The Horror! Hitchcock through Zizek

[This is the second post in the USIH Blog's participation in For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III. See Ben's fantastic first contribution here. This year's blogathon, which runs through Friday, May 18, focuses on Alfred Hitchcock. Money is being raised for the National Film Preservation Foundation's The White Shadow Project, which will record Michael Mortilla's score to this 1924 silent that Hitchcock wrote and on which he worked as an Assistant Director, and will make the movie available for free streaming online. Those interested in donating can click this link or the thumbnail announcing the blogathon over in the right margin.  For the Love of Film III is being cohosted by Farran Nehme of The Self-Styled Siren, Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films, and Rod Heath of This Island Rod.]

What do horror films do? What makes them persistently popular? I came of age in the 80s with Freddy Krueger, the undead, knives-as-finger-nails antagonist in Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street film series. These films pivoted from the tried-and-true horror flick formula. Teenagers who behaved badly, those who imbibed in drugs and sex, died the first horrific deaths at the "hands" of Freddy, who worked as a sort of demonic guarantor of a traditional symbolic order--an order that was dying an equally horrific death. But even more, Freddy was the return of the repressed for the parents, who had long ago violated Biblical commandments in their futile efforts to protect the old order. So Freddy is a ghoulish representation of the corruption of both old and new orders. There's no going back to the old, which was sustained by an undercurrent of repression. But the new, the libertine, the transgressive, the antinomian, is nothing to celebrate. Freddy as such is the quintessential postmodern specter.


But even if A Nightmare on Elm Street and other horror films of the 80s nicely illustrate the conundrum of post-sixties culture, they cannot compare to the understated brilliance of the Hitchcock horror film. I also, in a way, came of age with Hitchcock. My father loved Hitchcock and introduced me to all of his films on VHS in the 80s. I was so taken with these movies, for reasons I only faintly grasped at the time. Hitchcock uses horror as a backdrop for the human struggle to come to terms with the symbolic order. Horror goes where we consciously cannot go. At least, this is Slavoj Zizek's interpretation of Hitchcock's 1963 film The Birds--elaborated in Zizek's lovely little film, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. Here's a clip where Zizek explains his interpretation of Hitchcock:




In deconstructing the famous blue pill/red pill scene from The Matrix, a take, of course, on Plato's Cave, Zizek argues that the choice offered Neo between fiction and reality is a false one. The two are mutually reinforcing. "Fictions structure our reality. If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it, you lose reality itself." Zizek wants a "third pill," one that allows us to see the reality in fiction, or to see how fiction makes reality more real. This is how he wants us to interpret Hitchcock. Zizek claims that the key to understanding horror films is to imagine the same story without the elements of horror.

There are non-horror elements that disturb reality in The Birds, such as the intrusion of a strange, seductive woman into the Oedipal relationship between Mitch and the mother he lives with. But these intrusions can be digested or incorporated into the symbolic order. The birds, then, represent an intrusion into the reality that disintegrates it, that upends the symbolic order, that lays bare a more primal  human condition. The Birds do what Mitch's mother wishes she could but cannot due to the symbolic order that structures her reality. Horror does what our unconscious wishes we could do but cannot.

Given that I'm more an expert on Zizek and contemporary critical theory than I am on Hitchcock and film history, I will conclude with a question for our readers, many of whom might be cinephiles, newly drawn to the USIH blog this week thanks to the For the Love of Film blogathon. Is Zizek's a standard interpretation of Hitchcock? Or is it new to you?

Some Muddled Thoughts* on Truth, Non-Fiction, History, and Objectivity

When Peter Novick passed away recently, I immediately thought of the enormous impact that That Noble Dream had on my generation of graduate students.  The book was published in September, 1988, the very month that I began graduate school. The book's importance to many of my fellow graduate students and myself rested on at least three factors: first, it immediately became a centerpiece of the reading list for the historiography / methods course that we all took in our first semester of grad school (i.e. it was going to be "on the test"); second, it provided a historical narrative of the professional identity as historians that we had all recently decided to assume; finally, as Jim Harrison commented at the time (and, more recently, on this blog), the book was a "serious meditation about the state of things in the late 80s," and thus very much spoke to the particular world of historical practice that we were all entering at the time.**

I was going to write something to this effect in response to Tim's invitation to comment on Novick's passing (I would have liked to say something, too, about The Holocaust in American Life, which was also a book of enormous importance to me), but I never got around to doing so. And the moment passed.

In part, I hesitated to write my memories of That Noble Dream in the late 1980s because I felt that the whole question of objectivity was less front-and-center in the profession today, that the book, while still a fine piece of scholarship, had (not surprisingly) lost its immediate currency. But I couldn't manage to formulate exactly what had changed in this regard.***



Then, late last week, This American Life announced that, for the first time, they were retracting a story.   "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory," an episode-long exploration of conditions in a Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, China, that manufactures products for Apple, originally aired back in January and was an excerpt from a longer staged monologue by Mike Daisey who traveled to Shenzhen to investigate working conditions there.  It turns out that many of the details of Daisey's story were fabricated.  Though it's worth listening to the entire TAL story devoted to the retraction, the executive summary is that Daisey successfully, if temporarily, hid his fabrications from the show's producers by lying to them about, among other things, the name of his translator, thus essentially making fact-checking the details of the story impossible. When the translator was later located, the fabrications became obvious and Daisey fell back on pseudo-defending himself by insisting that, since he is not a journalist, it's wrong to hold him to the standards of journalism.

When this story broke, I commented on Facebook that "I've grown increasingly tired of people who try to pass fiction off as nonfiction. The issue of working conditions in China is a serious one, but fabricating stories about bad working conditions there does not help the cause. And simply saying 'I'm not a journalist,' as Mike Daisey does, won't do. Nonfiction storytelling needs to be not fictional, whether or not one calls it journalism."

In a variety of interesting ways, this is not quite Novick's "objectivity question." But it's a cousin of it. And, like Novick's book was in the 1980s, the Daisey scandal is very much of its time.  From the controversy over James Frey's pseudo-memoir A Million Little Pieces to the recent publication of John D'Agata and Jim Fingal's The Lifespan of a Fact, which anticipates the controversy and undoes the scandal by making the nature of truth the very topic of the book itself, we find ourselves in a moment that both has an unusually high regard for non-fiction storytelling, yet is very unclear on how to define the boundary between fiction and non-fiction.

