21L907 Readings

Lovell, Terry. "Chapter 1: Marxism Is a Realism."
Pictures of Realitv: Aesthetics. Politics. Pleasure.
BrMsh Film Institute, 1980, 1983. Pages 9-28.

Marxism is a
Realism

In this chapter I want to establish the proposition that marxism is al
realism. I t posits a social world which consists in a complex structure of,
social relations which are produced by the dominant mode of production |
and reproduction of material life. The social world is emphatically not, |
for Marx, the product of either theoretical work, or of the consciousness 1l
of individuals or groups. It cannot be known without the work of theory |
construction, and that work of theory construction and the conscious- 1
ness that individuals and groups have of the social world is itself part of L
that world.
It is necessary to establish these fundamental propositions about
marxism in order to assess recent developments in marxist cultural
studies, because of the extent to which these developments rest upon a
qualification or even refusal of the philosophy of realism. To establish
these propositions in even the most cursory form it is necessary to engage
with some of the debates which have occupied the literature of
philosophy of science over a considerable period of time. These debates
tend not to be well known among students of cultural studies. This
creates a double problem. For the issues are complex and require more
than the few pages available here for full exposure. Anyone who knows of
these debates only through the brief introduction advanced here will
probably remain perplexed. Therefore this chapter serves only to
establish a prima facie case that marxism is a realism, and to explore
some of the consequences which follow for marxist theories of cultural
production. In particular, the development of such theories on the basis
of a non-realist account of language and culture becomes immediately
ploblematic. This does not matter, of course, for non-marxists, or for
marxists who believe that marxism can be reinterpreted as a form of

conventionalism which is commensurable with these conventionalist
theories of language. But the problematic nature of marxist convention-
alism hl cultural studies must be faced, on peril of intellectual confusion
ol' the first order, by' those who become convinced that what is most
valuable in the marxist theory of society' and history depends upon a
philosophy which is irreconcilable with conventionalist theories of
cultural production.
In order to convince readers who have become familiar with precisely
such conventionalist marxism through marxist cultural studies, that

()
marxisrtl is a realism, it will be necessary for them to read beyond these
pages. One of the tasks of this chapter is to introduce the sources where
this proposition is more fully established than it can be here, and to
convince readers on the basis of the prima facie case that it will prove
worthwhile or even necessary to pursue this matter further.
Realism is both a theory of knowledge and an ontology (an account of
what exists and is real in the world). Two recent important contributions
to the philosophy of social science (Benton, 1977; Keat and Urry, 1975)
concur in identifying three major types of theory of knowledge, of which
realism is one. These theories might perhaps more properly be described
as 'limit positions' around which theories of knowledge cluster. The first
which they identify is positivism,* although the more generic term might
be empiricism. Positivism is, they argue, logically incoherent. It cannot
provide an account of the processes of knowledge production in which
scientists are actually engaged in their day-to-day activities, nor of the
history of science. The second position is known as conventionalism, and
is the source of a devastating critique of positivism and empiricism. But
conventionalism is undermined by its inability to avoid relativism. The
third position, realism, shares with positivism and empiricism the belief
in the existence of an independent reality and thus avoids relativism. Yet
it also claims to be able to avoid the conventionalist critique which
cripples positivism and empiricism.
The context of the development of modern epistemological realism is
what has been termed the 'Copernican Revolution' in the philosophy ol'
science. The prehistory of this revolution goes back to the early
rationalist challenge to empiricism, as we shall see.

1. kMPIRlt.lSM

i. Empiricism and 'the Real'
Empiricism embraces a wide variety of philosophical theories of
knowledge. All theories of knowledge have ontological implicationsÑ
implications about what the world is like and what things exist in it.
Empiricist ontology posits a real world which is independent of
consciousness and theory, and which is accessible through sense-
experience. To be a candidate for (empirical) reality, sometllillg must be
capable of generating actual or possible experiences. But by makhlg
sense-experience the sole criterion of the real empiricism achieves a
+'I'hereisallellormouslitelatureollpositivisn)illlditshistory Plssitixislllrollsistshlsically
ill the belieS that positive kilowledge can ollly l e obtailled by the Illeth(~ls IlS~ (I by th(-
natural sciences alid what c.lilnot be knowil througil thils 1Ill thlsds is Ililkilowalbl . I t is
aiso collllllitted to .111 ma erllpiricisl accoliln jrs(ilitiiie Illt'lhOd thedill-tlilil thilt the so
alidibundationolkilowledgeisilitile tXpt'l'i(ll('t' ol )bj((tsl)ltileextilili~lwl)lil thiougil
the senses. I he term positivism was coined by Aug(lst( (:oliltt who d(\-( lope 1 the first
systematic positivist sociology.

fusion between what is and what can be known. Ontology is reduced to
epistemology; what is to what can be known. As Roy Bhaskar remarks,
. . . . . . . . . .
nl cnaracterlsmg tlle emplrlclst posltlon:

. . . only perception gives knowledge of things . . . hence knowledge
must be of what is given in perception. Thus on the one hand only
items directly given in sense-experience may be said to be known to
exist; and on the other, the world may now . . . be regarded as

constituted by facts which are given as the real objects of experience
. . . (Bhaskar, 1975, p3s)*

Empiricism is premised on the existence of a knowing subject, source of
(he sense data which validates knowledge. This knowing subject and its
experience are taken as given and unproblematic by empiricism, or,
where it is problematised, empiricism begins to be undermined.

ii. Empiricism, Knowledge Production and the Knowing Subject
In its simplest form, empiricism sees the process of knowledge produc-
.tion as a matter of careful, objective recording of empirical regularities.
These regularities are established by induction (reasoning from particu-
lar to general) on the basis of the observation of the behaviour of
particular things under experimentally controlled conditions. Rigorous
controls in the production of empirical data are necessary because of the
danger of slipping into subjectivist error. For the particular individual
subjects whose sense experience provides the data may err. They may
lapse in their attention, may suffer from delusions, or may distort their
experiences in the direction of what they hope or expect to find.
Therefore empiricism insists that the sense data of science must be
repeatable, regular, and in principle open to any investigator.
For simple empiricism, then, knowledge is determined by nature or
reality, and is mediated by the experiences of the knowing subject. From
its inception empiricism has been troubled by the subjective side of this
process, the input of the knowing subject. Empiricists such as Locke and
Bacon were concerned to find ways of eliminating subjective error, so
that objective reality could be given untrammelled passage through the
mediations of sense-experience. The earliest critics of empiricism seized
upon this difficuly in a more positive manner, and proclaimed an active
and necessary part tbr the mind in the construction of knowledge. The
., . ~ _ _ , . .., ,,, .. . .. .... , , , _ _ .
* I he collrept or lilots is ambigilxlus as betweell states oi allairs ill the world and
l 1( llelit:lry prill)l)sitiolis .Ibo (I the world. It is this shili Or Illt';lllillg which perillits the
iihzSiolltll.lt'lilctsel)elollgsinlklltEllleousiytotwoord(lsXtheor(iel-l)ll)eilltlsalldlheorderof
z )X(eptsS Ihl pl)l)lelil ol rehitilg these two ord(ls appeals to 1( solved il there is a
sid)stlalulill (li l.ols' whi(ll bCt(lilgS to bl)tl .
It s(rilis best to lz(ogilisl tilc lelatiolishil) betweell lilets ;(lld theories/collreptual
s(h(lilil by plal hig tl(lil filililv withill tht olderl)l colicepts l-.ltl)~l thall thilgs. lilets
ade; ys nike the lol lll ol pil posili sils. 131u they rtler to st ltes ol .llI.lils hl the world.

mind was not to be viewed negatively as an unfortunate source of
potential error, the necessary but tlawed instrument through which the
real world was opened to knowledge, but as central to the whole process
of knowledge production. For the rationalist, knowledge was not a
retlection in consciousness of the real world, but something actively
constructed through the use ol mental constructsÑconcepts, theories
methodological rules, etc. These mental constructs which are the
working tools of knowledge production are not given with the data of
experience which they are used to understand. Classical idealism saw
these mental constructs as the i'ree creations of the human mind, and it
could continue to claim objective status for knowledge only if these free
creations could be shown to have some objective base. Kant located their
objectivity in the universal and necessary characteristics of knowledge
Ñwhat he termed the 'syntheticaprioris' which he held to be conditions
of any possible knowledge. He included such general organising
concepts as that of space, time and causality. Perhaps the most notorious
attempt to escape relativism and subjectivism was that of Bishop
Berkeley, who claimed that the world's objectivity was guaranteed by
God. It had objective existence only as an idea hs the mind of God. But
inevitably a fully fledged relativism and subjectivism was placed upon
the agenda in the philosophy of knowledge. It was only a matter ol' time
before someone took the bull by the horns and celebrated a relativism
which could not be avoided.
Subjectivism, the first precursor of conventionalism, is a celebration of
human freedom and creativity. Conventionalism departs only in
locating that freedom not in each individual, but in the collectivity, the
knowledge community. The development of conceptual frames of
ret'erence, theories and methods is held by conventionalism to depend
upon shared conventions established within the scientific community, or
within language itself.

iii. Empiricism and the Language of Theory
The rationalist insistence upon the critical importance ol' concepts
theories and methodological rules in knowledge production was the
source of the first challenge to empiricism. It forced recognition that
knowledge was not somethinoggiven with and in the reality it knew, but a
human construct, the result of certain kinds ol' mental activitv The
problem of accounting for the generation and role of theory in knowledge
production was one which all succeeding and more sophisticated
empiricisms have had to confront. The most obvious way to try to resolve
this problem was by treating theoretical terms as coded summariss ol'
em~g_alk~w edge. All references to theoretical enlilies were held to be
shortllalld summaries ol empirical data. Another solution was to treat
them as convenient or necessary fictions, useful in generating empil ical
knowledge, but not in themselves entailing any reality-clailll. I he

theoretical furnitule of itbrces', 'atoms', etc. were to be treated as
heuristic fictions unless and until some corresponding empirical referent
could be t'ound. For instance, a simple apparatus known as the 'Wilson
cloud-chamber' is used to track the emissions from radioactive sub-
stances and other small elementary particles. The ability to generate
these empirical phenomena would justify elevating the status of such
elementary particles from convenient fictions, to existence in reality.
This interpretation of theories and theoretical terms was given some
support by the coexistence of two incompatible theories of light in
nineteenth-century physics. The wave and the particle models of light
equally accounted for the known facts, a given set of empirical
phenomena. They were used as convenience dictated according to the
particular needs of the work in hand. Obviously reality claims could not
be sustained for both models, as they were incompatible. Their
continued use side by side could only be justified if it were held that
neither made existence claims, and that such models were merely

convenient heuristic tools.

iv. Empiricism, the Language of Observation and Empirical Testing
Both of these attempted resolutions of the empiricist problem with
regard to theoretical terms depended upon the ability to translate
theoretical terms into an appropriate language of observation. Given
that the theories in question are multiple and competing, then any
adequate language of observation which might be used to arbitrate
between them must be neutral with respect to those theories and
therefore independent of any one. Competing theories could be tested
only by first being translated, or partly translated, into the observation
language. Empiricist theory tried to develop what it termed 'rules of
correspondence' between theory and observation languages. Once the
propositions of theory are translated into observation terms, then they
are open to test against empirical observations.
Recognition of the importance of theory led to a variant of empiricism
which was based on deduction rather than induction. A new orthodoxy
was inaugurated by the work of Karl Popper under the title of the
'hypothetico-deductive method'. The development of scientific know-
ledge was held to depend on the scientists' ability to develop theories
which would lead to hypotheses in any given science. Empirical
consequences would than be deduced from these hypotheses, and
sul)jected to empirical test, so that false hypotheses could be eliminated.
Popper argued that science proceeded by a process of conjectures and
relutations. 'I he conjectural moment was both the moment of theory
COIISII IlCIiOn, and witness to human l'reedom and creativity. It was
governed only by the limits of bold speculation and intellectual daring.
'I'hc resulting hypotheses were then subject to the acid moment of
cnll)ilical test, the moment ol'objectivity and control. Tllose hypotheses

and theories which survived repeated attempts to refute them by the
production of contrary evidence provided the most certain knowledge
that we could hope to have. Knowledge, for Popper, could never be more
than provisional and uncertain. It consisted in the elimination of error
rather than the production of truth; refutation not verification. But the
moment of empirical test remained privileged, as it had been for the
positivists whom Popper attacked. It is his privileging of the empirical
test which allows us to class him as an empiricist rather than a
conventionalist. For at the very least, Popper had to hold that the
propositions in which the results of the empirical test were couched were
more certain than the propositions of the theoretical hypotheses which
they tested. *
Another important and influential thinker closely associated in some
respects with Popper's position was Karl Hempel. He developed a
formal model of scientific explanation known as the 'covering law
model'. Any given phenomenon was explained when it was brought
under a covering general law. As with simple empiricism, the covering
law model assumes that the relationships between phenomena are
regular, and that they always produce consequences at the level of sense
data which are subject to empirical test. Both ofthese more sophisticated
variants of empiricism failed to solve the problem of observation
language and its relation to the terms of theory, although both have paid
considerable attention to the problem and rejected simple-minded
solutions. Popper in particular marks the point of transition between
empiricism and conventionalism.

2. CONVENTIONALISM

i. ConventionaZism and the Languages of Theoy and Observalion
If Popper's privileging of the propositions of the empirical test keeps him
in the ranks of empiricism, his account of theory and theory construction
places him with the conventionalists. It is no accident that one of the
most influential contemporary conventionalists, Thomas Kuhn, stimu-
lated a vigorous and fruitful debate between his supporters and those of
Popper.
The hypothetico-deductive model of explanation recognised not only
the importance of theory but its pluralism. If empirical testing was to
adjudicate between competing theories, then they could not be couched
in theory-dependent terms which prejudged what they purported to test.
The quest for a neutral language of observation has a long history. The
main thrust ot' the conventionalist attack on empiricism is that such a
neutral observation language cannot in principle be found. Experience is
never directly given, conceptless. But the concepts in terms ol' which
experience is ordered and recorded are not and cannot be theory

neutral. Thomas Kuhn's flamboyant conventionalism declared that all
languages of observation and experience are theory-impregnated. He
contended that sense-perception itself depends u~ theory, so that the
way in which we perceive the world, the sensations and experiences we
have,-depenRupon the theoretical presuppositiorts we bring to it._It
--follows thar-tcr~wtedge cannot be validated by an appeal to experience
because~''tlie~-very-~'erÑms of our experience p-resuppose certain
knowledge-claim3,-and'-beg~~the~questi'ons which they are supposed~to
resolve. For Kuhn, the history of science is not the cumulative process,
brick' upon brick, of the empiricist account, in which each scientist is 'a
pigmy standing on the shoulders of giants' as the falsely modest
disclaimer of innumerable acknowledgement pages has it. Rather it is a
succession Or d sc_nt uous 'paradigms'. Paradigms are mutually
'~exclusive and incommensurable frames of reference, theories and
methods for ordering, examining and explaining the world. Kuhn
divides the history of each science into long periods of 'normal science',
punctuated by briefer periods of 'revolutionary science'. In any period of
'normal science' a single paradigm will reign in a mature discipline. This
ruling paradigm determines not only the concepts, theories and methods

which are acceptable to the community of scientists who work within
that discipline, but even what actually counts as a problem. There are no
rational procedures for deposing a ruling paradigm, choosing between
rivals, or installing a new one. But like dictators, each is overthrown in
due course and replaced after the coup by a new despot.

ii. C'onvenlionalism and 'the Real'
Kuhn goes so far as to claim not merely that diflfercnt paradigms are
different interpretations of reality, but that each paradigm constitutes
reality anew in its own terms. Because the terms of rival paradigms are
incommensurable, reality becomes a function of the paradigm, rather
than something independent of all paradigms against which rival
interpretations can be measured. People who use different paradigms
literally live in diflferent worlds, says Kuhn.
The limit position which all conventiorlalisms more or less approach is
one in which the world is in effect constructed in and by theory. Given
that there is no rational procedure for choosing between theories,
relativism is the inevitable result. Epistemological relativism dnes~t
necessarily entail a denial that there is a reai material worki. -B - if our
only access to it is via a succession of theories which describe it in
mutually exclusive terms, ~then the concept of an independent reality
ceases lo have any lorce or function. If the firsuiagtirlthtdisplac~ent
orenlpirieislll is the recognl[lon thal theories nd therefore knowledge
are socially produced, the second which often l:ollows close upon its heels
is the expansion of theory until it fills the world. Instead ol' the
empiricisPs instrumentalist view of theory as a tool for the production ol'

)

knowledge of reality, reality in conventionalism is swallowed up by
theory, and there are as many 'realities' as there are different theories of
reality (or paradigms).

iii. Conventionalism and Theories of Language
It is interesting to note the similarities between conventionalism in the
philosophy of science and certain developments in modern linguistics.
Since Saussure's pioneering work, linguistics has placed a wedge
between the terms of a language and their referents in the real world,
insisting that it is not what it refers to that defines a term, but its place
within the system of terms and relations which constitutes a language. In
discussing Saussure's theory, FrederickJameson notes that for Saussure:

. . . it is the totality of systematic language which is analogous to
whatever organised structures exist in the world of reality and that our
understanding proceeds from one whole or gestalt to the other, rather
than on a one to one basis. But of course, it is enough to present the
problem in these termsfor the whole notion of reality itself to become suddenly
problematic. (Jameson, 1972, pp32-3) (my emphasis)

Like Saussurean linguistics, conventionalist accounts of theory under-
stand the meanings of the terms of theory to be determined by their place
within a system of theoretical terms. They are internally defined by the
theory rather than by reference to some object in reality. Conventionalist
theories of knowledge share with Saussurean linguistics a tendency to
transform this real gain in the theory of linguistic meaning into a
justification for avoiding the thorny problem of reference. Put in this way,
the problem becomes 'how is it possible for terms which take their
W meaning from their place in a system of terms to refer to real objects
| which exist outside of that system of terms?' The problem is neatly
evaded by making language in effect the only reality, or making reality a
function of language. This solution is certainly available to many
contemporary forms of social theory, including symbolic interactionism,
ethnomethodology, and other idealisms. But it is not open to marxist
materialism. Signs cannot be permitted to swallow up their referents in a
never-ending chain of signification, in which one sign always points on to
another, and the circle is never broken by the intrusion of that to which
the sign refers.
At this point it is necessary to raise certain questions which must
confront any attempt to unite marxism with modern linguistics. IS
marxism is a realism, then it cannot rest upon a conventionalist theory ol'
language. Yet it is precisely this combination which inrorms recent
developments in marxist cultural studies. There are two possible
responses to this situation. The first is to attempt to reconcile marxisln
with conventionalism and the second is to look for a realist theory ol'

language. Marxist cultural studies~ has pursued the first alternative.
This has been facilitated by the development in Althusserianism of a
form of marxism which has distinct conventionalist leanings. In the last
resort, Althusser himselt draws back from fully fledged conventionalism.
He is a realist by fiat. But he sails dangerously close to the wind, while
the post-Althusserians Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst abandon caution
and openly embrace conventionalism without (as yet) disavowing
marxism .

J . R EA l.lSM

i. Realism, 'the Real ' and 'Ontological Depth '
Modern epistemological realism accepts much of the conventionalist
critique of empiricism. In particular it concedes that knowledge is
socially constructed and that language, even the language of experience,
is theory-impregnated. Yet it retains the empiricist insistence that the
real world cannot- be reduced to language or to theory, but is
independent of both, and yet knowable. The task of knowledge is to

produce knowledge of that real independent world, and not simply
elegant and internally consistent constructions which endlessly refer
inwards to themselves. The realist acknowledgement of the external
world must be more than the empty rhetoric of a world about which
nothing can be said or known: the Kantian 'thing-in-itselfR which always
escapes language and thought. If realism is to be more than a token
gesture, then the external world which it posits must be one which is in
principle accessible and about which things can be said and known.
Realism may best be characterised by a comparison with empiricism
on the one hand, and conventionalism on the other, since it shares
l'eatures of both. Sophisticated empiricism, the hybrid empiricism/
conventionalism of the hypothetico-deductive model, looked for the
logicalform which all bona fide explanations shared, and found it in the
form of the theoretically derived covering law. For realism noformal
criteria can be adequate to the task of characterising scientific explana-
tion. Many examples can be found of 'explanations' which can be
rormulated as covering laws but which we would not want to accept as
genuine explanations at all and, vice-versa, genuine explanations which
cannot be so formulated. Some regularities areÑ simply thatÑ
regularities: for instance, the regularity with which the sun rises and sets.
We do not feel that a given instance has been explained until we know the
structure of relationships which cause that regularity. Conversely,
something may interfere on occasion with the operation of cause-etiecl
~M;lily ol thc colluillitiolis to marxist cultulal studies which Cdl) IX Ibulid ill tht work (It
SW:reen, ltorkin,rs Papcrl in (:ullural Sludia, Ideaoloz!.v and (.'onsciousecss, etc. assuinc .Illd
(olltl-ibute to EI collventionalist ilue)p)-rt.ltioll ol III;lrxisn).

1
oo

relations so that no regularity can be detected, yet we want to say that the
citation of that cause-eflect explains the phenomenon in question. Thus
when we attempt to explain single events, such as a plane crash, it is
unlikely that the explanation can be immediately referred to any
regularity of the form 'whenever x, then y'. This problem has led to the
distinction between laws and mere empirical generalisations, and to the
assertion that explanations which cannot be referred to a law simply
mark gaps in our knowledge. We may not be able to explain the plane
crash in terms of laws governing regular relationships, but the explana-
tion will not be complete until we can.
Realism eschews all suchadhoc temporising. It argues that substantive
rather than formal criteria of explanation are required. The realist Rom
Harre ( 1972, pl87) has accounted for the power of science to provide
adequate explanations of phenomena in its development of theories
which have what he terms 'ontological depth'. Theories develop models
of real structures and processes which lie at a 'deeper' level of reality than
the phenomena they are used to explain. The theory explains the
phenomenon because the phenomenon and the 'deep structures' are
causally connected. Thus the explanatory power of a theory resides not
in the formal logical relationship which connects the propositions of the
theory to the propositions of empirical observation, but in real causal
connections between the different levels of the real phenomena to which
the theory refers. These real connections may or may not result in
empirical regularities which could be expressed in terms of a covering
law.

ii. Realism and the Languages of Theory and Obser;valion
For the realist, the entities and processes conceptualised in theories are
not convenient fictions, nor summaries of empirical data, as they are for
the empiricist. The terms which refer to those entities and processes
therefore cannot be fully or, in some cases, even partially translated into
terms with empirical referents. Reality is not, for the realist, coextensive
with what can be empirically observed. But it does have elrects which are
open to empirical observation. It is this link between 'the real' and the

'empirical', depth and surface, which gives us access to the lormer and
makes it possible to develop scientific knowledge. Therefore realism
shares with empiricism the importance which it grants to experiment
and empirical observation in the development of knowledge. But this
moment of empirical test is not given the unique privilege accorded it by
empiricism. For it is only theoretically informed and controlled experi-
ence which can act as a guide to 'the real'. The moment ol' theory is
equally privileged, as it is within conventionalism. But unlike conven-
tionalism, realism does not allow theory to englobe reality and push out
any place for the empirical. It does nol allow theory to expand until il lills
and defines the world.

If accounting for theory is the major problem of empiricism, then
accounting for the working scientist's predilection for experiment and
observation is the major problem for conventionalism. If Kuhn's (or for
that matter, Hindess and Hirst's) conventionalism were taken at full face
value, then experiment and observation could only be viewed either as
ritual games which scientists happen to play, or as the result of the
scientists' philosophical naivete. For the notion of putting theory to the
test of reality makes no sense on the conventionalist interpretation of
knowledge construction. The results of such 'tests' will already be
contained in the theoretical presuppositions it makes in its very
descriptive language.

iii. Realism, Crileria of 'the Real' and Knowledge of 'the Real'
We have seen that empiricism conflates what is with what can be known
through experience. Yet claims about what is and what can be kriown
cannot be kept entirely separate. The reality claims of realist theory
would be neither here nor there unless accompanied by epistemological
criteria which allow those claims to be tested against rival claims of rival
theories. Empiricism is committed to some version of the correspon-
dence theory of truth. That is to say, a proposition is held to be true if
what it asserts 'corresponds' to what is the case with regard to the
phenomena to which it refers. Conventionalism has no place for the idea
of 'correspondence to reality' since it posits no independent reality to
which its theories need to correspond. It turns instead to the rationalist
criterion of coherence for its theory of truth. Theories, as bearers of their
own reality, cannot be assessed in terms of the extent to which they
'correspond' to that reality. The order of being and of knowledge being
inextricably connected for conventionalism, the 'correspondence' of
theory to object' is already given because the object is theoretically
determined and defined. Theories and theoretically determined
'realities' can however be assessed according to their internal coherence
and consistency.
Realism's criterion of truth recognises that theories must be consistent
and coherent. But finally, like empiricism, realism rests upon the notion
of correspondence to reality. Unlike empiricism, however, the reality to
which theories correspond is not, for the realist, identical to the empirical
world: the world as it exists at the level of sense data, generated through
observation and experiment. The propositions of theory relate to the
'deep' ontological furniture of the universe, rather than to the surface at
which experience is located. Experience, properly interpreted, gives us
access to that 'deep' ontological layer because it is causally connected to
it. Only when the causal comIection is understood can experience act as
a guide to the real.
To take a well-worn cxample, a stick placed in water looks bent. I he
theory ol optics tells us why this is so. Armed with this theory, we will be

)

)
:)

able to use our observations to determine the real shape ol' the stick.
Similarly, the exchange between capitalist and labourer in which
labour-power is bought and sold has the appearance of and is
experienced as an equal exchange. The labour theory of value uncovers
not the 'reality' behind an 'illusion', but another, deeper level of social
relations of production which explains not only why that exchange is
really unequal, but also why it has the form of an equal exhange. Armed
with the labour theory of value, the worker can begin to use his/her
experiences of exchange and the production process as a guide to the
reality of capitalism.
The major challenge to realism is to give an adequate account of
'correspondence to reality' without recourse to the empiricist chimera of
a theory-neutral language of observation. Benton avoids any discussion
of correspondence, but makes some useful suggestions on ways of
assessing rival theories. If theories are to be assessed for their 'adequacy
to the real' then we must develop some means of rational comparison
between what the radical conventionalist Kuhn declares to be incom-
mensurableÑrival theories of 'reality'. Benton establishes the com-
mensurability of theories via the following arguments:
(a) While objects may be described by mutually incompatible
concepts which take their meanings from the different theoretical
systems in which they occur, nevertheless it is sometimes possible to
establish that their object of reference is the same. Difference of meaning
does not preclude identity of referensc. Benton places great weight upon
our ability to produce the object of reference common to two theories and
upon the existence of:

. . . procedures for producing the substance, which may be copied,
taught, learned, etc. without presupposing what is at issue between
two theories. (Benton, 1977, p l 87)

(b) An objective reality is a reality common to all sciences (although
diflferent sciences may address themselves to the explanation of diflferent
'levels' and aspects of that reality). This brings each science potentially
into a relationship with all others. The history of the difterent sciences is
one of combined and unequal development. Any single science may be
supported, at any given stage of its development, by others which are
more advanced. The requisite 'observation language' may be borrowed
from another science. This may be illustrated by an example which is
commonly cited.
The theory of planetary motion requires the use of the telescope as a
test instrument when it wishes to relate theory to empirical observation.
The telescope is not a theory-neutral instrument ottobservation, but it
may be treated as such lor this purpose, since the theory on which it
dependsÑthe theory ol opticsÑis not the same as the theory which it is

being used to test. Only if the theory of planetary motion itselt has a stake
in the theory of optics does the use ofthe telescope become problematic.
Of course the theory which supplies the test instruments of other theories
may itself be brought into question by a scientific revolution of the kind
described by Kuhn. In that case the theory of planetary motion will feel
the reverberations. But no revolution, in science or society, is or can be
total. Not everything can be placed in question at one and the same time.
Well-attested theories and results drawn from other disciplines are vital
resources for any given science. They provide theoretical models,
putative causal mechanisms, test instruments, and a body of well-
attested 'facts' essential for cognate fields. Like socialism in one country,
science in one discipline is doomed to failure. Borrowings and intercon-
nections between disciplines are endemic in the history of science, and

necessary to its development. Uneven and combined development is the
law of scientific knowledge as it is of the history of social formations.
(c) A third argument is offered by Bhaskar. Even the most extreme
version of conventionalism, which claims that theories are literally
incommensurable, paradoxically pays testimony to the existence of a
common reality. It only makes sense to speak of theories as incommen-
surable if they are in some sense 'about' the same thing. Hot dinners are
not incommensurable with wallpaper, because there is no basis for
comparison between them. The description of x as 'phlogiston' is
incommensurable with its description as 'oxygen' because they are
descriptions of the same thing. As Bhaskar says, it makes no sense to claim
that the rules of cricket were incommensurable with the rules of chess.
(But while this argument of Bhaskar's is in its own way unanswerable, it
does not of course help us to determine which of two incommensurable
descriptions of the same thing is to be preferred.)
(d) I have already pointed out that conventionalism can give no
account of the 'game' of reality-testing played by scientists who persist in
wishing to test their theories. Yet it is this game which is Kuhn's whole
motor of scientific progress and change. It is in the attempt to test
theories that anomalies, results that do not fit the theories, are thrown
up, and it is when anomalies have accumulated to an embarrassing
extent, or to the point when the scientists' careers are blocked by their
inability to solve the problems posed within the paradigm used by the
theory, that the decisive shil't from 'normal' to 'revolutionary' science
takes place. The coherence theory of truth, and a theory-determined
'reality' cannot explain how it comes about that there are anomalies
between theory and 'reality'. Anomalies testity to he e_istertce of a real
world which is hIdepelldent ol'theory but which theory explains, more or
less ade~;y. ~3ttly-~realism c-an give an account ofthe actual history of
science, and of the possibility of progress through revolution.t

tt ilill ilidt'l)tt'(l IOI IlliS IX)illt tO : I 11 jl l-lyer ((~lilillelits 1)1 tile II)S

To sum up: realism is both an ontology and an epistemology. It makes
ssertions about the nature of the real world, and these assertions have
onsequences for the manner in which that world may be known (or if
ou will, in which knowledge of the world may be produced) . I t does not
l dentify the real with what can be experienced, but as a multi-layered
| structure, consisting of entities and processes Iying at different levels of
I that structure, including the surface level of the empirical world. The
| empirical world with which we are familiar is causally connected to
/ 'deeper' ontological levels, and it is by virtue of these causal connections
/ that we can use sense-data, experience and observation in constructing
I knowledge of the structures and processes of the real. These causal
| connections cannot themselves be understood through experience,
f because neither the underlying structures nor the connection between
I these structures and the empirical world are themselves experienced.
The connection can only be reconstructed in knowledge. But these
connections are vital for the realist theory of knowledge. Experience may
be a treacherous and misleading guide to the structures of the real when
unassisted by theory. On the other hand theories are mere flights of
fancy unless they retain their link to the world of experience. The
relationship between theory and experience is not however circular,
because of the interconnection between different theories of connected
aspects of a common reality and the manner in which one theory draws
upon the resources provided by another, collectively generating a
residue of theoretically grounded 'observations' which may be taken as
the testing ground for any given theory at any given point in time. The
'combined and unequal development' of disciplines is necessary to the
grounding of any one. Without this necessary point of contact outside its
own theoretically defined field, individual disciplines are condemned to
the circularity described by Kuhn.

4. MARXISM IS A REAI.ISM

i. Marxism and ils Objeel of Referenee
A theory may be a realist theory and yet be false. There may be more
than one realist theory of a given phenomenon which explains it in quite
different ways. Here I am not concerned with the question ot the truth or
validity of marxism as a theory of society and history, but only with its
credentials as a realist theory.
Marxism has, of course, been interpreted in other terms throughout its
long history. It has had positivist interpreters, who need not detain us.
Of more interest are recent conventionalist marxisms, such as that oi
Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst. Conventionalists such as HhIdess and
Hirst do not make a distinction between positivism and realism, hut
interpret empiricism broadly to include both. I shall argue here that the

conventionalist interpretation of marxism leads to the loss of what is
most useful and a~nctive m It, while the realist interpretation brmg~
out'wfiat is 'mÑo alu~bre in ~ar~ work.
'Marxisms' of every complexion, i'rom the positivism of Kautsky,
through the humanism of Lukacs, to the anti-humanism of Althusser,
are agreed upon the first principle of realism: that there exists an
objective and inrlepe~2snt social world, which can he krlown. It is this
premise which has been abandoned by convent_gnalisai~voursia__
'reality' wlrich to alHmeiztr;~ntl:Bxi'rp^sesai6 constructed through the~ry,
since t~ real world outside of Aheory Lantl~b~own,r cdnnLIt he
compared wlth tlie world~sited by theory. It is true pace Kuhn and the
~, , ,,_, . , _ _ ,
conventlonansts, that that real, concrete world can only be known and
described within the terms of some theory or another. And it is true that
different theories demarcate the world in quite different terms. But while
this makes knowledge of the world theory-dependent, it does not make the
world itself theory-dependent, nor does it follow that a world indepen-

dent of theory cannot be known through theory. This only follows when
the connection between theories and their real referents is severed, as it is
within conventionalism. Here Benton's point about the importance of
maintaining a clear distinction between the meaning of a term and its
referent must be remembered. It is true that classical political economy
and marxism differ in their descriptions and explanations of capitalism
and that the terms in which they cast their theories and explanations are
drawn from mutually exclusive systems of ideas. It does not follow that
the term 'capitalism' refers to something entirely different in each case.
It may demarcate boundaries differently, but the object of reference of
marxism and political economy are one and the same. Although the
'production' of capitalist social relations presents problems of a different
order to the 'production' of phlogiston/oxygen, nevertheless assuming
that such social experiments were possible, political economists and
marxists would produce the same thing under different descriptions.

ii. Marxism, Experience and the Empirical
Marx makes the realist assertion of the necessity to go beyond
appearances, beyond the manner in which social relations are experi-
enced, in order to arrive at knowledge of-those social relations: 'science
would be supertlolls if there was an immediate coincidence of the
appearance and reality ofttlings.' (Marx, in Lukacs, 1 47O, p26) He does
not identify the real with the empirical. Appearances, taken at face
value, are misleading. They can only be understood in the light of the
theory of historical materialism. But as a realist Marx makes a causal
link hetweell e xperience/appearances and those objects and relations hz
the l ( al social world which they are appearances oJ: Althusser places a
wedge between the two by alguilIg that experielIce/appearallces are
produced only as a result ol 'ideological practice', which is in turn only

determined by the social relations of production in the 'last instance'.
Hindess and Hirst sever this slender connection altogether, so that the
ideological practice which determines experience, including the indi-
vidual's experience of his/her social identity, becomes a fully autonom-
ous practice, limited only by its 'conditions of existence' in other
practices of the social formation. But for both the moderate Althusser
and the radical Hindess and Hirst, the effect of this separation of the
ideological from the economic is to pre-empt any role for experience in
knowledge production, as we shall see in the next chapter when their
theories are examined in more detail. Experience can, as a result, only
provide a guide to ideological production, and not to the real structure of
social relationships.

iii. Marxism and the Language of Theory
By contrast, Marx's theory of commodity fetishism makes a direct link
between the forms of the social relations of production under capitalism,
and the appearances which these relations have for individuals and
groups who experience them. Under the system of capitalist commodity
production social relations take the form of relationships between things.
This form of social relations therefore gives rise to appearances which are
misleading when taken at face value. If human agents order their
experience and activities in terms of these appearances, they will fail to
develop knowledge of the reality of capitalist social relations. Marx uses
the concept of commodity fetishism to explain the way in which
capitalism is experienced, since he sees experience as a function of the
- position of human agents within the ensemble of social relations, and the
objective form which those social relations take within the mode of
production in question.
This theory of commodity fetishism allows Marx to answer the
question of the source of ideology. Ideologies are defined as those
theories which take the appearances of social relations under capitalism
at face value. This is at least a minimal criterion for distinguishing
ideology from adequate knowledge. Knowledge is a lunction of the
development of theories which explain the appearances or forms of
capitalist social relations in terms of the real underlying structures and
processes of capitalismÑthe social relations which these appearances
are appearances of.
This leaves open the further question of the source of ideological and
scientific theories. Here the orthodox answer is to relate the development
of ideas to class interest and the class struggle. This allows us to add to
the above minimal definition of ideology. For it is the bourgeoisie which
is the class in whose interest it is to develop theories of capitalism which
take the appearances or forms of capitalist social relations at full face
value, naturalising them as eternal and necessary forms; while it is the
proletariat which, if it is to overthrow capitalism in pursuit of its

collective class interests, must develop adequate knowledge of the reality
of capitalist social relations and the 'laws of motion' of capitalism
This answer, further developed in the work of Lukacs, leaves certain
questions unanswered. It does not, for example, tell us anything about
the work of theory construction, whether the theory in question is
ideological or scientific. In drawing attention to this work, and
attempting to analyse its processes, Althusser has made a valuable
intervention. For class interest does not lead automatically to theory
construction, and neither do the forms of capitalist social relations
automatically generate the terms and concepts of ideological theories
which have tried to explain them. It does, however, indicate the point of
view from which the work of knowledge construction must take placeÑ
the point of view of the proletariat, in its struggle with capitalism. I shall
examine in the next chapter the difficulties which Althusser's theory of
ideology and knowledge construction creates for theorising the role of
this collective class subject of history.

il. Marxism and the Human SubjecX

The Althusserian and post-Althusserian criticism of Lukacs, that he
nfailed to problematise the individual human subject of experience (Hirst
1976), applies to Marx as well as to Lukacs, in respect of his theory of
commodity fetishism. Marx provides no account of the individual
human subject and the manner in which it is constituted. This is not
necessarily a telling objection however, for Marx leaves the space for a
t heory of the subject. Unlike empiricism, realism does not depend upon
positing a knowing subject which is given rather than socially con-
structed. But it is absolutely essential that any such theory of the social
constitution of the subject should not sever the connection between that
(constituted) subject, experience and knowledge after the manner of
conventionalism, by severing the connection between the representation
of experience and the real objects which they are representations of.

5. MAKXISM IS A (IIIS'I'()RICAI.) MATERIAI.ISM

i. Materialism
Realism does not uniquely define marxism as a social theory. It does not
even serve to separate idealism from materialism, since there are several
lorms of 'objective idealism' which are fully realist in their epis-
temologies, although the reality they posit is non-material.
Materialism is a term which has suffered considerable loss of
delinition in recent years. It has become almost interchangeable with
'real'. This is partly the result of changes within the natural sciences,
always 'opinion leaders' in these matters. l he eighteenth-century model
ol physical reality was a mechanist one. The material world was thought

L
N

to consist in atomic particles of matter, mechanically coming into
contact with one another and setting up an endless chain of causation,
like Hume's billiard balls. Even at its height, the atomic/mechanist
model had difficulties with concepts thrown up within the most
prestigious sciences, such as the concept of gravity as a Ibrce acting at a
distance, without direct physical contact. Since Einstein's revolution,
the atomic/mechanist model has become increasingly obsolete. The
concept of the 'material' has had to be elastic enough to include the
furniture of contemporary physics, things which are very lar removed
from the tangible objects previously connoted by 'material'. This
redefining of the material world in the physical sciences has been
systematic and disciplined. While it is true that many things are now
included under the concept which were previously excluded, the
development of the sciences themselves provide the context Ibr this
extension of 'material'. But it has had radical consequences elsewhere.
The flood-gates have been opened. For if the natural sciences can get
away with the ooup of redefining as material anything which their
theories designate as real, then why not the social sciences also?
Materialism is the claim that what is material has causal primacy. If it is
redefined so that anything which claims to be real also qualifies for the
label 'material', then materialism becomes empty. The way is cleared for
theorists in such disparate fields as para-psychology and the history of
ideas to claim that the objects designated in their theories are real and
therefore material, and that their theories are materialist.
The resurgence of marxism in the social sciences in recent years has
been associated with a return to fashion of materialist claims. Its
new-found popularity has been at the expense of any real content. It
would be neither appropriate nor helpful here to enter into any general
discussion of materialism. All that is needed is a specification of the
meaning which must be retained if the notion of a materialist conception
of history is to have any specificity.
Firstly, it is not helpful to use 'material' and 'real' interchangeably.
Materialism is more usefully restricted to an assertion ofthe relationship
between different levels of reality, when reality is conceived on the realist

model of a multi-layered structure with different levels, or depths. Thus
to assert that ideas are real is perfectly proper, but to try to define ideas as
a material reality leads only to confusion; while to assert the primacy of
ideas is to attack materialism. Marxism is a materialism which consisls
in the principle of the primacy ol the mode of production, within the
~social iformatl-on.-The mode ol production, in Harre's terms, has greater
'ontological depth' than the other layers of the social Ibrmation which it
is used to exptain.~-Given the -current debasement of the term 'produc-
tion' in marxist theory, it is necessary to add that 'mode ol productioll'
here carries the sense which it had Ibr Marx in C'apitalÑthe mode ol
production (and reproduction) of material lile. It does not reler to a

generalised concept which is applicable to the production of ideas, for
instance, or for that matter, individual human subjects. The primacy of
the mode of production is an indispensable principle of marxist
materialism, that which distinguishes it finally from other realist
theories of society and history.

ii. Marxism and History
T~ whic_ must be insisted upon, and which has been
abandoned in conventionalist marxismL is N t~jai~ma-rXiSõTris rtheory
hlstory.EcÑannotZeÑtraÑrfsformed into a theory of some static 'social
forrnation' in the manner of sociological structural-functionalism.
Conventionalist theories of science tend to transform their 'objects' into
loÑseRsystems which are self-reproducirlg. l hls is a direct consequence
of the-confl tion within conventionalism of the real with the objectAf

theory.
The capitalist mode of production is an object which is theoretically
defined within marxist theory, and which does not as such correspond
exactly with any real society found in history. Nevertheless it refers to real
social relationships which exist in historical societies, and which explain
aspects of their development. The theory of the capitalist mode of
production developed by Marx investigates the 'powers' of that mode of
production to produce certain specific effects, including certain kinds of
experience. As it is specified within the theory, the capitalist mode of
production is a system which is artificially isolated, rather in the manner
of scientific models, in order to discover the relationship between its
parts. It is closed only in the sense that the effects of various things which
in reality might interfere in the operation of cause-effect between its
parts, are excluded from the model, the better to investigate those
cause-effect relations. It is emphatically not closed in the sense used in
modern systems theory. It is not a self-reproducing system in equilib-
rium, even in splendid theoretical isolation, let alone in reality. Indeed,
an essential part ol Marx's thcory of the capitalist mode of production is
its dynamic openness Ñ it cannot be self-reproducing because it
generates conllicting requirements for its own reproduction.
Some conventionalists argue that history is not a proper object of
scientific knowledge, whether the history of the physical or the social
world. They argue that historical events are the outcome of a number of
quite diirerent causal sequences interacting with one another in any
given conjuncture. Each of these causal sequences will be the proper
study ol one or another specialist science, and there cannot be a single
theory which will incorporate all of them and which can be used to
explaill or predict historical change. Historical events can therelbre only
be analysed, using these specialist sciences, and are not proper subjects
of scielltilic explanation and theory. Even the realist Bhaskar comes
close to ceding history to analysis rather than to science. He argues that

)

I
scientific disciplines operate by carving out some 'relatively autonom-
ous' area of determinations, and proceed by building models of the real
structures and processes which produce these determhlations. It is
necessary to study these 'relatively autonomous' areas of determination
in isolation from each other in the first instance, before their relative
weight and effect in 'open systems' can be known. History is such an
open system, in which a variety of radically different types of determina-
tion come into play so that the outcome is always contingent and
uncertain. These different determinations are the proper study of
specialist disciplines and independent sciences. Historians must draw
upon the findings of these disciplines in constructing historical analyses
gf particular 'conjunctures'.
| Yet marxism is precisely the study of what happens in history, and
Icannot be parcelled out to independent areas of investigation. Its
I materialism consists in the principle that of the various 'powers' at play
g in the social world those of the mode of production have primacy. It
| follows that the study of the other different kinds of social determination
I (e.g. the social determinants of the production of individual human
| subjects, or of literary forms) must always be studied within the context of a
I given mode of produclion. This is a minimal definition of marxist material-
ism, and it draws attention to what, for better or worse, gives marxism its
distinctiveness as a theory of the social world and history. Without this
principle, marxism becomes indistinguishable from either functionalist
l interactionism or a Weberian sociology of types.

~ _S _., .

)

(:II vI- sc R

Louis Althusser

1. KN()WI.F.D(;E ANI) II)EOI.O(:Y: 'I'IIE DISMAN'I'I.IN(; 01; BASI./
SU l'F:RS'I'Rll("l'llRF.

I n this country, the most consistent attempt to develop a conventionalist
marxism is to be tbund in the work of Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, the
outcome of a critical engagement with Althusser. While their own work
has centred elsewhere, Hindess and Hirst have had considerable
intluence on marxist cultural studies. At the present time marxist
cultural studies divides between those who have welcomed Hindess and
Hirst's work for its congruence with conventionalist theories of lan-
guage, and those who have drawn back from some of its implications.
Common to both groups is an interest in the language, 'discourse' or
'signifying practice' of cultural production, and in the 'ideological
elfects' which such 'discourse' produces. The point of separation
between them comes over the complete substitution of discourse analysis
Ibr analysis of social reality. Discourse analysis is never far from the
temptation of treating social reality itself as a discursive order, rather
than as a reality external to discourse but to which discourse refers.
I here is evidence then of a certain withdrawal from conventionalism
in marxist cultural studies recently. But this has usually stopped short of
withdrawal trom Althusser's work, and his theory of ideology remains
the backbone ol marxist cultural studies. In this chapter I want to
explore the extent to which Althusser's own framework is implicated in
conventionalism, in order that the extent of the reappraisal which will be
necessary if marxist cultural studies is to return to marxist materialism
and realism may be appreciated.

Althusser constructs his hsterpretation of Marx against 'empiricist',
'his(orlclst' and 'humanist' readings. He defines empiricism as the belief
thal knowledge is something which can be abstracted from the real
world, and known through experience. Humanism is the view that 'man
is the measure ol all things'; that the social world is constructed by men
and women, even it they do so under conditions not ot their choosing
an(l without lull consciousness of what they do.
In lSenton and in l^;eat and Urry, Althusser's interpretation ol Marx is
used to establish their thesis that marxislll is a realism. I)espite this, I
sh.lll argue here that jnucll of Althusser's work is incorlsistent with
r e alisTn, and that it contains strong elements of converitionalism whose
e llects are l:ar reachillg. ~

2(}
(

(
110 The Cinema of l.isenstein

in 2.2 and 2.3), a sequence of workers helping build the kolkhoz, several shots of
the scything competition, and shots of the clerks' degrading of Lenin's memory
(such as 2.132). According to the Film Society's program notes, Eisenstein ap-
proved the removal of these passages because he had been obliged to add some
of them to his original version completed in early 1929 (Anonymous 1930:158).
In the Film Society print, the transition between Marfa plowing and Marfa ad-
dressing the peasants has also been reedited for smoother continuity. My discus-
sion of Old and New is based on a Soviet version, apparently close to the one
originally released, that is held in European and American archives. In the United
Kingdom this version is available on Connoisseur Video.

Bordwell, David. "Chapter 3: Seking the Spectator
Film Theory in the Silent Era." The Cinema of
Eisenstein. Harvard University Press, 1993 (The
President and Fellows of Harvard College). Pages
111-138.

Seizing the Spectator:

Film Theory in the

Silent Era

Eisenstein was a prolific writer. Articles, lectures, and book chapters poured from
his pen for twenty-five years. Many of these works are occasional piecesÑpolem-
ical attacks and rejoinders, tributes and commemorative essaysÑbut his most
influential writings are devoted to the theory of cinema. This chapter, along with
the two that follow, lays out and organizes his principal ideas about film's nature
and functions. While the writing cannot be fully understood apart from the films,
it is of great interest in its own right.
Eisenstein's theoretical work can usefully be treated as falling into two fairly
distinct stages. While many concerns span his entire career, his 1920s work
concentrated on certain key ideas and developed them with considerable consis-
tency. Over the 1930s and 1940s he revised several of them significantly. In
addition, the relation of his writing to his filmmaking changed. Whereas the
writing of the silent era tends to reflect on experiments conducted in the films,
the writing of the later phase is somewhat more prolepeic, advancing ideas to be
tried out in future projects.
For such reasons, this chapter focuses on Eisenstein's essays from 1923 to 1929.
On the whole, these writings offer provocative conceptions of cinematic form,
style, and effect.

112 The Cinen a of Eisenstein

Between Theory and Practice

Most generally, "film theory" refers to any reflection on the nature and functions
of cinema. In the period 1920-1960 the most significant European and American
film theorists concentrated on defining cinema as a specific art or medium. What
features of film set it off from literature, theatre, painting, and other arts? What
is the nature of cinematic representation, and what relation does it have to the
physical and perceptual world it portrays? Such questions were answered in
various ways by Hugo Munsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Andre Bazin, and other
theorists. Classical film theory also had a prescriptive bent: once one had isolated
the differentiating feature of cinema, one could judge films according to how fully
they realized the unique possibilities of the medium. Arnheim, for instance,
argued that a good film imposed a significant form on its material, thereby making
the subject matter more vivid or bringing out its expressive qualities.
Soviet film theory in the early 1920s shared the concerns of this Western
paradigm. In a series of essays the young Lev Kuleshov asked what distinguished
film from theatre and painting, and he settled upon "montage," or editing, as the
differentiating factor. Shortly thereafter, Dziga Vertov suggested that cinematic
representation had a unique relation to visible reality; the camera's ability to
record movement yielded a mechanized vision, the world seen through a "kino-
eye." Both theorists also assumed that theorizing would be prescriptive: inquiry
into principles would yield criteria for judging good cinema.
Throughout his career Eisenstein was no less prescriptive in his aims than his
contemporaries. The young man who wrote in red ink "out of principle"
(1940b:143) proclaimed that cinema must be politically progressive and must
steer the audience in a useful direction. In supporting his claims, however, he
seldom tried to locate the essence of cinematic representation or to determine its
unique relation to physical or perceptual reality. He did not try to demarcate film
sharply from other arts. His main effort was to unite his practice with a theory
that would provide a wide-ranging, detailed reflection on film form, material,
and effect.
This tendency is not surprising. Movements with which Eisenstein had affini-
ties, such as Proletkult and Lef, sought to link concrete problems of artistic
practice to broader principles, often derived from scientific research. In the course
of the 1920s Eisenstein drew increasingly upon current debates around "materi-
alist" psychology and philosophical dialectics. Throughout his life he would seek
to make cinema a part of a scientific knowledge of the mind and human action.
At the same time, his concern with practice had parallels in the work of his
peers. Unlike most Western theorists of cinema, Kuleshov and Vertov treated
problems of film theory within the techne-centered context of 1920s Soviet art.
From this perspective, cinematic specificity was not taken as an aesthetic essence.
(Vertov in fact denounced aesthetics as a bourgeois discipline.) Instead, the search
for specificity fell into line with the Constructivists' and Formalists' concern with
defining the basic materials of the artisan's craft. Furthermore, both Kuleshov

Seizing the Spectator 113

and Vertov were practicing filmmakers. They sought to unite theoretical principle
with practical decisions about how a film should be shot and cut. From the start,
both thinkers approached film theory not as a purely speculative endeavor but as
a practical "cinepoetics": a systematization of the principles of making effective
works.
The most ambitious Soviet writing that followed Kuleshov and Vertov's pi-
oneering forays tended to treat theoretical problems along craft-centered lines.
Pudovkin's 1926 pamphlets on film direction and scriptwriting were largely prac-
tice-based, as were books such as Semyon Timoshenko's The Art of the Cinema
and the Montage of Films (1926) and What a Film Director Must Know (1929)
and Sergei Vasiliev's Film Montage (1929). The Formalist critics, many involved
in scriptwriting, also furnished important essays, such as Shklovsky's pamphlet
Literature and Cinema (1923) and Tynyanov's essay "CinemaÑWordÑMusic"
(1924). The most notable Formalist contribution was the 1927 anthology The

Poetics of Cinema. This volume ventured toward general aesthetic conclusions,
but these remained, as the title indicates, grounded in particular technical possi-
bilities. As Boris Eikhenbaum noted about the Formalist method as a whole, it
avoided abstract speculation ("problems of beauty, the aims of art") in favor of
inquiry into concrete problems of artistic form and its development (1926:104).
In these circumstances, Eisenstein was in an ideal position to mount a unified
poetics of cinema. For one thing, he cared more deeply than his peers about
creating one. The essays of most directors offer primarily practical suggestions
for the novice. Eisenstein was more intellectually restless, never satisfied that he
had followed an innovation or an idea to its end. He was concerned to show how
the craftsman's propositions about individual technical matters contributed to a
larger whole. In his essays there is a pressure to build an architectonic framework
within which each aspect of filmmaking will find its place. Late in life he described
his impulse through a quotation from Blake: "I must create a System or be
enslaved by another Man's" (1989:64). The Formalists might also have pursued
such ends, but, concentrating on literature, they were content merely to suggest
directions for future work on cinepoetics. Eisenstein the director had a stronger
stake in undertaking a systematic inquiry into the fine points of his mediumÑin
forging what he would call throughout his life a "method" that bound theory to
practice.
More learned than other directors, more practiced in film craft than the For-
malist poeticians, he is able to extend his thought in two complementary direc-
tions. On the one hand, he is drawn toward broad and basic speculations. "I'm
interested in everything besides . . . the cinema. Cinema is absorbing only in so
far as it is 'a miniature experimental universe' by which one can study the laws
of phenomena much more interesting than fleeting little pictures" (E2:47). Unlike
most of his contemporaries, Eisenstein links cinema to widely varied intellectual
disciplines and doctrines. He finds insights in the history of the arts (Western and
Eastern), psychology, historical materialism, anthropology, and linguistics. A sin-
gle aspect of cinema becomes the occasion for an excursusÑsometimes dazzling,
)

114 The Cinclll.l of Ei:;enstein

sometimes exasperatingÑon the nature of thought, the conventions of language,
the physiology of sight, or the essence of the dialectic.
At another extreme, Eisenstein's theoretical writings launch forays into the fine
points of film form and style. He wants to know how to stage an action or move
the body, how to account for every bit of data within the frame, how to catalogue
the possible ways in which sound can interact with the image. More than any
other theorist of his time, Eisenstein probes the details of his "fleeting little
pictures."
Characteristically Eisenstein's early poetics of cinema oscillates between these
two tendencies. Sometimes he exposes a detailed technical problem and then
borrows ideas from adjacent disciplines in order to resolve it. Sometimes the
connection between problem and solution is looser, and the ransacking of other
realms yields tangential observations that have intrinsic interest but postpone
confrontation with the cinematic issue. At their best, the writings lay bare the
intricacies of some directorial problem in cinema while connecting it with broader
issues of film practice and of artistic creation in general.
By virtue of his eclectic interests and divagative reasoning strategies, we ought
not to expect Eisenstein's writing to exhibit a strictly rational structure. Soviet
directors had to promote their projects in an atmosphere of competition, and
polemic was common. Rhetorically, Eisenstein's essays are indebted to the man-
if esto styles flourishing in the wake of the Revolution; his telegraphic syntax echoes
that of Tretyakov, Shklovsky, and Mayakovsky. His tone is peremptory, and his
labored wordplays, scattered exclamation points, and sarcastic asides to opponents
are at once exuberant and aggressive.
Typically, the arguments do not develop straightforwardly. Eisenstein is apt to
begin with a pun, an anecdote, or an arcane etymology. His thesis may slip out
sidewise, being elaborated intermittently before finally appearing, many pages
later, as a taken-for-granted premise. Digressions abound, and argument by anal-
ogy is much in evidence. Often Eisenstein proposes a taxonomy, but the under-
girding logic of the distinctions remains obscure, or the boundaries between
categories become fuzzy. The most salient examples are passages from his own
films. The essay characteristically ends by hailing the new expressive possibilities

brought to light and looking forward to their exploitation in his future films.
Among these often diverse and obscure formulations, I concentrate on the
most cogent and coherent arguments. First I consider how, under the impetus of
his theatrical work, Eisenstein developed an account of cinematic effect based on
a materialist theory of "expressive movement." Next I examine his distinctive
contributions to the emerging debates about cinematic montage. I then study his
effort to construct an "intellectual cinema" derived from semiotics and Bolshevist
dialectical materialism. All these developments show that the interplay between
specific problems and broad doctrines is central to his reasoning. After discussing
his two major essays of 1929, perhaps the most influential formulations of his
thinking during this era, I consider how Eisenstein's very eclectic sources fed into
his emerging poetics of cinema.

Seizing the Spectaltor 115

Despite the originality of Eisenstein's theoretical essays, they cannot easily be
disentangled from the tissue of assumptions and debates within the techne-cen-
tered tendencies of his time. Often the work of others prodded him to consider
a particular problem. For example, in the Civil War era several directors' attempts
to codify actors' performances led him to postulate a system of expressive move-
ment, while in the mid-1920s other writers' efforts to classify types of montage
pressed him toward his own solutions. Although he seldom acknowledged his
debts, current disputes shaped his theoretical agenda.

Agitation as Excitation

Eisenstein's earliest theoretical writings, from 1923 to 1925, mark his transition
from theatre directing to filmmaking. In these years he is occupied chiefly with
the problem of how theatrical spectacle moves audiences.
All his thinking presupposes that art in the new Soviet state had to inform,
educate, and above all persuade citizens. It was to celebrate the victory of the
working class and attack enemies of socialism. Like most contemporary artists,
Eisenstein shared Lunacharsky's belief that if art was to fulfill social purposes, it
could not be coldly didactic. It had to arouse emotion, inspiring the masses with
a dedication to the new society that was being built.
Conceiving film and theatre in relation to such effects was already on the
agenda when Eisenstein launched his career. He had seen mass spectacles mobilize
thousands; he had watched Meyerhold's productions provoke frenzied cheers. In
1922 Kuleshov pointed out that "to meet this or that demand an art must have
the power to impress" (1987:54-55). At the same time, the FEX group called for
a "nerve-wracking, openly utilitarian" theatre (Kozintzev 1978:12). Eisenstein's
contribution was to propose a physical, even physiological, conception of the
spectator's response.
He starts, in Constructivist/Formalist fashion, by seeking to define the material
upon which the theatre director works. Surprisingly, he takes the material of
theatre to be neither the real world of human action; nor the stuff of the spectacle
itself, the flats and costumes and bodies; nor even the language the actors speak.
"Theatre's basic material," he writes in his 1923 manifesto "The Montage of
Attractions," "derives from the audience: the moulding of the audience in a
desired direction (or mood) is the task of every utilitarian theatre" (1923b:34).
The stage apparatus, including the actors, becomes a set of tools for "processing"
the spectator.
This conception of the spectator-as-material may be hyperbolic, since Eisen-
stein's filmmaking will treat both the event in front of the camera and the strip
of photographed film as materials of filmmaking. Nevertheless, his chief point in
"The Montage of Attractions" will retain its salience throughout his career: every
artistic decision is to be guided by how the film will affect the spectator. More
drastically, Eisenstein views the spectator as putting up a material resistance that
must be overcome by violence. The audience must be attacked; the work of art

116

The Cinema of Eisellstein

is a tractor plowing the spectator's psyche; the artist administers a series of
"shocks" (1923b:34); Soviet cinema must crack skulls. Denigrating Vertov, Eisen-
stein asserts: "It is not a Cine-Eye that we need but a Cine-Fist" (1925d:64). The
spectator-as-material is worked, worked up, worked out, and worked over.
In order to affect spectators emotionally and intellectually, Eisenstein argues,
the production must manipulate their physical states. The spectacle "subjects the
audience to emotional or psychological influence, verified by experience and
mathematically calculated to produce specific emotional shocks in the spectator"
( 1923b:34 ). By reflexively repeating the performer's action the spectator becomes
"infected" with emotion (1923a:38). Although Eisenstein will assert that this
process includes both "motor imitation" and something else he calls "psycholog-
ical empathy" (1924:40), the former gets far more emphasis.
Broadly, this view echoes ideas of other Russian thinkers, such as Tolstoy and
Bukharin, who emphasized art's power to "infect" the spectator with feeling.
More proximate is Theodore Lipps's doctrine of empathy, a term for the emo-
tional absorption of the spectator in the spectacle. Many thinkers recast Lipps's
account in physiological terms, and Eisenstein follows them in treating emotional
arousal as arising from bodily changes. William lames, whom Eisenstein would
later mention as an influence, had stated the case this way: "We feel sorry because
we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble . . . Without the bodily
states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form,
pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth" (lames 1892:376). Iames, however,
rejected strict materialism. By contrast, Eisenstein assumes that emotional states
are simply physiological processes operating at some higher level of activity. In
support of this he invokes the language of reflex responses. The artist must create
"a new chain of conditioned reflexes by associating selected phenomena with the
unconditioned reflexes they produce" (1924:45). Throughout the 1920s Eisenstein
will speak of spectatorial effect as "reflexological."
Such ideas do not commit Eisenstein to a single doctrinal position. He draws
his physiological notions from various sources: Meyerhold's biomechanics (but
now applied to the spectator), Tretyakov's insistence that art must organize the
human psyche through the emotions, and purified Taylorist ideas promulgated
by Alexey Gastev of the Central Institute of Labor. Likewise, it would probably
be profitless to assign Eisenstein to a distinct "reflexological" tradition. His essays
and interviews mention two researchers in physiology, Vladimir Bekhterev and
Ivan Pavlov. Both men held that the reflex was the basis of animal behavior, and
both distinguished between innate and acquired reflexes. Bekhterev, less cautious
than Pavlov, extended reflex theory to all human action and social processes; his
work may have encouraged Eisenstein to treat reflexes as central to aesthetic
response. In later years, however, Eisenstein would attribute his "theory of artistic
stimulants" solely to Pavlov, who came to enjoy great authority in Soviet science.'

1. Throughout the 19205 Eisenstein also read Freud and he told interviewers that he sought to integrate
Freud s and Pavlov s do trines. His major thcoretical writings of the period however do not invoke
psychoanalytical accounts of the spectator. After 1930 when Freud was considered politically regressive

Seizing the Spectator 117

From the standpoint of avant-garde art, one advantage of Eisenstein's physio-
logical model of effect is that it is frankly nonmimetic. The spectacle can stimulate
the viewer even if it does not resemble the real world. No matter how stylized
the spectacle may be, it stamps its effects on the spectator's body. These effects
will, Eisenstein is confident, lead the perceiver to absorb the political theme.
Eisenstein maintains that, just as primitive tribes' dances with animal skins were
not imitations but rather practice exercises for hunting, so agitational theatre
arouses emotion in order to train the Soviet citizen in the attitudes of the new
society (1924:49).
If spectatorial impact is the end, formal organization becomes the means.

Eisenstein describes form as a matter of "stimulants and their montage for a
particular purpose" (1925d:66). In the 1923-1925 essays Eisenstein considers the
basic unit of stimulation to be the "attraction."
Early in his career Eisenstein and Yutkevich formulated this idea in relation to
fairground "attractions"Ñthe sideshow, the roller coaster, the acrobatic turn. In
1923 Eisenstein offers a core definition: the attraction is "any aggressive moment
in theatre" (1923b:34). The attraction is thereby defined functionally, not sub-
stantively. Anything that jolts the spectator's sensory apparatus counts as an
attraction, regardless of source or artistic status: Romeo's soliloquy, the color of
an actress's tights, a drumroll. Traditional theatre buries its attractions within a
plot structure, but the theatre of agitation can isolate and organize them for
political ends.
Attractions can be manifested in setting, lighting, or any other aspect of theatre
(including firecrackers under the seats of the audience, as in The Wiseman).
Eisenstein spends most time seeking to define how the actor's performance can
become an attraction. This leads him to formulate one of the most pervasive and
perduring concepts in his theoretical writings: expressive movement.
During the 1921-22 theatre season Eisenstein studied at Meyerhold's workshop,
where he learned biomechanics. Meyerhold publicly announced the technique in
the spring of 1922, emphasizing the training of the actor's reflexes through tech-
niques borrowed from the eurhythmic gymnastics of Emile laques-Dalcroze.
Eisenstein also worked with Nikolay Foregger, who undertook an actor-training
regimen based upon a dancelike organization of movement. Foregger's tye-
fe-trenage system eventually became a grid of three hundred poses depicting
stylized gestures. When in the summer of 1923 Eisenstein and Tretyakov recast
the training regimen of the Moscow Proletkult's acting troupe, they proposed a
"left" revision of such proposals.
Rejecting laques-Dalcroze and ignoring choreographic models, Eisenstein and
Tretyakov argue for adapting the gymnastic theories of the German Rudolf Bode.
In his Expression-Gymnastics ( 1922), Bode treated the human body as character-
ized both by physical constraints (wholeness, submission to gravity, and so on)

within the Soviet Union Eisenstein seldom refi o rs to him. Still some psychoanalytic beliefs did
his theories and filmsi he was particularly aware of his representations of male authority ( 1964: 20-33).

118 'I he Cinenla of Eisenstein

and by voluntary impulses, such as the desire to act. Eisenstein and Tretyakov
take Bode's ideas as a point of departure for a theory of performance. By coor-
dinating pure reflex-bound activity with conscious control, the actor creates the
conditions for genuine expression.
The actor, therefore, does not pretend. The actor produces a movement that
empathically registers in the spectator. This idea had circulated among theatre
people well before World War I (Yampolsky 1991:32), but Eisenstein and Tre-
tyakov stress the need for exaggerated delivery. Suppose the actor must deliver
the line, "But there are two." The actor could simply utter the line and hold up
two fingers. But this would not infect the audience with emotion. Eisenstein and
Tretyakov recommend a more vigorous, stylized gesture: "How much the per-
suasiveness of the phrase itself would be strengthened, the expressiveness of the
intonation, if on the first words, you made a recoil movement with the body
while raising the elbow, and then with an energetic movement you threw the
torso and the hand with the extended fingers forward. Furthermore, the braking
of the wrist would vibrate (like a metronome)" (1923a:38). The spectator feels
within his or her own body the actor's tension between impetus and muscular
restraint. The muscular response triggers emotion.
A conventional gesture, such as making the sign of the cross, can also be
considered expressive. It requires that the performer brake reflex by volition, and
it calls forth emotional responses in the audience. For Eisenstein and Tretyakov
even theatrical language is a type of expressive movement. Speech displays the
pervasive tension between reflex and will, the pressure in the diaphragm versus
intonational and articulatory control. In treating language as gesture, the writers
subsume referential and denotative phenomena to the all-powerful expressive
impulse. It is as if theatrical signs can yield conceptual meanings only after they
have been given emotional thrust.
For many later theorists, a theory of artistic meaning starts with reference (to
things) or denotation (of concepts). Affective qualities somehow arise from or
are grafted onto these more basic "informational" properties. By contrast, Eisen-
stein will take artistic effect to be initially perceptual and emotional. Referential
meanings and more abstract implications build upon "the emotional seizure of
the audience" (1925d:61).
Eisenstein's move from theatre direction to filmmaking affected his thinking
in ways that set him significantly apart from his contemporaries. Most Western
and Soviet film theory sought to draw a sharp line between theatre and cinema.
If cinema were likened to theatre, many worried, the purely reproductive role of
the camera would be unduly emphasized and cinematic specificity would be
ignored. Even theorists who emphasized photographic reproduction, such as
Vertov, often denounced theatre as artificial and urged the director to take the
camera out into raw reality.
In this context Eisenstein is anomalous. Although he does suggest important
differences between theatre and film, he adapts many of his theatre-based ideas
to his new medium. In cinema as in theatre, the goal of the spectacle is to shape

the audience's response. Expressive movement will therefore have a place as a
cinematic attraction.
Kuleshov had proposed the idea that the film actor ought to become a "model"
or "mannequin" (naturshchik). "We need unusual, striking people, we need 'mon-
sters' . . . The 'monsters' are people who could train their bodies and achieve
complete mastery of its [sicl material construction" (Kuleshov 1987:56). Kuleshov
recommended adapting the pantomime techniques of Fran,cois Delsarte. In 1924
Eisenstein rejects such a static, codified approach to film acting because it turns
the actors into "mechanical dolls" (1924:58). He continues to insist that only
organic movement can create truly expressive gesture. He repeats that movements
expressing a character's psychology will stress the conflict between reflex and
volition.
Throughout the 1920s, expressive movement is central to Eisenstein's film
practice. In the flurry of fists that explodes during the mourning for Vakulinchuk,
the clash between political restraint and instinctive rebellion yields a disciplined
collective outrage. When Marfa Lapkina cries "No more can we live thus!" her
spontaneous revulsion in hurling down her plow is transformed into a conscious
gesture of exhortation to her comrades. Eisenstein's pedagogy will return to the
concept of expressive movement in its consideration of mise en jeu and mise en

geste.
Still, he is obliged to admit a major difference between :' and cinema.
Theatre's attractions trip off immediate effects. The presence of the performer
creates the "physiological perception of actually occurring fact . . . a direct animal
audience action through a motor imitative act towards a live character like one-
self" (1924:41). Film, however, operates indirectly. It shows not facts but "con-
ventional (photographic) representations." A piece of stage guignol, with agoniz-
ing screams and spurting blood, can never be matched in intensity on film.
How, then, is the film spectator to be moved? Eisenstein, perhaps building on
suggestions by Pavlov, Bekhterev, and Freud, concludes that only by creating
associations in the viewer's mind can an attraction achieve perceptual and emo-
tional power. A shot of a hand with a knife evokes a range of associations that
can be coordinated with associations attending a shot of a screaming face. Later
in the 1920s he will contrast his work with that of the Surrealists; they try, he
says, simply to expose "subconscious emotions," whereas he seeks "to use them
and play with them to provoke emotion" (1930a:202; italics added).
Eisenstein's emphasis on cinematic association has several implications. Most
explicitly, it fits neatly with his reflexology. Associations allow the filmmaker to
"condition" the audience's response by training preexisting reflexes through the
proper combination of stimuli.
Moreover, processes of association can replace the romances and intrigues of
traditional cinema. Eisenstein envisions the "plotless" agit-film as one dominated
by chains of association triggering perceptual and emotional "shocks." This con-
ception in turn hints at a rationale for his strategy of building a film through
intertwining motifs. The dangling pince-nez in Potemkfll can represent the over
120 The cinema of Eisenstein

throw of a decaying class because the spectacles, already associated with petit-
bourgeois mores, have been introduced and developed in a controlled context
that includes Smirnov's haughtiness and the worm-infested meat. The conflict in
Strike is intensified by associating the capitalists with animals and the workers
with machinery. Within a scene and across the whole film, the director can create
emotional and expressive effects by weaving associative networks.
From his belief that cinematic effect requires association Eisenstein draws the
conclusion that to compensate for the mediated quality of cinema, a film must
dwell upon its attractions for a longer time than a theatrical production needs to.
The associations must be firmly in place before they can be recast and combined.
In his films the emphasis on prolonging the process produces gradual modulations
of action and imagery, as in Strike's slaughter or the extended massacre on the
Odessa Steps. In his later teaching and writing he will insist that a lengthy cre-
scendo produces a powerful emotional climax.
The concept of association also encourages Eisenstein to probe the very texture
of the cinematic material. Once one has decided to guide the audience's process
of association, then one must scrutinize every scrap of material in the frame and
any possible join of shot to shot. The result is not only a practice that experiments
with the minute particulars of the medium but a film poetics that attempts to
systematize the principles governing form and style.

NIontage in Theatre and Pilm

Eisenstein is commonly thought of as a "formalist" theorist. But this does not
mean that he emphasizes "form" over "content." This distinction does not have
much force for him, since he sees both factors as part of a broader process. Like
most of those working in the Soviet techne-centered trend, he refuses the standard
concept of form as a vessel holding Ucontents." Instead, he conceives form as a
transformation of material in accordance with the art work's social tasks. Form
also represents the perceptible dimension of the work and thus serves as the basis
for the spectator's engagement. Form, as a dynamic process of construction, will
therefore trigger the work's effects.
Early on, Eisenstein conceives of the spectator as his material, with the tech-
niques of theatre furnishing the tools for working on it. The particular theatrical
production will be built out of attractionsÑtheatrical techniques selected for their
power to stimulate strong perceptual and emotional reactions. The attractions
will in turn be arranged in a certain pattern. The idea of montage represents
Eisenstein's most basic and persistent conception of the ways in which formal
units may be combined.

The Russian montazh, taken from the French montage, retains many of its
original meanings. One is "machine assembly," in the sense of "mounting" a
motor. This sense came to be metaphorically applied to artistic work in the
Constructivist era. Photomontage, litmontazh ("literature-montage"), and other
terms described the construction that resulted from the labors of the artist

seiz:ing the spectator 121

engineer. "One does not create a work," writes Eisenstein hl his diary in 1919;
"one constructs it with finished parts, like a machine. Montage is a beautiful word:
it describes the process of constructing with prepared fragments" (Aumont
1987:150).
To the machine-based sense of montage the Constructivist ethos linked a second
one: assembling materials in a way that generates a degree of friction among
them. In this way, the concept of montage constituted the Constructivists' re-
casting of the Cubists' practice of collage. The notion of montage as a tension-
based assembly is also central to Eisenstein's earliest usage. His productions of
Tretyakov's plays became famous for their "montage" of attractionsÑa dissonant
juxtaposition of fragments.
In the theatre, montage was thus a macrostructural principle, a way of govern-
ing the overall form of the production. Tretyakov pointed out that theatrical
montage could be conceived in two ways, depending on its relation to the plot
of the piece. In The Wiseman, Ostrovsky's plot provided a minimal continuity for
a string of circus and variety attractions. Eisenstein celebrates this aspect in his
1923 manifesto: The Wiseman offers "a free montage with arbitrarily chosen
independent . . . effects (attractions)" (1923b:35). In contrast, in Do You Hear,
Moscow? Tretyakov indicated that the montage of attractions entered into a dy-
namic interplay with the plot; the attractions, both naturalistic and stylized,
intensified or commented upon the action. The tension-based side of montage
remained, less in the friction among separate attractions than in the clash between
a relatively coherent plot and moments of amplified, emotionally arousing spec-
tacle. It is this form of construction, the accentuation of a large-scale plot through
diverting attractions, that Eisenstein uses in his silent films.
Upon coming to cinema, however, Eisenstein was confronted with a more
microstructural conception of montage. In both French and Russian, montage
also denotes film editing. Although the concept has implications for macrostruc-
ture, most writers restrict it to matters involving what we might call the stylistic
texture of the film: the ways in which shots A and B could be joined to create a
particular impression.
Again it was Kuleshov who gave the concept particular significance. As early
as 1917 he argued that cinema is distinguished from other arts by virtue of the
fact that montage organizes "separately filmed fragments, disordered and dis-
jointed, into a more advantageous, integral and rhythmical sequence" (Kuleshov
1917:41). For Kuleshov, montage was the essential factor differentiating cinema
from the other arts and forming the basis of the specific impact that film can
make. In a series of informal experiments, he showed that editing could create
emotions and ideas not present in either of the single shots. A man and woman
look offscreeni cut to a building. We will assume that they are looking at the
building, even if the first shot was made in Moscow and the second h1 New York.
A man with a neutral expression looks off; cut to a shot of a banquet table; cut
back to him, and now he will look hungry. Kuleshov's doctrine treated montage
as the director's principal tool in shaping the exact response desired.

122 The Cinenla ot Eisenstein

Kuleshov's account was almost wholly craft-bound; he offered no explanation
for these phenomena. His student Pudovkin went only a little further, suggesting
that certain editing devices are transpositions of ordinary perceptual acts, such as
the focusing of attention on a detail or the shifting of attention across a scene
(1926:67-73). On the whole, however, he too simply recommended certain editing
options as most effective in achieving the preferred results. Along similar lines,
in 1926 Timoshenko published a detailed typology of montage devices ("concen-
tration" cuts, "expansion" cuts, rhythmic editing, point-of-view editing, and so
on). His comprehensive inventory of editing techniques indicates the extent to
which Soviet filmmakers sought to put film craft on a systematic basis.
Kuleshov and his followers drew only oblique comparisons between film editing
and the Constructivist conception of montage. Dziga Vertov was more forthright.
Like Kuleshov, he celebrated the power of editing to create a whole out of detailsÑ
to assemble a man "more perfect than Adam" (1984: 17). But he took the machine
analogy much further. For him, the very analysis of movement was an act of
montage. So, indeed, was the entire filmmaking process. Selecting and researching
a subject, filming it, and assembling the results were to be understood as montage
in the broadest sense (72). Film production became like factory production, the
assembly of a whole out of pieces trimmed to fit. This analogy between filmmaking
and manufacturing forrns a major theme of Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera
(1929).
Immersed in filmmaking, neither Vertov nor the Kuleshovians had the incli-
nation or the leisure to elaborate a broad theory of cinematic montage. The most
systematic attempt was made by the Formalist literary theorists, who sketched a
poetics of cinema parallel to the one they proposed for literature. Approaching a
film as a system of interrelated components, the Formalists studied how formal
devices transformed material and accomplished particular functions.
Two important accounts of montage were offered in the 1927 Formalist col-
lection, The Poetics of Cinema. Boris Eikhenbaum suggested thinking of mon-
tage as purely a stylistic system, distinct from plot construction. He proposed that
it was analogous to syntax in language, and he traced levels of articulation: the
frame, the "cine-phrase" (a string of shots grouped around an accentual nucleus
such as a close-up), and the "cine-period" (a larger unit based on spatiotemporal
unity) (1927b:21-25).
By contrast, Yury Tynyanov compared montage to prosody. He argued that
editing does not so much group shots as force them into a system of rhythmic
equivalences. When shot B replaces shot A, there is a jump like that occurring
between lines in verse. The result, according to Tynyanov, is a shift in semantic
energy: the break-up into shots or verse lines, by creating equivalent rhythmic
units, invites the reader to compare meanings across units. Citing The Battleship
Potemkin as an example, Tynyanov declared that a plot cannot be easily divorced
from its stylistic patterning, and concluded that "the study of plot in cinema in
the future will depend on the study of its style and, in particular, of its material"
(1927:52).

Seizing the Speetator' 123

In the second half of the 1920s Eisenstein draws on all these ideas. Like Kule-
shov, he considers that the relation of shot to shot forms "the essence of cinema"
(1926a:79), and he uses a pun to stress that a new quality emerges out of the
conjuncture. "The conditions of cinema create an 'image' lobrazl from the jux-
taposition of these 'cuts' lobrez]" (80). Like Vertov, he suggests that the montage
principle goes beyond the technique of editing. And like the Formalists, he will
examine in detail the concrete effects of montage juxtaposition.
He therefore highlights certain features of montage. Editing, coordinated with
sharp changes in camera angle, can intensify a sequence's "accuracy and force of
impact" (1924:46). Montage can provoke and prolong those associations that
distinguish cinematic response from theatrical response. Montage enables the
director to dwell on salient material long enough to enable "the thorough incul-
cation of the associations" (41). Whereas Kuleshov considered montage to be a
storytelling technique, Eisenstein sees no reason for it to be bound by plot re-
quirements. As cinema's chief tool for creating perceptual and affective impact
montage can freely deviate from the story's demands, just as the assembly of
attractions did in his theatrical productions.

In such ways, Eisenstein follows the Constructivist tradition of treating montage
as a strategy for forming material in any medium. One consequence of this
decision is an idea that will dominate his career: cinema is not opposed to theatre
by virtue of some specific essence, but rather represents the stage beyond theatre
in the evolution of art. Eisenstein will soon apply the concept of montage far
more broadly than any Constructivist would, finding it in Kabuki, Zola, and
Ulysses. Denoting both a powerful film technique and a pervasive principle of
poiesis, the concept of montage becomes obsessively interrogated and reworked
throughout his career.

Film Language and Intellectual Cinema

From 1923 through 1927 Eisenstein concentrates largely upon the ways in which
expressive movement and shot juxtaposition can arouse the viewer's senses and
emotions. In the late 1920s he expands his theoretical purview. Perceptual and
emotional effect on the viewer remains central, but he also speculates on how
cinema can provoke ideas. He starts to examine film's resemblance to language
and other convention-based systems of signification. At the same time he begins
to explore finer-grained questions of film style: the factors that go into the
composition of a shot, the multiplicity of options opened by montage. And in
his most celebrated theoretical sally of the period, he seeks to integrate his evolving
notions of film form with current Soviet reflections on dialectical materialism.
His thinking continues to be driven by the prescriptive concerns of agitprop
filmmaking. How can one impell the audience to entertain certain doctrines? The
task of cinematography is "the deep and slow drilling in of conceptions"
(1929g:34). The artwork's "message" will then be furnished a prioriÑa slogan, a
Party policy, a general thesis. But if form is to remain a process, it cannot be
124 The cinelila of Eisenstein

simply the statement of a message. Form must engage the audience in an activity
that yields the concept as a product. And Eisenstein insists that this process must
still constitute a total engagement of the spectator: not only thought but also
perception and affect. He aims for a synthesis of right thinking and emotional
transport: "It must restore to science its sensuality. To the intellectual process its
fire and passion" (1929h:158).2
As so often in his career, the theoretical problem issued from a filmmaking
project. In editing October (1928) he had experimented with moments of "intel-
lectual cinema." By intercutting between the battlefield and the home front, he
had materialized metaphors: the tsarist eagle swooping down on the troops, a
flunky's document triggering a bombardment, a tank lowered off an assembly
line "oppressing" soldiers in the trench. He had shown Kerensky as at once
walking to his quarters and ascending through the ranks of official titles. Most
memorably, the "God and Country" sequence had turned a group of statues into
emblems of incompatible ideas of deity. Cutting October left Eisenstein burning
to make a film of Capital and to explain theoretically how one could use cinema
to generate concepts.
As a category, "plotless cinema" included films without an individual-centered
romantic plot, but Eisenstein now speculates that cinema can dispense with plot
entirely. "Plot is only one of the means without which we still do not know how
to communicate something to the spectator" (1929c:179). The Capitul film was
to be an essay in which the development of ideas would hold central place. This
cinema of intellectual discourse would, Eisenstein believed, transcend the distinc-
tion between newsreel and fiction. Showing nonfictional events and dealing with
history, it would also present a poetically charged argument about the abstract
laws of social change.
The urge to explore an intellectual cinema leads Eisenstein to extend reflexo-
logical assumptions to the realm of ideas. Like emotion, thought becomes a
physical activity, involving the brain and the nervous system. Eisenstein does not
try to demonstrate this; he simply assumes that thought cannot be radically
different from, say, vision or digestion. "The 'psychic' in perception is merely the
physiological process of a higher nervous activitj' (1929e:183). Such a reductive
materialism had become widespread in the Soviet academy. Bekhterev had ad-
vocated a sweeping and reductive reflexology, and Pavlov's research was popularly
understood along the same lines. The educational psychology of A. P. Pinkevich
took unconditioned reflexes as the basis for creating new reactions and associa-
tions that would mold correct intellectual behavior. Many scholars and scientists,

often identified as "Mechanists," held that a properly Bolshevik science of the
mind would eventually reduce all "mental" phenomena to physical factors.
As usual, currently circulating views stirred Eisenstein's speculations. In "The

2. The essay from which this is taken uPerspe tives may have been aimed at the literary fellow
travelers sympathetic to the do trines of Alexander Voronsky vort nsky wrote ll1 the same year: "Al I and
scien e have one and the same subjectÑlite reality. But s.-ience analyzes art synthesizes; science is abstract
art concrete; science is directed to man s reason art to his sensuous natureb (Mathewson 1975: 181).

Seizing the spectator 125

Montage of Attractions" he had claimed that in theatre "the path to knowledge"
runs through "the living play of the passions" (1923b:34). Now he asserts that
"intellectual attraction by no means excludes 'emotionality.' After all, a reflex
action is perceived as the so-called presence of an affect" ( 1927b:25). His writings
of the late 1920s sketch out a three-stage process, passing from perception through
emotion to cognition. Perception of an event triggers some motor activity, which
in turn yields an emotion; the emotion then launches a process of thought. This
three-stage model will become central to Eisenstein's theoretical work, shaping
several taxonomies of formal options.
He further exploits monistic materialism in order to link cognition to expressive
movement. Watching spectators rock to and fro during the mowing sequence of
Old and New, he is confirmed in his conviction that a primitive motor activity is
the basis of more refined responses, and that these can be harnessed to produce
intellectual effects. "Who has not drummed rhythmically with his fist, memorizing
'Surplus value is . . .' In other words who has not given visual stimulation a
helping hand by including some sort of motor rhythm in order to memorize
abstract truths?" (1929h:157) In its fullest manifestation, cognition becomes kin-
esthetic.
The reductivist thesis also enables Eisenstein to revive the possibility of finding
that "common denominator" of response first broached in "The Montage of
Attractions." In the Japanese theatre he discovers a "monistic ensemble." Here
stage setting or music is not subordinated to action or dialogue. Instead, Kabuki
grants various sensory channels an equal status in triggering spectatorial response.
Eisenstein's example is a scene from The Loyal Forty-Seven Ronin in which the
protagonist is leaving the castle. The idea of separation is conveyed via a series of
staging devices: the actor walks farther away, then the setting is changed to a more
distant view of the castle, then a curtain drops in front of the castle, and finally,
as the actor moves out onto the stage ramp, a samisen is heard. For Eisenstein,
since the realm of physiological response is uniform, all stimuli are equivalent.
Thus one stimulus may do duty for another or reinforce another by repetition.
When two or more channels act simultaneously, the effect is even greater, yielding
"a brilliantly calculated blow of the billiard cue at the audience's cerebral hemi-
sphere" (1928f:119). The artist remains a calculator of stimulants, choosing and
arranging them for maximum physiological impact.
Not satisfied with conceiving film form as a matter of choosing and arranging
stimulants, Eisenstein starts to consider the possibility that cinema constitutes a
system of signs. It is likely that he was encouraged in this line of inquiry by the
1927 Poetics of Cinema collection, wherein several authors suggested treating
the shot semiotically. In addition, Octobeds motivic opposition between static
signs and dynamic ones probably helped crystallize Eisenstein's interest in se-
miotic problems.
Eisenstein never wholly abandons the concept of attractions, but his essays of
1928-29 propose that the shot can also be considered a depictive sign. Central to
his argument is the suggestion that like language, visual systems of representation

)

126 'I he cinelua of Eisenstein

rely on convention. His conception of convention seems to be that of a widespread
agreement among members of a social group.
Eisenstein distinguishes "pure" conventionalism (what semiologists today
would call "arbitrary" signs) from the "logical" (or "motivated") signs of theatre.
Sometimes, he says, the logical sign resembles what it represents, as when con-
centric circles painted on the Chinese actor's face identify him as the "Oyster
Ghost." Sometimes an object with a specific function has withered into a con-
ventional sign; the general's epaulettes once served to ward off blows. But no
matter how a sign is motivated, Eisenstein suggests, it remains tied to a social
whole by convention. "Positivist realism is by no means the correct form of
perception. It is simply a function of a particular form of social structure, follow-
ing on from an autocratic state that has propagated a state uniformity of thought"
( 1929b: 142).
If cinema manipulates conventional signs, what are the features of this semiotic
system? Some theorists of the era were tempted to draw analogies to verbal
language. It was commonplace to talk of a "film language," as in Eikhenbaum's
conception of "cine-phrases" and "cine-periods." Eisenstein is closer to Tynyanov
in conceiving film "language" as more like poetic language; he speaks of borrowing
techniques from literature to achieve a "figurative" use of cinema (1928b:96). He
focuses this figurativeness by means of analogies drawn from his knowledge of
Asian culture.
Eisenstein first compares cinema to the lapanese writing system. Individual
shots are like the simpler graphic characters or "ideograms." For example, one
character denotes "dog" and one denotes "mouth." Eisenstein points out that
each character is pictorial, retaining a degree of resemblance to the physical
referent. In order to convey certain concepts, the writing system combines signs:
the character for "dog" plus that for "mouth" yields a third one, which signifies
a new idea, "to bark." Eisenstein sees this process as analogous to film editing,
which creates a meaning that cannot be represented in either shot.3
The process is figurative because the meaning is not denoted in either sign; it
emerges through juxtaposition. The metaphorical quality of the process is made
plain by another example supplied by Eisenstein: the character for "sorrow"
consists of the combination of the characters denoting "knife" and "heart."
Here is a starting point for the formal process of intellectual cinema. Still, the
ideogram yields only a "dry" concept. It lacks emotion. Eisenstein turns his
attention to Japanese Iyric poetry, where the method of combination creates a

3. By cont mporary standards of linguistic inquiry Eisenstein s account is problematic. Linguists reject
the term ideogranl for describing Chinese and lapanese writing systems since it tends to suggest that these
systems somehow represent ideas or things pictorially without appeal to the spoken laliguage. Eisenstein
seems to succumb to this error when he talks of a new concept-s being born through the conjunction of
two characters. In fact Chinese and Japanese writing are glottographic ': they represelit units of speech
so that "dog," mouth and bark" are already imbued with semantic contelit by virtue of their place in
the overall conceptual space of the spoken language. In contemporary termblology Eisenstein is interested
in the motivated aspects of the Japanese writing system but these consist of relatively few depictive
characters. See Sampson 1985: 148-150.

seizing the spectator 127

more evocative result. A verse of three or five lines juxtaposes concrete referential
images in order to create an emotionally charged idea. This suggestion seems
close to Tynyanov's proposal that the jump from line to line in verse resembles
that from shot to shot in cinema. Yet Eisenstein sees less of an equivalence or
exchange between unfolding elements than a holistic assembly out of distinct
pleces.
From poetry Eisenstein moves to other realms. He points out that the wood-
block artist Sharaku represents the separate features of a face accurately but creates
an expressive portrayal by combining the features disproportionately. Ever alert
for the "monistic ensemble," Eisenstein also implies that the principle of juxta-
position is present in the Japanese puppet theatre, in which the combination of
the silent puppet onstage and the verbal commentary of the joruri chanter yields
a new meaning for the spectator.
Eisenstein's argument here is not a paradigm of linear reasoning. The analogies
shift treacherously. At first the shot is said to resemble a single graphic character

in Japanese writing; then the shot becomes equivalent to the several characters
composing a line of verse. Moreover, neither the character nor the line offers a
strict parallel to the shot, since Eisenstein really uses both analogies to get at
different ways in which a shot may behave. A shot may be neutral and univocal,
like an isolated character; or it may be rich in suggestion, like a line of verse.
E: ~.: pursues this idea further, claiming (on obscure grounds) that the
lone ideogram conveys a concept unemotionally, whereas the poem is suffused
with feeling. Yet Eisenstein does not say what concepts are conveyed by the Iyric.
On the face of it, haikai or tanka verse would seem unlikely vehicles for "drilling
in" political doctrine. By the time Eisenstein puts forward his claims about Shar-
aku's distortions, he has narrowed his case to a single instance that may not be
typical of Japanese art as a whole, let alone cinema.
As Eisenstein's ideas stand, they remain unrefined. He seems torn between a
need to make the perception-emotion-cognition chain serve a strictly sloganizing
purpose and a fascination with the more intractable, fine-grained aspects of the
cinematic material. These receive increasing attention in the last essays of the
decade.

Film Form as Dialectics

After his brief exploration of the linguistic analogy, Eisenstein tries to conceive
the formal process of montage in yet another way. In several essays of 1929, he
explores the possibility that montage makes shots "collide."
Eisenstein's views again echo broader debates of the era. In 1922 Lenin had
advocated "the systematic study of Hegelian dialectics from a materialist stand-
point" (1922:233). The year 1925 saw the publication of Engels' Dialectics of
Nature and Lenin's notes "On the Question of Dialectics." Engels declared that
modern science was not only materialist but dialectical, while Lenin observed that
dialectics was at once a scientific method, a law of the world, and "a law of
p

cognition" (Lenin 1925:359). These rediscovered writings threw the Soviet intel-
ligentsia into a turmoil, challenging the supremacy of the Mechanistic materialists
and giving comfort to the emerging faction known as the Dialecticians. In phi-
losophy, Dialecticians gathered under the banner of Avram Deborin and began
an unremitting campaign against reductivist doctrines. The Dialecticians, follow-
ing Engels, argued that any material system was in ceaseless movement. Necessary
contradictions within the system yielded not only quantitative changes but also
qualitative transformations.
In psychological circles, the reflexologists found themselves facing formidable
Dialecticians, notably K. N. Kornilov, who had launched a "Marxist psychology"
as early as 1923. For Kornilov and his followers, there was necessarily a qualitative
leap from physiological processes to subjective activity. Consciousness became
defined as a "property" of the most highly organized matter known to science,
the human brain. Kornilov believed that the scientific explanation of behavior
would eventually conform to Engels' three laws of dialectics: the transformation
of quantity into quality, the interpenetration and struggle of opposites, and the
negation of the negation. As head of the Moscow Institute of Psychology, Kornilov
attracted brilliant young researchers such as Lev Vygotsky and A. R. Luria.
Artists joined the controversy. Critics of painting began to invoke the leap from
quantity to quality, while even the Symbolist Andrei Bely sought (in his 1929
monograph Rhythm as Dialectics) to link his poetics to the new trend. Eisenstein
was drawn into the debates. During the late 1920s, he met frequently with Vy-
gotsky and Luria (Ivanov 1976:66), and he undoubtedly knew of Vygotsky's view
that the artwork is predicated upon conflicts between form and content. "By
making opposite impulses collide, [the artworkl destroys the affect of content
and form, and initiates an explosive discharge of nervous energy" (Vygotsky
1925:215).
In 1929 Eisenstein begins to frame questions of film form and effect in dia-
lectical terms. The key text, and perhaps his most influential essay of the silent
era, is "The Dramaturgy of Film Form."
He starts from the Engels-Lenin view that every phenomenon, natural or social,
constitutes a tense field of opposed forces pressing toward a synthesis at a higher
level. He declares that art is a dialectical interaction of organic and rational forrn,

and that it seeks to "reveal the contradictions of being" ( 1929c: 161). The individ-
ual artwork is also a dialectical whole, holding in precarious balance rigid formula
and expressive distortion (as instantiated in the tension between meter and
rhythm in verse).
He also posits a dialectical epistemology, whereby the very process of coming
to know reflects the actual course of the world. That is, correct thinking is
dialectical in form. For Eisenstein, who always treats form as process, the agita-
tional artwork must not only reflect the dynamic of the world but also provoke
the spectator into patterns of thought. Intellectual cinema has a new task: it will
teach the worker to think dialectically.
Eisenstein proceeds to recast his conception of film form in terms of dialectical

Seizing the Spectator 129

conflict. He starts from the Constructivist belief that factors composing the in-
dividual image can be considered as dynamic elements flung together in tense
juxtaposition. Drawing examples from his films, he goes on to itemize all the
conflicts that may be found in the frame. There are conflicts of line, of plane, of
volume, of lighting, of tempo of movement. There are also conflicts between the
object and the framing (yielding the camera angle), between the object in space
and the properties of the lens (yielding optical distortion, as in wide-angle shots),
between the event and its temporal representation on film (yielding slow- or fast-
motion effects).
Eisenstein sees conflict within the shot as only "potential" montage. Dialectical
montage operates fully when one image is put into interaction with another.
Kuleshov and Pudovkin conceived editing as a linkage of shots, an assemblage
built "brick by brick." But Eisenstein asserts that linkage is only a weak version
of the more basic process of conflict.
Both Engels and Lenin took the biological "cell" as the model of dialectical
change, since its splitting produces a new unity. Eisenstein therefore speaks of the
shot as a "montage cell" (1929c:166). The analogy is somewhat obscure, but it
appears to rest on two points of resemblance. First, as the shot accumulates
quantitative tensions, such as that of figure and background or light and dark, it
cannot resolve them internally and thus "divides" into another shot. Second, this
process of division goes beyond mere proliferation: as in biology, the assembly of
cells produces a complex entity of a higher order. In this respect, the juxtaposition
of conflicting shots is a "leap into a new quality" in Engels' sense: an impression
or concept not present in the individual images.
A dialectical concept is also at the basis of the "tentative film syntax" proposed
in "The Dramaturgy of Film Form," one of the two hierarchical taxonomies
Eisenstein will build in 1929. At the lowest level he finds conflict governing the
perception of motion in cinema. He claims that when the visual system registers
the quantitative disparity between two frames, there occurs a leap to a new
qualityÑmovement. This phenomenon takes place at the level of the shot, but
the noncoincidence of the two frames forms the determining technical basis for
later types of montage.
We arrive at montage proper when we move to a second level. Here the
filmmaker can create an illusion of movement by juxtaposing two shots. Eisen-
stein's example of a "logical" use of this technique is a passage in October wherein
he creates a machine gun's rattling burst by intercutting very brief shots of parts
of the gun. An "alogical" instance is the stone lion that appears to leap up after
the Odessa Steps massacre. In both the first and the second domains, the montage
affects principally the spectator's perception.
A third possibility is to move to the level of emotion. Here conflicts between
shots yield those associations that Eisenstein believes to be central to cinema's
impact. His principal example is that of the slaughter of the bull intercut with
the massacre of the workers at the conclusion of Strike. Interestingly, Eisenstein
does not treat this as a metaphor or a piece of intellectual cinema; the two

.. . ..

130 The Cinen a of Eisenstein

conflicting shot series aim for "a powerful emotional intensilication of the scene"
( 1929c: 176).
Eisenstein's final category of montage moves sharply toward concept and met-
aphor. Here montage frees the action from "its conditioning by time and space"
(1929c:177). This category is fairly roomy. It includescuttingbetween two diegetic
events, as when in October shots of soldiers huddling in a trench are intercut with
shots of a cannon lowered off an assembly line. This category of montage also
includes instances that depart from the story world altogether, as in October's
little dissertation on God and country. In both types, spatial and temporal rela-
tions remain undefined. Eisenstein insists that such montage remains "dialectical"
in producing emotion-laden concepts as a synthesis out of conflict.
This taxonomy can be read as Eisenstein's effort to bring a systematic order to
the rather helter-skelter typology of montage offered by Timoshenko in his 1926
monograph. Overall, Eisenstein's scheme corresponds to the three-stage model
of perception-affect-cognition and thus has the virtue of subsuming an empirical
list of formal possibilities in a unified conception of the viewer's activity.
At the philosophical level, Eisenstein's use of dialectical concepts is highly
questionable. The concept of conflict is simply applied too broadly to be of much
explanatory value. The term seems to denote any incongruity, comparison, or
juxtaposition; it dwindles to difference. When Eisenstein insists on recasting all
differences as conflicts, he extends the idea to questionable cases. In what mean-
ingful sense does a camera angle represent a conflict between the profilmic object
and the framing? Similarly, two long shots of a prairie, with the horizon in
approximately the same zone, are hardly in conflict unless one postulates in
advance that all shot changes instantiate conflictÑin which case no counterex-
ample will ever test the explanatory hypothesis.
Furthermore, the idea that every conflict between shots produces a "third
somethhlg" in the Hegelian manner presumes that the spectator is building ever-
ascending dialectical unities. Not only does a synthesis arise from the conflict of
shots A and B, B and C, and so forth; if the dialectical model applies, the unity
derived from the A-B conflict itself ought to enter into conflict with the unity
derived from the B-C one. This conflict gets resolved in a unity that in turn
conflicts with one arising from the interaction of shots C and D and shots D and
E; and so on indefinitely. As an account of how spectators make sense of movies,
this is wildly implausible.
Although the "dialectical" side of Eisenstein's story is conceptually weak, it
bears fruit at the level of a practical poetics. In the 1927 Formalist anthology,
Boris Kazansky proposed that montage constitutes "the 'dramaturgy' of film form
. . . Cinema has still not worked out the formal methods for its own 'word,' it
still does not have its own 'language' which would allow the cinematic craftsman
to 'think in frames' in the same way that a poet thinks in verbal images" ( 1927:77-
78).
Eisenstein replies with a poetics of cinematic construction that suggests how
the filmmaker might "think in frames." For example, Eisenstein's principled

Seizing the Spectator 131

inventory of compositional options remains a useful advance in the consideration
of shot design in cinema. Treating the film image as a dynamic ensemble of
elements sensitizes the analyst to stylistic properties that can be systematically
explored. Likewise, the great influence of the "Dramaturgy" essay in the West
may be partly a result of the tendency of filmmakers to find visual conflicts an
ad hoc guide for imagining possible compositions and editing patterns.
Eisenstein marks out another area of inquiry in his speculations about how
abstract meanings are generated. Kuleshov had pointed out that viewers tend
intuitively to construe disparate shots as spatially and temporally continuous.
Eisenstein asks how spectators, confronted with shots that they take as spatially
and temporally discontinuous, create a more abstract meaning or idea. Does the
viewer take continuity as a default value, dropping it only when presented with
some specific cues, or with the absence of others? Does the fihnmaker who wants
shots to be perceived as signs have to stage them a certain wayÑsay, film an
object against a neutral background, like many of the nondiegetic shots in October?

In raising such questions, Eisenstein's close attention to editing options and levels
of spectatorial response stands alone in Soviet film theory of the period and
remains an important heuristic probe into central issues of film form.
Another major essay of 1929, "The Fourth Dimension in Cinema," retains the
dialectical emphasis of the "Dramaturgy" piece but offers a richer taxonomy of
formal options. Instead of postulating a conflict between equal forces within the
shot, Eisenstein proposes that every cut juxtaposes two shots on the basis of some
salient feature, the dominant. In cinematic montage, Eisenstein claims, the dom-
inant is not absolute or stable. Shots A and B might be joined according to
similarity of length, whereas shots B and C might take as the dominant factor the
movement within the frame.
Cutting on the dominant does not exhaust the editing possibilities. Every image
bristles with "a whole complex of secondary stimulants" (1929e:182). Joining
shots A and B by similarity of length will demote all other factors, such as shot
content and pictorial composition. Eisenstein names these secondary factors over-
tones. In acoustics, overtones are resonances produced by the dominant tone.
Juxtaposing shots according to some dominant automatically creates elusive but
rich relations among succeeding shots' overtones. Scriabin and Debussy organized
harmonic overtones into new musical structures; the filmmaker who is sensitive
to visual overtones can discover more powerful sources of filmic structure and
affect.
The concept of the dominant retains ties to Eisenstein's physiological interests;
Bekhterev and others had used the term to refer to brain centers that "dominate"
a given behavior. More proximately, the term had also emerged in Russian For-
malist literary theory. Yury Tynyanov had described the dominant as "the preem-
inence of one group of elements and the resulting deformation of other elements"
(Erlich 1981:199). Yet Eisenstein does not simply apply the concept of the poetic
dominant to cinema. He tries to refine the concept itself. By positing a fluctuating
dominant and by seeking to describe the interplay among subsidiary factors, "The
a)

132 The Cinenla of Eisenstein

Fourth Dimension in Cinema" pushes further Tynyanov's concept of the artwork
as a dynamic system (1924:33-34).
Armed with a dominant/overtone model of editing construction, Eisenstein
lays out a new set of montage options.
1. The simplest sort of montage is that which takes as its dominant the absolute
length of each shot. Eisenstein calls this metric montage. Although this option
takes no notice of the content of the shot, it offers some formal possibilities,
chiefly involving the establishment of a consistent beat from shot to shot. Eisen-
stein gives as an example the accelerating dance of the Wild Division in OctolJer.
2. Rhythmic montage is that which determines shot length by content. A simple
example would be the customary practice of allowing long shots more screen
time than close-ups. Eisenstein appears to conceive of rhythm as working with
both tempo and accent. As in music, filmic rhythm will emerge in interaction with
the norm established by the meter. Thus the Odessa Steps sequence utilizes
rhythmic montage in that the lengths of the shots of the descending soldiers never
fall into a stable beat-pattern.
3. A less clear-cut category is that of tonal montage. Eisenstein seems to conceive
this as an expressive pictorial quality that pervades the shots. For example, the
fog sequence in Potemkin has as its dominant the tonal quality of gloom. Light
values, degree of focus, graphic shapes, and all the other factors that can generate
conflict within the shot now become the source of tonal dominants. Lest the
notion of tonality seem vague, Eisenstein is quick to insist that such a quality can
be measured: the gloomy shot can be assigned "a mathematical coefficient for a
simple degree of illumination" (1929e:189).
4. All three previous types of montage concern editing on the basis of some
dominant featureÑshot length, overall content, primary expressive qualities.
Overtonal montage, by contrast, involves "taking full account of all the stimulants
in the shot" (1929e:191). Eisenstein claims to have innovated the visual overtone
in Old and New, where several sequences replace the dominant with " 'democratic'
equal rights for all the stimulants, viewed together as a complex" (182). The
religious procession of peasants hoping to relieve the drought is edited to bring

out secondary expressive qualities: the solemn advance of the icons, the frenzy of
the supplicating peasants, the broiling heat of the sun, and parching thirst.

