Desire and Recognition
On animation in film, see Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (New York: Routledge, 1998), and two useful collections, Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells, eds., From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), and Kevin Sandler, ed., Reading the Rabbit (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press); Norman Klein quotes are from here. My debt to Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper, 1994), is boundless, but I disagree with his periodization of the relation between words and images in the modern Western world. Even so, if I am right, his argument about the cultural force of comics in the twentieth century becomes all the more important. See also the Old Testament, as it were, by the graphic novel’s founding father, Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art (Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1985), and Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnick, High and Low: Modern Art [and] Popular Culture (New York: Museum of Modern Art/Abrams, 1990).
On performance art, the key text is Moira Roth, The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America, 1970–1980 (Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1983). See also Rozika Parker and Griselda Pollock, eds., Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement, 1970–1985 (New York: Pandora, 1987).
My questions about Bugs Bunny owe a great deal to Shannen Dee Williams, a graduate student in history at Rutgers University, who forced me to rethink Lawrence Levine’s treatment of the Trickster in Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), and, more immediately, to reread Constance Rourke, American Humor (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1931). The Trickster is of course a transhistorical figure, from Hermes the Thief to Br’er Rabbit, but his resonance in modern American culture is colored by his central position within the African American folk tradition. That Bugs and his carrot were inspired by Clark Gable’s fast-talking character in It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra’s Oscar-winning movie of 1934, emphasizes the Trickster’s liminal function, for this movie is an allegory of class struggle (and reconciliation) that authorizes the hard-boiled cynicism of Gable’s subaltern standpoint.
On anal erotism and anality more generally, the basic texts are Sigmund Freud, “Character and Anal Erotism” (1908), “The Predisposition to Obsessional Neurosis” (1913), and “On the Transformation of Instincts with Special Reference to Anal Erotism” (1916), in the Collected Papers, 8th ed. (London: Hogarth, 1952), each of which is a kind of commentary on the Three Essays on Sexuality (1905), the book that Freud repeatedly revised between 1910 and 1925. See also Sandor Ferenczi, “The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money,” in First Contributions to Psycho-Analysis (London: Ho-
garth, 1952). My appropriation of these texts is mediated and informed by Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), Dan Sabbath and Mandel Hall, End Product: The First Taboo (New York: Urizen, 1977), Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), and Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986).
Norman O. Brown is the most forceful advocate of treating Freud as a theorist of culture—or a philosopher of history—but along these same lines, see also Jonathan Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), Geza Roheim, The Origin and Function of Culture (1943; rpt. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1971), Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon, 1955), Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), and Theresa Brennan, History after Lacan (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Richard Chase argued long ago that romance has been the mainstream of American literature: see The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957). Compare this argument against Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), and my “Hegelian” reading of Sister Carrie in Miriam Gogol, ed., Theodore Dreiser: Beyond Naturalism (New York: New York University Press, 1995).
The “posthuman future” on display in biotechnology is mapped in Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). A very different angle on the same future—one in which angels, demons, cyborgs, vampires, and other out-of-body experiences become normal—
is taken in N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), a disturbing and brilliant book that addresses the effects of computer technology on “liberal subjectivity.” See also Rob Latham, Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), for a fascinating study of how the imaginary intersections between vampires and cyborgs, bodies and machines are animated by postindustrial regimes of production.
On America’s music as an Atlantic phenomenon, see Ned Sublette, Cuba and Its Music (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2004), Nick Tosches, Country: The Biggest American Music (New York: Dell, 1977), Gilbert Chase, America’s Music, 3rd rev. ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), and Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1987).
