Exploitation Films and Poetic Justice

I hope you'll excuse the shamless self-promotion here, and I know I've already blogged once this week, but reading Neve's chapter on the censorship and politics of noir reminded me of a conference essay that I wrote in the spring about poetic justice in exploitation movies of the 1960s (I know, more 60s stuff...).

Here's the thrust of my argument: I talk about the use of poetic justice to "punish" "transgressions" of sex, drugs, and violence in several late 60s movies and suggest that "In the late 60s [. . .] youth culture was no longer incipient. Indeed, there’s much evidence to suggest that while exploitation cinema prior to the 1960s was primarily aimed at parents, late 60s exploitica was aimed at young and old alike. In the late 60s youth culture had itself reached adolescence, and for the first time, youth culture was truly mass culture, not just some underground or alternative. For this reason, the moral stakes were higher and were important not just to the youth and not just to their parents, but to the culture at large."

I thought of this because I feel like it dovetails with Neve's comment that "The censors [. . .] always saw to it that evil was punished in these pictures and that sin or corruption was depicted with a degree of restraint" (98)

If Neve's essay or my preview has piqued your interest, you can check out my essay by following this link.

Again, I apologize if this feels tacky or isn't in the spirit of this blog. My intention here is simply to add to the discussion, so I hope it doesn't seem like I'm instead trying to directed it toward myself. Just give me dirty looks in class today if you feel it's warranted.

The Ritual in the Age of Sonic Reproduction

The last few pages of Jonathan Sterne's chapter, "The Resonant Tomb," brought me back to thinking about Walter Benjamin and his "The Work of Art and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In the Epilogue, Benjamin warns of the aestheticization of the politics, the de-humanization of the masses, and how these trends lead to war. Fascism, he argues, "sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right [to change property relations], but instead a chance to express themselves." I believe Sterne's discussion of the Omaha tribe and the desperate, sympathetic attempt of anthropologists to preserve their rituals and songs resonates with this argument. Those anthropologists who recognized the genocidal policies of the United States government toward Native Americans certainly knew they could do nothing to change the property relations (ie: land seized from the Native Americans), so they offered the Omaha, at the very least, "a chance to express themselves." Thus, they launched a project to "preserve music, ritual, and languages that federal policy at the time of their recording had intended to drive into the ground within a generation" (qtd. in Sterne 331).

Benjamin claims that "the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual," and though these works of art are alienated from their "aura," they are never fully divorced from it. These idols, talismans, or other objects used in ritual are, more or less, constant from one moment to the next. Early recorded sound, on the other hand, was subject to a "triple temporality." The medium itself can degrade. The recorded sound is just a the audible aspect of a fragment of a ritual. The recorded event is separate, modular, broken from the past. These temporalities are symptoms of translating the "interiority" of the "live" event into the "exteriority" of the recorded form. Furthermore, there "was no "unified whole" or idealized performance from which the sound in the recording was then alienated" (Sterne 332). The song or ritual exists within time. It can be present one moment and absent the next. This seems to explain why many members of the tribe were less interested in preserving rituals that the anthropologists. They were not seen as something material, durable. Putting a song in cylinder form and playing it later would not reproduce the ritual.

However, the same techniques of preservation which "exteriorized" the "interiority" of these rituals are also responsible for bringing the audible aspects of the recorded events back to the Omaha tribe nearly a century later. It seems to me that these recordings, in their materiality, can serve as a kind of talisman or spiritual object. An item used in a ritual (an idol, rattle, or drum) is given meaning by the person using it, and these recordings work in the same way. This is achieved through a "re-interiorization" of the "exteriorized" event by the individual. This may seem like a sleight of hand, substituting the recreated or reconceived interiority of someone today for the original interiority at the time of the recording. I would counter this by saying that culture is mutable. The interiority of a song is not static from invocation to invocation, or singer to singer. Each instantiation of a song allows for change; its interiority is recreated each time it is performed.

Sterne stops short of claiming this, saying only that "If the past is, indeed, audible, if sounds can haunt us, we are left to find their durability and their meaning in their exteriority" (333). A return to Benjamin can explain why even if a recorded ritual can be "re-interiorized," this does not guarantee the revivification of a destroyed culture. Benjamin sees the masses under Fascism, subjugated to the will of a dictator, as analogous to art in mechanical reproduction, violated by being "forced into the production ritual values." We only have fragments, both of the remaining Omaha and their rituals. Reuniting the two is "no doubt a good thing," but it is not enough to reverse the damage of this fragmentation and is powerless to change property relations or allow for any real exercise of rights (331).

Our Commodities, Ourselves

Gitelman and Haltman both argue that technologies in their respective periods invoke femininity to ease the user's transition from the old to the new. If the manufacturers of phonographs and telephones had to position their products as feminine, domestic, and personal (or has having a kind of personality), in what forms has this kind of personal identification survived? How do we now cope with new technologies, in a world of niche products and targeted marketing?

I don't really have an answer - this blog is ultimately a shameful excuse to post the above video. I think it's safe to say, however, that personal identification with technology is more important than ever. I think we tend to see ourselves as fully transitioned into our postmodern, posthument era, but our advertising belies this assumption. Apple's TV spots come to mind - the ones with the hip young guy in jeans and the old stuffed shirt. If you'd rather hava a beer with the Mac guy, well, you'd rather have a beer with a Mac. Even without Apple's ads, they've built this idea of "personality" into the way their products work - as in the ipod's request that you give it a name on your computer.

In our cultural characterization, we have slotted contemporary gadgets into the role of domestic assistants - sometimes by invoking gender or race, other times by simply positioning them as human. I also wonder if this positioning relies on the global structure of technological production and support. If my ipod was made in China, and its support network is in India, isn't it a tad disturbing that it's positioned as my servant?

Archiving Ephemera

The archive is a looming figure in both Sterne and Gitleman's histories of new media. So I hope I'm you don't think I'm being to presentist in trying to overlap their methodological concerns onto a current artifact: YouTomb. You've all, no doubt, heard of/visited YouTube, and in doing watching their videos, there's a good chance you've violated the copyright of someone or another. As much as YouTube promotes DIY culture, it also serves as a reservoir of free videos from larger copyrighted works. Not to get too mired in the legal questions surrounding this site, suffice it to say that, there is enough corporate pressure put on YouTube, which, by the way, is owned by Google, to require thousands of video's removal each day to prevent lawsuits. A group of concerned users at MIT have created an archive of these excised videos at the website YouTomb, http://youtomb.mit.edu/. While not all these examples are copyright related (there is also the question of decency, mind you) rest assured that plenty are.

