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Week Twelve: Globalization As you may recall, in one of the texts we read at the beginning of this course--Terry Eagleton's "Introduction" to Marxist Literary Theory--Eagleton raises the question whether Marxism, a pre-eminently modern phenomenon, continues to be relevant in postmodernity. Laclau and Mouffe's argument for a radical democracy that abandons "class" as the agent of social change and attempts to theorize identity politics as a movement that stands on the shoulders, so to speak, of Marxist theory, might be seen as one response to that question. Like other manifestations of postmodern theory, Laclau and Mouffe's conception of radical democracy attempts to theorize a political agency that is, in effect, individualistic, yet based on the materialist conception of the subject as socially constructed. That is, individual human subjects are seen as entities constrained and overdetermined by the social discourses available to them, and yet, within those boundaries, subjects are imagined as exercising a kind of agency deriving from the conception of human subjectivity as "performative" rather than essential or biological. In this view one can choose to "be" one kind of person or another, simply by an assertion of the will, gratifying one's "desire" (which, of course, is also overdetermined, but that tends to get lost in the heady language of "choice") to "be" one subject or another (usually, in practice, a particular subjectivity conceived in terms of gender and sexuality). |
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. In the consumerist theory of Jean Baudrillard, for example, the freedom to consume has replaced political freedom. In postmodern society, according to Baudrillard, subjectivity is formed and expressed through consumption. Postmodern consumption exceeds the fulfillment of need, expressing the subject's desire at the level of the "political economy of the sign," which is taken to supercede the society's economic relations of production. A broad (if tacit) coalition of mainstream political leaders from the center-right to the center-left has come together under the banner of "neoliberalism," the hegemonic ideology of postmodern consumerism. Neoliberalism revives Adam Smith's "invisible hand of the market," seeking, as Rosemary Hennessy has observed, "to free up the operation of the capitalist market from public (state) controls and regulations," and at the same time "to extend the rationality of the market-its schemes of analysis and decision-making criteria-to areas of social life that have not been primarily economic."(Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. London: Routledge, 2000, 75) The corporate-political strategies of neoliberalism have been gaining prominence since the economic downturn of the early 1970s. Under expanded free-trade agreements industrial production has been displaced from "rust belt" U.S. cities to the "maquiladora" region of northern Mexico and other "underdeveloped" locations where cheap labor, weak or nonexistent environmental protection regulations and undemocratic governments enable greater corporate profits and leverage for corporations to squeeze further concessions from U.S. workers. One of many harmful effects of neoliberal social and economic policy in the U.S. has been the corporate-sector demand for a curriculum of narrowly defined skills training in public schools and universities, undermining public education's role as a democratic social institution. Neoliberal attempts to limit state and federal funding for education and to divert tax revenues to private schools have also taken a toll. Schools in poor rural areas and inner-city neighborhoods are scandalously underfunded in comparison with affluent suburban schools. Meanwhile, right-wing politicians call for "school choice" voucher schemes that would make tax dollars available to subsidize families who send their children to parochial schools. "School choice" advocates employ the neoliberal rhetoric of marketization, arguing that forcing the public schools to compete in a "free market" would improve the quality of public schools, and arguing that all students should have the right to choose the school that best suits their needs. But the proposed voucher funds are never sufficient to pay the full cost of private schooling. Therefore, the inevitable result would be subsidies for middle-class families who can afford private schooling while poorer children are left in even more seriously underfunded public schools. Beyond the effects of social disinvestment on public education, both consumerism and neoliberalism shape the lived experiences of young people and the subjectivities available to them in postmodern society. In the era of industrial capitalism social subjectivity was predicated upon the adult male worker's productive capacity; the subjectivities of women and children were constituted in relation to that of the adult male worker. According to the conventional logic of modernity, teenagers were not productive workers, hence they were not social agents. But they did become agents-as-consumers after World War II. The teenager is, in fact, the ideal subject of an economic order in which consumer demand for services and nondurable goods seemingly generates profits out of thin air. Teenagers are primarily consumers rather than producers, and most of their income is "disposable" income that can be spent on leisure-oriented consumer goods rather than basic necessities. In addition to
its emphasis on consumer demand-or "desire"-neoliberalism
is marked by a tendency to obscure the relations of production of contemporary