Eisenstein believed that the concept of the visual overtone was one of his most
important contributions, and he would return to it in his later writing. In UThe
Fourth Dimension in Cinema" the overtone is considered a sensuous quality
subordinate to the overall expressive cast of the shot. Later, as he began to conceive
of montage as a "polyphonic" structure, he began to subsume the notion of
overtones into a larger category, that of the "motif" or "voice," which included
recurrent framings, objects, or gestures (1940h:330-331).
5. As in the earlier typology, intellectual montage constitutes the highest stage
of montage form. This involves "resonances of overtones of an intellectual order"
(1929e: 193). Interestingly, Eisenstein does not allow the possibility that intellectual
relations can serve as a dominant. Even October's "Gods" sequence starts from a

"universally human" emotional tonality associated with the images of deities and
only then moves toward "class-intellectual . . . resonances."4
According to Eisenstein, each of these formal possibilities produces a specific
effect on the spectator. Metric montage arouses the most primitive kinesthetic
effect, such as tapping the foot or rocking the body. Rhythmic montage triggers
a "primitive emotional" effect, while tonal montage yields something of a higher
physiological order, a "melodic-emotional" response (1929e:190). Overtonal
montage, Eisenstein says, repeats at a higher level the motor effect of metric
montage, since in music a thoroughgoing organization of timbres will create
emergent beats. And intellectual montage triggers the spectator's concept-forming
processes, although these too must be seen as no less physiological than the other
types. The common denominator of all these visual phenomena, and of all acous-
tic phenomena too, is cross-modal physiological sensation: no longer "I see" or
"I hear" but rather "I feel."
This scheme is challenging enough, but we have not yet plumbed its audacity.
Eisenstein brings back dialectics. He insists that all the juxtapositions he has
itemized should be conceived as conflictual. The overtone is potentially in op-
position to the dominant, intellectual overtones clash with other sorts, and so on.
A sequence may even set two local dominants in conflict. The dialectic thus leaps
up the ladder, to be resolved, at best provisionally, in the spectator's experience.
Once more, Eisenstein construes the concept of dialectic so broadly as to make
it vacuous or unchallengeable, and he posits an implausibly elaborate spectatorial
activity. Still, if one drops the commitment to the absolute notion of conflict and
grants that there can be relative degrees of dynamic contrast between shots, what
remains is a useful heuristic tool for filmmaking and film analysis. By noting that
there is a hierarchy of elements and qualities in the image, and by suggesting that
a filmmaker can organize a sequence so as to create contrasting or harmonizing
patterns out of them, Eisenstein moves us close to moment-by-moment fluctua-
tions of cinematic texture.
In addition, Eisenstein's overarching musical analogy (dominant, meter,
rhythm, tone, overtone) may be an attempt to extend and systematize 1927
Formalist insights. Although Eikhenbaum used the language metaphor ("cine-
phrase"), he emphasized that montage most resembles musical phrasing, grouping
shots around an "accentual nucleus" (1927b:22). Tynyanov's account also stresses
meter and rhythm in the jumps from shot to shot. Eisenstein, in offering a
comprehensive parallelism with musical construction, moves toward a conception
of formal "laws" operating across media. Not surprisingly, his later writing builds

4. This typology is not quit as clear-cut as my list might suggest. In principle wh n one factor is mad
th dominant any secondary factor ought to become a candidate for being an overtone. For example
when metrical cutting is the dominant the subsidiary rhythmic factors ought lo become overtones of that.
In practice Eisenstein usually takes tonal montage as the prototypical case of cutting on the dominant.
He then applies the term overtones only to subsidiary aspects of the image. Other subordinate structural
factors such as metrics or rhythm are labeled casually and confusingly "secondary dominants (1929e:
189).

)

134 The Cinen1.s of Eiseltstein

upon this second typology in considering how visual montage works with musical
structure.
In both of the 1929 essays, Eisenstein fails to square his commitment to a
hardheaded reductionist reflexology with a belief that "higher-level" qualities
somehow emerge from dialectical interaction. He is, in effect, trying to graft the
Dialecticians' position onto his original Mechanism. Such conceptual problems
may be partly a result of the circumstances surrounding the composition of the
manuscripts.5 The disheveled state of Eisenstein's dialectical ruminations may also
owe something to rapid changes on the academic front. In 1929 the rout of the
Mechanists began in earnest. In April a nationwide conference of scientists passed
a resolution condemning Mechanism as a departure from Marxist-Leninist doc-
trine. Shortly thereafter the Party Central Committee ordered that the Dialectical
standpoint be established in the natural sciences. But later in 1929, a revisionist
group of "New Philosophers" accused Deborin of founding a philosophical sect.
Gradually this attack gained adherents. In December 1930 Stalin labeled De-
borin the leader of a Trotskyite deviation. The "reactologist" Kornilov suffered a
similar fall. Although his theory was endorsed by a major 1930 conference on
human behavior, by the end of the year he found himself one of the "Menshevizing
idealists" denounced by Stalin. It would probably have been incautious for Eisen-
stein to polish and publish strongly "dialectical" essays in such an unstable period.
Whatever their shortcomings as a general account of "film language," Eisen-
stein's articles from the late 1920s contribute a great deal to our understanding
of cinematic form. In their attention to the detailed choices facing the filmmaker,
they surpass nearly all the theoretical initiatives of his Soviet contemporaries. He
echoes a premise of the techne-based tendency when he claims that in Japanese
Iyric poetry the meaning "is embellished and developed on the basis of the
material" (1929b:140), but he might as well be talking about the way in which
his own dissection of shot composition and editing springs from close attention
to the stuff of his medium. In order to shape the spectator's response, the artist
must work the finest grain of the material. Eisenstein's reflections on the com-
positional relations within and between shots and on the dominant and its over
tones yield a more nuanced discussion of film style than anyone had previously
produced.

The Eclectic NIodernist

Eisenstein's 1920s writings bequeath us a unique conception of cinematic form
and effect. The film will be assembledÑ"mounted," like an engineÑout of stim-
ulants. Within and between shots, the stimulants involve everything from meter

s. The Dra naturgy of Film Form and The Fol rth Dimension in Chrema were written concurrently
alid piecemeal in the spring. summer. and fall of 1929. I he first essay was not published 1ll Russian and
only a portion of the second article wa The obscurities and scrappiness of the arguments betray collsid-
erable haste as would be expected 1ll a year in which thc autbor had to fini h Old arld New before going
abroad in August.

seizing the spect;xtor

135

and rhythm to dominant and overtone, all harboring some possibility of conflict.
These formal possibilities will in turn be shaped by the response they can evoke
in the spectatorÑa response involving perception, emotion, and a degree of
cognitive awareness. Conceiving the stimulants as "attractions" stresses the per-
ceptual and emotional dimensions; conceiving them as "signs" plays up their
intellectual aspects. In either case, the film leads the spectator to an experience
that evokes ideological conclusions: a piece of agitation, propaganda, or, at the
limit, abstract demonstration such as the Capital project. Yet Eisenstein insists
that perceptual and emotional impact ought to be present in even the most
intellectual forms of cinematic discourse.
To a great extent, this theory grew out of concrete problems in Eisenstein's
filmmaking. Admittedly, the technical issues are comparatively narrow. He focuses

primarily on composition and editing, and these at a fairly local level. For a
"formalist" he is notably uninterested in overall organizational principles. Prob-
ably several factors in his milieu account for this: debates about the "plotless
film," theorists' interest in the peculiar capacities of the film medium, and the
Constructivist emphasis on faktura (the surface working of materials). Not until
later will he develop a theory of larger-scale patterning.
Much of this theory reinforces the image of Eisenstein as a doyen of Construc-
tivism in the cinema. His revisions of biomechanics, his machine-based concep-
tion of materials and montage, his call for a rational-engineering approach to art,
and his constant assumption that art must serve a social purpose are indebted to
that broad trend of Constructivist thought that swept through the arts after the
Bolshevik Revolution. Yet his theory remains far less pure an instance of doctrinal
Constructivism than, say, Vertov's. Eisenstein was a very eclectic artist, eager to
assimilate disparate, even contradictory, intellectual sources.
In the way he conceived his own role, for example, he took a definite stand
against extreme Constructivist tendencies. He declared himself an artist. Against
those who hoped that art would be replaced by mass production, Eisenstein
insisted that art was a distinct activity with a "materialist essence" (1925d:62).
When Vertov and others charged Strike with appropriating Kino-Eye techniques
for "artistic" ends, Eisenstein rejoined that despite Vertov's Productivist disclaim-
ers, he too produced artÑbut art that refused to organize its material fully and
thus relinquished many possibilities of stirring the audience.
Eisenstein's commitment to art led him toward a view not typically stressed in
Constructivist programs: the power of art to organize emotional responses. Pro-
letkult's principal theorist, Alexander Bogdanov, insisted that art organized "living
images, not only in the sphere of knowledge but also in that of feeling and
aspirations" (1974). Echoes of this conception reverberate through Eisenstein's
early writings, especially in "The Montage of Attractions." In 1928 Eisenstein
signed the manifesto of the short-lived "October" group, which echoed Bogdanov
in demanding that artists organize mass psychology.
Mayakovsky's and Brik's Lef group, with its mixture of Futurism and Produc-
tivism, also affected Eisenstein's aesthetic. Here Sergei Tretyakov's influence was

decisive. According to Tretyakov's recasting of Bogdanov, by mastering art's
scientific basis the artist could calculate a work's emotional effects. Tretyakov's
first manifesto in Lef published several months before "The Montage of Attrac-
tions," called for the artist to apply dialectical materialism "to the problem of
organizing the human psyche through the emotions" (1923:216). Thus Tretyakov
envisioned the artist as a kind of industrial engineer. Along similar lines, Eisen-
stein's most markedly Productivist essay, "The Problem of the Materialist Ap-
proach to Form" (1925), urged artists to adapt the methods of heavy industry to
problems of aesthetic form. Despite his afffinity with Tretyakov, however, Eisen-
stein remained a marginal member of Lef, and he eventually underwent criticism
during the group's '^factographic" phase.
Eisenstein's ideas on the filmic sign and on montage were shaped by Russian
Formalist literary theory, particularly the work of Victor Shklovsky and Yury
Tynyanov. Unlike Kuleshov and the FEX directors, however, Eisenstein never
collaborated with the Formalists on film projects, and his writings pointedly omit
mention of them. Moreover, he diverges sharply from certain Formalist tenets.
He avoids discussion of "defamiliarization" (ostranenie) and leaves no room for
the gesture of "baring the device"Ñthat is, flaunting material or formal qualities
of the artwork. Against the Formalists he insists that form is inherently political,
since it cannot be divorced from a social and ideological context (1929d:155-
158).
Although Eisenstein's appeals to behavioral science could also be considered a
Constructivist impulse, his enthusiasms are far from doctrinally rigid. Starting
with a version of strict reflexological materialism, he flirts with the Deborinist
dialectical position. Off the page, he pursues inquiries into psychoanalysis, hyp-
nosis, Gestalt psychology, Vygotsky's semiotic psychology, and Kurt Lewin's field
theory.
Eisenstein's aesthetic tastes lie far from any orthodoxy. While seeing himself as
a modern Leonardo and revering the art of the Renaissance, he discovers the
"montage of attractions" in the work of Grosz and Rodchenko. He finds analogies
with film in lapanese art, Daumier, Balzac, Toulouse-Lautrec, Debussy, and Scria-
bin. Amid debates on industrial art, he embarks on a study of the Mona Lisa and
Myron's discus-thrower. In 1928, asked what writers' works are most suitable for
filming, he claims interest in Serafimovich, Babel, and other Soviet contempor-
aries but confesses that his greatest attachments are to Joyce and ZolaÑan odd
pair for any "pure" Constructivist to admire.
One issue enables us to gauge the mixture of eclecticism and individuality in
Eisenstein's thinking. Soviet artists and cultural bureaucrats constantly debated
the proper attitude toward prerevolutionary art. The Futurists rejected the past
absolutely, calling for the destruction of museums and libraries. Wrote Mayakov-
sky: "We call anyone who treats old art with hatred a Lefist" (Thomson 1978:65).
Lenin, Lunacharsky, and Bogdanov believed that such draconian views were ir-
responsible; the proletariat had to learn from the past and select what should be
preserved. Though distancing himself from what he regarded as regressive tastes,

)

Eisenstein also argued that the modern artist should assimilate all available tra-
ditions. "The Montage of Attractions" announces that the means of affecting the
audience lie as much in Shakespearean soliloquy as in a drumroll or firecrackers
in the auditorium (1923b:34). In 1926 he declares that "art admits all methods
except those that fail to achieve their ends" (1926b:69). And a year later he asserts:
"If in our day the most powerful response in the auditorium calls for symbols
and analogies with the machineÑthen we shoot a "heart attack" in the machine-
room of the battleship; if on the other hand tomorrow it's all false noses and
theatrical rouge, we'll switch to false noses and theatrical rouge" (1927a:78).
Eisenstein's view is pragmaticÑwhatever works is admissibleÑbut it also assumes
that the artist will creatively rework whatever is taken from the past. The borrowed
material is subordinated to the immanent demands of form and intended effect.
From this perspective, the variety of sources in Eisenstein's work represents an
urge to subject an enormous diversity of artistic traditions, both recent and
distant, to his idiosyncratic eye. The techne-centered tradition of his day trained
him to find principles of style, structure, and effect manifested in all manner of
artworks and intellectual doctrines. If his borrowings from philosophy, philology,
art history, and psychology seem intellectually promiscuous, it is because, like
many creators who also speculate on their craft, he reads his sources "opportun-

istically," seizing on elements that confirm his hunches or prod his imagination.
But unlike most artists, he seeks to systematize those reactions, drawing them
together into an articulable method.
The chief test of his method is practice. The past furnishes models of stirring,
engaging art. The Soviet artist must master those methods that have proved
successful. We touch here upon what I earlier called Eisenstein's "Leninist for-
malism." Just as Lenin argued that the Soviet system would enable workers to
use the techniques of Taylorism to free themselves from exploitation, so the self-
conscious Marxist artist can extract formal methods from classic works and use
them for progressive purposes. Traditional theatre furnishes successful attractions;
bourgeois science yields knowledge of physiology; later Eisenstein will claim that
religious and spiritual traditions provide models of "ecstasy." At the limit, this
tendency to absorb techniques into an ever-grander synthesis reveals Eisenstein's
affinity for Hegelian conceptions of artistic and philosophical progress.
This widening spiral of assimilation becomes yet another justification for Ei-
senstein's reluctance to build his theory upon cinematic specificity. He asserts
film's kinship to other arts and searches for constructive principles that transcend
media. As a historical phenomenon, cinema poses problems of form, expression,
and response that are central to all arts. These problems can be illuminated by
findings in other domains of research. This is the Eisenstein who is interested in
"everything . . . besides the cinema."
Alongside him, however, stands the practicing director burning to disclose those
"particularities of method" that will yield detailed, systematic knowledge of his
craft. Of all theorists of the silent era, Eisenstein most actively brings film study
close to the techniques of literary and art-historical analysis. By fastening on fine

)
138 The Cinema of Eisenstein

points of cinematic texture and reflecting on what larger functions individual
devices might serve, Eisenstein increases the options available to the director and
at the same time forges a more sophisticated conception of film style than any
other theorist had developed. In his hands film theory becomes not a quest for
an essence of the medium but a reflection on concrete problems, a critical study
of artistic achievements, a scanning of other arts for instructive parallels, and a
scrutiny of "how a film is made"Ñin short, an empirical poetics of cinema.

N
~D

;

Practical Aesthetics:

Pedagogy

In May 1928 Eisenstein was appointed to head the direction course at the State
Cinema Technical College (GTK), the Soviet film academy. He taught a workshop
there through the following year while filming and editing The General Line. In
1932, aher his return from North America, he launched a full-scale program of
courses at the school. Through early 1935, when he took leave to work on Bezhin
Meadow, he led the direction faculty of what had become the All-Union State
Cinema Institute (VGIK). During his evacuation to Alma-Ata, he continued to
conduct courses while filming Ivan the Terrible. He returned to his VGIK duties
for a few months in 1945-46 before illness forced him to cease.
Eisenstein never managed to collect his lectures into his planned volume on
direction. Some talks found their way into the unfinished treatise on montage,
and stenographic transcripts of several class sessions have been published in his
selected works and in the 1958 volume, Lessons with Eisenstein, assembled by his
pupil Vladimir Nizhny.
These documents show us a somewhat different Eisenstein from the polemicist
and thinker we encounter in the published writings. Although he did occasionally

lecture on broad theoretical questions, most of the pedagogical material consists
of detailed probings of specific problems. This work can be most fruitfully under-
stood as a fresh attempt to build a poetics of film.
Suppose that we take poetics to be a kind of middle-level theorizingÑan
attempt to describe or explain particular crah practices while tying them to
broader issues of form, response, and social function. Within this framework,
)

)

Kuleshov, Lev. "Art of the Cinema." From Kuleshov on
Film: Writinos bv Lev Kuleshov. Ronald Levaco
Editor. University of California Press 1974 (Regents of
the University of California). Pages 41 6i.

ART OF THE CINEMA

Foreword

IN THE PAST we had no cinematographyÑnow we do. The establish-
ment of our cinema developed from Kuleshov.
Formal problems were unavoidable, and Kuleshov faced their
solution. He was slandered because he was a pioneer, because all his
energies were totally concerted in one clear direction, because he
knew no other way.
Film work was conducted in an atmosphere of extreme vagueness.
In order to break through the sticky and confusing tangle of seaweed,
a sharpened razor's edge was needed. Henceforth, an ascetically
rigorous direction came from the work of Kuleshov.
Kuleshov was the first filmmaker who began to talk about an
alphabet, an organization of inarticulate material, and who worked
with syllables, not words. This is what he stands accused of before the
court of muddled thinkers.
Some of us who had worked in the Kuleshov group are regarded
as having "outstripped" our teacher. It is a shallow observation. It was
on his shoulders that we crossed through the sargassos into the open

sea.
We make filmsÑKuleshov made cinematography.
Ñ-Pudovkin, Obolenski, Komarov, Fogel

A rt of the Cinema
Preface

"The Art of Cinema" is intended for:
I) Spectators
2) Executives of film studios
3) Filmmakers
To spectators because it is vital for them to know about the culture
of cinema, about the methods and means of film structure. Having
read the book, he will be better able to see films, better able to sense
and appraise them.
To executives because "Administration disappears, art remains."
Aside from the film apparatus, the studio, the laboratory, the business
office, distribution, and money, the head of a film organization must
be as well acquainted with film culture as is the viewer. A textbook
familiarity is better than complete absence of experience.
To filmmakers because we must not build our work solely on !
individual experience and on "artistic inspiration." Tested methods, E
the experience of colleagues must be recognized and studied. I want to
assist that process as much as I can.

ÑLev Kuleshov

1: Montage as the Foundation of Cinematography

The purpose of my book is to familiarize the reader with my
workÑthe work of the Kuleshov group.
I will not deal with the state of this method at present, but rather
with how this method developed and what forms were found for it.
The fact is that the work which my group and I carried out in
cinematography began eleven or twelve years ago, and only in recent
years, thanks to the revolution, thanks to changes in production
organization, did it become possible for us to achieve meaningful
results.
At first these were gained with great difficulty, and I consider it
necessary to note those stages through which our work developed.

i....

Art of the Cinema

At the beginning of the First World War Russia's cinema was
fairly large-scale; it had begun to produce merchandise, which went to
the marketplace and returned a definite profit. Any number of people
leapt into cinematographyÑactors, directors, scenarists, cameramen,
all thirsty for easy earnings in a fresh field, but the film industry in
Russia was so disorganized that some of questionable intent leapt into
it. Thus, filmworkers consisted of a conglomerate of bandits, chiselers
Ñpeople without any education whatsoever, who were eager to
squeeze money out of cinema but who were uninterested in its cultural
growth.
What is more, filmmakers became obsessed with writing about
their work in newspapers and magazines. Some said it was a real art,
others that it was not, that it was altogether nonsense, and so on.
Shallow articles and superficially enthusiastic reviews appeared.
Even what seemed to be a critical controversy emerged, but it was not
serious.
It was at this time that a group of people, interested as was I in
serious cinematography, posed for itself a whole series of problems
and took up their solution. Above all, we reminded ourselves that in
order to determine just what cinematography was, it was necessary to
find those specific characteristics and those specific means of im-
pressing the viewer, which are present only in cinema and no other
art.

Let us say if we are to examine any other form of art, such as
music for example, that we should find a definite auditory content in
it. Sounds abound in nature, and these sounds, this musical material,
are fixed by composers into an ordered arrangement, placed into a
prescribed relationship to each other (i.e., organized into a certain
form) which is harmonic and rhythmic and thus emerge as a musical
work.
Similarly it was quite clear to us what happens in painting: color
too has a material form and it is this which is organized; so, in all
other artistic crafts, it was equally possible to determine exactly the
material of any given art, the means of its practice, and the method of
its organization.

43
Art of the Cinema

Yet when we began to analyze the filmic picture, it was very
difficult for us to determine what emerged as its material, how this
material was organized, what is the integral, basic impression-making
means of cinema, what sets cinema apart from other forms of
performance and from other arts. But it was quite clear to us that
cinema has its own special means of influencing its viewers, since the
effect of cinema on the viewer was radically unlike the effect of other
entertainments and spectacles.
We then examined how a motion picture is constructed. In order
to determine the main strength of the cinematographic effect, we took
one strip of film, cut it apart into its separate shots and then discussed
where the very "filmness" which is the essence of filmic construction
lay.
Imagine that we have taken a passage of film in which superb
actors played superb scenes in superb settings. The cameraman shot
this scene very well. We projected this film onto a screen, and what
did we see? We saw a living photograph of very good film actors, a
living photograph of splendid sets, a well-filmed scene, a well-con-
ceived plot, beautiful photography, and so on, but without cinema
being in any one of these elements. It became perfectly apparent that
cinematography is a specific thing, a photographic device that gives
the illusion of movement, while what I was just describing has nothing
in common either with the concept of cinematography or with the
motion picture itself. In this example, we saw no specific methods of
affecting the viewer cinematographically. Having arrived at these
rather nebulous conclusionsÑthat what we had viewed was not
cinema, that it had no characteristic peculiar to itÑwe continued our
research.
We went to various motion picture theaters and began to observe
which films produced the greatest effect on the viewer and how these
were madeÑin other words, which films and which techniques of
filmmaking held the viewer, and how we could make him sense what
we had conceived, what we wished to show, and how we intended to
do this. At that time, it was wholly unimportant to us whether this
effect was beneficial or even harmful to the viewer. It was only

A rt of the Cinema

important for us to locate the source of cinematographic impressibil-
ity, and we knew if we did discover this means, that we should be able
to direct it to produce whatever effect was needed.
We decided to begin our observations at the city's central cinemas,
but it became apparent to us that for our purposes these were not the
right places. First, a fairly wealthy public patronized these cinemas,
and in a wealthy and well-educated audience it is considered in poor
taste to display emotions: one must be reserved, and try to respond to

what is taking place. Second, at that time people interested in
romance frequented the more expensive theatersÑwhere it was dark,
where there were loges, and this whole setting was a convenient place
to pass the time with a lady friend. And third, a rather large number
of psychologically disturbed viewers went to the more expensive
theaters, the "soul of Polonsky," the "soul of Maximov," "darling
KholodnayaÑor Coralli," etc.*
The public in cheaper theaters, less educated, much rougher and
more spontaneous, was not as neurotic and therefore reacted much
more directly to the effect of the action and entertainment on the
screen. Because of this, if that public was pleased by a particular scene
in the picture, it applauded, shouting its approval; whereas if
something in particular displeased it, it whistled and demonstrated its
indignation unmistakably. It was easier for us to observe this public
and to make our observations. Then it became apparent, first of all,
that it was not Russian films but foreign ones that were the most
popular.
It was foreign films that attracted the viewer most of all and forced
him to react. This was easily understood. The point was that the
technique of foreign films was finer than that of Russian films. The
photography in foreign films was considerably clearer and sharper,
the casting of actors more precise, the direction richer and more
absorbing. Hence, in their clarity and in their technical aspects.
Ioreign films attracted a larger audience than did Russian ones. Of
foreign films it was the American ones that elicited the maximum

t These were the most popular screen stars of pre-Revolutionary Russia. R.L.

45
w
p

Art of the Cinema

reaction, the greatest noise and applause. When it became apparent to
us that American films were best in terms of their influence on the
viewer, we took them for our study.
We began to analyze not only the separate shots of a film but
studied its entire construction.
We took two films, for exampleÑan American and a comparable
Russian oneÑand we saw that the difference between them was
enormous. It became apparent that the Russian film was constructed
of several very lengthy shots photographed from a single position. The
American film, on the other hand, at that time consisted of a large
number of short shots filmed from various positions, because, it might
be explained, for the price of admission the American viewer demands
in return the maximum impressions, the maximum entertainment, and
the maximum action. It was necessary in the American film to pack
into the required number of reels the devil-only-knows how many
incidents and to display them in the most interesting way since, I
repeat, the American demands a full show for his dollar.
Thanks to this commercial determinant of the American film,
thanks to the very tempo of American life, much more accelerated
than the tempo of Russian or European life, thanks to all this, what
caught our attention in the American film is that they consist of whole
series of very short shots, of whole series of brief sequences joined in
some predetermined order, as opposed to the Russian film, which at
that time consisted of a few very long scenes, monotonously following
one after another.
Working further, on comparing an American film to a Russian one
in order to test its effect on the viewer, we became convinced that the
fundamental source of the film's impact on the viewerÑa source
present only in cinemaÑwas not simply to show the content of certain
shots, but the organization of those shots among themselves, their
combination and construction, that is, the interrelationship of shots,
the replacement of one shot by another. This is the basic means that

produces the impact of cinematography on the viewer.
The content of the shots in itself is not so important as is the

A rt of the Cinema

joining of two shots of different content and the method of their
connection and their alternation.
In American films, where shots very quickly alternate one with
another, the combination of these changes is clearly perceived by the
viewer. In a Russian film, shots changed very slowly, and the power of
the effect which should come from these alternations was, in Russian
films, incomparably weaker than in American ones.
Let us imagine, say, a fence ten miles in length. The first half is
painted red, the second half green. The person who painted this
wishes to elicit from a passerby a realization of the change of these
two colorsÑthe interrelationship of green and redÑan understanding
of how they vibrate together and are perceived.
Imagine too that for five miles you are walking beside the green
color, at which point it changes and for five miles you walk along the
red. Now imagine the fence is still longerÑand another five miles is
painted blue. By the time you reach the blue section, you will have
forgotten that previously the fence was green, because you will have
spent so much time perceiving one and the same color. If this fence
were to change its color every yardÑgreen, red, blue, red, blue, and so
on, for fifteen milesÑyou would perceive a combination of these three
color relationships all along the way.
The same happens also in cinema: during a long sequence, a
lengthy alternation of scenes, you are not aware of the whole
construction, the whole organization of the cinematographic material.
During short sequences, during brief alternations, the relationships of
separate sections, the general organization is made exceptionally clear
for you. You immediately perceive it.
Thus, we came to realize that the source of filmic impact upon the
viewer lies within the system of alternating shots, which comprise the
motion picture.
The joining of shots into a predetermined order from which a film
is made is technically called montage. Thus we announced in 1916 *
that the fundamental source of cinematographic impact upon the

¥ Kuleshov's first theoretical essays appeared in Vesmik Kinemarografii. R.L.

)

Art of the Cinema

viewer, that is, the means on which it was necessary for us to work
prior to anything else (leaving for a given period all other cinemato-
graphic elements, perhaps for several years ahead) is montage, that is,
the alternation of shots.
Montage is the organization of cinematic material.
Hence, it became perfectly clear that separate shots, separately
connected pieces of film, still did not constitute cinema, but only the
material for cinema. We knew, of course, that for the preparation of
this material it would be necessary to apply the strictest discipline and
that extremely intense work would be needed in order that the quality
of this material be of the highest order. But then we could not find
time for this, since everything was so filled with theatricality, a false
approach to cinematography, and such a total lack of understanding
of the cinematic process, that temporarily it was necessary to set aside
work on the actual material, to label it extraneous for the moment,
and to direct all our attention and our labor toward the organization
of material, toward the organization of the film, that is, toward
montage.
For these reasons, we then proclaimed something that was not
entirely accurate, namely, that it was not important how the shots
were taken, but how these shots were assembled, how the motion
picture was assembled. Let the material be wretched; the only
importance was that it be well organized.
At the time that was a definite political step. Otherwise it would
have proved impossible to bridge the gap in those minds upon which
our work depended, because they were simply unable to grasp the
grand scale at one swoop. We could not win on all fronts at once. The
basic battle of our cinematographic faction, we announced, was the
battle for montage, for the very basis of cinemarography, and not for
separate shots, nor for the material, which had to wait to be studied.
Fast montage was then called American montage; slow montage.
Russian.
Moreover, by means of constructing their films according to the
principle of rapid montage, the Americans produced effects never
before seen by us. Let us visualize a scene: a person sitting at a desk,

Art of the Cinema

begins to think black thoughts, decides to shoot himself, takes a pistol
from the desk drawer, puts it to his temple, presses the trigger, the
pistol firesÑthe man falls.
In Russia the scene would be shot in the following way: the
camera was set in place, facing the set, and it was reasoned thus: The
man lives in a room, therefore it is necessary to build a room. We
can't build four walls soÑlet's build three. In the room we must have
windows and doors. The room must have wallpaper, flowered
wallpaper, let's paper the walls. Paintings are hung on the walls.
Flowers are placed on the windowsills. There must be a chest and a
stove. We place all this in the room. The desk has writing implements,
just as in reality.
An actor sits at the desk, imagines that he is feeling terribly
despondent, takes a pistol from the desk drawer, brings it to his
temple and fires. The cameraman films this entire scene, develops it,
prints it, projects it onto the screen, and when the viewer looks at the
screen, he simultaneously sees the curtain on the windows, the
paintings on the wall, and so on. He sees a tiny actor among a large
assortment of things, and while the actor is performing the juiciest
psychological suffering, the viewer might be examining the leg of the
writing table or the painting that is hung on the wallÑthat is, the
spectator receives an extraordinarily distracted account of what is

taking place on the screen.
The Americans filmed things completely differently. They divided
each separate scene into montage sequences, into a series of shots that
made up each sequence; in addition, they shot each separate moment
in such a way that only its action was visible, only that which was
categorically essential. Even in a long shot they constructed scenery
so that details were not noticed. If they needed to achieve the
impression of a room, they would achieve it by some simple detail. If
the wallpaper design did not have a particular function, walls were
darkened, or blackened, and only those objects were left in the light
which were essential to the incident.
Besides that, everything was shot in what is called close-up, that is,
when it was necessary to show the face of a person suffering, they

49
Arl of the Cinema

showed only his face. If he opened the drawer of a desk and took a
pistol from it, they showed the desk drawer and the hand taking the
pistol. When it came to pressing the trigger, they filmed the finger
pressing on the trigger, because other objects and the surroundings in
which the actor worked, were irrelevant at that particular instant. This
method of filming only that moment of movement essential to a given
sequence and omitting the rest, was labeled by us the "American
method," and it was thus placed in the foundations of the new
cinematography which we were beginning to form.
Consequently, before beginning our experimental work and attain-
ing any new results, we found our first working slogan contained in
the following: "Separate shots of cinema film constitute cinematic
material. Since we do not yet have the opportunity to work on the
content of film material, we proclaim that for a period of time content
will virtually cease to exist for us, and it will even be irrelevant for us.
For the present we are working on a method of organizing the given
material, that is, on montage, since montage is the main source of the
power of cinematic effectiveness. That effect is evident only in
cinematography and the optimum impression is attained only through
the montage, when that montage is not merely of ordinary scenes, but
of scenes filmed by the American method of shooting, that is,
employing scenes in which every given sequence shows what is
essential for the viewer to perceive, and shows them in the closest and
clearest shots possible."
These were the basic conditions which we set forth prior to
beginning our work. That was about ten or eleven years ago.
Now we are studying something entirely different in cinema. Yet,
all that we are now concerned with grew from these basic premises.
The method that I am discussing yielded rather prodigious results:
all that is well done in Soviet cinema is made by this method. All
European and Soviet cinematography works according to this method
but the Americans originated it. Now, having developed and used
what was conceived by the Americans, we are carrying the work to a
new frontierÑthe frontier of cinematic culture. But if the basis of
cinema's effective influence had not been in our hands, then, of

Arl of lhe Cinema

course, we would have never been able to achieve any results, for
without mastering the material of film, we would have been unable to
contribute anything.
Having established the work on montage as being foremost, we
began to analyze montage itself and to establish its basic properties
and methods.
What I am going to deal with now will, I think, appear simply

amusing to everyone, it is so naive, so primitive, and so obvious. But
at that time (and that time was rather recently) it seemed to be such
incredible "futurism" that a bitter battle was waged against it. It was
often necessary for our group, for my colleagues as well as myself, to
discontinue our work because we were such formalistic revolutionar-
ies. In my own case, it went so far that I had no money at home, no
shoes to wear, and all because I was developing a particular
cinematographic principle, which was simply "not acceptable."
The primary property of montage, which is now perfectly clear to
everyone, but which had to be defended rabidly and with inordinate
energy then, consists in the concept that montage creates the
possibility of parallel and simultaneous actions, that is, action can be
simultaneously taking place in America, Europe, and Russia, that
three, four or five story lines can exist in parallel, and yet in the film
they would be gathered together into one place. Ten years ago this
elementary concept demanded an incredible struggle for it to be
firmly established.
All the fundamental principles of montage, which I shall discuss,
were first used by me in the film Engineer Prile's Project [1917-1918].
In shooting Engineer Prite's Project we encountered a certain diffic-
ulty. It was necessary for our leading characters, a father and his
daughter, to walk across a meadow and look at a pole from which
electric cables were strung. Due to technical circumstances, we were
not able to shoot all this at the same location. We had to shoot the
pole in one location and separately shoot the father and daughter in
another place. We shot them looking upward, talking about the pole
and walking on. We intercut the shot of the pole, taken elsewhere, into
the walk across the meadow.

)
)

Art of the Cinema

This was the most ordinary, the most childlike thingÑsomething
which is done now at every step.
It became apparent that through montage it was possible to create
a new earthly terrain that did not exist anywhere, for these people did
not walk there in reality, and in reality there was no pole there. But
from the film it appeared that these people walked across a meadow
and the pole appeared before their very eyes.
A few years later I made a more complex experiment: we shot a
complete scene. Khokhlova and Obolensky acted in it. We filmed
them in the following way: Khokhlova is walking along Petrov Street
in Moscow near the 'Mostorg' store. Obolensky is walking along the
embankment of the Moscow RiverÑat a distance of about two miles
away. They see each other, smile, and begin to walk toward one
another. Their meeting is filmed at the Boulevard Prechistensk. This
boulevard is in an entirely different section of the city. They clasp
hands, with Gogol's monument as a background, and lookÑat the
White House!Ñfor at this point, we cut in a segment from an
American film, The White House in Washington. In the next shot they
are once again on the Boulevard Prechistensk. Deciding to go farther,
they leave and climb up the enormous staircase of The Cathedral of
Christ the Savior.' We film them, edit the film, and the result is that
they are seen walking up the steps of the White House. For this we
used no trick, no double exposure: the effect was achieved solely by
the organization of the material through its cinematic treatment. This
particular scene demonstrated the incredible potency of montage,
which actually appeared so powerful that it was able to alter the very
essence of the material. From this scene, we came to understand that
the basic strength of cinema lies in montage, because with montage it
becomes possible both to break down and to reconstruct, and
ultimately to remake the material.
Now to proceed: After we shot this scene, at the time of editing,

* This was the greatest cathedral in Russia and once stood opposite the Moscow Arl
Museum and Lenin Library, but was demolished on Stalin's orders, lo make space for a
gigantic Palace of the Soviets, which however was never built. On the site now is a large
open-air swimming pool. R.L.

Art of the Cinema

we found we were missing one pieceÑwe did not have the meeting
between Khokhlova and Obolensky, who by that time were no longer
available. So we then took Obolensky's and Khokhlova's overcoatsÑ
and, against the background of Gogol's Monument, shot two other
people's hands being clasped in greeting. We intercut a shot of these
hands and, because prior to this shot we had shown Obolensky and
Khokhlova, the substitution remained absolutely unnoticeable.
This brought a second experiment to my mind. In the first one we
had created an arbitrary earthly terrain; along a single line of
movement we created an arbitrary scenic background. In the second
experiment we let the background and the line of movement of the
person remain the same, but we interchanged the people themselves. I
shot a girl sitting before her mirror, painting her eyelashes and brows,
putting on lipstick and slippers.
By montage alone we were able to depict the girl, just as in nature,
but in actuality she did not exist, because we shot the lips of one
woman, the legs of another, the back of a third, and the eyes of a
fourth. We spliced the pieces together in a predetermined relationship
and created a totally new person, still retaining the complete reality of

the material. This particular example likewise demonstrated that the
entire power of cinematic effect is in montage. With the material alone
one can never achieve such unique, seemingly incredible things. This
is impossible in any other spectacle excepting cinema, in addition to
which none of this is achieved through tricks but solely by the
organization of the material, solely by bringing the material together
into this or that order. Let us take a simpler test: A person stands near
a door. This is filmed in a long shot. Next, we go to a close-up, and in
the close-up the head of another person is photographed. In this way,
you can splice the face of Alexandra Khokhlova with the body of
Nata Vachnadze, and again this will not be through trick photography
but montageÑthat is, by the organization of the material, rather than
by a technical gimmick.
After we had obtained such real achievements, after we felt a
particular strength within ourselves, we established two other things.
Before this, we had an argument about whether the particular

53
Art of the Cinema

psychological state an actor experiences is dependent or not on
montage. There were those who said that here is something which
could not be altered by montage. We had a dispute with a certain
famous actor to whom we said: Imagine this scene: a man, sitting in
jail for a long time, is starving because he is not given anything to eat;
he is brought a plate of soup, is delighted by it, and gulps it down.
Imagine another scene: a man in jail is given food, fed well, full to
capacity, but he longs for his freedom, for the sight of birds, the
sunlight, houses, clouds. A door is opened for him. He is led out onto
the street, and he sees birds, clouds, the sun and houses and is
extremely pleased by the sight. And so, we asked the actor: Will the
face reacting to the soup and the face reacting to the sun appear the
same on film or not? We were answered disdainfully: It is clear to
anyone that the reaction to the soup and the reaction to freedom will
be totally different.
Then we shot these two sequences, and regardless of how I
transposed those shots and how they were examined, no one was able
to perceive any difference in the face of this actor, in spite of the fact
that his performance in each shot was absolutely different. With
correct montage, even if one takes the performance of an actor
directed at something quite different, it will still reach the viewer in
the way intended by the editor, because the viewer himself will
complete the sequence and see that which is suggested to him by
montage.
I saw this scene, I think in a film by Razumny:* a priest's house,
with a portrait of Nicholas 11 hanging on the wall; the village is taken
by the Red Army, the frightened priest turns the portrait over, and on
the reverse side of the portrait is the smiling face of Lenin. However,
this is a familiar portrait, a portrait in which Lenin is not smiling. But
that spot in the film was so funny, and it was so uproariously received
by the public, that 1, myself, scrutinizing the portrait several times,
saw the portrait of Lenin as smiling! Especially intrigued by this, I
obtained the portrait that was used and saw that the expression on the

¥ Kombrig Jvanov, 1923, shown in the U.S. as The Beauty and the Bolshevik. R.L.

Art of the Cinema

face in the portrait was serious. The montage was so edited that we
involuntarily imbued a serious face with a changed expression
characteristic of that playful moment. In other words, the work of the
actor was altered by means of montage. In this way, montage had a
colossal influence on the effect of the material. It became apparent
that it was possible to change the actor's work, his movements, his

very behavior, in either one direction or another, through montage.
When we began making our own films, constructed on this
principle of montage, we were set upon with cries of: "Have pity, you
crazy futurists! You show films comprised of the tiniest segments. In
the eyes of the viewer the result is utter chaos. Segments jump after
each other so quickly that it is thoroughly impossible to understand
the action!" We listened to this and began to think what method we
could adopt to combine shots so as to avoid these abrupt shifts and
flashes. Let us say that in a certain shot we have a moving train.
Moreover, let us say it is swaying from right to left on the screen,
while in the final frame of the previous shot the train occupied a
position in the left-hand corner of the screen. However, in the first
frame of the next sequence, the new subject took a prominent position
in the right-hand corner of the screen. If you join these shots together,
that visual leap from one side of the screen to the other will produce
the sensation of an abrupt jump, will produce a nervous irritation
which will disturb the viewer, not giving the impression of a smooth
transition. Therefore, the direction of motion of the last frame of the
preceding shot and of the first frame of the successive shot must
coincide; if they do not, an abrupt jump necessarily takes place.
If one shoots a round object and intercuts it with a square one,
then this should be borne in mind. If one shoots a close-up of a face
but intercuts it with a face slightly smaller, watch out for these
involuntary flashes and jumps.

2: The Material of Cinematography

Let us now consider an analysis of the cinema's material. We have
4uickly considered the time factor of the motion picture's construc

Art of the Cinema ,

tion; now let us move on to an analysis of its spatial factor.
If we were to consider a chair painted by an artist on canvasÑ
what is more, painted by the finest artist, using the very best colors, on
imported canvas, with every detail painted most realisticallyÑif you
were to look at this conception of a chair, you would be full of praise,
because the chair would have come out beautifully, looking very real
indeed. Now let us attempt to photograph this painted chair on film.
Then, let us take a real chair, let us put it into an actual space, let us
light it, and photograph it, too.
If we were to compare these two chairs projected onto the screen
we would see that the actual chair, if photographed properly, would
come out well. Then looking at the piece of film where the chair
painted by the artist was photographed, we would see no chair there
at all; we would see only the canvas, the texture of it, and the
configuration of color in various combinationsÑthat is, we would see
only the materials with which the painted chair was made visible. It
bears repeating that only real things emerge on the screenÑthat is, the
interrelationship of various colors, the canvas, the flat surfaceÑbut
the chair, as such, the chair drawn in three-dimensional space, the
chair created by the artist on canvas, will not appear on the screen.
It becomes clear from this example that, before anything else, real
things in real surroundings constitute cinematographic material;
stylized material, the stylized representation of a chair will come out
in cinema only as a stylization.
To proceed further, let us try to photograph human workÑfor
instance, the work of an actor of the Kamerny Theater or the
Meyerhold Theater, or the Moscow Art Theater. Let us try, on the
same level, to film the work of a non-actor, or let us simply take a
non-actor and have him play the same scene that the actor played.
The scene consists of: a stevedore loading sacks of flour onto a ship.
This is a labor process. Therefore, we will have sequences completely
different in their human composition, albeit alike in their content,
their labor.
When we view all these sequences on the screen, we shall see that

w
~D

Art of the Cinema

the work of the Kamerny or the Meyerhold actor will not be
communicated from the screen, because it will contain a whole series
of affected movements, unnatural for cinematography, movements
which by themselves emerge as stylized and do not produce that
reality of content so essential in film. What the actor of the Kamerny
Theater will do will not resemble the normal working process, will not
resemble life, but will resemble only theater; the photography in the
sequence will be a living representation of the theater with all its
stylization and unsuitable elements for cinema.
Further, if we consider the work of the Moscow Art Theater actor,
we will see that it fits the film much more, and that it emerges as much
better, more expressive, more real. However, if we begin to analyze it
piece by piece and observe everything that takes place in this
sequence, we will see that, in the final count, the essence of the actor's
work at the Kamerny and Moscow Art Theaters is the same; the
latter's work has the maximum approximation to real living forms,

while the former has the maximum distance from them, but neither is
the material of reality needed in cinema.
If we simply choose a person, having no relationship to the
theater, and make him do what we need, we shall see that his work on
the screen appears better than the work of a theater actor and will give
us more realistic material, from which subsequently it will be easier to
construct a cinema film. If, finally, you photograph an organized
process of work, this sequenceÑand only this sequenceÑwill yield
substantial cinematographic results. If you film a real stevedore, who
is loading a bale, you will see that he strives to work in a way most
advantageous to ,him, in order that in the shortest time with minimum
effort he will complete his task. In the course of long years of work, he
has developed certain habits of standardized, working gestures: he
lifts the sacks deftly, drops them onto his shoulders, carries them well,
simply and economically, unloads them, etc. This sort of work
produces the clearest, most expressive, most efficient results on the
screen. Of course, this sequence cannot be compared with the
preceding ones, since all the preceding sequences will give a lesser

57
o

Art of the Cinema

effect: they are either saturated with theatrical stylization or are full of
a poor relation to real objects, an inability to walk, to sit, to jump onto
a streetcar, etc., etc.
Of course, if you need to shoot a footrace, an expert runner will
appear best on the screenÑa walking specialist, if you shoot a walking
race. If we film some labor process, then only a very well-trained
specialist in the given labor will produce the most expressive results.
Further, let us film, for instance, an autumn landscape: there is a
ramshackle cabin, clouds in the sky, and a small stream nearby. Then
you shoot a railroad bridge. Having examined both pieces of film on
the screen, you will see that, in order to analyze your picturesque
landscape, in order to perceive and analyze it, you need a great deal of
footage, since everything in it is somewhat crooked, somewhat
broken, and there are far too many different objects in it.
To understand the construction and basic lines of the railroad
bridge, much less time is needed, because you are operating with very
simple forms and directions which are quickly apprehended on the
screen. If in order to show this sort of landscape and be sure that the
viewer perceives it, let us say thirty feet are needed, then to show the
bridge only ten feet would be needed.
Thus, from all these considerations, it is already possible to
determine the basic line one must hold to in studying the material of
cinema. The material of cinema must be extremely simple and
organized. If a film is constructed by montage, then each piece will
run for a certain short time. In order that everything filmed be seen,
perceived, and understood in a brief given space of time, one must
show the content of each piece in extremely concrete and highly
organized ways.
Why, then, is the theater actor's work, which also is structured into
given forms, unsuited for this? Because all the work of a theater actor
is comprised of movements totally antithetical to those needed in
cinematography. The point is that the audience in a theater sees the
actor from various points of view: from the right side of the first row
and from the left side of the gallery; one sits close to, another sits far
from, the stageÑand in order that the work of the theater actor may

Art of the Cinema

reach all the audience more or less in the same way, an actor develops
a special style of gestureÑthe broad gesture. For instance, if it is
necessary that an actor "bulge" his eyes, he does it in such a way that
they may be seen from the very farthest point; if it is necessary to
make some gesture with the hand, he does it in such a way that every
member of the audience from both the right and the left, and from the
center can see the given movement. During a long period of years
theater culture was built upon this. It could not avoid taking into
account the fact that the actor performed on a stage for an audience,
which occupied an enormous area and comprised an enormous
quantity of varying points of view, and for this huge space it was
necessary to create one's work according to laws dictated by technical
circumstancesÑthe structure of the theater building itself. When the
theater began to develop, no matter what style or direction it took, it
was all the same: subconsciously this law, this rule of serving the
needs of the audience, seated before the stage, always emerged and
stamped its requirements onto all theatrical techniques. Regardless of
the actor, regardless how closely his work approached reality (and the
material of cinema must unconditionally be realistic: realistically
existing and realistically arranged subjects), it is all the same: the laws
of theater stamp their imprint on these techniques.
Cinematography, however, is constructed differently. With cinema
every viewer sees the action only from one point of viewÑthe point of
view of the lens; he sees the action not from his own position, but
from the position where he is placed by the filmmaker, shooting and
editing the film. The filmmaker takes the viewer as if by the scruff of
his neck and, let's say, thrusts him under a locomotive and forces him
to see from that point of view: thrusts him into an airplane and forces
him to see the landscape from the air, makes him whirl with the
propeller and see the landscape through the whirling propeller. In this
way, the viewer in the cinema is tossed about from place to place by
the filmmaker and either approaches the subject, or finds himself in
motion, or immobile, etc., etc. Consequently, the cinema viewer sees
completely differently, on a totally different base, from the theater
viewer. And regardless how cultured a given theater actor may be in

)

Art of the Cinema

his work, in cinema he is absolutely unsuitable inasmuch as his
technique is founded on completely contrary principles, antithetical to
cinema.
The conditions of shooting, from one point of view, present the
opportunity for an exceptionally exact perception. Let us say, we have
an angle made by a raised armÑthen, the entire audience sees this
angle of the raised arm as precisely the same, while in the theater this
cannot be done, since there the action is seen in general and not from
any particular point of view. Hence, the technique of the theater actor
is totally antithetical to the technique of the film actor.
In the theater, in order to show a man shooting his antagonist and
killing him, it is sufficient to produce a cardboard pistol, hit a drum
once, for the person to start rocking, for the antagonist who is shot to
fallÑcontinuing to breatheÑand the entire audience, even the most
demanding audiences of the Moscow Art Theater, will be completely
satisfied, it will seem to them that all this really happens this way.
Therefore, in the theater in order to show one or another event it is
enough to perform it, to represent it. In order to show the very same
event on film, it is vital that the given event should realistically occur.
Here film technique comes to the rescue. Owing to technique,
effects that seem unthinkable become possible. Let us take a fight, for
instance. Of course, it would be best that the actors actually fight, that
bruises appear, that they beat each other's faces and bodies with all
their might. If you merely represent a fight, it will not work on the
screen. It will appear as if a person pretends to stagger, pretends that
he is in pain, pretends to be fighting. But thanks to film technique, you
can produce a fight with utter reality on the screen, in addition to
which it is not necessary that the actors really fight in order for you to
film it. They can fight with the same degree of intensity and use the
same direction of blows and movements as in an actual fight, but, by
slowing down the shooting speed of your film, you can speed up the
actors' movements and then it will appear on the screen that the
actors are actually fighting, without in any way jeopardizing their
physical well-being. Moreover, adding to the slowed speed of their
performance the accelerated speed on the screen, you will have a

Art of the Cinema

realistic reproduction of the fight. To take another example, say we
need to imagine a dead man, who is not breathing. We can always
make a static frame, and the man will not be breathing. We can take a
photograph, and then rephotograph it onto movie film. There is
hardly a situation that cannot be made into an actual realistic event,
and those situations certainly come out beautifully on film. But the
moment you begin to imagine or suppose something, you immediately
produce in film a theatrical fake. You get the very effect that you got
from the painted chair. You will not have real meaning, real
movement, you will have stylized movement, and stylization in
cinema simply does not workÑonly real material by which film is
expressed comes out.
This extraordinary love of cinema for real material explains what,
in recent times, has been our attraction towards the newsreel. There
are those who, quite independently of their original convictions,
acknowledge nothing in cinema except the recording of actual events
in the newsreel.*
Why is this so?
Because the newsreel uses a maximum of real material and
everything appears absolutely real and authentic. But even in the

newsreel, if you show chaotic, disorganized movement with uncertain
directions and aims, the viewer must expend enormous energy in
order to sort out the chaos taking place within the rectangle of the
screen. In order that the viewer may clearly and easily read from the
screen what he is expected to, movement is needed, movement with
direction on the screen in an organized, rather than in a chaotic, form;
in addition to which the material must not only be real, but organized
within a given rectangle, on a given plane, which in cinema is
constant.
In cinematography we always have a plane with its sides in a
definite relationship and for this plane, for this rectangle, it is very
easy to discover its own laws. If one does bring out these laws and

¥ A probable "dig" at Dziga Vertov with whom a methodological rivalry was
developing. R.L.

61
p

Art of the Cinema

follow them, then no matter what takes place on the screen, it will be
extremely easy for the viewer to comprehend what he watches.
Imagine for yourself that we have a rectangular screen, and on this
plane some primitive motion is taking place. If this movement takes
place parallel to the top and bottom of the screen, the position of the
given movement in relation to all borders of the screen and in relation
to the given plane is perfectly clear for the viewer to apprehend. If the
line of movement abruptly inclines at an angle of forty-five degrees,
you will apprehend it very easily and clearly, and its incline and
direction will be clear to you. If the incline were to vary, however
slightly, you will perceive these small inclinations and changes in
relation to the given rectangle only with the greatest effort.
Therefore, if you construct a certain movement upon the screen
along a straight line parallel to the top and bottom and along a
straight line parallel to the right and left sides, that is, perpendicular to
the previous one, joining all the little quadrates, then all the directions
will be extremely clear and plain to you and a very small amount of
film will be needed for them. If crooked lines are introduced into this
given grid, on the basis of the given movement, the crooked lines will
likewise be easy to apprehend. The more complicated the construction
of the grid, however, the more it will confuseÑthe greater will be the
energy and time expended on that which is shown on the screen. That
is why a railroad bridge or a cityscape, constructed on clearly
delineated patterns, is read more clearly and distinctly than a
landscape with clouds, trees, water, grass, houses, etc., because the
lines of a house are somewhat crooked, a cloud is neither round nor
square, the form of this landscape is so indefinite that one has to
spend a great deal of time in order to read the screen clearly and
distinctly. In the final analysis, you will not come away with the same
impression from this landscape as you would, for instance, from the
view of a bullet fired from a pistol. The shot should act as a sign, as a
letter of the alphabet, so that you can instantly read it, and so that for
the viewer what is expressed in the given shot will be utterly clear. If
the viewer begins to get confused, then the shot does not fulfill its
functionÑthe function of a sign or letter. I repeat, each separate shot

Art of the Cinema

must act as each letter in a wordÑbut a complex type of letter, say, a
Chinese ideogram. The shot is a complete conception, and it must be
read instantly.
In order to present to the viewer a given shot, as a symbol, one
must give it a great deal of organizational attention, and for this there

are very limited means. In cinema you have a given planeÑthe
four-sided screen, which has no depth of light stereoscopically.
Therefore, in order to give maximum expressiveness to the symbol,
one must exploit the given plane of the screen with optimal
economyÑin other words, there must not be one piece of superfluous
space on the screen, and if you show something which cannot occupy
the whole surface, then all excess must be eliminated. The screen must
be filled to the maximum and totally used. It must not have a single
millimeter of unused space. Every tiny piece, every quadrate on the
screen must not only be put to work, but put to organized work in
simple, clear, expressive forms.
These considerations have led to the establishment of the technical
training of film actors. I shall describe this technique and this school
later, but now I shall briefly digress, for otherwise what is to follow
may not be clear. Let us deal with the following: We have established
that real material must be operative in cinematography. Imitating,
pretending, playing are unprofitable, since this comes out very poorly
on the screen. If a person is snub-nosed and you make him a longer
nose with putty, the counterfeit will be detectable in a close-up and
the nose will not seem real but will look stuck on. If you need a tall,
stout man, but your actor is thin, and you pad the thin actor with
cushions, and the like, the result on the screen will be a perfectly
formless, cotton-wool scarecrow, the movements of which will never
correspond to the basic construction of his figure. In other words, the
result on the screen will be obviously false, theatrical, a prop, a game.
Arising from these circumstances, we issued a timely announce-
ment that: owing to the technique of film actors being quite distinct
from that of theater actors, and because film needs real material and
not a pretense of reality owing to this, it is not theater actors but
"types" who should act in filmÑthat is, people who, in themselves, as

)

Art of the Cinema

they were born, present some kind of interest for cinematic treatment.
That is, a person with an exterior of character, with a definite, brightly
expressive appearance could be such a cinematic "type." A person
with an ordinary, normal exterior, however good-looking he may be,
is not needed in cinema.
In film everything is constructed on established interrelationships,
of people with varied characters. In order that a film actor justify what
he does, he must have an appearance that corresponds. No good actor
can be made to remold himself, to make himself over into another
type, since in film no make-up, no costuming will work. No short man
can be made tall, no thin man made fat. Therefore, it is quite clear
that a motion picture must be made from the start with that group of
chosen people who represent in themselves interesting material for
cinematic treatment.
If a given tall man can so contract his muscles that he can
transform himself into a short man, that is the epitome of remolding.
If a person with high eyebrows can in a given moment lower his
brows, he is thoroughly suited for film. The model can transform
himself as many times as he pleases, but only insofar as all this is
accomplished on the basis of real material. Insofar as this is done
externally by means of putty, by artificial thickenings and changings
rather than physical ones, it is inapplicable to film. Here I state
reservations: It is, of course, possible to paint a woman's lips, to paste
a beard on a man almost unnoticeably because the art of make-up is
now sufficiently developed. Yet, experience has shown that if one
films an actor with a fake beard, it will appear much worse than a real
beard.
If one really attempts to adapt the actor's art to the screen then
one must approximate, as much as possible, newsreel material and
provide actual, real material. Further, if we have people to write film
scripts and scenarios, then the entire work of the scenarist and
director, since they determine the character of a given work, must be
based on real material. If in a group we have a tall, thin person, this in
itself could determine a whole series of film stories, but if; say, the
story demands a third person, whom we don't have or who isn't

p
w

Arl of the Cinema

specially trained, the result will be so weak that it is useless to invent
situations for nonexistent material. Every piece should be constructed
on suitable material. For example, if you shoot a film in Batum based
on a story of the North Pole, it will not work. What pertains to nature,
pertains also to people.
These types who are to work in acted feature films cannot simply
perform the jobs as posed by the scenario. They must play their roles
in the finest, most organized method. Everything they do, all their
working processes, must be precise, clear, and plain, convincing and
optimally organized, because otherwise they cannot be well appre-
hended on the screen.
I shall give another example, which I have frequently observed in
the film school. When a person waiting to prepare himself to be a film
type comes in and he is told that the room is hotÑopen a windowÑhe
begins to imagine heat, approaches an imaginary window, acts as if he
is opening the window, and so on, he is unable to perform a simple,
real taskÑto take hold of a real window and open itÑwhat is more, to

do this with maximum ease, maximum simplicity, as any other task,
which should be done in the most efficient possible way. Occasionally,
to this type of work is added a characteristic mannerism which defines
a given type, but even this is done by physical means and not by
actingÑfor example, by movement along crooked rather than straight
lines, movement along angular lines or flowing ones; but the actual
plan of the disposition of a given work must still come in an organized
form.
Now I return to what I began with. All these considerations gave
birth to our school for the cinematographic training of people. Before
anything else, in order to teach a film type to move in an organized
manner, to control his own physical organism, and ultimately to fulfill
any given taskÑin order to take into account the entire mechanism of
work, the entire mechanics of movementÑwe divided the person into
his component parts. The point is that the quantity of human
movements is as limitless as the quantity of sounds in nature. In order
to play any musical composition, it is enough to have a definite
organized rangeÑa system of sounds, upon which an entire musical

65
$

Art of the Cinema

system can be based. In the same way we can create some sort of
system of human movements, on which any movement proposed can
then be based.
We divided man into basic articulations (movements). ,
We examined the movement of limbs as movements along three |
axes, along three basic directions, as, for instance, the head as the |
articulation of the neck.
A movement along the first axis was the movement of the head to
the right, to the left. This gesture corresponds to negation. A
movement along the second axisÑup and downÑis a gesture
corresponding to assent. A movement along the third axis was a tilting
of the head toward the shoulder. I
The eyes have one axis along which they move to the left or right |
and another for upward and downward movements; unfortunately
they do not have a third axis, and the rotation of the eyes around is a I
combination of the first and second axes. 4
The collar bone (clavicle) has the movement of the shoulder as its !
first axis forward and backward, on its second axis no mobility, while |
on the third, it can move up and down. |
The shoulder and the entire arm from the shoulder move along the |
first axis forward and backward, on the second axis upward and l
downward, and on the third axis have the movement of "twisting" l
and "turning." l
Then come the other bodily parts: the elbow, the hand, the fingers; l
then the waist and the legÑthe hip, knee, and foot. If a person is to
move on all these fundamental axes of his bodily parts and their fl
combinations, his movements can be recorded, and if his movements |
clearly express these combinations of axial movements, they can be 1
easily comprehended on the screen, and a person working can take i
into account his work at all times and will know what he is doing.
I As an actor considers his work in relation to his environment, so i
i must that environment be correspondingly taken into account. The
! environment in which an actor works is a pyramid, the top of which
converges to the center of the lens. This spaceÑwhich is taken by the j
lens at angles of 45¡ - 50¡ - 100¡ and which must be fitted onto a :
66 1

Art of the Cinema

rectangular screenÑcan be divided into those basic quadrangles
which provide an outline for movement with such precision that they
occupy a very clear and easily decipherable position in terms of the
rectangular screen.
If a person works along clearly expressed axes of his mechanism,
and movement along these axes is distributed within the space
allocated on the screenÑin the "spatial grid"Ñyou will get the
maximum clarity, maximum purity in the work of the actor. You will
read everything he does on the screen as clearly as in a mirror.
If a whole series of labor processes need to be performed, each of
those actions must be optimally organized, and it is very simple to
organize themÑthanks to the presence of the grid and also thanks to
the presence of axes in the human mechanism. In order for a person
to learn how to operate, without thinking about it, along his axes and
by a given grid, there is a special set of exercises, a special kind of
training, which brings one into a condition similar to that given in the
training to drive an automobile. The whole secret to driving a car lies
in its being driven automatically; that is, one does not consciously
think about when it is necessary to shift gears, as all of this is done
mechanically and instinctively. It is a poor driver who thinks about
when it is necessary to accelerate and to shift gears; and a good driver
who, when he is asked how often he changes gears, can never answer
the question, because he performs it all mechanically. The qualified
film actor, whose entire technique is calculated to give an efficient
reading of his screen performance, is the result of precisely this same
sort of training.
Working along these axes, it is vital to remember that the entire
film effect is a series of labor processes. The whole secret of the
scenario is contained in the author's giving a series of labor processes;
to wit, even the act of pouring tea or kissing is a labor process, in that
in both of these acts there is a known set of mechanics.
I must repeat: Only organized work comes out well in cinema.
I must repeat: A "type" who cannot alter his appearance by the
manipulation of his muscles is not sufficiently cinematically trained;
such a "type" is not suitable for work in film.

DZIGA VERTOV: ARTICLES, ADDRESSES

The repertoire planned for summer production, both here and in
the Ukraine, does not inspire the least confidence.
The proposals for broad experimental work have been passed
over.
All efforts, sighs, tears, and expectations, all prayersÑare di-
rected toward itÑthe six-act film-drama.
Therefore the Councii of Three without waiting for the kinoks to
be assigned work and ignoring the latter's desire to realize their own
projects, are temporarily disregarding authorship rights and resolve
to immediately publish for general use the common principles and
slogans of the future revolution-through-newsreel; for which pur-
pose, first and foremost, kinok Dziga Vertov is directed, in
accordance with party discipline, to publish certain excerpts from
the pamphlet Kinoks: A Flevolution, which shall sufficiently clarify the
nature of that revolution.

The Council of Thr-
In fulfillment of the resolution of the Council of Three on April 10 of
this year, I am publishing the following excerpts:

Upon observing the films that have arrived from America and the
West and taking into account available information on work and
artistic experimentation at home and abroad, I arrive at the following
conclusion:
The death sentence passed in 1919 by the kinoks on all films,
with no exceptions, holds for the present as well. The most scrupu-
lous examination does not reveal a single film, a single artistic
experiment, properly directed to the emancipation of the camera,
which is reduced to a state of pitiable slavery, of subordination to the
imperfections and the shortsightedness of the human eye.
We do not object to cinema's undermining of literature and the
theater; we wholly approve of the use of cinema in every branch of
knowledge, but we define these functions as accessory, as second-
ary offshots of cinema.
The main and essential thing is:
The sensory exploration of the world through fiim.
We therefore take as the point of departure the use of the

The Man with n Movie Camerrs

camera as a kino-eye, more perfect than the human eye, for the
exploration of the chaos of visual phenomena that filis space.
The kino-eye lives and moves in time and space; it gathers and
records impressions in a manner wholly different from that of the
human eye. The position of our bodies while observing or our per-
ception of a certain number of features of a visual phenomenon in a
given instant are by no means obligatory limitations for the camera
which, since it is perfected, perceives more and better.
We cannot improve the making of our eyes, but we can endlessly
perfect the camera.
Until now many a cameraman has been criticized for having
filmed a running horse moving with unnatural slowness on the screen
(rapid cranking of the camera)Ñor for the opposite, a tractor plow-
ing a field too swiftly (slow cranking of the camera), and the like.
These are chance occurrences, of course, but we are preparing
a system, a deliberate system of such occurrences, a system of

DZIGA VERTOV: ARTICLES, ADDRESSES

seeming irregularities to investigate and organize phenomena.
Until now, we have violated the movie camera and forced it to
copy the work of our eye. And the better the copy, the better the
shooting was thought to be. Starting today we are liberating the
camera and making it work in the opposite directionÑaway from
copying.
The weakness of the human eye is manifest. We affirm the kino-
eye, discovering within the chaos of movement the result of the
kino-eye's own movement; we affirm the kino-eye with its own di-
mensions of time and space, growing in strength and potential to the
point of self-affirmation.

I make the viewer see in the manner best suited to my presenta-
tion of this or that visual phenomenon. The eye submits to the will of
the camera and is directed by it to those successive points of the
action that, most succinctly and vividly, bring the film phrase to the
height or depth of resolution.
Example: shooting a boxing match, not from the point of view of
a spectator present, but shooting the successive movements (the
blows) of the contenders.
Example: the filming of a group of dancers, not from the point of
view of a spectator sitting in the auditorium with a ballet on the stage
before him.
After all, the spectator at a ballet follows, in confusion, now the
combined group of dancers, now random individual figures, now
someone's legsÑa series of scattered perceptions, different for
each spectator.
One can't present this to the film viewer. A system of successive
movements requires the filming of dancers or boxers in the order of
their actions, one after another . . . by forceful transfer of the view
er's eye to the successive details that must be seen.
The camera "carries" the film viewer's eyes from arms to legs,
from legs to eyes and so on, in the most advantageous sequence,
and organizes the details into an orderly montage study.

You're walking down a Chicago street today in 1923, but I make
you greet Comrade Volodarsky, walking down a Petrograd street in

KINOKS: A REVOLUTION 17

1918, and he returns your greeting.
Another example: the coffins of national heroes are lowered into
the grave (shot in Astrakhan in 1918); the grave is filled in (Kron-
stadt, 1921); cannon salute (Petrograd, 1920); memorial service,
hats are removed (Moscow, 1922)Ñsuch things go together, even
with thankless footage not specifically shot for this purpose (cf.
Kinopravda no. 13). The montage of crowds and of machines greet-
ing Comrade Lenin (Kinopravda no. 14), filmed in different places at
different times, belongs to this category.

I am kino-eye. I am a builder. I have placed you, whom I've
created today, in an extraordinary room which did not exist until just
now when I also created it. In this room there are twelve walls shot
by me in various parts of the world. In bringing together shots of
walls and details, I've managed to arrange them in an order that is
pleasing and to construct with intervals, correctly, a film-phrase
which is the room.

I am kino-eye, I create a man more perfect than Adam, I create
thousands of different people in accordance with preliminary blue-

prints and diagrams of different kinds.
I am kino-eye.
From one person I take the hands, the strongest and most dex-
terous; from another I take the legs, the swiftest and most shapely;
from a third, the most beautiful and expressive headÑand through
montage I create a new, perfect man.

I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the
world as only I can see it.
Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility, I am in
constant motion, I draw near, then away from objects, I crawl under,
I climb onto them. I move apace with the muzzle of a galloping horse,
I plunge full speed into a crowd, I outstrip running soldiers, I fall on my
back, I ascend with an airplane, I plunge and soar together with
plunging and soaring bodies. Now I, a camera, fling myself along
their resultant, maneuvering in the chaos of movement, recording
movement, starting with movements composed of the most complex
combinations.
Freed from the rule of sixteen-seventeen frames per second,

I
5

Mikhail Kautman

free of the limits of time and space, I put together any given points in
the universe, no matter where I've recorded them.
My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I
decipher in a new way a world unknown to you.

Once more let us agree: the eye and the ear. The ear does not
spy, the eye does not eavesdrop.
Separation of functions.
Radio-earÑthe montage "I hear!"
Kino-eyeÑthe montage "I see!"
There you have it, citizens, for the first time: instead of music,
painting, theater, cinematography, and other castrated outpourings.

Within the chaos of movements, running past, away, running into
and collidingÑthe eye, all by itself, enters life.
A day of visual impressions has passed. How is one to construct
the impressions of the day into an effective whole, a visual study? If
one films everything the eye has seen, the result, of course, will be a
jumble. If one skillfully edits what's been photographed, the result will

Mikhail Kautman

be clearer. If one scraps bothersome waste, it will be better still. One
obtains an organized memo of the ordinary eye's impressions.
The mechanical eye, the camera, rejecting the human eye as crib
sheet, gropes its way through the chaos of visual events, letting itself
be drawn or repelled by movement, probing, as it goes, the path of
its own movement. It experiments, distending time, dissecting move-
ment, or, in contrary fashion, absorbing time within itself, swallowing
years, thus schematizing processes of long duration inaccessible to
the normal eye.
Aiding the machine-eye is the kinok-pilot, who not only controls
the camera's movements, but entrusts himself to it during experi-
ments in space. And at a later time the kinok-engineer, with remote
control of cameras.
The result of this concerted action of the liberated and perfected
camera and the strategic brain of man directing, observing, and
gaugingÑthe presentation of even the most ordinary things will take
on an exceptionally fresh and interesting aspect.

How many people, starved for spectacles, are wearing away the

seats of their pants in theaters?
They flee from the humdrum, from the "prose" of life. And mean
oo

90 DZIGA VERTOV: ARTICLES, ADDRESSES

while the theater is almost always just a lousy imitation of that same
life, plus an idiotic conglomerate of balletic affectation, musical
squeaks, tricks of lighting, stage sets (from daubs to constructiv-
ism), and occasionally the work of a talented writer distorted by all
that nonsense. Certain masters of the theater are destroying the
theater from within, shattering old forms, and advancing new slo-
gans for theatrical work; to further their rescue they've enlisted
biomechanics (in itself a worthy pursuit), and cinema (honor and
glory to it), and writers (not bad in themselves), and constructions
(there are some good ones), and automobiles (how can one not
admire the automobile?), and gunfire (something dangerous and
impressive at the front); and by and large not a damned thing
comes of it.
Theater and nothing more.
Not only is this no synthesis; it's not even a legitimate mixture.
And it cannot be otherwise.
We kinoks, as firm opponents of premature synthesis ("For syn-
thesis must come at the summit of achievement!"), understand that
it's pointless to mix scraps of achievement: the little ones will imme-
diately perish from overcrowding and disorder. And in generalÑ
The arena's small. Come out, please, into life.
This is where we workÑwe, the masters of vision, the organizers
of visible life, armed with the omnipresent kino-eye. This is where the
masters of word and sound, the most skillful editors of audible life,
work. And I make bold to slip them the ubiquitous mechanical ear
and megaphoneÑthe radiotelephone.
This is:
newsreel,
radio-news.
I promise to drum up a parade of kinoks on Red Square on the
day when the futurists release the first issue of a radio-news
montage.
Not the newsreels from Pathe or Gaumont (newspaper chroni-
cle), not even Kinoprawda (political newsreel), but a real kinok
newsreelÑan impetuous survey of visual events deciphered by the
camera; bits of real energy (as opposed to theater) joined through
intervals into a tectonic whole by the great craft of montage.
Such structuring of the fiim-object enables one to develop any
given theme, be it comic, tragic, one of special effects, or some
other type.

. _

A FILM EXPERIMENT STATION 21

It's entirely a question of the particular juxtaposition of visual
details, of intervals.
The unusual flexibility of montage construction enables one to
introduce into a film study any given motifÑpolitical, economic, or
other. And therefore:

¥ As of now, neither psychological nor detective dramas
are needed in cinema,
¥ As of now, theatrical productions transferred to film
are no longer needed,
¥ As of now, neither Dostoyevsky nor Nat Pinkerton are
to be put on the screen.
¥ Everything is included in the new conception of the
newsreel. Into the jumble of life resolutely enter:

1. kino-eye, challenging the human eye's visual repre-
sentation of the world and offering its own "I see," and
2. the kinok-editor, organizing the minutes of the life-
structure seen this way for the first time.

1923

On the Organizaffon of a
Film Experiment Staffon

The film office and editorial staff of Kinopravda are being elimi-
nated. A small nucleus of workers, united by inner discipline, is being
formedÑthe first film experiment station.
By organized work, the agency aims to break through the front of
despair caused by idleness, among other factors, if only on one
sector of this frontÑthat of the newsreel and of experimentation. In
addition, experimentation is also to be regarded as a kind of ferment
that involves interested colleagues in intensive cooperationÑa
method that is tried and true.
Prospects for the future (a high objective): an institute for continu-
ous invention and perfection, a stake in the worldwide quality of
production, the cinema-lighthouse of the USSR.
Let those inclined to smile take note: the higher the objective, the

)
What Is Cinema?
swer this question and who must therefore reach out, as he did,
beyond the screen to the realms of history, philosophy, literature,
psychology, sociology in search of the answer, and in the process
add another dimension to the humanities, are particularly in the
debt of this preceptor.

And now I have certain other debts to pay, first of all to Ma-
dame Janine Bazin who in every negotiation concerned with this
undertaking has been graciousness itself. In addition I wish to
acknowledge that without the generous help of Jean Renoir, of
whose genius Bazin was an ardent and outspoken admirer, and of
my colleagues Drs. Madeleine Korol and Gabriel Bonno, I would not
have been able to render many difficult passages into English. I am
grateful also to one of my students, Senor Markowitz of the Argen-
tine, who assisted me in comparing my English with the Spanish
translation. Finally, I am also deeply indebted to the special num-
ber of Cahiers du Cine'ma dedicated to Andre Bazin for the facts
and impressions there recorded by his friends.

Bazin, Andre. "The Ontology of the Photographic
Image." From What Is Cinema? Hugh Gray, Editor.
University of California Press, 1967 (Regents of the
University of California Press). Pagff 16.

Bazin, Andre. "The Myth of Total Cinema." From
What Is Cinema? Hugh Gray, Editor. University of
California Press, 1967 (Regents of the University of
California Press). Pages 17-22.

THE ONTOLOGY
OF THE PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGE

1}7 THE plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of
embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in
their creation. The process might reveal that at the origin of paint-
ing and sculpture there lies a mummy complex. The religion of

ancient Egypt, aimed against death, saw survival as depending on
the continued existence of the corporeal body. Thus, by providing a
defense against the passage of time it satisfied a basic psychological
need in man, for death is but the victory of time. To preserve,
artificially, his bodily appearance is to snatch it from the flow of I
time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life. It was
natural, therefore, to keep up appearances in the face of the reality
of death by preserving flesh and bone. The first Egyptian statue,
then, was a mummy, tanned and petrified in sodium. But pyramids
and labyrinthine corridors offered no certain guarantee against ulti
mate piBage.
Other forms of insurance were therefore sought. So, near the
sarcophagus, alongside the corn that was to feed the dead, the
Egyptians placed terra cotta statuettes, as substitute mummies
which might replace the bodies if these were destroyed. It is this
religious use, then, that lays bare the primordial function of statu

_ ~
o

What Is Cinema?
ary, namely, the preservation of life by a representation of life.
Another manifestation of the same kind of thing is the arrow-
pierced clay bear to be found in prehistoric caves, a magic identity-
substitute for the living animal, that will ensure a successful hunt.
The evolution, side by side, of art and civilization has relieved the
plastic arts of their magic role. Louis XIV did not have himself
embalmed. He was content to survive in his portrait by Le Brun.
Civilization cannot, however, entirely cast out the bogy of time. It
can only sublimate our concern with it to the level of rational
thinking. No one believes any longer in the ontological identity of
model and image, but all are agreed that the image helps us to
remember the subject and to preserve him from a second spiritual
death. Today the making of images no longer shares an an-
thropocentric, utilitarian purpose. It is no longer a question of sur-
vival after death, but of a larger concept, the creation of an ideal
world in the likeness of the real, with its own temporal destiny.
"How vain a thing is painting" if underneath our fond admiration
for its works we do not discern man's primitive need to have the
last word in the argument with death by means of the form that
endures. If the history of the plastic arts is less a matter of their
aesthetic than of their psychology then it will be seen to be essen-
tially the story of resemblance, or, if you will, of realism.
Seen in this sociological perspective photography and cinema
would provide a natural explanation for the great spiritual and
technical crisis that overtook modern painting around the middle of
the last century. Andre Malraux has described the cinema as the
furthermost evolution to date of plastic realism, the beginnings of
which were first manifest at the Renaissance and which found a
limited expression in baroque painting.
It is true that painting, the world over, has struck a varied
balance between the symbolic and realism. However, in the fif-
teenth century Western painting began to turn from its age-old
concern with spiritual realities expressed in the form proper to it,

The Ontology of the Photographic Image
towards an effort to combine this spiritual expression with as com-
plete an imitation as possible of the outside world.
The decisive moment undoubtedly came with the discovery of
the first scientific and already, in a sense, mechanical system of
reproduction, namely, perspective: the camera obscura of Da Vinci
foreshadowed the camera of Niepce. The artist was now ir. a posi-

tion to create the illusion of three-dimensional space within which
things appeared to exist as our eyes in reality see them.
Thenceforth painting was torn between two ambitions: one,
primarily aesthetic, namely the expression of spiritual reality where-
in the symbol transcended its model; the other, purely psychologi-
cal, namely the duplication of the world outside. The satisfaction of
this appetite for illusion merely served to increase it till, bit by bit,
it consumed the plastic arts. However, since perspective had only
solved the problem of form and not of movement, realism was
forced to continue the search for some way of giving dramatic
expression to the moment, a kind of psychic fourth dimension that
could suggest life in the tortured immobility of baroque art.*
The great artists, of course, have always been able to combine
the two tendencies. They have allotted to each its proper place in
the hierarchy of things, holding reality at their command and mold-
ing it at will into the fabric of their art. Nevertheless, the fact
remains that we are faced with two essentially different phenomena
and these any objective critic must view separately if he is to un-
derstand the evolution of the pictorial. The need for illusion has not
ceased to trouble the heart of painting since the sixteenth century.
It is a purely mental need, of itself nonaesthetic, the origins of
which must be sought in the proclivity of the mind towards magic.
However, it is a need the pull of which has been strong enough to
have seriously upset the equilibrium of the plastic arts.

* It would be interesting from this point of view to study, in the illustrated
magazines of 1890-1910, the rivalry between photographic reporting and the
use of drawings. The latter, in particular, satisfied the baroque need for the
dramatic. A feeling for the photographic document developed only gradually.

1'1

What Is Cinema?
The quarrel over realism in art stems from a misunderstanding,
from a confusion between the aesthetic and the psychological; be-
tween true realism, the need that is to give sigluficant expression to
the world both concretely and its essence, and the pseudorealism of
a deception aimed at fooling the eye (or for that matter the mind);
a pseudorealism content in other words with illusory appearances.*
That is why medieval art never passed through this crisis; simul-
taneously vividly realistic and highly spiritual, it knew nothing of
the drama that came to light as a consequence of technical develop-
ments. Perspective was the original sin of Western painting.
It was redeemed from sin by Niepce and Lumiere. In achiev-
ing the aims of baroque art, photography has freed the plastic arts
from their obsession with likeness. Painting was forced, as it turned
out, to offer us illusion and this illusion was reckoned sufficient unto
art. Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries
that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession
with realism.
No matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to
an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened
cast a shadow of doubt over the image. Again, the essential factor
in the transition from the baroque to photography is not the per-
fecting of a physical process (photography will long remain the
inferior of painting in the reproduction of color); rather does it lie
in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying our appetite
for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which
man plays no part. The solution is not to be found in the result
achieved but in the way of achieving it.t

* Perhaps the Communists, before they attach too much importance to ex-
pressionist realism, should stop talking about it in a way more suitable to the
eighteenth century, before there were such things as photography or cin-
ema. Maybe it does not really matter if Russian painting is second-rate pro-
vided Russia gives us first-rate cinema. Eisenstein is her Tintoretto.
t There is room, nevertheless, for a study of the psychology of the lesser
plastic arts, the molding of death masks for example, which likewise involves a
certain automatic process. One might consider photography in this sense as a
molding, the taking of an impression, by the manipulation of light.

The Ontology of the Photographic Image
This is why the conflict between style and likeness is a relatively
modern phenomenon of which there is no trace before the inven-
tion of the sensitized plate. Clearly the fascinating objectivity of
Chardin is in no sense that of the photographer. The nineteenth
Icentury saw the real beginnings of the crisis of realism of which
l Picasso is now the mythical central figure and which put to the test
at one and the same time the conditions determining the formal
existence of the plastic arts and their sociological roots. Freed from
the "resemblance complex," the modern painter abandons it to the
'masses who, henceforth, identify resemblance on the one hand with
'photography and on the other with the kind of painting which is
related to photography.
Originality in photography as distinct from originality in paint-
4 ing lies in the essentially objective character of photography. [Bazin
here makes a point of the fact that the lens, the basis of photogra-
phy, is in French called the "objectif," a nuance that is lost in
English.ÑTR.] For the first time, between the originating object
and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a
no~nliving agent. For the first time an image of the world is formed
automatically, without the creative intervention of man. The per-
sonality of the photographer enters into the proceedings only in his
selection of the object to be photographed and by way of the
purpose he has in mind. Although the final result may reflect some-
thing of his personality, this does not play the same role as is played

by that of the painter. All the arts are based on the presence of
man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence.
Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower
or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an insep-
arable part of their beauty.
0 This production by automatic means has radically affected our
psychology of the image. The objective nature of photography con-
fers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-
making. In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we
are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced,
ul

What Is Cinema?

actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space.
Photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transfer-
ence of reality from the thing to its reproduction.*
A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the
model but despite the promptings of our critical intelligence it will
never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our
faith.
Besides, painting is, after all, an inferior way of making like-
nesses, an ersatz of the processes of reproduction. Only a photo-
graphic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is
capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it
something more than a mere approximation, a kind of decal or
transfer. The photographic image is the object itself, the object
freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No
matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking
in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the
very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is
the reproduction; it is the model.
Hence the charm of family albums. Those grey or sepia
shadows, phantomlike and almost undecipherable, are no longer
traditional family portraits but rather the disturbing presence of
lives halted at a set moment in their duration, freed from their
destiny; not, however, by the prestige of art but by the power of an
impassive mechanical process: for photography does not create
eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its
proper corruption.
Viewed in this perspective, the cinema is objectivity in time.
The film is no longer content to preserve the object, enshrouded as
it were in an instant, as the bodies of insects are preserved intact,
out of the distant past, in amber. The film delivers baroque art from

* Here one should really examine the psychology of relics and souvenirs
which likewise enjoy the advantages of a transfer of reality stemming from
the 44mummy-complex." Let us merely note in passing that the Holy Shroud
of Turin combines the features alike of relic and photograph.

The Ontology of the Photographic Image
its convulsive catalepsy. Now, for the first time, the image of things
is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it
were. Those categories of resemblance which determine the species
photographic image likewise, then, determine the character of its
aesthetic as distinct from that of painting.*
The aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in its
power to lay bare the realities. It is not for me to separate off, in the
complex fabric of the objective world, here a reflection on a damp
sidewalk, there the gesture of a child. Only the impassive lens,
stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-up
preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes
have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my
attention and consequently to my love. By the power of photogra-

phy, the natural image of a world that we neither know nor can
know, nature at last does more than imitate art: she imitates the

artist.
Photography can even surpass art in creative power. The
aesthetic world of the painter is of a different kind from that of the
world about him. Its boundaries enclose a substantially and essen-
tially different microcosm. The photograph as such and the object
in itself share a common being, after the fashion of a fingerprint.
Wherefore, photography actually contributes something to the
order of natural creation instead of providing a substitute for it.
The surrealists had an inkling of this when they looked to the
photographic plate to provide them with their monstrosities and for
this reason: the surrealist does not consider his aesthetic purpose
and the mechanical effect of the image on our imaginations as
things apart. For him, the logical distinction between what is im-
aBnary and what is real tends to &appear. Every image is to be

* 1 use the term category here in the sense attached to it by M. Gouhier
in his book on the theater in which he distinguishes between the dramatic and
the aesthetic categories. Just as dramatic tension has no artistic value, the per-
fection of a reproduction is not to be identified with beauty. It constitutes
rather the prime matter, so to speak, on which the artistic fact is recorded.

iK: .,

Si
What Is Cinema?
seen as an object and every object as an image. Hence photography
ranks high in the order of surrealist creativity because it produces
an image that is a reality of nature, namely, an hallucination that is
also a fact. The fact that surrealist painting combines tricks of
visual deception with meticulous attention to detail substantiates
this.
So, photography is clearly the most important event in the his-
tory of plastic arts. Simultaneously a liberation and an accomplish
ment, it has freed Western painting, once and for all, from its
obsession with realism and allowed it to recover its aesthetic auton-
omy. Impressionist realism, offering science as an alibi, is at the
opposite extreme from eye-deceiving trickery. Only when form
ceases to have any imitative value can it be swallowed up in color.
So, when form, in the person of Cezanne, once more regains pos-
session of the canvas there is no longer any question of the illusions
of the geometry of perspective. The painting, being confronted in
the mechanically produced image with a competitor able to reach
out beyond baroque resemblance to the very identity of the model,
was compelled into the category of object. Henceforth Pascal's con-
demnation of painting is itself rendered vain since the photograph
allows us on the one hand to admire in reproduction something that
our eyes alone could not have taught us to love, and on the other, to
admire the painting as a thing in itself whose relation to something
in nature has ceased to be the justification for its existence.
On the other hand, of course, cinema is also a language.

TH E MYTH O F TOTAL Cl N E MA

PARADOXICALLY enough, the impression left on the reader by
Georges Sadoul's -admirable book on the origins of the cinema is of
a reversal, in spite of the author's Marxist views, of the relations
between an economic and technical evolution and the imagination
of those carrying on the search. The way things happened seems to
call for a reversal of the historical order of causality, which goes
from the economic infrastructure to the ideological superstructure,
and for us to consider the basic technical discoveries as fortunate
accidents but essentially second in importance to the preconceived
ideas of the inventors. The cinema is an idealistic phenomenon. The

concept men had of it existed so to speak fully armed in their
minds, as if in some platonic heaven, and what strikes us most of all
is the obstinate resistance of matter to ideas rather than of any help
offered by techniques to the imagination of the researchers.
Furthermore, the cinema owes virtually nothing to the scientific
spirit. Its begetters are in no sense savants, except for Marey, but it
is significant that he was only interested in analyzing movement
and not in reconstructing it. Even Edison is basically only a do-it-
yourself man of genius, a giant of the concours LEpine. Niepce,
Muybridge, Leroy, Joly, Demeny, even Louis Lumiere himself, are
all monomaniacs, men driven by an impulse, do-it-yourself men or

7 ~. .s ¢_
U1

What Is Cinema?
at best ingenious industrialists. As for the wonderful, the sublime E.
Reynaud, who can deny that his animated drawings are the result
of an unremitting pursuit of an idee fixe? Any account of the cin-
ema that was drawn merely from the technical inventions that
made it possible would be a poor one indeed. On the contrary, an
approximate and complicated visualization of an idea invariably
precedes the industrial discovery which alone can open the way
to its practical use. Thus if it is evident to us today that the cinema
even at its most elementary stage needed a transparent, flexible,
and resistant base and a dry sensitive emulsion capable of receiving
an image instantlyÑeverything else being a matter of setting in
order a mechanism far less complicated than an eighteenth-century
clockÑit is clear that all the definitive stages of the invention of the
cinema had been reached before the requisite conditions had been
fulfilled. In 1877 and 1880, Muybridge, thanks to the imaginative
generosity of a horse-lover, managed to construct a large complex
device which enabled him to make from the image of a galloping
horse the first series of cinematographic pictures. However to get
this result he had to be satisfied with wet collodion on a glass plate,
that is to say, with just one of the three necessary elementsÑ
namely instantaneity, dry emulsion, flexible base. After the dis-
covery of gelatino-bromide of silver but before the appearance on
the market of the first celluloid reels, Marey had made a genuine
camera which used glass plates. Even after the appearance of cellu-
loid strips Lumiere tried to use paper film.
Once more let us consider here only the final and complete form
of the photographic cinema. The synthesis of simple movements
studied scientifically by Plateau had no need to wait upon the in-
dustrial and economic developments of the nineteenth century. As
Sadoul correctly points out, nothing had stood in the way, from
antiquity, of the manufacture of a phenakistoscope or a zootrope. It
is true that here the labors of that genuine savant Plateau were at
the origin of the many inventions that made the popular use of his
discovery possible. But while, with the photographic cinema, we

The Myth of Total Cinema
have cause for some astonishment that the discovery somehow pre-
cedes the technical conditions necessary to its existence, we must
here explain, on the other hand, how it was that the invention took
so long to emerge, since all the prerequisites had been assembled
and the persistence of the image on the retina had been known for
a long time. It might be of some use to point out that although the
two were not necessarily connected scientifically, the efforts of Pla-
teau are pretty well contemporary with those of Nicephore Niepce,
as if the attention of researchers had waited to concern itself with
synthesizing movement until chemistry quite independently of op-

tics had become concerned, on its part, with the automatic fixing of
the image.*
I emphasize the fact that this historical coincidence can appar-
ently in no way be explained on grounds of scientific, economic, or
industrial evolution. The photographic cinema could just as well
have grafted itself onto a phenakistoscope foreseen as long ago as
the sixteenth century. The delay in the invention of the latter is as
disturbing a phenomenon as the existence of the precursors of the
former.
But if we examine their work more closely, the direction of their
research is manifest in the instruments themselves, and, even more
undeniably, in their writings and commentaries we see that these
precursors were indeed more like prophets. Hurrying past the vari

* The frescoes or bas-reliefs of Egypt indicate a desire to analyze rather
than to synthesize movement. As for the automatons of the eighteenth century
their relation to cinema is like the relation of painting to photography. What-
ever the truth of the matter and even if the automatons from the time of
Descartes and Pascal on foreshadowed the machines of the nineteenth cen-
tury, it is no difierent from the way that trompe-ltoeil in painting attested to a
chronic taste for likeness. But the technique of trompe-l'oeil did nothing to ad-
vance optics and the chemistry of photography; it confined itself, if I can use
the expression, to "playing the monkey" to them by anticipation.
Besides, just as the word indicates, the aesthetic of trompe-loeJI in the
eighteenth century resided more in illusion than in realism, that is to say, in a
lie rather than the truth. A statue painted on a wall should look as if it were
standing on a pedestal in space. To some extent, this is what the early cinema
was aiming at, but this operation of cheating quickly gave way to an onto-
genetic realism.

w.;,....

What Is Cinema?
ous stopping places, the very first of which materially speaking
should have halted them, it was at the very height and summit
that most of them were aiming. In their imaginations they saw
the cinema as a total and complete representation of reality; they
saw in a trice the reconstruction of a perfect illusion of the outside
world in sound, color, and relief.
As for the latter, the film historian P. Potoniee has even felt
justified in maintaining that it was not the discovery of photogra-
phy but of stereoscopy, which came onto the market just slightly
before the first attempts at animated photography in 1851, that
opened the eyes of the researchers. Seeing people immobile in
space, the photographers realized that what they needed was
movement if their photographs were to become a picture of life
and a faithful copy of nature. In any case, there was not a single
inventor who did not try to combine sound and relief with anima-
tion of the imageÑwhether it be Edison with his kinetoscope made
to be attached to a phonograph, or Demenay and his talking por-
traits, or even Nadar who shortly before producing the first photo-
graphic interview, on Chevreul, had written, "My dream is to see
the photograph register the bodily movements and the facial ex-
pressions of a speaker while the phonograph is recording his
speech" (February, 1887). If color had not yet appeared it was
because the first experiments with the three-color process were
slower in coming. But E. Reynaud had been painting his little
figurines for some time and the first films of Melies are colored by
stencilling. There are numberless writings, all of them more or less
wildly enthusiastic, in which inventors conjure up nothing less than
a total cinema that is to provide that complete illusion of life which
is still a long way away. Many are familiar with that passage from
L'Eve Future in which Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, two years before
Edison had begun his researches on animated photography, puts
into the inventor's mouth the following description of a fantastic
achievement: ". . . the vision, its transparent fiesh miraculously
photographed in color and wearing a spangled costume, danced a

.. . . .. . . .
U1
~n

The Myth of Tofal Cinema
kind of popular Mexican dance. Her movements had the flow of life
itself, thanks to the process of successive photography which can
retain six minutes of movement on microscopic glass, which is sub-
sequently reflected by means of a powerful lampascope. Suddenly
was heard a fiat and unnatural voice, dull-sounding and harsh. The
dancer was singing the alza and the ole that went with her fandan-
go."
The guiding myth, then, inspiring the invention of cinema, is the
accomplishment of that which dominated in a more or less vague
fashion all the techniques of the mechanical reproduction of reality
in the nineteenth century, from photography to the phonograph,
namely an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own
image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of
the artist or the irreversibility of time. If cinema in its cradle lacked
all the attributes of the cinema to come, it was with reluctance and
because its fairy guardians were unable to provide them however
much they would have liked to.
If the origins of an art reveal something of its nature, then one
may legitimately consider the silent and the sound film as stages of
a technical development that little by little made a reality out of the
original "myth." It is understandable from this point of view that it
would be absurd to take the silent film as a state of primal perfec-
tion which has gradually been forsaken by the realism of sound and

color. The primacy of the image is both historically and technically
accidental. The nostalgia that some still feel for the silent screen
does not go far enough back into the childhood of the seventh art.
The real primitives of the cinema, existing only in the imaginations
of a few men of the nineteenth century, are in complete imitation of
nature. Every new development added to the cinema must, para-
doxically, take it nearer and nearer to its origins. In short, cinema
has not yet been invented!
It would be a reversal then of the concrete order of causality, at
least psychologically, to place the scientific discoveries or the indus-
trial techniques that have loomed so large in its development at the

_~
i

What Is Cinema?
source of the cinema's invention. Those who had the least confi-
dence in the future of the cinema were precisely the two industrial-
ists Edison and Lumiere. Edison was satisfied with just his kinetoZ
scope and if Lumiere judiciously refused to sell his patent to Melies
it was undoubtedly because he hoped to make a large profit out of
it for himself, but only as a plaything of which the public would
soon tire. As for the real savants such as Marey, they were only of
indirect assistance to the cinema. They had a specific purpose in
mind and were satisfied when they had accomplished it. The
fanatics, the madmen, the disinterested pioneers, capable, as was
Berard Palissy, of burning their furniture for a few seconds of shaky
images, are neither industrialists nor savants, just men obsessed by
their own imaginings. The cinema was born from the converging of
these various obsessions, that is to say, out of a myth, the myth of
total cinema. This likewise adequately explains the delay of Plateau
in applying the optical principle of the persistence of the image on
the retina, as also the continuous progress of the syntheses of move-
ment as compared with the state of photographic techniques. The
fact is that each alike was dominated by the imagination of the
century. Undoubtedly there are other examples in the history of
techniques and inventions of the convergence of research, but one
must distinguish between those which come as a result precisely of
scientific evolution and industrial or military requirements and
those which quite clearly precede them. Thus, the myth of Icarus
had to wait on the internal combustion engine before descending
from the platonic heavens. But it had dwelt in the soul of everyman
since he first thought about birds. To some extent, one could say the
same thing about the myth of cinema, but its forerunners prior to
the nineteenth century have only a remote connection with the
myth which we share today and which has prompted the appear-
ance of the mechanical arts that characterize today's world.

THE EVOLUTION
OF THE LANGUAGE OF CINEMA

BY 1928 the silent film had reached its artistic peak. The despair of
its elite as they witnessed the dismantling of this ideal city, while it
may not have been justified, is at least understandable. As they
followed their chosen aesthetic path it seemed to them that the
cinema had developed into an art most perfectly accommodated to
the "exquisite embarrassment" of silence and that the realism that
sound would bring could only mean a surrender to chaos.
In point of fact, now that sound has given proof that it came not
to destroy but to fulfill the Old Testament of the cinema, we may

most properly ask if the technical revolution created by the sound
track was in any sense an aesthetic revolution. In other words, did
the years from 1928 to 1930 actually witness the birth of a new
cinema? Certainly, as regards editing, history does not actually
show as wide a breach as might be expected between the silent and
the sound film. On the contrary there is discernible evidence of a
close relationship between certain directors of 1925 and 1935 and
especially of the 1940's through the 1950's. Compare for example
Erich von Stroheim and Jean Renoir or Orson Welles, or again Carl
Theodore Dreyer and Robert Bresson. These more or less clear-cut
affinities demonstrate first of all that the gap separating the 1920's

. a

)
!

cnY \ c~

him he sees an extension of Man's influence beyond the
day of Man's disappearance, a mechanical device by which
human thought continued to guide the Dogs long after
Man himself was gone.
We still have our robots, valuable and lovable little con-
traptions that exist for one purpose onlyÑto furnish us
with hands. Throughout the years, however, a Dog's robot
has become so much a part of him that no Dog now re-
gards his robot as a thing apart.
Tige's insistence that the robot is an invention of
Man, a heritage that our race carries forward from Man,
has been sturdily attacked by most other students of the
legend.
The idea that the robot may have been fashioned and
given to the Dogs as an aid to the development of their
culture, Bounce believes, is an idea which must be sum-
marily ruled out by the very virtue of its romanticism. It
is, he contends, a story device on the face of it and as
uch must necessarily be suspect from the first.
There is no way now of knowing how the Dogs evolved
a robot. Those few scholars who have given some time to
a study of the development of robotry, point out that the
highly specialized use to which the robot is put does in-
deed argue that it was invented by a Dog. To be so spe-
cialized, they argue, the robot must necessarily have been
invented and developed by the race for whose particular
use it is so singularly fitted. No one other than a Dog,
they contend, could have done so good a job on so in-
tricate a tool.
To say that no Dog today could build a robot is beg-
ging the question. No Dog today could build a robot be-
cause there is no need to build one, since the robots build
themselves. When there was a need, it is quite evident
that a Dog did build a robot and, by building a robot en-
dowed with the reproductive urge which resulted in his
building others like himself, solved the problem in a typ-
ically Doggish manner.

Simak, Clifford D. "Huddling Place" CitY Collier
Books, 1952, 1980 (Clifford D. Simak) (Original story
copyright Street and Smith Publications, Inc, 1944

1972) Pages 45-66

;

In this story likewise is introduced an idea which runs
through the rest of the legend and which for long has
puzzled all students and most readers. That is the idea
that one may move physically off this world, out into
space, crossing it to reach other worlds. While the idea in
most part has been regarded as pure fantasy which, of
course, has its proper place in any legend, a good deal of
study has been devoted to it. Most studies have confinned
the belief that such a thing is impossible. Such a belief
would argue that the stars which we see at night are mighty
worlds at great distances from our worlds. Everyone
knows, of course, that they are only lights hanging in the
slcy and that most of them are very near to us.
Bounce advances what may be the best cxplanation for
the origin of the across-space world idea. It is, he says,
no more than an ancient storyteller's twist on the cobbly
worlds, the existensc of which the Dogs have lsoown since
dim antiquity.

HUDDLING PLACEI

THE drizzle sifted from the leaden skies, like smoke drift-
ing through the bare-branched trees. It softened the hedges
and hazed the outlincs of the buildings and blotted out
the distance. It glinted on the metallic skins of the silent
robots and silvered the shoulders of the three humans
listening to the intonations of the black-garbcd man, who
read from the book cupped between his hands.
"For I am thc Rcsurrection and thc LiJeÑ"
The moss-mellowed graven figure that reared above the
door of the crypt seemed straining upward, every crystal
of its yearning body reaching toward something that no
one else could see. Straining as it had strained since that
day of long ago when men had chipped it from the granite

Vl
co

CllY I cnY

to adorn the family tomb with a symbolism that had i
pleased the first John J. Webster in the last years he held
of life.
"Ant whosoever liveth ant believcth in MeÑ"
Jerome A. Webster felt his son's fingers tighten on his "
arm, he rd the muffled sobbing of his mother, saw the lines
of robots standing rigid, heads bowed in respect to the
S master they had served. The master who now was going I
| homeÑto the final horne of all. !
{ Numbly, Jerome A. Webster wondered if they under
! stoodÑif they understood Ufe and deathÑif they under
stood what it meant that Nelson P. Webster lay there in the
casket, that a man with a book intoned words above him.
i Nelson P. Webster, fourth of the line of Webstcrs who I
had Uved on these acres, had Uved and died here, scarcely
leaving, and now was going to his final rest in th t place the
first of them had prepared for the rest of themÑfor that
long line of shadowy descendants who would live here and I
cherish the things and the ways and the life that the first
John J. Webster had established.
lerome A. Webster felt his jaw muscles tighten, felt a
little tremor run across'his body. For a moment his eyes l
burned and the casket blurred in his sight and the words I
the man in blaclc was saying were one with the wind that 8
whispered in the pines standing sentinel for the dead.
Within his brain remembrance marchedÑremembrance of
¥ gray-haired man stallcing the hills and fields, sniffing
the breeze of an early morning, standing, legs braced, be
fore the Daring fireplace with a glass of brandy in his hand.
PrideÑthe pride of land and life, and the humility and
greatness that quiet living breeds within a man. Content
ment of casual leisure and surety of purpose. Independence
of assured security, comfort of familiar surroundings, free
dom of broad acres.
; Thomas Webster was joggling his elbow. "Father,n he
| was whispering. "Father."

L.,

)

The service was over. The blaclcaarbed man had Flo ed
his book. Six robots stepped forward, lifted the casket.
Slowly the three followed the caslcet into the crypt, stood
dlently as the robots slid it into its V receptacle, closed
tiny door and sffited the plate that read:

NELSON F. WFBSrBR
2034~2117

That was all. Just the name and dates. And that, Jeromo
s Webster found himself thinlcing, was enough. There was
nothing else that needod to be there. That was all those
others had. The ones that called the family rollÑstarting
with William Stevens, 1920-1999. Gramp Stevens, they

had called him, Webstor remembered. Father of the wife of
that first John l. Webster, who was here himselfÑ1951-
2020. And after him his son, Chades F. Webstor, 1980-
2060. And his son, John J. II, 200~ 2086. Webster could
remember John J. II a grandfather who had slept beside
the fire vith his pipe hanging from his mouth, eternally
threatening to set his whiskers aflame.
Webster's eyes strayed to another plate. Mary Webster,
the mother of the boy here at his side. And yet not a
boy. He lcept forgetting that Thomas was twenty now, in
a weel: or so would be leaving for Mars, even as in his
younger days he, too, had gone to Mars.
All here together, he told himself. The Websters and
their wives and children. Here in death together as they
had lived together, sleeping in the pride and security of
bronze and marble with the pines outside and the sym-
bolic figure above the age-greened door.
The robots were waiting, standing silently, their task
fulfilled.
His mother looked d him.
"You're the head of the family now, my son," she told
lum.

)
uI CIIY

ul
~D

He reached out and hugged her close against his side.
Head of the familyÑwhat was left of it. Just the three of
them now. His mother and his son. And his son would be
leaving soon, going out to Mars. But he would come baclc.
Come back with a wife, perhaps, and the family would go
on. The family wouldn't stay at three. Most of the big
house wouldn't stay closed off, as it now was closed off.
There had been a time when it had rung with the life of
a dozen units of the family, living in their separate apart-
ments under one big roof. That time, he knew, would
come again
The three of them turned and left the crypt, took the
path back to the house, looming like a huge gray shadow in
the midst.

A fire blazed in the hearth and the book lay upon his
desk. Jerome A. Webster reached out and picked it up,
read the title once again:
"Martian PhysioloD, With lBspecial Reference to the
Brain" by letome A. Webster, M.D.
Thick and authoritativoÑthe word of a lifetime. Stand-
ing almost done in its field. Based upon the data gathered
'_ -_ those Sve plague years on MarsÑyears when he had
labored almost day and night with his fellow colleagues of
the World Committee's medical commission, dispatched
on an errand of mercy to the ndghboting planet.
A tap sounded on the door.
"Come in," he called.
The door opened and a robot glided in.
"Your whiskey, sir."
"Thank you, lenlcins," Webster said.

She minister, sir," said Jenkins, "has left."
"Oh, yes. I presume that you took care of him."
"I did, sir. Gave him the u ual fee and offered him a
drink. He refused the drinlc."
"That was a social error," Webster told him. "Ministers
don't drin1LX

[ "I'm sorry, sir. I didn't know. He asked me to ask you
l to come to church sometime."
"Eh?"
"I told him, sir, that you never went anywhere."
! "That was quite right, Jenkins," said Webster. "None of
j us ever go anywhere."
l Jenkins headed for the door, stopped before he got
l there, turned around. "If I may say so, sir, that was a
! touching service at the crypt. Your father was a fine hu
man, the finest ever was. The robots were saying the service
was very fitting. Dignified like, sir. He would have liked it
had he known."
"My father," said Webster, "would be even more
pleased to hear you say that, Jenkins."
"Thank you, sir," said Jenkins, and went out.
Webster sat with the whiskey and the book and fireÑ
felt the comfort of the well-known room close in about
him, felt the refuge that was in it.
This was home. It had been home for the Websters
since that day when the first John l. had come here and
built the first unit of the sprawling house. John J. had
chosen it because it had a trout stream, or so he always
said. But it was something more than that. It must have
been, Webster told himself, something more than that.
Or perhaps, at first, it had only been the trout stream.
The trout stream and the trees and meadows, the rocky
ridge where the mist drifted in each morning from the
river. Maybe the rest of it had grown, grown gradually
through the years, through years of family association un
til the very soil was soaked with something that ap
proached, but wasn't quite, tradition. Something that made
each tree, each rock, each foot of soil a Webster tree or
rock or clod of soil. It all belonged.
John l., the first lohn l., had come after the breakup of
the cities, after men had forsaken, once and for all, the
twentieth century huddling places, had broken free of the
tribal instinct to stick together in one cave or in one clear

CTY

ing against a common foe or a common fear. An in- |
stinct that had become outmoded, for there were no fears X
or foes. Man revolting against the herd instinct economic
and social conditions had impressed UpOD him in ages !
past. A new security and a new ¥ulliciency had made it
possible to break awag.
The trend had started back in the twentieth century,
more than two hundred gears before, when men moved
to country homes to get fresh air and elbow room and a
grsciousDcss in life that communal eustence, in its strictest
ense, never had given them.
And here.was the end result. A quiet living. A peace
that could only come with good things. The sort of life
that men had yearned for years to havo. A manorial ex
istence, based OD old family homes and leisurely acres,
with atomics supplying power and robots in place of serfs.
Webster smiled at the firep1sce with its blazing wood.
That was an anachronism, but a good oneÑsomething
that Man had brought forward from the caves. Useless, be
cawe atomic heating was betterÑbut more pleasant Ono
couldn't sit and watch atomics and dream and build cas
tla in the flames.
Even the crypt out there, where they had put his father
that afternoon. That was family, too. AD of a piece with
I the rest of it. The somber pride and leisured life and
peace. In the old days tbe dead were buried in vast plots
all together, stranger cheek by jowl with strangerÑ
Hc nevcr gocs anywherc.
That is what Jenkins had told the minister.
And that was right. For what need was there to go any
wherc? It all was here. By simply twirling a dial one
could talk face to face with anyone wished, could go, by
sense, if not in body, anywhere one wished. Could attend
the theater or hear a concert or browse in a library half
way around the world. Could transact any business one
might need to transact without rising from one's chair.