Then, just today, Aaron Bady published a really smart and interesting post over at The New Inquiry**** entitled "The McNulty Gambit."*****  Starting with the subplot from Season 5 of The Wire in which Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) invents a (media friendly) serial killer in an effort to attract public concern to crimes that would otherwise be ignored, Bady mounts a semi-defense of fabricating evidence, with reference to the Daisey case, the recent Kony viral video, the Three Cups of Tea fiasco, and the Gay Girl in Damascus blog.  It's an interesting effort.  Rather than summarize Bady's post in detail, I'll just suggest you go read it.

I'll wait.

Now that you're back, let me note a couple things about Bady's piece that bothered me.

Here is what I think are the nut 'graphs of Bady's post:

what these fiction writers also have in common is a certain objective sense in which they are right, in which the story they are telling is true. While their subjective accounts tend to be the least true part of it (the most damning lies have to do with Daisey’s description of his personal experiences, for example), but behind those subjective untruths, we also find a broad field of objective accuracy: Foxconn is a terrible place to work, Joseph Kony really is a nightmare, building schools in Afghanistan is a good thing to do, and Syrian repression is no joke. Marlo really was a serial killer. 

This is not a defense, of course, but it is worth saying: if we only emphasize the lies in these accounts, we thereby overlook the extent to which they were saying true things. And it is also worth remembering that truth is not an either/or. One can easily deceive by telling nothing but the truth – telling it selectively, misframed, etc – and one can also tell a kind of truth by using statements which are, on their own, untrue. This is why fiction matters, and why journalism never rests onquite the firm bedrock of objectivity that it needs to pretend it does. But again, this is not a defense, just an attempt to describe a problem that we often have vested interests in failing to acknowledge, the blurriness of the line that separates fact from fiction.

What bothers me here is the slippage in Bady's post between right and true.  Bady seems to want to argue that, though not true in one sense, the falsehoods in these stories are true in some other sense.

But this seems like a wholly unnecessary bit of water-muddying.  Certainly Daisey, Frey, Tom MacMaster ("Gay Girl in Damascus"), and (the fictional) McNulty absolutely understood that they were telling falsehoods and did what they could to cover up that fact. What each was interested in wasn't arriving at some higher truth, but rather compelling action, which each felt couldn't be done by simply sticking to the facts.

Bady understands this. And most of the rest of his post concerns precisely what one needs to do to compel action (more about this later).  But for some reason Bady starts the discussion by attempting to reframe the it in terms of the complexity of truth, almost suggesting that a lie that compels good action might be another form of truth.

Sorry. I'm not buying.

There is, of course, a tradition stretching at least back to Plato that argues in favor of "noble lies" or socially necessary falsehoods.  It is a tradition that, at least today, is largely associated with the political right.  I can't say I find this tradition very attractive. But speaking of noble lies seems to me a good deal clearer and, in a certain sense, more honest, than attempts to rebrand putatively socially necessary falsehoods as some other form of truth.  The story of the McNulty Gambit is, in fact, a story about noble lying.  We will be clearer about the virtues and vices associated with this strategy if we are honest about what it entails.

My other dissent from Bady concerns his post's concluding thoughts about the seemingly futile reformism of many of the efforts that he discusses.  In situations that require fundamental structural changes--the political situation in central Africa, crime in Baltimore, working conditions in China--Bady's protagonists spin yarns that seem to instead point to inadequate and local changes--killing Joseph Kony, capturing Marlo, boycotting Apple products.  This flawed reformism, Bady argues, is intimately linked to the limitations of narrative:

[B]ecause such stories are derived from their audience – and its imaginative capabilities – they will for that reason demand and privilege reactions to the problem that are maddeningly simplistic in their very imaginable practicality. Kony is bad and so he must be killed by the military, because that’s something we can picture, can visualize; fundamentally restructuring the Central African system of political economy and governance is impossibly and unthinkably remote. Apple is bad and must be regulated (or shunned or something), because, again, that’s something simple we can imagine happening (as opposed to any alternative to the advanced industrial capitalism that makes Foxconn all but inevitable). And MacMasters later admitted that he had given his story an ending, an ending that is striking by its plausible realism: “I was going to end the story with having her be free, and get out of country — end of story.” But this ending is necessary precisely because individual escapes happen every day (while a real solution to the Syrian crisis is unthinkably complicated).  

Each of these outcomes are imaginable, in part, as a direct consequence of the fact that they do not trouble the status quo. We can imagine those reforms, because they are essentially superficial adjustments of a system that not only remains intact, but which we – in our thinking about what is and isn’t possible – rely on and presume. 

All of which is simply to say: it’s in the nature of grand structural transformations that we will always have great difficulty picturing what the end-state would look like. And because we feel we have to, we tend not to, falling back on the narrative patterns we know better. 

I think, in principle, quite the opposite is the case. Our ability to imagine fundamental structural change is, if anything, more dependent upon, and more helped by, fictional narratives, than is the reformism of these particular efforts.  Our culture--and most other cultures of which I'm aware--is full of stories that imagine vast, fundamental changes in the world:  from the Book of Revelation to the entire genre of secular utopian (and dystopian) fiction.  The world's great revolutionary and reactionary movements have compelled transformative action--for good and ill--precisely by substituting fantastic tales for quotidian truth, often labeling the fiction a kind of higher truth (Stalinist Socialist Realism comes most immediately to mind, but just about any millenarian religious movement or radical political movement has similar structures).  Bady is right that the reformism of these efforts is worth noting. But that reformism is accidental; it does not reflect any limits of the McNulty Gambit.

Let me conclude by pointing this discussion back in the direction of historical practice (without ever quite getting there).  None of the figures that Bady discusses are historians. Despite historians occasionally playing with narrative and fiction, even the most postmodern of us tend to go no further than knowingly making stuff up that we simply cannot know and admitting as much (and even that is a bold, and IMO rarely entirely successful, maneuver).  To the best of my knowledge, the canons of historical practice still explicitly forbid passing on knowing falsehoods as the truth.

And yet the "objectivity question," to the extent that it still exists, revolves around similar issues.  The quest for a "usable past" is not entirely dissimilar from the desire to tell stories that will compel action.

So I'm back where I was when I didn't write about That Noble Dream the week before last, wondering how exactly this moment of our culture's continuing struggle to reconcile narrative and truth is reflected in my own profession.  And wishing, I suppose, that I had a guide as good as Novick around to help clarify these issues for me.

____________________________________
* What is blogging for if it is not, occasionally, for muddled thoughts?

** This was particularly the case in the Princeton History Department, which played a starring role of sorts in Novick's final chapter on the David Abraham controversy, which had occurred just a few short years earlier.  Several years later, I'd actually become friends with David. Though he was teaching at the University of Miami's law school, he continued to live in Princeton, NJ. And, during summers, he played softball with me on the History Department's B-league softball team, the Revolting Masses (fwiw, the more serious / skilled A-league History Department squad was called the Machiavellian Moment). But in the fall of 1988, David was very much an historical actor and, as of yet, unknown to me personally.