On the blues as such, the basic, indispensable texts are Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), and The Hero and the Blues (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982); Charles Keil, Urban Blues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Leroi Jones [Amiri Baraka], Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Morrow, 1963); Francis Davis, The History of the Blues (New York: Hyperion, 1995); William Ferris, Blues from the Delta (New York: DaCapo, 1978); Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (New York: Penguin, 1981); and Abbe Niles, “The Story of the Blues,” in W. C. Handy, ed., Blues: An Anthology, 4th ed. (1926; rpt. New York: DaCapo Press, 1990). The Wynton Marsalis quotation is taken from Herman Gray, Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
On the black aesthetic, see Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967). With respect to its purchase on the mainstream of American culture—a purchase typically mediated by the commodity forms, the mechanical means, and the commercial imperatives of mass markets—see Michael Eric Dyson, Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Leon Wynter, American Skin: Pop Culture, Big Business, and the End of White America (New York: Crown, 2002); Greg Tate, ed., Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture (New York: Broadway Books, 2003); Nelson George, Blackface: Reflections on African-Americans and the Movies (New York: Harper, 1994), and Elevating the Game: Black Men and Basketball (New York: HarperCollins, 1992); Todd Boyd, Young, Black, Rich and Famous: The Rise of the NBA, the Hip-Hop Invasion, and the Transformation of American Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2003). Notice that these are “primary sources” written in an anthropological mode by participant-observers.
On punk, Madonna, heavy metal, and the broader arc of the music scene at the end of the twentieth century, see Clinton Hevlin, From the Velvets to the Voidoids (London: Penguin, 1993), Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), Robert Micklitsch, From Hegel to Madonna (Albany: State University of New York, 1998), Cathy Schwichtenberg, ed., The Madonna Connection (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993), Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Musi
c (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), Barry Shank, Dissonant Identities: The Rock ’n’ Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), Aaron Fox, Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), Ian Christie, Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), and George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads (New York: Verso, 1994). The anthropological attitude of the participant-observer regulates these sources, too, as I suppose it must in view of the simple fact that music is typically embodied as performance.
On hip-hop, quotations and paraphrases are taken from Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), S. H. Fernandez Jr., The New Beats: Exploring the Music, Culture, and Attitudes of Hip-hop (New York: Doubleday, 1994), and Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989). See, more generally, Michael Eric Dyson, Between God and Gangsta Rap (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), Nelson George, Hip-hop America (New York: Viking, 1998), Janice Rahn, Painting without Permission: Hip-hop Graffiti Subculture (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 2002), and Tricia Rose, The Hip-hop Wars (New York: Basic, 2008). In many recent books informed by the methods and sensibilities of cultural studies, the text (music/dance) in question recedes, and the context (society/scene) becomes both the means and end of the analysis: see, for example, M. T. Kato, From Kung Fu to Hip-Hop: Globalization, Revolution, and Popular Culture (Albany: State University of New York, 2007). On the other hand, there are at least two invaluable ethnographies: Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: Picador, 2005), and Joseph G. Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004).
On technology and cultural meaning, change, and literacy, the essential books are Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991), Richard Lanham, The Economics of Attention (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality (New York: Summit, 1991), James R. Beninger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), Allucquiere Rosenne Stone, The War of Technology and Desire at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), Ted Friedman, Electric Dreams: The Computer in American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2005), and Katherine Hayles as cited above in the notes for this chapter. The presiding spirit of these studies remains Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967).
My use of the phrase “artificial intelligence” is not meant as a contribution to the debates on the topic, all of which circle the metaphysical and practical meanings of “mind,” “consciousness,” and “human nature.” Good introductions to the issues at stake are Margaret A. Boden, ed., The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), and Brian P. Bloomfield, ed., The Question of Artificial Intelligence (New York: Methuen, 1987). See also Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, as cited in chapter 3.
Chapter 6: The Ending of the “American Century”
In this chapter, I write as an heir to the intellectual legacy of the “revisionist” diplomatic history perfected at the University of Wisconsin in the 1950s and 1960s. The exemplar of this tradition is William Appleman Williams, whose pathbreaking book of 1959, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 3rd ed. (New York: Dell, 1972), was consciously indebted to Charles A. Beard, The Idea of National Interest (New York: Macmillan, 1934). Both texts are deftly situated and appropriated by Andrew Bacevich in American Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), a book that brilliantly renews the “revisionist” tradition. In my view, however, the best treatment of the Open Door policy and the meanings of the American Century is Martin J. Sklar, “The American Century: A Twice-Told Tale,” a still unpublished paper originally intended for inclusion in Michael J. Hogan’s indispensable collection of essays titled The Ambiguous Legacy: U.S. Foreign Relations in the “American Century” (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); the Henry Luce piece is reprinted here. The abridged, published version of Sklar’s paper is in David G. Becker and Richard L. Sklar, eds., Imperialism and World Politics (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999). A comparable long view of empires and imperialisms which also accords with my argument about the American Century in this chapter is Strobe Talbott, The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008).
