The Wisdom of Raymond Williams, Or Television: Technology and Cultural Form, and Oldie but a Goodie

When we hear from the big players in the telecom industry about net neutrality—the requirement that internet service providers (ISPs) treat all content on their network the same—the industry “does not call itself commercial, let alone capitalist. It uses public-relations descriptions like ‘free’ and ‘independent’, and often contrasts itself with ‘monopoly’ or ‘state control’” as it calls net neutrality a threat to freedom, peace, and puppies (Williams, 2003, p. 32).

Here’s the thing about that Raymond Williams quote, though. He wrote it in the 70s about television.

And here’s the thing about those major players and their allies: at the same time that they talk up the “free market” and “free choice” and worry about keeping the government’s hands off the internet and predict doom (Study: Net Neutrality to Cost 600,000 Jobs, Shrink GDP $80 Billion), what they aren’t saying is that they want to keep it legal to use pay-for-play in determining what content you get to see.

Without net neutrality, preferred, partner sites that show the money come to your browser window faster than Average Joe on the Web. Those are the stakes. I keep coming back to a phrase from Williams: “uncontrolled and therefore unequal competition” (2003, p. 38).

The idea that this constitutes anything resembling freedom is laughable, and Williams (2003, p. 136) called this one in the context of TV, too: “The American version of ‘public freedom’ was open broadcasting subject only to the purchase of facilities, which then settled freedom in direct relationship to existing economic inequalities.”

In the early days, the FCC “tried to keep the competitive market open, against strong tendencies to monopoly” (Williams, 2003, p. 30). This continued even into the recent past, but beginning with the Telecommunications Act of 1996 restrictions on how many different media properties one company could own were greatly reduced. And guess what? Fewer and fewer companies own greater and greater swaths of the mediascape—you can, then, blame Clinton for ClearChannel.

The fallout of this is harder to see in the Internet era even than it was in TV times--when we had FoxNews and MSNBC!!11!oneoneeleven!1!! “All earlier forms, in large-scale societies, were more limited in character and scale. The sermon, the lecture, the political address were obviously more limited in immediate points of view. Only in certain favourable situations was there regular choice and variety of viewpoints which is now common within even the limited range of current television argument” (Williams, 2003, p. 45).

These days, Google News gives us thousands of sources at our fingertips, and that is a dramatic improvement to be sure. But we can’t let that become a bait-and-switch such that “under the cover of talk about choice and competition, a few para-national corporations, with their attendant states and agencies, could reach farther into our lives, at every level from news to psycho-drama, until individual and collective response to many different kinds of experience and problem became almost limited to choice between their programmed possibilities” (Williams, 2003, p. 157).

References
Williams, R. (2003). Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Routledge.

“What about First Life?” and Other Pitfalls of Internet Research

Even today, with the Internet a well-established and vital part of contemporary existence, studying it is seen as less than fully respectable. As Tom Boellstorff (2008, 201) argues, this position rests on “an unfounded suspicion that cybersocialities are not legitimate or sustainable places of human culture in their own right.”

The implications of the argument that it’s illegitimate to take online cultures, such as that of Second Life, as the object of study are troubling. It is, in fact, exactly like contending that you can’t study “gay culture” (or “African-American culture” or “academic culture”) because it doesn’t exist in isolation from hegemonic culture.

Second Life, like other internet phenomena, has a distinct culture, worth studying, and this does not require believing that the subjects that interact in it aren’t produced by and with the capitalist, racist, and sexist prejudices of the actual world—no one, least of all Boellstorff, is claiming that.

This—the positioning of virtuality as always ever derivative, secondary, and incomplete—is why no one takes us seriously.

Instead, what we have to ask about not only “virtual worlds” such as Second Life but all new media developments is: to what extent is it new or different, and to what extent is it just like one’s “first” life or “old” media?

That is, to shamelessly plagiarize Eve Sedgwick (1992), we can’t know in advance how they will relate to each other—the cultural forms in SL and other new media phenomena are “shaped in unpredictable ways by actual-world sociality” (Boellstorff 2008, 25).

This is to say that, though “not everything connected to virtual worlds is novel,” neither is nothing new, such that “it is imperative that we ascertain precisely what elements are new and in what ways they are new” (Boellstorff 2008, 25).

Finally, though the technophobes and technophiles among us might want to pin everything on the technology, we also can’t know in advance how that influences the ultimate shape the culture takes

After all, technology “always comes to be through particular cultural and historical circumstances,” such that, for example, “drive-in movie theaters could not have come into existence without the automobile, but were not an inevitable consequence of the automobile’s invention” (Boellstorff 2008, 32, 58; see also Dyer 1997).