Sterne positions his reading of sound recording in terms of tropes of morbidity and "bourgeois modernity." While I think you could critique him for getting a little "save the rainforest" preachy by the end of his chapter, nonetheless, the stakes are apparent, and intriguing, in his dual reading of death of "other" cultures alongside the material aspects of the machine itself. When we couple this with Gitelman's claim of Victorian fascination with originality and "presence" we see that the question of the fleetingness of both cultural material and archives themselves is a central question for cultural studies, and the academy more generally.

This brings us back to the Internet, the supposed harbinger of ephemeral times, reality here for one click only. While people are trying to refute this notion, convincingly showing that "every click leaves a trace," the sheer number of videos on YouTomb suggests that our culture(s), taking place more and more online are going to be/are an archive we need to start, well, archiving in a serious way. To steal a telling example: When scholars of Salman Rushdie return to his writing after his death what do they count as "work"? Are his text messages worthy of authorial correspondence? Is his Internet history worthy of "creative inspiration"? His iPod playlist? You get the gist. The point here is twofold: first, the Internet is not as temporary as commonly believed, but if we don't start asking and answering questions about the nature of the digital archive we will not be able to reconstruct the terabytes of data we are cleansing, deleting, spilling coffee on, etc. in order to write cultural history or ethnographgies of our textually rich, copyrighted cultures of today.

Conservation, not preservation

Just a quick blog post that on the front page of the Post-Gazette today there was a little info on something called "ecopods" for "green burials." I'm attaching a link to the website hosting the local news article. It's interestingly timed since in this there is no preservation.

Kennedy Parody Records

Sterne’s “A Resonant Tomb” chapter from his book The Audible Past got me thinking about how sound recordings can preserve a voice or culture beyond its natural lifetime. Sterne makes a parallel between sound recordings that “can” the voice of the dead and spirit photography, which similarly captures the exteriority of an individual for the sake of posterity.

For whatever reason—maybe because I’m a longtime record collector, maybe because I often find myself preoccupied with 1960s pop culture bullshit—Sterne’s discussion made me think of a series of pop records made during that era that satirized the US’s “first family”: the Kennedys. These records came about, in my opinion, as a result of two not unrelated things: first, the 1960s witnessed an explosion of recorded music that has never been equaled before or since—not only in terms of volume of music/programming released but also in the boom of the record business as a major industry—and second, the sudden presence of a president who was young, sexy, and cool: JFK.

One such record is Sing along with JFK, released in 1961. This record used actual clips from Kennedy’s speeches that were then crafted into catchy pop songs. This record, like other political parody records of the era, was made mostly for the AM radio market. Click here to check out a paradigmatic sample from this album.

By far the best-known Kennedy parody record was Vaughn Meader’s The First Family, released in 1962. Meader, a stand-up comic, had become well known for his impersonations of the president and decided to make an album lampooning JFK and his political cronies. The spoken-word comedy album was an enormous success, selling 7.5 million copies—more than any long-play record album ever had sold before! It also won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1963. To get a sense of its success, try going into any thrift store in the United States and flipping through their used records: you’ll find at least one or two copies of The First Family. I always run into the damn things when I’m hunting for something cool. Someone on Youtube recently posted the entire album, which you can check out if you’d like.

Of course, the mirth came to an abrupt end in November, 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated. You just can’t laugh about JFK’s Harvard accent once you’ve seen his son saluting his casket. Meader’s top-selling album quickly dropped from sight, and needless to say, the JFK parody record era ended.

In a few years, though, the dust had settled and there was a new Kennedy to make fun of: Senator Robert “Bobby” Kennedy. A trio of comedians who called themselves the Hardly Worthit Players recorded a parody version of the Troggs’ hit “Wild Thing” by impersonating Robert Kennedy and released it as by “Senator Bobby.” The chatter at the beginning of the song declares it “take 72,” and the fake engineer encourages the singer by telling him “All right, senator, this one’s for the Democrats, so let’s really hear it.” The song became a Top 20 hit, and many sang along with Bobby as he crooned, “Uh, Wild Thinga…you make my, uh, haaaart singa.”

An entire album of Senator Bobby music was released with a cover that parodied the Beatles’ cover art for their 1965 album Rubber Soul. The 1967 Kennedy spoof album, to contrast, was called Boston Soul, and it featured Senator Bobby “singing” cover versions of pop hits like “Mellow Yellow,” “96 Tears,” and “Daydream.” Some of Senator Bobby’s political colleagues, including “Mr. President” (Lyndon Johnson) and “William Rebuttley, Jr.” (William F. Buckley, Jr.), joined the senator on several tunes. See this Youtube video for a clip of the Hardly Worthit Players “performing” their hit on the old Hollywood Palace TV show in 1967. Wow, those were the days.

Once again, however, the laughter died when Kennedy died. Robert Kennedy’s assassin also killed the last of the Kennedy parody records.

Nevertheless, these records remain as documents of the era and its political climate. If I may return to Sterne in closing, I think his use of the “can” metaphor to articulate sound recordings’ ability to “preserve” the voice of the dead applies rather fitly here. Although for the most part these parody records don’t capture the voices of either John or Robert Kennedy, what they do capture is the spirit of parody. It’s so easy to retrospectively view the 1960s and its fallen heroes with an inaptly rosy sense of awe or nostalgia. Because of the assassination of the Kennedys, their hallowed history tends to obscure the fact that they—like all politicians—were often the butt of jokes. So, in the case of things like the Vaugn Meader album and the “Wild Thing” record, while they may not have accurately “canned” the voices of the Kennedys (Sterne suggests that such “canning” can never really be accurate, anyway), they did successfully “can” the voice of parody, which we can reproduce simply by finding one of the old records and listening in.

