Figures on taxes, incomes, and the like are from Robert S. McIntyre and Dean C. Tipps, “How the Reagan Tax Policies Are Affecting the American Taxpayer and the Economy,” which is a revision of an earlier piece by McIntyre, “The Failure of Tax Incentives,” both distributed by Citizens for Tax Justice (1983). Peter G. Peterson said the same thing about the atrophy of net investment in a long list of publications, beginning with “The Morning After,” The Atlantic 260, no. 4 (October 1987). On long-term trends in capital formation and investment, see Simon Kuznets, Capital in the American Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press for the National Bureau of Economic Research, 1961), and James Livingston, Pragmatism and the
Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), part 1.
In the 1950s and 1960s, it was not unusual for theorists to belittle the role of capital formation and net private investment in determining the pace and the pattern of economic growth and meanwhile to define “technical change,” whether exogenous or endogenous (that is, whether a function of profit-maximizing activity or not), as the real source of growth. Among the economists who did so were Robert Solow, Moses Abramovitz, Solomon Fabricant, Kenneth Kurihara, Wassily Leontief, Harold Vatter, Edward Denison, and Edmund Phelps. By my reading, their contributions were part of a larger theoretical controversy started by Joan Robinson and Piero Sraffa (the latter in The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960]), which questioned the explanatory adequacy of production functions in measuring and evaluating the marginal product of capital. Since the 1970s and 1980s, their voices have been drowned out by supply-side economics and its policy-relevant urge to cut taxes and provide incentives to private investment; but in the twenty-first century’s second decade, as we struggle to deal with an economic crisis with no postwar parallel, we can perhaps begin to hear them again.
On transfer payments as a growing component of income as such, circa 1959 to 1999, see Edward L. Whalen, A Guided Tour of the United States Economy (Westport, CT: Quorum Press, 2002). Robert Bork’s pathetic lament about the 1960s is Slouching Towards Gomorrah, 2nd ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).
Chapter 2: “Tenured Radicals” in the Ivory Tower
Full disclosure: I am a beneficiary of what Clark Kerr called the great transformation of higher education and a participant observer as well. I lived through the upheavals that remade the university in the image of a transnational America. I was granted a PhD by Northern Illinois University (NIU), a small land-grant teacher’s college until 1962, when certain liberal arts departments established doctoral programs and the physical plant expanded to accommodate swelling numbers of high school graduates who fully expected to go to college. By the time I received my degree in 1980, undergraduate enrollment at NIU was approximately twenty-five thousand. Since then, I have taught in a suburban community college, a small liberal arts college, two maximum-security prisons, and four large state universities in the Midwest, the Upper South, and the Northeast. In my view, the great transformation of higher education is a magnificent achievement because it enriched the argument about what it means to be an American and gave working-class kids like Nancy Hewitt, Bonnie Smith, and Christopher Fisher, my colleagues at Rutgers, and Marvin Rosen, my mentor at NIU, a chance at the of a professor.
The history of higher education before and after the land-grant colleges is traced in Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), Richard Hofstadter and C. DeWitt Hardy, The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the U.S. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society (New York: Vintage, 1960), Christopher Newfield, Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), Seymour Martin Lipset and Everett Ladd, The Divided Academy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), and Clark Kerr, The Great Transformation of Higher Education, 1960–1980 (Albany: State University of New York, 1991). Figures and quotations are taken from the last two texts. See also Seymour Martin Lipset, Rebellion in the University, rev. ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1993), and Howard Dickman, ed., The Imperiled University (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1993).
On the common curricular concerns of liberals and conservatives, see Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1998), Lynne Cheney, Telling the Truth (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, rev. ed. (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1998), and Robert Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, as cited in chapter 1. Quoted remarks are taken from these texts and again from Irving Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism, as cited in chapter 1.