*** One way or another, I would have asked younger readers of this blog whether this book mattered to them at all.  So I might as well do so here.  Does it?

**** The New Inquiry's format, like that of the sports-and-culture blog Grantland, incorporates marginal notes, a marvelous (and marvelously old-fashioned) way of presenting additional information that turns out to be particularly well-suited to the web.  Certainly it beats the crap out of these jerry-rigged footnotes. Memo to myself: when this blog finally migrates to Wordpress, let's see if we can incorporate marginal notes in our new design!

***** The piece is apparently partly inspired by Slavoj Žižek's recent talk on The Wire, which I have yet to listen to.  Bady's description of that talk as "usefully wrong about lots of things, and strikingly insightful about a few," however, seems to me one of the best general descriptions of Žižek's work that I've ever read.

The whole world is watching the whole world watching the whole world

In a speech given by Slovoj Zizek on October 9 at Liberty Plaza (I think Andrew referenced this in his last post) Zizek made a bold plea (among many bold and sometimes scattered appeals) to shift our understanding of reality. If we imagine that these protests are extraordinary and exceptions then they will come to an end and we will return to a world where raising taxes on the wealthy seems unAmerican and healthcare should be expensive and difficult to come by. In his remarks, I was particularly struck by the following passage:

"There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember: carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after. When we will have to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then. I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like - oh, we were young, it was beautiful. Remember that our basic message is: We are allowed to think about alternatives. The rule is broken. We do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?"

Indeed, what do we want? And will we, the many of us who contribute to and read this blog, at least witness this protest when we are in NYC in a month? I am curious what many of might suggest our obligation is to a protest that claims to represent the 99%.

As an aside to the discussion about the paltry academic openings yet again, I've been reading Benjamin Ginsberg's The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. His contention is easy and well-documented: layers of administration have supplanted the imperative to hire full-time faculty who could be committed to the education of students. Those students are playing dramatically higher prices for an education that has seems to be producing dramatically declining results--students can take loads of cool classes and workout next to a cafe but cannot write or debate to save their lives. I recently presented a plan to some folks at my school that we reduce the number of courses offered, increase the credit hours of courses that are heavy on research, and add faculty to teach students how to identify, complete, present, and publish whatever research we can help they do. That is my reality, even if it is not yet anyone else's.

Sin City as Neo-Noir; Or, the Aesthetics of Post-Alienation

(This is the fifth in our film noir series. Thanks to Ben, David, Ray, and Tim for their highly entertaining and insightful posts, and special thanks to Ben for getting USIH involved. See his original post for details on the film noir blogathon and the Film Noir Foundation.)

Unlike my colleagues, I am not dedicating my blogathon contribution to one of the noir classics. Instead, I will analyze the not-so-hidden meanings of a recent film that fits the neo-noir category, among other genres, in the typical postmodern fashion of mixing and mashing: Sin City, the 2005 adaptation of Frank Miller’s neo-noir “Dark Horse Presents” comic series from the early 1990s (itself based loosely on a 1950s graphic novel series). Co-directed by Miller and Robert Rodriguez (with “special guest director” Quentin Tarantino), Sin City gives beautiful, digital form to an ugly urban dystopia (“Basin City”), with an all-star cast that includes Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba, Brittany Murphy, Benicio del Toro, Rosario Dawson, Josh Hartnett, and Elijah Wood, among others. Watch the trailer for a taste:




The Sin City plot, so far as one exists (among the three self-contained stories within the film), is not really worth summarizing here because it is immaterial to the meaning of the film. What is that meaning? At the most obvious level, the film is about the banality of violence. Shot mostly in black-and-white, which enhances the noir elements of the film, the only color consistently laid over the colorless screen is red. Blood red. There’s a lot of red because there’s a lot of blood. But despite of all the blood, despite all the violence, despite all the torture, there is no remorse. The viewer is not asked to feel bad for the people getting slaughtered. The viewer is not asked to feel anything. We’re meant to let the violence wash over us as we concentrate on the powerful if detached aesthetics of Basin City.

Sin City’s failure to garner an empathetic, much less sympathetic, audience was the crux of a host of ambivalent to negative reviews. Reviewing the film for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis writes disapprovingly:

The soporific vibe isn’t helped by the fact that “Sin City” has the muffled, airless quality of some movies loaded with computer-generated imagery. The film feels as if it takes place under glass, which makes conceptual sense, since the characters don’t bear any resemblance to actual life: they don't have hearts (or brains), so there’s no reason they should have lungs or air to breathe. At the same time, Mr. Miller and Mr. Rodriguez's commitment to absolute unreality and the absence of the human factor mean it’s hard to get pulled into the story on any level other than the visceral. When stuff goes blam, you jump like someone who’s landed on a whoopee cushion. But then you just sit there, wrap yourself in the dark and try not to fall asleep.

Acclaimed New York Times film critic A. O. Scott also wrote about Sin City in an essay linking it back (as well as Kung Fu Hustle) to the first film to effectively mix real people with cartoons, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), which played explicitly on neo noir themes, right down to the 1930s Los Angeles setting. Scott writes:

But even if the technology is neither inherently dangerous nor inherently wonderful, its applications can be worrisome. It is curious that the new techniques are so often used in the service of parody and nostalgia… And the result is often that the old forms, as they are spiffed up and retrofitted, are also emptied out. Mr. Rodriguez, for example, has rendered a gorgeous world of silvery shadows that updates the expressionist cinematography of postwar noir without expressing very much at all. His city, with its tough guys and femmes fatales, feels uninhabited, and the social anxiety and psychological unease of the old film noirs has been digitally broomed away. Instead, "Sin City" offers sensation without feeling, death without grief, sin without guilt and, ultimately, novelty without surprise. Something is missing—something human.

Both Dargis and Scott are correct in the descriptive sense. But they seem to miss the larger point. The brilliance of Sin City—and it is brilliant—lies not in its ability to connect to its audience in some human capacity, but rather, in the ways that it reflects America circa 2005, desensitized to horror by its awful war in Iraq and revelations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib—torture sanctioned by the upper rungs of the chain of command. Silja J. A. Talvi overtly makes this link in an article she titles “Torture Fatigue,” where she quotes psychologist Bruce Levine: “When you become disconnected from your own alienation [from society], you become cut off from your humanity… You become numb to all kinds of atrocities.”