My [Death] Space

Jonathan Sterne introduces a variety of ways in which we may read our media, and our fascination with an ever-growing gamut of new media technology, as intimately connected to human anxieties about death. The idea, even, that recording technology helps us through a conceptual switch from the idea of "live" music or sound (as it is termed) to "canned" (preserved) sound, and that our terminology for it has developed thus, is further evidence that this is eerily the case. Sterne's discussion of Nipper, the RCA dog, is an early example of where we might see media technology hotly pursuing the dream of immortality (and, by the way, I have a reproduced version of Nipper hanging in my house, and it's totally a coffin. Like, totally. It's right above my piano, the dead and the living side by side ... )

And while I'm on the subject ... if you haven't been there before, take a little trip to MyDeathSpace.com, a site which collects, and editorializes upon, the public MySpace profiles of the deceased. The site can't actually contain the profiles, so it links to them and categorically organizes them. It is interesting to note how many of the dead who now populate and sustain the pages of the site are under the age of 35; this, I think, points to some telling generational markers that reveal the modern relationship of death to media and the technology which enables that media. MySpace, thus, appears in fundamental conception to bear a lot of resemblance to early sound recording -- namely, that the ephemerality of human life can achieve permanence in digital format -- since it is able to chronicle a person's chosen public identity, including sounds, pictures, movies, etc., and sustain that public identity into the great unknown.

MyDeathSpace.com, claiming to be "MySpace.com's cemetary," presents an veneered array of the dead much the same way MySpace.com does of the living. And, as with the living, people are allowed the opportunity to "interact" with the deceased. They can leave them messages, make public comments about them, or merely flip through catalogues of pictures, evincing an "active audience role" in the context of these pages. Perhaps these pages constitute, for this new generation, tombstones of the 21st Century.

But, then again, maybe MyDeathSpace.com will have a run for it's money once these babies really take off -- digital tombstones.

Sometimes a Phone is not just a Cigar

I appreciate Haltman's use of "psychocultural" analysis of the candlestick telephone (86) and its physical associations, its "suggestively organic" connection, with the human body (75). The material cultural analysis of its many distinct ingredients is, if nothing else, interesting and from its details we receive clues to help interpret the ways in which it was intended to be used (focusing, perhaps on the base?), such as the following observation: "The felt pad underneath the base, allowing for easy sliding back and forth without damage to a surface, seems to argue for a tabletop or desk location" (Ibid.). We also have a brief summary of its seemingly brief popularity (1923-1927 from what I'm gathering from this essay, except one photo which is from 1919), following it quickly from office to home, mixed ever so gently with a summation of the history of "the telephone." But I can't seem to ignore the fact that Haltman is either teasing us with his psychocultural obtuseness or is simply missing the point. Or that psychoanalysts so overemphasized "the point" that Hatlman daren't bring it up where it might actually make sense, lest his useful reading of the phone's form be dismissed as phallocentric. But all I can see when I look at the candlestick phone is a phallus, with its "overall stature and dignity, its heft and weight" (71).

Haltman uses language that helps to humanize the telephone, mixing "touch" with "carress" and imbuing it with "warmth" and body parts. I absolutely see it. But, and it could be because I'm gay, I don't see the dial as the genitals. If there are genitals to be found (my reading of Susan Bordo has helped me to distinguish between phallus and penis and here I see a phallus), I would argue that it is the "gracefully expanding cylinder" with its "cap" (73), ready to burst into upper middle-class homes during this period of the telephone's "explosive growth" (78). Haltman's only nod to its perfected manhood, beyond the sensuous language used to describe the telephone ("hard," "smooth," and "swelling" within the same line on page 76), is reference to its "verticality" (86).

I can't imagine that Haltman is not being coy, but I'm afraid that he might be and I wonder what that means or has meant for analyses that might benefit from a more direct "psychocultural" approach. Has he opted to "conceal it" in the same way that House and Garden of 1923 spoke of the candlestick phone (85)? I'm not sure that he speaks (or doesn't speak) of a penis, since it's clear that this phallus has "stability and calm" (71) and "visual harmony" (74) that doesn't sound all that familiar to male anatomy. Here we have a brilliant opportunity, not just to get into the "omniscient eye" of the telephone (84), which I think is also a great reading, but to get into the omnipresent and always potent (it's always upright) intruder in the house.

I'll admit that phallic readings are often overdone and rarely that illuminating (I don't know that it really matters to me whether the Washington Monument is a phallus, but I do know I'm interested in the fact that it's an obelisk), but I think it's an important consideration for this particular phone (that's what they all say, right?). Its "unsightly" nature (fig 4.6 on 84) makes me think that their is something of phallic disgust at play, but beyond that I like thinking of the "anxiety" it could produce. Its form comes out of "commercial" interests, "the first self-conscious telephone design," but the thing ends up in the home. There the user becomes self-conscious, because of its intrusive qualities and perhaps because of its "unsightly" form.

Why is it unsightly? It's "vertical," large (it is almost a foot long and, as is mentioned several times, has "heft"), and a deep shiny black. I can't imagine that a man of the household isn't a little distraught to see his lady of the house weilding that (black) monster so close to her face. She probably doesn't do that for him, so why should the telephone get all the (imagined) fun? If women were so associated with telephones and their use, then it might have seemed a smidge inappropriate in its shape. The blackness is an afterthought, as I've said, I think this is a phallus, not a penis. But it could be a new jumping off point.

According to Haltman, the later "French Telephone" has none of the human form of before (86), but I can't help notice that it does still have the "genitals" of the dial and the "anus" of the "phonecord aperture" (75) and it does look more like a face than the old wall phones that he suggests were made to have faces (82). The eyes are still there, although they do look a little sleepier than the one-eyed giant that used to stand proudly at the productive man's desk. In its new iteration, it's a little more servile, perhaps, and just as black (for anyone who wants to go that route).

And now you all get a free pass to psychoanalyze me, because every psychoanalyst brings it on themself.

Advertising Quiz and The Meta

Here I go again with my art jargon contributions... but a few pieces call into conversation much of what we've been reading, and I think you might find two artists particularly of interest. (If any of you are familiar with these works already, please excuse my overly simplistic explanation.)

Louis Cameron relates most to Smythe's article about the content of culture serving the realm of advertising. Cameron makes a lot of work that first looks like it might be abstract expressionism, but on closer examination, his subject is that of commercial marketing.

Basically, the artist takes brands or pairings of pantone colors and turns them into art that summons our unconscious associations with those products he references. See how quickly you can identify the images I've imbedded here... of course, some are more obvious than others. I've given the "answers" at the bottom of this post, so try to figure them out first before scrolling if you don't want to be a cheater.

What I find interesting is that the decoding of these works summons the products we're all so intimately familiar with - so much so that we don't need to see what they look like, because they're already embedded in visual memory.