On the eclipse of “pioneer individualism” and the rise of “social selfhood” at the turn of the twentieth century, see James Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (New York: Routledge, 2001). A. Lawrence Lowell’s Public Opinion and Popular Government (New York: Longmans, 1913) is part of a larger debate on the relation of the new “social self” to the future of democracy, a debate that pitted John Dewey against Walter Lippmann in the 1920s; its distant echoes can be heard in contemporary arguments over the utility of identity politics and the rationality of the American electorate.
Chapter 3: The Creators and Constituents of the
“Postmodern Condition”
The postmodern condition is a many-splendored thing. As I suggest in this chapter, agreement on its meanings is tenuous at best; only the chronology seems secure, but even here you can roam freely throughout the twentieth century. Among the most influential accounts are Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (New York: Oxford, 1971), Jean-François Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (1979; rpt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), David Harvey, The Condition of Post-Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989), and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). To my mind, the most useful accounts are Margaret Rose, The Post-Modern and the Post-Industrial: A Critical Analysis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Donald M. Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), and The Body in Late-Capitalist USA (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); and Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. Jon Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
Quoted remarks of Lynne Cheney and Alan Bloom are taken, respectively, from Telling the Truth, as cited in chapter 2, and The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). The argument that the idea of a postmodern condition has American antecedents is drawn from James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, as cited in chapter 1; Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy, as cited in chapter 2; and Livingston, “Pragmatism, Nihilism, and Democracy: What Is Called Thinking at the End of Modernity?” forthcoming in John Stuhr, ed., One Hundred Years of Pragmatism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). My procedure in these works is to trace the relevant intellectual genealogies—for example, the connective citations and the philosophical idioms that link William James, Josiah Royce, Jean Wahl, and Alexandre Kojeve, or William James, Edmund Husserl, Carl Schmitt, and Martin
Heidegger—rather than merely to note the strong resemblance between the early scandal of pragmatism and the latter sensation of postmodernism (or, as Judith Butler would have it, poststructuralism). Both words, “scandal” and “sensation,” also apply to the reception of Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
On poststructuralism, semiotics, deconstruction, and the Heideggerian backstory, see Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca, NY: Cor
nell University Press, 1981), Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in 20th-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), Harold Bloom et al., Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1979), Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), Tom Cohen, ed., Jacques Derrida and the Humanities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), and the big event itself, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
For feminist appropriations and inflections of poststructuralism, as well as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and many other “classical” social theorists, see, for example, Joan Kelly, Women, History, and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), Susan Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), and Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). As Joan Kelly observed in “The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory,” reprinted in the collection of essays cited above, historians of women were drawn to cross-disciplinary ways of addressing their subjects because the “split vision of social reality” determined by the received tradition was inadequate to the apprehension of a world in which the distinctions between public and private, the personal and the political, had stopped making a difference: “Our analyses, regardless of the tradition they originate in, increasingly treat the family in relation to society; treat sexual and reproductive experience in terms of political economy; and treat productive relations of class in connection with sex hierarchy. In establishing these connections, feminist thought is moving beyond the split vision of social reality it inherited from the recent past. . . . That is, we are moving beyond a nineteenth-century conception of society because our actual vantage point has shifted.”
The seminal works discussed in the text are Gayle Rubin, “Notes on the Traffic in Women: Toward a Political Economy of Sex,” in Rayna Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91 (1986), and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
The historiographical background of such theoretical forays—that is, the empirical, anomalous evidence that demanded a paradigm shift of the kind attempted by Rubin, Scott, and Butler—can be sampled in Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), Mary Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg (New York: Norton, 1984), Bonnie Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoisies of Northern France in the 19th Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the U.S. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), and Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’ Right: Birth Control in America, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1990).
On the culture wars as an intramural sport on the left or, at any rate, as a debate conducted within a narrow ideological spectrum that remained more or less liberal, see Jonathan Rieder, ed., The Fractious Nation? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), and Alan Wolfe, One Nation, After All (New York: Penguin, 1998). See also the works cited in the text: Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), volume 45 of Social Text (1995), Linda Nicholson, ed., Feminist Contentions (New York: Routledge, 1995), and Martha Nussbaum in the September 21, 1999, issue of The New Republic.