. ,/

)

Webster drank the whiskey, then swung to the dialed
machine beside his desk.
He spun dials from memory without resorting to the
log. He knew where he was going.
His finBer flipped a toggle and the room melted away
Ñor seemed to melt. There was left the chair within which
he sat, part of the desk, part of the machine itself and
that was all.
The chair was on a hillside swept with golden grass and
dotted with scraggly, wind-twisted trees, a hillside that
straggled down to a lake nestling in the grip of purple
mountain spun. The spurs, darkened in long streaks with
the bluish-green of distant pine, climbed in staggering
stairs, melting into the blue tinged snow-capped peaks that
reared beyond and above them in jagged saw-toothed

outline.
The wind talked harshly in the crouching trees and
| ripped the long grass in sudden gusts. The last rays of
the sun struck fire from the distant peaks.
Solitude and grandeur, the long s veep of tumbled land,
the cuddled lake, the knifelike shadows on the far-off
l ranges.
I Webster sat easily in his chair, eyes squinting at the
peaks.
Avoice said almost at his shoulder: "Mag I come in?"
A soft, sibilant voice, wholly unhuman. But one that
Webster knew.
He nodded his head. "By all means, Juwain."
He turned slightly and saw the elaborate crouching ped-
estal, the furry, soft-eyed figure of the Martian squstting
on it. Other alien furniture loomed indistinctly beyond thc
pedestal, half guessed furniture from that dwelling out on
Mars.
The Martian flipped a furry hand toward the mountain
range.
"You love this," he said. "You can understand it. And I

)
I

can understand how you understand it, but to me there
is more terror than beauty in it. It is something we could
never have on Mars:"
Webster reached out a h od, but the Mattiao stopped
him.
"Leave it on," he said. "I know why you came here. I
would not have come at a time like this exeept I thought
perhaps an old friend_ n
"It is Icind of you," said Webster. "I am glad that you
have come."
"Your father," said Juwdo, "was a great man. I re-
member how you used to talk to me of him, those years
you spent on Mars. You aid then you would come baclc
ometime. Why is it you've never come?"
"Why," said Webster, "I just never_ n
"Do not tell me," said the Martian. "I already Icnow."
"My son," said Webster, "is going to Mars in a few
days. I shall have him call on you."
"That would be a plea ure," aid Juwain. "I shall be
expecting him."
He stirred uneasily on the crouching pedestal. "Perhaps
he carries on tradition." |
"No," said Webster. "He i studying engineeting. He I
never cared for surgery." l
'YHe has a right," observed the Mardan, "to follow the
life that he has chosen. StiU, one might be permitted to
wish." !
"One could," Websbr agreed. "But that is over and l
done with. Perhaps he will be a great engineer. Space
structure. Talks of ships out to the stars."
enough for medical science. You and your father_ n l
"Perhaps," suggested Juwain, "your family has done
"And his father," said Webster, "before him."
"Your book," declared Juwain, "has put Mars in debt
to you. It may focus more attention on Martian special-
ization. My people do not make good doctors. They have
no background for it. Queer how the minds of races run.

Queer that Mars never thought of medicine literally nev-
er thought of it. Supplied the need with a cult of fatalism.
While even in your early history, when men still lived in
cavesÑ"
"There are many things," said Webster, "that you
thought of and we didn't. Things we wonder now how we
ever missed. Abilities that you developed and we do not
have. Take your own specialty, philosophy. But different
than ours. A science, while ours never was more than or-
dered fumbling. Yours an orderly, logical development of
philosophy, workable, practical, applicable, an actual tool."
Juwain started to speak, hesitated, then went ahead. "I
am near to something, something that may be new and
startling. Something that will be a tool for you humans as
well as for the Martians. I've worked on it for years,
starting with certain mental concepts that first were sug-
gested to me with arrival of the Earthmen. I have said
nothing, for I could not be sure."
"And now," suggested Webster, "you are sure."
"Not quite," said Juwain. "Not positive. But almost."
They sat in silence, watching the mountains and the
lake. A bird came and sat m one of the scraggly trees and
sang. Dark clouds piled up behind the mountain ranges
and the snow-tippod pea1:s stood out like graven stone.
The sun sank in a lake of crimson, hushed finally to the
glow of a fire burned low.
A tap sounded from a door and Webster stirred in his
chair, suddenly brought back to the reality of the study, of
the chair beneath him.
Juwain wu gone. The old philosopher had come and
sat an hour of contemplation with his friend and then
had quietly slipped away.
The rap came again.
Webster Ieaned forward, snapped the- toggle and the
mountains vanished; the room became a room again. Dusk
filtered through the high windows and the fire was a rosy
flicker in the ashes.

cmr

)

iCome in," said Web ter. n If he were back home, Webster told bimself, he would
lenlcins opened the door. ~Dioner is erved, sir~ he have finished lunch, would now be ready to lie down for
said. his midday nap. The fire would be blazing on the hearth
'~ThaDlc you," said Webster. Ho rose slowly from the and the fliclcer of the flames would be reflected from the
chair andirons. Ienkins would bring him a Uqueur and would |
"Your place, dr," said lenlcios, "is Idd at the head of say a word or twoÑinconsequential conversation. l
the table." He hurried toward the door, quickening his step, anxiow
"Ah, yes," said Web ter. "Thanlc you, Jenl~ins. Thanlc to get away from the bare cold expanse of the massive
you very much, for re me." ramp.
Funny how he had felt about Thomas. Natural, of course, i
Webster stood on the broad ramp of the space field tl.at he should have hated to see him go. But entirely un- I
ot watched the hape that dwindled in the slry with faint oatural that he should, in those last few minutes, find such
flickering points of ret lancing through the wintry sunlight horror welling up within him. Horror of the trip through
For long minutes after the hape was gone he stood space, horror of the alien land of blus_lthough Mars was
there, hands gripping the railing in front of him, eyes still scarcely alien any longer. For more than a century now
staring lrp into the sky. Barthmen had known it, had fought it, lived with it; some
His lips moved ant they said: "Good-by son"; but there of them had even grown to love it.
was no sound. But it had only been utter will power that had prevent
Slowly he came alive to his surroundings. Knew that ed him, in those last few seconds before the ship had taken
people moved about the ramp, aw that the landing field off, from running out into the fidd, shrieking for Thoma
eemed to stretch interminably to the fat horizon, dotted to come back, shricking for him not to go
here and there with hump-baclced things that were waltmg And that, of course, never would have done. It would
spaceships. Scooting tractors worlced near one hangar, have been eshibitionism, disgraceful and humiliatingÑ
clearing away the last of the snowfall of the nightbefore. the sort of a thing a Webster could not do.
Webster shivered and thought that it was queer, for the After all, he told himself, a trip to Mars was no great
noonday sun was warm. Andshivered again. ! adventure, not any longer. There had been a day when
Slowly he turned away from the railing and headed for t it had been, but that day was gone forever. He, himself,
the administration building. And for one brain-wrench- in his earlier days hat made a trip to Mars, had stayed
ing moment he felt a sudden fearÑan unreasonable and em- there for five long years. That had beenÑhe gasped when
barrassing fear of that stretch of concrete that formed the he thought of itÑt~at had been almost thirty years ago.
ramp. A fear that left him shaking mentally as he drote y The babble and hum of the lobby hit him in the face as
his feet toward the waiting door. the robot attendant opened the door for him, and in that
A man walked toward him, briefcase swinging in his babble ran a vein of something that was almost terror.
hand and Webster, eyeing him, wished fervently that the For a moment he hesitated, then stepped inside. The door
man would not speak to him. closed softly behind him.
The man did not spealc, passed him with scarcely a He stayed close to the wall to Iceep out of people's way,
glance, and Webster felt relief. headed for a chair in one corner. He at down and hud

cne fi c~

a~
w

dled back, forcing his body deep into the cushions, watch- I
ing the milling humanity that seethed out in the room.
Shrill people, hurrying people, people with strange, un-
ndghborly faces. StrangersÑevery one of them. Not a
face he lcnew. People going places. Heading out for the
planets. Anxious to be off. Worried about last details.
Rushing here and there.

Out of the crowd loomed a familiar face. Webster |
hunched forward. l
"Jenkinsl" he shouted, and then was sorry for the shout, |
although no one seemed to notice. I
The robot moved toward him, stood before him. I
UTeU Raymond," said Webster, "that I must return un-
mediately. Tell him to bring the 'copter in front at once.
"1 am sorry, sir," said Jenkins, "but we cannot Ieave at t
once. The mechanics found a flaw in the atomics chamber.
They are installing a new one. It wiU talce scveral hours.'
"Surely ' said Webster, impatiently, "that could wat
until some other time."
"The mechanic said not, sir," lenlcins told hun. 'It
might go at any minute. The entirc charge of powerÑ
UYa, ya," agreed Webster, "' suppose so." .
He fidgeted with his hat. 'Y just remembered, he slud,
"something I must do. Something that must be done at
once. I must get home. I can't wait several hours.
He hitched forward to the edge of the chair, eyes staring
at the milling crowd.

"Perhaps you could televise," suggested Jenkins. 'One of
the robots might be able to do it. There is a boothÑ
UWut, Jenkins," said Webster. He hesitated a moment.
"There is nothing to do bac1: home. Nothing at all. But I
must get there. I can't stay here. If I have to, 1'11 go crazy.
I was frightened out there on the ramp. I'm bewildered
and confused here. I have a feelingÑa strange, terrible
feelin; c Jenkins, IÑ

"I understand, sir ' said Jenlcins. "Your father had it,
too."
Webster gasped. "My father?"
"Yes, sir, that is why he never went anywhere. He was
about your age, sir, when he found it out. He tried to
make a trip to Europe and he couldn't. He got halfway
there and turned back. He had a name for it."
I Webster sat in striclcen silence.
"A name for it," he finally said. UOf course there's a
name for it. My father had it. My grandfather- did he
I have it, too?"
I "I wouldn't know that, sir," said Jenkins. "I wasn't cre
ated until after your grandfather was n elderly man. But
he may have. He never went anywhere, either."
UYou understand, then," aid Webster. "You know how
it is. I feel Ulce I'm going to be siclcÑphysicaBy ill. See
if you can charter a 'copter- anything, just SO WC get
home."
"Yes, sir," said lenkins.

He started off and Webster cslled him back.
"Jenkins, does anyone else l~now c about this? AnyoneÑ
"No, sir," said Jenlcins. "Your father never mentioned it
nd I felt, somehow, that he wouldn't wish me to."
"Than} you, Jenkins," said Webster.
Webster huddled baclc into his chair again, feeling des_
olate and alone and misplaced. Alone in a humming lobby
that pulsed with lifeÑa loneliness that tore at him, that
lcft him Ump and weak.
Homesickness. Downright, shameful homesickness, he
told himself. Something that boys are supposed to feel
when they first leave home, when they fit go out to meet
the world.
There was a fancy word for it agoraphobia, the mor-
bid dread of being in the midst of open spacesÑfrom the
Greek root for the fearÑliterally, of the market place.
If he crossed the room to the television booth, he coult
put in a call, tallc with his mother or one of the robots

i
)

or, better yet, just sit and look at the place until Jenlcins
came for him.
He started to rise, then satelc baclc in the chair again.
It was no dice. Just talking to someone or loolcing in on the
place wasn't being there. He couldn't smelt the pines in
the wintry air, or hear familiar snow crunch on the walk
beneath his feet or reach out a hand and touch one of the
massive oaks that grew along the path. He couldn't feel
the heat of the fire or sense the sure, deft touch of be-
longing, of being one with a tract of ground and the
things upon it.
And yetÑperhaps it would help. Not much, maybe,
but some. He started to rise from the chair again and froze.
The few short steps to the booth held terror, a terrible,
overwhelming terror. If he crossed them, he would have
to tun. Run to escape the watching eyes, the unfamiliar
I sounds, the agonizing ne rness of strange faces.
Abruptly he sat down. ,
A woman's shrill voice cut across the lobby and he l
shrank away from it. He felt tembte. He fit liSce helL
He wished lenkin~ ) would get a hustle on.

The first breath d spring came through the window,,
fillinY the study with the promise d melting snows, of i
corning leaves and floweta, of notibound wedges af --- \
terfowi streaming through the blue, of trout that lurked in
pools waiting for the fly. L
Webster lifted his eyes from the sheaf of papers on his l
teslc, sniffed the breeze, felt the cool whisper of it on his
eheelc. His hand reached out for the brandy glass, found
It empty, and put it baclL \
He bent baclc above the papers once again, picbet up:
s pencil and crossed out a word.
Critically, he read the final paragraphs:

The fact that d the two hundred fifty men who were in-
ited to vi,sit me, presumably on missions of more, than

ordinary importance, only three, were able to come, does
not necessarily prove that an but those three are victims

of agoraphobia. Some may have had legitimate reasons for
being unable to accept my invit tton. But it doss indicate
a growing unwillingness of men living under the mode d
Earth existence set up following the breakup of the cities
to move from familiar pl ces, ¥ deepening instinct to stay
among the scene and possessioos which in their mind
have become associated with contentment and graciowness
of life.
What the result o such a trend will be, no one can
clearly indicate since it applies to only a small portion of
Earth's population. Among the larger families economic
pressure forces some of the sons to, eet their fortunes
either in other parts of the lBaxth or on one of the other
I planets. Many others deliberately seel: adventure and op-
portunity in space while still others become associated
with professions or trades which malce z sedentary exist-
ence impossible.

He flipped the page over, went on to the last one.
It was a good paper, he knew, but it could not be pub-
lished, not just yet. Perhaps after he had died. No one,
so far as he could determine, had ever o much as realized
the trend,11ad taken as matter of course the fact that men
seldom left their homes. Why, after all, should they leave
their homes?

Certain dangers me bc recognized inÑ
The televisor muttered at his elbow and he reached out
to flip the toggle.
The room faded and he was face to face with a man
who sat behind a desk, almost as if he sat on the opposite
side of Webster's desk. A gray-haired man with sad eyes
behind heavy lenses.
For a moment Webster stared, memory tugging at hinL
"Could it beÑ" he asked and the man smiled gravely.

CTY

"I have changed," he said. "So have you. My name is one else has the knowledge. You hold Juwain's life in
aayborne. Remember? The Martian medical commis your hands. If you come, he lives. If you don't, he dies."
donÑ" "I can't go into space," said Webster.
"Claybornel I'd often thought of-you. You stayed on "Anyone can go into space," sn pped Clayborne."it's
Mars n not like it wed to be. Conditioning of any sort desired is
Clayborne nodded. "I've read your boolc, doctor. It is a available."
teal contribution. I've often thought one should be writ- "But you don't understand," pleaded Webster. "YouÑ"
ten, wanted to myself, but I didn't have the time. lust as "No, I don't," said Claybornc. "Frankly, I don't. That
well I didn't. You did a better job. EspeciaXy on the nyone should refuse to save the life of his friendÑ"
brain." The two men stared at one another for a long moment,
"The Martian brain." Websta told him, "always in- i neither speaking.
trigued me. Certain peculiaritie . I'm afraid l spent more 1l "I shall tell the committee to send the ship straight to
of those fivo years taking notes on it than I hould have. j your home," said Claybotne finally. "I hope by that time
There was other worlc to do." you will see your way clear to come."
"A good thing you did," said CJaybotne. Shat's why Clayborne faded and the wall came into view againÑ
rm calling you now. I have s patient_ brain operation- ' the wall and books, the fireplacc and the paintings, the
Onlyyoucanhandleit." well-loved furniture, the promise of spring tbat c~ne
Webster gasped, his hands trembling. ZYoull bring him i tbrough the open window.
hereT' !
Clayborne shook his head. "He cannot be moved. You
lcnow him, l believe. luwain, the philosopher."
"Juwain!" said Webstet. "He's one of my best friends.
We tallred together just a couple of days ago."
"The attack w s suddell," saua asyborne. "He's been
slring for you."
Webster was silent and cold cold with a chill that crept
upon him from some unguessed place. Cold that sent pet- i
piration out upon his forehead, that knotted his fists. !
"If you start immediately," said Clayborne, "you can
be here on time. I've already arranged with the World
Committee to have a ship at your disposal instantly. The
utmost speed is necessary."
"But," said Webster, "but . . . I cannot come,"
"You can't comeln
"It's impossible," said Webster. "I doubt in any case
that I am needed. Surely, you yourselfÑ"
"I can't," said Cl yborne. "No one can but you. No

Webster sat frozen in his chair, staring at the wall in
front of him
luwain, the fur y, wrinkled face, the sibilant whisper,
the friendliness and understanding that was his. Juwado,
grasping the stuff that dreams are made of and shaping
tbem into logic, into rules of life and conduct. Juwain,
using philosophy as a tool, as a science, as a stepping
stone to better living.
Webster dropped his face into his hands and fought the
agony that welled up within bim.
Clayborne had not understood. One could not expect
him to understand since there was no way for him to
know. And even knowing, would be understand? Even
he, Webster, would not have understood it in someone else
until he had discovered it in himselfÑtbe terrible fear of
leaving his own fire, his own land, his own possessions,
the litlle symbolisms that he had erected. And yet, not he,
himself, alone, but those other Websters as well. Starting

with the first John J. Men and women who had set up a
cult of life, a tradition of behavior.
He, Jerome A. Webster, had gone to Mars when he was
a young man, and had not felt or suspected the psy-
chological poison that ran through his veins. Even as |
Thomas a few months ago had gone to Mars. But thirty
years of quiet life here in the retreat that the Webstels
called a home had brought it forth, had developed it with
out his even knowing it. There had, in fact, been no op
portunity to know it. l
It was clear how it had developedÑclear as crystal
DOW. Habit and mental pattern and a happiness associa-
tion with certain thingsÑthings that had no actual value in
themselves, but had been assigned a value, a definite,
concrete value by one family through 6ve generations.
No wonder other places seemed alien, no wonder other +
horizons held a hint of horror in their sweep.
And there was nothing one could do about itÑnothing, '
that is, unless one cut down every tree and burned the
house and changed the course of waterways. Even th t
might not do itÑeven thatÑ
The televisor purred and Webster lifted his head from
his hands, reached out and thumbed the tumbler. i
Thc room became a flare of white, but there was no i
image. A voice said: "Sccret call. Secret call."
Webster slid baclc a panel in the machine, spun a pair
of dials, heard the hum of power surge into a screen tbat
blocked out the room.
"Secrecy established," he said.
The white flare snapped out and a man sat across the l
desk from him. A man he had seen many times before in
televised addresses, in his daily paper.
Henderson, president of the World Committce.
"I have had a call from Clayborne," said Hcnderson.
Webster nodded without speaking.
"He tells me you refuse to go to Mars."
"I have not refused," said Webster. "When Clayborne

)

I z ut off the Sue tion was left open. I had told him it was
impossible for me to go, but he bad rejected that, did not
seem to understand."
"Webster, you must go," said Henderson. "You are the
only man with the necessary 1csowledge of the Martian
br in to perform this operation. If it were a simple opera-
tioo, perhaps someone else could do it. But not one such
u this."
"That may be true," said Webster, "butÑ"
"It's not just a question of saving a life," said Hender-
soo. "Even the life of so distinguished a personage as Ju-
wain. It involves even more than that. Iuwain is a friend
of yours. Perhaps he hinted of somethinghe has found."
"Yes," said Webster. "Yes, he did. A new concept of
I philosophy.
! "A concept," declared Henderson, "that we cannot do
without. A concept that will remake the solar system, that
will put mankind ahe d ¥ hundred thousand years in the
space of two generations. A new direction of purpose that
will aim toward a goal we heretofore had not suspected,
had not even Icnown existed. /i brand new truth, you see.
One that never before had occurred to anyone."
Webster's hands gripped the edge of the desk until his
lcauc}les stood out white.

"If luwain dies," said Henderson, "that conscpt dies
with him. May be lost forever."
"111 try," said Webster. "I'll tryÑ"
Henderson's eyes were hard. "Is that the best you can
do?"
"That is the best," said Webster.
"But, man, you must have a reason! Some explanation."
"None," said Webster, "that I would care to give."
Deliberately he reached out and flipped up the switch.

Webster sat at the desk and held his hands in front of
him, staring at them. Hands that had skill, held knowledge.
Hands that could save a life if he could get them to

_)
Mars. Hands that could save for the solar system, for man-
kind, for the Martians an ideaÑa new ideaÑthat would
advance them a hundred thousand years in the next two
generations.
But hands chained by a phobia that grew out of this
quiet life. DecadenceÑa strangely beautifulÑand de d-
IyÑdecadence.
Man had forsaken the teeming cities, the huddling |
places, two hundred years ago. He had done with the old l
foes and the ancient fears that Icept him around the com-
mon campfire, had left behind the hobgoblins that had
walked with him from the caves.
And yetÑand yet.
Here was another huddling place. Not a huddling place ¢
for one's body, but one's mind. A psychological campfire |
that still held a man within the circle of its light. !
Still, Webster knew, he must leave that fire. As the men j
had done with the cities two centuries before, he must l
waLk off and leave it. And he must not look back. |
He had to go to MarsÑor at least start for Mars. There
was no question there, at all. He had to go.
Whether he would survive the trip, whether he could j
perform the operation once hc had arrived, he did not j
Icnow. He wondered vaguely, whether agoraphobia could |
be fatal. In its most exaggerated form, he supposed it
could.
He reached out a hand to ring, then hesitated. No use
having Jenkins pack. He would do it himselfÑsomething to
lseep him busy until the ship arrived.
From the top shelf of the wardrobe in the bedroom, he
took down a bag and saw that it was dusty. He blew on
it, but the dust still dung. It had been there for too many
years.
As he packed, the room argued with him, talked in that
mute tongue with which inanimate but familiar things may
converse with a man.

ib..

C ~C~

"You can't go," said the room. "You can't go off and
leave me."
And Webster argued back, half pleading, half explana-
tory. "I have to go. Can't you understand? It's a friend,
an old friend. l will be corning back."
Packing done, Wcbster returned to the study, slumped

into his chair.
He must go and yet he couldn't go. But when the ship
arrived, w'nen the time had come, he knew that he would
walk out of the house and toward the waiting ship.
He steeled his mind to that, tried to set it in a rigid
pattern, tried to blank out everything but the thought that
he was leaving.
Things in the room intruded on his brain, as if they
were part of a conspiracy to keep him there. Things that
he saw as if he were seeing them for the first time. Old,
remembered things that suddenly were new. The chronom-
eter that showed both Earthian and Martian timc, the days
of the month, the phases of the moon. The picture of his
dead wife on the desk. The trophy he had won at prep
school. The framed short snorter bill that had cost him ten
bucks on his trip to Mars.
He stared at them, half unwilling at first, then eagerly,
storing up the memory of them in his brain. Seeing them
s separate components of a room he had accepted all
these years as a finished whole, never realizing what a mul-
titude of things went to make it up.
Dusk was falling, the dusk of early spring, a dusk that
smelled of early pussy willows.
The ship should have arrived long ago. He caught him-
self listening for it, even as he realized that he would not
hear it. A ship, driven by atomic motors, was silent ex-
cept when it gathered speed. Landing and taking off, it
floated like thistledown, with not a murmur in it.
It would be here soon. It would have to be here soon
or he could never go. Much longer to wait, he knew, and
his high-keyed resolution would crumble like a mound of

ae
co

sm | CITY

dust in beating rain. Not much longer could he hold his
purpose anainst the pleading of the room, against the flick-
er of the fire, against the murmur of the land where five
generations of Websters had lived their lives and died.
He shut his eyes and fought down the chill that crept ;
across his body. He couldn't let it get him now, he told
himself. He had to stick it out. When the ship arrived
he still must be able to get up and walk out the door to
the waiting port. l
A tap came on the door. l
"Come in," Wcbster called. I
It was Jenkins, the tight from the fircplace flickering on ,
his shining metal hidc. l
"Had you called earlier, sir?" he asked.
Webster shoolc his hcad.
"I was afraid-you might have," Jenlcins explained, "and
wondered why I didn't come. There was a most extraordi-
nary occurrence, sir. Two men came with a hip and said
they wanted you to go to Mars."
"They are here," said Webster. "Why didn't you call
me?"
He struggled to his feet.
"I didn't think, sir," said Jenkins, "that you would want
to be bothered. It was so preposterous. I finally made them
understand you could not possibly want to go to Mars." !
Webster stiffened, felt chill fear gripping at his heart. i
Hands groping for the edge of the desk, he sat down in the
chair, sensed the walls of the room dosing in about him, a
trap that would never let him go.

NOTES ON THEL THIRD TALE

To THe thousands of readers who love this tale, it is dis-
tinguisbed as the one in which the Dogs first appear. To

the student it is much more than that. Basically, it is a
tale of guilt and futility. Here the breakdown of the human
race continues, with Man assaulted by a sense of guilt
and plagued by the instability which results in the human
! mutants.
t The tale attempts to rationalize the mutations, attempts
, even to explain the Dogs as modifications of the primordial
l drain. No race, the story says, can become improved if
, there are no mutations, but there is no word concerning
l the need of a certain static factor in society to ensure sta
bility. Throughout the legend it becomes abundantly clear
that the human race placed little value upon stability;
, Tige, who has combed the legend to bolster his conten
! tion that the tales actuatlg arc human in their origin, bc
lieves that no Doggish storyteller would have advanced
the theory of mutation, ¥ concept which runs counter to
everything in the canine creed. A viewpoint such as this, he
l claims, must have sprung from some alien mind.
! Bounce, however, points out that throughout the leg
cnd viewpoints which are diametrically opposed to canine
logic often are presented in a favorable light. This, he says,
is no more than the marl: of a good storytellerÑa a twisting

of values for certain dramatic shock effect.
That Man is presented deliberately as a character who
realizes his own shortcomings there can be no doubt at
all. In this tale, the human, Grant, talks about a "groove
of logic" and it is apparent that he senses something wrong
with human logic. He tells Nathaniel that the human race
is always worried. He fastens an almost infantile hope up
on the luwain theory as something which might yet save
i the human race.
: And Grant, in the end, seeing the trend of destruction
inherent in his race, passes the destiny of humanity on
to Nathaniel.
Of all the characters which appear in the legend, Na
thaniel may be the only one having an actual historic ba
sis. In other tales which have come from the racial past,

L
106 Tochnopoly

multiplied, so did the diagnoses which made them seem neces-
sary. Through it all, the question of what was being undone had
a low priority if it was asked at all. The Zeitgeist of the age
placed such a question in a range somewhere between peevish-
ness and irrelevance. In a growing Technopoly, there is no time
or inclination to speak of technological debits.

ae
ux

)

Postman, Neil. "Chapter 7: The Ideology of Machines:
ComputerTechnology." TechnowlY: The Surrender
of Culture to Technolow. Alfred A. Knopf, 1992 (Neil
Postman). Pages107-122.

The Ideology of Machines:

Computer Technology

I hat American Technopoly has
now embraced the computer in the same hurried and mindless
way it embraced medical technology is undeniable, was perhaps
inevitable, and is certainly most unfortunate. This is not to say
that the computer is a blight on the symbolic landscape; only
that, like medical technology, it has usurped powers and en-
forced mind-sets that a fully attentive culture might have
wished to deny it. Thus, an examination of the ideas embedded
in computer technology is worth attempting. Others, of course,
have done this, especially Joseph Weizenbaum in his great and
indispensable book Compuier Power and Human Reason. Weizen-
baum, however, ran into some difficulties, as everyone else has,
because of the "universality" of computers, meaning (a) that
their uses are infinitely various, and (b) that computers are
commonly integrated into the structure of other machines. It is,

therefore, hard to isolate specific ideas promoted by computer
technology. The computer, for example, is quite unlike the
stethoscope, which has a limited function in a limited context.
Except for safecrackers, who, I am told, use stethoscopes to hear
o

100 T chnepdv

the tumblers of locks click into place, stethoscopes are used only
by doctors. But everyone uses or is used by computers, and for
purposes that seem to know no boundaries.
Putting aside such well-known functions as electronic filing,
spreadsheets, and word-processing, one can make a fascinating
list of the innovative, even bizarre, uses of computers. I have
before me a report from The New York Times that tells us how
computers are enabling aquatic designers to create giant water
slides that mimic roller coasters and eight-foot-high artificial
waves. I In my modest collection, I have another article about
the uses of personal computers for making presentations at
corporate board meetings.2 Another tells of how computer
graphics help jurors to remember testimony better. Gregory
Mazares, president of the graphics unit of Litigation Sciences, is
quoted as saying, "We're a switched-on, tuned-in, visually ori
i ented society, and jurors tend to believe what they see. This
| technology keeps the jury's attention by simplifying the mate
i rial and by giving them little bursts of information." 3 While Mr.
Mazares is helping switched-on people to remember things,
Morton David, chief executive officer of Franklin Computer, is
helping them find any word in the Bible with lightning speed
by producing electronic Bibles. (The word "lightning," by the
way, appears forty-two times in the New Intemational version
and eight times in the King James version. Were you so inclined,
you could discover this for yourself in a matter of seconds.) This
fact so dominates Mr. David's imagination that he is quoted as
saying, 'Our technology may have made a change as momen
tous as the Gutenberg invention of movable type."4 And then
there is an article that reports a computer's use to make invest
ment decisions, which helps you, among other things, to create
"what-if" scenarios, although with how much accuracy we are
not told.5 In Technology Review, we find a description of how
computers are used to help the police locate the addresses of
callers in distress; a prophecy is made that in time police officers

Cexpilicr Techndew

)

f ~ ::

109

will have so much instantly available information about any
caller that they will know how seriously to regard the caller's
appeal for help.
One may well wonder if Charles Babbage had any of this in
mind when he announced in 1822 (only six years after the

appearance of Laennec's stethoscope) that he had invented a
machine capable of performing simple arithmetical calculations.
Perhaps he did, for he never finished his invention and started
work on a more ambitious machine, capable of doing more
complex tasks. He abandoned that as well, and in 1833 put aside
his calculator project completely in favor of a programmable
machine that became the forerunner of the modem computer.
His first such machine, which he characteristically never fin-
ished, was to be controlled by punch cards adapted from de-
vices French weavers used to control thread sequences in their
looms.
Babbage kept improving his programmable machine over the
next thirty-seven years, each design being more complex than
the last. 6 At some point, he realized that the mechanization of
numerical operations gave him the means to manipulate non-
numerical symbols. It is not farfetched to say that Babbage's
insight was comparable to the discovery by the Greeks in the
third century B.C. of the principle of alphabetizationÑthat is,
the realization that the symbols of the alphabet could be sepa-
rated from their phonetic function and used as a system for the
classification, storage, and retrieval of information. In any case,
armed with his insight, Babbage was able to speculate about the
possibility of designing "intelligent" information machinery,
though the mechanical technology of his time was inadequate
to allow the fulfillment of his ideas. The computer as we know
it today had to await a variety of further discoveries and in-
ventions, including the telegraph, the telephone, and the appli-
cation of Boolean algebra to relay-based circuitry, resulting in
Claude Shannon's creation of digital logic circuitry. Today,

)

110 Technopoly

when the word "computer" is used without a modifier before it,
it normally refers to some version of the machine invented
by John von Neumann in the 19405. Before that, the word
"computer" referred to a person (similarly to the early use of the
word "typewriter") who performed some kind of mechanical cal-
culation. As calculation shifted from people to machines, so did
the word, especially because of the power of von Neumann's
machine.
Certainly, after the invention of the digital computer, it was
abundantly clear that the computer was capable of performing
functions that could in some sense be called "intelligent." In
1936, the great English mathematician Alan Turing showed that
it was possible to build a machine that would, for many practical
purposes, behave like a problem-solving human being. Turing
claimed that he would call a machine "intelligent" if, through
typed messages, it could exchange thoughts with a human
beingÑthat is, hold up its end of a conversation. In the early
days of MlT's ArtiRcial Intelligence Laboratory, Joseph Weizen-
baum wrote a program called ELIZA, which showed how easy
it was to meet Turing's test for intelligence. When asked a
question with a proper noun in it, ELIZA'S program could
respond with "Why are you interested in," followed by the
proper noun and a question mark. That is, it could invert state-
ments and seek more information about one of the nouns in the
statement. Thus, ELIZA acted much like a Rogerian psycholo-
gist, or at least a friendly and inexpensive therapist. Some
people who used ELIZA refused to believe that they were
conversing with a mere machine. Having, in effect, created a
Turing machine, Weizenbaum eventually pulled the program off
the computer network and was stimulated to write Computer
Power and Human Reason, in which, among other things, he
raised questions about the research programs of those working
in artificial intelligence; the assumption that whatever a com-
puter can do, it should do; and the effects of computer technol

Ce llulsr Tethnology 111

ogy on the way people construe the worldÑthat is the ideol-
ogy of the computer, to which I now turn.
The most comprehensive idea conveyed by the computer is
suggested by the title of J. David Bolter's book, Turing's Man.
His title is a metaphor, of course, similar to what would be
suggested by saying that from the sixteenth century until re-
cently we were "Gutenberg's Men." Although Bolter's main
practical interest in the computer is in its function as a new kind
of book, he argues that it is the dominant metaphor of our age;
it defines our age by suggesting a new relationship to informa-
tion, to work, to power, and to nature itself. That relationship
can best be described by saying that the computer redeRnes
humans as "information processors" and nature itself as informa-
tion to be processed. The fundamental metaphorical message of
the computer, in short, is that we are machinesÑthinking ma-
chines, to be sure, but machines nonetheless. It is for this reason
that the computer is the quintessential, incomparable, near-
perfect machine for Technopoly. It subordinates the claims of
our nature, our biology, our emotions, our spirituality. The
computer claims sovereignty over the whole range of human
experience, and supports its claim by showing that it "thinks"
better than we can. Indeed, in his almost hysterical enthusiasm
for artificial intelligence, Marvin Minsky has been quoted as

saying that the thinking power of silicon "brains" will be so
formidable that "If we are lucky, they will keep us as pets." 7 An
even giddier remark, although more dangerous, was offered by
John McCarthy, the inventor of the term "artificial intelligence."
McCarthy claims that "even machines as simple as thermostats
can be said to have beliefs." To the obvious question, posed by
the philosopher John Searle, "What beliefs does your thermo-
stat have?," McCarthy replied, "My thermostat has three be-
liefsÑit's too hot in here, it's too cold in here, and it's just right
in here." 8
What is significant about this response is that it has redefined
-£

112

Technopoly

the meaning of the word "belief." The remark rejects the view
that humans have internal states of mind that are the foundation
of belief and argues instead that "belief" means only what
someone or something does. The remark also implies that simu-
lating an idea is synonymous with duplicating the idea. And,
most important, the remark rejects the idea that mind is a
biological phenomenon.
In other words, what we have here is a case of metaphor
gone mad. From the proposition that humans are in some
respects like machines, we move to the proposition that humans
are little else but machines and, Rnally, that human beings are
machines. And then, inevitably, as McCarthy's remark suggests,
to the proposition that machines are human beings. It follows
that machines can be made that duplicate human intelligence,
and thus research in the Reld known as artificial intelligence was
inevitable. What is most significant about this line of thinking
is the dangerous reductionism it represents. Human intelligence,
as Weizenbaum has tried energetically to remind everyone, is
not transferable. The plain fact is that humans have a unique,
biologically rooted, intangible mental life which in some limited
respects can be simulated by a machine but can never be du-
plicated. Machines cannot feel and, just as important, cannot
understand. ELIZA can ask, "Why are you worried about your
mother?," which might be exactly the question a therapist
would ask. But the machine does not know what the question
means or even that the question means. (Of course, there may
be some therapists who do not know what the question means
either, who ask it routinely, ritualistically, inattentively. In that
case we may say they are acting like a machine.) It is meaning,
not utterance, that makes mind unique. I use meaning" here to
refer to something more than the result of putting together
symbols the denotations of which are commonly shared by at
least two people. As I understand it, meaning also includes
those things we call feelings, experiences, and sensations that

)

Compuler Technelegy 113

do not have to be, and sometimes cannot be, put into symbols.
They "mean" nonetheless. Without concrete symbols, a com-
puter is merely a pile of junk. Although the quest for a machine
that duplicates mind has ancient roots, and although digital
logic circuitry has given that quest a scientific structure, artiRcial
intelligence does not and cannot lead to a meaning-making,
understanding, and feeling creature, which is what a human
being is.
All of this may seem obvious enough, but the metaphor of
the machine as human (or the human as machine) is sufRciently
powerful to have made serious inroads in everyday language.
People now commonly speak of "programming" or "depro-
gramming" themselves. They speak of their brains as a piece of
"hard wiring," capable of "retrieving data," and it has become
common to think about thinking as a mere matter of processing
and decoding.
Perhaps the most chilling case of how deeply our language
is absorbing the "machine as human" metaphor began on No-
vember 4, 1988, when the computers around the ARPANET
network became sluggish, Rlled with extraneous data, and then
clogged completely. The problem spread fairly quickly to six
thousand computers across the United States and overseas. The
early hypothesis was that a software program had attached
itself to other programs, a situation which is called (in another
human-machine metaphor) a "virus." As it happened, the in-
truder was a self-contained program explicitly designed to dis-
able computers, which is called a "worm." But the technically
incorrect term 'virus" stuck, no doubt because of its familiarity
and its human connections. As Raymond Gozzi, Jr., discovered
in his analysis of how the mass media described the event,
newspapers noted that the computers were "infected," that the
virus was "virulent" and "contagious," that attempts were made
to "quarantine" the infected computers, that attempts were also
being made to "sterilize" the network, and that programmers

hoped to develop a "vaccine" so that computers could be
"inoculated" against new attacks.9
This kind of language is not merely picturesque anthropo-
morphism. It reflects a profound shift in perception about the
relationship of computers to humans. If computers can become
ill, then they can become healthy. Once healthy, they can think
clearly and make decisions. The computer, it is implied, has a
will, has intentions, has reasonsÑwhich means that humans are
relieved of responsibility for the computer's decisions. Through
a curious form of grammatical alchemy, the sentence "We use
the computer to calculate" comes to mean "The computer calcu-
lates." If a computer calculates, then it may decide to miscalcu-
late or not calculate at all. That is what bank tellers mean when
they tell you that they cannot say how much money is in your
checking account because "the computers are down." The impli-
cation, of course, is that no person at the bank is responsible.
Computers make mistakes or get tired or become ill. Why blame
people? We may call this line of thinking an 'agentic shift," a
term I borrow from Stanley Milgram to name the process
whereby humans transfer responsibility for an outcome from
themselves to a more abstract agent. 10 When this happens, we
have relinquished control, which in the case of the computer
means that we may, without excessive remorse, pursue ill-
advised or even inhuman goals because the computer can ac-
complish them or be imagined to accomplish them.
Machines of various kinds will sometimes assume a human
or, more likely, a superhuman aspect. Perhaps the most absurd
case I know of is in a remark a student of mine once made on
a sultry summer day in a room without air conditioning. On
being told the thermometer read ninety-eight degrees Fahren-
heit, he replied, "No wonder it's so hot!" Nature was off the
hook. If only the thermometers would behave themselves, we
could be comfortable. But computers are far more "human" than
thermometers or almost any other kind of technology. Unlike

Compuler Technology 115

most machines, computers do no work; they direct work. They
are, as Norbert Wiener said, the technology of "command and
control" and have little value without something to control.
This is why they are of such importance to bureaucracies.
Naturally, bureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technol-
ogy that helps to create the illusion that decisions are not under
their control. Because of its seeming intelligence and impartial-
ity, a computer has an almost magical tendency to direct atten-
tion away from the people in charge of bureaucratic functions
and toward itself, as if the computer were the true source of
authority. A bureaucrat armed with a computer is the unac-
knowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear.
We cannot dismiss the possibility that, if Adolf Eichmann had
been able to say that it was not he but a battery of computers
that directed the lews to the appropriate crematoria, he might
never have been asked to answer for his actions.
Although (or perhaps because) I came to "administration"
late in my academic career, I am constantly amazed at how
obediently people accept explanations that begin with the
words "The computer shows . . ." or "The computer has deter-
mined . . ." It is Technopoly's equivalent of the sentence "It is
God's will," and the effect is roughly the same. You will not be
surprised to know that I rarely resort to such humbug. But on
occasion, when pressed to the wall, I have yielded. No one has
as yet replied, "Garbage in, garbage out." Their defenselessness
has something Kafkaesque about it. In The Trial, losef K. is
charged with a crime of what nature, and by whom the charge
is made, he does not know. The computer turns too many of us
into Josef Ks. It often functions as a kind of impersonal accuser

which does not reveal, and is not required to reveal, the sources
of the judgments made against us. It is apparently sufficient that
the computer has pronounced. Who has put the data in, for
what purpose, for whose convenience, based on what assump-
tions are questions left unasked.
~ -

116 Technepdy

This is the case not only in personal matters but in public
decisions as well. Large institutions such as the Pentagon, the
Internal Revenue Service, and multinational corporations tell us
that their decisions are made on the basis of solutions generated
by computers, and this is usually good enough to put our minds
at ease or, rather, to sleep. In any case, it constrains us from
making complaints or accusations. In part for this reason, the
computer has strengthened bureaucratic institutions and sup-
pressed the impulse toward significant social change. "The ar-
rival of the Computer Revolution and the founding of the
Computer Age have been announced many times," Weizen-
baum has written. "But if the triumph of a revolution is to be
measured in terms of the social revision it entrained, then there
has been no computer revolution." 11
In automating the operation of political, social, and commer-
cial enterprises, computers may or may not have made them
more efficient but they have certainly diverted attention from
the question whether or not such enterprises are necessary or
how they might be improved. A university, a political party, a
religious denomination, a judicial proceeding, even corporate
board meetings are not improved by automating their opera-
tions. They are made more imposing, more technical, perhaps
more authoritative, but defects in their assumptions, ideas, and
theories will remain untouched. Computer technology, in other
words, has not yet come close to the printing press in its power
to generate radical and substantive social, political, and religious
thought. If the press was, as David Riesman called it, "the
gunpowder of the mind," the computer, in its capacity to
smooth over unsatisfactory institutions and ideas, is the talcum
powder of the mind.
I do not wish to go as far as Weizenbaum in saying that
computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant
functions and that the computer revolution is an explosion of
nonsense. Perhaps that judgment will be in need of amendment

Cezpuler Techwlewy 117

in the future, for the computer is a technology of a thousand
usesÑthe Proteus of machines, to use Seymour Papert's phrase.
One must note, for example, the use of computer-generated
images in the phenomenon known as Virtual Reality. Putting on
a set of miniature goggle-mounted screens, one may block out
the real world and move through a simulated three-dimensional
world which changes its components with every movement of
one's head. That Timothy Leary is an enthusiastic proponent of
Virtual Reality does not suggest that there is a constructive
future for this device. But who knows? Perhaps, for those who
can no longer cope with the real world, Virtual Reality will
provide better therapy than ELIZA.

What is clear is that, to date, computer technology has served
to strengthen Technopoly's hold, to make people believe that
technological innovation is synonymous with human progress.
And it has done so by advancing several interconnected ideas.
It has, as already noted, amplified beyond all reason the
metaphor of machines as humans and humans as machines. I do
not claim, by the way, that computer technology originated this
metaphor. One can detect it in medicine, too: doctors and
patients have come to believe that, like a machine, a human
being is made up of parts which when defective can be replaced
by mechanical parts that function as the original did without
impairing or even affecting any other part of the machine. Of
course, to some degree that assumption works, but since a
human being is in fact not a machine but a biological organism
all of whose organs are interrelated and profoundly affected by
mental states, the human-as-machine metaphor has serious med-
ical limitations and can have devastating effects. Something
similar may be said of the mechanistic metaphor when applied
to workers. Modern industrial techniques are made possible by
the idea that a machine is made up of isolatable and interchange-
able parts. But in organizing factories so that workers are also
conceived of as isolatable and interchangeable parts, industry
118 Technopoiy

has engendered deep alienation and bitterness. This was the
point of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, in which he tried to
show the psychic damage of the metaphor carried too far. But
because the computer "thinks" rather than works, its power to
energize mechanistic metaphors is unparalleled and of enor-
mous value to Technopoly, which depends on our believing
that we are at our best when acting like machines, and that in
signiScant ways machines may be trusted to act as our surro-
gates. Among the implications of these beliefs is a loss of
conSdence in human judgment and subjectivity. We have de-
valued the singular human capacity to see things whole in all
their psychic, emotional and moral dimensions, and we have
replaced this with faith in the powers of technical calculation.
Because of what computers commonly do, they place an
inordinate emphasis on the technical processes of communica-
tion and offer very little in the way of substance. With the
exception of the electric light, there never has been a technol-
ogy that better exemplifies Marshall McLuhan's aphorism "The
medium is the message." The computer is almost all process,
There are, for example, no "great computerers," as there are
great writers, painters, or musicians. There are "great programs"
and "great programmers," but their greatness lies in their inge-
nuity either in simulating a human function or in creating new
possibilities of calculation, speed, and volume. 12 of course, if 1.
David Bolter is right, it is possible that in the future computers
will emerge as a new kind of book, expanding and enriching the
tradition of writing technologies. 13 Since printing created new
forms of literature when it replaced the handwritten manuscript,
it is possible that electronic writing will do the same. But for the
moment, computer technology functions more as a new mode
of transportation than as a new means of substantive communi-
cation. It moves informationÑlots of it, fast, and mostly in a
calculating mode. The computer, in fact, makes possible the
fulfillment of Descartes' dream of the mathematization of the

| Conpuler Tlithndogy

llg

world. Computers make it easy to convert facts into statistics
and to translate problems into equations. And whereas this can
be useful (as when the process reveals a pattem that would
otherwise go unnoticed), it is diversionary and dangerous when
applied indiscriminately to human affairs. So is the computer's
emphasis on speed and especially its capacity to generate and
store unprecedented quantities of information. In specialized
contexts, the value of calculation, speed, and voluminous infor-
mation may go uncontested. But the "message" of computer
technology is comprehensive and domineering. The computer
argues, to put it baldly, that the most serious problems con-
fronting us at both personal and public levels require technical
solutions through fast access to information otherwise unavail-
able. I would argue that this is, on the face of it, nonsense. Our
most serious problems are not technical, nor do they arise from
inadequate information. If a nuclear catastrophe occurs, it shall
not be because of inadequate information. Where people are
dying of starvation, it does not occur because of inadequate
information. If families break up, children are mistreated, crime
terrorizes a city, education is impotent, it does not happen
because of inadequate information. Mathematical equations, in-
stantaneous communication, and vast quantities of information
have nothing whatever to do with any of these problems. And
the computer is useless in addressing them.
And yet, because of its "universality," the computer compels
respect, even devotion, and argues for a comprehensive role in
all fields of human activity. Those who insist that it is foolish to
deny the computer vast sovereignty are singularly devoid of
what Paul Goodman once called "technological modesty"Ñ
that is, having a sense of the whole and not claiming or obtrud-
ing more than a particular function warrants. Norbert Wiener
warned about lack of modesty when he remarked that, if digital
computers had been in common use before the atomic bomb
was invented, people would have said that the bomb could not

120

Tochnopoly

have been invented without computers. But it was. And it is
important to remind ourselves of how many things are quite
possible to do without the use of computers.
Seymour Papert, for example, wishes students to be epis-
temologists, to think critically, and to learn how to create
knowledge. In his book Mindstorms, he gives the impression
that his computer program known as LOGO now makes this
possible. But good teachers have been doing this for centuries
without the benefit of LOGO. I do not say that LOGO, when
used properly by a skilled teacher, will not help, but I doubt that
it can do better than pencil and paper, or speech itself, when
used properly by a skilled teacher.
When the Dallas Cowboys were consistently winning foot-
ball championships, their success was attributed to the fact that
computers were used to evaluate and select team members.
During the past several years, when Dallas has been hard put
to win more than a few games, not much has been said about
the computers, perhaps because people have realized that com-
puters have nothing to do with winning football games, and
never did. One might say the same about writing lucid, eco-
nomical, stylish prose, which has nothing to do with word-
processors. Although my students don't believe it, it is actually
possible to write well without a processor and, I should say, to
write poorly with one.
Technological immodesty is always an acute danger in Tech-
nopoly, which encourages it. Technopoly also encourages in-
sensitivity to what skills may be lost in the acquisition of new
ones. It is important to remember what can be done without
computers, and it is also important to remind ourselves of what
may be lost when we do use them.
I have before me an essay by Sir Bernard Lovell, founder of
Britain's jodrell Bank Observatory, in which he claims that
computers have stifled scientific creativity. 14 After writing of
his awe at the ease with which computerized operations provide

Computor Tochnology

121

amazing details of distant galaxies, Sir Bernard expresses con
cern that "literal-minded, narrowly focused computerized re
search is proving antithetical to the free exercise of that happy
faculty known as serendipityÑthat is, the knack of achieving
favorable results more or less by chance." He proceeds to give
several examples of monumental but serendipitous discoveries,
contends that there has been a dramatic cessation of such dis
coveries, and worries that computers are too narrow as filters of
information and therefore may be antiserendipitous. He is, of
course, not "against" computers, but is merely raising questions
about their costs.
Dr. Clay Forishee, the chief PAA scientist for human perfortn
ance issues, did the same when he wondered whether the auto
mated operation of commercial aircraft has not disabled pilots
from creatively responding when something goes wrong. Rob

ert Buley, flight-standards manager of Northwest Airlines, goes
further. He is quoted as saying, "If we have human operators
subordinated to technology then we're going to lose creativity
[in emergencies]." He is not "against" computers. He is worried
about what we lose by using them. 15
| M. Ethan Katsch, in his book The Electronic Media and the
4 Transfortnation of Law, worries as well. He writes, "The replace
ment of print by computerized systems is promoted to the legal
profession simply as a means to increase efficiency." 16 But he
goes on to say that, in fact, the almost unlimited capacity of
computers to store and retrieve information threatens the au
thority of precedent, and he adds that the threat is completely
unrecognized. As he notes, "a system of precedent is unneces
sary when there are very few accessible cases, and unworkable
when there are too many." If this is true, or even partly true,
what exactly does it mean? Will lawyers become incapable of
choosing relevant precedents? Will judges be in constant confu
sion from "precedent overload"?
We know that doctors who rely entirely on machinery have

i
122

Tuchnopoly

lost skill in making diagnoses based on observation. We may
well wonder what other human skills and traditions are being
lost by our immersion in a computer culture. Technopolists do
not worry about such things. Those who do are called techno-
logical pessimists, leremiahs, and worse. I rather think they are
imbued with technological modesty, like King Thamus.

s . .

Invisible Technologies

If we define ideology as a set of
assumptions of which we are barely conscious but which none-
theless directs our efforts to give shape and coherence to the
world, then our most powerful ideological instrument is the
technology of language itself. Language is pure ideology. It
instructs us not only in the names of things but, more important,
in what things can be named. It divides the world into subjects
and objects. It denotes what events shall be regarded as pro-
cesses, and what events, things. It instructs us about time, space,
and number, and forms our ideas of how we stand in relation to
nature and to each other. In English grammar, for example, there
are always subjects who act, and verbs which are their actions,
and objects which are acted upon. It is a rather aggressive
grammar, which makes it difficult for those of us who must use
it to think of the world as benign. We are obliged to know the
world as made up of things pushing against, and often attack-
ing, one another.
Of course, most of us, most of the time, are unaware of how
language does its work. We live deep within the boundaries of

Disjuncture and Difference in the Global
Cultural Economy

Arjun Appadurai

Appadurai, Arjun "Disjuncture and Difference in the
Global Cultural Economy." From Global Culture:
Nationalism. Globalization and Modernitv. Mike
Featherstone, Editor. SAGE Publications, 1990.
Material and arrangement Mike Feathelstone, c1990
Article Arjun Appadurai, c1990 Pages 295-310.

The central problem of today's global interactions is the tension
between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization. A
vast array of empirical facts could be brought to bear on the side of
the 'homogenization' argument, and much of it has come from the
left end of the spectrum of media studies (Hamelink, 1983;
* Mattelart, 1983; Schiller, 1976), and some from other, less appeal
[ ing, perspectives (Gans, 1985; Iyer, 1988). Most often, the homo
genization argument subspeciates into either an argument about
| Americanization, or an argument about 'commoditization', and
l very often the two arguments are closely linked. What these
arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from
various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to
become indigenized in one or other way: this is true of music and
housing styles as much as it is true of science and terrorism,
spectacles and constitutions. The dynamics of such indigenization
have just begun to be explored in a sophisticated manner (Barber,
1987; Feld, 1988; Hannerz, 1987, 1989; Ivy, 1988; Nicoll, 1989;
Yoshimoto, 1989), and much more needs to be done. But it is worth
noticing that for the people of Irian Jaya, Indonesianization may be
more worrisome than Americanization, as Japanization may be for
Koreans, Indianization for Sri Lankans, Vietnamization for the
; Cambodians, Russianization for the people of Soviet Armenia and
the Baltic Republics. Such a list of alternative fears to Americaniza
i tion could be greatly expanded, but it is not a shapeless inventory:
for polities of smaller scale, there is always a fear of cultural absorp
tion by polities of larger scale, especially those that are near by. One
man's imagined community (Anderson, 1983) is another man's poli
tical prison.
This scalar dynamic, which has widespread global manifesta
t ions, is also tied to the relationship between nations and states, to

Theory, Culture dE Sociery (SAGE, London, Newbury Park and New Delhi), Vol 7
(1990), 295-310

~l
~:
C'ls :

t::
:

: i

! Is

296 Theory, Culture & Society

which I shall return later in this essay. For the moment 1_. "~,
that the simplification of these many forces (and fears) of hom~o'
ization can also be exploited by nation-states in relation to their I
minorities, by posing global commoditization (or capitalism
some other such external enemy) as more 'real' than the threat l
own hegemonic strategies.
The new global cultural economy has to be understood
complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which cannot any lo
e understood in terms of existing center-periphery models (~
ose t at might account for multiple centers and peripheries)./
is it susceptible to simple models of push and pull (in terms of rn
tion theory) or of surpluses and deficits (as in traditional mode

Marxist theorles of develOpm er)s and pr¡ducers (as in most
exi e theories of global development which have come out o
Marxist tradition (Amin, 1980; Mandel, 1978; Wallerstein, I
, ) are inadequately quirky, and they have not com

disorganized capitalismS The rry (1987) have recently C2
economy has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures betu
economy, culture and politics which we have barely begw

global cultural flow which can be termed: (a) ethnoscapes
medlascapes; (c) technoscapes; (d) finanscapes; and (e) ideoscap
use terms with the common suffix scape to indicate first of all t
ese are not objectively given relations which look the same from _

~'S

. .

(ppadurai, Difference in the Global Cultural Economy 297

Mations of persons and groups spread around the globe
t'durai, 1989). An important fact of the world we live in today
it many persons on the globe live in such imagined 'worlds and
ust in imagined communities, and thus are able to contest and
¥times even subvert the 'imagined worlds' of the official mind
of the entrepreneurial mentality that surround them. The suffix
e also allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these
scapes, shapes which characterize international capital as l
bly as they do international clothing styles. \
y 'ethnoscape', I mean the landscape of persons who constitute I
;hifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees,
bs, guestworkers and other moving groups and persons con-
tute an essential feature of the world, and appear to affect the
tics of and between nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree.
s is not to say that there are not anywhere relatively stable
Imunities and networks, of kinship, of friendship, of. work and
zisure, as well as of birth, residence and other filiative forms. But
is to say that the warp of these stabilities is everywhere shot

rough with the woof of human motion, as more persons and
oups deal with the realities of having to move, or the fantasies of
anting to move. What is more, both these realities as well as these
ntasies now function on larger scales, as men and women from
illages in India think not just of moving to Poona or Madras, but
9- f moving to Dubai and Houston, and refugees from Sri Lanka find
[ hemselves in South India as well as in Canada, Just as the Hmong
8 re driven to London as well as to Philadelphia. And as interna-
% onal capital shifts its needs, as production and technology generate
| ifferent needs, as nation-states shift their policies on refugee popu-
0 ations, these moving groups can never afford to let their imagina-
[. ons rest too long, even if they wished to.
By 'technoscape', I mean the global configuration, a so ever
id, of technology, and of the fact that technology, both high and
w, both mechanical and informational, now moves at high speeds
ross various kinds of previously impervious boundaries. Many
untries now are the roots of multinational enterprise: a huge steel
mplex in Libya may involve interests from India, China, Russta
d Japan, providing different components of new technological
nfigurations. The odd distribution of technologies, and thus the
eculiarities of these technoscapes, are increasingly driven not by
ny obvious economies of scale, of political control, or of market
ationality, but of increasingly complex relationships between

I
298 Theory, Culture & Society

money flows, political possibilities and the availability of
and highly-skilled labor. So, while India exports wal~ers,
chauffeurs to Dubai and Sharjah, it also exports software enginz
to the United States (indentured briefly to Tata-Burroughs- orffl
World Bank), then laundered through the State DepartmenX
become wealthy 'resident aliens', who are in turn objectsS
seductive messages to invest their money and know-how in fedaA
and state projects in India. The global economy can stillba
described in terms of traditional 'indicators' (as the World Bal
continues to do) and studied in terms of traditional comparisionsa
in Project Link at the University of Pennsylvania) but the comial
cated technoscapes (and the shifting ethnoscapes) which undeia
these 'indicators' and 'comparisions' are further out of the reaci- _
the 'queen of the social sciences' than ever before. How is oni~
make a meaningful comparision of wages in Japan and the Un ~
States, or of real estate costs in New York and Tokyo, withogZ
taking sophisticated account of the very complex fiscal and inveX
ment flows that link the two economies through a global grid.'o~
currency speculation and capital transfer? '~2
Thus it is useful to speak as well of 'finanscapes', since t
disposition of global capital is now a more mysterious, rapid a
difficult landscape to follow than ever before, as currency marke
national stock exchanges, and commodity speculations move me
monies through national turnstiles at blinding s~)with vast abs
lute implications for small differences in percentage points and tin
units. But the critical point is that the global relationship betwa
ethnoscapes, technoscapes and finanscapes is deeply disjunctive an
profoundly unpredictable, since each of these landscapes is subje~
to its own constraints and incentives (some political, some inform:
tional and some techno-environmental), at the same time as eac
acts as a constraint and a parameter for movements in the othera
Thus, even an elementary model of global political economy musM
take into account the shifting relationship between perspectives oni5
human movement, technological flow, and financial transfers-
which can accommodate their deeply disjunctive relationships with; '
one another. d
Built upon these disjunctures (which hardly form a simple,-:- 0~
mechanical global 'infrastructure' in any case) are what I have called, g
mediascapes' and 'ideoscapes', though the latter two are closely hM

related landscapes of images. 'Mediascapes' refer both to the M
distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate. s

Lpadurai, Difference in the Clobal Cultural Economy 299

~N
[ the master-term 'democracy'. The master-narratlve of the

¥ViiS

i
:,
:E
~'
.:
300 Theory, Culture & Socrety

Enlightenment (and its many variants in England, France anS
United States) was constructed with-a certain internal lo ic~
presupposed a certain relationship between reading, represent
and the public sphere (for the dynamics of this process in the~
istory of the United States, see Warner, 1990). But their diasfl
across the world, especially since the nineteenth century,:;~3
oosened the internal coherence which held these terms and imk
together in a Euro-American master-narrative, and provicil
instead a loosely structured synopticon of politics, in which dl
erent nation-states, as part of their evolution, have organized ihe
political cultures around different 'keywords' (Williams, 1976)-~
As a result of the differential diaspora of these keywords the po:
tical narratives that govern communication between elites ad
o lowings in different parts of the world involve problems of both
semantic and a pragmatic nature: semantic to the extent that worc
(and their lexical equivalents) require careful translation froi
context h¡ context in their global movements; and pragmati t~

audiences may be subject to very different sets of contextual convens
ns t at mediate their translation into public politics. Sbc

(viz what does the aging Chine5s l¡f dhe nature of political rhetO
the dangers of hooliganism? What does the South Korean lead
ship mean when it speaks of 'discipline' as the key t d

These conventions also involve the far more subtle question of + q
what sets of communicative genres are valued in what way (news-' g
papers versus cinema for example) and what sorts of pragmatic
genre conventions govern the collective 'readings' of different kinds;
ext. So, while an Indian audience may be attentive to the
resonances of a political speech in terms of some key words and

r.eSpond to the subtle codingS of Bnedmda' a Korean audience may
rical strategy encoded in a political document. The very relationship
of reading to hearing and seeing may vary in important ways that
determine the morphology of these different 'ideoscapes' as they
; ape themselves in different national and transnational contexts
is globally variable synaesthesia has hardly even been noted, but
it emands urgent analysis. Thus 'democracy' has clearly become a
master-term, with powerful echoes from Haiti and Poland to the
oviet Union and China, but it sits at the center of a variety

_ _ i

kppadurai, Difference in the Global Cultural Economy 301
Weoscapes (composed of distinctive pragmatic configurations of
hgh 'translations' of other central terms from the vocabulary of
Enlightenment). This creates ever new terminological kaleido
{pes, as states (and the groups that seek to capture them) seek to
, fy populations whose own ethnoscapes are in motion, and
tose mediascapes may create severe problems for the ideoscapes
ith which they are presented. The fluidity of ideoscapes is compli
ted in particular by the growing diasporas (both voluntary and
voluntary) of intellectuals who continuously inject new meaning
reams into the discourse of democracy in different parts of the
[This extended terminological discussion of the five terms I have
~ined sets the basis for a tentative formulation about the conditions
nder which current global flows occur: they occur in and through
We growing disjunctures between ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finan
^apes, mediascapes and ideoscapes. This formulation, the core of
j model of global cultural flow, needs some explanation. First,
leoPle, machinery, money, images, and ideas now follow increas
ingly non-isomorphic paths. of course, at all periods in human
fiistory, there have been some disjunctures between the flows of
hese things, but the sheer speed, scale and volume of each of these
flows is now so great that the disjunctures have become central to
the politics of global culture. The Japanese are notoriously hospi
table to ideas-and are stereotyped as inclined to export (a"? and
import (some) goods, but they are also notoriously closed to Immi
ration, like the Swiss, the Swedes and the Saudis. Yet the Swlss and
Saudis accept populations of guestworkers, thus creating labor
S diasporas of Turks, Italians and other circum-mediterranean groups. l
Some such guestworker groups maintain continuous contact with .
it their home-nations, like the Turks, but others, like high-level South
9 Asian migrants tend to desire lives in their new homes, raising anew
F; the problem of reproduction in a deterritorialized context.
Deterritorialization, in general, is one of the central forces of the
modern world, since it brings laboring populations into the lower
class sectors and spaces of relatively wealthy societies, while some
times creating exaggerated and intensified senses of criticism or
attachment to politics in the home-state. Deterritorialization,
whether of Hindus, Sikhs, Palestinians or Ukranians, is now at the
core of a variety of global fundamentalisms, including Islamic
and Hindu fundamentalism. In the Hindu case for example (Appa
durai and Breckenridge, forthcoming) it is clear that the overseas

! 0. t .

l
ft I

302 Theory, Culture & Society

movement of Indians has been exploited by a variety of intJ
both within and outside India to create a complicated netwos
finances and religious identifications, in which the problem7
cultural reproduction for Hindus abroad has become tied toq
politics of Hindu fundamentalism at home. lX
At the same time, deterritorialization creates new marketsi
film companies, art impressarios and travel agencies, who thrivi
the need of the deterritorialized popuiation for contact withH
homeland. Naturally, these invented homelands, which constit
the mediascapes of deterritorialized groups, can often become sui
ciently fantastic and one-sided that they provide the material~tfc
new ideoscapes in which ethnic conflicts can begin to erupt ia
creation of 'Khalistan', an invented homeland of the deter
torialized Sikh population of England, Canada and the Unit
States, is one example of the bloody potential in such mediascaI
as they interact with the 'internal colonialisms' (Hechter, 1974)
the nation-state. The West Bank, Namibia and Eritrea are otl
theaters for the enactment of the bloody negotiation between exi
ing nation-states and various deterritorialized groupings
The idea of deterritorialization may also be applied to money a
finance, as money managers seek the best markets for their inve
ments, independent of national boundaries, In turn, these moS;
ments of monies are the basis of new kinds of conflict, as Ll
Angelenos worry about the Japanese buying up their city, ar
people in Bombay worry about the rich Arabs from the Gulf Statei
who have not only transformed the prices of mangoes in Bombay,
but have also substantially altered the profile of hotels, restaurants
and other services in the eyes of the local population, just as theyõ~
continue to do in London. Yet, most residents of Bombay are ambi~
valent about the Arab presence there, for the flip side of their
presence is the absence of friends and kinsmen earning big money iri}
the Middle East and bringing back both money and luxury commo-~
dities to Bombay and other cities in India. Such commodities trans-~
form cons_mer ta ts in these cities, and also often end up smuggled l
through air and sea ports and peddled in the gray markets of.
Bombay's streets. In these gray markets, some members of Bom-0:
bay's middle-classes and of its lumpenproletariat can buy some of
these goods, ranging from cartons of Marlboro cigarettes, to Old
Spice shaving cream and tapes of Madonna. Similarly gray routes,
often subsidized by the moonlighting activities of sailors, diplomats,
and airline stewardesses who get to move in and out of the country

Sppadurai, DifSerence in the Global Cultural Economy 303
,.

arly, keep the gray markets of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta
with goods not only from the West, but also from the Middle
'Hong Kong and Singapore.
is this fertile ground of deterritorialization, in which money,
nodities and persons are involved in ceaselessly chasing each
around the world, that the mediascapes and ideoscapes of the
ern world find their fractured and fragmented counterpart. For
deas and images produced by mass media often are only partial
es to the goods and experiences that deterritorialized popula-
transfer to one another. In Mira Nair's brilliant film, India
oret, we see the multiple loops of this fractured deterritorializa-
as young women, barely competent in Bombay s metropolitan
l , come to seek their fortunes as cabaret dancers and prostitutes
l ombay, entertaining men in clubs with dance formats derived
y from the prurient dance sequences of Hindi films. These
; cater in turn to ideas about Western and foreign women and
. ir 'looseness', while they provide tawdry career alibis for these
n. Some of these women come from Kerala, where cabaret

bs and the pornograpic film industry have blossomed, partly in
onse to the purses and tastes of Keralites returned from the
{ ddle East, where their ~;~ .: lives away from women distort
h r very sense of what the relations between men and women might
. These tragedies of displacement could certainly be replayed in a l
no e detailed analysis of the relations between the Japanese and l
m sex tours to Thailand and the tragedies of the sex trade in l
g angkok, and in other similar loops which tie together fantasies l
but the other, the conveniences and seductions of travel, the
nomics of global trade and the brutal mobility fantasies that
E ominate gender politics in many parts of Asia and the world at

2 While far more could be said about the cultural politics of erri-
ialization and the larger sociology of displacement that it l
sresses, it is appropriate at this juncture to bring in the role of the :1
9 ation-state in the disjunctive global economy of culture today. The \
W elationship between states and nations is everywhere an embattled t
| ne. It is possible to say that in many societies, the nation and the
[: tate have become one another's projects. That is, while nations (or
[t ore properly groups with ideas about nationhood) seek to capture
~ or co-opt states and state power, states simultaneously seek to
i~: apture and monopolize ideas about nationhood (Baruah, 1986;
ti hatterjee, 1986; Nandy, 1989). In general, separatist, transna

'.i

Sj;

: :d
. r~ i

~i
. \
i.

304 Theory, Culture & Society

l tional movements, including those which have included tel

, X

their methods, exemplify nations in search of states: SikhsM
Sri Lankans, Basques, Moros, Quebecois, each of these reS
imagined communities which seek to create states of their oiM
carve pieces out of existing states. States, on the other han~
everywhere seeking to monopolize the moral resources of coõn
nity, either by flatly claiming perfect coevality between natioM
state, or by systematically museumizing and representing all.;
groups within them in a variety of heritage politics that see
remarkably uniform throughout the world (Handler;-:
Herzfeld, 1982; McQueen, 1988). Here, national and internatiol .
mediascapes are exploited by nation-states to pacify separatistsS
even the potential fissiparousness of all ideas of differenS
Typically, contemporary nation-states do this by exercising tap
nomical control over difference; by creating various kinds of idteõ
national spectacle to domesticate difference; and by seducing sma
groups with the fantasy of self-display on some sort of globali85
cosmopolitan stage. One important new feature of global cultun
politics, tied to the disjunctive relationships between the vario~
landscapes discussed earlier, is that state and nation are at each'
throats, and the hyphen that links them is now less an iconst
conjuncture than an index of disjuncture. This disjunctive relatior
ship between nation and state has two levels: at the level of any give
nation-state, it means that there is a battle of the imagination, wit
state and nation seeking to cannibalize one another. Here is the seed
bed of brutal separatisms, majoritarianisms that seem to hav
appeared from nowhere, and micro-identities that have becom
political projects within the nation-state. At another level, thi
disjunctive relationship is deeply entangled with the global disjune
tures discussed throughout this essay: ideas of nationhood appear to~
be steadily increasing in scale and regularly crossing existing stat
boundaries: sometimes, as with the Kurds, because previous
identities stretched across vast national spaces, or, as with the~:8
Tamils in Sri Lanka, the dormant threads of a transnational !
diaspora have been activated to ignite the micro-politics of a nation--
state . .;
In discussing the cultural politics that have subverted the hyphen
that links the nation to the state, it is especially important not to
forget its mooring in the irregularities that now characterize T.
'disorganized capital' (Lash and Urry, 1987; Kothari, 1989). It is,
because labor, finance and technology are now so widely separated.

Appadurai, DifSerence in the Global Cultural Economy 305

at the volatilities that underlie movements for nationhood (as
rge as transnational Islam on the one hand, or as small as the
ovement of the Gurkhas for a separate state in the North-East of
dia) grind against the vulnerabilitities which characterize the rela-
nships between states. States find themselves pressed to stay
pen' by the forces of media, technology, and travel which had
:led consumerism throughout the world and have increased the
ving, even in the non-Western world, for new commodities and
ectacles. On the other hand, these very cravings can become
ght up in new ethnoscapes, mediascapes, and eventually, ideo-
pes, such as 'democracy' in China, that the state cannot tolerate
threats to its own control over ideas of nationhood and 'people-
od'. States throughout the world are under siege, especially where |
ntests over the ideoscapes of democracy a* fierce and funda- I
tal, and where there are radical disjunctures between ideoscapes

technoscapes (as in the case of very small countries that lack
eE ntemporary technologies of production and information); or
tween ideoscapes and finanscapes (as in countries, such as Mexico |
t Brazil where international lending influences national politics to |
'ry large degree); or between ideoscapes and ethnoscapes (as in |
[ irut, where diasporic, local and translocal filiations are suicidally \
1t battle); or between ideoscapes and mediascapes (as in many
F untries in the Middle East and Asia) where the lifestyles
t resented on both national and international TV and cinema
tf mpletely overwhelm and undermine the rhetoric of national
t: litics: in the Indian case, the myth of the law-breaking hero has
tv erged to mediate this naked struggle between the pieties and the
F alities of Indian politics, which has grown increasingly brutalized
t d corrupt (Vachani, 1989). /
| The transnational movement of the martial-^Arts, particularly
F t ough Asia, as mediated by the Hollywood and Hongkong film
:; ustries (Zarilli, forthcoming) is a rich illustration of the ways in
!4 hich long-standing martial arts traditions, reformulated to meet

t e fantasies of contemporary (sometimes lumpen) youth popula-
;. ti ns, create new cultures of masculinity and violence, which are in
5 t rn the fuel for increased violence in national and international
d p litics. Such violence is in turn the spur to an increasingly rapid and
a oral arms trade which penetrates the entire world. The world-
w de spread of the AK-47 and the Uzi, in films, in corporate and
state security, in terror, and in police and military activity, is a
reminder that apparently simple technical uniformities often

)

conceal an increasingly complex set of loops, linking image
violence to aspirations for community in some 'imagined worl
Returning then to the 'ethnoscapes' with which I began
central paradox of ethnic politics in today's world is that primo
(whether of language or skin color or neighborhood or of kin
have become globalized. That is, sentiments whose greatest for
in their ability to ignite intimacy into a political sentiment and
locality into a staging ground for identity, have become spread
vast and irregular spaces, as groups move, yet stay linked to
another through sophisticated media capabilities. This is not to c
that such primordia are often the product of invented tradit
(Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983) or retrospective affiliations, bl
emphasize that because of the disjunctive and unstable interpl
of commerce, media, national policies and consumer fantas
ethnicity, once_a genie contained in the bottle of some sorl
!ocality_(howeve_large)_has now become a global_force, fore
slipping in and through the cracks between states and borders.
But the relationship between the cultural and economic levels
this new set of global disjunctures is not a simple one-way stree
which the terms of global cultural politics are set wholly by,
confined wholly within, the vicissitudes of international flows'
technology, labor and finance, demanding only a modest modifil
tion of existing neo-Marxist models of uneven development a
state-formation. There is a deeper change, itself driven by t
disjunctures between all the landscapes I have discussed, and .
constituted by their continuously fluid and uncertain interplay, _
which concerns the relationship between production and consum
tion in today's global economy. Here I begin with Marx's famous
(and often mined) view of the fetishism of the commodity, and .
suggest that this fetishism has been replaced in the world at largc'
(now seeing the world as one, large, interactive system, composed of !;~
many complex sub-systems) by two mutually supportive descen- I
dants, the first of which I call production etishisrn, and the second
of which I call the fetishism of the conNsumer.
By production fetishism I mean an illusion created by contem-
porary transnational production loci, which masks translocal .
capital, transnational earning-flows, global management~n
faraway workers (engaged in various kinds of high-tech putting out 1
operations) in the idiom and spectacle of local (sometimes even
worker) control, national productivity and territorial sovereignty.
To the extent that various kinds of Free Trade Zone have become

; Appadurai, Difference in the Clobal Cultural Economy 307

e models for production at large, especially of high-tech commo- l
ies, production has itself become a fetish, masking not social rela- |
ns as such, but the relations of production~which are increasingly l
nsnational. The locality (both in the sense of the local factory or
¥ of production and in the extended sense of the nation-state)
:omes a fetish which disguises the globally dispersed forces that
ually drive the production process. This generates alienation
Marx's sense) twice intensified, for its social sense is now
npounded by a complicated spatial dynamic which is increasingly
obal.
Ss for the fetishism of the consumer, l mean to indicate here that
e consumer has been transformed, through commodity flows (and
b mediascapes, especially of advertising, that accompany them)
D a sign, both in Baudrillard's sense of a simulacrum which only
mptotically approaches the form of a real social agent; and in the
ense of a mask for the real seat of agency, which is not the
onsumer but the producer and the many forces that constitute
roduction. Global advertising is the key technology for the world
f ide dissemination~'of''aHhora of creative, and culturally well-
[ hosen, ideas of consumer agency. These images of agency are
[;1 creasingly distortions of a world of merchandising so subtle~t
consumer is consistently helped to believe that he or she is an

or, where in fact he or she is at best a chooser._
rhe globalization of culture is not the same as its homogeniza-
. ion, but globalization involves the use of a variety of instruments
!: f homogenization (armaments, advertising techniques, language
723 egemonies, clothing styles and the like), which are absorbed into
k l cal political and cultural economies, only to be repatriated as
erogeneous dialogues of national sovereignty, free enterprise,
i ndamentalism, etc. in which the state plays an increasingly
elicate role: too much openness to global flows and the nation-state
is threatened by revoltÑthe China syndrome; too little, and the
state exits the international stage, as Burma, Albania and North
Korea, in various ways have done. In general, the state has become
the arbiter of this repatriation of difference (in the form of goods,
signs, slogans, styles, etc.). But this repatriation or export of the
designs and commodities of difference continuously exacerbates the
'internal' politics of majoritarianism and homogenization, which is
most frequently played out in debates over heritage.
Thus the central feature of global culture today is the politics of
thP mutual effort of sameness and difference to cannibalize one

t /

- ;e
308 Theory, Culture & Society

another and thus to proclaim their succeSful hijacking Od
Enlightenment ideas Of the triumphantly universal and
iently particular. This mutual cannibalization shows its U8~
riots, in refugee-flows, in state-sponsored torture and in eid
(with or without state support). Its brighter side is in the eQl
7 of many individual horizons Of hope and fantasy, in tfili
spread of oral rehydration therapy and other low-tech instM
of Well-berg, in the susceptibility even of South Africa to {it
of global opinion, in the inability of the Polish state to r~
Own working-classes, and in the growth of a wide range of
sive, transnational alliances. Examples of both sorts could b~
| plied, The critical point is that both sides Of the coin of^t/
I cultural process today are products of the infinitely varied t
\ contest Of sameness and difference on a stage characterize~
\ radical disjunctures between different sorts Of global flows anX
\ uncertain landscapes created in and through these disjunctur~
tS
Notes ;~
A longer version of this essay appears in Public Culture 2 (2) Spring 1990~
longer version sets the present formulation in the context of global cultural trafi.
earlier historical periods, and draws out some of its implications for the siuS
cultural forms more generally
_ ' .f-s

I . One major exception is Fredric Jameson, whose ( 1984) essay on the relations
between postmodernism and late capitalism has in many ways, inspired this eit
However, the debate between Jameson (1986) and Ahmad (1987) in Social Textsht
that the creation of a globaliz ng Marxist narrative, in cultural matters, is difrc_
territory indeed. My own effort, in this context, is to begin a restructuring ofS
Marxist narrative (by stressing lags and disjunctures) that many Marxists might tt
abhorrent. Such a restructuring has to avoid the dangers of obliterating differet
within the 'third world', of eliding the social referent (as some French postmoderniS
seem inclined to do) and of retaining the narrative authority of the Marxist tradittoi
in favar of greater attention to global fragmentation, uncertainty and difference,Ji
2 These ideas are argued more tully in a~ok I am currently working on, tent
tively entitled Imploding Worlds: Imagination and Disjuncture in the clobeV
Cultural Economy. -;;

:,d,~
.:~,,~
References i

Ahmad, A. (1987) 'Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the "National Allegory';::
Social Texl 17: 3-25. :i; iY
Amin, S. ( 1980) Class and Nation: Historically and in the Current Crisis. New York Z
and London: Monthly Review. Irq

)

ppadurai, Difference in the Clobal Cultural Economy 309

on, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
onelism. London: Verso,
uirai, A. (1989) 'Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational
hropolo9y', in R.G. Fox (ed.), Interventions: Anthropology of the Present.
urai, A. and Breckenridge, C.A. (forthcoming) A Transnational Culture m
Making: The Asian Indian Diaspora in the United States. London: Berg.
K. (1987) 'Popular Arts in Africa', African Studies Review 30(3).
tah, S. (1986) 'Immigration, Ethnic Conflict and Political Turmoil, Assam
41985 Asian Survey 26 (11).
rjee, P. (1986) Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative
ourse. London: Zed Books.
S. (1988) 'Notes on World Beat', Public Culture 1(1): 31-7.
hi,, Eric (1985) The End of Culture: Toward a Cenerative Anthropology.
berkeley- University of California.
,%ildink, C. (1983) Cultural Autonomy in Global Communications. New York:

lalzndler R. (1988) Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec. Madison:
1~7university of Wisconsin.
Isannerz, U. (1987) 'The World in Creolization,' Africa 57(4): 546-59.
Nannerz, U. (1989) 'Notes on the Global Ecumene', Public Culture 1(2): 66-75.
[echter, M. (1974) Interna/ Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National
W Development, 1536-1966. Berkeley and Los Angdes: University of California.
iMerzfeld, M. (1982) Ours Once More: Folklore Ideology and the Making of Modern
Greece. Austin: University of Texas.
||~Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. (eds) (1983) The Invention of Tradition. New York:
Columbia University Press.
~Ivy, M. (1988) 'Tradition and Difference in the Japanese Mass Media', Public
; Culture 1(1): 21-9.
lyer, P. (1988) Video Night in Kathmandu New York: Knopf.
~Jameson, F. (1984) 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', New
[ Left Review 146 (July-August): 53-92.
tJameson, F. (1986) 'Third World Literature in the Era of Multi-National Capital-
; ism Social Text 15 (Fall): 65-88.
' Kothari, R. (1989) State Against Democracy: In Search of Humane Covernance.
r - New York: New Horizons.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London:
D University of Chicago,
r Lash, S. and Urry, J . (1987) The End of Organized Capitalism. Madison: University
;$ of Wisconsin.
r McQueen, H. (1988) 'The Australian StamF: Image, Design and Ideology', Arena 84
1=: Spring: 78-96.
t Mandel, E. (1978) Late Capitalism. London: Verso.
r Mattelart, A. (1983) Transnationals and Third World: The Struggle for Culture.
| South Hadley MA: Bergin and Garvey.
| Nandy, A. (1989; 'The Political Culture of the Indian State', Daedalus 118(4): I-26.
t i Nicoll, F. ( I989) ' My Trip to Alice', Criticism Heresy and Interpretation (CHA 1) 3:
[ Schiller, H. (1976) Communication and Cultural Domination. White Plains, NY:
g International Arts and Sciences.

- ) )

Ñle 4
: F 25e
if the Ogtsider Formul ', MA thesis, The Annenberg School of Cornmunia

London Acadenlic Press. ork
Warner, M. (1990) The Letters of the Republic: Pub/ication and the Public Sp
Wllliams R. (1976) Keywords. New Yorl:: Oxford. ~';

Yoshimoto, M. (1989) 'The Postmodern and Mass Images in Japan', Public Cu
I a Asian 1~\r~ n C A Breck ridge, (ed.), Producing the PgslLoh

f.,,

~h Asian Stl dies

310 Theory, Culture & Societv

....,.6@ ~;lasulJuge umverSlty Press, 1986).

.. ;S
.1
,. t
.::

F 6
~i

~ '
~ ~ Li

. 1.
.

.
:
,, Being in the World: Globalization and

Localization

Jonathan Friedman

bm 1970 to 1980 the population of Nortn American Inalans
creased from 700,000 to 1.4 million including the creation of
eral new tribes. The world network of stockmarkets are overcapi-
ized and lodged on the fluctuating brink of the threatening crash
1990. The governments are there to stem disaster, by means of
Issive credit, whatever problem that may solve. In the Eastern
loc, large scale ethnic mobilization threatens the monolithic face of
pire while presenting new and even less manageable problems.
le same T-shin designs from Acapulco, Mallorca or Hawaii; the
ne watch and computer clones with different names, even Gucci
.. , the nostalgic turn in the tourist trade, catering to a search for
ots, even if largely simulacra, and the western search for the expe-
rience of otherness. Ethnic and cultural fragmentation and
modernist homogenization are not two arguments, two opposing
views of what is happening in the world today, but two constitutive
rends of global reality. The dualist centralized world of the double
ast-West hegemony is fragmenting, politically, and culturally, but
he homogeneity of capitalism remains as intact and as systematic as
er. The cultural and by implication intellectual fragmentation of
he world has undermined any attempt at a single interpretation of
he current situation. We have been served everything from post-

ndustrialism, late capitalism and post-modernism (as a purely
ultural phenomenon expressive of an evolution of western
apitalist society), to more sinister traditionalist representations of
he decline of western civilization, of creeping narcissism, moral
decay etc. For years there has been a rampaging battle among
intellectuals concerning the pros and cons of postmodernity, while
imperialism theorists have become addicted admirers of all sorts of
social movements, and the development elites have shifted interests,

eory, Culture & Sociefy (SAGE, London, Newbury Park and New Delhi), Vol. 7
1990), 311-328
1,
..,~
;.0.t

,. t
'4
' ;%E
.US
: i

¥ s
~ '
- ws
BAUDRY: IDEOLOGICALEFFECTS 531

another, and thus can be understood by reference to that other (e.g., the cinema-
viewing situation and the mirror stage), l am claiming to establish the unity of
one area by finding it reRected in another. As in the relationship between the child
and his mirror image, however, l must deny the differences implicit in the reflec-
tion in order to create that unity. It is thus only by adopting an Imaginary dis-
course himself that Metz is able to demonstrate that cinema has an Imaginary
signifier. As a method of reasoning, analogy presents the constant danger that
critical language will remain a prisoner of Imaginary relationships.

Baudry, Jean-Louis. "Ideological Effects of the Basic
CinematographicApparatus." FromMoviesand
Methods, Volume 11: An Antholouv. Bill Nichols, Editor.
Unõversity of California Press, 1985 (Regents of the
University of California). Pages 531-542.

IDEOLOGICAL EFFECTS
OF THE BASIC
CINEMATOGRAPHIC
APPARATUS

JEAN-LOUIS BAUDRY

In this seminal article, Jean-Louis Baudry, like many others in this volume, uses
an analogy to develop the implications of his argument. Baudry claims that the
masking of social contradiction and difference in the cinema resembles the
masking of our perception of still images by the illusion of movement. Baudry
elabor ates on the basic concept of apparent movement to construct an imposing
theoretical argument. He draws from Louis Althusser the idea that relations
to r eal conditions which do not help us to realize how those relations were
constructed are ipso facto ideological. They lack the "knowledge effect" that a
realizatioll of their production would entail. This idea allows Baudry to posit that
the cinema, based as it is on an ilhxsion of movement that we mistake for actual
movement, is based on a fundamentally ideological effect.
Baudl-y turns to Jac4ues Lacan to demonstrate that this ideological effect

involves constituting the viewer as o transcendental subject or imaginary unity.
The ('OlllillU010 unfiuling of a univel se beybre our eyes at the cinerna c onfrrrms our
own centl-cllity: When our vision r ooms freely, liberatedf iom the body, the world
exists f br it. Our sight is the world 's point of origin and its sourf e of coherence.
Baudry summarizes Locall's notion of the mir r ol stage, likening it to our
expel-ience at the cinema, where we identify not only with charactel s but also with
the camera as the surrogate fbr our desire for order, organization, and unity. We
want a n ar r ative that makes sense of d isparate experiences, that conf rms the self
as the transcerldent, all-knowing center of the world.
o

532 PSYCHOANALYTIC SEMIOTICS

This turn toward Lacan and the psychoanalytic approach also turns us toward
ideology, but ideology here remains at some remove from c instances In the
political, economic, or social arenas. It is an ideology of the subyect and of
subjectivity, which certainly underpins c ideologies of class, gender, race,
and nationality but which in isolation leads to an idealist conception of the subyect
or ego apart from c historical cond itions. Some, like Nick Browne, argue
that such generalized effects fail to account for parterns of varied and conflictual
ideological effect at particular levels of textual analysis. If Browne is right,
Baudry's presentation shows that Altman's strictures about analogy are correct:
The presentation constructs an imaginary coherence for the cinema by positing
an attractive analogy in which the cinema masks d ifference in a way that
resembles the masking of d ifference in the mirror-stage. Thus, Baudry's argument
may be compelling and satisfying precisely because of its own effect, which is one
of producing an imaginary unity for cinema. But, even if his analogy is
overextended, Baudry may also be right: The potenrial of cinema for the
production of knowledge may be severely constrained by the nature of the
apparatus. That this apparatus renders the production of knowledge completely
impossible, as Baudry seems to imply, remains very muc h in doubt. (The
translation published here is a revised version of the one that appeared in Film
Quarterly 28, no. 2 [ Winter 1974-19751.

^ pvPnt their being questioned.

)

BAUDRY: IDEOLOGICALEFFECTS 533

But already a question: if we are to take account of the imperfections of these
instruments, their limitations, by what criteria may these be defined? If, for exam-
ple, one can speak of a restricted depth of field as a limitation, doesn't this term
itself depend on a particular conception of reality for which such a limitation
would not exist? Contemporary media are particularly in question here, to the
extent that instrumentation plays a more and more important role in them and that
their distribution is more and more extensive. It is strange (but is it so strange?)
that emphasis has been placed almost exclusively on their influence, on the effects
that they have as finished products, their content, the field of the signified if you
like; the technical bases on which these effects depend and the specific character-
istics of these bases have, however, been ignored. They have been protected by
the inviolability that science is supposed to provide. We would like to establish for
the cinema a few guidelines which will need to be completed, verified, improved
We must first establish the place of the instrumental base in the set of opera
tions which combine in the production of a film (we omit consideration of eco
nomic implications). Between "objective reality" and the camera, site of inscrip-
tion, and between the inscription and projection are situated certain operations, a
work which has as its result a finished product. To the extent that it is cut off from
the raw material ("objective reality") this product does not allow us to see the
transformation which has taken place.
Equally distant from "objective reality" and the finished product, the camera
occupies an intermediate position in the work process which leads from raw mate-

rial to finished product. Though mutually dependent from other points of view
clecoupage lshot breakdown before shooting] and montczge [editing, done af-
terwards] must be distinguished because of the essential difference in the signif
ing raw material on which each operates: language (scenario) or image. Between
the two complementary stages of production a mutation of signifying material
takes place (neither translation nor transcription, obviously, for the image is not
reducible to language) precisely in the place occupied by the carnera. Finally
between the finished product (possessing exchange value, a commodity) and its
consumption (use value) is introduced another operation effected by a set of in-
struments. Projector and screen restore the light lost in the shooting process and
transform a succession of separate images into an unrolling which also restores
but according to another scansion, the movement seized from "objective real ity.'
Cinematographic specificity thus refers to a work, that is, to a process of trans-
formation. The question becomes: is the work made evident, does consumption
of the product bring about a "knowledge effect" lAlthusser], or is the work con-
cealed? If the latter, consumption of the product will obviously be accompanied
by ideological surplus value. On the practical level, this poses the question of by
what procedures the work can in fact be made "readable" in its inscription
These procedures must of necessity call cinematographic technique into pla
But, on the other hand, going back to the first question, one may ask, do the
mstruments (the technical base) produce specific ideological effects, and are
these effects themselves determined by the dominant ideology? In which case
concealment of the technical base will also bring about an inevitable ideologicai
534 PSYCHOANALYTIC SEMIOTICS

effect. Its inscription, its manifestation as such, on the other hand, would produce
a knowledge effect, as actualization ofthe work process, as denunciation of ideol-
ogy, and as critique of idealism.

THE EYE OF THE SUBJECT

Central in the process of production3 Of the film, the cameraÑan assem-
bly of optical and mechanical instrumentationÑcarries out a certain mode of
inscription characterized by marking, by the recording of differences of light
intensity (and of wavelength for color) and of differences between the frames.
Fabricated on the model of the camera obscura, it permits the construction of an
image analogous to the perspective projections developed during the Italian Ren-
aissance. Of course the use of lenses of different focal lengths can alter the per-
spective of an image. But this much, at least, is clear in the history of cinema: it is
the perspective construction of the Renaissance which originally served as
model. The use of different lenses, when not dictated by technical considerations
aimed at restoring habitual perspective (such as shooting in limited or extended
spaces which one wishes to expand or contract), does not destroy [traditional]
perspective but rather makes it play the role of norm. Departure from the norm,
by means of a wide-angle or telephoto lens, is clearly marked in comparison with
so-called "normal" perspective. We will see in any case that the resulting ideo-
logical effect is still defined in relation to the ideology inherent in perspective.
The dimensions of the image itself, the ratio between height and width, seem
clearly taken from an average drawn from Western easel painting.
The conception of space which conditions the construction of perspective in
the Renaissance differs from that of the Greeks. For the latter, space is discontin-
uous and heterogeneous (for Aristotle, but also for Democritus, for whom space
is the location of an infinity of indivisible atoms), whereas with Nicholas of Cusa
will be born a conception of space formed by the relation between elements which
are equally near and distant from the " source of all lite." In addition, the pictorial
construction of the Greeks corresponded to the organization of their stage, based
on a multiplicity of points of view, whereas the painting of the Renaissance will
elaborate a centered space. (" Painting is nothing but the intersection of the visual
pyramid following a given distance, a fixed center, and a certain lighting."ÑAl-
berti.) The center of this space coincides with the eye which Jean Pellerin Viator
will so appropriately call the "subject." ("The principal point in perspective
should be placed at eye level: this point is called fixed or subject."4) Monocular
vision, which as Pleynet points out is what the camera has, calls forth a sort of
play of "reflection." Based on the principle of a fixed point by reference to which

the visualized objects are organized, it specifies in return the position of the ' sub-
ject,"5 the very spot it must necessarily occupy.
In focusing it, the optical construct appears to be truly the projection-reflec-
tion of a "virtual image" whose hallucinatory reality it creates. It lays out the
space of an ideal vision and in this way asserts the necessity of a transcendenceÑ
metaphorically (by the unknown to which it appeals; here we must recall the
structural place occupied by the vanishing point) and metonymically (by the dis

BAUDRY: IDEOLOGICAL EFFECTS 535

placement that it seems to carry out; a subject is both " in place of " and " a part for
the whole"). Contrary to Chinese and Japanese painting, Western easel painting
presenting as it does a motionless and continuous whole, elaborates a total vision
which corresponds to the idealist conception of the fullness and homogeneity of
"being,"6 and is, so to speak, representative of this conception. In this sense it
contributes in a singularly emphatic way to the ideological function of art, which
is to provide the tangible representation of metaphysics. The principle of tran-
scendence which conditions and is conditioned by the perspective construction
represented in painting and in the photographic image which copies from it
seems to inspire all the idealist paeans to which the cinema has given rise:

This strange mechanism, parodying man's spirit, seems better to accomplish the latter's
own tasks. This mimetic play, brother and rival of the intelligence, is, finally, a means of
the discovery of Truth. (Cohen-Seat)
Far from leading us down the path of determinism, as one could legitimately believe
this artÑthe most positive of all, insensible to all that is not brute fact, pure appearanceÑ
presents us on the contrary the idea of a hierarchical universe, ordered in terms of an
ultimate end. Behind what film gives us to see, it is not the existence of atoms that we are
led to seek, but rather the existence of an 'other world' of phenomena, of a soul or of any
other spiritual principle. It is in this revelation, above all, of a spiritual presence, that I
propose we seek Poetry. (Andre Bazin)

PROJECTION: DIFFERENCE DENIED

Nevertheless, whatever the effects proper to optics generally, the movie
camera differs from still photography by registering through its mechanical in-
strumentation a series of images. It might thus seem to counter the unifying and
"substantializing" character of the single-perspective image, taking what would
seem to be instants of time or slices from " reality" (but always a reality already
worked upon, elaborated, selected). This might permit the supposition, espe-
cially since the camera moves, of a multiplicity of points of view which would
neutralize the fixed position of the eye-subject and even nullify it. But here we
must turn to the relation between the succession of images inscribed by the cam-
era and their projection, bypassing momentarily the place occupied by editing
which plays a decisive role in the strategy of the ideology produced.
The projection operation (projector and screen) restores continuity of move-
ment and the temporal dimension to the sequence of static images. The relation
between the individual frames and the projection would resemble the relation
between points and a curve in geometry. But it is precisely this relation and the
restoration of continuity to discontinuous elements which poses a problem. The
meaning effect produced does not depend only on the content of the images but
also on the material procedures by which an illusion of continuity, dependent on
persistence of vision, is restored from discontinuous elements. These separate
frames have between them differences that are indispensable for the creation of
an illusion of continuity, of continuous passage (movement, time). But only on
one condition can these differences create this illusion: they must be effaced as
differences.7
Thus on the technical level the question becomes one of the adoption of a very

53p PSYCHOANALYTIC SEMIOTICS

small difference between images, such that each image, in consequence of an
organic factor [presumably persistence of visionl, is rendered incapable of being
seen as such. In this sense we could say that filmÑand perhaps this case is exem-
plaryÑlives on the denial of difference: differences are necessary for it to live,
but it lives on their negation. This is indeed the paradox that emerges if we look
directly at a strip of processed film: adjacent images are almost exactly repeated,
their divergence being verifiable only by comparison of images at a sufficient
distance from each other. We should remember, moreover, the disturbing effects
which result during a projection from breakdowns in the recreation of movement,
when the spectator is brought abruptly back to discontinuityÑthat is, to the
body, to the technical apparatus which he had forgotten.
We might not be far from seeing what is in play on this material basis if we
recall that the " language" of the unconscious, as it is found in dreams, slips of the
tongue, or hysterical symptoms, manifests itself as continuity destroyed, broken,
and as the unexpected surging forth of a marked difference. Couldn' t we thus say
that cinema reconstructs and forms the mechanical model (with the simplifica-
tions that this can entail) of a system of writing [ecrirure] constituted by a material
base and a counter-system (ideology, idealism) which uses this system while also
concealing it? On the one hand, the optical apparatus and the film permit the
marking of difference (but the marking is already negated, we have seen, in the
constitution of the perspective image with its mirror effect). On the other hand,
the mechanical apparatus both selects the minimal difference and represses it in
projection, so that meaning can be constituted; it is at once direction, continuity,
movement. The projection mechanism allows the differential elements (the dis-
continuity inscribed by the camera) to be suppressed, bringing only the relation
into play. The individual images as such disappear so that movement and continu-
ity can appear. But movement and continuity are the visible expression (one
might even say the projection) of their relations, derived from the tiny discontinu-
ities between the images. Thus one may presume that what was already at work as
the originating basis of the perspective image, namely the eye, the "subject," is
put forth, liberated (in the sense that a chemical reaction liberates a substance) by
the operation which transforms successive, discrete images (as isolated images
they have, strictly speaking, no meaning, or at least no unity of meaning) into
continuity, movement, meaning. With continuity restored, both meaning and
consciousness are restored.8

THE TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECT

Meaning and consciousness, to be sure: at this point we must return to
the camera. Its mechanical nature not only permits the shooting of differential
images as rapidly as desired but also destines it to change position, to move. Fihn
history shows that, as a result of the combined inertia of painting, theater, and
photography, it took a certain time to notice the inherent mobility of the cine-
matic mechanism. The ability to reconstitute movement is after all only a partial,
elementary aspect of a more general capability. To seize movement is to become

BAUDRY: IDEOLOGICAL EFFECTS 537

movement, to follow a trajectory is to become trajectory, to choose a direction is
to have the possibilityofchoosingone, to determine a meaning is to giveoneselfa
meaning. In this way the eye-subject, the invisible base of artificial perspective
(which in fact only represents a larger effort to produce an ordering, regulated
transcendence) becomes absorbed in, "elevated" to a vaster function, propor-
tional to the movement which it can perform.
And if the eye which moves is no longer fettered by a body, by the laws of
matter and time, if there are no more assignable limits to its displacementÑ
conditions fulfilled by the possibilities of shooting and of filmÑthe world will not
only be constituted by this eye but for it.9 The movability of the camera seems to
fulfill the most favorable conditions for the manifestation of the "transcendental
subject." There is a fantasmatization of objective reality (images, sounds, col-
ors)Ñbut of an objective reality which, limiting its powers of constraint, seems
equally to augment the possibilities or the power of the subject.le As it is said of
consciousnessÑand in point of fact we are concerned with nothing lessÑthe
image will always be image of something; it must result from a deliberate act of

consciousness lvisee intentionellel. "The word intentionality signifies nothing
other than this peculiarity that consciousness has of being consciousness of some-
thing, of carrying in its quality of ego its cogitatum within itself."" In such a
definition could perhaps be found the status of the cinematographic image, or
rather of its operation, the mode of working which it carries out. For it to be an
image of something, it has to constitute this something as meaning. The image
seems to reflect the world but solely in the naive inversion of a founding hierar-
chy: "The domain of natural existence thus has only an authority of the second
order, and always presupposes the domain of the transcendental ~12
The world is no longer only an "open and indeterminate horizon." Limited by
the framing, lined up, put at the proper distance, the world offers up an object
endowed with meaning, an intentional object, implied by and implying the action
of the "subject" which sights it. At the same time that the world's transfer as
image seems to accomplish this phenomenological reduction, this putting into
parentheses of its real existence (a suspension necessary, we will see, to the for-
mation of the impression of reality) provides a basis for the apodicity'3 of the ego.
The multiplicity of aspects of the object in view refers to a synthesizing opera-
tion, to the unity of this constituting subject: Husserl speaks of " 'aspects,' some-
times of 'proximity,' sometimes of 'distance,' in variable modes of 'here' and
'there,' opposed to an absolute 'here' (which is locatedÑfor meÑin 'my own
body' which appears to me at the same time), the consciousness of which, though
it remains unperceivefl, always accompanies them. lWe will see moreover what
happens with the body in the mise-en-scene of projection.ÑJ.-L. B.1 Each
'aspect' which the mind grasps is revealed in turn as a unity synthesized from a
multiplicity of corresponding modes of presentation. The nearby object may
present itself as the same, but under one or another 'aspect.' There may be varia-
tion of visual perspective, but also of 'tactile,' 'acoustic' phenomena, or of other
'modes of presentation"4 as we can observe in directing our attention in the
proper direction ." '5
538 PSYCHOANALYTIC SEMIOTICS

For Husserl, "the original operation [of intentional analysis] is to unmask the
potentialities implied in present states of consciousness. And it is by this that will
be carried out, from the noematic point of view, the eventual explication, defini-
rion, and elucidation of what is meant by consciousness, that is, its objective
meaning"" And again in the Cartesian Meditations: " A second type of polariza-
tion now presents itself to us, another type of synthesis which embraces the
particular multiplicities of cogitationes, which embraces them all and in a special
manner, namely as cogitariones of an identical self which, active or passive, lives
in all the lived states of consciousness and which, through them, relates to all
objects." '7
Thus is articulated the relation between the continuity necessary to the consti-
tution of meaning and the " subject" which constitutes this meaning: continuity is
an attribute of the subject. It supposes the subject and it circumscribes its place. It
appears in the cinema in the two complementary aspects of a " formal" continu-
ity established through a system of negated differences and narrative continuity in
the filmic space. The latter, in any case, could not have been conquered without
exercising violence against the instrumental base, as can be discovered from most
of the texts by film-makers and critics: the discontinuity that had been effaced at
the level of the image could have reappeared on the narrative level, giving rise to
effects of rupture disturbing to the spectator (to a place which ideology must both
conquer and, in the degree that it already dominates it, must also satisfy: fill).
"What is important in a film is the feeling of continuity which joins shots and
sequences while maintaining unity and cohesion of movements. This continuity
was one of the most difficult things to obtain."'8 Pudovkin defined montage as
"the art of assembling pieces of film, shot separately, in such a way as to give the
spectator the impression of continuous movement." The search for such narrative
continuity, so difficult to obtain from the material base, can only be explained by
an essential ideological stake projected in this point: it is a question of preserving
at any cost the synthetic unity of the locus where meaning originates [the sub-
ject]Ñthe constituting transcendental function to which narrative continuity
points back as its natural secretion.'9

THE SCREEN-MIRROR: SPECULARIZATION
AND DOUBLE IDENTIFICATION

But another supplementary operation (made possible by a special tech-
nical arrangement) must be added in order that the mechanism thus described can
play its role effectively as an ideological machine, so that not only the reworked
"objective reality" but also the specific type of identification we have described
can be represented.
No doubt the darkened room and the screen bordered with black like a letter of
condolences already present privileged conditions of effectivenessÑno ex-
change, no circulation, no communication with any outside. Projection and
reflection take place in a closed space and those who remain there, whether they
know it or not (but they do not), find themselves chained, captured, or captivated.