For more of these, check out the artist's site; it's all Flashed out, so I can't grab some of the better imagery for this blog post. Identifying and examining the forms that he uses for these different commodities (many of which have to do with the act of consumption itself) is a fun game to play with yourself.
Try it at: http://www.louiscameron.com



The other piece I continue to think of in this reoccurring conversation about relationships between base/superstructure - perhaps in a more abstract sense - is Pierre Huyghe's film "The Third Memory." Maybe it's just that I recently found this work and have become unabashedly obsessed with it, but it seems that the piece calls into question what happens to a film and it's makers after it's become an economically viable, recognizable cultural product. And talk about issues of mediation. The video is almost 10 minutes long, so I won't harp on this; basically all you need to know is that the man speaking is the "real" robber that Al Pacino played in Dog Day Afternoon. To watch the film (pre-apology for the quality), go to: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3izfb_the-third-memory-huyghe_shortfilms For a more detailed reading of the film, see: http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/saltz/saltz2-14-01.asp


ANSWERS TO CAMERON: Snickers, American Express, Corona, Aquafresh, Mountain Dew, (installation: foreground) Doublemint, Orangina

The American in Peril

... and, yes, I stole that title to my post, from a girl we all like to call Baby Bird.

Anyway, Smythe's analysis of the extra labor of the modern-day laborer brought to mind another example that I thought I'd toss into the mix: American Apparel. The reason this company springs to the forefront of my consideration with reference to Smythe has to do with the work performed by "consumer audiences" and consumers-as-laborers alike: "[Consumers] work to create the demand for advertised goods which is the purpose of the monolopy capitalist system" (6). At American Apparel, however, a company that prides itself on being completed "vertically integrated," this scheme is intensified: it uses -- or at least reports to often use -- its own employees as models in its smuttily retro ad campaign (what is less often reported here is that American Apparel also utilizes a cast of well-known porn stars in its ads as well). So, here, we see the employees themselves functioning to sell a message to a demographic of consumers, expanding the function and meaning of their wage-slavery to the capitalist enterprise (for it certainly is: American Apparel has grossed a year-end profit of $250 million, a number which continues to rise). And, like all the scum-sucking, child-labor-exploiting clothing stores that American Apparel pretends not to emulate, it requires its employees to wear its clothing while at work, the neo-Fordist hypocrisy of which should be self-evident since it's employees make just above minimum wage so they can buy t-shirts that they, or people like them, make which run upwards of $18 each.

Matt Mason, in a truly ridiculous book called The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism, calls this "punk capitalism," a term that makes me a little green and gooey inside. While the "capitalism" inherent in the American Apparel company model is probably obvious, the "punk" aspect appears a bit more elusive. I think it's safe to say that the following facts do not contribute to the company's punk ethic: the lawsuits which have been filed against American Apparel by scores of female employees (on the grounds of sexual harassment, varying degrees of "exploitation" on the job, and, in some cases, being told that they would need to lose weight in order to avoid being fired); the CEO, Dov Charney, who has been personally sued on similar grounds; and using your employees to sell your brand to your employees (or to audiences of consumers who are won by the exploited labor of your employees). It seems that the only thing "vertically integrated" about this company is its consumption, not production.

Spoof American Apparel ads and outright attacks, such as the one included at the top of this post, are part of a small campaign of resistance by both "audiences" and employees alike.

Impulse Politics

Along with everyone else so far, I found Smythe an especially productive addition to the conversation - he opened up a number of questions for me, and suggested some interesting ways of thinking about Marxism in the era of flexible accumulation. Marx, while he certainly made rational predictions, couldn't actually see into the future - and capitalism has made some pretty spectacular moves in order to avoid its demise. Giving people the illusion of choice and leisure when they are merely reproducing their own labor power is one specatacular and perverse move that has allowed capitalism to survive the major crises of the 20th century - and it seems the culture of choice intensifies each time.

There are a bunch of questions that go along with this, but given my current frustration at being bombarded with political ads (even though I don't have cable and barely watch TV), I'd like to ask what effect this culture of choice may have had on our political system. On p. 12, Smythe writes that "Monopoly capitalist marketing practice has has a sort of seismic, systemic drift towards "impulse purchasing." Quoting Linder, he adds that "[advertising] serves to provide quasi-information for people who lack time to acquire the genuine insights" (13). I don't think I'm suggesting anything new if I say that this same principle applies to politics - not just in ads, but in the boiled-down, time-saving "sound bites" that structure political rhetoric all over the place. If we begrudgingly accept that politics for most voters is a matter of either brand loyalty or impulse purchase, does that imply that, like Smythe's consumerism, "choice" is merely an illusion?

By the way, you really can buy political party "brands" - that's what the picture is. They suggest you use them on steaks, but I think their mere existence suggests far more disturbing uses.

I Don't Want F.O.P., Godammit! I'm a Dapper Dan Man!

Branding is the great triumph of monopoly capitalism, but no where is its influence more obvious than in the field of personal hygiene. For example, "Kleenex" is used as a synecdoche for the larger field of facial tissue in general, just as "Q-Tip" is for cotton swab and "Band-Aid" is for adhesive bandage. In fact, it is hard to think of any one personal hygiene item that does not immediately conjure a specific brand or set of brands. These products are so inextricably bound up in the culture posited by their advertising campaigns that convincing someone to change brands presents a real challenge. Try convincing a life long user or Irish Spring that they really ought to be bathing with Dove. You're liable to hear something like, "I ain't washing with something what share a name with a chocolate." Smythe pretty clearly explains that this brand loyalty is a result of targeted advertising which establishes "in the worker's consciousness (1) the existence of a "problem"...(2) the existence of a class of commodities which will solve that problem, and (3) the motivation to give top priority to purchasing brand X of that class of commodities in order to "solve" that "problem" (12).

However, I would be inclined to argue that this loyalty is even more pronounced in when it comes to hygiene products because the effect of the product is immediately evident on the body. No one can tell, just by talking to me, what kind of blender, computer, or underwear I have, unless of course that is the subject of the conversation. What they can tell is that I smell like Dial -- the yellow kind -- at least most of the time.