I think Levine is onto something with his “disconnected from your own alienation” phrase. As historian David Steigerwald argues, alienation is no longer a concept used to describe our current state. Instead, we’re collectively numb. It’s in this context that we need to situate Sin City. In contrast to mid-century film noir, when cynicism was meant to be felt as something, perhaps as a symptom of alienation, Sin City is utterly devoid of feeling. And rightly so. In his post on The Third Man, Ray poses a bifurcation between noir and liberalism, the former too despairing, the later at least offering a message of redemption, if not a naïve one rooted in a predictably happy ending. Sin City does not work along these lines. It represents a void, plain and simple.

Or take Tim’s contextual analysis of Touch of Evil. Tim writes:

I think something of the significance of film noir, at least in the 1950s, is in the way that the genre captures that slice of the repressed dissatisfaction, always roiling below the surface, of the decade. If the period’s intense anti-communism resulted in idealist visions of America (i.e. as the proverbial “city on the hill”), then noir captures that city’s messy undercurrents. The aesthetic beauty in those films alerts us to their artistry, but their mood reflects what every close-up of the decade reveals: flaws, cracks, and imperfections in the foundational narrative.

In contrast, Sin City is not a return of the repressed in this sense. Everything is out in the open, nothing bubbles out from under the surface, because there is nothing. Just violence. And beauty.

Nihilism wrapped in aesthetics is, of course, one of the historical characteristics of fascism. Another recent Frank Miller adaptation, 300, a fictional account of Spartan resistance to the Persian Empire, has in fact been charged with expressing militaristic values approaching fascism. In his typically amusing yet overstated way, Slavoj Žižek argues against this liberal consensus grain. In an essay titled “The True Hollywood Left,” Žižek relates the Persian Army—multicultural, hedonist, with the latest in long-range weaponry—to U.S. imperialism. Conversely, he relates the disciplined Spartans to the resistance to American imperialism and advises the left to quit distrusting discipline as a means to an end.

But what makes Žižek’s essay on 300 more interesting, and relevant to a discussion of Sin City, is his political analysis of the film’s form. 300, like Sin City, is highly stylized digital unreality. Žižek writes:

What makes 300 notable is that, in it (not for the first time, of course, but in a way which is artistically much more interesting than, say, that of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy), a technically more developed art (digitalized cinema) refers to a less developed one (comics). The effect produced is that of “true reality” losing its innocence, appearing as part of a closed artificial universe, which is a perfect figuration of our socio-ideological predicament. Those critics who claimed that the “synthesis” of the two arts in 300 is a failed one are thus wrong for the very reason of being right: of course the “synthesis” fails, of course the universe we see on the careen is traversed by a profound antagonism and inconsistency, but it is this very antagonism which is an indication of truth.

Žižek’s conclusion is cryptic at best. But what I take him to mean is that westerners witness horror via the mediated unreality of modern, digital technologies. We don’t feel horror. Only our victims do. This is the “profound antagonism” of Sin City. This is the aesthetics of post-alienation.

Sin City as Neo-Noir; Or, the Aesthetics of Post-Alienation

(This is the fifth in our film noir series. Thanks to Ben, David, Ray, and Tim for their highly entertaining and insightful posts, and special thanks to Ben for getting USIH involved. See his original post for details on the film noir blogathon and the Film Noir Foundation.)

Unlike my colleagues, I am not dedicating my blogathon contribution to one of the noir classics. Instead, I will analyze the not-so-hidden meanings of a recent film that fits the neo-noir category, among other genres, in the typical postmodern fashion of mixing and mashing: Sin City, the 2005 adaptation of Frank Miller’s neo-noir “Dark Horse Presents” comic series from the early 1990s (itself based loosely on a 1950s graphic novel series). Co-directed by Miller and Robert Rodriguez (with “special guest director” Quentin Tarantino), Sin City gives beautiful, digital form to an ugly urban dystopia (“Basin City”), with an all-star cast that includes Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba, Brittany Murphy, Benicio del Toro, Rosario Dawson, Josh Hartnett, and Elijah Wood, among others. Watch the trailer for a taste:




The Sin City plot, so far as one exists (among the three self-contained stories within the film), is not really worth summarizing here because it is immaterial to the meaning of the film. What is that meaning? At the most obvious level, the film is about the banality of violence. Shot mostly in black-and-white, which enhances the noir elements of the film, the only color consistently laid over the colorless screen is red. Blood red. There’s a lot of red because there’s a lot of blood. But despite of all the blood, despite all the violence, despite all the torture, there is no remorse. The viewer is not asked to feel bad for the people getting slaughtered. The viewer is not asked to feel anything. We’re meant to let the violence wash over us as we concentrate on the powerful if detached aesthetics of Basin City.

Sin City’s failure to garner an empathetic, much less sympathetic, audience was the crux of a host of ambivalent to negative reviews. Reviewing the film for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis writes disapprovingly:

The soporific vibe isn’t helped by the fact that “Sin City” has the muffled, airless quality of some movies loaded with computer-generated imagery. The film feels as if it takes place under glass, which makes conceptual sense, since the characters don’t bear any resemblance to actual life: they don't have hearts (or brains), so there’s no reason they should have lungs or air to breathe. At the same time, Mr. Miller and Mr. Rodriguez's commitment to absolute unreality and the absence of the human factor mean it’s hard to get pulled into the story on any level other than the visceral. When stuff goes blam, you jump like someone who’s landed on a whoopee cushion. But then you just sit there, wrap yourself in the dark and try not to fall asleep.

Acclaimed New York Times film critic A. O. Scott also wrote about Sin City in an essay linking it back (as well as Kung Fu Hustle) to the first film to effectively mix real people with cartoons, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), which played explicitly on neo noir themes, right down to the 1930s Los Angeles setting. Scott writes:

But even if the technology is neither inherently dangerous nor inherently wonderful, its applications can be worrisome. It is curious that the new techniques are so often used in the service of parody and nostalgia… And the result is often that the old forms, as they are spiffed up and retrofitted, are also emptied out. Mr. Rodriguez, for example, has rendered a gorgeous world of silvery shadows that updates the expressionist cinematography of postwar noir without expressing very much at all. His city, with its tough guys and femmes fatales, feels uninhabited, and the social anxiety and psychological unease of the old film noirs has been digitally broomed away. Instead, "Sin City" offers sensation without feeling, death without grief, sin without guilt and, ultimately, novelty without surprise. Something is missing—something human.

Both Dargis and Scott are correct in the descriptive sense. But they seem to miss the larger point. The brilliance of Sin City—and it is brilliant—lies not in its ability to connect to its audience in some human capacity, but rather, in the ways that it reflects America circa 2005, desensitized to horror by its awful war in Iraq and revelations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib—torture sanctioned by the upper rungs of the chain of command. Silja J. A. Talvi overtly makes this link in an article she titles “Torture Fatigue,” where she quotes psychologist Bruce Levine: “When you become disconnected from your own alienation [from society], you become cut off from your humanity… You become numb to all kinds of atrocities.”

