominance of the upper classes becomes rooted in bodily dispositions, expressed in what Bourdieu calls “bodily hexis.” The everyday order of things imposes, through these bodily dispositions, thousands of “seemingly insignificant constraints and controls of politeness,” different ways of talking and of bodily deportment that exact recognition of hierarchical differences between the classes, sexes, and generations (Bourdieu 1991: 86, 88). Thus for Bourdieu hierarchy penetrates all levels of social action, right from embodiment to intellectual action (although his clear emphasis is on how hierarchies are constituted by the linguistic marketplace). Bourdieu’s analysis of language, structure, power, and hierarchy is useful in its synthesizing mode, although he reifies his concepts and over-objectifies the controlling influence of linguistic social power on individual lives. Like Foucault, Bourdieu looks for insidious hegemonies in every nook and cranny of social interaction. Nevertheless, he is right in linking language as a form of symbolic social action to the dominance of powerful groups and classes within a society. Bringing together van Dijk, Burke, and Bourdieu, we can see that the spirit of hierarchy naturally invades the constitution of social roles and the social cognitions that support them. When we symbolically express our allegiance to a social role through language, we feed symbolic capital into that role, thereby supporting any claims to dominance it makes over other social roles. Social agents, by adopting given roles, find themselves situated within a hierarchy that is usually not of their making, but which they all the same support insofar as they play their roles according to pre-established rules associated with it. To put what I have said in this chapter in a broader perspective (and thereby to build a bridge to my theory of social explanation, as outlined in the next chapter), the general presupposition of my structural idealism (following Giddens) is that action and structure dialectically presuppose each other, and that action is not a series of dis-

The Nature of Social Consciousness

47

crete acts, but a continuous flow of conduct (Giddens 1979: 53, 55). This flow of conduct aspires towards ideals that are both individual and structural, channelled by “interpretive schemes,” standardized elements of stocks of knowledge applied by actors in the production of interaction. These form the “core of mutual knowledge whereby an accountable universe of meaning is sustained through and in processes of interaction” (Giddens 1979: 83). These social cognitions, otherwise known as “paradigms” (Kuhn), “absolute presuppositions” (Collingwood), “forms of life” (Wittgenstein), “epistemes” (Foucault), or “structural ideals” (me), are sustained and reproduced in the flow of social encounters. Our interpretive schemes sustain our social consciousness through all four of its levels—the body, the passions, our purposes, and our intellect—as it expresses itself symbolically in language, and by so expressing itself creates social rules and roles. This whole process creates an external social world structured in various ways. Ultimately, as Collingwood noted early in his career, this external world is a picture of the mind itself, one that with time grows firmer and harder, takes surface and polish and steadiness, eventually becoming the “Mirror of the Mind,” reflecting in detail the mind’s own face (1924: 313). Of course, material reality is worked and reworked by social action. But “the construction of external worlds— works of art, religion, sciences, structures of historical fact, codes of law, systems of philosophy and so forth ad infinitum—is the only way by which the mind can possibly come to that self-knowledge which is its end” (1924: 315). When we do social theory or reconstruct the past, we are investigating social and historical consciousness, investigating the human mind as an incarnate, active thing. We are mirroring in our own minds the past and present thought/action of other social agents. This mirroring is at the heart of all social theory, which is why I began this chapter with an account of sympathy as the core of social consciousness. To be social, we must take the Other into account. To do this, we must have sympathy for that Other, defining “sympathy” in the perhaps odd sense I have in this chapter. We must see the Other as a meaning-generating organism whose acts express social ideals, as least in some small way.

2 Intention, Meaning, and Structure in Social Explanation1

Prologue In this chapter I will propose a tripartite model of social explanation. My goal here is to produce a bird’s-eye view of the archaeology of a social act within what I term a “structural idealist” model. Like Schliemann at Troy, where he discovered seven distinct levels of the ancient city, layered one on top of another, the social archaeologist can, I believe, unearth three distinct strata within any given social act: the intentions of the actor, the meaning of the act independent of those intentions, and its structural context.2 Each of these levels involves its own distinctive panorama of forms of rationality, as we shall soon see. Intention is univalent and can usually be identified on a surface level with an actor’s reply to the question (assuming they’re telling the truth), “why did you do that?” It is a good part of what Weber refers to as “subjective meaning.” An intentional account of an act must take the actor at his or her word as far as motivation goes. Meaning is another matter. I take it in a broader sense, as a series of bivalences—i.e., those between stated and unstatable intentions, conscious and unconscious thought, nature and nurture, or rationally justifiable political beliefs and disguised class interests—that requires a penetration beneath the surface intentionality connected with the act. This middle term I see as “hard-wired” into the everyday sense of what a statement or action “means” over and above the Notes to chapter 2 are on pp. 272-76.

49

50

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

conscious intention of the actor, as when we say, for example, that “her expression of anger towards her friend really means that her marriage is on the rocks and she is taking out her troubles on those around her,” or “his libertarianism on the surface may be an expression of his love of freedom, but on a deeper level it shows that he is an apologist for the rich.” It’s when we say of a belief that it means something other than that which its holder intends it to mean. Naturally, actors are not consciously aware of the full meaning of their social acts. Meaning comes to light primarily through a narrative that attempts to understand and explain these bivalences. Structure is multivalent, subsuming both intention and meaning, but not submerging them. It illustrates how the concrete individual act is connected with other individual acts. Social structures are those webs of social rules and roles I spoke of in the previous chapter that actors take as natural, or which they follow without very much thought. Structures can affect individual intentions only through structural ideals, which we explain in large part by penetrating into the social meaning of an act or series of acts performed by individual agents. Structural ideals are those ideals that “intend” social objects. They add values to these objects, and thus either maintain, shape, or destroy them. They are the rules that a social actor considers to be “givens” (whether morally, aesthetically, or practically) within their given situation. One could imagine the existence of personal ideals, i.e., those ideas that do not intend social objects, as a noumenal ground for structural ideals. In addition, there are certainly many “ideas” or thoughts that are non-intentional, e.g., me simply picturing a canoe gliding across a Northern Ontario lake. However, as soon as this picture is charged with a longing to be in that canoe, it becomes in some small way intentional, perhaps expressing my desire to escape the noise of bustle of the city for a week or two. I will term the theory I sketch out here “structural idealism” (although “structural interactionism” may have been just as appropriate) because I see social structure as expressed first and foremost in the collective and shared ideals that constitute social reality for a group of actors, yet at the same time is a real institutional horizon for social action.3 These shared ideals are not the benign functions discussed by Talcott Parsons and other structural functionalists. They can lead to social stratification, to the social power of dominant economic classes and the hegemonic power of dominant

Intention, Meaning, and Structure in Social Explanation

51

cultural actors and groups in ways that are morally suspect. Be that as it may, I hope to use each of these three central terms—intention, meaning, and structure—in ways that stick to their ordinary English-language senses, with suitable clarifications. This model will be metatheoretical, a prelude to social theory in general, a sort of “critique of sociological reason.” The point of this chapter will be to show how to arrive at a complete case of social explanation. As to what such a case involves, it must explain in a satisfactory way the human acts under investigation by telling a true story of these acts.4 The truth of this story involves an interpretive web the theorist casts over events, involving narrative on some level. This narrative is intended to convince the reader. It relates the events being considered to other (similar) events, social actions to other social actions, the rules followed by Actor A to those followed by Actor B. As stated in chapter 1, I will not argue for sociological or historical laws here, and for causal explanations only in a limited sense, i.e., in the sense that we can say that human “purposes” (whether conscious or unconscious, intended or unintended) “cause” events to happen. Instead, I believe that social theory should aim at a true interpretation of human actions that in some way generalizes their meaning beyond their original narrow temporal and spatial context by means of a bridging concept like structural ideals. I will discuss each of my three methodological levels in turn. But before doing this, I want to sketch out a typology of theories of rationality to show how each type of rationality interacts with each level of social explanation.

The Varieties of Rationality One of the burning questions of the day in social and political theory is to what degree human action can be explained in rational terms. In order to answer this question, we have to get clear just what we mean by “rationality.” I believe that we can categorize the varieties of rationality discussed by social theorists into three broad camps, with a number of further subdivisions (see Chart 3), as follows: 1. Systemic Rationality (SR): Under systemic rationality, agents are assumed to have reasons for their actions in order for those actions to be comprehensible to the social theorist. This doesn’t mean that all human actions occur for a conscious “reason,” or even

52

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

that all human actions can have specific reasons ascribed to them by a theorist. It does mean, however, that we must take as a methodological principle the notion that human action is significantly governed by some form of rationality (no matter how flawed) that can be understood independent of the actor’s internal mental processes by an external observer. Thus human social action is in some sense rule governed (but not especially selfish, or instrumentally rational, or part of a historical process that is moving toward some grand telos). If it weren’t, all we would have is intellectual solipsism, or, at best, pure “description,” if such a thing were possible. On the most basic level, systemic rationality implies that human action isn’t random—it can be explained by those not present at the time and place where the act occurred. Chart 3. The Varieties of Rationality 1. Systemic Rationality (SR) 2. Instrumental Rationality (IR) 2.1. Descriptive Instrumental Rationality (DIR) 2.1.1. Descriptive Selfish Instrumental Rationality (DSIR) based on Material Goods (DSIR-m) or Objects of Pleasure (DSIR-u) 2.2. Prescriptive Instrumental Rationality (PIR) 2.2.1. Prescriptive Selfish Instrumental Rationality (PSIR) 3. Teleological Rationality (TR) 3.1. Descriptive Teleological Rationality (DTR) 3.2. Prescriptive Teleological Rationality (PTR)

2. Instrumental Rationality (IR): Agents either do or should chose the best (most efficient, most cost-effective, etc.) means to whatever end they value the most in a given situation. The goals of our actions are kept separate from the means by which we choose to pursue them. The passions, in short, do not cloud our instrumentally rational pursuit of the goals stipulated by those passions. There are two varieties of IR: 2.1. Descriptive Instrumental Rationality (DIR): This is the classic instrumental rationality of rational-choice theory, imported from economics. As a matter of fact, says the DIR theorist, human beings seek the best means to achieve their goals, to pursue their considered preferences. In its strongest form, the DIR theorist claims that social actors pursue their preferences along the route that they see as the

Intention, Meaning, and Structure in Social Explanation

53

most promising (and “cost effective”) way of getting to their destination. In its weaker form, the DIR theorist admits that perhaps not all human behaviour lives up to the high standards posited by instrumental rationality, but that we have to assume that presently and for the most part it does pursue these standards in order for us to theorize and do empirical research in the social sciences. Thus we can speak of “literal” and “methodological” versions of DIR. 2.1.1. Descriptive Selfish Instrumental Rationality (DSIR): Further, we can speak of a descriptive version of rationality that posits that human being habitually seek selfish ends using instrumental means. It can be further broken down into two versions: one version (DSIR-m) defines the selfish ends that human beings supposedly seek as material goods, mostly financial ones, while another version (DSIR-u) merely stipulates that these selfish ends involve “objects of pleasure,” or utilitarian goals more broadly defined. 2.2. Prescriptive Instrumental Rationality (PIR): This is the simple claim that people ought to instrumentally pursue their considered preferences, come hell or high water. It is the importation of Homo economicus from the realm of economic theory into that of normative discourse. As with its descriptive cousin, we can also imagine a Prescriptive Selfish Instrumental Rationality (PSIR), which tells us that we should seek selfish goals by the most efficient means possible (as Ayn Rand’s objectivism suggests). 3.1. Descriptive Teleological Rationality (DTR): This third camp defines the goals of human action as either actually or prescriptively rational in terms of the social and historical goals actors can be seen to pursue. This is perhaps the most sweeping application of rationality to social theory: it is the claim that human society, or some sub-section thereof, is, as a matter of fact, moving toward some goal that the theorist defines as “rational.” We can see evidence of this in Christian eschatology, in Condorcet’s hope for democratic liberation in the coming Tenth Epoch of history, in Hegel’s claim that history is moving toward some form of rational freedom, and in Marx’s claim that the historical evolution of the class struggle will lead to a revolution against capitalism and the inauguration of a golden age of equality and prosperity. Individuals may indeed participate in this rational telos; but by and large this individual participation is engulfed within a broader social process by the cunning of reason. In short, for the DTR theorist, the rational is real, and the real is rational.

54

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

3.2. Prescriptive Teleological Rationality (PTR): The PTR theorist urges us to move towards some social or historical goal defined by the theorist as rational, even though this goal is not in any sense inevitable. A certain type of liberalism might fit in here: the idea that we have a moral duty to build a society where tolerance, freedom, and human decency come to dominate the polity. Teleological Rationality has a long and storied history, and the moralist should by no means be quick to abandon its prescriptive variety. An exclusively social-structuralist understanding of social theory might lead us to DTR (indeed, I think that DTR has a natural tendency to ally itself with such a structuralism, as we can see quite clearly in Marx and Engels’s historical materialism). But any serious attention paid to subjective reason, whether it’s merely systemic or more rigorously instrumental, will surely lead us away from embracing DTR. A purely teleological account of rationality is best left to prophets (DTR) and moralists (PTR). So the real issue for debate in grounding social explanation is whether there is any need to move from the admittedly thin view of rationality encompassed by its systemic variety to the thicker view held by instrumental rationality theory. I will argue here (following in the spirit of Weber, Collingwood, and Peter Winch) that we definitely need some sense of systemic rationality, some sense that we can understand from a distance the motivations of social actors, in order to explain (as opposed to merely describe) human action. However, even within the realm of intentionality, things other than pure instrumentality shape behaviour, things such as what Michael Taylor (1995) calls “normative” and “expressive” behaviour, social identification, and intrinsic motivation.5 When we move on the “meaning” level, instrumentally rational behaviour loses even more ground to such motivations as unconscious impulses and normative and expressive behaviour, while when we arrive at the social-structural level of explanation, all we really have left is a minimum systemic rationality, the idea that people do things for reasons of some sort. The logic of collective action involves so much more than the instrumental pursuit of clearly understood and ordered preferences. Social forces shape our actions in a variety of preconscious and unconscious ways by impelling, enticing, cajoling, or seducing us to accept structural ideals (roughly speaking, group norms) to guide our actions in a myriad of circumstances.

Intention, Meaning, and Structure in Social Explanation

55

I’ll return to the issue of rationality throughout this chapter. Let’s now look at each level of social explanation in some detail.

Intention A convenient starting point for social explanation is Weber’s own starting point, the subjective meaning social actors attach to their acts. As he himself puts it, we can speak of a social action only insofar as actors attach a subjective meaning to their acts (1978: 4). Part of this meaning is the actor’s taking into account the attitudes and actions of others. Human intentionality on this level of analysis is univalent in the following sense: the observer must accept the actor’s own definition of the intention behind the act. There is no depth to be plumbed in the analysis of intentionality: although the meaning of an act may refer to something lying below the surface of an actor’s stated reason(s) for acting, the actor’s intention is simply the statement of that reason. This intentionality presupposes only systemic rationality to get started: there is no particular reason why even a clearly stated and understood intention need be instrumentally rational (unless we define instrumental so broadly that it loses any power to distinguish itself from non-instrumental behaviour). Building on this Weberian foundation of social explanation, Peter Winch (1958) notes that the categories of meaning that underlie sociological investigations are dependent on social interactions between human beings. Further, the problems generated by these investigations are in fact philosophical problems, with such terms as language and intelligibility requiring prior philosophical analysis before we proceed along the road to social theory (Winch 1958: 43-44). Understanding social actions involves grasping the point or meaning of what was done or said. This has nothing to do with causal laws, but is methodologically closer to the way we look at realms of discourse (115). The first step on the road to social explanation is indeed to grasp the point of what was done or said. This is how we understand an intention. If we do not take this first step, we risk misrepresenting the character of a social action, of not understanding why it happened. So we should start by sorting out what an action meant to the actor himself or herself. More recently, Anthony Giddens (1982: 49) has pointed out that if we want to connect human action with structural explanation we

56

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

need a theory of the human agent or subject, an account of the conditions and consequences of actions, and an interpretation of structure as somehow produced by or producing these conditions and consequences. All of this seems obvious. Yet I believe that Giddens’s “theory of the human subject” should have a dual nature, that of intentionality and meaning, if it is to be part of a complete theory and if it is going to be able to provide a link to social structure. This is the “bridging concept” I mentioned in previous chapter. Further, human intentions are not discrete things. It would be more proper to say, following Giddens (1986: 543), that there is a context of intentionality and practice that “saturates” any given social product. Human thought and human interaction are in reality processes, not collections of atomic units, although the analyst must, to some degree, treat them as units to get on with his or her analysis. The boundary that separates a given interaction from other interactions, and from external things or objects, is quite fuzzy at the edges. As Giddens (1982: 31) reminds us, intentional behaviour is itself a process, and it takes place in the durée of everyday life. Each decision, thought, or act that we can reflect on and isolate from the others surrounding it is saturated with the physiological grounding, emotive colouring, and mental logic of its neighbours when experienced in its immediate and original location in time and space. Consciousness is intentional insofar as it is directed towards objects, whether physical or ideal. For the purposes of understanding a section of the flux of consciousness and the way consciousness is played out in social acts, it is useful to introduce an “analytical atom” that the social theorist can focus on and examine. This atom I will call the “phenomenological moment.” It is an act or series of human acts that the social theorist accords unity for heuristic purposes. It is a slice of space/time containing a discrete quantum of human interaction. The size of this slice varies according to the interests and purposes of the social theorist, so its content cannot be defined in advance, any more that a list of things a ruler can measure can be defined in advance of the ruler’s manufacture and use. I want to argue that within each phenomenological moment, we can discern the entire intention/meaning/structure network at work. A given phenomenological moment can be understood synchronically, as crossing the three elements of our theoretical network at a given point in time. Or it can be understood diachronically, within

Intention, Meaning, and Structure in Social Explanation

57

one level of analysis alone (say, just in terms of the actors’ intentions), by showing how it is connected to prior and later moments in the same local series. For the social theorist, history and sociology are methodologically indistinguishable, although they are too often assigned the separate tasks of analyzing social diachrony and synchrony respectively in the traditional academic division of labour. A full analysis of a given phenomenological moment should include both history, with its more diachronic flavour, and sociology (at least taken in its structuralist mode), with its greater sense of synchrony. Of course, for reasons of time or interest, such full accounts are rare. An interesting analysis of a province of intentional discourse comes from Marvin B. Scott and Stanford M. Lyman (1968), who discuss the accounts people attempt to give of their untoward behaviour. They divide these accounts between excuses and justifications, detailing several types of each. Their more general point is that the success or failure of an account offered to a given group, subculture, and so on will depend in part on the background expectations of each party (i.e., of the person offering the account and those listening to it). The point that Scott and Lyman make with respect to accounts can be generalized in a discussion of all sorts of behaviour: that the “success” or “failure” of actions often depends on a correct reading by the actor(s) of the background expectations, or structural ideals, relevant to the situation. Thus the success of intentional discourse can to a large degree be measured by the social meanings attributed to it by its intended audience, these meanings being themselves to some degree structural products. The wrong meaning attached to a given discursive effort may doom the actor to being misunderstood or ignored. As I’ve already mentioned, at the level of a strictly intentional account of human behaviour, we must assume at least a systemic rationality for human action to make any sense at all. Ferejohn and Satz (1995: 78-79) take this a step further, and claim that intentional explanation must be privileged in the social sciences, for only thus can we achieve the partial universalism they hope for. This is part of their attempt to situate rational-choice theory—which they see as a a mild version of what I call descriptive instrumental rationality—at the centre of political science. However, even if we accept the centrality of intentionality in social explanation, it is a rather large category error to leap from this assumption to the conclusion that we must give any explanatory privilege to DIR. Even

58

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

acts with clear intentions behind them do not always aim to achieve their goals along instrumentally rational paths. Our core values and our passions (not to mention our social identifications) too often cloud the sunny skies of the pretended utility maximizer. As the psychologist Robert Abelson (1995: 27) puts it, the instrumental state of mind is part of a mindset that can be switched on and off at different times, with different people having different mixtures of instrumental and non-instrumental orientations.6 Blumer’s presentation of the premises of symbolic interactionism act as a useful methodological sextant with which to navigate our way through this level of analysis to the next, i.e., through intentionality towards meaning: a. Human beings act towards things on the basis of the meanings that things have for them. b. The meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one’s fellows. c. These meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he encounters. (2) Blumer castigates what was traditional social science in his own day, e.g., the positivists and functionalists, for failing to go directly to the empirical social world in its work (1969: 32) (although attacks on functionalism today might seem to be little more than red herrings). This critique is especially well taken on the level of intentionality, for it is easiest to get at the actual reasons that these actors have (or would give, if asked) for their acting by asking them directly, or by using reliable written accounts of their actions.7 We have to take the empirical world seriously when doing social theory or social research. Blumer and symbolic interactionism contributed to social theory the very useful notion that social interaction always occurs within a universe of social meanings that actors bring to their interactions, and which these interactions in turn generate anew through the interpretive process these actors bring to their interactions. Intentionality in concrete human social interactions is always mediated by the meanings brought to these interactions. Part of this meaning is indeed the stated, conscious intention of the actor (or at least an intention that could be stated, given a

Intention, Meaning, and Structure in Social Explanation

59

moment of reflection). Yet other meanings are brought to social acts by actors, meanings that cannot always be stated, even given such a moment of reflection.8 These elements of meaning include things like our unconscious drives, our metaphysical and ideological presuppositions, the social space and “spirit of the age” that an act takes place in, and the unintended consequences of an act. All of these phenomena (and others too) are tied to, but in various ways transcend, the intentionality of the individual. The classic sociological case is, of course, the way that a series of individual acts can carry a social meaning intended by none of the individual actors—these acts have an unintended consequence. It would not be hyperbolic to claim that economic life is driven by such consequences: currency fluctuations, stock market crashes, inflation, and so on are only in part the result of intentional acts. It is true, as Giddens (1979: 5) notes, that all actors have a degree of “discursive penetration” of the society in which they live. They are aware, on the level of discursive consciousness, of the social rules of the game. Even if individual investors didn’t intend to contribute to a decline in stock prices by selling off their portfolios, they can usually still understand, after the fact, how their individual acts could contribute to such a fall. Yet this awareness is inevitably less than total, both because of the cognitive limitations on the individuals’ awareness of all the discursive knowledge that there is out there, and also because their awareness is channelled or dammed up by the phenomena I see as central to the second level of social analysis, social meaning: the unconscious mind, our basic presuppositions, the limited social and mental space that acts take place in, and the unintended consequences of our acts.9 This relates back to the depth model of human thought/action I presented in chapter 1: what we have in our mind at a given moment is only a fraction of what influences our actions. Most importantly, social structure resides largely in our preconscious and unconscious assumptions about the social symbols we interact with. Because social structure is so deeply embedded, in our unreflective moments we sometimes forget that it’s there. Or we believe, with some structuralists, that it’s ontologically real, somehow separate from individual human minds. The image of an iceberg comes to mind: the tip is always visible, clear and sparkling under a northern sun, while its massive base is hidden beneath the surface of the sea. Yet both elements are

60

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

part of the same whole, part of the same thing, just as agency and structure are part of every social act. To illustrate how this model of social explanation works, allow me to introduce two fictional characters. Tom is an impressionable young undergraduate at a local university; Mary is a professional woman in a dual-income suburban family. Within each of their social worlds, they intend to be successful. Tom is trying to maintain his straight-A average, something he sees as instrumental to the career in accounting he has established as one of his life goals. Mary, a middle-level manager at Globex Inc., seeks to climb the corporate ladder to, for the most part, earn a higher salary. On this basic level, we can see how they could both engage in instrumentally rational thinking to plan for and achieve their goals: they both aim at courses of action that will result in successful careers and financial well being. Whenever Tom encounters Professor X at school, he automatically and unconsciously treats him with deference, with a degree of formal respect. Similarly, when Mary encounters a police officer on the street, she accords him the same sort of respect. Built into these interactions are the subjective intentions of the actors. Yet there is also something more. This formal respect paid to authority figures is a sort of status. The intentions of each actor explain only in part the according of this status—there are unconscious fears and worries at play in both Tom and Mary’s cases. In addition, this respect can be explained in terms of instrumental rationality to only a limited degree, e.g., in terms of Tom getting a good mark in his course with Professor X, or Mary establishing good relations with the police. In each case, they express a certain normative acceptance of the respective institutions receiving the respect (i.e., the university and the police force). For example, Tom may indeed ridicule Professor X behind his back for his clumsy and forgetful manner, but he abandons this attitude of ridicule in his presence. This ridicule is not incompatible with the formal respect he pays X. This respect is “structural” in the sense that it is shared by Tom with most, if not all, of his fellow undergraduates as a given notion and is ingrained in Tom’s practical consciousness. It is anchored in the reality of concrete interactions with the professor. Its “meaning” may reflect on Tom’s public character (“he’s such a polite young man”), on his upbringing, on an unconscious projection of a stern and scolding father-image onto the professor, etc. Both the

Intention, Meaning, and Structure in Social Explanation

61

meaning and the structure of Tom and Mary’s respect for authority figures are tied to the phenomenological moments when each encounters these figures in a given time and space, i.e., in interacting with them, whether passively (e.g., in avoiding walking by the professor’s office when one’s assignment is late) or actively (e.g., in politely asking a traffic cop for travel directions). I conclude by noting that such a simple and common feeling as respect for authority can assume a multidimensionality when we try to bring it within the realm of social theory. In a sense, we can enter into any of the common notions associated with social interaction on any of the three levels I discuss in this chapter, in terms of the actors’ intentions, the act’s meaning, or the associated social structure, and from that initial “slice” spread out our analysis into the other two terms. At the same time, we can see not only instrumental rationality at work in the social phenomenon of respect, but also elements of expressive and normative behaviour, not to mention social solidarity. I suggest that none of the three levels of analysis has any special privilege, either methodologically or chronologically, although it seems more pragmatic to start with the subjective intentions of the actors in explaining what happened in a given case because (a) this avoids the holist bias endemic to some social science and (b) we are both morally and epistemologically obliged to take into account the individual actors’ view of themselves before we impose any social meanings or structures upon that self- understanding. To revive the archaeological metaphor I used at the start of this chapter, when social theorists “dig” into a given social act, all three strata of explanation are simultaneously available if they work hard enough to get at them. The stratum investigated depends on the theorists’ particular interests, though a complete archaeology of a social act should investigate all three strata. Theorists should not just ignore the rubble covering their primary object of interest, as Schliemann did at Troy, for all social rubble has some significance.

Meaning When we leave the conscious intentions of the actor behind and ask what is the meaning of his or her act, we must consider a series of bivalences within the social act that constitute its meaning. These bivalences include (although this list is by no means exhaustive) conscious intentions vs. unconscious drives, conscious and truth-

62

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

fully stated intentions vs. conscious but falsely stated intentions, intended vs. unintended consequences, the prior conditions of the act of which the actor was aware vs. those of which the actor was not aware, the actor’s reflexive interpretation of his or her own past acts vs. others’ interpretations of them. “Meaning” encompasses both sides of each of these binary pairs. In Economy and Society, Weber claims (6) that actions that cannot be related to an actor’s intended purpose are devoid of meaning, but two pages later he tells us that there are two types of understanding (Verstehen): direct observational understanding and explanatory understanding. This latter mode of Verstehen is what he terms a “rational” understanding of motivation which involves “placing the act in an intelligible and more inclusive context of meaning” (8).10 Leaving aside the questionable validity of a separate “direct observational” understanding of a social act, I want to argue here that what Weber calls “explanatory understanding” is analytically distinct from an understanding of the actor’s intentions and can be more simply stated as a search for the social meaning of an act. When we understand why an actor did X, we can ask them to tell us their reasons or motivations. Yet when we want to explain X, this isn’t enough: we also have to understand the context (both external and internal) of the act. As Parkin (1982: 26) points out, in one sense Verstehen seems to be based on the idea that actors are typically aware of their motives and of their subjective states of mind, thus having no place for Marxist (or other) notions of “false consciousness.” Yet Weber himself admits that only rarely is the full subjective meaning of an act present in the consciousness of the actor: The theoretical concepts of sociology are ideal types not only from the objective point of view, but also in their application to subjective processes. In the great majority of cases actual action goes on in a state of inarticulate half-consciousness or actual unconsciousness of its subjective meaning. The actor is more likely to “be aware” of it in a vague sense than he is to “know” what he is doing or be explicitly self-aware about it. (1978: 21) This tension built into Weber’s analysis of subjective meaning can be dispelled if we are willing to admit that analysis “meaning” is a separate category from “intention.” Meaning goes beyond the

Intention, Meaning, and Structure in Social Explanation

63

strictly intentional to unconscious motivations and knowledge, and to the unintended consequences of actions. The constitution of “meaning” as a separate level of analysis frees us from Weber’s self-contradiction on the question of how to understand the subjective meaning of an act as being, at the same time, both intentional and unintentional. The way that the meaning of our social acts escapes us leads me back to Blumer and symbolic interactionism. The philosophical premise of the interactionist analysis of the social act is Winch’s observation that our social relations with our fellows are permeated with ideas about reality, and thus we can say that social relations can be seen as ideas about (social) reality (1958: 22). We come to our interactions with a set of preconceived notions about how this or that type of interaction will proceed, how we can treat others in the type of situation we’re in, along with a rough idea of what not to do in the situation at hand. Social interactions are micro-level forms of life, ways of being-in-the-world. Blumer moves forward from this Wittgensteinian premise to suggest that the “worlds” we live in consist of “objects” created by symbolic interaction. Human life is one vast process of forming, sustaining, and transferring these social objects, which have no fixed status unless their meaning is sustained (Blumer 1969: 10, 12). The social object is the focal point for the production of any meaning in a social act over and above that contained in the conscious intention of the actor.11 The social meaning of an object, say this book, cannot be exhausted by even a thorough examination of the intentions of the actors participating in it, in this case my intentions in writing it. It is a social object at all only insofar as others read their own meanings into it (keeping in mind that these meanings might parallel quite closely my own in writing it), and also insofar as we consider the circumstances (biographical, political, and economic) of its production to be part and parcel of its social meaning. We can speak of what the author “meant to say” in a given text, but also of what that text “means” in the greater context of his or her life, the “historical meaning” of the work, or even what the ideas contained in the text “meant” to the lives of its readers. That is, unlike an actor’s intentions, the meaning of a social object must be interpreted (either reflectively by the actor, or by someone else, perhaps a theorist). And these interpretations can themselves also be interpreted (as the sociologist of knowledge does) as having their own “meanings,” as the product of certain material or ideological structures.

64

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Meaning is constructed by means of a narrative of human action. The narrator transforms constellations of intentions, consequences, unintended consequences, unconscious drives, background factors, and purely structural factors such as social status and class origin into a historical narrative that hopefully compels the readers’ attention, and which asks them to make a cognitive judgment as to its truthfulness (or at least its likelihood). Once this transformation successfully takes place, the narrator has produced the social meaning of the actions in question. To merely list a series of the actors’ intentions would hardly constitute an adequate narrative of events (although it might work in diaries). Similarly, just to provide a record of the structural causes of behaviour without taking into account the actors’ purposes would be too reductionist to be either true or useful. A narrative can present the social meaning of a series of actions only insofar as both the actors’ intentions and the relevant structural factors are accounted for and linked together in a coherent way. The sociology of knowledge is vital to an understanding of the “meaning” of social acts. Berger and Luckmann (1966: 1) take as their basic premise the notion that reality is socially constructed, and that the sociology of knowledge must analyze the process whereby this occurs. For the sociologist of knowledge, over and above any concern with intellectual history, the central focus must be the world of common-sense knowledge, that knowledge which constitutes the fabric of meanings without which no society could exist (14). This world of everyday life has a paramount reality and is organized around the “here” of my body and the “now” of my present (21-22). Indeed, the analysis of this “here and now” has become an important part of sociology and history in the last twenty years, fuelled in large part by feminism and postmodernism, and especially by Michel Foucault’s archaeologies of knowledge and genealogies of the enchained body. This is as it should be: our bodies situate us in time and space, are the centre of our existences. All social interactions revolve around them, like planets orbiting a corporeal sun.12 Our understanding of this world of everyday knowledge requires us to move beyond the stated intentions of the social actors to the preconscious practical knowledge and unconscious processes that sustain everyday life. The social self is in a continual process of construction from moment to moment by the attribution of meaning to it by those in contact with that self. We in turn evaluate or reject

Intention, Meaning, and Structure in Social Explanation

65

that construction, insofar as we can become aware of it, by attributing various values to the judgments of others. Part of this process of self-construction is tied to our practical consciousness. This is our awareness of “how to do things,” which calls forth, as Berger and Luckmann point out, “recipes” for the mastery of routine problems (1966: 43). The uncovering of the “recipes” embedded in practical activities is part of what I mean by reconstructing the “meaning” of a social act. Needless to say, the actor may know how to use a recipe without being able to explicitly formulate it. It may be preconscious, or even unconscious—if asked “how do you do that?” the actor’s only reply might be “well…like this,” followed by a repetition of the action. Social theory, insofar as it seeks to produce a phenomenology of everyday life, has to take into account how these recipes allow actors to perform on the stage of the social in competent or incompetent ways. It also has to recognize that social actors may not be able to explicitly formulate the elements of these recipes, even if they can cook the dishes described by them quite competently. Without getting too deeply into the question of the social construction of the self, it is important to remember that our self-image and our image of others is the end product of a never-ceasing process of reflecting reflected images.13 We see ourselves as reflections of the way others talk about us and act towards us, which influences our future performances, which in turn influences the way these others will either maintain or revise their images of us. The social meaning of individual acts is usefully seen as tied to a series of performances given within the framework of an infinitely reflexive (and, as Lasch reminds us, sometimes narcissistic) construction of the self. This construction takes place largely by means of images communicated from the others present in the collection of phenomenological moments we call everyday life. Weber saw hidden “motives” and repressions as one of the limits on the understanding of subjective meaning (1978: 9).14 These were the subaqueous formations inaccessible to the surface-sailing social theorist. If we seek to understand the subjective meaning of an act, it becomes a problem for us if there is a realm of motivation inaccessible to our casual observation. Yet, as Giddens notes, beyond discursive or intentional accounts of social action, there are many other forms of knowledge embedded in and constitutive of that action (1986: 536). He goes on to suggest that we must trace the origins of social meaning to the methodological apparatus embedded in

66

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

the “practical consciousness” of the routines of day-to-day life (538). This “practical consciousness,” this preconscious sense of how to do things, acts for Giddens as a link between conscious and unconscious forms of knowledge. An understanding of both our practical consciousness and our unconscious drives must enter into any full account of the meaning of any given phenomenological moment; a failure to do so is the great mistake made by rational-choice theorists, at least on the level of social explanation. Although the stated intentions of actors have a certain methodological primacy, we must further come to understand the practical knowledge that allows (or fails to allow) them to complete the act, along with the possibility that our awareness of the actors’ unconscious impulses might help us to more fully comprehend the context of their intentions and therefore the meaning of the act. Thus a complete social theory would see social acts as the product of intentional consciousness, practical consciousness, and unconscious drives, all at the same time. This is what I mean when I say that social theory should come to an understanding of the social meaning of an act. Social theorists notoriously argue over the status (or even the possibility of understanding) this “meaning.” This lack of agreement has led to the postmodernist refusal to search for the “true” significance of behaviour. To generalize amongst at least the “skeptical” postmodernists (to use Pauline Rosenau’s term), the social world is one great text for them, full of signs that can be read in a variety of ways. The problem that postmodernism presents to social theory is that of true interpretation: if the signifiers of the social world are infinitely flexible, subject to an infinite number of interpretations, none of them better than any other, then the theorist is in big trouble. If the skeptical postmodernists are right about truth and signification, then the narratives spun by sociologists, historians, and cultural theorists are just stories, no better than the tall tales parents tell children about goblins and elves and Easter bunnies. Intuitively, this seems wrong-headed. We offer interpretations of people’s social interactions almost every day of our lives, usually without adding the caveat that, of course, this is only one of an infinite number of interpretations of this situation. I’m not suggesting we resurrect intact the Scottish School of Common Sense, and use everyday discourse as a sextant to guide us to an effective social theory. Yet I will argue that common sense is right, at least in this instance: even if there are a number of different plausible

Intention, Meaning, and Structure in Social Explanation

67

interpretations of a given social act, it is possible to be mistaken in such interpretations. To start with, I think that understanding a social act isn’t quite like reading a text, at least the texts read by post-structuralists. Social theory can attempt to understand the meaning of a social act because that act is tied to extratextual social objects, to movements of bodies in space, to speech, to concepts. The meaning of an act is not like an empty ship adrift on the ocean, one that can be pulled by the determined tugboat/theorist any which way. It is instead anchored on the one side in the subjective intentions of the actor and on the other in the structural ideals that shaped the act, not to mention the physical space where the act took place. Our intentions, our social concepts, and the spatial and temporal frameworks in which they occur are not floating signifiers that can be interpreted in whatever way a theorist wants. A social act always takes place at place X and time Y; it is motivated by one or several intentions, and is shaped by one or more structuring ideals. Since these intentions and values are not arbitrary to the actor, it would be strange indeed if they suddenly became arbitrary to the interpreter. Although a social epistemology cannot provide a clear and precise formula to guide us to the “objective” meaning of a social act, if we keep ourselves firmly anchored to both intention and social structure we can avoid the postmodernist tendency to drift far out into the dangerous waters of epistemological relativism.15 As we escape pure intentionality and move toward interpreting the social meaning of human action, it should become clear that explanations of behaviour in terms other than pure instrumental rationality have to be considered. Specifically, part of the “meaning” of a social act is the sense in which it can express values, class, gender, or other social group solidarity (or lack thereof), or some motivation of which the actor isn’t conscious. Yet when we look for the social meaning of an act, we can begin to talk about a limited sense of teleological rationality as part of social explanation. Jeffrey Friedman (1995) rightly suggests (in line with a number of other critics of rational-choice theory) that instrumental rationality is a “learned” way of thinking that is largely accepted in economic life, but is seen as less than holy in the political arena. Friedman goes on to applaud a Verstende approach to social science, calling for a “transcendent critique that would historicize, as the contingent products of Western rationalism, the

68

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

strategic maximizing modern academics may find plausible as a universal explanation simply because we (among others) often engage in it” (1995: 15). In short, we should look at instrumental rationality as part of what it “means” to live in the West at the start of the new millennium, where more and more a narrowly economic instrumental model dominates the discourse of daily life, especially media reportage and academic and political debate. This type of rationality can be seen less as hard-wired into the central processor of human nature and more as a semi-conscious telos for a given group of people in a given place and time. Another dimension to explore as part of our tour through social meaning is the question of ideology, whether political, economic, or religious. It would seem almost trite to claim that an important part of an analysis of the meaning of a social act lies in some understanding of the ideological presuppositions of the actor (or of the theorist, for that matter). But this is true all the same. Ideology is one of the principal means by which unconscious assumptions about social life enter the conscious world of interactive discourse. Let’s return to Tom and Mary at this point to help us understand how ideology can affect everyday social acts. Part of the social context of Tom’s everyday life is the politically charged atmosphere of the campus he visits five days a week. Feminism, environmentalism, corporatism, and other political concerns influence the way classes are taught, the way students dress and relate to each other, and the way that Tom speaks and acts towards those he sees as bearers of different ideological positions. For example, Tom is especially mindful that he does not say anything disrespectful of women when in the presence of his friend Jane both because he is quite attracted to her (the meaning of his acts being influenced by a strong biological drive) and because he knows that she is a radical feminist and will thus not tolerate the “looser” language that Tom’s male friends use. His “stable and ordered preference” is to sleep with Jane, and he adjusts his behaviour so as not to offend her. However, even though deep down Tom is a laissez-faire relativist on moral and religious issues (thus proving Alan Bloom right about university undergraduates), according others the right to believe whatever they see fit as long as they do not try to impose their beliefs on him, he reacts with some degree of horror at politically incorrect expressions of sexism and racism on the part of his fellow students (admittedly in part simulated in order to impress

Intention, Meaning, and Structure in Social Explanation

69

Jane). In short, Tom is ideologically confused: his behaviour is a mixture of instrumentally rational motivations (“yes, you’re absolutely right, Jane!”) and normative goals (“we should all love each other, regardless of race, religion, or culture”). Mary, however, is in quite another boat. Although herself quite sympathetic to feminism, she works in the competitive environment of the middle management of a large corporation, with both men and women in positions of authority. Many of her fellow managers have no sympathy for her political views, and tell her so to her face. Some of her male colleagues even claim that Mary’s feminism is just a way of her compensating for her lack of success, so far, at climbing the corporate ladder. This infuriates Mary, but at the same time it has taught her that she must shelve her ideological position in most of her everyday relations with her co-workers. Instead she pretends to adopt, with some degree of cynicism, the ideology of competitive economic individualism favoured by those in positions of power in the corporation, but she retains a strong social identification with the women’s movement outside her office. The point of these two brief cases is that the environments that Tom and Mary work within allow them a distinct lists of choices on their ideological menus. And each has real restrictions imposed on them by the social structures they live and work within, the structural ideals of their friends, colleagues, and superiors shaping their own ideals and thus their behaviour. Of course, each brings with them their own preferred selections on these menus. As is the case in the social construction of the self, the construction of the individual’s ideological position is tied to a process of reflecting one’s own initial “gut feelings” in the mirror of the world around us, having this reflected back on us through the speech and actions of others, re-evaluating our initial ideological gut feelings, and so on, ad infinitum. In this process of construction, instrumental rationality tells only part of the story: intrinsically held values, along with various social identifications, are also important. When determining the social meaning of an act it is important to look at the actor’s conscious ideological position, the ideological “environment” of the act, along with any unstated ideological presuppositions influencing the act (thus opening the door to the sort of sociology of knowledge to which Mannheim was sympathetic). Any explanation of the meaning of a social act is less than complete if it fails to address ideology as such a multitextured phenomenon.

70

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Structure I return to Weber to introduce the third level of analysis in my methodological triad, namely structure. Weber saw the necessity of constructing “ideal types” of purely rational courses of action to evaluate how these courses of action were influenced by irrational factors. He later says that collective concepts must be treated solely as the result of ways of organizing a collection of particular acts of individual persons (1978: 6, 13). One of the standard criticisms of Weber is that this focus on subjective, individual meaning prevented him from evoking any sense of social structure in his sociology. Talcott Parsons takes up this criticism in noting that Weber’s suspicion of a functionalist approach to social science is based on his sense of the indispensability of an analysis of individual motivation (1947: 20). Obviously, Parsons’s functionalism was more interested in explaining how systems variables operated, how the social system as a whole worked. Parsons was a structuralist as well as a functionalist, and he was little interested in how the individual subjective meanings contained in social acts help to constitute social structure. But he was interested in how individual actions are expressions of the broader social functions that allow for the creation and maintenance of a stable social system. This position is very much at odds with Weber’s seeming methodological individualism. Yet, in fact, Weber often resorted to structural explanations himself, such as his exploration of the effect of Protestant religious beliefs on the development of capitalism in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. To resolve this seeming paradox, we can once more look to Weber himself for a solution. His notion of the “ideal type,” originally manufactured as a methodological tool to analyze the various aspects of social reality (e.g., “charismatic leadership” as a concept to describe something that inevitably includes, in its actual empirical instances, other leadership styles), can be redescribed in normative terms and thus rehabilitated to serve as a starting point for our analysis of structure. I take this rehabilitated “ideal type” to be a mental phenomenon that, as instantiated in everyday thinking, structures action in a way that transcends individual choice. It is a structural ideal. As R. G. Collingwood points out in his Idea of History (1946: 200), that a certain people live on an island in itself has no effect on their history, while how they perceive that insularity, as a barrier or as a highway, does have an effect. In other words, the “hard facts” of a situation are the hard

Intention, Meaning, and Structure in Social Explanation

71

facts of the way the actor sees the situation (Collingwood 1946: 317). When these perceptual “hard facts” are accepted as a constellation of unquestioned assumptions across a given social group, class, culture, or subculture, we can speak of a structural ideal and thus identify, with varying degrees of certainty, an element of social structure.16 These ideals connect actors both to the material resources available to the society in which they live and to that society’s most cherished values and assumptions. We can thus imagine a web linking material goods to social actors by means of these structural ideals: thus is born class, both as a theoretical construct and a practical reality. Social structure is a set of values that we explicitly, tacitly, or unconsciously accept as valid ways of structuring our relations with others. These values are real to the actors acting upon them and are shared by at least some other actors across space and time. So in this sense social structure is both virtual—in the sense that it exists only in people’s minds—and real—in the sense that people within a given status group or class might share similar social values—at the same time. These values are transmitted from insiders to outsiders (e.g., immigrants), and from adults to the young, through a variety of channels: paternal discipline, the schools, the media, social interactions in public spaces such as offices and shopping malls, the dreaded look of the Other, even texts from time to time. The net effect of these transmissions is to order the social world of the affected actors in a normative way: certain things are more valued than others. This helps to shape one’s way of speaking and interacting with friends, family, and coworkers, one’s dress and deportment, one’s economic life, one’s connection to culture and politics. To some degree, Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and doxa capture what I mean by “structural ideal.” However, both of his concepts have their limitations. The former is a set of ingrained dispositions within a given group or class. Bourdieu (1992: 85) feels that habitus is necessary for objective social structures to succeed in reproducing themselves in the form of durable dispositions in organisms living within the same material conditions of existence. Sociology must treat as identical all biological individuals who support the same habitus, with an objective view of social class having as its object of knowledge not aggregates of individuals, but class habitus, “the system of dispositions (partially) common to all prod-

72

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

ucts of the same structure.” People sharing the same habitus are in fact related in terms of homology, of diversity within homogeneity, which unifies the singular habitus of different members of the same class. Although this implies some diversity of world views, for Bourdieu the history of the individual is never anything else than a certain “specification” of the collective history of his group or class, with individual systems of dispositions being seen as structural variants of the group or class habitus (1992: 86). At times Bourdieu’s habitus acquires all-encompassing causal powers, putting into question some of its power to explain social action. He says that as a system of acquired “generative schemes” adjusted to particular conditions, “the habitus engenders all the thoughts, all the perceptions, and all the actions consistent with those conditions, and no others” (1992: 95). If he means by this simply that some sort of norms or ideals inform social action, then one can agree (although without much enthusiasm for his pretended discovery). In this case, habitus could be seen as fluid, as constantly changing. But if he means that people working within a given habitus are controlled and directed by it in a more rigid way, and that this habitus is fairly stable (which I don’t think Bourdieu would want to say, although he sometimes comes close to doing so), then we would have to abandon his ideas as some form of structural determinism that tries to sweep under the carpet the thought-side of action, reducing intentionality to a mere function of systemic variables. So if we can read Bourdieu’s habitus as a non-deterministic notion of how certain normative habits become engrained in a given class, it comes close to what I mean by structural ideals. Doxa is Bourdieu’s term for the naturalization of the arbitrariness of a given social order in the mind and body of the social agent. He writes (1992: 164) that when there is a quasi-perfect fit between the objective social order and subjective principles of organization, “the natural and social world appears as self-evident,” an experience he calls doxa, to “distinguish it from an orthodox or heterodox belief implying awareness and recognition of the possibility of different or antagonistic beliefs.” In the doxic mode, “the world of tradition is experienced as a ‘natural world’ and taken for granted.” When we see all things as good and right with our social world, we have slipped into a doxic mode of thinking. Doxa becomes orthodoxy when challenged by non-believers in this normalized social order, their own views being a heterodoxy.

Intention, Meaning, and Structure in Social Explanation

73

What I mean by structural ideals would have to include all three of Bourdieu’s ways of organizing responses to social solidarity— doxa, orthodoxy, and heterodoxy—as all three can structure social thought/action. The peaceful surfaces of social life may be controlled by doxic thought and action; when these are challenged by heterdoxic thought/action, the forces of social order erect orthodox barriers to change. Bourdieu’s intention in coining these terms is to explain social conflict and control, whereas my intention in this chapter is to explain all social actions, not just the conflict/control aspect of these actions. Bourdieu’s distinction is useful, however, in showing that social conflict, on the structural level, is composed of three distinct ways of thinking about order: as normal, as needing to be defended, or as requiring change. The “structural” component of social explanation should take into account the way social forces affect behaviour, keeping in mind that social forces exist only when certain ideals are taken to be doxa by large numbers of actors. These forces include the unstated (or unknown) prior conditions of action, historical inheritances, social status, and social roles. Needless to say, these structural elements tend to flow into each other in a concrete analysis of a given social act. It is useful to bring in Giddens’s concept of the “duality of structure” at this point to break out of the dualism of agency and structure.17 Under this concept, social structure should be seen as both the medium and the outcome of the human actions it recursively organizes (Giddens 1986: 533).18 Social actors are able to carry out their day-to-day activities only by instantiating certain structural properties or, to use my own terminology, by invoking or applying (whether consciously, unconsciously, or on the level of practical consciousness) a network of structural ideals. Structure influences the individual actor through the sort of collective concepts that Weber was so suspicious of. We must allow for the possibility that the historical preconditions (including a society’s economic arrangements, its political system, and its cultural values) and the unintended consequences of our actions generate structural ideals that impel people within a given social group to define certain actions as “good,” “lawful,” or “useful,” and so on, and others as belonging to the opposite categories. When these ideals become sufficiently spread out and temporally durable, we can begin to use concepts like “class,” “subculture,” or “nation.” As Giddens (1979: 9) notes, institutions can be seen as the structured social practices followed by most people taking place in space

74

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

and in the longue durée of time. We can thus see an institution like the university as a spatio-temporal meeting point of the social practices (e.g., teaching, research, writing, going to the pub, etc.) of a loosely defined but more-or-less regular body of actors (i.e., students, faculty, staff). The “structure” of these practices exists in the general notions that each group of actors brings to the situation, these notions organizing actions within a given space (e.g., the buildings of the university) that take place over a given span of time (e.g., a lecture hour). Although the rules that make up these practices do restrain the actors who follow them, they also make these practices possible, and thus we can add a “duality of power” to Giddens’s “duality of structure.” Power is both restraining and creative. Hierarchy and power relationships help to constitute social practices on an everyday level. Returning to my example of university life, someone has to decide who will teach “Introduction to Social Theory,” where the class will be held, its hours, its significance to an undergraduate’s degree, and so on, not to mention hiring support staff, determining tuition fees, and setting entry standards for incoming students. Even if these decisions are made democratically in committees, they still illustrate how power can be exercised by small groups of people to help generate meaningful social practices for larger groups. On one level, structure has a virtual reality only. We cannot put our finger on a structural element like “class” but only indicate the beliefs, practices, and material signs that point to its “existence.” All the same, structure seems quite real to most actors. For example, in a society with striking differentiations of wealth, poverty is a real restraint on freely thinking and acting. It may be true that property is a “notion” sustained by symbolic interactions between the members of the society where it exists as a legal concept, but the “virtuality” of this poverty seems to melt away when the social agent begins to worry about paying next month’s rent, buying food and clothing, etc. The reality of a concept like poverty exists in its ideational sedimentation in political and economic ideologies, in the legal system, and in everyday economic interactions. Indeed, the most important structural ideals may be those that organize, distribute, and legitimize the physical and informational objects we call “property,” a regional structure of control that, as Enlightenment Scots such as Adam Smith, William Robertson, and John Millar were the first to really point out, dominates many other

Intention, Meaning, and Structure in Social Explanation

75

regional structures of control (including the law, political ideologies, forms of government and public administration). The acceptance of concepts such as private ownership, the division of labour, and social stratification as givens by the vast majority in a society limits the flow of resources to the poor and thus seems to deny on the level of practice what seems evident on the level of theory, namely, the virtuality of social structure. When we arrive at the point where significantly large social groups blindly or subserviently accept ideals that structure their lives and positions as obvious truths, we have discovered the operation of hegemonic power, the ideological substructure of what is commonly termed “economic” or “political” power. Thus we can define power in the negative sense as the capacity of an individual or group to compel another individual or group to accept certain structural ideals as valid.19 A parallel to the way that structural ideals influence everyday action can be seen in Goffman’s discussion of how impressions of reality are fostered by our public performances. As human beings, we have variable impulses and moods. Yet we are expected in our social performances to exhibit a more regular picture of ourselves to those around us, thus requiring a certain “bureaucratization of the spirit” (Goffman 1959: 56). This is obviously connected to the social roles an actor has taken on: the rules that constitute a given social role are largely already in place, and we as individuals are expected to bureaucratize our spirits according to these rules (or else be called “bad workers,” “bad husbands,” “bad girlfriends,” etc.). This leads the actor to feel a strong obligation to appear in a steady moral light, to be an effective “merchant of morality,” one whose wares are known and trusted by those who consume his or her performances (251). In the narratives we spin about each other, we assume a certain consistency of performance from the Other. There seems to be an innate tendency to assume that there are “selves” out there whose social acts can be understood, if not predicted. Goffman’s self is a product of a collection of dramatically staged public performances. These performances help to create the nebulous structure we call “character.” The tendency to bureaucratize one’s actions, to produce a pattern of activities that point to a coherent, core self, is accomplished partly by instantiating a coterie of structural ideals into everyday thinking and acting. We choose certain qualities, virtues, and tastes as distinctly “ours” at a given point in our life, and act towards oth-

76

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

ers in such a way as to “impress” the reality of this construction of our self on those around us. Naturally, others share our ideals. We see these patterns in phenomenological moments where other actors use phrases such as “she’s such a nice woman,” “he’s a hard worker,” or “your taste in music is exquisite,” to describe the “self” in question. Lévi-Strauss tells us that just as music makes the individual conscious of his physiological rootedness, mythology makes one aware of one’s roots in society (1969: 28). With the caveat that Lévi-Strauss was wrong to see structures as operating independently of individual human motivation, if we extend his ideas a bit, we can see broadly accepted structural ideals as the modern “myths” that give us a sense of rootedness in everyday life. If someone rejects key elements of these myths, we term that person an “outsider,” “a rebel,” or, in extreme cases, “mentally ill.” The social theorist does not have to be concerned so much with the moral truth or falsity of these myths/ideals but with the epistemological question of their content and influence, and the way that they change over time. The analysis of social structure is equally a sociological and a historical pursuit. At the structural level of social explanation we leave instrumental rationality behind. When “social forces” influence behaviour, they work, almost by definition, in the province of values and identifications of which actors are only partly conscious. People’s ethics, political affiliations, styles of dress, codes of deportment, and definitions of economic self-interest are structured by ideals of which they are usually only dimly aware (unless they engage in a Socratic process of self-examination). These ideals don’t work by presenting actors with menus of choices, each with its own distinct cost or benefit; instead, they define the menus themselves, or, to speak more accurately, they structure what items on the menu social actors take seriously and which ones they automatically discount. When speaking of the way that social structure shapes social action, conscious rational choice is the exception, not the rule. If it weren’t, then we would be back at the level of intention, and social structure would vanish in a puff of smoke. Even if one side of social structure is only virtual, this doesn’t mean that it must be willed into existence from moment to moment by all the actors whose lives are shaped by it for it to continue to exist. It exists in the preconscious and unconscious social values these actors share, in their structural ideals. These ideals are considerably more durable than the concrete intentions of

Intention, Meaning, and Structure in Social Explanation

77

individual actors, and they sometimes have substantial economic, legal, and political powers backing them up. Let’s pay one last visit to Tom and Mary. Tom’s life is structured in space and time by the social practices of university life. He may bring with him to the university certain class or cultural ideals, and these may continue to influence his actions in part. However, the institution of the university tends to generate its own structural ideals. These include class timetables and the associated assumption of punctuality, an attitude of respect that is generally expected by professors from students, and the sense that education has a positive value either in itself or as a means to the future end of employment. Further, Tom imbibes subconsciously modes of dress and ways of speaking that reflect his status as a stylish male undergraduate at the turn of the century. He wears a Nike cap and shoes, brand-name jeans, and sports an earring, a stylistic ensemble that expresses his solidarity with the mock non-conformity of his friends. As Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, and the rest of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies showed in the seventies (and as I will discuss in the next chapter), such ensembles express various forms of subcultural identity. In this brief interval between childhood and the working world of the adult, Tom wishes to be part of a psuedo-subculture that defies what he sees as the dull conformity of middle-class suburban life (although if he gets his accounting degree and marries Jane, he will enter this world soon enough). Ironically, his identity with this subculture is expressed in modes of dress and deportment that are given to him in the form of structural ideals he blindly accepts: he is, in short, just as much the “victim” of social forces as rest of his undergraduate male friends. Although Tom chooses his way of being for various reasons, which he can to some degree articulate (i.e., he is systemically rational), this way of being is given to him by structural ideals not of his own making (i.e., he is plugged into a sort of teleological rationality of which he is only dimly aware). Of course, by choosing to conform to the modes of dress and deportment of his friends, he helps to keep these ideals alive. Mary’s corporate environment is perhaps more rigorously structured in terms of organizing its employees in space and time. Like Tom’s university environment, Mary’s corporate life hands out status and respect differentially by means of a set of structural ideals that its members generally accept, or at least act in accordance with. We can speak of her corporation as being part of a capitalist

78

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

economic structure insofar as it exists in a network of regular (often competitive) interactions with other conglomerations of actors with similar structural ideals. Mary’s primary motivation in working for Globex Inc. is money, with a tip of her cap to social status. But she, like Tom, presents her body in a specific stylistic ensemble that embodies her acceptance of the structural ideals of her professional position and class. She dresses in power suits and tight skirts, her hair tied tightly back, as if to symbolize the aerodynamic efficiency of her physical self and thus her value to Globex as a performative employee. This ensemble also expresses her social identification and normative connection with corporate life. Further, she revels in the gossipy chit-chat about who’s on the way up and who’s on the way down within Globex’s hierarchy. In fact, this attention to her company’s hierarchy is how she integrates her feminism into her work life: she is a tireless worker for employment equity and for more women in the boardroom. If one were to ask Mary about all of this, she would explain her actions in terms of individual instrumental and normative reasons (i.e., money and sexual solidarity). Yet, like Tom, the network of structural ideals (of dress, deportment, organizational rules, and ideology) within which she lives and works is not of her own making. In summary, Tom and Mary’s intentions govern their social acts, which the social theorist understands as having certain meanings, which meanings sometimes come together to produce certain structures. These structures, taken as real by other actors, then in turn influence their future intentions in an endless feedback loop. Social causality is like the wheel of fortune at a carnival: round and round it goes, and where it stops, nobody can fully know. Before I leave behind my account of social structure, I want to make one last caveat. A social explanation framed solely in terms of social structures would be a very strange beast. Structural accounts of social actions are meaningful only insofar as they are connected with the consciousness of actors and the subjective meanings they assign to their acts. We lose much of the richness of social explanation if we fail to go beyond the level of structure. Structure is not some sort of “occult quality” or deus ex machina that we can pull out of our theoretical hats whenever we are puzzled by a given set of social events. Hume observed a similar tendency in metaphysicians:

Intention, Meaning, and Structure in Social Explanation

79

But as nature seems to have observ’d a kind of justice and compensation in every thing, she has not neglected philosophers more than the rest of the creation; but has reserv’d them a consolation amid all their disappointments and afflictions. This consolation principally consists in their invention of the words faculty and occult quality. For it being usual, after the frequent use of terms, which are really significant and intelligible, to omit the idea, which we wou’d express by them, and to preserve only the custom, by which we recall the idea at pleasure; so it naturally happens, that after the frequent use of terms, which are wholly insignificant and unintelligible, we fancy them to be on the same footing with the precedent, and to have a secret meaning, which we might discover by reflection.…By this means these philosophers set themselves at ease, and arrive at last, by an illusion, at the same indifference, which the people attain by their stupidity, and true philosophers by their moderate scepticism. They need only say, that any phaenomenon, which puzzles them, arises from a faculty or an occult quality, and there is an end of all dispute and enquiry upon the matter. (1888: 224) All the same, social theorists should retain structural explanation as an important weapon in their theoretical arsenal if they hope to fully explain “what happened” in a given phenomenological moment—provided they remind themselves once in a while that a deterministic structure that exists wholly independent of individual consciousnesses is indeed an “occult quality.” This is why I tilted Marx sideways in my introduction, to de-occultize his notion of “real life” from his mythological “material” realm to that of social values and practices. When we see social structure as separate from individual human minds, we are indeed thinking in occult terms. In summary, I see social explanation as requiring the following elements: 1. An account of the individual intentions of the relevant social actors. 2. An account of the social meaning of these acts (as embodied in a narrative). 3. An account of the social structures underlying these individual intentions and the social meaning of these acts.

80

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

4. An acceptance that these three levels of explanation are separate things only in a virtual sense, in the act of analysis, and that in a concrete phenomenological moment they are inextricably intertwined. 5. A regulative and heuristic concept like “structural ideals” to explain how social structure is inculcated in individual acts and in the meanings both the actors and the theorist ascribe to those acts. ——— ••• ——— In my next chapter I will discuss two schools of thought concerning deviance, namely, labelling theory and New Subcultural Theory, and look at how my structural idealist model fits each. My point in doing this is to set up an enriching equilibrium between my own metatheory and these two approaches within the theoretical province of theories of deviance. I believe that in applying the metatheoretical model found in this chapter to deviance theory, we can arrive at a fuller theory than is put forward by either of these perspectives in isolation from each other.