BAUDRY: IDEOLOGICAL EFFECTS 539

(What might one say of the function of the head in this captivation: it suffices to
recall that for Bataille materialism makes itself headlessÑlike a wound that
bleeds and thus transfuses.) And the mirror, as a reflecting surface, is framed
limited, circumscribed. An infinile mirror woulbl no longer be a mirror. The para-
doxical nature of the cinematic mirror-screen is without doubt that it reflects
images but not " reality"; the word reflect, being transitive, leaves this ambiguity
unresolved. In any case this "reality" comes from behind the spectator's head and
if he looked at it directly he would see nothing except the moving beams from an
already veiled light source.
The arrangement of the different elementsÑprojector, darkened hall
screenÑin addition to reproducing in a striking way the mise-en-scene of Plato's
cave (prototypical set for all transcendence and the topological model of ideal-
ism20) reconstructs the situation necessary to the release of the "mirror stage"
discovered by Lacan. This psychological phase, which occurs between six and
eighteen months of age, generates via the mirror image of a unified body the
constitution or at least the first sketches of the " I" as an imaginary function . " It is
to this unreachable image in the mirror that the specular image gives its gar-
ments."2' But for this imaginaryconstitutionofthe self to be possible, there must
beÑLacan strongly emphasizes this pointÑtwo complementary conditions: im-
mature powers of mobility and a precocious maturation of visual organization
(apparent in the first few days of life). If one considers that these two conditions are
repeated during cinematographic projectionÑsuspension of mobility and predom-
inance of the visual functionÑperhaps one could suppose that this is more than a
simple analogy. And possibly this very point explains the " impression of reality" so
often invoked in connection with the cinema for which the various explanations
proposed seem only to skirt the real problem. In order for this impression to be
produced, it would be necessary that the conditions of a formative scene be repro-
duced. This scene would be repeated and reenacted in such a manner that the imagi-
nary order (activated by a specularization which takes place, everything consid-
ered, in reality) fulfills its particular function of occultation orof filling the gap, the
split, of the subject on the order of the signifier.22
On the other hand, it is to the extent that the child can sustain the look of
another in the presence of a third party that he can find the assurance of an identi-
fication wit h the image of his own body. From t he very fact that during the mirror
stage is established a dual relationship, it constitutes, in conjunction with the
formation of the self in the imaginary order, the nexus of secondary identifica-
tion.23 The origin of the self, as discovered by Lacan, in pertaining to the imagi-
nary order effectively subverts the "optical machinery" of idealism which the
projection room scrupulously reproduces.24 But it is not as specifically "imagi-
nary," nor as a reproduction of its first configuration, that the self finds a "place"
in the cinema. This occurs, rather, as a sort of proof or verification of that func-
tion, a solidification through repetition.
The "reality" mimed by the cinema is thus first of all that of a "self." But
because the reflected image is not that of the body itself but that of a world al-
ready given as meaning, one can distinguish two levels of identification. The first,

540 PSYCHOANALYTIC SEMIOTICS

attached to the image itself, derives from the character portrayed as a center of
secondary identifications, carrying an identity which constantly must be seized
and reestablished. The second level permits the appearance of the first and places
it "in action"Ñthis is the transcendental subject whose place is taken by the
camera which constitutes and rules the objects in this " world." Thus the spectator
identifies less with what is represented, the spectacle itself, than with what stages
the spectacle, makes it seen, obliging him to see what it sees; this is exactly the
function taken over by the camera as a sort of relay.25 Just as the mirror assembles
the fragmented body in a sort of imaginary integration of the self, the transcen-
dental self unites the discontinuous fragments of phenomena, of lived experience,
into unifying meaning. Through it each fragment assumes meaning by being inte-
grated into an "organic" unity. Between the imaginary gathering of the frag-
mented body into a unity and the transcendentality of the self, giver of unifying
meaning, the current is indefinitely reversible.
The ideological mechanism at work in the cinema seems thus to be concen-
trated in the relationship between the camera and the subject. The question is
whether the former will permit the latter to constitute and seize itself in a particu-
lar mode of specular reflection. Ultimately, the forms of narrative adopted, the
"contents" of the image, are of little importance so long as an identification
remains possible.26 What emerges here (in outline) is the specific function
fulfilled by the cinema as support and instrument of ideology. It constitutes the
" subject" by the illusory delimitation of a central locationÑwhether this be that
of a god or of any other substitute. It is an apparatus destined to obtain a precise
ideological effect, necessary to the dominant ideology: creating a fantasmatiza-
tion of the subject, it collaborates with a marked efficacy in the maintenance of
idealism.
Thus the cinema assumes the role played throughout Western history by vari-
ous artistic formations. The ideology of representation (as a principal axis orient-
ing the notion of aesthetic "creation") and specularization (which organizes the
mise-en-scene required to constitute the transcendental function) form a singu-
larly coherent system in the cinema. Everything happens as if, the subject him-
self being unableÑand for a reasonÑto account for his own situation, it was
necessary to substitute secondary organs, grafted on to replace his own defective
ones, instruments or ideological formations capable of filling his function as sub-
ject. In fact, this substitution is only possible on the condition that the instrumen-
tation itself be hidden or repressed. Thus disturbing cinematic elementsÑsimi-
lar, precisely, to those elements indicating the return of the repressedÑsignify
without fail the arrival of the instrument " in flesh and blood," as in Vertov's Man
with a Movie Camel w. Both specular tranquillity and the assurance of one's own
identity collapse simultaneously with the revealing of the mechanism, that is, of
the inscription of the film-work.
The cinema can thus appear as a sort of psychic apparatus of substitution,
corresponding to the model defined by the dominant ideology. The system of
repression (primarily economic) has as its goal the prevention of deviations and
of the active exposure of this " model ,"27 Analogously one could say that its " un

BAUDRY: IDEOLOGICAL EFFECTS 541

conscious" is not recognized (we speak of the apparatus and not of the content of
films, which have used the unconscious in ways we know all too well). To this
unconscious would be attached the mode of production of film, the process of
"work" in its multiple determinations, among which must be numbered those
depending on instrumentation. This is why reflections on the basic apparatus
ought to be possible to integrate into a general theory of the ideology of cinema.

Notes
1. Cf. on this subject Derrida's work "La Scene de l'ecriture" in L'Ecriture et la
difference (Paris: Seuil).
2. [The term "subject" is used by Baudry and others not to mean the topic of dis-
courseÑthough this is clearly involvedÑbut rather the perceiving and ordering self, as in
our term subjective"ÑTr . I
3. Obviously we are not speaking here of investment of capital in the process .
4. Cf. L. Brion Guerry, Jeun Pellerin Vi~lror (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1962).
5. We understand the term "subject" here in its function as vehicle and place of

intersection of ideological implications, which we are attempting progressively to make
clear, and not as the structural function which analytic discourse attempts to locate. It
would rather take partially the place of the ego, of whose deviations little is known in the
analytic field.
6. The perspective "frame" which will have such an influence on cinematographic
shooting has as its role to intensify, to increase the effect of the spectacle, which no diver-
gence may be allowed to split.
7. "We know that the spectator finds it impossible to notice that the images which
succeed one another before his eyes were assembled end-to-end, because the projection of
film on the screen offers an impression of continuity although the images which compose it
are, in reality, distinct, and are differentiated moreover by variations in space and time.
"In a film, therecan be hundreds, even thousandsofcuts and intervals. But if it is shown
for specialists who know the art, the spectacle will not be divulged as such. Only an error
or lack of competence will permit them to seize, and this is a disagreeable sensation, the
changes of time and place of action." Pudovkin, " Le Montage," in Cillellla d'aujourd'hui
et dc demain (Moscow, 1956).
8. It is thus first at the level of the apparatus that the cinema functions as a language:
inscription of discontinuous elements whose effacement in the relationship instituted
among them produces meaning.
9. "In the cinema I am simultaneously in this action and oursideof it, in this space and
out of this space. Having the power of ubiquity, I am everywhere and nowhere." lean
Mitry, Extheriqueet pzychologieducille9na(Paris: P.U.F., 1965), p. 179.
IO. The cinema manifests in a hallucinatory manner the belief in the omnipotence of
thought, described by Freud, which plays so important a role in neurotic defense
mechanisms.
I I . Husserl, Les Medilations c al tesiennes ( Paris: Vrin, 1953), p. 28.
12. Ibi,l., p. 18.
13. lApodicity, in phenomenological terminology, indicates something of an ulti-
mately irrefutable nature. See Husserl, op CEn Here, Baudry is using the term criticallyÑ
in a sense fl-onicallyÑTR.I
14. On this point it is true that the camera is revealed as incomplete. But this is only a

542 PSYCHOANALYTIC SEMIOTICS

technical imperfection which, since the birth of cinema, has already in large measure been
remedied.
15. Ibid., p. 34, emphasis added.
16. Ibid., p. 40.
17. Ibid., p. 58.
18. Mitry, op. eir., p. 157.
19. The lens, the "objective," is of course only a particular location of the "subjec-
tive." Marked by the idealist opposition interior/exterior, topologically situated at the
point of meeting of the two, it corresponds, one could say, to the empirical organ of the
subjective, to the opening, the fault in the organs of meaning, by which the exterior world
may penetrate the interior and assume meaning. " It is the interior which commands," says
Bresson. " I know this may seem paradoxical in an art which is all exterior." Also the use of
different lenses is already conditioned by camera movement as implication and trajectory
of meaning, by this transcendental function which we are attempting to define: it is the
possibility of choosing a field as accentuation or modification of the visee imentionelle.
No doubt this transcendental function fits in the field of psychology without difficulty.
This, moreover, is insisted upon by Husserl himself, who indicates that Brentano's discov-
ery, intentionality, "permits one tmly to distinguish the method of a descriptive science of
consciousness, as much philosophical and transcendental as psychological."
20. The arrangement of the cave, except that in the cinema it is already doubled in a
sort of enclosure in which the camera, the darkened chamber, is enclosed in another dark-
ened chamber, the projection hall.
21. Lacan, EcrErs (Paris: Seuil, 1966). See in particular "Le Stade du miroir comme
formateur de la fonction du le."
22. We see that what has been defined as impression of reality refers less to the "real-
ity" than to the apparatus which, although being of an hallucinatory order, nonetheless
founds this possibility. Reality will never appear except as relative to the images which
reflect it, in some way inaugurated by a reRection anterior to itself.
23. We refer here to what Lacan says of identifications in liaison with the structure
determined by an optical instrument (the mirror), as they are constituted, in the prevailing
figuration of the ego, as lines of resistance to the advance of the analytic work.
24. "That the ego be ' in the right' must be avowed, from experience, to be a function
of misunderstanding." Lacan, op. eir., p. 637.
25. "That it sustains itself as 'subject' means that language permits it to con~iider itself
as the stagehand or even the director of all the imaginary capturings of which it would
otherwise only be the living marionette ." Ibid., p. 637.
26. It is on this point and in function of the elements which we are trying to put in place
that a discussion of editing could be opened. We will at a later date attempt to make some
remarks on this subject.
27. Medirerranee, by J.-D. Pollet and Philippe Sollers (1963), which dismantles with
exemplary efficiency the "transcendental specularization" which we have attempted to
delineate, gives a manifest proof of this point. The film was never able to overcome the
economic blockade.

Translated by Alan Williams.

STORY/DISCOURSE: NOTES
ON TWO KINDS OF
VOYEURISM'

CHRISTIAN METZ

This short article has a significancefor the psychoanalytic study of cinema
tharfar exceeds its length. In it, Metz argues that voyeurism is a viral psychic
mechanism associated with both cinema and video, and he distinguishes between
histoireÑthe story or narration, which is issued by an all-knowing but unseen
intelligenceÑand discoursÑthe act of telling the material practice of making
meaning what Heath has called "specific signifying pracf ices" and what others
stress as combining the abstract rules of langue with rhe more concrete and
variable instances of parole, speech. The opposition between discours and
histoire allows Metz to highlight textual procedures that acknowledge their own
means of production and the place of the author or speaker. Histoire is
churacteristically third-person, whereas discours is also first-person; ideally,
discours acknowledges that the "I" of a story is only a representative of the

subject or agent who produced the story.

The difference proposed here by Metz within afairly phenomenological and
nonconrentiousframework takes on added importance when it is placed in an
e.rplicitly politicalframework. Metz himself refers to the classiefounts of
inspirarion, Freud and Marx, but in a manner that makes the primacy of Freud
and psychoanalysis for him clear. He asks if the cinematic instirution is a ma~er
of ideology. "The audience has the same ideology as the f lms that are provided
f or them; they fill the cinemas, and that is how the machine keeps turning. Of
c ourse. BuM M s also a question of desire, and hence of symbolic positioning." In
the r est of the article, Metz explores the question of desire, position, and spectator.
Merz argues that histoire is disguised discours. Histoire effaces its marks of
enonciation and disguises itself as story. This invites a voyeuristic response, since
it thus becomes an object presented by an agent who hides, rather than confronts
our gaze. This also allows us nor only to look but to engage or attend: To some
degree, we become the authoring agency as we make sense of an unfolding story
thal no one seems to tell. In this manner, Merz reintroduces the idea of ideology
that he dismissed as mere congruence Ims and viewers share a common
ideology; this sharing sustains the institution of cinema). Only now it is ideology
ax the c onstruction of the very notion of viewer, something that holds us to a
collstricring 5 unjl(. tif ably egocentl-ic, voyeuristic, but pleasurable position.
notioll that a text that hides irs own means of production, its enonciation, its
xtatles as discours must be contested and replaced by an alternative cinematic
practice lies behind much recent writing that champions Brechrian cinema, the
avall t-garde, or f Im theory it. elJ as an interl ogation or intervention that reveals
what histoire tries to conceal. Whether this program, which informed a great deal

~
EDWARD BRANIGAN
THE SPECTATOR AND
FILM SPACE - TWO THEORIES

I B E G I N W I T H the assurnpti In that narrative film is a
language, a symbolic activity, and that, for the purposes of
analysis, it may be divided into two systems: a narratiOn..Qr a
telling of the story, and a narrative, or what is told. It is narration
which draws a subject (author. render) into a process of exchange
whereby the author constructs an imaginary reader in the wridng
while the reader constructs an imaljinary author in the reading.
_
The_round of this exchange is narrative. More specifically, and
leaving aside the question of the author, I will teSne film
narration as a positioning of the viewer with respect to a produc-
tion of s~d~ub-je vity as a produc ion of sRacg attributed
to aaharacte . T will not discuss the many theories which attempt
to elaborate the exact nature of this production of space, or the
nature of the imaginary unities (e 'character') which the viewer
constructs to account for the production of space, but will instead
examine a problem faced by any theory which grounds narration
in a symbolic process of some kid: How can one recognise the
various sorts of narradon in a text, or better, the different Icvels
of narration?

One such level is character narration, or what I will call
subjectivity; for instance, the point-of-view shot where we see
what a character sees from his or her point in space. This use of
the term subjectivity is merely a convenience since, in actuality.
each successive level of narration implicates a new subjectÑa
fictional or hypothetical perceive: Ñ in an activity of seeing
(listening, telling, giving, portraying, presenting, displaying.
producing...) an object (ie, what is seen, heard, etc). 'Subject

' '

and 'object' are not fixed tsms but indicative of a relationship
between two elaments. For example, a table may be the object of 5
vision of a char cter who may be the object of a voice over~
narrator who may be the object of atte don for a viewa; or, i
stated the other way around, the viewer may be the subject for a
voice-over narradon which may be the subject for a character
who may be the subject who nominally produces (sees) a table.
The text, then, is a hierarchical series of pairs of (nominal) subjects
and objects where a subject/object pair may at any dme become
an object for a higher level subject. The text becomes something
like a set of ch es boxes one inside the otha with each
successive box, or level, introducing a new relation of subject
and obj t so that subjecdviq is in every narration, including the
so-called 'neutral' shots of a film. The assumption is that when
a film text is con d red as an obEcst for contemplation, there
must of necessiq be some co c pdon of a subject who presents
the text (author), tells the story (narrator), lives in the ficdonal }
wodd lcharacter), and who listens, watches, and desires that the t
story be told (viewer). Thus in order to understand subjectivitg}
in its widest sense, not just the forms of character narration, we,~
must be able to discriminate among levels. z

I believe that there are two broad ways of discovering levels
of narrationÑthrough 'error' and through 'hypothesis'Ñand
that each of these ways has important consequences for our
reading; in particular, for how we conceive the en ity 'cam ra,'~
and how we con ua 'story space,' the diegesis. These two ways
of reating are related to a meta-theoredcal choice which, uldmately.
divides all theo es c . narration into ampirical or rationalist. This
choice of how to read, in turn, affects the nature of the codes.
Or rules, which the theorist postulates to describe a viewa's t
comprehension of a film text. A further consequence of the way we g
read involves the analysis of 'point of view' which I take to be a f
measure of the difference between any two narradons. or in
dynarnic terms, a measure of the cfiwnge, the movement of narra
don in a text.

I will have something to say about each of the above iss es
but first we must ask, how can levels of narradon be located?
What are the two ways we may read and how do these ways
influence our conception of the 'camera'?

She Camera
Let's begin with an example of a change in narration where j
itnpersonal space apparently becomes subjective. How do we knott'

that it's subjective? What exactly does 'apparently subjective' mean
in the context of reading? In our example, character A catches
5ight of character B and moves toward B. In the next shot the
camera continues A's movement toward B but without showing A.
The camera reaches B who reacts with surprise at the unexpected
approach of A- So far the situation seems to be this: We began
sSr k -Q a! impersonal space (character A) and then changed to
re (glance of A. camera movement picking up A's
;@;6.. -sance between A and B decreases, absence of A).
The subjectlve space, here, is that of the familiar, travelling
point-of-view shot where we see as it from character A's eyes as
A moves to B. Now, however, something happens which throws
this account into doubt. Character B reacts not by looking into
the camera (our hypothesis was camera c character A) but by
looking 30 degrees to one side and conversir J with A (whom we
hear but still do not see). How do we interpret the sequence?
- One interpretation, which I shall term the 'error' theory, is that
we were simply in errorÑthe space was and remains irnpersonaL
The camera was never in fact character A but only moved parallel
to A. Paul Willemen uses stronger language. He asserts that the
revealed 'gap' between camera and character A is a marked inter-
vendon of the authorÑthe intrusion of another (The Other)
organising presence into the narration. The sudden appearance of
the author creates a 'shock effect' 1 for de viewer. But in what
sense were we wrong? Was it a mistake on our part, or careless
camerawork2 Was it an accident that we believed the shot to be
ubjective? Certainly not. If there is a 'shock effect' on the reader,
it must depend on an initial 'misreading' of the sequence which
we suddenly recognise to be false; that is, the misreading is
relevant toÑfunctions inÑthe reading of the text and in that
sense is not a misreading at all but a necessary part of an on-going
process of interpretation.
There is a second major problem with the 'error' interpreution.
It is an all or nothing interpretation: Either the narration is or is
not subjective. There may be room for ambiguity but not for the
Semi subjective (an example of which we will examine later). The
error õnterpretation assumes that the entire shot as a unit (the
camera movement toward B, the glance of B 30 degrees off-screen.
etc) must be either subjective or not. This assigns a material divi-
Si¡n in the text (the shot) a deterlIõining role in narration. The
camera, also, is conceived of as a concrete entity which is the
character (by following in the character's footsteps) or is not (by
f¡Uowing a different, though parallel. path). Thus both the 'shot'

1 The example I am
using is based on
Paul Willernen's
analysis of a
sequence from
Pursued, Paul
Willemen, 'The
Fugidve Subject'
in Raoul Walsh,
et Phil Haniy.
Edinburgh Fllm
Festival 1974. In
this connecdon it
does not matter
that his descrip-
don of the actual
shots in the film
is not accurate.
ILke Willemen,
Mark Nash finds

proof of the
author when a
subjective
sequence is
revealed to be
'false'. Mark
Nash. Varnpye
and the Fantasdc',
Scracn vol 17 no
3. Autumn 1976,
p 41 (the non-
assigned first-
person pronoun
funsdon).
58

100

and the 'camera' become primary terms in the search for levels of
narration. The error interpretadon relies on material divisions in
the text so that one speaks literally of a subjective shot or sub-
jecdve camera. Segmentation of the textÑfinding the beginning
and end of a unit of narrationÑis an acute problern for the
'error' theory because it must answer the question, with respect
to what 'entity' or formal device is the interpretation in error? 4
How can we account for the necessity of misreading in a shot'
sequence and avoid imposing arbitrary limits on narration (by-
making the shot or carnera a decisive unit)? Let's examine how the -
'misreading' in our exampk arose. We assumed, after seeing
character A glance toward B and begin moving toward B, that the
subsequent shot presented the camera as having located at A's;
point in space and continued A's movement (ie time was con-
tinuous). This was not an unreasonable belief; in fact, there were
many cues for it (we approach B, we don't see A anymore. etc)
and perhaps no contrary cues (though relevant cues may have-
been omittedÑa deliberate undercoding of the space). Can we
not sag that the best hypothesis at this time, based on the available
evidence, is that the sequence is subjective? Later. new cues will
present themselves (B's stare 30 degrees off-screen) which will
require us to revise our hypothesis. In this sense the shot is
subjective for a time and non-subjective at a later time. It can be
both because what is measured is a change in hypothesis, not a
change in shot. It does not matter where the camera 'really' was X
located; at an earlier moment, the space simply was represented.
as subjective (or was both subjective and objective) according to a -
valid hypothesis and then shifts to objective. Part of the camera
movement is subjective even if part is not. This second interpreta-
tion I shall term a 'reading hypothesis' theory. By contrast, the
'error' theory links the inexplicable camera movement to a mistake
of the reader, to a trick, a trapÑor betterÑto an author
made manifest. The 'hypothesis' theory asserts that reading in-
cludes making mistakes, even forgetting. Reading is a process of
'I name, I unnarne, I rename.' It does not settle a text into truth,
error, or author. As Barthes says, t

To read, in fact, is a labor of language. To read is to find mean-
ings, and to find meanings is to name them; but these named
meanings are swept toward other names; names call to each
other, reassemble, and their grouping calls for further naming:
I name, I unname, I rename: so the text passes: it is a nomina

. X

_rfi

tion in the course of becoming, Q tireZess approximation, a meto-
nytnic labor.2

The example under discussion is more general than might at first
appear. Consider a shot we initially believe to be subjective but,
in following the object of a character's attention, reveals at the end
that the character is watching the object from a distant place,3
or a subjective shot which contains a match on action from a
slightly different angle,' or ends with the character merely
stepping in front of the camera, or with part of a character's
:-e shoulder appearing in frame (as the camera moves away from the
character). These cases, according to the 'error' theory, involve
0 - the realisationÑretrospectivelyÑthat the camera and character
arc in different places and hence the shot could never have been
0 subjective or, in the case of the match on action, one of the shots
cannot be subjective. My original example used the eyeline cue 4
- of a second character, B, who was assumed to be looking at A and
thus by not looking at the camera proved that A was at a distance.
Suppose it turns out that B is not looking at A but at something
else? The error theory must say that we were fooled again and
that 'really' the author's momentary appearance was an illusion.
In short, the hypothesis theory forces the recognition that
character subjectivity is more prevalent and plays a much greater
role in classical films than previously thought.
What is at stake at the minimum (without additional narrations)
is a four term relation among character, camera, object, and
narrator/viewer (perceiver); logically speaking, these terms
complete a quadratic predicate and at any given moment describe
the point of view. In order to describe a changing point of view -
(diachrony) one must consider how these terns change through
time; that is, through a succession of camera placements (editing),
carnera movement, character movement, optical transitions, etc.
The relationship among the four terms can shift at any time and in
many ways according to its terms. Contemporary film and literary
theory has begun to address three of these terms: the notion of
charactert the status of the various objects in a symbol system,
as well as the relationship of text and spectatoL Little, however.
has been said about the entity 'camera'. We must now reconsider
the notion of camera in light of a 'reading hypothesis' theory.
I will define the camera not as a real, profilmic object (which
leads to misunderstanding about the viewer's access to reality) but
as a construct of the readerÑa reading hypothesis which seeks

2 Rolant Barthes.
S/Z trans Richard
Miller. hill and
Wane, New York
1974, section 5.

3 See the analvsis
of a sequence from
Cronaca di un
Amorc (1950) by
Noel Burch in
Theory of Film
Practice, Praeeer.
New York 1973.
pp 78-79.

An example may
be found in the
openine scene of
Dark Passage
(1947) when

Vincent Parry
(Humphrey
Bogartl assaults a
man. The reading
hypothesis
theory allows us
to say that both
of these shots may
be subjectiveÑ
a continuous
POV of the same
character.

l
- t

5 See generally
David BortwelL
'Camera Move-
ment ant
Cinematic Space:
Cind Traas, vol
1 no 2, Sum ner
1977. cE Irving
Pichel. 'Seeing
with the Camera'
Hollywood
Quartcrly, vol 1
no 2, Jan 1946.

102

to make intelligible the spaces of a film. Space, in turn, is defined t
by the placement and displacement of frame lines. The frame is,
stressed because it is the measure and logic of the simultaneity of ^
textual elements. To frame is to bracket an array of elements
(usually in two or three dimensions). The frame is a perceptual
boundary which divides what is represented from what is not t
represented: here it is, and not there. The displacement of frame i
lines is often that of 'camera' movement, but includes zoom shots, d
optical and special efEects, rack focus, split screens, animation, and t
other - movements of the frame lines. Thus it is more accurate to
consider the camera as a label we as viewers apply to certain t
spatial effects of the text. (Spatial effects may be differendated 5
with precision through the use of methods deeived from sensory X
psychology.) In this way one can say that the text creates its ^
camera.5 The classic text, in particular, surrenders to that familiar n
reading competence (that coherence) which we name as the i
'camera'Ñitself compounded of those six spatial effects we label t
as the dolly, track, boom, pan, tilt, and lateral tilt. t
1 The hypothesis is not just anything a reader may conceive but &
: must be internally justified (systematic, multiply coded, etc) and, s
l ultimately, must reflect shared assumptions/expectations of a com- t-
munity with respect to a set of texts. The way we read is inter }
subjective and depends on cultural convention just as a language }
belongs not to an individual but to a group. Moreover, since film
space and narration do not depend on real space or actual
narrators for their intelligibility so the camera does not depend
on a real camera object which must beÑretrospectivelyÑeitha i
'here' or 'there' in conceete space and not in both places or in l,
neither place. The 'error' theory searches for a final, complete }
meaningÑ the coreect meaningÑrather than measuring the s
flux of perceiving (and narrating). ~,
Obviously no decisions can be made without weighing the X
evidence supplied by the text. Nothing that has been said eules 1
out another set of perceptual cues (consistent or inconsistent)

which leaves a given sequence uncertain, underdetermined.
ambiguous, misleading, multiple, contradictory, undefined, hidden,
or inadvertent as well as prey to a host of evaluative claimsÑ
good, bad, subtle, ineffective, etc.
It is of interest to note that cstain camera movements (eg, the
lateral tilt where the frame is angled on an edge) and especially }
certain combinations of movements are prohibited or ~repressed' i
by the classic text. (The lateral tilt is virtually confined to tbe
representation of distuebed, subjective states.) One aspect of

t
Michad Snow's filrns, which may be judged modern, is the extent
sto which the films refuse that familiar coherence known as the
'catnera' (Wavelength (1967); 4 4 Back and Forth (1969); La
Region Centrale (1971)).
According to 8 reading hypothesis theory, then, the camera is
not a profilmic object which is shifted from place to place, but a
construct of the spectator, a hypothesis about spaceÑabout the
production and change of space. The camera is simply a label
applied by the reader to certain plastic transformations of space.
It is not a matter of guessing the location of a profiltnic object.
Indeed the profilmic camera doesn't exist, in the usual sense,
when one considers animation. The fluid and moving camera we
project in watching animated films contrasts sharply with the
inert camera of the animation stand.

The Diegesis
A modification in our notion of camera Icads to a corresponding
revision of the concept of diegesis. In general, to say that a
particular narration is diegetic is to assign a source to the space,
sound, titles, dialogue, etc of a fi]m on the basis of whether (and
how) one or more elements are within or outside story space.
More specifically, the diegetic in film comprises those elements
which give rise to the fictional world of characters. landscapes,
and events. The diegetic is the implied spatial, temporal, and
causal system of the characters.6 I will interpret the diegetic to
include those aspects of the fictional world which are accessible
to the characters. Thus a sound, for instance, is non-diegetic if it
is not, and could not be, heard by a character even if the sound
later also functions diegetically (as in a sound bridge between
scenes). (Further distinctions are possible. For instance, one might
define as intra-diegetic a sound which can be heard by only one
characters eg character thought.)
The problem addressed by the concept of diegesis is the relation
of character to sound and space. It is an important problem
because one of the ways we understand a text is by relating its
elements to a nominal perceiver (eg character) since we ourselves
cannot stand in that relation. The concept diegetic/non-diegetic
is also itnporcant because character is a potential site for narration
(character subjectivity); that is, we may encounter space through
a character who sees, hears, tells the story to us. As the relation
between character and sound/space changes, so too does the
viewerss relation to character and sound/space: we achieve a
ditierent perspective on the story.

6 The term'diegetic
was introduced
into film studies
by Etienne
Souriau. See
L'Vnivers filmiquc,
Paris, 1953. p 7;
'La Structure de
runivers filmique

et le vocabulaire
de la filmologie'
in Rcvuc intcr-
nadonak de
filmologic. nos
7-8:
Christian Metz;.
Film Languagc: A
Semiotics of thc
Cinema, trans
Michael Taylor,
Oxford University
Press, New York
1974, pp 97-98.

103
-Ñx~

104

Let's consider an example. The embrace of two lovers in a
room is accompanied by an unexpected, booming sound of a
steamship whistle. We assume, on the basis of cues presented, that .
the whistle is not a proper part of the room and thus is non- T~
diegetic in origin and functions like a burst of music to accentuate $
this particular moment in the narrative. The whistle serves as a $
metaphor transferring such attributes as steam, torrid, sensational
to the love scene. Now, however, suppose the camera pans to a;
radio or to a window revealing a steamship at dock, or there is a X
cut (or dissolve) to a new scene on board a steamship, distant in t
time and place, but which nevertheless continues the whistle ¤
sound? How does our interpretation of diegetic/non-diegetic
change once a realistic motivation for the whisde is provided?
Using an error dheory of reading, the whistle sound in all these
cases suddenly becomes diegetic, even in the extzeme case of a
sound bridge to a new scene. The earlier part of the sound is
converted, retrospectively, to a diegetic sound. In this approach
to reading, the sound bridge is diegetic and was always diegetic
even though at one tirne we believed it to be non-diegetic. Our
first belief that the sound was non-diegetic was accidental,
mistaken, and of passing consequence. Note particularly that with
this definition of diegetic there is no difference in function
between a sound that is first presented as non-diegetic and then
becomes diegetic as opposed to one that is first diegetic and
then becomes non-die etdc. The entire sound is simply diegedc:
the actual perceiving of the sound is irrelevant.
By contrast, using a hypothesis theory of reading, we find that
that part of the whistle sound which is juxtaposed to the lover's
embrace remains non diegedc even though at a later time the
remainder of the sound becomes diegetic (when we see the radio, ]
or the ship nearby). In this approach it is our relationship to,
character and sound which has changed and that is what is being ]
measured. The advantage of this approach is that it maps a process }
of readingÑa sequence of hypotheses made by the readerÑand
it preserves the fact that inferences have been made; for example,
a sound which is first non-diegedc and than diegedc involves the
hypothesis that it is the same sound. The question is still open,
however, to examine the grounds of that belief and to ask how
the sound funct oned non-diegetically in the reading (as a trap for
dhe reader, a metaphor, authorial comrnent, etc?). Thus the 'same' 3
sound may have different functions at different times. What is *
important in analysing a logic of reading are the conditions of our ',
belief, moment by moment (and how it is manipulated), rather j

than relying on such formal divisions as canera movement, shot
cbange, mise-cn-scene and sound. In sum, the error theory seeks
to assign an absolute division between dieg tic and non-diegetic
without taking into account the position of the viewer, namely
the hypotheses the viewer must make about the story. The error
theory relies on a forrnal definition independant of the act of
perceiving.
: The difference between the two approaches can be clearly seen
in the analysis of a sound bridge. In an error approach, once the
transition to a new scene reveals a diegetic source, then the antire
sound ova both scenes is recast as diegetic This is because what
is being measured is the absolute status of a sound, not, as in the
hypothesis approach, the shifting relation of sound to a perceiver
(character, viewer). The hypothesis approach denies the apparent
continuity of a sound bridge in favour of split function for the
sound. In the case of the steamship whistle: first, as non-diegetic
-and metaphoric and second, for the new scene only, as diegetic
and part of a reality effect.

Empiricist versus Radonalist Theories of Narradon
So far I have been discussing the impact of the error and
hypothesis ways of reading on our conception of the camera and
the diegesis. I now wish to suggest that these ways of reading
are special instances of a more fundarnental division in method-
ology. The error theory, at its extreme. relies on formal or material
divisions in the text (subiecõive camera, diegedc sound) which
exist apart from a perceiver. The hypothesis theory, on the other I
band, tends to emphasise the role of a perceiver by favouring
more~abstractX principles or procedures which structure the text.
Here, a perceiver is actively labelling spaces and speculating about
the relation of character and sound according to that perceiver's
acquired principles and habits. By contrast, in an error approach
the reliance on formal categories means that the viewer is a
passive receiver of stimuli (even if surprised by unfamiliar stimuli).
The 'corrections a viewer makes would seem to be based on a
Simple feedback model of perception in which the viewer remains
essentially passive. The error theory udlises a linear model of
Perception which seeks to fix a beginning, middle, and end.
Indeed, the 'end' of a segment is considered the point at which
to measure the truthÑthe outcomeÑof a text ('this is/was
dlegetic; it is not/was not non diegetic as we first believed').
The error theory tends to formally demarcate units so that an
end can be fixed and the truth known. At its extreme, an

105

7 On effacet
narrators, see Ann
Banfield.
'Narrative Stgk
and the Gram nar
of Direct and
Indirect Speech,'
Foundation of
Language, no 10.
1973.

8 On the linguistic,
philosophical, and
political implica-
tions of the
doctrines of
- rationalism and
empiricism see
Noam Chomsky,
Rcflcstions on
Languagc,
Pantbeon. New
York, 1975.

9 See Ann Banfielt,
'Where
Epistemology,
Style. and
Grammar Meet
Literary History:
The Devdopment
of Represented
Speech and
Thought.- New
Literary History,
vol 9 no 3, Spring
1978.

10 Julio Moreno
'Subiective
Cinema: And the
Problem of Fllm
in the Fist
Person.' The
Quar.terly of Film,
Radio and
Tclcrision, vol 7,
1952 53. pp 354,
358 (author's
emphasis).

106

error theory dispenses with the perceiver altogether whichÑ0
considering that other subject, the authorÑamounts also to !
the belief that there are texts, or parts of texts, which have
(or need) no author or no narrator (= the world objectified). t
For a hypothesis theory, however, the absence of a narrator is only
an effect of the text; that is, the narrator is still fully present, S
though 'effaced.'
The error and hypothesis ways of reading lead fõnally to
empirical or rationalist methodologies. A convenient test is |
whether a theory eventually posits a narrator where one toes not
explicitly appear. If so, such a narrator is termed 'effaced" and

leads to rationalist assurnptions. (Alternadvely, the rationalist
position may be stated in terms of an 'effaced reader,' where a test
constructs an abstract, invisible reader(s) of some sort.) An
empirical theory of narradon will hold to the surface of a work
asserdng that if one doesn't observe it, then there is no need
to hypothesise its existence. The difference betweer what I call
rationalism and what I call empiricism is that the former posits
certain unobservable, abstract endties (which in some versions of
rationalism are inna e, 'mental' structures, eg 'ideas') while theff
latter holds that human knowledge and behaviour derive solely
from experience (stimuli)Ñthat mental concepts are built up
(through association, condidoning, osten ~ sion, habit
from simple, vaifiable percepts.8 Empiricist psychology an
philosophy explain learning by relying on such other mechanisms
as induction, gensalisation, analogy, substitution, segmentation.
and dassification. The difference between modern versions of
rationalism and empiricism cannot be lodged simply on the issue4-
of innate structures, for both propose such structures. -i}
The empirical position holds that there are instances of dis-~
course which eithl r have no narrator at all or, in special
circumstances,9 may have a narrator but no addressee/hearer.t
In the case of film narration, an extreme position is stated bY.
Julio Moreno. He believes that first person visual narradon is 4
'myth' since 'in cinema it is not possible to speak, in the strictX
sense, of a narrator. The film does not narrate, but rather it placesJ
the spectator directly without intermediaries, in the presencc~
of the facts narrate 1. ~¡ One can see that an empirical view easilYX
slides toward a phenomenology where a word or image simply 'is.
(And we can experience this bare perceptual datu n by a 'bracket*
ing' and a 'reduction' of stimuli.) How does one interpret tbi
objectivity? As a profiltnic reality and/or a postfilmic attention ¡t;
a real specator? j

In a strict empirical view the world may appear directly, without
mediadont and thus linguistic shifters are not needed in any 11
physical or psychological description of the world.ll What is
slighted in the empirical account is what the rationalists call textual
production and ideological context. Point of view in an empirical
theory may easily be interpreted as an attitude of a human person
and not as an abstract textual process involving, say, logical
embedding.l2 the presence of shifters, and the social use that a
text represents. Further, an empirical account of authorship either
denies that there is an author (text = world) or else is strictly
causal and behaviouristic; that is, the text is determined by
the biography, expressive intention, etc, of the author and/or
by the causal links to a viewer (on the latter see, for example, the
theory of Rudolf Arnheirn). The price for avoiding the communica-
tion model, typical of rationalist theories, is an expression model
or a model of the text as pure objectnity: a window on the soul
and/or a window on the world. In each case the reader is left in a
passive, secondary role as the simple receiver of stimuli.
What are the characteristics of a rationalistic position? The
following passage from Nick Browne reveals a rationalist approach
to narration:

In this sequence [a series of shots from John Ford's Stagecoach
(1939)] the author has eflaced himself, as in other instances of
indirect discourse, for the sake of the characters and the action.
Certainly he is nowhere visible in the same manner as the
characters. Rather he is visible only through the materialization Ñ
of the scene and in certain masked traces of his action. The 1
indirect presence to his audience that the narrator enacts. the
particular form of self-effacement. could be described as the
masked displacement of his narrative authority as the producer of
imagery from himself to the agency of his characters. That is, the
film makes it appear as though it were the depicted characters to
thom the authority for the presentation of shots can be referred
Ñmost evidently in the case of a depiction of a glance, but also,
it more complex fashion, in the reading of shots as depictions of
a state of mind'. The explanation of the presence of the imagery
Is :Inastr by the film not to the originating authority who
inVisiblet behind the action, but to his masks within the depicted
space.^8

4NOte partiNlarlys in relation to the effaced narrator hypothesis,
Bt¡~Yne'S use of such words as 'effaced,' 'self-effacement,' 'nowhere

Bertrand RusseLI,
An Iryuiry Into
Meaning and
Truth, LoxLdon,
1940.

12 Eznbetting is a
linguistic ant
logical relation
whereby one set of
ststesnents
encloses another
et of statements
thus limiting their
epistetnological
status. Words
which are often
indicative of a
process of
embedding include

the follo ving:
nesting,
hierarchy, levels,
subordination,
containmen
framing. See
Tzvetan Totorov,
The Poctics of
Prose, trans
Richard Howsrt.
Cornell University
Press Ithaca, New
York

3 Nick Bro Arne, 'The
Spectator-in-the
Text: The
Rhetoric of
Stagecoach,' Film
Quarterly, vol 29
no 2, Winter
1975-76.

107
66

108

14 Robert Scholes
and Robert
Kellogg, The
Nature of

Narrative, Oxford
University Press,
New York. 1966
p 270.

15 Quoted in John
Lyons, Noam
Chomsky, Penguin.
N7, 1977, p 136.
See also Noam
Cbomsky, Rules
and Representa-
tions, Columbia
University Press,
New York, 1980.
pp5-6.

visible,' 'invisible,' 'masked,' 'traces,' 'indirect presence.' 'behind'.
the action,' 'displacement,' 'masks'; and the phrase, 'as though it,
were'. (A theory of 'traces,' in fact, figures prominently, though in -
very different ways, in the later works of Noam Chomsky and
Jacques Derrida.) K
In literary studies, the problem of the effaced narratorÑag
'transparency'Ñis poset most acutely with instances of scenic
narration (eg Ernest Hemingway), internal monologues (James
Joyce, William Faulkne ), and the recording or reflecting conscious- t
ness of a character (Henry James). For rationalists like Scholes and;
Kellogg the absence of a narrator is only a surface phenomenon*4
'The result of the disappearance of the narrator is not the refining .
away of the artist but a continual reminder of his presenceÑash
if God were omnipresent and invisible, yet one could continually t
hear Him breathing.'l' This statement reveals a common tendenqe.
of rationalism to veer toward the metaphysical for an interpretation '

of that thing or andy which is constitutive but unseen. Moreova,{
in the Western tradition, a creative power is often vested in the-
Author or Artist who functions not unlike an absent god. Hence,{-
for structuralists and materialists whose theories are rationalistic,~-
the definition of 'author' becomes a delicate matter. Even if the!
concept of author can be explained as a construction of humanist~
discourse, a certain 'mentalism' hovers ova rationalist theories.-
In spite of this, Chomsky believes that a rationalist is not cora t
mitted to the ultin ate irreducibility of mind and body. He}
contends that in the development of modern science 'the concept
"physical" has been extended step by step to cover anything we
understand,' so that 'when we ultimately begin to understand thtt
properties of mind, we shall simply . . . extend the notion "physical"*
to cover these properties as well.'15 Recant literary criticism
attempts to avoid mentalism by arguing hat 'absence' does not:
imply that somewhere there is 'presence' (origin, author, God):A.-.
instead, there is only the perpetual play of differences inaugurated~-
by representation. Though thee may not be an author in thea
ordinary sense, a rationalist must believe in an 'implied' authot.~ |
an 'undrarnatised' narrator, an 'image' of the narrator, or an absent j
entity or structure of some kind. A rationalist theory will alsO;
construct an abstract entity on the side of reading, such as. a;4t,
effaced reader, ideal reader, an 'image' of the reader, a 'cOIns
petence', etc. 4
I have already mentioned certain issues that a rationalist theofl
must confrontÑthe problem of metaphysics (where is the absent

.
~

b ,tructure?)} authorship, and mentalism or idealism. Rationalists are
, frequently accused of positing a 'ghost in the machine' because
t manY of the entities they propose are unobservable. Even the
- concept of 'meaning' has been strongly challenged by, among
others. Nelson Goodman and Willard Quine. They argue that
the 'meaning' of a word has a ghostly quality which marks just
0 what we know least about words; that is, it marks the failure
of linguistic theory. Meaning, for them, seems to be a vague,
' absent quality wtith no clear definition and thus perfect for hiding
;- the inadequacies of a theory. If whatever is absent in representation
-9 is deemed innate to the human species, a whole new set of issues
-, anse.
- A rationalist theory is also vulnerable to a comrnunication
theory of representation; in fact, a communicadon theory can be
-.- used to require a narrator where one does not explicitly appear
- and in this way justify effaced narrators. The word 'narrator' then
may lead to new difficulties: the notion of a real person as the
source of narration, and the reduction of texts to psychology.
Psychoanalytic theory is a conspicuous example of rationalism
I n this theory, to sirnplify a bit, what is effaced in narration are
the structures of the unconscious (the hidden, the missing, the
repressed, the 'other scene'). The charge that psychoanalysis can
~ be neither verified nor falsified is also levelled at other rationalist
theories, though usually to a lesser degree

The Study of Narration
Keeping the above problem areas in mind, let's continue to pursue
a rationalist approach to film narration by asking why, in fact,
a viewer~s hypotheses about film space and sound are important
and how these hypotheses may be studied. These questions have
Counterparts in modern linguistic theory. N am Chomsky states:

The central fact to which any significant linguistic theory must
address itself is this: a mature speaker can produce a new sentence
of his language on the appropriate occasion, and other speakers
Can understand it immediately, though it is equally new to

thern . . Nonnal mastery of a language involves not only the
abtlity to understand immediately an indefinite number of entirely
tS¢Iv sentencest but also the ability to identify deviant sentences
stttt, on sscasion, to impose an interpretation on them.... On the
bQsis of a limited experience with the data of speech, each normal

109
16 Noasn Chornsky.
'Current Issues in
linguistic
Theory,' in Thc X
Structure of
Language: l
Readings in the
Philosophy of
Language, ed by
Jerry Fodor and
Jerrold Katz,
Prentice-Hall,
New Jersey, 1964.

human has developed for himself a thorough competence in
native language."

It is my belief that a film spectator, through exposure to a srnall
number of narrative films, knows how to understand a potentiaDy~
infinite number of new films. The spectator is able to irnrnediately
recognise repetitions and variations among films even though the
films are entirely new and outwardly quite distinct. Certain deviant-
or unusual narrations can also be identified and, often, interpretedn
I believe that this abiliq to understandÑhowever it is acquiredÑ4
I is evidence of the prior knowledge, or competence, of a spectator,-
In general, this abiliq is unconscious; that is, derived from
unconscious mechanisms. I think that, as a modest goal, cont-
temporary film theory should reach toward a description of thatt
competence underpin ng a single class of filmÑthough a very
large classÑwhich might be terrned 'classical' film. Note that!
whether or not pictures themselves are held to be symbolic i
nature, the claim he e is merely that a narrative arrangement of;
pictures is symbolic and so permits certain linguistic analogies.
Tne purpose of a rationalist theory, then, is to examine a viewer's~
knowledge about film, particularly the conditions of film narration
which give rise to that which a viewer 1 recognises as
The terrn 'meaning,' however, is itself a problem because it is
applied in so many contexts by different writers. Let's assume thaF
the term meaning will refer to, or be the end result of, a series o~
judgments and inferences made by a reader about the underlyirg
structure of a text. These judgments mav be svstematised, fot
anarytical~urposes, IS a set of rules (nf 'codes9). What are somt
of the properties of these rules? 1
The rulesÑwhich we may think of as formation rues or
transforrnationc _ rP firlitP in numher ~nd opPtNtP [Ip0tE. a firlitC
set of basic elements neither the rules nQL the elements a::
dependent on physical properties (the ms~ of the metium) 4
on formal, surface properties of the text! The r_le and element;
are 'abstract' and structural in nature. In this way the rules
be used to relate texts wiõõch- are outwardly quite dissimilai
Moreover, we cannot expect such phenomena as the 'camera;*
properties of the camsa (eg position, distance, angle), or th
'shot' to be decisive terms in our reading. Rather, surface featllr
ebb and flow in in portance according to their place, at a givdk
moment, within the ordered set of inferences and hypotheses we
make about the text and its underlying structure. The rationalist

,~,
contention is that our understanding of films is not ad hoc but 69
depends on a shared set of rules or assumptic ls (= meaning). | 17 In addition to the
Ihe possible surface features of films are indefinite in number. i oftnttra~sfvotrrnnaaNrt
I believe that they are derived from a small set of rules and tional grammar.
dements and are the result of the generativc capacity of the of the 'generative
systetn- If there were no system or the system were not generative factors' in a
(but only. say, taxonomic), then there would be only an infinite broader,
nmnber of texts, unique unto themselves, with no possibility for system' (beyond
the reader to learn and predict meaning from instance to instance.l' semantics) which,
By 'predict' I mean that a reader must begin somewhereÑmust grammar, consti
rislc a hypothesisÑand my belief is that these hypotheses are not tutes our know
random. A text is a specific junctureÑa working throughÑof. in Rules and
the hypotheses and shared conventions by which a community Rcprcsentations
fabricates meaning for itself. Thus, in general, the rationalist 181, opcit. Inthe
approach emphasises structural similarities rather than the (endt context of sensory
less) differences among texts because only the former directly Hochberg and V
illuminate the underlying structure which permits endless variety. srooks have
if there is only difference, then one is lead to an extreme version of argued the impor
! tance of schematic
an empirical theory of learning and knowledge. or cognitive maps.
As an analogy, consider the following sentences which look not necessarily
visual in nature.
quite different: which a viewer
tests in watching
a film in 'The
Perception of
Motion Pictures'
in Handbook of
Perception, vol 10
'Perceptual
Ecology' ed E
Carterette and M
Friedman,
Academic Press.
New York, 1978.

1 Zohn played tennis.
2 My friend likes music.
3 The professor will give the lecture.

Chomsky points out that, in one sense, these sentences are
'similarly understood.' This fact 'could not be explained in terms
of a grammar that did not go beyond tbe level words Qr
morphemes~ls The reason for the similarity is that the sentences
re derived from the same underlying phrase structure: noun
phraseÑverb Ñnoun phrase. In a ILlce way, the rationalist
approach attempts to uncover some of the underlying similarities
in a narrative, pictorial system wbich allow a spectator access to a
Wide range of texts. These similarities must go beyond the level
cameras or 'shot' just as the modern study of the syntax of
rlatural languages depends on units both less than, and greater
than, the word. It has long been accepted in film study that the
Shot cannot be equated to the word, but we can now see that this
equation is never reached, for neither the shot nor the word is
determinate in an analysis of either a film or a linguistic system.
The aim of a rationalist theory, therefore, will be to give an
account of the logic and procedures of our readingÑhow we

18 Chomsky dis-
cusses the first
two of the
sentences in
Syntactic
Stnfcturcs,
Mouton. Tke

Harue, 1957
p 86. It is also
possible that
sentences which
look quite similar
are based on verv
different under-
lyinc structures
and hence are
differently under-
stood.

111
toÑ\

112

come to lmderstand not just a single text but a range of texts and -
potential texts. t
One of the advantages of giving up a taxonomic approach to.
the materials of film in favour of structural descriptions is that:
important sisnilarides are revealed among sequences which are ~^
outwardlyÑformally, physicallyÑquite different. As an illustra. X
tion, consider the following five non-subjective representations 5
(several of which appear in one scene of Murnau's The Last Laugh,:
1924): 8

Wi.

1 a multiple, split image showing many people chattering to '
one another t
2 a sequence of shots (a montage) each showing one person.-
tatking to another 4
3 a camera movement from person to person as they talk (or
a zoom, rack focus, etc)
4 a composition in depth where several persons are talking to
one another
5 people walking toward the camera, chatting as they pass

Each of these reprcsentations, I contend, is a transformation of s
a single narrative statement (determined by context), eg, 'gossip
spreads,' 'people argue,' etc. They are functionally equivalen
despite formal differences. Note especially that there is no priority
among the fiveÑthe montage, in particular, may be derived
equally from split image or the composition in depth (a fact in-
sutfidently appredated by Andre Bazin). There are indeed surfa
differences among the five representations but my contention is
that narrative, as well as narration and point of view, are trans- ~=
media and depend on transformational rules, not the forrnal S
properties of surface symbols. As the rationalists emphasise, a-
taxonomic approach is not generative and hence offers no hope of X
explaining a reading competence. s

Conclusion l
The most general problem that a viewer must confront about'
film narration is how to justify successive spaces and new scenes-
How are we able to know what we come to know in a narrative?
Through what authority do we experience changes in space?
For example, in La Regle du Jeu (1939) the shots of.
rabbits and pheasants in the forest preparing to flee from the
hunters are of an entirely different order than camera set-ups of z
the hunters. The former are impossible views for any character in

FS=3C;;~
Ef :~ . .. .

-, _.,~ ~_~
E_ =
~=

==W=t

a
_. .

a h, sequence from La REglc du Jcu
113

114

the film. Similarly, in Psycho (1960) how is it that we areX
privileged to see Norman Bates in secret conversation with his~
mother? Furthermore, though we may see him with his mothers s
certain aspects of the staging continue to serve as much to conceal;
as to reveal the story. The point is that these instancesÑnot at .
all atypicalÑprovide the viewer a sudden and special access to~S
the story. In a literary mode, they might be marked out ae
'objective,' or the result of a (limited) 'omniscient' narration. These -
labels do not mark absolute categories so much as indicate a:
certain relative status among the narrations of a particular text,1
In addition, we should not forget that there are a great number
of conceivable images which are absent because they are deemed~
'untimely,' 'ineffective,' or 'irrelevant' to the story; still others are 4
forbidden by society. The power to select, arrange. and evade~
leaves a trace in the text which we label as a greater or lesser
power to know (and to tell). This trace and its shifts wiD not go
unnoticed and the viewer must, in one way or another, rationalise
his or her method for acquiring knowledge about the story. Thusj
the viewer will project a sequence of hypotheses to justify thed
continuing presentadon of space. There must be some explanadon
for the shift from what we see now to what we see next.
Alternatively, we can say that the text, by presenting and rationalis-
ing a method for knowing the worldÑa 'point of view'
confronts a spectator in the most profound and subtle way witb
a representation of what that world is or might be.
I would like to sur~marise these issues in a concrete way by
examining a particular moment from Federico Fellini's I Vitelton
(1953).'9 I will concentrate, here, on what I believe to be the ac
of reading: the flow of hypotheses a viewer makes about narration

19 l am indebted to
David sordwell
for bringing this
sequence to my
attention, and in
general for his
and Janet Staiger's
valuable
comments.

At the end of the fitm a principal character, Moraldo, decidesl~
to leave his family and the four close friends with whom he has
shared much of his if e. Without disclosing his decision, he boards 1
a train and a conversation ensues with a young boy, Guido, who

remains on the platform. Basically, the set-ups alternate in shot/~
reverse shot fashion. As the train pulls out from the station, we,
continue to alternate between Moraldo looking back and Guidoe
now running after the train. We see a shot of the city frosnÇ
Moraldo's point-of-view (shot 1) and then see Moraldo still lookislg
back along the tracks. Suddenly he turns his head sharplY
90 degrees to stare directly off-screen left towards the city (2)-
Next, there are four remarkable shots showing each of his four
friends asleep in their beds (3-6). Finally, we return to the set up

,
1-6, sequence from I Vitclkmi

115
- ^~

20 See also Federico
Fellini Threc
Screcnplays: 'I
Vitclloni'. '11
Bidonc', 'Thc
Tcmptations of
Doctor Antonio',
trans Judith
Green, Orion
Press. New
York, 1970.

116

of 2ÑMoraldo st' ring left. After t moment he seems to wake
up, as if from a daydream; casually he glances about, settles into
his seat, and ends by looking sadly downward.

A more complete description of shots 3-6 is as follows: 20 X
SHOr 3: Extreme long shot, high angle of Leopoldo asleep in his bet
which is at an angle to the camera The camera is pulling away ant.
arcing right (with slight pan left) from the foot of the bed (space moves l
left). Time: 1.5 secs, 35 frames. $

SHOT 4: Medium long shot, traight-on of Alberto asleep in his betfl
which is at an angle to the camera. The camera is pulling back from {
the side of the bed (space angles toward upper right). Tune: 2.4 secs.
57 fratnes

SHOT 5: Extreme long shot, slight high angle of Nccardo asleep in
his bed which is at a sharp angle to the camera. The camera is pulling
back and slightly arcing right (or panning left) from the foot of the bed
(space angles toward upper left). Time: 2.0 secs. 49 frames.

SHOT 6: Extreme long shot, high angle of Fausto, his wife Sandra
(sister of Moraldo), and their infant child asleep in their bed which is at
an angle to the camera The camera is arcing left and panning right
along the foot of the bed (space moves right). This camera movement
Is somewhat slower than the movements in 3, 4. and 5. Tirnes: 5.8 ucs.
138 frames.
:

The camera movement of 6 ends near the bottom left corner of
the bed approximately where the camera movements of 3 and 5
spiral out and on the same side of the bed where the camera

movement of 4 begins (assuming all four beds are similarly
oriented)Ñsee figure 1.
The drawing in Eigure 1 should be interpreted not in relation
to a profilmic camera or real space but as itself a fictionÑa record
of the hypotheses and predictions a viewer makes about the spaces
(ie symbolic fields) represented in this scene. The viewer in this
case is able to construct an internally consistent and relatively s
simple master space. Some of the cues for this construction are the
well known 'continuity' rules.
What is of interest to me is the status of the four shots in the
bedrooms. Essentially they are brief, full shots of Moraldo's
sleeping friends, who are unaware of his departure. The camera
is continuously moving iD a complex way involving several motions
from unusual angles. These eccentric camera movements are stdk-
ingly different from any other movements in the film. How does
the spectator justify these moving spaces?
One possible interpretation is that the train carrying Moraldo is.
metaphorically, passing through the bedrooms (by analogy with j
shot 1). This interpretation is partially defeated by the movement |

. Flgure 1: Four camera movements (Set-ups 3-6) from Fellini's I VitcLIoni
5: involving different bedrooms shown here in relation to a single bed
s.S.
pi 5 of space which, though generally away from the characters, is not
,,? consistently in one direction. (Space in the four shots moves left,
4 angles right, angles left, moves right.) Nevertheless, we sense that
x there is some connection between Moraldo and the bedrooms. It
8 seems to be a twilight subjectivity: part subjecdve, part objective.
-~ Our intuitive judgment, in the words of one critic, is that 'In
L- I Vitelloni the landscapes may represent "states of soul," but they
-- are also acceptable on the realistic plane.'2' The problem, however,
;- for film study is to make explicit our intuidon, not just by
9 marshalling evidence from the text but by uncovering the methods
through which we search for evidence. We can say that a conven-
tion or code is involved, but we still need to know the details of
that convention and how it is mobilised by the reader.
What evidence in the film points to a subjective interpretation?
There is Moraldo's POV (1), his marked glance off-screen (2), the
eccentric movement of space (3-6), and the final return to
Moraldoss gaze which encloses the bedroom spaces, apparently
making them subordinate to Moraldo's vision. In addition. there is
evidence from the soundtrack. The sound ova the bedroom spaces
continueS the loud noise of a train gathedng speed from the
previous shots. We hear the clicking and swaying of train cars
on rails and (over 6) two Ioud blasts of the train whistle. These
Sound5 could only be heard by someone on the train. A third
blast then appears over the next shot, Moraldo's contemplative
gaze; finally, the spell is broken.22 In terms, however, of the
train sound, the viewer is both on the train and in the bedroom,
Ihe sound is not simply diegetic but. placed ova the bedroom
SpaceS, is also non-diegetic. (The characters of shots 3-6, even if

21 John Russell
Taylor, Cinana
Eyc, Cinema Ear,
Hill ant Wang,
New York 1964,

22 We see that
Moraldo's sub
' jective spell is
ended and a new
narration begins

by observing his
behaviour coupled
with various
marks on the
soundtrack After
the third train
whistle the sound
of a jew's-harp is
beard (associated
elsewhere in the
film with a
narrator's voice-
over cornmentary).
The train sounds
then fade out and
are replaced by
non-diegetic
music

117
76

23 By features, I
have in mind an
indefinite array of
formal elements,
such as camera
position, move-
ment, angle. lens,
distance; lighting.
setting, colour;
acting, gesture.
editing, sound,
graphic compo-
sido4 tides.
optical effect,
slow motion, and
many others
which may
beco ne
pertinent in our
reading.

24 Tbis approach
derives from
Nelson Good-
man's treatment
of expression in
Lnngunges of Art:
An Approach to a
Theory of Symbols.
Hackett,
Indianapolis 1976.
chapter 2.

118

awake, could not hear these sounds.) The complexity of the sound/
space relation is a clue to the intermediate kind of subjectivity
being represented and is best revealed through a hypothesis, rather
than error, approach to a definition of diegesis.
Evidence, however, is not enough, for there is nothing special
about the formal devices chosen for this sequence: they are neither
necessary nor individually sulficient to establish a subjective
narration and they are certainly not inherently subjective. In
particular, it is not a 'camera' movement which is subjective but

our relation to the text as measured through our changing hypo-
theses about the fluctuation of space. The formal devices in a film
are held captiv.e both by the narrative and by the ways we read.
In fact, the features23 of film advance and recede in importance
according to narrative context and structure; that is, according
to their place at a specific moment within the ordered set of
inferences we make about the text. What is important, then, is tofl
examine these inferen es and procedures which a reader applies
to the text. If we follow a rationalist approach, the procedures,
will be abstract, or based on abstract processes. 4
One way to describe these procedures is in terms of a reader i
who scans the text for the presumed origin of a vision which'
frames through time an object as the result of a particular atten- t-
tion or (represented) mental act (eg a character's normal aware-
ness, memory, fear, hallucination, etc). That is, the reader justifies
objects on the screen by referring them to a set of coordinatesÑ
a hypothesised origin, vision, frame, time, and state of mind.
Character subjectivity exists, then, when these elements are
referred to character.
Another way to describe the intervention of the viewer in the
sort of character subjectivity depicted in I Viteltoni is as follows. J
A set of cues (eg Moraldo's glance) refer us to a particular A
semantic field (character and character subjectivity) from which
we select one or more labels, or predicates, which, in turn, denote
(sometimes metaphorically) the filmic instance (eg an eccentric
movement of space.2' Note that this account does not involve any
simple signifier/signified relation frozen in the text. Other
approaches also show promise.
The result is that the sequence as a whole, with its many eyeline
glances, acts to centre Moraldo and his vision. In addition, there
are no cues suggesting a break in the continuous present of time
(early morning). Therefore the bedroom spaces become an
'extended' sort of eyelil e, matched to Moraldo's attention. Since .
he cannot liteXally be in the bedroom, we infer that the objects t

Us~s
@--X-~ we see are. in part measure, objects of his thought.25 One can
-''~azard other guesses concerning Moraldo's thinking but the filrn
-~ provides no steady answers. (The film could have, for example,
: employed expressionist codes of lighting and decor to amplify his
i- thoughts-) The subjectivity remains, to a degtee, open and un-
~- determined; that is, the bedroom spaces also continue the realist
- ; codes of the text.
- ,^ Our conclusion is that the l Vitetloni sequence is partly subjective
zfi^ nd partly objective. But this does not mean that the sequence
- can be anything or everything. We also know what the sequence
0 dces nGt represent. It is not the subjective vision of Guido, who
.. is left standing on the train platform; or of the persons sleeping
r', in the bedrooms (dreaming of themselves): or of two unseen
, passengers on the train. It is also not a flashback, hallucination, or
the vision of an inanimate object like the train. We can, and do,
.. make these sorts of judgments about films. The fundamental
challenge for film theory is to explicate our intuitions and to show
the basis of our competence with respect to, not merely one
- particular subjective narration, but to an indefinite number of such
-: narrations which may utilise any number of formal devices and
be immediately recognised by a viewer. Moreover, a rationalist
theory will hold that our recognition of ncwv forms cannot be
based on 'memorising' all possible forms or by making 'analogies'
tbrough 'resemblance' to past forms. hlstead, narration depends
on 'abstract' processes or rules. These rules which limit admissible
hypotheses determine the limits of our comprehension.2' For
instance, I believe that the various types of subjectivity in classical
film are actually categories of thought which mark the very limits
of what can be thought about character in that system of discourse.

In summary, I have argued for a rationalist theory of narration
whiCh holds that the surface features of a text, essentially
chaotic and accidental, are given significance and order through
abstract procedures applied to the text by the reader. An empirical
theor.y can do scarcely more than create arbitrary lists of forms
vhiCh give no hint about our ability to recognise an infinite
number of forms in novel combination. The text to spectator
relation is more than stimulus/responseÑit is a mutual working
through of the rules and conventions of a generative system.
There are, of course, difficult issues to be faced by a radonalist
theory including the status of mental entities, the meaning of
absence, and the definition of author (as well as narrator and
character). Nevertheless, as a starting point, I contend that a

25 Moraldo's
connection to the
bedrooms can only
be stated using a
modal verb form
(eg the subjunc-
tive conditional):
'If Moraldo were
not on the tram
and instead were
in the bedrooms
of his fdends
then he wouit
see . . .'
This sequence
is an example of
certain
'expressive'
moments in film
which I call
character

'projection' and
is closely related
to character
'reflection,' which
includes mirror
shots and eyeline
matches.
Both of these
types of
subjectivity are
capable of precise
definitions much
as one can isolate
the constituents
of the point-of-
view hot.

26 Cf Noam
_ Chomsky.
Problems of
J~nowledge ant
Freedom,
Pantheon New
York, 197i chap
1 'On Interpreting
the World', p 49.

1 1 9
S - fi

27 Christian Metz,
'The Imaginary
Signifier,' Screcn.
vol 16 no 2,
Summer 1975.
p28.

Photography by
Erich Sargeant

| rationalist theory must redefine the notion of camera so that t_z
z camera becomes a label applied by the reader to certain spatialr
4 effects and not a profilmic object which leaves its scar on the;
t material of cinema Similarly, the diegesis is not something con-~
crete in the world or internal to the film but rather the label by
which we understand the relation of character to sound/space and,
hence, our potential relation to sound/space. The above sorts of
labels are continually being modified, overthrown, or reassert
according to a reader's on-going speculations about the text. It is
not the finality of a reading which is prominent but a certain
indeterminacy which allows, for exarnple, a serni-subjective judg-
ment (as in I Vitclloni).
The fundamental problem fm thP v~S is to rationalise in some
way the appearance of new spaces in a film, I have proposed
analysis of bow we read, centered on what Christian Metz calls a
secondary, symbolic processÑas opposed to the primary process
explored by psychoanalysis.2' When reading is considered as a
perceptual act, it is symbols which are first encountered and, hence,
their analysis is a necessary ground for any complete description
of narration. Our ability to manipulate symbols is neither incidental
nor obvious and should not be impervious to scrutiny.

Fcrtungst Reuew aims to develop the theory of Women's Iiberation
and debate the political perspectives and strategy of
the movement, snd to be a forum for work in progress
and current research and debates in Women's Studies.

Previous issues of Feminist Review have included: Mandy Snell on the
sex discrimination legislation, Beatrix Campbell on sexual politics and
women's liberation, Nicola Murray on Cuba, Veronica Beechey on
patriarchy and much more . . . education,
_ ~feminist historv feminist onmnaionc

~rÑ f
s ~bL feminism and culture . . .

Why not subscribe?
Feminist Review is published three
times a year. Only £4.50 for three
issues for a UK individual subscription
_ + Only £5.50 for an overseas individual
L 3 l subscription.

E~ I ~ ~]~ Subscriptions, general enquiries and
r ~ ^ ~ W information about institutional and
3 ~ airrnail overseas rates available from
_ 2 Feminist Review, 65 Manor Road,
London N.16, UK.

120

,
Thompson,Kristn."Chapter1: NeoformalistFilm 1
Analysis: OneApproach,ManyMethods." Breakina
the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analvsis. - _
Princeton University Press, 1988. PaAes 346.

Neoformalist Film Analysis: One
Approach, Many Methods

GOALS OF FILM ANALYSIS

THERE IS no such thing as film analysis without an approach. Critics
do not go to films only to gather facts which they convey in pristine
i:asllion to others. What we take to be the "facts" about a film will
partly depend on what we assume films to consist of, how we assume
people watch films, how we believe films relate to the world as a
whole, and what we take the purposes of analysis to be. If we have not
thought over our assumptions, our approach may be random and self-
contradictory. But if we examine our assumptions, we have at least a
chance of creating a reasonably systematic approach to analysis. An
aesthetic approach, then, as I am using the tenn here, refers to a set
of assumptions about traits shared by different artworks, about proce-
dures spectators go through in understanding all artworks, and about
ways in which artworks relate to society. These assumptions are capa-
ble of being generalized and hence constitute at least a rough theory
of art. The approach thus helps the analyst to be consistent in studying
more than one artwork. I will consider a method to be something more
specific: a set of procedures employed in the actual analytical process.
The approach which a critic adopts or devises often depends on why
he or she wishes to analyze films at all. There are, it would seem, two
general ways analysts typically decide to work on a filmÑone centered
on an approach, one on the fihn itself.
One can decide to look at a film in order to demonstrate an approach
and its attendant method (since in most approaches there is generally
ollly one method). This is currently a common strategy in academic
fihn studies. The critic begins with an analytical method, often derived
from approaches in literary studies, psychoanalysis, linguistics, or phi-
losophy; she or he then selects a fihn that seems suited to displaying
that method. When I first began doing film analysis in the early 1f370s,
this kind of impetus for fihn criticism seemed almost self-evidently the

way to go about things. Method was paramount, and if one were not

3
NEOFORMALIST FILM ANALYSIS

seen to have a method before beginning an analysis, one risked ap-
pearing naive and muddled.
Yet now such an attitude seems to me to present considerable pit-
falls. The critic could, of course, truly use the analysis of a fihn as an
actual test of the method, to challenge and perhaps change it. But all
too often in the analyses written in the past fifteen years or so, the
choice of a film simply serves to confirm the method. That psychoan-
alytic film readings can be done of films like S pellbourl(l and Vertigo is
hardly surprising; such an analysis offers little challenge to a method.
But can a psychoanalytic method deal equally well with The Creat
Train Robbery or Singin' in the RainÑwithout forcing the fihn into a
simplistic and distorted reading?
Here we encounter a second problem with the imposed-method
tactic. Preconceived methods, applied simply for demonstrative pur-
poses, often end by reducing the complexity of films. Because the
method exists before the choice of film and the process of analysis, its
assumptions must be broad enough to accommodate any film. Every
film must then be considered in some way "the same" in order to
make it conform to the method, and the method's broad assumptions
will tend to iron out differences. If every film simply plays out an Oed-
ipal drama, then our analyses will inevitably begin to resemble each
other. The result is that the critic makes films seem dull and unintri-
gUiligÑyet I take it that the critic's task is, at least in part, to empha-
size the intriguing aspects of films.
Such homogeneity in the treatment of films furthermore suggests
that, by choosing a single method and pressing it down, like a cookie
cutter, on each film in the same way, we risk losing any sense of chal-
lenge in analysis. The films we use as examples are those appropriate
to the method, with the result that our approach becomes perpetually
self:confirming. There can be no difficulty for the system, and ease
will discourage revision. Indeed, revision, for critic,s who develop a
method and then apply it in order to prove it, tends to come from
outside the field of film. Developments in linguistics or psychoanalysis
may alter the method, but the medium of cinema usually has little
effect on it. (This is often because in such cases the original approach
itselfÑpsychoanalysis, linguistics, etc.Ñlies outside the field of aes-
thetic studies.)
In years of dealing with films, I have gradually moved away from
this notion of applying a preexisting method in order to demonstrate
it. Rather, I will be assuming here that we usually analyze a fihn be-
cause it is intriguing. In other words, there is something about it
which we cannot explain on the basis of our approach's existing as

ONE APPROACH, MANY METHODS

sumptions. It remains elusive and puzzling after viewing. This is not
to say that we begin with no approach at all. Rather, our general ap-
proach will not dictate fully how we would analyze any given film.
Since artistic conventions are constantly changing and there are infi-
nite possible variations within existing conventions at any given mo-
ment, we could hardly expect that one approach could anticipate
every possibility. When we find films that challenge us, that is a sure
sign that they warrant analysis, and that the analysis may help to ex-
pand or modify the approach. Alternatively, we may sense a lack in
the approach as it stands and thus deliberately look for a film that
seems to offer it difficulties in that weak area. I have selected a few of
the films in this volume for this reason. For example, a formalist
method is thought to be most appropriate to highly stylized or unusual
films. I have chosen Terror By Night to lead off my analyses precisely

because it is a fairly ordinary classical film. Moreover, many would
consider realism a challenge to a formalist approach, and I have ana-
lyzed two of the most widely accepted examples of cinematic real-
ismÑThe Rules of the Came and Bicycle ThievesÑto show how neo-
formalism can treat realism as a style.
I believe that analysis involves an extended, careful viewing of a
filmÑa viewing that gives the analyst a chance to examine in leisurely
fashion those structures and materials that intrigued him or her on
initial and subsequent viewings. In a manner of speaking, the film it-
self can push us to do such a viewing; that is, some disparity emerges
between the viewing skills we bring to the film and the film's struc-
tures as we experience them. We are confronted by something that we
had not expected to find. (Again, this problematic quality can surface
in the approach itself: we may realize that something we had hoped
the approach would contain is in fact missing, and we will then seek a
film or films that can help us to fill in that gap.)
When the fihn piques our interest, we analyze it in order to explain,
in formal and historical terms, what is going on in the work that would
cue such a response. Similarly, when an issue arises in the approach
that eludes specification, our first response should be to turn to a di-
verse group of actual films in order to understand how the approach
would deal with issues they raised. We then pass the results of close
viewing along to others who may also have tound this or similar films
intriguing, or who at least have been intrigued by the issues raised by
analysisÑfor ultimately we write and read criticism as much for the
issues raised as for the explication of a single film. Theory and criticism
thus become two dilferent aspects of the same give-and-take process.
Neoformalism is an approach to aesthetic analysis based fairly

)

NEOFORMALIST FILM ANALYSIS

closely on the work of the Russian Formalist literary theoretician-crit-
ics. They worked in Russia in the period from the mid-1910s to about
1930 before being forced by official pressure to modify their views. In
my previous book of analysis, Eisenstein's loan the Terrible, I pre-
sented an explication of how the original Formalists' assumptions
could be adapted to film. Here I shall not be retracing this ground;
rather, I shall lay out the neoformalist approach itself, with less fre-
quent references to the Russian Formalists' writingsÑbringing them
in primarily when they seem to offer the clearest definition of a given
term or concept.' In this book, I am interested in how neoformalism
applies to film analysis, but the approach is based upon many assump-
tions about the general nature of art. Hence I will feel free to bring in
examples from artworks in other media as well.
Neoformalist analysis has the potential to raise theoretical issues.
And unless we wish to deal with the same theoretical material over
and over, we must have an approach that is flexible enough to respond
to and incorporate the results of those issues. This approach must be
able to suit each film, and it must build into itself the need to be con-
stantly challenged and thus changed. Each analysis should tell us
something not only about the film in question, but about the possibil-
ities of film as an art. Neoformalism builds into itself this need for
constant modification. It implies a two-way interchange between the-
ory and criticism. It is not, as I have already suggested, a method as
such. Neoformalism as an approach does offer a series of broad as-
sumptions about how artworks are constructed and how they operate
in cueing audience response. But neoformalism does not prescribe
how these assumptions are embodied in individual films. Rather, the
basic assumptions can be used to construct a method specific to the
problems raised by each fihn. In 1924, Boris Eikhenbaum stressed this
limited meaning of the word "method."

The word "method" must be reinvested with its previous modest meaning of
a device used for the study of any concrete pn)blem. The methods of the study
of form may be as varied as is wishe(l, while hol(ling to a single principic,
depending on the themc, the material and the way thc qtlestion is put. Meth-
ods of the study of the text, methods of study of verse, methods of study of a
particular period, and so onÑthese are the natural uscs of thc wor(l "metho(l
. . . we are dealing not with methods but with a principlo. You can think up
as many methods as you like, but the best method will be thc one which can

' For explications of Russian Formalism as an approacil, see my Eisenstein's llun the
Terrible: A Neufomlalisl Anahysis (Princeton: Priliceton University Press, 1981), chap
1, alid Victor Erlich, Russian Fomwlis1)l: llistoryÑDoctrine, (3d ed.)(The Hague: Mou-
ton, 1969).

ONE APPROACH, MANY METHODS

be relied upon most to lead to the goal. we ourselves have an infinite number
of methods. But there can be no question of peaceful coexistence between ten
different principles, there cannot be even two principles. The principle which
establishcs the content or the object of a specific science must stand alone.
Our principle is the study of litcrature as a specific category of phenomena.2
In effect, what Eikhenbaum calls the "principle," and what I am call-
ing the "approach," is what allows us to judge which of the many (in-
deed, infinite) questions we could ask about a work are the most useful
and interesting ones. The method then becomes an instrument we
devise to answer these questions. Because the questions are (at least
slightly) different for each work, the method will also be different. Of

course, we could make things easy for ourselves (as busy academics)
by asking the same question every time, choosing the same types of
film, and using the same method. But this would defeat the purpose,
which is to discover what is intriguing or challenging in each new
work; moreover, it would not modify and illuminate our approach with
each new study.
By assuming an overall approach that dictates modification or com-
plete change of the method for each new analysis, neoformalist film
criticism avoids the problem inherent in the typical self-confirming
method. It does not assume that the text harbors a fixed pattern which
the analyst goes in and finds. After all, if we assume at the outset that
the text contains something, we are likely to find it. Thus neoformal-
ism sidesteps cliche and tedium by using analysis as a means to test
itself against actual films.

THE NATURE OF THE ARTWORK

Neoformalism jettisons a communications model of art. In such a
model, three components are generally distinguished: sender, me-
dium, and receiver. The main activity involved is assumed to be the
passing of a message from sender to receiver through the medium
(e.g., speech, television images, Morse code). Hence the medium
serves a practical function, and its effectiveness is judged by how effi-
ciently and clearly it conveys that message.
Many approaches to artworks assume that art communicates in a
similar way: the artist sends a message (meanings or a theme) via the
artwork, to the receiver (i.e., the reader, viewer, or listener). The im-
plication here is that the artwork, too, should be judged by how well

2 B. M Eykhenl)alims Concerning tile Questioll of the Forlllalists, in Tlle Futurists,
the Fonnalists arlll the Marxist Critique, trans. alld ed. Chris Pike (London: Ink Links,
1979), pp. 5142.

NEOFORMALIST FILM ANALYSIS

it conveys its meanings. Moreover, the artwork should usually serve a
directly practical purpose in our lives, since communication is a prac-
tical activity. As a result, many critical traditions have treated artworks
as valuable only if they convey significant themes or philosophical
ideas. "Merely entertaining" works are not as valuable, since they are
seen as performing no useful service for us. From this basic assump-
tion has come the traditional distinction between "high" and "low" art.
One way of avoiding a communications model of art traditionally has
been the adoption of "art for art's sake" position. Art is assumed not
to communicate ideas, but to exist for the pleasure we experience in
our reaction to it. Beauty, intensity of emotion, and similar qualities
would be the criteria for judging works. Again, a certain elitist distine-
tion between high and low art would tend to inform this position, since
the aesthetic experience becomes the province of aesthetes, with su-
perior taste, who can appreciate the attractions of well-made works,
while the average person can only cope with the crudities of popular
art.
Though it is frequently assumed that the Russian Formalists advo-
cated an art-for-art s-sake position, this was not at all the case. Rather,
they found an alternative to a communications model of artÑand
avoided a high/low art split as wellÑby distinguishing between prae-
tieal, everyday perception and specifically aesthetic, non-practical per-
eeption. For neoformalists, then, art is a realm separate from all other
types of cultural artifacts because it presents a unique set of perceptual
requirements. Art is set apart from the everyday world, in which we
use our perception for practical ends. We perceive the world so as to
filter from it those elements that are relevant to our immediate ac-
tions. Standing at a street corner, for example, we may ignore a myr-
iad of sights, sounds, and smells, focusing upon a small traffic signal
for the moment when it turns green, indicating that we may proceed
toward our actual goal, an appointment a t'ew blocks beyond. For such
purposes, our mental processes must be l'ocused down, factoring out
other stimuli. If we noticed every perceptual item within our ken, we
would have no time to make decisions concerning our most pressing
needs, like not stepping out in front of a bus. Our brains have become
well adapted to concentrating on only those aspects of our environ-
ment that affect us practically; other items are kept peripheral.
Films and other artworks, on the contrary, plunge us into a noIl-
practical, playful type of interaction. They renew our perceptions and
other mental processes because they hold no immediate practical im-
plications for us. If we see the hero or heroine in danger on screen,
we do not leap forward ready to act as rescuer. Rather, we enter the

ONE APPROACH, MANY METHODS

film-watching process as an experience completely separate from our
everyday existence. This is not to say that films have no etfect on us.
As with all artworks, they are of vital importance in our lives. The
nature of practical perception means that our faculties become dulled
by the repetitive and habitual activities inherent in much of daily life.
Thus art, by renewing our perceptions and thoughts, may be said to
act as a sort of mental exercise, parallel to the way sports is an exercise
for the body. Indeed, individuals' use of artworks is often comparable
to their use of non-exercise games~hess, for exampleÑand to the
aesthetic contemplation of nature for its own sake. Art fits into the
class of things that people do for recreationÑto "re-create" a sense of
freshness or play eroded by habitual tasks and the strains of practical

existence. Often the renewed or expanded perceptions we gain from
artworks can carry over to and affect our perception of everyday ob-
jects and events and ideas. As with physical exercise, the experience
of artworks can, over a period of time, have considerable impact on
our lives in general. And because playfully entertaining films can en-
gage our perceptions as complexly as can films dealing with serious,
difficult themes, neoformalism does not distinguish between "high"
and "low" art in films.
Neoformalism's assumption of an aesthetic realm distinct from
(though dependent upon) a nonaesthetic realm goes against a major
trend in contemporary fihn theory. Both Marxist and psychoanalytic
film theory depend on large-scale explanations of how people and so-
ciety work. These approaches are not concerned with the specificity of
the aesthetic realm. Yet the Russian Formalists were "specifiers," as
Eikhenbaum put it. They singled out the aesthetic realm as their ob-
ject of interest, realizing full well that it was a limitedÑthough impor-
tantÑone. They started from the specificity of art and then moved
toward a general theory of mind and society that was consistent with
their basic assumptions and helpful in explaining the work and how
people reacted to it in real, historical contexts. Marxism and psycho-
analysis work t'rom the top down, arriving at the artwork with a huge-
body of major assumptions already made and proponents of such the-
ories must in etfect find an ontology and aesthetic of art to fit.
This is not to say that neoformalism takes art to be a permanent,
fixed realm. It is culturally determined and relative, but it is distinc-
tive. All cultures seem to have had art, and they all recognize the
aesthetic as a realm apart. Neoformalism is a modest approach, seek-
ing only to explain that realm and its relation to the world. It does not
seek to explain the world as a whole, with art as a corner of that world.

)

NEOFORMALIST FILM ANALYSIS

This difference in aims, more than anything else, makes it difficult to
reconcile neoformalism with these other current approaches.
Before neot'ormalism is condemned as conservative, however, it
should be noted that its view of the purpose of art avoids the tradi-
tional concept of aesthetic contemplation as passive. The spectator's
relationship to the artwork becomes active. Nelson Goodman has
characterized the aesthetic attitude: "restless, searching, testingÑ[it]
is less attitude than action: creation and re-creation."3 The viewer ac-
tively seeks cues in the work and responds to them with viewing skills
acquired through experience of other artworks and of everyday life.
The spectator is involved on the levels of perception, emotion, and
cognition, all of which are inextricably bound up together. As Good-
man puts it, "In aesthetic experience the emotions function cogni-
tively. The work of art is comprehended through the feelings as well
as through the senses. 4 Thus the neoformalist critic does not treat
aesthetic contemplation as involving an emotional response that no
type of object other than artworks can elicit. Rather, artworks engage
us at every level and change our ways of perceiving, feeling, and rea-
soning. (I shall usually speak of ' perception, a simplified formula in
which I assume that emotion and cognition are also functioning.)
Artworks achieve their renewing effects on our mental processes
through an aesthetic play the Russian Formalists termed defamiliari-
zation. Our nonpractical perception allows us to see everything in the
artwork differently from the way we would see it in reality, because it
seems strange in its new context. Victor Shklovsky's tdlllous passage
on defamiliarization probably provides the best definition of the term:

If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we sec that as pereep-
tion becomes habitual, it becomes automatic.... such habituation explains
the principles by which, in ordinary speech, we leavc phrases unfinished and
words half expressed.... The object, perceived in the manner of prose per-
ception, fades and does not leave even a first impression; ultimately even the
essenec of what it was is forgotten.... Habitualizatioll devours work, clotllcs,
furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war.... And Art cxists that onc may
recover the sensation of lit'e; it cxists to makc one feel thiligs, to makc the
stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart thc sensation of things as they are
perceived, and not as they are knowil. Tlle techni(luc of art is to makc objects
"unfamiliar," to make forms (lifticult, to increase the (lifficulty an(l Icngth of
perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic cn(l in itself and
must be prolonged.5

3 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Bolll)s-Merrill, 19fi~), p 242
4 Ibid., p. 248.
S victor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique, ' ill Russian Formalist Criticislll: Four Essays,

ONE APPROACH, MANY METHODS

Art defamiliarizes our habitual perceptions of the everyday world, of
ideology ("the fear of war"), of other artworks, and so on by taking
material from these sources and transforming them. The transforma-
tion takes place through their placement in a new context and their
participation in unaccustomed formal patterns. But if a series of art-
works uses the same means over and over, the defamiliarizing eapabil-
ity of those means diminishes; the strangeness ebbs away over time.
By that point, the defamiliarized has become familiar, and the artistic
approach is largely automatized. The frequent changes that artists in-
troduee into their new works over time reHeet attempts to avoid au-
tomatization, and to seek new means to defamiliarize those works' for-

mal element. Defamiliarization, then, is the general neoformalist term
for the basic purpose of art in our lives. The purpose itself remains
consistent over history, but the constant need to avoid automatization
also explains why artworks change in relation to their historical contexts
and why defamiliarization can be achieved in an infinite number of

ways.
Defamiliarization must be present for an object to function for the
spectator as art; yet it can be present to vastly varying degrees. Auto-
matization may nearly wipe out the defamiliarizing capacities of ordi-
nary, unoriginal artworks, such as B westerns. Such ordinary works
tend not to defamiliarize the conventions of their genre of classical
Hollywood filmmaking. Yet even an unoriginal genre fihn is, in its sub-
ject matter, minimally different from other, similar films. Thus it is
slightly defamiliarizing in its use of nature and history. Indeed, we can
assume that all art at least defamiliarizes ordinary reality. Even in a
conventional work, the events are ordered and purposeful in a way
that differs from reality. The works that we single out as most original
and that are taken to be the most valuable tend to be those that either
defamiliarize reality more strongly or defamiliarize the conventions es-
tablished by previous art worksÑor a combination of the two. Yet if
we single out an ordinary film and submit it to the same scrutiny that
we afford more original works, its automatized elements can shed their
t:ainiliality and become intriguingÑas we shall see when we examine
such a film in the next chapter. Def:amiliarization is thus an element
in all artworks, but its means and degree will vary considerably, and
the defamiliarizing powers of a single work will change over history.
These assumptions about defilmiliarizatioll and automatization allow
neoformalism to eliminate a common feature of most aesthetic theo

tralis. alsd ed Lee T. Lemoll antl Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebr.lska Press,
1965), pp. 11-12.

NEOFORMALIST FILM ANALYSIS

ries: the form-content split. Meaning is not the end result of an art-
work, but one of its formal components. The artist builds a work out
of, among other things, meanings. Meaning here is taken to be the
work's system of cues for denotations and connotations. (Some of those
cues will be existing meanings that the work uses as its basic material;
cliches and stereotypes are obvious examples of preexistent meanings
brought in by the artwork, though these may serve a variety of func-
tions within the work.) We can distinguish among tour basic levels of
meaning. Denotation can involve referential meaning, in which the
spectator simply recognizes the identity of those aspects of the real
world that the work includes. For example, we understand that Ivan
the Terrible's hero represents an actual tsar who lived in Russia in the
sixteenth century, and that the plot of The Wi~ard of Oz involves a
lengthy dream. Beyond this, films otten state more abstract ideas out-
right, and this type of meaning we may designate as exylicit. Because
the General in The Rules of the Came keeps lamentilig that upper-
class values are becoming rare, we may assume that the fihn explicitly
sets forth the notion, as one pattern in its formal system, that that class
is in decline. Since these types of meaning are laid out in the film, we
comprehend them or not, according to our prior experience of art-
works and the world.
Connotative meanings move us to a level where we must interpret
to understand. Connotations may be implicit meanings cued by the
work. We tend to look for referential and explicit meanings first, and,
when we cannot account for a meaning in this straightforward way, we
then move to the level of interpretation. At the end of Eclipse, f'or
example, we are unlikely to assume that Antonioni shows us seven
minutes of empty streets simply to refer to the streetsÑthe lengthy
time span and privileged placement at the end of the film work against
such an assumption. Similarly, the explicit meaningÑthat neither Vit-
toria nor Piero has shown up for their ren(lezvousÑseems inadequate
to explain the sequence thoroughly. The ending of Eclipse eneourages
us to think back over the couple's relationship aild environment, and
to come to additional conclusions about themÑmost likely sometiling
about the sterility of their lives and of' modern society. We also use
intelpretation to create meanings that go heyolid the level of the in-
dividual work, and that help define its relation to the world. When we
speak of a film's non-explicit ideology, or ol the fihn as a reflection of
social tendencies, or of the film as suggestive of the mental states of
large groups of people, then we are interpreting its s~l~lytO711(1tiC
meanings. Siegfried Kracauer's discussion of German silent films as

)

ONE APPROACH, MANY METHODS

indicative of the population's collective desire to surrender to the au-
thority of the Nazi regime would be a symptomatic interpretation.fi
All of these types of meaningÑreferential, explicit, implicit, and
symptomaticÑcan contribute to the defamiliarizing effect of a film. On
the one hand, familiar meanings may themselves be defamiliarized by
striking treatments. Indeed, most meanings that are used in films will
of necessity be existing ones. Truly new ideas rarely appear in philos-
ophy or economics or the natural sciences, and we can hardly expect
great artists to be great and original thinkers as well. (Of course, some
critics do expect the artist to be a sort of philosopher, with a vision of
the world; this assumption underpins auteurist criticism in particular.
The Russian Formalists, however, viewed the makers of art as skilled
craftspeople working at a particularly complex craft.) Rather, artists
usually deal with existing ideas and make them seem new through

defamiliarization. The ideas in Ozu's Tokyo Story boil down to one
explicitly stated theme: "Be kind to your parents while they are alive."
This idea is hardly earthshaking in its originality, yet few people would
deny that this film's treatment of it is extremely affecting.
Meanings do not exist in artworks only to be defamiliarized. They
can help in defamiliarizing other elements. Meanings can play the part
of justifying the inclusion of stylistic elements which themselves will
be the main focus of interest. The rather simple, almost cliched no-
tions in Tati's films about how modern society affects people serve in
part as a pretext for unifying a string of highly original, perceptually
ehallenging, comic bits.
Because neot'ormalism does not view art as eommunication, inter- ,~
pretation becomes one tool among many for the neoformalist critic.
Each analysis uses a method adapted to the film and the issues at
hand, and interpretatioll will not always be used in the same way. It
may be crucial or iilcidental, according to whether the work eoneen-
trates on implicit or explicit meanings. Depending on the analyst's,
purpose, interpretation may emphasize meanings within the work or
the work's relation to society.
In this way neoformalism differs considerably from other critical ap-
proaehes, most of which stress interpretation as the analyst's centralÑ
often onlyÑactivity. Interpretive methods usually assume that how
one interprets meanings remains constant from fihn to film. Such a
method may have to be (tuite general, since it will need to force all
films into a similar pattern. Tzvetan Todorov has differentiated be

6 Siegfried Kracauer, From CaliKari to llitler (Princeton: Princetol1 Ulliversity Press,
1947).

)

NEOF()BMALIST FILM ANALYSIS

tween two broad types of interpretive strategies in common use: "op-
erational," which places constraints on the process of interpretation,
and "finalist," which places constraints on the results of the interpre-
tive process. As examples of the latter, he cites Marxism and Freudi

anism:

In both the former and the latter, the point of arrival is known beforeband,
and cannot be modified it is the principles derived from tile work of Marx or
of Freud (it is significant that these types of criticism bear the names of their
inspirers; it is impossible to modify the text produced without violating the
doctrine, and hence without abandoning it).'

Referring specifically to Freudian interpretation, Todorov declares:

If psychoanalysis is really a specific strategy (as I believe), it can only be such,
on the contrary, through an a priori cotdification of the results to be obtained.
Psychoanalytical interpretation can only be defined as an interpretation that
discovers in the objects analyzed a content in harmony with psychoanalytical
doctrine; . . . it is foreknowledge of the meaning to be discovered that gui(les
the interpretation.

As an instance of this guidance, Todorov cites Freud's declaration that
the vast majority of symbols in dreams are sexual in nature.S
Such pre-determined patterns have become quite common in film
studies. For example, recently some critics have claimed to find a
'-family romance" (based on Freudian notions of the Oedipus complex)
in all classical narrative films. Another interpretive template dictates
that the analyst sort out eyeline directions for the various characters,
determining through them who has the "look" and therefore is more
powerful. Such reductive schemata are tautological, since they assume
that any film will fit these patterns, and the patterns are simple
enough that any film can be made to fit them. (Or, if a fihn seems not
to fit, the analyst can find its meaning ironic.) Alternatively, many
Freudian critics deal with symptomatic meanings, finding in a fihn
symptoms of psychic repression or ideological conHicts. Such a
method, while more complex, still ends up dictating a narrow range of
meanings ahead of time, which the analyst will necessalily find pres-
ent in the film. Such systems are impossible to attack or det'end, since
no conceivable evidence could confirm or deny them.
Another problem with an exclusive concentration on interpretation
is that even if the film makes its meanings very explicit indeed, the

7 Tzvetan Todorov, Symbolisme et itltt r1~retation (Paris Editiol~s d,. Seuil, 1978), uP
16(W161.
8 Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the SIJnibol, trans. Catherille Porter (Ithaca Cornell
university Press, 1982), pp. 25254.

ONE APP~OACH, MANY METHODS

critic has to deal with them as if they were implicit or symptomaticÑ
otherwise, what would he or she have to talk about?
Neoformalism assumes that meaning differs from film to film be
cause it, like any other aspect of the film, is a device. The word desice v
indicates any single element or structure that plays a role in the art
workÑa camera movement, a frame story, a repeated word, a cos
tume, a theme, and so on. For the neoformalist, all devices of the
medium and of formal organization are equal in their potential for de- 1/
familiarization and for being used to build up a filmic system. As Ei
khenbaum pointed out, the older aesthetic tradition treated the ele

ments of the work as the "expression" of the author; the Russian
Formalists looked upon these elements as artistic devices.9 The struc
ture of devices is seen as organized not solely in order to express
meaning, but to create defamiliarization. We can analyze devices using ;/
I the concepts of function and motivation.
8 Yuri Tynjanov defined function as "the interrelationship of each ele
I ment with every other in a literary work and with the whole literary
I system."k¡ It is the purpose served by the presence of any given de
! .vice. Function is crucial to understanding the unique qualities of a
; given artwork, for, while many works may use the same device, that
device's function may be different in each work. It is risky to assume
that a given device has a fixed function from film to film. For example,
to use two of the cliches of film studies, bar-like shadows do not always
symbolize that a character is "imprisoned," and verticals in a compo
sition do not automatically suggest that characters on either side are
isolated from each other. Any given device serves different functions
according to the context of the work, and one of the analyst's main jobs
is to find the device's functions in this or that context. Functions are
also important in relating the work to history. Devices themselves be
come automatized quite easily, and the artist may replace them with
new devices that are more defamiliarizing. But functions tend to re
main more stable, since they are renewed by a change of device, and
they persist longer historically than do individual devices. We may call
diff'erent devices that serve the same function functional e4uioalents.
As Eikhenbaum pointed out, the function of the device in context is
usually more important for the analyst than is the device as such.ll

9 Boris Eikhenbaum, "Stir la theorie de la prose," in Theorie de la litterature, trans.
and ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969), p. 228.
"' Yuri Tynjanov, ' On Literary Evolution, trans. C. A. Lliplow, in Readirigs in Rus
sian Poetics ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1971j, p. ti8.
" Boris M. Ejxenbaum, The Theory of the Formal Method, trans. 1. R. Titunik, in
Readings in Russian Poetics, p. 29.

NEOFORMALIST FILM ANALYSIS

Devices perform functions in artworks, but the work must also pro-
vide some reason for including the device to begin with. The reason
the work suggests for the presence of any given device is its motiva-
tion. Motivation is, in efl'ect, a cue given by the work that prompts us
' to decide what could justify the inclusion of the device; motivation,
l then, operates as an interaction between the work s structures and the
v spectator's activity. There are four basic types of motivation: compo-
sitional, realistic, transtextual, and artistic. 12
Briefly, compositional motivation justifies the inclusion of any de-
y vice that is necessary for the construction of narrative causality, space,
or time. Most frequently, compositional motivation involves the
"planting'- of information early on which we will need to know later.
For example, in P. G. Wodehouse's The Cirl in Blue, a lazy secretary
fails to pass on a message to her boss that a friend has placed his val-
uable Gainsborough portrait in a drawer; as a result, the latter assumes
that the painting has been stolen. The novel's entire series of comic
misunderstandings follows from the motivation provided by one
eventÑthe secretary's blunder. As a result, we anticipate that the mix-
up will be resolved by the finding of the portrait in the drawer. Often
,, compositional motivation does not promote plausibility, but we are
willing to overlook this for the sake of having the story continue. As
Shklovsky put it, "To the question of Tolstoi: 'Why does Lear not rec-
ognise Kent and KentÑEdgar' one may answer: because this is nec-
essary for the creation of the drama, and the unreality disturbed
Shakespeare no more than the question 'Why cannot a knigilt move
straight?' disturbs a chess player."'3 Indeed, compositional motivations
act to create a kind of internal set of rules tor the individual artwork.
Plausibility falls within the realm of realistic motivation, wilicil is a
v type of cue in the work leading us to appeal to notions from the real
world to justify the presence of a device. For example, when Phineas
Fogg makes his bet to travel around the world in eighty days at the
beginning of Verne's novel, we realize that he is wealthy, and hence
able to drop everything in order to travel; moreover, he can pay for all

12 The Russian Formalists differentiated only three, and transtextual is not ilicilided
in Boris Tomashevsky s seminal exploration Of motivation in lwis "Thelilatics ' ill Russiull
Fomuxlist Cnticisrn: Four xNEOFOR pp. 78 87. I)avid Bor(lwell l)orrowed the ter m trutis-
textual from Cerard Cenette lo accoulsl lor how artworks appeal directly to the co)s-
venlions established by otber artworksÑa Iype of apl)eal llot explicilly eovered in the
original three categories. See Bordwell s Narration in the Fictioll Fihn (Maelison: Uni-
versily of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 36.
13 Viklor Shklovsky, "On the Colilleclion Betweels I)evices ol Syuzhet Colsstruelion
and Ceneral Stylistic Devices, trans. Jane Knox, in Russian Formolisill, ed. Slephe
Bann alld John E. Bowlt (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 65.

ONE APPROACH, MANY METHODS

;

the different vehicles he employs along the way. (A similar realistic
motivation of wealth underpins Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wim-
sey novels and many screwball-comedy films of the 1930s.) Our ideas
about reality are not direct, natural knowledge of the world, but are
culturally determined in various ways. Thus realistic motivation can
appeal to two broad areas of our knowledge: on the one hand, our 1/
knowledge of everyday life gained by direct interaction with nature
and society; on the other, our awareness of prevailing aesthetic canons
of realism in a given period of an art form's stylistic change. We shall
see both types of realistic motivation at work in Bicycle Thieves (Chap-
ter 7) and in The Rules of the Ca1ne (Chapter 8).

Since realistic motivation is an appeal to ideas about reality, rather ,~
than an imitation of reality as such, its means can be extremely varied,
even within a single work. For most of Mozart s Le Nozze di Figaro,
the fact that the characters sing instead of speak is motivated transtex-
tually by genre: people do sing in operas, even though they are not
always represented as singing within the narrative s world. Yet oc-
casionally realistic motivation does "justify-- their singing. Cherubino's
first aria, "Non so piu cosa son, cosa t:accio," functions simply as a way
for the boy to tell Susanna about his feelings. Later, however, Susanna
accompanies on a guitar Cherubino-s song to the Countess, "Voi -'- -
sapete c he cosa e amor," and the two women praise his singing voice.
The introduction of an "actual'- song amid the rest of the singing in an
opera is common enough (e.g., Pasquale's comic serenade "Ecco spi-
ano" in Haydn's Orlando Paladrino). But a completely different type
of realistic motivation appears in the duet "Canzonetta sull aria, in
which the Countess dictates to Susanna a letter in the form of a poem.
Ordinarily in a duet, the singers repeat and pass back and forth the
-same lines, or parts of lines, and that practice is motivated by the
genre of opera. Here that practice is realistically motivated as Susan-
na's repetition of the last word or phrase of the Countess's previous
line of dictation, to check if she has written it correctly. Thus:

Coulitess: "A gentic zophyr . . ."
Susalllla:". . . zephyr. . ."
(Coulltess: ". . . will sigh tonight . . ."
Sllsanlia: ". . . will sigh tollight . . .
Cotultess: '. . . Ilcatll thc pincs in the copse . . ."
Susallllla: '' 'Neath the pines'R"
('oulitess: '. . . 'neatil the pincs in the copse . . ."
SusanIla (writing): . . . neath the pines in the
..
copsc . . .

.e
J

NEOFORMALIST FILM ANALYSIS

Moreover, in the first go-through, there is a musical passage between
each line as Susanna writes, and at the "pines" line she gets behind
and has to ask about the phrasing, thus motivating turther repetition.
In the second part of the duet, the two women read over the letter,
and now they sing in counterpoint, with no pauses for writingÑas if
checking or revising the letter. (At the end of the whole thing Susanna
declares, "The letter is ready.") As these examples from Le Nozze di
Figaro indicate, a mixture of types of motivation can be defamiliariz-
ing. Indeed, "inconsistent" motivation of this type (the duet does not
need to be realistically motivated in the way it is) is the privilege of
art, and audiences are usually prepared to accept it.
Transtextual motiDationX the third of our four types, involves any
appeal to conventions of other artworks, and hence it can be as varied
as the historical circumstances allow. In effect, the work introduces a
device that is not motivated adequately within its own terms, but that
depends on our recognition of the device from past experience. In
film, types of transtextual motivation most commonly depend on our
knowledge of usage within the same genre, our knowledge of the star,
or our knowledge of similar conventions in other art t'orms. For ex-
ample, the lengthy buildup to the shoot-out in Sergio Leone's The
Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is certainly not realistic, nor is it neces-
sary for the narrative (a quick exchange of gunfire would settle the
issue at hand in seconds). But from having watched countless west-
erns, we realize that the shoot-out has become a ritual of the genre,
and Leone treats it as such. Similarly, a familiar star carries many as-
sociations which the film can exploit. When Chance (played by john
Wayne) first appears in Rio Bravo, we need not be told that he is the
protagonist, and he can get down to business with no exposition to set
him up; his behavior is also consistent with the way we know john
Wayne's characters ordinarily behave. And an example of a convention
in film coming from another art lorm is the "cliflhanger" ending, which
was adopted into fihn serials in the 1910s, having been established
through the nineteenth-century publishing practice of issuing novels
in installments.
Our expectations about transtextual conventions are so pervasive
that we probably accept them fairly automatically in many cases; yet it
is also easy l'or the artwork to play with our assumptions by violating
genre conventions, casting actors against type, and so on. Although
the Russian Formalists did not designate a separate type of motivation
of this transtextual sort, they did tacitly recognize its existence. Ei-
khenbaum mentions both the familiar nature of this motivation and its

ONE APPROACH, MANY METHODS

violation in his discussion of Lermontov's use of the Republic of Geor-
gia as a Iyrical element in a poem.

Georgia appears as something intrinsically poetic, as an exotic element which
does not require special motivation. After innumerable Caucasian poems and
tales had made the Caucasus a fixed literary decoration (which Tolstoy later
destroyed with such irony), there was no need to motivate the choice of Ceor-
gia. l4

Transtextual motivation, then, is a special type which preexists the
artwork, and upon which the artist may draw in a straightforward or
playful way. (A work that depends heavily on the violation of transtex-

tual motivations of a specific type will most likely be perceived as pa-
rodic.)
Artistic motivation is the most difficult type to define. In one sense,
every device in an artwork has an artistic motivation, since it functions
in part to contribute to the creation of the work's abstract, overall
shapeÑits form. Yet many, probably most, devices have an additional,
more prominent compositional, realistic, or transtextual motivation
and in these cases artistic motivation is not particularly noticeableÑ
though we can deliberately shift our attention to the aesthetic qualities
of the work's texture even if it is densely motivated. Yet in another
sense, artistic motivation is present in a really noticeable and signifi-
cant way only when the other three types of motivation are withheld.
Its pervasive quality sets artistic motivation apart. As Meir Sternberg
puts it, "Behind every quasi-mimetic motivation there is an aesthetic
motivation . . . though not vice-versa. l5 That is, artistic motivation
can exist by itself, without the other types, but they never can exist
independently from it. Some films foreground artistic motivation at
intervals by withholding the other three types, and in such cases we
sense the overall motivation as "thin" or inadequate and strive to dis-
cover abstract relations among devices.
Some aesthetic modesÑfor example, non-programmatic music
decorative and abstract painting, abstract filmsÑare almost com-
pletely organized around artistic motivation, and their audiences will
be aware of that fact. Yet even in a narrative film, I would argue, ar-
tistic motivation can be systematically foregrounded. When this hap-
pens, and artistic patterns compete for our attention with the narrative
functions of devices, the result is parametric form. In such films, cer

" Boris Eikhenbaum, Lermontoo, trans. Ray Parrott and Henry Weber (Ams Arbor:
Ardis, 1981), p. 101.
15 Meir Sternberg, Erpositional Abodes b Temporal Ordering in Fictiorl (Baltimore:
The lohn Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 251-252.

NEOFORMALIST FILM ANALYSIS

tain devices, such as colors, camera movements, sonic mOtifs, will be
repeated and varied across the entire work's form; these devices be-
come parameters. They may contribute to the narrative's meaningÑ
for example, by creating parallelisms or contrastsÑbut their abstract
functions exceed their contribution to meaning and draw our attention
more. Because artistic motivation and parametric form are difEicult
concepts, and because they hold such potential for defamiliarizing
automatized narrative and genre conventions, I shall spend a consid-
erable portion of this book, the last four chapters, on this topic.
A special, 'strong" case of artistic motivation comes with the baring
i Of the device. Here artistic motivation foregrounds the formal function
of a given device or structure in the work. In a classical or realist work
that draws heavily upon the other three types of motivation, the de-
vice will be bared only occasionally. (We shall see, I'or example, how
Bicycle Thieves foregrounds its own realism by referring ironically at
intervals to the glamor of classical entertainment films.) But some art-
works make device-baring a central structure. Shklovsky's analysis of
Sterne's Tristram Shandy finds that the novel Haunts its own delaying
tactics as arbitrary and playful, to the point at which real progression
of the narrative action becomes a side issue. 16 A highly original art-
work will tend to bare the device a good deal to help cue spectators as
to how to adjust their viewing skills to cope with the new and difficult
devices in use. The concept of baring the device should become
clearer in the course of this book, since we shall encounter it often.
Thus formal devices serve a variety of functions, and their presence
can be motivated in one or more of the four possible ways. Devices
can serve the narrative, can appeal to similar devices familiar from
other artworks, can imply verisimilitude, and can defamiliarize the
structures of the artwork itself. Meaning, as a device, may also serve
any of these functions. Some artworks foreground meanings and invite
us to interpret them. The works of Ingmar Bergman, especially those
of the 1960s and 1970s, contain obscure imagery that cannot be under-
stood without considerable interpretation. In a different way, Jean-
Luc Godard's films elicit interpretation as a major viewing strategy, as
we shall see with Sause qui peut (la vie), in which even the film's basic
referential level is made obscure so as to guide us toward implicit
meanings. Yet, as I have suggested, meaning in a film may be very
simple and obvious; it may serve as a motivating device around which
defamiliarizing systems of style are structured, as we shall see in such

16 victor Shklovsky, "sterlle's Tristram Shancly: Stylistic Commentary," ill Russian
Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, pp. 25 57.

ONE APPROACH, MANY METHODS

films as Play Time and Late Spring. The analyst, in formulating an
appropriate method, must decide what type and degree of interpre-
tation is appropriate to the overall analysis. But analysis of function
and motivation will always remain the analyst's central goal, and it will v
subsume interpretation.