I think Levine is onto something with his “disconnected from your own alienation” phrase. As historian David Steigerwald argues, alienation is no longer a concept used to describe our current state. Instead, we’re collectively numb. It’s in this context that we need to situate Sin City. In contrast to mid-century film noir, when cynicism was meant to be felt as something, perhaps as a symptom of alienation, Sin City is utterly devoid of feeling. And rightly so. In his post on The Third Man, Ray poses a bifurcation between noir and liberalism, the former too despairing, the later at least offering a message of redemption, if not a naïve one rooted in a predictably happy ending. Sin City does not work along these lines. It represents a void, plain and simple.

Or take Tim’s contextual analysis of Touch of Evil. Tim writes:

I think something of the significance of film noir, at least in the 1950s, is in the way that the genre captures that slice of the repressed dissatisfaction, always roiling below the surface, of the decade. If the period’s intense anti-communism resulted in idealist visions of America (i.e. as the proverbial “city on the hill”), then noir captures that city’s messy undercurrents. The aesthetic beauty in those films alerts us to their artistry, but their mood reflects what every close-up of the decade reveals: flaws, cracks, and imperfections in the foundational narrative.

In contrast, Sin City is not a return of the repressed in this sense. Everything is out in the open, nothing bubbles out from under the surface, because there is nothing. Just violence. And beauty.

Nihilism wrapped in aesthetics is, of course, one of the historical characteristics of fascism. Another recent Frank Miller adaptation, 300, a fictional account of Spartan resistance to the Persian Empire, has in fact been charged with expressing militaristic values approaching fascism. In his typically amusing yet overstated way, Slavoj Žižek argues against this liberal consensus grain. In an essay titled “The True Hollywood Left,” Žižek relates the Persian Army—multicultural, hedonist, with the latest in long-range weaponry—to U.S. imperialism. Conversely, he relates the disciplined Spartans to the resistance to American imperialism and advises the left to quit distrusting discipline as a means to an end.

But what makes Žižek’s essay on 300 more interesting, and relevant to a discussion of Sin City, is his political analysis of the film’s form. 300, like Sin City, is highly stylized digital unreality. Žižek writes:

What makes 300 notable is that, in it (not for the first time, of course, but in a way which is artistically much more interesting than, say, that of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy), a technically more developed art (digitalized cinema) refers to a less developed one (comics). The effect produced is that of “true reality” losing its innocence, appearing as part of a closed artificial universe, which is a perfect figuration of our socio-ideological predicament. Those critics who claimed that the “synthesis” of the two arts in 300 is a failed one are thus wrong for the very reason of being right: of course the “synthesis” fails, of course the universe we see on the careen is traversed by a profound antagonism and inconsistency, but it is this very antagonism which is an indication of truth.

Žižek’s conclusion is cryptic at best. But what I take him to mean is that westerners witness horror via the mediated unreality of modern, digital technologies. We don’t feel horror. Only our victims do. This is the “profound antagonism” of Sin City. This is the aesthetics of post-alienation.

Žižek on Liberals and the Arab Revolutionary Spirit (and other fun Friday readings)

Six suggestions:
1. Slavoj Žižek, "Why Fear the Arab Revolutionary Spirit?"

In this essay Žižek takes to task those western liberals who are too cautious in their support of the Egyptian revolutionaries and protestors in other nations, arguing that such a move will repeat the mistakes of the past, when western help in shutting down Arab socialism helped give rise to Muslim fundamentalism. He concludes his little op-ed:

The hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported democracy, and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned. Why concern, why not joy that freedom is given a chance? Today, more than ever, Mao Zedong's old motto is pertinent: "There is great chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent." Where, then, should Mubarak go? Here, the answer is also clear: to the Hague. If there is a leader who deserves to sit there, it is him.


2. John Summers, "Daniel Bell and The End of Ideology"

In this timely retrospective, Summers wonders why a book that categorized the death knell of socialist utopia is still considered so important. Here's a glimpse:

What is the legacy of The End of Ideology today? I think it lies in the sober, anti-romantic, wiser-than-thou style of political analysis and leadership on display on the night of January 25, hours after Bell died, in Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech. “Obama aims to realize the end-of-ideology politics that Daniel Bell and others glimpsed,” David Brooks opined in 2009, as if every Democratic president since John F. Kennedy has not feared an uprising from the Left, after the Left put them in power. Two years into Obama’s administration, the ironies and fatuities of the style deserve to be clearly stated. While the president claims the post-ideological, responsible center, he stands accused of promulgating socialism by Americans who have no memory, and little understanding, of socialist ideology; the electorate fights over party dogmas awkwardly labeled neoconservative and neoliberal; civic discourse runs thick with empty rhetoric of rebellion and revolution, interrupted by sporadic episodes of passionless violence; and political society, long lacking the New Deal consensus assumed by Bell and his cohorts, swings from apathy to protest and back again.

And a little more from this piece on how Bell's anti-ideology might have acted as the intellectual correlative of anti-politics, which might help us come to terms with whether or not Bell was a neoconservative:

But if ideology had ended, then how could “the reader” judge the contributions of The End of Ideology? Was Bell a neoconservative, his book an early signpost for the neoconservative path? He rejected the label, though not because he felt free of conservatism. In a minor paradox that gave his book its polemical energy, he claimed that his thesis exempted him from all labels, that he spoke from a nameless position beyond ideology. The neoconservative “designation is meaningless,” he insisted—not wrong, mind you, but “meaningless.” His book represented a “new cultural criticism” that “seeks to transcend the lines of the present debates and to present the dilemmas of the society within a very different framework.” In place of closed ideologies and forgone conclusions, he mated the spirit of openness with the discipline and tentativeness of new facts. In place of wild passion, he embraced “the hardness of alienation, the sense of otherness.”

3. Check out Nemo's excellent review of Daniel Rodgers, The Age of Fracture at the PhD Octopus blog.

Although it is obvious that Nemo mostly likes the book, he does question one of Rodgers's central claims, that intellectuals in the age of disaggregation quit thinking about limits placed upon people by power, instead thinking about the limitlessness of human agency. Nemo writes:"Is this really the case though? Is it true that thinkers such as Cornel West and Judith Butler really had less of a concern with institutions, history, and power than their predecessors?"