These, then, are the major difficulties one runs into when examining new media phenomena: (non)triviality, (non)novelty and (non)technology. Through careful analysis and a willingness to stick to one’s guns, however, they can be negotiated, and truly high-quality work can emerge.

Works Cited
Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Dyer, Richard. 1997. White. London: Routledge.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1992. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Old Fashioned Marxism for New Media Labor

Particularly in the contemporary era, when the media-producing organization “no longer even needs to directly pursue everywhere the profit interests,” but can instead achieve profit indirectly through “the manufacturing of ‘goodwill’” (Adorno, 2001, p. 100), it is vital that the common-sense linkage between “produsage” or “prosumption” and democratization be broken.

That is, though Jenkins (2006, p. 3) most likely did not mean it this way, it’s essential to pay attention to the “the work—and play—spectators perform in the new media system,” and we should pay special attention to the fact that the exploitation of users’ freely-given, playful labor for corporate profit is always a possibility (Howe, 2009; Moore & Karatzogianni, 2009).

This is particularly so when, as Van Dijck and Nieborg (2009) point out, many of the most enthusiastic expositions of the possibilities of user-generated content—for example Howe (2009) and Shirky (2008)—are business books designed to help companies build businesses around this unpaid labor.

Fuchs (2010, pp. 148-9) argues that “the produser commodity does not signify a democratization of the media towards participatory systems, but the total commodification of human creativity.” In this way, he argues, the labor done by users of Web 2.0 sites produces value for the capitalist without said capitalist having much (or even any) outlay of labor costs, resulting in more or less pure profit (Fuchs, 2010, pp. 143, 147).

Fuchs does this quite explicitly, demonstrating—in what strikes me as a particularly orthodox Marxist way, with those delightful M-C-M’ formulas—the “overexploitation” of these produsers. However, there’s also something to be said for a more theoretical articulation, which is what Adorno gives us. It’s a bit less concrete, admittedly, but it is very good to think with (things I never thought I’d say about Adorno include . . . ).

In particular, Adorno’s (2001, pp. 88, 98) vision helps us understand the sleight-of-hand involved in linking self-exploitation with democracy—just how it is that “for the citizen the free capacity to produce replaces the idea of a life free from domination” and mass culture, a “culture industry” product, is passed off as “something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves.”

In fact, what we quite eagerly take on in the name of freedom is really quite the opposite: “the masses are [ . . . ] an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object” (Adorno, 2001, p. 99).

In this way, it is clear that “we should not think of those plain new rows of dwellings but rather of the detached family houses which fill such a large part of Old and New England: standardized mass products which even standardize the claim of each one to be irreplaceably unique” (Adorno, 2001, pp. 78-9).

That is, it’s not the little boxes made of ticky-tacky you need to keep your eye on, not what is transparently mass-produced, but rather that which appeals to the sense of smugness we get from not being “taken in” by the mass produced, and this is exactly what much of Web 2.0 is.

Works Cited

Adorno, T. W. (2001). The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Fuchs, C. (2010). Class, Knowledge and New Media. Media, Culture & Society, 32(1), 141-150.

Howe, J. (2009). Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. New York: Random House.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Moore, P., & Karatzogianni, A. (2009). Parallel Visions of Peer Production. Capital & Class, (97), 7-11.

Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York: Penguin Press.

Van Dijck, J., & Nieborg, D. (2009). Wikinomics and its Discontents: A Critical Analysis of Web 2.0 Business Manifestos. New Media & Society, 11(5), 855-874.

The Tea Party and the Politics of White Backlash

There’s something about the Tea Party.

That something is eerily familiar as I’ve been rereading David Savran’s 1998 book Taking it Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. And no, this won’t be something that hasn’t already been said about the Tea Party’s racially-inflected hysteria, but damned if this whole white-people-angry-at-their-imagined-victimhood thing isn’t something we’ve seen before.

And it’s entirely possible that, in Battlestar Galactica style, all this will happen again, particularly as white Americans do become numerically the minority, but I have enough faith in the inexact nature of iteration (Butler, 1999; Derrida, 1988) to think that figuring out how it works will make it go differently on down the road.