3 A Structural Idealist Interpretation of Theories of Deviance

Labelling/Transactionalist Views of Deviance I now turn to two major schools of thought in the sociology of deviance as case studies of how well my intention/meaning/structure triad works as a general model for social explanation. Firstly, I will examine views of deviance based on symbolic interactionism. These views are usually termed either “labelling theory” or transactional analysis. I will concentrate on two works in this tradition, Howard Becker’s Outsiders, and Stan Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics, keeping in mind that it is suspect to categorize either work, but especially Cohen’s, as being pure instances of labelling theory. Yet at the core of each is a study of how the labelling of certain acts as “deviant” creates subcultural outsiders. The transactionalist sees deviance as the outcome of a process of social interaction wherein a group of people is labelled deviant by those with the power to make rules. This analysis is further fleshed out by looking at what happens to those labelled deviant after the label has been successfully applied by the societal control culture (e.g., the courts, police, mass media, social welfare agencies, etc.). This new approach to deviance has been termed a “skeptical revolution” in that it abandoned the debate over values that dominated sociological thinking on deviance up until the 1960s in favour of focusing on the process of becoming a deviant.1 In many cases, transactionalists “went native” and studied deviant subcultures Notes to chapter 3 are on p. 276.

81

82

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

from within, becoming participant observers, phenomenologically bracketing their own (presumably middle-class) values in order to more fully understand the subcultural rules of the game. Becker’s Outsiders stands as a landmark in this tradition. Becker’s central thesis is that social groups create deviance by making rules whose breaking constitutes deviance, after which they are labelled deviant (1973: 9). Thus deviance is the outcome of a transaction between rule creators and rule breakers. But this labelling of the rule breaker as an “outsider” does not come out of nowhere; it is the result of moral enterprise. Moral entrepreneurs, whether politicians, priests, or media pundits, use whatever publicity-generating techniques they have at their disposal to mobilize social forces in favour of some set of new rules they favour, or to “blow the whistle” on a group that is violating an existing rule. Their enterprise, if successful, results in the creation of a new fragment of the “moral constitution of society” (Becker 1973: 122, 128, 145). Becker’s transactional approach focuses on the intentions of each of the two central players in the sociological drama—the rule makers and the deviants—and how their interactions result in new definitions of acceptable behaviour. As he himself puts it, it has the great merit of refusing to settle for mysterious and invisible forces as explanatory mechanisms (Becker 1973: 193). Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics uses some of the insights of transactional analysis to look at the phenomenon of the rise and fall of a particular pair of folk devils, the Mods and Rockers of mid-sixties England. Cohen sees the creation of “folk devils” as the end product of a successful moral panic engineered by moral entrepreneurs within the societal control culture. The mass media is the main channel of dissemination for a moral panic. The media, with its power to dramatize social life, reports heavily on deviance, telling the public the shape that folk devils can assume. Cohen draws from Lemert the premise that social control leads to deviance, and not vice versa, echoing Becker’s notion that rule creation is a necessary precondition for the creation of outsiders (Cohen 1987: 17, 15). Cohen uses a sequential model adapted from studies of reactions to natural disasters to describe a moral panic. He simplifies the seven-stage model he borrows from these studies to four stages, around which he structures his book: warning, impact, inventory, and reaction (1987: 22). His study of the Mods and Rockers phenomenon moves from the initial warning and impact of the distur-

A Structural Idealist Interpretation of Theories of Deviance

83

bances in the seaside towns of Clacton, Margate, and Brighton in southern England to the “inventory” that the press, national political leaders, local government, and ordinary citizens make of the deviance, to what is really at the core of Cohen’s study, the social reaction to these seaside scuffles with police, petty vandalism, etc. However, in the case of a moral panic, unlike a natural disaster, the model is circular and amplifying, with built-in feedback systems that serve to increase future deviance as society’s control culture reacts to the initial cases of misbehaviour (1987: 24). This leads Cohen in his last chapter to propose a model of deviancy amplification that looks like this: 1. The Initial Social Problem (the structural/cultural position of working-class youth) ----> 2. Initial Solution (deviant acts, deviant styles) ----> 3. Societal Reaction (involving misperception & distortion) ----> 4. Operation of Control Culture/Creation & Exploitation of Stereotypes (sensitization, dramatization, escalation) ----> 5. Increased Deviance, Polarization of Deviant Groups ----> 6. Confirmation of Control Culture’s Stereotypes Part of the amplification effect is the “pyramidal conception of blame and responsibility,” which, tied to the belief that the deviance is just the tip of a more broadly based social malaise, Cohen takes as important prerequisites of a successful moral enterprise (in a conscious attempt to expand on Becker’s own criteria for such an enterprise) (1987: 113). The moral panic emerges only if the local control culture can convince the greater part of society that the local problem is also their problem and that it will not go away unless wider social forces are mobilized against it. Without getting too deeply into the twists and turns of Cohen’s argument, we can summarize his position by looking at the subtitle to his book: deviance in general, and the Mods and Rockers specifically, were created by the reaction of the societal control culture to a disparate collection of acts by hooligans on holiday that in themselves did not constitute anything like the assault on values and property by organized gangs that the press portrayed it as. Becker (1973) deals with two groups of outsiders: the marijuana user and the dance musician. The former case is the more interesting of the two and better illustrates how Becker’s transactionalism works. He suggests that many kinds of deviance are socially learned, the proto-deviant having to be introduced to “new pleas-

84

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

ures” by participating in a subculture organized around these pleasures (Becker 1973: 30). The case of the marijuana user shows how new social interpretations of an ambiguous physical experience (i.e., smoking a joint) creates “deviant motivation” from deviant behaviour, and not vice versa (42). In itself, a marijuana high is morally neutral: moral entrepreneurship must intervene and label the act of smoking a joint as “deviant” before we can speak of “deviancy” as a corrupt element of a person’s character. According to Becker, marijuana use does not continue unless the smoker (a) learns the proper smoking techniques, (b) learns to recognize the effects and connect them with the drug, and (c) learns to enjoy the sensations (58). Naturally, once all of this occurs, the smoker “joins” the deviant subculture of marijuana users, learning in interactions with this subculture such things as how to find a safe supplier of the drug and, how to hide its effects in public, as well as a set of rationalizations with which to defend the use of the drug. Cohen’s book, although it focuses on the scene at English seaside resort communities on mid-1960s holiday weekends, is also a generic primer on moral panics and the creation of folk devils. The successful creation of folk devils involves portraying them as atypical actors against an over-typical background, the labellers drawing on a ready-made stock of images to brand these “atypical” actors as deviant (Cohen 1987: 61, 73). Stereotyping is the key to the creation of folk devils. This takes place by means of a process of symbolization: a word, e.g., “Mod,” become symbolic of a certain status, objects (such as dress) come to symbolize the word, and, finally, these objects themselves become symbolic of a negative status (1987: 40). The whole phenomenon started on a cold and wet Easter weekend at Clacton in 1964, with groups of youths scuffling and throwing stones (the impact), followed by an unorganized local response, and then by the media’s inventory, consisting largely of a gross exaggeration of the seriousness of the events (29, 30). Out of this initial inventory came the invention of the Mods and Rockers as distinctive and hostile groups, despite their common working-class origins and the fact that they were never “gangs” in any meaningful sense (165). Cohen speculates that youth deviance has its origins in the fact that working-class adolescents, faced with leisure goals they could not reach, manufactured their own entertainment, making things happen out of nothing. They were generally aware of the absurdity

A Structural Idealist Interpretation of Theories of Deviance

85

of both their problem and their solution (182). In a word, they were intelligent social actors. The danger that society at large saw in groups like the Mods was that they lived in leisure time, and created themselves as Mods in that time (188). They defined themselves outside of the workplace and thus outside of their usually low-status position in the English economic hierarchy. This leads me to the broader question of the position of transactional theory within the framework I have outlined in the previous chapter. I will come back to this question at the end of the next section, but as a preliminary answer I suggest that transactional theory uses the intentions of the actors it studies to penetrate into the social meaning of their acts. In explaining deviance as the outcome of a labelling process (Becker), and then showing how the process of labelling different groups of adolescents as “deviant” works (Cohen), the focus is on the intentional acts of two groups (the labellers and the labelled), and how these groups interact to produce new social objects (outsiders, folk devils, etc.). There are some important caveats to make at this point, however. Becker notes that those whose position gives them the weapons and power to make and enforce rules are the most successful at doing so, thus tipping his hat to the role of legal and political power in the creation of outsiders (1973: 17). In addition, in his addendum to Folk Devils and Moral Panics, “Labelling Theory Reconsidered,” Cohen tells us that it is a misinterpretation of labelling theory to see it as suggesting that labelling causes deviance: stick-up men don’t stick up people because of having been labelled stick-up men (1973: 181). Nevertheless, the structural element is largely absent from labelling theory. There is certainly enough evidence, at least in Becker’s Outsiders, to suggest that labelling theorists see deviance as a social object that is in some sense “created” by the intentional action of moral entrepreneurs. For Becker, outsiders are manufactured by horrified or Machiavellian paragons of virtue. The case for at least a “passive” structural element being present in Cohen’s work is stronger than for Becker’s. In the Introduction to the 1987 edition of Folk Devils and Moral Panics (the original work came out in 1972), he complains that his book was misinterpreted as implying no need for a structural explanation of deviance, saying that it was more of a study of moral panics than of folk devils (iii). He suggests that the whole beach scene was structured by the lack

86

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

of leisure choices offered to youth by society, and further that “endogenous” factors like the youth culture and the structural position of working-class adolescents are difficult to keep separate from the societal reaction to deviance (183,190). Lastly, Cohen shows how the manipulation of the appropriate symbols by the control culture is made easier when the group under attack is highly visible and structurally weak (which was more the case with the Rockers than the Mods) (198). All of this adds up to a greater sensitivity on Cohen’s part than Becker’s to the structural ideals guiding the actions of each of the players in the drama of deviance. However, structural explanations are kept firmly in the background in both of these transactional studies in favour of the “intentional” route into social meaning. This certainly cannot be said of the other group of social theorists I will examine, to whom I now turn.

New Subcultural Theory The second approach to deviance I want to consider here is what I will call “New Subcultural Theory,” a catch-all term to cover the neo-Marxist sociology that came out of the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies from the early seventies and on. I will focus on two works here: the essays contained in Hall and Jefferson’s germinal work Resistance through Rituals, originally published by the centre itself, and to a lesser degree Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, one of the more powerful statements of the “resistance through rituals” theme. For New Subcultural Theory, “spectacular” British youth subcultures such as the Teddy Boys, the Mods, the Skinheads, and the Punks were attempts by working-class youth to resist the hegemony of bourgeois ideology, as incorporated in their schools, homes, workplaces, and mainstream popular culture, through the magical formula of style (which is taken to include dress, music, slang, and behaviour). Capitalist societies are still riddled with class contradictions; but, as Gramsci suggests, these contradictions are papered over by bourgeois hegemony, which makes the rule of the dominant classes seem natural and normal by reframing all competing definitions of the world within its range of acceptable definitions (Clarke et al. 1976: 38-39). Thus for New Subcultural Theory the struggle between classes on the level of social and material life always assumes a further struggle over the distribution of cultural power.

A Structural Idealist Interpretation of Theories of Deviance

87

Since culture and social structure are intimately linked in New Subcultural Theory, the centre felt it necessary to “de-construct” youth culture as a purely generational phenomenon, to get at its deeper social, economic, and cultural roots, and thereby “re-construct” this youth culture in structural terms (Clarke et al. 1976: 11, 16). There was more going on in youth subcultures, they thought, than a rejection of their parents’ culture. They aimed to do this by looking at post-war youth subcultures in Britain in structural and historical terms, especially in the way that they either resisted or succumbed to the cultural hegemony of the dominant classes (Hall and Jefferson 1976: 5). As the title of their sociological manifesto suggested, the centre found time and time again that these subcultures resisted hegemony through rituals, through the self-defeating but nevertheless magical formula of style.2 This whole project was by and large a reaction to interactionist and transactionalist approaches to deviance, which the centre’s theorists found “naive” in their focus on public labelling as the chief origin of deviance (Hall and Jefferson 1976: 5). As Brian Roberts notes, only rarely did the transactionalists look at the relation between the poor and the powerful in structural rather than interactional terms (1976: 248). Overall, New Subcultural Theory’s search for structural explanations of deviance and skepticism with regards to middleclass values made it critical of both traditional (largely American) subcultural theory and interactionist approaches because of their attempts to frame their analyses in terms of an assumption of the need for some sort of bourgeois social consensus. The fact that these earlier schools of thought largely wanted to preserve this consensus distorted their understanding of deviance. The theoretical foundation for New Subcultural Theory’s analysis of subcultures and style came from Phil Cohen’s work in the early1970s. Cohen concluded that “the latent function of subculture is…to express, albeit ‘magically,’ the contradictions which remain hidden or unresolved in the parent culture” (qtd. in Murdock and McCron 1976: 204). Youth’s expression of class contradictions through subcultural activities was a result of the fact that the life-options for working-class adolescents at work were limited, so they “articulated” their class locations through consumption and leisure (205). Yet it was a class (and not generational) location being expressed all the same. Given the largely mythical quality of the “affluence,” political “consensus,” and the “embourgeoisement” of the working class, themes that dom-

88

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

inated the social analysis of the 1950s and 1960s in Britain, the centre drew attention to the fact that class stubbornly refused to disappear as a major dimension and dynamic of social structure (Clarke et al. 1976: 25). These class locations were “negotiated,” according to New Subcultural Theory, through the construction of distinctive leisure styles (Murdock and McCron 1976: 203). The shared experiences of adolescents in a given location in the social structure were the breeding ground for these styles. As Corrigan and Frith note, postwar youth should not be seen as pop-corrupted teens, as entirely passive consumers, but as “exuberant, proud, belligerent” makers of their own cultures (1976: 237). Even though New Subcultural Theory tends toward structuralism, it still sees social actors as creative and intelligent, and not as dupes of economic forces. Three ways that these cultures were made stand out in the ethnographic section of Resistance through Rituals. Firstly, Tony Jefferson thinks that the Teddy Boys of the fifties, who were sort of English greasers in neo-Edwardian jackets, can be “decoded” as attempting symbolically to defend a constantly declining space and declining status of old working-class neighbourhoods and values (1976: 81). Dick Hedbige sees the Mods of the mid-sixties as trying to compensate for their relatively low daytime economic positions by exercising complete control over their leisure pursuits (1976: 91). Lastly, John Clarke feels that the Skinheads of the early seventies tried to magically recreate, through the football mob and an aggressively proletarian style, a traditional working-class community as a substitute for that community’s real decline (1976a: 99). However, the “magical” solutions to class contradictions created by these subcultures do not address the real material causes of their class subordination. Their solutions are not mounted on their real terrain of economic and political struggles and thus fail to pose a counter-hegemonic challenge to the parent culture (Clarke 1976b: 189). Their importance lies in their winning of space for workingclass youth through the distinctive leisure styles that embody their way of life. This way of life, as I have already hinted, is personified in the creation of subcultural styles. New Subcultural Theory suggests that subcultural groups choose objects for their individual style that are homologous with their central beliefs and activities. There must be some fit between the elements of the style and the way of

A Structural Idealist Interpretation of Theories of Deviance

89

life it personifies. A group must be able to recognize itself in the repressed meanings of the symbolic objects that go into making the style (Clarke 1976b: 179). As Dick Hebdige claims in Subculture, the punks (who postdate the earlier Resistance through Rituals essays) constructed a homologous ensemble of symbolic objects out of “the trashy cut-up clothes and spiky hair, the pogo and amphetamines, the spitting, the vomiting, the format of the fanzines, the insurrectionary poses and the ‘soulless’, frantically driven music” (1979: 114). The self-consciousness and self-image of the punk subculture was expressed in the elements of dress, language, music, and behaviour, which punks cobbled together to produce their own unique style. A central element in New Subcultural Theory’s analysis of style is the fact that adherents of subcultures are not just passive consumers. When they appropriate a commodity, they redefine its use and value, and thereby relocate its meaning within a different context (Hebdige 1976: 93). They are, in short, bricoleurs.3 “Bricolage” involves an individual or group taking objects with already “sedimented” meanings and reordering or reconstructing them so as to communicate fresh meanings (Clarke 1976b: 177). Whether it is the punk’s safety pins, the mod’s stylish jacket, or the skinhead’s braces and boots, subculture is read by New Subcultural Theory as undermining the traditional meanings of social objects through their stylistic ensembles. The point of this undermining exercise is to communicate group identity and significant difference, both from other subcultural groupings and from mainstream culture (Hebdige 1979: 102; Clarke 1976b: 180). These differences serve as a convenient hook for the media (and the control culture as a whole) to latch on to in their efforts to stigmatize subcultures as evidence of a more general social malaise, sometimes leading to the sort of moral panics Cohen talked about. Dick Hebdige describes the meaning of subcultural style as even more explicitly confrontational that do most of the other centre theorists: Moreover commodities can be symbolically “repossessed” in everyday life, and endowed with implicitly oppositional meanings, by the very groups who originally produced them…the challenge to hegemony which subcultures represent is not issued directly by them. Rather it is

90

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

expressed obliquely, in style.…Our task becomes, like Barthes’, to discern the hidden messages inscribed in code on the glossy surfaces of style, to trace them out as “maps of meaning” which obscurely re-present the very contradictions they are designed to resolve or conceal. (1979: 16-18) Hebdige is clearly interested in the social meanings contained within subcultural styles. Yet unlike the interactionists, he will read these meanings through structurally tinted sunglasses. Under Hedbige’s schema, subcultural style acts as a coded response to community changes (1979: 80). Indeed, “coding” (and the need for decoding) is one of the key contributions of New Subcultural Theory to the analysis of subcultural styles. It linked these codes back to their structural roots, usually class. The subculture Hebdige discusses the most in his book are the punks, largely working-class kids whose stylistic ensemble (e.g., safety pins, ripped T-shirts) involved icons living a double life, reflecting in heightened form their perceived condition of exile from the parent culture and from other recent subcultures (1979: 65-66). Sadly, as one can imagine from Hebdige’s general tone, these symbolic acts of resistance to hegemony are destined to self-destruct, as the original innovations of the style become frozen commodities for sale at the local mega-mart. Hebdige concludes that youth “cultural styles may begin by issuing symbolic challenges, but they must inevitably end by establishing new sets of conventions” (1979: 96). The engine of consumer capitalism consumes these styles and spits them back out as mass-produced objects no longer tied to the counter-hegemonic meanings they originally signified.4 For New Subcultural Theory, commodities have no distinct meaning in and of themselves: they are “social hieroglyphs,” as Marx put it. This raises the broader question of how New Subcultural Theory connects meaning and structure in its analysis of class and subcultural styles. The centre’s theorists admit that commodities are cultural signs that often seem to have fixed and natural meanings, but quickly add that this is an illusion, and that they “mean” something only because they have been arranged within cultural codes that assign meanings to them (Clarke et al. 1976: 55). They thus add to Marx’s social hieroglyph just a bit of Derrida’s floating signifier when it comes to interpreting stylistic ensembles. A couple of cases

A Structural Idealist Interpretation of Theories of Deviance

91

in point help to show how New Subcultural Theory connects structure and meaning in explaining deviance. The way the Teddy Boys dressed is seen by Tony Jefferson as a symbolic way of negotiating with their social reality, of giving “cultural meaning to their social plight” (1976: 86). Their snappy river-boat gambler image acted as a compensation for the loss of both physical and ideological space by, and the implicit “humiliation” of, the metropolitan English working class in the 1950s. Jumping ahead twenty years, Hebdige sees lurking beneath the “clownish makeup” of the punks “the unaccepted and disfigured face of capitalism; that beyond the horror circus antics a divided and unequal society was being eloquently condemned” (1979: 115). He saw the punks as mirroring the inequality, powerlessness, and especially the alienation of bourgeois society in their decisive break not only with the parent culture but with their own location in experience (1979: 121). In a word, New Subcultural Theory sees the meaning of subcultural style as expressing in code class contradictions, exhibiting from the fifties to the seventies an increasing alienation by working-class youth from bourgeois hegemony in Britain. The meaning of subcultural styles lies in the fragmented structures that gave them birth. One of the best summaries of New Subcultural Theory, which is at the same time a powerful critique of it, came in Stan Cohen’s 1987 introduction to the new edition of his Folk Devils and Moral Panics. Although to some degree sympathetic to the work of the centre, he attacks New Subcultural Theory principally on four grounds: (a) that it fails to connect the symbolic elements of subcultural style with the conscious intentions of its bearers; (b) that New Subcultural Theory’s decoding technique is too free-ranging and unverifiable; (c) that it is ideologically remote from concrete interactions; and (d) that it over-romanticizes the youthful deviant. Taking these one at a time, Cohen feels that New Subcultural Theory’s focus on the structural underpinnings of subcultures brings the social theorists’ too far away from the subjective consciousness of the actor, suggesting that their focus on historical and structural explanations relieves them of having to show that the symbolic meanings of subcultural styles are actually a part of the awareness of their bearers (1987: xiv). This I read as the claim that New Subcultural Theory too often severs the connection between subjective intention and social meaning, certainly a valid criticism.

92

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Secondly, Cohen questions the whole “decoding” technique: Above all else, the new theories about British post war youth cultures are massive exercises of decoding, reading, deciphering, and interrogating. These phenomena must be saying something to us—if only we could know exactly what. So the whole assembly of cultural artefacts, down to the punks’ last safety pin, have been scrutinized, taken apart, contextualized and re-contextualized. The conceptual tools of Marxism, structuralism and semiotics, a Left-Bank pantheon of Genet, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes and Althusser have all been wheeled out to aid in this hunt for the hidden code. The result has been an ingenious and, more often than not, plausible reading of subcultural style as a process of generating, appropriating and re-ordering to communicate new and subversive meaning. (1987: ix) As one can see, Cohen is partly sympathetic to these decoding exercises, but with serious reservations. For example, he questions (with good reason) New Subcultural Theory’s decoding of subcultural styles purely in terms of resistance and never in terms of accommodation to the parent culture (1987: xii). This second problem feeds back into the first, for the effectiveness of decoding is in large part tied to the theorist’s remaining true to the intentional content of the symbols used by subculture members. The third and fourth elements in Cohen’s critique are New Subcultural Theory’s ideological remoteness from and romanticism towards the youthful deviants it studies. Cohen thinks that this remoteness leads to premature ideological closure, for the intellectual pyrotechnics of New Subcultural Theory are too cerebral and remote from the “emotional tone” of the actual deviant acts (1987: xxiv, xix). He seems to suggest that a bit of participant observation (Cohen himself was at some of the English seaside resorts on holiday weekends in the mid-sixties, interviewing his “folk devils” on the scene) would cure the centre’s theorists of their structuralist decoding excesses. Lastly, Cohen takes aim squarely at Hebdige’s celebration of the Punk Refusal and other subcultural “resistance” as involving a romanticization of delinquents as the “vanguard” of the revolution to come (1987: xxvi). New Subcultural Theory’s neoMarxist reading of working-class subcultures as centres of resist-

A Structural Idealist Interpretation of Theories of Deviance

93

ance, if not as proto-revolutionary, certainly opens the door to this sort of romanticism. So how can we situate labelling theory and New Subcultural Theory? I suggest that we can map these two schools of thought with respect to social deviance onto my intention/meaning/structure theoretical network (see Chart 4). Chart 4. Mapping Deviance Theory Labelling Theory ====================> <-----------------INTENTION

MEANING

STRUCTURE

-----------------> <==================== New Subcultural Theory

Labelling theory sees the social meaning of deviancy as largely the product of intentional interactions between potential (i.e., not yet labelled) deviants and the societal control culture, especially moral entrepreneurs. New Subcultural Theory reads (or decodes) the social meaning of subcultural style and culture, which it sees quite rightly as “maps of meaning,” from the symbolic objects created by actors within a given historical/structural location. It reads biography through structurally tinted glasses. My claim is a simple one: that both theories make a valuable contribution to the understanding of deviance, but that both are self-limiting and therefore “provincial” theories. Labelling theory makes little attempt to understand the causes of deviance in terms of the structural ideals that distribute power and resources within late capitalism. New Subcultural Theory romanticizes the working class and its deviant subcultures, using structuralist and poststructuralist parlour tricks to remove stylistic ensembles from the intentions of their bearers. We need an integrated theory that borrows elements from both the transactionalists and the structuralists to fully explain deviance. This integrated theory would pay close attention to the actors’ intentions, the cultural (including the ideological) seedbed of their acts, along with the social structures, notably class, that act as both the background and the consequences of these acts. As I argued in my previous chapter, social meaning is the product of an interaction between the intentions of the relevant actors and the structuring ideals that preconsciously

94

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

and unconsciously shape their actions. So we should “hit the beach” (as Stan Cohen did) with deviants such as the Mods and Rockers and ask them why they’re smashing up shop windows and fighting with the police; but we must also take some time to sit back in our bureaus and interpret what they’ve told us, trying to sort out the structural values underlying their reasons for acting as they did, along with the dominant structural ideals their deviancy challenges.

A Structural Idealist Understanding of Deviance and the Question of Causality Looking at deviance from the point of view of structural idealism would involve approaching concrete cases of deviance on three levels: a. The intentions of the deviants: what did they think they were doing? How well do these intentions jibe with their behaviour? b. The meaning of the deviant acts, including how their deviance is shaped by social reaction, how their acts lead to social consequences beyond their original intentions, how subcultural stylistic ensembles take on a meaning expressing the basic beliefs and solidarity of a given social grouping, and (although one must be cautious about this) the degree to which we can see deviance as a form of social and political resistance to dominant ideologies and cultures. c. The structural context of the deviant acts, i.e., where deviance (including its stylistic component) comes from, and what sort of structural ideals operate to shape the case of deviancy under investigation, including those ideals which the deviancy in question threatens. If we are able to penetrate into deviance on all three levels, in terms of the intentions of the individual deviants, the social meanings produced by deviance, and the extent to which we can offer a structural etiology of the deviant acts, we can offer a full explanation of the phenomenon. However, most social theory looks at only a partial slice of the full spectrum of social acts. It would be well if we abandoned this provincialism in social explanation, even if it

A Structural Idealist Interpretation of Theories of Deviance

95

involves a further abandonment of sharp and distinct divisions between theoretical camps. Social theory must allow its panoptic gaze to linger over the entire length, breadth, and height of human social behaviour to explain it fully. The idea that the meaning of an act can escape the actor’s intentions pushes us to consider an important related issue in social theory, namely, the question of levels of causality. The bulk of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is taken up in an extended defence of the idea that spiritual factors, notably the worldly asceticism of the Protestant sects, favoured the development of a rational bourgeois economic life. At the end of the Protestant Ethic, Weber adds the caveat that it is also necessary to see how Protestant asceticism was influenced by the totality of social conditions, especially economic ones, but that he had no desire to substitute a one-sided materialistic causal explanation of culture for an equally one-sided spiritualistic one (1958: 183). This raises the whole question of how ideas influence social and economic conditions, and vice versa. I do not think that we can solve this problem in any final way, especially not on the level of theory alone. However, if we see the intention/meaning/structure analytical network as offering three distinct but linked avenues into any given phenomenological moment, then we may be able to suggest armistice terms to the warring parties in this dispute. On the level of intention, our primary focus must be on the ideas that influence action. On the level of structure, greater attention must be paid to the economic and other material arrangements within the agent’s society. The importance of interpreting an act’s meaning in this regard lies in the theorist’s judgment of how to weigh, respectively, the ideational and material factors influencing the way the phenomenological moment under investigation was played out by the actors involved. In this sense, the spiritual superstructure/material substructure debate that comes out of Marxist theory is a theoretical Northern Ireland, where all the parties to the conflict disdain the company of each other and, collectively, refuse compromise. We can usefully see the debate between economic determinism and voluntaristic subjectivism as grounded in a pretheoretical decision to favour either structure or intention as the primary way into social analysis. Yet if we can keep our levels of analysis clear to start with, we may be able, to a large degree, to defuse this conflict. For example,

96

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

if we’re aware that in a given case of social analysis we’re more interested in the actors’ intentions than broader social forces, we can legitimately focus on how their subjective ideas influenced their actions. It’s all a matter of which analytical language-game we want to play when we do social theory. Naturally, if we want a rich picture of the field of social action under study, we’ll have to enter into these acts on all three levels, via intention, meaning, and structure. All of this can be applied to the more limited field of deviance studies by way of suggesting a methodological imperative that commands the theorist to approach the phenomena of deviance via each of these three levels, and then showing how they interact. This is what I mean by a structural idealist theory of deviance. The causality and agency/structure debates within sociology serve to illustrate the thesis that the taking up of a position usually involves the staking out of a theoretical domain in a search for cultural and intellectual capital. The sharper, more clearly defined, and more novel the position, the greater the potential rewards for its holder in terms of this capital (as long as one’s position isn’t completely mad). If I am right about the need to approach social explanation from all three of the levels discussed in the previous and present chapters, it behooves social theorists to swallow their pride and accept the fact that a complete case of social explanation will not garner them these longed-for rewards, for such an explanation is not likely to be reducible to a neat bundle of causes contained within a single category (e.g., the “economic”). Completeness and intellectual honesty, not fame, will be the prize for such an effort. More concretely, deviance theory should focus on control and power in their various manifestations. This control is both structural and of discourse, of group labels. Those who control the media, the police, academia, and public opinion in general control the dominant culture’s structural ideals and thus the meaning of subcultural “deviance” (whether it is a legitimate rebellion against the mass conformity of modern industrial and bureaucratic societies, or the work of hooligans and druggies who have nothing better to do with their time). The social theorist should live in an atmosphere of a constant shifting of focus between the stated intentions of members of the subculture or deviant group under study and the structural roots of the group or subculture’s behaviour. The balance point of this methodological see-saw, rocking back and forth between agency and structure, is the meaning of the deviance. Labelling the-

A Structural Idealist Interpretation of Theories of Deviance

97

orists sit on one end of this teeter-totter, the new subcultural theorists on the other, each seeking to swing the interpretation of deviance towards their own end. We should instead seek out that elusive middle position, from which we can access both the intentional and the structural elements of social theory by paying close attention to the social meaning of deviant acts.

4 Reconstructing the Past A Structural Idealist Approach1

The central epistemological question in the philosophy of history is how we can know the past. In this chapter I will try to answer this question by rehabilitating R. G. Collingwood’s philosophy of history by means of situating it within a structural idealist framework. I will take Collingwood’s re-enactment thesis both as an a priori condition for historical knowledge and as a serious methodological statement, showing its weaknesses as such, and then go on to reformulate it as a “reconstruction” thesis that I believe more fully expresses what the historian does in writing history. By adding a structural component to his re-enactment thesis, by attacking the intuitionist interpretation of the thesis, and lastly by widening the standard definition of the thought that the historian re-enacts in constructing historical narratives, we can generate a theory of history that can serve us on two fronts: on the philosophical side as an a priori foundation for historical knowledge, and on the historical side as a working methodology for the interpretation of evidence and the construction of narratives. Further, I believe that the reconstruction thesis also applies to social theory and sociological research. Yet in this field it is not so much a description of what the average sociologist actually does as what he or she should do if they wish to fully describe the phenomena they are dealing with. Purely statistical analyses of social phenomena by sociologists tend to avoid any real attempt to re-enact the thoughts of those being studied, although the symbolic interacNotes to chapter 4 are on pp. 276-78.

99

100

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

tionists come close to invoking a Collingwoodian method in their work. I have tried to show, in the last two chapters, the importance of balancing intention, meaning, and structure in social explanation. I will now focus my efforts on the philosophy of history (although these are by no means neatly separable). So let’s turn the intellectual clock back to Collingwood’s starting point, to his methodological idealism and his idea of re-enactment.

Collingwood’s Re-enactment Thesis In his Idea of History and Autobiography, Collingwood states quite clearly the three premises of his philosophy of history: a. All history is the history of thought. b. This thought must be re-enacted in the mind of the historian. c. This re-enactment is not a passive process, but a critical one. The thought being re-enacted is that which is incapsulated in present thought. (Collingwood 1946: 215; 1939: 110-14) Collingwood sees history as a science that seeks answers to questions about human actions in the past, a science whose method is the interpretation of evidence and whose goal is human self-knowledge (1946: 10-11). This clear suggestion that the basic method of history is the interpretation of evidence, added to his various descriptions of the re-enactment thesis, will lead me to a “hybrid” methodological interpretation of this thesis. This interpretation sees the re-enactment thesis as, simultaneously, both a description of the goal of historical inquiry and as one way of going about actually interpreting the evidence chosen as relevant to that goal. The actual re-enactment thesis received a number of formulations in Collingwood’s writings. But one can date it back, at least in a rough-and-ready version, to an article on Roman Britain he contributed to a popular magazine of 1925: Get a Roman road, or, for that matter, any road, under your feet, and you enter into the spirit of the men who made it; you see the country through their eyes; you get into your bones a feeling—obscure, perhaps, but powerful

Reconstructing the Past

101

and unmistakable—of what they meant to do with the country and how they meant to do it. (Collingwood qtd. in van der Dussen 1981: 321) Even here we see Collingwood’s methodological idealism at work: if you want to know why a historical event took place, try to figure out what the historical actors were thinking at the time. Later, in an essay on Oswald Spengler published in 1927, Collingwood chides the German historian for not being able to enter into the spirit of classical culture, which he feels is possible only by putting oneself in the shoes of classical historical agents and rethinking for oneself their thoughts (1965c: 71). Lastly, in The Idea of History, he says (in speaking of Michael Oakeshott) that the historian must look to a living past, “a past which, because it was thought and not mere natural event, can be re-enacted in the present and in that re-enactment known as past” (1946: 158). Historians must re-enact past thought in its widest sense in their own mind to know the past. They become historians of, say, the Theodosian Code or of ancient philosophy only insofar as they can rethink and understand the problems that Theodosius or the ancient philosopher faced themselves (1946: 282-83).2 This, needless to say, is very Weberian in spirit: we have to understand the subjective meaning historical actors attributed to their acts to understand and explain those acts in the present. Moving to the nuts and bolts of the thesis, we find Collingwood, in his unpublished notes of 1926 and 1928, emphasizing the “ideality of history.” He says in the former (“Lectures on the Philosophy of History,” quoted in van der Dussen 1981: 138) that “the present alone is actual; the past and future are ideal”; while in the latter (“Outlines of a Philosophy of History,” qtd. in van der Dussen 1982: 142) he suggests that our knowledge of the past is not that of an actual object, but only “the reconstruction of an ideal object in the interest of knowing the present.” There are no past facts “except so far as we reconstruct them in historical thought” (142); this re-enactment of the past in the present “is the past itself so far as that is knowable to the historian” (qtd. in Nielsen 1981: 13). Thus an important element of Collingwood’s first approximations to his mature philosophy of history is this sense that present historical thinking can deal with ideal objects only. These objects become “real” when re-enacted in the present mind of the historian.3 Of course, if we take this notion

102

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

of the ideality of history literally, we’re not re-enacting the past at all, but merely commenting on the present. Shifting back to The Idea of History, one finds Collingwood claiming that the thoughts historians re-enact are in a sense “outside” time and “outside” the temporal flow of consciousness (1946: 217, 287). If they were not, but were instead irretrievably “past,” they could not be thought in the present. They would be opaque relics. This peculiar character of thought allows historians to re-enact past thoughts just as they originally were, provided they restrict themselves to the reenactment of the thought involved in rational, purposive actions. Unlike memory, which presents the past as a “mere spectacle,” in historical thinking the past thought being re-enacted as present thought can become part of historical knowledge (1946: 293). Intimately tied into the re-enactment thesis is Collingwood’s famous but troublesome “inside/outside” distinction. The outside of a historical event is bodies and their movements, while the inside of the event is thought. The historian is enjoined to investigate not the mere events (i.e., the outsides), but actions, the unity of the inside and the outside. The events of nature are mere events, presenting us with a spectacle (1946: 213, 214). They can be investigated by the natural sciences. Those of history, having a thought-side, can be rethought and thus understood by the historian. They are historical acts. Here Collingwood is echoing the distinction made by late-nineteenth-century German thinkers like Windelband between the natural and human sciences, between nomothetic and idiographic modes of inquiry. Clearly, Collingwood sees history as a Geisteswissenschaft, a human science, whose focus is the intentions and values held by historical actors. Once again, he is thus echoing Weber’s call for social theory to focus on the subjective meaning of social acts in trying to understand them. This distinction has led to several early interpretations of Collingwood as an “intuitive methodologist,” notably by Patrick Gardiner (1959) and W. H. Walsh (1967). The intuitionist interpretation sees Collingwood as putting forward the need for empathy and intuitive insight as the historian’s primary methodological tools. Gardiner sees the re-enactment thesis and the act/event distinction as asking the historian to look via something akin to telepathy into the mind of the historical agent; he sees Collingwood as positing a peculiar entity (thought) housed in a peculiar container, which the historian gets at by some form of intuition (1959: 213).

Reconstructing the Past

103

Walsh is more kindly disposed, but he criticizes Collingwood for thinking that we understand past thought by means of a single intuitive leap instead of interpreting and reinterpreting a growing body of evidence in the light of general truths (1967: 58). The sections “The Historical Imagination” and “Historical Evidence” in The Idea of History provide a full-blown description of historical method that is self-confessedly Baconian in spirit, and which refutes the intuitionists: evidence is what counts in answering historical questions, and not intuitions. In the latter section Collingwood likens history to criminal detection, which proceeds by asking intelligent questions about the evidence before the investigator. Nothing is evidence except in relation to some specific question (1946: 268, 281). When investigating a crime scene, a detective may be faced with many potential clues: is the green fleck of paint on the garden fence of relevance to the crime? or the discarded glove in the flowerbed? or the scrap of paper with “meet John at 2 PM” written on it found crumpled up in the wastebin? These are all of relevance if they help to answer certain types of questions—e.g., was the house recently painted green? is the gardener a suspect in the crime? is the discarded note in the handwriting of the victim? The historian should follow Bacon’s lead in putting nature to the question both by taking the initiative with a question and by devising tortures to get her to answer (1946: 269). Shifting analogies slightly, he asks the historian to put the historical authorities in the witness box and cross-examine them (1946: 237). Collingwood argues that whether it’s a historian, a police detective, or a crossexamining attorney, intelligent questions must be asked if we are to make the evidence at hand “speak” to us, if we are to compel it to give us true historical knowledge. The difficult part comes when he suggests that after this questioning of the evidence historians construct their narratives by means of their “a priori imagination.” He says that it gives a historical narrative continuity by bridging gaps and is structural as opposed to ornamental (1946: 241). Narrative creates a structure of historical understanding, as opposed to merely adding colour to the “facts in themselves” (supposing that there are such things). This bridging of gaps Collingwood attempts to picture as a web of imaginative construction stretched out between “fixed points” provided by historical authorities, although he quickly reverses this description in noting that the fixed points are not all that

104

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

fixed, also being the product of the historian’s imagination (1946: 242-43). This whole idea of the a priori imagination and the imaginative web as central to historical explanation seems a bit nebulous until we explicitly connect Collingwood’s Baconian reliance on evidence with what he sees as the goal of historical investigation, a goal that colours the methodology itself, namely, the reenactment of past thought. To reiterate, one thing is quite clear from Collingwood’s philosophy of history, although this may seem a trivial observation to the practising historian: that historical explanation depends on evidence (as opposed to any sense of history as aiming at a mystical, intuitive insight into past events). We can see this throughout his work: in the early essay “The Limits of Historical Knowledge,” where he says that in the game of history the player must support his position with evidence (1965e: 97); in the 1930 essay “The Philosophy of History,” where he says that the interpretation of evidence and the principles of historical method exist together or not at all (1965g: 136-37); in An Essay on Metaphysics, where what he calls the “historian’s rubric” is that “the evidence at our disposal obliges us to conclude that” X or Y happened (1940: 55); and finally in The Idea of History, especially in the section entitled “Historical Evidence,” which outlines how the historian uses the evidence at his or her disposal to reconstruct a historical event along the same lines as a detective reconstructs a crime. Thus Collingwood’s primary methodological injunction is to look to the evidence. It is true that the questions historians ask determine what counts as evidence for them. This is what Collingwood meant by his third principle of history: re-enactment of the past must be a critical, active process. Yet once historians ask their questions, they are led by them to a body of evidence appropriate to answering them. The re-enactment of past thought is not possible at all without the appropriate evidence; in its absence, there is no past thought to re-enact. So evidence is constitutive of past thought, and thus of historical knowledge. It may be the case that the “idea of history” is part of the furniture of the historian’s mind (1946: 248), but as any good interior decorator knows, the furniture must suit the room in which it is placed, and this room is defined for historians by their evidence.4 We are now led to a second group of interpreters, those who see the re-enactment thesis not as a methodological rule, but as sort of a “transcendental deduction” of historical knowledge, an a priori

Reconstructing the Past

105

principle of historical understanding. Alan Donagan, in his “Verification of Historical Theses” (1957: 199, 203), tries to show how Collingwood’s interpreters have mistaken a description of an element in the goal of historical inquiry for a description of historical method, a way of verifying historical theses. He prefers to see the thesis as describing the conditions under which historical knowledge is possible. William Dray (1980: 22) sees rethinking as a thesis not about the procedure but the goal of historical inquiry. Lastly, in his magnum opus on Collingwood’s philosophy of history, History as a Science (1981: 312), W. J. van der Dussen claims that the thesis should be seen “in the context of a transcendental analysis of the universal and necessary characteristics of the science of history.” He feels that this “transcendental principle” interpretation of the re-enactment thesis is strongly supported by the unpublished materials he has analyzed in detail in the book, a conclusion that Nielsen (1981) disputes. Yet this new school of interpretation wishes to have its Baconian cake on the question of methodology and, transcendentally speaking, eat it too. Both in The Idea of History and in his assorted historical works, Collingwood tries to show the reader that the whole point of paying close attention to the evidence is to explain what was going on in the past, and that the past we are trying to explain is past thought, the only realm of experience open to the historian. The search for, and interpretation of, evidence is not a passive act of absorption but an active rethinking of the thoughts embodied in that evidence.5 Thus re-enactment is both a goal of historical inquiry and a vital (although not the only) component of its method. With this joining of a Baconian search for evidence to his principle of all history being the history of thought, we come to a third school of interpretation, which we can loosely call that of the non-intuitive or Baconian methodologists. Goldstein sees the re-enactment thesis as an attempt to reconstitute the historical past, the what of history, having nothing to do with explanation, the why of past events. Looking at Collingwood’s history of Roman Britain, Goldstein suggests that only through reenactment is the evidence at hand converted into human action (1972: 244, 261). Margit Nielsen, who along with van der Dussen is a relatively new player in the Collingwood hermeneutical sweepstakes, sees the thesis as a non-intuitive, constructivist methodology. She links the theme of sections 2 and 3 of the epilegomena of

106

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

The Idea of History, “reconstruction by the interpretation of evidence,” to that of section 4, “the re-enactment of past experience,” to provide a unified theory of Collingwood’s methodology of history (1981: 31, 24). This third school I believe hits closest to the mark. Needless to say, the historian’s prime job is to interpret whatever evidence is at hand. However, as Collingwood points out clearly in his Autobiography (1939: 128), historical evidence has to be seen as connected to human thoughts or purposes, to human “action” in some sense of that term, to be historical evidence in the first place. Thus the historian’s “method” is simultaneously a Baconian search for evidence and an interpretation of that evidence. It is an attempt to understand the past thoughts of historical agents, to “rethink” them in the light of the evidence (both written and unwritten), including that provided by other historical narratives. Thus evidence and rethinking are mutually parasitical, since human action, seen as the manifestation of thought, is what, strictly speaking, all historical evidence is evidence for. So when historians attempt to construct a historical narrative, they must look to the evidence. Yet that evidence counts as evidence only if we can get at the human thought behind it, the human purposes it embodies. So one could say metaphorically that for Collingwood, re-enactment brings evidence alive, shines the light of understanding on dead objects. This seems to be what he means by the a priori imagination: not flights of fantasy into some ethereal inner realm, but a critical re-thinking of the past.

Problems with the Thesis Scholars have found there to be a number of problems associated with the re-enactment thesis. Assuming that the intuitionist/sympathy model of historical explanation is as unfairly attributed to Collingwood as I have claimed it to be in the previous section, we are left with five serious critiques of Collingwood’s position (with [4] and [5] representing my own extensions of other scholars’ critiques): 1. His excessive rationalism and the inability of the re-enactment thesis to deal with past emotions and impulsive action. His thesis seems to focus on rational, self-conscious, purposive actions only. This may also leave him unable to explain the effect of natural events on human action.

Reconstructing the Past

107

2. His wrong-headed rejection of psychoanalysis (and to a lesser degree psychology as a whole) as irrelevant to the historian’s project, and his related rejection of an embodied self as part of the subject matter of history. 3. His inability to deal with mass phenomena, including social and economic history, because of the presumed methodological individualist bias of his philosophy of history. 4. His failure to deal with unintended consequences and the structuredness of everyday life. 5. Doubts about whether a historical narrative constructed according to the a priori imagination can be claimed to be “true,” independent of the historian’s social and cultural position (the relativism problem).6 All five of these critiques of the thesis have some merit, yet all five of them have been answered at least in part by Collingwood himself. I will attempt to sift the critical wheat from the chaff of misunderstanding by reviewing each critique in turn. As far as critique 1 goes, there is ample evidence in The Idea of History and elsewhere that Collingwood did believe that only rational, purposive action can be re-enacted. He says there that the only subject matter of history is reflective thought. Reflective acts, he suggests, “may be roughly described as the acts which we do on purpose,” the only acts that can be the subject matter of history (1946: 308-309). Later, he tells us that just as historical thought is free from the domination of natural science, the rational activity that is uniquely historical is free from the domination of nature (1946: 318). There is no history of purely natural events, but only of self-conscious thought (1946: 302, 306). The initial picture one gets from The Idea of History is that of a radical divorce between a rational human mind and the irrational natural background for that mind’s activities. History deals with human actions, while the natural sciences explain events in nature, usually under classificatory schemes. We can find evidence of Collingwood’s rationalism elsewhere in his works. In An Essay on Metaphysics, he states that of the three types of causality that he outlines, only historical causality deals with human actions. Here is his definition of this sense of the word cause: “that which is ‘caused’ is the free and deliberate act of a conscious and responsible agent, and ‘causing’ him to do it means affording him a motive for doing it” (1940: 285).

108

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

This leads Dray (1966: 44) to identify causes with reasons for Collingwood, placing him firmly within the anti-naturalist hermeneutical tradition. Under this interpretation, all history has to do with human rationality, at least in its “systemic” variety (see chapter 2). In his Autobiography, in a discussion of archaeological method, Collingwood says that for the archaeologist all objects (broken pottery, coins, scrolls, etc.) must be interpreted in terms of thoughts or purposes, with an event like the eruption of Mount Vesuvius being historical only insofar as people reacted to it (127-28). This has led some unsympathetic interpreters to claim that Collingwood is unable to show how natural phenomena have influenced human history, despite evidence to the contrary in his histories of ancient Britain (e.g., a long description of the geography of the British Isles in one work). Leaving aside his rationalism for a moment, Collingwood can be easily cleared of the latter charge. If a people live on an island, it is not the island itself that has an effect on their history, but the way that they regard the seas as a barrier or a highway to traffic. Had it been otherwise, their insular position, being a constant fact, would have produced a constant effect on their historical life.…In itself, it is merely a raw material for historical activity, and the character of historical life depends on how this raw material is used. (1946: 200) His point is simple enough: the physical circumstances that a people find themselves in do not determine in a rigid way their actions, but offer them a continuum of choice, which will result in different outcomes at different places and times. The history of his own country clearly illustrates this: whatever one thinks of the Empire, one cannot deny that from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries the British were a dynamic people, exploring the globe and trading in all corners of the earth. Their island was certainly no barrier: quite the opposite. Nature is part of history, but only as mediated by human thoughts and purposes, just like the archaeologist’s pottery shards. These shards are in themselves mute. They can be be made to speak, according to Collingwood, only by discerning the thoughts and purposes that went into the construction of their unfragmented originals.7 Returning to the central theme, Louis Mink thinks that critique 1 refers to a “fictional” Collingwood, a bull-headed rationalist (among

Reconstructing the Past

109

other things), and further that we can hunt down several important “recessive principles” in his work, one of which is that re-enactment does not exclude emotions, will, etc. (1972: 155-57). Mink claims that if we look to Collingwood’s other works, especially The New Leviathan and The Principles of Art, we can find a four-stage model of the mind: pure feeling, appetite, desire, and will. Only acts on the fourth level of consciousness can be re-enacted, although these acts of will “carry the freight” of the other three levels within them (Mink 1969: 167). These other levels are like “hidden faces in the clouds” that survive into the fourth level of consciousness, and thus enter into history via the historian’s re-enactment of past thought on this level (Mink 1972: 157). Although the work of an industrious and inventive scholar, Mink’s attempt to save Collingwood from an excessive rationalism by reconstructing his late theory of mind seems to fly in the face of most of his positive pronouncements in his early essays and lectures and in The Idea of History on the non-re-enactability of instinctive and irrational actions. Yet it is true that we can find flashes of antirationalist insight scattered throughout Collingwood’s works. In the unpublished “Outlines of a Philosophy of History,” he says that all history is the history of thought, where thought is “used in its widest sense and includes all the conscious activities of the human spirit” (qtd. in Nielsen 1981: 14), an injunction he repeats in a watered-down version in The Idea of History, where he says simply that the historian must discover thought in its widest sense (1946: 282). On the question of purposiveness, he attacks the Greeks and Romans for their rational humanism, saying that the idea that an agent is wholly responsible for everything he or she does is naive and “ignores certain important regions in moral experience” (1946: 41). On the next page, he partially mitigates his own excesses in noting: Most human action is tentative, experimental, directed not by a knowledge of what it will lead to but rather by a desire to know what will come of it.…The ethical thought of the Greco-Roman world attributed far too much to the deliberate plan or policy of the agent, far too little to the force of a blind activity embarking on a course of action without foreseeing its end and being led to that end only through the necessary development of that course itself. (1946: 42)

110

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

However, these insights swim against the tide of Collingwood’s general emphasis on rational, planned actions. All in all, he tries to close the circle as tightly as possible around these rational, purposive actions as the only ones that are re-enactable, no doubt hoping for increased theoretical and methodological rigour by so doing. However, he would be well advised to follow the precept of his countryman G. M. Trevelyan that the historian’s job is to recover the thoughts of past actors in their full emotional and intellectual value (1930: 143, 151). This the re-enactment thesis in its original form is ill-equipped to do. On the role of psychology and embodiment (critique 2), Collingwood is even clearer. He says of the former that it can deal with only the irrational elements of the psyche, the blind forces (e.g., sensations, feelings, and appetites) that are a part of human life but not of human history (1946: 231). The historian is not so much interested in such animal appetites as eating, sleeping, and sex as in the “social customs which they create by their thought as a framework within which these appetites find satisfaction in a way sanctioned by convention and morality” (1946: 216). This distinction between the provinces of the mind dealt with by philosophy and history on the one hand, and psychology on the other, is echoed in Collingwood’s distinction between immediate experience and the mediacy of thought. Immediate experience (e.g., sensations, feelings, and the immediate context of thought in general) cannot be re-enacted: we cannot know how the flowers smelled in the garden of Epicurus, or how the mountain winds felt in Nietzsche’s hair. But we can recreate their thought, for we have evidence of it: we can re-enact the mediate, or conceptual, element in their original experience by reading the relevant books and understanding them (1946: 296-97). Thus psychology cannot deal with the rational or conceptual element of human experience. Collingwood’s theory was open to reconciliation with psychoanalytic approaches, insofar as the latter attempt to understand the irrational processes of the unconscious mind in terms of our conscious, rational egos. And Collingwood certainly hints in The Idea of History and elsewhere that unconscious thought could be rationally understood and thus re-enacted. Yet he was inconsistent on this point. It is perhaps better to see behaviouristic psychology, and not psychoanalysis, as his principal target of attack. In any case, he did show a strong bias against psychological explanations of the past. Not all human experience is rational

Reconstructing the Past

111

or conceptual, and the historian must deal with “certain important regions in moral experience” where psychology might be a useful tool. In addition, Collingwood’s rejection of most psychology and of animal appetites as irrelevant to the historian’s project leads him, at least by implication, to an even stronger rejection of any historical awareness of embodiment, a direct awareness of one’s own physical bodily processes, and how these are the same as, or different from, those of others (outside the realm of those “social customs” he mentions). So Collingwood cannot be entirely acquitted of the second charge of an antipsychological bias either. As for critique 3, based on Collingwood’s supposed “methodological individualism,” there is certainly evidence that the re-enactment thesis refers to the historian’s attempt to recreate the thoughts of individuals alone. At the centre of the re-enactment thesis is the free and rational agent attempting to fulfill a purpose or plan. Common currency among early critics of his philosophy of history was the idea that he ignores the influence of institutions upon actions, for example, Maurice Mandelbaum in his 1947 review of The Idea of History. He says there that Collingwood should see institutions as independent of the actions that make them up, and as canalizing and moulding concrete human actions (1947: 186-87). In response to this, we do hear Collingwood speak about a “corporate mind” of a community or age (1946: 219). Several interpreters have asked us to look to his histories of ancient Britain to see how he speaks of the influence of geography and climate, of broad social and economic forces, to refute this individualism. Yet Collingwood could be writing this way in his actual histories in direct contradiction to his re-enactment thesis. His talk of a “corporate mind” moves us very far indeed from the rigorous Baconianism he proposes in section 3 of the epilegomena of The Idea of History. E. H. Carr’s reminder (1964: 52) to Collingwood that historical facts are facts about the relation of individuals to each other in society still carries some sting in its tail, despite the efforts of interpreters like Dray (e.g., 1989: 198) to remove the poison from this critique. So we cannot acquit Collingwood of critique 3 either, that his methodology fails to adequately account for mass social phenomena. Critique 4 implies that social products often escape the intentions of their creators: they have unintended consequences. This has been a matter of common knowledge to social thinkers since the days of Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and the Scottish Enlightenment.

112

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Again there are hints in The Idea of History that Collingwood recognizes this problem (see 1946: 41-42), but these are dark and obscure at best. A solution to this problem is suggested by Walsh, who chastises Collingwood for not recognizing that what an agent has in his mind is not the same thing as what he has before his mind (1967: 54). In other words, even if human actions are the product of human intentions, these intentions are shaped by a congerie of preconscious and unconscious assumptions and values. Taking up Walsh’s hint, I believe that the elements missing from the historical agent’s mind in Collingwood’s account of historical explanation are (a) human passions, which are sometimes only semi-conscious and semi-purposive, and (b) structural ideals (see chapter 2 for my initial attempt to define these). We need to take into account these missing elements if we are to overcome the four critiques just discussed and thus rehabilitate Collingwood’s philosophy of history. Lastly, we come to the relativist dilemma (critique 5): when constructing a historical narrative according to Collingwood’s principles, can we claim that it is in any sense “true”? Lorraine Code (1989) raises an interesting point in connection with this criticism. She sees Collingwood as an “epistemological individualist” who posits a timeless Cartesian knower at the core of his historical method (552). Collingwood’s “absolute presupposition” about human agency is that human beings are self-constituting, self-determining rational agents, and further that the historian can produce a reenactment of an agent’s thought “wholly untainted by his own historical and cultural location” (Code 1989: 547-48). In conclusion, she says that the self-knowledge that Collingwood’s philosophy of history aims at is not that of an embodied, culturally and historically located, differentiated self (1989: 559-60). We can infer that Code is suggesting that Collingwood would fail the test of feminist standpoint theory: his notion that we can know the past by rethinking it in the present implies that our present social, economic, and biological standpoint doesn’t get in the way of that rethinking. Obviously, Code feels that it does: the notion that we can have “objective” knowledge of the past is just an illusion. The relativist critique is perhaps the most telling one. On the one hand, as anti-relativist or “objectivist” elements in Collingwood’s thought, we have the ideas of the rational, purposive agent as the centre of the process of interpreting evidence and re-enacting the past, and of history and archaeology conceived of as sciences that

Reconstructing the Past

113

can recreate past actions as they originally occurred. On the other, we have the a priori imagination as a narrative technique, the imaginative web, and the theory of absolute presuppositions in An Essay on Metaphysics as strongly constructivist or historicist elements of his thought. I will return to this problem in my last section. But I would suggest at this point that relativism is a problem that haunts the whole of modern philosophy, history, and social science. As Nietzsche and those influenced by his thought have pointed out, if God is dead, the idea of eternal truth, which is independent of human languages and ideas, vanishes with him. Like crime, the problem of relativism is in principle insoluble, although it can be mitigated. This is no doubt what Collingwood was trying to do by way of his emphasis on evidence, his idea of the a priori imagination, and his re-enactment thesis. His success in so doing depends on the degree to which we can make the philosophical and methodological tools he has bequeathed us in his philosophy of history more flexible, a task to which I now turn. One of the major problems with the re-enactment thesis is the question of what Collingwood meant by “thought.” Collingwood cannot totally escape the criticism based on a careful reading of The Idea of History that his notion of thought is excessively rationalistic, despite Louis Mink’s best efforts to broaden Collingwood’s concept of thought by pointing to the analyses of layers of the mind he lays out in other late works. I now turn away from exegesis to offer a solution to critiques 1 and 2, dealing with critiques 3 and 4 in my next section. “All thought exists for the sake of action” (1924: 1). Thus Collingwood starts his first important philosophical work. Later, he claims that the mind is nothing apart from what it does (1946: 83). When we treat social consciousness at least, we must see thought and action as two sides of the same coin. As discussed in chapter 1, I take thought/action to be the best way to describe human consciousness in a social setting, borrowing the cue to unify the concepts from Foucault’s power/knowledge. Social consciousness would not be social if it were not directed toward social objects. These objects become social, as opposed to private, insofar as they are acted upon in some way in the public realm (whether the object is a piece of property, a political office, or an ideological system of belief). A unexpressed and unrecorded thought on which no action is based is not part of any social consciousness and is therefore not a possi-

114

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

ble element of historical knowledge, probably not even of biographical knowledge either. It would probably not even be of any interest to the historian, although this is more debatable. In short, there are no private historical languages. To clarify the notion of “thought” with respect to the possibility of re-enacting the past and thus producing historical knowledge, I shall now return to the four-level model of social consciousness I laid out in my first chapter, keeping in mind that these “levels” are separated only heuristically and are present to varying degrees in pretty well all real-world actions:8 a. Embodiment, or Bodily Action: This includes perception, feelings, bodily instincts and drives, as well as physiological processes in general. Especially important here are “differences” between different types of embodiment (such as those based on gender and race). It covers the spectrum <>. Speaking figuratively, embodiment represents the roots of the tree of thought/action, to borrow a metaphysical metaphor from Descartes. b. Passionate Action: These are impulsive, emotional, unreflective actions; they spring from desire. Passionate action can be symbolized by the trunk of the tree of thought/action. Such action covers the same mental spectrum (from the unconscious to the conscious) as embodiment. It differs from embodiment in that it intends or points to specific external objects, objects of desire such as sexual partners, a good meal, or striking a target of anger. Most of the time, of course, passions are allied to purposes, as “plans” are concocted by the actor to direct them toward the object of his or her passion. c. Purposive Action: These are actions done on purpose; actions that are at the same time both reflective and passionate: e.g., planning to pursue an object of desire. Since purposive actions are willed, the will takes over from desire as the central motive force behind action. This sort of action can be symbolized by the branches of the tree of thought/action. This is the level of thought/action that is perhaps the most directly

Reconstructing the Past

115

affected by background structural ideals. It exists largely in the <> spectrum of thinking. d. Reason, or Intellectual Action: This is thought largely free of affect, of a “theoretical” nature; “thinking” in the traditional rationalist sense. We can picture intellectual thought/action as the leaves of our metaphorical tree. By definition it is largely self-conscious: it is the facing of a problem, whether intellectual or practical, by thinking about it in abstract terms, perhaps in terms of instrumental rationality. As Hume shows, “reason” is the slave of the passions in the sense that it is never the origin of what I call passionate or purposive action, although it is often used as a tool to serve our individual purposes. Collingwood’s re-enactment thesis, as I understand it, excludes the reconstruction of embodiment but includes our rethinking past intellectual and purposive action. The difficult case comes when we turn our attention to passionate actions: can we re-enact a blind impulse? This is what psychoanalysis seeks to do, to apply a rational understanding to what seem, at least on the surface, to be irrational actions. Thus, although there is some merit to Collingwood’s dismissal of psychology as an anti-historical attempt to reduce the mind to a timeless psyche, a historically orientated psychology like psychoanalysis should be given some recognition as a valuable aid in reconstructing what I call passionate action, actions based on impulse and instinct. Whether or not we accept Freud’s story about the unconscious mind and about how the ego, id, and superego do battle in the human psyche, or some other psychoanalytical model of the mind, there must surely be occasions when the historian is obliged to turn to psychology to reconstruct the etiology of human passions and the purposes that flow from these passions. Without some sort of understanding of the unconscious mind, we end up explaining all action in a purely conscious way, which gives us an incomplete and distorted picture of human motivation. Embodiment and passionate action are levels of human thought/action that Collingwood largely neglects. Yet historians of the late twentieth century have written about them at some length. A case in point is Michel Foucault’s various political economies of

116

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

the body such as Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality and Thomas Laquer’s Making Sex. These works attempt to reconstruct, in different ways, what I call “embodiment” and “passionate action” (although I recognize that there is no small degree of purposive action in the fields of punishment and sexuality). We can apply Collingwood’s own re-enactment thesis to a broadened conception of thought and thus provide the contemporary historian with an a priori set of principles and a methodology for the interpretation of evidence when dealing with past events, even though in actual historical work, especially in the history of the body, these a priori principles will have to be treated as quite loose heuristic rules. We can redefine the thought that the historian re-enacts as including passionate, purposive, and intellectual action. It can include even bodily action in a limited fashion, in terms of a presentation of a chronicle (in Benedetto Croce’s sense) of some historical agent’s memoirs, diaries, films, recordings, or other record of his or her bodily states embodied in a wider narrative. My critique of Collingwood’s re-enactment thesis for failing to account for embodiment leaves aside a more fundamental question, namely, whether we can reconstruct the outsides of actions—what Collingwood calls bare “events”—within a methodological-idealist framework. It is in one sense true that we need to do more than reenact past thought to reconstruct the purely physical side of past events: we need to describe a series of physical movements. Yet how do we know these movements when they are no longer present to us, unless we have some witness’s report? We appear to be back at Collingwood’s first dictum, that all history is the history of thought (though not all perception is the perception of thought, as we can be directly aware of our own and others’ bodily states in the present). This leaves us with the equally important question of whether purely physical movements, uninformed by human goals and purposes, are historically interesting. Bodily events, therefore, cannot be re-enacted in their original vitality, but they can be remembered by their direct participants, or be presented to the reader as evidence for the interpretation of the agent’s other levels of thought/action. Of course, this sort of direct evidence of an agent’s bodily states may be highly subjective; in many cases it will not be of great relevance in the reconstruction of the past. Yet even embodiment has “structures” or

Reconstructing the Past

117

regimes associated with it, mediated (as Collingwood himself hints) by social customs and mores. Indeed, the revealing nature of these structures or regimes was very much at the heart of Foucault’s intellectual life project.

