Number 18 in a Series of Mini-lectures for grad students in sociology.
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SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES
by
In the last lecture, I laid out several social bases for postmodern critique/transcendence of both modern and pre-modern understandings of the missions and methods of the knowledge process. I want to make the point that sociologists may use/depart/work from any one of these; feminist theory, cultural marxism, critical theory, french post-structuralist, third world re-capture of culture and social philosophy or postmodern religious sensibility among which are both New Age Religion and Liberation Theology.
Today, I want to lay out the technical bases for postmodern tactics/texts/practices. All this oriented to the point made by Fredric Jameson that postmodernity grows out of the logics of late, advanced capitalism. Jameson makes the point again but the short version is that, more than any other form of political economy, capitalism has a built in logic for the improvement of the means of production. Jameson assumes that most people know the history of capitalism so goes on to more esoteric considerations.
Slavery, Feudalism, Primitive communism, hydraulic agrarian societies use human labor and have the ideologies to justify domination.
Capitalism, oriented to profit, improves technology in order to a) lower labor costs, b) integrate the market process, and c) generate demand and d) manage opposition. New technologies have been developed in the past 200 years which, together, serve as the technical base for the production of images which may or may not have any great connection to the underlying realities they purport to describe, reproduce or interpret.
There are five technologies I want to trace; all of them converge in a globalized, massified market system to help connect the sectors in production with those in distribution of goods and services. The technical bases of postmodernity are:
1. Electronic: Telegraphy, teletype, telephone, radio, television, and the electronic satellite system. All these enhance the flow of information...and, the production of imagery.
2. Dramaturgy: Scripts, props, staging, rehearsals, actors, directors, writers, musicians, stage managers, audiences and performances combine to create the dramaturgical impression of value, need, agency or efficacy in massified and globalized markets.
3. Social Science: Psychology, Sociology, Economics and Political science combine to generate the information needed to increase the rate of production of surplus value as well as the legitimacy for this form of political economy.
4. Advertizing and Public Relations. Today, a trillion dollar industry brings these technologies together to generate demand, colonize desire, manage consciousness and legitimize an economic system in which some 1000 or so firms [300 or so in the USA] orchestrate the production and distribution of goods and services.
5. The Political Economy Itself. I will start with the technical features of capitalism itself since, in the Jameson writing, postmodern is the child of this economic formation.
a. The exchange of goods for other goods goes back to the beginning of human time...however, most economists note capitalism became dominant over other economic formulations in the last 400 years or so. One can note three general eras in capitalism:
1) commodity capitalism...trade routes from Africa and China to Europe are ancient. The Crusades saw Venice and Florence arise as the center of commodity capitalism. That center moved to Brussels in the 15th century; to London in the 17th Century; to New York in the 19th century; to Japan in the 20th century. The center of capitalism moves to wherever profits are higher, labor costs lower, the state most supportive and the dangers of loss lesser. In the 21st century, the center of capitalism might move to Hong-Kong/China; to Brazil; to Bombay/Calcutta; or to the old Soviet Bloc...or it might fragment into some 10 or 12 economic blocs...very interesting time to be alive and to think about these things.
2) Industrial capitalism...sometime in the 1700s [some say in Huddersfield, England], steam power was linked to machines and cottage production, as a technology, was displaced by factory production. The history of the mechanization of production in mines, shops, farms and warfare is well known...all these provide the technical base for a mode of being and believing that we know as postmodernity.
3) Finance capitalism...By the middle of the 19th century, great banks replaced great industrial firms as the most dynamic part of capitalism. There is more profit and less effort in credit than in the production of cereals, automobiles, computers or houses. Today, Sears pushes its credit cards more aggressively than its merchandize. Today, MasterCard goes every where, snuggles everywhere and buys everything. Every day, the technical base for finance capital improves. Now one can get cash from one's checking account in every point on the earth.
This is made possible by:
A. An Electronic information flow technology. In human history, information has been encoded in smoke signals, knots, whistles, arm and semaphore signals, glyphics, cuniforms, alpha-bets and now, in the 21st century, on the changing pulses of light through silicon wires. With the advent of trans-national markets, the need for accurate and quick information flow increased...in France, Napoleon established a series of semaphore stations to send messages to and from the coast quickly. In Brussels, pigeons were use to transfer information about the cost of goods, exchange rates or the demand for credit.
Marconi invented the telegraph and made the pony express archaic. Seimens developed the teletype out of it to send the letters of the alphabet instead of dots and dashes. Bell, interested in helping deaf children hear, developed the telephone but it was the wireless radio which served as base for the transfer of sound; it was television which served as the base for the transfer of images. The network of satellites which now girdle the earth to transfer images everywhere arose out of the first and second world wars...each fought to garner markets and raw materials for differing blocs of capitalist nations; and to prevent the spread of economic systems more concerned with improvement in the means of distribution than in the means of production and marketing.
B. Dramaturgy. For most of human history, dramaturgy and the artful staging of impressions; the contrived effort to shape feelings and thinking, these were oriented to various Dramas of the Holy in which existing social relations were clarified and sanctified. Until the time of Shakespeare, whoever said theatre, said theology. Indeed, our word for theatre, theology and theory all come from the same word, thea, meaning to look at, to gaze, to contemplate. One can see the beginnings of the postmodern concern with the simulacra in the premodern concern for the dramaturgical semblance of that which is evil and that which is holy.