capitalism. Following Daniel Bell's highly influential The Coming
of Post-Industrial Society (1973), neoliberalism argues that we
have entered a new phase of capitalism in which information processing
is more important than material production. In the new information-driven
economy, it is asserted, technological breakthroughs (primarily the
development of virtually instantaneous global communications) have enabled
the compression of time and space such that a surplus of material wealth
is produced, making basic "needs" increasingly irrelevant
for more and more people, and elevating "desire" as the principal
concern of the postmodern subject. In the books of conservative futurists
like Bell these conditions are taken as almost a fait accompli. But
they tend to assume that industrial production has disappeared, when
actually it has simply been restructured and relocated. In his early writings Baudrillard argues that the distinction between use value and exchange value is no longer tenable in late capitalism, thus rejecting Marx's critique of "commodity fetishism" and the concept of alienation. Both the concepts of use value (expressing human needs) and exchange value (expressing human desires) are "an organized extension of productive forces" (Baudrillard, 46) and, as such, both express the "puritan" disciplinary ethos of capitalism. In the contemporary "information society" Baudrillard asserts, this disciplinary ethos leaves very little room for political agency. Confronted with a glut of information, the masses are entangled in a network of media discourses, completely "informed" by the media, which is the same thing as being "formless" (218). The individual is in a "double bind," which, he argues, is exactly like the situation faced by young people in the transition to adulthood: They are at the same time told to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free, and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive objects, inert, obedient, and conformist. The child resists on all levels, and to these contradictory demands he or she replies by a double strategy. When we ask the child to be object, he or she opposes all the acts of disobedience, of revolt, of emancipation; in short, the strategy of a subject. When we ask the child to be subject, he or she opposes just as obstinately and successfully a resistance as object; that is to say, exactly the opposite: infantilism, hyperconformity, total dependence, passivity, idiocy. (218) Autonomous "subject
resistance" is generally considered positive "in the same
way as in the political sphere only the practices of liberation, of
emancipation, of expression, of self-constitution as a political subject
are considered worthwhile and subversive." But the "strategic
resistance" of refusal of meaning and of speech, "of the hyperconformist
simulation of the very mechanisms of the system," is, Baudrillard
concludes, the "winning" strategy of postmodernity, "because
it is the most adapted to the present phase of the system" (218-19). This "silent"
resistance, Baudrillard emphasizes, is not at all "passive"
(215). But many cultural critics remain unconvinced. Following the lead
of Michel de Certeau, cultural studies scholars have examined the neoliberal
marketization of everyday life, searching for instances of symbolic
resistance and "subversive consumption" in discursive practices
such as youth fashion and popular music. In Postmodernism and Popular
Culture, for example, Angela McRobbie analyzes "the role of
the rag market" and the ongoing popularity of "retro"
fashion as an implicit critique of consumerism and the social inequities
of late capitalism. In Black Noise Tricia Rose describes how
rap music's production concepts evolved significantly in the context
of the mid-1970s bankruptcy crisis in New York. Faced with the widespread
retrenchment of music programs in the public schools, young people created
a new hybrid musical form through "sampling" of existing records
and the use of playback and production technologies (such as the turntable
and the sound-board) as instruments in themselves. In Rose's discussion
of hip-hop culture there is an emphasis on the overtly pedagogical and
polemical force of the discourse that distinguishes her analysis from
other critics who treat the random nonconformism of youth subcultural
styles as self-evidently subversive. Absent this self-consciously polemical and pedagogical dimension, however, subversive consumption has obvious limitations as a resistance strategy. In the words of Dick Hebdige, youth subcultural styles are "meaningful mutations," capable of embodying a symbolic refusal of the social consensus on which western democracies depend, but in the end, "no amount of subcultural incantation can alter the oppressive mode in which the commodities used in subculture have been produced."6 The problems with the "freedom to consume" argument are fairly evident. The power to consume is distributed very unevenly, notwithstanding the claims of the dominant ideology. Even for the affluent the power to consume never meets the desire produced by the advertising industry. By definition the consumer gratification dulls the critical edge, leaving us stalled in the effort to produce a better world, unaware that conditions could be different. |