Structuring Human Actions We need to bring a structural element into Collingwood’s re-enactment thesis, but within an idealist framework, in terms of structural ideals. These are the underlying assumptions of everyday life, whether in the social, cultural, political, or economic spheres, and are best investigated by means of a socially and historically oriented phenomenology. By joining structural ideals to the re-enactment thesis we can defeat the critiques of the thesis based on its failure to deal with mass phenomena, unintended consequences, and social structure. One preliminary suggestion is to use Collingwood’s theory of absolute presuppositions as a bridge between the methodological individualism of his philosophy of history and a theory of social structure. In his Essay on Metaphysics, Collingwood sees “scientific” propositions (taking “science” in the broadest possible sense) as based on presuppositions of two types: absolute presuppositions, which are neither true nor false, and which ground specific scientific principles; and relative presuppositions, which make sense only in relation to the absolute presuppositions on which they depend, and which can indeed be either verified or refuted. “God exists” is an example of an absolute presupposition, one for which no evidence counts as a refutation. Metaphysics should now be seen as a historical science, says Collingwood. The metaphysician’s job is akin to the historian’s: to decipher the constellations of presuppositions held by science (taken in its broadest sense) in the past. Mink (1969: 185) sees the a priori imagination as an earlier, cruder version of the theory of absolute presuppositions. He feels that the analogies between the art, politics, religion, and social institutions of an age are not causally explicable, but are intelligible as exhibiting the complex structure of the dominant constellation of absolute presuppositions of the times (156). A given set of absolute presuppositions, a given Weltanschauung, produces a specific constellation of political and social beliefs, artistic styles, and forms of worship. Yet this may be a case of an intellectual Stockholm

118

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

syndrome, Mink’s intense study of Collingwood leading to his reading into Collingwood’s later metaphysics the outlines of a fullfledged social theory. And besides, the theory of presuppositions found in Collingwood’s Essay on Metaphysics has very little to say about the structural underpinnings of these constellations. Stephen Toulmin points out the tension in this theory between a rational and causal explanation of why constellations of presuppositions change. If indeed we could posit a causal explanation of presupposition change, in terms of intellectual strains caused by general social and cultural tensions, then conceptual strain might be seen as an epiphenomenon of broader socio-historical crises (Toulmin 1972: 212). Yet Collingwood hesitates between a rational and a causal explanation for presupposition formation and change. By no means can his late metaphysics be reduced to a neo-Marxist view of ideas as the by-products of underlying material relations. In the end, the theory of absolute presuppositions is not an element in social theory. It was intended to be a theory about science and its metaphysical underpinnings, a deconstruction of the attempts of metaphysicians to penetrate to the heart of the “real” worlds in their theoretical imaginations, to build a “science of Being.” The later Collingwood believed that this project was doomed to failure. A more promising approach to the status and function of social structure, and one largely compatible with Collingwood’s philosophy of history, can be found in the work of Peter Winch and Anthony Giddens. Winch sees social relations as expressions of ideas about reality, with these relations becoming meaningful only insofar as human actions exemplify rules (1958: 22, 62). This echoes a point that Collingwood himself makes: an action depends on knowing and believing that we are in a certain situation, and in a given situation we often act according to rules applying to that situation (1939: 102). In The Idea of History, he notes how, for the agent about to act, the space before him will be crowded with people pursuing activities of their own, and that, even though the situation before him consists entirely of thoughts, it cannot be changed by a voluntary change of mind: “For a man about to act, the situation is his master, his oracle, his god.…And if he neglects the situation, the situation will not neglect him. It is not one of those gods that leave an insult unpunished” (1946: 316). One could see in Collingwood’s idea of the “situation” a proto-structuralism, a vague sense that social structure is a powerful external force that “punishes” those who choose to act in

Reconstructing the Past

119

ignorance of it. This might provide a small theoretical opening to reinterpret Collingwood along structuralist lines. If we connect this notion of the “situation” with social rules that are not the product of individual purposes (although they are in individual consciousnesses), we reach the notion of social structure I would like to propose. Giddens hints at the location of social rules in his distinction between the unconscious, discursive consciousness, and practical consciousness. Discursive consciousness operates in the realm of surface discourse, where people talk and write to each other, while practical consciousness is made up of that tacit knowledge used in action that is not formulable discursively, generally conforming to Wittgenstein’s idea of “knowing a rule” (Giddens 1979: 31). To reiterate what I said in chapter 2, structural ideals operate in part within the sphere of our practical consciousness, although most of them can be explicitly formulated in everyday discourse given some reconstructive effort. If all history is the history of thought—and we discover that thought by means of a reconstruction of the purposes, plans, and so on of historical agents—then how do we account for mass phenomena like great economic changes or large-scale social movements? Following Walsh’s fertile suggestion (1967: 54), we must remember that what is immediately before the mind is not all that is in the mind: included in the background of our actions are certain ideals (moral, political, aesthetic, pragmatic, or socially regulatory) that govern how we structure our thought/action in a given situation. They can be simple things like waiting for a green light before crossing the street at an intersection, or more complex ones like using the proper notation in a computer language one is using to write a computer program. They can also involve such highly complex sets of social rules as those surrounding the search for a romantic partner or professional interaction in a public or private institution. They are the “do’s” and “don’ts” of types of social situations. These ideals are not the direct result (at least in most cases) of individual purposes and intentions, yet all the same they shape human behaviour on a mass scale by directing and channelling those purposes. A structural ideal is some idea that suggests the normal or proper (whether moral, political, economical, or ideological) ordering of a historical agent’s social field. Insofar as it orders the behaviour of the agent, it may also produce (if sufficiently widespread) “social structures” among social actors, which further order the distribution of

120

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

power, status, and wealth in the society they affect. Like Giddens’s duality of structure, a structural ideal both conditions its behaviour and is conditioned by it, that is, it is both a product of social interaction and a factor that conditions that interaction (see Giddens 1986: 533). Also, following Giddens, we can see social structure as having a virtual existence only (Giddens 1979: 9), even though it is also very real to the actors instantiating its rules in their acts. Social rules exist only insofar as people have either rationally accepted them as guiding factors in intellectual or purposive action or have semi-consciously “absorbed” them as elements of purposive or passionate action, or as determining factors in their individual embodiment. Structural ideals are social rules that channel, direct, and on the widest scale make possible human thought/action. They are the products of human interaction, while, although usually not in a wholly conscious fashion, they also help to shape those interactions. A classical example of a structural ideal is the idea of private property, the cornerstone of the capitalist economic system. It acts both as a day-to-day prescription on the usability of physical goods in our society and as a moral ideal of how people interact economically. It is equally embodied in the small child’s yelling “this is my ball, you can’t play with it” and in the pile of stock certificates in the millionaire’s private vault. Even in its violation, in the thief ’s actions, we can recognize its workings; it declares the thief ’s act to be illegitimate and a possible target for penitential punishment. It may not be immediately before the mind of the individual agent, but it unconsciously structures the agent’s perceptions of the physical objects in the social world and of the “holders” of those objects. Foucault had much to say about the social history of the body. In his “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” he looks at the body as an inscribed surface of events, calling for a genealogy that will expose the human body as totally imprinted by history (1977: 148). It is indeed possible to extend the notion of structural ideals to the norms governing passionate thought/action, e.g., to the sexual practices of a given people at a given time.9 These practices and their associated mores can be reconstructed given sufficient evidence, and they can be understood as either repressing or challenging individual actors. All we have to do, although this is no small feat, is to discover by means of the evidence at hand what the people at a given point in history thought about their sexual practices: did ancient Greek gentlemen really think that having sex with young

Reconstructing the Past

121

boys was an acceptable practice? Perhaps even a mark of worldly distinction? Clearly, Western ideals concerning this practice have radically changed since the days of Socrates and Alcibiades. The way that we discover these ideals is rather different from the way that we discover the past thoughts of individual agents. We discover them by using the classical methods of the social sciences and of phenomenology (the latter taken in its broadest possible sense as a close inspection of the relevant social field), added to the historical detective work that Collingwood was quite familiar with, given his work as a practising archaeologist. These investigations all take place within the context of an awareness that social structure has no “real” existence beyond the thought/action of individual agents. In the language of Sartre, social structure is “created” by individual praxis. Structural ideals are those pragmatic, prescriptive, or normative rules that govern human thought/action in society at large. They exist only if acted upon.

The Centrality of Meaning in Historical Explanation Collingwood’s re-enactment of past thoughts (qua purposive and reflective mental activity, taken in its widest sense), combined with the need to reconstruct past structural ideals, produces a “dialectical synthesis,” using Jörn Rüsen’s term for the the meaning of the historical event. Rüsen argues against “the perspective from Mars,” suggesting that there must be a common world of meaning between the historian and those whose actions he or she is studying (Ankersmit 1988: 87). He concludes that we must marry a hermeneutical identification with past thoughts and actions with an analysis of the real world surrounding those thoughts and actions, thereby arriving at a dialectical synthesis of the two (91). The attempt to understand the “meaning” of that part of the past dealt with by the historian is the central purpose of historical explanation in its narrative form. It is achieved by a dialectical synthesis of the reconstruction of past thought/action and of the structural ideals instantiated in it. In his Autobiography and elsewhere, Collingwood points out that the purpose of the study of history is the search for self-knowledge. Knowledge is useful and desirable only if it is meaningful. Under the tutelage of positivism and common sense, we are tempted to see historical facts as fish on a fishmonger’s slab from which the histo-

122

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

rian selects a basketful to his taste (Carr 1964: 9). However, the historian must be guided by some concept of meaningful action (i.e., meaningful to the historian, as well as to the agents themselves, although the historian’s meaning in some sense takes precedence) given that the immediate meaning of the action for the agents might be irretrievably lost in the process of reconstructing the past. The injunction for historians to attempt to discover meaning in historical events is like the instructions in a gourmet recipe on how to select and cook fish: one is not directed to a specific fish, but to a species appropriate to the dish. The injunction directs historians to a class of events. The search for historical meaning can yield many different results, according to the events historians choose to study, their cultural and social location, the age they live in, and so on. Max Weber’s Verstehen sociology hints at the importance of the search for meaning in understanding human actions. The whole point of sociology, he says, is to understand “the subjective meaningcomplex of action” (1978: 13). This can be done in three ways: (a) by the historical approach; (b) in the case of mass phenomena, by way of an average or approximation of the intended meaning; and (c) by looking for meaning in scientifically formulated ideal or pure types (1978: 9). A modified re-enactment thesis covers the first approach, while by collapsing the second and third we get a social theory of structural ideals. In the end, Weber admits, anticipating Giddens’s more extensive formulation of the idea, namely, that only rarely is an action’s subjective meaning brought clearly into consciousness, and thus that sociology must delve beneath the surface layers of social consciousness (1978: 21-22). We have to look to the “practical consciousness” of historical agents to get at the mass ideal or pure types that guide their thought/action. Weber’s search for the subjective meaning of social action parallels Freud’s search for the meaning of psychic action, of jokes, dreams, neuroses, and slips of the tongue. In reconstructing the past, we have need of both a humanist sociology, as opposed to number-crunching surveys, to investigate structural ideals, and psychoanalysis, to investigate individual passionate action. As I’ve already mentioned, to exclude the unconscious from human motivation is to leave us stranded on the shores of pure intentionality, where what actors say about their motivation is law. We certainly do not accept such a limitation in judging the everyday interactions of others, and there is no need to accept it in historical explanation.

Reconstructing the Past

123

Peter Winch ties the understanding of behaviour to the following of rules in a social setting (1958: 116). As with Freud’s positing of the unconscious mind in relation to dreams, neuroses, and so on, we need to posit sets of social rules as embedded in thought/action to understand human social behaviour. Without the assumption of social rules structuring social consciousness, narratives of past events would collapse into a heap of innumerable and separate biographies. Raw events, those dealt with in a purely chronicle form, become meaningful as historical events only insofar as they are narrated, put into a narrative context. This becomes methodologically possible only when we take into consideration both the original meaning the acts had for their agents and the structures that condition those acts. Thus history deals with two sorts of causality: the direct, intentional causality that Collingwood (in An Essay on Metaphysics) thought was the only real sort of causality (i.e., causes are agents’ reasons for acting), and the unintended, structural causality (Giddens’s duality of structure) of historical agents that both defines the flux of experience as a given “situation” and provides these agents with a list of options within that situation. Parallelling Giddens’s duality of structure is a duality of cause: we can interpret human behaviour in terms of either intentional or structural causes. Collingwood admitted two other types of causality—the scientific and the technological—in his Essay on Metaphysics, but he would probably say that these types of causality apply only to physical events, and not to actions. If we turn our attention briefly to a 1924 essay by Collingwood called “The Nature and Aims of a Philosophy of History,” we can see how his early identification of history with the perception of external facts led to a struggle with historical skepticism and a position close to Hayden White’s theory that all historians engage in an “emplotment” of the past when writing history. Collingwood suggests there that historians are spectators of a life they cannot participate in, mere perceivers of a foreign world of facts (1965b: 47, 49). He concludes that history is a drama, and that the historian must look for a plot in it (36, 40). So the perception of historical facts through a realist lens distances us from those facts, compelling the historian to look for a dramatic thread amidst the heap of events he or she must deal with. One might imagine a sort of realist interpretation of the path to historical knowledge as underlying White’s idea of the body of facts

124

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

being “neutral” to how a historical narrative is actually constructed, thus leading historians to emulate fiction writers by encoding facts within specific plot structures using largely aesthetic criteria (1987: 46-47). As the early Collingwood makes clear, the realist view of the interpretation of evidence treats that evidence as a foreign bundle of perceptions (to echo Hume on the self) that can be arranged, manipulated, stapled, and glued together in whatever manner suits the historian’s tastes (what he later calls “pigeon-holing”). However, unlike White, whose realism with regards to historical facts pushes him toward a postmodernist method, Collingwood overcame his own early realism in realizing that all history is the history of thought, and that the historian can best appropriate that thought by re-enacting it in his or her own mind. For the later Collingwood, although we must still “construct” a narrative according to our a priori imaginations, the evidence at our disposal is by no means a neutral bundle of perceptions that can be emplotted in any number of ways.10 Collingwood believed that by following sound principles of historical method, and by paying close attention to the evidence, the historian is led toward some general sense of what happened in the past events he or she is studying, albeit a sense that changes with each generation and (to a lesser extent) from historian to historian. This sense is the meaning of the human actions being narrated. By focusing historical explanation on meaning and not purely on subjective intentions we can deal not only with mass phenomena, but also with unintended consequences. In the latter case, our rethinking the thoughts of all the relevant agents would still not provide an explanation of the event in question, e.g., the stock market crash of 1929. Presumably, pretty well no one “willed” the crash to occur. Yet the collection of individual efforts to manipulate the stock market or to pull out of it when it started to decline resulted in an economic disaster. We can say, without any recourse to a “group mind” or a “spirit of the age,” that the meaning (unintended, in this case) of the mass of individual economic decisions surrounding the events of 1929 was the collapse of the stock market, an institution held in place by certain rules of trading, price fluctuations, fair play, gain, and loss that together form the structural ideals that governed people’s thinking and acting in that institution. Needless to say, as good Baconians, we must look to the evidence to reconstruct that meaning, to reconstruct the rules leading to the dramatic breakdown of the financial markets on that black day in

Reconstructing the Past

125

1929. We could emplot this as a tragedy for capitalism or for Western civilization, or as a satire on how low human greed brings us; but whichever emplotment we use, the skeletal structure of historical fact must be there to hold our narrative together. Of course, the specific bones are of our own choosing, but the way they fit together is largely a product of the evidence at our disposal. The emplotment of the historical facts may differ from historian to historian, but the point of narrative seen as a “cognitive instrument” (Mink 1987: 185) is to reconstruct the actual meaning of those past events. I will return to this question of the objectivity of historical reconstructions after laying out what I call my “reconstruction thesis,” the rehabilitated version of Collingwood’s re-enactment thesis.

The Reconstruction Thesis In writing history, historians can more accurately be said to be reconstructing, as opposed to re-enacting, the past. They “put back together” as much as they can the elements of the past event(s) they are interested in, given the evidence they have before them. This is where the detective analogy comes into play: the detective does not use the available clues to recreate the crime as it “really happened,” but enough of the crime to assign guilt beyond any reasonable doubt. Similarly, historians operate within a realm of varying degrees of reasonable doubt in piecing together a narrative of the past based on the collection of evidence they have before them. Historians reconstruct events not as they really were but as they probably were, given the evidence, their various presuppositions, the present-day level of historical science, and the sort of plot best able to bring out the meaning they see in them. To conclude this rehabilitation of Collingwood’s re-enactment thesis along “reconstructionist” lines, I will define a “historical event,” offer my “reconstruction thesis,” then rewrite Collingwood’s three theses of history. First, I offer a definition of a historical event: An event is some human action or constellation of actions in the past that historians have decided, based on the questions they seek to answer and on the constellation of evidence, method, and the community standards of historians, to be essential to their narrative. All historical events are the acts of human agents, or natural (including animal) events that somehow affect these acts.

126

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Second, my “reconstruction thesis” summarizes what I have said so far on how the historian explains the past: The Reconstruction Thesis: A historical explanation of a past event or set of events must involve a reconstruction of the thought/action (i.e., on the intellectual, purposive, and passionate levels) of the historical agents involved set in the context of the structural ideals that shaped this thought/action. Last, I rewrite, somewhat iconoclastically, Collingwood’s three theses on history in structural idealist terms: a. All history is the history of thought/action. b. This thought/action, along with the structural ideals that shaped it, must be reconstructed in the mind of the historian. c. This reconstruction is a critical process on the historian’s part. It accepts the fact that past thought/action and structural ideals are incapsulated in present thought/action and structural ideals, and further accepts the need to turn to psychoanalysis, social phenomenology, and the traditional social sciences (sociology, politics, economics, anthropology, and geography) to aid in this reconstructive effort.

Construction, Reconstruction, and Objectivity I will finish this chapter by distinguishing between constructing and reconstructing the past by looking at objectivity not as a realizable goal, but as a regulative ideal. Without the regulative ideal of truth, the search for meaning by way of reconstructing past thoughts and structural ideals loses direction. It gets caught up in literary technique or ideology. Thus history can be said to be a “reconstructive” discipline insofar as it aims at the construction of true narratives as an ideal goal.11 There is an “objectivity problem” in Collingwood’s philosophy of history. An imaginary critic could legitimately ask: “Isn’t it possible that the past thoughts that we have reconstructed aren’t the real ones? Aren’t historians influenced by the social and cultural presuppositions of our own age? Isn’t history really a matter of the imaginative construction of narratives, albeit grounded to some degree in evidence?” On one reading of Collingwood, the answers to

Reconstructing the Past

127

all of these questions could be yes. This line of interpretation could lead one to see a tie between Collingwood’s philosophy of history and postmodernism. F. R. Ankersmit, staggering about due to the alcoholic excess of books published every year on many academic subjects, feels that we no longer have any real texts or past, just interpretations of them (1989: 137). Contemporary scholars spend all their time wading through this quagmire of scholarship, leaving them little time to read and understand the original texts (or events) themselves. Pauline Rosenau sees postmodern history as questioning (1) whether there is a real, knowable past; (2) whether historians should be objective; (3) whether reason explains the past; and (4) whether the role of history is to transmit the human cultural and intellectual heritage from one generation to the next (1992: 63).12 Collingwood also questions (1), while critics could easily wonder whether given what he says in The Idea of History and elsewhere, he would also be forced to question (2) and (4). So we are left with the distinct possibility that Collingwood can be read as being at least partly submerged in the quicksand of a proto-postmodernist relativism. To help pull him out, one should start by looking at truth in history not as a realizable goal, but as a regulative ideal. Collingwood says that the historian’s picture of the past is meant to be true, and to be so must be (1) localized in space and time, (2) consistent with itself, and (3) consistent with the evidence (1946: 246). Yet all of this, even with the a priori imagination mixed in, does not result in a hard-and-fast guarantee of narrative truth. Leaving aside personal honesty and diligence, we need something more to help this regulative ideal function properly. One way that this regulative ideal is upheld is by the criticism of other historians, on the level of either fact or interpretation. Within a vital community of interpreters, history is kept on the rails to objectivity by a vigorous internal debate. There is no higher arbiter of who wins at the game of historical truth than the skill of the players who actually play at the game of history (i.e., both those who read and those who write histories), given that this game has at any point in time a common, if somewhat loose, set of rules, and that the actual pieces on the chessboard come from a pool of evidence available to all the players. Truth, whether relativist or absolute, disappears without a community of interpreters. I can choose to believe that the moon is made of cotton candy, or that neighbourhood cats speak to each other telepathically. Until

128

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

and unless someone questions my beliefs and points out good reasons for their being false, the question of their “truth” doesn’t arise (unless, of course, I was somehow able to fly to the moon or to communicate telepathically with animals myself). In the simplest terms, truth is a product of social conventions, of language games accepted within a given community.13 As far as “progress” goes, we cannot expect the arrival of any sort of millennium of a perfect knowledge of the past. Yet we can, following Collingwood’s discussion of progress in general, expect progress in history insofar as historians are able to solve new problems without losing sight of old solutions (1946: 329).14 It may be the case that considered from a literary point of view, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is a masterpiece. Yet no twenty-first-century history professor would suggest that students check their copy of Gibbon over a sound (if more plodding) contemporary historian of ancient Rome as a historical source. We should not fall into some sort of aesthetic perspectivism in assuming that our choice of a contemporary academic historian over a master historical stylist such as Gibbon or Hume is motivated purely and simply by current literary fashions or by some dubious sense of the superiority of our own present world view. I now turn to the “debate” between Louis Mink and Hayden White on the question of truth in history as part of my end-game strategy. White sees historical narratives as verbal fictions, “the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences” (1987: 42). For White, the formulizations of poetic insight that help historians explain the past are ultimately grounded in aesthetic and moral, not epistemological, criteria (1973: xii). Mink takes issue with this: he admits that there is a tension between the implicit presupposition that historical narratives are somehow connected with an “untold story” of the past and the conscious belief that the formal structure of narrative is constructed rather than discovered (1987: 199-200). He sees historical narrative as a cognitive instrument that aims at truth by means of bodying forth “an ensemble of interrelationships of many different kinds as a single whole,” as opposed to a fictional narrative, which aims at emotional or aesthetic satisfaction (198). Mink thus hints at a distinction that Collingwood makes in Speculum Mentis, between history and art as unique forms of knowledge with

Reconstructing the Past

129

unique goals. For Mink, history has a truthful intent that is missing from White’s variously emplotted narratives. We can build on this distinction to create a partial way out of the relativist dilemma, based on Collingwood’s own ideas. In his Speculum Mentis, he outlines five forms of experience—art, religion, science, history, and philosophy—which he calls both forms of knowledge and ways of life. As one might suspect, these forms are linked together by a neo-Hegelian dialectic. The mind constructs external worlds as reflections of itself to come to some sort of selfknowledge. These forms of experience are all “competitors for the prize of truth” (1924: 315, 42). However, the point of art is to create imaginative products without making any claim that these products are real (the claim that religion makes of its imaginative products), while the point of history is to tell a true story about the past.15 Admittedly, the form of knowledge called “history” is grounded partly in the imagination, like art, but just as firmly in truth telling. History is a reflection of the historian’s mind in the mirror of the past, mediated by evidence and sound interpretive methods. History is grounded in an archaeological culture, a culture which seeks to unearth a true past, although it does have a literary element. Postmodernist thinkers live by and large within a literary and aesthetic culture, where verbal grace, beauty, and cleverness rule over method and truth. The freewheeling deconstruction of the postmodern literary critic cuts itself off from evidence in a way abhorrent to most conscientious historians. We make a serious category error in assuming that Derridean deconstruction can cross over from literary criticism to history. The telos of the former is private and subjective meaning, that of the latter public and objective meaning. To once again appeal to Wittgenstein, the language games of history and literary criticism have different sets of rules. To imagine that we can blithely transfer those of the latter to the former is to ignore the nature of the form of knowledge called history. The reconstruction of past thought is not an arbitrary procedure, a type of free variation, but is one guided by evidence and method. Even if a given body of evidence forces no one reconstruction upon the historian, it rules out an infinite number of false reconstructions. As Sosa puts it, from the fact that no one alternative is forced upon us objectively, it is a fallacy to infer that none are objectively foreclosed (1987: 713). In other words, just because a given set of historical facts is open to a number of narrative emplotments, this

130

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

does not mean that (to use Paul Feyerabend’s phrase) “anything goes.” Even if historians of a given generation guided to a given body of evidence by a given set of questions can produce a number of more-or-less equally convincing narratives, they should always retain enough faith in objectivity, a sense of being able to come into contact with “reality” (Collingwood 1924: 315-16), to avoid the scorn of the community of scholars that will, no doubt, pass judgment on their completed work. Part of this avoidance of scorn is an openness to the critique of this community, and an acceptance of the need to revise one’s work in the light of any cogent criticisms from this quarter. Thus historical “truth” is provisional and communitarian, grounded (pragmatically speaking, at least) in the regulative ideal of objectivity. If it were not, where would history (as opposed to literature) derive its rhetorical force? As Hume notes: Poets themselves, tho’ liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions.…[but] The conversation of those, who have acquir’d a habit of lying, tho’ in affairs of no moment, never gives any satisfaction; and that because those ideas they present to us, not being attended with belief, make no impression on the mind. (1888: 121) Hume may perhaps be too hard on the poets. Yet in the implied suggestion that people should generally endeavour to tell the truth (at least as they know it), he is certainly not too hard on the historian. Only such an attempt can make a satisfactory impression on the minds of the community of interpreters of the past. This reinterpretation of Collingwood’s philosophy of history, which adds a “structural” component and a more textured understanding of the nature of human action to his original re-enactment thesis, rehabilitates Collingwood’s idealism as a useful historical methodology. The hermeneutic of structural idealism, tied to the notion that the past can be meaningfully reconstructed, offers a path between the Scylla of a natural law understanding of history and the Charybdis of postmodern relativism and constructivism. I now turn to a historical narrative of my own, to my telling the tale of the intellectual epic of the rise and fall of the search for depth meaning in late modernity.

5 The Search for Depth Meaning as the Essence of Late Modernity

This chapter will be an exercise in the sociology of knowledge on a grand scale. My basic thesis will be that for some of the key theorists of late modernity, specifically those on the cutting edge of the European intellectual scene over the last century, the central task is the search for depth meaning within actions and structures, whether mental, ideological, or social. This task has shaped the way that late moderns interpret human existence, the mind, and the social world. The surface, stated, conscious, intentional meaning of an utterance, act, or structure is no longer seen as its “actual” meaning. Any attempt to understand the thing being examined must penetrate beneath this surface appearance. Thus a leading theme within late modernity is the rise of structuralism, the interpretation of human behaviour as the product of structures (whether psychic, economic, or social). Naturally, this coming to the fore of structural interpretations involves a decline of intentional explanations of behaviour.1 I will tie this unmasking trend within contemporary thought to the general move towards political, economic, and social rationality under modern industrial capitalism as a structural meta-ideal, and then try to show how the “postmodern break” from the unmasking project is also a break from this rationalization trend, and that this break has concrete social and economic roots. My subsidiary thesis will be that this whole movement ends inevitably in postmodernism, which is a radical questioning of the Notes to chapter 5 are on pp. 278-79.

131

132

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

very notion of depth meaning and a celebration of the surfaces of things (or at least a grim acceptance that there may be nothing beneath these surfaces). The structural meta-ideal of modernity is rationalization, which is displayed in the political, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual spheres in a variety of ways. This includes democracy and individual rights; modern capitalism, with its instrumental rationality; the secularization and disenchantment of the Western world; futurism in art and aesthetic modernism in architecture; realism in literature; and, last but not least, positivism (i.e., the sense that empirical science can explain everything) and the search for depth meaning in the intellectual world.2 This structural meta-ideal both shapes and is shaped by these local ideals. On both levels, these ideals form the social and economic realities of the contemporary Western world. When we descend from the ethereal realm of theory to the daily lives of our contemporaries, we find such elements as instrumental economic realism, laissez-faire attitudes to morality and religious belief based on the democratic attention to individual rights, and an almost worshipful respect for natural science as guiding and propelling principles for the modern masses. The intellectual world of late modernity has done its part in undermining traditional “irrational” beliefs, not to mention some of the earlier certainties of modernism, as in Marx’s critique of liberal political economy and Nietzsche’s critique of moral codes. Over the next two chapters I will focus on European intellectual life over the last century or so as instantiating on the level of the intentions of the individual thinker the broader social, economic, and cultural changes in structure brought about by this metaideal of rationalization. Terry Eagleton puts the distinction between the modernist search for meaning and the postmodernist abandonment of this search quite nicely: What is amiss with old-fashioned modernism, from this perspective, is just the fact that it obstinately refuses to abandon the struggle for meaning. It is still agonizingly caught up in metaphysical depth and wretchedness, still able to experience psychic fragmentation and social alienation as spiritually wounding, and so embarrassingly

The Search for Depth Meaning

133

enmortgaged to the very bourgeois humanism it seeks to subvert. Postmodernism, confidently post-metaphysical, has outlived all fantasy of interiority, that pathological itch to scratch surfaces for concealed depths; it embraces instead the mystical positivism of the early Wittgenstein, for which the world—would you believe it—just is the way it is and not some other way. (1985: 69-70) Eagleton too hints at a strong postmodern break, a break that I will attempt to explain over the next two chapters. In this chapter and the next I will investigate a half dozen or so major figures in contemporary European thought, trying to “decode” the language in which each cloaks this search for depth meaning, or its abandonment. We can see the search for depth meaning in its critical mode in Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals, in Freud’s theory of the unconscious, and in Mannheim’s Situationsgebundenheit. We can see it in its self-consuming mode in Foucault’s power/knowledge equation and hermeneutics of the self, in Derrida’s deconstructive technique and attack on logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence, in Lyotard’s incredulity towards meta-narratives, and in Baudrillard’s heralding of the Age of the Simulacrum. I take it as axiomatic that while these thinkers pursue their own private ideals, they do so within broader structures (universities, medical establishments, technological changes, social and economic realities) that help shape these private ideals. I will deal with Nietzsche, Freud, and Mannheim, my representative “late moderns,” in this chapter, going on to discuss Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Baudrillard, my “postmoderns,” in the next. I should make it clear at the start that my sketches of the thought of these European thinkers is not intended to be a comprehensive treatment of their thought. Whole library shelves are full of such studies. Instead, I want to reveal only enough of their ideas to show how each fits into my story of the rise and fall of the search for depth meaning in late modernity and postmodernity, and how this story is tied to another epic tale, the rise and partial fall of rationality as the governing ideal of Western civilization. However, before I turn to this story, I would like to take the reader on a Cook’s tour of late modernity from the point of view of the structural idealist.

134

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

A Cook’s Tour of Late Modernity The central thrust of modernity, which for the sake of this chapter I will take to be co-extensive with the development of capitalist economies and democratic polities in the West from the seventeenth century until our own times, is systemic rationalization. This is a structural meta-ideal, into which feed a number of subsidiary structural ideals. We can see this thrust at work in the destruction of superstition, in the decline of religion as an active political and social force, in the growth of market economies and an international trading community, in bureaucracies and modern administration, and in the technological revolutions of the modern world. It can thus be found working simultaneously on political, economic, social, and intellectual levels. As Baudrillard notes, modernity is a mode of civilization that is opposed to tradition and which, irradiating from the Occident, imposes itself on the world as a homogeneous unity (1987: 63). In the nineteenth century, we see the triumph of the scientific/technological world view allied to the victory of bourgeois optimism and capitalist economic power. We might term this period “high modernity,” to distinguish it from the late modernity of the twentieth century. It was characteristic of high modernity that, as Charles Taylor notes, only an inner exile would allow us to operate according to anything other than instrumental reason (1991: 97). Technological, economic, and other efficiencies ruled the day. Instrumental reason was for a time normalized as the only sort worth being taken seriously in intellectual debate.3 As Albert Borgmann points out, the medieval edifice came crumbling down with the triple blows delivered by Columbus, Copernicus, and Luther. Columbus shattered the locally bounded, cosmically centred, and divinely constituted medieval world; Copernicus decentred the earth from its privileged cosmic position; Luther’s focus on the Word fatally weakened the communual power of the Catholic Church (1992: 21-22). This led to a world where the distinctive discourse was prediction and control, and to a social order created by technology and economy characterized by aggressive realism (as seen in Bacon), methodological universalism (Descartes), and ambiguous individualism (Locke) (Borgmann 1992: 1, 5). Borgmann’s list of the central characteristics of modernity—realism, universalism, and individualism—can be reinterpreted as the three basic structural ideals subservient to and supporting the meta-ideal of rationality. If modernity

The Search for Depth Meaning

135

is envisaged as a great pyramid, with rationality at its peaks, its three tips can be seen as realism, universalism, and individualism. Breaking these tips down into their constituent bricks, the central philosophical assumptions of early modernity include a conscious subject, the possibility of an objective, rational morality, the possibility of a science of society, and therefore the existence of social and historical facts, the possibility of knowing these facts, the notion that a text means what its author intended it to mean, and that knowledge is at least separable if not inherently separate from power. The search for meaning in depth bursts all of these assumptions. One of the chief ways that this rationalization drive manifests itself in intellectual circles is in the unmasking projects of thinkers like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the point of which is to expose the false consciousness of the day on a variety of subjects, finding its real “meaning” lurking somewhere beneath the depths of surface thinking. I will avoid discussing Marx, having covered some of his ideas already in my introduction. Yet it is easy enough to see how Marx’s exposé of the class-boundedness of the ideological presuppositions of the European bourgeoisie stripped away the surface language of middle-class thinking to show to the world the naked class interests lying underneath their optimism, their theory of progress, their touting of laissez-faire, their utilitarian systems of morals. The unmasking projects of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud proceeded in the name of a higher reason. They carried the rationalization project started by the European bourgeoisie to its logical extreme. The late-modern world (roughly speaking, the twentieth century) is one where myth, religion, and tradition were on the retreat on all fronts. The rationalization drive begins the long process of the death of God. The decline in religious faith finds its reflection in the decline of faith in the ability of literature to explore transcendent truths (witness T.S. Eliot and Camus) or of art to represent “reality,” “truth,” or, in extreme cases, anything at all (witness Dada and Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionism). This is part of a larger crisis of faith that thought, whether political, philosophical, psychological, or sociological, can represent the world out there. We must now ask, “what is the ‘meaning’ of this or that bit of knowledge, wisdom, or truth?” as thought becomes internally reflexive and self-questioning. This can also be seen in the decline in the faith that science, at least old-fashioned positivist science, can represent the world.

136

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Admittedly, the Anglo-American intellectual world lost this faith in the representability of reality in art, science, and thought later than Continental thinkers did, and was slower and more reluctant to accept the postmodern break. We can perhaps explain this historically: the twentieth century was in many ways the American century, the optimism emanating from the New World stubbornly refusing to take the Old World’s self-doubts too seriously. For Americans, at least until recently, science and technology seemed to offer real solutions to most social and economic problems. European pessimism just seemed misplaced to most American intellectuals. Yet despite all this, the modern search for meaning in depth left its impact upon American cultural and intellectual life, notably in America’s embracing of psychoanalysis in the middle of the twentieth century. It perhaps says something about the collective optimism of American society that it could accept the late-modern search for meaning in depth on the individual level, in terms of plumbing the depths of disordered psyches, but had a much harder time accepting it on the level of morals or social relations (i.e., as found in the works of Nietzsche and Marx). In the twentieth century, we witness a metaphysical void left by the triumph of science over religion, which is partly filled at first by historical ways of understanding politics, morals, religion, art, and even science (Troeltsch’s “crisis of historicism”), and later in the century by radical/utopian politics and a quest for personal authenticity (as in existentialism). Moral relativism, nationalism, and battling ideologies have rushed in to fill this void. The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a dangerous if not disastrous flirtation with utopian antirationalism in politics: e.g., European imperialism, fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism. This and other social and political developments went hand in hand with a fragmentation of European thought: the Anglo-American intellectual world has found itself “threatened and undermined by successive waves of hermeneuticists, structuralists, post-empiricists, deconstructionists, and other invading hordes” (Skinner 1985: 6). Some of these movements it has embraced half-heartedly; some of them it has fairly firmly rejected. The unmasking project that dominated European thought from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries is now seen as passé. This may be because it is largely unnecessary in a social and economic sense. The rationalization drive of modernity, like a har-

The Search for Depth Meaning

137

bour dredge, has scraped from the bottom of the harbour of the West weed-covered artifacts of the premodern soul and reclassified them as the unconscious mind, repression, illusions, will to power, ressentiment, and so on, tossing them into a junkyard that only historians and antiquaries visit. We now live in an era of remasking, of covering the commodities (whether material, intellectual, or political) our civilization produces with fresh layers of affective gloss enamel so that they might have a shiny appeal to potential consumers. Only such products will appeal to the narcissistic, cynical, disenchanted citizen/consumer of late modernity, its primary population. In both our cities and the corporate world that owns and runs our economy we can see the meta-ideal of rationality at work. It is embedded in the daily physical life of our urban environments and in the daily managerial life of the business enterprise. Modernism turned on its first-born metropolitan children, the cities that failed to measure up to the standards of a rational and enlightened order, and replaced them with those modelled on a rigorous Cartesian purity, realizations of a three-dimensional coordinate system in wood, brick, and concrete. Similarly, the Cartesian ideal of rational organization was applied to the corporate economy, the corporation being a monument to time universal, a legal person possessing eternal life (Borgmann 1992: 58, 36). A sound sociology of knowledge thus visits both the peaks of wide socio-cultural phenomena and the valleys of the everyday: it is only insofar as it can do both that it can lay any claim whatsoever to realism, even if this realism can visit only one perspective at a time. The structural meta-ideal of rationality is thus not a free-floating manifestation of some Absolute Spirit, but rather a powerful force manifesting itself in our daily lives in a thousand ways, some obvious, some hidden. My structural idealism takes it as a basic premise that intellectual developments proceed to some degree according to their own inner logic, but are all the same inextricably tied into broader economic and social structures without which we cannot fully understand them. It is thus (as the reader may already have guessed) both structuralist and idealist, for my central claim here is that social and historical explanation must be both if it is to fully explain their objects. As this will be an exercise in the sociology of knowledge, I will have recourse to both this internal logic of development and to the structural foundations of this development. The tale I will try to tell in this chapter is how the project of rationalization

138

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

characteristic of late modernity was expressed in non-positivistic Continental thought as a search for the depth meaning of human thought/action, going on in the next chapter to tell the associated tale of how European theorists, from the 1960s on, by and large gave up on this search for depth meaning in the wake of a postmodern break. I will begin my tale with Nietzsche’s critique of modern philosophy, looking first at the epistemological foundations of his attack on truth and morality, and then at his unmasking of the history of moral codes, trying to show how these endeavours feed into the central late-modern intellectual project of the search for depth meaning.4

Nietzsche: From Morality to the Genealogy of Morals TRUTH, MASKS, AND BAD CAUSALITY

Nietzsche had quite a bit to say about truth, including his famous suggestion that it had a female pedigree, but it is perhaps easiest to sum up his position by means of this passage written early in his career: What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically…truths are illusions…metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. (“On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”; future references to Nietzsche will use the standard system of abbreviations and section numbers) So Nietzsche sees truth, right from the beginning, as a series of worn-out metaphors. This was not an entirely revolutionary position: in The Defence of Poetry, Shelley speaks along the same lines, arguing that in the infancy of human societies, all language was metaphorical or poetical. All creators of new languages were poets to Shelley. So language is itself either a living or a fossilized poetry. Yet Nietzsche was no romantic (or at least so he says). His intention here is not so much to champion the poet as to show how truth

The Search for Depth Meaning

139

is “a sum of human relations” expressed poetically or rhetorically. Truth is the product of social interactions, which are inevitably expressed in language. Truth is not a representation of some ethereal hidden reality, not a communication of we mortals with the eternal Forms, but a way of adjudicating claims, a way of speaking, within a given culture. It is a language game, a set of absolute presuppositions, a paradigm. It is not that long a road from Nietzsche’s view of truth as metaphor to Rorty’s ironist culture. But before we timewarp too far forward, it is important to note that Nietzsche provided late modernity with a number of intriguing hints that objective truth might not be all that it is cracked up to be, that the truth claims of science and philosophy had deep, largely unseen roots in biology and irrational psychic structures. In this special sense he was a structuralist, like Marx and Freud. Not surprisingly, this led him to the conclusion that all philosophies were just foreground philosophies, and that “every philosophy conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word also a mask” (BGE 289). This pithy aphorism provides the late-modern search for depth meaning with its epistemological raison d’être: every major claim to truth is some sort of mask hiding an unpleasant reality. Nietzsche begins the late-modern project of stripping away the veils hiding the truth of morals, religion, and by implication civilization, revealing the timid little wizard behind the curtain. He opens the way for a society-wide deep rationalization, and, ironically, for the “de-rationalization” of the Nazi era, where anything that served the needs of the regime served for truth, where the positivist ideal of scientific knowledge in Germany was betrayed by the fascist ideals of blood, soil, and race.5 So truth is metaphorical and philosophies are masks. Then what of the claims of morality and religion? He unmasks these in a number of ways. What might be called his “epistemological” or Humean critique derives from his suggestion that they rest on a flawed sense of causality. In Twilight of the Idols he informs the reader that the whole realm of morality and religion belongs to that of imaginary causes (VI, 6). In The Antichrist he tells us that the whole point of sin, guilt, grace, and so forth, is to destroy man’s natural causal sense, to attribute deeds to spectres of superstition and thereby allow the priest to rule over the mass of humanity (49). The subterranean meaning of this destruction of our natural causal sense is to tame our wild wills and make us subservient to priestly rule. The

140

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

mask that the priest wears necessitates the creation of the realm of imaginary causes, what Hume might have called “occult qualities.” If there is a realm full of transcendent beings, or of abstract truths that inform all things in this world, this realm must operate according to such causes. And there must be burning bushes and pineal glands to allow the ideal to communicate with and command the real. Nietzsche’s point here is simple enough: this positing of a realm of imaginary causes is not motivated on the deepest level by a search for truth. Instead, it is the product of priestly will to power, an attempt to dupe the herd into a blind acceptance of religious and philosophical nonsense. INTENTIONALITY, REPRESSION, AND THE WILL TO POWER

The road to Freud’s discovery of psychic meaning in the unconscious mind was mapped out in advance by Nietzsche. He claims that everything that is of value in an action is unintentional, while everything that is intentional and conscious belongs merely to the surface and skin of the action (BGE 32). He, like the other seekers for depth meaning, shifts social and historical meaning from surface intentionality to deep structures. This is one of the unique aspects of the late-modern search for depth meaning: it questions the validity of the surface language, what Marx called the “ideologies,” which people use to justify their psychic or economic interests. In Nietzsche’s and Freud’s cases, this repression of psychic depth meaning involves the wearing of moral masks that cover the dirty little secrets that lurk within us, our basic drives—the will to power, sex, and death; in Marx’s case, the repression of economic meaning takes place by means of political ideologies that cover the naked oppression carried out by the current ruling class with a pleasing mask of moral universalism. In all cases, the great unmaskers of late modernity declared that human intentions couldn’t be trusted as true descriptions of the meaning of social acts. There were depths that demanded plumbing. We get a greater sense of Nietzsche’s desire to plumb the depths of human action in On the Genealogy of Morals, where he offers a prelude to Freud’s theory of repression in noting that a “bad conscience,” a serious illness, results from enclosing men within the walls of society and peace, where they lose their unconscious, infallible drives, being reduced to consciousness, “their weakest and most fallible organ” (II, 16). Under such conditions the old uncon-

The Search for Depth Meaning

141

scious natural drives are repressed, and we chafe against the prison-bars of civilization. “Civilized” moral and religious codes are nothing more than interpretations of our being-in-the-world. More specifically, the feeling of sinfulness is not a fact, but an interpretation of the fact of physiological depression (III, 16). Our morality is, for Nietzsche, very much a product of our physiology, although we rarely if ever admit this. Again, late modernity is defined by its double entendres, its refusal to take the surface meaning of a phenomena as the last word on the issue at hand. Nietzsche tells us at various places how this state of depression can be avoided by a healthy diet, good air, good reading and music, and so on, perhaps with his tongue partly in his cheek. Yet all the same, we must take him at his word when he suggests that the meaning of moral turpitude can be found in states of weakness in the body or the will (or both). Good and evil, as we will see, each have their own deep structural roots in concrete, non-moral foundations; they are caused things, almost epiphenomena. Morality for Nietzsche is never a set of rational principles embraced by enlightened minds, or a set of rules burned into stone by some deity, lessons which academic ethicists are to this day reluctant to acknowledge. Nietzsche’s basic metaphysical monism is the will to power. All living things are driven by it. Life itself is will to power, he tells us, with self-preservation being only the most common result of that will (BGE 13). “Good” in Nietzsche’s subterranean sense, in its “deeper” sense, is whatever heightens one’s will to power; “bad” is whatever thwarts it (Anti 2). To continue my aquatic metaphor, the will to power is a powerful underground channel from which spring both moralities and courses of action. Understanding it is the key that unlocks the history of moral codes and makes a genealogy of morals possible. A MORAL GENEALOGY THE GENEALOGICAL METHOD

Nietzsche moved Western thinking from a discussion of ethical theories to a search for the genealogy of ethical systems and codes. He moved from morality to a genealogy of morals, the key stroke in his more general search for depth meaning. Again he starts from something akin to a Humean position with this aphorism from Beyond Good and Evil: “There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena” (108). Moral judgments are

142

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

projected onto the external world by the individual or group making the judgment for extra-moral reasons. These judgments have a psychological or physiological basis: moralities are a “sign language of the affects” (BGE 187). Moralities are like coastal buoys serving to mark the existence of structures deep below the water’s surface. These surfaces had, until Nietzsche’s day, stood largely unexplored. Happy capitalists, happy utilitarians, and happy modernizers preferred to clarify the most effective surface routes for their life journeys along instrumentally rational terms, preferred to repress knowledge of these hidden reefs regardless of how real or how dangerous to our psychic and social development they were. Nietzsche’s genealogical method is laid out in greatest detail, not surprisingly, in his Genealogy of Morals. His stated modus operandi there is to look for the conditions under which humanity devised its concepts of good and evil, and to determine what value these values themselves possess, i.e., whether they express a sense of degeneration or regeneration of life and the will to power in their holders (Preface 3). His method is thus to question the value of values, to go beyond their surface rationality or irrationality to interrogate them at a deeper level. This leads him to put forward his grand schema of the historical dialectic of master and slave moralities, to his concept of ressentiment and his critique of Christianity. RESSENTIMENT AND CHRISTIANITY

Here is Nietzsche’s general comment on the nature of moralizing: Moral judgments constitute the favorite revenge of the spiritually limited against those less limited—also a sort of compensation for having been ill-favored by nature— finally an opportunity for acquiring spirit and becoming refined—malice spiritualized. (BGE 219) The depth meaning of moral judging is some lack, whether physiological or psychological, from which springs resentment and a need for revenge against those who don’t experience this lack. This is what Nietzsche means by ressentiment. The resenters tell themselves and others, “Look, here are these full, happy people. We cannot tolerate this fullness, this happiness, in the midst of our misery. It cannot be good, as we do not have it. Therefore it must be evil. We must eliminate it.” The great slave revolt in morals begins when “ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth

The Search for Depth Meaning

143

to values” (GM I, 10). The slaves, the resentful, try to poison the consciences of the more fortunate, thereby achieving the “sublimest triumph of revenge” (GM II, 14). They try to activate the forces of repression in their masters, to turn their happiness into a guilty conscience. However, even this ressentiment can become dangerous if not bled off or channelled into less dangerous areas. This is the job of the ascetic priest: he “detonates” the accumulating ressentiment of the herd, the slaves, in “orgies of feeling,” or turns it inward by telling the herd that they themselves are the cause of their own suffering, thereby giving birth to guilt, sin, and bad conscience (GM II, 15). The herd must exercise restraint in its subterranean campaign against master morality, to undermine this morality from within, and not by a direct assault on its fortresses. The historical point of origin of the slave revolt in the West Nietzsche takes to be the ancient Jews, that priestly nation par excellence. In that great struggle between the Jewish and Roman moral codes of antiquity we can read the entire history of the opposition between master and slave moralities (GM I, 16). In The Antichrist Nietzsche delivers one long, withering attack on the chief manifestation of slave morality over the last two thousand years, namely, Christianity. Christ was a sublime seduction for the blonde beasts of Europe, his moral code such a sticky sweet substance that these marauding pagan bears could little resist that first taste, bringing them to their spiritual ruin. The cross was the “mark of recognition for the most subterranean conspiracy that ever existed—against health, beauty, whatever has turned out well; courage, spirit, graciousness of the soul, against life itself ” (Anti 62). Nietszche overturns the love/brotherhood/forgiveness mythology surrounding Christianity, finding deep in the waters of Christian love the slimy sea serpents of unsatisfied revenge and of hatred of all that is healthy, mighty, and life enhancing. Hidden within commandments like “love thy neighbour” was an unsatisfied resentment of slaves against their masters: with such a love, the mighty are brought low, the herd become the masters of the noble, aristocracies become mass democracies, mass mediocrities. MASTERS AND SLAVES/GOOD AND EVIL

Nietzsche’s distinction between master and slave morality, between the moral codes of the noble and the herd, is the metanarrative he uses to attribute meaning to the history of religion and morality.

144

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Hidden beneath the surface of this history he pretends to discover a darker dialectic, a struggle between two types of human being, one that continues to this day. These types of human being are not distinguished so much by their ideals, although these are different; instead, they are distinguished by the different ways they give play to the wills to power, ways that are themselves grounded in distinct levels of physiological well-being. The psychological presupposition of slave morality is that everything that “elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbor is henceforth called evil; and the fair, modest, submissive, conforming mentality, the mediocrity of desires attains moral designations and honors” (BGE 201). Parallel to this psychological presupposition is an etymological one that Nietzsche makes with regard to the origins of the terms good, evil, and bad. Under the reign of master morality, “good” meant noble, aristocratic, and privileged, while “bad” meant common, low, plebeian. Now that slave morality has won out, “good” is associated with Christian and democratic virtues, while the “good” of master morality, the free exercise of power, has been transvalued by the herd into an “evil” (GM I, 4). Under the Roman Empire, the Jews (including the Christian sect) aimed at spiritual revenge by revaluing the values of their Roman enemies and overlords, producing the Judeo-Christian slave revolt in morals that ruled Europe pretty well unopposed until the Renaissance (GM I, 7). According to Nietzsche, we can read into the etymological shift in the meaning of good and evil in the ancient world an underlying grand historical shift in moralities, a shift that only the moral genealogist can fully appreciate. This structural shift is echoed on the theological level in the move from paganism to Christianity: it is not a free choice by a people to embrace a kindler, gentler moral code, but a surface expression of an underlying political-physiological weakness on the part of the herd. To engage in a logical debate over the relative value of moral codes embraced by the Romans, Jews, and other peoples in history is to entirely miss the point of Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals, and further to miss the point of the late-modern unmasking project as applied to moral life. To put it another way, for late-modern unmaskers like Nietzsche, moral codes never stand alone: they are always the expressions of deeper structures. To debate whether Kant’s categorical imperative or Mill’s injunction for us to pursue the greatest happiness of the greatest number is closer to some sort

The Search for Depth Meaning

145

of moral truth is for Nietzsche merely a stubborn refusal to see both of these principles as the expressions of their creators’ characters, as expressions of their respective wills to power. The former could be seen as the expression of Kant’s stern pietism and meticulous formalism: all principles must be universal if they are to count as principles at all. Lying is wrong, even if done to murderous thugs inquiring about the whereabouts of one’s family. This was the sort of thinking one would expect from a mustard-loving Konigsbergian professor whose promenades the townspeople could use to set their clocks by. Mill’s greatest happiness principle is that of a practical Englishman, a liberal caught up in the middle class’s coming to power amidst the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution. Mass utility seemed more important than great art and noble deeds in such a society (though to be fair, Mill was very conflicted about this, as his essay on Coleridge shows). The real distinction in Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals is not so much that between good and evil, but that between “bad” and “evil.” “This ‘bad’ of noble origin and that ‘evil’ out of the cauldron of unsatisfied hatred…how different these words ‘bad’ and ‘evil’ are, although they are both apparently the opposite of the same concept ‘good’.” The good man under master morality is noble and powerful, but dyed in the colours of ressentiment, he becomes petty and revengeful (GM I, 11). The historical shift, the slave revolt in morals, takes place when the goodness of the masters is revalued into the evil of the slaves, the very slaves whom the masters formerly took to be “bad” (i.e., low, dirty, petty, weak, subservient, etc.), but not evil. Now the badness of the slaves, their resentment and thirst for revenge, becomes the new good, as seen in Christianity’s depictions of the horrors that await the wicked after death in Lucifer’s fiery domain. All of this might be a rather fanciful construction. But Nietzsche’s point here is that the genealogist must use such “traces” as etymological shifts to get at broader historical changes in values. After Nietzsche, the Western world could never again look at morality with the naïveté reserved for the intellectually primitive. Good and evil had now revealed their hidden depths, their spiritual and physiological meanings, their nasty little etymological secrets. Nietzsche’s unmasking rationality pushed these nasty secrets into the foreground and exposed the whole moral apparatus of modernity (including Christianity, democracy, feminism, and socialism) to

146

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

the deep cuts of the genealogist’s scalpel. Nietzsche is a representative of the late-modern European intellectual bourgeoisie gone bad: he pushes the search for depth meaning to its limits, abandoning it in the end in favour of a salute to naked power. Like the greasers in black leather jackets on motorcyles that haunted the fringes of fifties American white-bread suburban culture, Nietzsche was the wild one of late-modern intellectual culture, revving his genealogical engines a bit too loudly for the taste of the late-nineteenth-century educated bourgeois. The philosophical neighbourhood would never again be quite the same. I now turn to Freud’s unmasking project, which, like Nietzsche’s, interrogates the human soul, but in the psychological sense.