THE FILM IN HISTORY

Given that film sets up a renewing playfulness for the spectator
through defamiliarization, how can the analyst determine what
method is appropriate to a specific work? Neoformalism resolves this

question in party by insisting that the film can never be taken as an /
abstract object outside the context of history. Every viewing occurs in
a specific situation, and the spectator cannot engage with the film ex-
cept by using viewing skills learned in encounters with other artworks
and in everyday experience. Neoformalism therefore grounds analysis
of individual films in historical context based upon a concept of norms
and deviations. Our most frequent and typical experiences form our ,/
perceptual norms, and idiosyncratic, defamiliarizing experiences stand
out in contrast.
Neoformalism calls norms of prior experience backgrounds, since v
we see individual films within the larger context of such prior experi-
ence. There are three basic types of background. First, there is the l/
everyday world. Without a knowledge of it, we could not recognize
referential meaning, and it would be impossible to comprehend sto-
ries, character behavior, and other basic devices of films; moreover,
we need everyday knowledge to comprehend how films create symp-
tomatic meanings in relation to society. A second type of background
involves other artworks. From a very young age we see and hear a
great many artworks and come to understand their conventions. We
are not born understanding how to follow plots, how to grasp filmic
space Irolll shot to shot, how to notice the return of a musical theme
in a symphony, and so on. Third, we recognize how films are used for
practical purposes (advertising, reportage, rhetorical persuasion, and
so oll), and we see the artistic use of cinema as somethilig apart from
such usage. Thus when we watcil an aesthetic film, we perceive it as .
deviatilig t'rom reality, Irom other artworks, and lirom practical usage
in cert;lill distinct ways. The tihn's adllerelice to and departure from
its hatkgioulid norms are the subjects of tile analyst's work, and the
histol ical context provided by the backgrounds gives the analyst cues 1/
lor constructing an appropriate method. Those methods that privilege
interpretation, on the other hand, often have no way to treat diti'er

l )

NEOFORMALIST FILM ANALYSIS

ently films of different periods and sources; all will be forced into the
same pattern of meaning. For neoformalism the film's functions and
motivations can only be understood historically.
This is not to imply that neoformalism simply reconstructs the view-
ing circumstances of the film's original audiences. The work does not
exist only at the moment of its creation and first screenings. Many
artworks continue to exist and are seen in different circumstances. In-
deed, it would be impossible to reconstruct fully the original viewing
circumstances of most films. We shall probably never know precisely
who saw pre-1909 films and under what circumstances. We can still
find primitive films interesting and enjoyable, but we can never be
sure we understand them in at all the same way as their first audiences
did. We no longer have access to the original backgrounds, and critics
and historians almost invariably must analyze these early films against
the background of later, classical filmmaking. (I am not suggesting that
we should avoid historical research into the original contexts of films,
but we should realize that our perspective inevitably will be colored
by more recent developments.) To take another example, many Japa-
nese films made in the 1930s and early 1940s contain implicit or ex-
plicit militarist propaganda. Western audiences looking at these films
today do not accept this ideology in the way original audiences would
have in Japan; indeed, modern Japanese viewers, particularly those
living in the United States, seem to find such films difficult to enjoy
thoroughly. Yet, because they present striking similarities to and dif-
ferences from the more familiar Western films of the same era, and
because many are skillfully made, with interesting narratives, these
films still intrigue audiences for whom the original backgrounds are
irrecoverable.
Even a relatively recent example demonstrates how quickly chang-
ing backgrounds can alter our perception of a film. When Bonnie and
Clyde was released in 1967, its astonishing amount of violence and
particularly its advertising campaign (-'They're young. They're in love.
They kill people") aroused a great deal of controversy. In the interven-
ing two decades, the use of violence in films has become so common-
place that Bonnie and Clyde and its ads seem tame. A new background
has automatized the film's devices to a considerable extent. Audiences
will probably never be able to watch it with the sense of shock felt by
1967 viewers.
As these examples suggest, ref'erential and symptomatic meanings
tend to be the most difficult types for audiences to recover outside the
original context. Explicit and implicit meanings, on the other hand,
are to a greater extent created by the work's internal structures and

ONE APPROACH, MANY METHODS

thus they will be more apparent to later audiences. In judging what
sorts of reality backgrounds it may be useful to discuss, we should v
determine what types of meanings the film at hand emphasizes. To
enable ourselves to do this, we should avoid using a method that pre-
determines the meanings to be found, but should instead pay atten-
tion to those aspects of the film that may be difflcult to interpret. Such
difficulties are, in effect, cues within the work directing us to move x.,K'
beyond obvious levels of meaning. In the next section of this chapter
we shall see how historical norms help the critic determine what a
film's meanings might consist of in a specific context.
Some films depend extensively on a knowledge of historical, social

backgrounds, while others create more self-contained systems that en-
courage us to view them primarily against other artworks. Lancelot du.
Lac provides an example of a film that downplays the importance of
realistic backgrounds. The burden of proof would fall to the critic who
claimed that an extensive familiarity with French society of the early
1970s would help us understand the film better (the way it would with
a Godard fihn of the same period). Lancelot's meanings are largely
explicit and implicit. On the other hand, by comparing Lancelot with
other films representing the same distinctive modernist system of ,~
filmmakingÑparametric formÑwe can perhaps better grasp the film's
peculiar formal strategies.
In choosing what type of background to use, the neoformalist critic
also makes assumptions about whether his or her reader will be famil-
iar with various backgrounds relevant to the film. In this book, for ¢
example, I decided that to analyze Late Spring for a largely Western
readership, it would be helpful if I examined the ideology of family
and marriage practices in postwar Japan; looking at Ozu's films against
an ethnocentric background of recent Western ideology distorts them
as we shall see in Chapter 12. Stylistically, however, Late Spring plays
upon deviations from the norms of classical Western filmmaking, thus
the latter provides a relevant background as well. Other films utilize
much more 6miliar backgrounds of reality, as in Play Ti1ne. It is hardly
necessary to harp on that film's satirization of modern life; rather, I
shall be examining its perceptual challenges in terms of traditional
comic gag structures. It may also be usetul to place some films against
a variety of backgrounds. Audience perceptions of The Rules of the
Game have changed radically over the decades since it was madeÑ
changes we can explain by comparing different backgrounds with each
other. Altered reactions to Rules will help demonstrate, in Chapter 8
that the perception of realism as a style is a historically based reaction.
As is indicated by my freqtJent references to the classical cinema,

NEOFORMALIST FILM ANALYSIS

both here and in the individual analyses, I consider it one of the most
pervasive and helpful backgrounds against which we can examine
many films. Historically, the type of filmmaking associated with Hol-
lywood from the mid-19lOs to the present has been widely seen by
audiences and widely imitated by other filmmaking nations all over
the world. 17 As a result, vast numbers of viewers have developed their
most normative viewing skills by watching classical films. Moreover,
many filmmakers who have worked in original ways have set up formal
systems that play off and challenge those normative skills. Chapter 2
will examine an ordinary Hollywood film, and I will frequently make
reference to such films as backgrounds for the less classical films dis-
cussed in other chapters.'8
The notion of backgrounds does not mean that neoformalism is
doomed to complete relativism. For one thing, appropriate back-
grounds are not infinite in number. Because neoformalist analysis de-
pends upon an understanding of historical context, some backgrounds
will clearly be more relevant than others. For example, there has been
a trend in the past decade to look at primitive (pre-1909) films against
the background of modern experimental cinema. As a result, analysts
sometimes ascribe some sort of radical form and ideology to these
early films. Yet such a proceeding is arbitrary, since it ignores the dif-
ferences in norms between the two periods. Early filmmakers were
experimenting with an new medium in which norms did not exist,
except as borrowed f'rom the established arts; over the first two dec-
ades, specifically cinematic norms were themselves established. But
by the time modern experimental filmmakers began working, the
norms had been in existence for a long time, and the filmmakers were
reacting specifically against them. Hence to equate these two types of
film simply remains an intriguing game, not an historically valid
method of comparison. The notion of backgromids does not legitimate
any whim of the analyst. The current fashion (resulting from au ahis-
torical approach to analysis) of an "infinite play of readings" cannot he
justified by using a vast group of different backgroulids for the same

17 I have examined how the American cinema s begemolly was achieved dilrilig World
War I and how it was perpetllated in tbe p(lstwar era ill my Erporting Entert(lillmetlt:
America ill the World 11'ilm Market 19()7-1934 (London: British lilln Illstitllte, 1985),
Ih There is no space llere to deal witll the classival cinellla tllorollgllly. For a basic
actoullt ol classical film style, see l)avid Bordwell and Kristin Tholnl)soll~ Filrn Art: An
Introductioll 2d ed. (New York: Alrred A. Knopf, 1985); lor more tl)eort lical alld bistor-
ical discussiolls, see David Bordwell, Janet staiger, and Kristin Thoml)sol), Tlle ('lassi-
cal llolly(oood cillenw: Film Stgle and ltlode l)f rtO(/UCtiOII to 1960 (New York: Col(lm-
bia University Press, 1985), and David Bordwell, Narration in tlle Fiction Filll,, chap.
9.

ONE APPROACH, MANY METHODS

film. Since there are a finite number of reading conventions at any
given moment, we may assume that they can produce a variety of
"readings," but not an infinite number of them.
Precisely because backgrounds give neoformalist analysis a histori-
cal basis, they make possible an examination of how defamiliarization
occurs. Defamiliarization depends on historical context; devices that
may be new and defamiliarizing will decline in effectiveness with rep-
etition. Our Bonnie and Clyde example has already suggested how this
happens. Highly original artworks tend to foster imitation, and de-
vices are introduced, used, and dropped. As the original background
becomes more remote, an older artwork may once again seem unfa- v
miliar to a new generation of audiences. We constantly see examples
of artworks going through cycles of popularity, being revived as norms

and perceptions change. Nineteenth-century American realist paint-'
ing, for example, was long considered of little interest; yet recently it
has become more "respectable" through major exhibitions and publi-
cations. Film serials provide an interesting example of a form that has
gone through cycles. In the teens, serials were taken quite seriously;
they were the equivalent of "A" pictures. During the 1920s and 1930s
they declined in status and became cheap "B" products. Finally, in
the 1950s, television took over the funetion of providing eontinuing
narratives, and serial production ended. But in the later 1970s and the
1980s, a number of filmmakers who grew up watching "B" serials have
revived some of their conventions, and we see very popular and pres-
tigious classical filmsÑRaiders of the Lost Ark, the Star Wars and Star
Trek series, and so onÑonce again drawing upon the tradition. Simi-
larly, French intellectuals of the 1920s held such popular filmmakers
as Louis Feuillade and Leonce Perret in utter contempt; yet decades
later, the works of these two filmmakers have garnered increasing re-
spect. The concepts of defamiliarization, automatization, and changing
backgrounds can help account for such cycles in fihn viewing.

THE SPECTATOR'S ROLE

Because the work exists in constantly changing circumstances, audi-
ences' perceptions of it will differ over time. Hence we camlot assume
that the meanings and patterns we notice and interpret are completely
there in the work, immutable for all time. Rather, the work's devices
constitute a set of cues that can encourage us to perform certain view-
ing activities; the actual form those activities take, however, inevitably
depends ml the work's interaction with its and the viewer's historical
contexts. In analyzing a film, therefore, the neoformalist critic will not

)

NEOFORMALIST FILM ANALYSIS

w
w

treat its devices as fixed and self-contained structures that exist inde-
pendent of our perception of them. The film exists physically in its can
when we are not watching it, of course, but all those qualities that are
of interest to the analystÑits unity; its repetitions and variations; its
'2 representation of action, space, and time; its meaningsÑresult from
the interaction between the work's formal structures and the mental
operations we perform in response to them.
As we have seen, perception, emotion, and cognition are central to
the neoformalist critic's view of how film's formal qualities function
That view does not treat the spectator as being wholly "in the text,
since this would imply a static view; backgrounds changing over time
would be incapable of affecting our understanding of films if we as
spectators were constructed entirely by the work's internal form. Yet
the spectator is not "ideal" either, since that traditional view also im-
plies that the work and the spectator exist in a constant relationship
untouched by history. But in accounting for the effects oi history on
spectators, critics need not go to the opposite extreme of dealing only
with the reactions of actual people. (They need not resort to audience
surveys, for example, to find out how people watch films, or plunge
into complete subjectivity, taking their own reactions as the only ac-
cessible ones.) The notion of norms and deviations allows critics to
v make assumptions about how viewers would be likely to understand a
given device.
In the neoformalist approach, viewers are not passive ' subjects, as
current Marxist and psychoanalytic approaches would have it. Rather,
viewers are largely active, contributing substantially to the final effect
of the work. They go through a series of activities, some physiological,
some preconscious, some conscious, and some presumably uncon-
scious. Phgsiological processes involve those automatic responses
that viewers do not control, such as perceiving movement across a
succession of static film images, differentiating colors, or hearing a se-
ries of sound waves as sounds. Such perceptions are automatic and
mandatory; we cannot determine by introspection how we are aware
of them, nor can we by conscious willing make them otherwise (e.g.,
we can never see the motion-picture image as a series of still pictures
separated by black moments). The medium of film depends upon
these automatic abilities of the human brain and senses, but in many
cases in film criticism, they are so self-evident as to be oi little imme-
diate interest; the critic can assume them as givens and go on to the
preconscious and conscious activities. (Some films, and particularly
modern experimental genres, play with our physiological responses
and make us aware of them; for example, Stan Brakhage s Mot ght

ONE APPROACH, MANY METHODS

draws our attention to the flicker effect and the perception of apparent
motion . )
Preconscious activities are of more general interest to the analyst
for these involve easy, nearly automatic processing of information in
ways that are so familiar that we do not need to think about them.
Much object recognition is preconscious, as when we realize that the
same person appears in shot A and shot B (as in a match on action) or
that in a crane upward it is the camera that moves, not the landscape
that suddenly "falls away" (even though the latter may be the percep-
tual effect on the screen). Such mental processes differ from physio-
logical activities in that they are available to our conscious mind.
We can, if we think about it, realize how we went about recognizing
continuous action over a cut or the stability of the ground in the crane
shot. We can at will think of these stylistic flourishes as abstract pat-

terns. Much of our reaction to stylistic devices may be preconscious in
that we learn cutting, camera movement and other techniques from l
classical films, and we learn them so weil that we usually no longer
need to think about them, even after only a few visits to the cinema
(It is instructive, by the way, to watch a film intended for children and
listen to young audience members asking their parents questions, they
are, in effect, in the process of learning skills that will later become
preconscious.) Object recognition and other activities will be precon-
scious or conscious, depending upon the degree of familiarity involved.
Familiar objects will be recognized without conscious effort, while we
may have to struggle to cope with the novel devices with which a film
may confront us.
Conscious processesÑthose activities of which we are awareÑalso
play a major role in our viewing of films. Many cognitive skills in-
volved in film viewing are conscious: we struggle to understand a
story, to interpret certain meanings, to explain to ourselves why a
strange camera movement is present, and so on. For the neoformalist
critic, conscious processes are usually the most important ones, since
it is here that the artwork can ¥hallenge most strongly our habitual
ways of perceiving and thinking and can make us aware of our habitual
ways of coping with the world. In a sense, for the neoformalist, the
aim of original art is to put any or all of our thought processes onto this
conscious level.
There is a fourth level of mental processes, the unconscious. Much
of recent film theory and analysis has been devoted to an application
of psychoanalytic methods of various stripes, in an effort to explain film
viewing as an activity primarily carried on in the viewer's unconscious
For neoformalists, however, the unconscious level is largely an unnec

l J

NEOFORMALIST FILM ANALYSIS

essary construct. For one thing, the textual cues that psychoanalytic
criticism points toÑthe repetition and variation of motifs, the use of
glances, patterns of symmetry in narrative structureÑare wholly avail-
able to neoformalism as well. The psychoanalytic argument hinges
upon the interpretations that can be produced from these cues, but
these tend to be of the cookie-cutter variety, whereby every film en-
acts the castration complex or the rule "he who has the look has the
power." Moreover, it can be argued that contemporary psychoanalytic
criticism, despite its claim to offer a theory of"spectatorship," is in
fact not particularly concerned with the viewer. Most psychoanalytic
studies of films simply employ a Freudian or Lacanian model of the
text's internal operations (in which the film is taken as analagous to
the discourse of the psychoanalytic patient) in order to interpret the
film as an isolated object. The viewer becomes a passive receiver of
textual structures. Furthermore, psychoanalytic criticism has posited
that viewer as existing largely outside history. If the spectator per-
forms no significant conscious activities in viewing, then he or she is
not using experience gained in the world and from other artworks.
Hence there can be nothing comparable to what I have been calling
backgrounds, and historical circumstances cannot affect the viewing.
One could posit that perhaps backgrounds affect the unconsciousÑ
though how could we ever know this?Ñbut in the practice of film anal-
ysis, categories used to characterize the viewer's unconscious have
been general and static ones. If the experience of moviegoing perpet-
ually replays for us the mirror phase of entering into the imaginary, or
imitates dreaming, or reminds us of the mother's breast in our infancy
(all explanations put forth in recent theory), then it presumably does
so in the same way for all viewers and in the same way at all viewings
throughout the individual spectator's life. We would have to assume,
therefore, that all the effects of the film are created by structures
within the film itself, and that it exists unchanging, outside history.
Certainly many psychoanalytic "readings" treat the film as just such
an ahistorical object. (This is not to say that psychoanalytic concepts
can never be used by the neoformalist critic as part of a method for
j analyzing a specific film, as we shall see in examining Laura in Chap-
ter 6.)
It is for such reasons that Dana B. Polan is, I believe, in error when
he proposes a synthesis of neoformalist poetics and Marxist-psychoan-
alytic theory. He writes of how "psychoanalysis and materialism . . .
have come more and more to realize the necessity for a theory of form
and therefore for a dialogue with Formalism. ''~ While I appreciate the

ss Dana B. Polan, "Terminable and Interminable Alialysis: Formalisn1 and Film The-
ory, ' Quarterly Resiew of Film Studies 8, no 4 (Fall 1983): 76.

ONE APPROACH, MANY METHODS

friendly gesture, I take this to be wishful thinking. For a successful
blend of approaches to be possible, psychoanalysis would have to pro-
vide an epistemology compatible with Formalism's ontology and aes-
theticÑand it clearly does not. Psychoanalysis is not concerned with
perception and everyday cognitive processes in the way that neofor-
malism must be in order to retain its concern with defamiliarization,
backgrounds, and the like. This is not to say that neoformalism is at
present a complete theory, since much more reflection and research
needs to be done. But the point is that neoformalism offers a reason-
able sketch of an ontology, epistemology, and aesthetic for answering
the questions it poses, and these are not commensurable with the pre-
suppositions of the Saussurean-Lacanian-Althusserian paradigm.
A merger with other versions of Marxism is more conceivable, since
Marxism is basically a socioeconomic theory, not concerned with the
aesthetic realm at all. Marxists concerned with analyzing how art-

works relate ideologically to society might well use neoformalist anal- t
ysis as a basic approach to the formal properties of art objects, concen-
trating on those functions of formal devices that link art to society. But
those breeds of Marxism that are tied to a psychoanalytic epistemology
would seem not to be compatible with neoformalism.
Neoformalism posits that viewers are activeÑthat they perform op-
erations. Contrary to psychoanalytic criticism, I assume that film view-
ing is composed mostly of nonconscious, preconscious, and conscious
activities. Indeed, we may define the viewer as a hypothetical entity
who responds actively to cues within the film on the basis of automatic
perceptual processes and on the basis of experience. Since historical
contexts make the protocols of these responses inter-subjective, we
may analyze films without resorting to subjectivity. David Bordwell
has argued that recent Constructivist theories of psychological activity
offer the most viable model of spectatorship for an approach derived
from Russian Formalism. (Constructivist theories have been the dom-
inant view in cognitive and perceptual psychology since the 1960s.) In
such a theory, perceiving and thinking are active, goal-oriented proc-
esses. According to Bordwell, "The organism constructs a perceptual
judgment on the basis of nonconscious inferences." For example, we
recognize that shapes on the flat cinema screen represent three-di-
mensional space because we can rapidly process depth cues; unless
the film plays with our perception by introducing difficult or contra-
dictory cues, we will not consciously have to think about how to grasp
the spatial representation. Similarly, we tend automatically to register
the passage of represented time, unless the film uses a complex tem

t' Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, p. 31.

)

NEOFORMALIST FILM ANALYSIS

poral layout that skips over, repeats, or otherwise juggles events, in
which case we begin a conscious sorting-out process.
We are able to understand sueh aspects of most films because we
have had vast experience in coping with similar situations. Other art-
works, everyday life, film theory and criticismÑall provide us with
V countless schemata, learned mental patterns against which we cheek
individual devices and situations in films. As we watch a film, we use
these schemata to form hypotheses continuallyÑhypotheses about a
character's actions, about the space offscreen, about the source of a
sound, about every local and large-scale device that we notice. As the
film goes on, we find our hypotheses confirmed or diseonfirmed; if the
latter, we form a new hypothesis, and so on. The concept of hypothe
J~ sis-forming helps explain the constant activity of the spectator, and the
parallel concept of schemata suggests why that activity is based in his-
tory: schemata change over time. In effect, what I have called "back-
grounds" are large clusters of historical schemata organized by the an-
alyst for the purpose of making statements about viewer responses.
According to Bordwell, ¥-The artwork is made so as to encourage the
applieation of eertain sehemata, even if these must eventually be dis-
carded in the course of the pereeiver's activity."2' This is why we can
say that the work cues us in our responses. The analyst's task becomes
to point out the cues and on the basis of them to discuss what re-
sponses would reasonably result, given a knowledge of backgrounds
on the part of the viewer. The neoformalist critic thus analyzes not a
set of static formal structures (as an "empty formalist or "art for art's
sake" position might dictate), but rather, a dynamic interaction be-
tween those structures and a hypothetical viewer's response to them.
Because we are dealing with aesthetic films, we must remember
that the viewer's skills will be employed for non-practical ends:

What is nonconscious in everyday mcntal life becomes consciously attended
to. Our schemata get shaped, stretched, and transgrcssed; a delay in hypoth-
esis-confirmation can be prolonged for its own sake. And likc all psychological
activities, aesthetic activity has long-rangc cffccts. Art may rcinforec, or mod-
ify, or even assault our normal pcrccptual-cognitivc repertoirc.2

If an artwork largely reinforces our existing viewing skills, we are not
likely to notice how we employ schemata and form hypotheses. Thus
certain films seem simple to watch, and we may assume that we are
"naturally" able to view such films. (Even while watching the most
familiar films, of course, we go through very complex operations in

2, Ibid., p. 32
22 Ibid

ONE APPROACH, MANY METHODS

order to understand structures of causality, time, and space.) Other
films, however, challenge our experience more strongly; if we are un-
able to account for what we see on the screen, we become aware of
being puzzled and of having our expectations delayed, or even per-
manently frustrated.
The films that we value highly for their complexity and originality {/
are exactly those that challenge our expectations and habitual viewing
skills. Last Year at Marienbad is a famous example of a film that in-
duees us to keep forming different hypotheses concerning its causal,
temporal, and spatial contradictions; finally it leads us to the eonelu-
sion that there is no satisfactory way of reconciling them (or to a per-
petual wrangling among viewers who insist on forcing the film into a
familiar pattern: the heroine is insane, or the narrator is insane, or
they are both ghosts, and so on).23 Other, perhaps more subtle exam-
ples are Ozu's films; he almost constantly plays with our familiar no-

tions of how space is laid out from shot to shot in continuity-style films.
We shall see how in Late Spring he cheats our expectations about
character position repeatedly by reversing continuity guidelines. Sim-
ilarly, Tati's refusal to furnish the payoff in certain gags forces us to fill
in the rest ourselves; here, by eueing us to ereate hypotheses and then
failing to eonfirm or deny them, Tati encourages active participation
by the viewer.
The notions of historical cues and backgrounds enable us to speeify
the goals of fihn analysis. The viewer can respond actively to a fihn
only to the degree that he or she notices its cues, and only if he or she v
has viewing skills developed enough to respond to these cues. The
analyst can help in both areas: by pointing out the cues and by sug-
gesting how the viewer might cope with them. Such an approach
would work on everything from complex, challenging works to ordi-
nary, highly familiar ones. The viewer may find an original work in-
comprehensible because he or she lacks familiarity with the viewing
conventions appropriate to it. On the other hand, faced with a fihn
that sticks closely to the norms, the viewer may employ iamiliarized
skills automatically and thus, through lack of interest, coast over many
of the film's cues.
For these tasks of pointing out cues or suggesting new perspectives
on films, the critic need not have more refined tastes or greater intel-
ligence than the reader. Rather, the analyst seeks to uncover the his-
torical circumstances that would suggest viewing skills relevant to the

zI For an analysis of Last Year at Marienbad-s unresolval)le contradictions, see Bord-
well and Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction, pp. 3()s308.

NEOFORMALIST FILM ANALYSIS

film. The analyst also tries to become as aware as possible of how he
or she applies those skills in the extended viewing upon which analysis
is based. The resulting discussion can then point out additional, less
noticeable cues and patterns within the workÑthings that more casual
viewers might find of interest but have not been able to ferret out for
themselves. Such an approach can be equally valuable for familiar, less
original sorts of films. Neoformalism often deals with highly original,
challenging works, but its goal is also to take familiar, even cliched
films and create a new interest for themÑto ¥'re-det:amiliarize" them.
As Shklovsky put it, "The aim of the formalist method, or at least one
of its aims, is not to explain the work, but to call attention to it, to
restore that 'orientation towards form which is characteristic of a work
of art."24 In this sense, the neoformalist critic can take a familiar film
and point out its underlying strategiesÑstrategies usually camouflage(l
by motivating devices. The analyst can thus encourage the viewer to
perceive the film in a more active fashion than the film would seem at
first to warrant. (As we have seen, the film may also have been highly
original at one point, but become automatized by many imitations or
by repeated viewings. This, I think, is to some degree the case with
Bssycle Thieves, for example.)
At first, the neoformalist approach may seem rather "elitist," in that
it favors those highly original films that may be inaccessible to mass
audiences. But I would contend that this is not the case. For one
thing, as we shall see in Chapter 2 with Terror By Night, neoformal-
ism can and does concern itself with popularly oriented films. (We take
popular films seriously, not by taking the fun out of them, but by treat-
ing them with the same respect we would accord any other film.) But,
more important, neoformalism treats audience response as a matter of
education about and awareness of norms, not as a matter of passive
acceptance of norms imposed by the makers of popular films. Much of
contemporary theory treats the viewer (read "ordinary spectator") as a
passive subject taken in by whatever ideology and formal patterns the
popular cinema cares to impose upon the public. Such an approach
implies that the critic should be an arbiter of tastes by pointing out
the advantages of avant-garde cinema, and by treating the classical cin-
ema as an ideological machine that uses conventional approaches to
seduce a mass audience.
Neoformalism assumes that spectators are, to a large extent, actise,
and that they can cope with films to the degree that they have learned

2' Viktor Shklovski, "Pushkin and Steme: Eugene Onegul, tralis Jallles M Hol(luists
i} 20th Century Russian Literary Criticism, ed. Victor Erlich (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1975), p. 68.

ONE APPROACH, MANY METHODS

the norms appropriate to those films, and also to the degree that they /
have learned to be aware of and question those norms. The neofor-
malist concepts of backgrounds and defamiliarized perception are not
neutral in this sense. They imply that the critic is not an arbiter of
tastes, but an educator who places at the disposal of the spectators
certain skillsÑskills that allow them to become more aware of the
strategies by which films encourage spectators to respond to them.
The neoformalist critic assumes that spectators are able to think for
themselves, and that criticism is simply a tool for helping them to do X
it better in the area of the arts, by widening the range of their viewing
abilities. In the case of familiar films, this process can consist of point-
ing out in the work additional cues and patterns as the potential ob-

jects of a more active understanding. For more difficult films, the neo-
formalist critic can help develop new viewing skills. A combination of
these goals is most appropriate to very difficult or highly original
films. If a viewer has few viewing skills appropriate to, say, a film by
Jean-Luc Godard, the sudden confrontation with such a film can be
discouraging. The building up of viewing experience takes time, and
we may need to see a number of films of a given type before we begin
to be comfortable with their challenges. Indeed, people who have
been nurtured on an almost-exclusive diet of classical films may simply
reject the notion that film viewing should be challenging and even
difficult. In such cases, film analysis can help give them the knowledge
needed to build up these new viewing skills more quickly, allowing
them to find these difflcult films more interesting. This is not to say
that the neoformalist critic simplifies these films for the less-experi-
enced viewer. Rather, analysis should try as much as possible to point
out and preserve the ditficulties and complexities of the film, but 2
should suggest at the same time the perceptual and formal functions
of the problematic aspects. Neoformalism does not want to explain the
film, but to send the reader back to it and to other films like it with a
better set of viewing skills.
Moreover, even the most experienced viewers will not have time to
watch every complex fihn with equal care, and the reading of criticism
can help such viewers to learn more about the films and about viewing
skills. We return here to the idea that we read criticism as much for
the issues it raises as for knowledge of specific films. I would presume
that we never reach a saturation point in our viewing skills. There is
always more to learn, and as our viewing skills become habitual, we
also need to rethink and renew them. Analyses of all types of films v
should be capable of challenging viewers, however much experience
they may have. This is another reason why we cannot settle for simple

2, ilu

)

NEOFORMALIST FILM ANALYSIS

"readings" that skim the same sorts of things off every film and sum-
marize them in simplified ways. The analyst must take the trouble to
watch a film very closely indeed, and to present his or her readers
with new questions, not with predigested answers.
In this sense, the current notion of infinite readings" is again
shown to be inappropriate to the neoformalist critic. Some analysts
would say that we can use mental play to generate more and more
readings, more meanings, without limitation. Again, this is an ahistor-
ical claim, making the untenable assumption that we could go on deal-
ing with the same film forever without its becoming automatized for
us. But in practical terms, the film would necessarily become auto-
matized if we simply went over and over it with the same goal each
time, of doing a different "reading.-' As we went on, the memory of
the sum of previous readings would make new ones more and more
difficult to find. Moreover, each new reading would have to resort to
less appropriate schemata to explain devices in the work, and the later
readings would seem increasingly silly and far-fetched and ultimately
uninteresting. 2s
The only way to keep a work reasonably fresh upon many repeated
viewings is to look for different things in it each timeÑmore subtle
and complex things, seen in new ways. And this means developing
new viewing skills that will allow us to form different kinds of hy-
potheses about all formal relationshipsÑnot just meanings. We do
this, as we have seen, by studying films themselves, forcing ourselves
to expand and modify our overall approach on the basis of the method
demanded by each new work. This book is an exercise in that process.
Five of these analyses were written and published over a period span-
ning the mid- to late 19170s; the other six were written later, specifi-
cally for this volume. The differences in method should be obvious
from one analysis to the next. In doing the later analyses, I was drawn
to certain conclusions that influenced my revision of the earlier pieces.
Moreover, since the earlier essays were written, both David Bordwell
and I have done work on structures of narration; his book on that sub-
ject has influenced a number of the later analyses in this volume. This
kind of ongoing work, though it makes one perpetually dissatisfied
with one's earlier analyses, aids, I believe, in renewing and multiply-
ing the ways one can look at familiar films.
The result is not infinite readings, but increasingly detailed and

@s Neolormalism does 1lot do readings" of fihns For one thing, films are not written
texts and do not need to be read. For anotiler, readilig' has come to e(ltial interpre-
tation," and, as we have seen, for the neoformalist, inie?retation is olily one part ol
analysis. The main critical activity, therefore, is analysis.

ONE APPROACH, MANY METHODS

complex analyses. The analyst focuses on more of the work's formal
subtleties and tackles the work from more than one standpoint. An
analysis of narration, for example, stresses different aspects than those
emphasized by an analysis of character traits and their effects on caus-
ality. To discuss how the critic goes about finding such varied traits in
a film, we need to examine what analytical tools are available in a neo-
formalist approach.

THE BASIC TOOLS OF ANALYSIS
Neoformalism makes two broad, complementary assumptions about
how aesthetic films are constructed: that films are artificial constructs
and that they involve a specifically aesthetic, non-practical type of per-

ception. These assumptions help determine how the most specific and
localized sorts of analyses are carried out.
First, films are constructs that have no natural qualities. In terms of
any absolute or permanent logic, the choice of the devices that will go
toward creation of the film will inevitably be largely arbitrary. (This
assumption simply states in another way the idea that art works re-
spond to historical pressures rather than to eternal v~ ., Even the
devices that go into works seeking to imitate reality as closely as pos-
sible will vary from era to era and from film to film; realism, like all
viewing norms, is an historically based notion. There are certainly
pressures that help determine aesthetic choice, and these come from
l'actors extrinsic to the individual work. Ideological pressures, the his- t/
torical situation of film and the other arts at the time of creation, the
artist's decisions about how to recombine and modify devices to
achieve defamiliarizationÑall contribute to making artworks respond
to the forces of culture rather than of nature. In every work, then, we
must expect a tension between the conventions that preexist in that
culture and whatever degree of inventiveness the filmmaker brings to
the individual torm of the film.
In passing, I want to make clear that neotormalism's stress on inven-
tiveness and originality does not place us back in the "Great Man"
theory of history, which would assume that the individual's inspira-
tions are the source of all innovations in art. Neoformalisln assumes
that artists are rational agents, making choices they judge appropriate
to an end they have in view. Artists have intentions, even if the results 2
they achieve are often unintentional. One step in judging those results
(not the intentions themselves) may be the reconstruction of the art-
ist's choice situation. As one step in that judgment, we should realize
that inventiveness is itself a convention in many modern aesthetic tra

w
co

NEOFORMALIST FILM ANALYSIS

ditions. Our culture values originality, and some artists do create
highly innovative works. Yet those innovations cannot come independ-
ent of all cultural influences. This is true of a highly distinctive artist
like Godard as well as of a conventional one like Lloyd Bacon. Yet at
any given moment, any artist will have a broad range of possible
choices open to him or her, within the limitations imposed by the cul-
tural context.
Since films are made in response to cultural rather than natural
principles, the critic should eschew a notion of analyzing films accord-
ing to a set of assumptions about mimesis. It is never "just natural"
that a filmmaker would put any given device into a work, no matter
how realistic a film may seem. Here the concepts of motivation and
function become central. We can always ask why a device is present;
usually we will find that a great many of a film's devices function to
create and perpetuate the film's own structures. Repetition may foster
Man impression of unity, may form narrative parallelisms, or may even
call attention to a stylistic flourish. Any film's first task is to engage our
attention as forcefully as possible, and many, if not most, of its moti-
vations and functions will serve that purpose, among others. Art's
v main concern is to be aesthetic.
Beyond the idea that films are arbitrary rather than natural con-
structs, neoformalist analysis makes a second broad assumption de-
rived from the notion of defamiliarization. Because everyday percep-
tion is habitual and strives for a maximum of etliciency and ease,
b aesthetic perception does the opposite. Films seek to defamiliarize
conventional devices of narrative, ideology, style, and genre. Since
everyday perception is efticient and easy, the aesthetic film seeks to
prolong and roughen our experienceÑto induce us to concentrate on
,~ the processes of perception and cognition in and of themselves, rather
than for some practical end. (Again, there may be a practical result, in
that our viewing skills, and hence our perceptual-cognitive abilities in
general, will be challenged and changed. Any one fihn is not likely to
change our perception greatly, but the process is cumulative.) Rough
3 ened form and delays are two important concepts in the neoformalist
approach. Since such structures pervade art works, they will take dif-
ferent forms in different films, and hence the methods used to analyze
them will change. But in approaching any film the analyst will assume
.. that they are present in some shape. Most films will contain a tension
between those strategies that are included to make the form easily
perceptible and comprehensible and those that are used to impede
perception and understanding.
Roughened form, the more general of the two concepts, encompas

)

ONE APPROACH, MANY METHODS

ses all types of devices and relations among devices that would tend to
make perception and understanding less easy. For example, D. W. i
Griffith's decision to intercut the four epochs in Intolerance roughens
the form of the film, even though the total film may be the same
length it would have been if told through successive stories. Luis Bun-
uel's apparently unmotivated use of two actresses to play a single role
in That Obscure Object of Desire provides another example of rough-
ened form. A given device may be used consistently across the entire
structure of a work, as in these cases, or it may enter only in isolated
portions, as in the "white-on-white" prison sequence of George Lu-

cas's THX-1138, where spatial orientation is temporarily minimized.
Roughened form can function to create an infinite variety of effects,
but one of the most common types of roughened form involves the v
creation of delays. On the level of a film's overall formal organization,'
length is arbitrary. This book will be dealing exclusively with narra-
tive, feature-length films, and we will see how causal material can be
added to delay the progress toward the end of the narrative. Similarly,
the same events can be presented in a more or less compressed way;
expansion will also cause delay.26 The same set of narrative events can
be presented in quick summary form or can be strung out in leisurely
fashion into a lengthy work. One of the narrative film's most important
sets of devices is that group which functions to hold off an ending until
a point appropriate to the overall design. All but the shortest narrative
films are likely to have some delaying structures.
The overall pattern of such delays is called stairstep construction.
This metaphorical term implies stretches of action in which the events
progress toward the ending alternating with other stretches in which
digressions and delays deflect the action from its direct path. As
Shklovsky noted, there is an unlimited possibility for additional delay:
"I have noticed in particular a type [of storytelling] where the themes
are accumulated in steps. These accumulations are, by their very na-
ture, infinite, just as those adventure novels are infinite which are
built upon them." He cites the case of sequels, in which authors use
continuing characters to string together new sets of adventuresÑfor
example, Dumas, with his Dix ans apres and Vingt ans apres, and
Twain, with his series of Tom Sawyer-Huck Finn novels.2' (Even the
death of an author need not shut off the process of expansion, as we

25 TlleSe same principles can ill{Orill 11011-llarratiVe formal structure as well. For a dis
cussion of four types of non-narrative l'ormal organi7.ationdl prblciples, see Bordwell and
Thompson, Fibrl Art: An Introductioll, chaps. 3 and 9.
27 Victor Chklov~ki, Sur la theorie de la prose, tralls. Cuy Verret (Lausallne: Editions
l'Age d'homme, 1973), pp. 81-82.

)

NEOFORMALIST FILM ANALYSIS

have seen in our century with the fad for non-Doyle Sherlock Holmes
books, Fred Saberhagen's Dracula series, and post-Fleming lames
Bond adventures; similarly, several comic strips have been continued
after the deaths of their creators. Radio and television soap operas
have indicated the potential of a narrative to last longer than the lives
of some of its audience members.) Practically speaking, however, most
narrative works are relatively short and self-contained; feature-length
films accommodate themselves to a single evening's entertainment.
But this length is culturally determined, and we should approach such
w films with the knowledge that they are constructed specifically to fit
this basic length.
The concept of stairstep construction implies that some materials
are more crucial to the narrative progression than others. Those ac-
tions that move us toward the end are necessary to the overall narra-
tive, and we can call them bound motifs. The digressions, or "landings
of the staircase" are there to delay the ending, and they are likely to
be tangential actions that could be altered or eliminated or replaced
without changing the basic causal line. These delaying devices we will
/term free motifs. As with any device, delays can be more or less thor-
oughly motivated. Extensive compositional and realistic motivation
may make the free motifs seem as important to the narrative as are the
bound ones, and in that case we will not notice the digressions as such;
we will see this happening in Terror By Night. But delays can be left
evident to the viewer through artistic motivation, and we shall find
examples of this in Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, Late Spring,
Sauve 4ui peut(la vie), and other films. (Note that free motit's are as
'v functionally important as bound ones, since art depends upon delay
for its aesthetic effect.) Roughened form, stairstep construction, and
bound and free motifs, then, are the general components of a film's
overall form, but how does the critic go about analyzing their functions
in a variety of narrative films?

ANALYZING THE NARRATIVE FILM
One of the most valuable methodological procedures devised by the
Russian Formalists for analyzing narratives has been the t'abula-syu
zhet distinction.25 Basically, the syuzhet is the structured set of all

28 This methodological procedure has been translated widely as the story-plot distinc-
tion, and there is a temptation to use these English terms Ibr simplicity's sakeÑas ill-
deed I have done in the past. But the English terms also carry the burdell of all the
other senses in which non-Formalist critics have used them, while l:allllla and syuzhet
relate only to the llussiao Formalists' definitions. Hence for presentation of the neolor

w
~D

ONE APPROACH, MANY METHODS

causal events as we see and hear them presented in the film itself
Typically some events will be presented directly and others only men-
tioned; also, events often will be given to us out of chronological order,
as when flashbacks occur or when a character tells us of earlier events
which we did not witness. Our understanding of these syuzhet events
often involves rearranging them mentally into chronological order.
Even when the film simply presents events in their 1-K3 order, we
need to grasp their causal connections actively. This mental construc-
tion of chronologically, causally linked material is the fabula. Such
rearrangement is a viewing skill we learn thoroughly from watching
narrative films and from dealing with other narrative artworks as well.
For most films, we are able to construct the fabula without great dit:

ficulty. But the differences between fabula and syuzhet can be manip-
ulated in an infinite number of ways, and thus the distinction between
the two allows the analyst to deal with one of the narrative film's
strongest means of defamiliarization.
A useful pair of concepts for analyzing the syuzhet is the distinction
between the proairetic and hermeneutic lines.29 The proairetic aspect
of the narrative is the chain of causality that allows us to understand
how one action is linked logically to others. The hermeneutic line con-
sists of the set of enigmas the narrative poses by withholding infor-
mation. The interaction of these two forces is important for maintain-
ing our interest in the narrative. By working to grasp the proairetic
line, we feel satisfaction in understanding actions, but the ongoing
questions posed by the hermeneutic material pique our interest and
keep us oriented toward hypothesis formation. Thus these two as-
pects of the syuzhet are important in their encouraging an active per-
ception on the part of the spectator. The different functions of the
proairetic and hermeneutic lines are responsible for much of the nar-
rative's forward impetus. Most crucially, they function to spur us into
constructing the fabula. Without the interaction of causality and
enigma, events would merely be strung together, one after another,
and would lack an overall sense of dynamism.
Every narrative film has a beginning and an ending. Those points
are not casual parts of the overall syuzhet. The beginning tends to

malist position, I have decided to stick to the original terms at the risk of adding some
extra terminological weight. Bordwell s Narration in the Fictiotl Film also uses these
temls extensively.
291 have borrowed the idea ol' the proairetic and hermellelltic lines Irolll Roland
Barthes's S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang. 1974), p. 19 passim.
Barthes temis them the proairetic and hermeneutic "codes,' but as this suggests that
there is some sort of preexistent lunction lor each, I have chosell to treat them as struc-
ttires, or "lines." runnilig througil the work and varying in each context.

NEOFORMALIST FILM ANALYSIS

provide us with the crucial information from which we form our
strongest and most lingering hypotheses about the fabula. And the
ending is essentially the moment when the most important informa-
tion which the narration has been withholding from us is finally re-
vealedÑor at least when we find out that we will never be given the
crucial information; the hermeneutic line is thus very important in giv-
ing us a sense of when the narrative ends. Not all narratives emphasize
beginnings and endings so forcefully. Shklovsky suggested that a sim-
ple narrative might use stairstep construction merely to string to-
gether a series of events, constituting what we typically think of as a
picaresque narrative; such a work (e.g., The Decameron) could be pro-
longed or shortened by adding or taking away episodes without signif-
icantly affecting the construction of the whole. But when the begin-
ning sets up a proairetic or hermeneutic whose answer or completion
,zis delayed throughout the whole narrative until the end, then we per-
ceive the whole syuzhet as being unified around a sequence of inter-
related events. Shklovsky termed this the "buckle" construction, for
the end reverses and refers to the beginning in some way: we sense
the end as such because it echoes the situation of the beginning.
Shklovsky gives as examples Oedipus Rex and Macbeth, both of which
revolve around the main characters' attempts to elude prophecies;
each ends when the prophecy is completely fulfilled. 30 Those narra-
tives that provide all the information needed to answer an enigma, and
that make clear the effects of all the causal action I will assume are
"closed"; they achieve closure, coming full circle to complete the
buckle structure. Some narratives do not provide this kind of closure.
A film that leaves dangling causes and does not provide a complete
solution to the enigma has an "open" narrative.
The main agents that carry through the various causal events of the
narrative are, as I have mentioned, characters (though social and nat-
ural forces can provide some causal material as well). For the neofor
p/ malist, characters are not real people, but collections of semes, or char-
acter traits. Because "traits" are qualities that we take real people to
have, I will be using Roland Barthes's term "semes" here, meaning
devices that characterize the figures in a narrative.3' Since characters
are not people, we do not necessarily judge them by the standards of
everyday behavior and psychology. Rather, as with all devices and col-
lections of devices, characters must be analyzed in terms of their func-
tions in the work as a whole. Some characters may be fairly neutral,

30 Chklovski, Sur la theorle de la prose, pp. 82, 84.
pI Tomashevsky, "Thematics," p. 88; Barthes, S/Z, p. 68.

ONE APPROACH, MANY METHODS

existing primarily to hold together a series of picaresque imbedded
narratives; Shklovsky remarked that "Gil Blas is not a man; it is the
thread which connects the episodes of the novel, and that thread is
gray."32 Even in a more unified, psychologically oriented narrative we
can find various functions for characters: providing information, pro-
viding the means for withholding information, creating parallels, em-
bodying shapes and colors that participate in shot compositions, mov-
ing about to motivate tracking shots, and any number of others.
Shklovsky has found that Watson, in the Sherlock Holmes series, has
three main functions: (1) he tells us what Holmes does and keeps us
interested in the solution (he creates, in other words, an uncommun-
icative narration, since Holmes only gives him bits of information at
intervals); (2) he plays the "perpetual idiot," since he gives us clues
without being able to place a significance on themÑeven suggesting
false solutions; and (3) he keeps the conversation going, as "sort of ball

boy who permits Sherlock Holmes to play."33
Characters may be presented in great depth, with a great many
traits, but these do not necessarily conform to real psychological pat-
terns. Characterization can provide the main focus of a work (though
this does not make the characters any less artificial and device-bound).
However much they may strike us as being like "real people," we can
always trace that impression back to a set of specific, character-creat-
ing devices.
The process whereby the syuzhet presents and withholds fabula in-
formation in a certain order is narration. Narration thus continually
cues our hypothesis-forming about fabula events throughout the
course of viewing the film. (Some theorists and critics have assumed
that narrative artworks always have a narrator, whom they regard as
the person through whom information is filtered. Here I will assume
that narration is a process, not a person, and that the only times films
have narrators as such is when a voice, either diegetic or non-diegetic,
speaks to give us information.) David Bordwell has laid out three basic
properties that can be used in analyzing any narration: its degrees of
knowledgeability, self-consciousness, and communicativeness.34
The apparent knowleclgeability of the narration is characterized
first, by the range of fabula information to which it seems to have ac-
cess. Frequently, by restricting us to one or a few characters' under-
standings of the situation, the narration is able to withhold other infor

t2 victor Cllklovski, "La constrtletioll de la nouvelle et dtl roman," ill The'orie de la
itter(lturei p. 190.
33 Chklovski, Sur la theorie de la prose, p. 152.
34 Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Fil,tt, pp. 57-61.

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. "The
Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception."
DialecticofEnllchtenment. Continuum, 1990. R
(Original edition: Dialektik der Aufklaruna, c1944 by
Social Studies Association, Inc. German reissue c1969
by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH. English translation c1972
by Herde! and Herder, Inc.) Pages 120-167.

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY:
ENLIGHTENMENT
AS MASS DECEPTION

THe sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively
established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of
precapitalism, together with technological and social differentia-
tion or specialization, have led to cultural chaos is disproved
every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on every-
thing. Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is
unifor n as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activi-
ties of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedi-
ence to the rhythm of the iron system. The decorative industrial
management buildings and exhibition centers in authoritarian
countries are much the same as anywhere else. The huge gleam-
ing towers that shoot up everywhere are outward signs of the
ingenious planning of international concerns, toward which the
unleashed entrepreneurial system (whose monuments are a mass
of gloomy houses and business premises in grimy, spiritless
cities) was already hastening. Even now the older houses just
outside the concrete city centers look like slums, and the new
bungalows on the outskirts are at one with the flimsy structures
of world fairs in their praise of technical progress and their built-in
demand to be discarded after a short while like empty food cans.
Yet the city housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual
as a supposedly independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling
make him all the more subservient to his adversaryÑthe abso-
lute power of capitalism. Because the inhabitants, as producers
and as consumers, are drawn into the center in search of work
and pleasure, all the living units crystallize into well-organized
complexes. The striking unity of microcosm and macrocosm

120

THE C'ULTURB INDUSTRY: ENLIOHTeNM~NT AS MASS DECEPTION

presents men with a model of their culture: the false identity of
the general and the particular. Under monopoly all mass culture
is identical, and the lines of its artificia'l framework begin to
show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested
in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so
its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be
art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ide-
ology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce.
They call themselves industries; and when their directors' in-
comes are published, any doubt about the social utility of the
finished products is removed.
Interested parties explain the culture industry in technologi-
cal terms. It is alleged that because millions participate in it,
certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably re-
quire identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with
identical goods. The technical contrast between the few pro-
duction centers and the large number of widely dispersed
consumption points is said to demand organization and plan-
ning by management. Furthermore, it is claimed that stan-
dards were based in the first place on consumers' needs, and
for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The
result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in

which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. No men-
tion is made of the fact that the basis on which technology
acquires power over society is the power of those whose eco-
nomic hold over society is greatest. A technological rationale
is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive ns-
ture of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and
movies keep the whole thing together until their leveling ele-
ment shows its strength in the very wrong which it furthered.
It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than
the achievement of standardization and mass production, sacri-
ficing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the
work and that of the social system. This is the result not of a
law of movement in technology as such but of its function in
today's economy. The need which might resist central control
has already been suppressed by the control of the individual
consciousness. The step from the telephone to the radio has

121
as
a~

DIALBCTIC OF ENLIOHTENMeNT

dearly distinguished the roles. The former still allowed the sub-
sodber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. The latter is
democratic: it turns all participants into listeners and authod-
tatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all
exactly the same. No machinery of rejoinder has been devised,
and private broadcasters are denied any freedom. They are con-
6ned to the apocryphal field of the "amateur," and also have to
accept organization from above. But any trace of spontaneity
from the public in official broadcasting is controlled and ab-
sorbed by talent scouts, studio competitions and official pro-
grams of every kind selected by professionals. Talented per-
formers belong to the industry long before it displays them;
otherwise they would not be so eager to fit in. The attitude of
the public, which ostensibly and actually favors the system of
the culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse
for it. If one branch of art follows the same formula as one with
a very different medium and content; if the dramatic intrigue
of broadcast soap operas becomes no more than useful material
for showing how to master technical problems at both ends of
the scale of musical experienceÑreal jazz or a cheap imitation;
or if a movement from a Beethoven symphony is crudely
"adapted" for a film sound-track in the same way as a Tolstoy
novel is garbled in a film scdpt: then the claim that this is done
to satisfy the spontaneous wishes of the public is no more than
hot air. We are closer to the facts if we explain these phenomena
as inherent in the technical and personnel apparatus which,
down to its last cog, itself forms part of the economic mecha-
nism of selection. In addition there is the agreementÑor at
least the determinationÑof all executive authorities not to
produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from their
own rules, their own ideas about consumers, or above all them-
selves.
In our age the objective social tendency is incarnate in the
hidden subjective purposes of company directors, the foremost
among whom are in the most powerful sectors of industryÑ
steel, petroleum, electricity, and chemicals. Culture monopolies
are weak and dependent in comparison. They cannot afford to
neglect their appeasement of the real holders of power if their
122

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLIGHTENMBNT AS MASS DECEPTION

sphere of activity in mass society (a sphere producing a specific
type of commodity which anyhow is still too closely bound up
with easygoing liberalism and Jewish intellectuals) is not to
undergo a series of purges. The dependence of the most power-
ful broadcasting company on the electrical industry, or of the
motion picture industry on the banks, is characteristic of the
whole sphere, whose individual branches are themselves eco-
nomically interwoven. All are in such close contact that the
extreme concentration of mental forces allows demarcation
lines between different firms and technical branches to be ig-
nored. The ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of
what will happen in politics. Marked differentiations such as
those of A and B films, or of stories in magazines in different
pdce ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on classi-
fying, organizing, and labeling consumers. Something is pro-
vided for all so that none may escape; the distinctions are
emphasized and extended. The public is catered for with a
hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality,
thus advancing the rule of complete quantification. Everybody
must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his
previously determined and indexed level, and choose the cate-
gory of mass product turned out for his type. Consumers appear
as statistics on research organization charts, and are divided by
income groups into red, green, and blue areas; the technique is
that used for any type of propaganda.
How formalized the procedure is can be seen when the
mechanically differentiated products prove to be all alike in the
end. That the difference between the Chrysler range and Gen-
eral Motors products is basically illusory strikes every child
with a keen interest in varieties. What connoisseurs discuss as
good or bad points serve only to perpetuate the semblance of
competition and range of choice. The same applies to the
Warner Brothers and Metro Goldwyn Mayer productions. But
even the differences between the more expensive and cheaper
models put out by the same firm steadily diminish: for auto-
mobiles, there are such differences as the number of cylinders,
cubic capacity, details of patented gadgets; and for films there
are the number of stars, the extravagant use of technology,

123

)

DIALECTIC OP ENLWHTENMENT

labor, and equipment, and the introduction of the latest psy-
chological formulas. The universal cdterion of merit is the
amount of "conspicuous production," of blatant cash invest-
ment. The varying budgets in the culture industry do not bear
the slightest relation to factual values, to the meaning of the
products themselves. Even the technical media are relentlessly
forced into uniformity. Television aims at a synthesis of radio
and film, and is held up only because the interested parties have
not yet reached agreement, but its consequences will be quite
enormous and promise to intensify the impoverishment of aes-
thetic matter so drastically, that by tomorrow the thinly veiled
identity of all industrial culture products can come triumphantly
out into the open, derisively fulfilling the Wagnedan dream of
the GesamtkunstwerkÑthe fusion of all the arts in one work.
The alliance of word, image, and music is all the more perfect
than in Tristan because the sensuous elements which all ap-
provingly reflect the surface of social reality are in pdnciple
embodied in the same technical process, the unity of which be-
comes its distinctive content. This process integrates all the
elements of the production, from the novel (shaped with an eye
to the film) to the last sound effect. It is the triumDh of in-
vuted capital, whose title as absolute master is etched deep into
the hearts of the dispossessed in the employment line; it is the
meaningful content of every film, whatever plot the production
team may have selected.

The man with leisure has to accept what the culture manufac-
turers offer him. Kant's formalism still expected a contribution
from the individual, who was thought to relate the varied ex-
pedences of the senses to fundamental concepts; but industry
robs the individual of his function. Its prime service to the cus-
tomer is to do his schematizing for him. Kant said that there
was a secret mechanism in the soul which prepared direct intui-
tions in such a way that they could be fitted into the system of
pure reason. But today that secret has been deciphered. While
the mechanism is to all appearances planned by those who serve
up the data of experience, that is, by the culture industry, it is
in fact forced upon the latter by the power of society, which

124

)

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLIGHTENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION

remains irrational, however we may try to rationalize it; and
this inescapable force is processed by commercial agencies 80
that they give an artificial impression of being in command.
There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers
have done it for him. Art for the masses has destroyed the
dream but still conforms to the tenets of that dreaming idealism
which critical idealism balked at. Everything derives from con-
sciousness: for Malebranche and Berkeley, from the consciow-
ness of God; in mass art, from the consciousness of the pro-
duction team. Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap
operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the
specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them
and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable.
The short interval sequence which was effective in a hit song,
the hero's momentary fall from grace (which he accepts as good

sport), the rough treatment which the beloved gets from the
male star, the latter's rugged defiance of the spoilt heiress, are,
like all the other details, ready-made cliches to be slotted in
anywhere; they never do anything more than fulfill the purpose
allotted them in the overall plan. Their whole raison d'etre is to
confirm it by being its constituent parts. As soon as the film be-
gins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded,
punished, or forgotten. In light music, once the trained ear has
heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming
and feel flattered when it does come. The average length of the
short story has to be rigidly adhered to. Even gags, effects, and
jokes are calculated like the setting in which they are placed.
They are the responsibility of special experts and their narrow
range makes it easy for them to be apportioned in the office.
The development of the culture industry has led to the predomi-
nance of the effect, the obvious touch, and the technical detail
over the work itselfÑwhich once expressed an idea, but was
liquidated together with the idea. When the detail won its free-
dom, it became rebellious and, in the period from Romanticism
to Expressionism, asserted itself as free expression, as a vehicle
of protest against the organization. In music the single harmonic
effect obliterated the awareness of form as a whole; in painting
the individual color was stressed at the expense of pictorial

125

am
co

DLiLECTIC OP ENLIGHTENMeNT

composition; and in the novel psychology became more impor-
tant than structure. The totality of the culture industry has put
an end to this. Though concerned exclusively with effects, it
crushes their insubordination and makes them subserve the
formula, which replaces the work. The same fate is inflicted on
whole and parts alike. The whole inevitably bears no relation to
the detailsÑjust like the career of a successful man into which
everything is made to fit as an illustration or a proof, whereas it
is nothing more than the sum of all those idiotic events. The
so-called dominant idea is like a file which ensures order but not
coherence. The whole and the parts are alike; there is no antith-
esis and no connection. Their prearranged harmony is a mock-
ery of what had to be striven after in the great bourgeois works
of art. In Germany the graveyard stillness of the dictatorship
already hung over the gayest films of the democratic era.
The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the cul-
ture industry. The old experience of the movie-goer, who sees
the world outside as an extension of the film he has just left (be-
cause the latter is intent upon reproducing the world of every-
day perceptions), is now the producer's guideline. The more
intensely and flawlessly his techniques duplicate empirical ob-
jects, the easier it is today for the illusion to prevail that the
outside world is the straightforward continuation of that pre-
sented on the screen. This purpose has been furthered by me-
chanical reproduction since the lightning takeover by the sound
film.
Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The
sound film, far surpassing the theater of illusion, leaves no room
for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is
unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate
from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story;
hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with real-
ity. The stunting of the mass-media consumer's powers of imagi-
nation and spontaneity does not have to be traced back to any
psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those

attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves,
especially to the most characteristic of them, the sound film.
They are so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and

THE CULTURB INDUSTRY: ENLlGHTBNMBNT AS MASS DECEPTION

experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet
sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to
miss the relentless rush of facts. Even though the effort required
for his response is semi-automatic, no scope is left for the
imagination. Those who are so absorbed by the world of the
movieÑby its images, gestures, and wordsÑthat they are un
able to supply what really makes it a world, do not have to
dwell on particular points of its mechanics during a screening
All the other films and products of the entertainment industry
which they have seen have taught them what to expect; they
react automatically. The might of industrial society is lodged in
men's minds. The entertainments manufacturers know that their
products will be consumed with alertness even when the cus
tomer is distraught, for each of them is a model of the huge
economic machinery which has always sustained the masses,
whether at work or at leisureÑwhich is akin to work. From
every sound film and every broadcast program the social effect
can be inferred which is exclusive to none but is shared by all
alike. The culture industry as a whole has molded men as a type
unfailingly reproduced in every product. All the agents of this
process, from the producer to the women's clubs, take good
care that the simple reproduction of this mental state is not
nuanced or extended in any way.
The art historians and guardians of culture who complain of
the extinction in the West of a basic style-determining power
are wrong. The stereotyped appropriation of everything, even
the inchoate, for the purposes of mechanical reproduction sur
passes the rigor and general currency of any "real style," in the
sense in which cultural cognoscenti celebrate the organic pre
capitalist past. No Palestrina could be more of a purist in
eliminating every unprepared and unresolved discord than the
jazz arranger in suppressing any development which does not
conform to the jargon. When jazzing up Mozart he changes him
not only when he is too serious or too difficult but when he
harmonizes the melody in a different way, perhaps more simply,
than is customary now. No medieval builder can have scruti
nized the subjects for church windows and sculptures more sus
piciously than the studio hierarchy scrutinizes a work by Balzac
126 127

)

DIALECTIC OF BNLIGHTENMENT

or Hugo before finally approving it. No medieval theologian
could have determined the degree of the torment to be suffered
by the damned in accordance with the ordo of divine love more
meticulously than the producers of shoddy epics calculate the
torture to be undergone by the hero or the exact point to which
the leading lady's hemline shall be raised. The explicit and im-
plicit, exoteric and esoteric catalog of the forbidden and toler-
ated is so extensive that it not only defines the area of freedom
but is all-powerful inside it. Everything down to the last detail is
shaped accordingly. Like its counterpart, avant-garde art, the
entertainment industry determines its own language, down to its
very syntax and vocabulary, by the use of anathema. The con-
stant pressure to produce new effects (which must conform to
the old pattern) serves merely as another rule to increase the
power of the conventions when any single effect threatens to slip
through the net. Every detail is so firmly stamped with sameness
that nothing can appear which is not marked at birth, or does
not meet with approval at first sight. And the star performers,
whether they produce or reproduce, use this jargon as freely
and 9uently and with as much gusto as if it were the very lan-
guage which it silenced long ago. Such is the ideal of what is
natural in this field of activity, and its in9uence becomes all the
more powerful, the more technique is perfected and diminishes
the tension between the finished product and everyday life. The
paradox of this routine, which is essentially travesty, can be
detected and is often predominant in everything that the culture
industry turns out. A jazz musician who is playing a piece of
serious music, one of Beethoven's simplest minuets, syncopates
it involuntarily and will smile superciliously when asked to fol-
low the normal divisions of the beat. This is the "nature" which,
complicated by the ever-present and extravagant demands of
the specific medium, constitutes the new style and is a "system
of non-culture, to which one might even concede a certain 'unity
of style' if it really made any sense to speak of stylized bar-
barity."l
The universal imposition of this stylized mode can even go

1. Nietzsche, Unzeitgemasse Begrachtungen, Werke, Vol. I (Leipzig,
1917), p. 187.

128

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLlGHrENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION

beyond what is quasi-officially sanctioned or forbidden; today a
hit song is more readily forgiven for not observing the 32 beats
or the compass of the ninth than for containing even the most
clandestine melodic or harmonic detail which does not conform
to the idiom. Whenever Orson Welles offends against the tricks
of the trade, he is forgiven because his departures from the
norm are regarded as calculated mutations which serve all the
more strongly to confinn the validity of the system. The con-
straint of the technically-conditioned idiom which stars and
directors have to produce as "nature" so that the people can
appropriate it, extends to such fine nuances that they almost
attain the subtlety of the devices of an avant-garde work as
against those of truth. The rare capacity minutely to fulfill the
obligations of the natural idiom in all branches of the culture
industry becomes the criterion of efficiency. What and how they
say it must be measurable by everyday language, as in logical
positivism. The producers are experts. The idiom demands an
astounding productive power, which it absorbs and squanders.

In a diabolical way it has overreached the culturally conservative
distinction between genuine and artificial style. A style might be
called artificial which is imposed from without on the refractory
impulses of a form. But in the culture industry every element of
the subject matter has its origin in the same apparatus as that
jargon whose stamp it bears. The quarrels in which the artistic
experts become involved with sponsor and censor about a lie
going beyond the bounds of credibility are evidence not so
much of an inner aesthetic tension as of a divergence of inter-
ests. The reputation of the specialist, in which a last remnant of
objective independence sometimes finds refuge, conflicts with
the business politics of the Church, or the concern which is
manufacturing the cultural commodity. But the thing itself has
been essentially objectified and made viable before the estab-
lished authorities began to argue about it. Even before Zanuclz
acquired her, Saint Bernadette was regarded by her latter-day
hagiographer as brilliant propaganda for all interested parties.
That is what became of the emotions of the character. Hence
the style of the culture industry, which no longer has to test
itself against any refractory material, is also the negation of

129
o

DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT

style. The reconciliation of the general and particular, of the
rule and the specific demands of the subject matter, the achieve-
ment of which alone gives essential, meaningful content to style,
is futile because there has ceased to be the slightest tension be-
tween opposite poles: these concordant extremes are dismally
identical; the general can replace the particular, and vice versa.
Nevertheless, this caricature of style does not amount to
something beyond the genuine style of the past. In the culture
industry the notion of genuine style is seen to be the aesthetic
equivalent of domination. Style considered as mere aesthetic
regularity is a romantic dream of the past. The unity of style not
only of the Christian Middle Ages but of the Renaissance ex-
presses in each case the different structure of social power, and
not the obscure experience of the oppressed in which the general
was enclosed. The great artists were never those who embodied a
whoUy flawless and perfect style, but those who used style as a
way of hardening themselves against the chaotic expression of
suffering, as a negative truth. The style of their works gave what
was expressed that force without which life flows away un-
heard. Those very art forms which are known as classical, such
as Mozart's music, contain objective trends which represent
something different to the style which they incarnate. As late as
Schonberg and Picasso, the great artists have retained a mistrust
of style, and at crucial points have subordinated it to the logic of
the matter. What Dadaists and Expressionists called the un-
truth of style as such triumphs today in the sung jargon of a
crooner, in the carefully contrived elegance of a film star, and
even in the admirable expertise of a photograph of a peasant's
squalid hut. Style represents a promise in every work of art.
That which is expressed is subsumed through style into the domi-
nant forms of generality, into the language of music, painting,
or words, in the hope that it will be reconciled thus with the idea
of true generality. This promise held out by the work of art that
it will create truth by lending new shape to the conventional
social forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical. It uncondition-
ally posits the real forms of life as it is by suggesting that fulfill-
ment lies in their aesthetic derivatives. To this extent the claim
of art is always ideology too. However, only in this confronta

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLIGHTENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION

don with tradition of which style is the record can art express
suffering. That factor in a work of art which enables it to tran-
scend reality certainly cannot be detached from style; but it does
not consist of the harmony actuaUy realized, of any doubtful
unity of form and content, within and without, of individual and
society; it is to be found in those features in which discrepancy
appears: in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for
identity. Instead of exposing itself to this failure in which the
style of the great work of art has always achieved self-negation,
the inferior work has always relied on its similadty with others
Ñon a surrogate identity.
In the culture industry this imitation Snally becomes abso-
lute. Having ceased to be anything but style, it reveals the lat-
ter's secret: obedience to the social hierarchy. Today aesthetic
barbarity completes what has threatened the creations of the
spirit since they were gathered together as culture and neutral-
ized. To speak of culture was always contrary to culture. Cul-
ture as a common denominator already contains in embryo that
schematization and process of cataloging and classification
which bdng culture within the sphere of administration. And
it is precisely the industrialized, the consequent, subsumption
which entirely accords with this notion of culture. By subordi-
nating in the same way and to the same end all areas of intel-
lectual creation, by occupying men's senses from the time they
leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again
the next morning with matter that bears the impress of the
labor process they themselves have to sustain throughout the
day, this subsumption mockingly satisfies the concept of a uni-
fied culture which the philosophers of personality contrasted
with mass culture.

And so the culture industry, the most rigid of all styles, proves
to be the goal of liberalism, which is reproached for its lack of
style. Not only do its categories and contents derive from liber-
alism~omesticated naturalism as well as operetta and revue
Ñbut the modern culture monopolies form the economic area
in which, together with the corresponding entrepreneurial types,
for the time being some part of its sphere of operation survives,

)

DIALECTIC OF ENLIONTENMENT

despite the process of disintegration elsewhere. It is still possible
to make one's way in entertainment, if one is not too obstinate
about one's own concerns, and proves appropdately pliable.
Anyone who resists can only survive by fitting in. Once his par-
ticular brand of deviation from the norm has been noted by the
industry, he belongs to it as does the land-reformer to capital-
ism. Realistic dissidence is the trademark of anyone who has a
new idea in business. In the public voice of modern society
accusations are seldom audible; if they are, the perceptive can
already detect signs that the dissident wiU soon be reconciled.
The more immeasurable the gap between chorus and leaders,
the more certainly there is room at the top for everybody who
demonstrates his supedority by well-planned originality. Hence,
in the culture industry, too, the liberal tendency to give full
scope to its able men survives. To do this for the efficient today
is sdll the function of the market, which is otherwise proficiently
controlled; as for the market's freedom, in the high period of
art as elsewhere, it was freedom for the stupid to starve. Sig-
nificantly, the system of the culture industry comes from the
more liberal industrial nations, and all its characteristic media,
such as movies, radio, jazz, and magazines, floudsh there. Its
progress, to be sure, had its odgin in the general laws of capital.
Gaumont and Pathe, Ullstein and Hugenberg followed the in-
ternational trend with some success; Europe's economic depen-
dence on the United States after war and inflation was a con-
tdbutory factor. The belief that the barbadty of the culture
industry is a result of "cultural lag," of the fact that the Amer-
ican consciousness did not keep up with the growth of tech-
nology, is quite wrong. It was pre-Fascist Europe which did not
keep up with the trend toward the culture monopoly. But it was
this very lag which left intellect and creativity some degree of
independence and enabled its last representatives to existÑhow-
ever dismaUy. In Germany the failure of democratic control to
permeate life had led to a paradoxical situation. Many things
were exempt from the market mechanism which had invaded
the Western countries. The German educational system, uni-
versides, theaters with artistic standards, great orchestras, and
museums enjoyed protection. The political powers, state and

132

)

THE CULTURe INDUSTRY: ENLIGHTENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION

municipalities, which had inherited such institutions from abso-
ludsm, had left them with a measure of the freedom from the
forces of power which dominates the market, just as princes and
feudal lords had done up to the nineteenth century. This
strengthened art in this late phase against the verdict of supply
and demand, and increased its resistance far beyond the actual
degree of protection. In the market itself the tdbute of a qual-
ity for which no use had been found was turned into purchasing
power; in this way, respectable literary and music publishers
could help authors who yielded little more in the way of profit
than the respect of the connoisseur. But what completely fet-
tered the artist was the pressure (and the accompanying drastic
threats), always to fit into business life as an aesthetic expert.
Formerly, like Kant and Hume, they signed their letters "Your
most humble and obedient servant," and undermined the foun-
dations of throne and altar. Today they address heads of gov-
ernment by their first names, yet in every artistic activity they
are subject to their illiterate masters. The analysis Tosqueville
offered a century ago has in the meantime proved wholly ac-

curate. Under the pdvate culture monopoly it is a fact that
"tyranny leaves the body free and directs its attack at the soul.
The ruler no longer says: You must think as I do or die. He
says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property,
everything shall remain yours, but from this day on you are a
stranger among us."2 Not to conform means to be rendered
powerless, economically and therefore spirituaXyÑto be "self-
employed." When the outsider is excluded from the concern, he
can only too easily be accused of incompetence. Whereas today
in material production the mechanism of supply and demand is
disintegrating, in the superstructure it still operates as a check
in the rulers' favor. The consumers are the workers and em-
ployees, the farmers and lower middle class. Capitalist produo
tion so confines them, body and soul, that they fall helpless vic-
tims to what is offered them. As naturally as the ruled always
took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did
the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated

2. Alexis de Tocquevilb, De la Democratie en Amerique Vol. II
(Paris, 1864), p. 151.

133
I

DIALECTIC OP EN LIGHTEN M eNT

by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Im-
movably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them.
The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which
is done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authori-
ties. It is stronger even than the dgorism of the Hays Office, just
as in certain great times in history it has inflamed greater forces
that were turned against it, namely, the terror of the tribunals.
It caUs for Mickey Rooney in preference to the tragic Garbo,
for Donald Duck instead of Betty Boop. The industry submits
to the vote which it has itself inspired. What is a loss for the
firm which cannot fully exploit a contract with a declining star
is a legitimate expense for the system as a whole. By craftily
sanctioning the demand for rubbish it inaugurates total har-
mony. The connoisseur and the expert are despised for their
pretentious claim to know better than the others, even though
culture is democratic and distributes its privileges to aU. In view
of the ideological truce, the conformism of the buyers and the
eflrontery of the producers who supply them prevail. The result
is a constant reproduction of the same thing.
A constant sameness governs the relationship to the past as
well. What is new about the phase of mass culture compared
with the late liberal stage is the exclusion of the new. The
machine rotates on the same spot. While determining consump-
tion it excludes the untded as a dsk. The movie-makers distrust
any manuscdpt which is not reassuringly backed by a bestseller.
Yet for this very reason there is never-ending talk of ideas,
novelty, and surprise, of what is taken for granted but has never
existed. Tempo and dynamics serve this trend. Nothing remains
as of old; everything has to run incessantly, to keep moving. For
only the universal triumph of the rhythm of mechanical produc-
tion and reproduction promises that nothing changes, and noth-
ing unsuitable will appear. Any additions to the well-proven
culture inventory are too much of a speculation. The ossified
formsÑsuch as the sketch, short story, problem film, or hit
songÑare the standardized average of late liberal taste, dic-
tated with threats from above. The people at the top in the
culture agencies, who work in harmony as only one manager
can with another, whether he comes from the rag trade or from

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: eNLIGHTENMENT AS MASS DECePTION

college, have long since reorganized and rationalized the objec-
tive spirit. One might think that an omnipresent authority had
sifted the material and drawn up an official catalog of cultural
commodities to provide a smooth supply of available mass-
produced lines. The ideas are written in the cultural firmament
where they had already been numbered by PlatoÑand were in-
deed numbers, incapable of increase and immutable.
Amusement and aU the elements of the culture industry ex-
isted long before the latter came into existence. Now they are
taken over from above and brought up to date. The culture
industry can pride itself on having energetically executed the pre-
viously clumsy transposition of art into the sphere of consump-
tion, on making this a principle, on divesting amusement of its
obtrusive naivetes and improving the type of commodities. The
more absolute it became, the more ruthless it was in forcing
every outsider either into bankruptcy or into a syndicate, and
became more refined and elevatedÑuntil it ended up as a syn-
thesis of Beethoven and the Casino de Pads. It enjoys a double
victory: the truth it extinguishes without it can reproduce at
will as a lie within. "Light" art as such, distraction, is not a
decadent form. Anyone who complains that it is a betrayal of
the ideal of pure expression is under an illusion about society.
The purity of bourgeois art, which hypostasized itself as a world
of freedom in contrast to what was happening in the material
world, was from the beginning bought with the exclusion of the
lower classesÑwith whose cause, the real universality, art keeps
faith precisely by its freedom from the ends of the false univer-
sality. Serious art has been withheld from those for whom the
hardship and oppression of life make a mockery of seriousness,
and who must be glad if they can use time not spent at the pro-
duction line just to keep going. Light art has been the shadow
of autonomous art. It is the social bad conscience of serious art.
The truth which the latter necessarily lacked because of its
social premises gives the other the semblance of legitimacy. The
division itself is the truth: it does at least express the negativity
of the culture which the different spheres constitute. Least of all
can the antithesis be reconciled by absorbing light into serious
art, or vice versa. But that is what the culture industry attempts.

135

DIALECTIC OP ENLIGHTENMENT

The eccentricity of the circus, peepshow, and brothel is as em-
barrassing to it as that of Schonberg and Karl Kraus. And so
the jazz musician Benny Goodman appears with the Budapest
string quartet, more pedantic rhythlmcally than any philhar-
monic clarinettist, while the style of the Budapest players is as
uniform and sugary as that of Guy Lombardo. But what is sig-
nificant is not vulgarity, stupidity, and lack of polish. The cul-
ture industry did away with yesterday's rubbish by its own per-
fection, and by forbidding and domesticating the amateurish,
although it constantly allows gross blunders without which the
standard of the exalted style cannot be perceived. But what is new
is that the irreconcilable elements of culture, art and distraction,
are subordinated to one end and subsumed under one false
formula: the totality of the culture industry. It consists of repe-
tition. That its characteristic innovations are never anything
more than improvements of mass reproduction is not external
to the system. It is with good reason that the interest of innu-
merable consumers is directed to the technique, and not to the
contentsÑwhich are stubbornly repeated, outworn, and by now
half-discredited. The social power which the spectators worship
shows itself more effectively in the omnipresence of the stereo-
type imposed by technical skill than in the stale ideologies for
which the ephemeral contents stand in.
Nevertheless the culture industry remains the entertainment
business. Its influence over the consumers is established by en-
tertainment; that will ultimately be broken not by an outright
decree, but by the hostility inherent in the principle of enter-
tainment to what is greater than itself. Since all the trends of the
culture industry are profoundly embedded in the public by the
whole social process, they are encouraged by the survival of
the market in this area. Demand has not yet been replaced by
simple obedience. As is well known, the major reorganization
of the film industry shortly before World War I, the material
prerequisite of its expansion, was precisely its deliberate accep-
tance of the public's needs as recorded at the box-officeÑa pro-
cedure which was hardly thought necessary in the pioneering
days of the screen. The same opinion is held today by the cat
tains of the film industry, who take as their criterion the more

136

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLIGHTENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION

or less phenomenal song hits but wisely never have recourse to
the judgment of truth, the opposite criterion. Business is their
ideology. It is quite correct that the power of the culture indus-
try resides in its identification with a manufactured need, and
not in simple contrast to it, even if this contrast were one of
complete power and complete powerlessness. Amusement under
late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as
an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit
strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the
same time mechanization has such power over a man's leisure
and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture
of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-
images of the work process itself. The ostensible content is
merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic suc-
cession of standardized operations. What happens at work, ill
the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by ap-
proximation to it in one's leisure time. All amusement suffers
from this incurable malady. Pleasure hardens into boredom be-
cause, if it is to remain pleasure, it must not demand any effort

and therefore moves rigorously in the worn grooves of associa-
tion. No independent thinking must be expected from the audi-
ence: the product prescribes every reaction: not by its natural
structure (which collapses under reflection), but by signals.
Any logical connection calling for mental effort is painstakingly
avoided. As far as possible, developments must follow from
the immediately preceding situation and never from the idea of
the whole. For the attentive movie-goer any individual scene
will give him the whole thing. Even the set pattern itself still
seems dangerous, offering some meaningÑwretched as it might
beÑwhere only meaninglessness is acceptable. Often the plot
is maliciously deprived of the development demanded by char-
acters and matter according to the old pattern. Instead, the
next step is what the script writer takes to be the most striking
effect in the particular situation. Banal though elaborate sur-
prise interrupts the story-line. The tendency mischievously to
fall back on pure nonsense, which was a legitimate part of pop-
ular art, farce and clowning, right up to Chaplin and the Marx
Brothers, is most obvious in the unpretentious kinds. This ten

137
p

DIALECTIC OF ENLWHTENMENT

dency has completely asserted itself in the text of the novelty
song, in the thriller movie, and in cartoons, although in Slms
starring Greer Garson and Bette Davis the unity of the socio-
psychological case study provides something approximating a
claim to a consistent plot. The idea itself, together with the ob-
jects of comedy and terror, is massacred and fragmented. Nov-
elty songs have always existed on a contempt for meaning
which, as predecessors and successors of psychoanalysis, they
reduce to the monotony of sexual symbolism. Today detective
and adventure films no longer give the audience the opportunity
to experience the resolution. In the non-ironic varieties of the
genre, it has also to rest content with the simple horror of situa-
tions which have almost ceased to be linked in any way.
Cartoons were once exponents of fantasy as opposed to ra-
tionalism. They ensured that justice was done to the creatures
and objects they electrified, by giving the maimed specimens a
second life. All they do today is to confirm the victory of tech
nological reason over truth. A few years ago they had a con-
sistent plot which only broke up in the final moments in a crazy
chase, and thus resembled the old slapstick comedy. Now, how-
ever, time relations have shifted. In the very first sequence a
motive is stated so that in the course of the action destruction
can get to work on it: with the audience in pursuit, the protag-
onist becomes the worthless object of general violence. The
quantity of organized amusement changes into the quality of
organized cruelty. The self-elected censors of the film industry
(with whom it enjoys a close relationship) watch over the un-
folding of the crime, which is as drawn-out as a hunt. Fun re-
places the pleasure which the sight of an embrace would
allegedly afford, and postpones satisfaction till the day of the
pogrom. In so far as cartoons do any more than accustom the
senses to the new tempo, they hammer into every brain the
old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all
individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society.
Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get
their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own
punishment.

The enjoyment of the violence suffered by the movie char

138

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLIGHTENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION

acter turns into violence against the spectator, and distraction
into exertion. Nothing that the experts have devised as a stimu-
lant must escape the weary eye; no stupidity is allowed in the
face of all the trickery; one has to follow everything and even
display the smart responses shown and recommended in the
film. This raises the question whether the culture industry ful-
fills the function of diverting minds which it boasts about so
loudly. If most of the radio stations and movie theaters were
closed down, the consumers would probably not lose so very
much. To walk from the street into the movie theater is no
longer to enter a world of dream; as soon as the very existence
of these institutions no longer made it obligatory to use them,
there would be no great urge to do so. Such closures would not
be reactionary machine wrecking. The disappointment would
be felt not so much by the enthusiasts as by the slow-witted,
who are the ones who suffer for everything anyhow. In spite of
the films which are intended to complete her integration, the
housewife finds in the darkness of the movie theater a place of
refuge where she can sit for a few hours with nobody watching,
just as she used to look out of the window when there were still
homes and rest in the evening. The unemployed in the great
cities find coolness in summer and warmth in winter in these
temperature-controlled locations. Otherwise, despite its size,
this bloated pleasure apparatus adds no dignity to man's lives.
The idea of "fully exploiting" available technical resources and
the facilities for aesthetic mass consumption is part of the eco-
nomic system which refuses to exploit resources to abolish
hunger.
The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what
it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its
plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged;
the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is
illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never
be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. In
front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and
images there is finally set no more than a commendation of the
depressing everyday world it sought to escape. Of course works
of art were not sexual exhibitions either. However, by repre

139

)

DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT

senting deprivation as negative, they retracted, as it were, the
prostitution of the impulse and rescued by mediation what was
denied. The secret of aesthetic sublimation is its representation
of fulfillment as a broken promise. The culture industry does
not sublimate; it represses. By repeatedly exposing the objects
of desire, breasts in a clinging sweater or the naked torso of the
athletic hero, it only stimulates the unsublimated forepleasure
which habitual deprivation has long since reduced to a mas-
ochistic semblance. There is no erotic situation which, while
insinuating and exciting, does not fail to indicate unmistakably
that things can never go that far. The Hays Office merely con-
firms the ritual of Tantalus that the culture industry has estab-
lished anyway. Works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the
culture industry is pornographic and prudish. Love is down-
graded to romance. And, after the descent, much is permitted;
even license as a marketable speciality has its quota bearing
the trade description "daring." The mass production of the
sexual automatically achieves its repression. Because of his
ubiquity, the film star with whom one is meant to fall in love is
from the outset a copy of himself. Every tenor voice comes to
sound like a Caruso record, and the "natural" faces of Texas
girls are like the successful models by whom Hollywood has
typecast them. The mechanical reproduction of beauty, which
reactionary cultural fanaticism wholeheartedly serves in its me-
thodical idolization of individuality, leaves no room for that
unconscious idolatry which was once essential to beauty. The
triumph over beauty is celebrated by humorÑthe Schadent
freude that every successful deprivation calls forth. There is
laughter because there is nothing to laugh at. Laughter, whether
conciliatory or terrible, always occurs when some fear passes.
It indicates liberation either from physical danger or from the
grip of logic. Conciliatory laughter is heard as the echo of an
escape from power; the wrong kind overcomes fear by capitu-
lating to the forces which are to be feared. It is the echo of
power as something inescapable. Fun is a medicinal bath. The
pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it. It makes laughter
the instrument of the fraud practised on happiness. Moments of
happiness are without laughter; only operettas and films portray
140

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLIGHTENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION

sex to the accompaniment of resounding laughter. But Baude-
laire is as devoid of humour as Holderlin. In the false society
laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness and is draw-
ing it into its worthless totality. To laugh at something is always
to deride it, and the life which, according to Bergson, in laugh-
ter breaks through the barrier, is actually an invading barbaric
life, self-assertion prepared to parade its liberation from any
scruple when the social occasion arises. Such a laughing audi-
ence is a parody of humanity. Its members are monads, all
dedicated to the pleasure of being ready for anytlung at the ex-
pense of everyone else. Their harmony is a cadcature of soli-
darity. What is fiendish about this false laughter is that it is a
compelling parody of the best, which is conciliatory. Delight is
austere: res severa verum gaudium. The monastic theory that
not asceticism but the sexual act denotes the renunciation of
attainable bliss receives negative confirmation in the gravity of
the lover who with foreboding commits his life to the fleeting
moment. In the culture industry, jovial denial takes the place
of the pain found in ecstasy and in asceticism. The supreme
law is that they shall not satisfy their desires at any pdce; they

must laugh and be content with laughter. In every product of
the culture industry, the permanent denial imposed by civiliza-
tion is once again unmistakably demonstrated and inflicted on
its victims. To offer and to deprive them of something is one
and the same. This is what happens in erotic films. Precisely be-
cause it must never take place, everything centers upon copula-
tion. In films it is more stdctly forbidden for an illegitimate
relationship to be admitted without the parties being punished
than for a millionaire's future son-in-law to be active in the
labor movement. In contrast to the liberal era, industrialized as
well as popular culture may wax indignant at capitalism, but it
cannot renounce the threat of castration. This is fundamental.
It outlasts the organized acceptance of the uniformed seen in
the films which are produced to that end, and in reality. What is
decisive today is no longer puritanism, although it still asserts
itself in the form of women's organizations, but the necessity
inherent in the system not to leave the customer alone, not for a
moment to allow him any suspicion that resistance is possible.

141

.
a~

DLSLECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT

The principle dictates that he should be shown all his needs as
capable of fulfillment, but that those needs should be so pre-
determined that he feels himself to be the eternal consumer, the
object of the culture industry. Not only does it make him believe
that the deception it practices is satisfaction, but it goes further
and implies that, whatever the state of affairs, he must put up
with what is offered. The escape from everyday drudgery which
the whole culture industry promises may be compared to the
daughter's abduction in the cartoon: the father is holding the
ladder in the dark. The paradise offered bv the culture industry
is the same old drudgery. Both escape and elopement are pre-
designed to lead back to the starting point. Pleasure promotes
the resignation which it ought to help to forget.
Amusement, if released from every restraint, would not only
be the antithesis of art but its extreme role. The Mark Twain
absurdity with which the American culture industry flirts at
times might be a corrective of art. The more seriously the latter
regards the incompatibility with life, the more it resembles the
seriousness of life, its antithesis; the more effort it devotes to
developing wholly from its own formal law, the more effort
it demands from the intelligence to neutralize its burden. In
some revue films, and especially in the grotesque and the fun-
nies, the possibility of this negation does glimmer for a few mo-
ments. But of course it cannot happen. Pure amusement in its
consequence, relaxed self-surrender to all kinds of associations
and happy nonsense, is cut short by the amusement on the mar-
ket: instead, it is interrupted by a surrogate overall meaning
which the culture industry insists on giving to its products, and
yet misuses as a mere pretext for bringing in the stars. Biog-
raphies and other simple stories patch the fragments of non-
sense into an idiotic plot. We do not have the cap and bells of
the jester but the bunch of keys of capitalist reason, which even
screens the pleasure of achieving success. Every kiss in the
revue film has to contribute to the career of the boxer, or some
hit song expert or other whose rise to fame is being glorified. The
deception is not that the culture industry supplies amusement
but that it ruins the fun by allowing business considerations to
involve it in the ideological cliches of a culture in the process

142

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLIGHTENMENT AS MASS DECePTION

of self-liquidation. Ethics and taste cut short unrestrained amuse-
ment as "nalve"Ñnaivete is thought to be as bad as intellec-
tualismÑand even restrict technical possibilities. The culture
industry is corrupt; not because it is a sinful Babylon but be-
cause it is a cathedral dedicated to elevated pleasure. On all
levels, from Hemingway to Emil Ludwig, from Mrs. Miniver to
the Lone Ranger, from Toscanini to Guy Lombardo, there is
untruth in the intellectual content taken ready-made from art
and science. The culture industry does retain a trace of some-
thing better in those features which bring it close to the circus,
in the selfjustifying and nonsensical skill of riders, acrobats
and clowns, in the "defense and justification of physical as
against intellectual art."3 But the refuges of a mindless artistry
which represents what is human as opposed to the social mecha-
nism are being relentlessly hunted down by a schematic reason
which compels everything to prove its significance and effect.
The consequence is that the nonsensical at the bottom disap-
pears as utterly as the sense in works of art at the top.
¥ The fusion of culture and entertainment that is taking place
today leads not only to a depravation of culture, but inevitably
to an intellectualization of amusement. This is evident from the
fact that only the copy appears: in the movie theater, the photo
graph; on the radio, the recording. In the age of liberal expansion,
amusement lived on the unshaken belief in the future: things
would remain as they were and even improve. Today this belief
is once more intellectualized; it becomes so faint that it loses
sight of any goal and is little more than a magic-lantern show
for those with their backs to reality. It consists of the meaning
ful emphases which, parallel to life itself, the screen play puts
on the smart fellow, the engineer, the capable girl, ruthlessness
disguised as character, interest in sport, and finally automobiles
and cigarettes, even where the entertainment is not put down to
the advertising account of the immediate producers but to that
of the system as a whole. Amusement itself becomes an ideal,
taking the place of the higher things of which it completely de
prives the masses by repeating them in a manner even more

3. Frank Wedekind, Gesammelte Werke Vol. IX (Munich, 1921), p.
426.

143

)

DIALLCTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT

stereotyped than the slogans paid for by advertising interests.
Inwardness, the subjectively restricted form of truth, was always
more at the mercy of the outwardly powerful than they im-
agined. The culture industry turns it into an open lie. It has now
become mere twaddle which is acceptable in religious best-
sellers, psychological films, and women's serials as an embar-
rassingly agreeable garnish, so that genuine personal emotion in
real life can be all the more reliably controlled. In this sense
amusement carries out that purgation of the emotions which
Aristotle once attributed to tragedy and Mortimer Adler now
allows to movies. The culture industry reveals the truth about
catharsis as it did about style.

The stronger the positions of the culture industry become, the
more summarily it can deal with consumers' needs, producing
them, controlling them, disciplining them, and even withdraw-
ing amusement: no limits are set to cultural progress of this
kind. But the tendency is immanent in the principle of amuse-
ment itself, which is enlightened in a bourgeois sense. If the
need for amusement was in large measure the creation of in-
dustry, which used the subject as a means of recommending the
work to the massesÑthe oleograph by the dainty morsel it de-
picted, or the cake mix by a picture of a cakeÑamusement al-
ways reveals the influence of business, the sales talk, the quack's
spiel. But the original aflinity of business and amusement is
shown in the latter's specific sigl.uficance: to defend society. To
be pleased means to say Yes. It is possible only by insulation
from the totality of the social process, by desensitization and,
from the first, by senselessly sacrificing the inescapable claim of
every work, however inane, within its limits to reflect the whole.
Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget
suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It
is flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from
the last remaining thought of resistance. The liberation which
amusement promises is freedom from thought and from negation.
The effrontery of the rhetorical question, "What do people
want?" lies in the fact that it is addressedÑas if to reflective indi-
vidualsÑto those very people who are deliberately to be deprived

144

THE INDUSTRY: ENLIGHT~NMENT AS MASS DECEPTION

of this individuality. Even when the public does exceptionallyÑ
rebel against the pleasure industry, all it can muster is that feeble
resistance which that very industry has inculcated in it. Never-
theless, it has become increasingly difficult to keep people in
this condition. The rate at which they are reduced to stupidity
must not fall behind the rate at which their intelligence is in-
creasing. In this age of statistics the masses are too sharp to
identify themselves with the millionaire on the screen, and too
slow-witted to ignore the law of the largest number. Ideology
conceals itself in the calculation of probabilities. Not everyone
will be lucky one dayÑbut the person who draws the winning
ticket, or rather the one who is marked out to do so by a higher
powerÑusually by the pleasure industry itself, which is repre-
sented as unceasingly in search of talent. Those discovered by
talent scouts and then publicized on a vast scale by the studio
are ideal types of the new dependent average. Of course, the
starlet is meant to symbolize the typist in such a way that the
splendid evening dress seems meant for the actress as distinct
from the real girl. The girls in the audience not only feel that
they could be on the screen, but realize the great gulf separating
them from it. Only one girl can draw the lucky ticket, only one

man can win the prize, and if, mathematically, all have the
same chance, yet this is so infinitesimal for each one that he or
she will do best to write it off and rejoice in the other's success,
which might just as well have been his or hers, and somehow
never is. Whenever the culture industry still issues an invitation
nalvely to identify, it is immediately withdrawn. No one can
escape from himself any more. Once a member of the audience
could see his own wedding in the one shown in the film. Now
the lucky actors on the screen are copies of the same category
as every member of the public, but such equality only demon-
strates the insurmountable separation of the human elements.
The perfect similarity is the absolute difference. The identity of
the category forbids that of the individual cases. Ironically, man
as a member of a species has been made a reality by the culture
industry. Now any person signifies only those attributes by
which he can replace everybody else: he is interchangeable, a
copy. As an individual he is completely expendable and utterly

145
oo

DIALECTIC OP BNLIGHTENMBNT

insigruficant, and this is just what he finds out when time de-
prives him of this similarity. This changes the inner structure of
the religion of successÑotherwise strictly maintained. Increas-
ing emphasis is laid not on the path per aspera ad astra (which
presupposes hardship and effort), but on winning a prize. The
element of blind chance in the routine decision about which
song deserves to be a hit and which extra a heroine is stressed
by the ideology. Movies emphasize chance. By stopping at noth-
ing to ensure that all the characters are essentially alike, with
the exception of the villain, and by excluding non-conforming
faces (for example, those which, Uke Garbo's, do not look as
if you could say "Hello sisterl" to them), life is made easier for
movie-goers at first. They are assured that they are all right as
they are, that they could do just as well and that nothing be-
yond their powers will be asked of them. But at the same time
they are given a hint that any effort would be useless because
even bourgeois luck no longer has any connection with the cal-
culable effect of their own work. They take the hint. Fundamen-
tally they all recognize chance (by which one occasionally
makes his fortune) as the other side of planning. Precisely be-
cause the forces of society are so deployed in the direction of
rationality thst anyone might become an engineer or manager,
it has ceased entirely to be a rational matter who the one will
be in whom society will invest training or confidence for such
functions. Chance and planning become one and the same thing,
because, given men's equality, individual success and failureÑ
right up to the topÑlose any economic meaning. Chance itself
is planned, not because it affects any particular individual but
precisely because it is believed to play a vital part. It serves the
planners as an alibi, and makes it seem that the complex of
transactions and measures into which life has been transformed
leaves scope for spontaneous and direct relations between man.
This freedom is symbolized in the various media of the culture
industry by the arbitrary selection of average individuals. In a
magazine's detailed accounts of the modestly magnificent pleas-
ure-trips it has arranged for the lucky person, preferably a
stenotypist (who has probably won the competition because of
her contacts with local bigwigs), the powerlessness of all is re-
l46

THB CULTtlRE INDUSTRY: BNLIGEITeNMENT AS MASS DECEPTION

flected. They are mere matterÑso much so that those in con-

trol can take someone up into their heaven and throw him out
again: his rights and his work count for nothing. Industry is
interested in people merely as customers and employees, and
has in fact reduced mankind as a whole and each of its elements
to this all-embracing formula. According to the ruling aspect at
the time, ideology emphasizes plan or chance, technology or
life, civilization or nature. As employees, men are reminded of
the rational organization and urged to fit in like sensible people.
g As customers, the freedom of choice, the charm of novelty, is
demonstrated to them on the screen or in the press by means of
the human and personal anecdote. In either case they remain
0 objects.
The less the culture industry has to promise, the less it can
offer a meaningful explanation of life, and the emptier is the
ideology it disseminates. Even the abstract ideals of the har-
mony and beneficence of society are too concrete in this age of
u niversal publicity. We have even learned how to identify ab
, stract concepts as sales propaganda. Language based entirely on
truth simply arouses impatience to get on with the business deal
;~ it is probably advancing. The words that are not means appear
senseless; the others seem to be fiction, untrue. Value judg
^ ments are taken either as advertising or as empty talk. Accord-
ingly ideology has been made vague and noncommittal, and
S thus neither clearer nor weaker. Its very vagueness, its almost
00;scientific aversion from committing itself to anything which
cannot be verified, acts as an instrument of domination. It be-
comes a vigorous and prearranged promulgation of the status
quo. The culture industry tends to make itself the embodi
0 ment of authoritative pronouncements, and thus the irrefutable
prophet of the prevailing order. It skilfully steers a winding
course between the cliffs of demonstrable misinformation and
manifest truth, faithfully reproducing the phenomenon whose
opaqueness blocks any insight and installs the ubiquitous and
intact phenomenon as ideal. Ideology is split into the photograph
of stubborn life and the naked lie about its meaningÑwhich is
not expressed but suggested and yet drummed in. To demon-
strate its divine nature, reality is always repeated in a purely

147

DlALECTIC OP BNLIGHTBNMENT

cynical way. Such a photological proof is of course not strin-
gent, but it is overpowering. Anyone who doubts the power of
monotony is a fool. The culture industry refutes the objection
made against it just as well as that against the world which it
impartially duplicates. The only choice is either to join in or to
be left behind: those provincials who have recourse to eternal
beauty and the amateur stage in preference to the cinema and
the radio are alreadyÑ~liticallyÑat the point to which mass
culture drives its supporters. It is sufficiently hardened to de-
ride as ideology, if need be, the old wishfulfillments, the father-
ideal and absolute feeling. The new ideology has as its objects
the world as such. It makes use of the worship of facts by no
more than elevating a disagreeable existence into the world of
facts in representing it meticulously. This transference makes
existence itself a substitute for meaning and right. Whatever
the camera reproduces is beautiful. The disappointment of the
prospect that one might be the typist who wins the world trip is
matched by the disappointing appearance of the accurately
photographed areas which the voyage might include. Not Italy
is offered, but evidence that it exists. A film can even go so far
as to show the Paris in which the American girl thinks she will
still her desire as a hopelessly desolate place, thus driving her
the more inexorably into the arms of the smart American boy
she could have met at home anyhow. That this goes on, that, in
its most recent phase, the system itself reproduces the life of
those of whom it consists instead of immediately doing away
with them, is even put down to its credit as giving it meaning
and worth. Continuing and continuing to join in are given as
justification for the blind persistence of the system and even for
its immutability. What repeats itself is healthy, like the natural
or industrial cycle. The same babies grin eternally out of the
magazines; the jazz machine will pound away for ever. In spite
of all the progress in reproduction techniques, in controls and
the specialities, and in spite of all the restless industry, the bread
which the culture industry offers man is the stone of the stereo-
type. It draws on the life cycle, on the well-founded amazement
that mothers, in spite of everything, still go on bearing children
and that the wheels still do not grind to a halt. This serves to

148

THE CULTURE INDUSlltY: ENLIGHTENMBNT AS MASS DECEPTION

confirm the immutability of circumstances. The ears of corn
blowing in the wind at the end of Chaplin's The Great Dictator
give the lie to the anti-Fascist plea for freedom. They are like
the blond hair of the German girl whose camp life is photo-
graphed by the Nazi film company in the summer breeze. Na-
ture is viewed by the mechanism of social domination as a
healthy contrast to society, and is therefore denatured. Pictures
showing green trees, a blue sky, and moving clouds make these
aspects of nature into so many cryptograms for factory chim-
neys and service stations. On the other hand, wheels and ma-
chine components must seem expressive, having been degraded
to the status of agents of the spirit of trees and clouds. Nature
and technology are mobilized against all opposition; and we
have a falsified memento of liberal society, in which people sup-
posedly wallowed in erotic plushlined bedrooms instead of tal:-
ing open-air baths as in the case today, or experiencing break-
downs in prehistoric Benz models instead of shooting off with
the speed of a rocket from A (where one is anyhow) to B
(where everything is just the same). The triumph of the gigan-

tic concern over the initiative of the entrepreneur is praised by
the culture industry as the persistence of entrepreneurial initia-
tive. The enemy who is already defeated, the thinking individual,
is the enemy fought. The resurrection in Germany of the anti-
bourgeois "Haus Sonnenstosser," and the pleasure felt when
watching Life with Father, have one and the same meaning.

In one respect, admittedly, this hollow ideology is in deadly
earnest: everyone is provided for. "No one must go hungry or
thirsty; if anyone does, he's for the concentration campl" This
joke from Hitler's Germany might shine forth as a maxim from
above all the portals of the culture industry. With sly naivete,
it presupposes the most recent characteristic of society: that it
can easily find out who its supporters are. Everybody is guar-
anteed formal freedom. No one is officially responsible for what
he thinks. Instead everyone is enclosed at an early age in a sys-
tem of churches, clubs, professional associations, and other such
concerns, which constitute the most sensitive instrument of so-
cial control. Anyone who wants to avoid ruin must see that he

.
o

DIALECTIC OP ENLIGHTENMENT

is not found wanting when weighed in the scales of this appa-
ratus. Otherwise he will lag behind in life, and finally perish. In
every career, and especially in the liberal professions, expert
knowledge is linked with prescribed standards of conduct; this
can easily lead to the illusion that expert knowledge is the only
thing that counts. In fact, it is part of the irrational planning of
this society that it reproduces to a certain degree only the lives
of its faithful members. The standard of life enjoyed corTe-
sponds very closely to the degree to which classes and individ-
uals are essentially bound up with the system. The manager can
be relied upon, as can the lesser employee DagwoodÑas he is
in the comic pages or in real life. Anyone who goes cold and
hungry, even if his prospects were once good, is branded. He is
an outsider; and, apart from certain capital crimes, the most
mortal of sins is to be an outsider. In Slms he sometimes, and
as an exception, becomes an original, the object of maliciously
indulgent humor; but usually he is the villain, and is identified
as such at first appearance, long before the action really gets
going: hence avoiding any suspicion that society would turn on
those of good will. Higher up the scale, in fact, a kind of wel-
fare state is coming into being today. In order to keep their
own positions, men in top posts maintain the economy in which
a highly-developed technology has in principle made the masses
redundant as producers. The workers, the real bread-winners,
are fed (if we are to believe the ideology) by the managers of
the economy, the fed. Hence the individual's position becomes
precarious. Under liberalism the poor were thought to be lazy;
now they are automatically objects of suspicion. Anybody who
is not provided for outside should be in a concentration camp,
or at any rate in the hell of the most degrading work and the
slums. The culture industry, however, reflects positive and nega-
tive welfare for those under the administrators' control as direct
human solidarity of men in a world of the efficient. No one is
forgotten; everywhere there are neighbors and welfare workers,
Dr. Gillespies and parlor philosophers whose hearts are in the
right place and who, by their kind intervention as of man to
man, cure individual cases of socially-perpetuated distressÑ
always provided that there is no obstacle in the personal de

150

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLIOHTENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION

pravity of the unfortunate. The promotion of a friendly at-
mosphere as advised by management experts and adopted by
every factory to increase output, brings even the last private
impulse under social control precisely because it seems to relate
men's circumstances directly to production, and to reprivatize
them. Such spiritual charity casts a conciliatory shadow onto
the products of the culture industry long before it emerges from
t he factory to invade society as a whole. Yet the great benefao
tors of mankind, whose scientific achievements have to be writ-
ten up as acts of sympathy to give them an artiScial human
i nterest, are substitutes for the national leaders, who finally de-
cree the abolition of sympathy and think they can prevent any
recurrence when the last invalid has been exterminated
By emphasizing the "heart of gold," society admits the suf-
fering it has created: everyone knows that he is now helpless in
the system, and ideology has to take this into account. Far from
concealing suffering under the cloak of improvised fellowship
the culture industry takes pride in looking it in the face like a
man, however great the strain on self-control. The pathos of
composure justifies the world which makes it necessary That is
lifeÑvery hard, but just because of that so wonderfui and so
healthy. This lie does not shrink from tragedy. Mass culture
deals with it, in the same way as centralized society does not
abolish the suffering of its members but records and plans it
That it is why it borrows so persistently from art. This provides
the tragic substance which pure amusement cannot :+self supply
i but which it needs if it is somehow to remain fa..ilful to the
principle of the exact reproduction of phenomena. Tragedy
made into a carefully calculated and accepted aspect of the
world is a blessing. It is a safeguard against the reproach that
truth is not respected, whereas it is really being adopted with
cynical regret. To the consumer whoÑculturallyÑhas seen
better days it offers a substitute for longÑdiscarded profundities
2 It provides the regular movie-goer with the scraps of culture he
f must have for prestige. It comforts all with the thought that a
tough, genuine human fate is still possible, and that it must at
all costs be represented uncompromisingly. Life in all the as
0 pects which ideology today sets out to duplicate shows up all
151

)

DsLev}lC OP E~NLIGNT~NMLNT

the more gloriously, powerfully and magnificently, the more it
is redolent of necessary suffering. It begins to resemble fate.
Tragedy is reduced to the threat to destroy anyone who does
not cooperate, whereas its paradoxical signiScance once lay in a
hopeless resistance to mythic destiny. Tragic fate becomes just
punishment, which is what bourgeois aesthetics always tried to
turn it into. The morality of mass culture is the cheap form of
yesterday's children's books. In a first-class production, for ex-
ample, the villainous character appears as a hysterical woman
who (with presumed clinical accuracy) tries to ruin the happi-
ness of her opposite number, who is truer to reality, and her-
self suffers a quite untheatrical death. So much learning is of
course found only at the top. Lower down less trouble is taken.
Tragedy is made harmless without recourse to social psychology.
Just as every Viennese operetta worthy of the name had to have
its tragic finale in the second act, which left nothing for the
third except to clear up misunderstandings, the culture industry
assigns tragedy a fixed place in the routine. The well-known
existence of the recipe is enough to allay any fear that there is
no restraint on tragedy. The description of the dramatic formula
by the housewife as "getting into trouble and out again" em-
braces the whole of mass culture from the idiotic women's serial
to the top production. Even the worst ending which began with
good intentions confirms the order of things and corrupts the
tragic force, either because the woman whose love runs counter
to the laws of the game plays with her death for a brief spell of
happiness, or because the sad ending in the film all the more
: clearly stresses the indestructibility of actual life. The tragic
film becomes an institution for moral improvement. The masses,
demoralized by their life under the pressure of the system, and
who show signs of civilization only in modes of behavior which
have been forced on them and through which fury and recalci-
trance show everywhere, are to be kept in order by the sight of
f an inexorable life and exemplary behavior. Culture has always
played its part in taming revolutionary and barbaric instincts.
Industrial culture adds its contribution. It shows the condition
under which this merciless life can be lived at all. The individ-
ual who is thoroughly weary must use his weariness as energy

152

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLIOHTENMENT A8 MASS DECEPTION

for his surrender to the collective power which wears him out.
In films, those permanently desperate situations which crush the
spectator in ordinary life somehow become a promise that one
can go on living. One has only to become aware of one's own
nothingness, only to recognize defeat and one is one with it all.
Society is full of desperate people and therefore a prey to rackets.
In some of the most significant German novels of the pre-
Fascist era such as Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz and Fallada's
Klcincr Mann, Was Nun, this trend was as obvious as in the
average film and in the devices of jazz. What all these things
have in common is the self-derision of man. The possibility of
becoming a subject in the economy, an entrepreneur or a pro-
prietor, has been completely liquidated. Right down to the
humblest shop, the independent enterprise, on the management
and inheritance of which the bourgeois family and the position
of its head had rested, became hopelessly dependent. Everybody
became an employee; and in this civilization of employees the
dignity of the father (questionable anyhow) vanishes. The affl-
tude of the individual to the racket, business, profession or
party, before or after admission, the Fuhrer's gesticulations be-
fore the masses, or the suitor's before his sweetheart, assume

specifically masochistic traits. The attitude into which every-
body is forced in order to give repeated proof of his moral
suitability for this society reminds one of the boys who, during
tribal initiation, go round in a circle with a stereotyped smile on
their faces while the priest strikes them. Life in the late capital-
ist era is a constant initiation rite. Everyone must show that he
wholly identifies himself with the power which is belaboring
him. This occurs in the principle of jazz syncopation, which
simultaneously derides stumbling and makes it a rule. The
eunuch-like voice of the crooner on the radio, the heiress's
smooth suitor, who falls into the swimming pool in his dinner
jacket, are models for those who must become whatever the
system wants. Everyone can be like this omnipotent society;
everyone can be happy, if only he will capitulate fully and sacri-
fice his claim to happiness. In his weakness society recognizes
its strength, and gives him some of it. His defenselessness makes
him reliable. Hence tragedy is discarded. Once the opposition
153
oo
N

DLiLECTIC OF ENLWHTPNMPNT

of the individual to society was its substance. It glorified "the
bravery and freedom of emotion before a powerful enemy, an
exalted affliction, a dreadful problem."4 Today tragedy has
melted away into the nothingness of that false identity of society
and individual, whose terror still shows for a moment in the
empty semblance of the tragic. But the miracle of integration,
the permanent act of grace by the authority who receives the
defenseless personÑonce he has swallowed his rebelliousness
Ñsignifies Fascism. This can be seen in the humanitarianism
which Doblin uses to let his Biberkopf find refuge, and again in
socially-slanted films. The capacity to find refuge, to survive
one's own ruin, by which tragedy is defeated, is found in the
new generation; they can do any work because the work process
does not let them become attached to any. This is reminiscent
of the sad lack of conviction of the homecoming soldier with no
interest in the war, or of the casual laborer who ends up by
joining a paramilitary organization. This liquidation of tragedy
confirms the abolition of the individual.