Actually, Rodgers does make one glaring exception to his rule: race. In his Chapter Four, "Race and Social Memory," he contends that though many sought liberation from the past in their optimistic attempts to re-imagine a limitless future—a postmodern future where power was inoperative—blacks could not escape the confines of power and history, written as they were onto their skin. So instead of seeking to escape history, they sought to flip it to their advantage. Black became a source of pride, history a point of continuity.

This leads me to my next reading suggestion:


4. Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America.

I just read this book for the first time alongside a class of undergraduate students. I found it beautifully written and cogently argued. It's more political and biographical than intellectual history, though Joseph does pause to analyze key texts such as Harold Cruse's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. In short, I highly recommend this book.

5. Bill McKibben, "Catastrophic Weather Events Are Becoming the New Normal -- Are You Ready for Life on Our Planet Circa 2011?"

This is short. But I found it to be good ammunition for those illogical people in your lives who make the fallacious argument that the cold weather and storms we're experiencing refute global warming. (This coming from someone who spent two hours digging out my car on Wednesday.)

6. Ben Alpers, "Neoliberalism (Slight Return)"

In the hopes of rescuing this post from getting lost in the shuffle, please check out what I guess might be the last post on our long debate about neoliberalism. In conclusion, Ben and I agree on this important matter (which I wrote in my previous post):

"The neoliberalism (us) that Ben dug up for us—the neoliberalism of 1980s Democrats like Gary Hart—is a relatively important aspect of recent political history, but is not all that important in most larger contexts."

Happy Friday!

Žižek on Liberals and the Arab Revolutionary Spirit (and other fun Friday readings)

Six suggestions:
1. Slavoj Žižek, "Why Fear the Arab Revolutionary Spirit?"

In this essay Žižek takes to task those western liberals who are too cautious in their support of the Egyptian revolutionaries and protestors in other nations, arguing that such a move will repeat the mistakes of the past, when western help in shutting down Arab socialism helped give rise to Muslim fundamentalism. He concludes his little op-ed:

The hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported democracy, and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned. Why concern, why not joy that freedom is given a chance? Today, more than ever, Mao Zedong's old motto is pertinent: "There is great chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent." Where, then, should Mubarak go? Here, the answer is also clear: to the Hague. If there is a leader who deserves to sit there, it is him.


2. John Summers, "Daniel Bell and The End of Ideology"

In this timely retrospective, Summers wonders why a book that categorized the death knell of socialist utopia is still considered so important. Here's a glimpse:

What is the legacy of The End of Ideology today? I think it lies in the sober, anti-romantic, wiser-than-thou style of political analysis and leadership on display on the night of January 25, hours after Bell died, in Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech. “Obama aims to realize the end-of-ideology politics that Daniel Bell and others glimpsed,” David Brooks opined in 2009, as if every Democratic president since John F. Kennedy has not feared an uprising from the Left, after the Left put them in power. Two years into Obama’s administration, the ironies and fatuities of the style deserve to be clearly stated. While the president claims the post-ideological, responsible center, he stands accused of promulgating socialism by Americans who have no memory, and little understanding, of socialist ideology; the electorate fights over party dogmas awkwardly labeled neoconservative and neoliberal; civic discourse runs thick with empty rhetoric of rebellion and revolution, interrupted by sporadic episodes of passionless violence; and political society, long lacking the New Deal consensus assumed by Bell and his cohorts, swings from apathy to protest and back again.

And a little more from this piece on how Bell's anti-ideology might have acted as the intellectual correlative of anti-politics, which might help us come to terms with whether or not Bell was a neoconservative:

But if ideology had ended, then how could “the reader” judge the contributions of The End of Ideology? Was Bell a neoconservative, his book an early signpost for the neoconservative path? He rejected the label, though not because he felt free of conservatism. In a minor paradox that gave his book its polemical energy, he claimed that his thesis exempted him from all labels, that he spoke from a nameless position beyond ideology. The neoconservative “designation is meaningless,” he insisted—not wrong, mind you, but “meaningless.” His book represented a “new cultural criticism” that “seeks to transcend the lines of the present debates and to present the dilemmas of the society within a very different framework.” In place of closed ideologies and forgone conclusions, he mated the spirit of openness with the discipline and tentativeness of new facts. In place of wild passion, he embraced “the hardness of alienation, the sense of otherness.”

3. Check out Nemo's excellent review of Daniel Rodgers, The Age of Fracture at the PhD Octopus blog.

Although it is obvious that Nemo mostly likes the book, he does question one of Rodgers's central claims, that intellectuals in the age of disaggregation quit thinking about limits placed upon people by power, instead thinking about the limitlessness of human agency. Nemo writes:"Is this really the case though? Is it true that thinkers such as Cornel West and Judith Butler really had less of a concern with institutions, history, and power than their predecessors?"

Actually, Rodgers does make one glaring exception to his rule: race. In his Chapter Four, "Race and Social Memory," he contends that though many sought liberation from the past in their optimistic attempts to re-imagine a limitless future—a postmodern future where power was inoperative—blacks could not escape the confines of power and history, written as they were onto their skin. So instead of seeking to escape history, they sought to flip it to their advantage. Black became a source of pride, history a point of continuity.

This leads me to my next reading suggestion:


4. Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America.

I just read this book for the first time alongside a class of undergraduate students. I found it beautifully written and cogently argued. It's more political and biographical than intellectual history, though Joseph does pause to analyze key texts such as Harold Cruse's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. In short, I highly recommend this book.

5. Bill McKibben, "Catastrophic Weather Events Are Becoming the New Normal -- Are You Ready for Life on Our Planet Circa 2011?"

This is short. But I found it to be good ammunition for those illogical people in your lives who make the fallacious argument that the cold weather and storms we're experiencing refute global warming. (This coming from someone who spent two hours digging out my car on Wednesday.)

6. Ben Alpers, "Neoliberalism (Slight Return)"

In the hopes of rescuing this post from getting lost in the shuffle, please check out what I guess might be the last post on our long debate about neoliberalism. In conclusion, Ben and I agree on this important matter (which I wrote in my previous post):

"The neoliberalism (us) that Ben dug up for us—the neoliberalism of 1980s Democrats like Gary Hart—is a relatively important aspect of recent political history, but is not all that important in most larger contexts."

Happy Friday!

Tim's Light Reading (1/6/2011)

Happy New Year!