Freud: From Mind to Psyche THE “DISCOVERY” OF THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE PSYCHE

Following Nietszche’s instructive hints, Freud brought together the work of such immediate predecessors in psychology as Charcot and Janet in his theory of the unconscious mind.6 The idea that the rational, conscious component of thought is either the only or the most important element in human motivation is unmasked; deep beneath the flow of consciousness runs a raging torrent, murky but not entirely impenetrable: the unconscious mind. The deeper psychic structure of the human psyche is now seen as a warring triad consisting of the ego, the id, and (in the later Freud) the superego. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud announces that the unconscious is the true reality, and that this reality is as little communicated to us by the data of consciousness as the reality of the external world is by the reports of our sense organs (Freud 1938a: 542). The fundamental premise of psychoanalysis is this division of the psychical into the conscious and the unconscious. Freud fine-tunes this division with his famous tripartite structure of the psyche: the ego represents our perceptual system, the external world, and common sense: it is conscious or preconscious; the id represents the instincts and passions, and is the unconscious reservoir of our sexual and aggressive energies; while the superego is the censor, our “conscience,” which is probably formed out of the “harboured residues of the existences of countless egos” deposited in the id and revived by the ego as the psychic organ of repression (Freud 1962: 15, 28). The thing that keeps

The Search for Depth Meaning

147

the whole mechanism working is the libido, the psychic energy that Freud at first saw as explicitly sexual. This flows out into the world and fixes onto erotic objects, and then returns to the ego, like the arms of an amoeba (Freud 1969: 7). So insofar as our basic psychic energy emanates from the id, we can see the unconscious mind as a power station that keeps our whole psychic network going. Without it, we couldn’t think or act. We would “black out,” the city of the mind left without energy. Even though civilization requires that these energies be repressed or sublimated into constructive endeavours, there is a sense in which Freud clearly anchors the meaning of human psychic life deep in the depths of the unconscious mind. Underneath the clarity of our rational intentions there is hidden a twisted jungle of psychic repressions, of drives that flow into conscious life along tortuous channels emanating from deep, hidden sources. Just as nineteenth-century European explorers penetrated into the heart of darkness of Africa, Freud explored the river of the psyche, going from its estuary in such traces of the id in conscious life as dreams, hysteria, neuroses, and paraphraxes to its origins in what were hitherto mysterious unconscious processes. His method was to fill in the “breaks” in conscious psychical events with reasonable inferences as to what was going on in the unconscious mind (Freud 1969: 16). Freud looked for the structures of the psyche behind those thousand little daily events of conscious experience. He was a detective of the unconscious, reconstructing its operations out of the verbal and behavioural clues it leaves behind in the external world. The point of pyschoanalysis was to oblige the unconscious mind to reveal its secret history (Hutton 1988: 124). Insofar as this process had a therapeutic motivation, its point was to strengthen the ego, the rational, conscious, perceptual component of the pscyhe. It aimed to unmask the workings of the id and the superego to the ego and therefore allow our reason to establish a permanent foothold in the territory of the instincts and the repressed passions. Thus Freud investigated the deep structures of human conscious intentionality with the hope that he could buttress that intentionality against the hidden internal psychic forces seeking to undermine it. REPRESSION: THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF

The study of dreams, claims Freud, provides the via regia into the unconscious element of our psyche (1938a: 540). Extending the

148

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

metaphor a bit, he tells us that when the psychic censor (which he later calls the superego) rules over the wishes of the id, we can speak of “repression.” When repression occurs, the mind becomes like a mountain region where the main highways have been flooded, and (psychic) traffic is forced to use steep and inconvenient pathways formally used by hunters alone (1938a: 484). One of these pathways is dreaming. Just as dreams provide a way out of the mountain valleys of repressed wishes for the mind, they at the same time provide a way back into these valleys for the psychoanalyst. Even early in his exploration of the unconscious mind, in his study of dreams, Freud makes use of metaphors of surface and depth, of hidden regions not normally accessible to rational thinking. Freud divides a dream between its manifest and its latent content, the former its surface symbolism, the latter its partially hidden unconscious meaning. The latent content of a dream undergoes a process of distortion consisting of condensation, displacement, symbolization, and dramatization before the psychic censor allows the repressed wishes emanating from the unconscious to be expressed in the dream. Once again, we see the metaphor of surface and depth at play: the manifest content of a dream is merely a set of symbols or codes that the analyst has to decipher to understand its latent or true meaning. It’s not that the manifest meaning of a dream is unimportant: quite the contrary, it offers the analyst clues as to what the dream really means. Yet just as Marx sought to discover the economic struggles taking place below the surface ideological disagreements between social classes, and Nietzsche sought to understand how slave moralities like Christianity were grounded in political and physiological weakness, Freud sought out the true meaning of psychic phenomena such as dreams, jokes, and slips of the tongue in our psychic depths, in our unconscious drives. The discovery of a dream’s meaning is precisely what Freud was after in his interpretation of dreams: dreams weren’t just random replayings of day residues and memories, but meaningful (if coded) stories told by the id to the ego. Freud is quite clear that the motive power of a dream is a wish-fulfillment of a censored unconscious desire (1938a: 485). We can imagine the id as a seething cauldron of warring and unsatisfied urges that constantly batter themselves against the containing wall of the superego, akin to Nietzsche’s wild blonde beast caged by the moral codes of slave morality. Even though this seething cauldron is held in check by powerful contain-

The Search for Depth Meaning

149

ing forces, notably our conscience and the social forces that support it, its activities are registered from time to time in our conscious life. The whole process is connected to waking life insofar as our day thoughts act as the entrepreneurs of our repressed psychic energies, providing the capital that allows these energies to invest in the creation of a dream (Freud 1938a: 506). Given that dreams attempt to rid the psyche of disturbances, they can be seen as the “guardians of sleep” (Freud 1969: 28). But what do they guard against? “Dreaming is a fragment of the superseded pyschic life of the child,” specifically, a fragment consisting of repressed infantile sexual wish-impulses that the superseded psychic censor will not allow to enter the conscious mind (Freud 1938a: 510, 538). So the interpretation of dreams allows us access to the long-buried treasure chest of secrets concerning our childhood sexuality. Not only do we repress the unconscious drives striving to find their way out of the mountain valleys of the unconscious, but also our own childhood histories. Yet there is still another level of repression going on in the psyche. The interpretation of dreams tells us something else, something about the history of the human race: We are encouraged to expect, from the analysis of dreams, a knowledge of the archaic inheritance of man, a knowledge of psychical things in him that are innate. It would seem that dreams and neuroses have preserved for us more of the psychical antiquities than we suspected; so that psychoanalysis may claim a high rank among the sciences which endeavour to reconstruct the oldest and darkest phases of the beginning of mankind. (1938a: 497) So another metaphor comes into play here: psychology as archaeology. In his search for these psychic antiquities, Freud was acting as an archaeologist of the human soul, digging deep, like Schliemann at Troy and Mycenae, beneath the accumulated surface rubble of culture, moral ideals, and religion to uncover the gilded treasures of hidden lusts. Freud no doubt felt the same glee that Schliemann did upon his discovery of what he took to be the golden necklace of Helen of Troy when he himself discovered that fairly complicated mental processes occurred in the unconscious part of the mind, processes that could be understood by means of an archaeology of their conscious remnants in dreams and associated phenomena. He was able to do this because he believed that the life of the uncon-

150

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

scious mind is indestructible, that nothing there is past or forgotten (Freud 1938a: 518). He saw it as acting as a sort of archive wherein all past acts of repression are recorded for future reference. This archive can be probed by psychoanalytic methods, including the analysis of dreams and the “talking cure.” To return to an old metaphor, the unconscious, whether individual or collective, is like a powerful river flowing under all our conscious psychic life, providing it with a hidden, deeper meaning. Dreams are one way in which this meaning is revealed. With Freud we see how the meta-ideal of rationality sought to conquer the terra incognita of our dreams and our unconscious sexual and aggressive drives. The modern industrial and bureaucratic system needed to bring these under the aegis of its productive, instrumental rationality, but could do so only by wielding the dangerously double-edged sword of the search for depth meaning. The hysterias and neuroses of the late nineteenth century that Freud focused on in his clinical work were seen as expressions of psychic apparatuses that no longer functioned properly. If the light of psychoanalytical reason could be directed on those dark pathways that Freud spoke of in his Interpretation of Dreams, his patients could see how their pathologies were of their own making, and dispel them. These patients could be returned to full citizenship within the commonwealth of a productive reason, returned to the iron cage of rationality. Later, under the consumer capitalism of the post-war period, although instrumental rationality was still an important factor in the productive process, commodious rationality required a clever manipulation of the unbottled genies of dreams, hidden childhood memories, and sexuality by a people who were in a sense still coming to terms with Freud’s rational reconstruction of these phenomena. To repeat a commonplace in contemporary social theory, consumerism shifted the West away from the cultural dominance of the Protestant work ethic, with its obsessions about the denial of immediate pleasure and the accumulation of capital, towards that of a more immediate gratification of our programmed desires as expressed in the consumption of commodities in our leisure time. Two worlds met somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century (although the libidinal culture of consumption never entirely subsumed the ascetic culture of work). A case in point of the meeting of these two worlds is Salvador Dali doing car commercials for television in the sixties, the

The Search for Depth Meaning

151

surrealist magus doling out suburban dreams to the television camera by a twirl of his trademark moustache. The depths of the unconscious had already been discovered; the only task left was to figure out how to use these depths to sell more products (in this case, American automobiles). Although melting clocks and burning giraffes are not big consumer items, they do stand as aesthetic symbols of the late-modern opening of the unconscious mind through visual art. That Dali late in life turned from artist to salesman perhaps signals a broader shift, that of the end of the search for depth meaning and the coming of postmodern culture. EROS AND DEATH

After working through several versions of his depth psychology, Freud turned to the theory of the instincts. At first, he believed that all psychic energy was basically sexual: our libido powered our psychic apparatus. However, this left unexplained a number of things, notably self-destructive behaviour (as found in some phobias and neuroses), and more strikingly the very fact of repression itself. If our basic drive is toward sex, why did the culture of Freud’s day so obviously repress that drive? Part of this can be explained by social factors such as the need to buttress the traditional model of the family, including the property relationships associated with that institutions (e.g., fathers wanted to be sure they would be passing on their property to their real sons, so they required monogamy from their wives). Yet the repressions of our sexual drives couldn’t be explained solely in terms of social functionality. There seemed to be internal psychic forces at work here that repressed human sexuality far more than is required by social peace. This added to the fact that Freud found early on, while working with Joseph Breuer, that his mostly female hysterical patients could be cured by unblocking a longburied childhood memory associated with some traumatic event of a sexual nature. What kept these memories hidden for so long? Freud’s solution to this problem was that there were in fact two basic psychic drives. These were Eros and Death, the sources of our sexual and aggressive or self-destructive energies. Eros moves us to preserve life and to join together in greater organic unities, while the death instinct moves things back to their primeval, inorganic state (1961: 66; 1969: 5-6). They flow like twin rivers through human thought and action, through both the psyche and history. The meaning of civilization is the struggle between Eros and Death,

152

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

a struggle for the life of the human species; “it is this battle of the giants that our nursery-maids try to appease with their lullaby about heaven” (1961: 69). Thus the structure of human history echoes that of the psyche for Freud: it is a Manichean struggle of darkness and light. Within us, this struggle plays out as a conflict between our freely playing libidos and our repressive superegos, between our desire to create life and to destroy it. By becoming civilized we to a large measure repudiate our sexual drives (1969: 43). This repudiation, as part of the struggle of love and death, leads to an increase of the superego-sponsored sense of guilt to perhaps intolerable heights. Parallel to this battle of giants is a further one between personal happiness and the urge to unite with other human beings, the battle of individual and cultural development (1961: 80, 88). These struggles will continue as long as human civilizations exist, and force the civilizing powers and agencies to exercise a considerable degree of repressive damping of our individual erotic and aggressive drives. SUFFERING, RELIGION, AND CIVILIZATION

The last element of Freud’s search for depth meaning to be examined is not so much psychological as social. In his Civilization and Its Discontents and elsewhere in his later social theory, Freud applied ideas taken from his psychoanalytic theory and practice to the very nature of civilized life. He moved his search for depth meaning from the psyche to culture as a whole. One of the central themes of Civilization and Its Discontents is suffering, both its sources and how to control it. There are three such sources: our body, the external world, and our relations with others (1961: 24). Civilized societies have largely eliminated the threats posed by lions, tigers, and bears—i.e., the external world—while the sufferings caused by our bodies are in a sense inevitable, although they can be moderated in part by modern medicine. So in a sense Freud’s book is a meditation on the sufferings that result from our relations with other people, on sociological dukkha.7 Humanity’s efforts to combat suffering can be grouped into three general categories: powerful deflections to make light of our miseries, substitutive satisfactions that diminish them, and intoxicating substances that make us insensitive to them (Freud 1961: 22). Freud discusses several concrete cases under each of these categories. Yet perhaps his most interesting remarks concern intoxi-

The Search for Depth Meaning

153

cants, cultural sublimations, and religion. He believes that intoxicating substances have an established place in “the economics of the libido,” but that they have wound up wasting a great amount of energy that might otherwise have gone into improving the human lot (1961: 25). Alcohol and drugs may make one feel good, but they do little to fix the human condition in the long term, a conclusion that the Buddha would agree with. Freud is more sympathetic to displacements of our libidinal energies into sublimative satisfactions such as art and science. These are mildly successful at dealing with the frustrations of the social repression of the sexual and aggressive instincts, but they still cannot compensate for the sufferings caused by our own bodies (26-27). Yet the most effective palliative to suffering, at least before the twentieth century, was also the most dangerous one, for it fostered illusions. This was religion, the great foe of late-modern unmaskers like Nietzsche and Freud. In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud refers to religion as a delusional remoulding of reality that depresses the value of life and distorts our picture of the real world (1961: 28, 32). However, his most extended and stinging criticisms can be found in what is perhaps his sequel to Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, namely, The Future of an Illusion. He begins this book by suggesting that the gods performed three tasks for our ancestors: they exorcised the terrors of nature, reconciled men to the cruelty of fate, and compensated them for the sufferings and privations of a life in common (1964: 24). Behind every divine figure, especially for monotheists, was a father writ large. He derives religion explicitly from the Oedipus complex, making it a “universal obsessional neurosis” of humanity. He feels that it is high time that we replace this neurosis, the effects of repression, by the effects of the rational operation of the intellect (1964: 71, 72). Here Freud is quite consciously championing the meta-ideal of rationality of late modernity as manifested in his support for its drive to restrict or abolish religious belief. In modern life, science, technology, and bureaucracy take the place of superstitious terrors and fears as the underlying principles of social organization. Nature is no longer a mysterious Other, a dark haven for goblins, spirits, and sea monsters. For late moderns like Freud, it was accessible to rational organization and human use by means of agriculture, technology, and industry. For late moderns religion becomes a private thing, something indulged in the home or on Sunday mornings at

154

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

the parish church. In the modern period, work life, politics, and public culture were thoroughly secularized, purged of the divine. It should not be surprising in the wake of this broad process of secularization that intellectuals such as Nietzsche and Freud rejected the metaphysical underpinnings of religious belief as illusions. As should be clear by now, Freud believed that the cornerstone of civilized life was repression. In An Outline of Psychoanalysis, he suggests that the most valued assets of our civilization are acquired at the cost of sacrificing most of our sexuality (1969: 58). There is one major counter-current to this process of social repression. One of the most “uncivilized” courses of action is falling in love, in that in a love relation one feels the need of only the Other, and not of society as a whole (1961: 55). When sexuality is sublimated into romance, our culturally massaged ids manage to escape to a small degree the repressive powers of civilized life. Similarly, Freud tells us that human beings have a great degree of mutual hostility as a result of our natural aggressive instincts, and that civilization must set up an agency within each of us, the superego, to watch over these aggressive instincts “like a garrison in a conquered city” (1961: 59, 71). Such language conjures up a Hieronymus Bosch-style image of condemned souls in pain reaching out of hell for paradise, only to be thrown back into the pit by stern angelic guardians. Or to use a pagan metaphor that would have, not doubt, been more to Freud’s liking, Eros and Death stand like giants outside the gates of civilization, ready to hurl down the Olympian gods from their palace of reason and humanity onto the rocks below. These gods must be continually on their guard, their repressive forces vigilantly manning the ramparts of rationality (at least during the daytime), on watch against these titanic children of heaven and earth. This brings us to Freud’s general estimate of the value of civilization in Civilization and Its Discontents. He argues that we cannot overlook the degree to which civilization is based on the renunciation of instinct (1961: 44). It holds eros and aggression in check, to the point where it is hard for us to be happy under its sway. The primitive man was much better off in this regard, finding happiness easier to come by (1961: 62). Freud’s dark vision of how the excessive demands of our cultural superegos deprive the individual under civilization of happiness leads him to conclude that, under the influence of “cultural urges,” some epochs of civilization, or perhaps all

The Search for Depth Meaning

155

of humanity, have become neurotic (1961: 91). Underneath the optimism about progress in modern civilization Freud detected a neurotic undercurrent fed by the hidden tributaries of massive influxes of repressed instinct. This progress is fed by deep neurotic structures, hidden away in the psycho-social bedrock, structures that generate untold megawatts of repressive energy. Naturally, his mission as both psychoanalyst and cultural theorist was to diagnose and cure these neuroses, to get modern industrial-technocratic civilization back on its psychic feet. Freud was the great explorer of the bourgeois world of repressed and duplicitous sexuality, the great unearther of human instinctual drives. His own search for depth meaning revealed the grubby and ignoble origins of what most had previously thought noble endeavours, such as religion, war, art, and literature. Underneath the accomplishments of civilization lay repressed fragments of childhood wishes, warring instincts, old hysterias and neuroses, and ancient fears of nature and of cruel fathers. His unmasking project laid these bare and thus contributed to the rationalization drive of modernity. I now briefly turn to twentieth-century sociology’s search for meaning in depth, as found in the sociology of knowledge. Once again, this search is the product of Middle-European culture, although it had no small effect on sociology in the Anglo-American world.

From Sociology to the Sociology of Knowledge MANNHEIM’S SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE

The movement in the twentieth century from a sociology of “social facts” to the sociology of knowledge was the product by and large of German historicism and phenomenology, and it received an early, clear formulation in Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia. Here we move from a science of society along the lines of an August Comte or Emile Durkheim to a study of how knowledge is produced in a given society, to an investigation of the depth meaning of positivist or historicist sociological methods. Mannheim says that the sociology of knowledge looks at the mental structure of the subject in its totality, which requires us to look at how this structure appears in different social and historical groups (1936: 266). This is because he feels that we must consider how an investigator’s social position infiltrates his or her thinking, especially if this thinking is ideological. This leads him to conclude that by investigating various

156

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

species of knowledge, the sociologist of knowledge “seeks to obtain systematic comprehension of the relationship between social existence and thought” (1936: 271, 309). This is yet another Copernican Revolution in thinking: the sociologist moves from trying to understand social life, social existence, to trying to understand how other theorists have thought about or explained this existence. In this sense, the sociology of knowledge is second-order theorizing premised on a hermeneutic of suspicion. Things and social theories are not always what they seem to be on the surface. Indeed, insofar as this chapter is itself an exercise in the sociology of knowledge, it participates in the late-modernist project of searching for depth meaning, in this case reflexively, by asking what lies underneath the sociology of knowledge itself. It could even be seen as “third-order theorizing,” which opens up the thorny problem of when, if ever, we can get off the merry-go-round of reflexive theory.8 However, to finish off my account of late-modern European intellectual life, we do have to try to situate the sociology of knowledge within the larger context of late modernity, as part of the unmasking tradition, and thus as part of the history of the rise and fall of this search for depth meaning. Mannheim’s basic concern with his own participation in the unmasking tradition was that his work would wind up in relativism, so he invented the term “relationism” to describe his brand of sociology, a brand that does not wish to deny criteria of rightness and wrongness, but insists that they can be formulated only outside of some specific perspective (1936: 283). All knowledge is Situationsgebunden, bound to a situation. The concept of truth does change through time. But its exact physiognomy at any given time is structured by its surrounding social world (see 1936: 291). Mannheim defends his relationism against the suggestion that it might be code for relativism by noting that it would become so only if linked to the older idea of static, eternal, unperspectivistic truths independent of the subjective experience of the observer (300). Truth is fluid and perspectival, a lesson learned from Nietzsche. If our model of truth is Heraclitean and historicist, there’s no reason why changes in the content of truth should be particularly worrisome. This is a lesson that would not be lost on the postmodernists, as we shall soon see. It is also a clever piece of rhetoric, leaving open the question of whether such a concept of truth transports us into an entirely new epistemological language game.

The Search for Depth Meaning

157

BERGER AND LUCKMANN AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF EVERYDAY KNOWLEDGE

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann extended the sociology of knowledge even further in suggesting that the origins of this “discipline” were too much steeped in the history of ideas, that it should focus instead on the social construction of “reality,” or at least on the bodies of knowledge that constitute everyday reality in the modern world (1967: 1-4). So not only are bodies of intellectual knowledge subjected to sociology’s unmasking gaze, but everyday life is also. Berger and Luckmann suggest that what “everybody knows” has its own sort of logic (1967: 43). Common sense knowledge, not abstract ideas, is the focus of their sociology of knowledge. This knowledge constitutes the fabric of meanings without which no society could exist. This sort of knowledge is made up of the signs and symbols that everyday language uses to build up semantic “zones of meaning” (Berger and Luckmann 1967: 14, 41). The job of the sociologist of knowledge is to decode these signs and symbols, to make clear what they mean in the situation where they are used. The search for depth meaning in late modernity was thus the mission of self-critical rationalizers in European bureaucratic, economic, and technological elites, a sort of second Enlightenment rejecting the uncritical rationality and optimism of the first one. The sociology of knowledge, whether in the hands of Mannheim or Berger and Luckmann, continues the unmasking project of late modernity, in this case unmasking knowledge seen as a realm of truth independent of the social circumstances that gave it birth. The search for depth meaning in the realm of the production of knowledge is perhaps the final frontier of the meta-ideal of rationality within the confines of late modernity. It is only a short leap from the social construction of reality to the postmodern deconstruction of reality, a matter to which I will turn in a moment. However, before I do, I would like to emphasize the “virtuality” of the way I see the modern structures of rationality. In each of its manifestations, we must keep in mind that there have always been, and will be again, alternative ideals. Some cases in point: the rigid Cartesian grids of the late-modern city may have replaced the winding lanes and haphazard, landmark-hugging arrangements of earlier periods. Yet these earlier arrangements still have an evocative charm for many of us, and we see a partial attempt to evoke some of this charm in postmodern architecture. Secondly, the instrumen-

158

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

tal rationality and emphasis on productivity in contemporary economic life, with its telos of an undifferentiated global economy, have recently been attacked by postmodern “localists” and by theorists like John Ralston Saul, who quite rightly notes that positive political changes and movements towards social justice have never been the result of an unseen economic hand pushing society forward. Lastly, ethical rationalists within the theoretical community (e.g., utilitarians, libertarians, and contractarians) have lately faced a barrage of criticism from communitarians and dialogicians like Charles Taylor for the futility and hollowness of their attempts to distill the essence of the Good from the liquor of human reason alone. A fuller treatment of this theme of the ultimate plasticity of human social arrangements must await my final chapter for a fuller treatment. Suffice it to say here that the escape from an undiluted structuralism as a form of historical and social explanantion is at the same time an escape from determinism, whether in its geo-climatic (Montesquieu), economic (Marx), or psychological (B. F. Skinner) form. In short, things can change, and probably will.

6 The End of the Search for Depth Meaning as the Essence of Postmodernity

The Basic Themes THE BIG PICTURE

Somewhere in the first decade or two after the Second World War our culture underwent a dramatic shift, a shift prompted by the rise to prominence of the economy of mass consumption in the West. Parallel (and intimately connected) to this development came, about a decade later, starting from the European avant-garde, and filtering slowing but surely out into the English-speaking world, poststructuralist and postmodernist thought. This provided a powerful paradigm to compete with such older, more established ways of thinking as positivism, liberalism, and historicism. This paradigm called a halt to the creeping advance of the structural meta-ideal of rationality in exchange for a limited (to the consumer economy and popular and intellectual culture, at least) return to the irrational. This represents a limited functional acceptance of the meta-ideal of public irrationality as a counter to the general modern trend to social rationality.1 Mass awareness of depth meaning, tied to the social and technological changes that have come with the economy of mass consumption from, roughly, the end of the Second World War until today, has created a feedback effect. Even when we think and act naively and purely consciously, we are at the same time vaguely aware of the unconscious, ideological, or social signification of our act or thought. Notes to chapter 6 are on pp. 279-83.

159

160

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Truth has been bifurcated between the literal and the hidden, between the surface and the depth. This results in relativism and historicism as important intellectual problems, but also in a general “disenchantment” of the social world, a theme I will return to later in this chapter. Notably, it creates in certain areas of Western culture a tendency toward irony and cynicism (as Richard Rorty and Peter Sloterdijk have noted), as those “in the know” feel a loss of the ability to act spontaneously and unconsciously. As Baudrillard suggests, we live in an era of mass culture and mass media, where revolutions of style, fashion, writing, and custom create an aesthetic of change for change’s sake (1987: 68-69). Late-modern culture had its self-confidence eroded by unsettling technological revolutions, allied to revolutions in the consumer economy, the decline of stabilizing religious traditions, the crumbling of the nuclear family and “patriarchy,” and the dislocations caused by subcultural and countercultural self-alienations over the last four decades. Connected to this loss of self-confidence in modern Western culture, the bourgeoisie has lost its stake in the rationalization project. The new managers and mythmakers of late-modern capitalism must spread a layer of affect, of manufactured need, over consumer products to fuel the dialectic of desire. The modern manufacturer, as Christopher Lasch notes, must educate the masses in the culture of consumption, creating an unappeasable appetite for goods, services, and personal fulfillment (1979: 136-37). The consumer economy requires a large element of mystification in the consuming masses.2 The spiritual artifacts of earlier periods, including myths, religious symbols, and unconscious drives, are used in this remasking effort. Pop stars sport crucifixes and frolic sensuously for the camera, a can of soda pop in their hands. Reality for the masses is now media-mediated, the image taking precedence over the concrete product, political theatre over debate, the simulacrum over the physical thing. Reality has become hyperreality. This coincides with the rise of a new social reality, as intellectual life becomes isolated and protected in the university. A new, privileged subclass emerges from this development, the state-sponsored intellectual with academic tenure and a salary that puts them squarely within the upper middle class, into what John Ralston Saul calls the “corporatist” system. It bars entry to outsiders with gatekeepers versed in arcane and technical languages, languages that one must learn to be permitted entry into the various profes-

The End of the Search for Depth Meaning

161

sional “corporations” that make up university departments. And as media images penetrate deeper and deeper into everyday life, these intellectual corporations tend to either retreat further into the explorations of their sacred canons (e.g., philosophy departments) or in some cases simply give up their independence to private business interests (e.g., physical science, engineering, and computer science departments). In either case, a critical engagement with the society around them vanishes. Coinciding with the exhaustion of the modernist rationalization project in philosophy and the arts comes this “remasking” impulse, emerging fully armed, like Athena from the head of Zeus, from the search for depth meaning in the great unmaskers of late modernity such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. The project of the Enlightenment was never completed. It instead lies on the side of the philosophical freeway of modernity behind a garish billboard, burned out and smashed like an old Chevy, flowers growing from its rusty hubcaps. Gleaming BMWs stream by these flowers, riding off into the brave new world of the late-capitalist consumer economy. One of the more hardy floral species growing from these hubcaps is postmodernism. It has distinct expressions in the world of art and architecture, where it shows a mild, parodic classicism, and in that of philosophy, literary criticism, and social thought. This second expression of postmodernism has been born and nurtured almost exclusively within the intellectual hothouses of university life, and we should not be surprised if it bears the marks of its social origins. Postmodernist thought is the product of a late-capitalist consumer culture where the spirit of a vigorous social and political critique is largely exhausted. It grows best in the fertile fields of what Rorty calls “ironist culture,” where thick descriptions of private idiosyncracy are assigned the job of penetrating the veil of reality, a job formerly the business of theology, philosophy, and science (1989: 94). The last real root-and-branch critique of Western culture came out of Critical Theory and the New Left of the sixties, which by the eighties had gone out of fashion. Now critique turns to parodic and ironic readings of texts, and not social structures, as its principle occupations.3 Linda Hutcheon (1989: 3-4) is quite explicit about the role of the postmodern cultural critic: she is a “dedoxifier,” accepting in principle that artistic production cannot be separated from its political context (i.e., that political power penetrates to every nook and cranny of personal and cultural life). Yet after this process of de-dox-

162

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

ification is finished, the field is left empty of meaningful ideals. “No more doxa,” cries the postmodern critic, yet no more epist¯em¯e either: no marches forward to absolute ideas, no proletarian revolutions, no technological utopias. Only deconstructed texts and literary play. The postmodern critic is an intellectual criticizing texts and how others have read them, i.e., criticizing his own subclass, the academic. In the postmodern break, thinkers begin to doubt even the depths as a source of meaning. As Frederic Jameson has put it, the post-structuralist critique of hermeneutics, of the depth model, is usefully seen as a significant symptom of a postmodernist culture (1991: 12).4 Foucault is among the last of the major European figures to perform a search for depth meaning, finding that knowledge and the self are the products of power. After him, we have only the play of meaning within the text, Derrida’s deconstruction. In this chapter I will map the physiognomy of this postmodern break, bracketing for the most part the whole question of whether we live in a “postmodern era.” (I believe that from a social and economic point of view it is more proper to speak of our own times as “late capitalist” or “late modernist,” and that much of what passes for “postmodern” social thought is just a highly rhetorical species of late-modern avant-gardisme.) New ideals are now competing for power in the world of culture, ideals which I will attempt to briefly outline below. THE TEXTUALIZATION OF THE WORLD

To paraphrase the Bard, for postmodern philosophers and literary critics, all the world’s a text, and we are only poor (but all the same potentially quite creative) readers. Most postmodernists agree that the author is dead, and the reader has been freed from the shackles of authorial intentionality as a guide to textual meaning. A text is no longer seen as the expression of a creative mind’s power. Instead, it is seen as “problematic,” as an ambiguous picture of colonial, imperialist, sexist, or racist tendencies, yet at the same time as divorced from its historical context. This ahistorical historicism brings us into a strange new critical realm. The reality of this strange new world can be found only in Kristeva’s intertextuality, insofar as we can speak of “reality” in a postmodern context at all. This is the reality where texts bump up against each other in the night, illuminated only by the verbal cunning of the postmodern reader. The meaning of texts can only be discovered by relating

The End of the Search for Depth Meaning

163

them to other texts, the search for meaning becoming one vast exercise in reflexive thinking. There are no tortuous depths to be probed: just more texts. A new modesty (theoretical, not personal) has taken hold of the postmodern intellectual. As Richard Rorty tells us, we should now see moral and intellectual progress as the history of more and more interesting metaphors. Language does not represent the “real world,” and when we think that it does, we are merely worshipping the corpse of dead metaphors (Rorty 1989: 9, 21). Truth now wears a metaphorical cloak, the colour and shape of which is left to individual taste. The logical extreme of this way of thinking is to see the body itself as a social construction, a simulacrum, a text upon which the social world inscribes its hierarchies and logocentrisms (see Turner 1992: 47 in this regard). There is no need to deny textuality to the body: even the physical is colonized by the intertextual universe within postmodern discourse. Lacan goes so far as to transform the Freudian unconscious from a mythic battleground of psychic drives and repressions to yet another text, speaking to the conscious mind in symbols and metaphors. A FAREWELL TO METANARRATIVES: ANYTHING GOES

Truth is seen as the effect of power, as inherently ideological, and thus as a form of terrorism insofar as it silences those who disagree. Here the postmodernist continues the late-modern hermeneutic of suspicion, but without a clear division between surface and depth meaning. For postmodern thought, truth is fragmentary, changing, aesthetic; it is found in traces here and bits and pieces there (Rosenau 1992: 77-79). The new epistemological rule for the leading fringe of postmodern thinkers is “anything goes,” even in natural science. The old humanist, rationalist, objectivist culture imagined that theory in some way reflected the world around it. Lyotard announces the need to say goodbye to what he calls meta-écrits, metanarratives, which seem to include all the stories that humanity has ever told itself about the cosmos, history, the world, and the self other than fragmented, local, discontinuous ones. Postmodern discourse rejects the two great metanarratives of modernity, the German idealist notion of the dialectic of Spirit and the unity of knowledge, and the French revolutionary one of the liberation of humanity, in exchange for little tales, local narratives. Science is instead seen as an appeal to the consensus of experts, whose self-

164

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

appointed rules establish whether a given move within the language game of science is permitted (Lyotard 1979: 98, 52). Even those doing so-called hard science are seen by some postmodernists as playing games with “texts.” Postmodern thought is thus motivated by what Ernest Sosa calls “freedom of spirit,” with its subjectivism and antirealism, to which he opposes realist, objectivist “serious” philosophy (Sosa 1987). Unentangled in metanarratives, free to disregard modernist notions of truth, the postmodernist is free to play with meaning (fast-forwarding to Derrida for but an instant). This unplugging of epistemology and metaphysics from some conception of the “real world” leads to Rorty’s ironism. Rorty sees ironists as (a) having continuing doubts about their “final vocabulary” (which is something like “truth” for Rorty), (b) believing that arguments in their final vocabulary cannot dissolve these doubts, and (c) not believing that their final vocabulary is any closer to reality than anyone else’s (1989: 73). Ironism is just the philosophically modest version of “anything goes.” It is the ideological presupposition of a polite academic debate, where nothing is really at stake. Both ironism and the “anything goes” position give precedence to the fleeting image over the continuity of history.5 Social and historical explanation become inherently problematic, as postmodernists question whether human motivation, both past and present, can be accurately represented in sociological or historical narratives. Just as the “real world” seems to disappear for postmodern theory, our internal worlds, our social ideals, become highly subjective texts that we can express in fictional narratives, but which elude objective representation by others. THE IMAGE CULTURE AND THE CRITIQUE OF HISTORY

Under consumer culture, our sense of history has diminished, or been transformed into television snapshots and Hollywood kitsch. To echo Christopher Lasch, we have in important ways moved from a historical culture that found meaning in our collective pasts to a therapeutic culture that finds meaning in acts of consumption, or, when these no longer satisfy, in various forms of therapy. For the postmodern theorist, we have access to the past through its traces only (i.e., documents, witness testimony, etc.), constructing our historical narratives out of these representations (Hutcheon 1989: 58).6 In the textualized world of postmodern culture, all texts (whether contemporary or ancient, new or old) are co-temporal. Our evidence

The End of the Search for Depth Meaning

165

of the past is intertextual, as that past loses its privileged aura, its pastness. As Pauline Rosenau notes of what she calls the “skeptical” postmodernists, we live in a series of perpetual presents, where the future is an anticipated present and the past a remembered present (1992: 64).7 We witness increasingly the privileging of the new, living in the eternal now of the most recent act of consumption. The use of the slogan “new and improved” by advertisers has become so hackneyed that it can barely be spoken without irony by the peddlers of consumer goods in the mass media. This perilous overengagement with the present finds echoes in intellectual life. For one thing, when we mix in the “end of metanarratives” position suggested by Lyotard with this present-tenseness, we get one version of the end of history hypothesis, for “history” is premised on the idea that the events of the past can be shown to have some sort of rational course (Vattimo 1991: 133-34). History is no longer seen as having any clear goal or goals driving it forward. In this sense, history has ended. The end of truth, reason, and univocal meaning thus coincides with the end of history taken in this older, teleological sense.8 This leads the postmodern historian to focus on traces and scraps, in the spirit of the Foucauldian genealogist. This is tied to a parallel social development, the development of the “image culture” in which most of us in the late-modern Western world live. After the world is textualized, the postmodern culture seeks history by means of pop images and simulacra of the past, which in and of itself remains forever out of reach (Jameson 1991: 25). This culture is the result of the marriage of the consumer economy to late-twentieth-century technologies of information exchange and broadcast. In Baudrillard’s words, we now live in a culture of “daily events” (1987: 71). Technologies such as radio, television, and Internetlinked computers can shift us into the global village in blink of an eye (or click of an “on” button). From presidential scandals to the mass extinction of wildlife in the jungles of the Amazon, thanks to the media the globe has become eternally present to us; yet at the same time it is also eternally evanescent, its images flowing through our consciousness like strips of film through a projector. Putting this into a broader perspective, Christopher Lasch calls all of late-modern American culture the “culture of narcissism,” where the forgetting of the past (and thus of history) is the mark of a narcissistic impoverishment of the psyche. He ties this to the way

166

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

that the mechanical reproduction of culture produces a swirl of visual and audial images surrounding us on a daily basis, electronically mediating our sense of reality (1979: 25, 96). This mediated reality has led to a mediated sense of self, one where our self-images are often ideals given to us, the image culture that we project onto the internal screens of our private psychic viewing rooms. Some postmodernists have suggested that the paradigm model of the self in the “postmodern age” is that of a “filmic self,” a distinct echo of Hume’s theatrical self; this is one which attends to past and future images through the fleeting moments of the present (Wurzer 1988: 248). Unlike Hume’s theatrical self, which needed a live audience to play out its dramas, the postmodern filmic self can play to empty houses or to distant, unknown spectators. The present image culture, where the concrete self is replaced by a strip of celluloid, stands opposed to the “historical” culture existing a century and more ago and is largely responsible for the postmodern break in Western thought. This ontological-aesthetic structural ideal given to us by our postmodern image culture has come to challenge the verbal, literate culture of the first half of the twentieth century, despite the latter’s dogged resistance in the universities and “higher” culture. So, as Baudrillard notes, we now resurrect our histories as mummified remains and put them on display in museums, just as the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses was exhumed and museumified. This, as he puts it in his typical hyperbole, is symbolic of a hatred of a whole civilization for its foundations (1984: 261). It would perhaps be more accurate to say that it represents an indifference of a culture toward its origins, other than as commodity images, fodder for a Disney cartoon. Yet he is right to the degree that the hyperreal infusion brought about by the image culture has degraded our abilities to directly access our collective pasts in a meaningful way. If postmodern consumer culture does not quite mummify history, it at least embalms it, treating the past as almost forgotten traces, as fragments of memory, to be from time to time injected with artificial life to entertain or persuade the consuming masses. I’M OK, YOU’RE OK: PARODY REPLACES CRITIQUE

The rational foundation for social critique crumbles under the epistemological regime of “anything goes.” Reason and logic are put on the same footing as myth and magic, with preference replacing rational

The End of the Search for Depth Meaning

167

argument as the central determinant of belief (Rosenau 1992: 128). Yet all those disempowered intellectuals need something to do, so, as Frederic Jameson suggests, postmodern techniques give them fresh and seemingly socially useful tasks, if not some sense of exhilaration (1991: xiv). Admittedly, some hold on to older objectivisms, as seen in analytic philosophy; but others, such as students of literature, simply give up the ghost and accept that their claims about the latent imperialism in Jane Austen’s novels or the overt sexism in Coleridge’s Kublai Khan are hopelessly subjective impressions with no interpersonal truth value. In other words, mere noise. To claim otherwise would be to slip into semantic imperialism oneself. The critical methods of choice for most postmodernists are parody and irony. But they serve only a false criticality, resulting at best in an assault on the social order with colourful but ineffective ships and planes constructed out of balsa wood and paper maché. As Kupsit puts it: I suggest that the term “postmodernism” is deliberately kept flexible and enchanting—so rich with connotations that it dissolves on direct contact with reality—as a pretentious, pseudo-autonomous display of theory’s critical power in its bourgeois situation of social impotence. (1990: 54) The socio-economic interests of avant-garde theorists within academia explain to a large degree how postmodernists can abandon truth and reason as ideals while at the same time claim to be exercising the function of social and political critic. Linda Hutcheon (1989: 8, 11) comes clean on this question when she sees the weight of long traditions of visual and narrative representations combined with her loss of faith in the power of existing representations as leading her to parody as the only way out of the contemporary crisis of representation, to a paradoxical postmodernism of complicity and critique. Naturally, the postmodern critic must go through a few moments of angst in the process of critique. But at the end of the day she is complicitous with the object of her criticism in a joyfully parodic acceptance of the way things are. Critique and a sense of truth part company, the former set free to explore and play in an intertextual universe where there is nothing really at stake (other than perhaps academic tenure).

168

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC MILIEU OF THE POSTMODERN BREAK

When postmodernists textualize the world, abandon representations, bid farewell to metanarratives, and “privilege” the fleeting present over the historical past, they do so by and large from the social position of a comfortable upper-middle-class academic post and from the historical position of the late-capitalist consumer economy.9 Insofar as they have been successful as academicians, their class position is that of the late-modern bourgeois on both major fronts, the economic and the cultural. As I have already suggested, this economy is an image culture in the sense that the evanescent audiovisual byte is the chief means of information exchange. We find there a contemporary subject that is no longer a “strenuous agent,” a homo faber, but a “dispersed, decentered network of libidinal attachments, emptied of ethical substance and psychical interiority, the ephemeral function of this or that act of consumption, media experience, sexual relationship, trend or fashion” (Eagleton 1985: 71). The meta-ideal of rationality finds its place in the economic instrumentalism of late-modern capitalism, which in turn generates a dispersed, decentred, grasping subject as the archetype of the contemporary individual.10 This image culture is still formally tied to a “capitalist” economy. But it has, in league with a spreading of the consumption of consumer goods to the masses, worked such great changes in Western societies that we can speak of a quasi-structural shift and a quite real “break” in the corresponding intellectual evolution. So we can identify the social and economic milieu of postmodernism as that of middle-class intellectuals absorbed in the image culture of late capitalism. Yet these intellectuals are propagators of the structural meta-ideal of rationalization too: they are immersed in the dualistic causal web that propels modernity, right down to their day-to-day interactions and decisions. They shop at supermarkets, buy computers, watch television, surf the Internet. They participate. However, to return to my broader theme, the older rugged individualism, and its economic counterpart, bourgeois entrepreneurial individualism (which still receives worshipful praise in self-help manuals and television shows, but whose socio-economic function is rapidly becoming a thing of the past), are in retreat as dominant social paradigms, being replaced by what Albert Borgmann calls “commodious individualism,” whose primary telos is the unencum-

The End of the Search for Depth Meaning

169

bered consumption of consumer goods (1992: 43). Not that the majority don’t have to work to exercise this new individualism. Yet the point of work has changed for most people: the Protestant ethic has been replaced by a sense that most work is mere drudgery whose purpose is to free one to consume in one’s leisure time (outside of some privileged artistic, intellectual, and professional elites, who may indeed still find their work meaningful apart from the money it supplies). This has led to a disenchantment of the workplace, and a sharp division between people’s work lives and personal lives. I will come back to the theme of the disenchantment of the social self at the end of the next chapter. Instead, I will now leave this “big picture” (or, to parody Lyotard, meta-tableau) behind to turn to the first of the theorists heralding the postmodern break, Michel Foucault, trying to show how his understanding of archaeology and genealogy helped to begin the process whereby the search for depth meaning, propelled by the structural meta-ideal of rationality, came to a halt.

Foucault: From Truth to Power/Knowledge POWER/KNOWLEDGE/HUMAN SCIENCES

Foucault begins to undermine the rational basis of the whole unmasking project of late modernity by pushing the search for depth meaning to its outer limits. For the mature Foucault, power, knowledge, and the human sciences represent one big complex underlying all human organization, culture, and intellectual achievements. In Discipline and Punish, he says that power and knowledge constitute each other (1979: 27). Underneath every will to knowledge lies a will to power. But we should not see power in a purely negative sense, for it produces reality, domains of objects, and rituals of truth (1979: 194). In an interview on method, Foucault attacks great unmaskers such as Marx and Freud for thinking that they could escape the regimes of power/knowledge into some transcendent realm of truth (1987: 97). This remark illustrates Foucault’s real break from Nietzsche’s unmasking project, yet at the same time it illustrates the weakness of Foucault’s own project. Nietzsche said in effect that the point of his unmasking of religions and moral codes was to discover the naked power drives hidden within these. His critique had a metaphysical foundation, however flexible this was (and we should note that Nietzsche would

170

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

never have called it “transcendent”). Yet Foucault is at a loss when asked what lies underneath power/knowledge. Naturally, if we cannot escape the complexes of power/knowledge, then we are left without any grounds from which to critique our culture, our society. As soon as we open our mouths, or unsheath our pens, we are participating in some power/knowledge relation, some “oppressive” (although even this word is problematic) act.11 Foucault goes on to say that the purpose of his work is to see how men govern themselves and others by the “production” of truth (1987: 108). To put it most simply, truth is produced by power relations.12 There is no cognitive power independent of power relationships that can generate truths. We should note here that Foucault’s seeming claim is much stronger than Wittgenstein’s notion of the language game: the latter sees truth as varying from one game to the next, but as truth all the same. Foucault instead sees truth as produced, a product of certain types of power relationships. There are no innocent truths for him, even within a specific form of life. Foucault sees the human sciences as implicated in modern schemes to pacify the masses by creating docile bodies and normalized minds. Modern societies control and discipline their populations by sanctioning the knowledge claims of the human sciences, e.g., psychiatry, economics, medicine, etc. The result is a disciplined, docile individual ready to work, play, and interact within the limits set by the current regime of power/knowledge. One gets the impression after reading Foucault at length that what we know, what we count as normal—whether in terms of crime and deviance, mental health, or sexuality—rigidly constrains the human subject, turning him or her into a docile body. This would be a reasonable line of critique for Foucault if it weren’t for the fact that he holds out no realm of freedom, no Sartrean ground of an initself being from which to challenge this rigid docility. Yet Foucault’s line of critique has caught on like wildfire in certain disciplines in the humanities, notably literature departments. Why? To echo critics such as Jameson and Eagleton, this is due to the fact that academic Foucauldians have accepted their impotence as social and cultural critics, and find in Foucault’s self-exculpating formulae an excuse for doing nothing. If the master tells us that we are so many docile bodies held fast in the iron grip of regimes of power/knowledge, why revolt?

The End of the Search for Depth Meaning

171

MADNESS: A STRUCTURALIST OVERTURE

Madness and Civilization acts like an overture to Foucault’s investigation of the power/knowledge regimes of modernity, an overture that still shows strong links to the methods of Foucault’s structuralist teachers. In this work Foucault unmasks three such regimes of madness: the premodern regime that saw madness as opening a path to the supernatural, the classical regime that saw madness as the unreason of an unchained animality, and the modern regime that sees madness as simply a disease. He tells us in the preface that in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, man’s dispute with madness took the form of a dramatic debate in which he confronted the secret powers of the world; now, madness has been reduced to silence by psychiatry. Foucault’s work represents an attempt to write an archaeology of that silence (1973: xi-xii). At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared, and the spaces in the lazar houses that formerly housed lepers were taken up by the insane. In addition, ships of fools floated along the coasts and rivers of Europe, manned by the mad condemned to a watery exile. They sailed through a Boschian landscape of delights with a false happiness that bore witness to the diabolical triumph of the Antichrist (1973: 22). The Renaissance view of madness, as seen in Shakespeare and Cervantes, was of a sort of semi-divine and semi-infernal Fall into unreason: hence all the talk about the wisdom of fools. But the classical age was soon to “reduce to silence the madness whose voices the Renaissance had just liberated” (1973: 38). Unreason had to be banished, controlled, or at least hidden from the salons of the enlightened. This age, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, saw the madman as someone who had let loose his normally hidden animal nature. The madman was not yet a sick man. His madness was situated against a background of Unreason, revealing a “liberty raging in monstrous forms of animality.” Madness was both an excessive passion and a delirium that required a brutal discipline (1973: 74, 83, 75). And it was futile to look back at this period and try to distinguish physical therapeutics from psychological medications because psychology had yet to come into existence. Thus treatment was a matter both of transforming physical nature and of discoursing with the unreason of the mad (1973: 197). Yet this all changes with the birth of the asylum in the hands of the reformers Pinel and Tuke, when madness was seen as a disease that had to be cured. Madness now became a moral deformity, some-

172

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

thing to be judged and condemned. This cure was to be effected by a “medical personage,” a doctor who was at the same time father and judge, a magic perpetrator of a cure, a thaumaturge (1973: 273). Foucault interprets the new regime of psychiatric practice as a lateeighteenth-century moral tactic that was preserved in the rites of the asylum, these rites later being overlaid with the myths of positivism. These myths transformed the doctor/wise man into a scientist who engineers a cure for the insane. Freud later demystified the asylum’s structures, but through his psychoanalysis concentrated the powers set up in the confinement of the asylum in the person of the psychoanalyst. Freud’s psychoanalyst became a sort of engineer of human souls, attempting to return them from the province of unreason to a more rational place. Yet even Freud’s psychoanalysis cannot penetrate to the heart of insanity. Foucault concludes that psychoanalysis can unravel some forms of madness, but remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason (1973: 276-278). Freud himself stands unmasked by Foucault’s overture on the history of madness. The deep psychic structures that he hoped to reveal are reinvested with their primal mystery by Foucault’s archaeology of silence. GENEALOGY/PUNISHMENT/COUNTERPOINT

The second phase of Foucault’s life project involved a move from archaeology to Nietzsche’s notion of genealogy as his central unmasking strategy, and his application of this strategy to the history of punishment in Discipline and Punish. Here the search for depth meaning in his genealogy of regimes of punishment shifts back and forth between structuralist and post-structuralist modes with a contrapuntal flair. Foucault laid out his notion of genealogy in a 1971 essay on Nietzsche, where he begins by calling it grey and meticulous, operating on a field of entangled and confused parchments “that have been scratched over and recopied many times” (1977: 138). It seeks to shorten the historical vision to those things that are nearest: the nervous system, the body, its energies, etc. If it chances upon lofty epochs, it is suspicious of finding there a “barbarous and shameful confusion” (1977: 155). Foucault proposes his genealogy as a “postmodern” successor to old-fashioned history. It will be practised by the “specific intellectual” who struggles locally to detach truth from the hegemonic structures under which it operates (Foucault 1987: 97). It involves a painstaking rediscovery of

The End of the Search for Depth Meaning

173

struggles and of local, specific knowledge (Philp 1985: 76). This new genealogical strategy definitely involves an abandonment of any sense of the unity of history. Yet in its localism, it also seems to go beyond Nietzsche’s more sweeping genealogical judgments about master and slave moralities, about Christianity and democracy. It embraces tangled parchments, shameful confusions, and disrupted nervous systems instead of general historical claims. In its celebration of fragmentation, Foucault’s genealogical method parallels the postmodern filmic self and the image culture of contemporary consumer society. Foucault starts off Discipline and Punish by telling us that this study will be a history of the microphysics of punitive power as an element in the genealogy of the human soul, and that this punitive power is situated in a certain “political economy” of the body (1979: 29, 25). This focus on the body is sustained throughout the work. As Merquior puts it, from the early seventies on, Foucault’s epistemological categories were politicized (1985: 85). In his mature works Foucault spoke more and more of how paradigms of power/knowledge took hold of the human body, notably by imposing on it regimes of punishment and sexual normality. Under the old monarchical regime of punishment, a crime represented an attack on the person of the prince and was repaid with the terror of torture and execution. This did not re-establish justice, but reactivated the power of the prince (Foucault 1979: 49). With the growth of democracy, torture became less popular; there was a shift in the point of application of power away from spectacular rituals performed on the victim’s body to punishing the criminal mind (101). The reformers of the Enlightenment turned their heads away from the barbarities of the ancien régime, but in doing so opened the way leading to the discliplinary society and its panoptic methods of control. The new methods of discipline in the schools, barracks, workshops, and prisons produced docile bodies through a whole “micropenality” of time, behaviour, speech, body, and sexuality (Foucault 1979: 138, 178). This exercise of power aimed at the production of docility penetrated to every nook and cranny of modern industrial societies. As far as criminality is concerned, a notable shift occurred when imprisonment became the chief method of punishing criminals. The perfect mechanism of carceral discipline was Bentham’s Panopticon, his model prison, a circle of barred cages facing a central observation tower. This induced in the inmate a state of per-

174

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

manent and conscious visibility, leading to the automatic functioning of power (201). The observation tower acts for Foucault as a powerful metaphor for the eternal visibility of human action in contemporary societies, for the possibility that at any time we are being watched, or that we regulate our conduct as though we are being watched. This internalization of discipline is the key move in the disciplinary society’s establishment of normalized codes of intellectual, social, and sexual behaviour. Foucault takes “panopticism” to be a general mark of the regime of docile bodies in which we now live, the depth meaning, as it were, of the disciplinary society.13 He relates this to the accumulation of capital in the West, which allowed the economic takeoff of the Industrial Revolution: the parallel political takeoff required a new technique in the administration of men, discipline being the most cost-effective way of “reducing” the body to order and docility (1979: 220). Work, whether in prison or in the factory, produced individuals “mechanized according to the general norms of an industrial society” (1979: 242). In a sense, this observation can be tied directly into Marx’s theory of alienation as expressed in the 1844 Manuscripts, where he describes how the industrial worker is alienated from his product, the activity of work, his fellow workers, and from his “species being,” from his humanity. The worker becomes a cog in the industrial machine. This connection of the mechanization of labour to the control of docile bodies is a basic element in Foucault’s structuralist counterpoint. The last major issue dealt with in Discipline and Punish is the “ensemble” police/prison/delinquency, which Foucault sees as a never-interrupted circuit (1979: 282). The current that flows through all three elements of this ensemble is the idea that, according to modern police forces, social workers, and the like, the criminal exists in some sense before his crime, as a psychological potentiality (252). This gives rise to the idea of the “dangerous individual,” or delinquent. In fact, prisons succeed quite well in producing a certain type of delinquency, one that is less dangerous politically and economically: the offender as a pathological subject (277). But prisons are only one part of a much broader structure, the “carceral network.” Within it, we see a universal reign of the normative, where judging has become a major social function of control (304). The underlying meaning of the disciplinary society and its carceral network is the creation and enforcement of norms, norms that allow that society to

The End of the Search for Depth Meaning

175

function smoothly in an economic and political sense. Part of this creation and enforcement of norms is the construction of the criminal subject as pathological, as a social deviant. Naturally, for Foucault there is no essential self, no real deviance underneath this construction of the criminal subject. This subject is produced by certain regimes of power/knowledge as part of its overall project of rendering the socially acting body docile. Yet as Foucault moved from a structuralist to a post-structuralist method, one feels compelled to ask him a simple question with regards to this construction: why? Why do these regimes of power/knowledge “want” to produce docile bodies? To exercise their will to power? To serve some social function? It would seem that Foucault, if he is to remain consistent, is thrown back onto the late-modern unmasking project, to a search for the structural depth meaning of the carceral network, perhaps even to Parsonian structural functionalism. Either that, or accept that social institutions and the ideals that support them just happen for no reason at all—not a very happy conclusion, especially given the many pages he has filled describing their nature and development. SEXUALITY: THE POST-STRUCTURALIST FINALE

Lastly, I turn to the “finale” of Foucault’s career, his multi-volume history of sexuality. In the first volume we hear Foucault telling us that modern power/knowledge complexes use sexuality to control populations. Specifically, in it he describes how the repression hypothesis wasn’t as true of Victorian society as most people think it was: in some ways, Freud’s late-Victorian world was obsessed with sex, both in people’s private lives and in the public world of scientific study. Despite the surface prudishness of the Victorian world, the science of sexuality got its start in this period in the work of Charcot, Freud, Kraft-Ebbing, and other pioneers of the field. The second volume of The History of Sexuality, titled The Use of Pleasure, which I will focus on here, travels back in time to study the sexuality of the ancient Greeks. It begins with a muddled theoretical introduction where Foucault makes several tentative suggestions about the course he will follow within: he wants to write a history of the experience of sexuality, to put forward a hermeneutics of desire and of the self, both grounded in “games of the self” and an aesthetics of existence, while his analysis of desiring man will be located at the intersection of an “archaeology of problematizations” and a “genealogy of practices” (Foucault 1990: 3-13). This rhetoric,

176

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

which mixes together archaeology, genealogy, hermeneutics, and aesthetics, represents a significant acceptance by the older Foucault of post-structuralist categories of thought. His search for the meaning of ancient Greek sexuality as an aesthetics of existence led him to focus on the three great arts of self-conduct for those Greeks: dietetics, economics, and erotics (1990: 251). Under the first art, sex was seen as more or less pernicious in its consequences, thus requiring prudence and discretion. It was a techne that required the subject to control his conduct like a pilot steering between rocks or a statesman governing a city (1990: 116, 138-39). The second art, the economics of self-conduct, gave the wife a privileged place within the household, but allowed the husband certain freedoms in the public realm (e.g., relations with boys, mistresses, etc.). The third art of self-conduct, erotics, dealt with how adult males treated the young boys they lusted after. There was a moral concern for their fragile beauty, for their corporeal honour, their training, and their future as free citizens, which could be jeopardized by their taking a passive, subordinate role in their sexual relations with adult men (213-15). All three arts led to philosophical reflections on the necessities of personal regimens, self-limitation, and the importance of timing in erotic encounters. However, the great sea change came in the fourth century B.C., when the Socratic-Platonic reflection on Eros creates the figure of the Master of Truth who wins the love of his followers by getting them to renounce the urgings of their carnal impulses towards him and others (241-43). This last move opens the door to the dark and gloomy Christian view of sexuality as unclean. Foucault thus tries to show how that the traditional notion of there being a sharp break between the fun-loving ancients and those repressed, self-flagellating Christians is untrue: as Nietzsche himself said in Beyond Good and Evil, Christian thought had deep roots in Platonism. In the end, Foucault’s method becomes an aesthetic genealogy, a search for traces as part of an attempt to question past constructions of the self. The last half of Foucault’s career was one long flirtation with skeptical postmodernist notions of method with regards to social and historical investigation. It ends in the acceptance of the self as evanescent and as tied into shifting norm-granting networks. In the course of his very productive intellectual career, as he moved from a pseudo-structuralist attempt to determine the depth meaning of social practices and institutions like the insane asylum, the clinic,

The End of the Search for Depth Meaning

177

and the prison, to a more overly post-structuralist foray into the history of sexuality, we can trace the postmodern break. Indeed, one can almost sense the palpable frustration that Foucault felt as he wrestled with the unmasking impulse in his work up until the mid-seventies, the ghosts of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud just in the background of his writing. Indeed, he revives the ghost of Marx from time to time in Discipline and Punish, not able to entirely disregard the work of the master unmasker of nineteenth-century capitalism, at least when describing the world of industrial labour. Like an old friend with whom one no longer has much in common yet for whom one feels a nostalgic bond, Foucault was reluctant to part company with the late-modern search for meaning in depth. It remained for his former student Jacques Derrida to put to rest the very notion of depth meaning as part of a critical and philosophical technique.

Derrida: From Meaning to Play THE PHARMAKON AND THE TEXT

Derrida reduces meaning to play by way of a multi-stage process. First of all, we find him saying in Of Grammatology that there “is nothing outside the text” (qtd. in Derrida 1981: xiv). He reads everything, including the self, social relations, and history, as texts. This may seem innocent at first: after all, can’t we read all things that have meaning as texts if we choose to do so? Yet Derrida’s pronouncement will turn out to be more radical than this simple suggestion. This idea is tied to his attack on the “metaphysics of presence,” which I will discuss in more detail in the next section. Suffice it to say here that this attack involves the destruction of real-world referents for language, of the “transcendentally signified,” which “extends the domain and play of signification indefinitely” (Derrida 1978a: 280). Indeed, in a discussion of the post-structuralist elements in Freud’s thought, Derrida says that Freud’s metaphor of the Mystic Writing-Pad shows how we can see psychic content as a text, and the psychic apparatus as a writing machine. Yet for Derrida, the text of the unconscious mind is not a presence, but a weave of traces (1978b: 199, 211). So Freud’s unconscious mind is not a secret but clear history, but rather a heap of fragments that may not be able to tell us a meaningful story. Derrida seeks in the illogic of the unconscious writing machine an ontological platform for his attack on logocentrism, one not available in the rationality of

178

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

consciousness. Like other postmodernist thinkers, Derrida tries to implicate the great unmasking tradition of Nietzsche, Freud, and constructivist sociology in his attack on the possibility of “objective” meaning (whether surface or depth). In his essay “Plato’s Pharmacy” Derrida attacks the privileging of speech over writing in philosophy. Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedrus, calls writing a “pharmakon,” which means simultaneously a poison, cure, and remedy. This pharmakon has no stable essence, no substance; we cannot master it, just as no absolute privilege allows us to master a textual system (Derrida 1972b: 125-26, 96). All the world’s a text, and the meaning of this text, just like the irreducibly idiomatic element in the dream-work, is always slipping away. “A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the laws of its composition and the rules of its game” (Derrida 1972b: 63). So what is to be done in the wake of these elusive texts and a fragmented unconscious mind? What can an intellectual do if the very possibility of meaningful (to others as well as oneself) interpretation is laid aside? As we will see, the déclassé literary critic/philosopher within our contemporary image culture is left with just the play of the world, sans objectivity, sans meaning, sans teeth, sans everything. This play of the world need not take the presence (or absence) of things too seriously: the units of meaning in texts, the signifiers, are left to float wherever they might go, no longer anchored by rational discourse to extratextual objects. I now turn to this floating. THE METAPHYSICS OF PRESENCE AND DIFFÉRANCE

Derrida sees the history of metaphysics, the epic adventure of reason in the West, as the determination of Being as presence (whether as arch¯e or telos) (1978a: 279). Under the sway of the metaphysics of presence (which, as one might guess, favours that which is present over the absent, the trace, the deferred, the different), philosophy and science assumed the presence of a real world of truths, causes, and origins capturable in discourse (Novitz 1986: 41). These are now seen as elusive. At the heart of this mythic epic is logocentrism, the Western mind’s centring itself on the Greek logos, the presence of the (spoken) word. Derrida’s counter to logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence is différance, a term coined by him that combines the meanings of to “defer,” or put off, and to “differ,” to be different.

The End of the Search for Depth Meaning

179

Différance is based on the idea of language as a circulation of signs, and the deferral of the moment when we can encounter “the thing itself,” make it ours, consume and expend it (Derrida 1982: 9). The signs of language defer the presence of the thing signified. Derrida’s différance is not a present being and exercises no authority. Instead, it “instigates the subversion of every kingdom” with its play of the trace, played out on a chessboard that has no depth but is all the same bottomless (1982: 21-22). This image of a bottomless chessboard without depth captures quite nicely the radical postmodernist view of meaning, its simultaneous infinity, its plurality, its thinness. Within the postmodern intellectual condition, meaning is everywhere yet nowhere: like a sheet of paper, looked at from one angle it seems flat and expansive, but from another it is quite unsubstantial, a mere sliver. Derrida’s différance puts into play deconstruction as an interpretive technique that is unable to reach the great social world surrounding the scholar’s dry-as-dust biblia and is thus unable to critique that world. It is, however, able to reach the world, the form of life, wherein it is practised, namely, literary and cultural criticism in academe. DECONSTRUCTION AND THE ABANDONMENT OF MEANING

Derrida’s deconstructive technique abandons the search for the “meaning” or complex of meanings of a text either in the author’s intentions or in its social and historical position. In terms of the theoretical structure I’ve laid out earlier in this book, the deconstructionist rejects both intentionality and structure as grounds for the construction of meaningful social objects. The deconstructionist sees the signifier and the signified as losing their status as fixed points within some stable order of discourse (Sim 1986: 115). Both are allowed to float freely within the hyperreality of the intertextual atmosphere, within a sort of semantic cyberspace where physical or historical location is less important than the theoretical fancy of the cybernaut. Derrida’s deconstruction wants to tease out the “warring forces of signification” within a text (Johnson in Derrida 1981: xiv). He seeks the law that compels us to apply the name “writing” to that which “critiques, deconstructs, wrenches apart the traditional, hierarchical opposition between writing and speech, between writing and the…system of all that is customarily opposed to writing” (1981a: 4). Indeed, one of the chief targets of deconstructionism is binary

180

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

oppositions like presence/absence, truth/falsity, and male/female. It seeks to ferret the hidden metaphysical presuppositions of these binary pairs and to show how these presuppositions have no validity, or how these oppositions aren’t as sharp as Western metaphysics and ethics once thought. In this limited sense, in looking for what underlies these binary pairs, deconstructionism is the last echo of the search for depth meaning within the unmasking tradition. However, once the metaphysical underpinnings of these binary oppositions are revealed to the world, the deconstructionist is left with nothing, proposing no positive post-metaphysical program.14 All of this seeks to put out of the way any question of a text having a meaningful relation to that in the external world which it describes. We find in the postmodernist abandonment of meaning traces of the evanescence of the image culture, along with what Camille Paglia calls the obsession with language of the “worddrunk” French intellectual. If all the world’s a text, if we must defer presence and language games centred on presence, and if our foundational critical method is to give up trying to discover the “actual” meaning of even just the texts themselves (never mind real-world events and ideas, which for Derrida are only more texts anyway), it should come as no surprise that we eventually see reality by analogy with the flickering lights and dancing sounds of the cinema or television screen.15 The naive spectator may see a film as a continuous flow; but canny projectionists and film editors know full well that a film is made up of thousands of individual frames linked together to produce the simulacrum of such a flow. The deconstructionist notions of textual interpretation and meaning are like a film: they are composed of a seemingly endless strip of individual interpretations linked together in the continuous flow called theory. Yet in reality, each interpretive frame is separate, linked only by the form of life shared by theorists and critics. PLAYING AMONG THE SANDCASTLES ON THE SHORES OF LATE MODERNITY

We find the scraps of Derrida’s positive program amongst the deconstructed metaphysical sandcastles of late modernity. Or perhaps we should say that we can find traces of Derridean footprints amongst these sandcastles. This program is no longer the search for meaning in any sense of the word, but the play of the text/world. To compensate for the significatory shortages in his diet, Derrida requires a

The End of the Search for Depth Meaning

181

reading and writing supplement that operates by the logic of play (1978b: 64). The god of writing in Egyptian mythology, Theuth, is sly, slippery, and masked; “an intriguer and a card, like Hermes, he is neither king nor jack, but rather a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play” (1978b: 93). Derrida’s project goes forward by paying an annual tribute to Theuth, his own god of literary play. Part of this tribute lies in his attack on Lévi-Strauss in particular and structuralism in general. The idea of structure is firmly implanted in the history of logos and epist¯em¯e, philosophy and science, in the West. The function of the center of a structure is to orient it, but at the same time it limits its play (Derrida 1978a: 278). Structuralism is thus derided for being implicated in the metaphysics of presence. Derrida’s idea of writing links it to the “play of the world” (1978b: 228); against the “saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play,” which he ties to the structuralists, he opposes the “Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation” (1978a: 292). Here among the crumbled sandcastles of late modernity we find the sad end of the search for depth meaning. The sun of signification has set. Thinkers no longer attempt their clumsy seductions of that venerable dame, Truth. Instead they revel all day in Dionysian dances and joyous destructive acts, at twilight tiring and flopping down onto their beach blankets, slipping into the world of dreams under a postmodern moon.