In the culture industry the individual is an illusion not merely
because of the standardization of the means of production. He
is tolerated only so long as his complete identification with the
generality is unquestioned. Pseudo individuality is rife: from the
standardized jazz improvization to the exceptional film star
whose hair curls over her eye to demonstrate her originality.
What is individual is no more than the generality's power to
stamp the accidental detail so firmly that it is accepted as such.
The defiant reserve or elegant appearance of the individual on
show is mass-produced like Yale locks, whose only difference
can be measured in fractions of millimeters. The peculiarity of
the self is a monopoly commodity determined by society; it is
falsely represented as natural. It is no more than the moustache,
the French accent, the deep.voice of the woman of the world,
the Lubitsch touch: finger prints on identity cards which are
otherwise exactly the same, and into which the lives and faces of
every single person are transformed by the power of the gener

4. Nietzsche, Cotzendammerung, Werke, Vol. Vlil, p. 136.

154

THE CULTURE LNDUSTRY: ENLIGHTBNMENT AB MASS DECEPTION

ality. Pseudo individuality is the prerequisite for comprehending
tragedy and removing its poison: only because individuals have
ceased to be themselves and are now merely centers where the
general tendencies meet, is it possible to receive them again,
whole and entire, into the generality. In this way mass culture
discloses the fictitious character of the "individual" in the bour-
geois era, and is merely unjust in boasting on account of this
dreary harmony of general and particular. The principle of in-
dividuality was always full of contradiction. Individuation has
never really been achieved. Self-preservation in the shape of
class has kept everyone at the stage of a mere species being.
Every bourgeois characteristic, in spite of its deviation and in-
deed because of it, expressed the same thing: the harshness of
the competitive society. The individual who supported society
bore its disfiguring mark; seemingly free, he was actually the
product of its economic and social apparatus. Power based it-
self on the prevailing conditions of power when it sought the
approval of persons affected by it. As it progressed, bourgeois
society did also develop the individual. Against the will of its
leaders, technology has changed human beings from children
into persons. However, every advance in individuation of this
kind took place at the expense of the individuality in whose
name it occurred, so that nothing was left but the resolve to
pursue one's own particular purpose. The bourgeois whose ex-
istence is split into a business and a private life, whose private
life is split into keeping up his public image and intimacy,
whose intimacy is split into the surly partnership of marriage
and the bitter comfort of being quite alone, at odds with him-
self and everybody else, is already virtually a Nazi, replete both
with enthusiasm and abuse; or a modern city-dweller who can
now only imagine friendship as a "social contact": that is, as
being in social contact with others with whom he has no inward
contact. The only reason why the culture industry can deal so
successfully with individuality is that the latter has always re-
produced the fragility of society. On the faces of private indi-
viduals and movie heroes put together according to the patterns
on magazine covers vanishes a pretense in which no one now
believes; the popularity of the hero models comes partly from a
155

)

DIALECTIC OF BNLIGHTENMENT

secret satisfaction that the effort to achieve individuation has at
last been replaced by the effort to imitate, which is admittedly
more breathless. It is idle to hope that this self-contradictory,
disintegrating "person" will not last for generations, that the
system must collapse because of such a psychological split, or
that the deceitful substitution of the stereotype for the indi-
vidual will of itself become unbearable for mankind. Since
Shakespeare's Hamkt, the unity of the personality has been
seen through as a pretense. Synthetically produced physiogno-
mies show that the people of today have already forgotten that
there was ever a notion of what human life was. For centuries
society has been preparing for Victor Mature and Mickey
Rooney. By destroying they come to fulfill.
The idolization of the cheap involves making the average the
heroic. The highest-paid stars resemble pictures advertising un-
specified proprietary articles. Not without good purpose are
they often selected from the host of commercial models. The
prevailing taste takes its ideal from advertising, the beauty in
consumption. Hence the Socradc saying that the beautiful is the
useful has now been fulfilledÑironically. The cinema makes
propaganda for the culture combine as a whole; on radio, goods
for whose sake the cultural commodity exists are also recom-
mended individually. For a few coins one can see the film which
cost millions, for even less one can buy the chewing gum whose
manufacture involved immense richesÑa hoard increased still
further by sales. In absentia, but by universal suffrage, the
treasure of armies is revealed, but prostitution is not allowed
inside the country. The best orchestras in the worldÑclearly
not soÑare brought into your living room free of charge. It is
all a parody of the never-never land, just as the national society
is a parody of the human society. You name it, we supply it. A
man up from the country remarked at the old Berlin Metropol
theater that it was astonishing what they could do for the
money; his comment has long since been adopted by the culture
industry and made the very substance of production. This is
always coupled with the triumph that it is possible; but this, in
large measure, is the very triumph. Putting on a show means
showing everybody what there is, and what can be achieved.
156

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLlGHTENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION

Even today it is still a fair, but incurably sick with culture. Just
as the people who had been attracted by the fairground barkers
overcame their disappointment in the booths with a brave smile,
because they really knew in advance what would happen, so the
movie-goer sticks knowingly to the institution. With the cheap-
ness of mass-produce luxury goods and its complement, the
universal swindle, a change in the character of the art com-
modity itself is coming about. What is new is not that it is a
commodity, but that today it deliberately admits it is one; that
art renounces its own autonomy and proudly takes its place
among consumption goods consdtutes the charm of novelty. Art
as a separate sphere was always possible only in a bourgeois
society. Even as a negation of that social purposiveness which is
spreading through the market, its freedom remains essendally
bound up with the premise of a commodity economy. Pure
works of art which deny the commodity society by the very
fact that they obey their own law were always wares all the
same. In so far as, until the eighteenth century, the buyer's pat-
ronage shielded the artist from the market, they were dependent
on the buyer and his objectives. The purposelessness of the
great modern work of art depends on the anonymity of the
market. Its demands pass through so many intermediaries that

the artist is exempt from any definite requirementsÑthough
admittedly only to a certain degree, for throughout the whole
history of the bourgeoisie his autonomy was only tolerated, and
thus contained an element of untruth which ultimately led to
the social liquidation of art. When mortally sick, Beethoven
hurled away a novel by Sir Walter Scott with the cry: "Why,
the fellow writes for money," and yet proved a most experi-
enced and stubborn businessman in disposing of the last quar-
tets, which were a most extreme renunciation of the market; he
is the most outstanding example of the unity of those opposites,
market and independence, in bourgeois art. Those who suc-
cumb to the ideology are precisely those who cover up the con-
tradiction instead of taking it into the consciousness of their
own production as Beethoven did: he went on to express in
music his anger at losing a few pence, and derived the meta-
physical Es Muss Sein (which attempts an aesthetic banishment

157

l
DLiLECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT

of the pressure of the world by taking it into itself) from the
housekeeper's demand for her monthly wages. The principle of
idealistic aestheticsÑpurposefulness without a purposeÑre-
verses the scheme of things to which bourgeois art conforms
socially: purposelessness for the purposes declared by the mar-
ket. At last, in the demand for entertainment and relaxation,
purpose has absorbed the realm of purposelessness. But as the
insistence that art should be disposable in terms of money
becomes absolute, a shift in the internal structure of cultural
commodities begins to show itself. The use which men in this
antagonistic society promise themselves from the work of art is
itself, to a great extent, that very existence of the useless which
is abolished by complete inclusion under use. The work of art,
by completely assimilating itself to need, deceitfully deprives
men of precisely that liberation from the principle of utility
which it should inaugurate. What might be called use value in
the reception of cultural commodities is replaced by exchange
value; in place of enjoyment there are gallery-visiting and fac-
tual knowledge: the prestige seeker replaces the connoisseur.
The consumer becomes the ideology of the pleasure industry,
whose institutions he cannot escape. One simply "has to" have
seen Urs. Miniver, just as one "has to" subscribe to Life and
Time. Fverything is looked at from only one aspect: that it can
be used for something else, however vague the notion of this use
may be. No object has an inherent value; it is valuable only to
the extent that it can be exchanged. The use value of art, its
mode of being, is treated as a fetish; and the fetish, the work's
social rating (misinterpreted as its artistic status) becomes its
use valueÑthe only quality which is enjoyed. The commodity
function of art disappears only to be wholly realized when art
becomes a species of commodity instead, marketable and inter-
changeable like an industrial product. But art as a type of
product which existed to be sold and yet to be unsaleable is
wholly and hypocritically converted into "unsaleability" as soon
as the transaction ceases to be the mere intention and becomes
its sole principle. No tickets could be bought when Toscanini
conducted over the radio; he was heard without charge, and
every sound of the symphony was accompanied, as it were, by
158

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLIGHTENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION

the sublime puff that the symphony was not interrupted by any
advertising: "This concert is brought to you as a public ser-

vice." The illusion was made possible by the profits of the
united automobile and soap manufacturers, whose payments
keep the radio stations goingÑand, of course, by the increased
sales of the electrical industry, which manufactures the radio
sets. Radio, the progressive latecomer of mass culture, draws
all the consequences at present denied the film by its pseudo-
market. The technical structure of the commercial radio system
makes it immune from liberal deviations such as those the
movie industdalists can still permit themselves in their own
sphere. It is a pdvate enterprise which really does represent the
sovereign whole and is therefore some distance ahead of the
other individual combines. Chesterfield is merely the nation's
cigarette, but the radio is the voice of the nation. In bringing
cultural products wholly into the sphere of commodities, radio
does not try to dispose of its culture goods themselves as com-
modides straight to the consumer. In America it collects no
fees from the public, and so has acquired the illusory form of
disinterested, unbiased authority which suits Fascism admirably.
The radio becomes the universal mouthpiece of the Fuhrer; his
voice rises from street loud-speakers to resemble the howling of
sirens announcing panicÑfrom which modern propaganda can
scarcely be distinguished anyway. The National Socialists knew
that the wireless gave shape to their cause just as the printing
press did to the Reformation. The metaphysical charisma of the
Fiihrer invented by the sociology of religion has finally turned
out to be no more than the omnipresence of his speeches on the
radio, which are a demoniacal parody of the omnipresence of
the divine spirit. The gigantic fact that the speech penetrates
everywhere replaces its content, just as the benefaction of the
Toscanini broadcast takes the place of the symphony. No lis-
tener can grasp its true meaning any longer, while the Fuhrer's
speech is lies anyway. The inherent tendency of radio is to
make the speaker's word, the false commandment, absolute. A
recommendation becomes an order. The recommendation of the
same commodities under different proprietary names, the sci-
entifically based praise of the laxative in the announcer's smooth
159

DLULECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT

voice between the overture from La Traviata and that from
Rienzi is the only thing that no longer works, because of its
silliness. One day the edict of production, the actual advertise-
ment (whose actuality is at present concealed by the pretense
of a choice) can turn into the open command of the Fuhrer. In
a society of huge Fascist rackets which agree among themselves
what part of the social product should be allotted to the na-
tion's needs, it would eventually seem anachronistic to recom-
mend the use of a particular soap powder. The Fuhrer is more
up-to-date in unceremoniously giving direct orders for both the
holocaust and the supply of rubbish.
Even today the culture industry dresses works of art like po-
litical slogans and forces them upon a resistant public at re-
ducedpdces; they are as accessible for public enjoyment as a park.
But the disappearance of their genuine commodity character does
not mean that they have been abolished in the life of a free so-
ciety, but that the last defense against their reduction to culture
goods has fallen. The abolition of educational privilege by the
device of clearance sales does not open for the masses the
spheres from which they were formerly excluded, but, given
existing social conditions, contdbutes directly to the decay of
education and the progress of barbaric meaninglessness. Those
who spent their money in the nineteenth or the early twentieth
century to see a play or to go to a concert respected the per-
formance as much as the money they spent. The bourgeois who
wanted to get something out of it tried occasionally to establish
some rapport with the work. Evidence for this is to be found in
the literary "introductions" to works, or in the commentaries on
Faust. These were the first steps toward the biographical coat-
ing and other practices to which a work of art is subjected
today. Even in the early, prosperous days of business, exchange-
value did carry use value as a mere appendix but had developed
it as a prerequisite for its own existence; this was socially help-
ful for works of art. Art exercised some restraint on the bour-
geois as long as it cost money. That is now a thing of the past.
Now that it has lost every restraint and there is no need to pay
any money, the proximity of art to those who are exposed to it
completes the alienation and assimilates one to the other under

160

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLIGHTENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION

the banner of triumphant objectivity. Criticism and respect dis-
appear in the culture industry; the former becomes a mechani-
cal expertise, the latter is succeeded by a shallow cult of leading
personalities. Consumers now find nothing expensive. Never-
theless, they suspect that the less anything costs, the less it is
being given them. The double mistrust of traditional culture as
ideology is combined with mistrust of industrialized culture as a
swindle. When thrown in free, the now debased works of art,
together with the rubbish to which the medium assimilates
them, are secretly rejected by the fortunate recipients, who are
supposed to be satisfied by the mere fact that there is so much
to be seen and heard. Everything can be obtained. The screenos
and vaudevilles in the movie theater, the competitions for guess-
ing music, the free books, rewards and gifts offered on certain
radio programs, are not mere accidents but a continuation of
the practice obtaining with culture products. The symphony be-
comes a reward for listening to the radio, andÑif technology
had its wayÑthe film would be delivered to people's homes as
happens with the radio. It is moving toward the commercial
system. Television points the way to a development which might
easily enough force the Warner Brothers into what would cer-

tainly be the unwelcome position of serlous musicians and cul-
tural conservatives. But the gift system has already taken hold
among consumers. As culture is represented as a bonus with
undoubted private and social advantages, they have to seize
the chance. They rush in lest they miss something. Exactly
what, is not clear, but in any case the only ones with a chance
are the participants. Fascism, however, hopes to use the train-
ing the culture industry has given these recipients of gifts, in
order to organize them into its own forced battalions.

Culture is a paradoxical commodity. So completely is it subject
to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so
blindly consumed in use that it can no longer be used. There-
fore it amalgamates with advertising. The more meaningless
the latter seems to be under a monopoly, the more omnipotent
it becomes. The motives are markedly economic. One could cer-
tainly live without the culture industry, therefore it necessarily

161
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT

creates too much satiation and apathy. In itself, it has few re-
sources itself to correct this. Advertising is its elixir of life. But
as its product never fails to reduce to a mere promise the en-
joyment which it promises as a commodity, it eventually coin-
cides with publicity, which it needs because it cannot be enjoyed.
In a competitive society, advertising performed the social ser-
vice of informing the buyer about the market; it made choice
easier and helped the unknown but more efficient supplier to
dispose of his goods. Far from costing time, it saved it. Today,
when the free market is coming to an end, those who control
the system are entrenching themselves in it. It strengthens the
firm bond between the consumers and the big combines. Only
those who can pay the exorbitant rates charged by the adver-
tising agencies, chief of which are the radio networks them-
selves; that is, only those who are already in a position to do
so, or are co-opted by the decision of the banks and industdal
capital, can enter the pseudo-market as sellers. The costs of
advertising, which finally flow back into the pockets of the
combines, make it unnecessary to defeat unwelcome outsiders
by laborious competition. They guarantee that power will re-
main in the same handsÑnot unlike those economic decisions
by which the establishment and running of undertakings is con-
trolled in a totalitarian state. Advertising today is a negative
principle, a blocking device: everything that does not bear its
stamp is economically suspect. Universal publicity is in no way
necessary for people to get to know the kinds of goodsÑwhose
supply is restricted anyway. It helps sales only indirectly. For a
particular firm, to phase out a current advertising practice con-
stitutes a loss of prestige, and a breach of the discipline im-
posed by the influential clique on its members. In wartime,
goods which are unobtainable are still advertised, merely to
keep industrial power in view. Subsidizing ideological media is
more important than the repetition of the name. Because the
system obliges every product to use advertising, it has permeated
the idiomÑthe "style"Ñof the culture industry. Its victory is
so complete that it is no longer evident in the key positions:
the huge buildings of the top men, floodlit stone advertisements,
are free of advertising; at most they exhibit on the rooftops, in

162

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLIGNTENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION

monumental brilliance and without any self-glorification, the
firm's initials. But, in contrast, the nineteenth-century houses,

whose architecture still shamefully indicates that they can be
used as a consumption commodity and are intended to be lived
in, are covered with posters and inscriptions from the ground
right up to and beyond the roof: until they become no more
than backgrounds for bills and sign-boards. Advertising be-
comes art and nothing else, just as Goebbels with foresightÑ
combines them: rart pour l'art, advertising for its own sake, a
pure representation of social power. In the most influential
American magazines, Life and Fortune, a quick glance can now
scarcely distinguish advertising from editorial picture and text.
The latter features an enthusiastic and gratuitous account of the
great man (with illustrations of his life and grooming habits)
which will bring him new fans, while the advertisement pages
use so many factual photographs and details that they represent
the ideal of information which the editorial part has only begun
to try to achieve. The assembly-line character of the culture in-
dustry, the synthetic, planned method of turning out its prod-
ucts (factory-like not only in the studio but, more or less, in the
compilation of cheap biographies, pseudodocumentary novels,
and hit songs) is very suited to advertising: the important indi-
vidual points, by becoming detachable, interchangeable, and
even technically alienated from any connected meaning, lend
themselves to ends external to the work. The effect, the trick,
the isolated repeatable device, have always been used to exhibit
goods for advertising purposes, and today every monster
close-up of a star is an advertisement for her name, and every
hit song a plug for its tune. Advertising and the culture industry
merge technically as well as economically. In both cases the
same thing can be seen in innumerable places, and the mechani-
cal repetition of the same culture product has come to be the
same as that of the propaganda slogan. In both cases the insis-
tent demand for effectiveness makes technology into psycho-
technology, into a procedure for manipulating men. In both
cases the standards are the striking yet familiar, the easy yet
catchy, the skillful yet simple; the object is to overpower the
customer, who is conceived as absent-minded or resistant.

163

)

DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT

By the language he speaks, he makes his own contribution to
culture as publicity. The more completely language is lost in
the announcement, the more words are debased as substantial
vehicles of meaning and become signs devoid of quality; the
more purely and transparently words communicate what is in-
tended, the more impenetrable they become. The demytholo-
gization of language, taken as an element of the whole process
of enlightenment, is a relapse into magic. Word and essential
content were distinct yet inseparable from one another. Con-
cepts like melancholy and history, even life, were recognized in
the word, which separated them out and preserved them. Its
form simultaneously constituted and reflected them. The abso-
lute separation, which makes the moving accidental and its
relation to the object arbitrary, puts an end to the superstitious
fusion of word and thing. Anything in a determined literal se-
quence which goes beyond the correlation to the event is re-
jected as unclear and as verbal metaphysics. But the result is
that the word, which can now be only a sign without any mean-
ing, becomes so fixed to the thing that it is just a petrified for-
mula. This affects language and object alike. Instead of making
the object expedential, the pudfied word treats it as an abstract
instance, and everything else (now excluded by the demand for
ruthless cladty from expressionÑitself now banished) fades
away in reality. A left-half at football, a black-shirt, a member
of the Hitler Youth, and so on, are no more than names. If be-
fore its rationalization the word had given rise to lies as well as
to longing, now, after its rationalization, it is a straitjacket for
longing more even than for lies. The blindness and dumbness
of the data to which positivism reduces the world pass over into
language itself, which restricts itself to recording those data.
Terms themselves become impenetrable; they obtain a striking
force, a power of adhesion and repulsion which makes them
like their extreme opposite, incantations. They come to be a
kind of trick, because the name of the prima donna is cooked
up in the studio on a statistical basis, or because a welfare state
is anathematized by using taboo terms such as "bureaucrats"
or "intellectuals," or because base practice uses the name of the
country as a charm. In general, the nameÑto which magic most

164

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: BNLICHTENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION

easily attachesÑis undergoing a chemical change: a metamor-
phosis into capricious, manipulable designations, whose effect
is admittedly now calculable, but which for that very reason is
just as despotic as that of the archaic name. First names, those
archaic remnants, have been brought up to date either by styl-
ization as advertising trade-marks (film stars' surnames have
become first names), or by collective standardization. In com-
padson, the bourgeois family name which, instead of being a
trade-mark, once individualized its bearer by relating him to his
own past history, seems antiquated. It arouses a strange embar-
rassment in Amedcans. In order to hide the awkward distance
between individuals, they call one another "Bob" and "Harry,"
as interchangeable team members. This practice reduces re-
lations between human beings to the good fellowship of the
sporting community and is a defense against the true kind of
relationship. Signification, which is the only function of a word
admitted by semantics, reaches perfection in the sign. Whether
folksongs were rightly or wrongly called upper-class culture in
decay, their elements have only acquired their popular form

through a long process of repeated transmission. The spread of
popular songs, on the other hand, takes place at lightning
speed. The American expression "fad," used for fashions which
appear like epidemicsÑthat is, inflamed by highly-concentrated
economic forcesÑdesignated this phenomenon long before to-
talitadan advertising bosses enforced the general lines of cul-
ture. When the German Fascists decide one day to launch a
wordÑsay, "intolerable"Ñover the loudspeakers the next day
the whole nation is saying "intolerable." By the same pattern,
the nations against whom the weight of the German "blitzkrieg"
was thrown took the word into their own jargon. The general
repetition of names for measures to be taken by the authorities
makes them, so to speak, familiar, just as the brand name on
everybody's lips increased sales in the era of the free market.
The blind and rapidly spreading repetition of words with spe-
cial designations links advertising with the totalitarian watch-
word. The layer of experience which created the words for
their speakers has been removed; in this swift appropriation
language acquires the coldness which until now it had only on
165

I
DULECTIC OF ENLWHTENMENT

billboards and in the advertisement columns of newspapers. In-
numerable people use words and expressions which they have
either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger
off conditioned reflexes; in this sense, words are trade-marks
which are finally all the more firmly linked to the things they
denote, the less their linguistic sense is grasped. The minister for
mass education talks incomprehendingly of "dynamic forces,"
and the hit songs unceasingly celebrate "reverie" and "rhapsody,"
yet base their popularity precisely on the magic of the unintel-
ligible as creating the thrill of a more exalted life. Other stereo-
types, such as memory, are still partly comprehended, but
escape from the experience which might allow them content.
They appear like enclaves in the spoken language. On the radio
of Flesch and Hitler they may be recognized from the affected
pronunciation of the announcer when he says to the nation,
"Good night, everybody!" or "This is the Hitler Youth," and
even intones "the Fuhrer" in a way imitated by millions. In such
cliches the last bond between sedimentary experience and lan-
guage is severed which still had a reconciling effect in dialect in
the nineteenth century. But in the prose of the journalist whose
adaptable attitude led to his appointment as an all-German edi-
tor, the German words become petrified, alien terms. Every
word shows how far it has been debased by the Fascist pseudo-
folk community. By now, of course, this kind of language is
already universal, totalitarian. All the violence done to words is
so vile that one can hardly bear to hear them any longer. The
announcer does not need to speak pompously; he would indeed
be impossible if his inflection were different from that of his
particular audience. But, as against that, the language and ges-
tures of the audience and spectators are colored more strongly
than ever before by the culture industry, even in fine nuances
which cannot yet be explained experimentally. Today the cul-
ture industry has taken over the civilizing inheritance of the
entrepreneurial and frontier democracyÑwhose appreciation of
intellectual deviations was never very finely attuned. All are
free to dance and enjoy themselves, just as they have been free,
since the historical neutralization of religion, to join any of the
innumerable sects. But freedom to choose an ideologyÑsince

166

TNE CULTURE INDUSTRY: BNLIOHTENMeNT AS MASS DECEPTION

ideology always reflects economic coercionÑeverywhere proves
to be freedom to choose what is always the same. The way in
which a girl accepts and keeps the obligatory date, the inflection
on the telephone or in the most intimate situation, the choice of
words in conversation, and the whole inner life as classified by
the now somewhat devalued depth psychology, bear witness to
man's attempt to make himself a proficient apparatus, similar
(even in emotions) to the model served up by the culture in-
dustry. The most intimate reactions of human beings have been
so thoroughly reified that the idea of anything specific to them-
selves now persists only as an utterly abstract notion: person-
ality scarcely siglufies anything more than shining white teeth
and freedom from body odor and emotions. The triumph of
advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel com-
pelled to buy and use its products even though they see through
them.

)
EIGHTEEN

What Is an Author?

Michel Foucault

In proposing this slightly odd question, I am conscious of the need tor
an explanation. To this day, the "author" remains an open question both
with respect to its general function within discourse and in my own writ-
ings; that-is, this question permits me to return to certain aspects of my
own work which now appear ill-advised and misleading. In this regard,
I wish to propose a necessary criticism and reevaluation.
For instance, my objective in The Order of Things had been to analyse
verbal clusters as discursive layers which tall outside the t:amiliar cate-
gories of a book, a work, or an author. But while I considered "natural
history," the "analysis of wealth," and "political economy" in general terms,
I neglected a similar analysis of the author and his works; it is perhaps
due to this omission that I employed the names of authors throughout
this book in a naive and often crude fashion. I spoke ot Butfon, (Cuvier,
Ricardo, and others as well, but failed to realize that I had allowed their
names to function ambiguously. This has proved an embarrassment to
me in that my oversight has served to raise two pertinent objections.
It was argued that I had not properly described Button or his work
and that my handling of Marx was pititully inadequate in terms ot the
totality of his thought.l Although these objections were obviously justi
fied, they ignored the task I had set myself: I had no intention of de
scribing Buffon or Marx or of reproducing their statements or implicit
meanings, but, simply stated, I wanted to locate the rules that tormecl a

Reprinied from Michel l;oucatilt, "What Is an Author?" in Larlguagr, (.01ltiter-Memolys /'ruc-
tice: Seksteel Ess~sys and Itltetviews by Michel Foucault, translate(l Irom the i'rcnHI by l)slsald
F. Boouchard and Sherry Simoll, and cdited by Donald F. Bouchard. Copyl ight e 1977 by
Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press, and
Schmidt Periodicals CmbH, Dettendorf.

446

WIIA'I' IS AN AU'I'HOR? 447

certain number of concepts and theoretical relationships in their works.2
In addition, it was argued that I had created monstrous families by
bringing together names as disparate as Buffon and Linnaeus or in plac-
ing Cuvier next to Darwin in defiance of the most readily observable
family resemblances and natural ties.3 This objection also seems inap-
propriate since I had never tried to establish a genealogical table of ex-
ceptional individuals, nor was I concerned in forming an intellectual da-
guerreotype of the scholar or naturalist of the seventeenth and eighteenth
century. In fact, I had no intention of forming any family, whether holy
or perverse. On the contrary, I wanted to determineÑa much more
modest taskÑthe functional conditions of specific discursive practices.
Then why did I use the names of authors in The Order of Things? Why
not avoid their use altogether, or, short of that, why not define the man-
ner in which they were used? These questions appear fully justified and
I have tried to gauge their implications and consequences in a book that
will appear shortly.4 These questions have determined my effort to sit-
uate comprehensive discursive units, such as "natural history" or "polit-
ical economy," and to establish the methods and instruments for delim-
iting, analyzing, and describing these unities. Nevertheless, as a privileged
.. of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, and lit-
eratul-e, or in the history of philosophy and science, the question of the
atithol- demands a more direct response. Even now, when we study the
history of a concept, a literary genre, or a branch of philosophy, these
concerns assume a relatively weak and secondary position h1 relation to
the solid and fundamental role of an author and his works.
For the purposes of this paper, I will set aside a sociohistorical analysis
of the author as an individual and the numerous questions that deserve
attention in this context: how the author was individualized in a culture
sucil as ours; the status we have given the author, for instance, when we
began our research into authenticity and attribution; the systems of va-
lorization in which he was included; or the moment when the stories of
heroes gave way to an author's biography; the conditions that fostered
the tormulation of the fundamental critical category of "the man and his
work." For the time being, I wish to restrict myself to the shlgulal rela-
tionsilip that holds between an author and a text, the manllel- in which
a text apparently points to this figure who is outside and precedes it.
IJeckett supplies a direction: "What matter who's speaking, someone
said, what matter who's speaking."5 In an indifference such as this we
mtist recognize one of the tundamental ethical principles of contempo-
rary writing. It is not simply "ethical" because it characterizes OUI way of
speaking and writillg, but because it stands as an immanent rule end-
lessly adopted and yet never fully applied. As a principle, it dominates
writing as an ongoing practice and slights our customary attention to the

448

Mlt.HEI. i'()U(:AUI.'I'

finished product.t' For the sake ot illustration, we need only consider two
ot its major themes. First, the writing of our day has treed itself from
the necessity of "expression"; it only refers to itself, yet it is not restricted
to the confines of interiority. On the contrary, we recognize it in its ex-
terior cleployment.7 This reversal transforms writing into an interplay
of signs, regulated less by the content it signifies than by the very nature
of the signifier. Moreover, it implies an action that is always testing the
limits of its regularity, transgressing and reversing an order that it ac-
cepts and manipulates. Writing unfolds like a game that inevitably moves
beyond its own rules and finally leaves them behind. Thus, the essential
basis of this writing is not the exalted emotions related to the act of com-
position or the insertion of a subject into language. Rather, it is primarily
concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly
disappears.8
The second theme is even more familiar: it is the kinship between
writing and death. This relationship inverts the age-old conception of
Greek narrative or epic, which was designed to guarantee the immortal-
ity of a hero. The hero accepted an early death because his life, conse-
crated and magnified by death, passed into immortality; and the narra-
tive redeemed his acceptance of death. In a different sense, Arabic stories,
and The Arabian Nighis in particular, had as their motivation, their theme
and pretext, this strategy for defeating death. Storytellers continued their
narratives late into the night to forestall death and to delay the inevitable
moment when everyone must fall silent. Scheherazade's story is a des-
perate inversion of murder; it is the effort, throughout all those nights,
to exclude death from the circle of existence.9 This conception ot a spo-
ken or written narrative as a protection against death has been trans-
formed by our culture. Writing is now linked to sacrifice and to the sac-
rifice of life itself; it is a voluntary obliteration of the self that does not
require representation in books because it takes place h1 the everyday
existence of the writer. Where a work had the duty of creating immor-
tality, it now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its au-
thor. Flaubert, Proust, and Kafka are obvious examples of this rever-
sal. '¡ In addition, we find the link between writing and death Illallifested
in the total etfacement of the individual characteristics ot the writer; the
quibbling and confrontations that a writer generates between himselt
and his text cancel out the signs of his particular h1dividuality. If we wish
to know the writer in our day, it will be through the singularity ot his
absence and in his link to death, which has transtormed him into a victim
of his own writing. While all of this is familiar in philosophy, as in liter-
ary criticism, I am not certain that the consequences derived from the
disappearance or death of the author have been fully explored or that
the importance of this event has been appreciated. To be specific, it seems

WIIA I IS AN AU l ll()~i

449

to me that the themes destined to replace the privileged position ac-
corded the author have merely served to arrest the possibility of genuine
change. Of these, I will examine two that seem particularly important.
Fo begin with, the thesis concerning a work. It has been understood
that the task of criticism is not to reestablish the ties between an author
and his work or to reconstitute an author's thought and experience
through his works and, further, that criticism should concern itself with
the structures of a work, its architectonic forms, which are studied for
their intrinsic and internal relationships." Yet, what of a context that
questions the concept of a work? What, in short, is the strange unit des-

ignated by the term, work? What is necessary to its composition, if a
work is not something written by a person called an "author"? Difficul-
ties arise on all sides if we raise the question in this way. If an individual
is not an author, what are we to make of those things he has written or
said, lett among his papers or communicated to others? Is this not prop-
erly a work? What, for instance, were Sade's papers before he was con-
secrated as an author? Little more, perhaps, than rolls of paper on which
he endlessly unravelled his fantasies while in prison.
Assuming that we are dealing with an author, is everything he wrote
and said, everything he left behind, to be included in his work? This
problem is both theoretical and practical. If we wish to publish the com-
plete works of Nietzsche, for example, where do we draw the line? Cer-
tainly, everything must be published, but can we agree on what "every-
thing" means? We will, of course, include everything that Nietzsche himself
published, along with the dratts of his works, his plans for aphorisms
his marginal notations and corrections. But what if, in a notebook filled
with aphorisms, we find a reference, a reminder of an appointment, an
address, or a laundry bill, should this be included in his works? Why
not? These practical considerations are endless once we consider how a
work can be extracted from the millions of traces left by an individual
after his death. Plainly, we lack a theory to encompass the questions gen-
erated by a work and the empirical activity of those who naively under-
take the publication of the complete works of an author often suffers
from the absence of this framework. Yet more questions arise. Can we
say that The Arabian Nights, and Stromates of Clement of Alexandria, or
the Ltves of Diogenes Laertes constitute works? Such questions only be-
gin to suggest the range of our difficulties, and, if some have found it
convenient to bypass the individuality of the writer or his status as an
author to concentrate on a work, they have failed to appreciate the equally
problematic nature of the word "work" and the unity it designates.
Another thesis has detained us from taking full measure of the au-
thor's disappearance. It avoids confronting the specific event that makes
it possible and, in subtle ways, continues to preserve the existence of the

)

450 Ml(:HEI. F'OU(:AUI.'I'

author. This is the notion of ecriture.l2 Strictly speaking, it should allow
us not only to circumvent references to an author, but to situate his re-
cent absence. The conception of ecriture, as currently employed, is con-
cerned with neither the act of writing nor the indications, as symptoms
or signs within a text, of an author's meaning; rather, it stands for a
remarkably profound attempt to elaborate the conditions of any text,
both the conditions of its spatial dispersion and its temporal deployment.
It appears, however, that this concept, as currently employed, has
merely transposed the empirical characteristics of an author to a tran-
scendental anonymity. The extremely visible signs of the author's empir-
ical activity are effaced to allow the play, in parallel or opposition, of
religious and critical modes of characterization. In granting a primordial
status to writing, do we not, in effect, simply reinscribe in transcendental
terms the theological affirmation of its sacred origin or a critical belief
in its creative nature? To say that writing, in terms of the particular
history it made possible, is subjected to forgetfulness and repression, is
this not to reintroduce in transcendental terms the religious principle of
hidden meanings (which require interpretation) and the critical assump-
tion of implicit significations, silent purposes, and obscure contents (which
give rise to commentary)? Finally, is not the conception of writing as
absence a transposition into transcendental terms of the religious belief
in a fixed and continuous tradition or the aesthetic principle that pro-
claims the survival of the work as a kind of enigmatic supplement of the
author beyond his own death?'3
This conception of ecriture sustains the privileges of the author through
the safeguard of the a priori; the play of representations that tormed a
particular image of the author is extended within a gray neutrality. The
disappearance of the authorÑsince Mallarme, an event of our timeÑis
held in check by the transcendental. Is it not necessary to draw a line
between those who believe that we can continue to situate our present
discontinuities within the historical and transcendental tradition of the
nineteenth century and those who are making a great etfort to liberate
themselves, once and for all, trom this conceptual framework?l4

It is obviously insufficient to repeat empty slogans: the author has
disappeared; (;ocl and man died a common deatll.lr' Rather, we shoultl
reexamine the empty space left by the author's disappearance; we should
attentively observe, along its gaps and fault lines, its new demarcations,
and the reapportionment of this void; we should await the Ruid tunc-
tions released by this disappearance. In this context we can briefly con-
sider the problems that arise in the use ot an author's name. What is the
name of an author? How does it tunction? Far from offering a solution,

WI{A'r IS AN AU'I'HOR? 451

I will attempt to indicate some of the difficulties related to these ques-
tions.
The name of an author poses all the problems related to the category
of the proper name. (Here, I am referring to the work of John Searle,l6
among others.) Obviously not a pure and simple reference, the proper
name (and the author's name as well) has other than indicative func-
tions. It is more than a gesture, a finger pointed at someone; it is, to a
certain extent, the equivalent of a description. When we say "Aristotle,"
we are using a word that means one or a series of definite descriptions
of the type: "the author of the Analytics," or "the founder of ontology,"
and so forth.l7 Furthermore, a proper name has other functions than
that of signification: when we discover that Rimbaud has not written La
Chasse spirituelle, we cannot maintain that the meaning of the proper name
or this author's name has been altered. The proper name and the name
of an author oscillate between the poles of description and designation

and, granting that they are linked to what they name, they are not totally
determined either by their descriptive or designative functions.'8 YetÑ
and it is here that the specific difficulties attending an author's name
appearÑthe link between a proper name and the individual being named
and the link between an author's name and that which it names are not
isomorpllous and do not function in the same way; and these difterences
require clarification.
To learn, for example, that Pierre Dupont does not have blue eyes
does not live in Paris, and is not a doctor does not invalidate the fact that
the name, Pierre Dupont, continues to refer to the same person- there
has been no modification of the designation that links the name to the
person. With the name of an author, however, the problems are far more
complex. The disclosure that Shakespeare was not born in the house
that tourists now visit would not modify the functioning of the author's
name, but, if it were proved that he had not written the sonnets that we
attribute to him, this would constitute a significant change and affect the
manner in which the author's name functions. Moreover, if we establish
that Shakespeare wrote Bacon's Organon and that the same author was
resporisible tor both the works ot Shakespeare and those of Bacon, we
would have introduced a third type of alteration which completely mod-
ities the tunctioning of the author's name. Consequently, the name of
an author is not precisely a proper name among others.
Many other factors sustain this paradoxical singularity of the name of
an author. It is altogether ditterent to maintain that Pierre Dupont does
not exist and that Homer or Hermes Trismegistes have never existed.
While the first negation merely implies that there is no one by the name
ot Pierre l)upont, the second indicates that several individuals have been
~D

452 MICHEL FoUCAuLtr

referred to by one name or that the real author possessed none of the
traits traditionally associated with Homer or Hermes. Neither is it the
same thing to say that Jacques Durand, not Pierre Dupont, is the real
name of X and that Stendhal's name was Henri Beyle. We could also
examine the function and meaning of such statements as "Bourbaki is
this or that person," and "Victor Eremita, Climacus, Anticlimacus, Fra-
ter Taciturnus, Constantin Constantius, all of these are Kierkegaard."
These differences indicate that an author's name is not simply an ele-
ment of speech (as a subject, a complement, or an element that could be
replaced by a pronoun or other parts of speech). Its presence is func-
tional in that it serves as a means of classification. A name can group
together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others. A
name also establishes different forms of relationships among texts. Nei-
ther Hermes not Hippocrates existed in the sense that we can say Balzac
existed, but the fact that a number of texts were attached to a single
name implies that relationships of homogeneity, filiation, reciprocal ex-
planation, authentification, or of common utilization were established
among them. Finally, the author's name characterizes a particular man-
ner of existence of discourse. Discourse that possesses an author's name
is not to be immediately consumed and forgotten; neither is it accorded
the momentary attention given to ordinary, fleeting words. Rather, its
status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which
it circulates.
We can conclude that, unlike a proper name, which moves from the
interior of a discourse to the real person outside who produced it, the
name of the author remains at the contours of textsÑseparating one
from the other, defining their torm, and characterizing their mode of
existence. It points to the existence of certain groups of discourse and
refers to the status of this discourse within a society and culture. The
author's name is not a function of a man's civil status, nor is it fictional;
it is situated in the breach, among the discontinuities, which gives rise to
new groups of discourse and their singular mode of existence.l9 Conse-
quently, we can say that in our culture, the name of an author is a vari-
able that accompanies only certain texts to the exclusion of others: a
private letter may have a signatory, but it does not have an author; a

contract can have an underwriter, but not an author; and, similarly, an
anonymous poster attached to a wall may have a writer, but he canllot
be an author. In this sense, the tunction of an author is to characterize
the existence, circulation, and operation ot certain discourses within a
society.

In dealing with the "author" as a tunction ot discourse, we must con
sider the characteristics of a discourse that support this use and deter

WIIA I IS AN AU I II()R? 453

mine its difterence from other discourses. If we limit our remarks to
only those books or texts with authors, we can isolate four different fea-
tures.
First, they are objects of appropriation; the form of property they
have become is of a particular type whose legal codification was accom-
plished some years ago. It is important to notice, as well, that its status
as property is historically secondary to the penal code controlling its ap-
propriation. Speeches and books were assigned real authors, other than
mythical or important religious figures, only when the author became
subject to punishment and to the extent that his discourse was con-
sidered transgressive. In our cultureÑundoubtedly in others as wellÑ
discourse was not originally a thing, a product, or a possession, but an
action situated in a bipolar field of sacred and profane, lawful and un-
lawtul, religious and blasphemous. It was a gesture charged with risks
long betore it became a possession caught in a circuit of property val-
ues. But it was at the moment when a system of ownership and strict
copyright rules were established (toward the end of the eighteenth and
beginning of the nineteenth century) that the transgressive properties
always intrinsic to the act of writing became the forceful imperative of
literature.21 It is as if the author, at the moment he was accepted into
the social order of property which governs our culture, was compensat-
ing for his new status by reviving the older bipolar field of discourse in
a systematic practice of transgression and by restoring the danger of
writing which, on another side, had been conferred the benefits of prop-
erty.
Secondly, the "author-function"22 is not universal or constant in all
discourse. Even withhl our civilization, the same types of texts have not
always required authors; there was a time when those texts which we
now call "literary" (stories, folk tales, epics, and tragedies) were accepted
circulated, and valorized without any question about the identity of their
author. I'heir anonymity was ignored because their real or supposed age
was a sutheient guarantee of their authenticity. Texts, however, that we
now call "scientific" (dealing with cosmology and the heavens, medicine
or illness, the natural sciences or geography) were only considered truth-
ltil during the Middle Ages if the name of the author was indicated.
Statemelits on the order of "Hippocrates said . . ." or "Pliny tells us that
. . ." were not merely formulas tor an argument based on authority; they
mal ked a proven discourse. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries, a totally new conception was developed when scientific texts were
accepte(l on their own merits and positiolled within an anonymous and
coherent concepttial system of established truths and methods of verifi-
cation. Authentitication no longer required reference to the individual
who had produced them; the role ot the author disappeared as an hidex

)

f,l

454 Ml(.IIEI. FOU(.AUI.'I

ot truthfulness and, where it remained as an invelitol's name, it was
merely to denote a specific theorem or proposition, a strange eflect, a
property, a body, a group of elements, or pathological syndrome.
At the same time, however, "literary" discourse was acceptable only if
it carried an author's name; every text of poetry or fiction was obliged
to state its author and the date, place, and circumstance of its writing.
The meaning and value attributed to the text depended on this mfor-
mation. If by accident or design a text was presented anonymously, every
etfort was made to locate its author. Literary anonymity was of interest
only as a puzzle to be solved as, in our day, literary works are totally
dominated by the sovereignty of the author. (Undoubtedly, these re-
marks are tar too categorical. Criticism has been concerned for some
time now with aspects of a text not fully dependent on d~e notion ot an
individual creator; studies of genre or the analysis of recurring textual
motifs and their variations from a norm other than the author. Further-
more, where in mathematics the author has become little more than a
handy reterence for a particular theorem or group of propositions, the
reference to an author in biology and medicine, or to the date of his
research has a substantially different bearing. This latter reference, more
than simply indicating the source of information, attests to the "reliabil-
ity" of the evidence, since it entails an appreciation of the techniques
and experimental materials available at a given time and in a particular
laboratory .)
The third point concerning this "author-function" is that it is not formed
spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an indi-
vidual. It results from a complex operation whose purpose is to con-
struct the rational entity we call an author. Undoubtedly, this construc-
tion is assigned a "realistic" dimension as we speak of an individual's
"profundity" or "creative" power, his intentions or the original inspira-
tion manifested in writing. Nevertheless, these aspects of an individual,
which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as an
author), are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of
our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we
extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we
practice. In addition, all these operations vary according to the period
and the form of discourse concerned. A "philosopher" and a "poet" are
not constructed in the same manner; and the author of an eighteenth-
century novel was formed differently from the modern novelist. I here
are, nevertheless, transhistorical constants in the rules that govern the
construction of an author.
In literary criticism, for example, the traditional methods for definin~
an authorÑor, rather, for determining the configuration of the author
from existing textsÑderive in large part from those used in the Chris

WIIAI' IS AN AUTHOR? 455

tian tradition to authenticate (or to reject) the particular texts in its pos-
session. Modern criticism, in its desire to "recover" the author from a
work, employs devices strongly reminiscent of Christian exegesis when
it wished to prove the value of a text by ascertaining the holiness of its
author. In De Viris Illustribus, Saint Jerome maintains that homonymy is
not proof of the common authorship of several works, since many indi-
viduals could have the same name or someone could have perversely
appropriated another's name. The name, as an individual mark, is not
sufhcient as it relates to a textual tradition. How, then, can several texts
be attributed to an individual author? What norms, related to the func-
tion of the author, will disclose the involvement of several authors? Ac-
cording to Saint Jerome, there are four criteria: the texts that must be
eliminated from the list of works attributed to a single author are those
inferior to the others (thus, the author is defined as a standard level of
quality); those whose ideas conflict with the doctrine expressed in the
others (here the author is defined as a certain field of conceptual or

tileoretical coherence); those written in a different style and containing
words and phrases not ordinarily found in the other works (the author
is seen as a stylistic uniformity); and those referring to events or histori-
cal hgures subsequent to the death of the author (the author is thus a
dehilite historical figure in which a series of events converge). Although
modern criticisin does not appear to have these same suspicions con-
cerl1ing autllelltication, its strategies for definh1g the author present
striking similarities. The author explains the presence of certain events
within a text, as well as their transformations, distortions, and their var-
ious modifications (and this through an author's biography or by reter-
ence to his particular point ot view, in the analysis of his social prefer-
en(.es ancl his position within a class or by delineating his fundamental
objectives). The author also constitutes a principle of unity in writing
whel-e any unevenness of production is ascribed to changes caused by
evolution, maturation, or outside influence. In addition, the author serves
to neutralize the contradictions that are tound in a series of texts. Cov-
erning this tunction is the beliet that there must beÑat a particular level
of all author's thought, of his conscious or unconscious desireÑa point
where contradictions are resolved, where the incompatible elements can
be shown to relate to one anotller or to cohere around a fundamental
and origilsating contradiction. Fillally, the author is a particular source
ot expression who, in more or less finished torms, is manifested equally
well, and with similar validity, in a text, in letters, fragments, drafts, and
so lorth. Thus, even while SaintJerome's tour principles of authenticity
might seem largely inadequate to modern critics, they, nevertheless, de-
fine the critical modalities now used to display the function of the au
456

Ml('IILI. 4

However, it would be false to consider the functioll of the author as a
pure and simple reconstruction after the tact of a text given as passive
material, since a text always bears a number of signs that reter to the
author. Well known to grammarians, these textual signs are personal
pronouns, adverbs of time and place, and the conjugation of verbs.24
But it is important to note that these elements have a ditterent bearing
on texts with an author and on those without one. In the latter, these
"shifters" refer to a real speaker and to an actual deictic situation, with
certain exceptions such as the case of indirect speech in the first person.
When discourse is linked to an author, however, the role of "shifters" is
more complex and variable. It is well known that in a novel narrated in
the first person, neither the first person pronoun, the present indicative
tense, nor, for that matter, its signs of localization reter directly to the
writer, either to the time when he wrote, or to the specific act of writing;
rather, they stand for a "second self"25 whose similarity to the author is
never fixed and undergoes considerable alteration within the course of
a single book. It would be as false to seek the author in relation to the
actual writer as to the fictional narrator; the "author-function" arises out
of their scissionÑin the division and distance of the two. One might
object that this phenomenon only applies to novels or poetry, to a con-
text of "quasi-discourse," but, in fact, all discourse that supports this "au-
thor-function" is characterized by this plurality ot egos. In a mathemat-
ical treatise, the ego who indicates the circumstances of composition in
the preface is not identical, either in terms of his position or his I unction,
to the "I" who concludes a demonstration within the body ot the text.
The former implies a unique individual who, at a given thne and place,
succeeded in completing a project, whereas the latter indicates an in-
stance and plan of demonstration that anyone could perform provided
the same set of axioms, preliminary operations, and an identical set of
symbols were used. It is also possible to locate a third ego: one who speaks
of the goals of his investigation, the obstacles encountered, its results,
and the problems yet to be solved and this "I" would function in a fielcl
of existing or tuture mathematical discourses. We are not clealing with a
system of dependencies where a tirst and essential use of the "I" is re-
duplicated, as a kind ot fiction, by the other two. On the contrary, the
"author-function" in such discourses operates so as to etfect the simul-

taneous dispersion of the three egos.2'i
Further elaboration would, of course, disclose othel- characteristics ol
the "author-function," but I have limited myself to the four that seemed
the most obvious and important. 'I hey can be summarized in the tollow-
ing manner: the "author-function" is tied to the legal and institutional
systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realln ol dis-
courses; it does not operate in a unitorm manner in all discourses, at all

WIIA'I' IS AN AU I lI()i ~457

thlles, and in any given culture; it is not defined by the spontaneous
attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and
complex procedures; it does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual
hidividual insotar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and
to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class may come
to occupy.

I am aware that until now I have kept my subject within unjustifiable
limits; I should also have spoken ot the "author-function" in painting
music, technical fields, and so forth. Admitting that my analysis is re-
stricted to the domain of discourse, it seems that I have given the term
"author" an excessively narrow meaning. I have discussed the author
only in the limited sense ot a person to whom the production of a text,
a book, or a work can be legitimately attributed. However, it is obvious
that even within the realm of discourse a person can be the author of
much more than a bookÑof a theory, for instance, of a tradition or a
discipline within which new books and authors can proliferate. For con-
venience, we could say that such authors occupy a "transdiscursive" po-
sition .
Homer, Aristotle, and the Church Fathers played this role, as did the
lirst mathematicians and the originators of the Hippocratic tradition.
I 11is type of author is surely as old as our civilization. But I believe that
the nineteenth century in Europe produced a singular type of author
who should not be contused with "great" literary authors, or the authors
ol canonical religious texts, and the founders of sciences. Somewhat ar-
bitrarily, we might call them "initiators of discursive practices."
The distinctive contribution of these authors is that they produced
not only their own work, but the possibility and the rules of formation
ol other texts. In this sense, their role differs entirely trom that of a
novelist, lor example, who is basically never more than the author of his
OWIl text. Freud is not simply the author of The Interpretalion of Dreams
or ol Wil ar d its Relazion lo tlle UncorBcious and Marx is not simply the
autilor ol the (,'ommunist Manifesto or Capital: they both established the
endless possibility of discourse. ()bviously, an easy objection can be made.
I he author ol a novel may be responsible tor more than his own text; if
he acquires some "importance" hl the literary world, his inHuence can
have sigililicant ramilications. 'I o take a very simple example, one could
say that Anil Radslitte did not simply write The Mysteries of Udolpho and
a lew other novels, but also made possible the appearance of Cothic
Romances at the beginning ol the nineteenth century. To this extent,
her lUIlCtioll as an author exceeds the limits ot her work. However, this
objectioll can be answered by the filct that the possibilities disclosed by
the initiators of discursive practices (ushig the examples of Marx and

458

MICHEL FOUCAULT

Freud, whom I believe to be the first and the most important) are signif-
icantly different from those suggested by novelists. The novels of Ann
Radcliffe put into circulation a certain number of resemblances and
analogies patterned on her workÑvarious characteristic signs, figures,
relationships, and structures that could be integrated into other books.
In short to say that Ann Radcliffe created the Cothic Romance means
that there are certain elements common to her works and to the nine-
teenth-century Gothic romance: the heroine ruined by her own inno-
cence, the secret fortress that functions as a countercity, the outlaw-hero
who swears revenge on the world that has cursed him, etc. On the other
hand, Marx and Freud, as "initiators of discursive practices," not only
made possible a certain number of analogies that could be adopted by
future texts, but, as importantly, they also made possible a certain num-
ber of differences. They cleared a space for the introduction of elements
other than their own, which, nevertheless, remain within the field of
discourse they initiated. In saying that Freud founded psychoanalysis,
we do not simply mean that the concept of libido or the techniques of
dream analysis reappear in the writings of Karl Abraham or Melanie
Klein, but that he made possible a certain number of differences with
respect to his books, concepts, and hypotheses, which all arise out of
psychoanalytic discourse.
Is this not the case, however, with the founder of any new science or
of any author who successfully transforms an existing science? After all,
Galileo is indirectly responsible for the texts of those who mechanically
applied the laws he formulated, in addition to having paved the way for
the production of statements far difterent from his own. If Cuvier is the
founder of biology and Saussure of linguistics, it is not because they were
imitated or that an organic concept or a theory of the sign was uncriti-
cally integrated into new texts, but because Cuvier, to a certain extent,
made possible a theory of evolution diametrically opposed to his own
system and because Saussure made possible a generative grammar radi-
cally different from his own structural analysis. Superficially, then, the
initiation of discursive practices appears similar to the founding of any
scientific endeavor, but I believe there is a tundamental difterence.
In a scientific program, the founding act is on an equal footing with
its future transtormations: it is merely one among the many modifica
tions that it makes possible. T his interdependence can take several forms.
In the future development of a science, the founding act may appear as
little more than a single instance of a more general phenomenon that
has been discovered. It might be questioned, in retrospect, for being too
intuitive or empirical and submitted to the rigors of new theoretical op
erations in order to situate it in a formal domain. Finally, it might be
thought a hasty generalization whose validity should be restricted. In

Wl-lA'r lS AN AU rHOR?

459

other words, the founding act of a science can always be rechanneled
through the machinery of transformations it has instituted 27
On the other hand, the initiation of a discursive practice is heteroge-
neous to its ulterior transformations. To extend psychoanalytic practice
as initiated by Freud, is not to presume a formal generality that was not
c aimed at the outset; it is to explore a number of possible applications.
O imit it is to isolate in the original texts a small set of propositions or
statements that are recognized as having an inaugurative value and that
mark other Freudian concepts or theories as derivative. Finally, there
are no "false" statements in the work of these initiators; those statements
considered inessential or "prehistoric," in that they are associated with
another discourse, are simply neglected in favor of the more pertinent
aspects of the work. The initiation of a discursive practice, unlike the
founding of a science, overshadows and is necessarily detached from its

later developments and transformations. As a consequence, we define
the theoretical validity of a statement with respect to the work of the
initiator, whereas in the case of Galileo or Newton, it is based on the
structural and intrinsic norms established in cosmology or physics: Stated
schematically, the work of these initiators is not situated in relation to a
sclence or in the space it defines; rather, it is science or discursive prac-
tice that relate to their works as the primary points of reference.
In keeping with this distinction, we can understand why it is inevitable
that practitioners of such discourses must "return to the origin." Here
as well, it is necessary to distinguish a "return" from scientific "rediscov-
eries" or "reactivations." "Rediscoveries" are the effects of analogy or
isomorphism with current forms of knowledge that allow the perception
of forgotten or obscured figures. For instance, Chomsky in his book on
C'artesian grammar28 "rediscovered" a form of knowledge that had been
in use from Cordemoy to Humboldt. It could only be understood from
the perspective of generative grammar because this later manifestation
held the key to its construction: in eftect, a retrospective codification of
an historical position. "Reactivation" refers to something quite different:
t e insertion of discourse into totally new domains of generalization
pl-actice, and transtormations. The history of mathematics abounds in
examples of this phenomenon as the work of Michel Serres on mathe-
matical anamnesis shows.29
I he phrase, "return to," designates a movement with its proper spec-
~ficity, which characterizes the initiation of discursive practices. If we re-
turn, it is because of a basic and constructive omission, an omission that
is not the result ot accident or incomprehension.30 In effect, the act of
initiation is such, in its essence, that it is inevitably subjected to its own
distortions; that which displays this act and derives from it is, at the same
time, the root of its divergences and travesties. This nonaccidental omis
~D

460 Ml(:l-IEI. F'OU(:AUI.'I'

sion must be regulated by precise operations that can be situated, ana-
lysed, and reduced in a return to the act ot illitidtiOIl ~ rhe barrier
posed by omission was not added from the outside; It arises from the
discursive practice in question, which gives it its law Both the cause of
the barrier and the means for its removal, this omissionÑalso responsi-
ble for the obstacles that prevent returning to the act ot initiationÑcan
only be resolved by a return. In addition, it is always a return to a text in
itself, specifically, to a primary and unadorned text with particular atten-
tion to those things registered in the interstices of the text, its gaps and
absences. We return to those empty spaces that have been masked by
omission or concealed in a false and misleading plenitude. In these re-
discoveries of an essential lack, we find the oscillation of two character
¥st-c responses- "This point was madeÑyou can't help seeing it if you
know how to read"; or, inversely, "No, that point is not made in any of
the printed words in the text, but it is expressed through the words, in
their relationships and in the distance that separates them." It follows
naturally that this return, which is a part of the discursive mechanism,
constantly introduces modifications and that the return to a text is not a
historical supplement that would come to fix itself upon the primary
discursivity and redouble it in the form of an ornament which, after a,
is not essential. Rather, it is an effective an .. y
forming discursive practice. A study of Calileo's works could alter our
knowledge Of the history, but not the science, of mechanics; whereas, a
reexamination of the books of Freud or Marx can transform our under-
standing of psychoanalysis or Marxism.
A last feature of these returns is that they tend to reinforce the enig-
matic link between an author and his works. A text has an inaugurative
value precisely because it is the work of a particular author, and our
returns are conditioned by this knowledge. The rediscovery of an ,un-
known text by Newton or Cantor will not modit'y classical cosmology or
group theory; at most, it will change our appreciation of theil Ilistorical
genesis. Bringing to light, however, An Oulline of Psychoanalysts, to the
extent that we recognize it as a book by Freud, can transform not on y

our historical knowledge, but the field of psychoanalytic theoryÑit only
through a shift of accent or of the center of gravity. These returns,
important component of discursive practices, torm a relationship be-
tween "fundamental" and mediate authors, which is not identical to that
which links an ordinary text to its immediate author.
These remarks concerning the initiation of discursive practices have
been extremely schematic, especially with regard to the opposition I have
tried to trace between this initiation and the tounding of sciences. e
no proof that the two procedures are mutually exclusive My only pur

WHA I IS AN AU I HOR?

461

pose in setting up this opposition, however, was to show that the "au-
thor-function," sufficiently complex at the level of a book or a series of
s t a ar a definite signature, has other determining factors when
analysed in terms of larger entitiesÑgroups of works or entire disci

Unfortunately, there is a decided absence of positive propositions in
essay, as it applies to analytic procedures or directions for future
research, but I ought at least to give the reasons why I attach such

p ovide the basis for a typology of discourse gA typoloar anfalYhS-~S

turess fortnal strUcturesy and oSbt.¡¡d in relation to the grammatiQl f is
doubtedly exist specific discursive properties or relationships that are
irreducible to the rules of grammar and logic and to the laws that govern
scourse. rhe different forms of relationgships

Illstor'cal analysis of discourse Pgerhh also hPermit the intrOduction Of d
only the expressive value and formal transformations of discourse, but
its mode of existence: the modifications and variations, within any cuI
ture, of modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and a pro ri

his WOrkw the ''authOr-fullctioll~ cOuladlldl C¡ncepts that an a~lthor place
discourse Is articulated on the basis of social relationships
terlial alid arChlPe i [ ile.ges of the subje(t. Clearly, in undel taking an in

.11 and biographjCal refererlceS SuC work) and in delimiting psychYOlox '
l~centjrellebanddcreadtive role ot the subject. But the subjectgh Id

o an originating subject, but to seize its functions, its intervelltion in
discourse, and its system of dependencies. We should suspend the typi-
ca 4uestions: how does a free subject penetrate the density ot things
all( endow them with meanilig; how does it accomplish its design b
animating the rules of discourse from within? Rather, we should ask-
ulider what conditions and through what forms can an entity like the
subject appear in the order of discourse; what position does it occupy-
what functions does it exhibit; and what rules does it follow in each type
of discourse? In short, the subject (and its substitutes) must be strinped

)

462

Ml('IILL FOU('AULT

of its creative role and analysed as a complex and variable function of

The authorÑor what I have called the "author-function"Ñis un-
doubtedly only one of the possible specifications of the subject and, con-
sidering past historical transformations, it appears that the form, the
complexity, and even the existence of this function are far from immut-
able. We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate
without any need for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form,
or value, and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold
in a pervasive anonymity. No longer the tiresome repetitions:

"Who is the real author?"
"Have we proof of his authenticity and originality?"
"What has he revealed of his most profound self in his language?"

New questions will be heard:

"What are the modes of existence of this discourse?"
"Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?"
"What placements are determined for possible subjects?"
"Who can fulfill these diverse functions of the subject?"

Behind all these questions we would hear little more than the mur-
mur of indifference:
"What matter who's speaking?"

NOTES

[All footnotes supplied by Donald F. Bouchard, editor.]

1. See "Entretiens sur Michel Foucault" (directed by J. Proust), La Pensee, No.
1 37 ( I 968), pp. 6-7 and I l; and also Sylvie le Bon, Un Positivisme desesperee,"

EsP2rit'FNoucault's purpose concerned with determining the "codes" of discourse,
is explicitly stated in the Preface to Michael Foucault, The Order of Thtngs (New
York: Pantheon, 1973), p. xx. These objectionsÑsee "Entretiens sur Mlchel Fou-
cault"Ñare obviously those of specialists who f:ault Foucault for his apparent
failure to appreciate the facts and complexities of their theorencal lleld.
3. For an appreciation of Foucault's technique, see lonathan Culler, " he
Linguistic Basis of Structuralism," Structuralism: An Introduction, ed. David Robey
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 27-28.
4. I he Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (I.otldon: Fav
istock, 1972) was published in France in 1969; tbr discussion of the author, see

5. Samuel Beckt tt, Texts for Nothing, trans. Beckett (London: Calder & Boy
ars, 1974), p. 16.

WHA I' IS AN AU Fll~)R?

463

6. (:t. Edward Said, "The Ethics of Language," Diacrifics, 4 (1974), 32.
. On expression" and writing as self-referential, see Jean-Marie Benoist
I he End of Structuralism," Twentieth Century Studies, 3 (1970), 39; and Roland
Barthes, Critique et verite (Paris: Collection Tel Quel, 1966). As the following
sentence implies, the "exterior deployment" of writing relates to Ferdinand de
Saussure s emphasis of the acoustic quality of the signifier, an external phenom-
ena of speech which, nevertheless, responds to its own internal and differential
articulation.
8. On "transgression," see "A Preface to Transgression," p. 42, and "Lan-

guage to Infinity," p. 56 in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays by
Mtchel Foucault, ecl. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1977).
Cf Blanchot, L'Espace lilteraire (Paris, 1955), p. 58; and David P. Funt, ' Newer
Criticism and Revolution," Hudson Review, 22 (1969), 87-96.
9. See "Language to Infinity," p. 58.
10. The recent stories of John Barth, collected in Lost in the Funhouse and
amera, supply mteresting examples of Foucault's thesis. The latter work in-
cludes, in fact, a novelistic reworking of Arabian Nights.
11. Plainly a prescription for criticism as diverse as G. Wilson Knight's The
Wheel of (FN (London, 1~30) and Roland Barthes' On Racine, trans. Richard

12. We have kept the French, e'criture, with its double reference to the act of
writing and to the primordial (and metaphysical) nature of writing as an entity
in Itself, since it is the term that best identifies the program of Jacques Derrida.
Like the theme of a self-referential writing, it too builds on a theory of the sign
and denotes writing as the interplay of presence and absence in that "signs rep-
resent the present in its absence" ("Differance," in Speech and Phenomena, trans.
David B. Allison [Evanston, 111.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973], p. 138). See
J. I)errlda, De la gtammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967)
13. On "supplement," see Speech and Phenomena, pp. 88-104.
14. I his statement is perhaps the polemical ground of Foucault's dissociation
11 oln phenolllenology (and its evolution through Sartre into a Marxist discipline)
on one side and structuralism on the other. It also marks his concern that his
work be Judged on its own merits and not on its reputed relationship to other
movements. I his insistence hitbrms his appreciation of Nietzsche in "Nietzsche
(,enealogy, History" as well as his sense of his own position in the Conclusion of
7 lu Archaeolog~ of Knowledge.
15. Nietzsche, TheCayScience, 111, 108.
lfi. Iohn Searle, Speech Acts: An F.ssay in the Philosophy of Language (Cam-
I)licige: (,alnbridge University Press, 1969), pp. 162-174.
17. Ibid., p. 169.
18. Ibid., p. 172.
19. I his is a particularly important point and brings together a great many
of FotJcault's insights conceming the relationship of an author (subject) to dis-
course. It reHects his understandbig of the traditional and often unexamined
unities ol discourse whose actual discontinuities are resolved in either of two
ways: by reference to an originating subject or to a language, conceived as plen-
tude, which supports the activities of commentary or interpretation. But since

464 M tC EL F oUCAU L r

Foucault rejects the belief in the presumed fullness of language thal underlies
discourse, the author is subjected to the same fragmentation which characterizes
discourse and he is delineated as a discontinuous series; {or example, see L'Ordre
du discours (Paris: Callimard, 1971), pp. 54-55 and 61 -62.
20. In a seminar entitled "L'Epreuve et L'enquete." which Foucault con-
ducted at the University of Montreal in the spring of 1974, he centered the
debate around the following question: is the general conviction that truth de-
rives from and is sustained by knowledge not simply a recent phenomenon, a
limited case of the ancient and widespread belief that truth is a function of events?
In an older time and in other cultures, the search for truth was hazardous in the
extreme and truth resided in a danger zone, but if this was so and if truth could
only be approached after a long preparation or through the details of a ritual-
ized procedure, it was because it represented power. Discourse, for these cul-
tures, was an active appropriation of power and to the extent that it was success-
ful, it contained the power of truth itself, charged with all its risks and benefits.
21. Cf. The Order of T}zings, p. 300; "A Preface to Transgression," pp. 30Ñ33.
22. Foucault's phrasing of the "author-function" has been retained. This
concept should not be confused (as it was by Goldmann in the discussion that
followed Foucault's presentation) with the celebrated theme of the "death of
man" in The Order of Things ( pp. 342 and 386). On the contrary, Foucault's pur-
pose is to revitalize the debate surrounding the subject by situating the subject,
as a fluid function, within the space cleared by archaeology.
23. See Evaristo Arns, La Technique du livre d 'aprEs Jerome (Paris, 1953) .
24. On personal pronouns ("shifters"), see R. Jakobson, Selected Wntings (Paris:
Mouton, 1971), 11, 130-132; and kssais de linguistique gEnerale (Paris, 1966), p.
252. For its general implications, see Eugenio Donato, "Of Structuralism and
Literature," MLN, 82 (1967), 556-558. On adverbs of time and place, see Emile
Benveniste, ProblFmes de la linguastique gEnerale (Paris, 1966), pp. 237-250.
25. Cf. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1961), pp. 67-77.
26. This conclusion relates to Foucault's concern in developing a "philosophy
of events" as described in L'Ordre du discours, pp. 60-61: "I trust that we can
agree that I do not refer to a succession of moments in time, nor to a diverse
plurality of thinking subjects; I refer to a caesura which tragments the moment
and disperses the subject into a plurality of possible positions and functions."
27. Cf. the discussion of disciplines in L'Ordre du dascours, pp. 31 -38.
28. Noam Chomsky, Cartesiatl l Linguislics (New York: Harper & Row, 1966)
29. La Communication: Herrnes I (Paris: Editions de M inuit, 1968), pp. 78- 112.
30. For a discussion of the recent reorientation of the sign, see Foucault's
"Nietzsche, Freud, Marx," in Nietzsche (Cahiers de Royaumont, Philosophie V I,
1967). On the role of repetition, Foucault writes in L'Ordre du discours: "The new
is not found in what is said, but in the event of its return" (p. 28).

)

NINETEEN

Interpretive Communities and
Variable Literacies

The Functions of Romance Reading

Janice Radway

One of the most engaging volumes yet published on the subject of read-
ing is the marvelous collection of photographs by Andre Kertesz titled
simply, On Reading. | Presented without commentary, this series of im-
ages ot readers absorbed in apparently diverse materials, in both ex-
pected and unexpected contexts, is eloquent in its insistence that books
and reading serve myriad purposes and functions tor a wide variety of

individuals. For that reason alone, this simple photographic essay pro-
vides an implicit but nonetheless profound commentary on some en-
trenched and tamiliar assumptions about literacy.
By grouping together readers as ditferent as the well-dressed man
perched on a library ladder in a book-lined study and the ragged young
boy sprawled across a pile of discarded newspapers in the street, Kertesz
is able to suggest that whatever the ditterences and merits of the mate-
rials they peruse, all are engaged in some torm of the engrossing behav-
iOr through which print is transtormed into a world.2 The very inclu-
siveness of the series equalizes readers and reading processes that would,
in other contexts, be ranked hierarchically on an imaginary literary scale.
()n that scale, the grade ot "truly literate" would be reserved for those
educated individuals who were not only capable of reading texts that the
culture deems "literature," but who also regularly choose to read such
texts tor utilitarian purposes, however broadly conceived. As Raymond
Williams has observed, literature and literacy within this sort ot system
would be inextricably linked with the bourgeois ideology of taste and its
concomitant construction of the "literary tradition."3

Rcprintc(l by perlllissioll of Daedulus, lournal ol the American Academy of Arts and Sci-
enacs, "Anticipations," 113, no. 3 (Sumlllcr 1974).

465

)
|258| FOR MS OF TIME AND CHRONOTOPE IN THE NOVEL

we will not engage them here. For us the following is important:
whatever these meanings turn out to be, in order to enter our ex-
perience lwhich is social experience) they must take on the form
of a sign that is audible and visible for us la hieroglyph, a mathe-
matical formula, a verbal or linguistic expresslon, a s etch, e c. .
Without such temporal-spatial expression, even abstract thought
is impossible. Consequently, every entry into the sphere of mean-
ings is accomplished only through the gates of the chronotope.

* * *

As we stated in the beginning of our essay, the study of temporal
and spatial relationships in literary works has only recently be-
gun, and it has been temporal relationships by and large that ave
been studiedÑand these in isolation from the spatial relation-
ships indissolubly tied up with them. Whether the approach taken
in this present work will prove fundamental and productive, only
the further development of literary research can determine.
937ÑI938 9

y. The "Concluding Remarks" were written in 1973.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. "Discourse in the Novel." From
The Dialoaic Lnnaaination: Four Essavs bY M. M.
Bakhtin. Michael Holquist, Editor. UniversityofTexas
Press, 1981. (Requests to Permissions, University of
Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713.) Pages
259-331.

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

The principal idea of this essay is that the study of verbal art can
and must overcome the divorce between an abstract "formal" ap-
proach and an equally abstract "ideological" approach. Form and
content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal
discourse is a social phenomenonÑsocial throughout its entire
range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image
to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning.
It is this idea that has motivated our emphasis on "the stylis-

tics of genre." The separation of style and language from the ques-
tion of genre has been largely responsible for a situation in which
only individual and period-bound overtones of a style are the priv-
ileged subjects of study, while its basic social tone is ignored. The
great historical destinies of genres are overshadowed by the petty
vicissitudes of stylistic modifications, which in their turn are
linked with individual artists and artistic movements. For this
reason, stylistics has been deprived of an authentic philosophical
and sociological approach to its problems; it has become bogged
down in stylistic trivia; it is not able to sense behind the individ-
ual and period-bound shifts the great and anonymous destinies of
artistic discourse itself. More often than not, stylistics defines it-
self as a stylistics of "private craftsmanship" and ignores the so-
cial life of discourse outside the artist's study, discourse in the
open spaces of public squares, streets, cities and villages, of social
0 groups, generations and epochs. Stylistics is concerned not with
l living discourse but with a histological specimen made from it
l with abstract linguistic discourse in the service of an artist's indi-
| vidual creative powers. But these individual and tendentious
| overtones of style, cut off from the fundamentally social modes in
l which discourse lives, inevitably come across as flat and abstract
in such a formulation and cannot therefore be studied in organic
unity with a work's semantic components.
[2601 DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

Modern Stylistics @ the Novel

Before the twentieth century, problems associated with a stylis-
tics of the novel had not been precisely formulatedÑsuc a or-
mulation could only have resulted from a recognition o t e
stylistic uniqueness of novelistic lartistic-prose) discourse.
For a long time treatment of the novel was limited to itt e
more than abstract ideological examination and publicistic com-
mentary. Concrete questions of stylistics were either not treated
at all or treated in passing and in an arbitrary way: the discourse
of artistic prose was either understood as being poetic in t e nar-
row sense, and had the categories of traditional stylistics lbased
on the study of tropesl uncritically applied to it, or else such ques-
tions were limited to empty, evaluative terms for the character;
ization of language, such as "expressiveness," "imagery,' force,
"clarity" and so onÑwithout providing these concepts with any
stylistic significance, however vague and tentative.
Toward the end of the last century, as a counterweight to this
abstract ideological way of viewing things, interest began to grow
in the concrete problems of artistic craftsmanship in prose, in the
problems of novel and short-story technique. However, in ques-
tions of stylistics the situation did not change in the slightest; 1
attention was concentrated almost exclusively on problems
composition (in the broad sense of the word}. But, as before, e
peculiarities of the stylistic life of discourse in the novel land in
the short story as well} lacked an approach that was both prin-
cipled and at the same time concrete (one is impossible without
the other); the same arbitrary judgmental observations about lan-
guageÑin the spirit of traditional stylisticsÑcontinued to relgn
supreme, and they totally overlooked the authentic nature of ar-
tistic prose.
There is a highly characteristic and widespread pomt of view
that sees novelistic discourse as an extra-artistic medium, a dis-
course that is not worked into any special or unlque style. After
failure to find in novelistic discourse a purely poetlc formulation
"poetic" in the narrow sensel as was expected, prose discourse Is
denied any artistic value at all; it is the same as practical spee
for everyday life, or speech for scientific purposes, an artistlca y
neutral means of communication.

I. As recently as the 1920S, V. M. Zirmunskij limportant fellow-traveler of

the Formalists, ed.l was writing: "When Iyrical poetry appears to be aut e

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL |26I|

Such a point of view frees one from the necessity of undertak-
ing stylistic analyses of the novel; it in fact gets rid of the very
problem of a stylistics of the novel, permitting one to limit
oneself to purely thematic analyses of it.
It was, however, precisely in the 1920S that this situation
changed: the novelistic prose word began to win a place for itself
in stylistics. On the one hand there appeared a series of concrete
stylistic analyses of novelistic prose; on the other hand, system-
atic attempts were made to recognize and define the stylistic
uniqueness of artistic prose as distinct from poetry.
But it was precisely these concrete analyses and these attempts
at a principled approach that made patently obvious the fact that
all the categories of traditional stylisticsÑin fact the very con-
cept of a poetic artistic discourse, which lies at the heart of such
categoriesÑwere not applicable to novelistic discourse. Novelis-
tic discourse proved to be the acid test for this whole way of con-
ceiving style, exposing the narrowness of this type of thinking
and its inadequacy in all areas of discourse's artistic life
All attempts at concrete stylistic analysis of novelistic prose ei-
t er strayed into linguistic descriptions of the language of a given
novelist or else limited themselves to those separate, isolated
stylistic elements of the novel that were includable lor gave the
appearance of being includable} in the traditional categories of
sty istics. In both instances the stylistic whole of the novel and of
novelistic discourse eluded the investigator.
The novel as a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and
varlform in speech and voice. In it the investigator is confronted
with several heterogeneous stylistic unities, often located on dif-
ferent linguistic levels and subject to different stylistic controls.

_
ticalantai work of verbal art, due to its choice and combination of word I

e aest etic prolect, Tolstoy's novel, by contrast, which is free in its verbal
position, does not use words as an artistically significant element of in-
c lon ut as a neutral medium or as a system of significations subordi
e las appens in practical speech} to the communicative function, direct-
ng our attention to thematic aspects quite abstracted from purely verbal
onsi erations. We cannot call such a literary work a work of verbal art or, in
y case, not m the sense that the term is used for Iyrical poetry'~ l''On the
em o the Formal Method," in an anthology of his articles, Problems of
eory of Literature ILeningrad, 1928, p. I73); Russian edition- "K voprosu
o 'formal'nom metode'," in Voprosy teorXi literatury, (L., 1928}l.

1 62] DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

We list below the basic types of compositional-stylistic unities
into which the novelistic whole usually breaks down:

} Direct authorial literary-artistic narration lin all its diverse
zl St;lization of the various forms of oral everyday narration

3) Stylization of the various forms of semiliterary lwritten} ev-
eryday narration lthe letter, the diary, etc.); h
14} Various forms of literary but extra-artistic authorial speec
moral, philosophical or scientific statements, oratory, et -
nographic descriptions, memoranda and so forthl;
l 5 l The stylistically individualized speech of characters.

These heterogeneous stylistic unities, upon entering the novel,
combine to form a structured artistic system, and are subordi-
nated to the higher stylistic unity of the work as a whole, a unity
that cannot be identified with any single one of the unities subor-
dinated to it.
The stylistic uniqueness of the novel as a genre consists pre-
cisely in the combination of these subordinated, yet Still re a-
tively autonomous, unities leven at times comprised of different
languages) into the higher unity of the work as a whole: the sty e
of a novel is to be found in the combination of its styles; the lan-
uage of a novel is the system of its "languages." Each separate
element of a novel's language is determined first of all by one
such subordinated stylistic unity into which it enters direct yÑ
be it the stylistically individualized speech of a character, t e
down-to-earth voice of a narrator in skaz, a letter or whatever.
The linguistic and stylistic profile of a given element llexical, se-
mantic, syntactic} is shaped by that subordinated unity to which
it is most immediately proximate. At the same time this element,
together with its most immediate unity, figures into the sty e o
the whole, itself supports the accent of the whole and participates
in the process whereby the unified meaning of the whole Is struc-
tured and revealed.
The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types
sometimes even diversity of languages} and a diversity of m ivi -
ual voices, artistically organized. The internal stratification
any single national language into social dialects, characteristic
group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, lan

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL 12631

guages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, lan-
guages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fash-
ions, languages that serve the specific sociopolitical purposes of
the day, even of the hour leach day has its own slogan, its own
vocabulary, its own emphases)Ñthis internal stratification pres-
ent in every language at any given moment of its historical exis-
tence is the indispensable prerequisite for the novel as a genre
The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of
objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the
social diversity of speech types [raznoreciel and by the differing
individual voices that flourish under such conditions. Authorial
speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of
characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities
with whose help heteroglossia Iraznorecie~ can enter the novel
each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide
variety of their links and interrelationships ialways more or less
dialogized). These distinctive links and interrelationships be-
tween utterances and languages, this movement of the theme
through different languages and speech types, its dispersion into
the rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia, its dialogiza-
tionÑthis is the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of

the novel.
Such a combining of languages and styles into a higher unity is
unknown to traditional stylistics; it has no method for approach-
mg the distinctive social dialogue among languages that is pres-
ent in the novel. Thus stylistic analysis is not oriented toward the
novel as a whole, but only toward one or another of its subordi-
nated stylistic unities. The traditional scholar bypasses the basic
distinctive feature of the novel as a genre; he substitutes for it an-
other object of study, and instead of novelistic style he actually
analyzes something completely different. He transposes a sym-
phonic lorchestrated} theme on to the piano keyboard.
We notice two such types of substitutions: in the first type, an
analysis of novelistic style is replaced by a description of the lan-
guage of a given novelist lor at best of the "languages" of a given
novel); in the second type, one of the subordinated styles is iso-
lated and analyzed as if it were the style of the whole.
In the first type, style is cut off from considerations of genre,
and from the work as such, and regarded as a phenomenon of lan-
guage itself: the unity of style in a given work is transformed ei-
ther into the unity of an individual language l"individual di
o

12641 DISC O URSE IN THE N OVEL l
precisely the individuality of the speaking subject that is recog |

W have no need to follow where such an analysis of novelistic
=W
vidual languages, or into a linguistics of the utteran e. f
sense of a system of general normative forms and m the other

verse-based poetic genres, but even in theRenl:~ tlKy [or ln~
lete description of the individual language and speech o a

t1~ _Sp-0 : W nsi i d le ar~tist] ~ F

those that govern the linguistic systems of language and of
th langJa~ ~nin the mai¡ritYl¡fdP¡uentiqugeness} of the poet s

Thus the substitution of the individualized language of the
novelist (to the extent that one can recover this language r

DISCO URSE IN THE N OVEL [2651
m
X~
I ar~erent aspects of novelistic style are se
J

12661 DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

point of view not of its objective descriptive mode, but of its sub-
jective expression mode lexpressiveness). One might select ele-
ments of vernacular extraliterary narration lskaz) or those as-
pects that provide the information necessary to further the plot
as one might do, for example, in analyzing an adventure novel).
And it is possible, finally, to select those purely dramatlc e e- |
ments of the novel that lower the narrational aspect to the level
of a commentary on the dialogues of the novel's characters. But
the system of languages in drama is organized on completely
different principles, and therefore its languages sound utterly
different than do the languages of the novel. In drama there 1S no
all-encompassing language that addresses itself dialogically to
separate languages, there is no second all-encompassing plotless
ndramatic) dialogue ¡lutsidaerethinadequate to the style not only

of the novelistic whole but even of that element isolated as fun-
damental for a gi en novhlÑhnarSsmchanges its stylistic meaning

and ceases to be that which it in fact had been in the novel.
The current state of questions posed by a Stylistics of the nove
reveals, fully and clearly, that all the categories and methods
traditional stylistics remain incapable of dealing effectively wit
the artistic uniqueness of discourse in the novel, or with the s e-
c fic life that discourse leads in the novel. Poetic language in- i
dividuality of language," "image," ~symboli debpic stlylei and l,

well as the entire set of concrete stylistic devices subsume y i
these categories Ino matter how differently understood by in i- l
vidual critics}, are all equally oriented toward the single-lan- l
guaged and single-styled genres, toward the poetic genres in the |
narrow sense of the word. Their connection with this exclusive !
orientation explains a number of the particular features and l,m-
itations of traditional stylistic categories. All these categories,
and the very philosophical conception of poetic discour
which they are grounded, are too narrow and cramped, and can-
not accommodate the artistic prose of novelistic iscourse.

these two last levels, that isw eittuhde~ed as most characteristic of lite Y

prose.

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL 12671
Thus stylistics and the philosophy of discourse indeed confront
a dile ma: either to acknowledge the novel land consequently all
artistic prose tending in that direction) an unartistic or quasi
reconsider that=nd which
This dilemma, however, is by no means universally recognized
ost scholars are not inclined to undertake a radical revision of
t e fundamental philosophical conception of poetic discourse
any do not even see or recogmze the philosophical roots of the
sty is ics land linguistics} in which they work, and shy away from
any fundamental philosophical issues. They utterly fail to see be
md their isolated and fragmented stylistic observations and lin
gulstic descnptions any theoretical problems posed by novelistic
iscourse. OthersÑmore principledÑmake a case for consistent
and fo emost they seek in the styliinstgi of l;~ngU4lge and style. First
unmedlated expression of authorial individuality, and such an un
erstandmg of the problem is least likely of all to encourage a re
consideration of basic stylistic categories in the proper direction
owever, there is another solution of our dilemma that does
a e asic concepts into account: one need only consider oft
neglected rhetoric, which for centuries has included artistic prose
in its purview. Once we have restored rhetoric to all its ancient
rights, we may adhere to the old concept of poetic discourse, rele

gatmg to "rhetorical forms" everything in novelistic prose that
l es not t t e Procrustean bed of traditional stylistic categories 3
Gustav Shpet,^ in his time, proposed such a solution to the di
l emma, with all due rigorousness and consistency. He utterly ex

_
~= 71, outstanding representative 31 the neo I:ax

l
|268] DISCO URSE IN THE N OVEL i
cluded artistic prose and its ultimate realizationÑthe novelÑ !
from the realm of poetry, and assigned it to the category of purely [
rhetorical forms.4
Here is what Shpet says about the novel: "The recognition that
contemporary forms of moral propagandaÑi.e., the novelÑo
not spring from poetic creativity but are purely rhetorical com
positions, is an admission, and a conception, that apparently can
not arise without immediately confronting a formidable obstac e
in the form of the universal recognition, despite everything, that
the novel does have a certain aesthetic value
Shpet utterly denies the novel any aesthetic significance. T e
novel is an extra-artistic rhetorical genre, "the contemporary
form of moral propaganda"; artistic discourse is exclusively po
etic discourse lin the sense we have indicated above).
Viktor Vinogradovb adopted an analogous point of view in his
book On Artistic Prose, assigning the problem of artistic prose to
rhetoric. While agreeing with Shpet's basic philosophical defini
tions of the "poetic" and the "rhetorical," Vinogradov was, how
ever, not so paradoxically consistent: he considered the novel a
syncretic, mixed form ("a hybrid formation") and admitted that it
contained, along with rhetorical elements, some purely poetic
ones.6
The point of view that completely excludes novelistic prose, as
a rhetorical formation, from the realm of poetryÑa point of vlew
that is basically falseÑdoes nevertheless have a certain indis
putable merit. There resides in it an acknowledgment in princi
ple and in substance of the inadequacy of all contemporary stylis
tics, along with its philosophical and linguistic base, when it
comes to defining the specific distinctive features of novelistic
prose. And what is more, the very reliance on rhetorical forms
has a great heuristic significance. Once rhetorical discourse is

4. Originally in his Aesthetic Fragments IEsteticeskie fragmentyl; in a
more complete aspect in the book The Inner Form of the Word l Vnutrenniala
forma sloval lM., I9271.
5. Vnutrennjaja forma slova p. 215.
6. V. V. Vinogradov, On Artistic lvrose 1¡ xudozestvennom prozel Mos
cow-Leningrad, 1930, pp. 75-I06.
b. Viktor Vinogradov 11895-I969), outstanding linguistic and student of
style in literature, a friendly critic of the Formalists, and an important t eo
rist in his own right (especially his work on skaz techmquel.

)

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL 1269]

brought into the study with all its living diversity, it cannot fail to
ave a deeply revolutionizing influence on linguistics and on the
philosophy of language. It is precisely those aspects of any dis-
course Ithe internally dialogic quality of discourse, and the phe-
nomena related to it}, not yet sufficiently taken into account and
athomed m all the enormous weight they carry in the life of lan-
guage, that are revealed with great external precision in rhetorical
orms, provided a correct and unprejudiced approach to those
orms IS used. Such is the general methodological and heuristic
significance of rhetorical forms for linguistics and for the philoso-

phy of language.
The special significance of rhetorical forms for understanding
the novel is equally great. The novel, and artistic prose in general
as the closest genetic, family relationship to rhetorical forms
nd throughout the entire development of the novel, its intimate
interaction Iboth peaceful and hostile} with living rhetorical
genres (journalistic, moral, philosophical and others) has never
ceased; t is mteraction was perhaps no less intense than was the
novel s interaction with the artistic genres lepic, dramatic, Iyric}
ut in t is uninterrupted interrelationship, novelistic discourse
preserved its own qualitative uniqueness and was never reducible
to rhetorical discourse.
The novel is an artistic genre. Novelistic discourse is poetic
discourse, but one that does not fit within the frame provided b
the concept of poetic discourse as it now exists. This concept has
certain underlying presuppositions that limit it. The very con-
ceptÑin the course of its historical formulation from Aristotle to
the present dayÑhas been oriented toward the specific "official"
genres and connected with specific historical tendencies in verbal
ideological life. Thus a whole series of phenomena remained
beyond its conceptual horizon.
Philosophy of language, linguistics and stylistics [i.e., such as
they have come down to us] have all postulated a simple and un-
mediated relation of speaker to his unitary and singular "own"
anguage, and have postulated as well a simple realization of this
anguage in the monologic utterance of the individual. Such dis-
clplines actually know only two poles in the life of language, be-
tween which are located all the linguistic and stylistic phe-
nomena they know: on the one hand, the system of a unitary
anguage, and on the other the individual speaking in this
12701 DISC O URSE IN THE N OVEL
Various schools of thought in the philosophy of language, in lin
guistics and in stylistics have, in different periods (and always m
close connection with the diverse concrete poetic and ideological
styles of a given epoch), introduced into such concepts as "system
of language," "monologic utterance," "the speaking individuum,
various differing nuances of meaning, but their basic content re
mains unchanged. This basic content is conditioned by the spe
cific sociohistorical destinies of European languages and by the
destinies of ideological discourse, and by those particular hlstor
ical tasks that ideological discourse has fulfilled in specsfic social
spheres and at specific stages in its own historical development.
These tasks and destinies of discourse conditioned specific ver
bal-ideological movements, as well as various specific genres of
ideological discourse, and ultimately the specific philosophical
concept of discourse itselfÑin particular, the concept of poetic
discourse, which had been at the heart of all concepts of style.
The strength and at the same time the limitations of such basic
stylistic categories become apparent when such categories are
seen as conditioned by specific historical destinies and by the
task that an ideological discourse assumes. These categories
arose from and were shaped by the historically aktuell forces at
work in the verbal-ideological evolution of specific social groups;
they comprised the theoretical expression of actualizing forces [
that were in the process of creating a life for language.
These forces are the forces that serve to unify and centralize
the verbal-ideological wolld.
Unitary language constitutes the theoretical expression of the
historical processes of linguistic unification and centralization,
an expression of the centripetal forces of language. A unitary lan- i
guage is not something given Idanl but is always in essence
posited IzadanlÑand at every moment of its linguistic life it is
opposed to the realities of heteroglossia. But at the same tlme it
makes its real presence felt as a force for overcommg this heter
oglossia, imposing specific limits to it, guaranteeing a certaln
maximum of mutual understanding and crystalizing into a real,

although still relative, unityÑthe unity of the reigning conver
sational leverydayl and literary language, "correct language.
A common unitary language is a system of linguistic norms.
But these norms do not constitute an abstract imperative; they
are rather the generative forces of linguistic life, forces that strug
gle to overcome the heteroglossia of language, forces that unlte

DISC O URSE IN THE N OVEL [27I1

and centralize verbal-ideological thought, creating within a het-
eroglot national language the firm, stable linguistic nucleus of an
of ficially recognized literary language, or else defending an already
formed language from the pressure of growing heteroglossia.
What we have in mind here is not an abstract linguistic mini-
mum of a common language, in the sense of a system of elemen-
tary forms [linguistic symbols) guaranteeing a minimum level of
comprehension in practical communication. We are taking lan-
guage not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but
rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as
a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of
mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life. Thus a
unitary language gives expression to forces working toward con-
crete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which
develop m vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical
and cultural centralization.
Aristotelian poetics, the poetics of Augustine, the poetics of
the medieval church, of "the one language of truth," the Carte-
sian poetics of neoclassicism, the abstract grammatical universal-
ism of Leibniz {the idea of a "universal grammar"), Humboldt's
insistence on the concreteÑall these, whatever their differences
in nuance, glve expression to the same centripetal forces in socio-
linguistic and ideological life; they serve one and the same proj-
ect of centralizing and unifying the European languages. The vic-
tory of one reigning language (dialect) over the others, the sup-
planting of languages, their enslavement, the process of illumi-
nating them with the True Word, the incorporation of barbarians
and lower social strata into a unitary language of culture and
0 truth, the canonization of ideological systems, philology with its
a methods of studying and teaching dead languages, languages that
were by that very fact "unities," Indo-European linguistics with
ltS focus of attention, directed away from language plurality to
f a single proto-languageÑall this determined the content and
j power of the category of "unitary language" in linguistic and sty-
I listic thought, and determined its creative, style-shaping role in
the majority of the poetic genres that coalesced in the channel
formed by those same centripetal forces of verbal-ideological life
But the centripetal forces of the life of language, embodied in a
; "unitary language," operate in the midst of heteroglossia. At any
glven moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into
linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word laccording to for

o
am

12791 DISCO URSE IN THE N OVEL

mal linguistic markers, especially phoneticl, but alsoÑand for us
this is the essential pointÑinto languages that are socio-ideologi-
cal: languages of social groups, "professional" and "generic" lan-
guages, languages of generations and so forth. From this point of
view, literary language itself is only one of these heteroglot lan-
guagesÑand in its turn is also stratified into languages Igeneric,
period-bound and others). And this stratification and heteroglos-
sia, once realized, is not only a static invariant of linguistic life,
but also what insures its dynamics: stratification and heteroglos-
sia widen and deepen as long as language is alive and developing.
Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of lan-
guage carry on their uninterrupted work; alongside verbal-ideo-
logical centralization and unification, the uninterrupted pro-
cesses of decentralization and disunification go forward.
Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point
where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear.
The processes of centralization and decentralization, of unifica-
tion and disunification, intersect in the utterance; the utterance
not only answers the requirements of its own language as an indi-
vidualized embodiment of a speech act, but it answers the re-
quirements of heteroglossia as well; it is in fact an active particl-
pant in such speech diversity. And this active participation of
every utterance in living heteroglossia determines the linguistic
profile and style of the utterance to no less a degree than its inclu-
sion in any normative-centralizing system of a unitary language.
Every utterance participates in the "unitary language" lin lts
centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes
of social and historical heteroglossia Ithe centrifugal, stratifying
forcesl.
Such is the fleeting language of a day, of an epoch, a social
group, a genre, a school and so forth. It is possible to give a con-
crete and detailed analysis of any utterance, once having exposed
it as a contradiction-ridden, tension-filled unity of two embattled
tendencies in the life of language.
The authentic environment of an utterance, the environment
in which it lives and takes shape, is dialogized heteroglos-
sia, anonymous and social as language, but simultaneously con-
crete, filled with specific content and accented as an individual
utterance.
At the time when major divisions of the poetic genres were de-
veloping under the influence of the unifying, centralizing, cen

Dtripetal forces of verbal-ideological life, the novelÑand those
artistic-prose genres that gravitate toward itÑwas being histor
0lcally shaped by the current of decentralizing, centrifugal forces
At the time when poetry was accomplishing the task of cultural
national and political centralization of the verbal-ideological
world in the higher official socio-ideological levels, on the lower
levels, on the stages of local fairs and at buffoon spectacles, the
heteroglossia of the clown sounded forth, ridiculing all "lan
guages" and dialects; there developed the literature of the fabli
aux and Schwdnke of street songs, folksayings, anecdotes, where
there was no language-center at all, where there was to be found
a lively play with the "languages" of poets, scholars, monks
knights and others, where all "languages" were masks and where
no language could claim to be an authentic, incontestable face
Heteroglossia, as organized in these low genres, was not merely
heteroglossla vis-a-vis the accepted literary language {in all its
vanous generic expressions), that is, vis-a-vis the linguistic cen
ter of the verbal-ideological life of the nation and the epoch, but
was a heteroglossia consciously opposed to this literary language.

It was parodic, and aimed sharply and polemically against the of
ficial languages of its given time. It was heteroglossia that had
been dialogized.
Linguistics, stylistics and the philosophy of language that were
born and shaped by the current of centralizing tendencies in the
life of language have ignored this dialogized heteroglossia, in
which IS embodied the centrifugal forces in the life of language.
For this very reason they could make no provision for the dialogic
nature of language, which was a struggle among socio-linguistic
pomts of view, not an intra-language struggle between individual
wills or logical contradictions. Moreover, even intra-language
dialogue (dramatic, rhetorical, cognitive or merely casual) has
hardly been studied linguistically or stylistically up to the present
day. One might even say outright that the dialogic aspect of dis
course and all the phenomena connected with it have remained
to the present moment beyond the ken of linguistics
Stylistics has been likewise completely deaf to diaiogue. A lit
erary work has been conceived by stylistics as if it were a hermet
| lc and self-sufficient whole, one whose elements constitute a
closed system presuming nothing beyond themselves, no other
; utterances. The system comprising an artistic work was thought
; to be analogous with the system of a language, a system that

DISC O URSE IN THE N OVEL 12731

)
12741 DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

could not stand in a dialogic interrelationship with other lan-
guages. From the point of view of stylistics, the artistic work as a
wholeÑwhatever that whole might beÑis a self-sufficient and
closed authorial monologue, one that presumes only passive lis-
teners beyond its own boundaries. Should we imagine the work
as a rejoinder in a given dialogue, whose style is determined by its
interrelationship with other rejoinders in the same dialogue lin
the totality of the conversation}Ñthen traditional stylistics does
not offer an adequate means for approaching such a dialogized
style. The sharpest and externally most marked manifestations
of this stylistic categoryÑthe polemical style, the parodic, the
ironicÑare usually classified as rhetorical and not as poetic phe-
nomena. Stylistics locks every stylistic phenomenon into the
monologic context of a given self-sufficient and hermetic utter-
ance, imprisoning it, as it were, in the dungeon of a single con-
text; it is not able to exchange messages with other utterances; it
is not able to realize its own stylistic implications in a relation-
ship with them; it is obliged to exhaust itself in its own single
hermetic context.
Linguistics, stylistics and the philosophy of languageÑas
forces in the service of the great centralizing tendencies of Euro-
pean verbal-ideological lifeÑhave sought first and foremost for
unity in diversity. This exclusive "orientation toward unity" in
the present and past life of languages has concentrated the atten-
tion of philosophical and linguistic thought on the firmest, most
stable, least changeable and most mono-semic aspects of dis-
courseÑon the phonetic aspects first of allÑthat are furthest re-
moved from the changing socio-semantic spheres of discourse.
Real ideologically saturated "language consciousness," one that
participates in actual heteroglossia and multi-languagedness, has
remained outside its field of vision. It is precisely this orientation
toward unity that has compelled scholars to ignore all the verbal
genres (quotidian, rhetorical, artistic-prose) that were the carriers
of the decentralizing tendencies in the life of language, or that
were in any case too fundamentally implicated in heteroglossia.
The expression of this hetero- as well as polyglot consciousness
in the specific forms and phenomena of verbal life remained ut-
terly without determinative influence on linguistics and stylistic

thought.
Therefore proper theoretical recognition and illumination
could not be found for the specific feel for language and discourse

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL [275]

that one gets in stylizations, in skaz, in parodies and in various
forms of verbal masquerade, "not talking straight," and in the
more complex artistic forms for the organization of contradic-
tion, forms that orchestrate their themes by means of languagesÑ
in all characteristic and profound models of novelistic prose, in
I Grimmelshausen, Cervantes, Rabelais, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne
I and others.
i The problem of stylistics for the novel inevitably leads to the
I necessity of engaging a series of fundamental questions con
j cerning the philosophy of discourse, questions connected with
those aspects in the life of discourse that have had no light cast
on them by linguistic and stylistic thoughtÑthat is, we must
deal with the life and behavior of discourse in a contradictory and
multi-languaged world.

Discourse in Poetry and Discourse in the Novel

For the philosophy of languagej for linguistics and for ^-,-' -- -
structured on their base, a whole series of phenomena have there-
fore remained almost entirely beyond the realm of consideration:
these include the specific phenomena that are present in dis-
course and that are determined by its dialogic orientation, first,
amid others' utterances inside a single language (the primordial
dialogism of discourse}, amid other "social languages" within a
single national language and finally amid different national lan-
guages within the same culture, that is, the same socio-ideologi-
cal conceptual horizon.7
In recent decades, it is true, these phenomena have begun to
attract the attention of scholars in language and stylistics, but
their fundamental and wide-ranging significance in all spheres of
the life of discourse is still far from acknowledged.
The dialogic orientation of a word among other words lof all
kinds and degrees of otherness} creates new and significant artis-
tic potential in discourse, creates the potential for a distinctive
art of prose, which has found its fullest and deepest expression in
the novel.

7. Linguistics acknowledges only a mechanical reciprocal influencing and
intermixing of languages, Ithat is, one that is unconscious and determined by
social conditions) which is reflected in abstract linguistic elements Iphonetic
and morphologicall.

N
o

276| DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL [2771

We will focus our attention here on various forms and degrees alogue as a continuation of it and as a rejoinder to itÑit does not \
of dialogic orientation in discourse, and on the special potential approach the object from the sidelines. -J
for a distinctive prose-art. |The way in which the word conceptualizes its object is a com
As treated by traditional stylistic thought, the word acknowl- p actÑal objects, open to dispute and overlain as they are
edges only itself (that is, only its own context}, its own object, its qua ifications, are from one side highlighted while from the
own direct expression and its own unitary and singular language. o er SI e dimmed by heteroglot social opinion, by an alien word
It acknowledges another word, one lying outside its own context, about them. And into this complex play of light and shadow the
only as the neutral word of language, as the word of no one in par- wor entersÑit becomes saturated with this play, and must deter
ticular, as simply the potential for speech. The direct word, as tra- mine within it the boundaries of its own semantic and stylistic
ditional stylistics understands it, encounters in its orientation contours. The way in which the word conceives its object is com
toward the object only the resistance of the object itself Ithe im- p icated by a dlalogic interaction within the object between vari
possibility of its being exhausted by a word, the impossibility of ous aspects of its socio-verbal intelligibility. And an artistic repre
saying it alll, but it does not encounter in its path toward the ob- sentation, an lmage'' of the object, may be penetrated by this
ject the fundamental and richly varied opposition of another's ia ogic play of verbal intentions that meet and are interwoven in
word. No one hinders this word, no one argues with it. it; suc an image need not stifle these forces, but on the contrary
But no living word relates to its object in a singular way: be- may activate and organize them. If we imagine the intention of
tween the word and its object, between the word and the speaking suc a word, that IS, its directionality toward the object, in the
subject, there exists an elastic environment of other, alien words orm a ray of light, then the living and unrepeatable play of col
about the same object, the same theme, and this is an environ- ors an ight on the facets of the image that it constructs can be
ment that it is often difficult to penetrate. It is precisely in the explained as the spectral dispersion of the ray-word, not within
process of living interaction with this specific environment that e o ,_ . ltself las would be the case in the play of an image-as
the word may be individualized and given stylistic shape. a trope, in poetic speech taken in the narrow sense, in an "autotelic
Indeed, any concrete discourse lutterance) finds the object at I wor ), but rather as its spectral dispersion in an atmosphere
which it was directed already as it were overlain with qualifica- I e with the alien words, value judgments and accents through
tions, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in I w 1C the ray passes on its way toward the object; the social at
an obscuring mistÑor, on the contrary, by the "light" of alien I mosp ere of the word, the atmosphere that surrounds the object
words that have already been spoken about it. It is entangled, shot ¢ ma es the facets of the image sparkle.
through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judg- I The word, breaking through to its own meaning and its own
ments and accents. The word, directed toward its object, enters . expression across an environment full of alien words and vari
a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien , ous y evaluating accents, harmonizing with some of the elements
words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of com- t environment and striking a dissonance with others, is
plex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from othersE - a e~ m this dlaloglzed process, to shaDe its own QtVIicti~nx
intersects with yet a third group: and all this may crucially shape
discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers, may com
plicate its expression and influence its entire stylistic profile.
The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a par
ticular historical moment in a socially specific environment, can
not fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads,
woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the glven ob
ject of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant
in social dialogue. After all, the utterance arises out of this di

and tone.