1. The Most Influential Thinker In Europe Is...---According to a poll conducted by the journal Social Europe, "the thinker with the most influence on the European left-of-centre political agenda" is an American, Paul Krugman. A fellow USIHer, Andrew Hartman, will be pleased with #3. Here's the top ten:

1. Paul Krugman
2. Juergen Habermas
3. Slavoj Zizek
4. Anthony Giddens
5. Daniel Cohn-Bendit
6. Umberto Eco
7. Zygmund Bauman, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen
9. Oskar Lafontaine
10. Ulrich Beck

2. A Scandalous Conversion in the Philosophy of Religion---A (former) philosopher of religion at the University of Houston, Keith Parsons, has given up his academic discipline. Parsons said he could no longer sincerely present arguments for theism in an academic setting. Too much support for Intelligent Design seems to have been Parsons tipping point. Here's a snippet from the article:

Keeping an eye on the truth was also a matter of practical importance for Parsons, who was alarmed by the support for Intelligent Design creationism among philosophy of religion’s most influential names. These include Alvin Plantinga and Peter van Inwagen, who led the subfield’s resurgence in the 1970s and ’80s, and William Lane Craig, an Evangelical who popularizes the subfield’s arguments for God in widely-attended public debates. “One of the things the really active conservative Christians covet enormously, more than anything else, is intellectual respectability. And they think they have found it in some of the arguments from these philosophers of religion,” Parsons said.

BTW: The online magazine Religion Dispatches has quickly become a go-to site for thoughtful analysis and news on its namesake topic. Add it to your reader; all the the cool kids are doing it.

3. Almost All of Us are Unhappy with Our Jobs---A survey by Manpower subsidiary Right Management reports that 84 percent of workers are looking for a new job. ...I just thought I'd throw this out there light of the history job market news.

4. Good Censorship---On January 1, Lake Superior State University put forth its 36th annual "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness." I like several of the selections---fail, viral, man up, momma grizzlies, refudiate, wow factor---but disliked the hate for "back story." Here's the sour quote in the press release on that term:

"This should be on the list of words that don't need to exist because a perfectly good word has been used for years. In this case, the word is 'history,' or, for those who must be weaned, 'story.'" Jeff Williams, Sherwood, Ariz.

BTW: I don't think it's an accident that at least two phrases from Sarah Palin made it into the list.

5. Tips on Refereeing for Journals---Thom Brooks of Newcastle University wrote an article for the open access Social Science Research Network (SSRN) titled "Guidelines on How to Referee." Here's the abstract:

This essay offers clear practical advice on how to act as a referee when asked to review an article for an academic journal. The advice is also relevant for reviewing manuscript proposals for academic publishers. My advice is based on my experiences in editing an academic journal, the Journal of Moral Philosophy, and four book series. I will draw on these experiences throughout as illustrations. The structure of the advice is as follows. First, I will begin by saying a few words about the academic publishing industry. Secondly, I will discuss whether one should accept or decline an invitation to review. Thirdly, I will examine the question of what appropriate standard should be applied when reviewing submissions. Finally, I conclude with advice on how to draft a report before submitting it to an editor.

6. The Intellectual Historian's Toolbox---Larry Cebula at Northwest History offers advice on what should be in a "Digital Toolbox for Graduate Students in History." I agree with all of his recommendations, as well as the suggestions given in the post's comments. In addition, I would add something specific to Cebula's #1 that Ben mentioned in a post here a few days ago: Google's "Books Ngram Viewer." Here's a link to what Google says about that tool.

7. Rethinking Human Rights---The ubiquitous Scott McLemee reviews a book for The National Conversation that takes human rights talk to task for its latent utopianism. The book's author, Samuel Moyn, a Columbia University historian of European intellectual life (and co-editor of Modern Intellectual History), seems to argue that strong doses of hard-headed empiricism (in the mode of Jeremy Bentham) and an on-the-ground, rough-and-tumble political sensibility would be beneficial to the future of human rights ideals. The book's title is The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard, 2010).

Tim's Light Reading (1/6/2011)

Happy New Year!

1. The Most Influential Thinker In Europe Is...---According to a poll conducted by the journal Social Europe, "the thinker with the most influence on the European left-of-centre political agenda" is an American, Paul Krugman. A fellow USIHer, Andrew Hartman, will be pleased with #3. Here's the top ten:

1. Paul Krugman
2. Juergen Habermas
3. Slavoj Zizek
4. Anthony Giddens
5. Daniel Cohn-Bendit
6. Umberto Eco
7. Zygmund Bauman, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen
9. Oskar Lafontaine
10. Ulrich Beck

2. A Scandalous Conversion in the Philosophy of Religion---A (former) philosopher of religion at the University of Houston, Keith Parsons, has given up his academic discipline. Parsons said he could no longer sincerely present arguments for theism in an academic setting. Too much support for Intelligent Design seems to have been Parsons tipping point. Here's a snippet from the article:

Keeping an eye on the truth was also a matter of practical importance for Parsons, who was alarmed by the support for Intelligent Design creationism among philosophy of religion’s most influential names. These include Alvin Plantinga and Peter van Inwagen, who led the subfield’s resurgence in the 1970s and ’80s, and William Lane Craig, an Evangelical who popularizes the subfield’s arguments for God in widely-attended public debates. “One of the things the really active conservative Christians covet enormously, more than anything else, is intellectual respectability. And they think they have found it in some of the arguments from these philosophers of religion,” Parsons said.

BTW: The online magazine Religion Dispatches has quickly become a go-to site for thoughtful analysis and news on its namesake topic. Add it to your reader; all the the cool kids are doing it.

3. Almost All of Us are Unhappy with Our Jobs---A survey by Manpower subsidiary Right Management reports that 84 percent of workers are looking for a new job. ...I just thought I'd throw this out there light of the history job market news.

4. Good Censorship---On January 1, Lake Superior State University put forth its 36th annual "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness." I like several of the selections---fail, viral, man up, momma grizzlies, refudiate, wow factor---but disliked the hate for "back story." Here's the sour quote in the press release on that term:

"This should be on the list of words that don't need to exist because a perfectly good word has been used for years. In this case, the word is 'history,' or, for those who must be weaned, 'story.'" Jeff Williams, Sherwood, Ariz.

BTW: I don't think it's an accident that at least two phrases from Sarah Palin made it into the list.

5. Tips on Refereeing for Journals---Thom Brooks of Newcastle University wrote an article for the open access Social Science Research Network (SSRN) titled "Guidelines on How to Referee." Here's the abstract:

This essay offers clear practical advice on how to act as a referee when asked to review an article for an academic journal. The advice is also relevant for reviewing manuscript proposals for academic publishers. My advice is based on my experiences in editing an academic journal, the Journal of Moral Philosophy, and four book series. I will draw on these experiences throughout as illustrations. The structure of the advice is as follows. First, I will begin by saying a few words about the academic publishing industry. Secondly, I will discuss whether one should accept or decline an invitation to review. Thirdly, I will examine the question of what appropriate standard should be applied when reviewing submissions. Finally, I conclude with advice on how to draft a report before submitting it to an editor.