Lyotard and Baudrillard: From an Incredulity to Metanarratives to Embracing Simulacra LYOTARD BIDS FAREWELL TO GRAND TALES

To recapitulate some of what I’ve said earlier, Lyotard suggests that now that we have entered a post-industrial era (speaking socio-economically) and a postmodern era (speaking culturally), the essence of this new “postmodern condition” is our incredulity towards metanarratives. The search for metaphysical depths in the seas of late modernity has been replaced by incredulity, unbelief, cynicism. The grand recit has lost its allure, whether in the form of the revolutionary tale of liberation (with its Gallic accent) or the speculative

182

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

tale of the quest for complete knowledge (with its more Germanic accents) (Lyotard 1979: 63, 98). Scientific discourse loses its old meta-legitimacy, being grounded now in pure performativity or in paralogy, the greater rationality of a search for the Whole being replaced either by the more limited techno-rationality of efficiency or by an investigation of such arcane mysteries as chaos theory. Knowledge for Lyotard seems to be made up of stories, tales, or narratives. If Derrida says that “there is nothing outside the text,” we can easily imagine Lyotard telling us “there is nothing outside the tale.” Of course, the foundation of a tale-driven culture is the oral tradition, which transmits its stories by means of three types of know-how: knowing how to speak, how to hear, and how to do. A traditional community establishes its social bonds by means of this triple savoir faire, embodying pragmatic rules in the stories that elders and chiefs and bards tell the young (Lyotard 1979: 40). These stories, in both traditional and modern societies, legitimize culture. For Lyotard narrative knowledge, which in a sense constitutes all knowledge, encompasses both traditional and scientific discourse, each of which is made up of a series of Wittgensteinian-style language games. Within each form of knowledge there are rules that govern the game in question, rules that tell the players which moves are “good” or allowed, and which ones aren’t (1979: 47). To call a given form of knowledge “scientific” or even “valid” depends on a prior decision to accept the rules of the local language game: the way we determine the legitimacy of a given savoir moves from an epistemological or metaphysical towards an aesthetic or political (if not whimsical) foundation. And the self is not like a theatre, as Hume would have us believe, but more like a gasping tuna caught in the nets of modern means of communication, stranded belly up on nodes by which messages are continually passing (1979: 31). These nodes connect together the various language games that scientists play. The ruling deity of these language games, as already hinted at, is not truth but efficiency: a move is a “good” one when it works better and/or costs less. Thus under the present regime of scientific research, an equation is established between riches, efficiency, and truth, with the latter being an indentured servant of the first two. Performativity replaces truth as the telos of science; one doesn’t buy scientists, technicians, and apparatus to know truth, but to augment one’s power. In the context of the mercantilization of knowledge, the operative question is no longer, “is it true?” but

The End of the Search for Depth Meaning

183

“what use is it?” or, more often, “can it be sold?” (Lyotard 1979: 73, 76, 84). In other words, science becomes a consumer good, although one that only the hyper-rich can afford to buy. For Lyotard, science (and research in a broader sense) is now geared towards technical efficiency in the service of capitalist profiteering. Yet this new dominance of the principle of performativity isn’t all bad. It excludes in principle adhesion to metaphysical discourse, it requires the abandonment of fables, it needs clear spirits and cold wills, it puts the calculus of interactions in the place of the definition of essences, and it gives to the “players” the responsibility not only for the statements they propose, but also for the rules to which they submit in order for these to be rendered acceptable (Lyotard 1979: 100). All in all, it clears the decks of Western thought of obsolete quests, of metaphysical tilting at windmills: even Derrida’s deconstruction could in theory be measured against this principle of performativity. Its exchange value might well be nil. In this sense the postmodern condition that Lyotard describes is a more radical departure from the search for depth meaning than even Derrida’s project, for it submits theory itself to the test of performativity, to that of the callous cash nexus. If it doesn’t pay off, then it will be abandoned. This has a very practical application, for Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition was a report to the government of Quebec on the state of knowledge and by extension education in the most developed societies. The ultimate irony is opened up by Lyotard’s analysis of postmodern knowledge as pure commodity: even the deconstructionists, who in a way have adapted themselves so well to the plasticity of demands and relativity of standards of the consumer economy, might well be shown the door if universities were brought fully under the reign of the performative impulse. Thus Lyotard abandons both the search for depth meaning and the meta-ideal of rationality in his post-sociology-of-knowledge position. He is the high sociological theorist of postmodernity, the investigator of the techno-economic grounds of late-modern unbelief. On the fringes he foretells the new rules of postmodern knowledge, the brave new world that awaits us: this is one where not performativity but paralogy rules the day, where the “little tale” is the form par excellence taken by imaginative invention (1979: 98). Yet in the end he betrays his own class origins in this oft-quoted passage from his afterword to The Postmodern Condition, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?”:

184

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and “retro” clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games.…By becoming kitsch, arts panders to the confusion which reigns in the “taste” of the patrons. Artists, gallery owners, critics, and public wallow together in the “anything goes,” and the epoch is one of slackening. But this realism of the “anything goes” is in fact that of money; in the absence of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful to assess the value of works of art according to the profits they yield. Such realism accommodates all tendencies, just as capital accommodates all “needs,” providing that the tendencies and needs have purchasing power. (1984: 76) Capital may indeed accommodate all needs, and eclecticism may indeed be the degree zero of postmodern culture, but the “one” who wears Paris perfume in Tokyo, retro clothes in Hong Kong, and picks and chooses the best buys in art galleries is clearly bourgeois, cosmopolitan, and comfortable. Lyotard tells us the tale of the uprooted bourgeois firmly entrenched in the information economy in his La condition postmoderne: he is providing that bourgeois with new structural ideals, new rules of the game, under the cover of pure description (with a certain nostalgia for the disappearance of aristocratic taste built in to this description). He is, in short, telling his own story writ large, the story of a man perched on the brink of the postmodern break, from which the socio-cultural flatlands ahead are unmarred by metaphysical heights and valleys. These are no long needed; in fact, they are quite a nuisance. They would only impede the clarity of the messages sent by the post-industrial information networks that link together and manage the nodes of the late-capitalist global economic machine. BAUDRILLARD SAYS HELLO TO THE RULE OF THE SIMULACRUM

When we shift to Baudrillard’s heralding of the age of the simulacrum, we see not just the abandonment of metanarratives about the real and truth, but a replacement of the real with a constructed (simulated) image of the real, not to mention a certain celebratory mood that goes along with this replacement. In his important essay

The End of the Search for Depth Meaning

185

“The Precession of Simulacra,” an essay that dances on the grave of signification, he starts off by talking about a story by Borges where the cartographers of an imaginary empire create a map so detailed and so large that it covers the entire territory of the empire. In this fiction, the real empire and its map decay in tandem, yet the cartographers feel a nostalgia for the “metaphysical beauty” of the ruined map, not the territory that it supposedly represents. This map is a second-order simulacra, a representation of something real that can be endlessly copied and disseminated. We are leaving the era of the second-order simulacrum behind, for under the present conditions of our image- and media-driven culture, the map now precedes the territory, engendering it. Baudrillard argues that the age of the simulacrum, our own age, begins by the liquidation of all referentials, leaving only the desert of the real. This desert of the real is Baudrillard’s version of depth meaning: it is now an arid and lifeless place, devoid of meaningful signposts. These referentials are later resurrected artificially in a system of signs, in the hyperreal (Baudrillard 1984: 253). The new maps of the real do not simulate anything other than the imaginations and desires of their creators.16 We have entered the Third Order of the Simulacrum, where simulations are not representative of some real thing, blueprints for a potentially infinite number of copies, but hyperreal simulations, unconnected with anything real. They precede the real, maybe even acting as codes for it (just as DNA acts as a genetic code for organic life, or computer languages act as codes for programs and computer applications). The crisis of the real gives way to its desertification and replacement by the hyperreal, the ontological streams that once fed it from reservoirs located in the natural sciences, philosophy, and religion drying up into mere trickles. In “The Precession of Simulacra” and elsewhere, Baudrillard lays out his theory of the four phases of the image. These phases parallel his three Orders of the Simulacrum and the Symbolic Order that precedes these orders. We can imagine these phases as a dialectical quartet of the ascent (or descent?) from the real to the hyperreal (1984: 256). Further, we can associate these with distinct sociometaphysical periods. Here is an overview of Baudrillard’s four phases of the image, and how they map onto the orders of simulacra and the cultural epochs supported by them: Phase 1: The image as a reflection of a basic reality. This is the Symbolic Order where both signs and people recognize their

186

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

“real” place in the order of things, where hierarchies are clear and reality is not yet an issue. This is the pre-modern world, where God and King stand at the top of a well-established metaphysical and social pyramid. Phase 2: The image as a mask and perversion of a basic reality. This is the First Order of the Simulacrum, one where reality was still taken seriously, but where counterfeits and other false pictures begin to intrude upon real things (e.g., in copies of the works of the great masters, in charlatans who pretend to be aristocrats to climb up the social ladder, in priests who fake miracles to reinvigorate religious belief, in baroque angels climbing from elaborate altars to their baroque heavens). Philosophically, this is what we might call the high-modernist view of reality, the view of a Bacon, Locke, or Kant, which takes place against the economic backdrop of an emerging capitalism. Phase 3: The image as a mask of the absence of a basic reality. Here we find the Second Order of the Simulacrum, where mass production generates endless copies of things and images. This is Marx’s industrial age, where the reproduced copies of a given prototype aren’t fakes, but just as real as their progenitor. Here we find the late-modernist sense of the real, as seen in Nietzsche and Freud’s search for depth meaning, in the fin de siècle’s cultural doubts, and in the socialist critique of capitalism. Phase 4: The image as bearing no relation to any reality at all. Finally, we enter the Third Order of the Simulacrum, where the signs of language and culture bear no relation to reality at all: they are pure simulacra. The binary distinction of real/fake, of real/copy, disappears. This is the era of binary and genetic codes, of pseudo-politics, of television families, of virtual reality. This is the era of the post-industrial information economy, with its interconnected global financial markets, and of Derrida’s deconstructionism, with its appeal to the virtuality of meaning within an intertextual universe. This picture of the move from a symbolic to a simulacral order of things is not without its critics. As Linda Hutcheon notes (1989: 33), Baudrillard has been attacked for his metaphysical idealism, his nostalgia for pre-mass-media authenticity, and for his apocalyptic nihilism. Yet, according to Hutcheon there is a more telling criticism of his theory of the simulacrum: that we have never had an unmedi-

The End of the Search for Depth Meaning

187

ated access to reality, except through representations, and that there is nothing “natural” about the real. This may well be true. But Hutcheon misses the “phenomenological” point that underlies Baudrillard’s so-called idealism: in the past the representations that people took for the real (e.g., of the self, of the laws of nature, of God) seemed real, were quite palpable things within the minds of those who believed in them. The medieval peasant saw God and his Church on earth as real things, not as simulacra of his superstitious fears. Now the mass-media images that flood our collective awareness no longer have that same ontological hardness (except perhaps to the entirely unreflective consumer). They are processed and understood as unreal. In the past many believed that they did have unmediated access to the real. Today, this belief is thrown into doubt. We may well have to accept Hutcheon’s conclusion that to exist is to be represented. Yet her Berkeleyism on this issue fails to grasp Baudrillard’s central contention, that as we move through the three orders of simulacra, the status of these representations has changed. Perhaps we do only touch reality through our perceptions or representations of it. Yet the more interesting question is, “what is the status of these representations?” Baudrillard’s utopia (or dystopia?) is Disneyland, which he sees as more “real” than the rest of America. It is a third-order simulacra, a simulation of a simulation, a hyperreal code of the ideal America. Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact (for Baudrillard) all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but simulations. “It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle” (Baudrillard 1984: 262). It is a simulation of a society and culture that is itself already a simulacrum of the real: Disneyland is a metamap of a map of a system of signs. Its only “reality” exists in its self-awareness of being a pure simulacrum: Mickey knows he is just a just an actor in a suit angling for tourist dollars. Disneyland is the enchanted dream of a consumer capitalism that can deliver the goods without exploitation, without conflict, without pain. Baudrillard is a bit of a structural idealist himself, for this process of the domination of the simulacrum is not an abstract, ungrounded development, but is directly related to changes in cap-

188

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

italist modes of production. In this sense he makes theoretical concessions to the influence of the structural underpinnings of our hyperreal culture, and not just to changing modes of production à la Marx, but also to changing modes of communication à la McLuhan. As for the former, Baudrillard observes that throughout its history, capitalism has been fed by the destruction of every referential, every human goal, truth and falsity, good and evil, “in order to establish a radical law of the equivalence and exchange, the iron law of its power” (1984: 268). It sought to liquidate reality in exterminating everything’s use value (converting it, of course, to exchange value, the better to sell it with). Now the consumer economy must foster unreality, simulation. But it is threatened by a “contagious hyperreality,” which isn’t very conducive to the mass consumption of actual physical objects. So its new slogan is “Take your desire for reality!” (Baudrillard 1984: 268). Capitalism, most notably in advertising, seeks an ontologicization of the desire for the goods it produces, to treat our desires as real and thus legitimate. Not as the products of greed or fetishism, but as wholesome expressions of individual needs. More generally, Baudrillard argues that it gambles on remanufacturing artificial social, political, and economic stakes to restore the reality of the social world it creates. Yet the production of goods and commodities no longer makes any sense on its own. “What society seeks through production, and overproduction, is the restoration of the real which escapes it. That is why contemporary ‘material’ production is itself hyperreal” (Baudrillard 1984: 268-69). In the end, capital for Baudrillard is a “sorcery of a social relation”; it is not a scandal to be opposed by an alternative economic or political rationality, but a challenge that we must take up “according to symbolic law” (1984: 263). It cannot be opposed by an Enlightened Reason, for its very logic (i.e., the ideals that structure our economic activities) is grounded in the production of irrational desires. Without a doubt, Baudrillard goes too far in saying that all contemporary capitalist production is hyperreal. Food, clothing, and shelter are very real necessities, regardless of what other manufactured needs the consumer economy produces. Yet being the prophet he is, he is pointing the way to a possible future. Just as Lyotard was the sociologist of the postmodern break, Baudrillard is the cultural prophet of that break, the Cassandra of late-consumer capitalism. He sees a new structural ideal coming (indeed,

The End of the Search for Depth Meaning

189

already here in certain social and cultural sectors): that of the hyperreal, of pure infotainment, endlessly replayable and exchangeable. This ideal structures both everyday life and more large-scale economic activities (i.e., with the coming of the “information economy,” where the prime commodity is information, not physical goods). This is both a technological and an economic revolution, one powered by cathode ray tubes, silicon chips, global markets, and international currency exchanges. This revolution takes Marx’s notion of exchange value to its logical extreme: there is no real value left, in some cases, not even a real product, or real gold or silver backing a currency. Just numbers on a computer screen, or binary data on a floppy disk. In other words, the simulacrum of value. The hyperreal. I now turn to the broader issue of cultural significance of the hyperreal. THE HYPERREAL AS THE END-GAME OF THE SEARCH FOR DEPTH MEANING

The “reality question” is very much alive these days amongst the theorists of postmodernity. Linda Hutcheon (1989: 34) sees the postmodern not as a degeneration into hyperreality but a questioning of what reality means; Lyotard (1984: 76) says that modernism discovers the lack of reality of reality; while Albert Borgmann (1992: 12, 119) sees us as in danger of losing our sense of reality, with hyperreality being a thickening network obscuring and choking the real. This debate is rather abstract stuff. Yet there is an underlying social meaning to all of this. It is that the intellectual structural ideal of the search for depth meaning is under siege by a mass awareness of the allure of the hyperreal, of Baudrillard’s third-order simulacra (e.g., the map that maps nothing but the desires of the cartographer). This allure is one of the chief products of a late-consumer capitalism allied with advanced technotronic techniques (e.g., crisp video images, brilliant audio, and digital storage, retrieval and manipulation of data). The hyperreal, which is, after all, more “real” than reality itself, has three distinct qualities: (1) it’s brilliant, excluding unwanted information and noise; (2) it’s rich; and (3) it’s pliable, subject to the user’s desire and manipulation. Borgmann defines these three aspects taken together as hyperreal “glamour” (1992: 87-88). Reality is dirty, encumbering, and confining. But hyperreal glamour is disposable and dis-

190

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

continuous: it can be thrown away, or replayed from the beginning at any time. These are the signs of a perfect commodity (Borgmann 1992: 96). Exchange value is multiplied to infinity (assuming that there is an infinite desire for this value), while a thing’s use value is defined purely by the desires of the commodity’s potential user. Frederic Jameson takes his analysis of the hyperreal into the city street, into the architectural structures of contemporary North America. Postmodern buildings such as Toronto’s Eaton Centre and L.A.’s Westin Bonaventure Hotel aspire to be miniature cities that create “hypercrowds” and hyperspaces, suppressing depth in favour of a packed emptiness (Jameson 1991: 40-42). Natural crowds, the type we see in Renaissance Italian paintings of busy piazzas in Venice or Florence, have dispersed into these hyperspaces. Some recent buildings even strive for an overt hyperreality, such as West Edmonton’s mega-mall, with its life-size replica of one of Columbus’s ships, submarine fleet, and recreation of Bourbon Street (all safer and cleaner than the real things). These buildings are like computer simulations: they try to create a hyperreality that will both protect their visitors from the less structured and more dangerous urban reality that surrounds them, while also offering them hyperreal simulacra of exotic places and technological wonders. Jameson sees the Bonaventure’s reflective skin as repelling the city outside, with its messy and dirty reality, like those reflective sunglasses that repel the glance of the Other (1991: 42). Appropriately, the Bonaventure plays a central role in the futurist thriller film Strange Days (directed by Kathryn Bigelow, 1995). The central character in the film, Lennie Nero (played by Ralph Fiennes), is a “clip” blackmarketeer. Clips are CDs on which are recorded little bits of people’s inner lives and experiences—sex, violence, good times, bad times—the ultimate hyperreal escapism, with all the glamour that Albert Borgmann calls for in his dystopian vision of hypermodern hyperreality. They can be replayed on illegal headsets that richly simulate the recorded experience. The crucial final scenes of revenge and redemption for Lennie are played out in the hyperreal city of the Bonaventure Hotel as the year 2000 approaches, second by second, counted down on a huge Sony screen in the public square. The moral of the film is that Lennie, formerly happy to fiddle with his clips while L.A. burned, seems to embrace the real once again, in the person of Macy, an old friend (played by Angela Bassett) whose love is pres-

The End of the Search for Depth Meaning

191

ent and palpable, unlike the long-buried emotions of a past lover recorded on Lennie’s clips. Forgetting is a good thing, Macy tells Lennie and the audience near the end of the film: it keeps us anchored in the present time and place. I would add that remembering is a good thing too, if that remembering is of history and tradition, of voices speaking authentically to us out of past lives. Both assist us in rejecting the synchronic flatness of the hyperreal, of the propaganda of commodities, and losing oneself in a past that no longer exists or in a future that never will. Yet television and computers, not buildings, are the chief ways that hyperreality enters most people’s lives. In the act of watching TV we have a concrete viewing of the hyperreal, whether it’s a sitcom, a film, or the nightly news. The television sitcom family, in its twenty-two-minute struggle with the problem of the week, exudes a hyperreal glamour unattainable by mundanely real families. Hence its allure. As Baudrillard notes (1984: 273-74), TV and life dissolve into each other as medium and message merge.17 Viewers are sucked into television hyperreality, much like James Woods’s character in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1982), the first and perhaps only truly McLuhanesque film, insofar as they allow the dancing pixels and audio to penetrate their consciousness. In Videodrome, Max Renn (Woods) is literally pulled into an undulating TV screen, on which we see a woman’s breasts or lips. He is seduced by televisual hyperreality. As McLuhan (1967: 26, 41) himself suggested, all media are extensions of some human faculty, with electric circuitry being an extension of the central nervous system. This extending of our nervous systems can be seen in operation even more clearly in computer programs and games. Indeed, as I sit in front of a computer and type these words, they are given expression on the monitor screen in front of me thanks to a computer’s central processing unit and some word-processing software. My ideas flow from my cerebral cortex, through the nerves and sinews in my fingers, to the keyboard and thus to the computer’s CPU and hard drive. My computer extends my central nervous system through time and space, both in terms of its ability to save my work for future reference, and its capacity to send messages via the Internet. Computerized intelligence makes products lite, portable, almost wraith-like; now information does not merely organize and refine material reality, but displaces it altogether (Borgmann 1992: 71). “The medium is the message” (or “massage,” as McLuhan himself hinted, tongue in cheek) is the

192

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

extreme statement of the more valid limited truth that our ideas are powerfully restructured by the videotronic culture that surrounds us. One of the most important effects of the media’s massaging of our perceptual systems is the substituting of the hyperreal for the real as the ontological ground of our socio-economic system. This is the age of TV commercials featuring a basketball superstar going one on one with a Tyrannosaurus Rex (and beating it with a nifty layup) to glorify the latest high-tech running shoe, of slick animated films made entirely by computer, of the real being crushed by the glamour of the hyperreal.18 I found a case in point in a café in Waterloo, Ontario, I once frequented. Just as Borgmann talks of hyperreal mountain trails replayed in city gyms, this café had a TV screen that displayed an endlessly looped video of a burning log in a fireplace, complete with the sound of exploding sparks crackling through the café’s stereo speakers. This image of fire, a hyperreal fire (one that never burned out), was seen by many of the young patrons of the café as a comfortable illusion. This is, no doubt, to a large degree the result of having been raised within a culture where the video image is the most important purveyor of information and entertainment. With this immersion into the clean hyperreality of the video image we see the end of the search for depth meaning in late modernity, for pure hyperreality is pure commodity. The hyperreal, as video images, computer programs, or VR games, is physically tied only to the apparatus that allows us to experience it: it is endlessly repeatable and endlessly exchangable (assuming we take proper care of this apparatus). It is the techno-economic bottomless chessboard on which consumer capitalism plays out its principle of performativity to all those commodious individuals who make up the majority of the populations of the post-industrial West.

The Search for Meaning in Depth as a Disenchantment of the Social World The decline and fall of the search for depth meaning, linked to the image culture of late modernity, has left us with a general disenchantment with the social world. The unmasking project of modernity, tied to the meta-ideal of rationalization, wound up burning itself out when it struck up against the wall of the limited remasking drive of consumer culture. Consumer culture attempts to remask, to repaint its output with a thick layer of the enamel of

The End of the Search for Depth Meaning

193

irrational need to create a situation where its denizens are in a continual state of alienation from both themselves as inadequate and from their past acts of consumption as unfulfilling. This disenchantment is by no means alleviated by becoming aware of contemporary theory: quite the contrary. Many have come to realize that this remasking, this propaganda of consumerism, is a mug’s game that cannot be won, a happiness sweepstakes where the players always lose. Yet they still feel the allure of commodities, the pull to consume, the temptation to eradicate their depths with surface glitter. This pull implicates the citizen/consumer/intellectual of late modernity in the creation and sustenance of four interrelated selves, each with its own theoretical mentor. Elements of these four selves are instantiated in varying mixtures in many if not most living individuals under late capitalism. Here they are. THE PERFORMING SELF

In performing in the social world we separate our “real” selves from our social selves, allowing the former to come out only in the privacy of family life, writing, or (in the worst cases) hidden fantasies. Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical model of the self in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life gives us a striking illustration of this process. Goffman suggests that the reality of everyday life is performance, and that a certain “bureaucratization of the spirit” is necessary for these performances to have consistency from one time to another, and thus to make our audiences trust us (1959: 56). In other words, the performing self restricts itself to a number of social roles with loosely predefined rules, as I’ve illustrated in chapter 1. Yet even more than this, in the decades since Goffman wrote The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, our media-mediated and electronicized daily lives have accentuated this performing self. For Goffman, the self is “staged”: it is not an organic thing, but a dramatic effect arising from the scenes we play out in everyday life (1959: 252). It is, to echo a Humean metaphor, a bundle of performances. Yet a damping effect was formerly more available to the performer than it is now: the one-off quality of each performance. As the performances of everyday life were always “live,” they were surrounded by at least a thin patina of authenticity, like Benjamin’s works of art prior to the mechanical age of mass reproduction. Thanks to modern video technology, these scenes can now be recorded (by film, video, or Internet cameras) and played back to us,

194

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

these lasting electronic impressions of our performances serving to reinforce our sense of the reality of the staged self. Hence the urge typical of suburbanites to record each and every key moment in their personal and family lives on videotape: these cinematographic records somehow prove the reality of their dramaturgical selves, of their willingness to follow the rules and fill the roles ordained by bourgeois structural ideals. Yet like all stage and film actors playing parts, this encourages a distancing of the “core” self from the roles it plays, knowing that these are only roles. This leads to a cynicism about social life, a refusal to take that person up on the stage too seriously in the role they are playing (even if it’s oneself). THE CYNICAL SELF

The modern self-aware, cynical self recognizes that many of our public performances are phoney; we become disenchanted with work, play, relationships, and family life, but soldier on in a separate enclave of cynical detachment. Peter Sloterdijk sees this cynical self as an integrated but asocial character, a creature of the modern metropolis, whose evil gaze is not an amoral quirk but the look de rigueur, whose attitude is part of a collective, “realistic” view of things (1984: 192). Sloterdijk sees cynicism as a form of false consciousness, a modernized unhappy consciousness diseased with the Enlightenment (1984: 192-93). He too ties modern cynicism to the unmasking tradition. The unmasker’s treatment of truth “functionalistically” carries with it an immense potential for cynicism, and since “every contemporary intelligence is caught up in the process of such…theories, it becomes ineluctably entangled in the latent or open master cynicism inherent in these forms of thinking” (Sloterdijk 1984: 206). In other words, once the hidden depths have been unmasked, it’s rather difficult to take the surface verities of social life too seriously. Christianity, moral codes, capitalist economic relations, family life, “healthy” sexuality, and scientific research all lose their aura of innocence in the wake of Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Mannheim. They stand exposed, their seriousness undermined, their depth meanings unearthed as ethical distortions and metaphysical frauds. The awareness of standing on the precipice of the yawning empty chasm of truth seen as a tradeable commodity, an intellectual good hawked in the marketplace by loud-mouthed merchants, makes the cynic suspicious of intellectual endeavour. Public appearances

The End of the Search for Depth Meaning

195

become performances. The cynic turns narcissistically inward towards a private self. This whole process is accentuated by the news media, whose reportage of car crashes, fires, and political events turns these real things into hyperreal audiovisual bites, and by film, television, and popular music, whose narratives from time to time lay out this cynicism in its starkest form.19 We need only common sense to tell us that cynicism breeds a retreat from the public sphere, from political participation, from emotional engagement with one’s culture. “Private life” becomes the hallowed ground for late-modern consumers, both in their acts of consumption and in their relations with others. We now cue Christopher Lasch, who has been eagerly waiting his turn in the wings. THE NARCISSISTIC SELF

Lasch shifts the investigation of narcissism from individual cases of psychoanalysis to a psycho-social analysis of a whole society, America in the sixties and seventies. He sees the reality of the performing self as generated by the propaganda of consumer culture, out of the materials of advertising, film, and television, where a vast range of cultural traditions are all made equally contemporary (1979: 166). I will deal with Lasch at greater length in my last chapter. Suffice it to say here that the overarching reality of Lasch’s culture of narcissism is the dying culture of competitive individualism, with its war of each against all, and where the search for “authenticity” and happiness winds up in the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self (Lasch 1979: 8). The narcissist gets involved in the various awareness movements, lives in the hedonism of the present moment, treats politics as theatre, and flies from feeling into an easygoing sexual promiscuity that is protectively shallow and cynically detached (Lasch 1979: 330 and elsewhere). In all of these therapeutic activities, cynical performances are mixed in with committed engagement. Even more than the performing and cynical selves, the narcissistic self is well suited to the economic imperatives of the present economy of mass consumption.20 The self preoccupied with its own desires, its own needs, to the detriment of any external sphere, is the ideal target for the programming offered by the propaganda of commodities and for the ideology of a globalized capitalism. Who better to absorb the simple lesson that one can never have enough consumer goods in one’s house, a new enough car, nice enough

196

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

clothes? Narcissism, cynicism, and dramaturgy are the natural allies of consumerism. The narcissistic self is also admirably suited to the postmodern intellectual condition: fleeing from feeling, meaning, and depth, it is more than happy to have a game of chess on the beach with Derrida on his bottomless but paper-thin chessboard. THE PRIVATE SELF

For Pauline Rosenau the “postmodern individual” pulls back from public discourse and privatizes his or her concerns, realizing that everyone has their own truth and should be left to it, thank you very much. Such individuals become detached, alienated, and private, staying at home and watching television rather than socially interacting (1992: 104). They become cynical couch potatoes, manufacturing truths out of fragments of media reports, film narratives, and soliloquies from pulp novels. The richness of modern technology makes this possible: despite the pap that fills the airwaves, flopping in front of a television still seems more interesting than attending committee meetings or engaging in long boring conversations with people one is indifferent towards. Charles Taylor diagnoses one of the elements of the malaise of modernity as the contemporary culture of authenticity, which in its negative aspect is a purely personal understanding of self-fulfillment that sees community associations as purely instrumental (1991: 43).21 This turning away from community is at the heart of the private self ’s mission. Taylor believes that the search for this brand of authenticity involves the collapse of the horizons of significance for life, for it seeks self-fulfillment in opposition to society, nature, history, and the bonds of solidarity (1991: 38, 40). What matters is still the self, but a self unconnected to the great reservoirs of meaning that the Western social and spiritual adventure has generated over the past three millennia. Such a self eventually dries up, and the social world crumbles into diffuse tribes of television or Internet junkies who surf through world views with channel changers manufactured in Paris by Les Frères Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard et Baudrillard, a recently established firm specializing in leading-edge technologies and ontologies. ——— ••• ——— The unmasking tradition, the search for depth meaning, was allied to the rationalization drive of modernity, a drive that stalls with the postmodern intellectual condition and the consumer society.

The End of the Search for Depth Meaning

197

This results in a social world that produces an interlocking network of sophisticated, technologically aware, economically prosperous, occasionally super-conscious, but disenchanted selves. Whether this disenchantment with the social world is a permanent or temporary condition is an open and certainly interesting question. If we could but turn the page of tomorrow…but that would be prophecy, not philosophy.

From the Unmasking Mind to the Liquid Body Over the last two chapters I have told the tale of the decline and fall of the meta-ideal of rationality within contemporary intellectual culture, and how its decline and fall was related to broader socioeconomic shifts. In the next chapter I will turn from the history of ideas to a “secret history” of what I call the “liquid body,” the shifting constellations of body images accepted as the norm at different points in the twentieth century. In doing so, I want to show how structural ideals can mould and shape everyday life, even in terms of the clothes we wear. It is almost a truism in cultural studies that style encodes our social location and aspirations; this style can in turn be decoded theoretically if one can understand the relation between its wearers’ intentions and their structural position. This decoding exercise is, not surprisingly, an attempt to understand the social meaning of style. I believe that it can be best accomplished by understanding human thought/action as a dynamic interplay between the individual intentions of social actors and the structural ideals that guide or channel their aspirations. In other words, style is an expression of structural ideals.

7 A Secret History of the Liquid Body Image and Counter-Image in Twentieth-Century Culture

In vain do you pretend to have learned the nature of bodies from your past experience. Their secret nature, and consequently all their effects and influence, may change, without any change in their sensible qualities. —David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism…is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. —Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

A Theoretical Sketch The body has a secret history, as a liquid body, a history we see played out against the background of twentieth-century social and economic history. This is a history of the multiplication and acceleration of body images, thanks to the increasing dominance of consumer culture and its alliances with modern mass entertainment and electronic communications. By body image I mean ideals concerning the physical shape of the human body, including how this is altered by cosmetics, hairstyle, jewellery, and other adornments, along with clothes, and thus Notes to chapter 7 are on pp. 283-84.

199

200

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

style taken in its broadest sense. According to my central metaphor, given body images represent moments of congealment of what I call the “liquid body,” these moments prescribed by a dialectical development between structural ideals. From the demure debutant in a flowing dress peering out from street posters of the fin de siècle to the evanescent images of gyrating muscular bodies in a nineties’ music video, we can trace a dialectic of body image that is simultaneously a story about style, i.e., about the commodification and production of pictures of the human body that act as prescriptive injunctions to the consumers of the industrial West, and about resistance, of (often isolated) pockets of images that try to act as a counter to those that at the time rule the public world. I will thus focus my attention on the fourth of the ways that Bryan Turner sees the body as confronting social organization, as representation (1992: 59). This story of the social representation of the body is the one that I will attempt to sketch in this chapter, by way of a structural idealist analysis of everyday life, a discussion of the channels of communication for body images, and a brief historical periodization of shifting constellations of these images. My central concept here is that of the liquid body, the sometimes deceptively open-endedness of bodily images presented in consumerism. It is liquid in that it is shaped and reshaped by shifting constellations of structural ideals. The image is the receptacle into which the liquid body is “poured.” Needless to say, the liquid body is a metaphor that I take be theoretically fruitful, and not a concrete “thing.” If we look at the relation between ideas and social conditions as laid out in Marxism and in the sociology of knowledge (e.g., Mannheim, Berger and Luckmann), we find an attempt to explain such things in terms of the socio-economic structures underlying them. Here I will tilt this analysis sideways by adding an ideal element to the equation, the body image, which exists on a level that is less conscious and purposeful than social ideas, but which presents itself as more phenomenologically startling than the background social conditions of the consumption of style alone. I realize that I walk upon dangerous ground in speaking of body image in the abstract, before its various differentiations due to race, gender, or sexual orientation. Yet I would like to sketch out a transsexual and transracial theoretical picture, leaving an all-too-brief fleshing out of this sketch to my fourth, historical, section, where I periodize twentieth-century Western history into six distinct fields where various constellations of images and counter-images have done battle.1

A Secret History of the Liquid Body

201

I share Tony Featherstone’s basic premise that the “inner logic of consumer culture depends upon the cultivation of an insatiable appetite to consume images” (1991: 178). The way this image consumption works can be summed up in the following phenomenological model of everyday thought and action in the social world of consumer capitalism, keeping in mind that in actual cases histories it would not be so easy to distinguish one stage from another: a. We start with the unformed liquid body ready for crystallization and thus commodification. b. A cluster of prescribed body images is presented to the consumer by advertising and other techniques. One or another body image is accepted by the consumer, and thus the liquid body is transiently solidified. c. There is an initial perception of an improved “lifestyle” (from greater popularity, sex appeal, or social acceptance) as the body image is internalized, consumed, and displayed. d. This perception is frustrated by the illusory quality of the lifestyle improvement promised by the purveyors of the body image, and by the constant flood of new body images arriving via the propaganda of consumer capitalism. A feeling of alienation from the initial congealment of the liquid body develops. e. The liquid body melts, and the consumer returns to the first stage, at minimum to search for ways to improve his or her present body image, if not to look for a newer and better image as a replacement for the present one. This structure is instantiated in everyday life in the way that consumerist propaganda interacts with social and political ideology on the one hand and people’s choices of supposedly “individual” body images on the other. People’s perceived social positions mediate the sort of body images they see as ideal, from the high-priced male attorney in a sober suit, with a leather briefcase and Rolex watch, to the young woman in a club with a midriff-baring top, tight black pants, and a small but clearly visible tattoo. People’s body images reveal not only a sense of their own look, their own sexuality; they also reveal their social position, their perception of how they “fit” into the public sphere. In other words, body images reveal (among other things) the structural ideals their wearers accept and seek to display in everyday life.

202

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Parallel to this process of the consumption of body images is the development, especially in the second half of this century, of a dialectic of counter-images, from the calculated cool of the beats of the fifties to the mods, hippies, and other exotica of the sixties to the nihilistic grimace of the punks of the seventies to the aggressive separatism of the “fems” of the eighties and nineties. As Dick Hebdige points out, commodities can be repossessed by the very groups that produced them and given oppositional meanings (1979: 16). These oppositional meanings are contained in what I mean by resistance. Needless to say, these counter-images start out as stylistic/aesthetic rebellions against whatever social-ideological hegemony existed at the time. Yet they wind up as ideologically marginalized while their styles are being made safe for general consumption. As Henri Lefebvre poignantly notes, what was yesterday reviled “today becomes cultural consumer-goods; consumption thus engulfs what was intended to give meaning and direction” (qtd. in Hebdige 1979: 92). The very essence of popular culture in the late twentieth century, to borrow a line from a Clash song, is “turning rebellion into money,” is extracting value (i.e., both physical and ideological capital) from the process of the popularization of these counter-images and the products consumed connected to this popularization. In such a short space I will have to sacrifice detailed historical proofs for rather sweeping theoretical generalizations. However, turning Lyotard on his head, I offer this account as what I hope will be a convincing metanarrative about the countless little stylistic narratives found in everyday life in the Western world in the recently passed twentieth century. When relating this metanarrative about style, it is useful to see our social world as a collection of cultures and subcultures, standing in relations of co-operation and hostility, domination and subordination. At any given time, this world is “ordered” through the structures that express the hegemony (echoing Gramsci) of the currently most powerful alliance of cultural interests (see Clarke et al. 1976: 11). And sometimes we can see this hierarchy reflected or expressed in the dialectic of body images that appears before us in the public places of the Western world. So part of the story of the liquid body must be grounded in the understanding, as Tony Jefferson says of the Teddy Boys of the fifties, that style represents a symbolic way of expressing and negotiating, for a cultural or subcultural group, with their social reality, or giving cultural mean-

A Secret History of the Liquid Body

203

ing to their social plight (1976: 86).2 Hence our job as social theorists approaching the phenomenon of style is to attempt to understand its social meaning for the group that “wears” it, involving both a reading of its manifest, or surface, meaning, and a decoding of its latent meaning, as an expression of socio-economic structures, which I see as having their principal reality in structural ideals. I now turn to how our understanding of body images and counterimages can be divided between their manifest and latent meanings, and how this division engages Michel Foucault’s power/knowledge equation and his political economy of the body.

Body Images, Power, and Levels of Meaning Body image, or stylistic “discourse,” has a right to both manifest and latent meanings. We thus owe the consumer of a body image an understanding of the manifest meaning of that consumption (e.g., “a thin muscular body is sexy and therefore will make me more attractive to the opposite sex”), while at the same time not being timid in asserting the latent meaning of this acceptance of a body image, i.e., in terms of its place in social and economic processes (e.g., the propaganda of consumer capitalism, the cult of narcissism, the turning of Cartesian dualism on its head, the restless search for selfimprovement and fulfillment, or subcultural hostility toward the dominant culture). Indeed, the manifest and latent meanings of style feed off each other, being engaged in the same sort of feedback loop I mentioned in chapter 2 apropos of the relationship between intention and structure. Foucault tells us, in Discipline and Punish, that there is no power relation that doesn’t simultaneously imply a knowledge relation, and vice versa (1979: 27). This becomes tied to the history of the body when, in his important essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault announces his interest as a genealogist in the way that the body is imprinted by history, as an inscribed surface of events (1977: 148). For Foucault the body is a empty tablet on which history writes its truths, a blank piece of paper awaiting imprint of the printer’s inked type. This equation of power with knowledge and the subsequent subsumption of the body under the aegis of this equation is not such a productive theoretical move as it may seem. The whole problem of tying in power, knowledge, and the body so tightly is, as Turner notes, that it ignores the facticity of the body (1992: 52). Foucault’s

204

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

equation robs social actors of the direct “feel” of the body images they choose, of the intentions that their styles were meant to express. It turns these actors (to borrow a phrase from Stuart Hall) into “cultural dopes.” Foucault collapses what I term the whole manifest/latent distinction in discussing the social meaning of embodiment, as the manifest meanings that actors assign to their stylistic ensembles vanish into the black hole of the power/knowledge equation. He makes the resistance to hegemonic cultural powers encoded in style a futile act of self-delusion, as all power revolves within the same ethical solar system. I mention all of this because Foucault has played such a central role in “body theory” over the last couple of decades, his word approaching law in some circles of cultural analysis in North America and Europe. No doubt his notion that our bodies are the passive victims of social and political forces appeals to theorists operating under certain ideological presuppositions, not to mention people who enjoy playing the role of victim. Yet it seriously distorts the social meaning of style. If we turn back the sociological clock to Weber, we recall the importance he placed in social explanation on understanding the subjective meaning of the social actor’s actions. If we are to grasp the whole social and historical significance of a given moment of embodiment, we must pay close attention to the subjective, manifest meaning of that moment. Foucault tells us that in every society the body “is in the grip of very strict powers which impose on it constraints, prohibitions, and obligations” (1979: 137), which may be true enough. However, the consumer’s immediate awareness of the attraction of a body image, its acceptance, and its consumption by that consumer has an existential quality (whether of conformity, a feeling of utilitarian necessity, pleasure, or whatever) that cannot be reduced, purely and simply, to the power/knowledge equation or to its being a substructural by-product. A phenomenology of power, to be meaningful, requires a domain of freedom. We can put forward an equation at this point, but it isn’t Foucault’s power/knowledge equation: rather, it is one of power/style, alongside of which is the dual possibility of either engagement with the dominant culture or of resistance to this culture. Camille Paglia makes this point against Foucault’s notion of embodiment with acerbic wit: she says of his History of Sexuality that all those Greeks banging away didn’t know that they were discoursing on power (1992: 182). This is exactly the point: they were

A Secret History of the Liquid Body

205

just banging away, for the most part, for the sheer pleasure of it all, just as the turn-of-the-millennium consumer consumes body images for the sheer pleasure of it all. It is excessively narrow-minded to engage in the sort of world-historical demonizing that, for example, feminists like Laura Mulvey do when they state that development of the “cosmetic” body and the cosmetics industry is “so that the psychic investment the patriarchy makes in feminine appearance is echoed by an investment on the part of capitalism” (1991: 147). Even if part of the social meaning of cosmetics is as Mulvey suggests, the lived body takes a real pleasure in this “psychic investment” all the same. It is both bad phenomenology and questionable morality to treat the subjects of social theory as the dupes of an outrageously rigid structuralism.3 As Kim Sawchuk notes (1987: 55), it is a mistake to follow the more dogmatic feminists and Marxists and decode all social relations under patriarchy or capitalism as essentially and homogeneously repressive in their effects. Instead, we should see the body as a textured object “touched by the rich weave of history and culture,” and remember that in resisting dominant powers it does women no good to engulf themselves in an anti-fashion discourse that seeks to return to some form of “natural beauty,” some core of being that exists prior to or transcends socialization (1987: 55, 58). It’s not unreasonable to claim that capitalism makes a significant investment in female appearance. Yet it also makes some investment, perhaps less, in male appearance. Lest we forget, the whole point of consumerism is to convince people to buy things they don’t need. To ignore this fact and to attempt to reduce the consumption of style to the passive acts of robotically passive consumers is to surrender the phenomenon to its latent meanings alone. Instead, social theory must retain a vivid awareness of the manifest meanings of style, of the pleasure that its wearers of both sexes discover in its various manifestations, and of the social messages that these wearers intend in their ensembles (e.g., as in the early nineties, when the ensemble of grunge clothes, the Generation X lifestyle, and music from Seattle expressed for many white, middle-class kids high social expectations set against a background of declining economic opportunities for youth). So the body does have a secret history, running like a subterranean river underneath the manifold of acts of consumption as they are subjectively perceived by the consumer. We must keep in

206

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

mind the dual nature of the contemporary consumption of body images, both their manifest and their latent meanings. My secret history is the history of the latent meanings of this process of consumption, which are inevitably tied to our present economic and social structures and, thus, to a dialectical development of structural ideals. They are also very much tied to the channels of communication that link these structures to the individual. We can read their manifest history in the conversation and expression of those around us every day of our lives. The manifest meanings of style have a public history. On the other hand, we need to do some cultural archaeology to get at their latent or secret history. This shows us in a myriad of forms the dialectic of images and counter-images of the liquid body under consumer capitalism. I now turn to the mechanisms that communicate our culture’s dominant body images and, more surreptitiously, its counter-images to these dominant pictures of the body.

The Channels of Communication The liquid body produced by the contemporary consumer society is set in the various forms it has assumed in this century by means of a crystallizing agent: the channels of communication of the modern world. Advertising taken in its narrow commercial sense is the central such agent, but by no means the only one: the “indirect” advertising created by stars of the entertainment industries also helps to communicate body images, while the way that these body images are presented in everyday life, for example, in school cafeterias, shopping malls, and pubs, helps to reinforce the initial (usually visual) messages. The principle channels of communication for consumerist propaganda are as follows: The Printed Page: This includes, of course, newspapers and magazines, but can also be understood in the wider sense of including posters, billboards, and allied phenomena. This was once a dominant technique, although it suffered a serious decline in significance with the increasing dominance of celluloid and electronic images in the second half of this century. Radio: This is an indirect communicator of body images, doing so in terms of advertising aesthetic values to the consumer rather than directly exhibiting how these values “look.” Radio was an important channel in, roughly speaking, the second quarter of the twentieth century.

A Secret History of the Liquid Body

207

Film: By weaving fashion, body shapes, and aesthetic values into storytelling, Hollywood and the European film industries have had and continue to have a decisive influence on congealing the liquid body into the various forms it has assumed in our times. Film stars still loom large as purveyors of ideal body images, including high fashion. Television: This is the most direct and persuasive channel of communication, for not only does it present to the consumer an immediate visual image (like the printed page) and talk (like radio), but it combines the two into an audiovisual narrative (like film). Further, it does this in the living room of the consumer, and interweaves within its narratives explicit consumerist propaganda, unlike film.4 The television set can be a direct pipeline between the individual consumer and the advertising wizards of the corporate, stylistic, and political elites. Computers: As yet hardly exploited at all as a channel of communication for body images, although with their ever-increasing sophistication and with mass-produced virtual reality just around the corner, they have the capacity to be even more powerful than television as a direct communicator of body images. Needless to say, the growing juggernaut that is the Internet will play a key role here. Yet this is limited by the ability of the net surfer to zoom out of a commercial narrative with the click of a mouse; it is, at present, much harder to embed consumer propaganda into web sites than television shows. The way these channels works is by no means “neutral” and entirely dependent on the way consumer capitalism as an economic system works. They have a certain independence of this process, and, as is especially the case with television and electronic communication, the potential to lead consumer culture down previously unexplored social pathways. To repeat a by now perhaps tired formula, the medium is indeed the message. Each form of communication is biassed toward certain sense ratios, toward certain ways of interacting with our central nervous system. Their central function is to promote the consumer culture either directly as commodities themselves (e.g., a videotape of a film, a magazine), or indirectly, through advertising and the promotion of alluring, glamorous, or comfortable lifestyles tied to the consumption of certain goods (e.g., a new car, technological gadget, or pair of jeans). Yet this process has consequences not entirely intended by those who create it. As

208

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Christopher Lasch reminds us, the modern manufacturer has to “educate” the masses in the culture of consumption: In a simpler time, advertising merely called attention to the product and extolled its advantages. Now it manufactures a product of its own: the consumer, perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, bored. Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life…the propaganda of commodities turns alienation itself into a commodity. It addresses itself to the spiritual desolation of modern life and proposes consumption as a cure. (1979: 136-38) The consumer culture is by its very nature an alienative culture: to maintain consumption at acceptably high levels, it must, by definition, promote a process of serial alienation by the consumer from past acts of consumption. It must promote the notion that product X1 (with “X” standing for any product one could imagine) is no longer “good enough,” and must be replaced by product X2, even though X1 can still fulfill the function it was designed for. Our culture promotes a social-aesthetic ideal that is self-consuming, like a snake eating its own tail. Part of this is the consumer’s decision to reject past congealments of his or her own personal liquid body, along with the clothes, cosmetics, accoutrements, exercise gear, hairstyles, and so forth, that went along with that congealment. The consumer is made “aware” of the inadequacy of these past solidifications by way of the channels of communication I’ve outlined above. Thus these channels are also purveyors of the central commodity of our culture, namely, alienation. This is accepted more and more by the masses due the overturning of Cartesian dualism within popular (and also, increasingly, intellectual) culture: the body is valued over the spirit or mind, and becomes the archetype of all commodification. Consumer capitalism sells to the body as directly as possible through audio bites and the flashy, evanescent visual image, in an attempt to bypass the latent psychic resistances of traditional religious, moral and aesthetic values. The more that the body is seen as the self, the more products can be sold (with apologies to the book industry). So consumerism now concentrates on our physicality, especially by using sex to sell its wares.

209

A Secret History of the Liquid Body

A Periodization I will now try to situate what I’ve said in the first three sections of this chapter within a historical framework, to give colour to the grey theoretical picture presented there. My central technique in periodizing clusters of body-image types is to base this periodization on the more important changes in the channels of communication used to disseminate these clusters. I outline below what I see as a sensible periodization, including a brief outline of each period that will also serve as a peremptory justification for what might seem to be rather arbitrary lines of division. I do so in the full realization that the next few pages will be something of a historical roller-coaster ride, and that each of these periods could be handled at much greater length. So buckle up your seat belts, and let’s go. THE POST-VICTORIAN PERIOD:

1901–1918

Despite the rumblings of things to come in such turn-of-the-century intellectual and artistic movements as early feminism, socialism, Dada, Freudianism, and so on, the male liquid body here remains by and large congealed in the dark, respectably bourgeois images left over from the nineteenth century, while women remain in the mode of tight-laced matrons or romantic heroines à la the Pre-Raphaelites.5 This is reflective of the continued dominance of the ethos of middleclass achievement that built capitalism and of a radical dualism of the sexes. The desire for a Christian and bourgeois respectability informed the structuring ideals of not only the middle classes, but also the working class on holiday by the seaside or attending a musical or silent film. This restraint was significantly eroded by the carnage of the Great War, which caused a crisis of faith in the value of civilized codes of deportment, and by the bureaucratic spirit (in both corporation and state) that further imprisoned the industrial West in Weber’s iron cage of rationality, which promoted performativity over respectability. We see in this period the first crude beginnings of radio and film, but the printed page remains as the dominant channel for the communication of body images. Glitz and sexuality had barely begun to appear in the print advertisements of the day: if one scans an early-century newspaper, one finds fashion ads that attempt to convince ladies to buy elaborate dresses worn by noble Europeans, the message being that every well-bred woman can buy for herself a bit of the distinction of a countess or duchess by mail order or at a bigcity department store.

210

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

We also see the beginning of an aesthetic paradigm shift in the way the human body is valued. As late as the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as witnessed in Renoir’s glowing nudes, an abundance of female flesh was seen as aesthetically pleasing (Caskey 1989: 177). In the twentieth century we see the triumph of the thin woman, with the ideal of thinness being firmly established for men also in the second half of this century. As regards counterimages, we will have to wait until well into the century to see the more vivid examples of these. But, as Elaine Showalter notes of the fin de siècle, we do see the “New Women,” who accepted the Victorian belief in female passionlessness and looked and acted as chaste yet maternal heralds of a higher race, having purged their female sexuality (1990: 45). They were a subtle early glimpse of the more aggressively resistant “fem” subculture of our own day. These New Women, their necks choked by high collars (perhaps restricting blood flow to their brains), gave birth to the various early-century movements for social purity, including campaigns to eradicate prostitution and marijuana, not to mention their more successful battle to purge society of the demon rum, leading to a disastrous social experiment with the prohibition of alcohol in the twenties and thirties. THE TWENTIES:

1919–1929

This is the golden age of both radio and silent film, which begin to challenge the printed page as the central propagators of body images to the masses. The flapper and the suave man-about-town provided glamourous pictures of the good life for these masses. In the images presented by the film industry and the popular press, these dapper gents went from club to club dressed in tux and tails, a cane or top hat in their hand, a wafer-thin demoiselle dancing alongside their promenades. Women now wore skimpy skirts that their mothers would chafe in horror at, and cut their hair short as if to reject the Pre-Raphaelite and Renoiresque models of femininity dominant in the late Victorian period. These images represent a new liberation for the body from the oppressive conformity of the pre-war period, no doubt in part the product of a “tonight we dance, for tomorrow may not come” attitude fostered by the mass slaughter of the Great War, when conformity to social codes brought death to millions. Berlin, Paris, and New York were the centres of twenties popular culture, the latter contributing its jazz soundtrack, the former a cultural archetype of moral decay, given its notoriety as the

211

A Secret History of the Liquid Body

centre of fringe subcultures of drugged-out aristocrats, cabaret dancers, foppish gays, and leftist intellectuals. George Grosz sketched the whole scene in pen and ink or on canvas, while Brecht and Weill threw their own three pennies’ worth of moral parody of the culture into the musical pot. The brownshirts destroyed this meeting of subcultures in the early thirties, imposing their own moral code, a new respectability of body image tied to the social ideals of petty bourgeois Bavarian burgomasters and failed Austrian artists. For German men, tuxes were out, and crisp brown, grey, or black uniforms were in; for German women, white blouses, peasant skirts, and long blonde hair were de rigueur. Politics and style were, and still are, strange bedfellows. Advertising also begins to change in this period. As Lasch points out, narcissistic self-reflection as a way of internalizing the need to consume body images is made part of the propaganda of commodities: ads featuring women staring at themselves in the mirror were widespread in the magazines ads of the day (1979: 167). Mass consumerism begins to take off, its glossy and glamorous message brought to the consumer via the visual images of print advertising and film and the audio images of radio advertising. Yet economics and politics were to soon intervene in a massive way, to a large degree putting the takeoff of a mass consumer culture on hold for two decades. DEPRESSION AND WAR:

1930–1951

In this period the film industry takes two giant leaps forward: first to talkies, then to colour movies. Consumer capitalism begins to develop “modern,” more propagandistic advertising techniques to go along with the increased varieties of products it makes available to the masses.6 However, the Great Depression and the Second World War forestall for a time the full flowering of consumer culture, despite the technological revolutions produced in this time (e.g., the jet engine, atomic energy, television, primitive computers, etc.). The Depression caused economic growth in the West, notably in the American economy, to grind to a halt. With massive unemployment and the resulting decline in disposable income, the consumption of new styles went into a temporary recession. This despite the fact that magazines and films still promoted the glamorous lifestyles of social elites and of the new aristocrats of the entertainment industries. With women being brought into the workforce during the Second World War, we see the first mass-produced female counter-image to

212

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

the previously dominant woman of the home or of high society: the working woman, hair tied back in a red kerchief, wearing a blue workshirt, boots, and jeans, flexing her now muscled arms. Rosie the Rivetter helped to promote the war effort on the home front in America, just as several decades later she would act as an early icon for American feminism. However, this counter-image was circulated to the public as a result of the exigencies of war, and became dormant in the fifties as men came home from the war and women returned to the home. Despite the dislocations of depression and war, this was the great age of Hollywood glamour, when Bogart and Bergman and Bacall shimmered from the screens of film noir, cigarette smoke seemingly endlessly curling away from these dapperly dressed romantic refugees. They symbolized on film the stylish edges of mainstream society, the swing musicians, the private eyes, the failed debutantes, the spies and saboteurs, whom the general public idolized as glamorous ideals of masculinity and femininity. A well-cut doublebreasted suit, hat, and tie filled in the male side of this picture; a flowing sequined gown, or a crisp suit and skirt topped by a feathered hat, the female side. Film was the central means of communication of body images in this period in a way that it would never again be. In this period and the next, it was still able to promote an ideal of style that distanced its consumers from the unwashed masses, that distinguished them from those unwilling or unable to buy into the body images purveyed by it. Not that the idea of distinction as embodied in personal style has ever been absent from everyday life: quite the contrary. Yet in the innocence of mid-century Hollywood images of the male and female body one can read a mass acceptance of the idea that by buying into this distinction one could separate oneself from the unstylish majority. This acceptance was a very real thing for consumers who sought to use their film-inspired revamped body images to climb social ladders. THE DAWN OF THE ELECTRONIC AGE:

1952–1962

The agora, which has always acted as a theatre for displaying the liquid body in whatever form it had presently congealed into, is transferred indoors, to the privacy of the family living room, the increasingly omnipresent cathode ray tube beaming these images directly at the consumer, and to the shopping mall, where the body image/commodity is both purchased and displayed. The television

A Secret History of the Liquid Body

213

set now becomes an important agent of bodily socialization, its grainy black and white images still tied to the aesthetics of film (except perhaps in the new phenomena of newsmen like Edward R. Murrow, who embodied a no-nonsense factuality that was symbolized in the no-nonsense suits and ties they wore on air). At the same time, the post-war baby boom gave birth to a massive expansion of city suburbs in North America, as mainstream culture became more rigidly middle class, patriarchal, and conformist for a short while. To service these new suburbs with the consumer goods provided by the post-war economic takeoff, the shopping mall in its modern manifestation was born. Malls became (and still are) the contemporary piazzas for Western urbanites, where body images are advertised by stores, bought by consumers, and (figuratively speaking) sold by their new wearers to the observing crowds that gather to pay tribute to these new temples of consumerism. In the fifties the glamour of Hollywood was still largely intact. As Laura Mulvey points out, in the United States there was a democracy of glamour, a society of the spectacle in a time when, in the context of the Cold War, advertising, movies and the actual packaging and seductiveness of commodities all marketed glamour. Glamour proclaimed the desirability of American capitalism to the outside world and, inside, secured American-ness as an aspiration for the newly suburbanized, white, population as it buried incompatible memories of immigrant origins. (1991: 148) In the full rush of naive optimism and economic prosperity that followed the triumph of the Allied forces in the war, the consumer culture took off. Consumer goods rolled off the assembly lines in mass quantities: automobiles, televisions, radios, kitchen gadgets, and plastic toys for children of both sexes. For many, conformity to wellestablished ideals of the nuclear family, with father playing the role of breadwinner and rule-giver, and mother supplying the domestic labour and child rearing, seemed a small price to pay for all this plenty. The ads of the day pictured the domestic bliss of suburban life: dad in his cardigan, relaxing in front of the television with his pipe, mom with her sensible dress and apron in the kitchen cooking or cleaning up with the latest in cooking or cleaning technology, their children orbiting them like planets around some sun, playing

214

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

with toy guns or Barbie dolls (their choice of toys strictly determined by their sex). The social ideals of family life in the fifties helped to shape the body images of the day, as they do in all other periods of history. Yet underneath all this economic activity and conformity lurked the beginnings of counterculture in the beat subculture and in the formation of a youth entertainment market centred on rock and roll. The black and white television images of a gyrating Elvis helped to loosen the bonds of conformity for his teenage fans. Beatniks dressed in black sweaters and berets, hanging around late-night cafés, smoking dope, and reading Kerouac and Ginsberg haunted the fringes of the North American fifties bourgeoisie. The roads out of the suburbs were open, even if the counterculture of the fifties wasn’t quite sure yet where they led. This counterculture explodes onto the scene in the early sixties. COUNTERCULTURE AND THE NEW NARCISSISM:

1963–1978

This is the period when television becomes the central channel for the communication of body images, its images now broadcast in living colour, although, as Paglia points out, it is also a great age for cinema, with a real mobility of mind found there that wasn’t present in the more conventional films of the previous two decades (1992: 217). It is also the great age of counter-images, from the almost omnipresent long-haired flower children of the late sixties to the various youth subcultures, mostly British in origin, of both decades, e.g., the Mods, skinheads, glam-rockers and punks (I’ll discuss these in at greater length in the next section). The stylistic ensembles of coercive or bohemian modes of dress, rock and roll, and oppositional social attitudes drives the dialectic of body images in this period. And, of course, television was there every night to report on all of this. Once again, the creation of subcultural and countercultural styles was propelled by social conflict and war. American society (and by extension much of the Western world) was convulsed by at least three great struggles in this period: the domestic opposition to the Vietnam war by large portions of the young educated middle class, (not to mention the real combat of the war itself); the civil rights movement, which sought to eradicate the legacy of slavery; and the women’s movement, which aimed at a political and social equality of the sexes. The hippies, with their long hair, beads, psychedelic

215

A Secret History of the Liquid Body

colours, and deliberate blurring of gender roles, embraced body images at odds with the violence and straight-edged masculinity they associated with the military-industrial establishment. Pop music finally brought black musicians into the mainstream, thanks to the embrace of blues by British rock bands in the mid-sixties, along with indigenous expressions of black culture like Motown Records, which fed further colourful non-conformist body images into the counterculture, while women in the late sixties discarded their bras and cosmetics, which they saw as symbols of their oppression to men.7 Social conflict was reflected in new body images, which in turn mirrored these conflicts to the viewing public on television and in popular culture as a whole. In this period, starting roughly in the seventies, we witness a new, body-centred narcissism. Turner notes how there is now an increased emphasis on the surface of the body, the preference being an athletic and therefore beautiful body. This represents a major value shift in the West from the internal control of the body for ascetic purposes to its external control for aesthetic purposes (Turner 1992: 47). This shift to an aesthetics of the surface of the body coincides with the coming to fore of the narcissistic personality type, with its need for “constant infusions of approval and admiration,” its charming lack of depth, and its manipulative and exploitive approach to personal relations (Lasch 1979: 85). This narcissism was partly submerged by the undercurrents of the countercultures and the subcultures of the time, their cultural politics restraining for a while a full-fledged descent into self-worship. Yet when oppositional politics went out of style in the eighties and nineties, cultural narcissism bloomed into full flower, and we become submerged within the body as pure image, the messages of consumerism reaching us even more directly due to improvements in communications technologies. THE VIDEOTRONIC AGE:

1979–1999

Now the computer comes home (the major computer companies all producing home computers by the late seventies), videotaping, via the VCR and the video camera, allows a certain “freedom” of image selection, and the television set, thanks to cable and satellite dishes, explodes to thirty, forty, or more channels. The visual image now becomes portable, transient, and replayable. This transcience can be seen in the frenetic visual field and soundscape of video games, music videos, some of contemporary film, and television.8 As many

216

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

have warned us, for the first time in the modern period the visual image has caught up to if not surpassed the written word as the chief engine of ideological and aesthetic communication for the masses. The new advertising techniques emphasize colour, noise, a quick intercutting between images, and raw sexuality. This has spilled over into political persuasion, art (e.g., in pictorial art, film, and music), and the educational process. Style loses its last vestiges of religious, spiritual, or moral content. There are new congealments of the liquid body now, new stages of the dialectic of image and counter-image. We see, especially among youth cultures, the dull (if not dogmatic) conformity of the male preppies (perhaps the bourgeois skinheads of the nineties), with their marine-style haircuts and brand-name baseball caps; the marginal nostalgic rebellions of the new hippies and eco-warriors; the in-yourface resistance to gender stereotypes of the “fem” look (boots, fatigues, buzzcuts); the Harlequin Romance pirates of the early nineties, with their ponytails and earrings; and the early eighties’ androgyny of Boy George and friends, highlighting the entrance of homosexuals and bisexuals into the cultural mainstream in that decade. The move to the anorexic ideal for women started in the seventies now gathers speed, with the form-fitting female fashions of the nineties allowing an easy public display of the body images of those who can squeeze into this ideal; while a handful of lesbian sexual separatists offer a resistance to this trend in the form of the butch look, perhaps with some ideologically motivated chubbiness mixed in. In short, new cultural rituals, with new forms of resistance.9 Continuing a process begun in the previous period, Anthony Synott notes that between the fifties and the eighties beauty (in self-help books and beauty advice manuals) was redefined from being an effect of charm, self-esteem, happiness, education, and virtue to being a “purely physical phenomenon of bones and muscle, diet and makeup.” The physical now determines the emotional: virtue and happiness become by-products of a beautiful body (Synott 1989: 632). Connected to this physicalization of body image is an electronicization of reality. Lasch foresaw the increasing presence of the electronic image from his perspective at the beginning of this period, noting that we live in a “swirl of images and echoes that arrest experience and play it back in slow motion.” For Lasch modern life has become so much mediated by electronic images that it undermines our very sense of reality (1979: 96-97).