So, with that in mind, what is it that’s so familiar? During the 70s, Savran (1998, p. 207) says, “as Faludi points out, ‘the “traditional” man’s real wages shrank dramatically (a 22 percent free-fall in households where white men were the sole breadwinners.’ Yet these wages were being channeled from working-class white men not to African Americans but to the very rich (who are overwhelmingly white).”

Does this sound to anyone else like our current situation, in which there was an economic downturn due to the greed of those extremely rich, overwhelmingly white people but neither the blame nor the consequences ever seems to fall on them (unless you’re Rolling Stone exposing Goldman Sachs)?

And now there’re angry white people in the streets over anything our black-under-the-one-drop-rule president does, even things that are in their class interest like the expansion of healthcare.

People have, of course, been picking up on the racial politics of the Tea Party, but it’s not the central story the way it seems to me like it should be. After all, “only after the Oklahoma City bombing did the press even begin to consider that there might be a relationship between the mythology of the white male as victim and the growth of the paramilitary Right,” and it seems like there’s some amount of asleep-at-the-wheel happening here again (Savran, 1998, p. 206).

Even the fact that a guy flew a plane into that IRS building didn’t quite connect the dots. Apparently it has to be guns and bombs for anyone to notice.

Moreover, the dominance of white people has in no way been challenged by recent events. Unemployment, after all, has disproportionately affected people of color in this recession much as it always has.

Nevertheless, now as 40 years ago, “the remarkable level of prosperity of white men relative to women and African Americans by no means prevented them from later identifying themselves as the victims of the slender and precarious gains made by those groups” (Savran, 1998, p. 192).

The only real difference would seem to be the inclusion of white women, and that’s a kind of gender equality I, for one, could do without.

In the end, then, the Tea Party may be new in that it is a populist white backlash instead of the more top-down one the last time (though my knowledge of that history is admittedly a bit fuzzy), in many more ways it is disturbingly familiar.

Works Cited
Butler, J. (1999). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Derrida, J. (1988). Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Savran, D. (1998). Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Colorblindness, the “Free” Market, and Other Neoliberal Fictions

In the United States, and in particular for people who were raised on neoliberalism (roughly, those who became aware of the world during or after the Reagan administration), a commitment to colorblindness and individual achievement make cultural sense. If we are to undermine neoliberalism’s dominance, then, we must start by troubling the assumptions that make it possible.

Beginning with the idealization of colorblindness, Melamed (2006) helpfully explains how it is that race becomes invisible under neoliberalism. As “new categories of privilege and stigma overlay older, conventional racial categories, so that traditionally recognized racial identities—black, Asian, white, or Arab/Muslim—can now occupy both sides of the privilege/stigma opposition,” being less privileged (and, indeed, stigmatized as nonnormative) no longer aligns precisely with race, and it becomes even easier to attribute lesser success to individual factors rather than structures such as racism (Melamed, 2006, pp. 2-3).

This move, then, “made it possible to ascribe stigma to segments of African American society without the act of ascription appearing to be an act of racial power,” such that one can differentiate “between ‘healthy’ African American cultural formations (those aligned with idealized American cultural norms and nationalist sentiment) and ‘pathological’ ones” (Melamed, 2006, p. 8).

In this way, because some African Americans “get it right,” the status of African Americans as a group is no longer of issue; instead, individuals are imagined to “choose” to succeed or fail: “inequalities are routinely assigned to ‘private’ life, understood as ‘natural,’ and bracketed away from the consideration in the ‘public’ life of the state” (Duggan, 2004, p. 5). In this way, neoliberalism can both express a concern for racial inequality and perpetuate it.

Alternately, even if one values only neoliberalism's economic tenets, it is still based on false premises and fails on its own terms (which, according to Hegelian dialectic, is what brings down each social structure anyway).

Neoliberalism works through an “equation of economic activity with voluntary, uncoerced, private freedom,” such that, if we can show that people are not actually “free” in this sense we can undermine the practice of treating them as if they are (Duggan, 2004, p. 13). This is to call attention to the structural determinants of decisions—workers don’t really freely choose their working conditions, so the simple supply-and-demand model that says they can just leave if they aren’t getting paid enough doesn’t really match up to reality, and this lack of freedom gets multiplied for criminalized populations such as men of color and welfare recipients.

Moreover, the “free” market isn’t so free either, such that neoliberalism fails at its own premises. As Duggan (2004, p. 13) points out, “inefficient, unprofitable ‘private’ industries routinely request and receive government support, even direct subsidies,” a point that has become crystal clear since the start of the recent economic meltdown.