This brings me to Listerine, a brand which literally invented a problem in order to market itself as a solution. This is not to say that bad breath didn't exist before the 1920s, but "halitosis," a scare term applied to bad breath, did not. Originally sold as a cleaning solution, a cure for

 "infectious dandruff," and a remedy for colds, Listerine did not become a household name until it the word halitosis was invented. Within a matter of years, bad breath went from a being widely accepted "fact of life" to a symptom of bad hygiene with the potential to "ruin your life." Listerine ads struck at the heart of human insecurity, featuring women who worried, "Can I be happy with him in spite of that?" One in particular, from a 21 July 1928 issue of Collier's Magazine reads, "Halitosis may get you discharged: Employers prefer fastidious people...halitoxics not wanted." Listerine saw its revenue jump 7,000% in less than a decade and today has spun itself off into a number of other products. Though it can no longer legally claim to alleviate cold symptoms or clean as well as flossing, Listerine has proven effective in fighting gingivitis and plaque. However, the main thrust of its advertising campaign is, to this day, that it 'kills the germs that cause bad breath." I would argue that this function of the product is privileged above all others because it immediately presents itself on the body of the consumer. Unless you're a doctor, you are much more likely to notice someone's coffee breath than you are to diagnose their gum disease, and that is the primary reason people buy and use Listerine. And remember, twice a day, everyday.

Warp-Speed through Ideological Tunnel Vision!

Dallas Smythe sure is pessimistic for a Canadian,
and that's not a bad thing. Along with Thomas and Kurt, I think his analysis of mass com is revelatory. His vision is not a bright one though; I felt just as trapped as I did at the end of Althusser, if not more so, if you take that whole "mind slavery (a tendency towards ideological tunnel vision) thing at face-value. (121) I have a criticism about his defintion of "conscious labor", but maybe it's just because I've been reading too much French theory.

His main addition is the damning claim that "all non-sleeping time of most of the population is work time...[which] is devoted to the production of commodities- in-general" (3). He explains this with Guy Debord's (similar to Mao Tse-Tung) society of the spectacle, when you are busy consuming your don't have time to overthrow capitalism. But, my question is why does this process stop when you are sleeping? He seems to be mapping desire onto commodification as a form of labor, which I think is a great addition, but I don't think it ends when you pass into sleep. Any psychoanalytic theory of desire (vulgar or not) or even of film, indicates that the unconscious time, such as sleep, contributes as much, if not more, to desire than your waking life. Even the most cursory investigation of mass-com will return plenty of sexual imagery which clearly helps motivate the labor of brand-identification, and the primacy of advertisement over narrative, another unconscious motivation.

Think also about how many of us fall asleep to the tv, or the radio, or wake up to an iPod clock alarm, or whose apartment mate won't shut off their Metallica even when we tell them we are trying to sleep. Superstructural immersion in our lives, and the obliterating of "leisure time" doesn't stop, the ideological city never sleeps. Maybe a personal example can really bring this home: My father is the perfect embodiment of Smythe's citation of Linder's term a "rationale of irrationality" (12). My father loves cheap shit more than anything: I've had a long-running joke that he thinks "we'd lose money if we didn't buy" product x. His purchases single handedly clothe all the Wal-Mart employees in Sichuan Province. But really, he's admitted that he dreams about good deals, about fixing his car instead of bringing it to a mechanic. He calls this process "grokking" it out from Stranger in A Strange Land. The thing is, I don't think my dad's that strange, he's really just good at this craziness: he travels at warp speed through the ideological tunnel vision of the consciousness industry. Smythe offers probably the most satisfying of the constructions of b/ss for me, and don't know how much wiggle room that leaves us. There's definatley something active about his construction audience labor, but I don't think it's that liberatory.

MTV, Monkees, Marketing

Along with Thomas, I, too, was arrested by Dallas Smythe’s discussion of advertizing in our mass communication media. I particularly relished the “free lunch” model of media that he sets forward: subverting our usual impression that commercial content is “the price we pay” to enjoy our media programming, Smythe asserts that “[. . .] the central purpose of the information, entertainment, and ‘educational’ material [. . .] transmitted to the audience is to ensure attention to the products and services being advertized” (6). In other words, it isn’t that programming is central and advertising is a means to an end; rather, it is the advertising that is central, while the programming is a peripheral project aimed at attracting attention and favor toward it.

I want to suggest here that today our media outlets are today taking the “free lunch” model to aggressive extremes, with the lunch portions becoming ever scantier and the advertising increasingly becoming the main course. Either that or the media outlets simply mix the two together in a sort of indistinguishable goulash.

One of the best examples of an outlet that hawks this brand (pun intended) of marketing-saturated programming is MTV. There’s an excellent PBS Frontline program from a few years back called The Merchants of Cool that I used to show to my freshman classes at Ohio University when we read a few essays on consumerism. In it, a University of Illinois Communications professor, Robert McChesney, explains:

"Everything on MTV is a commercial; that’s all that MTV is. Sometimes it’s an explicit advertisement, paid for by a company to sell a product. Sometimes it’s going to be a video for a music company, there to sell music. Sometimes it’s going to be the set that’s filled with trendy clothes and stuff, there to sell a look that will include products on that set. Sometimes it will be a show about an upcoming movie, paid for by the studio—though you don’t know it—to hype a movie that’s coming out from Hollywood. But everything’s an infomercial: there is no non-commercial part of MTV" (Merchants of Cool).

McChesney’s suggestion of MTV as a sort of “marketing-only medium” breaks down Smythe’s dichotomy of programming (“news, features, and entertainment,” according to the great quotation Smythe pulls from Humphrey McQueen) and advertisement: in the case of MTV, if we take McChesney’s suggestion, it’s not that the programming aids the advertising; it’s that the two are one and the same.



I think it’s fair to say that MTV has revolutionized the way that marketing and programming intermingle in our contemporary media, but it does have precedents. One that I think is particularly illustrative is The Monkees, the mid-1960s TV show about America’s loveable pop ‘n’ roll foursome. It’s no secret that the Monkees (the group) were modeled after major groups like the Beatles and Rolling Stones. I like to imagine that the board meeting that produced the Monkees started off as follows: “You know, kids sure seem to like those Beatles, but there’s one problem: we’re not getting rich off of them. Now, how can we figure out a way to do that?” Although the prompt for that question was the success of the British Invasion, the answer was uniquely American: a pop group that was simultaneously a television program. The Monkees show, like MTV today, had no non-commercial content. Either it showed the group “performing” their hits in order to sell records, or it showed the group being cool and fun in order to sell their image and, again, more records. Oh, and then there were Monkees lunchboxes, toys, trading cards, costumes, and other assorted products.