6. The Intellectual Historian's Toolbox---Larry Cebula at Northwest History offers advice on what should be in a "Digital Toolbox for Graduate Students in History." I agree with all of his recommendations, as well as the suggestions given in the post's comments. In addition, I would add something specific to Cebula's #1 that Ben mentioned in a post here a few days ago: Google's "Books Ngram Viewer." Here's a link to what Google says about that tool.

7. Rethinking Human Rights---The ubiquitous Scott McLemee reviews a book for The National Conversation that takes human rights talk to task for its latent utopianism. The book's author, Samuel Moyn, a Columbia University historian of European intellectual life (and co-editor of Modern Intellectual History), seems to argue that strong doses of hard-headed empiricism (in the mode of Jeremy Bentham) and an on-the-ground, rough-and-tumble political sensibility would be beneficial to the future of human rights ideals. The book's title is The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard, 2010).

Neoliberalism and the Spirit of the 60s

At the risk of flogging a dead horse, today’s post is on the relationship between neoliberalism, defined as unfettered capitalism with a smiley face, and the spirit of the sixties, understood as public tolerance of things that were once intolerable, such as racial and sexual difference. I first wrote about this relationship here nearly two years ago, when I summarized a compelling Nancy Fraser essay on “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History.” Putting what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call “the new spirit of capitalism” to work, Fraser argued that “the cultural changes jump-started by… second wave [feminism], salutary in themselves, have served to legitimate a structural transformation of capitalist society that runs directly counter to feminist visions of a just society.” At that time, I wrote: “Second-wave feminism acted as an unintentional ideological softener for neoliberalism as women poured into the labor market in numbers never before seen.”

In retrospect, I think “unintentional” is the wrong word to describe the relationship between neoliberalism and the spirit of the 60s.

In an interview with the editors of a new and what looks to be fun little magazine, Jacobin, Walter Benn Michaels, who has argued "against diversity," against the racial and ethnic “diversity” on campuses that merely helps to legitimate a university system that keeps poor people out, makes the case that corporate culture is just as invested in the spirit of the 60s as is academic culture: “There isn’t a single US corporation that doesn’t have an HR office committed to respecting the differences between cultures, to making sure that your culture is respected whether or not your standard of living is.” Why is this? He continues:

…multiculturalism and diversity more generally are even more effective as a legitimizing tool, because they suggest that the ultimate goal of social justice in a neoliberal economy is not that there should be less difference between the rich and the poor—indeed the rule in neoliberal economies is that the difference between the rich and the poor gets wider rather than shrinks—but that no culture should be treated invidiously and that it’s basically OK if economic differences widen as long as the increasingly successful elites come to look like the increasingly unsuccessful non-elites. So the model of social justice is not that the rich don’t make as much and the poor make more, the model of social justice is that the rich make whatever they make, but an appropriate percentage of them are minorities or women. That’s a long answer to your question, but it is a serious question and the essence of the answer is precisely that internationalization, the new mobility of both capital and labor, has produced a contemporary anti-racism that functions as a legitimization of capital rather than as resistance or even critique.

But there’s more to the relationship between our contemporary corporate culture and the spirit of the 60s than just multiculturalism. The anti-authoritarianism of the 60s, which sprung from the alienation felt by the white, middle-class college students being trained for the positions in the soulless white-collar world, was also sopped up by the neoliberal order. David Steigerwald smartly makes this connection in his essay, “Where Have You Gone, Holden Caulfield? Why We Aren't ‘Alienated’ Anymore,” which Ray already cited in a post earlier this week. Steigerwald writes: “the structures of power that made the early postwar a period of alienation were reoriented after 1970, partly in response to the political sensibilities that erupted in the Sixties and partly in response to the shape of the post-industrial economy.” He continues:

American life is as bureaucratized as ever, but Wal-Mart-like, private corporations and public institutions have put on a smiley face. The cloddish corporation of mid-century was “re-invented” into the nimble “new corporation” that practices “total quality management” or any of a thousand other business school schemes designed to convince workers that they are a “team” rather than isolated individuals. The stone-faced automaker has given way to Apple, which flirts with revolution.

So the cunning of history is as such: neoliberalism—capitalism on steroids—thrives off of the spirit of a movement that many thought was formed as resistance to capitalism, or at least, as resistance to the symptoms of capitalism: imperialism, racism, sexism, etc. It turns out, expressions of tolerance and rebellion are quite profitable. This theoretical depth serves as a critique of recent historical defenses of corporate America, such as Jennifer Delton’s Racial Integration and Corporate America, 1940-1990.

But the story does not end there. Slavoj Žižek has long given the treatment to multiculturalism, terming it the “cultural logic of multinational capitalism.” Recently, he extends this to a critique of liberal tolerance. But his argument has evolved. It is not just that tolerance of racial and other differences allows for tolerance of economic inequality. Žižek argues that tolerance is not just the new form of class exploitation. It is also the new form of racism, or cultural intolerance. He writes:

Why are today so many problems perceived as problems of intolerance, not as problems of inequality, exploitation, injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, not emancipation, political struggle, even armed struggle? The immediate answer is the liberal multiculturalist's basic ideological operation: the “culturalization of politics”—political differences, differences conditioned by political inequality, economic exploitation, etc., are naturalized/neutralized into “cultural” differences, different “ways of life,” which are something given, something that cannot be overcome, but merely “tolerated.”

In other words, the growing class chasm is naturalized as a cultural chasm, or as a gap between races, ethnicities, religions, etc. In the U.S., the discourse about the so-called “underclass” nicely fits this schema. And rather than fight to obliterate this chasm, we tolerate it. And the politics of tolerance are actually the politics of anti-politics celebrated by neoliberalism. Zizek quotes Wendy Brown on this:

The retreat from more substantive visions of justice heralded by the promulgation of tolerance today is part of a more general depoliticization of citizenship and power and retreat from political life itself. The cultivation of tolerance as a political end implicitly constitutes a rejection of politics as a domain in which conflict can be productively articulated and addressed, a domain in which citizens can be transformed by their participation. (Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, p. 89.)

In the Jacobin interview, Walter Benn Michaels contends that the Tea Party is the only known resistance to neoliberalism in the U.S. He makes this case based on their aversion to illegal immigration, which so nicely serves the interests of the neoliberal race to the bottom of the wage scale. He is not arguing that Tea Party activists are theoretically aware as such, made clear by their antipathy to the welfare state. But perhaps Michaels is onto something. Perhaps the Tea Party is a rejection of the neoliberal politics of anti-politics, the politics of tolerance? Or am I crazy?