The “revisionist” position on American diplomacy inspired and informed by Williams and his mentor at the University of Wisconsin, Fred Harvey Harrington, is often characterized by historians and political scientists as an instance of economic determinism because the revisionists, among them Walter LaFeber, Thomas McCormick, Lloyd Gardner, Marilyn Young, Emily Rosenberg, Carl Parrini, Joan Hoff, Michael Hunt, and Bruce Cumings, emphasize the relation between the development of American capitalism and the evolution of U.S. foreign policy. In fact, the revisionists have indeed paid attention to the economic dimension of the Open Door, but they have never equated foreign relations and dollar diplomacy. Their goal has always been to dismantle the stale opposition of “realism versus idealism,” which still regulates conventional thinking about the making of U.S. foreign policy; the means to this end is the revisionists’ recognition that (1) until the very late twentieth century, policymakers saw no contradiction between their commitment to the globalization of capitalism and the realization of the highest possible morality, and (2) that capitalism is more than an economic phenomenon to be comprehended in terms of economic history.
On globalization, there are already too many prize-winning books that should never have been published. Most of them go by the name of “American Empire.” The brilliant exception to this rule is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), an ambitious attempt to periodize modern imperialism that inevitably cites the American example as the template of the future. On the first stage of globalization, that is, on the creation of a world market in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries by European exploration and conquest, see Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York: Academic Press, 1976); Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1974); E. E. Rich and C. H. Wilson, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), vol. 4; Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985); Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1994). In Croissance et regression en Europe XIVe–XVIIIe siècles: receuil d’articles (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1972), M. Malowist mistakenly claims that Poland and Russia developed “very differently” under the pressures of a world market in agricultural raw materials—Wallerstein and Anderson follow his lead—but this study of the “second serfdom” east of the Elbe remains the best book on the crucial issue of early modern underdevelopment in Europe as a function of globalization; it is contextualized and corrected in James Livingston, “Russia and Western Trade, 1550–1790: Studies in the Origins of Economic Backwardness” (master’s thesis, Northern Illinois University, 1975).
On the second stage of globalization, circa 1870 to 1960, the basic texts are J. A. Hobson, Imperialism (1902; rpt. London: Allen & Unwin, 1938), V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1914; rpt. New York: International, 1939), and Charles A. Conant, The United States in
the Orient (1901; rpt. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1971); quotations
are fro
m here. As Carl Parrini and Martin J. Sklar have shown, the pro-capitalist theory of imperialism developed by Conant, which stresses the problem of surplus capital, is quite similar to, and indeed feeds directly into, the anticapitalist theories of Hobson and Lenin. See Parrini’s fugitive pieces on Conant in Lloyd Gardner, ed., Redefining the Past (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1984), and in Walter LaFeber and Thomas McCormick, eds., Behind the Throne: Servants of Power to Imperial Presidents, 1898–1968 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); and Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). See also Giovanni Arrighi, The Geometry of Imperialism (New York: Verso, 1983), Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (New York: Monthly Review, 1968), Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars of the 20th Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), Bill Warren, Imperialism, Pioneer of Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1980), and Herbert Feis, Europe: The World’s Banker, 1870–1914 (New York: Norton, 1965). On the threat from Germany of a renewed Napoleonic empire encompassing the Eurasian land mass, see H. C. Meyer,
Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action, 1815–1945 (The Hague, 1955), R. J. S. Hoffman, Great Britain and the German Trade Rivalry, 1875–1914 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), and Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York: Norton, 1967).
On the third stage of globalization, see David Harvey, The New Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 2003), Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership (New York: Basic, 2004), Jagdish Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalization (New York: Oxford, 2004), Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), Leo Panitch and Martijn Konigs, eds., American Empire and the Political Economy of Global Finance (New York: Palgrave, 2008), and Marc Chandler, Making Sense of the Dollar (New York: Bloomberg, 2009).
The World Turned Inside Out Page 25