A Secret History of the Liquid Body

217

The videotronic age represents a partial completion of the process of turning Descartes on his head, as mentioned earlier: body is given complete precedence over spirit in consumer culture, with this message being transmitted with greater speed and increased clarity through a widening spectrum of electronic media. Because of this process, the danger of conformity in word and image also increases, as the gap between the mainstream consumer culture’s awareness of a counter-image and its commodification and thus sterilization of the counter-image narrows to the point of almost totally disappearing (witness the rapidity with which the “grunge” look and the Seattle music scene were disseminated to the masses). In the postmodern capitalist economy, fashion becomes the commodity par excellence, fed by a logic of planned obsolescence and a spinning cycle of desire (Faurschou 1987: 72). It becomes more and more difficult for body images to express subcultural or countercultural rebellion, given the speed with which consumer culture absorbs these rebellions. Indeed, it can even create the simulacrum of rebellion through the promotion of new stylistic ensembles advertised as distinctively countercultural, such as the baggy pants, black baseball caps, and rap music sold to white middle-class kids, an ensemble that they associate with the black hip-hop culture of urban America, romanticized for its overt violence and sexuality. This is a simulacrum not because the kids buying into this ensemble don’t feel a bit dangerous as they wear it, but because for most of them it doesn’t reflect the social reality of their comfortable, suburban lives (nor any principle of opposition to mainstream culture, as the body images of the hippies of the sixties and the punks of the seventies seemed to do). Once again, rebellion is turned into money.

A Case in Point: British Subcultural Styles, 1963–197810 In this section I will apply my notion of the liquid body to the styles of several of the “spectacular” youth subcultures that developed in Britain in my fifth period. Here I will rely heavily on the work of British subcultural theorists such as Stan Cohen, John Clarke, and Dick Hebdige, whose work in the seventies and later allowed for a radical rethinking of the meaning of youth “deviancy.” Needless to say, the concepts of the liquid body and of the dialectic of image and counter-image could just as easily be applied to any of the other

218

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

epochs I have outlined in any of the other major Western cultural locations. I choose this era for two reasons: because there is a substantial body of cultural theory already in place describing it, and because this was truly the age of spectacular subcultures, ones that fairly clearly defined themselves as subcultures. We can find at the start of this period a classic subcultural clash of styles, that between the mods and rockers, as celebrated in the Who’s film Quadrophenia and discussed at length in Stan Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics. The mods (from “modernist”) were mostly working-class youth who dressed “sharply” in Italian suits, were obsessively neatly groomed, listened to rhythm and blues, used speed to extend their nights of leisure, got around town (mostly London) on Vespa scooters, and frequented underground nightclubs. In contrast, the rockers were more of a “lumpen” crowd, preferring black leather, motorbikes, metal studs, transport cafés, and early rock and roll (Cohen 1987: 185). The seaside clashes of these two groups on holiday weekends in the mid-sixties helped to solidify these subcultures, largely thanks to television and press reporting. The more interesting of the two, the mod subculture, appropriated commodities like the business suit and amphetamines, redefined their use and value, and relocated their meanings within a different context. The mods were the petty clerks, gofers, and service industry workers of London and its suburbs. As Dick Hebdige notes, the mod compensated for his lowly daytime status by exercising complete control over his leisure time. Every mod “was existing in a ghost world of gangsterism, luxurious clubs, and beautiful women even if reality only amounted to a draughty Parker anorak, a beaten up Vespa, and fish and chips out of a greasy bag” (Hebdige 1976: 93, 91, 90). This subculture eventually dissolved on one end into the broader hippy counterculture and on the other into the skinheads. But for a time it presented its congealment of liquid body as a counter-image uncomfortably close to that of the respectable middle classes. In the late sixties and early seventies, growing out of the “hard mod” subculture, came the skinheads. They wore Doc Martens boots, braces, rolled jeans, and closely cropped hair. The counter-image they presented to the public was directed against such enemies as Pakistani immigrants, homosexuals, and hippies; their style personified working-class values, against the hippies’ rejection of the work ethic. In their territoriality, collective solidarity, and “masculinity,”

A Secret History of the Liquid Body

219

John Clarke sees a “magical” recreation of a working-class community in decline (1976a: 102). Their counter-image was aggressive, anti-bourgeois, and nostalgic for (perceived) lost class values. They used style to plug (indirectly) into the fading structural ideals of the British working class: its solidarity, work ethic, masculinity, and ethnic xenophobia. This is not to mention the feeling of personal power that the skinhead ensemble no doubt gave its wearers. Lastly, in the late seventies we find one of the “purer” and most self-conscious (at least on the aesthetic plane) subcultures of the period, the punks. Their counter-image was anti-fashion, intentionally ugly and offensive to the public, and involved sadomasochistic gear, gender confusion, and fascist symbols (especially the swastika) (Henry 1989: 80). They wore cheap fabrics, including plastics, held together their ripped shirts and suits with safety pins, dyed their hair orange, black, or green, used cosmetics excessively and garishly, and in general anarchistically deconstructed the rules of fashion. Together with their fast, loud, and often obscene music, the punk counter-image lived a short but authentic life. As Hebdige notes, punk icons like the safety pin and the rip acted as paradigms of crisis that reflected in heightened form a perceived condition of unmitigated exile, assumed voluntarily (1979: 65-66). The punks were a sort of ironic circus troupe mocking the elaborate rock music and shows of the day, the economically paralyzed Britain of the seventies, and consumer culture as a whole. They were a doppelganger of Dada, deconstructing the dandyism of pop music and style that came out of the commercialization of psychedelic hippiedom. In general, a perceived condition of exile is the essence of the message relayed by the British subcultural styles of this period. Such styles are a transformation and rearrangement of what is given in consumer culture into a new pattern with a new meaning. Their style exists as a total lifestyle, but it is sooner or later transformed, via the commercial nexus, into a novel consumption style alone (Clarke 1976b: 178, 188). They represent moments when the liquid body is crystallized more or less independently of messages received via the central channels of communication of corporate consumer culture. They present alternative social ideals through the mediation of style. So it’s no surprise that these alternative ideals have to be “decoded” in order to get at their social meaning.11 Like the Buddha’s candle flame, their moment of authenticity is brief.

220

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

The Liquid Body and the Question of Freedom The basic psychic elements of consumer culture today are the narcissistic personality and the performing self. These are the semiparodic social ideals indirectly expressed by the majority of people in our culture to varying degrees. The former emerges as we become more and more concerned with the appearance and display of our bodies and less and less with moral, spiritual, and intellectual matters. In our consumer culture, restraint and repression are inappropriate—the emphasis is on immediate gratification. As Lasch points out, one of the more interesting ways this plays out is in a desublimation of sexuality, involving an almost total severing of the old links between sex and love, marriage, and procreation. Sexual pleasure is now pursued as an end in itself, unmediated by romance (Lasch 1979: 326). Narcissism has made emotional shallowness and defensive cynicism the order of the day in relations between the sexes. This movement is hard-wired into the new emphasis on the need to have a thin, muscular body, thus requiring an ascetics of the body as a path to its hedonistic enjoyment. For an understanding of the latter, the performing self, we can turn once again to the pages of Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman presents his own metanarrative of the modern self there, which he calls the dramaturgical self, the self that goes out on the stage of the public spaces of our societies to make an “impression.” As he puts it, the self is not an organic thing, but a dramatic effect arising diffusely from the scene that the actor presents to his audience (1959: 253). Like Foucault’s power/knowledge equation, Goffman’s self cannot escape its own terms of reference, its callous dramaturgical nexus. It cannot help but perform. The warp and woof of the public spaces of modern consumer capitalism are made up of this performing self, this self in search of leaving some desired public impression, along with the narcissistic personality (tied to which are the various resistances to this personality that have sprung up over the last couple of decades). The question of freedom arises in relation to the liquid body as to when and how it is congealed into a given body image. As Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, the “cunning of pedagogic reason lies precisely in the fact that it manages to extort what is essential while seeming to demand the insignificant” (1990: 69). In earlier days, the regimentation of the spirit was the central concern of moral, religious, and political authorities. Yet in modern liberal democratic societies

A Secret History of the Liquid Body

221

this regimentation of the spirit has slackened, coinciding with a perceived decline in the significance of the “spirit” as a metaphysical essence. The body has taken over as the individual’s primary mode of presenting the self to the world. Thus part of what we mean by the question of freedom in the modern world is the choosing of our own unique body images, if necessary in direct opposition to those promoted in the consumerist propaganda of the present day. When we enter the social world, we present ourselves as a congealed moment in the history of the liquid body. In the public body image we present, we either conform to or resist the cluster of body images within the realm of social hegemony. If we accept the need to conform to the slim and muscular body images now accepted by the narcissistic consumerism of our own videotronic epoch, we will reap the benefits of increased social status and popularity, being able to plug ourselves into that network of gyms, exercise wear, and trendy parties reserved for the upper ranks of the bourgeois chic. Similar remarks could be made about clothes, hairstyles, and so on: the urge to conform one’s body image to some mass ideal is a very powerful one, especially when it’s tied to economic success or failure (as it clearly is in corporate life and in public institutions like the university at the turn of the century). However, this is a political move, like all other congealments of the liquid body. It is the buying into a system that thrives on, to somewhat self-indulgently quote yet another punk anthem (The Sex Pistols/“EMI”), “stupid fools who stand in line.” ——— ••• ——— I will now try to show how structural idealism can rescue cultural critique from sinking into the quagmire of the postmodern critical tropes of parody and irony by looking briefly at five friendly “voices in the wilderness” and how elements of their cultural criticism feed into my own reconstructive project. My final goal, which unfortunately can only be roughly sketched in this work, is a unified social theory, a goal that is at least a challenging and worthy one, if not insanely ambitious.

8 The Contribution of Structural Idealism to Cultural Critique

Prologue: What Is Culture? Before looking at contemporary cultural critique and sketching a structural idealist theory that builds on it, it would probably be useful to define the term culture. According to Raymond Williams (1963: 16), “culture” originally meant “tending to natural growth” and a process of human training. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it also came to mean (1) a general state or habit of the mind, (2) the general state of intellectual development in a society as a whole, or (3) the general body of the arts; later in the century it came to mean (4) a whole way of life, material, intellectual, and spiritual. These definitions, taken together, are rather broad and scattered, although each reflects an aspect of the way the word culture is used. Instead, I will condense them and define culture as “the body of social and historical practices of a people or civilization as expressed in intellectual life, the arts (both high and popular), daily habits, and the material objects and economic structures that make these possible.” These practices are social in that they are the products of communities of involvement. They are also historical, as MacIntyre notes, because practices always have histories: “at any given moment what a practice is depends on a mode of understanding it which has been transmitted often through many generations” (1984: 221). Thus culture is both a bearer of tradition, in Notes to chapter 8 are on pp. 284-87.

223

224

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

MacIntyre’s sense, and a creative force working upon those traditions. Naturally, which should be obvious if you’ve followed my argument so far, I will also argue that the practices that make up culture are informed by the structural ideals of the day.

Voices in the Wilderness: A Tour of Contemporary Cultural Criticism, 1978–1995 To begin my effort to sketch a structural idealist notion of cultural critique, I will now turn to a brief tour of five contemporary cultural theorists. This will act as a propaedeutic for a unified theory of contemporary culture. These five voices are distinctive, but they all contribute unwittingly and partially (like Hegel’s cunning of reason) to a structural idealist theory of social criticism. I shall look at a key work for each thinker, beginning with Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. In engaging each thinker I will look at both the methodology they employ and some of the actual content of their cultural criticism, with the intention of recycling parts of these methodologies as building blocks within my own theoretical edifice. CHRISTOPHER LASCH AND THE CULTURE OF NARCISSISM

In 1978 Christopher Lasch, in his Culture of Narcissism, unleashed a critical broadside aimed at the comfortable consumerism of the American middle classes, a consumerism feeding psychologically on post-sixties liberationist narratives concerning sex and politics and on large doses of therapeutic self-deception. He called this culture narcissistic, comparing it to the parallel neurosis that Freud named after the Greek god Narcissus, who was so fond of gazing at his own image reflected in a pool of water. Similarly, Lasch found, in the 1970s, a highly individualistic American society very much in love with its own reflection. This society was one where liberalism was bankrupt, where the historical faith that formerly surrounded public events was fading, and most importantly where a dying culture of competitive individualism presided over a war of each against all, the vaunted pursuit of happiness leading to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self (Lasch 1979: 18, 20, 21).1 Lasch sees the overall moral climate at the end of the seventies as one of self-absorption, where the conquest of nature and the quest for new frontiers that characterized nineteenth-century America had given way to an untrammelled quest for self-fulfillment (61). Lasch sees

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

225

this quest as a general psychological tendency. When he ties it to the new economic and social relationships created by the post-war consumer economy, it becomes something very close to what I call a structural ideal. Lasch’s cultural critique starts from a basic psychological premise: he sees economic man as giving way to psychological man as the final product of bourgeois individualism (22). He means by “economic man” the hard worker imbued with the Protestant ethic of a century ago. The psychological climate today is therapeutic, one where people seek the illusion of personal well-being, health, and psychic security by various therapeutic means (33). This therapeutic climate is both an internal psychological phenomenon and an external one manifested in various social practices. His “psychological dualism” sees social changes as manifested inwardly and outwardly, in changing perceptions, habits of mind, and unconscious associations (355), as well as through social institutions. “Every society reproduces its culture—its norms, its underlying assumptions, its modes of organizing experience—in the individual, in the form of personality” (76). So Lasch argues that personality traits and social organization feed into each other, just as I’ve argued that human intentions and social structure feed into each other. This dualism is clearest when he connects the pathological narcissism of individual character disorders with narcissism as a social phenomenon (82): the contemporary prevalence of the former gives us the best evidence of the reality of the latter. This is Lasch at his boldest: at a certain point the number of sick individuals qualitatively transform a culture as a whole from health to sickness. Lasch heaps great piles of invective on the narcissist: he or she is charming, but lacks curiosity about others; lacks any real intellectual engagement with the world; has little capacity for sublimation; is parasitically dependent on infusions of admiration from others; and is manipulative and exploitive in personal relations (85). The narcissist is, in short, centred on the pursuit of a narrowly defined sense of personal happiness as the best means of self-fulfillment. Lasch connects these psychic traits to the economic organization of society, to late capitalism. Narcissists are bureaucratic successes because of their manipulative approach to interpersonal relations and their lack of deep attachments (91). The psychic shallowness of the narcissist serves well the needs of late or managerial capitalism: its need for mobility of capital, labour, and expertise, its reliance on

226

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

the temporary contract, and its ruthlessness to its employers in the name of corporate wealth. Lasch plugs the primal scene of family life into broader socio-economic changes of the present era. Narcissism starts in the peculiar structure of the American family, in the abdication of parental authority and the related transformation of the superego. This comes from changing modes of production, as industrial production and the sexual revolution of the 1960s removes the father from the household (302). The abdication of parental authority instills in the young character traits demanded by a permissive, hedonistic culture. “The decline of parental authority reflects the ‘decline of the superego’ in American society as a whole,” or its transformation into a harsh and punitive one, based on archaic images of the parents fused with grandiose self-images. The result is the oscillations of self-esteem typical of pathological narcissism (305). Once again, personality structure, economics, and culture are mixed together. Lasch sees social-structural changes such as the shift to the consumer economy, the rule of bureaucracies, and the “warlike and dangerous conditions of life” as making the new model of success the Happy Hooker, ready to sell pleasure for a few dollars (107, 122). A similar ethic invades personal life, where a search for competitive advantage through emotional manipulation recreates the stress of the marketplace (126). He speaks perhaps hyperbolically of social events like staff parties as involving a sort of Hobbesian jockeying for position amongst corporate underlings. Economic competition penetrates all aspects of life. Everything becomes a commodity: everything can be bought or sold. As Marx foretold, under capitalism everything is reduced to its exchange value. In the end, all of society echoes de Sade’s sexual utopia, where people are interchangeable and anonymous sexual objects. “His ideal society thus reaffirmed the capitalist principle that human beings are ultimately reducible to interchangeable objects” (132). This idea of objectification or commodification, a favourite idea of Lasch’s Frankfurt School progenitors, is central to his critique of the culture of narcissism. Lasch holds out the notion of a more authentic intellectual, historical, or spiritual culture as a possible alternative to the current narcissistic one. This would be a culture where people and their projects aren’t just economic objects, but Kantian ends in themselves. Lasch ties in narcissism with a critique of consumer capitalism in noting that the latter feels compelled to educate the masses in the

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

227

culture of consumption by means of a “propaganda of commodities.” This propaganda is disseminated through advertising, which now manufactures a product of its own: the consumer, “perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, bored”; it promotes consumption as a way of life, educating the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods, but also for new experiences and personal fulfillment (137). Yet this educational process also has a wider therapeutic purpose, for the propaganda of commodities both upholds consumption as an alternative to rebellion and proposes consumption as a cure for contemporary spiritual desolation and alienation (138). So consumerism both creates and tries to cure alienation: the former to encourage future acts of consumption, the latter by means of the products it offers the consumer. Lasch brings a number of compelling cases forward as evidence for his central thesis that contemporary culture is deeply narcissistic. Everyday life, he claims, has become a theatre where an escalating cycle of self-consciousness is played out, where spontaneous action is squeezed out by Goffman’s performing self (165). Also, the mass culture of romantic escape, by filling people’s heads with visions of experience beyond their means, further devalues routine, leading to an ironic detachment that cripples the will to social change and the restoration of meaning and reality to everyday life (174). Both of these claims are difficult to prove, other than as felt realities of everyday life. Yet our highly structured, bureaucratically rational societies, which thanks to computerization are becoming even more structured, do seem to be good breeding grounds for this bifurcation of the self between a bland public world and our romantic dreams for our private lives, however little our actual private lives match these dreams. Further, leisure (especially sports) is now organized as an extension of commodity production, reducing it to an appendage of industry (217). Like many of Lasch’s generalizations about our culture, this is even more true today, more than twenty years after the book was written, than it was in the late seventies. Even mediocre role players in professional sports earn a million dollars per season, which teams pay for with high ticket prices, massive marketing and merchandise campaigns, and big television contracts. Sports is big business. Even the Olympic Games is now treated as a huge economic windfall by the cities chosen to host them, with professionals openly competing in team sports like hockey; the once lily-white

228

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

purity of amateur athletics is now only a dim memory. Not surprisingly, Lasch argues that since advanced industrial society requires a stupefied population ready to consume, education also suffers (224). Universities become diffuse, shapeless institutions which serve up courses like items on a cafeteria menu, catering to personal fulfillment; knowledge is commodified like everything else in consumer society (264). There is no real attempt to compel students to learn a core curriculum of history, the arts, philosophy, or the sciences: courses are tied to either corporate or political interests, or to students’ whims. Perhaps the most interesting section of The Culture of Narcissism is on the “sex war.” Lasch sees a real intensification of combat between the sexes as capitalism is transformed into a managerial, corporate, and bureaucratic system. He traces this intensification to five things: (1) the collapse of chivalry in an era of greater sexual equality, (2) the liberation of sexuality from moral and religious constraints, (3) the pursuit of sex as an end in itself, (4) the emotional overloading of personal relations, and (5) the irrational male response to the liberated woman (322-23). As a result, both sexes cultivate a protective shallowness and a cynical detachment that embitters personal relations (330). Relationships become more and more brittle; the divorce rate skyrockets. The big escape from all this embitterment and alienation is promiscuity, which Lasch sees as a flight from feeling (339). Narcissists seek a validation of their self-love in transient, empty sexual relationships with other narcissists, just as junkies seek fresh injections of their poison of choice to quell their own inner pain. In the end, narcissists, with a pallid superego that cannot ally with external authorities (for they have all gone too soft), feel consumed by their own appetites (342). And getting old is no cure. Due a lack of inner resources, narcissists look to others for validation; they need to be admired for the fading attributes of beauty, charm, celebrity, and power; unable to find satisfactory sublimations in love and work, they find little to sustain them when youth passes them by (356). American society, says Lasch, has rejected priestly and monarchical hegemony “only to replace it with the hegemony of the business corporation, the managerial and professional classes who operate the corporate system, and the corporate state” (370). This corporatism (a key concept in John Ralston Saul’s work, as we shall soon see, although he uses the term somewhat differently) makes

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

229

use of therapeutic forms of social control, which, by softening or eliminating the adversarial relation between subordinates and superiors, makes it more and more difficult for citizens to defend themselves against the state or for workers to resist the demands of the corporation (315). The class struggle slackens: everything appears to be done for the “good” of the worker or citizen. Yet make no mistake, Lasch warns us: the therapeutic elite serves the interests not just of the professionals, but of monopoly capitalism as a whole (394). The conservative critique of bureaucracy conveniently overlooks the close connection between the erosion of authority, the corruption of schools, and the spread of permissiveness on the one hand, and the rise of monopoly capitalism on the other (which results in bureaucracy in both government and industry) (392). It would seem that at the end of his book, even though he spends so much of it discussing personality disorders, Lasch thought that it is ultimately social reality that determines consciousness. Yet his discussion of bureaucracy is merely one strand of a complex theoretical weave wherein he attempts to integrate Marxist structuralism with psychoanalytic theory, swinging back and forth between human intentions and social structure. So what is to be done? In a nostalgic frame of mind, he suggests that we have to look to the tradition of local action, “the revival and extension of which holds out the only hope that a decent society will emerge from the wreckage of capitalism” (20). This tradition is undermined by bureaucracy, so the struggles against bureaucracy and capitalism must proceed hand in hand: ordinary citizens must try to control production and the technical knowledge on which production rests by creating “communities of competence.” In short, the productive capacities of modern capitalism must come to serve the interests of humanity, a conclusion that echoes Marx (at least on the rhetorical level) (396). Needless to say, this is a rather vague demand, one that only a major shift in thinking about consumer capitalism and the material culture it has produced would allow to be fulfilled. In this case, the doctor’s diagnosis is more effective than his cure. Lasch’s form of cultural critique combines psychoanalysis, social psychology, political economy, and morals. His psycho-moral categories of culture are linked to the economic base of consumer capitalism, suggesting a last gasp of the Freudo-Marxism of the early Frankfurt School. He hints at the need to “de-commodify” life by

230

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

somehow restraining consumer capitalism, thereby limiting its output of narcissistic consumer-citizens. How this is to be done is not entirely clear. But he does present a rhetorically convincing, if somewhat hurried, picture of a culture where a shallow ethic of selffulfillment is promoted by a consumer economy in need of a daily intake of rubes into its carnival tents. His open questioning of the ethic of self-fulfillment, and his tying of this ethic to economic and political changes such as consumerism, feminism, and the sexual revolution, puts this ethic front and centre in cultural critique. Does this ideal have to result in a squalid worship of the self, or can it be reinterpreted as the illegitimate offspring of a legitimate endeavour, the search for authentic meaning in life? I’ll return to this question when looking at Charles Taylor. I now turn to a more strongly Marxist reading of late-capitalist culture, to Frederic Jameson’s critique of postmodernism. FREDERIC JAMESON AND THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF LATE CAPITALISM

Frederic Jameson’s central argument in his Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) is summarized by the title: postmodern culture is part of a “cultural logic” of the third stage of capitalism, the post-industrial. He says that to grant originality to postmodern culture is to affirm a radical structural difference between consumer society and the earlier moments of capitalism from which it emerged (1991: 55), a concession which Jameson is prepared to make only in part. He instead sees postmodernism as a “systematic modification” of capitalism, or as a new cultural production within a “social restructuring” of late capitalism (xii, 62). And postmodern culture must be viewed politically: every stance on postmodernism is “also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today” (3). Jameson will have little or none of Lasch’s psychologizing: culture is a product of economic structures, even if it assumes a certain independence of those structures. Jameson borrows Ernest Mandel’s three-stage model of modern capitalism, which differentiates between (1) the market capitalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; (2) the monopoly or imperialistic capitalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and (3) the multinational or “post-industrial” capitalism of the late twentieth century. Parallelling these three economic stages

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

231

are three stages of machine evolution: steam engines (1800s); electrical devices and internal combustion motors (from the 1890s on); and electronic devices and nuclear power (from the 1940s on) (35). The nature of consumer capitalism, the third stage, is by no means inconsistent with Marx’s general picture of capitalism, which is based on his observations about the first-stage capitalism of his own day. In fact, it is the purest form of capital, “a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas” (36). It is a commodification of the world, a conquest of physical nature and of “backward” societies by the global capitalist network. Unlike in the first two stages, multinational capital (if it has its druthers) leaves no stones unturned, no protective enclaves of pre-capitalist cultures or wild nature. No “other.” Jameson rejects McLuhan’s enthusiasm for the power of technology to change social structures: he sees the technology of contemporary society as mesmerizing and fascinating not in itself, but insofar as it offers a representational shorthand for grasping the decentred global network of power and control of the third stage of capital, the world system of multinational capitalism (37-38). The world computer network is thus only a surface picture of the substructural world network of global capitalism. Indeed, the “informationality” of the new technology should not lead us to meditate on language (as the post-structuralists do), but instead to invent new ways of dealing with something that is still a quite material phenomenon (386). Once again, Jameson rejects the independence of surface phenomena, in this case technology, from their economic substructures. Jameson sees five themes worth looking at within “postmodern” culture: (1) a new depthlessness in art, (2) a weakening of historicity, (3) a new emotional ground tone of intensities, (4) a whole new technology and economic world system, and (5) a new political mission for art in the new world space of late or multinational capital (6). Within postmodern art, such as Andy Warhol’s silk-screen photo reproductions, there is a certain flatness, disappearance of depth, and superficiality, as art becomes pure commodity (9). Jameson uses Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes as a case in point of the depthlessness of postmodern art, in which we find dead, fetishized objects: commodities. He contrasts this with the Heideggerian depths of Van Gogh’s painting of peasant boots, in which we can read back-breaking toil and agricultural misery (7). So postmodern art does have a

232

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

sort of depth meaning, but a rather empty meaning at that: art as pure commodity. With the collapse of high modernist style, the producers of culture turn to the past. Dead cultural motifs are parodied in a random cannibalization of all styles, the consumer’s appetite for a world transformed into sheer images or simulacra (17-18). At least in the eighties, nostalgia films like Body Heat dominated the cinema, desperately attempting to appropriate a missing past by turning it into pastiche, Jameson’s term for a blank and affectless form of parody (19). Whether or not this is still true, Jameson’s point is simple enough: film appropriates the past on the level of nostalgia, as a series of pseudo-historical images whose purpose is to entertain while ignoring any real attempt to understand the past. In other words, Hollywood uses the past as a commodity to be replayed in a simulacral form to the present.2 Jameson sees postmodernism as backward-looking and nostalgic. Its architecture is a “complacent eclecticism” that salvages what it can from the past (18-19). Yet postmodern buildings are also part the new economic order: they therefore try to shut out nature, creating hyperspaces full of offices, shops, and meeting places, with hypercrowds gathering within these spaces, reflecting away the urban decay with glass skins of silver and gold (40-42). The new economic order affects all aspects of culture. Admittedly, this is a rather odd definition of postmodern architecture, which, to be fair, is usually characterized by a return to such past motifs as colour, external ornamentation, statuary, and the column, even if it consumes these motifs parodically. A true case of postmodern architecture is Portland’s Public Services Building, designed by Michael Graves in the early eighties, with its art deco facade and simulated brown columns emerging from ochre walls, and more significantly with the baroque playfulness of the magnificent thirty-six-foot copper statue of Portlandia, a neo-classical goddess brandishing a trident, that stands atop the entrance. Yet perhaps what Jameson is thinking of here is not so much postmodernism as a distinct architectural style, but of buildings like the L.A. Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Toronto’s Eaton Centre, both built in the postmodern period, regardless of whether they evidence the distinctively postmodern elements I’ve just mentioned. The hypercrowds certainly gather in these buildings, even without such nostalgic architectural elements as faux columns or neo-classical statuary.

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

233

When we look at the political status of culture within Jameson’s cultural theory, we find him, in his preface to the English translation of Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, saying that for those committed to radical social change, we still need the category of the “mode of production” as fundamental, but that no good model of a given mode of production can exist “without a theory of the historically and dialectically specific and unique role of ‘culture’ within it” (1984: xv). Thus we need a theory that explains how economic substructures influence cultural superstructures. According to Jameson’s Marxism, one can believe that before the late twentieth century, the cultural sphere may have enjoyed some degree of independence from economic determination. Culture in the heyday of Matthew Arnold or T. S. Eliot may have existed outside the realm of pure exchange value. Their cultures were not solely collections of commodities. However, Jameson believes that this “semi-autonomy” of the cultural sphere may have been destroyed by late capitalism, just as the prodigious expansion of this capitalism has penetrated into the pre-capitalist enclaves of nature and the unconscious, which formerly “offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity” (1991: 48-49). Now all that is cultural has melted into the solid: the arts, intellectual life, and pop culture all drip with materiality, are all imbued with the central cultural logic of late capitalism, namely, commodification. Postmodern aesthetic production has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods…now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation…[the main point is] that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror. (4-5) Just as postmodern culture is the expression of the commodification of a formerly independent sphere, its social meaning is the expression of the world domination of the American economic and political empire, which, like all empires, is grounded in the possession and

234

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

occasional use of military power. For Jameson, decadence within this culture, in the form of weird sects, futuristic films about technological breakdown (e.g., Blade Runner), and bizarre fashion styles, is just the ghost of the superstructure, of cultural autonomy, haunting the omnipotence of the base (382). Culture hangs on as a superstructural spirit, a poltergeist reminding American society from time to time of its former independence with strange noises in the dead of night. The difference between seeing postmodernism as one style among many, and seeing it as the cultural dominant of late capitalism, is the difference between a moral judgment of the phenomenon and a “genuinely dialectical attempt” to understand history in the present tense (45-46). Not surprisingly, Jameson explicitly rejects Lasch’s psychologizing and moralizing on culture, feeling that there are far more damaging things to be said about our culture than those emanating from a psychological understanding of it (26). This is questionable: Lasch’s condemnation of American society as narcissistic to the core is quite damaging, just as diagnosing an individual as pathologically self-loving is a rather deep indictment of their personality. Yet Jameson obviously prefers a cultural critique grounded in political economy. He suggests that the political form of a critical postmodernism, if it ever comes into being, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of “a global cognitive mapping” that is both social and spatial, one that maps the global nature of multinational capitalism (54). What this global mapping would concretely involve is left fairly vague. But Jameson’s last word can be found in his preface to Lyotard, where he reiterates that Marxism remains (perhaps without its call to revolution) the privileged mode of analysis for capitalist society. Further, we cannot expect that any private monopoly of information (i.e., Lyotard’s postmodern managers of knowledge), like the rest of the private-property system, will be reformed by a supposedly benign technocratic elite: it can be challenged only by genuinely political action (1984: xx). A post-industrial capitalism is still capitalism. The exploitative relations between capital and labour today are similar to those found in earlier stages of this economic system. In other words, for Jameson the essence of capitalism hasn’t changed, although its scope has considerably widened. If anything, capitalism has become more powerful, colonizing third-world societies, nature, and high culture with its market mechanisms and with the process of commodification.

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

235

Jameson’s critique of postmodern culture is squarely within the tradition of twentieth-century Marxist “revisionism” (from Lenin to Lukacs to Gramsci). He includes culture as a semi-autonomous set of practices, but proceeds to deconstruct it as a separate category by linking it to the omnipotence of its economic base: late or consumer capitalism. Postmodernism is the cultural logic of an economic system. His cultural theory shows us a strength that Lasch’s lacks, but it also illustrates a weakness that Lasch does not share. His strength lies in his refusal to accept that culture can be understood in any terms other than as a projection of the commodified Weltanschauung of late capitalism onto all aspects of the social (Lasch waffles on this issue). But his weakness comes in his rejection of a moral element from cultural critique, his refusal to tell us why we should bother resisting this capitalist commodification of culture. As Habermas once asked of Foucault, why fight?3 ALBERT BORGMANN AND CROSSING THE POSTMODERN DIVIDE

Albert Borgmann’s Crossing the Postmodern Divide reveals its basic premise not so much in its title, as did Lasch and Jameson, but in the cover painting on the paperback edition: we see the back of a huddled, naked young man on top of a mountain enshrouded in darkness looking out over bleak hills into a distant hazy bright horizon. Borgmann’s book deals with the cultural landscapes of a dark and decaying modernism, a living but troubled hypermodernism, and a nascent but still distant postmodernism. Borgmann, like the youth on the cover, is troubled by the current state of our culture, yet also gazes longingly at the bright promise that postmodern culture holds out, especially its promise to revive communal celebrations of urban social life. As mentioned in chapter 5, Borgmann argues that the holy trinity of founders of the modern are Columbus, Copernicus, and Luther. Columbus’s discovery of America shattered the “locally bounded, cosmically centered and divinely constituted medieval world”; Copernicus’s revised solar system “decentered the earth from its privileged position in the universe”; while the Reformation that Luther helped inaugurate, with its focus on the Bible, “fatally weakened the communal power of divinity” (1992: 22). The result was also a trinity of broadly based social ideals. Through technology and the economy the “modern project was worked into a social order

236

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

characterized by aggressive realism, methodological universalism, and ambiguous individualism” (5).4 Here Borgmann is transforming the landscape of modernity sketched by Jameson, with its economic foundation, into one that mixes economic, religious, scientific, and philosophical categories. His analysis of culture tries to combine an eclectic spirituality with a clear understanding of the economic and technological underpinnings of postmodernity. Describing a social landscape, says Borgmann, is like drawing a picture in which no one social vista by itself is significant, but the general configuration might be. One such vista of America today is a national mood of sullenness (6). This is connected to the generally private nature of the American economy, whose disavowal of public responsibilities involves the toleration of widespread poverty, damage to the environment, and the trivialization of culture as its depressing concomitants (47). Like Lasch, Borgmann is not afraid to moralize the economic and technological realms. He says that under modern industrialism, ethics cannot keep pace with technology, making us forget that the adoption of a technological device always and already involves a moral decision (110).5 There is a notable sense of the duality of human action in Borgmann, one that is caught between individual intentions and social results. This all takes place within the realm of the moral, even if the social results of economic and technological change often disguise themselves as inevitable. Indeed, he sees “individuals’ fundamental material decisions as embedded in collective fundamental decisions that pattern the tangible social setting,” suggesting Giddens’s duality of structure and my own structural ideals (113). Borgmann’s sense of the duality of human action moves us closer to a unified theory of cultural critique. For Borgmann, there are two ways we can go at present. One path is to extend modern technology. This path he calls “hypermodernism,” which is devoted to the “design of a technologically sophisticated and glamorously unreal universe, distinguished by its hyperreality, hyperactivity, and hyperintelligence.” The other path involves the “recovery of the world of eloquent things,” a path that accepts the postmodern critique and tries to realize postmodern aspirations: he calls this “postmodern realism,” with its emerging characteristics of focal realism, patient vigour, and communal celebration (5-6). Under hypermodernism, life begins to separate itself from the real. Thanks to television, computers, and other technolo-

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

237

gies, we lose touch with ourselves, others, and nature. Thus one of the dangers of the hypermodern condition is losing our sense of reality (12).6 This critique is a more moderate version of Baudrillard’s heralding of the Third Order of the Simulacra, his “desert of the real.” Bormgann outlines a number of ways in which our sense of reality is lost in the hypermodern condition. One way in which this can happen is through the simulation of the real in hyperreality, for example, a computer simulation of a mountain trail in a suburban gym replacing the real experience of a mountain jog, an experience with which Borgmann seems quite familiar, Montana being his home. Hyperreality is like “a thickening network that overlies and obscures the underlying natural and traditional reality,” choking off the underlying reality and reducing it “to a mechanical and marginal condition” (119). Borgmann’s hunger for ontological hardness is quite evident in a number of places in Crossing the Postmodern Divide: he will have none of Baudrillard’s mordant celebration of the desert of the real. He wants his nostrils filled with real mountain air, real dirt under his feet, real breezes wafting by his body. In short, reality involves a deeper sensation for Borgmann, however much hyperreal simulations might appeal to our eyes and ears. In the workplace the fleeing of reality is fought by hyperactivity, which mobilizes people into long work hours aimed at success. In general, hyperactivity has its own trinity of features: the suspension of civility, the rule of the vanguard, and the subordination of civilians (14). The suspension of humanitarian and cultural programs, along with a ruthless international competition, are at the core of Borgmann’s hypermodern capitalism. This despite the fact that at the end of the modernist era, the advanced industrial countries are awash with consumer goods, which threaten to exhaust not only our physical capacities to produce and consume, but also the “emotional hunger that fuelled the immense productive efforts of the modern period” (63). Yet the commodious individual is still seduced by the glamour of disposable commodities: Lasch’s propaganda of commodities still has a lot of rhetorical steam left in it. Hypermodern consumers are in a morally weak position, for their daily decisions are already preformed by fundamental social decisions, which themselves have been shaped by the nature of our technological society. Thus consumers are deeply implicated in hyperreality, hyperactivity, and hyperintelligence, being allured by the glamour, fever, and ethereal charm of the hypermodern condition

238

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

(114). They unthinkingly accept these as the social reality of the current age. Last but not least, Borgmann sees the late-modern public realm as massive in its physical presence but devoid of intrinsic or final dignity, bereft of celebration and festivity (42). He hints at an alternative structuring ideal for everyday life: that of spiritual and communal celebrations taking place locally, in real physical spaces. Borgmann, showing his idealist credentials,7 notes that an epoch ends when its fundamental convictions begin to weaken and no longer inspire enthusiasm among its advocates (48). In our case, we are living through the decline and fall of modernism’s holy trinity of realism, universalism, and individualism. He sees the developments of the past generation as having led us beyond the broad and once fertile plains of modernism to a point where, looking back, we can see that we have risen irreversibly above the unworried aggressiveness, boundlessness, and unencumberedness of modernism. Modernism now seems brash and heedless, if not arrogant and oppressive (78). But, to continue with his geographical metaphor, Borgmann sees hope at the fringes of this landscape. “Communities of memory and practices of commitment still have animating power at the margins of society. These we must learn to recover and to respect” (57). He echoes Lasch’s communities of competence with his own communities of memory, though these would seem to mutually implicate each other. Yet these communities of memory are not the only source of hope, for he sees a concrete postmodern paradigm developing within our economies, one characterized by information processing, flexible specialization, and informed co-operation (5). These together hold out the promise of at least an attenuation of hypermodernism.8 He suggests that we have to challenge the commodious individualism that is so much a part of our present condition, to decommodify our sense of ourselves. But he remains uncertain whether or not postmodernism will be just technology by other means (80). Maybe more than merely economic solutions are needed. The problem perhaps lies in the very nature of hypermodern labour: Since mindless work is uniquely exhausting and debilitating, its subjects are uniquely susceptible to disburdening and diverting hyperrealities. The latter in turn, alien-

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

239

ating us most powerfully from the real world, make reentry into reality especially harsh and leave us sad and sullen. Becoming insensible to the radiance of reality, we become confined, as Dante has it, to an infernal and inarticulate condition. (101) So, in addition to tinkering with postmodern economic changes, spiritual and political solutions may be called for. Part of this is the need for a “real conversation,” to talk in a public forum about things that really matter and about common measures that give these things a secure and prominent place in our midst (116). In addition to some form of dialogical communitarianism (to which both Taylor and Saul will be sympathetic, as we shall soon see), Borgmann wants to put forward a broader program of public spirituality, a program that he christens “postmodern realism” (an odd coinage, but in keeping with his claim that hypermodernism erodes our sense of reality). This would resolve the ambiguities of the postmodern condition with an attitude of “patient vigour for a common order centered on communal celebrations,” celebrating reality by allowing things to “speak in their own right” (116-17). Other than a vague evocation of communalism, Borgmann’s social solutions to the hypermodern dilemma seem diffuse. Yet in keeping with his geographical metaphor for the continental divide between modernity and postmodernity, his best case for his postmodern realism (at least in the North American context) is his evocation of the power of wilderness, for it has the clearest voice among “eloquent things.” This voice “has a powerfully commanding resonance” because it “shows no traces of human intonation. It speaks to us naturally” (120).9 So in the end Borgmann evokes something of the visionary gleam of Romanticism, following Wordsworth’s suggestion to close up the barren leaves of modern culture and let nature be his teacher. The machinery of hypermodernism mechanizes and commodifies celebration itself, weakening and expelling its genuine elements: reality, community, and divinity (134). Communal celebrations such as national holidays, insofar as they are celebrated by corporate bodies public or private, too often turn into well-orchestrated media pseudo-events. What we need is a vigorous shift away from this machinery, towards the support of places where the above three elements are “joined in celebration” (139). Part of the problem here lies in the utilitarian grid, technological con-

240

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

cealment, and superficial display of commodities in the hypermodern city (131-33). To erode these and to make the above shift, Borgmann suggests a transformation of daily urban life that links it to the natural, raises it to the festal, and extends its enjoyment to the poor (133). The result would be an evolution of a festive city from its present more humdrum counterpart. In his end-game Borgmann pulls out a deus ex machina, calling for a heavenly city on earth that celebrates communally through religion (in his case, preferring the Catholic version of the deity) (144-45). But thankfully, before we unbelievers become too nervous, he allows his god to retreat into the clouds, noting that the universal principle of postmodern political discourse is to let everyone speak in the first person, whether this is singular or plural (144). The basic methodology of Borgmann’s cultural theory might be described as “onto-geographical,” with its mix of ontological, spiritual, moral, and geographical categories (the latter being meant primarily although not entirely as metaphors). Economics and technology seem at some times to function as active forces shaping our culture’s destiny, at other times as pools of in-itself being that revolutions of the spirit must overcome. Yet Borgmann’s primary strength as a cultural theorist lies in his identification and understanding of broad historical forces such as modernism, hypermodernism, and postmodernism, each with its own set of ruling ideals, and his connection of these to substructural changes in the economy and in technology. It may well be that he has bitten off more than he can chew with his evocation of broad trinities of ideals for each historical period, and with his somewhat utopian hopes for postmodernism’s capacity to revive reality, community, and divinity through a return to nature and a spiritualized politics. But all the same, he paints an intriguing picture of the landscapes of the modern and the postmodern, one that is gentler and more textured than Lasch’s and Jameson’s. I now turn to another view of the contemporary culture of authenticity. CHARLES TAYLOR AND THE MALAISE OF MODERNITY

Charles Taylor’s The Malaise of Modernity (the 1991 Massey lectures, broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and later published in book form) presents in a pithy format an outline of his broader social and cultural theory. Like Borgmann, Taylor uses a trinitarian logic to identify the malaises within modernity,

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

241

suggesting that they are (1) individualism, with its associated narcissism and disenchantment of the world; (2) the primacy of instrumental reason, with its use of economic efficiency to determine both the best means and the best ends; and (3) the restriction of political choice in technological-industrial societies (1991: 2-8). Mapping onto these fears are a loss of existential meaning and a fading of moral horizons, an eclipse of ends before the dominance of instrumental reason, and a general loss of freedom (10). Taylor argues that if we go back to the cult of sensibility and the beginnings of the Romantic movement in the second half of the eighteenth century, we find the start of the massive subjective turn in modern culture, to a sense of ourselves as beings with inner depths (26). This turn led to the formulation of the ideal of self-fulfillment or authenticity. The question of the status of the ideal of authenticity is central to Taylor’s book. He suggests that despite the bitter invective of Alan Bloom, Daniel Bell, and Lasch himself, there is a powerful moral ideal lurking behind the narcissistic facade of the urge to self-fulfillment, that of being true to oneself in the specifically modern sense of the term (13-14). Sadly, the cult of authenticity’s default solution to the question of authenticity, and the bane of our culture, is the idea of self-determining freedom. “This sets up a vicious circle that heads us towards a point where our major remaining value is choice itself” (69).10 Liberalism, in its laissezfaire, individualistic sense, has co-opted the ideal of authenticity and transformed it into a narrow sense of self-worship. Taylor suggests that to deal critically with modern culture, we should instead believe three things: (1) that authenticity is a valid ideal; (2) that you can argue rationally about ideals and whether practices conform to them; and (3) that these arguments can make a difference (1992: 23). In other words, the structural ideal of authenticity is valid, though warped by a narrow laissez-faire reading of it. As part of this work of retrieval, we have to reject narcissistic modes of culture, realizing that self-understanding involves the acceptance of horizons of significance that exist independent of our will (such as nobility and courage) (1991: 34, 39). Taylor isn’t especially arguing for any sort of moral objectivism here; just that our social ideals are defined communally, in a process of dialogical interactions that transcends the acts of a single individual or small group of individuals. Also, due to a purely personal understanding of self-fulfillment, too often political citizenship is marginalized,

242

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

and personal relationships are seen as secondary to the self-realization of each partner (which naturally tends to undermine the durability of these relationships). To cure this ill, we have to universally accept difference on the public level, and engage in committed, identity-forming love relationships in the private sphere of our lives (43, 50). In short, we need more meaningful dialogue. Taylor summarizes his view of authenticity as follows: Authenticity (A) involves (i) creating and construction as well as discovery, (ii) originality, and (iii) frequently, opposition to society’s rules and what we see as morality. But is also (B) requires (i) openness to horizons of significance, and (ii) self-definition in dialogue. (66) In several places in The Malaise of Modernity, Taylor hints at the notion of the duality of structure, the notion that structures both shape and are shaped by actions and ideals. He rejects the idea that modern technological society is an iron cage: the connection between norms and the civilization supporting them is not unidirectional. Instead, just as institutions breed the philosophies of atomism and instrumental reason, these philosophies were abroad in Western lands before the development of capitalism, and acted as an ideological preparation for it (98). Also, political fragmentation is caused in part by the vicious circle linking failing social sympathies and the “lack of the experience of common action” (113). Our sympathy with the public realm promotes our working together in its interests, while doing the latter helps to reinforce the former. Lastly, Taylor makes the opposite point, saying that in such a fragmented society people find it harder and harder to identify with any sense of community, which results in an absence of effective common action, which further helps to entrench the “initial” atomism (117).11 So the economic, social, and political structures that support the ideal of authenticity are seen by Taylor as working in an equilibrial relationship with the moral content of this ideal. Taylor is no backward-looking mystic or Luddite when it comes to dealing with modernity’s malaises. He concedes that we have to work within the demands of modern rationality to some degree if we are to avoid inner exile or marginalization (97). But we do have to change the way that we approach technology. We have to see it not only as a way of dominating nature, but also within an ethic of practical benevolence (106). His more general cure for these malaises is

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

243

to retrieve the higher ideal behind the debased practices of modernity by entering sympathetically into the animating ideal of authenticity behind them (72, 79). He thus aims at the revival of a more “authentic” version of authenticity, one unencumbered by the commodious individualism of Borgmann’s hypermodern condition. Instrumental reason and the notion of the disengaged human subject (atomism) separate human thinking from its messy embedding in our bodily constitutions, our dialogical situations, our emotions, and in traditional forms of life: to re-engage our selves, we have to respect the embodied, dialogical, and temporal nature of human beings (101, 106). This re-engagement would help us retrieve the ideal of authenticity. To fight political fragmentation, we have to engage in the politics of “democratic will-formation,” to prevent people’s corporate identities from being transferred away from their political communities (118). Only by retrieving the ideal of authenticity and a sense of political community will the promise of modern culture be fulfilled. The dominant metaphor in Taylor’s book is a political-medical one, a diagnosis of a culture that is sick but curable, if we administer the proper philosophical potions. His book examines the problems with our current culture from the point of view of a debased and degraded ideal, that of authenticity, and the illegitimate offspring of this debasement, atomism and instrumental reason; he tries to show how through sound thinking and political action we can overcome our cultural malaise. Perhaps it would be unfair to chastise Taylor for oversimplifying the problems of modern culture, given the brevity of this book. But like Lasch, Taylor distills the rich variety of problems within modern culture into one central philosophical issue. His critique succeeds or fails based on the degree to which the reader can be convinced that this struggle with the ideal of authenticity is indeed the key issue in our culture. JOHN RALSTON SAUL AND THE UNCONSCIOUS CIVILIZATION

John Ralston Saul’s The Unconscious Civilization, the Massey lectures for 1995, posits the existence of a structural villain in modern culture: corporatism. This, simply defined, is the sense that modern individuals see themselves first and foremost as members of a corporate group (whether public or private), and not as citizens of a democratic society. This sense of corporate membership is exacerbated by the ideology of corporatism, which seeks to organize soci-

244

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

ety under the control of interlocking sets of these corporations. Saul sees our civilization as locked in the grip of this corporatism, [a]n ideology that undermines the legitimacy of the individual as a citizen in a democracy. The particular imbalance of this ideology leads to a worship of self-interest and a denial of the public good. The quality that corporatism claims as its own is rationality. The practical effects on the individual are passivity and conformism in areas that matter and non-conformism in the areas that don’t. (1995: 187) One of the principal results of this ideology is that members of the educated, specialized, and technocratic elites find themselves caught in structures that require courtier-like behaviour of them (26).12 They are obliged in a large degree to submerge their identities as citizens of a democratic polity into a loyalty to the organization they work for, to be lickspittles to their corporate masters (or else risk losing their jobs). This breeds cynicism and detachment from public life, or a servile docility to the interests of the corporate body one is a member of. In a corporate society, not surprisingly, debates on public policy take place almost entirely between the representatives of interest groups, the representatives of this or that organization (61).13 Underlying this political modus operandi is the ideology of the market, which preaches the gospel of the invisible hand as the sole effective mechanism for the production of social well-being. This ideology makes it difficult to see government as the justifiable force of the citizen, denying the existence of an “actively organized pool of disinterest called the public good” (84). Saul draws on Enlightenment figures such as David Hume and Adam Smith to flesh out this idea of the public good, an idea that he sees as political and philosophical, as free from economic or technological determinism. Sadly, he sees our corporate civilization as unconscious of this public good. Most people within it are limited to a narrow area of knowledge and practice, showing the naïveté of a child outside of their specializations (15). Specialists leave the good of the whole to other specialists, to bureaucrats and professional politicians, pretending that their expertise will be able to engineer this public good, just as electrical engineers can wire a building, or computer engineers can design a computer system. As the servants of self-interested corporate fragments of civil society, we have agreed

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

245

to deny reality. The result is an addictive weakness for large illusions, a weakness for ideology (18). An ideology for Saul is any largescale simplification or distortion of the truth in the service of promoting simple (sometimes violent) solutions to complex problems. He groups fascism, communism, neo-conservatism, and corporatism under the banner of ideology. Our trust in ideologies to solve our problems is part of a civilization-wide great leap backwards, away from democratic doubt, towards the comfort of utopian illusion. Saul agrees with Lyotard that within contemporary culture knowledge is bought and sold like a commodity. The ownership of this knowledge is power (42). Like many postmodern thinkers, Saul focuses on language as the key element in culture. But unlike them, he is not interested in deconstructing it, but in reconstructing language with its former clarity and vigour (as found, for example, in the Athens of Socrates, or in the European mini-renaissance of the twelfth century, or in the Enlightenment). Saul is no postmodernist; in fact, he is hostile to the negative effect that the poststructuralist distortion of the clarity of language, with its creation of an arcane dialect accessible only to insiders, has had on modern academic life. There are two types of language in our civilization: the public, which is enormous, rich, varied, but mostly powerless, and the corporatist, the sort of language that is attached to power and action, consisting of rhetoric, propaganda, and dialect (46). Saul sees rhetoric as describing the public face of ideology, while propaganda is used to sell this face. They are both aimed “at the normalization of the untrue” (60). In other words, they lie. The selling technique of commercial advertising is essentially the same as that of propaganda: images and music replace words. These techniques were pioneered in the Germany and Italy of the thirties, reaching their early pinnacle in Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film The Triumph of the Will. He sees the use of advertising to sell Coke or Calvin Klein jeans as drawing directly on the methods of fascist propaganda, thus echoing Lasch’s notion of the propaganda of commodities (6062). When we see pretty young models parading Gap clothes to the beat of some revived pop tune, there is no argument, no attempt to use words to convince us that Gap clothes are well made or stylish: only the image of happy, hip kids, the sounds of that bouncy song, and that sense that something will be missing in our lives if we don’t go to the mall and consume.

246

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

For Saul the sign of a healthy civilization is the existence of a relatively clear language in which everyone can participate. The sign of a sick one is the growth of an obscure, closed language that seeks to prevent communication (54). Corporatism promotes the creation of dialects that obscure the very knowledge that their users generate and promote. In this sense, corporatism is positively medieval, despite the myth of open dialogue found in the propaganda surrounding modern means of communication. In these lectures Saul engages in a running battle with the modern university, given that the university is both the centre of higher education and the only public institution that is in theory free to criticize the propaganda of corporate society and to thereby promote clear language and thought. Needless to say, he accuses it of failing to do so. Our universities have become the handmaidens of corporatism, due to both their impenetrable academic dialects and their betrayal of higher education’s wider mission, the humanist tradition (67). They feed into the conformity of corporate society when they should be fighting against it: While the universities ought to be centres of active independent public criticism, they tend instead to sit prudently under the protective veils of their own corporations.…The universities, which ought to embody humanism, are instead obsessed by aligning themselves with market forces and continuing their pursuit of specialist definitions, which are apparently their protection against superstition and prejudice. (70) Part of the problem is the growth and power of such job-training factions within the university as administration, computer science, engineering, and accounting departments. Saul argues interestingly that this promotion of university education as a direct conduit to the managerial economy does not help students all that much in the workplace, especially in high-tech fields: the computer technology and languages learned now will be obsolete in five years. Yet this sort of education does serve one “positive” purpose: it prepares the young to accept the structures of corporatism (163). In the end, universities are centres of linguistic obfuscation through their promotion of arcane dialects and the propaganda of corporatism. They cannot help to wake up the unconscious civilization, but only administer placebos that will ease its slumbers. For Saul, the best

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

247

hopes for the regeneration of language can be found not in academe, but in increased citizen participation (173). Saul is adamant on the power of moral ideals to change reality, rejecting all forms of economic determinism. The basic choices in human relationships never change: they can be affected by material conditions, but they are neither created nor destroyed by them (55). He further rejects the neo-liberal idea that the Industrial Revolution and capitalism made individualism and democracy possible. Quite the opposite: every important characteristic of both individualism and democracy has preceded the key economic events of our millennium. It was these, in fact, that made most of the economic events possible, not vice versa (3). Democracy and individualism have often advanced in spite of or against economic interests; they have often required financial sacrifice (83). Saul argues quite convincingly that in its early stages, the Industrial Revolution produced more hardship and poverty than wealth for the masses. It was only the actions of the democratic citizenry that forced the economic mechanism to behave morally, i.e., to improve working conditions, to spread out the wealth among the workers, and in general to assume the shape of our modern civilization (116-17). The great democratic movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Chartists in Britain, the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, the suffragettes and other workers for women’s rights in Britain and America, and the labour movement throughout the Western world, created modern liberaldemocratic societies, not capitalists seeking profits or the marketplace acting according to mysterious benevolent mechanisms. Saul thus claims that it was the disinterested actions of the masses, working for the public good, that made modern industrial democracies a going concern. More sweepingly, he suggests that there is an ethical, humanist, and democratic line of thought/action stretching back twenty-five-hundred years to Socrates, “free and independent of the evolving specifics of economics, technology, intellectual elitism and military force, among other periodic expressions of the Western experience” (58). There is thus a “great tradition” for Saul, one that we as a culture have lost consciousness of. To help us recover this lost tradition, he critiques the four pillars of contemporary economic determinism: the ideology of the market, the rule of technology, the inevitability of a globalized economy, and the money markets as the leading edge of capitalism (132-50). All four are illusions promoted by corporate groups that stand to benefit by them,

248

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

e.g., the rule of technology by technocrats who are already deeply implicated in its use, or globalization by business representatives seeking to evade national corporate taxes. Our economic elites have no desire to effect change; only “a persistent public commitment by the citizenry can bring that about” (153). Capital operates according to its own inner, less than benign logic; it can promote only private greed, not the public good. It must be compelled to think of the latter by citizens who champion it as an ideal, and who are willing to act politically to ensure that this greed is restrained by sound laws and institutions. Saul’s philosophical hero is ancient Athens’s gadfly, Socrates, whose annoying habit of examining himself and others in the agora promoted doubt and therefore the democratic spirit (40-41). We must actively question the dominant ideological definitions of economic and political terms such as growth, wealth, justice, and government. Our society must use “consciousness” to promote action, rejecting economic and technological determinism (112). Part of this action involves an active questioning of the wisdom of elites. Indeed, Saul sees as the “very essence” of individualism the refusal to mind one’s own business, the need to go about the modern marketplace questioning members of these elites. This is not a particularly pleasant or easy style of life, often consisting of being annoying to others, stubborn, and repetitive. Yet, criticism is perhaps the citizen’s primary weapon in the exercise of her legitimacy. That is why, in this corporatist society, conformism, loyalty and silence are so admired and rewarded; why criticism is so punished and marginalized. Who has not experienced this conflict? (165) This is so obviously true that it risks becoming a truism (although one could question whether corporatist society is significantly different in this respect from previous ones). Real expressions of individualism are not only discouraged but punished in our society: active, outspoken citizens are unlikely to prosper in their professional careers (31-32).14 Saul calls instead for “equilibrium,” for a society that allows for non-conformism in the public place, that celebrates uncertainty, doubt, and participation. Corporatism depends on the citizen’s desire for inner comfort. Instead, we need a society that, in recognizing reality, recognizes the need for permanent social discomfort, for consciousness (190).