Individuals can’t “compete” fairly, and corporations don’t; in this way the premises upon which neoliberalism makes sense prove to be illusory.

Works Cited
Duggan, L. (2004). The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press.
Melamed, J. (2006). The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism. Social Text, 24(4), 1-24.

Strange Bedfellows: A Tale of Mutually Constitutive Structures

An idea that has been at the forefront of my thinking of late is of the strangeness of bedfellows: some people are in bed together and don’t realize it, others are in bed together and probably shouldn’t be, and still others are could or should be in bed together but aren’t—in short, the bedfellows idea helps make sense of why it is that typical modes of identity-politics organizing don’t really work.

To begin with those who have radically different commitments but operate from and support the same premises—those who are in bed together and don’t realize it—the connections are surprising. Ferguson (2003, p. 124) usefully points out the ways in which “the discourse of black matriarchy” brought together very different groups as, “in addition to seducing black nationalists, that discourse facilitated a conservative blockade of social welfare policy in the United States.”

This is to say that the Black Panthers operated from a position that, like the so-called Moynihan Report (Office of Policy & Research, 1965), saw racism as emasculating and figured its correction as revolving around seizing manly agency, and this stance made them complicit with “U. S. nationalism, cultural nationalism, and the civil rights movement”—people they would never have though themselves like—due to their common “beliefs in heteropatriarchal discourses and practices”(Ferguson, 2003, pp. 115, 113).

Moreover, the black matriarchy discourse construction of the African American family as not only pathological but incompatible with achievement in the American system justified welfare reformers’ refusal to “sanction” it by financially supporting said matriarchs, thus making the Black Panthers in a sense also complicit with neoconservatism (Ferguson, 2003, pp. 124-5).

Similarly, Smith (2008, p. 241) points out the ways in which leftist causes often appeal to the same values as rightist premises—for example, “choice” in the case of abortion presumes universalized choosing subjects just as the conservative personal responsibility ethos does. Moreover, though Clinton was generally perceived as a pro-choice president, Smith(2008, p. 243) notes that the welfare reforms passed during his presidency, in increasing pressure on poor women of color not to have children, acted to restrict reproductive freedom in much the same way (though the opposite direction) as the pro-life camp seeks to

In this way, race-based nationalism or choice-based reproductive rights organizing, in taking on only a piece of the structure, fundamentally misregognizes the mutual constitution of the whole and renders one’s stated goals unachievable.

Alternately, some groups think they’re in bed together but aren’t, assuming commonality where in fact it does not inherently or transparently exist. Smith (2008, p. 204) notes that “Native identity is itself a form of coalition politics,” which illustrates the ways in which identity-political groups—in general, though some more than others as this example shows—have to elide intragroup difference so that the particular organizational principle becomes the defining feature. That is, not every member has the same interests, and particularly there are differences in resources and what are the most pressing issues between subgroups, as Smith (2008, p. 209) demonstrates with the difference between urban Indians and those who live on the reservation.

Similarly, the Combahee River Collective (1981) statement traces out the ways in which feminist organizing assumed the primacy of gender and excluded race and Black nationalist organizing assumed the primacy of race and excluded gender; in this, each group assumed that Black feminists would join them because of their stake in the issue it prioritized, disregarding as irrelevant (or at least of lesser importance) other issues of vital interest to African American women. In this way, it is clear that, as Smith (2008, pp. 202, 252-3) argues, we cannot assume who our allies are in the way that typical organizing has traditionally tended to do.

However, Smith (2008) also notes that we should not assume who our allies are not; the third category of strangeness in bedfellows comprises groups who could or should be in bed together but can’t see it because of how they conceive of what constitutes commonality with their cause. Thus, Ferguson (2003, p. 135) clearly articulates the links between “the devaluation of African American labor” and globalization, showing how African Americans and anticapitalist activism have a stake in the same issues, yet in practice this tends to be obscured by perceiving race and capital as separate systems.

Similarly, “pathologizing women of color immigrants as wild reproducers [ . . . ] became a way of justifying cuts to public spending and obscuring the ways in which the United States needed immigrant labor. The theory of black matriarchy, in other words, helped to generate discourses about other nonheteronormative racial formations, legitimating the exploitation of nonwhite labor and devastating the lives of poor and working-class communities of color” (Ferguson, 2003, p. 136).