.v.ss. ^ ~ ~ ~- ----r~ ~;D VWIX D~yllStlC prohle
Such is the image in artistic prose and the image of novelistic

)

1278] DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

prose in particular. In the atmosphere of the novel, the direct and
unmediated intention of a word presents itself as something im-
permissably naive, something in fact impossible, for naivete it-
self, under authentic novelistic conditions, takes on the nature of
an internal polemic and is consequently dialogized lin, for exam-
ple, the work of the Sentimentalists, in Chateaubriand and in
Tolstoyl. Such a dialogized image can occur in all the poetic
genres as well, even in the lyric Ito be sure, without setting the
tone}.9 But such an image can fully unfold, achieve full complex-
ity and depth and at the same time artistic closure, only under the
conditions present in the genre of the novel.
In the poetic image narrowly conceived lin the image-as-tropel,
all activityÑthe dynamics of the image-as-wordÑis completely
exhausted by the play between the word {with all its aspects) and
the object lin all its aspects}. The word plunges into the inex-
haustible wealth and contradictory multiplicity of the object it-
self, with its "virginal," still "unuttered" nature; therefore it pre-
sumes nothing beyond the borders of its own context lexcept, of
course, what can be found in the treasure-house of language it-
self ). The word forgets that its object has its own history of con-
tradictory acts of verbal recognition, as well as that heteroglossia
that is always present in such acts of recognition.
For the writer of artistic prose, on the contrary, the object re-
veals first of all precisely the socially heteroglot multiplicity of its
names, definitions and value judgments. Instead of the virginal
fullness and inexhaustibility of the object itself, the prose writer
confronts a multitude of routes, roads and paths that have been
laid down in the object by social consciousness. Along with the
internal contradictions inside the object itself, the. prose writer
witnesses as well the unfolding of social heteroglossia surround-
ing the object, the Tower-of-Babel mixing of languages that goes
on around any object; the dialectics of the object are interwoven
with the social dialogue surrounding it. For the prose writer, the
object is a focal point for heteroglot voices among which his own
voice must also sound; these voices create the background neces-
sary for his own voice, outside of which his artistic prose nuances
cannot be perceived, and without which they "do not sound."
( The prose artist elevates the social heteroglossia surrounding
} objects into an image that has finished contours, an image com

9. The Horatian Iyric, VilIon, Heine, Laforgue, Annenski; and othersÑde-
spite the fact that these are extremely varied instances.

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL [279]

8 pletely shot through with dialogized overtones; he creates artis~\
tically calculated nuances on all the fundamental voices and
tones of this heteroglossia. But as we have already said, every ex
tra-artistic prose discourseÑin any of its forms, quotidian, rhe
torical, scholarlyÑcannot fail to be oriented toward the "already
uttered," the "already known," the "common opinion" and so
forth. The dialogic orientation of discourse is a phenomenon that
is, of course, a property of any discourse. It is the natural orienta
tion of any living discourse. On all its various routes toward the
object, in all its directions, the word encounters an alien word
and cannot help encountering it in a living, tension-filled interac
tion. Only the mythical Adam, who approached a virginal and as
yet verbally unqualified world with the first word, could really
I have escaped from start to finish this dialogic inter-orientation
with the alien word that occurs in the object. Concrete historical
I human discourse does not have this privilege: it can deviate from
I such inter-orientation only on a conditional basis and only to a
certain degree.
It is all the more remarkable that linguistics and the philoso

phy of discourse have been primarily oriented precisely toward
| this artificial, preconditioned status of the word, a word excised
from dialogue and taken for the norm lalthough the primacy of
dialogue over monologue is frequently proclaimed}. Dialogue is
studied merely as a compositional form in the structuring of
speech, but the internal dialogism of the word {which occurs in a
monologic utterance as well as in a rejoinder}, the dialogism that
penetrates its entire structure, all its semantic and expressive
layers, is almost entirely ignored. But it is precisely this internal
dialogism of the word, which does not assume any external com
positional forms of dialogue, that cannot be isolated as an inde
pendent act, separate from the word's ability to form a concept
Ikoncipirovaniel of its objectÑit is precisely this internal dialo
gism that has such enormous power to shape style. The internal
i dialogism of the word finds expression in a series of peculiar fea
tures in semantics, syntax and stylistics that have remained up to
the present time completely unstudied by linguistics and stylis
tlcs {nor, what is more, have the peculiar semantic features of
ordinary dialogue been studied).
The word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it;
I the word is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that
is already in the object. A word forms a concept of its own object
in a dialogic way.
18O| DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL
But this does not exhaust the internal dialogism of the word. It
encounters an alien word not only in the object itself: every word
is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound in
fluence of the answering word that it anticipates.
The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented
toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates
it and structures itself in the answer's direction. Forming itself in
an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same
time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is
needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the
situation in any living dialogue.
r All rhetorical forms, monologic in their compositional struc
i ture, are oriented toward the listener and his answer. This orien
I tation toward the listener is usually considered the basic con
I stitutive feature of rhetorical discourse.l¡ It is highly significant
I for rhetoric that this relationship toward the concrete listener,
\ taking him into account, is a relationship that enters into the 0
very internal construction of rhetorical discourse. This orienta
stion toward an answer is open, blatant and concrete.
This open orientation toward the listener and his answer in ev
eryday dialogue and in rhetorical forms has attracted the atten
tion of linguists. But even where this has been the case, linguists
have by and large gotten no further than the compositional forms
by which the listener is taken into account; they have not sought
influence springing from more profound meaning and style. They
have taken into consideration only those aspects of style deter
mined by demands for comprehensibility and clarityÑthat is,
precisely those aspects that are deprived of any internal dialo
gism, that take the listener for a person who passively under
stands but not for one who actively answers and reacts.
The listener and his response are regularly taken into account
when it comes to everyday dialogue and rhetoric, but every other
sort of discourse as well is oriented toward an understanding that
is "responsive"Ñalthough this orientation is not particularized
in an independent act and is not compositionally marked. Re
sponsive understanding is a fundamental force, one that particl
pates in the formulation of discourse, and it is moreover an active

lo. Cf. V. Vinogradov's book On Artistic Prose, the chapter "Rhetoric and
Poetics," pp. 7sff., where definitions taken from the older rhetorics are
introduced.

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL 128I|

understanding, one that discourse senses as resistance or support
enriching the discourse.
Linguistics and the philosophy of language acknowledge only a
passive understanding of discourse, and moreover this takes place
by and large on the level of common language, that is, it is an un-
derstandmg of an utterance's neutral signification and not its ac-
tual meaning.
The linguistic significance of a given utterance is understood
against the background of language, while its actual meaning is
understood against the background of other concrete utterances
on the same theme, a background made up of contradictory opin-
ions, points of view and value judgmentsÑthat is, precisely that
background that, as we see, complicates the path of any word to-
ward ltS object. Only now this contradictory environment of alien
words is present to the speaker not in the object, but rather in the
consciousness of the listener, as his apperceptive background,
pregnant with responses and objections. And every utterance is
oriented toward this apperceptive background of understanding,
which is not a linguistic background but rather one composed of
specific obiects and emotional expressions. There occurs a new
encounter between the utterance and an alien word, which
makes itself felt as a new and unique influence on its style.
A passive understanding of linguistic meaning is no under-
standing at all, it is only the abstract aspect of meaning. But even
a more concrete passive understanding of the meaning of the
utterance, an understanding of the speaker's intention insofar as
that understanding remains purely passive, purely receptive, con-
tributes nothing new to the word under consideration, only mir-
roring it, seeking, at its most ambitious, merely the full reproduc-
tion of that which is already given in the wordÑeven such an
understanding never goes beyond the boundaries of the word's
context and in no way enriches the word. Therefore, insofar as
the speaker operates with such a passive understanding, nothing
new can be introduced into his discourse; there can be no new
aspects in his discourse relating to concrete objects and emo-
tional expressions. Indeed the purely negative demands, such as
could only emerge from a passive understanding lfor instance, a
need for greater clarity, more persuasiveness, more vividness and
so forthl, leave the speaker in his own personal context, within
his own boundaries; such negative demands are completely im-
manent in the speaker's own discourse and do not go beyond his
semantic or expressive self-sufficiency.

1282] DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

In the actual life of speech, every concrete act of understanding
is active: it assimilates the word to be understood into its own
conceptual system filled with specific objects and emotional ex-
pressions, and is indissolubly merged with the response, with a
x~pwated agreement or disagreement. To some extent, primacy
4Qf'bb6ngs to the response, as the activating principle: it creates the
{,1 dA£ound for understanding, it prepares the ground for an active and
engaged understanding. Understanding comes to fruition only
1\8 / in the response. Understanding and response are dialectically
t) / merged and mutually condition each other; one is impossible
/ without the other.
J/ Thus an active understanding, one that assimilates the word
under consideration into a new conceptual system, that of the
one striving to understand, establishes a series of complex inter
relationships, consonances and dissonances with the word and
enriches it with new elements. It is precisely such an understand
ing that the speaker counts on. Therefore his orientation toward
the listener is an orientation toward a specific conceptual hori
zon, toward the specific world of the listener; it introduces totally
new elements into his discourse; it is in this way, after all, that
various different points of view, conceptual horizons, systems
for providing expressive accents, various social "languages" come
to interact with one another. The speaker strives to get a read
I ing on his own word, and on his own conceptual system that
| determines this word, within the alien conceptual system of the
I understanding receiver; he enters into dialogical relationships
with certain aspects of this system. The speaker breaks through
the alien conceptual horizon of the listener, constructs his own
utterance on alien territory, against his, the listener's, appercep-
tive background.
This new form of internal dialogism of the word is different
from that form determined by an encounter with an alien word
within the object itself: here it is not the object that serves as the
arena for the encounter, but rather the subjective belief system of
the listener. Thus this dialogism bears a more subjective, psycho-
logical and lfrequently) random character, sometimes crassly ac-
commodating, sometimes provocatively polemical. Very often,
especially in the rhetorical forms, this orientation toward the lis-
tener and the related internal dialogism of the word may simply
overshadow the object: the strong point of any concrete listener
becomes a self-sufficient focus of attention, and one that inter-
feres with the word's creative work on its referent.

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL 1283]

Although they differ in their essentials and give rise to varying
stylistic effects in discourse, the dialogic relationship toward an
i alien word within the object and the relationship toward an alien
word in the anticipated answer of the listener can, nevertheless,
be very tightly interwoven with each other, becoming almost in
distinguishable during stylistic analysis
Thus, discourse in Tolstoy is characterized by a sharp internal
dialogism, and this discourse is moreover dialogized in the belief
system of the readerÑwhose peculiar semantic and expressive
characteristics Tolstoy acutely sensesÑas well as in the object
These two lines of dialogization {having in most cases polemicai
overtones) are tightly interwoven in his style- even in the most
"lyrical" expressions and the most "epic" descriptions, Tolstoy's
discourse harmonizes and disharmonizes {more often disharmo-
nizes) with various aspects of the heteroglot socio-verbal con-
sciousness ensnaring the object, while at the same time polem-
ically invading the reader's belief and evaluative system, striving

to stun and destroy the apperceptive background of the reader's
active understanding. In this respect Tolstoy is an heir of the
eighteenth century, especially of Rousseau. This propagandizing
impulse sometimes leads to a narrowing-down of heteroglot so-
cial consciousness lagainst which Tolstoy polemicizes) to the
consciousness of his immediate contemporary, a contemporary of
the day and not of the epoch; what follows from this is a radical
concretization of dialogization lalmost always undertaken in the
service of a polemic}. For this reason Tolstoy's dialogization, no
matter how acutely we sense it in the expressive profile of his
style, sometimes requires special historical or literary commen-
tary: we are not sure with what precisely a given tone is in har-
mony or disharmony, for this dissonance or consonance has
entered into the positive project of creating a style." lt is true
that such extreme concreteness {which approaches at time the
feuilleton) is present only in those secondary aspects, the over-
tones of internal dialogization in Tolstoy's discourse.
In those examples of the internal dialogization of discourse
that we have chosen (the internal, as contrasted with the exter-
nal, compositionally marked, dialogue} the relationship to the
alien word, to an alien utterance enters into the positing of the

II. Cf. B. M. Eichenbaum's book Lev Tolstoj, book I ILeningrad, xyx8)
which contains much relevant material; for example, an explication of the
topical context of "Family Happiness."
|2841 DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

style. Style organically contains within itself indices that reach
outside itself, a correspondence of its own elements and the ele-
ments of an alien context. The internal politics of style {how the
elements are put together} is determined by its external polities
its relationship to alien discourse). Discourse lives, as it were,
on the boundary between its own context and another, alien,
context.
In any actual dialogue the rejoinder also leads such a double
life: it is structured and conceptualized in the context of the di-
alogue as a whole, which consists of its own utterances l"own"
from the point of view of the speaker) and of alien utterances
those of the partner). One cannot excise the rejoinder from this
combined context made up of one's own words and the words of
another without losing its sense and tone. It is an organic part of a
heteroglot unity.
The phenomenon of internal dialogization, as we have said, is
present to a greater or lesser extent in all realms of the life of the
word. But if in extra-artistic prose leveryday, rhetorical, scholarly)
dialogization usually stands apart, crystallizes into a special kind
of act of its own and runs its course in ordinary dialogue or m
other, compositionally clearly marked forms for mixing and po-
lemicizing with the discourse of anotherÑthen in artistic prose,
and especially in the novel, this dialogization penetrates from
within the very way in which the word conceives its object and
its means for expressing itself, reformulating the semantics and
syntactical structure of discourse. Here dialogic inter-orientation
becomes, as it were, an event of discourse itself, animating from
within and dramatizing discourse in all its aspects.
In the majority of poetic genres lpoetic in the narrow sense), as
we have said, the internal dialogization of discourse is not put to
artistic use, it does not enter into the work's "aesthetic object,"
and is artificially extinguished in poetic discourse. In the novel,
however, this internal dialogization becomes one of the most fun-
damental aspects of prose style and undergoes a specific artistic
elaboration.
But internal dialogization can become such a crucial force for
creating form only where individual differences and contradic
tions are enriched by social heteroglossia, where dialogic rever
berations do not sound in the semantic heights of discourse las

happens in the rhetorical genres) but penetrate the deep strata of
discourse, dialogize language itself and the world view a particu

)

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL |285|

lar language has {the internal form of discourselÑwhere the di-
alogue of voices arises directly out of a social dialogue of "lan
g guages," where an alien utterance begins to sound like a socially
alien language, where the orientation of the word among alien
utterances changes into an orientation of a word among socially
alien languages within the boundaries of one and the same na-
tional language.

In genres that are poetic in the narrow sense, the natural dialo-
gization of the word is not put to artistic use, the word is suffi-
cient unto itself and does not presume alien utterances beyond its
| own boundaries. Poetic style is by convention suspended from
| any mutual interaction with alien discourse, any allusion to alien
discourse.
Any way whatever of alluding to alien languages, to the pos-
sibility of another vocabulary, another semantics, other syntactic
t forms and so forth, to the possibility of other linguistic points of
4 view, is equally foreign to poetic style. It follows that any sense of
| the boundedness, the historicity, the social determination and
specificity of one's own language is alien to poetic style, and
therefore a critical qualified relationship to one's own language
las merely one of many languages in a heteroglot world) is foreign
I to poetic styleÑas is a related phenomenon, the incomplete com-
1 mitment of oneself, of one's full meaning, to a given language.
i Of course this relationship and the relationship to his own lan
fl guage lin greater or lesser degree) could never be foreign to a his
, torically existent poet, as a human being surrounded by living
hetero- and polyglossia; but this relationship could not find a
place in the poetic style of his work without destroying that
7 style, without transposing it into a prosaic key and in the process
turning the poet into a writer of prose.
In poetic genres, artistic consciousnessÑunderstood as a unity
of all the author's semantic and expressive intentionsÑfully real-
izes itself within its own language; in them alone is such con-
sciousness fully immanent, expressing itself in it directly and
without mediation, without conditions and without distance.
The language of the poet is his language, he is utterly immersed
in it, inseparable from it, he makes use of each form, each word,
each expression according to its unmediated power to assign
meaning las it were, "without quotation marks"), that is, as a
pure and direct expression of his own intention. No matter what

13861 DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

"agonies of the word" the poet endured in the process of creation,
in the finished work language is an obedient organ, fully adequate
to the author's intention.
The language in a poetic work realizes itself as something j
about which there can be no doubt, something that cannot be
disputed, something all-encompassing. Everything that the poet
sees, understands and thinks, he does through the eyes of a given
language, in its inner forms, and there is nothing that might re
quire, for its expression, the help of any other or alien language.
The language of the poetic genre is a unitary and singular Ptol
emaic world outside of which nothing else exists and nothing
else is needed. The concept of many worlds of language, all equal
in their ability to conceptualize and to be expressive, is organical
ly denied to poetic style.
The world of poetry, no matter how many contradictions and
insoluble conflicts the poet develops within it, is always il-
lumined by one unitary and indisputable discourse. Contradic-
tions, conflicts and doubts remain in the object, in thoughts, in
living experiencesÑin short, in the subject matterÑbut they do
not enter into the language itself. In poetry, even discourse about
doubts must be cast in a discourse that cannot be doubted.
To take responsibility for the language of the work as a whole
at all of its points as its language, to assume a full solidarity with
each of the work's aspects, tones, nuancesÑsuch is the funda-
mental prerequisite for poetic style; style so conceived is fully ad-
equate to a single language and a single linguistic consciousness.
The poet is not able to oppose his own poetic consciousness, his
own intentions to the language that he uses, for he is completely
within it and therefore cannot turn it into an object to be per-
ceived, reflected upon or related to. Language is present to him
only from inside, in the work it does to effect its intention, and
not from outside, in its objective specificity and boundedness.
Within the limits of poetic style, direct unconditional inten-
tionality, language at its full weight and the objective display of
language (as a socially and historically limited linguistic reality}
are all simultaneous, but incompatible. The unity and singularity
of language are the indispensable prerequisites for a realization of
the direct Ibut not objectively typifying) intentional individuality
of poetic style and of its monologic steadfastness.
This does not mean, of course, that heteroglossia or even a for-
eign language is completely shut out of a poetic work. To be sure,

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL [287|

such possibilities are limited: a certain latitude for heteroglossia
exists only in the "low" poetic genresÑin the satiric and comic
genres and others. Nevertheless, heteroglossia lother socio-ideo-
logical languagesl can be introduced into purely poetic genres,
primarily in the speeches of characters. But in such a context it is
objective. It appears, in essence, as a thing, it does not lie on the
| same plane with the real language of the work: it is the depicted
gesture of one of the characters and does not appear as an aspect
of the word doing the depicting. Elements of heteroglossia enter
here not in the capacity of another language carrying its own par-
ticular points of view, about which one can say things not ex
j pressible in one's own language, but rather in the capacity of a
| depicted thing. Even when speaking of alien things, the poet
speaks in his own language. To shed light on an alien world, he
never resorts to an alien language, even though it might in fact be
more adequate to that world. Whereas the writer of prose, by con
| trastÑas we shall seeÑattempts to talk about even his own
! world in an alien language lfor example, in the nonliterary lan-
guage of the teller of tales, or the representative of a specific so-
cio-ideological group}; he often measures his own world by alien

linguistic standards.
i As a consequence of the prerequisites mentioned above, the
i language of poetic genres, when they approach their stylistic
1 limit,'2 often becomes authoritarian, dogmatic and conservative,
1! sealing itself off from the influence of extraliterary social dialects.
Therefore such ideas as a special "poetic language," a "language
X of the gods," a "priestly language of poetry" and so forth could
flourish on poetic soil. It is noteworthy that the poet, should he
not accept the given literary language, will sooner resort to the
artificial creation of a new language specifically for poetry than
he will to the exploitation of actual available social dialects. So
, cial languages are filled with specific objects, typical, socially lo-
calized and limited, while the artificially created language of po-
etry must be a directly intentional language, unitary and singular.
Thus, when Russian prose writers at the beginning of the twen

I1, It goes without saying that we continually advance as typical the ex-
treme to which poetic genres aspire; in concrete examples of poetic works it
Is possible to find features fundamental to prose, and numerous hybrids of
various generic types exist. These are especially widespread in periods of shift
l in literary poetic languages.
|288| DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL 1

tieth century began to show a profound interest in dialects and
skaz, the Symbolists lBal'mont, V. Ivanov} and later the Futunsts
dreamed of creating a special "language of poetry," and even made
experiments directed toward creating such a language {those of
V. Khlebnikov).
The idea of a special unitary and singular language of poetry is !
a typical utopian philosopheme of poetic discourse: it is grounded |
in the actual conditions and demands of poetic style, which IS al- I
ways a style adequately serviced by one directly intentional lan- |
guage from whose point of view other languages lconversational, |
business and prose languages, among others} are perceived as ob; ]
jects that are in no way its equal. '3 The idea of a '{poetlc language I
is yet another expression of that same Ptolemaic conception of {
the linguistic and stylistic world.

LanguageÑlike the living concrete environment in which the
consciousness of the verbal artist livesÑis never unitary. It is
unitary only as an abstract grammatical system of normative
forms, taken in isolation from the concrete, ideological con-
ceptualizations that fill it, and in isolation from the uninter-
rupted process of historical becoming that is a characteristic of all
living language. Actual social life and historical becoming create
within an abstractly unitary national language a multitude of
concrete worlds, a multitude of bounded verbal-ideological and
social belief systems; within these various systems lidentical in
the abstract} are elements of language filled with various seman-
tic and axiological content and each with its own different sound.
Literary languageÑboth spoken and writtenÑalthough It IS
unitary not only in its shared, abstract, linguistic markers but
also in its forms for conceptualizing these abstract markers, is it-
self stratified and heteroglot in its aspect as an expressive system,
that is, in the forms that carry its meanings.
This stratification is accomplished first of all by the specific or-
ganisms called genres. Certain features of language llexicological,
semantic, syntactic} will knit together with the intentional aim,
and with the overall accentual system inherent in one or another
genre: oratorical, publicistic, newspaper and journalistic genres,
the genres of low literature {penny dreadfuls, for instance) or, fi

13. Such was the point of view taken by Latin toward national languages
in the Middle Ages.

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL 1289]

nally, the various genres of high literature. Certain features of lan-
guage take on the specific flavor of a given genre: they knit to-
gether with specific points of view, specific approaches, forms of
thinking, nuances and accents characteristic of the given genre.
In addition, there is interwoven with this generic stratification
of language a professional stratification of language, in the broad
sense of the term "professional": the language of the lawyer, the
doctor, the businessman, the politician, the public education
teacher and so forth, and these sometimes coincide with, and
sometimes depart from, the stratification into genres. It goes
without saying that these languages differ from each other not
only in their vocabularies; they involve specific forms for man-
if esting intentions, forms for making conceptualization and eval-
u ation concrete. And even the very language of the writer Ithe
poet or novelistl can be taken as a professional jargon on a par
with professional jargons.
What is important to us here is the intentional dimensions,
that is, the denotative and expressive dimension of the "shared"
language's stratification. It is in fact not the neutral linguistic
components of language being stratified and differentiated, but
rather a situation in which the intentional possibilities of lan-
guage are being expropriated: these possibilities are realized in
specific directions, filled with specific content, they are made
concrete, particular, and are permeated with concrete value judg-
ments; they knit together with specific objects and with the be-
ief systems of certain genres of expression and points of view pe-
culiar to particular professions. Within these points of view, that
is, for the speakers of the language themselves, these generic lan-
guages and professional jargons are directly intentionalÑthey
denote and express directly and fully, and are capable of express-
lng themselves without mediation; but outside, that is, for those
not participating in the given purview, these languages may be
treated as objects, as typifactions, as local color. For such out-
siders, the intentions permeating these languages become things,
limited in their meaning and expression; they attract to, or excise
from, such language a particular wordÑmaking it difficult for the
word to be utilized in a directly intentional way, without any
qualifications.
But the situation is far from exhausted by the generic and pro-
fessional stratification of the common literary language. Al-
though at its very core literary language is frequently socially ho

)

|39o] DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

mogeneous, as the oral and written language of a dominant social
group, there is nevertheless always present, even here, a certain
degree of social differentiation, a social stratification, that in
other eras can become extremely acute. Social stratification may
here and there coincide with generic and professional stratifica-
tion, but in essence it is, of course, a thing completely autono-
mous and peculiar to itself.
Social stratification is also and primarily determined by dif-
ferences between the forms used to convey meaning and between
the expressive planes of various belief systemsÑthat is, strat-
ification expresses itself in typical differences in ways used to
conceptualize and accentuate elements of language, and strat-
ification may not violate the abstractly linguistic dialectological
unity of the shared literary language.
What is more, all socially significant world views have the ca-
pacity to exploit the intentional possibilities of language through
the medium of their specific concrete instancing. Various tenden-
cies lartistic and otherwise}, circles, journals, particular news-
papers, even particulu significant artistic works and individual
persons are all capable of stratifying language, in proportion to
their social significance; they are capable of attracting its words
and forms into their orbit by means of their own characteristic
intentions and accents, and in so doing to a certain extent alienat-
ing these words and forms from other tendencies, parties, artistic
works and persons.
Every socially significant verbal performance has the abilityÑ
sometimes for a long period of time, and for a wide circle of per-
sonsÑto infect with its own intention certain aspects of language
that had been affected by its semantic and expressive impulse,
imposing on them specific semantic nuances and specific ax-
iological overtones; thus, it can create slogan-words, curse-words,
praise-words and so forth.
In any given historical moment of verbal-ideological life, each
generation at each social level has its own language; moreover,
every age group has as a matter of fact its own language, its own
vocabulary, its own particular accentual system that, in their
turn, vary depending on social level, academic institution lthe
language of the cadet, the high school student, the trade school
student are all different languages) and other stratifying factors.
All this is brought about by socially typifying languages, no mat
ter how narrow the social circle in which they are spoken. It IS

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL 129II

even possible to have a family jargon define the societal limits of
a language, as, for instance, the jargon of the Irtenevs in Tolstoy,
with its special vocabulary and unique accentual system.
And finally, at any given moment, languages of various epochs
and periods of socio-ideological life cohabit with one another.
I Even languages of the day exist: one could say that today's and
yesterday's socio-ideological and political "day" do not, in a cer-
tain sense, share the same language; every day represents another
socio-ideological semantic "state of affairs," another vocabulary,
| another accentual system, with its own slogans, its own ways of
assigning blame and praise. Poetry depersonalizes "days" in lan-
guage, while prose, as we shall see, often deliberately intensifies
difference between them, gives them embodied representation
and dialogically opposes them to one another in unresolvable
dialogues.
Thus at any given moment of its historical existence, language
is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of
socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the
past, between differing epochs of the past, between different
socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies,

schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form. These "lan-
guages" of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways
forming new socially typifying "languages."
Each of these "languages" of heteroglossia requires a methodol
t ogy very different from the others; each is grounded in a com-
pletely different principle for marking differences and for estab-
lishing units {for some this principle is functional, in others it is
the principle of theme and content, in yet others it is, properly
speaking, a socio-dialectological principle). Therefore languages
do not exclude each other, but rather intersect with each other in
many different ways {the Ukrainian language, the language of the
epic poem, of early Symbolism, of the student, of a particular gen-
eration of children, of the run-of-the-mill intellectual, of the
Nietzschean and so on). It might even seem that the very word
"language" loses all meaning in this processÑfor apparently
there is no single plane on which all these "languages" might be
juxtaposed to one another.
In actual fact, however, there does exist a common plane that
f methodologically justifies our juxtaposing them: all languages of
heteroglossia, whatever the principle underlying them and mak
[ ing each unique, are specific points of view on the world, forms
11921 DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views,
each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values. As
such they all may be juxtaposed to one another, mutually supple-
ment one another, contradict one another and be interrelated di-
alogically. As such they encounter one another and co-exist in the
consciousness of real peopleÑfirst and foremost, in the creative S
consciousness of people who write novels. As such, these lan-
guages live a real life, they struggle and evolve in an environment
of social heteroglossia. Therefore they are all able to enter mto
the unitary plane of the novel, which can unite in itself parodic
stylizations of generic languages, various forms of stylizations
and illustrations of professional and period-bound languages, the
languages of particular generations, of social dialects and others
as occurs, for example, in the English comic novel). They may all
be drawn in by the novelist for the orchestration of his themes
and for the refracted lindirect) expression of his intentions and
values.
This is why we constantly put forward the referential and ex-
pressiveÑthat is, intentionalÑfactors as the force that stratifies
and differentiates the common literary language, and not the lm-
guistic markers llexical coloration, semantic overtones, etc.) of
generic languages, professional jargons and so forthÑmarkers
that are, so to speak, the sclerotic deposits of an intentional pro-
cess, signs left behind on the path of the real living project of an
intention, of the particular way it imparts meaning to general lin-
guistic norms. These external markers, linguistically observable
and fixable, cannot in themselves be understood or studied with-
out understanding the specific conceptualization they have been
given by an intention.
Discourse lives, as it were, beyond itself, in a living impulse
Inapravlennost'l toward the object; if we detach ourselves com-
pletely from this impulse all we have left is the naked corpse of
the word, from which we can learn nothing at all about the social
situation or the fate of a given word in life. To study the word as
such, ignoring the impulse that reaches out beyond it, is just as
senseless as to study psychological experience outside the con-
text of that real life toward which it was directed and by which it
is determined.
By stressing the intentional dimension of stratification in liter-
ary language, we are able, as has been said, to locate in a single
series such methodologically heterogeneous phenomena as pro

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL 12931

fessional and social dialects, world views and individual artistic
works, for in their intentional dimension one finds that common
plane on which they can all be juxtaposed, and juxtaposed di-
alogically. The whole matter consists in the fact that there may
be, between "languages," highly specific dialogic relations; no
matter how these languages are conceived, they may all be taken
as particular points of view on the world. However varied the so-
cial forces doing the work of stratificationÑa profession, a genre,
a particular tendency, an individual personalityÑthe work itself
everywhere comes down to the (relatively) protracted and socially
meaningful Icollective) saturation of language with specific land
consequently limiting} intentions and accents. The longer this
stratifying saturation goes on, the broader the social circle en-
compassed by it and consequently the more substantial the social
force bringing about such a stratification of language, then the
more sharply focused and stable will be those traces, the linguis-
tic changes in the language markers llinguistic symbols), that are
left behind in language as a result of this social force's activityÑ
from stable land consequently sociall semantic nuances to au-
thentic dialectological markers Iphonetic, morphological and
others), which permit us to speak of particular social dialects.
As a result of the work done by all these stratifying forces in
language, there are no "neutral" words and formsÑwords and
forms that can belong to "no one"; language has been completely i
taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any in- I
dividual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract j
system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot con- i
ception of the world. All words have the "taste" of a profession, a I
genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a I
generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of I
the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged ]
life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. Contextual
overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in
the word. ~
As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opin-
ion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the bor-
derline between oneself and the other. The word in language is
half someone else's. It becomes "one's own" only when the
speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent,
when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic
and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation,

)

1194] DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

F the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language lit is
not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!),
but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's
contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that
one must take the word, and make it one's own. And not all
words for just anyone submit equally easily to this appropriation,
to this seizure and transformation into private property: many
words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the
mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks
them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of
it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the
will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes
freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's inten-
tions; it is populatedÑoverpopulatedÑwith the intentions of
others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own inten
W tions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.
L We have so far proceeded on the assumption of the abstract-lin-
guistic Idialectologicall unity of literary language. But even a lit-
erary language is anything but a closed dialect. Within the scope
of literary language itself there is already a more or less sharply
defined boundary between everyday-conversational language and
written language. Distinctions between genres frequently coin-
cide with dialectological distinctions (for example, the highÑ
Church SlavonicÑand the lowÑconversationalÑgenres of the
eighteenth century); finally, certain dialects may be legitimized
in literature and thus to a certain extent be appropriated by liter-
ary language.
As they enter literature and are appropriated to literary lan-
guage, dialects in this new context lose, of course, the quality of
closed socio-linguistic systems; they are deformed and in fact
cease to be that which they had been simply as dialects. On the
other hand, these dialects, on entering the literary language and
preserving within it their own dialectological elasticity, their
other-languagedness, have the effect of deforming the literary
language; it, too, ceases to be that which it had been, a closed so-
cio-linguistic system. Literary language is a highly distinctive
phenomenon, as is the linguistic consciousness of the educated
person who is its agent; within it, intentional diversity of speech
raznorecivost'] {which is present in every living dialect as a
closed system) is transformed into diversity of language {razno
jazyciel; what results is not a single language but a dialogue of
languages.

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL 1295]

The national literary language of a people with a highly devel-
oped art of prose, especially if it is novelistic prose with a rich and
tension-filled verbal-ideological history, is in fact an organized
microcosm that reflects the macrocosm not only of national het-
eroglossia, but of European heteroglossia as well. The unity of a
literary language is not a unity of a single, closed language sys-
tem, but is rather a highly specific unity of several "languages"
that have established contact and mutual recognition with each
other Imerely one of which is poetic language in the narrow
sensel. Precisely this constitutes the peculiar nature of the meth-
odological problem in literary language.
Concrete socio-ideological language consciousness, as it be-
comes creativeÑthat is, as it becomes active as literatureÑdis-

covers itself already surrounded by heteroglossia and not at all a
single, unitary language, inviolable and indisputable. The ac-
tively literary linguistic consciousness at all times and every-
where (that is, in all epochs of literature historically available to
us) comes upon "languages," and not language. Consciousness
finds itself inevitably facing the necessity of having to choose a
language With each literary-verbal performance, consciousness
must actively orient itself amidst heteroglossia, it must move in
and occupy a position for itself within it, it chooses, in other
words, a "language." Only by remaining in a closed environment,
one without writing or thought, completely off the maps of socio-
ideological becoming, could a man fail to sense this activity of
selecting a language and rest assured in the inviolability of his
own language, the conviction that his language is predetermined.
Even such a man, however, deals not in fact with a single lan-
guage, but with languagesÑexcept that the place occupied by
each of these languages is fixed and indisputable, the movement
rom one to the other is predetermined and not a thought process;
it is as if these languages were in different chambers. They do not
collide with each other in his consciousness, there is no attempt
to coordinate them, to look at one of these languages through the
eyes of another language.
Thus an illiterate peasant, miles away from any urban center
naively immersed in an unmoving and for him unshakable every-
day world, nevertheless lived in several language systems: he
prayed to God in one language (Church Slavonic), sang songs in
another, spoke to his family in a third and, when he began to dic-
tate petitions to the local authorities through a scribe, he tried
1296] DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

speaking yet a fourth language {the official-literate language, "pa-
per" language}. All these are different languages, even from the
point of view of abstract socio-dialectological markers. But these
languages were not dialogically coordinated in the linguistic con-
sciousness of the peasant; he passed from one to the other wlth-
out thinking, automatically: each was indisputably in its own
place, and the place of each was indisputable. He was not yet able
to regard one language land the verbal world corresponding to it)
through the eyes of another language lthat is, the language of ev-
eryday life and the everyday world with the language of prayer or
song, or vice versa).
As soon as a critical interanimation of languages began to occur
in the consciousness of our peasant, as soon as it became clear
that these were not only various different languages but even in-
ternally variegated languages, that the ideological systems and :
approaches to the world that were indissolubly connected with
these languages contradicted each other and in no way could live
in peace and quiet with one anotherÑthen the inviolability and 0
predetermined quality of these languages came to an end, and the :
necessity of actively choosing one's orientation among them
began.
The language and world of prayer, the language and world of
song, the language and world of labor and everyday life, the spe-
cific language and world of local authorities, the new language
and world of the workers freshly immigrated to the cityÑall :
these languages and worlds sooner or later emerged from a state
of peaceful and moribund equilibrium and revealed the speech di-
versity in each.
Of course the actively literary linguistic consciousness comes
upon an even more varied and profound heteroglossia within ht-
erary language itself, as well as outside it. Any fundamental study
of the stylistic life of the word must begin with this basic fact.
The nature of the heteroglossia encountered and the means by
which one orients oneself in it determine the concrete stylistic
life that the word will lead.
r The poet is a poet insofar as he accepts the idea of a unitary and

\ singular language and a unitary, monologically sealed-off utter-
Snce. These ideas are immanent in the poetic genres with whic

14. We are of course deliberately simplifying: the real-life peasant could
and did do this to a certain extent.

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL 1297]

he works. In a condition of actual contradiction, these are what
determine the means of orientation open to the poet. The poet
must assume a complete single-personed hegemony over his own
language, he must assume equal responsibility for each one of its
aspects and subordinate them to his own, and only his own, in-
tentions. Each word must express the poet's meaning directly
and without mediation; there must be no distance between the
poet and his word. The meaning must emerge from language as a
single intentional whole: none of its stratification, its speech di-
versity, to say nothing of its language diversity, may be reflected
m any fundamental way in his poetic work.
To achieve this, the poet strips the word of others' intentions
he uses only such words and forms land only in such a way} that
they lose their link with concrete intentional levels of language
and their connection with specific contexts. Behind the words of
a poetic work one should not sense any typical or reified images 2
of genres lexcept for the given poetic genre), nor professions, ten- I
dencies, directions lexcept the direction chosen by the poet him- 2
self), nor world views lexcept for the unitary and singular worldS
vlew of the poet himself1, nor typical and individual images of
speaking persons, their speech mannerisms or typical intona-
tlons. Everything that enters the work must immerse itself in
Lethe, and forget its previous life in any other contexts: language
may remember only its life in poetic contexts (in such contexts
however, even concrete reminiscences are possible). _
Of course there always exists a limited sphere of more or less
concrete contexts, and a connection with them must be deliber-
ately evidenced in poetic discourse. But these contexts are purely
semantic and, so to speak, accented in the abstract; in their lin-
guistic dimension they are impersonal or at least no particularly
concrete linguistic specificity is sensed behind them, no particu-
lar manner of speech and so forth, no socially typical linguistic
face Ithe possible personality of the narrator) need peek out from
behind them. Everywhere there is only one faceÑthe linguistic
face of the author, answering for every word as if it were his own.
No matter how multiple and varied these semantic and accentual
threads, associations, pointers, hints, correlations that emerge
from every poetic word, one language, one conceptual horizon, is
sufficient to them all; there is no need of heteroglot social con-
texts. What is more, the very movement of the poetic symbol If or
example, the unfolding of a metaphor} presumes precisely this

)

13981 DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

", I

. .
; t;
~ l
!
~1
, . . .

!!#
,

unity of language, an unmediated correspondence with its object.
Social diversity of speech, were it to arise in the work and stratify
its language, would make impossible both the normal develop-
ment and the activity of symbols within it.
The very rhythm of poetic genres does not promote any appre-
ciable degree of stratiflcation. Rhythm, by creating an unmedi-
ated involvement between every aspect of the accentual system
of the whole {via the most immediate rhythmic unities}, destroys
in embryo those social worlds of speech and of persons that are
potentially embedded in the word: in any case, rhythm puts defl-
nite limits on them, does not let them unfold or materialize.
Rhythm serves to strengthen and concentrate even further the
unity and hermetic quality of the surface of poetic style, and of
the unitary language that this style posits.
As a result of this workÑstripping all aspects of language of
the intentions and accents of other people, destroying all traces of
social heteroglossia and diversity of languageÑa tension-fllled
unity of language is achieved in the poetic work. This unity may
be naive, and present only in those extremely rare epochs of po-
etry, when poetry had not yet exceeded the limits of a closed, uni-
tary, undifferentiated social circle whose language and ideology
were not yet stratifled. More often than not, we experience a pro-
found and conscious tension through which the unitary poetic
language of a work rises from the heteroglot and language-diverse
~ chaos of the literary language contemporary to it.
This is how the poet proceeds. The novelist working in prose
land almost any prose writer} takes a completely different path.
He welcomes the heteroglossia and language diversity of the lit-
erary and extraliterary language into his own work not only not
weakening them but even intensifying them (for he interacts
with their particular self-consciousness}. It is in fact out of this
stratification of language, its speech diversity and even language
diversity, that he constructs his style, while at the same time he
maintains the unity of his own creative personality and the unity
although it is, to be sure, unity of another order} of his own style.
The prose writer does not purge words of intentions and tones
that are alien to him, he does not destroy the seeds of social het-
eroglossia embedded in words, he does not eliminate those lan
\ guage characterizations and speech mannerisms Ipotential narra
\ tor-personalitiesl glimmering behind the words and forms, each
\ at a different distance from the ultimate semantic nucleus of his
I work, that is, the center of his own personal intentions.

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL 1299]

The language of the prose writer deploys itself according to de- l
grees of greater or lesser proximity to the author and to his ulti-
mate semantic instantiation: certain aspects of language directly
and unmediatedly express las in poetry) the semantic and expres-

sive intentions of the author, others refract these intentions; the
writer of prose does not meld completely with any of these words,
but rather accents each of them in a particular wayÑhumorously
ironically, parodically and so forth; '5 yet another group may stand
even further from the author's ultimate semantic instantiation, l
still more thoroughly refracting his intentions; and there are, fi
nally, those words that are completely denied any authorial inten
tions: the author does not express himself in them las the author
of the wordlÑrather, he exhibits them as a unique speech-thing,
they function for him as something completely reified. Therefore
the stratification of languageÑgeneric, professional, social in the
narrow sense, that of particular world views, particular tenden
cies, particular individuals, the social speech diversity and lan
0 guage-diversity {dialects} of languageÑupon entering the novel
establishs its own special order within it, and becomes a unique
artistic system, which orchestrates the intentional theme of the
; author.
i Thus a prose writer can distance himself from the language of
his own work, while at the same time distancing himself, in vary
ing degrees, from the different layers and aspects of the work. He
can make use of language without wholly giving himself up to it,
he may treat it as semi-alien or completely alien to himself, while
compelling language ultimately to serve all his own intentions
The author does not speak in a given language (from which he
distances himself to a greater or lesser degree}, but he speaks,
as it were, through language, a language that has somehow
more or less materialized, become objectivized, that he merely
ventriloquates .
The prose writer as a novelist does not strip away the inten-)
tions of others from the heteroglot language of his works, he does
not violate those socio-ideological cultural horizons {big and lit-
tle worlds} that open up behind heteroglot languagesÑrather, he
welcomes them into his work. The prose writer makes use of

15. That is to say, the words are not his if we understand them as direct
words, but they are his as things that are being transmitted ironically, ex-
hibited and so forth, that is, as words that are understood from the distances
appropriate to humor, irony, parody, etc.

1300| DISC O URSE IN THE N OVEL

words that are already populated with the social intentions of
others and compels them to serve his own new intentions, to :
serve a second master. Therefore the intentions of the prose
writer are refracted, and refracted at different angles, depending
on the degree to which the refracted, heteroglot languages he
deals with are socio-ideologically alien, already embodied and al
ready objectivized.
The orientation of the word amid the utterances and languages
of others, and all the specific phenomena connected with this ori-
entation, takes on artistic significance in novel style. Diversity of
voices and heteroglossia enter the novel and organize themselves
within it into a structured artistic system. This constitutes the
distinguishing feature of the novel as a genre.
Any stylistics capable of dealing with the distinctiveness of the
novel as a genre must be a sociological stylistics. The internal so-
cial dialogism of novelistic discourse requires the concrete social
context of discourse to be exposed, to be revealed as the force that
determines its entire stylistic structure, its "form" and its "con-
tent," determining it not from without, but from within; for
indeed, social dialogue reverberates in all aspects of discourse,
in those relating to "content" as well as the "formal" aspects
themselves.
The development of the novel is a function of the deepening of
dialogic essence, its increased scope and greater precision. Fewer
and fewer neutral, hard elements l"rock bottom truths''l remain
that are not drawn into dialogue. Dialogue moves into the deep-
est molecular and, ultimately, subatomic levels.
Of course, even the poetic word is social, but poetic forms re-
flect lengthier social processes, i.e., those tendencies in social life
requiring centuries to unfold. The novelistic word, however, reg-
isters with extreme subtlety the tiniest shifts and oscillations of
the social atmosphere; it does so, moreover, while registering it
r ab a whole, in all of its aspects.
When heteroglossia enters the novel it becomes subject to an
artistic reworking. The social and historical voices populating
language, all its words and all its forms, which provide language
with its particular concrete conceptualizations, are organized in
the novel into a structured stylistic system that expresses the dif
ferentiated socio-ideological position of the author amid the het-
\_ eroglossia of his epoch.

DISCO URSE IN THE N OVEL 13¡I1
Heteroglossia in the Novel

The compositional forms for appropriating and organizing hetero
glossia in the novel, worked out during the long course of the
I genre's historical development, are extremely heterogeneous in
their variety of generic types. Each such compositional form is
connected with particular stylistic possibilities, and demands
particular forms for the artistic treatment of the heteroglot "lan
guages" introduced into it. We will pause here only on the most
basic forms that are typical for the majority of novel types.
The so-called comic novel makes available a form for appropri
ating and organizing heteroglossia that is both externally very
vivid and at the same time historically profound: its classic repre
sentatives in England were Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Dickens,
Thackeray and others, and in Germany Hippel and lean Paul.
In the English comic novel we find a comic-parodic re-process
ing of almost all the levels of literary language, both conversa
tional and written, that were current at the time. Almost every
novel we mentioned above as being a classic representative of this
generic type is an encyclopedia of all strata and forms of literary

language: depending on the subject being represented, the story
line parodically reproduces first the forms of parliamentary elo
quence, then the eloquence of the court, or particular forms of
parliamentary protocol, or court protocol, or forms used by re
porters in newspaper articles, or the dry business language of the
City, or the dealings of speculators, or the pedantic speech of
scholars, or the high epic style, or Biblical style, or the style of the
hypocritical moral sermon or finally the way one or another con
crete and socially determined personality, the subject of the story,
l happens to speak.
t This usually parodic stylization of generic, professional and
| other strata of language is sometimes interrupted by the direct
| authorial word (usually as an expression of pathos, of Sentimental
or idyllic sensibility), which directly embodies Iwithout any re
fractingl semantic and axiological intentions of the author. But
the primary source of language usage in the comic novel is a
highly specific treatment of "common language." This "common
language9'Ñusually the average norm of spoken and written lan
guage for a given social groupÑis taken by the author precisely as
the common view, as the verbal approach to people and things
normal for a given sphere of society, as the going point of view

1
1302| DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

and the going value. To one degree or another, the author dis-
tances himself from this common language, he steps back and
objectifies it, forcing his own intentions to refract and diffuse
themselves through the medium of this common view that has
become embodied in language la view that is always superficial
and frequently hypocritical).
The relationship of the author to a language conceived as the
common view is not staticÑit is always found in a state of move-
ment and oscillation that is more or less alive lthis sometimes is a
rhythmic oscillation}: the author exaggerates, now strongly, now
weakly, one or another aspect of the "common language," some-
times abruptly exposing its inadequacy to its object and some-
times, on the contrary, becoming one with it, maintaining an al-
most imperceptible distance, sometimes even directly forcing it
to reverberate with his own "truth," which occurs when the au-
thor completely merges his own voice with the common view. As
a consequence of such a merger, the aspects of common language,
which in the given situation had been parodically exaggerated or
had been treated as mere things, undergo change. The comic style
demands of the author a lively to-and-fro movement in his rela-
tion to language, it demands a continual shifting of the distance
between author and language, so that first some, then other as-
pects of language are thrown into relief. If such were not the case,
the style would be monotonous or would require a greater indi-
vidualization of the narratorÑwould, in any case, require a quite
different means for introducing and organizing heteroglossla.
Against this same backdrop of the "common language," of the
impersonal, going opinion, one can also isolate in the comic
novel those parodic stylizations of generic, professional and other
languages we have mentioned, as well as compact masses of
direct authorial discourseÑpathos-filled, moral-didactic, senti-
mental-elegiac or idyllic. In the comic novel the direct authorial
word is thus realized in direct, unqualified stylizations of poetic
genres (idyllic, elegiac, etc.) or stylizations of rhetorical genres
the pathetic, the moral-didactic}. Shifts from common language
to parodying of generic and other languages and shifts to the di-
rect authorial word may be gradual, or may be on the contrary
quite abrupt. Thus does the system of language work in the
comic novel.

We will pause for analysis on several examples from Dickens,
from his novel Little Dorrit.

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL 1303|

II I The conference was held at four or five o'clock in the afternoon, when
all the region of Harley Street, Cavendish Square, was resonant of car-
riage-wheels and double-knocks. It had reached this point when Mr.
Merdle came home from his daily occupation of causing the British
name to be more and more respected in all parts of the civilized
globe capable of appreciation of wholewide commercial enterprise
and gigantic combinations of skill and capital. For, though nobody
knew with the least precision what Mr. MerdleSs business was, except
that it was to coin money, these were the terms in which everybody
defined it on all ceremonious occasions, and which it was the last
new polite reading of the parable of the camel and the needle's eye to
accept without inquiry. [book I, ch 331

The italicized portion represents a parodic stylization of the
language of ceremonial speeches lin parliaments and at ban-
quets}. The shift into this style is prepared for by the sentence's
construction, which from the very beginning is kept within
bounds by a somewhat ceremonious epic tone. Further onÑand
already in the language of the author land consequently in a dif-
ferent style}Ñthe parodic meaning of the ceremoniousness of
lvlerale s labors becomes apparent: such a characterization turns
out to be "another's speech," to be taken only in quotation marks
l"these were the terms in which everybody defined it on all cere-
monious occasions ''l .
Thus the speech of another is introduced into the author's dis-
course (the story) in concealed form, that is, without any of the
formal markers usually accompanying such speech, whether di-
rect or indirect. But this is not just another's speech in the same
"language"Ñit is another's utterance in a language that is itself
'other" to the author as well, in the archaicized language of or-
atorical genres associated with hypocritical official celebrations.

(21 In a day or two it was announced to all the town, that Edmund Spark-
ler, Esquire, son-in-law of the eminent Mr. Merdle of worldwide re-
nown, was made one of the Lords of the Circumlocution Office, and
proclamation was issued, to all true believers, that this admirable ap-
pointment was to be hailed as a graceful and gracious mark of
homage, rendered by the graceful and gracious Decimus, to that
commercial interest which must ever in a great commercial coun-
tryÑand all the rest of it, with blast of trumpet. So, bolstered by this
mark of Government homage, the wonderful Bank and all the other
wonderful undertakings went on and went up, and gapers came to
Harley Street, Cavendish Square, only to look at the house where the
golden wonder lived. lbook 2, ch. Itl

1304| DISCO URSE IN THE N OVEL

Here, in the italicized portion, another's speech in another's
official-ceremonial} language is openly introduced as indirect
discourse. But it is surrounded by the hidden, diffused speech of
another lin the same official-ceremonial language1 that clears the
way for the introduction of a form more easily perceived as an-
other's speech and that can reverberate more fully as such. The
clearing of the way comes with the word "Esquire," characteristic
of official speech, added to Sparkler's name; the final confir-
mation that this is another's speech comes with the epithet
"wonderful." This epithet does not of course belong to the author
but to that same "general opinion" that had created the commo-
tion around Merdle's inflated enterprises.

l3) It was a dinner to provoke an appetite, though he had not had one.
The rarest dishes, sumptuously cooked and sumptuously served; the
choicest fruits, the most exquisite wines; marvels of workmanship m
gold and silver, china and glass; innumerable things delicious to the
senses of taste, smell, and sight, were insinuated into its composl
tion. O, what a wonderful man this Merdle, what a great man, what
a master man, how blessedly and enviably endowedÑin one word,
what a rich man! Ibook a, ch. Ial

The beginning is a parodic stylization of high epic style. What
follows is an enthusiastic glorification of Merdle, a chorus of his
admirers in the form of the concealed speech of another ithe ital-
icized portionl. The whole point here is to expose the real basis
for such glorification, which is to unmask the chorus' hypocrisy:
"wonderful," "great," "master," "endowed" can all be replaced by
the single word "rich." This act of authorial unmasking, which is
openly accomplished within the boundaries of a single simple
sentence, merges with the unmasking of another's speech. The
ceremonial emphasis on glorification is complicated by a second
emphasis that is indignant, ironic, and this is the one that ul-
timately predominates in the final unmasking words of the
sentence.
We have before us a typical double-accented, double-styled
hybrid construction.
What we are calling a hybrid construction is an utterance that
belongs, by its grammatical Isyntactic} and compositional mark-
ers, to a single speaker, but that actually contains mixed within
it two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two "lan-
guages,'~ two semantic and axiological belief systems. We repeat,

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL 13051

there is no formalÑcompositional and syntacticÑboundary be
tween these utterances, styles, languages, belief systems; the di
vision of volces and languages takes place within the limits of a
; single syntactic whole, often within the limits of a simple sen
tence. It frequently happens that even one and the same word will
belong simultaneously to two languages, two belief systems that
mtersect in a hybrid constructionÑand, consequently, the word
has two contradictory meanings, two accents lexamples belowl.
As we shall see, hybrid constructions are of enormous signifi
cance in novel style. 16

4 141 But Mr. Tite Barnacle was a buttoned-up man, and consequently a
weighty one. Ibook a, ch. Ial

The above sentence is an example of pseudo-objective motiva
tion, one of the forms for concealing another's speechÑin this
example, the speech of "current opinion." If judged by the formal

markers above, the logic motivating the sentence seems to belong
to the author, i.e., he is formally at one with it; but in actual fact
the motivation lies within the subjective belief system of his
characters, or of general opinion.
Pseudo-objective motivation is generally characteristic of novel
style, since it is one of the manifold forms for concealing an
other's speech in hybrid constructions. Subordinate conjunctions
and link words l"thus," "because," "for the reason that," "in spite
of " and so forth), as well as words used to maintain a logical se
quence l"therefore," "consequently," etc.l Iose their direct au
thonal intention, take on the flavor of someone else's language,
become refracted or even completely reified.
Such motivation is especially characteristic of comic style, in
which someone else's speech is dominant (the speech of concrete
persons, or, more often, a collective voice).'8
Is) As a vast fire will fill the air to a great distance with its roar, so the
sacred flame which the mighty Barnacles had fanned caused the air to
resound more and more with the name of Merdle. It was deposited on
every lip, and carried into every ear. There never was, there never had
been, there never again should be, such a man as Mr. Merdle. Nobody,

16. For more detail on hybrid constructions and their significance, see ch
4 of the present essay.
17. Such a device is unthinkable in the epic
18. Cf. the grotesque pseudo-objective motivations in Gogol.
,1

[3061 DISCO URSE IN THE N OVEL

as aforesaid, knew what he had done; but everybody knew him to be
the greatest that had appeared. Ibook ^, ch. I31

Here we have an epic, "Homeric" introduction lparodic, of
course} into whose frame the crowd's glorification of Merdle has
been inserted lconcealed speech of another in another's lan-
guage}. We then get direct authorial discourse; however, the au-
thor gives an objective tone to this "aside" by suggesting that "ev-
erybody knew" Ithe italicized portion). It is as if even the author
himself did not doubt the fact.
61 That illustrious man and great national ornament, Mr. Merdle, con-
tinued his shining course. It began to be widely understood that one
who had done society the admirable service of making so much
money out of it, could not be suffered to remain a commoner. A bar-
onetcy was spoken of with confldence; a peerage was frequently men-
tioned. Ibook l, ch 241

We have here the same fictive solidarity with the hypocritically
ceremonial general opinion of Merdle. All the epithets referring |
to Merdle in the first sentences derive from general opinion, that
is, they are the concealed speech of another. The second sen
tenceÑ"it began to be widely understood," etc.Ñis kept within
the bounds of an emphatically objective style, representing not
subjective opinion but the admission of an objective and com
pletely indisputable fact. The epithet "who had done society the
admirable service" is completely at the level of common opinion,
repeating its official glorification, but the subordinate clause at
tached to that glorification l"of making so much money out of
it"} are the words of the author himself las if put in parentheses in
the quotation}. The main sentence then picks up again at the
level of common opinion. We have here a typical hybrid con
struction, where the subordinate clause is in direct authorial
speech and the main clause in someone else's speech. The main
and subordinate clauses are constructed in different semantic and
axiological conceptual systems. :
The whole of this portion of the novel's action, which centers
around Merdle and the persons associated with him, is depicted

in the language lor more accurately, the languages} of hypo
critically ceremonial common opinion about Merdle, and at the
same time there is a parodic stylization of that everyday language
of banal society gossip, or of the ceremonial language of official ;
pronouncements and banquet speeches, or the high epic style or I

DISCO URSE IN THE N OVEL 13071

Biblical style. This atmosphere around Merdle, the common
opinion about him and his enterprises, infects the positive heroes
of the novel as well, in particular the sober Pancks, and forces
him to invest his entire estateÑhis own, and Little Dorrit'sÑin
Merdle's hollow enterprises.

171 Physician had engaged to break the intelligence in Harley Street. Bar
could not at once return to his inveiglements of the most enlightened
and remarkable jury he had ever seen in that box, with whom, he
could tell his learned friend, no shallow sophistry would go down,
and no unhappily abused professional tact and skill prevail Ithis was
the way he meant to begin with them); so he said he would go too,
and would loiter to and fro near the house while his friend was inside.
lBook l, ch. 15, mistakenly given as ch. 15 in Russian text, tr.l

Here we have a clear example of hybrid construction where
within the frame of authorial speech linformative speech}Ñthe
beginning of a speech prepared by the lawyer has been inserted,
"The Bar could not at once return to his inveiglements . . . of the
jury ... so he said he would go too...." etc.Ñwhile this speech
is simultaneously a fully developed epithet attached to the sub-
ject of the author's speech, that is, "jury." The word "jury" enters
into the context of informative authorial speech lin the capacity
of a necessary object to the word "inveiglements"} as well as into
the context of the parodic-stylized speech of the lawyer. The au-
thor's word "inveiglement" itself emphasizes the parodic nature
of the re-processing of the lawyer's speech, the hypocritical
meaning of which consists precisely in the fact that it would be
impossible to inveigle such a remarkable jury.

I8) It followed that Mrs. Merdle, as a woman of fashion and good breed-
ing who had been sacrificed to wiles of a vulgar barbarian Ifor Mr.
Merdle was found out from the crown of his head to the sole of his
foot, the moment he was found out in his pocketl, must be actively
championed by her order for her order's sake. lbook ~, ch. 3 31

: This is an analogous hybrid construction, in which the defini
tion provided by the general opinion of societyÑ"a sacrifice to
the wiles of a vulgar barbarian"Ñmerges with authorial speech
exposing the hypocrisy and greed of common opinion.
So it is throughout Dickens' whole novel. His entire text is, in
fact, everywhere dotted with quotation marks that serve to sepa
i rate out little islands of scattered direct speech and purely au-
thorial speech, washed by heteroglot waves from all sides. But it

[3081 DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

would have been impossible actually to insert such marks, since,
as we have seen, one and the same word often figures both as the
speech of the author and as the speech of anotherÑand at the
same time.
Another's speechÑwhether as storytelling, as mimicking, as
the display of a thing in light of a particular point of view, as a
speech deployed first in compact masses, then loosely scattered,
a speech that is in most cases impersonal l"common opinion,"
professional and generic languages}Ñis at none of these points
clearly separated from authorial speech: the boundaries are delib-
erately flexible and ambiguous, often passing through a single
syntactic whole, often through a simple sentence, and sometimes
even dividing up the main parts of a sentence. This varied play
with the boundaries of speech types, languages and belief sys-
tems is one most fundamental aspects of comic style.
Comic style lof the English sort) is based, therefore, on the
stratification of common language and on the possibilities avail-
able for isolating from these strata, to one degree or another, one's
own intentions, without ever completely merging with them. It
is precisely the diversity of speech, and not the unity of a norma-
tive shared language, that is the ground of style. It is true that
such speech diversity does not exceed the boundaries of literary
language conceived as a linguistic whole Ithat is, language de-
fined by abstract linguistic markers}, does not pass into an au-
thentic heteroglossia and is based on an abstract notion of lan-
guage as unitary Ithat is, it does not require knowledge of various
dialects or languages}. However a mere concern for language is
but the abstract side of the concrete and active li.e., dialogically
engaged} understanding of the living heteroglossia that has been
introduced into the novel and artistically organized within it.
In Dickens' predecessors, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, the
men who founded the English comic novel, we find the same pa-
rodic stylization of various levels and genres of literary language,
but the distance between these levels and genres is greater than
it is in Dickens and the exaggeration is stronger lespecially in
Sternel. The parodic and objectivized incorporation into their
work of various types of literary language lespecially in Sternel
penetrates the deepest levels of literary and ideological thought
itself, resulting in a parody of the logical and expressive structure
of any ideological discourse as such Ischolarly, moral and rhetori-
cal, poetic) that is almost as radical as the parody we find in
Rabelais.

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL 1309]

Literary parody understood in the narrow sense plays a funda-
mental role in the way language is structured in Fielding, Smol-
lett and Sterne {the Richardsonian novel is parodied by the first
two, and almost all contemporary novel-types are parodied by
Sterne}. Literary parody serves to distance the author still further
from language, to complicate still further his relationship to the
literary language of his time, especially in the novel's own terri-
tory. The novelistic discourse dominating a given epoch is itself
turned into an object and itself becomes a means for refracting
new authorial intentions.
Literary parody of dominant novel-types plays a large role in
the history of the European novel. One could even say that the
most important novelistic models and novel-types arose precisely
during this parodic destruction of preceding novelistic worlds.
This is true of the work of Cervantes, Mendoza, Grimmelshau-

sen, Rabelais, Lesage and many others.
In Rabelais, whose influence on all novelistic prose land in par-
ticular the comic novel) was very great, a parodic attitude toward
almost all forms of ideological discourseÑphilosophical, moral,
scholarly, rhetorical, poetic and in particular the pathos-charged
forms of discourse ,... Rabelais, pathos almost always is equiv-
alent to lie}Ñwas intensified to the point where it became a par-
ody of the very act of conceptualizing anything in language. We
might add that Rabelais taunts the deceptive human word by a
parodic destruction of syntactic structures, thereby reducing to
absurdity some of the logical and expressively accented aspects of
words {for example, predication, explanations and so forth}. Turn-
ing away from language {by means of language, of coursef, dis-
crediting any direct or unmediated intentionality and expressive
excess lany "weighty" seriousness) that might adhere in ideologi-
cal discourse, presuming that all language is conventional and
false, maliciously inadequate to realityÑall this achieves in
Rabelais almost the maximum purity possible in prose. But the
truth that might oppose such falsity receives almost no direct in-
tentional and verbal expression in Rabelais, it does not receive its
own wordÑit reverberates only in the parodic and unmasking ac-
cents in which the lie is present. Truth is restored by reducing the
lie to an absurdity, but truth itself does not seek words; she is
afraid to entangle herself in the word, to soil herself in verbal
pathos.
Rabelais' "philosophy of the word"Ña philosophy expressed

)
13I¡I DISCO URSE IN THE N OVEL

~ !

I .

'1':

. '

not as much in direct utterances as in stylistic practiceÑhas had
enormous influence on all consequent novel prose and in particu-
lar of the great representative forms of the comic novel; with that
in mind we bring forward the purely Rabelaisian formulation of
Sterne's Yorick, which might serve as an epigraph to the history
of the most important stylistic lines of development in the Euro-
pean novel:

For aught I know there might be some mixture of unlucky wit at the
bottom of such Fracas:ÑFor, to speak the truth, Yorick had an invincible
dislike and opposition in his nature to gravity;Ñnot to gravity as such;Ñ
for where gravity was wanted, he would be the most grave or serious of
mortal men for days and weeks together;Ñbut he was an enemy to the
affectation of it, and declared open war against it, only as it appeared a
cloak for ignorance, or for folly; and then, whenever it fell his way, how-
ever sheltered and protected, he seldom gave it much quarter.
Sometimes, in his wild way of talking, he would say, That gravity was
an errant scoundrel; and he would add,Ñof the most dangerous kind
too,Ñbecause a sly one; and that, he verily believed, more honest, well-
meaning people were bubbled out of their goods and money by it in one

twelve-month, than by pocket-picking and shop-lifting in seven. In the
naked temper which a merry heart discovered, he would say, There was
no danger,Ñbut to itself:Ñwhereas the very essence of gravity was de-
sign, and consequently deceit;Ñ'twas a taught trick to gain credit of the
world for more sense and knowledge than a man was worth; and that,
with all its pretensions,Ñit was no better, but often worse, than what a
French wit had long ago defined it,Ñviz. A mysterious carriage of the
body go cover the defects of the mind;Ñwhich deflnition of gravity,
Yorick, with great imprudence, would say, deserved to be wrote in letters
of gold. IBakhtin does not locate citation; it is from Tristram Shandy,
vol. 1, ch. II, tr.|

Close to Rabelais, but in certain respects even exceeding him
in the decisive influence he had on all of novelistic prose, is Cer-
vantes. The English comic novel is permeated through and
through with the spirit of Cervantes. It is no accident that this
same Yorick, on his deathbed, quotes the words of Sancho Panza.
While the attitude toward language and toward its stratifica-
tion {generic, professional and otherwise) among the German
comic writers, in Hippel and especially in Jean Paul, is basically
of the Sternean type, it is raisedÑas it is in Sterne himselfÑto
the level of a purely philosophical problem, the very possibility of
literary and ideological speech as such. The philosophical and

DISCO URSE IN THE N OVEL 13II]

ideological element in an author's attitude toward his own lan-
guage forces into the background the play between intention and
the concrete, primarily generic and ideological levels of literary
language (cf. the reflection of just this in the aesthetic theories of
Jean Paul). 19
Thus the stratification of literary language, its speech diversity,
is an indispensable prerequisite for comic style, whose elements
are projected onto different linguistic planes while at the same
time the intention of the author, refracted as it passes throughr
these planes, does not wholly give itself up to any of them. It is as
if the author has no language of his own, but does possess his own
style, his own organic and unitary law governing the way he plays
with languages and the way his own real semantic and expressive
intentions are refracted within them. Of course this play with-
languages land frequently the complete absence of a direct dis-
course of his own) in no sense degrades the general, deep-seated
intentionality, the overarching ideological conceptualization of
the work as a whole.
In the comic novel, the incorporation of heteroglossia and its
stylistic utilization is characterized by two distinctive features:
IIJ Incorporated into the novel are a multiplicity of "language"
and verbal-ideological belief systemsÑgeneric, professional,
class-and-interest-group {the language of the nobleman, the
farmer, the merchant, the peasant); tendentious, everyday Ithe
languages of rumour, of society chatter, servants' language} and
so forth, but these languages are, it is true, kept primarily within
the limits of the literary written and conversational language; at
the same time these languages are not, in most cases, consoli-
dated into fixed persons {heroes, storytellers} but rather are incor-
porated in an impersonal form "from the author," alternating
{while ignoring precise formal boundaries} with direct authorial
discourse.
12) The incorporated languages and socio-ideological belief sys-
tems, while of course utilized to refract the author's intentions,
are unmasked and destroyed as something false, hypocritical,

19 Intellect as embodied in the forms and the methods of verbal and ideo-
logical thought li e., the linguistic horizon of normal human intellectual ac-
tivityl becomes in Jean Paul something infinitely petty and ludicrous when
seen in the light of "reason." His humor results from play with intellectual

activity and its forms.
13I~1 DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

greedy, limited, narrowly rationalistic, inadequate to reality. In
most cases these languagesÑalready fully formed, of ficially recog-
nized, reigning languages that are authoritative and reactionaryÑ
are lin real life) doomed to death and displacement. Therefore
what predominates in the novel are various forms and degrees of
parodic stylization of incorporated languages, a stylization that,
in the most radical, most Rabelaisian20 representatives of this
novel-type ISterne and Jean Paul), verges on a rejection of any
straightforward and unmediated seriousness {true seriousness is
the destruction of all false seriousness, not only in its pathos-
charged expression but in its Sentimental one as well~ j2' that is, it
limits itself to a principled criticism of the word as such.
There is a fundamental difference between this comic form for
incorporating and organizing heteroglossia in the novel and other
forms that are defined by their use of a personified and concretely
posited author (written speech) or teller loral speech).
Play with a posited author is also characteristic of the comic
novel lSterne, Hippel, Jean Paul), a heritage from Don Quixote.
But in these examples such play is purely a compositional device,
which strengthens the general trend toward relativity, objectifica-
tion and the parodying of literary forms and genres.
The posited author and teller assume a completely different sig-
nificance where they are incorporated as carriers of a particular
verbal-ideological linguistic belief system, with a particular point
of view on the world and its events, with particular value judg-
ments and intonationsÑ"particular" both as regards the author,
his real direct discourse, and also as regards "normal" literary nar-
rative and language.
This particularity, this distancing of the posited author or teller
from the real author and from conventional literary expectations,
may occur in differing degrees and may vary in its nature. But in
every case a particular belief system belonging to someone else, a
particular point of view on the world belonging to someone else,
is used by the author because it is highly productive, that is, it is
able on the one hand to show the object of representation in a
new light Ito reveal new sides or dimensions in it) and on the

20. It is of course impossible in the strict sense to include Rabelais him-
selfÑeither chronologically or in terms of his essential characterÑamong
the representatives of comic novelists.
11. Nevertheless sentimentality and "high seriousness" is not completely
eliminated lespecially in lean Paull.

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL 13I31

other hand to illuminate in a new way the "expected" literary
horizon, that horizon against which the particularities of the
teller's tale are perceivable.
For example: Belkin was chosen lor better, created) by Pushkin
because of his particular "unpoetic" point of view on objects and
plots that are traditionally poetic lthe highly characteristic and
calculated use of the Romeo and tuliet plot in "Mistress into
Maid" or the romantic "Dances of Death" in "The Coffinmaker''l.
Belkin, who is on the same level with those narrators-at-third-re-
move out of whose mouths he has taken his stories, is a "prosaic"
man, a man without a drop of poetic pathos. The successful
"prosaic" resolutions of the plots and the very means of the
story's telling destroy any expectation of traditional poetic ef-
fects. The fruitfulness of the prosaic quality in Belkin's point of
view consists in just this failure to understand poetic pathos.
| Maxim Maximych in A Hero of Our Time, Rudy Panko, the
narrators of "Nose" and "Overcoat," Dostoevsky's chroniclers,
! folkloric narrators and storytellers who are themselves characters

l in Melnikov-Pechersky and Mamin-Sibiryak, the folkloric and
i down-to-earth storytellers in Leskov, the character-narrators in
i populist literature and finally the narrators in Symbolist and post
Symbolist prose lin Remizov, Zamyatin and others)Ñwith all
$ their widely differing forms of narration loral and written), with
| all their differing narrative languages lliterary, professional, so
j ci,al-and-special-interest-group language, everyday, slang, dialects
! and others)Ñeverywhere, they recommend themselves as spe
| cific and limited verbal ideological points of view, belief systems,
opposed to the literary expectations and points of view that con
r stitute the background needed to perceive them; but these narra-
| tors are productive precisely because of this very limitedness and
specificity.
The speech of such narrators is always another's speech las re-
gards the real or potential direct discourse of the author) and in
another's language li.e., insofar as it is a particular variant of the
literary language that clashes with the language of the narrator).
Thus we have in this case "nondirect speaking"Ñnot in lan-
guage but through language, through the linguistic medium of
anotherÑand consequently through a refraction of authorial
intentions.
The author manifests himself and his point of view not only in
his effect on the narrator, on his speech and his language Iwhich

)
13I41 DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

,
11,
,
1.
.1,
:l
i!
's.1,

i.
l

are to one or another extent objectivized, objects of display) but
also in his effect on the subject of the storyÑas a point of view
that differs from the point of view of the narrator. Behind the nar
rator's story we read a second story, the author's story; he is the
one who tells us how the narrator tells stories, and also tells us
about the narrator himself. We acutely sense two levels at each
moment in the story; one, the level of the narrator, a belief sys
tem filled with his objects, meanings and emotional expressions,
and the other, the level of the author, who speaks lalbeit in a re
fracted way) by means of this story and through this story. The
narrator himself, with his own discourse, enters into this au
thorial belief system along with what is actually being told. We
puzzle out the author's emphases that overlie the subject of the
story, while we puzzle out the story itself and the figure of the
narrator as he is revealed in the process of telling his tale. If one
fails to sense this second level, the intentions and accents of the
author himself, then one has failed to understand the work. 4
As we have said above, the narrator's story or the story of the
posited author is structured against the background of normal lit
erary language, the expected literary horizon. Every moment of
the story has a conscious relationship with this normal language
and its belief system, is in fact set against them, and set against
them dialogically: one point of view opposed to another, one

evaluation opposed to another, one accent opposed to another
i.e., they are not contrasted as two abstractly linguistic phe
nomenal. This interaction, this dialogic tension between two lan
guages and two belief systems, permits authorial intentions to be
realized in such a way that we can acutely sense their presence at
every point in the work. The author is not to be found in the lan
guage of the narrator, not in the normal literary language to
which the story opposes itself lalthough a given story may be
closer to a given language)Ñbut rather, the author utilizes now
one language, now another, in order to avoid giving himself up
wholly to either of them; he makes use of this verbal give-and
take, this dialogue of languages at every point in his work, in
order that he himself might remain as it were neutral with regard
to language, a third party in a quarrel between two people lal
though he might be a biased third party}.
All forms involving a narrator or a posited author signify to one
degree or another by their presence the author's freedom from a
unitary and singular language, a freedom connected with the rela

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL |3I51

tivity of literary and language systems; such forms open up the
possibility of never having to define oneself in language, the pos
sibility of translating one's own intentions from one linguistic
system to another, of fusing "the language of truth" with "the
language of the everyday," of saying "I am me" in someone else's
language, and in my own language, "I am other."
Such a refracting of authorial intentions takes place in all these
forms Ithe narrator's tale, the tale of a posited author or that of
one of the characters); it is therefore possible to have in them, as
in the comic novel, a variety of different distances between dis
tinct aspects of the narrator's language and the author's language:
the refraction may be at times greater, at times lesser, and in
some aspects of language there may be an almost complete fusion
of voices.
The next form for incorporating and organizing heteroglossia in
the novelÑa form that every novel without exception utilizesÑ
4 is the language used by characters.
The language used by characters in the novel, how they speal~
is verbally and semantically autonomous; each character's speech I
possesses its own belief system, since each is the speech of an- i
other in another's language; thus it may also refract authorial in- I
tentions and consequently may to a certain degree constitute a I
second language for the author. Moreover, the character speech
almost always influences authorial speech land sometimes pow- |
erf,ully so), sprinkling it with another's words Ithat is, the speech |
of a character perceived as the concealed speech of another) and |
in this way introducing into it stratification and speech diversity. |
Thus even where there is no comic element, no parody, no J
Irony and so forth, where there is no narrator, no posited author
or narrating character, speech diversity and language stratifica
tion still serve as the basis for style in the novel. Even in those
places where the author's voice seems at first glance to be unitary
and consistent, direct and unmediatedly intentional, beneath that
smooth single-languaged surface we can nevertheless uncover
prose's three-dimensionality, its profound speech diversity, which
enters the project of style and is its determining factor.
Thus the language and style of Turgenev's novels have the ap
pearance of being single-languaged and pure. Even in Turgenev,
however, this unitary language is very far from poetic absolutism.
Substantial masses of this language are drawn into the battle be
tween points of view, value judgments and emphases that the

|3I6| DISC O URSE IN THE N OVEL

characters introduce into it; they are infected by mutually contra-
dictory intentions and stratifications; words, saylngs, expres-
sions, definitions and epithets are scattered throughout lt, in-
fected with others' intentions with which the author is to some
extent at odds, and through which his own personal intentions
are refracted. We sense acutely the various distances between t
author and various aspects of his language, which smack of t e
social universes and belief systems of others. We acutely sense m
various aspects of his language varying degrees of the presence o
the author and of his most recent semantic instantiation. In
Turgenev, heteroglossia and language stratification serve as the
most fundamental factors of style, and orchestrate an authoria
truth of their own; the author's linguistic consciousness, his con-
sciousness as a writer of prose, is thereby relativized.
In Turgenev, social heteroglossia enters the novel primarily in
the direct speeches of his characters, in dialogues. But this het-
eroglossia, as we have said, is also diffused throughout the au-
thorial speech that surrounds the characters, creating highly par-
ticularized character zones lzony geroevl. These zones are forme
from the fragments of character speech lpolllrec'l, from various
forms for hidden transmission of someone else's word, from scat-
tered words and sayings belonging to someone else's speech, from
those invasions into authorial speech of others' expressive indica-
tors lellipsis, questions, exclamations). Such a character zone is
the field of action for a character's voice, encroaching in one way
or another upon the author's voice.
HoweverÑwe repeatÑin Turgenev, the novelistic orchestra-
tion of the theme is concentrated in direct dialogues; the charac-
ters do not create around themselves their own extensive or
densely saturated zones, and in Turgenev fully developed, com-
plex stylistic hybrids are relatively rare.
We pause here on several examples of diffuse heteroglossia in
Turgenev.C

111 His name is Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov. Some ten miles from the
coaching-inn stands a respectable little property of his Consisting o a
couple of hundred serfsÑor five thousand acres, as he expresses it
now that he has divided up his land and let it to the peasants, an
started a "farm." [Fathers and Sons, ch. II

c. citations from Fathers and Sons are from: Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and
Sons, tr. Rosemary Edmonds (London: Penguin, 19651.

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL 13I71
~qYulael foil dhe liberals~ are pu't lhnarqctetrisitic of the era and in the

aUthor s speech if judged by its frOargraplht while being a part of th
same tlme in its choice of expressions l"this son of a medico"}
afnd in its emotional and expressive structure the hidd h
(31

141
~high of dcial h [nscll ¥=
f Is) H g g ¥ w S Soil, ch. 41

)

13I81 DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

This is an analogous pseudo-objective construction.

I6) Semyon Petrovich was in the ministry of the Court, he had the title
of a kammeryunker. He was prevented by his patriotism from 1oin-
ing the diplomatic service, for which he seemed destined by every-
thing, his education, his knowledge of the world, his popu anty wi
women, and his very appearance.... I Virgin Soil, ch. s l

The motivation for refusing a diplomatic career is pseudo-
objective. The entire characterization is consistent in tone and
given from the point of view of Kallomyetsev himself, fused with
his direct speech, beingÑat least judging by its syntactic mark-
ersÑa subordinate clause attached to authorial speec l or w ic
he seemed destined by everything . . . mais quitter la Russie!
and so forth).

171 Kallomyetsev had come to S Province on a two months' leave
to look after his property, that is to say, $~to scare some and squeeze
others." Of course, there's no doing anything without that. I Vlrgin
Soil, Ch. sl

The conclusion of the paragraph is a characteristic exarnple of a
pseudo-objective statement. Precisely in order to give it the ap-
pearance of an objective authorial judgment, it is not put in
quotation marks, as are the preceding words of Kallomyetsev I
himself; it is incorporated into authorial speech and deliberately
placed directly after Kallomyetsev's own words.

I8) But Kallomyetsev deliberately stuck his round eyeglass between his :
nose and his eyebrow, and stared at the Isnit of al student who dared
not share his "apprehensions." I virgin Soll, ch. 71

This is a typical hybrid construction. Not only the subordinate
clause but also the direct object l"the Isnit of al student ) of t e
main authorial sentence is rendered in Kallomyetsev s tone. The
choice of words l"snit of a student," "dared not share''l are deter-
mined by Kallomyetsev's irritated intonation, and at the same
time, in the context of authorial speech, these words are perme-
ated with the ironic intonation of the author; therefore the con
struction has two accents lthe author's ironic transmission, and a
mimicking of the irritation of the character).

d. Citations from virgin Soil are from: Ivan Turgenev, virgin Soil tr. corl-
stance Garnett INew York: Grove Press, n.d.}.

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL 13I9|

Finally, we adduce examples of an intrusion of the emotional
aspects of someone else's speech into the syntactic system of au-
thorial speech lellipsis, questions, exclamations}.

191 Strange was the state of his mind. In the last two days so many new
sensatsons, new faces.... For the first time in his life he had come
| close to a girl, whom, in all probability, he loved he was present at
! the beginning of the thing to which, in all probabiiity, all his energies
| were consecrated Well? was he rejoicing? No. Was he wavering
I afraid, confused? Oh, certainly not. Was he at least, feeling that ten
sion s whole being, that impulse forward into the front ranks of
I the battle, to be expected as the struggle grew near? No again. Did he
! believe, then, in this cause? Did he believe in his own love? "Oh,
I damned artistic temperament! sceptic! ~ his lips murmured inaudibly.
y is weanness, this disinclination to speak even, without shriek
ing and raving? What inner voice did he want to stifle with those rav
ings? IVirgin Soil ch. 18|

| Here we have, in essence, a form of a character's quasi-direct
f discourse [nesobstvenno-prjamaja rec'~. Judging by its syntactic
markers, it IS authorial speech, but its entire emotional structure
belongs to Nezhdanov. This is his inner speech, but transmitted
in a way regulated by the author, with provocative questions
from the author and with ironically debunking reservations l"in
all probability"), although Nezhdanov's emotional overtones are
preserved.
Such a form for transmitting inner speech is common in
urgenev lapd is generally one of the most widespread forms for
transmitting inner speech in the novell. This form introduces
or er and stylistic symmetry into the disorderly and impetuous
flow of a character's internal speech la disorder and impetuosity
would otherwise have to be re-processed into direct speech} and
moreover, through its syntactic (third-person) and basic stylistic
markers llexicological and other), such a form permits another's
inner speech to merge, in an organic and structured way, with a
context belonging to the author. But at the same time it is pre
cisely this form that permits us to preserve the expressive struc
ture of the character's inner speech, its inability to exhaust itself
in words, its flexibility, which would be absolutely impossible
wit in the dry and logical form of indirect discourse [kosvennaja
ec 1. Precisely these features make this form the most conve
nient for transmitting the inner speech of characters. It is of
course a hybrid form, for the author's voice may be present in
w
o

13to] DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL
varying degrees of activity and may introduce into the transmit
ted speech a second accent of its own lironic, irritated and so on}.
The same hybridization, mixing of accents and erasing of
boundaries between authorial speech and the speech of others is
also present in other forms for transmitting characters' speech.
With only three templates for speech transcription {direct speech
prjama ja rec'l, indirect speech lkosvennaja rec'] and quasi-direct
speech [nesobstvenno-prjamaja rec l1 a great diversity is nev
ertheless made possible in the treatment of character speechÑ
i.e., the way characters overlap and infect each otherÑthe main
thing being how the authorial context succeeds in exploiting the
various means for replicating frames and re-stratifying them. I
The examples we have offered from Turgenev provide a typical I
picture of the character's role in stratifying the language of the
novel and incorporating heteroglossia into it. A character in a
\ novel always has, as we have said, a zone of his own, his own
I sphere of influence on the authorial context surrounding him, a
I sphere that extendsÑand often quite farÑbeyond the boundaries
I of the direct discourse allotted to him. The area occupied by an
I important character's voice must in any event be broader than his
I direct and "actual" words. This zone surrounding the important
| characters of the novel is stylistically profoundly idiosyncratic: ]
the most varied hybrid constructions hold sway in it, and it 1S a I
ways, to one degree or another, dialogized; inside this area a di- ]
alogue is played out between the author and his charactersÑnot a
dramatic dialogue broken up into statement-and-response, but i
that special type of novelistic dialogue that realizes itself within
the boundaries of constructions that externally resemble mono
logues. The potential for such dialogue is one of the most funda- f
mental privileges of novelistic prose, a privilege available neit er ,.
to dramatic nor to purely poetic genres.
Character zones are a most interesting object of study for
stylistic and linguistic analysis: in them one encounters con
structions that cast a completely new light on problems of syntax
and stylistics.
Let us pause finally on one of the most basic and fundamen t

tal forms for incorporating and organizing heteroglossla m t e
novelÑ"incorporated genres." b h
The novel permits the incorporation of various genres, ot I
artistic (inserted short stories, lyrical songs, poems, dramatic I
scenes, etc.) and extra-artistic jeveryday, rhetorical, scholarly, re
ligious genres and others}. In principle, any genre could be ln

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL [32I]

~'
1~
When intr¡duced Into the nOveelthe IYhiCal genres} for example)

13231 DISC O URSE IN THE N OVEL {
ality, the full semantic charge, of poetry. Such, for example, are I
the verses Goethe introduced into Wilhelm Meister. In such a
way did the Romantics incorporate their own verses into their
proseÑand, as is well known, the Romantics considered the pres
ence of verses in the novel (verses taken as directly intentional
expressions of the author} one of its constitutive features. In other
examples, incorporated verses refract authorial intentions; for ex
ample, Lensky's poem in Evgenij Onegin, "Where, o where have
ou gone . . ." Although the verses from Wilhelm Meister may
be directiy attributed to Goethe (which is actually done), then
"Where, o where have you gone...." can in no way be attributed
to Pushkin, or if so, only as a poem belonging to a special group
comprising "parodic stylizations" (where we must also locate !
Grinev's poem in The Captain's Daughter}. Finally, poems in
corporated into a novel can also be completely objectified, as are,
for example, Captain Lebyadkin's verses in Dostoevsky's The
Possessed.
A similar situation is the novel's incorporation of every pOSSI-
ble kind of maxim and aphorism; they too may oscillate between
the purely objective (the "word on display"} and the directly in-
tentional, that is,. the fully conceptualized philosophical dicta
of the author himself (unconditional discourse spoken with no
qualifications or distancing). Thus we find, in the novels of lean
PaulÑwhich are so rich in aphorismsÑa broad scale of grada-
tions between the various aphorisms, from purely objective to
directly intentional, with the author's intentions refracted in
varying degrees in each case.
In Evgenij Onegin aphorisms and maxims are present either on
the plane of parody or of ironyÑthat is, authorial intentions in
these dicta are to a greater or lesser extent refracted. For example,
the maxim
He who has lived and thought can never
Look on mankind without disdain;
He who has felt is haunted ever
By days that will not come again;
No more for him enchantments semblance,
On him the serpent of remembrance
Feeds, and remorse corrodes his heart.

e. citations from Eugene Onegin are from the Walter Arndt translation
lNew York: Dutton, }963} slightly modified to correspond with Bakhtm's re
marks about particulars.

{ DISC O URSE IN THE N OVEL 1323}

is given us on a lighthearted, parodic plane, although one can still
feel throughout a close proximity, almost a fusion with authorial
mtentions. And yet the lines that immediately follow:
All this is likely to impart
An added charm to conversation
{a conversation of the posited author with Oneginl strengthen the
parodic-ironic emphasis, make the maxim more of an inert thing
We sense that the maxim is constructed in a field of activity dom
inated by Onegin's voice, in hisÑOnegin'sÑbelief system, with
{ hisÑOnegin'sÑemphases.
But this refraction of authorial intentions, in the field that re
I sounds with Onegin's voice, in Onegin's zoneÑis different than
f the refraction in, say, Lensky's zone Icf. the almost objective par
ffi ody on his poems}.
[ This example may also serve to illustrate the influence of a
character's language on authorial speech, something discussed
| by us above: the aphorism in question here is permeated with
Onegin s {fashionably Byronicl intentions, therefore the author
i maintains a certain distance and does not completely merge with
The question of incorporating those genres fundamental to the
novels development Ithe confession, the diary and othersl is
| much more complicated. Such genres also introduce into the
novel their own languages, of course, but these languages are pri
I manly significant for making available points of view that are
i generative in a material sense, since they exist outside literar
conventionality and thus have the capacity to broaden the hori
zon of language available to literature, helping to win for lit
erature new worlds of verbal perception, worlds that had been
already sought and partially subdued in otherÑextraliterary
spheres of linguistic life.
A comic playing with languages, a story "not from the author"
Ibut from a narrator, posited author or character), character speech
character zones and lastly various introductory or framing genres
: are the basic forms for incorporating and organizing heteroglos
~vays that are indirect, condition l di
relativizing of linguistic consciousness in the perception of lan
guage bordersÑborders created by history and society, and even
the most fundamental borders li-e-, those between languages as z
such)Ñand permit expression of a feeling for the materiality of !

[3241 DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

language that defines such a relativized consciousness. This rela-
tivizing of linguistic consciousness in no way requlres a corre-
sponding relativizing in the semantic intentions themselves:
even within a prose linguistic consciousness, intentions them-
selves can be unconditional. But because the idea of a singular
language la sacrosanct, unconditional language} IS foreign to
prose, prosaic consciousness must orchestrate its OWIlÑeven
though unconditionalÑsemantic intentions. Prose conscious-
ness feels cramped when it is confined to only one out of a multi-
tude of heteroglot languages, for one linguistic timbre is inade-
quate to it.
We have touched upon only those major forms typical of the
most important variants of the European novel, but in them-
selves they do not, of course, exhaust all the possible means for
incorporating and organizing heteroglossia in the novel. A com-
bination of all these forms in separate given novels, and con-
sequently in various generic types generated by these novels, is
also possible. Of such a sort is the classic and purest model of the
novel as genreÑCervantes' Don Quixote, which realizes in itself,
in extraordinary depth and breadth, all the artistic possibilities of
heteroglot and internally dialogized novelistic discourse.

Heteroglossia, once incorporated into the novel (whatever the
forms for its incorporation), is another's speech in another's lan-
guage, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted
way. Such speech constitutes a special type of double-voiced dls-
course. It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses SI-
multaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the
character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the au-
thor. In such discourse there are two voices, two meanings and
two expressions. And all the while these two voices are dialogi-
cally interrelated, theyÑas it wereÑknow about each other Ijust
as two exchanges in a dialogue know of each other and are struc-
tured in this mutual knowledge of each other); it is as if they ac-
tually hold a conversation with each other. Double-voiced dis-
course is always internally dialogized. Examples of this would be
comic, ironic or parodic discourse, the refracting discourse of a
narrator, refracting discourse in the language of a character and
finally the discourse of a whole incorporated genreÑall these dis-
courses are double-voiced and internally dialogized. A potential
dialogue is embedded in them, one as yet unfolded, a concen

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL [3251
trated dialogue of two voices, two world views, two languages
Double-voiced, internally dialogized discourse is also possible
of course, in a language system that is hermetic, pure and unitary
a system alien to the linguistic relativism of prose consciousness
it follows that such discourse is also possible in the purely poetic
genres. But in those systems there is no soil to nourish the devel-
opment of such discourse in the slightest meaningful or essential
way. Double-voiced discourse is very widespread in rhetorical
genres, but even thereÑremaining as it does within the bound-
aries of a single language systemÑit is not fertilized by a deep-
rooted connection with the forces of historical becoming that
serve to stratify language, and therefore rhetorical genres are at
best merely a distanced echo of this becoming, narrowed down to
an individual polemic.
Such poetic and rhetorical double-voicedness, cut off from any
process of linguistic stratification, may be adequately unfolded
into an individual dialogue, into individual argument and con-
versation between two persons, even while the exchanges in the
dialogue are immanent to a single unitary language: they may

not be in agreement, they may even be opposed, but they are di-
verse neither in their speech nor in their language. Such double-
voicmg, remaining within the boundaries of a single hermetic
and unitary language system, without any underlying fundamen-
tal socio-linguistic orchestration, may be only a stylistically sec-
ondary accompaniment to the dialogue and forms of polemic.22
The internal bifurcation Idouble-voicing) of discourse, suffficient
to a single and unitary language and to a consistently monologic
style, can never be a fundamental form of discourse. it is merely a
game, a tempest in a teapot
The double-voicedness one finds in prose is of another sort
altogether. ThereÑon the rich soil of novelistic proseÑdouble-
voicedness draws its energy, its dialogized ambiguity, not from in-
dlvldual dissonances, misunderstandings or contradictions Ihow-
ever tragic, however firmly grounded in individual destinies) 23 in
the novel, this double-voicedness sinks its roots deep into a fun

genres, especially m satire crucial only in the low
23. Within the limits of the world of poetry and a unitary language, every-
thing important in such disagreements and contradictions can and must be
laid out m a direct and pure dramatic dialogue.

)
1326] DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

w
w

damental, socio-linguistic speech diversity and multi-languaged-
ness. True, even in the novel heteroglossia is by and large always
personified, incarnated in individual human figures, with dis
I agreements and oppositions individualized. But such oppositions
I of individual wills and minds are submerged in social heteroglos-
I sia, they are reconceptualized through it. Oppositions between
I individuals are only surface upheavals of the untamed elements
l in social heteroglossia, surface manifestations of those elements
I that play on such individual oppositions, make them contradic-
\ tory, saturate their consciousness and discourses with a more fun-
\ damental speech diversity.
Therefore the internal dialogism of double-voiced prose dis-
course can never be exhausted thematically Ijust as the meta-
phoric energy of language can never be exhausted thematically);
it can never be developed into the motivation or subject for a
manifest dialogue, such as might fully embody, with no residue,
the internally dialogic potential embedded in linguistic hetero-
glossia. The internal dialogism of authentic prose discourse,
which grows organically out of a stratified and heteroglot lan-
guage, cannot fundamentally be dramatized or dramatically re-
solved lbrought to an authentic end); it cannot ultimately be
fitted into the frame of any manifest dialogue, into the frame of a
mere conversation between persons; it is not ultimately divisible
into verbal exchanges possessing precisely marked boundaries.
This double-voicedness in prose is prefigured in language itself
in authentic metaphors, as well as in myth), in.language as a so-
cial phenomenon that is becoming in history, socially stratified
and weathered in this process of becoming.
The relativizing of linguistic consciousness, its crucial par-
ticipation in the social multi- and vari-languagedness of evolving
languages, the various wanderings of semantic and expressive in-
tentions and the trajectory of this consciousness through varlous
languages llanguages that are all equally well conceptualized and
equally objective), the inevitable necessity for such a consclous-
ness to speak indirectly, conditionally, in a refracted wayÑthese
are all indispensable prerequisites for an authentic double-voiced

prose discourse. This double-voicedness makes its presence felt
by the novelist in the living heteroglossia of language, and in the

14. The more consistent and unitary the language, the more acute, dra-
matic and "finished" such exchanges generally are.

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL [3271

multi-languagedness surrounding and nourishing his own con
sclousness; it is not invented in superficial, isolated rhetorical po
lemics with another person.
If the novelist loses touch with this linguistic ground of prose
0 style, if he is unable to attain the heights of a relativized, Galilean
linguistic consciousness, if he is deaf to organic double-voiced
ness and to the internal dialogization of living and evolving dis
course, then he will never comprehend, or even realize, the actual
possibilities and tasks of the novel as a genre. He may, of course
create an artistic work that compositionally and thematically
WIll be similar to a novel, will be "made" exactly as a novel is
made, but he will not thereby have created a novel. The style will
always glve him away. We will recognize the naively self-con
fident or obtusely stubborn unity of a smooth, pure single-voiced
language (perhaps accompanied by a primitive, artificial, worked
up double-voicednessl. We quickly sense that such an author
I finds it easy to purge his work of speech diversity: he simply does
I not listen to the fundamental heteroglossia inherent in actual
language; he mistakes social overtones, which create the timbres
of words, for irritating noises that it is his task to eliminate. The
novel, when torn out of authentic linguistic speech diversity
emerges in most cases as a "closet drama," with detailed, fully de
veloped and "artistically worked out" stage directions (it is, of
course, bad drama). In such a novel, divested of its language diver
sity, authorial language inevitably ends up in the awkward and
absurd position of the language of stage directions in plays.25
The double-voiced prose word has a double meaning. But the
poetic word, in the narrow sense, also has a double, even a multi
f ple, meaning. It is this that basically distinguishes it from the
word as concept, or the word as term. The poetic word is a trope,
; requiring a precise feeling for the two meanings contained in it.
But no matter how one understands the interrelationship of
meanings in a poetic symbol la tropeX, this interrelationship is
never of the dialogic sort; it is impossible under any conditions or
at any time to imagine a trope lsayE a metaphor) being unfolded

25. In his well-known works on the theory and technique of the novel
pielhagen focuses on precisely such unnovelistic novels, and ignores pre
clse y the kind of potential specific to the novel as a genre. As a theoretician
ple hagen was deaf to heteroglot language and to that which it specifically
! generates: double-voiced discourse.

s)
w

13289 DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

into the two exchanges of a dialogue, that is, two meanings par-
celed out between two separate voices. For this reason the dual
meaning lor multiple meaning) of the symbol never brings in its
wake dual accents. On the contrary, one voice, a single-accent
system, is fully sufficient to express poetic ambiguity. It is possi-
ble to interpret the interrelationships of different meanings in a
symbol logically las the relationship of a part or an individual to
the whole, as for example a proper noun that has become a sym-
bol, or the relationship of the concrete to the abstract and so on);
one may grasp this relationship philosophically and ontologically,
as a special kind of representational relationship, or as a relation-
ship between essence and appearance and so forth, or one may
shift into the foreground the emotional and evaluative dimension
of such relationshipÑbut all these types of relationships between
various meanings do not and cannot go beyond the boundaries of
the relationship between a word and its object, or the boundaries
of various aspects in the object. The entire event is played out be-
tween the word and its object; all of the play of the poetic symbol
is in that space. A symbol cannot presuppose any fundamental re-
lationship to another's word, to another's voice. The polysemy of
the poetic symbol presupposes the unity of a voice with which it
is identical, and it presupposes that such a voice is completely
alone within its own discourse. As soon as another's voice, an-
other's accent, the possibility of another's point of view breaks
through this play of the symbol, the poetic plane is destroyed and
the symbol is translated onto the plane of prose.
To understand the difference between ambiguity in poetry and
double-voicedness in prose, it is sufficient to take any symbol and
give it an ironic accent lin a correspondingly appropriate context,
of course), that is, to introduce into it one's own voice, to refract
within it one's own fresh intention.''l In this process the poetic
symbolÑwhile remaining, of course, a symbolÑis at one and the
same time translated onto the plane of prose and becomes a dou

z6. Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin had the habit of avoiding ccrtain words,
and expressions connected with them. He madc up double-voiced con-
strucuons outside any context, exclusively on the intonational plane: "'Wcll,
yes, as you see, your devoted husband, as devoted as in the first year of mar-
riage, is burning with impatience to see you,~ he said in his slow high-pitched
voice and in the tone in which he almost always addressed her, a tone of deri-
sion for anyone who could really talk like that" jAnna Karenina INew York
signet, Iy611 part 1, ch. 30; translation by David Magarshackl.

DISC O URSE IN THE N OVEL 1329]

ble-voiced word: in the space between the word and its object an-
other s word, another's accent intrudes, a mantle of materiality is
cast over the symbol (an operation of this sort would naturally re-
sult m a rather simple and primitive double-voiced structure)
An example of this simplest type of prosification of the poetic
symbol in Evgeni; Onegin is the stanza on Lensky:

of love he ILenskyl sang, love~s service choosing
And timid was his simple tune
As ever artless maiden's musing,
As babes aslumber, as the moon. 27

The poetic symbols of this stanza are organized simultaneously
at two levels: the level of Lensky's lyrics themselvesÑin the se-
mantic and expressive system of the "Gdttigen Geist"Ñand on
the level of Pushkin's speech, for whom the "Gottigen Geist"

with its language and its poetics is merely an instantiation of the
literary heteroglossia of the epoch, but one that is already becom-
ing typical: a fresh tone, a fresh voice amid the multiple voices of
literary language, literary world views and the life these world
views regulate. Some other voices in this heteroglossiaÑof lit-
erature and of the real life contemporaneous with itÑwould be
Onegin's Byronic-Chateaubriandesque language, the Richardso-
nian language and world of the provincial Tatiana, the down-to-
earth rustic language spoken at the Larins' estate, the language
and the world of Tatiana in Petersburg and other languages as
wellÑincluding the indirect languages of the authorÑwhich un-
dergo change in the course of the work. The whole of this hetero-
glossia IEvgenij Onegin is an encyclopedia of the styles and lan-
guages of the epoch) orchestrates the intentions of the author and
is responsible for the authentically novelistic style of this work
Thus the images in the above-cited stanza, being ambiguous
{metaphorical) poetic symbols serving Lensky's intentions in
Lensky's belief system, become double-voiced prose symbols in
the system of Pushkin's speech. These are, of course, authentic
prose symbols, arising from the heteroglossia inherent in the ep-
och's evolving literary language, not a superficial, rhetorical par-
ody or irony.
Such is the distinction between true double-voicedness in fic

27. We offer an analysis of this example in the essay "From the Prehistory
of Novelistic Discourse" {cf. pp. 43-45 in the current volume}.
[3301 DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

tive practice, and the single-voiced double or multiple meaning
that finds expression in the purely poetic symbol. The ambiguity
of double-voiced discourse is internally dialogized, fraught with
dialogue, and may in fact even give birth to dialogues comprised
of truly separate voices lbut such dialogues are not dramatic; they
are, rather, interminable prose dialogues}. What is more, double-
voicedness is never exhausted in these dialogues, it cannot be ex-
tracted fully from the discourseÑnot by a rational, logical count-
ing of the individual parts, nor by drawing distinctions between
the various parts of a monologic unit of discourse las happens in
rhetoricl, nor by a definite cut-off between the verbal exchanges
of a finite dialogue, such as occurs in the theater. Authentic dou-
ble-voicedness, although it generates novelistic prose dialogues,
is not exhausted in these dialogues and remains in the discourse,
in language, like a spring of dialogism that never runs dryÑfor
the internal dialogism of discourse is something that inevitably
accompanies the social, contradictory historical becoming of

language.
If the central problem in poetic theory is the problem of the po-
etic symbol, then the central problem in prose theory is the prob-
lem of the double-voiced, internally dialogized word, in all its di-
verse types and variants.
For the novelist working in prose, the object is always en-
tangled in someone else's discourse about it, it is already present
with qualifications, an object of dispute that is conceptualized
and evaluated variously, inseparable from the heteroglot social
apperception of it. The novelist speaks of this "already qualified
world" in a language that is heteroglot and internally dialogized.
Thus both object and language are revealed to the novelist in
their historical dimension, in the process of social and heteroglot
becoming. For the novelist, there is no world outside his socio-
heteroglot perceptionÑand there is no language outside the het-
eroglot intentions that stratify that world. Therefore it is possible
to have, even in the novel, that profound but unique unity of a
language lor more precisely, of languagesl with its own object,
with its own world, unity of the sort one finds in poetry. Just as
the poetic image seems to have been born out of language itself,

to have sprung organically from it, to have been pre-formed in it,
so also novelistic images seem to be grafted organically on to
their own double-voiced language, pre-formed, as it were, within
it, in the innards of the distinctive multi-speechedness organic

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL 133I1

to that language. In the novel, the "already bespoke quality"
logovorennost'] of the world is woven together with the "already
uttered" quality Iperegovorennost'l of language, into the unitary 9
event of the world's heteroglot becoming, in both social con
sciousness and language.
Even the poetic word (in the narrow sensel must break through
to its object, penetrate the alien word in which the object is en-
tangled; it also encounters heteroglot language and must break
through in order to create a unity and a pure intentionality
{which is neither given nor ready-made). But the trajectory of the
poetic word toward its own object and toward the unity of lan-
guage is a path along which the poetic word is continually en-
countering someone else's word, and each takes new bearings
from the other; the records of the passage remain in the slag of
the creative process, which is then cleared away las scaffolding is
cleared away once construction is finished}, so that the finished
work may rise as unitary speech, one co-extensive with its object,
as if it were speech about an "Edenic" world. This single-voiced
purity and unqualified directness that intentions possess in po-
etic discourse so crafted is purchased at the price of a certain con-
ventionality in poetic language.
If the art of poetry, as a utopian philosophy of genres, gives rise
to the conception of a purely poetic, extrahistorical language, a
language far removed from the petty rounds of everyday life, a
language of the godsÑthen it must be said that the art of prose is
close to a conception of languages as historically concrete and liv-
ing things. The prose art presumes a deliberate feeling for the his-
torical and social concreteness of living discourse, as well as its
relativity, a feeling for its participation in historical becoming and
in social struggle; it deals with discourse that is still warm from
that struggle and hostility, as yet unresolved and still fraught with
hostile intentions and accents; prose art finds discourse in this
state and subjects it to the dynamic unity of its own style.

The Speaking Person in the Novel

We have seen that social heteroglossia, the heteroglot sense of the
world and of society orchestrating a novelistic theme, either en-
ters the novel as impersonal stylizations of generic, professional
and other social languagesÑimpersonal, but pregnant with the

.. : X f ;. . |

)

: : ;

::} S

;4 ! An::: ::

:0 : :

Is fAere a Text in fAis Class?

Fish, Stanley. "Chapter 13: Is There a Text in This
Class?" Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authoritv
of lnterDretive Communities. Harvard University Press,
1980 (President and Fellows of Harvard Cofege).
Pages 303-321.