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

249

Saul’s deceptively simple language disguises a rich and forceful picture of contemporary culture. He works in the moral-political realm like Taylor, but speaks in a broader dialectic, of democracy vs. corporatism, consciousness vs. unconsciousness, the humanist tradition vs. the specialized, managerial approach to knowledge. His praise of doubt, his understanding of history, his critical examination of language, and his distrust of ideological thinking (especially the ruling economic ideologies of the market and globalization) are usefully tied to a view of civilization as an organization of political, moral, and economic forces. He may indeed go overboard in rejecting economics and technology as causal forces, but only to foreground the need for the democratic control of a culture/civilization by its citizens as the central issue facing us today. Saul most clearly lays out what I take to be a central facet of a structural idealist cultural theory: that the physical resources of our society are defined and controlled by structural ideals such as private property, the market, efficiency, and fair distribution, and not by the gods, Fate, or economic Destiny. He, more than the other theorists I’ve just discussed here, loosens the iron grip of economic determinism on culture.

Explorations in Contemporary Cultural Criticism I now turn to two schools of thought within contemporary cultural criticism to further enrich the mixture from which I will synthesize my own conclusions on the subject. I turn first to a very brief sketch of critical discourse analysis. CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Born of a marriage of neo-Marxism, literary criticism, and the poststructuralist concern with the text and language, critical discourse analysis sees power relations not as natural or objective, but as artificially created, socially constructed intersubjective realities. Language is seen as the major mechanism of this social construction, a practice that manipulates and consolidates concepts to help ensure the rule of one group or class over another (Fowler 1985: 61). Social discourse produces and reproduces social inequality, especially if the power elites control the media. They have special access to public discourse. Since modern power is mostly cognitive, this control of public discourse leads to political hegemony (van Dijk

250

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

1993: 249, 254). This social construction of institutions, roles, and statuses preserves the hierarchic nature of society, aiding the ruling classes in exploiting the weaker ones, and keeping the lower classes subservient by articulating systems of belief that legitimate the institutions of power (Fowler 1985: 64). The goal of critical discourse analysts is to criticize bits of discourse such as newspaper articles, parliamentary speeches, and television reports to prevent the social inequalities they promote (often in disguised form) from becoming normalized. As noble as this goal may be, critical discourse analysis suffers from the same weakness as post-structural philosophy: it takes everything as a text, and assumes that by criticizing texts we can change the world. But if, as Marx himself said, the point is not to talk about the world, but to change it, this cannot be done in polite forums where academics debate over the social meaning of this or that bit of public discourse. It is not texts that have to be engaged, but the moral ideals that underlie the ideology and rhetoric in those texts. Discourse analysts may indeed effectively deconstruct the ideological presuppositions of a text, but without constructing their own alternative ideals they fail as cultural critics. So, although interesting, discourse analysis falters insofar as it does not take seriously the reality of the moral ideals expressed in the discourse of our culture, reducing them to epiphenomenal steam emanating from the smokestacks of our socioeconomic structures. THE CANADIAN SCHOOL OF CULTURAL CRITIQUE

More fruitful than critical discourse analysis is what I shall term the “Canadian school” of cultural critique, one that had its dim origins in the 1950s in the work of Harold Adams Innis, gathering speed in the 1960s, and remaining a strong (if somewhat amorphous) philosophical force within this country to this day. In Arthur Kroker’s words, “Canada’s principal contribution to North American thought consists of a highly original, comprehensive, and eloquent discourse on technology” that stands midway between the technological imperative of American culture and the historical orientation of European thought (1984: 7). Taking Kroker’s “Canadian discourse” more broadly, we can posit a loose family resemblance between the ideas of Canadian writers and thinkers such as Northrop Frye, George Grant, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Margaret Atwood, Gaile McGregor, Arthur

251

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

Kroker, Mark Kingwell, and William Gibson, along with film director David Cronenberg, that sheds light on contemporary culture.15 This family resemblance is based on our ability to situate them in a continuum of interests that they all share: the interaction of nature, culture, and technology, specifically, how these are related in the Canada of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Each of these theorists enters the triad nature/culture/technology at different points of insertion—indeed, I would argue that George Grant and David Cronenberg enter the triad at two distinct points. This set of interests and their individual places within it is diagrammed in chart 5. Chart 5. The Canadian School of Cultural Critique: Points of Entry into the Nature/Culture/Technology Triad Frye, Grant, Atwood, McGregor, Cronenberg


Nature---------------------------------Culture--------------------------------Technology

 Innis, McLuhan, Kroker, Kingwell, Grant, Gibson, Cronenberg

Each theorist encounters this triad of concerns in a different way. McLuhan was famously interested in how technology affects the shape and pace of human culture, an interest he inherited from Harold Innis, and which is continued by Arthur Kroker and Mark Kingwell amongst active theorists. William Gibson and David Cronenberg have explored how modern technology has affected the human body and its place in our culture, Gibson exploring how our entry into cyberspace has attenuated our sense of corporeality, Cronenberg exploring how weird medicine and biological research can have unhappy consequences. Cronenberg also explores how our relationship with nature is altered by modern science and technology, so he seems to fit in the nature/culture part of the triad too. Lastly, Northrop Frye, George Grant, Margaret Atwood, and Gaile McGregor have all looked at how the background of wilderness and our harsh northern climate have helped to shape the Canadian character and Canadian culture, thus showing how nature and culture interface with each other. I believe that this tripartite continuum of interest echoes on the level of material and formal culture my own tripartite analytic schema of the social act, as laid out in chapter 2. See Chart 6 for how the

252

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

nature/culture/technology triad of the Canadian school can be mapped onto my triad of social explanation, structure/meaning/intention: Chart 6. Mapping the Canadian School Triad onto My Triad of Social Explanation Nature---------------------------------Culture--------------------------------Technology







Structure-----------------------------Meaning--------------------------------Intention

We can see our economic and cultural starting point as what Sartre would call “in-itself being,” both nature itself (including the surrounding environment) and our social and economic “nature,” i.e., the structures presently existing in our society. Nature and social structure thus share a common quality: they are both “that which already exists,” the background against which we build our cultures. Frye, Atwood, and McGregor all see the Canadian sensibility as dominated by a dreadful consciousness of a vast, unknowable, threatening nature empty of human life and values (Beard 1994: 123). Frye talked of how the Canadian “garrison mentality” helped shape our attitude towards nature: Canada, in this account, is a series of human garrisons in the primeval lawlessness and moral nihilism of the wilderness. This stands in contrast to the American myth of the frontier, with its implication of a border between nature and culture that is steadily pushed back by heroic human efforts. The settlers with their wagon trains, the cowboys with their lariats, and the cavalry with their Winchester rifles were the shock troops of this heroic effort to move the frontier from a strip of territory along the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean in the nineteenth century, their efforts being celebrated in American popular culture in the twentieth century (notably in John Wayne films). In the American experience, nature was a challenge to be overcome. The Canadian experience instead promoted a garrison mentality, which saw nature as primeval and nihilistic, in Frye’s words a “faceless, mindless unconsciousness, which fosters life without benevolence and destroys it without malice” (Frye 1971: 146). This dialectical opposition of a terrible nature and a fragile and vulnerable human life was paralleled by an internal opposition between our bodily natures and culture or mind: “Whatever sinister lurks in nature lurks also in us…the unconscious horror of nature and the subconscious horror of the mind thus coincide” (Frye 1971: 141). Although Frye’s

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

253

rhetoric is perhaps less true than it once was, he nevertheless presents clearly the general position of these theorists that the presence of a nihilistic wilderness without and within us made order, restraint, and self-control natural to English-Canadian culture in the twentieth century. This plays into the contrast between Canadian and American political ideals: peace, order, and good government on the one hand; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on the other. Peace and order resonate more deeply in a culture faced with an unconquerable and chilly wilderness than do liberty and self-fulfillment, although one could argue that global warming allied to a global consumer culture could break down this cultural divide in the near future. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness are characteristic of a culture that sees itself as without limits, without barriers; indeed, in the rhetoric of recent Republican presidents, namely, Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior and junior, unlimited economic growth and international power are seen as key elements in the American ideal.16 Such rhetoric is much rarer in Canadian political discourse. George Grant, in his Technology and Empire and elsewhere, echoes Frye’s opposition of nature and culture in the Canadian sensibility, adding technology to the mix as the primary way in which we conquer our natural Other. The encounter of the early settlers of this country with nature was different from the European experience of the wilderness. “For us the primal was much different. It was the meeting of the alien yet conquerable land with Englishspeaking Protestants” (1969: 19). The very intractability, immensity, and extremes of the new land required that its meeting with the mastering European settlers would be a battle of subjugation. Before that battle, we had no long, pre-industrial history of living with the land. Even our cities are “encampments on the road to economic mastery” (Grant 1969: 17).17 They are military garrisons in a hostile country, not peaceful settlements integrated with the countryside (like the archetypal English country village). These sternly Protestant early settlers sought to tame not only small islands of wilderness in this barren landscape, but also themselves. Their dominations of nature and their bodies ran parallel: What did the body matter; it was an instrument brought into submission so that it could serve this restless righteousness.…When one contemplates the conquest of nature one must remember that that conquest had to include our

254

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

own bodies. Calvinism provided the determined and organised men and women who could rule the mastered world. The punishment they inflicted on non-human nature, they had first inflicted on themselves. (Grant 1969: 23-24) This is why the stern Scots Presbyterians still to this day represent an archetype of the Canadian pioneer, just as in a different way poor Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants seeking prosperity and freedom stand as the archetypes of the nineteenth century wave of immigration to America. Technology allowed the primeval Canadian wilderness to be conquered in bits and pieces, and it later allowed these bits and pieces to be connected together with various means of travel and communication. If there is a great Canadian frontier myth equivalent to the American myth of the pacification of the Great Plains with cavalry troupes and wagon trains full of settlers, it is that of the building of a transcontinental railway connecting eastern Canada to British Columbia in the 1880s. The driving of the last spike into the Canadian Pacific Railway in November 1885 turned Canada from a collection of British colonies into a country (or at least the possibility of a country), the moment immortalized in a photograph every Canadian schoolchild has seen. In the twentieth century, radio and television furthered this effort at nation building, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, right from its birth in 1936, being very aware of its role in this regard. Picking up this theme of the role of technology in the formation of culture, George Grant sees the pure will to technology as more and more the sole animating spirit of the public realm throughout North America. We live in “the most realised technological society which has yet been; one which is, moreover, the chief imperial centre from which technique is spread around the world.” Sadly, our expertise in technique has made us unable to comprehend that technique from beyond its own dynamism (Grant 1969: 40). We have become servants of the very technologies that we created to dominate nature and to unite the scattered settlements that made up our society in its earlier stages. Technology can be seen as the product of a series of intentional reworkings of the materials given the human race by nature and by previous labour. Yet technology often has cultural effects that warp or outstrip its intentional components. This is the other side of the Canadian school, that which focuses on the social meaning of tech-

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

255

nology, especially techniques of communication. Indeed, one can look at Harold Innis, who earned his spurs as an economic historian at the University of Toronto, as the founder of modern communications theory. In such books as Empire and Communications (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951), Innis showed how changes in the dominant medium of communications in a society creates changes in the culture as a whole, most famously in the move from oral to written cultures in ancient times. Marshall McLuhan took the baton of communications theory from Innis’s hand, exploring the cultural effects of the printing press in The Gutenburg Galaxy (1962) and the effects of modern means of communication as a whole in his groundbreaking Understanding Media (1964). In the latter he observed that the revolution in electronic communication has created a Western world imploding in on itself. Just as the mechanical age extended our bodies in space, today, “after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both time and space as far as our planet is concerned” (1964: 19). McLuhan sees new technologies as not only shaping human culture and thought, but also as involving an extension or self-amputation of our very physical bodies by altering the ratio between our sensory organs and changing how they relate to the external world: Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, at it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. (1964: 54, 55-56) These extensions take place mainly by means of communications media—print, film, radio, and television. A medium shapes and controls the scale and nature of human association and action; the real message of a medium is the changes in the pace and pattern that it introduces (1964: 24). McLuhan’s famous mantra the medium is the message is perhaps hyperbolic and not meant literally. Yet his general point should be taken seriously: the surface content of a medium’s message (e.g., a philosophical argument in a book or a news report on television) has fewer long-term consequences for the structure of our

256

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

cognitive powers and for our culture as a whole than the psycho-physiological effects of the widespread use of that medium. McLuhan scorns those who think otherwise, calling our conventional response to changes in media, that it is how they are used that matters the most, the “numb stance of a technological idiot”; the content of a medium “is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind” (1964: 32). For McLuhan, new technologies and media not only alter our bodies and how we sense the world, but also redefine the shape of human culture. The inventor of the cyberpunk genre in science-fiction literature, William Gibson, pictures a near-future in his novels Necromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Virtual Light and elsewhere in which giant techno-corporations control the economy, where cybercowboys psychically “ride” through a super-sophisticated version of the Internet, and where human bodies are subject to infinite reshaping, regendering, and renovation thanks to a marriage of flesh and technology. Gibson’s fiction is in many ways a pop-cultural continuation of Innis’s and McLuhan’s work, as he gives his readers a vivid picture of the corporeal and cultural effects of the computer revolution (extended a few decades into our future). Cyberpunk “is hard science fiction which recognizes the paradigm-shattering role of technology in post-industrial society” (Hollinger 1990: 35). It collapses the “nature” end of the tripartite continuum pictured in Chart 6, opting for a fusion of culture and technology. This collapse is controlled by the information flowing at light speed through cyberspace, a term Gibson coined for the virtual space that links together the world’s computer networks, which one of his characters calls “mankind’s unthinkably complex consensual hallucination” (1986: 40). Gibson and his imitators give us the clearest picture of what a non-catastrophic conquest of nature, including the human body, by machines would look like in a future where the human adventure has been reduced to psychic journeys through simulations of reality. Gibson’s world is one where the human intention to create a complex global computer web to manage communications and information storage and exchange in a globalized capitalist economy has created a strange new cultural landscape, one where our corporeality is attenuated by our capacity to voyage mentally within this web. As with McLuhan’s work on the coming of the television age, description and critique merge in Gibson’s treatment of his fictional cyberpunk cultural space.

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

257

David Cronenberg’s films have been variously classified as science fiction, horror, and dystopian fantasies. He cut his teeth both philosophically and cinematographically in the Toronto of the 1960s, the same Toronto where Frye, Innis, and McLuhan all worked—indeed, his films are often explicitly McLuhanesque in their picturing of how technology, notably the media, extends and alters the human body (this is especially the case in Videodrome, as I’ve already metioned). They share a concern with the way that technology, the product of human intentions (usually good ones), attempts to tame nature, especially the human body, but in the end it fails. This failure is due to either human hubris (i.e., misguided scientists reaching too high) or non-human nature staging a revolt against technological interventions into her realm. Chart 7 summarizes how good technological intentions in Cronenberg’s films are converted by a terrible nature into unpleasant consequences. Cronenberg’s films explore how a Cartesian separation of human rationality from nature and the tyranny of this rationality over the body and its instincts produces a tension that causes nature to rebel. His films usually feature an ultra-rational doctor or scientist (e.g., Dr. Hobbes in Shivers and Seth Brundle in The Fly) who is convinced he can improve the human condition through technology, but who unwittingly upsets the delicate balance of nature (which we know from Frye and other Canadian theorists is a threatening Other) and causes a biological catastrophe. Cronenberg shows how the projects of the technology-loving conscious ego and its moral censor the superego come up against the natural chaos of the id, usually in the form of uncontrolled sexuality. A case in point is Shivers, his first film, filmed on a shoestring budget in and around a pristine modern apartment complex on Nun’s Island in Montreal. It tells the story of a scientist (Dr. Hobbes) who comes to the conclusion that Freud was right about the meaning of modern civilization being repression, that human beings have lost touch with their bodies and instincts. To cure them of this problem, he invents a slithering parasite that is, in the words of his assistant Rollo, a “combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease that will hopefully turn the world into one beautiful, mindless orgy” (Shivers, 1975). After an unsuccessful test, the parasite escapes into the water pipes and air ducts of the building, infecting its tenants one by one, reproducing itself as it does so. Once infected, they lose their repressions and turn into lust-crazed semi-animals, returning to a

258

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Chart 7. David Cronenberg’s Films as Illustrations of the Unintended Consequences of Scientific Inventions Intention of the Scientist (The New Technology Created)

Unintended Consequence (Nature Strikes Back)

Shivers (1975)

To get an overly intellectual creature back in touch with its body

A parasite that turns humans into lust-crazed zombies

Rabid (1976)

To do an experimental skin graft on an accident victim with “morphogenetically neutral tissue”

A blood-sucking underarm growth that stimulates hunger for blood, but causes a virulent strain of rabies in its victims

The Brood (1978)

To bring out psychic repressions and hidden terrors as physical manifestations

Murderous malformed children (“the brood”) extruded from a hideous external fetal sac

Scanners (1979)

A sedative for pregnant women (“Ephemerol”)

Telekensis, telepathy, and megalomania

Videodrome (1982)

Extra-intense pornographic TV with a hidden signal

Altered perceptions, bodily mutations, and death

The Fly (1986)

Teleportation

Unstable man/fly hybrid

Dead Ringers (1988)

Gynecological research to create the “perfect” female body

Weird sex, drug addiction, and death

Naked Lunch (1991)

Drugs used by writers to promote their literary creativity

A visit to the “Interzone”; hallucinations of bizzare creatures, deviant sexuality

Crash (1996)

Auto-eroticism (literally)

Car crashes, death

eXistenZ (1999)

An extremely realistic virtual reality game using a “biopod” (living interface)

Weird events in a hallucinogenic landscape; the blurring of fantasy and reality; hyperreality

Film and Year

Hobbesian (pardon the pun) state of nature. Oddly, although in keeping with Cronenberg’s Mary Shelley-like pessimism about the power of human intentions to control our technological inventions, the film doesn’t end with the extinction of the parasites and the reassertion of control by the rational ego of modern science and the repressive superego of conventional morality. Instead, the whole building is infected with the lust-parasites, even the obvious symbol of science and morality in the film, Dr. St. Luc (who

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

259

holds out almost to the end). In the last scene we see the tenants driving one by one out of the parking garage to infect the rest of Montreal. For Cronenberg, sexuality threatens to bring into consciousness a subordination of the ego-self to the body, disease, and death, resulting in an annihilation of the self (Beard 1994: 121, 125). Nature/sex is death, the self ’s extinction. This is not all that far from Grant’s Calvinists morally girding themselves against the wild nature without and within. Although there is a certain dark humour in Cronenberg’s films, he seems nevertheless quite serious about the need to defend ourselves against the wilderness within by means of a combination of a careful use of technology and a repressive superego.18 Fitting the Canadian school into my structural idealist model of social explanation, technology, the intentional side of human action, and nature, the structural side of human affairs, can be seen as together producing culture, just as intentions and structures can be seen as together shaping social meaning. Culture is that which is crystallized out of the dialectic of nature and technology, of the material world unworked by human hands and the techniques, machines, and procedures that human beings use to change that world. The Canadian school of cultural critique illustrates, in a variety of ways, the manner in which nature and technology impact upon modern culture, from Frye’s vast threatening wilderness dotted with garrison cities to Cronenberg’s marriage of chrome, vinyl, and eros in the film Crash. It is perhaps more accurate to envisage the nature/culture/technology triad not as a linear continuum, but as a snake curled around in a circle eating its own tail, with human technology swallowing the last bits of wild nature, thereby transforming modern culture into something entirely of human manufacture.

A Sketch of a Structural Idealist Theory of Cultural Critique Building on the tours and sketches of cultural criticism above, a contemporary theory of cultural critique should embody at least the following elements: 1. A recognition of the economic basis of culture, and of the philosophical ideals that support it. This is not to say culture is determined by an independent material realm, as Marx thought, but that

260

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

the structural ideals of cultural life stand in a give-and-take relationship with those of economic life. In the contemporary Western world this involves a recognition of the omnipresence of late or consumer capitalism (as I argue in chapter 6), and the further recognition that this form of economic organization is grounded in certain structural ideals that escape from the realm of economics to deeply influence the general shape of our culture. These include the powerful call of the ideal of efficiency, which is tied to the use of instrumental reason as the only valid form of reasoning in the rhetoric of the representatives of late-capitalist corporate structures (except in the realm of advertising); the growth of the managerial or bureaucratic ethic (as opposed to the entrepreneurial ethic of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries); the claim that the market will assure growth and will solve social and political problems without too much political intervention; corporatism, i.e., the notion that only institutions and groups have political legitimacy; and commodious individualism, with its urge to consume. The subject under late capitalism is by and large reduced to a consumer of commodities, so it is not surprising if art and intellectual life themselves become forms of commodity production. However, the commodification of culture is not a result of purely material causes, but due to a general acceptance of some or all of the structural ideals listed above by the makers and participants of our culture. This acceptance is not inevitable, however hard it would be to change it. 2. Within this understanding of the modern economy, nature and technology should be seen as “boundary phenomena.” Nature is the purely material substratum of culture, limiting us until technology can find a means to conquer it. Grant is right in saying that our encounter with the North American wilderness was a different sort of “primal” relation than that experienced by Europeans over the last millennium. Each culture is faced with a different picture of nature, derived from its own distinctive history of relating to its natural surroundings. Nature also provides us with the raw materials for technology, and with idealized pictures of pre-technological terror or bliss for our species. It is thus, along with representing the great Other to human action, a source of social and political ideals (e.g., the American myth of the frontier). At the other extreme we find technology, the product of human scientific intentions, which produces unintended consequences that become “nature” for us. They become embedded in social con-

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

261

sciousness as naturalized structural ideals—for example, the belief that the computer age is with us, and that knowledge is now, more than ever, power, or the association of social status with the ownership of certain pieces of technology: a car, a cellphone, or a home computer. Technology involves the reification of our notions of ideal systems of manufacture, travel, communication, and leisure (e.g., an Internet-connected computer as approximations to an ideal personal link to the global communication web). The systemically flawless ideals that surround new technologies often hide from us the real nature of the technological, i.e., that it is technique, a way of doing something with machines, a way of doing that is sometimes beneficial to a culture, and sometimes not. Technology is always morally ambivalent, even if we reject Luddism and accept that, generally speaking, technological progress is good for the human race. Cellphones may connect their users to family and friends at all times, but they also take away the last vestiges of privacy for their users, not to mention forcing strangers in public places to listen to banal conversations about where their users are, or when they will be coming home. Part of this ambivalence is the way that technologies take away their users’ self-reliance at the same time as they empower them—the automobile, which McLuhan says amputates our legs, is the classic case of such a dual process. A structural idealist theory of cultural critique would try to awaken a sense of this dual or ambivalent nature of technology, to see its use as the product of concrete economic decisions, and not of a grand march to a technological utopia. It would argue that technology is human thought/action in machine form, and not a deterministic force external to human purposes. A subtext here is the need to engage with McLuhan’s notion of media and technology as extensions of the human body. While this is not literally true, we can nevertheless see the revolutions in media and technology as modifications of the way we see our bodies, as a metaphorical extension of our sensory fields, and in some cases our bodies, through space (e.g., telephoning Britain in a few seconds, same-day television reports from Russia on the nightly news, jetting to Florida in a couple of hours). Each significant technological advance changes in some way how we handle and control material things, information, or people: for example, the computer, added to modern techniques of classification and record keeping, makes it possible to reduce the individual to a series of recordable and

262

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

quickly accessible numbers (birth date, social insurance number, height, weight, financial data, school marks, etc.), presumably in aid of bureaucratic efficiency. Yet the side effect of this intention is the inclusion of the individual human being within a quantified and mechanistic world view, the last stage of the century-spanning quest that Galileo started when he came to the conclusion that the book of nature was written in a mathematical language, one that could be read by natural philosophers who asked the right questions and performed the right experiments. 3. Any theory of culture must include an understanding and critique of the phenomena of everyday life, including work, education, the family, love, sex, and play, from the point of view of the currently dominant structural ideals. A case in point would be how the structural ideal of the managerial ethic affects both work life and personal life: how this ethic might reduce all elements of a person’s situation to the instrumentally rational exploitation of objects within a time/space field, and consequently how this might debase family life and personal relationships by bureaucratizing them or subjecting them to the cult of expertise (Lasch’s “therapeutic culture”) in the form of self-help and how-to manuals, marriage counsellors, or rigidly scheduled time management. We should also accept that once the structural ideals that rule a given category of thought/action in everyday life have been identified through historical or sociological research, we can go ahead and critique these by offering alternative ones (and thus alternative economic and material structures). An example of this would be how Lasch holds up the rugged, frontier-bred individualism of nineteenthcentury America to the pallid, narcissistic individualism of the postwar period. A detailed attempt to counterpoise alternative structural ideals to those that rule present-day culture is a major project in itself, and is best left to another day. However, I will say that amongst those structural ideals connected to everyday life that need critiquing are the commodification of art and intellectual life by consumerism, the unthinking mass acceptance of the technological imperative to speed life up with better and better machines, and the economic ideologies of the marketplace and of globalized capitalism as replacements for an active citizenry with some sense of the public good. 4. We need a treatment of the moral ideal of authenticity, selffulfillment, or narcissism (depending on whether one is for it, neutrally inclined, or against it), all species of individualism, as central

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

263

to modernity, and of how this ideal is integrated into daily life and the contemporary economy. We need some sense of whether Taylor is right in seeing authenticity as a recoverable ideal, or Lasch is right in seeing it as a cultural horror that we should reject, or Saul is right that we should focus instead on democratic individualism as a way of recovering a sense of political community. It is without a doubt true that individualism is the central social and political problem of the last two or three centuries, and thus we must gauge its impact upon culture. It is also evident that not all forms of individualism are culturally healthy: we have all met individuals who are narcissistically wrapped up in their own egos, body images, or social status and wealth, and can easily enough connect these individual cases of narcissism to general aspects of our image-driven consumer culture. In the end, there are at least three questions that a structural idealist theory of cultural critique must ask with regards to individualism: (a) how widespread are the debased forms of individualism within our culture?; (b) what structural ideals serve as the basis for these debased forms of individualism?; and (c) what can be done to change the structural ideals that support these debased forms? 5. A structural idealist theory of culture must also deal with the role of the postmodern impulse, notably in theory, literature, and the arts. As outlined in chapters 5 and 6, I see (with Jameson) postmodernism as a variant of late modernism. More specifically, it is a modification of the structural ideals of the modern period. It is a move away from depth meaning, rationality, and reality towards surface meaning, limited irrationality (as least for the consuming masses), and hyperreality as cultural archetypes. This is linked to modern technology, especially television and the computer, which originated in the impulse to efficiency and economic rationality, but wound up promoting a severing of the link between the content of the technology’s narrative (i.e., the television show, the computer simulation) and the real-world narrative that it mimics or copies. In other words, modern media create third-order simulacra, using Baudrillard’s terminology. These simulacra tend to divorce us from both the world of physical nature and the social and political world that contains real flesh-and-blood people. Borgmann’s hyperactivity and hyperreality are two of the results of the postmodern condition, which is an odd pairing, given that the former stimulates us to frenetic activity in pursuit of supposedly concrete economic

264

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

goals, at the same time as the latter takes us to simulated, unreal worlds. Lastly, late-modern or postmodern art shows us a new flatness and superficiality, representing the retreat to surface meaning, as Jameson has pointed out. Overall, postmodern culture prefers surface play, parody, and irony to the search for inner depths or outer meaning. 6. A complete theory of cultural critique would require some description of a sound cultural politics, that is, some notion of how our culture can be protected or changed by political action. This could involve Lasch’s revival of local action, Borgmann’s evocation of the festive city, or Saul’s Socratic gadfly stinging the lazy ideological beast of the corporatist polis (I would guess that the latter would be the most effective). At a minimum, a structural idealist theory of culture, insofar as it does not discharge responsibility for social arrangements onto political destiny or substructural forces such as technological change and economic fate, compels critics to attempt to understand their culture, to critique the ideals that structure its cultural resources, and if necessary to offer alternative structuring ideals as antidotes to any malaises endemic to their culture. If the critic is also a professional philosopher employed by the state (which is, ideally, the strong right hand of a democratic citizenry), then it is doubly their duty to play the role of the gadfly, for not only is this a fulfillment of the philosophical legacy of the West, but their position within academe gives them the time and financial security to do so. The philosopher is noblest when emulating the critical spirit of Socrates, and should do so, even if tempted towards silence by a comfortable position or by the social or financial capital that comes from serving corporate interests (whether public or private). In short, cultural change does not just happen by itself. It is up to the critic to both become involved in contemporary culture, and, if possible and desirable, change that culture through intellectual thought/action (if not direct political action). 7. Lastly, such a theory calls for cultural consciousness. This involves a wedding of personal and critical qualities such as reason, understanding, and at least methodological sympathy (i.e., the capacity to re-enact others’ motivating thoughts). It also involves being aware of the general state of one’s culture. We should cultivate the ability to see culture as a series of social and historical practices that can be understood and reconstructed through an understanding of

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

265

their motivating structural ideals. This can be seen as an extension of Collingwood’s first principle, that all history is the history of thought. Similarly, all cultural consciousness is a consciousness of thought, of ideas, although some of these ideas are anchored deeply in structuring ideals that are so resistant to change that they take on the patina of political “common sense,” or, even more scandalously, “truth.”19 ——— ••• ——— Speaking now in more general terms, the core theoretical concept of cultural criticism should be something like structural ideals. The notion that the primary purpose of culture is to organize people and raw matter according to a set of ideals that at the same time promotes structural relationships between human actors is the sine qua non of cultural critique. This notion allows for both understanding and change: culture is freed from economic and other determinisms, and is seen at its meaningful core as the point where human intentions and the structures that create and condition those intentions meet. If we see culture as ruled by structural ideals instead of being the result of blind economic, geographical, or social forces, we can become conscious of our power as citizens to effect changes in the political realm. So, in short, a structural idealist theory of culture politicizes change. Of course, a Marxist like Jameson does precisely the same thing. His explanation of postmodern culture as a superstructural form of late capitalism has built into it the ideal of political critique and change (although probably not proletarian revolution, as the time for this has apparently passed). Yet Jameson rejects the notion that moral ideals are part of what shapes modern social structures, having no use for the countering of one moral ideal with another. This view handicaps cultural critique for no good reason. Yet we should not go too far to the other extreme, to what I referred to in my introduction as “teleological” idealism, where ideas are seen as the “cause” of human action, but only by moving from some sort of transcendental realm to individual minds. A structural idealist theory of culture has as its basic assumption the existence of an equilibrial relationship between the ideas that shape our culture and the social, economic, and technological structures that these ideas gave birth to and either support or challenge. Or, to speak more accurately, structural idealism sees these structures as ideas themselves, hardened temporarily into concrete determinants

266

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

of human action by those who choose to remain unconscious of the motive forces in their own and others’ lives. Since ideas can change, it allows those who desire a way out of what critics have called the narcissistic, commodified, hyperactive, or unconscious culture of the day a chance to wake up and act.

Towards a Unified Social Theory So where do we go from here? All of what I have said here was aimed at contributing to the revival of what Quentin Skinner calls “grand theory in the human sciences.” In it I have offered, as my own small contribution to this revival, what I hope is a social theory that unifies various understandings of human action, most importantly, methodological idealism and social structuralism. My theory makes use of a conceptual evolution that involves the following notions: structural ideals as the core element in social and historical explanation, the duality and virtuality of structure (which I have borrowed from Giddens), the phenomenological moment as the theoretical atom in human action, thought/action as an attempt to overcome the dualism of thinking and acting, the self as embodied, passionate, purposive, and intellectual, a tripartite picture of social action (as intentional, meaningful, and structural), and declining rationality and the end of the search for depth meaning as the governing meta-ideals of modern intellectual (and to some degree material) culture. If there is a central concept in all of this, it is equilibrium: the sense that ideals and structures exist and operate in an endless feedback loop in all human social action that can be meaningfully understood and explained. I end my evocation of structural idealism where I started it, with the Scots of the eighteenth century. I would like to call for a revival of the eighteenth-century notion of morals, as Hume and his contemporaries used the term, as the centre of philosophical speculation and education. This would involve not only ethics conceived in the narrow sense, but also psychology, phenomenology, sociology, history, political theory, and literature. It would also involve a breaking down of the barriers between philosophy and these other disciplines. And last but not least, it would broaden the horizons of all those who have fallen victim to the temptations of specialization or of the false rigour of a natural-scientific approach to the human condition.

The Contribution of Structural Idealism

267

Kierkegaard said upon reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that if he had only claimed at the end that the whole thing had been one long thought experiment, it would have been a roaring success. Hopefully, my evocation of a structural idealist theory of history and society is something more than such a thought experiment, if something less than the final word on these matters.

Notes

Introduction 1 In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein seems to suggest that language games like those connected to making a joke, doing logic, or painting a shed are so diverse that they may not have any common structure, other than the fact that they’re all language games and follow an implicit set of rules. This theoretical pluralism is a healthy starting point for the analysis of social life. 2 A whole critique of the currently in vogue demi-discipline of critical thinking (or informal logic) could be mounted along these lines. 3 See my article “Collingwood’s Hermeneutic of Acts and Events in Historical Explanation,” in Eidos 11 (1993) for an outline of this distinction. 4 I’m not suggesting that this would be a good idea. This example merely points out in a clear way how one of our most cherished institutions is sustained by structural values. 5 This remark can be found in Marx’s succinct summary of his historical materialism, his Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (Marx and Engels 1978: 4). 6 I will deliberately use terms such as shape or influence in this book to describe the way that social structure operates since I take very seriously the critique of natural scientific models of explanation from the pens of Weber, Collingwood, Winch, and Giddens, my theoretical guiding lights. To speak of social causality is to yield the field of battle to structuralism pure and simple, to erase the power of human agency from social life. The best we can hope for in the “science” of social explanation, I would argue, are broad statistical regularities. Yet it would be a category error of significant proportions to move from these statisti-

269

270

7

8

9

10

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

cal regularities (e.g., Durkheim’s suggestion that there was a correlation between higher national suicide rates and the dominance of Protestantism) to the notion that impersonal social laws “cause” individual actions X, Y, or Z. This is metaphysics in the bad old sense that A. J. Ayer rightly attacks in his Language, Truth and Logic. This in no way denies the reality of social conflict: strikes, political squabbling, crime, economic competition, etc. My point here is simply that stable social life is premised on the idea that we can get along with each other for substantial periods of time, and that we more or less agree to use non-violent means to resolve personal, economic, or political conflicts. I should clarify what might be a minor point here: when I speak of “social theory,” I mean simply any theory that pretends to understand and explain social life. So philosophies of history (as I’ll show in chapter 4) are “social theories” in that they try to understand and explain past events, which, it goes without saying, usually took place in some sort of social realm. This stands in contrast to psychology, which might explain human thought processes in a purely individual sense, and “sociological theory,” that subcategory of social theory taught in sociology courses in universities. Needless to say, these distinctions are quite fuzzy at the edges. This is in addition to the vexing problem as to what level this economic conditioning of our ideas takes place. To make sense of Marx, we must take him to mean that this conditioning works at the most general level. Beliefs such as “it’s raining today” or “someone is knocking at my door” are probably not ideological in Marx’s sense. Nor are value-laden claims like “I like ice cream,” for they express individual aesthetic tastes unrelated to broader social conflicts. Further, there would have to be a grey area in between these fairly obviously non-ideological beliefs and patently ideological ones, like the rich capitalists’ insistence that lower taxes will be good for the economy. This grey area could include things such as a taste for classical music (this might indicate bourgeois pretentions) or a belief in the need to take personal responsibility for one’s actions (again, this might indicate a laissez-faire sense of liberty, which Marx associated with the capitalist class). I realize that what I’ve just said is very problematic, and deserves several pages of qualification. Even the disengaged person I’ve just described would have to have some means of employment (or state support), would have to buy food and clothing, etc. Further, it would be difficult to avoid corporate propaganda, notably commercial advertising. So such disengagement could never be total. Yet my point stands: our engagement with the ruling class is in part determined, at least in modern consumer societies with a benevolent welfare state in the background, by the basic values we bring to the table of social life. I’m merely echoing the Buddha here: at least part of our social suffering is caused by our desires. When we want something in the social world, we must engage that world, including its regulatory ideals and power structures, to get what we want. Social conflict is caused by conflicting desires (as opposed to individual conflict, which may be caused by trivial things such as insults or misunderstandings).

Notes

271

Chapter 1 1 Pierre Bourdieu (1992: 91) repeats this point in outlining his languagecentred theory of social practise: “The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects which is itself but an endless circle of mutually reflecting metaphors.” He was, no doubt, unaware of Hume’s prior formulation. 2 I don’t mean to imply that we all share some sort of common consciousness when I speak of the “social mind.” All I mean by the term are those characteristics of social consciousness that most, if not all, people share. 3 Of course, these divisions are rather artificial. But they are heuristically valuable as a way of spelling out the different psychic foundations of each level of thought/action. 4 I deal more extensively with the question of what types of historical thought/action can be reconstructed in chapter 4. 5 This is why drunks and the mentally deranged seem “childish” to most people: they don’t repress their feelings, and are all too willing to tell us what they “really think.” Not to mention the fact that without the normal level of repression in place, their sexual and aggressive drives have a tendency to get out of hand. This can make sober, repressed adults very uncomfortable. 6 Of course, these divisions are not mutually exclusive or ontologically “real”: personal and social consciousness are joined inseparably in the same mind, while “right” actions can also be useful or dutiful, both for the individual and for society as a whole. And we can never underestimate the degree to which even rational actors do not do the “right” thing. 7 MacIntyre (1984: 211-12) agrees, noting that we render actions intelligible only in the context of a set of narrative histories. This leads him to conclude that the “unity of a human life is the unity of narrative quest” (219). I will argue in chapter 2 that narrative is the backbone of the middle element in social explanation, meaning. 8 A conclusion that Wittgenstein also came to as he moved from his earlier logical atomism to his notions of meaning as use and his view of language as a series of games of meaning that are parts of forms of life in his Philosophical Investigations. See Philosophical Investigations I, section 23, where Wittgenstein lists a whole litany of language games that don’t seem to share any common logic: e.g., giving orders, reporting an event, acting, guessing a riddle, singing, making a joke. Yet even such a list of language games is only a starting point in social explanation. 9 Of course, the degree of understanding varies widely with circumstances, the skill of the interpreter, and the sanity of the agent. If an insane person is someone whose passions never reach the level of clear purposes, then this makes those purposes unformulatable and thus makes them all the more difficult to understand. 10 A process that Anthony Giddens calls “the duality of structure,” as we shall see in chapter 2. 11 This is what Bourdieu means by the “objectivity” of the social world. I decline to use this notion myself because I think that it is more accu-

272

12

13 14

15

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

rate to describe social structure as a virtual reality, not as objectively real. They are “real” insofar as they are sustained by human interaction through some finite time and space, and can collapse suddenly, as we saw happen quite dramatically in 1989 with the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. Yet we shouldn’t forget the positive power of social rules to structure everyday life and thus make it predictable. This is especially important in the political and economic realms—imagine never being sure whether a passing police officer is going to arbitrarily arrest you, or having to barter with shopkeepers for every minor purchase. So it’s not entirely fair to see social rules as a web that catches unwary actors: from another angle, social rules are constitutive of civilized life. I will have more to say about critical discourse analysis in chapter 8. Giddens notes in a similar vein that institutions and societies have structural properties in virtue of the continuity of actions of their members; but that those members can carry out their day-to-day actions only in virtue of their capability of instantiating those structural properties. For example, in Britain the Oxbridge English accent (once heard as the official accent of BBC broadcasts) is considered the touchstone against which regional dialects are measured, to the detriment of these dialects (e.g., the cockney slang, the Scottish brogue, the Irish lilt, etc.). Similarly, Parisian French plays a similar role in Québec. However, in each case this may be changing, as the linguistic dominance of the metropolitan upper classes erodes in the face of displays of regional pride, often thanks to popular culture (especially television and pop music).

Chapter 2 1 A version of this chapter has been published as “The Limits of Instrumental Rationality in Social Explanation,” Critical Review 13/12 (1999): 165-89. 2 MacIntyre (1984: 206) hints at a theory that roughly parallels my own in suggesting that we cannot characterize behaviour independently of intentions, nor intentions independently of the settings that make them intelligible both to social agents and to those who observe them. He then goes on to note that to “identify an occurrence as an action is in the paradigmatic instances to identify it under a type of description which enables us to see that occurrence as flowing intelligibly from a human agent’s intentions, motives, passions and purposes” (209). This multifaceted understanding of the origins and nature of human action is a useful starting point. MacIntyre goes on to construct a virtue theory of ethics on these foundations, a lead which I won’t follow here. 3 Of course, these “shared” ideals are held differently by different people within a collectivity; also, individuals may hold only certain elements of the widely accepted congerie of ideas concerning a given social object. For example, the average suburbanite might generally speaking share

Notes

4

5

6

7

8

9

273

the ideal of a “law and order” society, but upon occasion speed or smoke marijuana. The policeman might be less lenient on such matters, the university student more so. Of course, there are massive problems associated with the notion of truth. To cut through some of these, I would like to argue for a sense of “truth” as agreement among a community of knowledgeable interpreters, grounded in good evidence. I realize, however, that this by no means lays the problem of truth to rest. Taylor takes issue with rational-choice theorists when they attempt to explain behaviour that attempts to actualize values (i.e., normative behaviour) as “preferences” motivated by various “incentives.” Instead he sees such behaviour as expressive of a “self” that is committed to these values. Robert Abelson (1995, 27) agrees with Taylor’s critique of rational-choice theory. He defines expressive behaviour as the “spontaneous enjoyment or value-expressive action, performed for its own sake, with no apparent rational consideration of material consequences for the actor.” As both Taylor and Abelson point out, much of social and political behaviour can be explained only in expressive or normative terms. Indeed, people who consistently exhibit selfish instrumental rationality in their everyday dealings with others tend eventually to be shunned as manipulators or users, contra Ayn Rand’s moral prescriptions. It can by no means be concluded that an unsullied SIR is a superior social survival strategy. Blumer’s interactionism is such an effective bridge from intentionality to meaning in part because he himself does not rely on just the actor’s “word,” i.e., the actor’s intentions, to get at the “meaning” of a social act. However, we must be aware of Bourdieu’s critique of interactionism here, one that plays into my own thesis about the tripartite nature of social explanation. He chastises the interactionists for failing to realize that the truth of the interaction is never contained entirely just in the interaction: “In fact it is their present and past positions in the social structure that biological individuals carry with them, at all times and in all places, in the form of dispositions which are so many marks of social position and hence of the social distance between objective positions.” (1992: 81-82). Elsewhere, he makes the associated point that the whole social structure is present in each linguistic interaction, a fact ignored by interactionists, who treat each interaction as a closed world (1991: 67). Needless to say, the important question here is just how we carry these social structures that we are a part of within us. I would argue that we carry them in our structural ideals, our conscious and unconscious judgments about the value of the various social objects presented to us in everyday life. Under the rubric of unintended consequences we can distinguish two distinct types: those consequences that were merely unanticipated, which I will term “surface unintended consequences,” and the consequences of those events of which we have no consciousness but affect social reality all the same, which I will term “deep unintended consequences.” Both the surface and deep unintended consequences of our

274

10

11

12

13

14

15

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

actions force social theory away from strictly intentional accounts of human behaviour towards an account of the social meaning of that behaviour, and eventually, I believe, towards an account of structural ideals (or at least some concept with the same denotative content). Of course, prior to the use of Verstehen, Weber outlined social explanations that were adequate at the level of cause, i.e., explanations that outlined general empirical regularities such as “events of the type ‘A’ tend to cause events of the type ‘B’.” These were necessary for social explanation for Weber, but not sufficient. Bourdieu (1992: 79) agrees, saying that each social agent, “wittingly or unwittingly, willy nilly, is a producer and reproducer of objective meaning,” and that his or her actions are the product of a modus operandi of which they have no conscious mastery, containing an “objective intention” that always outruns their conscious intentions. He concludes that because social agents do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing, what they do has more meaning than they know. See my “Body as an ‘Object’ of Historical Knowledge” (1996) for an account and a critique of what I term “body theory,” i.e., of philosophical, sociological, and historical discussions of the various paradigms of the human body in different times and places. Under Goffman’s dramaturgical model of how the self is presented on the stage of everyday life, the individual’s goal is to control the conduct of others by controlling their definition of the situation (1959: 3-4). This way of looking at everyday life may be overloaded in terms of the degree of intentionality it accords social actors, as for Goffman social actors are always trying to “con” their audience, i.e., one cannot separate their “true” intentions from their stated motives. His analysis led him to the interesting conclusion that the self is not so much an organic thing with a specific location but a “dramatic effect” arising diffusely from the scene presented, and is thus a thing of collaborative manufacture (252-53). This notion of a dramatic effect is a useful metaphor, even if it makes social life too much like a Shakespearean drama—it has the effect of denaturalizing social life. Motives, in everyday language, can be either conscious or unconscious, acknowledged or hidden. A conscious and acknowledged motive, such as “I went to work today to make money,” is synonymous with an intention. But Weber means here an unconscious, hidden motive, the sort that we are reluctant to acknowledge, or simply repress. This isn’t to claim that the interpretation of a social act might not be difficult. All biographers are acutely aware of this. One is reminded of Orson Welles’s brilliant 1941 film Citizen Kane: it’s not until the final shot of Kane’s childhood sleigh “Rosebud” burning in a furnace that we understand the futility of his life project, the “meaning” of his life. Needless to say, most people’s lives have no such dramatic denouement. This is perhaps why good films can enchant us: they narrate the histories of their characters in a way that allows us to understand the meaning of their lives, an understanding that is largely absent from our own life on a day-to-day level.

Notes

275

16 As I said earlier, they are a generalized version of Scott and Lyman’s “background expectations” for accounts. Although I will not engage the thorny metaphysical issue of free will vs. determinism here, I would like to claim à la Sartre that there is a strong sense in which social structure is tacitly willed by those implicated in it, by the unconscious acceptance of structural ideals as facts and not values, e.g., it may be a fact that there is a BMW parked in my neighbour’s driveway, but it is a value judgment hardened into a quasi-fact if I believe that he “legitimately” owns it. Not that I want to promote auto theft: I merely wish to point out that property is a social institution buttressed by a network of moral, legal, economic, and political values. 17 In the existentialized Marxism of Search for a Method, with its progressive-regressive method, Sartre sounds almost Giddensian in the roughly equal attention he pays to both individual biography and social structure. He says there that the structures of society, including the material conditions of our existence, define for each of us our objective starting point, but that we constantly go beyond these in our practical activities (1963: 93). This leads him later on to suggest that every social act has a hierarchized multiplicity of significations and is like a pyramid of signs, with the more concrete signs being not dissolvable into the more general ones (102). We recover the full depth and meaning of this pyramid of signs through the progressive-regressive method, which bounces the social theorist or historian back and forth between the individual actor and the society or period in which the actor lived to understand his or her life. For Sartre, social structure seems to exist only as instantiated in this pyramid of meanings in the life of the individual actor. But if we turn our attention to Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, we get a truer picture of his philosophical motives. He says there (1991: 51) that in understanding the individual human life we must deny its distinctiveness so that we can understand its dialectical position within human development as a whole, for “beneath the translucidity of free individual praxis” we can discover “the rocky subsoil of necessity” (70-71). The fundamental condition of Sartre’s critique is that there must be “a necessity in History at the very heart of intelligibility” (72), i.e., that individual behaviour is rigorously grounded in, if not determined by, social structures. In the end, Sartre was still caught up in the dualism of the freely-choosing individual agent versus social and economic structures as constraints on action. Even for his existentialized Marxism, social structure acts like a series of barriers to action, of hurdles to be jumped over by revolutionary praxis. His Marxism is therefore still an unsatisfying structuralism. 18 Bourdieu (1992: 83) puts forward a very similar idea, although less forthrightly than Giddens, when he insists that one cannot ignore the dialectical relationship between objective social structures and the cognitive and motivational structures they produce and that tend to reproduce them. Unfortunately, the general direction of Bourdieu’s social theory, with its repeated invocation of “objective” structures, points toward structure as pure constraint and individual “cognitive and

276

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

motivational structures” as strongly flavoured with epiphenomenality (although I confess that this reading might be a result of his sometimes ponderous prose and not his theoretical intentions). 19 This excludes the use of direct physical force, which seems to be a different kettle of fish. A man holding a gun to my head can compel me to give him my wallet, and in this sense be said to momentarily have “power” over me. Yet it would be strange to call this sort of compulsion “economic” or “political” power.

Chapter 3 1 For example, see Matza and Sykes (1961) on how delinquency can be seen as a product of “subterranean values” adopted by youth as a reworking of standard adult middle-class values. 2 The dominant theorist lurking in the background of New Subcultural Theory is, of course, Gramsci, with his extension of the class struggle from politics to culture through the notion of “hegemony,” although credit must also be given to Althusser for his idea of “magical” resolutions of class contradictions. 3 A term borrowed from Roland Barthes, especially his book Mythologies. Barthes himself took it from Claude Lévi-Strauss, notably his La pensée sauvage. 4 Thus youth subcultures talk about “alternative” musicians or artists “selling out,” i.e., giving up their status as icons of the subculture in question in exchange for mass popularity or respectability, if not just for mounds of “filthy lucre.” Indeed, one could question whether the cultural binary alternative/mainstream makes any sense any more, what with the speed with which the music and fashion industries and the mass media are now able to jump onto pop-cultural bandwagons.

Chapter 4 1 An earlier, substantially similar version of this chapter was published as “Reconstructing the Past, A Structural Idealist Approach,” Clio 27, 2 (Winter 1998): 221-49. 2 Following Collingwood’s own style, I will use “re-enact,” “rethink,” “reconstruct,” and “recreate” as virtual synonyms, differing in flavour more than concrete meaning. 3 This ideality of historical facts is anticipated by Beard (1969: 171), who questions the commonsensical view that history is an actuality outside the historian’s mind, and Becker (1959: 124-25), who sees historical facts as symbols in the historian’s mind that allow him or her to recreate the “actual” events imaginatively. 4 Of course, one wonders just how this a priori imagination works, and whether we can speak of its being an “objective” technique for reconstructing the past. This is the “relativism problem,” the fifth of the critiques I list in section 2 of this chapter.

Notes

277

5 Of course, we must use “thought” in a rather catholic sense to make Collingwood comprehensible on this point. Thus coins, pottery shards, and birth registers involve “thoughts” about economic and political organization, craftsmanship, and religious and family life, respectively. A coin in and of itself, for example, means nothing until we see it as a social and economic object, which in turn embodies specific ideas about the political state of its origin, about the gods and heroes or heroines of that state, or, in general, about its collective self-image (e.g., Lady Liberté on the French franc). 6 Critiques 1-4 deal with the scope of Collingwood’s thesis, while 5 deals with the problem of whether historical truth can be arrived at through it. Due to its distinct nature, I will devote a separate section to critique 5 at the end of this chapter. 7 One possible rebuttal of Collingwood would involve the criticism that some “natural events,” e.g., the Black Plague, force historical actors to take them into account and therefore have a certain historical status in and of themselves. Still, the devoted Collingwoodian could reply that a biological understanding of the plague is relevant precisely because it affects human life and human social organization, which we can understand only qua human thought. 8 I do not want to valorize reason as the “highest” level of thought/ action, but start with embodiment because it is the first level of awareness in the history of the development of the human organism and also because it is the permanent ground of the other three levels (thus even Hume’s “abstruse reasoner” reasons in some mood or other, must occasionally succumb to physical needs like drink and food, has sexual drives that flow into and out of his or her consciousness, etc.). 9 Needless to say, there is a purposive side to sexual practices: the distinction between passions and purposes in this realm is not black and white but largely a matter of varying shades of grey. 10 Lest we make White sound too much like a perspectivist, he does make it clear that events restrict the historian’s freedom of emplotment, although how they do so is not always clear. Can one emplot President Kennedy’s assassination as a comedy instead of a tragedy? This would depend largely on one’s national sympathies, and thus would be more “possible” for, say, a Canadian historian than an American one. 11 I take my lead here from a hint made by Nielsen in a footnote on the distinction between construction and reconstruction, although she leans towards a purer constructionism in interpreting Collingwood than I do (1981: 26). 12 Needless to say, this comes close to being a gross oversimplification of postmodernist approaches to history: it might be more accurate to say that postmodernists doubt whether they still have access to the real past. Be that as it may, Richard Rorty, in a way the kingpin of American philosophical postmodernism, is saying much the same thing when he suggests that the world is out there, but truth (as independent of the mind) is not (1989: 5).

278

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

13 I don’t mean to deny that things fall down, that the night is dark, or other obvious physical facts. Yet as soon as we take “presence” away from these facts, in order to describe them we must in some sense theorize about them, make propositions not directly connected to immediately present physical things. This is what history is all about: talking about things that are not present. To construct an effective narrative of the past, we must write in such a fashion that our narrative compels the reader to believe it, or else it is discarded as a wistful fiction, if not lies. This belief is tied in part to the assent of the relevant community of interpreters. 14 Again, Kuhn echoes this idea in saying that in science there is no theory-independent reconstruction of the “out there,” no ontological march to truth, but that we can speak of progress in terms of new theories solving problems better than the old ones (1970: 206). 15 One could critique Collingwood to the effect that art often represents real things, but he could reply that the point of representative art is not representation in and of itself (outside, perhaps, of photography), but some sort of imaginative or expressive representation. Thus if we look at the work of a photo-realist painter like Canadian Ken Danby, say his “At the Crease” and “Lacing Up,” we could say that what he was trying to do in each case was not to show us what a hockey goalie or a pair of skates look like, but to express something of the feel and drama of the sport of hockey.

Chapter 5 1 We see in the twentieth century a partial return to the idealist end of the structuralist-idealist methodological continuum in the work of Max Weber, R. G. Collingwood, the later Wittgenstein, and Peter Winch, as should be evident from my earlier chapters. We can see this collection of thinkers as part and parcel of a miniature revolt against the methodological structuralism so dominant in twentieth-century intellectual life. 2 We can see this meta-ideal triumphantly celebrated in Marinetti’s 1909 Manifesto of Futurism, an ode to the technology of the day, and in Mies van der Rohe’s modernist concrete and steel boxes, which still dominate many North American cityscapes. 3 Of course, Romanticism was a huge exception to this rule, being very much a reaction to the dark satanic mills of instrumental reason. Yet all governing ideals have their opponents, just as all governments face at least a few discontented citizens. 4 I want to repeat here what I said a few pages ago: what follows in this chapter and the next is by no means to be taken as a comprehensive summary of the ideas of these thinkers. I am fully aware that much of the language that I use to paint these broad strokes is loose and imprecise, and will no doubt fail to convince the hardened empiricists in the audience. However, I am myself convinced that a century of analytic philosophy and logic worship has revealed no great social or historical

Notes

5 6

7

8

279

truths, at least, no truths that an adept storyteller couldn’t have revealed in a much more entertaining fashion. In this sense, I am wary of claiming any more truth value for this and the following chapter than their being a convincing narrative of the contemporary Western intellectual odyssey, or, in simpler language, of their being a tale well told. Nevertheless, this tale has value insofar as it shows how my structural idealist method can deal not only with concrete individual social interactions, along symbolic interactionist lines, but also with broad social and historical movements, not to mention intellectual life. An ahistorical exegesis based on the methods of analytic epistemology cannot do this, or, at least, cannot do it very well. And where Heidegger, an heir of Nietzsche, could defend the Nazi vision of the destiny of the German race in his Freiburg Rector’s Address. Again, we can see fragments of the idea of the unconscious in the work of the Romantics, for example, in Shelley’s The Defence of Poetry, where he says that “the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.” I use the Sanskrit term deliberately, to hint at how the problem of suffering Freud deals with here is substantially similar to the problem that the young Prince Siddhartha faced before achieving Buddhahood. Such raising of the theoretical stakes might seem like a group of aggressive poker players who call and raise each hand ad infinitum, refusing to ever lay their cards on the table. There’s no clear solution to this problem of reflexive theorizing, of when exactly we stop trying to unmask our predecessors. Perhaps theoretical exhaustion is the answer: after a while the process of unmasking theory becomes tiresome to one’s audience, which will demand some first-order meaning as a healthy corrective to this seemingly infinite reflexivity.

Chapter 6 1 Of course, the clearest evidence of this return to the irrational in late twentieth-century culture is the rise of fundamentalisms (both Christian and Moslem) and of religious cults like the Moonies, David Koresh’s Waco horde, etc. However, we shouldn’t get too carried away with the importance of such millennialisms, for they seem to be a recurring, maybe even cyclic, occurrence in Western history. 2 Unfortunately, as Borgmann (1992: 63) points out, we are perhaps now witnessing a sort of Götterdamerung of commodities, a goods saturation that he believes augurs the twilight of modernism. 3 To remind the reader of a point that should be obvious by now, I’m talking about the European intellectual tradition, and those intellectual subcultures in North America where this tradition has been largely accepted, such as literary criticism and university English depart-

280

4

5

6

7

8

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

ments in general. A very different story would have to be told about Anglo-American analytic philosophy, which has admittedly resisted the postmodern break, yet never really had much interest in social and political critique in the first place (with apologies to Bertrand Russell on this last point). Indeed, Jameson (1991: 12) lists four other fundamental depth models that have been repudiated in postmodern culture: (1) the dialectical one of essence and appearance; (2) the Freudian one of manifest and latent content (i.e., the theory of repression); (3) the existential one of authenticity and inauthenticity (e.g., the theory of alienation); and (4) the great semiotic opposition between signifier and signified. Terry Eagleton (1985: 62-63) situates this development nicely when he calls the new age one of a dark parody of antirepresentationalism, wherein art no longer reflects truth because “there is in truth nothing there to be reflected, no reality which is not itself already image, spectacle, simulacrum, gratuitous fiction.” Speaking of Lyotard with an invigoratingly Marxist spleen, Eagleton notes: “It is not difficult, then, to see a relation between the philosophy of J. L. Austin and IBM, or between the various neo-Nietzscheanisms of a post-structuralist epoch and Standard Oil. It is not surprising that classical models of truth and cognition are increasingly out of favour in a society where what matters is whether you deliver the commercial or rhetorical goods. Whether among discourse theorists or the Institute of Directors, the goal is no longer truth but performativity, not reason but power.” Although Hutcheon does go on to note that this implies no ontological reduction of the past: historical representation gives past events their meaning, but not their existence (1989: 81-82). However, the more rhetorically inclined of postmodern theorists do not always observe this important distinction. Charles Jencks (1987: 349) notes of postmodern architecture, which is generally accepted as the clearest expression of “postmodernism” as a wide cultural phenomenon, that it is schizophrenic about the past, wanting to retain elements of it yet escape its dead formulae. Kim Levin (1988: 4) sees postmodern art as scavenging, ransacking, and recycling the past, while Jameson (1991: 9) sees postmodern art as flat, depthless, and superficial, taking as his archetype Andy Warhol’s souped-up (excuse the pun) photomontages. Overall, we can say that postmodern art and architecture use history parodically without especially participating in it (or, in some cases, understanding it), hence allowing the possibility of its using images from the past without these images giving it any depth. Francis Fukuyama in his infamous 1989 article in The National Interest titled “The End of History?” outlined a very different sense of the end of history. He claims there that given the collapse of alternative political ideals to liberal democracy with the end of the Cold War, the global ideological battle was over, won by the West. Until we become bored and seek out new conflicts, future history would be noth-

Notes

9

10

11

12

13

14

281

ing more than the playing out of the consequences of liberalism. Needless to say, this is a very different sense of the “end of history.” Jameson suggests that the Other of late-modern consumer culture is no longer nature, as it was throughout most of human history, but technology, Sartre’s counterfinality of the practico-inert (1991: 35). The enemy in this sense is our own collective pasts as contained in the dead human labour stored up in machinery. The contemporary urbanite now treats the natural world by and large as a playground, another ground for the consumption of new and interesting experiences, and not as a source of terror or wonder. Romanticism, the aesthetic of natural wonder, is laughed at by the contemporary world-weary, cynical intellectual. But perhaps Appignanesi and Garratt are right when, at the close of their Postmodernism for Beginners (1995), a quite brilliant sketch of postmodernism using text, graphics, and comics, they conclude that maybe the homeopathic remedy to postmodernism we need is the “incurable illness of romanticism,” a return to wonder at a world long since overgrown with human constructions (in both the material and ideal senses). I specify “archetype” because common sense tells us that there are wide variations in the ways that individuals personify the ideals of consumer capitalism. Within our world there are many fringes, both modern and premodern, countercultural and subcultural, that radiate subtle energies, energies that serve to draw away substantial numbers of people from the purely instrumental economic rationality of consumer capitalism. It is the job of the social critic to nurture the more substantial of these energies, to keep their fires burning and thereby illuminate ideals counter to those held by mainstream culture. Of course, it’s difficult to use the term “oppressive” without having a non-oppressive state of things to contrast it to. Notions of liberty, equality, and solidarity have traditionally grounded claims that a social structure or a way of acting and thinking is “oppressive,” and Foucault would probably claim that even these notions are always tied to regimes of power/knowledge. Lyotard echoes this in suggesting that a sort of terror rules the latemodern ideal of efficiency, insofar as anyone who does not play the language game of whatever institution or culture they are a part of is told: “Adaptez vos aspirations à nos fins, sinon…” (1979: 103). The nonconforming, unruly inhabitant of a corporation of knowledge (using Saul’s terminology), whether academic, technocratic, or economic, is in effect asked the same question that Clint Eastwood qua Dirty Harry asked of the cornered petty criminal: “Do you feel lucky, punk?” Most don’t. As we shall see, Baudrillard prophesies the end of panoptic space within contemporary culture as, for example, television and life merge, and the medium, the message, and human existence are inextricably intertwined. Ironically, the deconstruction of binary pairs could lead to a return to the Parmenidean sphere of Being where nothing is differentiated, where all oppositions are reunited. Yet one might doubt whether

282

15

16

17

18

19

20

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Derrida would endorse such a return to the mother of all logocentrisms, even if his method might seem to suggest that such a return is possible. Of course, working within the Giddensian notion of the duality of structure, we should remind the reader of the impact of our image-centred culture back onto literary criticism and philosophy. I believe that the causal link between postmodern theory and this image culture works in both directions. Indeed, it would be quite surprising if it didn’t. Perhaps the most perfect map of the hyperrreal is the computer video game, which seems to reconstruct something real, but is “in reality” a pure fantasy dreamed up by the programmer. One could counter by saying that its elements are in a sense real: robotic tanks, spaceships, monsters, and so on. Yet the central narrative, the meaning, of the computer game is not meant to represent anything “out there,” except in the limited case of games of strategy that attempt to accurately recreate historical struggles and epochs. Indeed, in his usual hyperbole, Baudrillard concludes that the media and news services exist only to maintain the illusion of actuality, of the reality of the stakes (1984: 280). It would be more accurate to say that the media manipulate the reality they report on, in so doing creating hyperreal reportage. This reportage, however, is of something: there is an underlying series of events, a sort of noumenal realm, that feeds media hyperreality. The bombs exploding in Ulster, the world leaders meeting in Geneva, the parliamentary debates in Ottawa are all real things: they become hyperreal once the media turns them into video clips and sound bites. Indeed, 2001 was an auspicious year for virtual entertainment, with the films Shrek and Final Fantasy showing the public how far computer animation has come. The latter film features strikingly realistic images of the human body, notably the face, causing some Hollywood insiders to voice their fear that the age of real actors is coming to an end. There are many late-twentieth-century examples of this: punk rock, the television shows The Simpsons and The X-Files (both on Fox TV from the 1990s on), and the film Apocalypse Now all illustrate this social cynicism in their own ways. This list could be extended to fill several pages. I say this despite the fact that such cynicism can be deeply involving and reflect the reality of modern life in a way that is much more compelling than the soppy narratives found in their more bland cousins in popular music, television, and film. We see an allied phenomenon in computer junkies. As Borgmann (1992: 108) notes of those who surrender their substance to hyperintelligence: “Plugged into the network of communications and computers, they seem to enjoy omniscience and omnipotence; severed from their network, they turn out to be insubstantial and disconnected. They no longer command their world as persons in their own right. Their conversation is without depth and wit; their attention is roving and vacuous; their sense of place is uncertain and fickle.” Perhaps this points to a new personality type, the digital narcissist, who loses himself not in consumption, sex, and the search for self-

Notes

283

awareness, but in endless, pointless journeys through cyberspace. Yet perhaps we shouldn’t come down too hard on these digital narcissists: after all, as Borgmann makes quite clear, hyperintelligence is alluring; besides, there is a sense that digital networks reaching across continents represent for them a new sort of public sphere, a replacement for the old world of vibrant newspapers, cafés intellectuals, and public political meetings. 21 Although Taylor himself argues that there are both good and bad types of authenticity, and that the positive moral force behind the ideal of authenticity should be separated from its narcissistic and self-involved social manifestations.