These different nonwhite labor populations, then, have a common stake in contesting heteronormativity, yet are frequently at odds with one another due to operating with a race-based understanding of oppression—as in, for example, Black vs. Asian tensions demonstrated in Los Angeles in the early 1990s and elsewhere. “The key to developing a mass movement,” Smith (2008, p. 253) contends, “is to convince people to exchange their pursuit of short-term interests (such as the maintenance of their white-skinned, economic status or gender privileges) for their long-term interest in creating a world based on social equality and justice for all.”

This is to radically rethink who our bedfellows are, to move beyond organizing around identity-based categories (or, at least, essentialist understandings of them) to frame issues in ways that pull people across traditional boundaries—racial, gender, economic, or ideological.

Works Cited

Combahee River Collective. (1981). A Black Feminist Statement. In C. Moraga & G. Anzaldúa (Eds.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (pp. 210-218). Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press.
Ferguson, R. A. (2003). Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press.
Office of Policy & Research. (1965). The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. US Dept of Labor.
Smith, A. (2008). Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances. Durham: Duke University Press.

Good Vs. Bad, Good Vs. Evil, and the Trap of Universality

I went to a lecture on Nietzsche a while back that I found very useful in conceptualizing the contradictions of universality and inequality (and also, incidentally, why capitalism is incompatible with Christianity, though I don’t think Michael Moore [2009] argues it quite that way). According to the lecturer, Nietzsche argues that there was, at a certain point, a shift from “good vs. bad” morality to “good vs. evil” morality. In both cases, those who make the rules set themselves as the norm and treat those who don’t match it as deficient, but in a “good vs. bad” morality those who make the rules define themselves as superior precisely because there is a weak to their strong, a cowardly to their brave, etc. In a “good vs. evil” morality, however, those who embody the norm hold everyone to their standard and want people to change to meet it.

Universality is a “good vs. evil” morality, in which a norm is instantiated and everyone is compelled to live up to it; however, at the same time there persists a “good vs. bad” morality, in which those same people who expect everyone to live up to the norm simultaneously require a constitutive Other to produce their own superiority—that is, they require inequality.

In the context of the creation of desire for the universal position, this is produced through what Pérez (1999, p. 20) aptly characterizes as a “Hegelian notion,” a teleological narrative in which everyone should and must and will eventually get to the norm if they work hard enough—and if they fail it’s their own fault.

It thus becomes easy to see how the male, heterosexual subject becomes the organizing principle for cultural nationalism. Heterosexual men of color closely approximate the subject of universality, occupying a position of “the other as the same,” of almost but not quite (or white) (Pérez, 1999, p. 20). Using this figure for a movement makes it much easier to argue for the rights enjoyed by the dominant group; after all, it allows activists to construct their group as differing in only one respect, which is of course then framed as a minor difference.

However, discussing activism in this way positions the turn to universality as a cynical decision, calculated against a reckoning of social tradeoffs, and there’s no reason to suspect that it truly is. Instead, it is essential to recognize that arguing for recognition by the liberal state comes from within the structure itself. When people turn to the state to make them equal under the law, they have already subscribed to the belief that everyone should be perfectly interchangeable under the law, and consequently have also subscribed to the definition of what interchangeability looks like—white, male, and heteronormative, among other things.

Cultural nationalisms can’t take this entire, but they can change only the part that is obviously incompatible with their perceived goals and identities by excising whiteness. In doing so, they misrecognize the ways in which all of the parts of the universal subject are mutually constitutive and “failing” on any account renders one definitionally ineligible for full citizenship.

In light of this trap of liberal universality, zoot suiters’ resistance through racialized masculinities and delinquency, as described by Kelley (1994) and España-Maram (2006), begins to look like a good idea. Rather than applying to the state for relief, African American and Filipino men who found themselves corralled into subservience in their daily and working lives used zoot suit culture as a means of reasserting their control over themselves.

The two cases are also structurally very similar—both groups of young men were even newer migrants to the city environments who had conflict with longer-established people of their respective ethnic groups. The existence of this gap between youth culture and the larger racial communities to which the young people belonged does point to some of the limitations of this mode of resistance (the ill-treatment of women in African-American zoot suit culture being another glaring problem).

As a way of pushing back against dominant culture, it was limited, it was disorganized, and it didn’t necessarily produce broad-scale social change, but it shows one way one might conduct activism without relying on “we’re just like you” rhetoric or appealing to the state.

Works Cited
España-Maram, L. (2006). Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles's Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kelley, R. D. G. (1994). Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: Free Press.
Moore, M. (2009). Capitalism: A Love Story. Starz / Anchor Bay.
Pérez, E. (1999). The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.