Photography developed out of a movement in art to reproduce the natural and social world with precision...in order to get the necessary perspective, a little box was used with cartesian lines so an artist could pin-point an image on a gird. The image imprinted itself if a light shone on a piece of paper...and the camera [little room] was invented. By the Civil War, photography was a thriving business...by the turn of the century, 'moving' pictures were developed; that is, a series of still images which appeared to move. Now we have a picture of a thing which is assembled in a series of pictures which gives the dramaturgical impression that an image moves.
Hollywood was invented as movie makers sought a place where wages were low, lighting was good and the weather dependable. By the 1920's, Hollywood was invented; it re-produced socially acceptable forms of love and war, of family and friendship, of patriarchy and racism. It also produced a critique of power and wealth in a series of films, among which was 'The Wizard of Oz.' That movie shows every March on CBS; I will give you my lecture on it in a couple weeks...as a teaser, you will like to know that the Wicked Witch from the East was finance capital; the Yellow Brick road was a symbol of the gold Standard and the Silver [not ruby or garnet] slippers were emblematic of low interest rates and the Silver standard. I will tell you who the Wizard really was and what the tornado signified...all this coming in March...stay tuned.
Shakespeare serves as a turning point in the history of theatre; his plays were thinly disguised critiques of feudalism [Hamlet, Lear, Richard] with its murders and abuses of power by the nobility; and with its celebrations of modernity [The Tempest hurled contempt on pre-modern god concepts in the characters of Caliban, a brutish half human and Sycorax, a primitive god concept] while he gave praise for reason and rationality which was the center piece of the Enlightenment. His plays did not serve to reproduce the society in which they were located but rather to critique and transform them to a new and, presumably, more egalitarian social life world that was emerging out of the findings of Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo. The Tempest, Shakespeare's last play, written in 1611, took place on an island which was very much like the Utopia of Thomas More. But modern uses of dramaturgy often consolidate political and economic power as much as critique it.
Later Bacon would formalize this new sensibility in his de Novum Organum in 1620 while Newton would validate it in his Principia Mathematica in 1689.
The technology of the theatre also serves well to create the dramaturgical products with which both market demand and ideological hegemony are created. Enclosed within the information needs of industrial and finance capital, dramaturgy is combined with communications technology and
C. The social sciences. The first systematic study designed to serve the interest of the state in managing an occupied country and to determine the potential of the economy to bear exploitation was commissioned by Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector of England. He sent a team of social scientists to Ireland to study rebellion and resistance as well as the capacity of the land to provide food and meat to the English table. Thus was sociology born. Psychology has a similar history...Freud may have intended his new science to be liberative from the anxieties and neuroses we develop as infants and children but, by 1935, Depth Psychology was being used to suggest ways those same neuroses and anxieties could be used as envelopes within which to generate demand for the endless stream of goods and services in a market system which now reached beyond the village and beyond the state to encompass whole nations. On the shop floor, psychologists and sociologists were trying to taylorize production or to illuminate it.
Economics turned from the dismal science of Malthus, Smith and Marx to become the happy science of Keynes and the neo-keynsians in Chicago...all the flaws and failings of capitalism could be overcome by judicious intervention by the state or the Federal Reserve or the World Bank or the C.I.A. In classrooms and management symposia, economic principles were reified and deified in a drama curiously reminiscent of the morality plays which pre-ceded Shakespeare.
Conclusion. By the end of the 20th century, all these technologies were in place and with the new computer base for storing data, making images and generating graphics, the technical capacity to generate images was in place...your generation is heir to this new technology and the new sensibility which rides upon it. Many in the postmodern camp and in the pre-modern camp will excoriate such uses of technology; most universities will continue to produce the technicians to serve. But there are affirmative dimensions to post-modernity and to the capacity to create artful images. This technology can be used to re-sanctify the human project or to commodify it. It can be used to critique the deceptive and managerial uses of imagery or it can be used to solidify hegemony and domination. Whatever the case, it will not go away; one must learn to understand its uses and, perchance, re-assemble them.
Two footnotes: first, it is good to remember that but a small portion of the population of the world use or abuse such technology. Most people still use more human media with which to build symbols, to use the symbolic interactional process and to create social life worlds which bear adequate connection to that they depict. In Europe and in North America, such uses of the media; of symbolic activity, of dramaturgical imagery are pushing themselves forward to displace more democratic uses of the media. But we have not yet met the end of history nor had the final chapter been written on the central meaning of art, music, dance, drama, sociology and economics. We all will be both audience and actors in that drama of human knowledge.
Second, it is my considered and frequently voiced opinion that the human project requires the contributions made to the knowledge process by pre-modern, modern and postmodern theorists. Pre-modernity gave us the capacity to believe, to trust, to hope and to have faith that that which is prophesied will, in the consequence, become true. We cannot have the lovely or the ugly forms of social reality [whatever degree of facticity they carry] without the social psychological capacities developed in pre-modern times...and without society, we cannot have modern science with all its many contributions to medicine, transport, communications, housing and food production. Postmodernity is enabling and enlivening in that it puts responsibility for the good and evil we do on human beings instead of gods, devils, the iron laws of society or of nature.
Postmodern critique shows the human hand and the political agenda in the uses of science and technology; in the search for this or that kind of knowledge and the dismissal of that or this other kind of knowledge. Postmodern critique unravels and demystifies those models of madness, of good and evil, of governance and economics, of science itself and of postmodernity too. It shows us that all science, all religion, all law and all morality are both a politics and a poetics. The most interesting question remaining is what kind of politics and what kind of poetry will we write in the 21st century.
More next time. T. R.Y.