Where does The Monkees differ from MTV? Well, The Monkees was a single show that ran for two years. MTV is a network—nay, a media giant—that has been at the center of pop-culture television for twenty-seven years. MTV has branched out, too: sister channels, MTV movies, MTV books, etc.

The big joke these days with MTV is that there is no music on it anymore. I’ve got two ideas about this. First of all, today the internet brings people music videos in a much more expansive and convenient way than MTV could, so a few years ago they recognized that and focused their energies on a different kind of programming. Secondly, I think they realized that the kind of programming that they created in music’s place—largely reality TV—is even cheaper than music videos and every bit as commercial and marketable.

Bringing us closer to

Dallas Smythe's argument that "leisure" time, at least that which is spent consuming, either through shopping or engaged in advertisements or (others') money-making schemes, is "work" time was not only surprising but also informative. It's makes me rethink the way that I'm going about my final paper for this class. The topic, men's underwear, had originally been going in the direction of an advertising history. But Smythe's emphasis on the work of the consumer reminds me of the collectible aspect of men's underwear, at least for gay men. The advertising is not just in magazines, where you would have to tear out the ad, but on underwear boxes themselves (for Calvin Klein, RIPS, C-IN2, 2(x)ist, etc). Even more working leisure time is consumed by those suckers, like me, who follow a (no joke) video PodCast for companies with ads, like AussieBum, an Australian gay-run underwear company. They even have a "reality TV" component as well, to help make the models seem more interesting or ad-following worthy.

But it's not just underwear. YouTube has become an amazing source of not just bootleg media, but advertisements! You want to see an ad from the SuperBowl? Check out YouTube, or the company's website. It'll be there. In those instances, the ad need only be shown once and if it breaks through as funny or smart or absurd, it's going to be seen by twice as many people, and probably more than once, through no additional work (or cost) of the advertising corporation. That's incredible . . .

As we have discussed in some other classes, it seems that our current American economy is mostly in the realm of the superstructure, rarely creating actual material products. It's something to consider and I wish that Smythe had better discussed it. While he refutes Murdock saying that he has covered the ground, I'm not sure what to do with his statement that "the mass media of communications are simultaneously in the superstructure and engaged indispensably in the last stage of infrastructural production" (3). I agree, but what can or should we do about that? Is that better or, presumably, worse for us as a culture? But then aren't there ways in which such consciousness industry is being used "for good?"

Uncanny connections

For me, as I hopefully articulate in my position paper, one of the take-aways from the Raymond Williams article Base and Superstructure is his focus on the base. One of the ways in which Williams makes this claim that I find striking is to shift literary criticism from consumption, the "way that [literature] can profitably or correctly be consumed" (46), to creation. But to study literature, or any cultural artifact, as isolated from consumption would seem to ignore the very obvious fact, which Williams has in fact outlined on pages 44-45, that literature (etc) come from a tradition which has, at some point, been consumed by the creator.

I'm not as well-versed on theories of consumption as I'd like to be, but I'm sure this idea is out there. What I wonder is how Williams might address the issue of creator-as-consumer, and how that might affect the claim that we need to focus on the "components" of art and their production, not just on the cultural meanings. Is it a reflection of a postmodern perspective (and therefore after Williams's article) to understand creation as consumption, to never be able to fully separate the acts that work in partnership? While consumption and creation may not be dichotomous opposites, this idea reminds me a little of a not so new idea, Freud's idea of the unheimlich (which we discussed in Peggy Knapp's course on allegory yesterday hence my immediate reference), where the idea of a thing is always also within its opposite.

I'm currently looking at comic book artists and reading some of their stories on how they came to create comic art, the field of comics, etc. and each one of them has started as a consumer, and a fairly young one. I imagine that for other arts, and even many other productive processes, this holds true. One does not become an engineer simply by reading books, but by tinkering with toys and projects that involve actual engineering practices. Perhaps those who are "cogs" in a factory, putting on nuts or bolts without larger context, might offer an alternative. Are the men and women who ensure that a machine is, for example, putting together a funky lampshade consumers of the thing (the lampshade) they are producing? Probably not. But are they really producing it? What is it that they in fact are producing?

Have we, in an even more mechanized time than the time of Marx, entered a realm of production where some professions create nothing but the continuation of the system in which they work? And how do we view academia, which some argue produces only other academics, but which I hope most of us see as different?

Not a post about Etta James as cultural producer

... But she did write the theme song for the base (ment). I don't know why, but it really seems to fit. Here's a video of some people dancing to it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT3jSAOuEWs.

I don't actually want to talk about Etta James as a cultural producer, although that would probably be fun. Instead, I have two long quotes from Marx that that are bugging me, and that I think Williams might shed some light on.

These are from Capital, volume 1. In the first quote, he seems to be saying that the social relations of the base make resistance impossible:

"It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated at one pole of society, while at the other pole are grouped masses of men who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Nor is it enough that they are compelled to sell themselves voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition, and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance" (899, my emphasis).

Then, thirty pages later, these very conditions provide the framework for class consciousness and revolution:

"Along with the constant decrease in the number of constant magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, and degradation grows; but with this there also grows the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united, and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated" (929).

It's pretty clear to me that the seeming contradiction here emerges because Marx is talking about different moments in the development of capitalism. Once the capital and power is consolidated in few enough hands, and the pain and suffering of the masses reaches a certain point, the very conditions that prohibited resistance become those that further it.

At the moment though, it seems capitalism has pulled a fast one on us. The consolidation of capital under the new regime of flexible accumulation appears to us differently. Richard Ohmann's work on Print Culture provides an illuminating instance of this1. Media conglomerates, for instance, still appear to be made up of many small enterprises, though the power and capital are concentrated in the hands of an elite few. A multiplicity of products, produced for diversity rather than mass, give consumers the illusion of choice, and dull the pain and suffering. The debt accumulated from the purchase of these products becomes a fictitious entity, labeled and re-labeled within the market until it seems to have no bearing on everyday life. And finally, the style of work required for manufacturing these niche products appears to re-unite the worker with the labour from which he was originally alienated. So how do we re-imagine the process Marx describes under these circumstances? Is the current economic crisis the "bursting of the integument"?

1. Ohmann, Richard. “Epochal Change: Print Culture and Economics.” from Politics of Knowledge. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2003.

Marx quotes come fromthe Penguin edition. I haven't got it on me right now so I can't do a proper citation.