Chapter 7 1 If I give short shrift to feminist theory here, this is not due to malice or neglect but to a recognition of the fact that feminist work on body images focuses too exclusively on the female body, style, and so on, and on gender combats, leaving out to a large degree any attempt to understand a history of male body images and the social conditions that gave them birth. When Hélène Cixous advocates a return to the body, she means, obviously, a return to the female body as a counterattack on patriarchal representations of femininity. 2 Or, in the language of the theory of social explanation offered in chapter 2, social-structural conflicts produce intentional acts—certain ways of “appearing” in public—that collectively express social meanings that may be only in part intended by their bearers. 3 This leaves aside the very real problems associated with the use of sweeping terms like patriarchy, which, unlike capitalism, no longer represents a clear set of economic or political relationships (although it probably did a half century ago). If the majority of men prefer women who don’t wear makeup, what sense does it make to claim that patriarchy has an investment in the cosmetics industry? If Mulvey is to make her point here, she would be better off arguing that women engage in a sort of false consciousness about the nature of personal beauty in the act of buying cosmetics, and not that their use is imprinted on their bodies by nefarious patriarchs. 4 Sadly, this is becoming less and less true. In the last few years large cinema chains have began to preface films not only with “coming attractions,” with advertising promoting their own product, but also big-screen versions of television commercials. This says something about the colonization of the cinema, which once sold only its own product, film, by the more rigidly consumerist logic represented by commercial television. The popcorn and snacks sold in cinema lobbies don’t refute this point: they were, and still are, part of the lived experience of “going to the movies.” Commercials are not. 5 Or in early silent films, as innocent girl-women like Mary Pickford, with her long tumbling locks and impish dresses.

284

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

6 As opposed to the “rational” or “utilitarian” arguments for consumer products that dominated early-century print ads. John Ralston Saul, in The Unconscious Civilization, argues that modern advertising techniques, which emphasize images and music over words and ideas, can be traced back to fascist propaganda films of the interwar period, notably Leni Riefenstahl’s ode to the Nazi Party, The Triumph of the Will (1935). He has a good case here, at least in the sense that images and music dominate whatever “message” is contained in modern commercials and print ads for clothes, beer, cars, cosmetics, electronic goods, etc. However, there might, perhaps, be some moral difference between a mob of young Germans marching into a Hitler Youth recruiting office with Riefenstahl’s images and drum beats playing in their heads, and a similar mob of young North Americans marching into the Gap with the images and sounds from that company’s television commercials playing in their heads, even if the level of conformity is the same. 7 Watch a film clip of a Sly and the Family Stone or George Clinton performance to get a sense of what I mean here. 8 An excellent recent case in point being the 1999 film (written and directed by the Wachowski brothers) The Matrix. 9 Although at least in the North American context, it would be difficult to describe any of the body images I’ve just mentioned as “countercultural.” Except perhaps for lesbian separatism, none of these really had a moment of splendid isolation from the mainstream before being absorbed into consumer culture, the accoutrements of the body images mentioned above all being readily available in suburban shopping malls when these images were current. 10 For those familiar with the Birmingham school of cultural studies, this section will be familiar material. 11 For the debate between Stan Cohen’s version of labelling theory and the neo-Marxism of the Birmingham school on the value of such “decoding,” see chapter 3.

Chapter 8 1 I will refer to Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979; originally 1978) by page number only within this section, following a similar procedure in the sections on Jameson (1991), Borgmann (1992), Taylor (1991), and Saul (1995) for each of the main works I focus on. 2 I suspect that this is less true of films in the last decade since Jameson’s book appeared than in the decade or so before it. The nostalgic trend in films would seem to be on the wane, or transformed into something grittier, such as Curtis Hanson’s excellent 1997 crime drama L.A. Confidential (which is a period piece, but which it would be odd to describe as “nostalgic”). Having said this, Hollywood can still churn out the occasional historical blockbuster that trades heavily on nostalgia for a past age and its lost innocence: witness James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) or Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (2001).

Notes

285

3 This is a question that one must keep in mind when engaging the seductive critical power of Marx’s historical materialism. I will return to the question of cultural politics at the end of this chapter. Yet without the promise of the proletarian revolution, which Marx espoused but which twentieth-century “cultural” Marxists like Jameson shy away from, one is left to wonder what the point of Marxist cultural critique is, especially if it refuses to use moral language. At least the moral language of critique can encourage individuals to form subcultural communities that resist capitalist commodification, with or without the revolution. 4 Borgmann is much enamoured of methodological trinitarianism. The obvious lineage of this runs back through Hegel to Christian ontology. 5 This echoes Jacques Ellul’s ambivalent view of new technological progress. He argues that all technological progress has a price, including unforseen effects. Since the harmful effects of such progress are inseparable from the benefits of new technologies, this progress is never linear, but always involves moral ambivalence (1990: 39). Ellul is, admittedly, gloomier about the value of technology than is Borgmann, who is more pragmatic concerning its social utility. 6 As we shall see, John Ralston Saul centres his cultural critique on the idea that as citizens we have lost our consciousness of reality thanks to the perversion of language by ideology (mainly by use of propaganda, both of the political sort and in advertising). 7 Speaking methodologically, this is the notion that ideas, not material forces, are what shape human action, and not in the metaphysical sense of Berkeley’s esse est percipi. I’ve outlined what I mean by “methodological idealism” in my introduction. 8 Though one wonders how Douglas Coupland’s microserfs will be able to lead the revolt against hyperactivity in the information-processing industry they work in. 9 Interestingly enough, the Unabomber’s manifesto (which he forced the New York Times and Washington Post to publish in 1995 to prevent a continuation of his letter-bombing campaign) also makes a call to ecological awareness the central aspect of his ideology of change. He felt, in true Luddite fashion, that only wild nature was totally unpolluted by the industrial system. It is doubtful, however, that Borgmann would accept the Unabomber as an intellectual ally, despite the fact that they both lived in Montana. 10 This critique parallels Michael Sandel’s critique (1992) of Rawls’s unencumbered self and of neutralist liberalism in general; choice in and of itself is elevated to the highest social good under such a theoretical-political regime. 11 Saul would say that these political atomists are acting “unconsciously.” One could say that once political actors become aware of the duality of structure and ideal, they “wake up” or become conscious of their political responsibility and power. 12 Sadly, this is just as much the case of the corporations (i.e., departments) of which our universities are composed: the graduate student, sessional lecturer, or junior faculty member seeking tenure are all

286

13

14

15 16

17

18

19

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

forced to learn the value of courting the favours of those with the power to dispense them if they have any institutional phronesis at all. Whether or not this encourages a vigorous independence of mind I leave to the reader’s common sense. Saul seems to be entirely correct on this point (and on many others, I might add). If you are at all doubtful about this, keep this hypothesis in mind and watch any television newscast: other than a few “man in the street” sound bites, public debates are shown as taking place entirely between the representatives of organizations, usually large and powerful ones, with a touch of expertise from university professors or think-tank “theorists” (who are also themselves corporate representatives) sometimes added as an afterthought. As Saul hints, this is equally true in academic life as it is in the world of private enterprise. Each discipline has its ruling dogmas, its moral certainties, even if it tolerates small islands of difference in a sea of conformity. This is doubly sad in that, unlike private enterprise, which aims at profit for its owners or shareholders, the university supposedly aims at educating the young and the pursuit of knowledge, which by definition should sometimes place it in direct opposition to corporate interests. This leaves aside the obvious problem with all conformity of thought, as John Stuart Mill observed in On Liberty: without a spectrum of differing opinions and a vigorous culture of criticism, how can old ideas be tested, or new ones be heard? Technically speaking, Gibson is an American expatriate who has lived in Canada (Vancouver to be precise) since the 1970s. As I write this in the summer of 2001, President George W. Bush is proposing the opening of parts of the Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling in what is almost a parody of the frontier myth. Just when it looked as though all of American nature had been conquered, Bush has found one last vestige of it to be overcome, one last chance for heroism in the face of the Other. An experience I had in December 1999 convinced me of how true this was. I was on a train going from Ontario to Alberta. As we approached Winnipeg, Manitoba, at night, there was at first little to be seen other than miles and miles of barren, snow-covered fields. Then came a few glimmering lights off in the distance. Finally, the city engulfed us. The original conquest of these barren fields and the setting up of the “encampment” that later became Winnipeg must have taken the sort of stern effort and sacrifice that are largely foreign to modern North American city dwellers. Although in response to charges against him that he’s anti-sex or a puritan, Cronenberg has stated in interviews that he’s all in favour of the parasites in Shivers, and in general of a liberation of human beings from restraints on their sexuality. This is why all good social and cultural theorists need a lively sense of history to avoid the Fukuyama fallacy—the notion that since they cannot imagine a future that’s different from what currently exists, that future must not exist, and history has ended. As an example of the nat-

Notes

287

uralization of ideology as common sense or truth, we can look at the obvious case of the idolization of the market and the distrust of state intervention in the era of globalized capitalism that has taken root over the last decade or so. This structural ideal, like all others, will pass away with time. Those with any sense of history realize this. Yet it is sad to hear politicians and media pundits speak as though the ideology of the market is as natural as the changing of the seasons.

Bibliography

Abelson, Robert P. (1995). “The Secret Existence of Expressive Behavior.” Critical Review 9: 25-36. Allor, Martin (1987). “Projective Readings: Cultural Studies from Here.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 11, 1-2: 134-38. Ankersmit, F. R. (1988). Review of Jorn Rüsen’s “Gründzuge einer Historik II: Rekonstruction der Vergangenheit.” History and Theory 27: 81-94. ______ (1989). “Historiography and Postmodernism.” History and Theory 28: 137-53. Appignanesi, Richard, and Chris Garratt (1995). Postmodernism for Beginners. Cambridge: Icon Books. Ayer, A. J. (1982). Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. London: Phoenix. Baudrillard, Jean (1984). “The Precession of Simulacra.” In After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, 253-81. Ed. Brian Wallis. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art. ______ (1987). “Modernity.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 9, 3: 63-72. Beard, Charles (1959). “Written History as an Act of Faith.” In Meyerhoff, 140-51. ______ (1969). “The Case for Historical Relativism.” In Ideas of History, 159-76. Ed. Ronald N. Nash. New York: E. P. Dutton. Beard, William (1994). “The Canadianness of David Cronenberg.” Mosaic 27, 2: 113-33. Becker, Carl (1959). “What Are Historical Facts?” In Meyerhoff, 120-37. Becker, Howard S. (1973). Outsiders–Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press. Original edition 1963. Bell, Daniel (1976). The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic.

289

290

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann (1966). The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Anchor Books. Bizell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg (1990). The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Boston: St. Martin’s Press. Blair, Hugh (1824). Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. London: Baynes and Son. Bloom, Alan (1987). The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster. Blumer, Herbert (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press. Borgmann, Albert (1992). Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Bourdieu, Pierre (1986). “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, 241-58. Ed. John G. Richardson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ______ (1990). The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ______ (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Ed./Int. John B. Thompson. Trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ______ (1992). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brake, Mike (1980). The Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subcultures. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Burke, Kenneth (1969). A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press. ______ (1970). The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Butters, Steve (1976). “The Logic-of-Enquiry of Participant Observation.” In Hall and Jefferson, 253-73. Bynum, Carol Walker (1989). “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages.” In Fragments for a History of the Human Body, 161-219. Ed. Michel Feher. New York: Urzone. Campbell, George (1963). The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Ed. Lloyd Bitzer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Carr, E. H. (1964). What Is History? Harmondsworth: Penguin. Caskey, Noelle (1989). “Interpreting Anorexia Nervosa.” In The Female Body in Western Culture, 175-89. Ed. Susan R. Suleiman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cixous, Hélène (1990). “The Laugh of the Medusa.” In New French Feminisms, 245-67. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken. Clarke, John (1976a). “The Skinheads and the Magical Recovery of Community.” In Hall and Jefferson, 99-102. ______ (1976b). “Style.” In Hall and Jefferson. Clarke, John, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Roberts (1976). “Subcultures, Cultures and Class: A Theoretical Overview.” In Hall and Jefferson, 9-74.

Bibliography

291

Code, Lorraine (1989). “Collingwood’s Epistemological Individualism.” The Monist 72: 543-67. Cohen, Stanley (1987). Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Collingwood, R. G. (1924). Speculum Mentis. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ______ (1926). “Lectures on the Philosophy of History.” Unpublished paper. Bodleian Library, Oxford University. ______ (1928). “Outlines of a Philosophy of History.” Unpublished paper. Bodleian Library, Oxford University. ______ (1936). “Notes on the History of Historiography and Philosophy of History” Unpublished paper. Bodleian Library, Oxford University. ______ (1938). The Principles of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ______ (1939). An Autobiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ______ (1940). An Essay on Metaphysics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ______ (1971; orig.1942). The New Leviathan. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. ______ (1946). The Idea of History. Ed. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ______ (1965). Essays in the Philosophy of History. Ed./Intr. William Debbins. Austin: University of Texas Press. Collingwood’s early essays. Includes: (1965a; orig. 1922) “Are History and Science Different Kinds of Knowledge?” (1965b; orig. 1924) “The Nature and Aims of a Philosophy of History” (1965c; orig. 1927) “Oswald Spengler and the Theory of Historical Cycles” (1965d; orig. 1927) “The Theory of Historical Cycles” (1965e; orig. 1928) “The Limits of Historical Knowledge” (1965f; orig. 1929) “A Philosophy of Progress” (1965g; orig. 1930) “The Philosophy of History.” Corrigan, Paul, and Simon Frith (1976). “The Politics of Youth Culture.” In Hall and Jefferson, 231-39. Croce, Benedetto (1959). “History and Chronicle.” In Meyerhoff, 44-57. Davidson, Arnold I. (1987). “Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality.” Critical Inquiry 14: 16-48. Davidson, Donald (1968). “Actions, Reasons, and Causes.” In Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 44-58. Ed. May Brodbeck. New York: Macmillan. de Kerckhove, Derrick (1995). The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality. Toronto: Somerville. Derrida, Jacques (1972). Dissemination. Trans./Intr. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Includes: “Outwork” (1972a) and “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1972b). ______ (1978). Writing and Difference. Trans./Intr. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Includes “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1978a), “Freud and the Science of Writing” (1978b), “Metaphysics and Violence” (1978c), “Cogito and the History of Madness” (1978d). ______ (1982). “Différance.” In Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

292

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Donagan, Alan (1957). “The Verification of Historical Theses.” The Philosophical Quarterly 6: 193-208. ______ (1962). The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ______ (1967). “Robin George Collingwood.” The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, 140-44. Ed. Paul Edwards. New York: Macmillan. Dray, William (1957) “R. G. Collingwood and the Aquaintance Theory of Knowledge.” Revue internationale de philosphie 11: 420-32. ______ (1964). Philosophy of History. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. ______, ed. (1966). Philosophical Analysis and History. New York: Harper & Row. ______ (1978). “R. G. Collingwood et la connaissance historique.” Dialogue: The Canadian Philosophical Review 17: 659-82. ______ (1980). “R. G. Collingwood and the Understanding of Actions in History.” In his Perspectives on History, 2-26. London: Routledge. ______ (1989). “Collingwood’s Historical Individualism.” In his On History and Philosophers of History, 191-206. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Eagleton, Terry (1985). “Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism.” New Left Review 152: 60-73. Ellenberger, Henri (1970). The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York: Basic Books. Ellul, Jacques (1990). The Technological Bluff. Trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans. Faurschou, Gail (1987). “Fashion and the Cultural Logic of Postmodernity.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 11, 1-2: 68-84. Featherstone, Tony (1991). “The Body in Consumer Culture.” In The Body: Social Processes and Cultural Theory, 170-94. Ed. Mike Hepworth, Tony Featherstone, and Bryan S. Turner. London: Sage. Ferejohn, John, and Debra Satz (1995). “Unification, Universalism, and Rational Choice Theory.” Critical Review 9: 71-84. Foss, Sonia K., Karen Foss, and Robert Trapp (1985). Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Foucault, Michel (1973). Madness and Civilization. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books. ______ (1977). “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Language, CounterMemory, Practice, 139-64. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ______ (1979). Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. ______ (1987). “Questions of Method: An Interview with Michel Foucault.” In After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, 100-17. Eds. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy. Cambridge: MIT Press. ______ (1990). The Use of Pleasure. Vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. Fowler, Roger (1985). “Power.” In Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Vol. 4, 61-81. Ed. Teun A. van Dijk. London: Academic Press. Frank, Arthur W. (1990). “Bringing Bodies Back In: A Decade in Review.” Theory, Culture & Society 7: 131-62.

Bibliography

293

Freud, Sigmund (1938a). The Interpretation of Dreams. In The Basic Wrintings of Sigmund Freud, 181-549. Trans./Ed. A. A. Brill. New York: Modern Library. ______ (1938b). The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. In The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, 35-178. Trans./Ed. A. A. Brill. New York: Modern Library. ______ (1955). “Screen Memories.” In The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 3, 303-22. London: Hogarth Press. ______ (1961). Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton. ______ (1962). The Ego and the Id. Trans. Joan Riviere. London: Hogarth Press. ______ (1964). The Future of an Illusion. Trans. W. D. Robson-Scott. Rev. James Strachey. Garden City: Anchor Books. ______ (1969). An Outline of Psychoanalysis. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton. Friedman, Jeffrey (1995). “Economic Approaches to Politics.” Critical Review 9: 1-24. Frith, Simon (1984). The Sociology of Youth. Ormskirk: Causeway Books. Frye, Northrop (1971). The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi. Fukuyama, Francis (1989). “The End of History?” The National Interest, 16 (Summer): 3-19. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1976). Philosophical Hermeneutics. Trans. David E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gardiner, Patrick (1952). “The ‘Objects’ of Historical Knowledge.” Philosophy 27: 211-20. ______, ed. (1959). Theories of History. New York: Free Press. Gibson, William (1984). Neuromancer. New York: Berkeley. ______ (1986). Count Zero. New York: Arbor House. ______ (1988). Mona Lisa Overdrive. New York: Bantam. Giddens, Anthony (1979). Central Problems in Social Theory. London: Macmillan. ______ (1982). Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory. London: Macmillan. ______ (1986). “Action, Subjectivity, and the Constitution of Meaning.” Social Research 53: 529-45. Goffman, Erving (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. Golden, James L., and Edward P. J. Corbett (1990). The Rhetoric of Blair, Campbell, and Whately. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Goldstein, Leon J. (1970). “Collingwood’s Theory of Historical Knowing.” History and Theory 9: 3-36. ______ (1972). “Collingwood on the Constitution of the Historical Past.” In Critical Essays on the Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, 241-67. Ed. Michael Krausz. Grant, George (1969). Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America. Toronto: Anansi.

294

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Green, Donald P., and Ian Shapiro (1995). “Pathologies Revisited: Reflections on Our Critics.” Critical Review 9: 235-76. Grossberg, Lawrence (1987). “The Politics of Music.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 11, 1-2: 144-51. Habermas, Jürgen (1981). “Modernity versus Postmodernity.” New German Critique 22: 3-14. ______ (1986). “The Genealogical Writing of History: On Some Aporias in Foucault’s Theory of Power.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 10, 1-2: 1-9. Hall, Lesley A. (1992). “Forbidden by God, Despised by Man: Masturbation, Medical Warnings, Moral Panic, and Manhood in Great Britain, 1850–1950.” In Forbidden History, 293-315. Ed. J. C. Fout. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hall, Stuart and Tony Jefferson (1976). “Introduction.” In their Resistance through Rituals, 5-7. ______, eds. (1976). Resistance through Rituals. London: Hutchinson. Harkness, John (1983). The Word, the Flesh, and the Films of David Cronenberg.” Cinema Canada 97: 23-25. Harris, R. W. (1952). “Collingwood’s Idea of History.” History 37. Hayek, F. A. (1979). The Counter-Revolution of Science. Studies on the Abuse of Reason. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Hebdige, Dick (1976). “The Meaning of Mod.” In Hall and Jefferson, 8796. ______ (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Hempel, Carl G. (1959). “The Function of General Laws in History.” In Gardiner, 344-56. Henry, Tricia (1989). Break all the Rules! Punk Music and the Making of a Style. Ann Arbor: UMI Research. Hoesterey, Ingeborg (1991). “Introduction: Postmodernism as a Discursive Event.” In Zeitgeist in Babel: The Postmodern Controversy, ix-xv. Ed. I. Hoesterey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hollinger, Veronica (1990). “Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism.” Mosaic 23, 2: 29-44. Hoy, David (1985). “Jacques Derrida.” In The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, 43-64. Ed. Quentin Skinner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hume, David (1888). A Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ______ (1966). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ______ (1966). An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ______ (1948). Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Ed. Henry D. Aiken. New York: Hafner. ______ (1987). Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Ed. Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics. Husserl, Edmund (1960). Cartesian Meditations. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Bibliography

295

Hutcheon, Linda (1989). The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Hutton, Patrick H. (1988). “Foucault, Freud, and the Technologies of the Self.” In Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, 12144. Ed. Luther H. Martin. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. James, William (1904). Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1. New York: Henry Holt. Jameson, Frederic (1984). “Foreword” to Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. ______ (1991). Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Jefferson, Tony (1976). “Cultural Responses of the Teds: The Defence of Space and Status.” In Hall and Jefferson, 81-86. Jencks, Charles (1987). Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture. New York: Rizzoli. Kennedy, George A. (1980). Classical Rhetoric and the Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Kingwell, Mark (1996). Dreams of Millennium: Report from a Culture on the Brink. Toronto: Viking. Koslowski, Peter (1991). “The (De-)Construction Sites of the Postmodern.” In Zeitgeist in Babel: The Postmodern Controversy, 142-54. Ed. I. Hoesterey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Krausz, Michael, ed. (1972). Critical Essays on the Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kroker, Arthur (1984). Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/ McLuhan/Grant. Montreal: New World Perspectives. Kroker, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (1987). “Body Digest: Theses on the Disappearing Body in the Hyper-Modern Condition.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 11: i-xvi. Kuhn, Thomas S. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kupsit, Donald (1990). “The Contradictory Character of Postmodernism.” Postmodernism–Philosophy and the Arts, 53-68. Ed. Hugh J. Silverman. London: Routledge. Laqueur, Thomas (1990). Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lasch, Christopher (1979). The Culture of Narcissism. New York: Warner. ______ (1984). The Minimal Self. New York: W. W. Norton. Lawson, John (1972). Lectures Concerning Oratory. Ed. E. Neal Claussen and Karl R. Wallace. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1969). The Raw and the Cooked. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row. ______ (1978). Myth and Meaning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Levin, Charles (1986). “Richard Rorty and Postmodernity: Language as the Mirror of Philosophy.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 10: 20-34.

296

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Levin, Kim (1988). “Farewell to Modernism.” In Beyond Modernism: Essays on Art from the 70’s and 80’s, 1-9. Ed. Kim Levin. New York: Harper and Row. Lipovestsky, Gilles (1983). L’ère du vide: Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain. Paris: Gallimard. Longxi, Zhang (1985). “The Tao and the Logos: Notes on Derrida’s Critique of Logocentrism.” Critical Inquiry 11 (March): 385-98. Lyotard, Jean-François (1979). La condition postmoderne. Paris: Minuit. ______ (1984). “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” Trans. Régis Durand. In Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 71-82. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. MacHardy, Karin (1993). “Discourse of Division: History, Literature, and the Struggle over Distinction.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichte. MacIntyre, Alasdair (1984). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Mandlebaum, Maurice (1947). Book Review of The Idea of History. The Journal of Philosophy 44: 184-91. Mann, Doug (1993). “Collingwood’s Hermeneutic of Acts and Events in Historical Explanation.” Eidos 11: 19-43. ______. “The Body as an ‘Object’ of Historical Knowledge,” Dialogue (Canadian Philosophical Review) 35: 753-76. ______ (1998). “Reconstructing the Past, A Structural Idealist Approach,” Clio 27, 2 (Winter): 221-49. Mannheim, Karl (1936). Ideology and Utopia. Trans. L. Wirth and E. Shils. New York: Harvest. Marcuse, Herbert (1955). Eros and Civilization. New York: Vintage Books. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels (1978). The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd Ed. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton. Matza, D., and Sykes, G. M. (1961). “Juvenile Delinquency and Subterranean Values.” The American Sociological Review 26: 712-19. McLuhan, Marshall (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Toronto: Signet Books. McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore (1967). The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Toronto: Bantam Books. McRobbie, Angela, and Jenny Garber (1976). “Girls and Subcultures: An Exploration.” In Hall and Jefferson, 209-22. Merquior, J. G. (1985). Foucault. London: Fontana. Meyerhoff, Hans, ed. (1959). The Philosophy of History in Our Time. Garden City: Anchor Books. Mink, Louis O. (1969). Mind, History, and Dialectic: The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ______ (1972). “Collingwood’s Historicism: A Dialectic of Process.” In Krausz, 154-78. ______ (1987). “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument.” In his Historical Understanding, 182-203. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mitchinson, Wendy (1991). The Nature of Their Bodies: Women and Their Doctors in Victorian Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Bibliography

297

Modood, Tariq (1989). “The Later Collingwood’s Alleged Historicism and Relativism.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 27: 101-25. Moi, Toril (1985). Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Routledge. Mulvey, Laura (1991). “A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman.” NLR 188 (July/August): 136-50. Murdock, Graham, and Robin McCron (1976). “Consciousness of Class and Consciousness of Generation.” In Hall and Jefferson, 192-207. Nagel, Thomas (1986). The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press. Nehamas, Alexander (1985). Life as Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Nielsen, Margit Hurup (1981). “Re-enactment and Reconstruction in Collingwood’s Philosophy of History.” History and Theory 20: 1-31. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1968; orig. 1872). The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche. New York: Modern Library. ______ (1968; orig. 1873). “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense.” Trans. Walter Kaufmann. In The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking Press. ______ (1968; orig. 1883). Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. In The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking Press. ______ (1968; orig. 1886). Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche. New York: Modern Library. ______ (1968; orig. 1887). On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche. New York: Modern Library. ______ (1968; orig. 1889). Twilight of the Idols. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. In The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking Press. ______ (1968; orig. 1895). The Antichrist. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. In The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking Press. ______ (1968; orig. 1905). Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche. New York: Modern Library. Novitz, David (1986). “The Rage for Deconstruction.” The Monist 69: 39-55. Paglia, Camille (1992). Sex, Art, and American Culture. New York: Vintage Books. Parkin, Frank (1982). Max Weber. Chichester: Ellis Horwood. Parsons, Talcott (1947). “Introduction” to Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: Free Press. Pearson, Geoffrey, and John Twohig (1976). “Ethnography through the Looking Glass: The Case of Howard Becker.” In Hall and Jefferson, 119-25. Perelman, Chaim, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969). The New Rhetoric: A Treatise in Argumentation. Trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Philp, Mark (1985). “Michel Foucault.” In The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, 67-81. Ed. Quentin Skinner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Popkin, Richard (1980). The High Road to Pyrrhonism. San Diego: Austin Hill Press.

298

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Potter, Jonathan, and Margaret Wetherell (1987). Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. Beverley Hills: Sage. Powell, Rachel, and John Clarke (1976). “A Note on Marginality.” Hall and Jefferson, 223-29. Ricoeur, Paul (1992). Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ringer, Fritz K. (1989). “Causal Analysis in Historical Reasoning.” History and Theory 28: 154-72. Roberts, Brian (1976). “Naturalistic Research into Subcultures and Deviance.” In Hall and Jefferson, 243-52. Rorty, Richard (1989). Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ______ (1991). “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity.” In Zeitgeist in Babel: The Postmodern Controversy, 84-97. Ed. I. Hoesterey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rosenau, Pauline Marie (1992). Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rotenstreich, Nathan (1957). “Historicism and Philosophy: Reflections on R. G. Collingwood.” Revue internationale de philosophie 11: 401-19. ______ (1972). “Metaphysics and Historicism.” In Krausz, 179-200. Ryle, Gilbert (1949). The Concept of Mind. New York: Barnes & Noble. Sandel, Michael (1992). “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self.” In Communitarianism and Individualism, 12-28. Eds. Shlomo Avineri and Avner de-Shalit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1963). Search for a Method. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Vintage Books. ______ (1991). Critique of Dialectical Reason.Volume I: Theory of Practical Ensembles. Trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith; Ed. Jonathan Rée. London: Verso. Saul, John Ralston (1995). The Unconscious Civilization. Concord, ON: Anansi. 1995 Massey Lectures. Sawchuk, Kim (1987). “A Tale of Inscription/Fashion Statements.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 11, 1-2: 50-67. Scott, Charles E. (1990). “Postmodern Language.” Postmodernism– Philosophy and the Arts, 33-52. Ed. Hugh J. Silverman. London: Routledge. Scott, Marvin B., and Stanford M. Lyman (1968). “Accounts.” American Sociological Review 33: 46-62. Sennett, Richard (1977). The Fall of Public Man. New York: Knopf. Showalter, Elaine (1990). Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. New York: Viking. Silverman, Hugh J. (1990). “Introduction: The Philosophy of Postmodernism.” Postmodernism–Philosophy and the Arts, 1-9. Ed. Hugh J. Silverman. London: Routledge. Sim, Stuart (1986). “‘Not Quite Philosophy’: The Situation of Deconstruction.” Critical Quarterly 28, 4 (Winter): 114-22. Skinner, Quentin, ed. (1990). The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bibliography

299

Sloterdijk, Peter (1984). “Cynicism–The Twilight of False Consciousness.” New German Critique 33: 190-206. Smith, Adam (1907; orig. 1759). The Theory of Moral Sentiments. London: George Belland Sons. Sosa, Ernest (1987). “Serious Philosophy and Freedom of Spirit.” The Journal of Philosophy 84: 707-26. Stern, Fritz, ed. (1973). The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present. New York: Vintage Books. Strauss, Leo (1952). “On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History.” The Review of Metaphysics 5: 559-86. Synott, Anthony (1989). “Truth and Goodness, Mirrors and Masks–Part 1: A Sociology of Beauty and the Face.” British Journal of Sociology 40, 4: 604-36. Taylor, Charles (1987). “Overcoming Epistemology.” In After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, 464-88. Eds. K. Baynes, J. Bohman, and T. McCarthy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ______ (1991). The Malaise of Modernity. Concord, ON: Anansi. ______ (1992). “Atomism.” In Communitarianism and Individualism, 2950. Eds. Shlomo Avineri and Avner de-Shalit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Michael (1995). “Battering RAMs.” Critical Review 9: 223-34. Thagard, Paul (1994). “Mind, Society, and the Growth of Knowledge.” Philosophy of Science 61: 629-45. Tiefer, Leonore (1987). “In Pursuit of the Perfect Penis: The Medicalization of Male Sexuality.” In Changing Men, 165-84. Ed. Michael S. Kimmel. Newbury Park: Sage. Tomlin, E. W. F. (1961). R. G. Collingwood. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Toulmin, Stephen (1972). “Conceptual Change and the Problem of Relativity.” In Krausz, 201-21. Trevelyan, G. M. (1930). “Clio, A Muse.” In Clio, A Muse and Other Essays, 140-76. 2nd ed. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Turner, Bryan (1992). Regulating Bodies. London: Routledge. Unabomber (aka “FC”). Industrial Society and its Future. Retrieved off the Internet, September 1995 (published in the Washington Post, 19 September 1995). van der Dussen, W. J. (1981). History as Science: The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ______ (1991). “The Historian and His Evidence.” In Objectivity, Method and Point of View: Essays in the Philosophy of History, 154-96. Ed. W. J. van der Dussen and Lionel Rubinoff. Leiden: E. J. Brill. van Dijk, Tuen A. (1993). “Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis.” Discourse and Society 4/2: 249-83. Vattimo, Gianni (1991). “The End of (Hi)story.” In Zeitgeist in Babel: The Postmodern Controversy, 132-41. Ed. I. Hoesterey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Walsh, W. H. (1967). Philosophy of History: An Introduction. New York: Harper & Row.

300

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

Weber, Max (1978). Economy and Society. Ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich. Vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press. ______ (1958). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott Parsons. Foreword R. H. Tawney. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. ______ (1946). From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. White, Hayden (1973). Metahistory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ______ (1987). “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact.” In The Content of the Form, 41-61. Ed. Hayden White. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Williams, Raymond (1963). Culture and Society 1780–1950. Penguin: Harmondsworth. Winch, Peter (1958). The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1974). Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wurzer, Wilhelm S. (1988). “Postmodernism’s Short Letter, Philosophy’s Long Farewell...” In Postmodernism and Continental Philosophy, 24349. Ed. Hugh J. Silverman and Donn Welton. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Index

capitalism, 188; desert of the real, 185, 237; Disneyland, 187; God, 186-87; hyperreality, 185, 187-89, 282n; idealism, 186-87; image culture, 185; orders of simulacra, 185-86, 189, 237; phases of the image, 185-86; simulacra and simulations, 184-87, 263; virtual reality, 186 beats, 214 Becker, Howard: on deviance, 8286; marijuana users, 83-84; moral enterprise; 82-84, rule creators and breakers, 82 Benjamin, Walter, 194 Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann on the social construction of reality, 64-65; recipes, 65 Berkeley, George, 1, 3, 187, 285n Berlin in the 1920s, 210-11 binary pairs, 7, 62, 179-80, 281n Blumer, Herbert, 9, 58, 63, 273n; social objects, 63 body and embodiment, 16, 26-27, 36, 40, 46, 64, 67, 111-12, 11416, 120, 152, 199-221, 261, 277n. Also see body images, Foucault

academia, 96, 160-62, 167-68, 179, 246-47, 285-86n advertising, 201, 206-209, 211, 213, 216, 245, 284n agency, 1, 8, 9, 11, 56, 59, 96 aliens, 41 America, 136, 213-14, 217, 252-54; frontier myth, 252, 254; political ideals, 253. Also see Jameson, Lasch analytic philosophy, 37, 278n, 280n ancient monuments, 4, 6, 10 animals, 22, 27, 39, 110-11, 12728, 152 Ankersmit, F. R., 127 appetite, 30, 110, archaeology, 36, 49, 61, 108, 121, 129, 149, 206 authenticity, 136, 186, 191, 194, 196, 226, 262. Also see Taylor Ayer, A. J., 270n Bacon, Francis, 134 Barthes, Roland, 7, 90, 276n Baudrillard, Jean, 134, 160, 165-66, 184-89, 191, 237, 263, 281-82n; Borges’ map, 185; capital and

301

302 body images, 78, 199-211; counterimages, 202, 206, 210-11, 21618 Borgmann, Albert 134, 168-69, 189-90, 192, 235-40, 243, 263, 279n, 282-83n, 285n; Columbus, 235; commodities and consumerism, 190, 237-39, 279n; communal celebration, 238-40; Copernicus, 235; hyperactivity, 236-37, 263; hyperintelligence, 236, 28283n; hypermodernism, 236-39; hyperreality, 236-37, 263; hyperreal glamour, 189-90; Luther, 235; modernism, 238; postmodern culture, 235; postmodern realism, 236, 239; sullenness, 236; technology, 236, 238, 240; work, 238-39 Bourdieu, Pierre, 39-40, 45-46, 7173, 220, 271n, 273-75n; habitus, 45, 71-72; doxa, 45, 72-73; orthodoxy and heterodoxy, 7273 Brecht and Weill, 211 Buddha, 153, 219, 270n, 279n Burke, Kenneth, 38-39, 45; pentad, 39 Canadian school of cultural critique, 250-59; CBC, 254; cities, 253; communications, 255-56; CPR, 254; garrison mentality, 252-53; nature/wilderness, 25153, 259-60; political ideals, 253; protestant settlers, 253-54; technology, 251, 254-60 capital, 13, 17, 46, 96, 149-50,188, 248, 264 capitalism, 86, 90-91, 93, 131-32, 134, 168, 184, 188, 201, 203, 205, 207-208, 213, 220, 23035, 260, 281n, 283n; Also see Borgmann, Jameson, Lasch, Saul Carr, E. H. on historical facts and Collingwood, 111, 121-22

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

causes and causality, 32, 51, 95-96, 123. Also see Collingwood, Nietzsche cellphones, 261n civil rights movement, 214 Citizen Kane (1941), 274n city life, 137, 157, 190, 240 Clarke, John, 88, 219 The Clash, 202 class, 9, 14, 16, 17, 71, 73, 74, 8687, 93, 250 Code, Lorraine on Collingwood, 112 cognitive science, 25 Cohen, Phil, 87 Cohen, Stan on folk devils and moral panics, 82-86, 92, 94, 218; disaster model of deviance amplification, 82-83; Cohen’s critique of New Subcultural Theory, 91-93 Collingwood, R. G., 3-6, 11, 24, 2728, 30, 32-36, 42, 47, 70, 99130, 264, 276n; agency, 109, 111-12, 118, 123; a priori imagination, 103-104, 106, 113, 117, 124, 276n; art and religion, 129, 278n; Baconian methodological interpretation, 105106; Baconianism, 103-106; causes and causality, 107, 118, 123; corporate mind, 111; detective work, 103, 121; dictums of history, 4, 6, 100, 109, 116, 119, 124, 126, 264; evidence, 4, 6, 100, 103-106, 108, 113, 129; facts and emplotment, 123-25; history as drama, 123; ideality of history, 101, 276n; inside/outside distinction, 101, 116; intuitionist interpretation, 102-103; mass phenomena vs. methodological individualism, 107, 111, 117, 119; meaning, 121-25; mind and thought, 27-28, 30, 33, 35, 47, 110, 113, 119, 129, 277n; natural events, 107-108, 277n; natural science, 101, 107;

Index objectivity, 126-30; presuppositions, 113, 117; problems with intuitionist interpretation, 106107 ff; psychology, 107, 110-11, 115; purposes, 106-107, 110, 112; rationality, 34, 102, 10610, 112, 118; re-enactment thesis, 99-117, 125, 276n; relativism, 112-13, 127, 130; Roman Britain, 100-101, 105, 108, 111; scale of forms of knowledge, 35, 47, 129; selfknowledge, 121; Spengler, 101; transcendental deduction interpretation, 104-105; truth, 107, 113, 126-30; unconscious, 110, 112, 114-15, 122, 123; unintended consequences, 107, 111-12, 124 Columbus, Christopher, 134, 235 communications technology, 165, 200, 206-208, 215. Also see Canadian School computers, 185, 189, 191, 207, 215, 237, 256, 261, 282-83n Condorcet, Marquis de, 53 conflict and consensus, 9, 12, 270 consciousness, 13, 14, 25, 27, 56, consumers and consumerism, 137, 150-51, 159-60, 165, 168-69, 187-89, 192-93, 195-96, 199208, 211-13, 215, 217, 219-21, 224-30, 235, 237, 260, 262, 270, 281n, 284n; alienation from, 208 counterculture, 214-15, 217 Coupland, Douglas, 285n Copernicus, Nicolas, 134, 156, 235 corporations, 137 corporatism, 44-45 cosmetics, 205, 215, 283n critical discourse analysis, 44-45, 249-50 critical thinking, 269n Critical theory AKA the Frankfurt School, 161, 229 Croce, Benedetto on chronicle, 28, 116

303 Cronenberg, David, 191, 251, 25759; Crash (1996), 259; nature, 257, 259; rationality, 257; repression, 257-59; Sex, 257, 259, 286n; Shivers (1975), 257, 286n; summary of his films, 258; technology, 257, 259; unintended consequences, 258 Cultural Critique: See Chapter 8 cultural studies, 191 culture defined, 223 cyberspace, 256 Dada, 209, 219 Danby, Ken, 278n dance, 36 Dali, Salvador, 150-51 democracy, 132, 134, 143, 280n; Also see Saul depression, 211 Derrida, Jacques, 90, 177-81, 183; deconstruction, 179-80; différance, 178-79; logocentrism, 177-78; metaphysics of presence, 177-78, 180-81; pharmakon, 178; play, 180-81; structuralism, 181; texts, 17780; Theuth, 181; unconscious, 177-78 Descartes and dualism, 34-35, 114, 134, 137, 208, 217 de Saussure, Ferdinand, and semiology, 7 Deviance: See Chapter 3 digital narcissism, 282-83n disenchantment, 192-97 Donagan, Alan on Collingwood, 105 Dray, William on Collingwood, 105, 108 Durkheim, Emile, 270 duty, 32, 42 Eagleton, Terry, 132-33, 280n Eastwood, Clint, 281n Eaton Centre, 190, 231 economic life, 15, 53, 59, 67-69, 7778, 132, 259-60

304 Economic Structures: See Borgmann, Jameson, Lasch, Marx egoism and selfishness, 23, 53, Ellul, Jacques on technological progress, 285n end of history, 165, 280-81n enlightenment reason, 157, 161, 188 equilibrium, 248, 266 everyday life, 65, 238, 262 fashion, 205, 207, 209, 217 Featherstone, Tony, 201 feminism, 205, 212, 283n feminist standpoint theory, 112 Ferguson, Adam, 111 Feyerabend, Paul, 120 film, 180, 207, 209-14, 274n, 28284n Foucault, Michel, 64, 115-17, 120, 162, 169-177, 203-204, 220, 281n; archaeology, 175; body, 120, 170, 172-74, 203-204; Christianity, 176; genealogy, 120, 172-73, 175-76, 203; madness, 171-72; panopticon, 17374; power/knowledge, 113, 16970, 175, 203-204, 220, 281n; punishment, 173-75; sex, 173, 175-77; truth, 170, 176 Freud, Sigmund and psychoanalysis, 30-31, 115, 122, 135, 14655, 172, 175, 224; civilization, 151-55; death instinct, 146, 151, 154; dreams, 122, 14650; ego, 30, 146; eros (sex instinct), 146-47, 151-52, 154; id, 146-48; infantile sexuality, 149, 151; intoxicants, 153; jokes and slips, 122, 148; libido, 147, 151-52; mystic writing pad, 177; oedipus complex, 153; rationality, 14748, 150, 153-54; religion, 15354; repression, 146-47, 151, 154; sublimations, 153; suffering, 153; superego, 31, 146, 148, 152; talking cure, 150;

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

unconscious in general, 14650 Friedman, Jeffrey, 67-68 Frye, Northrop, 252 Fukuyama, Francis 280-81n, 286n fundamentalism, 279n Gadamer, Hans Georg, 37 gadfly, 264 Galileo, 262 games, 40-41, 127 Gardiner, Patrick on Collingwood, 102 Geisteswissenschaft, 102 Gibbon, Edward, 128 Gibson, William and cyberpunk, 251, 256 Giddens, Anthony and structuration theory, 2, 41, 47, 55-56, 59, 65-66, 73-74, 119, 120, 123, 271-72n; duality of structure, 73-74, 120, 123, 271n; discursive and practical consciousness, 119; virtuality of structure, 120 globalization and global capitalism, 196, 231, 253, 256, 262, 287n Goldstein, Leon on Collingwood, 105 Goffman, Erving on fronts and performances, 9, 42-43, 19394, 220, 227, 274n; bureaucratization of spirit, 75, 193; dramaturgical self, 220 Gramsci, Antonio on cultural hegemony, 86-87, 90, 276n Grant, George, 253-54 Great War, 209-10 Grosz, George, 211 Hall, Stuart, 77, 86, 204 Hebdige, Dick, 77, 86, 88-91, 202, 218 Hegel, G. W. F., 1, 2, 6, 11, 53 hegemony, 44-45, 50, 75, 91, 202, 249. Also see Gramsci Heidegger and the Nazis, 279n hierarchy, 26, 39-40, 45, 46

305

Index hippies, 214-15, 218-19 historical event defined, 125 historicism and philosophy, 4, 155 Historiography and the Philosophy of History: See Chapter 4 Hollywood, 207, 212-13, 232, 282n Hume, David, 6, 21-24, 33, 78-79, 115, 130, 139-41, 166, 199, 244, 266; occult qualities, 79; poets, 130; self, 166 Hutcheon, Linda, 161, 167, 18687, 189, 280n idealism, general, 1, 2, idealism, historical/teleological, 6, 11, 265 idealism, metaphysical, 1-3, 5, 6 idealism, methodological, 3, 5, 6, 11, 116 ideology, 13-15, 63, 68-69, 75, 156, 163. Also see Marx, Saul individualism, 263. Also see Borgmann, Lasch, Saul, Taylor information economy, 184, 189 Innis, Harold, 250, 255 intellectual action, 33-36, 115 Internet, 191, 196, 207, 256, 261 intentions and intentionality, 3, 4, 25, 33, 49, 50, 54-64, 67, 79, 85, 91, 93-96, 112, 122, 131, 204, 254, 265, 272n, 274n. Also see Collingwood, Nietzsche interests, 13, 15, 17 Jameson, Frederic, 162, 167, 190, 230-35, 265, 280-281n, 284n; American empire, 233; architecture, 232; commodification of art and culture, 231-33, 235; Lasch, 234-35; Marxism, 233-35; nature, 231, 233, 281n; nostalgia films, 232; stages of capitalism, 230-31; technology, 231; van Gogh, 231; Warhol, 231, 280n jazz, 210 Jefferson, Tony, 86, 88, 91, 202 Jencks, Charles, 280n

Kant, Immanuel, 144-45 Kierkegaard, Soren, 266 Kroker, Arthur, 250 Kuhn, Thomas, 278n L. A. Confidential (1997), 284n labelling theory and deviance, 8186, 93 Lacan, Jacques, 163 language as symbolic action, 2426, 36-41, 46 Lasch, Christopher, 65, 160, 165-66, 195-96, 208, 211, 215-16, 220, 224-30, 234, 238, 262; alienated consumers, 227; bureaucracy, 229; capitalism, 225-26, 22829; commodities, 226, 228; corporate hegemony, 228-29; de Sade, 226; economic man, 225; family, 226; liberalism, 224; local action, 229; narcissism, 65, 165-66, 195-96, 211, 215, 220, 224-25, 228, 230, 234-35, 262; propaganda of commodities, 227; sex, 195, 226, 228; sports, 227; superego, 226, 228; theatre of everyday life, 227; therapeutic culture, 164, 22425, 228; universities, 228 Lefebvre, Henri, 202 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 7, 76, 181 Liquid Body: See Chapter 7 Locke, John, 134 logic, 28, 37, Lucifer, Prince of Darkness, 145 Luther, Martin, 134 Lyotard, J. F., 163-65, 181-84, 281n; art, 184; capital, 184; language games, 182; metanarratives, 163; narrative, 182; parology, 183; performativity, 182-83; postmodern condition, 181-84; scientific discourse, 182; traditional discourse, 182; truth, 182; university, 183 MacIntyre, Alisdair, 223-24, 27172n

306 magazines, 206, 211 Mandel, Ernst, 230-31 Mandelbaum, Maurice on Collingwood, 111 Mannheim, Karl on the sociology of knowledge, 69, 155-57 Marinetti and futurism, 278n Marx, Karl and historical materialism, 1-3, 7, 9, 13-17, 46, 5354, 79, 90, 92, 95, 135, 140, 148, 174, 177, 189, 199, 226, 229, 250, 270n, 275n, 285n; alienation, 174; class struggle, 53; false consciousness, 14, 62, 135; ideology, 140, 270. Also see Jameson mass media, 16, 45, 82, 96, 160-61, 164, 193, 195, 282n materialism (general), 1-2, 95, 199. Also see Marx The Matrix (1999), 284n McLuhan, Marshall, 191, 251, 255-56, 261; central nervous system, 191, 255; media, 191, 255-56 meaning, social, 7, 49-50, 57-58, 60-69, 79-80, 85, 90, 93-95, 131, 135, 203-206, 274n metaphysics, 1, 21, 117-18, 179-81, 183. Also see Derrida Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 278n Mill, John Stuart, 144-45, 286n Mills, C. Wright, 10 Mink, Louis on Collingwood, 108109, 117-18, 128-29 mirroring the self, 65, 69 modernism, 132-33, 135, 279n; central assumptions, 135. Also see Borgmann mods, 82, 84-86, 88-89, 94, 218 moods, 29, 75 Motown, 215 Mulvey, Laura, 205, 213 Murrow, Edward R., 213 narcissism, 195-96, 214-15, 220-21. Also see Lasch

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

narrative, 36, 50-51, 64, 66, 75, 99, 103, 106, 123-25, 128, 130, 278n Naturwissenschaften, 13 Nazism, 211 New Subcultural Theory AKA the Birmingham School, 86-93; bricolage, 89; commodities and consumption, 87-90; decoding styles, 90-91; magical resolutions, 87-88; rituals, 87; style, 86-90, 94; youth cultures, 86-88 New Women, 210 newspapers, 206, 209 Nielsen, Margit on Collingwood, 105-106, 277n Nietzsche, Friedrich, 138-46, 148, 169, 180; ascetic priests, 143; bad conscience and guilt, 14041, 143; blonde beasts, 143; causality, 139-40; Christianity, 143-45; drives and instincts, 141; genealogy of morals, 14046; good and evil, 141-42, 14445; intentionality, 140; master and slave moralities, 142-44; Nazis, 139; philosophy as masks, 139; religion, 139, 140, 143; repression, 140, 143; ressentiment, 142-43, 145; truth, 138-39; unconscious mind, 140; will to power, 14142, 144 nuclear family, 213-14 objectivity as a regulative ideal, 126-30 outsiders, 38, 76, 82, 85 Paglia, Camille, 180, 204 Parmenides, 281n Parsons, Talcott and functionalism, 10, 50, 58, 70, 175 passions, 22-23, 27, 29-31, 33, 37, 52, 58, 112, 114-16 patriarchy, 205, 283n perfection, 39, 43

Index phenomenological moment, 56, 61, 65, 76, 79, 80, 95, 266 Pickford, Mary, 283n poets and poetry, 130, 138 political movements, 136 popular music, 195, 215, 219 Portlandia, 232 postmodernism, 17, 66, 127, 129-30, 131-33, 159-97, 230-40, 263-64, 280-82n; architecture, 158, 161, 196, 232, 280n; body, 163; culture, 165-66, 168, 180-81, 263-64; deconstruction, 129, 162, 179-80; filmic self, 166; hyperreality, 160, 179, 189-92, 282n; images and history, 16466; intertextuality, 162, 165, 167, 179; parody, 167; poststructuralism, 67, 162, 176, 249-50, 280n; rational critique, 166-67; representation, 167; simulacrum, 160, 163, 165, 180; texts, 66, 127, 162-64; truth, 163-64, 167, 176, 280n. Also see Baudrillard poverty, 74-75 power, 26, 44, 46, 74, 75, 85-87, 96, 203-206, 276n practical consciousness, 29, 41, 43, 60, 66, 73, 122 prejudice/prejudgment, 37-38 Pre-Raphaelites, 209-10 presuppositions, 59, 68, 112, 204. Also see Collingwood prohibition, 210 progress, 128 property, 8, 17, 74, 120, 151, 275n punks, 86, 89-92, 219 purposes, 27, 31-33, 37, 39, 51, 114, 116. Also see Collingwood radio, 206, 209-11 Rand, Ayn, 53 rap, 217 rationality, general, 34, 51-55, 5758, 60-62, 67-69, 76-77, 115, 120, 131-37, 139, 150, 160, 178, 197, 244, 266, 273n; as cultural

307 meta-ideal, 131-32, 137, 150, 153, 157, 160, 168-69, 197; instrumental rationality (AKA rational choice theory), 52-55, 57-58, 60-61, 67-69, 76, 132, 134, 142, 150, 158, 241, 260, 262; systemic rationality, 5152, 54-55, 57, 77; teleological rationality, 53-54, 67, 77. Also see Collingwood, Freud, Taylor reasons, 32, 51, 55, 58, 62 reconstruction, 36; reconstruction thesis, 125-26 relativism, 67-68, 127, 130, 156, 160 religion, 134-36, 160. See also Nietzsche, Freud Renoir, Auguste, 210 repression, 30, 33. Also see Nietzsche, Freud respect, 60-61 rhetoric, 38-39, 45 Ricoeur, Paul, 32-33, 40, 44 rockers, 82, 84, 94, 218 rock and roll, 214-15, 219 Romanticism, 239, 278-79n, 281n Rorty, Richard, 161, 163-64, 277n Rosenau, Pauline, 66, 127, 165, 196 Rüsen, Jörn, 121 Ryle, Gilbert, 27, 28, 33, 41, 45 Sandel, Michael, 285n Sartre, Jean-Paul, 35, 252, 275n Saul, John Ralston, 44, 158, 160, 228, 243-49, 284-86n; computers, 246; conformity, 244, 248; consciousness, 248; corporatism, 243-56, 258; courtiers, 244; dialects, 245-46; economic determinism, 249; globalization, 247-48; humanism, 246; ideology, 244, 259; individualism, 248; Industrial Revolution, 247; knowledge, 245; market, 244, 247; propaganda, 245-46, 284n; public good, 244; rationality, 244; rhetoric, 245; Socrates, 247-

308 48; specialists, 244; technology, 247-48; The Triumph of the Will (1935), 245, 284n; university, 246 Sawchuk, Kim, 205 science and technology, 134, 136, 153, 164, 260-62. Also see Borgmann, Canadian School, Cronenberg, Saul Scott and Lyman on accounts, 57 Scottish Enlightenment on property, 74; on morals, 266 Search for Depth Meaning, Its Rise and Fall: See Chapters 5 and 6 Second World War, 211 sex, 16, 27, 31, 40, 110, 114, 120-21, 201, 203-205, 208, 210, 220, 277n. Also see Freud, Foucault The Sex Pistols, 221, 279n Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 10, 138 shopping malls, 212-13 Showalter, Elaine, 210 skinheads, 86, 88-89, 218-19 Sloterdijk, Peter on cynical self, 194-95 Smith, Adam, 23, 24, 111, 244 Social Consciousness: See Chapter 1 social contract, 43 Social Explanation: See Chapter 2 social roles, 10, 12, 26, 42-43, 46, 75 social rules, 40-45, 50, 52, 75, 11921, 123, 272 social structure, 1, 2, 4-7, 9, 11, 12, 16, 45-46, 50, 59, 67, 69-80, 85-86, 93-96, 117-18, 121, 131, 137, 158, 200, 206, 265, 269, 273n, 275n social theory, point of, 5 Sociology of Knowledge: See Chapters 5 and 6 Sosa, Ernst, 164 space and time, 56, 64, 67, 74 stock market crash of 1929, 12425 Strange Days (1995), 190 structural ideals, 2, 3, 8, 16, 45, 47, 50, 54, 57, 67, 69-73, 75-78, 80,

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

94, 96, 112, 117, 119-21, 126, 134, 137, 184, 194, 197, 200201, 206, 217, 224-25, 241, 249, 259-60, 262-66, 273n-75n structural idealism, definition, 2, 137, 265 style, 197, 202-204, 211-12, 21619. Also see New Subcultural Theory subcultures, 57, 77, 84, 86-93, 202203, 210, 214, 217-19; British subcultures, 217-19 summary of book, 18-20 symbolic interactionism, 3, 58, 63, 87, 273n sympathy and shared sentiments, 22-25, 47 Synott, Anthony on beauty, 216 Taylor, Charles, 134, 158, 196, 24043, 283n; atomism, 242-43; authenticity, 241-43, 283n; community, 242-43; dialogue, 242; individualism, 241; instrumental reason, 241; liberalism, 241; narcissism, 241; politics, 242-43; rationality, 242; technological society, 242 Teddy Boys, 86, 88, 91, 202 television, 180, 191, 195, 196, 207, 212, 214-15, 281-83n, 286n thought/action, 25, 28, 33, 34, 37, 39, 40, 59, 73, 112-16, 121-22, 126, 138, 197, 261, 266 Toulmin, Stephen on Collingwood, 118 Trevelyan, G. M., 110 truth, 51, 64, 66-67, 113, 126-30, 156, 160, 195, 273n, 277n. Also see Collingwood, Foucault, Lyotard, Nietzsche, postmodernism Turner, Bryan, 200, 203, 215 Unabomber, 285n unconscious mind, 3, 7, 27, 30, 59, 61, 64-66, 112, 114-15, 122, 123, 137 Also see Freud

Index unintended consequences, 8, 59, 62, 64, 73, 273-74n. Also see Collingwood unmasking and remasking, 131, 135, 137, 144-46, 155-57, 161, 169, 172, 175, 177-78, 192, 194, 197 utility, 32, 53, 142, 145 values, 2, 4, 16, 67, 71, 76, 142, 208 van der Dussen, W. J. on Collingwood, 105 van Dijk, Teujen, 44-45; social cognitions, 44-45 video, 192, 194, 200, 215 video games, 282n Videodrome (1982), 191 Vietnam War, 214 virtual reality, 192, 207, 282n Walsh, W. H. on Collingwood, 102103, 112 Waterloo, Ontario, 192

309 Weber, Max, 2, 11, 33, 49, 55, 6263, 65, 70, 95, 101-102, 122, 204, 209, 274n; forms of authority, 2; ideal types, 2, 11, 70, 122; Protestant ethic, 70, 95; subjective meaning, 49, 55, 62-63, 122, 204 West Edmonton Mall, 190 Westin Bonaventure Hotel, 190, 232 White, Hayden on emplotment and history as a literary form, 123-25, 128-29, 277n Williams, Raymond, 223 Winch, Peter, 3, 12, 55, 63, 118, 123 Windleband, Wilhelm, 5, 102 Winnipeg, 286n Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2, 63, 119, 129, 133, 170, 269n, 271n; language games, 129, 269, 271n women’s movement, 214 working-class youth, 84, 86-91