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A somewhat different argument for the revolutionary implications of postmodernity is found in Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's recent book, Empire. Like both conservative futurists and left-liberal cultural studies scholars, Negri and Hardt argue that capitalism has entered a new stage-or "new times" in the phrase popularized by the British journal Marxism Today. But they emphasize the importance of understanding late modernity as "crisis" and they focus on labor rather than leisure as the driving force of subject-formation in postmodernity. In their view, the synthesis of Taylorism, Fordism, and Keynesianism that coalesced under Roosevelt's New Deal produced a "factory society"-"the highest form of disciplinary government"-in which "the entire society, with all its productive and reproductive articulations, is subsumed under the command of capital." In the disciplinary society of late modernity, "productive subjectivities are forged as one-dimensional functions of economic development," but during the 1960s "the expansion of welfare and the universalization of discipline in both the dominant and subordinate countries created a new margin of freedom for the laboring multitude," accompanied by key moments of dissent and political destabilization such as the Civil Rights and decolonization struggles, the Vietnam War, and the feminist and gay rights movements (243). In the dominant capitalist countries, they argue, the social struggles of the 1960s raised the costs of labor to the point at which it eventually forced a change in the "quality and nature" of labor itself:
In order for this revolution to be achieved Negri and Hardt identify three positive demands implicit in this "mass refusal": the right to global citizenship, the right to a social wage and a guaranteed income, and the right to reappropriation of the means of production (400-407). These are modernist, enlightenment-inspired goals, but, in Negri and Hardt's analysis, postmodernity presents the conditions for the achievement of these goals. Thus, at least in this sense, postmodernity becomes for them rather more an extension of modernity than a rejection of modernity. They see the demand for global citizenship, for example, as the inevitable result of a labor regime in which corporations seek to exploit the labor of "under-developed" regions. Inadvertently, or perhaps the better term is "collaterally," these ventures sometimes result in campaigns for unionization, skills training that translates to (post)industrial jobs abroad, and higher standards of living that enable workers in the dispersed industries to contest oppressive local regimes and to emigrate to metropolitan regions. Of course, both the industrialized countries and the "developing" countries attempt to control these steps toward global citizenship through immigration quotas and the creation of "international industrial zones" aimed at discouraging unionization. Nonetheless, the counterresponses themselves indicate that the trend toward the "globalization" of labor threatens to undermine the use of national sovereignty as a means of controlling the freedom of workers. The "new proletariat" of postmodernity is "not a new industrial class." The industrial working class of modernity, Negri and Hardt argue, represented only a temporary stage in the history of the proletariat, a stage at which "capital was able to reduce value to measure." Production under the conditions of contemporary global capitalism, by contrast, is more elusive; they call it "biopolitical." In postmodernity "the production of capital converges ever more with the production and reproduction of social life itself; it thus becomes ever more difficult to maintain divisions among productive, reproductive, and unproductive labor." In calling for a "social wage" and a guaranteed annual income for all, Negri and Hardt are opposing in particular the modernist concept of a "family wage," the "fundamental weapon of the sexual division of labor by which the wage paid for the productive laborer is conceived also to pay for the unwaged reproductive labor of the worker's wife and dependents at home" (402). Since, in post-Fordist flexible production, labor has become increasingly collective and social, conditions are favorable for "the demand that all activity necessary for the production of capital be recognized with an equal compensation such that a social wage is really a guaranteed income, or, effectively, a 'citizenship income'." This biopolitical regime of production also gives a distinctive emphasis to the fundamental Marxist demand for the worker's right to control the means of production. In the context of the "informatization of production" in postmodernity, all global citizens must also have "free access to and control over knowledge, information, communication, and affects" (407). Attributing the current developments in global capitalism at least partly to the pressure of proletarian resistance rather than simply to capital's escalating need for expanded profits, Negri and Hardt shift the discussion of "desire" from the terrain of consumption to that of production. This move points toward a more focused, active potential for a postmodern revolutionary struggle, one in which the resources and opportunities made available for young people are crucially at stake, and one in which young people might conceivably be mobilized to play a more active role than sullen rejection or subversive consumption. But the "new proletariat" Negri and Hardt describe still leaves out huge sectors of the global population. There is an immediate and urgent need to resist further privatization of resources and other kinds of social disinvestment. And, in their neglect of "desire as consumption" they leave aside the question of how to resist the ideological power of consumerism as well as the question of how to marshall the oppositional force--however limited--of "subversive consumption." |
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