Ray Ray Williams: Practicing to be a Cultural Study

In a similar vein to Kurt post which I would inaccurately summarize as "look at how bad-ass Williams is", I want to use my own post to argue for the credibility (cred) of Williams as a writer who practices what he preaches. Those of us who are familiar with Williams' brand of Anti-Arnoldian, Anti-High-brow form of scholarship that directly led to the creation of the discipline of cultural studies probably saw a lot of overlap in "Base and Superstructure" but I want to tease out his reformulation of the base from static economics to an investigation of the"nature of practice and then its conditions" (47). Basically I read this alongside his call to interrogate the neglected "real social conditions" production and not the consumption of cultural works, which encourages us to expand our notion of taste and aesthetics. So we're all pretty familiar with some of his critical approaches to Marxism: Marxism and Literature, Keywords, The Long Revolution, and now, Problems in Materialism and Culture, not to mention numerous other critical studies of communication, radio, television. What I wasn't cognizant of what how much more diverse his writing is; he's the author of seven novels, three plays, criticism of drama and even writings on utopia and even the lowest of the low science fiction! Williams not only studies the social conditions of production but he produced plenty himself. Raymond was a veritable means of production on his own.

I bring this up to inform his sometimes negative approach to "critical theory" and "Marxism" as oppose to "literature with a lower-case l" and "culture". Williams explored almost every genre conceivable to comprehend a truly "emergent" form of culture that is "non-metaphysical and non-subjectivist" (42). Like culture, theory/criticism takes place in "all areas" of society and in literally all genres of writing. (44) Fiction, non-fiction,theory or history, lit or pulp, tv or Werner Herzog, culture and the domination that can come with it, is ordinary. If we are to forget this simple but extensive truism, we are shirk the mantle of cultural studies as Williams understands and produces it.

Like Kurt, I'm pretty taken with Williams's argument that we can't disregard the superstructure as being less important than the base in terms of the proliferation of dominant modes of production. Maybe it's because of the fact that Williams is the first person we're reading in this section who explicitly identifies himself as concerned with literary and cultural criticism, but he's really struck a chord with me by pointing out that the superstructure is absolutely and necessarily central to cultural proliferation, and that if we "dismiss as superstructural, and in that sense as merely secondary" (35) everything but the basic modes of material production, we miss out on an important facet of the means by which dominant cultural forms and hegemonic structures reproduce. Like I said, I think this is where Williams's interest in literary and cultural criticism comes in and allows him to give us this interesting perspective...as he points out, Marx was focused on the means of material production; but ever since I began dabbling in this stuff I've been more interested (presumably like Williams, and like all of us in class too) in the means of cultural (re)production. So really, shouldn't the superstructure be where I'm looking?

Finally, I'd like to suggest another analogue to the piano example Williams discusses--because, like Kurt, I am a bit of a "course-issue whore," let's think about radio or television...who has a greater role in the reproduction of systems of cultural dominance, the guy who builds the radio (if it's even still a guy and not a machine; it's been some time since I've been in a radio factory ha ha ha) or Rush Limbaugh? The person(/machine) who installs the A/V jacks into the back of a TV, or a televangelist (or even the cast of "Friends")?

Raymond Williams vis-à-vis Liberace

A bit of an odd couple, you say? Granted. But I just kept thinking of Mr. Showmanship when I was reading through Williams’s essay. He sort of served as a talismanic paradigm for me to bounce ideas off of when I was reading, so I thought I would share one example of how my thinking was shaped by joining the Birmingham School theorist with the glittery pop music icon.

In the course of discussing the B/SS model in Marxism, Williams cites Marx’s piano paradigm, wherein Marx asserts that the man who makes the piano is a productive worker, the man who distributes the piano may possibly be considered a productive worker, “Yet,” Williams explains, “when it comes to the man who plays the piano, whether to himself or to others, there is no question: he is not a productive worker at all” (35). In this example, as Williams explains, “[. . .] piano-maker is base, but pianist superstructure” (35). The usual conclusion made from this paradigm, as Williams explains, is that the piano maker is more “important” than the pianist. That’s strike one for our friend Liberace.

Williams, however, strongly questions the idea that base is more “important” than superstructure in this piano paradigm and for good reason. Williams tell us that this usual conclusion, in its emphasis on “capitalist commodity production” loses sight of Marx’s notion of productive forces (35). Williams suggests that it’s a question of whether we’re focusing on “primary production within the terms of capitalist economic relationships, or to the primary production of society itself, and of men themselves, the material production and reproduction of real life” (35). Basically he’s suggesting that we’re preoccupied with actual material production at the expense of fully recognizing the effect that social or cultural production has on the base.

Let’s consider Liberace here. Wikipedia told me that he had released almost seventy record albums (!) by 1954, the peak of his career, and in addition to his records, his television show in the 50s regularly drew thirty million viewers and gave him ten thousand fan letters each week. And check out this diverse list of television programs he appeared on: The Ed Sullivan Show, The Jack Benny Show, The Red Skelton Show, Here’s Lucy, Batman, The Monkees, The Tonight Show, Kojak, The Muppet Show, and Saturday Night Live. What am I getting at? This schmaltzy bastard produced culture like it was his job.

Acknowledging that relations of material production and consumption form the base, we need to ask ourselves who made the bigger impact on that base: guys at the Baldwin factory or the culture-producing machine that was Liberace? There’s no doubt that selling hundreds of thousands of records and attracting millions to their flickery television sets does much more to reproduce the base—the process of material/economic exchanges and relationships—than putting eighty-eight keys in a row does. Liberace’s just scored a very big point here.

Dismissing the idea that the piano maker is more “important” than the pianist is part of Williams’s larger effort to complicate our typical understanding of the base: he asserts that the base is not a static state but rather a process that is “active,” “complicated,” and even “contradictory.” Next, Williams wants to stress that productive forces for Marx entail much more than just the manufacture of goods or commodities, and he connects these two suggestions when he says that “If we have the broad sense of productive forces, we look at the whole question of the base differently, and we are less tempted to dismiss as superstructural, and in that sense as merely secondary, certain vital productive social forces, which are in the broad sense, from the beginning, basic” (35, emphasis addded). Liberace, I suggest, can be seen as a “vital productive social force.” As I hope my example has illustrated, Liberace, by virtue of his fame, contributed in a much larger and more conspicuous way to the reproduction of the base than a simple laborer could. We shouldn’t make the same mistake as the interpreters of Marx whom Williams censures, however, by declaring that Liberace was more “important” than the guys who assembled his Steinway. Williams doesn’t want to turn the typical understandings of B/SS on their head; he simply wants to complicate them. When it comes to the superstructure, he wants us to acknowledge that it isn’t just a secondary thing that’s determined by the base, but rather a “related range of cultural practices” that help to define and reproduce the base (34).