Frank Lentricchia’s complaint against Michel Foucault is found in Ariel and the Police (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). See otherwise works by Harvey and Jameson as cited above in the notes for this chapter. Quoted remarks of Robert Bork and William Bennett are taken, respectively, from Slouching Towards Gomorrah, as cited in chapter 1, and The De-Valuing of America: The Fight for Our Children and Our Culture (New York: Summit Books, 1992).
Chapter 4: “Signs of Signs:” Watching the End of
Modernity at the Cineplex
Pat Robertson’s quoted remarks are taken from Frederick Detwiler, Standing in the Premises of God: The Christian Right’s Fight to Redefine America’s Public Schools (New York: New York University Press, 1999).
The possibilities of periodization according to Samuel P. Huntington and Daniel Bell are on display, respectively, in The Clash of Civilizations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), a book that grew out of an article in Foreign Affairs, and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism rev. ed. (New York: Basic, 1996), a book that reads as the autobiography of an entire generation of left-wing intellectuals. See Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 1980), for insight into how modern social formations sponsor divergent cultures, but always with his admonition from Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958) in mind: “The area of a culture, it would seem, is usually proportionate to the area of a language rather than the area of a class.”
I chose the movies discussed in this chapter for three reasons: they were immensely popular when released or have powerfully shaped subsequent filmmaking, they remain many-layered texts worthy of close reading, and I still love watching them, even at their most irritating or frightful extremes. The readings offered here are my own, but they are informed throughout by the work of film theorists and historians such as Paul Smith, Bill Nichols, Virginia Wexman, Laura Mulvey, Robert Ray, Mary Ann Doane, Teresa de Lauretis, and Barbara Creed. I am particularly indebted, however, to Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), and Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992); David Savran, Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); and Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990).
A representative sample of Jean Baudrillard’s ideas can be found in The Mirror of Production, trans. Mark Poster (St. Louis, MO: Telos, 1975). On
the end of modernity as an instance of the world Baudrillard maps, see also the works cited in chapter 3.
Sigmund Freud’s ideas about masochism are found in “A Child Is Being Beaten” (1924) and “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (1924), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1959), vols. 17 and 19. Clover, Silverman, and Savran have interesting disagreements on the uses of these ideas in diagnosing male masochism at the movies, all of which turn on inflections of Judith Butler’s performative theory of gender. My own test of Freud’s ideas on male maso-
chism can be found in a five-part essay on 300, the film adaptation of
Frank Miller’s graphic novel, which I wrote in 2007 for my blog, www
.politcsandletters.com.
On crime, gunslingers, and gangsters as both symptoms and attempted cures of massive social change, see Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1962), Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture (New York: Verso, 1987), Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), Robert Sklar, City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Garfield (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992),
and Francis Fukuyama, The Great Disruption (New York: Free Press, 1999). D. H. Lawrence read what is now canonical American literature as evidence of the crimes or tragedies that founded American culture in Studies in Classic American Literature (n.p., 1923). Three other seminal readings of the same moment are Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day (New York: Boni & Liverwright, 1926), F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), and R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955). A brilliant rewriting of these readings is Jonathan Arac, Critical Genealogies (New York, Columbia University Press, 1987).
My first take on The Little Mermaid was published by Cineaste in 1990 and later revised and enlarged to include Toy Story in “Cartoon Politics: The Case of the Purloined Parents,” an essay in Van Gosse and Richard Moser, eds., The World the Sixties Made (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). The political transparency or putative uniformity of Disney texts—the notion that these are “self-evidently reactionary parables of the American Right”—is rigorously challenged by Eleanor Bryce and Martin McQuillan, Deconstructing Disney (London: Pluto, 1999); I disagree with most of their readings, mainly because they often reduce cartoon figures to representations of neoliberal (Thatcherite) politics, but this is a brilliant, jarring, indispensable book. Susan Faludi takes the “downsizing of Dad” very seriously in Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).
Chapter 5: “Angels in America:” Technologies of
The World Turned Inside Out Page 24