What a breath of fresh air, this Gramsci reading. It's like an escape from the determined stranglehold of Althusser's structural Marxism. I mean, I don't want to come off as some dilettante Marxist marching off half-cocked on a diatribe against Althusser. But for as brilliant a guy as he was, Louis was also kind of a downer, so you can understand why I might relish the "wiggle room" offered by Gramsci's conception of society and hegemony. I appreciate the needs for a theoreticist or abstract model, which allows someone to look at any society and identify the aspects of the base and superstructure and how they interact. Just as important, however, is an historically specific model which allows me to understand at my society, in its moment, as opposed to every other society at any other time.

I think the most elegant aspect of Gramsci's formulation of base and superstructure is hegemony. The term has always sounded dirty to me, probably because I always heard it in discussions about American hegemony in a global context. It seemed big, oppressive, and inescapable. However, Gramsci makes clear that hegemony has a shelf-life. It is, by definition, only a temporary state of affairs, constantly repositioning itself against upstart forces gunning for its place in the field of struggle.

What's particularly satisfying about Gramsci's thinking is the fact that it is not only historically grounded, but that is seems to speak directly to societies in that critical Marxist historical stage, (no, not Oriental despotism, but [you guessed it]) capitalism. In other words, us. Now forget for a minute all the economic craziness going on right now and grant me the following: we live in a relatively stable civil society. We have the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, participatory democracy, and a Congressional system, the sum of which (almost all of the time) keeps us from being gulaged, or some such nonsense. We (which is to say the popular masses and forgive me if you don't think you belong under this heading) have before us a "field of struggle" on which the ruling class (which is not a class, per se, but a cohort of cooperative forces) must constantly prove itself. As a side note, and I'm not sure how Gramsci feels about it, but I think this pretty much implies that socialism is its own distinct stage through which a capitalist society must pass on its glorious march toward communism. Thoughts?

One final jab at Louis before we move on. Pictured is one of E.P. Thompson's satirical diagrams of Althusserian Marxism: "The Motor of History - Class Struggle." The diagram reads, "The motor...is operated by four simple levers at the base: these activate respectively the four gears of bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, proletariat, and peasantry. When left to run automatically, the motions are governed by four globes (two above, two at base) of the true and false consciousness of bourgeoisie and proletariat. In both cases the true and false globes are held in tension by a spring (ideology), and the resultant torsion regulates the motor."

A literal segue (or, How I Deleted All the Matrix References)

As segue from Dave's post on economics, I wanted to also draw a parallel from contemporary economics to Gramsci, to one of the few parts of this first part of the text around which I can easily wrap my head (so I'm excited for class discussion, which will hopefully elucidate my reading), and that is as follows:

• In economics, one cannot really know we are in a recession until it has passed (highlighted in McCain's response to the 60 Minutes question, "Do you think we're in a recession?" - "Sure. Technically, I don't know.");

• In Gramsci, "A structural phase can be concretely studied and analysed only after it has gone through its whole process of development, and not during the process itself, except hypothetically and with the explicit proviso that one is dealing with hypotheses" (191).

Now, Sheila mentioned this in class yesterday, but it had definitely caught my eye even when I first read it. What are we supposed to do with that? It seems to me the sort of statement that I love but also despise for its inutility, a statement like "We can never really know anything." In my personal understanding of experience, and I'm sure Gramsci would hate to hear it, I think we can only ever study hypothetically. If I understand correctly (and this may be a hazy, or at least dense, part for me), Gramsci is looking for hard evidence (200) in what is always contextual and thus mutable. As more recent criticism has suggested, no historic fact is a permanent fact. If that is true, is history any better than hypothesis?

Also, does anyone else see a potential problem with "structure" instead of "base"? Maybe it's the English . . .

It's the Hegemony, Stupid!

Hegemony for Gramsci's is how we can distinguish historical economism vs. historical materialism. The process of following the money is not enough for revolutionary change of the "structure" of the conflicts in the world economy. This is why Gramsci critiques syndicalists, in favor of labor union and direct action, nearly as much as he criticizes laissez-faire liberalism. Now I'll admit that much of his argument here escapes me, but it got me thinking about our current global economic crisis. We're fucked either way , but I think Gramsci is inviting us to complicate our understanding the "need for change" in Washington.

Gramsci excoriates crude "economists" claiming that "they forget the thesis that asserts that men become conscious of fundamental conflicts on the terrain of ideologies [which] is not physical or moralistic in character, but structural and epistemological...Critical activity is reduced to the exposure of swindles, to creating scandals, and to prying into the pockets of public figures" (Gramsci, 215). Investigative journalism never looked so asinine. Hegemonic forces of power deal out ideological warfare on the structural level, not on the personal. Reality trumps appearance.

As for nowadays, I recently listened to a lecture from Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, and most recently, The Shock Doctrine, criticizing Milton Friedman, the grandaddy of economic deregulation, which Gramsci himself points to as an unnatural symbiont to liberalism (perhaps the kind we know see as neo-liberalism). Friedman's economic revolution entered with Ronald Reagan and dominated the global landscape since, Clinton definately not excluded. Near the end of her talk Klein cites Friedman's 1982 edition of Capitalism and Freedom: "Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around." Her fear is that we have not yet produced new ideas for superstructural (cultural, economic, and political) philosopher that won't thrust us again into the pit of systemic crisis. Before we join the Obama bandwagon, we need to make sure that he's not just the glue that sticks old forms of hegemony back together.

Society for the Prevention of Voice

Just a quick FYI: we missed it, but last week (September 27 - October 4) was national Banned Books Week, an annual project sponsored by the American Library Association. Just in case you need further cause to probe the ramifications of ideology upon the workings of the superstructure, check out the ALA's Banned Books Week website. And, while you're at it, for a quick overview of veep nominee Sarah Palin's attempts to ban books during her tenure as the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, check out The Nation's discussion of the subject.

And stick to ol' Mr. Comstock the next time you check out a copy of Ulysses, or Invisible Man, or, heaven forbid, Harry freaking Potter!