[THESE ESSAYS have a double origin, in the incident that gave
them their title, and in Meyer Abrams's recently published paper
"How To Do Things with Texts," a forthright attack on the work
of Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom, and me. 1 was present when
Abrams delivered the paper at the Lionel Trilling Seminar of 1978,
and I remember laughing very hard when he took on Bloom and
Derrida and trying very hard to laugh when he turned his atten-
tion to me. Abrams's arguments are familiar; they are essentially the
same he deployed against J. Hillis Miller in the "pluralism" debate.
Specifically, he accuses each "Newreader" of playing a double game,
of "introducing his own interpretive strategy when reading someone
else's text, but tacitly relying on communal norms when undertaking
to communicate the methods and results of his interpretations to
his own readers" (Partisan Review, 1979, no. 4, p. 587). Miller, Der-
rida, and the others write books and essays, and engage in symposia
and debates, and in so doing use tlle standard language in order to
deconstruct the standard language. The very presumption tllat they
are understood is an argument against the position they urge.
As a counterargument this has a certain prima facie plausibility,
if only because it imagines as its object a theory that renders under-
standing impossible. But in the tlleory of tllis Newreader, under-
standing is always possible, but not from the outside. That is, the
reason that 1 can speak and presume to be understood by someone
like Abrams is that I speak to him from within a set of interests and
concerns, and it is in relation to those interests and concerns that 1
assume he will hear my words. If what follows is communication or
understanding, it will not be because he and I share a langtlage, in
the sense of knowing the meanings of individual words and the rules
for combining them, but because a way of thinking, a form of life,

1 3¡3

w
oo

3ov Is There a Text in TlIis Class7

shares us, all(l implicates us bl a worl(l of all-catly-ill-pl.lce objects, pur-
poses, goals, procedures, values, and so on; and it is to the features of
that world tllat any words we utter will be heard as necessarily
relerring. Thus Abrams and 1 could talk about wbetller or not a
poem was a pastoral, advance and counter arguments, dispute evi-
dence, concede points, and so forth, but we could do these things only
because "poem" and "pastoral" are possible labels of identificatioll
witllin a vIniverse of discourse tb.lt also includes stipulatiolls as to
what would count as an identifying mark, and ways of arguing that
susb a mark is or is not tllere. It would be within tlle assumptioll
of sucll ways, stipulations, and classifications that Abrams and I
would proceed, and we could not proceed at all if eitllcr of us were
someone for whom tlsey were not already assumed. Nor woukl it be
enough to give someone "on tlle outside" a set of definitiolls (of the
order "a poem is . . . ," "a genre is . . .") because in order to grasp the
meaning of an individual term, you must alrea(ly llave graspe(l
the general activity (in this case academic literary criticism) in rela-
tion to WlliCll it could be thougllt to be meaningful; a system of in-
telligibility cannot be reduce(l to a list of the thillgs it ren(lers in-
telligible. What Abrams and those wllo agree witll bim (lo not realize
is tbilt communication occurs only tvithin such a system (or context,
or situation, or interpretive community) and that the ~.. ' ... ~ ': ~,
achieved by two or more persolls is slxcific to tliaa system and de-
terminate only witllin its confincs. Nor do tlley realize tllat sucll an
understanding is enougb and tlult the more perfect tlnderstan(ling
tlley desireÑan understanelblg that oper.ltes above or across sitlla-
tionsÑwould b.lve no place in tllc worl(l even if it were available,
because it is only in situationsÑwitb tlleir interested specifications
as to what counts as a fact, wll.lt iv is possible to say, wllat will be
11eard as an argumentÑthat one is called on to underst.lnd.
Tbese essays were ol igillally (lelivere(l as the lobll Crowe Ransom
Memorial Lectllres, anul were gisen at Kenyon College from April 8
througll 13, 197!) In cRõcet, I was engage(l in a week-long seminar
consistillg of some tllree lmlldle(l memlxrs, and I foun(l the experi-
ence both exhilarating and exhausting. Apparently, some ot the same
feelings were shared by the audience, tor in an editorial written fol
tlle college newsp.ll)el (entitled "Fisll Baits Aualiell(e'') gcllcl-olls
praise of my ''intellestll.ll skill" was imllle{liately qu;llified by tbe
obselv;ltioll tllat, nee(Jless to say, "it was not always the skill of a
gentleman."]

;

Is There a Text in I his Class? 305

N THE FIRST DAY of the new semester a col
( league at Johns Hopkins University was ap
t proached by a student who, as it turned out,
had just taken a course from me. She put to him what I think
you would agree is a perfectly straightforward question: "Is there
a text in this class?" Responding with a confidence so perfect
that he was unaware of it (although in telling the story, he refers
to this moment as "walking into the trap"), my colleague said,
"Yes; it's the Norton Anthology of Literature," whereupon the
trap (set not by the student but by the infinite capacity of lan-
guage for being appropriated) was sprung: "No, no," she said,
"I mean in this class do we believe in poems and things, or is it
just us?" Now it is possible (and for many tempting) to read this
anecdote as an illustration of the dangers that follow upon listen-
ing to people like me who preach the instability of the text and
the unavailability of determinate meanings; but in what follows

I will try to read it as an illustration of how baseless the fear of
these dangers finally is.
Of the charges levied against what Meyer Abrams has re-
cently called the New Readers (Derrida, Bloom, Fish) the most
persistent is that these apostles of indeterminacy and undecida-
bility ignore, even as they rely upon, the "norms and possibili-
ties" embedded in language, the "linguistic meanings" words
undeniably have, and thereby invite us to abandon "our ordi-
nary realm of experience in speaking, hearing, reading and
understanding" for a world in which "no text can mean any-
thing in particular" and where "we can never say just what
anyone means by anything he writes."' The charge is that literal
or normative meanings are overriden by the actions of willful
interpreters. Suppose we examine this indictment in the context
of the present example. What, exactly, is the normative or lit-
eral or linguistic meaning of "Is there a text in this class?"
Within the framework of contemporary critical debate (as it
is reflected in the pages, say, of Critical Inq1(iry) there would
seem to be only two ways of answering this question: either there
is a literal meaning of the utterance and we should be able to
say what it is, or there are as many meanings as there are readers

)

)
306 Is There a Text in This Class?

and no one of them is literal. But the answer suggested by my
little story is that the utterance has two literal meanings: within
the circumstances assumed by my colleague (I don't mean that
he took the step of assuming them, but that he was already
stepping within them) the utterance is obviously a question
about whether or not there is a required textbook in this par-
ticular course; but within the circumstances to which he was
alerted by his student's corrective response, the utterance is just
as obviously a question about the instructor's position (within
the range of positions available in contemporary literary theory)
on the status of the text. Notice that we do not have here a case
of indeterminacy or undecidahility but of a determinacy and
decidability that do not always have the same shape and that
can, and in this instance do, change. My colleague was not
hesitating between two (or more) possible meanings of the utter-
ance; rather, he immediately apprehended what seemed to be
an inescapable meaning, given his prestructured understanding
of the situation, and then he immediately apprehended another
inescapable meaning when that understanding was altered. Nei-
ther meaning was imposed (a favorite word in the anti-new-
reader polemics) on a more normal one by a private, idiosyn-
cratic interpretive act; both interpretations were a function of
precisely the public and constituting norms (of language and
understanding) invoked by Abrams. It is just that these norms
are not embedded in the language (where they may be read out
by anyone with sufficiently clear, that is, unhiased, eyes) but in-
here in an institutional structure within which one hears utter-
ances as already organized with reference to certain assumed
purposes and goals. Because hoth my colleague and his student
are situated in that institution, their interpretive activities are
not free but what constrains them are the understood practices
and asstimptions of the institution and not the rules and fixed
meanings of a language system.
Another way to put this would he to say that neither read-
ing of the questionÑwhich we might for convenience's sake label
as "Is there a text in this class?", and "Is there a text in this
class?".,Ñwould be immediately available to any native speaker
of the language. "Is there a text in this class?"l is interpretable

Is There a Text in This Class? 307

or readable only by someone who already knows what is included
under the general rubric "first day of class" (what concerns
animate students, what bureaucratic matters must be attended
to before instruction begins) and who therefore hears the utter
ance under the aegis of that knowledge, which is not applied
after the fact but is responsible for the shape the fact immedi
ately has. To someone whose consciousness is not already in
formed by that knowledge, "Is there a text in this class?", would
he just as unavailable as "Is there a text in this class?"2 would
be to someone who was not already aware of the disputed issues
in contemporary literary theory. I am not saying that for some
readers or hearers the question would be wholly unintelligible
(indeed, in the course of this essay I will be arguing that unin
telligibility, in the strict or pure sense, is an impossibility), but
that there are readers and hearers for whom the intelligibility
of the question would have neither of the shapes it had, in a
temporal succession, for my colleague. It is possible, for exam
ple, to imagine someone who would hear or intend the question
as an inquiry about the location of an object, that is, "I think I
left my text in this class; have you seen it?" We would then have
an "Is there a text in this class?"3 and the possibility, feared by
the defenders of the normative and determinate, of an endless
succession of numbers, that is, of a world in which every utter
ance has an infinite plurality of meanings. But that is not what
the example, however it might be extended, suggests at all. In
any of the situations I have imagined (and in any that I might
be ahle to imagine) the meaning of the utterance would be
severely constrained, not after it was heard but in the ways in
which it conld, in the first place, he heard. An infinite plurality
of meanings wollld he a fear only if sentences existed in a state
in which they were not already embedded in, and had come into
view as a function of, some situation or other. That state, if it
t could he located, would he the normative one, and it would be
distllrhillg indeed if the norm were free-floating and indeter
I mhlate. But there is no such state; sentences emerge only in
I situations, and within those situations, the normative meaning
of an utteran(e will always be obviotls or at least accessible, al
thouoll within another situation that same utterance, no longer

!tt
F

l
a,5

308 Is There a Text in This Class7

the same, will have another normative meaning that will be no
less obvious and accessible. (My colleague's experience is pre
¥cisely an illustration.) This does not mean that there is no way
to discriminate between the meanings an utterance will have
in different situations, but that the discrimination ¥vill already
have been made by virtue of our being in a situation (we are
never not in one) and that in another situation the discrimina-
tion will also have already been made, I)ut differently. In other
words, while at any one point it is always possible to order and
rank "Is there a text in this class7"1 and "Is there a text in this
class?"2 (because they will always have already been ranked), it
will never be possible to give them an immutable once-and-for-
all ranking, a ranlaing that is independent of their appearance
or nonappearance in situations (I)ecause it is only in situations
that they do or do not appear).
Nevertheless, there is a distinction to he made between the
two that allows us to say that, in a limited sense, one is more
normal than the other: for while each is perfectly normal in the
context in which their literalness is immediately obvious (the
successive contexts occupied by my colleague), as things stand
now, one of those contexts is surely more available, and there-
fore more likely to be the perspective within which the utter-
ance is heard, than the other. Indeed, we seem to have here an
instance of what I would call "institutional nesting": if "Is there
a text in this class?''l is hearable only by those who know what is
included under the rubric "first day of class," and if "Is there
a text in this class?"., is hearahle only by those whose categories
of understanding include the concerns of contemporary literary
theory, then it is obvious that in a random population presented
with the utterance, more people would "hear" "Is there a text
in this class?", than "Is there a text in this class?"2: and, more-
over, that while "Is there a text in this class?"\ cowlld be immedi-
ately hearable by someone for whom "Is there a text in this
class?"2 would have to be laboriously explained, it is difficult
to imagine someone capable of hearing "Is there a text in this
chtss?"2 who was not already capable of hearing "Is there a text
in this class.", (One is hearable by anyone in the profession and
by most students and by many workers in the book trade, and

Is There a Text in This L'lass?

3o9

the other only by those in the profession who would not think
it peculiar to find, as 1 did recently, a critic referring to a phrase
"made popular by l.acan.") To admit as much is not to weaken
my argument by reinstating the category of the normal, because
the category as it appears in that argument is not transcendental
but institutional; and while no institution is so universally in
force and so perdurable that the meanings it enables will be
normal for ever, some institutions or forms of life are so widely
lived in that for a great many people the meanings they enable
seem "naturally" available and it takes a special effort to see
that they are the products of circumstances.

The point is an important one, because it accounts for the
success with which an Abrams or an E. D. Hirsch can appeal to
a shared understanding of ordinary language and argue from
that understanding to the availability of a core of determinate
meanings. When Hirsch offers "The air is crisp" as an example
of a "verbal meaning" that is accessible to all speakers of the
language, and distinguishes what is sharable and determinate
abotlt it from the associations that may, in certain circum-
stances, accompany it (for example, "I should have eaten less
at supper," "Crisp air reminds me of my childhood in Ver-
mont"),2 he is counting on his readers to agree so completely
witll his sense of what that shared and normative verbal mean-
ing is that he does not bother even to specify it; and although I
have not taleen a survey, I would venture to guess that his opti-
mism, with respect to this particular example, is well founded.
That is, most, if not all, of his readers immediately understand
the utterance as a rougll meteorological description predicting
a certain quality of the local atmosphere. 13ut the "happiness" of
the example, far from malaing Hirsch's point (which is always,
as he has recently reaffirmed, to maintain "the stable deter-
minacy of meaning"):' maloes mine. The obviotlsness Of the utter-
ance's meaning is not a fun(tioll of the values its words have in
a linguistic system that is independellt of context; rather, it is
becatlse the words are heard as already embedded in a context
that they have a meaning that Hirsch can then c ite as obvious.
One can see this hy embedding the words in another context
and observing how quickly another "obviotls" meaning emerges.

)
3IO

Is There a Text in This Class?

Suppose, for example, we came llpOIl "The air is crisp" (wllich
you are even now hearing as Hirsch assumes you hear it) in the
middle of a discussion ot music ("When the piece is played cor-
rectly the air is crisp"); it would immediately be heard as a com-
ment on the performance by an instrument or instruments of a
musical air. Moreover, it would 07lly be heard that way, and to
hear it in Hirsch's way ¥vould require an effort on the order of
a strain. It could be objected that in Hirsch's text "The air is
crisp", has no contextual setting at all; it is merely presented,
and therefore any agreement as to its meaning must be becatlse
of the utterance's acontextual properties. But there is a con-
textual setting and the sign of its presence is precisely the al)-
sence of any reference to it. Thalt is, it is impossible even to think
of a sentence independently of a context, and when we are asked
to consider a sentence for wl1icll no context has been specified,
we will automatically hear it in the context in which it has
been most often encountered. Thtls Hirsch invokes a context
by not invoking it; by not surrotlnding the utterance with c ir-
cumstances, he directs us to imagine it hl the circumstances in
which it is most likely to have heen produced; and to so imagine
it is already to have given it a shape that seems at the moment to
be the only one possible.
What conclusions can he drawn from these two examplesr
First of all, neither my colleaglle nor the reader of Hirsch's sen-
tence is constrained by the meanings words have in a normative
linguistic system; and yet neither is free to confer on an utter-
ance any meaning he likes. Indeed, "confer" is exactly the wrong
word because it implies a two stage procedure hl ¥vhich a reader
or hearer first scrutillizes an utterance and /he71 gives it a mean-
ing. The argument of the preceding pages can be redn(ed to the
assertion that there is no su(h first stage, th.lt one he.lrs an utter-
ance within, and not as preliminary to determinin,,, a l;nowl-
edge of its purposes and con(erns, alld that to so heal it is al-

ready to have assigned it a shape and given it a meaIling. In
other words, the problem of how meaning is detcrnline(l is only
a problem if there is a point at whicl1 its determinatioll has nOt
yet been made, and I am saying that there is no su( ll pOillt.
1 am 710t saying that one is never in the position Of havillg to

Is TlIere a Text in This Class? 3II

self-consciously figure out what an utter.mce means. Indeed, my
colleagtle is in just such a position when he is informed by his
student that he has not heard her question as she intended it
("No, No, I mean in this class do we believe in poems and things,
or is it just us?") and therefore must now figure it out. But the
"it" in this (or any other) case is not a collection of words wait-
ing to be assigned a meaning but an utterance whose already
assigned meaning has been found to be inappropriate. While my
colleague has to begin all over again, he does not have to begin
from square one; and indeed he never was at square one, since
from the very first his hearing of the student's question was in-
formed by his assumption of what its concerns could possibly
be. (That is why he is not "free" even if he is unconstrained by
determinate meanings.) It is that assumption rather than his
performance within it that is challenged by the student's correc-
tion. She tells him that he has mistaken her meaning, but this
is not to say that he has made a mistake in combining her words
and syntax into a meaningful unit; it is rather that the mean-
ingful unit he immediately discerns is a function of a mistaken
identification (made before she speaks) of her intention. He
was prepared as she stood before him to hear the kind of thing
students ordinarily say on the first day of class, and therefore
that is precisely what he heard. He has not misread the text (his
is not an error in calculation) but mispreread the text, and if he
is to correct himself he must make another (pre)determination
of the structllre of interests from which her question issues.
This, of course, is exactly what he does and the question of how
he does it is a crucial one, which can best be answered by first
considering the ways in which he didn't do it.
He didn't do it hy attending to the literal meaning of her
response. That is, this is not a case in which someone who has
been misunderstood clarifies her meaning by making more ex-
plicit, hy varying or adding to her words in such a way as to
render their sense inescapahle. Within the circumstances of
utterans e as he has assume(l them her words are perfectly clear,
and what she is doing is asking him to imagine other circum-
stances in which the same words will he equally, bllt differently,
clear. Nor is it that the words she does add ("No, No, I mean

3s2 Is There a Text in This Class?

. . .") direct him to those other circumstances by picking them
out from an inventory of all possible ones. For this to be the
case there would have to be an inherent relationship between the
words she speaks and a particular set of circumstances (this
would be a higher level literalism) such that any competent
speaker ot the language hearing those words would immediately
be referred to that set. But 1 have told the story to several com-
petent speakers of the language who simply didn't get it, and one
friendÑa professor of philosophyÑreported to me that in the
interval between his hearing the story and my explaining it to
him (and just how I was able to do that is another crucial ques-
tion) he found himself asking "What kind of joke is this and
have 1 missed it?" For a time at least he remained able only to
hear "Is there a text in this class" as my colleague first heard it;
the student's additional words, far from leading him to another
hearing, only made him aware of his distance from it. In contrast,
there are those who not only get the story but get it hefore 1
tell it; that is, they know in advance what is coming as soon as 1
say that a colleague of mine was recently asked, "Is there a text
in this class?" Who are these people and what is it that makes
their comprehension of the story so immediate and easy? Well,
one could say, without being the least bit facetious, that they
are the people who come to hear me speak because they are the
people who already know my position on certain matters (or
know that 1 will have a position). That is, they hear, "Is there a
text in this class?" even as it appears at the beginning of the
anecdote (or for that matter as a title of an essay) in the light of
their knowledge of what 1 am likely to do with it. They hear it
coming from me, in circumstances which have committed me to
declaring myself on a range of issues that are sharply delimited.
My colleague was finally able to hear it in just that way, as
coming from me, not becatlse 1 was there in his c lassroom, nor
becallse the words of the student's question pointed to me in a
way that would have been obvious to any hearer, bllt be(atlse he
was able to think of me in an ofElce three doors down from his
telling students that there are no determinate meanings and that
the stability of the text is an illusion. Indeed, as he reports it,
the moment of recognition and comprehension consisted of his

Is There a Text in T his Class7 313

saying to himself, "Ah, there's one of Fish's victims!" He did not
say this because her words identified her as sue h but because his
ability to see her as such informed his perception of her words.
The answer to the question "How did he get from her words
to the circumstances within which she intended him to hear
them?" is that he must already be thinking within those circum-
stances in order to be able to hear her words as referring to them.
The question, then, must be rejected, because it assumes that
the construing of sense leads to the identification of the context
of utterance rather than the other way around. This does not
mean that the context comes first and that once it has been iden-
tified the construing of sense can begin. This would be only to
reverse the order of precedence, whereas precedence is beside
the point because the two actions it would order (the identifi-
c ation of context and the making of sense) occur simultaneously.
One does not say "Here 1 am in a situation; now 1 can begin to
determine what these words mean." To he in a situation is to
see the words, these or any other, as already meaningful. For my
c olleague to realize that he may be confronting one of my victims
is at the samc time to hear what she says as a question about his
theoretical beliefs.

But to dispose of one "how" question is only to raise another:
if her words do not lead him to the context of her utterance,
how does he get there? Why did he think of me telling students
that there were no determinate meanings and not think of
someone or something else? First of all, he might well have. That
is, he might well have guessed that she was coming from another
direction (inquiring, let us say, as to whether the focus of this
class was to be the poems and essays or our responses to them, a
question in the same line of country as hers bllt quite distinct
from it) or he might have simply heen stymied, like my philoso-
pher friend, confined, in the absence of an explanation, to his
first determination of her concerns and ullable to make any
sense of her words other than the sense he originally made. How,
then, did he do it? In part, he did it because he col/ld do it: he
was able to get to this context becallse it was already part of his
repertoire for organizing the world and its events. The category
"one of Fish's victims" was one he already had and didn't have

f
3'v

15 There a Texl in This Class?

to work for. Of cotlrse, il did not always have him, in that his
world was not always being organized by it, and it certainly did
not have him at the beginning of the collversation; but it was
available to him, and he to it, and all he had to do was to recall
it or be recalled to it for the meanings it sul)tended to emerge.
(Had it not been available to him, the career of his comprehen-
sion would have been different and we will come to a considera-
tion of that difference shortly.)
This, however, only pushes our inquiry back further. How
or why was he recalled to it? The answer to this (luestion must be
probabilistic and it begins with the recognition that when some-
thing changes, not everything changes. Although my colleague's
understanding of his circumstances is transformed in the course
of this conversation, the circumstances are still understood to he
academic ones, and within that continuing (if modified) under-
standing, the directions his thought might take are already
severely limited. He still presumes, as he did at first, that the
student's question has something to do with university business
in general, and with English literature in particular, and it is
the organizing rubrics associated with these areas of experience
that are likely to occur to him. One of those rubrics is "what-
goes-on-in-other-classes" and one of those other classes is mine.
And so, by a route that is neither entirely unmarked nor wholly
determined, he comes to me and to the notion "one of Fish's
victims" and to a new construing of what his student has been
saying.
Of course that route would have been much more circuitolls
if the category "one of Fish's victims" was not already available
to him as a device for producing intelligibility. Had that device
not been part of his repertoire, had he been incapahle of being
recalled to it becatlse he never knew it in the first place, how
would he have proceeded? The answer is that he collld not have
proceeded at all, which does not mean that one is trapped for-
ever in the categories of understallding at one's disposal (or the
categories at whose disposal one is), hut that the introduction of
new categories or the expansion of old ones to include new (alld
therefore newly seen) data must always come from the outside

Is There a Text in This Class?

3IS

or from what is perceived, for a time, to be the outside. In the
event that he was unable to identify the structure of her concerns
because it had never been his (or he its), it would have been her
obligation to explain it to him. And here we run up against an-
other instance of the problem we have been considering all along.
She could not explain it to him by varying or adding to her
words, by being more explicit, because her words will only be
intelligible if he already has the knowledge they are supposed to
convey, the knowledge of the assumptions and interests from
which they issue. It is clear, then, that she would have to make
a new start, although she would not have to start from scratch
(indeed, starting from scratch is never a possibility); but she
would have to back up to some point at which there was a
shared agreement as to what was reasonable to say so that a new
and wider basis for agreement could be fashioned. In this par-
ticular case, for example, she might begin with the fact that her
interlocutor already knows what a text is: that is, he has a way
of thinking about it that is responsible for his hearing of her
first question as one about bureaucratic classroom procedures.
(You will remember that "he" in these sentences is no longer my
colleague but someone who does not have his special knowledge.)
It is that way of thinking that she must labor to extend or chal-
lenge, first, perhaps, by pointing out that there are those who
think abollt the text in other ways, and then by trying to find a
category of his own understanding which might serve as an ana-
logue to the understanding, he does not yet share. He might, for
example, be familiar with those psychologists who argue for
the constitlltive power of perception, or with Combrich's the-
ory of the beholder's share, or with that philosophical tradition
in which the stability of objects has always been a matter of dis-
pute. The example must remain hypothetical and skeletal, be-
cause it can only be Reshed out after a determination of the
particillar beliefs and assumptions that would make the expla-
nation necessary in the first place; for whatever they were, they
wolild dictate the strategy by which she would work to supplant
or change them It is when Stl(ll a strategy has been successftil
that the import of her words will be( ome clear, not because she

: \ f?
f:: : 2

316 Is There a Text in This Class?

has reformulated or refined them but because tlley will now
be read or heard within the same system of intelligibility from
which they issue.
In short, this hypothetical interlocutor will in time be brought
to the same point of comprehension my colleague enjoys when he
is able to say to himself, "Ah, there's one of Fish's victims," al-
though presumably he will say something very different to him-
self if he says anything at all. The difference, however, should
not obscure the basic similarities between the two experiences,
one reported, the other imagined. In both cases the words that
are uttered are immediately heard within a set of assumptions
about the direction from which they could possibly be coming,
and in both cases what is required is that the hearing occur
within another set of assumptions in relation to which the same
words ("Is there a text in this class?") will no longer be the same.
It is just that while my colleague is able to meet that requirement
by calling to mind a context of utterance that is already a part
of his repertoire, the repertoire of his hypothetical stand-in must
be expanded to include that context so that should he some day
be in an analogous situation, he would be able to call it to mind.
The distinction, then, is between already having an ability
and having to acquire it, but it is not finally an essential distinc-
tion, because the routes by which that ability could be exer-
cised on the one hand, and learned on the other, are so similar.
They are similar first of all because they are similarly not deter-
mined by words. Just as the student's words will not direct my
colleague to a context he already has, so will they fail to direct
someone not furnished with that context to its discovery. And
yet in neither case does the absence of su(h a mechanical de-
termination mean that the route one travels is randomly found.
The change from one structllre of understanding to anotller
is not a rupture but a modification of the interests and concerns
that are already in place; and because they are already in place,
they constrain the direction of their owll modification. That is,
in both cases the hearer is already in a situation informed by
tacitly known purposes and goals, and in botll cases he ends up
in another situation whose purposes and goals stand in some
elaborated relation (of contrast, opposition, expansion, exten

ls There a Text in 7 his Class?

3'7

sion) to those they supplant. (The one relation in which they
could not stand is no relation at all.) It is just that in one case the
network of elaboration (from the text as an obviously physical ob-
ject to the question of whether or not the text is a physical object)
has already been articulated (although not all of its articula-
tions are in focus at one time; selection is always occurring),
while in the other the articulation of the network is the btlsiness
of the teacher (here the student) who begins, necessarily, with
what is already given.
The final similarity between the two cases is that in neither
is success assured. It was no more inevitable that my colleague
tumble to the context of his student's utterance than it would be
inevitable that she could introduce that context to someone
previously unaware of it; and, indeed, had my colleague re-
mained puzzled (had he simply not thought of me), it would have
been necessary for the student to bring him along in a way that
was finally indistinguishable from the way she would bring some-
one to a new knowledge, that is, by beginning with the shape of
his present understanding.
I have lingered so long over the unpacking of this anecdote
that its relationship to the problem of authority in the classroom

and in literary criticism may seem obscure. I.et me recall you to
it by recalling the contention of Abrams and others that author-
ity depends upon the existence of a determinate core of mean-
ings because in the absence of such a core there is no normative
or public way of construing what anyone says or writes, with
the result that interpretation becomes a matter of individual and
private construings none of which is subject to challenge or
correction. In literary criticism this means that no interpretation
can be said to be better or worse than any other, and in the class-
room this means that we have no answer to the student who
says my interpretation is as valid as yours. It is only if there is
a shared basis of agreement at once guiding interpretation and
providing a mechanism for deciding between interpretations
that a total and dehilitating relativism can he avoided.
But the point of my analysis has heell to show that while
"Is there a text in this classP" does not have a determinate mean-
ing, a meaning that survives the sea change of situations, in any

)
318

Is There a 7 exl in This Class.2

situatioll we might imagine the me.lnilig ol the uttelilil(e is
either perfectly clear or capal)le, in the ( ourse of tiniefi ol l)eing
clarilied What is it that mai;es this possil)le, il it is not the
"possibilities and norms" alrea(ty encode(l in hlnonllage? Ilow
does communicatioll ever occilr il not by referen(e to a pill)li(
and stable norm? The answer, impli(it in everythilig I have
already said, is that commullication oce llrs Witllill sitmitiolis an(l
that to he in a situation is already to be in possession of (or to
he possessed by) a structilre of ;ISSlllllptiOllS, 01 pl-l(ti(es nn(ler-
stood to be relevant in relation to purposes an(l noals th;lt are
already in place; and it is within the assumption of these pur-
poses and goals that any utter; nce is immeditilely heard I stress
immediately becatise it seems to me that the plol)lelil of colil-
munication, as someone like Ahrams poses it, is a prol)lem only
becalise he assumes a distance l)etween one's receiving of all utter-
ance and the determination of its meaningÑa kin(l or dea(l spas e
when one has only the words and then fa(es lllc tasl; of coll-
struilig them If there were su(h a space, a moment l)efore hl-
terpretation hegan, then it wolil(l he necessary to have recolilse
to some mechani(al and algorithmi( procedure by means of
whi( h meanings could he c alculated and in relatioll to wili( h one
could recognize mistakes XVhat I have been arollillo is that
meanings come already cal(lilated, not be(;lilse Of norms em-
bedded in the language but be( anse langil;loe is always per-
ceived, from the very first, within a stru(tilre of norms That
strn(tilre, however, is not ahstra(t and indepcildelit btit so(ial;
and therefore it is not a single stm(tilre with a privilego,e(l rela-
tionship to the process of commulli(ation as it a-cilrs hl any
situation hut a structure that changes wilen one situationt with
its assumed ba(kgrolind of practi(es, plll'pOSt'S, an(l goals, has
given way to another In other words, the share(l basis of aoree-
ment songht by Ahrams and others is never not already folilid,
although it is not always the same one
Many will fin(l hl this last sentell(eb all(l in the aroumelit to
wili(h it is a coll(lilsionX nothillo more than a sophisti(ate(l ver-
SiOIl of the relativism they fear It will do no goo(l, they say, to
speak of norms and standards that are context specific, he(alise
this is merely to authorize an infillite pinrality of norms and

Is There a Text in This Class? 3I9

standards, and we are still left without any way of adjudicatilig
l)etween them and l)etween the competing systems of vahie of
which they are functions In short, to have many stand.lrds is to
have no standards at all
On one level this counterargument is uliassailable, bilt on
another level it is finally beside the point It is unassailahle as a
general and theoretical concitision the positing of context- or
institution-specific norms surely rules out the possil)ility of a
norm whose validity would be recognized by everyone, no mat-
ter what his situation lSut it is beside the point for any particu-
lar individual, for since everyone is situated somewhere, there is
no one for whom the absence of an asituational norm would be
of any practical consequence, in the sense that his performance
or his confidence in his ability to perform would be impaired
So that while it is generally true that to have many standards is
to have none at all, it is not true for anyone in particular (for
there is no one in a position to speak "generally"), and therefore
it is a truth of which one can say "it doesn't matter"
In other words, while relativism is a position one can enter-
tain, it is not a position one can OCCIlpy No one can l)e a rela-
tivist, because no one can achieve the distance from his own
beliefs and assumptions which would result in their heing no
more authoritative for him than the beliefs and assumptions
held by others, or, for that matter, the beliefs and assumptions
he himself used to hold. The fear that in a world of indifferently
authorized norms and values the individual is without a basis
for action is groundless because no one is indifferent to the norms
and values that enal)le his consciousness. It is in the name of
personally held (in fact they are doing the holding) norms and
values that the individual acts and argues, and he does so with
the full confidence that attends belief. When his beliefs change,
the norms and values to which he once gave untilinlwing assent
will have been demoted to the statils of opinions alid becollle
the objects of an analytical and critical attention; but that atten-
tion will itself he enabled by a new set of norms and values that
are, for the time being, as ullexamined and ulidolibte(l as those
they displace. The point is that there is never a moment when
one believes nothing, when consciousness is innocent of any

320 Is There a Text in This Class?

and all categories of thought, and whatever categories of thought
are operative at a given moment will serve as an undollbted
ground.
Here, I suspect, a defender of determinate meallillg would
cry "solipsist" and argue that a confidence that had its source
in the individual's categories of thought wotlld have no pul)lic
value. That is, unconnected to any shared and stable system of
meanings, it would not enable one to transact the verbal busi-
ness of everyday life; a shared intelligibility would be impossible
in a world where everyone was trapped in the circle of his own
assumptions and opinions. The reply to this is that an indi-
vidual's assumptions and opinions are not "his own" in any
sense that would give body to the fear of solipsism. That is, he
is not their origin (in fact it might be more accurate to say that
they are his); rather, it is their prior availability which delimits
in advance the paths that his consciousness can possibly take.
When my colleague is in the act of construing his student's ques-
tion ("Is there a text in this class?"), none of the interpretive
strategies at his disposal are uniquely his, in the sense that he
thought them up; they follow from his ~ ':. ,, of the
interests and goals that could possibly animate the speech of
someone functioning within the institution of academic Amer
ica, interests and goals that are the particular property of no one
in particular but which link everyone for whom their assump
tion is so habitual as to be unthinking. They certainly link my
colleague and his student, who are able to communicate and even
to reason about one another's intentions, not, however, because
their interpretive efforts are constrained by the shape of an in
dependent language but because their shared understanding of
what could possibly be at stake in a classroom situation results
in language appearing to them in the same shape (or successions
of shapes). That shared understanding is the basis of the confi
dence with which they speak and reason, bllt its categories are
their own only in the sense that as actors within an institution
they automatically fall heir to the institution's way of making
sense, its systems of intelligibility. That is lvhy it is so hard for
someone whose very being is defined by his position within an
institution (and if not this one, then some other) to explain to

Is There a Text in This Class?

321

someone outside it a practice or a meaning that seems to him to
require no explanation, I)ecause he regards it as natllral. Such a
person, when pressed, is lil;ely to say, "btlt that's just the way
it's done" or "but isn't it obviolls" alld so testify that tlle prac-
tice or meaning in question is community property, as, in a
sense, he is too.
We see then that (X) communicatiorl does occur, despite the
absence of all independent and context-free system of mean-
ings, that (2) those who participate in this communication do so
confidently rather than provisionally (they are not relativists),
and that (3) while their confidellce has its source in a set of he-
liefs, those beliels are not individllal-specific or idiosyncratic
btlt communal and conventiollal (they are not solipsists).
Of course, solipsism and relativism are what Abrams and
Hirsch fear and what lead them to arglle for the necessity of de-
terminate meaning. But if, rather than acting on their own, in-
terpreters act as extensions of an institutional community
solipsism and relativism are removed as fears becallse they are
not possible modes of being. That is to say, the colldition re-

quired for someone to be a solipsist or relativist, the condition
of being independent of institutional assulnptiolls and free to
originate one's own purposes and goals, could never be realized,
and therefore there is no point in trying to guard against it.
Abrams, Hirsch, and company spend a Freat deal of time in a
search for the ways to limit and constrain interpretation, but if
the example of my colleague and his student can be generalized
(and obviously I think it can be), what they are searching for
is never not already found. In short, my message to them is
finally not cllallenging, btlt consolingÑnot to worry.
How To Recognize a Poem When You See One 323

14
r r

Fish, Stanley. "Chapter 14: How to Recognee a
Poem When You See One." Is There a Text in This
Class?: The Authoritv of InterDretive Communibes.
Harvard University Press, 1980 (President and Fellows
of Harvard College). Pages 322-337.

now To Recognize a Poem
When You See One

T AST TIME I sketched out an argument by which
| meanings are the property neither of fixed and
tJ stable texts nor of free and independent readers
but of interpretive communities that are responsible both for
the shape of a reader's activities and for the texts those activities
produce. In this lecture I propose to extend that argument so
as to account not only for the meanings a poem might be said to
have but for the fact of its being recognized as a poem in the first
place. And once again I would like to begin with an anecdote.
In the summer of 197 1 I was teaching two : ~ -- under the
joint auspices of the Linguistic Institute of America and the
English Department of the !itate University of New York at
lSuffalo. I taught these courses in the morning and in the same
room. At 9:301 would meet a group of studellts wllo were in-
terested in the relationship between linguistics and literary criti-
cism. Our nominal subject was stylistics but our concerns were
finally theoretical and extended to the presuppositions and as-
sumptions which underlie both linguistic and literary practice.
At X l 00 these students were replaced by another group whose
con(erlls were exclusively literary and were in fact c(lnfinecl to
English religious poetry of the seventeenth centllry. These stu-
dents had l)een learning how to identify ('hristian syml)ols and
how to recognize typological patterns and how to move rrom the
observ.ltion of these symbols and patterns to the specification of
a poetic intention that was usually didactic or homileti(. ()n the
day I am thinking ahotlt, the only connection between the two
chlsses was an assignment given to the first which was still on
the blackl)oard at the heginning of the second. It read:

i, , 0, . . : .

Jacobs-Rosenbaum
Levin
Thorne
Hayes -
Ohman (?)
I am sure that many of you will already have recognized the
names on this list, but for the sake of the record, allow me to
identify them. Roderick Jacobs and Peter Rosenbaum are two
linguists who have coauthored a number of textbooks and co-

edited a number of anthologies. .Samuel I,evin is a linguist who
was one of the first to apply the operations ot transformational
grammar to literary texts. J. P. Thorne is a linguist at Edinbtlrgh
who, like Levin, was attempting to extend the rules of trans-
formational grammar to the notorious irregularities of poetic
language. ('.urtis Hayes is a linguist who was then using trans-
Eormational grammar in order to establish an objective basis
for his intuitive impression that the language of Gibbon's Rise
and Fall of the Rornan Empire is more complex than the lan-
guage of Hemingway's novels. And Richard Ohmann is the
literary critic who, more than any other, was responsible for
introducing the vocabulary of transformational grammar to the
literary community. Ohmann's name was spelled as you see it
here because I could not remember whether it contained one or
two n's. In other words, the question mark in parenthesis signi-
fied nothing more than a faulty memory and a desire on my part
to appear scrupulous. The fact that the names appeared in a list
that was arranged vertically, and that Levin, Thorne, and Hayes
formed a column that was more or less centered in relation to
the paired names of Jacobs and Rosenbaum, was similarly acci-
dental and was evidence only of a certain compulsiveness if, in-
deed, it was eviden(e of anything at all.
In the time between the two c lasses I made only one change.
I drew a frame arourld the assignment and wrote on the top of
that frame "p. 4y." When the members or the second class filed
in I told them that what they saw on the blaclel)oard was a re-
ligiotls poem of the kind they had been studying and I asked
them to interpret it. Immediately they began to perform in a

322
p
co

Is There a Text in This Class?

manner that, for reasons which will become clear, was more or
less predictable. The first student to speak pointed out that the
poem was probably a hieroglyph, although he was not sure
whether it was in the shape of a cross or an altar. This question
was set aside as the other students, following his lead, began to
concentrate on individual words, interrupting each other with
suggestions that came so quickly that they seemed spontaneous.
The first line of the poem (the very order of events assumed
the already constituted status of the object) received the most
attention: Jacobs was explicated as a reference to Jacob's ladder,
traditionally allegorized as a figure for the Christian ascent to
heaven. In this poem, however, or so my students told me, the
means of ascent is not a ladder but a tree, a rose tree or rosen-
baum. This was seen to be an obvious reference to the Virgin
Mary who was often characterized as a rose without thorns, it-
self an emblem of the immaculate conception. At this point the
poem appeared to the students to be operating in the familiar
manner of an iconographic riddle. It at once posed the ques-
tion, "How is it that a man can climb to heaven by means
of a rose tree?" and directed the reader to the inevitable answer:
by the fruit of that tree, the fruit of Mary's womb, Jesus. Once
this interpretation was established it received support from, and
conferred significance on, the word "thorne," which could only
be an allusion to the crown of thorns, a symbol of the trial suf-
fered by Jesus and of the price he paid to save us all. It was
only a short step (really no step at all) from this insight to the
recognition of l,evin as a double reference, first to the tribe of
l.evi, of whose priestly function Christ was the fulfillment, and
second to the unleavened bread carried by the children of Israel
on their exodus from Egypt, the place of sin, and in response to
the call of Moses, perhaps the most familiar of the old testa-

ment types of Christ. The final word of the poem was given at
least three complementary readings: it could be "omen," espe-
c ially since so much of the poem is concerned with foreshadow-
ing and prophecy; it could be Oh Man, since it is man's story
as it intersects with the divine plan that is the poem's subject;
and it could, of course, be simply "amen," the proper conclusion

How To Recognize a Poem When You See One 325

to a poem celebrating the love and mercy shown by a God who
gave his only begotten son so that we may live.
In addition to specifying significances for the words of the
poem and relating those significances to one another, the stu-
dents began to discern larger structural patterns. It was noted
that of the six names in the poem threeÑJacobs, Rosenbaum,
and LevinÑare Hebrew, twoÑThorne and HayesÑare Chris-
tian, and oneÑOhmanÑis ambiguous, the ambiguity being
marked in the poem itself (as the phrase goes) by the question
mark in parenthesis. This division was seen as a reflection of the
basic distinction between the old dispensation and the new, the
law of sin and the law of love. That distinction, however, is
blurred and finally dissolved by the typological perspective
which invests the old testament events and heroes with new
testament meanings. The structure of the poem, my students
concluded, is therefore a double one, estahlishing and under-
mining its basic pattern (Hebrew vs. Christian) at the same
time. In this context there is finally no pressure to resolve the
ambiguity of Ohman since the two possible readingsÑthe name
is Hebrew, the name is ChristianÑare both authorized by the
reconciling presence in the poem of Jesus Christ. Finally, I
must report that one student took to counting letters and found,
to no one's surprise, that the most prominent letters in the poem
were S, O, N.
Some of you will have noticed that I have not yet said any-
thing about Hayes. This is because of all the words in the poem
it proved the most recalcitrant to interpretation, a fact not with-
out conseguence, but one which I will set aside for the moment
since I am less interested in the details of the exercise than in
the ability of my students to perform it. What is the source of
that ability? How is it that they were able to do what they did?
What is it that they did? These questions are importallt because
they bear directly on a question often asked in literary theory,
Wllat are the distinguislling features of literary langtlage? Or,
to put the matter more colloquially, How do you recognize a
poem when you see one? The commonsense answer, to which
many literary critics and linguists are committed, is that the act

)

326

Is There a Text in This Class?

Of recognition is triggered by the observable presen(e of dis-
tinguishillg features. That is, you lenow a poem whell you see
one because its language displays the cllaracteristics that you
lenow to be proper to poems. This, however, is a model that
quite obviously does not fit the present example. Itty students
did not proceed from the noting of distinguishing features to the
recognition that they were confrollted by a poem; rather, it was
the act of recognition that came firstÑthey lenew in advance
that they were dealing with a poemÑand the distinguishing fea-
tures then followed.
In other words, acts of recognitiols, rather thall heing trig-
gered by formal characteristi(s, are their source. It is not that
the presence of poetic qualities compels a certahl leind of at-
tention btlt that the paying of a certain l; hld of attention results
in the emergence of poetic qualities. As soon as my students
were aware that it was poetry they were seeino, they hegan
to look ¥vith poetry-seeing eyes, that is, with eyes that saw every-
thing in relation to the properties they knew poems to possess.
They knew, for example (becanse they were told by their teach-
ers), that poems are (or are supposed to be) more densely and
intricately organized than ordinary communications; and that
knowledge translated itself into a willingnessÑone might even
say a determinationÑto see connections between one word and
another and between every wt rd and the poem's central in-
sight. Moreover, the assumption that there is a central insight
is itself poetry-specifi(, and presided over its own realization.
Having assumed that the collectioll of words l)efore them was
unified by an informing purpose (hecatlse nnifying purposes
are what poems have), my students proceeded to find one and
to formulate it. It was in the light of that purpose (llOW as-
sumed) that sigllifican( es for the individual words began to
suggest themselves, significances whi(ll then Reshed out the as-
sumption that had generated them in the first place. Thus the
meaniogs of the words and the interpretation hs ¥vhicll those
words were seen to be embed(led emerged together, as a (011-
sequence of the operations my stu(lents began to perfOrTIl oll(e
they were told that this was a poem.
It was almost as if they were following a recipeÑif it's a

How To Recognize a Poem When Yolz See One 527

poem do this, if it's a poem, see it that wayÑand indeed defini-
tions of poetry are recipes, for by directing readers as to wilat
to look for in a poem, they instrtlst them in ways of lool; ino that
will produce what they expect to see. If your definitioll of poetry
tells you that the language of poetry is complex, you will scrtl-
tinize the language of something identified as a poem in stlcl
a way as to bring out the complexity you kilOW to be "there."
You will, for example, be 011 the look-out for latent aml)igllities
you will attend to the presence of alliterative and consonantai
patterns (there will always l)e some), and you will try to make
something of them (you will always suc(eed); you will search
for meanings that sul)vert, or exist in a tensiolI witll the mcan-
ings that first present themselves; and if these operations fail
to produce the anticipated complexity, you will even propose
a significance for the words that are tlO/ there, be(aliset as every-
one knows, everything abotlt a poem, incllldin,, its omissions,
is significant. Nor, as you do these things, will you have any
sense of performing in a willftll manner, for you will only l)e
doing what you learned to do in the course of '~ :- - - a sleilled
reader of poetry. Skilled reading is ustlally thought to he a mat-
ter of discerning what is there, htlt if the example of my stn-

dents can be generalized, it is a matter of lenowing how to 1)7¡-
siltce what can thereafter be said to be there. Interpretation is
not the art of construillo but the art of constructing. Interpreters
do not decode poems: they make them.
To many, this will be a distressillg COII( Illsioll, and there are
a number of arguments that could he moullted in order to fore-
stllll it. One might point out that the cir( Illllstances of my stn-
dellts' performance were special. After all, they ha(l been con-
cerlletl excltlsively with religious poetry for some weeks, and
therefore wollld he uniqllely ¥ ullleral)le to the de(eption I had
pr.l(Liceci on them all(l ulligllcly eqtlil)ptd to impose religions
thellles and patterlls on words hlllotellt of eithel. I must report,
however, that I have dupli(ate(l this experilllellt any nllml)er
of times at nine or ten universities in three countries, and the
results are always the same, even when the participants know
from the be,,illlling that ¥vhat they are lookillg at was originally
an assignment. Of course this very fa(-t ollld itself le turned into
o

328

Is There a Text in This Class?

an objection: doesn't the reproducibility of the exercise prove
that there is something about these words that Icads everyone
to perform in the same way? Isn't it just a happy accident thdt
names like Thorne and Jacobs have counterparts or near coun-
terparts in biblical names and symbols? And wotlldn't my stu-
dents have been unable to do what they did if the assignment
I gave to the first class had been made up of different names?
The answer to all of these questions is no. Cliven a firm belief
that they were confronted by a religious poem, my students
would have been able to turn any list of names into the kind of
poem we have before us now, because they would have read the
names within the assumption that they were informed with
Christian significances. (This is nothing more than a literary
analogue to Augustine's rule of faith.) You can test this assertion
by replacing Jacobs-Rosenbaum, I.evin, Thorne, Hayes, and
Ohman with names drawn from the faculty of Kenyon CollegeÑ
Temple, Jordan, Seymour, Daniels, Star, Church. I will not
exhaust my time or your patience by performing a full-dress
analysis, which would involve, of course, the relation between
those who saw the River lordan and those who saw more by
seeing the Star of Bethlehem, thus fulfilling the prophecy by
which the temple of Jerusalem was replaced by the inner temple
or church built up in the heart of every Christian. Suffice it to
say that it could easily be done (you can take the poem home and
do it yourself) and that the shape of its doing would be con-
strained not by the names but by the interpretive assumptions
that gave them a significance even before they were seen. This
would be true even if there were no names on the list, if the
paper or blackboard were blank; the blanleness would present
no problem to the interpreter, who would immediately see in
it the void out of which C,od created the earth, or the abyss
into which unregenerate sinners fall, or, in the best of all pos-
sible poems, both.
Even so, one might reply, all you've done is demonstrate
how an interpretation, if it is is prosecuted with sufllcient vigor,
can impose itself on material which has its own proper sh.lpe.
Basically, at the ground level, in the first place, when all is said
and done, "Jacobs-Rosenbaum Levin Thorne Hayes Ohm.ln(7)''

How To Recognize a Poem When You .See One 329

is an assignment; it is only a trick that allows you to transform
it into a poem, and when the effects of the trick have worn off
it will return to its natural form and be seen as an assignment
once again. This is a powerful argument because it seems at
once to give interpretation its due (as an act of the will) and
to maintain the independence of that on which interpretation
works. It allows us, in short, to preserve our commonsense intui-
tion that interpretation must be interpretation of something.
Unfortunately, the argument will not hold because the assign-
ment we all see is no less the product of interpretation than the
poem into which it was turned. That is, it requires just as much
work, and work of the same kind, to see this as an assignment
as it does to see it as a poem. If this seems counterintuitive, it
is only because the work required to see it as an assignment is
work we have already done, in the course of acquiring the huge
amount of background knowledge that enables you and me to
function in the academic world. In order to know what an as-
sigment is, that is, in order to know what to do with something
identified as an assignment, you must first know what a class
is (know that it isn't an economic grouping) and know that
classes meet at specified times for so many weeks, and that one's
performance in a class is largely a matter of performing be-
tween classes.
Think for a moment of how you would explain this last to
someone who did not already know it. "Well," you might say,
"a class is a group situation in which a number of people are
instructed by an informed person in a particular subject." (Of
course the notion of "subject" will itself require explication.)
"An assignment is something you do when you're not in class."
"Oh, I see," your interlocutor might respond, "an assignment
is something you do to take your mind off what you've been do-
ing in class." "No, an assignment is a part of a class." "But
how can that be if you only do it when the class is not meeting?"
Now it would be possible, finally, to answer that question, but
only by enlarging the horizons of your explanation to include
the very c oncept of a university, what it is one might be doing
there, why one might be doing it instead of doing a thousand
other things, and so on. For most of us these matters do not re

330 15 Tllere a Text in This Class.2

qllire explanatioll, and indeed, it is hard lor us to imagine some-
one tor whom they do; bllt that is bec.luse our tacit knowledge
of what it means to move around in aca(lemic life was acquired
so gradually and so long ago tll.lt it doesn t seem like knowledge
at all (and therefore somethillg someone else might nol know)
but a part of the world. You might thillk th.lt wllell you're on
campus (a phrase that itself requires volullles) that you are
simply walking around on the two legs (,od nave you; but your
walking is intormed by all internalized awareness of institll-
tional goals and practices, of norms ol belulviorfi of lists of do's
and don't's, of invisible Ihaes and the dangers of crosshlg them;
and, as a result, you see everythillg as alrea(ly organized in rela-
tion to those same goals and pra(ti(es. It zvould never occur to
you, for example, to wonder il the people pourilIg out of that
building are Heeing from a fire; you kllOlO tholt they are exiting
from a class (what collld be more obviolls?) and you know that
because your perception of their action oce urs witllin a l;nowl-
edge of what people in a university colll(l possibly be de)ing an(l
the reasons they could have lor doing it (going to the next class,
going back to the dorm, meethlg someone hl the studelit ulliotl)
It is within that same knowledoe that an assignmellt be(onles
intelligible so that it appears to you immediately as an oblig.l-
tion, as a set of directions, as something with parts, some of whicll
nlay be more significallt than others. That is, it is a proper ques-
tion to ask of an assignlllellt whether some of its parts migllt be
omitted or slighted, whereas readers of poetry know that no part
of a poem can be sligllted (the rule is "everythillg 3 (Ollllt!i")
they do not rest until every part h.ls heen givell a significance.
In a way this armollllts to no more th.ln s.lyillg ~vll.lt every-
one alreadys knows: poems and assigllmellts are differellt, bllt
my point is that the differences are a result of the different in-
terpretive operatiolls we perform and not ol somethillg inllerellt
in one or the other. An assigllment no more compcls its OWI1
recognition thall does a poem; ratller, as in the c.lse of a poem,
the shape of an assignment emerges wllell someolle looks at
sometllino idenlified as one lvith assiglllllellt-seeillo eyes, that
is, witll eyes wllicll arc capal)le of seeing the wor(ts as already
embedded within the institutional structule that makes it pos

) I
i

How To Recognize a Poem When You See One 33I

sible for assignments to have a sense. The ability to see, and
therefore to make, an assignmel!t is no less a learlled ability
than the ability to see, and therefore to make, a poem. Both
are constructed artifacts, the products and not the producers of
interpretation, and while the differences between them are real,
they are interpretive and do not have their source in some bed-
rock level of objectivity.
Of course one might want to argue that there is a bedrock
level at which these names constitute neither an assignment nor
a poem but are merely a list. I~llt that argument too falls be-
a:ause a list is no more a natural objectÑone thitt wears its mean-
ing on its face and can be recogllized by anyoneÑthan an as-
signment or a poem. In order to see a list, one must already
be equipped with the concepts of seriality, hierarchy, sul)ordina-
tion, and so on, and while these are by no mean esoteric con-
cepts and seem available to almost everyone, they are nonethe-
less learned, and if there were someone who had not learned

them, he or she would not be able to see a list. The next recourse
is to descend still lower (in the direction of atoms) and to claim
ol)jectivity for letters, paper, graphite, black marks on white
spaces, and so on; but these entities too have palpability and
shape only because of the assunlption of some or other system of
intelligibility, and they are therefore just as available to a de-
construstive dissolution as are poems, assignments, and lists.
The conclusion, therefore, is that all objects are made and
not found, and that they are made by the interpretive strategies
we set in motion. This does not, however, commit me to sub-
jectivity becatlse the means by ¥vhich they are made are social
and convelltiollal. Th.lt is, the "you wllo does the interpreta-
tive work that puts poems and assignlllellts and lists into the
world is a commtlnal you and not an isolated individual. No one
ol us wal;es up in the morning and (in lsrencll fashion) rein-
vents poetry or thinks up a new educational system or decides
to reject seriality in lavor of some other, wllolly orighlal, form
of organizatioll. We do nOt do these things hecallse we could not
do them, becallse the mental operations we can perform are
limited hy the institutiolls in whicll we are alreafly embedded.
These institutions precede us, and it is only hy inhabiting them,
N

332 Is There a Text in This Class?

Or being inhabited by them, that we have access to the public
and conventional senses they make. Thus while it is true to say
that we create poetry (and assignments and lists), we create it
through interpretive strategies that are finally not our own but
have their source in a publicly available system of intelligibil-
ity. Insofar as the system (in this case a literary system) con-
strains us, it also fashions us, furnishing us with categories of
understanding, with which we in turn fashion the entities to
which we can then point. In short, to the list of made or con-
structed objects we must add ourselves, for we no less than the
poems and assignments we see are the products of social and
cultural patterns of thought.
To put the matter in this way is to see that the opposition
between objectivity and subjectivity is a false one because
neither exists in the pure form that would give the opposition
its point. This is precisely illustrated by my anecdote in which
we do not have free-standing readers in a relationship of
perceptual adequacy or inadequacy to an equally free-standing
text. Rather, we have readers whose consciousnesses are con-
stituted by a set of conventional notions which when put into
operation constitute in turn a conventional, and conventionally
seen, object. My students could do what they did, and do it in
unison, because as members of a literary community they knew
what a poem was (their knowledge was public), and that knowl-
edge led them to look in such a way as to populate the landscape
with what they knew to be poems.
Of course poems are not the only objects that are constituted
in unison by shared ways of seeing. Every object or event that
becomes available within an institutional setting can be so char-
acterized. I am thinking, for example, of something that hap-
pened in my classroom just the other day. While I was in the
course of vigorously making a point, one of my students, Wil-
liam Newlin by name, was just as vigorously waving his hand.
When I asked the other members of the class what it was that
Mr. Newlin was doing, they all answered that he was seeking
permission to speak. I then asked them how they knew that. The
immediate reply was that it was obvious; what else could he
be thought to be doing? The meaning of his gesture, in other

How To Recognize a Poem When You See One 333

words, was right there on its surface, available for reading by
anyone who had the eyes to see. That meaning, however, would
not have been available to someone without any knowledge of
what was involved in being a student. Such a person might have
thought that Mr. Newlin was pointing to the fluorescent lights
hanging from the ceiling, or calling our attention to some ob-
ject that was about to fall ("the sky is falling," "the sky is
falling"). And if the someone in question were a child of ele-
mentary or middle-school age, Mr. Newlin might well have been
seen as seeking permission not to speak but to go to the bath-
room, an interpretation or reading that would never occur to
a student at Johns Hopkins or any other institution of "higher
learning" (and how would we explain to the uninitiated the
meaning of that phrase).
The point is the one I have made so many times before: it
is neither the case that the significance of Mr. Newlin's gesture
is imprinted on its surface where it need only be read off, or
that the construction put on the gesture by everyone in the room
was individual and idiosyncratic. Rather, the source of our in-
terpretive unanimity was a structure of interests and under-
stood goals, a structure whose categories so filled our individual
consciousnesses that they were rendered as one, immediately in-
vesting phenomena with the significance they must have, given
the already-in-place assumptions about what someone could pos-
sibly be intending (by word or gesture) in a classroom. By seeing
Mr. Newlin's raised hand with a single shaping eye, we were
demonstrating what Harvey Sacks has characterized as "the fine
power of a culture. It does not, so to speak, merely fill brains
in roughly the same way, it fills them so that they are alike in
fine detail."' The occasion of Sacks's observation was the ability
of his hearers to understand a sequence of two sentencesÑ"The
baby cried. The mommy picked it up."Ñexactly as he did (as-
suming, for example that "the 'mommy' who picks up the 'baby'
is the mommy of that baby"), despite the fact that alternative
ways of understanding were demonstrably possible. That is,
the mommy of the second sentence could well have been the
mommy of some other baby, and it need not even have been a
baby that this "floating" mommy was picking up. One is tempted

334 Is There a Text in This Class?

to say that in the absence of a specific context we are authorized
to take the words literally, which is what Sacks's hearers do; lJut
as Sacks observes, it is within the assumption of a contextÑone
so deeply assumed that we are unaware of itÑthat the words
acquire what seems to be their literal meaning. There is nothing
in the words that tells Sacks and his hearers how to relate the
mommy and the baby of this story, just as there is nothing In
the form of Mr. Newlin's gesture that tells his fellow students
how to determine its significance. In botll cases the determina-
tion (of relation and significance) is the work of categories of
organizationÑthe family, being a studentÑthat are from the
very first giving shape and value to what is heard and seen
Indeed, these categories are the very shape of seeing itself,
in that we are not to imagine a perceptual ground more basic
than the one they afford. That is, we are not to imagine a
moment when my students "simply see" a physical configura-
tion of atoms and then assign that configuration a significance,
according to the situation they happen to be in. To be in the
situation (this or any other) is to "see" with the eyes of its in-
terests, its goals, its understood practices, values, and norms, and
so to be conferring significance l)y seeing, not after it. The cate-
gories of my students' vision are the categories hy which they
understand themselves to be functioning as students (what Sacks
might term "doing studenting"), and objects will appear to
them in forms related to that way of functioning rather than
in some objective or preinterpretive form. (This is true even
when an object is seen as not related, since nonrelation is not
a pure but a differential categoryÑthe specification of some-
thing by enumerating what it is not; in short, nonrelation IS
merely one form of relation, and its perception IS always
situation-specific .)
Of course, if someone who was not functioning as a stu(lent
was to walk into my classroom, he might very well see Mr. New-
lin's raised hand (and "raised hand" is alrea(ly an interpretation-
laden description) in some other way, as eviden(e of a disease,
as the salute of a political follower, as a muscle-improvillg
exercise, as an attempt to kill flies; hut he would always see it in
some way, and never as purely physical data waiting for his in

U1
w

How To Recognize a Poem When You See One 335

terpretation. And, moreover, the way of seeing, whatever it was
would never be individual or idiosyncratic, since its source
would always be the institutional structure of which the "see-er"
was an extending agent. This is what Sacks means when he says
that a culture fills brains "so that they are alike in fine detail"
it fills them so that no one's interpretive acts are exclusively
his own but fall to him by virtue of his position in some socially
organized environment and are therefore always shared and
public. It follows, then, that the fear of solipsism, of the imposi
tion by the unconstrained self of its own prejudices, is un
founded hecause the self does not exist apart from the communal
or conventional categories of thought that enable its operations
(of thinking, seeing, reading). Once one realizes that the con
ceptions that fill consciousness, including any conception of its
own status, are culturally derived, the very notion of an uncon
strained self, of a consciousness wholly and dangerously free, be
comes incomprehensible.
But withollt the notion of the unconstrained self, the argu

ments of Hirsch, Abrams, and the other proponents of objective
interpretation are deprived of their urgency. They are afraid
that in the absence of the controls afforded by a normative sys
t tem of meanings, the self will simply sul)stitute its own mean
fl ings for the meanings (usually identified with the intentions of
I the author) that texts hring with them, the meanings that texts
fl "have"; however, if the self is c onceived of not as an independent
: entity hut as a social construct whose operations are delimited
! })y the systems of intelligibility that inform it, then the meanings
1 it conlers on texts are not its own bllt have their source in the
interpretive commllnity (or communities) of which it is a func
I tion. Moreover, these meanings will he neither subjective nor
objective, at least in the terms assumed hy those who argue
within the traditional framework: they will not be objective
belallse they will always have been the proclllct of a point of
view rather than having been simply "read off"; and they will
not he sul)jective hecallse that point of view will always be social
or institutional. Or by the same reasoning one could say that
they are IJotl7 subjective and objective: they are sul)jective be
cause they inhere in a particular point of view and are there
N
U1

336 1s There a Text in This Class?

fore not universal; and they are objective becattse the point of
view that delivers them is public and conventiolull rather than
individual or unique.
To put the matter in either way is to see how unhelpful
the terms "subjective" and "objective" finally are. Rather than
facilitating inquiry, they close it down, by deciding in advance
what shape inquiry can possibly take. Specifically, they assume,
without being aware that it is an assumption and therefore open
to challenge, the very distinction I have l)een putting into qtzes
tion, the distinction between interpreters and the objects they
interpret. That distinction in turn assumes that interpreters and
their objects are two different kinds of acontextual entities, and
within these twin assumptions the issue can only be one of con
trol: will texts be allowed to constrain their own interpretation
or will irresponsible interpreters be allowed to obsstlre and over
whelm texts. In the spectacle that ensues, the spectacle of Anglo
American critical controversy, texts and selves fight it out in
the persons of their respective champions, Ahrams, Hirsch,
Reichert, Graff on the one hand, Holland, Bleich, Slatoff, and
(in some characterizations of him) Barthes on the other. But
if selves are constituted by the ways of thinkino and seeing that
inhere in social organizations, and if these constitllted selves in I
turn constitute texts according to these same ways, then there
can be no adversary relationship between text and self becatlse l
they are the necessarily related produ(ts of the same cognitive [
possibilities. A text cannot he overwhelmed by an irresponsible
reader and one need not worry about protecting the purity of a
text from a reader's idiosyncracies. It is only the distinction lie
tween subject and object that gives rise to these nrgencies, and I
once the distinction is blttrred they simply fall away. One can
respond with a cheerful yes to the question "Do readers make
meanings?" and commit oneselt to very little be(-atlse it wottld ;
be equally true to say that meanings, in the form of ctllturally
derived interpretive categories, make readers.
Indeed, many things lool; rather differellt once the subject
object dichotomy is eliminated as the assumed framework within
which critical discussion occurs. Problems disappear, not because
they have been solved but because they are shown never to have

How To Recognize a Poem When Yowt See One 337

been problems in the first place. Abrams, for example, wonders
how, in the absence of a normative system ot stable meanings
two people could ever agree on the interpretation of a work
or even of a sentence; but the difficulty is only a difficulty if the
two (or more) people are thought of as isolated individuals
whose agreement must be compelled by something external to
them. (There IS something of the police state in Abrams's vision
complete with posted rules and boundaries, watchdogs to en-
force them, procedures for identifying their violators as crim-
inals.) But if the understandings of the people in question are
informed by the same notions of what counts as a fact, of what
is central, peripheral, and worthy of being noticedÑin short,
by the same interpretive principlesÑthen agreement between
them will be assured, and its source will not be a text that en-
forces its own perception but a way of perceiving that results in
the emergence to those who share it (or those whom it shares) of
the same text. That text might be a poem, as it was in the case of
those who first "saw" "Jacobs-Rosenbaum Levin Hayes Thorne
Ohman(2)," or a hand, as it is every day in a thousand classrooms
but whatever it is, the shape and meaning it appears immediately
to have will be the "ongoing accomplishment"2 of those who
agree to produce it.
15

Fish, Stanley. "Chapter 15: What Makes an
Interpretation Acceptable?" Is There a Text in Ths
Class?: The Authoritv of Interpretive Communities.
Harvard University Press, 1980 (President and Fellows
of Harvard College). Pages 338-355.

What Makes an Interpretation
Acceptable?

AST TIME I ended by suggesting that the fact
of agreement, rather than being a proof of the
_ stability of objects, is a testimony to the power
of an in erpretive community to constitute the ol)jects upon
which its members (also and simultaneously constituted) can
then agree. This account of agreement has the additional ad
vantage of providing what the objectivist argument cannot sup
ply, a coherent account of disagreement. To someone who he
lieves in determinate meaning, disagreement can on!y be a theo
logical error. The truth lies plainly in view, available to anyone
who has the eyes to see; but some readers choose not to see it
and perversely substitute their own meanings for the meanings
that texts obviously bear. Nowhere is there an explanation of
this waywardness (original sin would seem to be the only relevant
model), or of the origin of these idiosyncratic meanings (I have
been arguing that there could be none), or of the reason why
some readers seem to be exempt from the general infirmity.
There is simply the conviction that the facts exist in their own
self-evident shape and that disagreements are to be resolved by
referring the respective parties to the facts as they really are. In
the view that I have been urging, however, disagreements cannot
be resolved by reference to the facts, be(ause the facts emerge
only in the context of some point of view. It follows, then, that
disagreements must occllr between those wllo hold (or are held
by) different points of view, and what is at stal;e in a disagree
ment is the right to specify what the facts can hereafter be said to
be Disagreements are not settled by the facts, but are the mealls
by which the facts are settled. Of course, no such settling is final,
and in the (almost certain) event that the dispute IS opened

338

What Mahes an Interpretation AcceptableS 33y

again, the category of the facts "as they really are" will be re-
constituted in still another shape.
Nowhere is this process more conveniently on display than
in literary criticism, where everyone's claim is that his interpre-
tation more perfectly accords with the facts, but where every-
one's purpose is to persuade the rest of us to the version of the
facts he espouses by persuading us to the interpretive principles
in the light of which those facts will seem indisputable. The re-
cent critical fortunes of William Blake's "The Tyger" provide a
nice example. In 1954 Kathleen Raine published an influential
essay entitled "Who Made the Tyger" in which she argued that
because the tiger is for Blake "the beast that sustains its own
life at the expense of its fellow-creatures" it is a "symbol of . . .
predacious selfhood," and that therefore the answer to the poem's
final questionÑ"Did he who made the l.amb make thee"Ñ"is
beyond all possible doubt, No."' In short, the tiger is unam-
I)iguously and obviously evil. Raine supports her reading by
pointing to two bodies of evidence, certain cabbalistic writings
which, she avers, "beyond doubt . . . inspired The Tyger," and
evidence from the poem itself. .She pays particular attention to
the word "forests" as it appears in line 2, "In the forests of the
night:" "Never . . . is the word 'forest' used by Blake in any
context in which it does not refer to the natural, 'fallen' world"
(p. 48).
The direction of argumellt here is from the word "forests"
to the support it is said to provide for a particular interpreta-
tion. Ten years later, however, that same word is being cited
in support of a quite different interpretation. While Raine as-
sullles that the lamb is for lSlalee a symbol of (2hrist-lilee self-
sacrifi(e, E. D. Hirsch believes that Blake's intention was "to
satirize the singlemindedlless of the I.aml)": "There can be no
doul)t," he declares, "that The Tyger is a poem that celebrates
the holhless of tigerness."2 In his reading the "ferocity and de-
stnlctivelless" of the tiger are transfigured and one of the things
they are trallsfigllred by is the wor(l "forests": "'Forests' . . .
sugpgests tall strai~(,ht forms, a nvorld that for all its terror has the
orderliness of the tiger's stripes or 131alee's perfectly balanced
verses" (p. 247).

340 15 There a Text in This Class?

What we have here then are two critics with opposing in-
terpretations, each of whom claims the same word as internal
and confirming evidence, Clearly they cannot both be right,
but just as clearly there is no basis for deciding between them.
One cannot appeal to the text, because the text has become an
extension of the interpretive disagreement that divides them;
and, in fact, the text as it is variously characterized is a con-
sequence of the interpretation for which it is supposedly evi-
dence. It is not that the meaning of the word "forests" points in
the direction of one interpretation or the other; rather, in the
light of an already assumed interpretation, the word will be seen
to obviously have one meaning or another. Nor can the ques-
tion be settled by turning to the contextÑsay the cabbalistic
writings cited by RaineÑfor that too will only be a context
for an already assumed interpretation. If Raine had not already
decided that the answer to the poem's final question is "beyond
all possible doubt, No," the cabbalistic texts, with their distinc-
tion between supreme and inferior deities, would never have
suggested themselves to her as Blake's source. The rhetoric of
critical argument, as it is usually conducted in our journals, de-
pends upon a distinction between interpretations on the one
hand and the textual and contextual facts that will either sup-
port or disconfirm them on the other; but as the example of
Blake's "Tyger" shows, text, context, and interpretation all
emerge together, as a consequence of a gesture (the declaration
of belief) that is irreducibly interpretive. It follows, then, that
when one interpretation wins out over another, it is not because
the first has been shown to be in accordance with the facts but
because it is from the perspective of its assumptions that the facts
are now being specified. It is these assumptions, and not the facts
they make possible, that are at stake in any critical dispute.
Hirsch and Raine seem to be aware of this, at least sublim-
inally; for whenever their respective assumptions surface they
are asserted with a vehemence that is finally defensive: "The
answer to the question . . . is beyond all possible doubt, No."
"There can be no doubt that The Ttyger is . . . a poem that cele
brates the holiness of tigerness." If there were a doubt, if the
interpretation with which each critic begins were not firmly in

What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable? 341

place, the account of the poem that follows from that interpreta-
tion could not get under way. One could not cite as an "obvious"
fact that "forests" is a fallen word or, alternatively, that it "sug
gests tall and straight forms." Whenever a critic prefaces an
assertion with a phrase like "without doubt" or "there can
be no doubt," you can be sure that you are within hailing dis-
tance of the interpretive principles which produce the facts that
he presents as obvious.
In the years since 1964 other interpretations of the poem
have been put forward, and they follow a predictable course.
Some echo either Raine or Hirsch by arguing that the tiger is
either good or evil; others assert that the tiger is both good and
evil, or beyond good and evil; still others protest that the ques-
tions posed in the poem are rhetorical and are therefore not
meant to be answered ("It is quite evident that the critics are
not trying to understand the poem at all. If they were, they
would not attempt to answer its questions.")3 It is only a matter
of time before the focus turns from the questions to their asker
and to the possibility that the speaker of the poem is not Blake

but a limited persona ("Surely the point . . . is that Blake sees
further or deeper than his persona").4 It then becomes possible
to assert that "we don't know who the speaker of 'The Tyger' is,"
and that therefore the poem "is a maze of questions in which the
reader is forced to wander confusedly."6 In this reading the
poem itself becomes rather "tigerish" and one is not at all sur-
prised when the original questionÑ"Who made the Tiger?"Ñis
given its quintessentially new-critical answer: the tiger is the
poem itself and Blake, the consummate artist who smiles "his
work to see," is its creator." As one obvious and indisputable in-
terpretation supplants another, it brings with it a new set of ob-
vious and indisputable facts. Of course each new reading is
elaborated in the name of the poem itself, but the poem itself
is always a function of the interpretive perspective from which
the critic "discovers" it.
A committed phlralist might find in the previous paragraph
a confirmation of his own position. After all, while "The Tyger"
is obviously open to more than one interpretation, it is not open
to an infinite number of interpretations. There may be disagree

)
3+2 15 There a Text in This Class?

ments as to whether the tiger is good or evil, or whether the
speaker is Blake or a persona, and so on, but no one is suggesting
that the poem is an allegory of the digestive processes or that it
predicts the Second World War, and its limited plurality is
simply a testimony to the capacity of a great work of art to gen-
erate multiple readings. The point is one that Wayne Booth
makes when he asks, "Are we right to rule out at least some read-
ings7"7 and then answers his own question with a resounding
yes. It would be my answer too; but the real question is what
gives us the right so to be right. A pluralist is committed to say-
ing that there is something in the text which rules out some
readings and allows others (even though no one reading can
ever capture the text's "inexhaustible richness and complexity").
His best evidence is that in practice "we all in fact" do reject
unacceptable readings and that more often than not we agree on
the readings that are to be rejected. Booth tells us, for example,
that he has never found a reader of Pride and Prejudice "who
sees no jokes against Mr. Collins" when he gives his reasons for
wanting to marry Elizabeth Bennet and only belatedly, in fifth
position, cites the "violence" of his affection.5 From this and
other examples Booth concludes that there are justified limits
to what we can legitimately do with a text," for "surely we could
not go on disputing at all if a core of agreement did not exist."
Again, I agree, but if, as I have argued, the text is always a func-
tion of interpretation, then the text cannot be the location of the
core of agreement by means of which we reject interpretations.
We seem to be at an impasse: on the one hand there would seem
to be no basis for labeling an interpretation unacceptable, but on
the other we do it all the time.
This, however, is an impasse only if one assumes that the
activity of interpretation is itself unconstrained; but in fact the
shape of that activity is determined by the literary institution
which at any one time will authorize only a finite number of
interpretative strategies. Thus, while there is no core of agree-
ment in the text, there is a core of agreement (although one sub-
ject to change) concerning the ways of producing the text. No-
where is this set of acceptable ways written down, but it is a
part of everyone's knowledge of what it means to be operating

What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable? 343

within the literary institution as it is now constituted. A student
of mine recently demonstrated this knowledge when, with an
air of giving away a trade secret, she confided that she could go
into any classroom, no matter what the subject of the course,
and win approval for running one of a number of well-defined
interpretive routines: she could view the assigned text as an
instance of the tension between nature and culture, she could
look in the text for evidence of large mythological oppositions;
she could argue that the true subject of the text was its own
composition, or that in the guise of fashioning a narrative the
speaker was fragmenting and displacing his own anxieties and
fears. She could not, however, at least at Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity today, argue that the text was a prophetic message inspired
by the ghost of her Aunt Tilly.
My student's understanding of what she could and could not
get away with, of the unwritten nlles of the literary game, is
shared by everyone who plays that game, by those who write and
judge articles for publication in learned journals, by those who
read and listen to papers at professional meetings, by those who
seek and award tenure in innumerable departments of English
and comparative literature, by the armies of graduate students
for whom knowledge of the rules is the real mark of professional
initiation. This does not mean that these rules and the practices
they authorize are either monolithic or stable. Within the liter-
ary community there are subcommunities (what will excite the
editors of Diacritics is likely to distress the editors of ~St1zdies in
Philology), and within any community the boundaries of the
acceptable are continually being redrawn. In a classroom whose
authority figures include David Bleich and Norman Holland, a
student might very well relate a text to her memories of a favorite
aunt, while in other classrooms, dominated hy the spirit of
Brooks and Warren, any such activity ¥vould immediately be
dismissed as nonliterary, as something that isn't done.
The point is that while there is always a category of things
that are not done (it is simply the reverse or flip side of the
category of things that are done), the membership in that cate-
gory is continually changing. It changes laterally as one moves
from subcommunity to subcommunity, and it changes through

V1
oo

344 Is There a Text in This CIass?

time wllen once interdicted interpretive strategies are admitted
into the ranks of the acceptal)le. Twenty years ago one of the
things that literary critics didn't do was talk about the reader, at
least in a way that made his experience the focus of the critical
act. The prohibition on such talk was largely the result ot Wim-
satt's and Beardsley's famous essay "The Affective Fallacy,"
which argued that the variability of readers renders any investi-
gation of their responses ad-hoc and relativistic: "The poem
itself," the authors complained, "as an object of specifically
critical judgment, tends to disappear."9 So influential was this
essay that it was possible for a reviewer to dismiss a book merely
by finding in it evidence that the affective fallacy had been
committed. The use of a juridical terminology is not acci-
dental; this was in a very real sense a legal finding of activity in
violation of understood and institutionalized decorums. Today,
however, the affective fallacy, no longer a fallacy but a method-
ology, is committed all the time, and its practitioners have be-
hind them the full and authorizing weight of a fully articulated
institutional apparatus. The "reader in literature" is regularly
the subject of forums and workshops at the convention of the
Modern Language Association; there is a reader newsletter which
reports on the multitudinous labors of a reader industry; any
list of currently active schools of literary criticism includes the
school ot "reader response," and two major university presses
have published collections of essays designed both to display the
variety of reader-centered criticism (the emergence of factions
within a once interdicted activity is a sure sign of its having
achieved the status of an orthodoxy) and to detail its history.
None of this of course means that a reader-centered criticism is
now invulnerable to challenge or attack, merely that it is now
recognized as a competing literary strategy that cannot be dis-
missed simply by being named. It is acceptahle not hecallse every-
one accepts it but l)ecause those who do not are now ohliged to
argue against it.

The promotion of reader-response criticism to the category
of things that are done (even if it is not being done by everyone)
brings with it a whole new set of facts to rvhich its practitioners
can now refer. These include patterns of expectation and dis

What Makes an Inlerpretalion Accel)tal)le.2 345

appointment, reversals of direction, trap.s, hlvitoltiolls to prema-
ture conclusions, textual gaps, delayed revel.ltiolls, temptatit)lls,
all of wllicll are related to a correspon(tillgl set of allthors' intell-
tions, of strategies designed to edu(ate the reader or hlllllili;lte
hilll or confouncl him or, in the more sophisti(;lte(l versions of
the mode, to malee him ena(t in his responses the very sul)je(t
matter of the poem. These facts allc'i V1 intelltiolls emerge wllel
the text is interrogated by a series of rclated qllestiollsÑWh.lt is
the reader doing? What is heing done to hilil? For what purpose?
Ñquestions that follow necessarily from the asslllnptioll thalt the
text is not a spatial olejee t l)ut the occasioll lor a temporal experi-
ence. It is in the course Of anssverillg su( h questiolls th;lt a rcader-
response critic elal)orates "the structure ol the reading experi-
ence," a structure wllicll is not so mucll discovered l~y the
interrogation lout demanded l)y it. (If you hegin by assumillg that
readers do something and the something they do has meaning,
you will never fail to discover a pattern of reader activities that
appears ol)viously to he meanillgful.) As that structllre emerges
(under the pressure of interrogation) it takes the form of a
"reading," and insofar as the procedures whi(ll ororlll( c-~l it are

recognized hy the literary conllnunity as something that some
of its meml)ers do, that reading will have the status of a compet-
ing interpretation. Of course it is still the case, as Booth insists,
that we are "right to rule out at least some readings," hut there
is now one less reading or kind of reading that can be ruled out,
hecause there is now one more interpretive procedure that has
heen accorded a place in the literary institution
The fact that it remains easy to think of a reacling that most
of us wolild dismiss out of hand does not mean that thc text
excilides it hut that there is as yet no elahorate(l interpretive
procc(lilre for produs illR that text That is why the examples of
criti(s like Wayne lSooth seem to havc so mil(h force; rather
than loolaing hack, as T have, to now familiar strategies that
were on(e alien an(l strange soundillo, they look forward to
str;ltegies that have not yet emerge i Norman Holland's analy-
sis of Faullener's "A Rose for Fmily" is a case in point Holland
is argiling for a kind of psychoanalytis pluralism The text, he
declares, is "at most a matrix of psychological possihilities for its

! )
I

346

Is There a Text in This Class?

readers," but, he insists, "only some possibilities . . . truly fit
the matrix": "One would not say, for example, that a reader of
. . . 'A Rose for Emily' who thought the 'tableau' [of Emily and
her father in the doorway] described an Eskimo was really re-
sponding to the story at allÑonly pursuing some mysterious
inner exploration.''l¡
Holland is making two arguments: first, that anyone who
proposes an Eskimo reading of "A Rose for Emily" will not find
a hearing in the literary community. And that, I think, is right.
("We are right to rule out at least some readings.") His second
argument is that the unacceptability of the Esleimo reading is a
function of the text, of what he calls its "sharable promptuary"
(p. 287), the public "store of structured language" (p. 287) that
sets limits to the interpretations the words can accommodate.
And that, I think, is wrong. The Eskimo reading is unaccepta-
ble because there is at present no interpretive strategy for pro-
ducing it, no way of "looking" or reading (and remember, all
acts of looking or reading are "ways") that would result in the
emergence of obviously Eskimo meanings. This does not mean,
however, that no such strategy could ever come into play, and it
is not difficult to imagine the circumstances under which it
would establish itself. One such circumstance would be the dis-
covery of a letter in which Faulkner confides that he has always
believed himself to be an Eskimo changeling. (The example is
absurd only if one forgets Yeat's Vision or Blal;e's .Swedenborg-
ianism or James Miller's recent elaboration of a homosexual
reading of The Waste Land). Immediately the workers in the
Faulkner industry would begin to reinterpret the canon in the
light of this newly revealed "belief" and the worlv of reinterpre-
tation would involve the elaboration of a symbolie or alhlsive
system (not unlike mythological or typological criticism) whose
application would immediately transform the text into one hl-
formed everywhere by Eskimo meanings. It mioht seem that I
am admitting that there is a text to be transformed, but the
object of transformation would be the text (or texts) given by
whatever interpretive strategies the Eskimo strategy was in the
process of dislodging or expanding. The result would be that
whereas we now have a Freudian "A Rose for Emily," a mytho

)

What Makes att Interpretation Acceptable? 347

logical "A Rose for Emily," a Christological "A Rose for Emily "
a regional "A Rose for Emily," a sociological "A Rose for Emily "
a linguistic "A Rose for Emily," we would in addition have an
Eskimo "A Rose for Emily," existing in some relation of com
patibility or incompatibility with the others.
Again the point is that while there are always mechanisms
for ruling out readings, their source is not the text but the pres
ently recognized interpretive strategies for producing the text.
It follows, then, that no reading, however outlandish it might
appear, is inherently an impossible one. Consider, for another
S example, Booth's report that he has never found a reader who
sees no jokes against Mr. Collins, and his conclusion that the
t ext of Pride and Prejudice enforces or signals an ironic reading.
S X First of all, the fact that he hasn't yet found such a reader does
:f;~ not mean that one does not exist, and we can even construct his
: ;~s profile; he would be someone for whom the reasons in Mr. Col
;4 I ins's list correspond to a deeply held set of values, exactly the
R 0 opposite of the set of values that must be assumed if the passage
~t 0: i s to be seen as obviously ironic. Presumably no one who has
0 0 ;;"~ sat in Professor Booth's classes holds that set of values or is
; Q f f~. allowed to hold them (students always know what they are ex-
;;.00000 pected to believe) and it is unlikely tÇhat anyone who is now
;; : working in the Austen industry begins with an assumption other
; ;Xif t. than the assumption that the novelist is a master ironist. It is
;: :000~ -:. 0. precisely for this reason that the time is ripe for the "discovery"
;;|~ ( 0 by an enterprising scholar of a nonironic Austen, and one can
V 0 even predict the course such a discovery would take. It would
;; 0 :t hegin with the uncovering of new evidence (a letter a lost manu
: . ,
S \ scrlpt, a contemporary response) and proceed to the conclusion
;$ that Austen's intentions have been misconstrued by generations
;; of literary critics. .SIle was not in fact satirizing the narrow and
f circtlmscribed life of a country gentry; rather, she was celebrat
X 0 ing that life and its tireless elaboration of a social fabric, com
0 plete with values, rituals, and self-perpetuating goals (marriage,
the preservation of great houses, and so on). This view, or some
thing very much like it, is already implicit in much of the criti
cism, and it would only be a matter of extending it to local
matters of interpretation, and specifically to Mr. Collins's list of

a
o

348

Is There a Text in This CIass7

reasons which might now be seen as reflecting a proper rallking
of the values and obligations necessary to the mailltenance of
a way of life.
Of course any such reading would meet resistance; its op-
ponents could point for example to the narr.ltor's ulleqllivocal
condemnation of Mr. Collins; btlt there are always ways in the
literary institution of handling this or any other objection. One
need only introduce (if it has not already beell introdtl(ed) the
notion of the fallible narrator in any of its various forms (the
dupe, the moral prig, the naif in need of educ.ltioll), and the
"unequivocal condemnation" would take its pla(e in a struc-
ture designed to glorify Mr. C.ollins and everythhlg he stands
for. Still, no matter how many objections were met and explained
away, the basic resistance on the part of many scllolars to this
revisionist reading would remain, and for a time at least Pride
and Prejlldice wotild have acquired the status of the fourth book
of Culliver's Travels, a work whose very shape changes in the
light of two radically opposed interpretive assumptions.
Again, I am aware that this argument is a tour-de-force and
will continue to seem so as long as the revolution it projects
has not occurred. The reading of Pride and Prejlldire, however,
is not meant to be persuasive. I only wanted to describe the con-
ditions under which it might l)ecome persuasive and to point out
that those conditions are not unimaginable given the procedures
within the literary institution by which interpretations are pro-
posed and established. Any interpretation cotlld be elaborated
by someone in command of those procedurcs (someone who
knows what "will do" as a literary argument), even my own
"absurd" reading of "The Tyger" as an allegory of the digestive
processes. Here the task is easy becallse according to the critical
consenstls there is no belief so bizarre that Blake coul(l not have
been committed to it and it would be no trick at all to find some
elal)orate system of alimentary significances (Pythagorean? Swe-
denborgian? Cabbalistic?) which he could be presumed to have
known. One might then decide that the poem was the first-
person lament of someone who had violated a dietary prohibi-
tion against eating tiger meat, and finds that forbidden food
burning brightly in his stomach, making its fiery way through

What Makes all Inlert7etation Acceplalule7 349

the forests of the intestinal tract, beating and halnrllerillg like
some devil-wielded anvil. In his distress he call do nothing but
rail at the tiger and at the miscllall(e that led him to mistake
its meat for the meat of some purified animal: "Did he who
made the I.amb malee thee?" The poem ends as it began, with
the speaker still paying the price of his sin and wolldering at the
inscrutable purposes of a deity wllo would lead his creatures into
digestive temptation. Anyone who thinlis that this time I have
gone too far might do very well to constllt some recent numbers
of Blake Studies.
In fact, my examples are very serious, and they are serious in
part because they are so ridiculolls. The fact that they are ridic-

ulotls, or are at least perceived to be so, is evidence that we are
never without canons of acceptability; we are always "right to
rule out at least some readhlgs." But the fact that we can imagine
conditions under which they would not seem ridiculotls, and
that readings once considered ridiculous are now respectable
and even orthodox, is evidence that the canons of acceptability
can change. Moreover, that change is not random but orderly
and, to some extent, predictable. A new interpretive strategy
always makes its way in some relationship of opposition to the
old, wllicll has often marked out a negative space (of things that
aren't done) from wllich it can emerge into respectability. Thus,
when Wimsatt and Beardsley declare that "the Affective Fallacy
is a confusion ',)etween the poem and its resteltsJ what it is and
what it does," the way is open for an affective critic to argue, as
I did, that a poem i.. wllat it does. And when the possibility of a
reader-centered criticism seems threatened by the variability of
readers, that thre.lt will be coulltered either by denying the
variahility (Stephen Bootll, Michael Riffaterre) or hy controlling
it (Wolfgallg Iser, I.ouise Rosenblatt) or by embracillg it and
maleing it into a principle Of value (I)avid Bleicll, Walter
sl;.tOrf).
Rlletori(ally the new position allllollnces itself as a bl-eal;
from the old, I)lit hl lact it is radically dependellt on the old,
bec,luse it is only hl the context of some diffel-elltial relationship
tll.lt it call be perceived as new or, for that matter, perceived at
all. No one would bother to assert that Mr Collins is the hero
3so Is There a Text in This Class?

of Pride and Prejudice (even as an example intended to be ab-
surd) were that position not already occupied in the criticism
by Elizabeth and Darcy; for then the assertion would have no
force; there would be nothing in relation to which it could be
surprising. Neither would there be any point in arguing that
Blake's tiger is both good and evil if there were not already
readings in which he was declared to be one or the other. And
if anyone is ever to argue that he is both old and young, some-
one will first have to argue that he is either old or young, for only
when his age has become a question will there be any value in
a refusal to answer it. Nor is it the case that the moral status of
the tiger (as oposed to its age, or nationality, or intelligence) is
an issue raised by the poem itself; it becomes an issue because a
question is put to the poem (is the tiger good or evil7) and once
that question (it could have been another) is answered, the way
is open to answering it differently, or declining to answer it, or
to declaring that the absence of an answer is the poem's "real
point."
The discovery of the "real point" is always what is claimed
whenever a new interpretation is advanced, but the claim makes
sense only in relation to a point (or points) that had previously
been considered the real one. This means that the space in which
a critic works has been marked out for him by his predecessors,
even though he is obliged by the conventions of the institution
to dislodge them. It is only by their prevenience or prepossession
that there is something for him to say; that is, it is only because
something has already been said that he can now say something
different. This dependency, the reverse of the anxiety of influ-
ence, is reflected in the unwritten requirement that an interpre-
tation present itself as remedying a deficiency in the interpreta-
tions that have come before it. (If it did not do this, what claim
would it have on our attention?) Nor can this be just any old
deficiency; it will not do, for example, to fault your predecessors
for failing to notice that a poem is free of split infinitives or
dangling participles. The lack an interpretation supplies must
be related to the criteria by which the literary community recog-
nizes and evaluates the objects of its professional attention. As
things stand now, text-book grammaticality is not one of those

What Makes an Interpretalion Acceplable? 35I

criteria, and therefore the demonstration of its presence in a
poem will not reHect credit either on the poem or on the critic
who offers it.
Credit will accrue to the critic when he bestows the proper
credit on the poem, when he demonstrates that it possesses one
or more of the qualities that are understood to distinguish poems
from other verbal productions. In the context of the "new"
criticism, under many of whose assumptions we still labor, those
qualities include unity, complexity, and universality, and it is
the perceived failure of previous c ommentators to c elebrate their
presence in a poem that gives a critic the right (or so he will
claim) to advance a new interpretation. The unfolding of that
interpretation will thus proceed under two constraints: not only
must what one says about a work be related to what has already
been said (even if the relation is one of reversal) btlt as a conse-
quence of saying it the work must be shown to possess in a
greater degree than had hitherto been recognized the qualities
that properly belong to literary productions, whether they be
unity and complexity, or ---I ---, '---:- 1: ' :,, or metaphoric
richness, or indeterminacy and undecidability. In short, the new
interpretation must not only claim to tell the truth about the
work (in a dependent opposition to the falsehood or partial
truths told by its predecessors) but it must claim to make the
work better. (The usual phrase is "enhance our appreciation of.")
Indeed, these claims are finally inseparable since it is assumed
that the truth abollt a work will he what penetrates to the es-
sense of its literary value.
This assumption, along with several others, is conveniently
on display in the opening paragraph of the preface to .Stephen
Booth's An lEssay on .Shakespeare's .Sonnets:t'

The history of criticism opens so many possibilities for an essay
on Sllakespeare's sonnets that I mnst warn a prospective reader
abolit what this work does and doesn't do. To begin with the
negative, I liave not solved or tried to solve any of the ptizzles of
Sliakespeare's sonnets. I do not attempt to identify Mr. W. H. or
the dark lady. I do not specuhtte on the occasions that may have
evoked particular sonnets. 1 do not attempt to date them. I
offer neither a reorganization of the sequcnce, nor a defense of

352 Is There a Texl in This Class?

the quarto order. What I have tried to do is find out what about
the sonnets has made them so highly valued by tlle vast majority
of critics and general readers.

This brief paragraph can serve as an illustration of almost every-
thing I have been saying. First of all, Booth self-consciously lo-
cates and defines his position in a differential opposition to the
positions he would dislodge. He will not, he tells us, do what
any of his predecessors have done; he will do something else,
and indeed if it were not something else there would be no
reason for him to be doing it. The reason he gives for doing it
is that what his predecessors have done is misleading or beside
the point. The point is the location of the source of the sonnets'
value ("what about the sonnets has made them so highly val-
ued") and his contention (not stated but strongly implied) is
that those who have come before him have been looking in the
wrong places, in the historical identity of the sequence's char-
acters, in the possibility of recovering the biographical condi-
tions of composition, and in the determination of an authorita-
tive ordering and organization. He, however, will look in the
right place and thereby produce an account of the sonnets that
does them the justice they so richly deserve.
Thus, in only a few sentences Booth manages to claim for his
interpretation everything that certifies it as acceptable within
the conventions of literary criticism: he locates a deficiency in
previous interpretations and proposes to remedy it: the remedy
will take the form of producing a more satisfactory account of
the work; and as a result the literary credentials of the workÑ
what makes it of enduring valueÑwill be more securely estab-
lished, as they are when Booth is able to point in the closing
paragraph of his book to .Shal;espeare's "remarkable achieve-
ment." By tlltls validating .Shakespeare's achievement, Booth
also validates his own credentials as a literary critic, as some-
one who knows what claims an(l demonstratiolls marll him as
a competent member of the institution.
What makes Stephen Booth so interestillg (altholloll not at
all atypical) is that one of his claims is to have freed himself and
the sonnets from that very institution and its practices. "I do

What Mahes an Inlerprelalion Acceptalvle? 353

not," he declares, "intentionally give any interpretations of the
sonnets I discuss. I mean to descril)e them, not to explain them."
The irony is that even as lSooth is declaring himself out of the
game, he is performing one of its most familiar moves. The move
has several versions, and Booth is here availing himself of two:
(I) the "external-internal," performed when a critic dismisses
his predecessors for being insufficiently literary ("but that has
nothing to do with its qualities as a poem"); and (2) the "back-
to-the-text," performed when the critical history of a work is
deplored as so much dross, as an obscuring encrustation ("we
are in danger of substitllting the criticism for the poem"). The
latter is the more powerful version of the move because it trades
on the assumption, still basic to the profession's sense of its ac-
tivities, that the function of literary criticism is to let the text
speak for itself. It is thus a move drenched in humility, although
it is often performed with righteousness: those other fellows may
he interested in displaying their ingenuity, but ¥ am simply a
servant of the text and wish only to make it more available to
its readers (who happen also to be my readers).
The basic gesture, then, is to disavow interpretation in favor
of simply presenting the text; but it is actually a gesture in which

one set of interpretive principles is replaced by another that
happens to claim for itself the virtue of not being an interpre-
tation at all. The claim, however, is an impossible one since in
order "simply to present" the text, one must at the very least
describe it ("I mean to describe them") and description can
occur only within a stipulative understanding of what there is to
be described, an understanding that will produce the object
of its attention. Thtts, when 13ooth rejects the assumptions of
those who have tried to solve the puzzles of the sonnets in favor
of "the assumption that the source of our pleasure in them must
be the line by line experience of reading them," he is not avoid-
hlg interpretation but proposing a change in the terms within
wlli(ll it will occllr. Specifically, he proposes that the focus of
attention, and therefore of description, shift from the poem
conceived as a spatial object which con/(liaTs meanings to the
poem conceived as a temporal experience in the course of which
meanings become momentarily available, before disappearing

,)
35~

Is There a Text in This ClassF

under the pressure of other meanings, whicll are in their turn
superseded, contradicted, qualified, or simply forgotten. It is
only if a reader agrees to this change, that is, agrees to accept
Booth's revisionary stipulation as to where the vahte and the
significance of a poem are to be located, that the facts to which
his subsequent analyses point will be seen to be facts at all. The
description which Booth offers in place of an interpretation
turns out to be as much of an interpretive construct as the in-
terpretations he rejects.
Nor could it be otherwise. Strictly spealeing, getting "back-to-
the-text" is not a move one can perform, becattse the text one
gets back to will be the text demanded by some other interpreta-
tion and that interpretation will be presiding over its produ(-
tion. This is not to say, however, that the "back-to-the-text" move
is ineffectual. The fact that it is not something one can do in no
way diminishes the effectiveness of claiming to do it. As a rhe-
torical ploy, the announcement that one is returlling to the text
will be powerful so long as the assumption that criticism is
secondary to the text and must not be allowed to ovenvhelm it
remains unchallenged. Certainly, Booth does not challenge it:
indeed, he relies on it and invokes it even as he relies on and
invokes many other assumptions that someone else might want
to dispute: the assumption that what distinguishes literary from
ordinary language is its invulneral)ility to paraphrase; the as-
sumption that a poem should not mean, bttt be; the assumption
that the more complex a work is, the more propositions it holds
in tension and equilibrium, the hetter it is. It wotlld not he at
all unfair to label these assumptions "conservative" and to point
out that in holding to them Booth undermines his radical cre-
dentials. But it would also be beside the point, whi(h is not
that Booth isn't truly radical but that he co7t1dn't he. Nor c
anyone else. The challenge he mounts to some of the conven-
tions of literary study (the convention of the poem as artifact,
the convention of meaningfulness) would not even be recog-
nized as a challenge if others of those conventions were not
firmly in place and, for the time being at least, unqllestioned. A
wholesale challenge would be impossible because there would
be no terms in which it could be made; that is, in order to be

a)
w

What Makes an Inlerpretation Acceptable? 355

wholesale, it would have to be made in terms wholly outside the
institution; but if that were the case, it would be unintelligible
because it is only within the institution that the facts of literary
studyÑtexts, authors, periods, genresÑbecome available. In
short, the price intelligibility exacts (a price Booth pays here)
is implication in the very structure of assumptions and goals
from which one desires to be free.
So it would seem, finally, that there are no moves that are
not moves in the game, and this includes even the move by which
one claims no longer to be a player. Indeed, by a logic peculiar to
the institution, one of the standard ways of practicing literary
criticism is to announce that you are avoiding it. This is so be-
cause at the heart of the institution is the wish to deny that its
activities have any consequences. The critic is taught to think
of himself as a transmitter of the best that had been thought and
said by others, and his greatest fear is that he will stand charged
of having substituted his own meanings for-the meanings of
which he is supposedly the guardian; his greatest fear is that he
be found guilty of having interpreted. That is why we have the
spectacle of commentators who, like Stephen Booth, adopt a
stance of aggressive humility and, in the manner of someone who
rises to speak at a temperance meeting, declare that they will
never interpret again but will instead do something else ("I
mean to describe them"). What I have been saying is that what-
ever they do, it will only be interpretation in another guise be-
cause, like it or not, interpretation is the only game in town.

: tS, ~ :,
264
Staiger, Janet. "Chapter 2: Reception Studies in Other
Disciplines." ~nterpretina Films: Studiesinthe
Historical RecePtion of American Cinema. Princeton
UniversityPress,1992. Pages 16-48.
CHAPTER TWO

Reception Studies in Other Disciplines

RECEPTION STUDIES does not start off helpless. On the contrary, an irn-
pressive history of discussion requires a sorting out of terms, ideas, and
methods that have potential value for the researcher. The lineage of cur-
rent research in readers' interpretation of texts extends back not only as far
as I. A. Richards but certainly also to Aristotle and Phto. However, sev-
eral contemporary scholarly arenas provide especially useful tidbits of data
or wide-ranging theses about readers.
One of these is the revised and renewed interest in sociocultural histo-
ries that explore the everyday life of eras, cultures, and collective mantal-
itas.t Some of this information can be enlightening, particularly when case
studies of readers are provided. One such instance is Robert Darnton's
investigation of the incredible emotional reaction after 1761 over Jean-
Jacques Rousseau's novel, La Nouvelk HcloiBc. Correspondents to Rous-
seau describe crying passionately, people traveled some distance to see the
author, and some readers seem to have identified with the characters to the
point of confusing fiction with reality.2 Such data are valuable in tracking
the historical existence of types of readerly phenomena. Also of impor-
tance has been the work of Michel Foucault and others on the historical
trajectories of discourses in their function of providing structures for inter-
pretation.
Another research area that intersects with reception studies is the sociol-
ogy of tastes and cultures. How have ranges of evaluations and aesthetics
developed? What explains groups of people's "liking" or "disliking" cul-
tural products? Examples here include the research of people such as Her-
bert Gans and Pierre Bourdieu, or Peter Burger, who describes the institu-
tion of art during the last one hundred yeal.i or so as necessarily (for
bourgeois society) operating as though art were autonomous; howcver,
this proposition of autonomy has simultaneously been attacked by some

avant-garde movements. Burger's sociology of art would adefine thc cp-
ochal framework with which the production and reception of literature
occurs."3
Linked to sociology are Claude Levi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, and Mary
Douglas in anthropology and ethnography. These individuals have helpcd
redeflne their fields using structuralist and semiotic methods. These mcth-
ods assume communication models that imply the participation of societal

al
vl

IN OTH~R DISCIPLINES 17

members in constructing cultural meaning. Patterns of behavior and be-
liefs function conventionally, structuring perception, cognition, and affec-
tive practices.4 Obviously, linguistics has also traditionally concerned itself
with reader comprehension, but recent contributions by sociology and
cognitive psychology have provided some important potential models of
reading.*5 Furthermore, psychoanalysis, of whatever variety, considers the
emotional effects of individuals' symbolically interpreting events.
History, sociology, ethnography, psychology, and linguisticsÑeach is
contributing to developments in reception studies. Yet immediate and ex-
tended discussions of readers have also occurred in literary, fine arts, and
communication fields. A number of immediate influences for these current
investigations of readers have been suggested by various writers. Because
of the prominence of the Constance School theorists, the heritage of Ger-
man hermeneutics and phenomenology often becomes central to histories
of reception studies. Here Fr. D. E. Schleierrnacher, Roman Ingarden,
and Hans-Georg Gadamer are fathers to Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert
lauss 6 Additionally, Robert Weirnann considers the publication of Bertolt
Brecht's writings in the 1960s as contributing to a revitalized focus on
readers. Weimann argues that Brecht defined "realism" in terms of a tex-
tual effect on the audience (identification versus distanciation), in contrast
to the formalism of Georg Lukacs (who defines "realism" via stylistic and
narrative characteristics). An unforeseen consequence of the altered defini-
tion was its attention to at least a theoretical, if not empirical, audience
affect.*7
As influences, certainly semiotic studies of the 1960s participated. The
study of codes of textuality joined the exploration of conventions of read-
ing and rhetorics of reader-effect. Textual poetics extended its repertoire of
tools and consistency of procedures so that its findings conveyed as much
scholarly authority and precision as had empirical mass communication
studies of effect. Furthermore, once linguistic models of communication
evoked the figure of a message's receiver, readers proliferated. aIdeal,"
"implied," "competent," and "real" readers began showing up. The arrival
of the reader has also promoted historical investigations of how and when
the "reader" as a character in a text appeared.*8
Another source for interest in readers has been post-structuralism. The
jolt of Jacques Derrida's philosophical analyses of Western assumptions
and theses about textuality and signifying practices has contributed to

reader-response criticism in the United States in part by implying a anega-
tive hermeneutics."*9 The proposition of indeterminate meaning now has
an extensive history of debate.
This chapter will not, however, try to catalog all of these genetic
strands. Nor will it cover all of the possible debates among participants
Rather I want to consider briefly four very specific issues and then survey

a~
a~

18 THBORBTICAL CONCBRNS

some contributions of several writers in the fields of literary and cultural
studies. In particular, the four issues I believe need some sorting out are
(1) the range of relations between the terms rcadin,g and interpretin,g; (2)
the difficulties with defining "meaning"; (3) various notions of "readers";
and (4) the philosophical possibility of "misreadings." These explorations
will take me into several convoluted philosophical arguments about her-
meneutical procedures. However, each of these issues requires some dis-
cussion so as to provide a rationale for the thesis that interpreting texts or
films is a historical reality determined by context, not an inherent or auto-
matic act due to some essential human process. For once interpretation
becomes historical rather than universal, then claims for privileging some
interpretations can be refuted. Interpretations-in-history become politi-
cized since they relate to historical social struggles, not to essences. Conse-
quently, these discussions will be an attempt to cut through terminological
disputes in order to provide a basis for a historical and contextual view of
several common questions in reader theory. Following that, I will compare
and contrast a number of writers on several bases, but most of all on their
representations of the text-and-reader interaction.

READING AND INTERPRI~TING

Up to this point I have been using the words reading, annprehendin,g, and
gntcrprctgn,~ more or less as though they were synonyms. In fact, my the-
saurus treats them as such. However, given their connotative force and the
fact that individuals make distinctions among the terms, sorting out fea-
tures of their semantics seems beneficial. Furthermore, debates about the
causal order of interpretive activities pivot around the group of terms com-
prising these and mcanin,a. Consequently, one must at least be sensitive to
the reasons for a variety of distinctions made by some writers, despite the
fact that the words are occasionally used interchangeably.
Most writers tend to consider "interpreting" as a subactivity of a larger
process, areading."*l¡ Any contentions center on what it means to ainter-
pret" and how "interpretation" fits into its context. Gerald Prince provides
a good starting point: aReading is an activity that presupposes a text (a set
of visually presented linguistic symbols from which meaning can be ex-
tracted), a reader (an agent capable of extracting meaning from that text),
and an interaction between the text and reader."ll Now, Prince is suppos-
ing that meaning is "in" the textÑa point which is quite debatable, as I
shall discuss belowÑbut his definition provides an otherwise common-
sense notion of "reading." Furthermore, as he continues, Prince provides
criteria for "reading": (l) knowing the language of the text, and (2) being
able to ask and answer relevant questions about its meaning. To do that,

IN OTHER DISCIPLINES 19

he continues, would imply competence in and knowledge of not only lin-
guistic information but also cultural, proairetic, hermeneutic, and sym-
bolic systems.*l2 Variables in ability to accomplish these activities would
involve the reader's "physiological, psychological, and sociological condi-
tioning, his predispositions, feelings, and needs . . ., his knowledge, his
interests, and his aims,"l3 and so forth. But these variables are normally
factored out when "reading" processes are considered in the abstract.
If this is a general notion of "reading," what is "interpretation"? Here
differences arise. One clear position is that of George L. Dillon. Dillon
begins his book, Lan,guqile ProcrsiniJ and the Readin,q of Litcrature, with
this seemingly simple proposition: aReading has at least three levels,
which we will call pcrccption, cotnprehension, and interprctation."*l4 Perccp-
tion involves general identifications of words but this process, he notes,
would also require inferences about words and sentences. Comprehension is
the placing of materials into some kind of aframe." (Since Dillon draws
extensively on psycholinguistic literature, the notion of aframe" is equiva-

lent to that of aschema" for him. Depending on the theories invoked,
acodes" or aconventions" might be substitute explanatory models.) Dillon
believes that frames may, in return, constrain the perception of new sen-
tences. Finally, interpretation aiS the most abstract level where we relate the
sense of what is going on to the author's constructive intention." This is in
any instance of discourse; for literature, literary conventions aid the
reader. Dillon further refines this by noting the interplay among the three
alevels" of reading: aInterpretation governs comprehension and percep-
tion in that we tend to see what we have inferred the writer wants us to
see."l5
What has been achieved in Dillon's definition? In one way, not much,
since his discussion provides few stable theses about sequentiality and hier-
archies of processes among the three levels. In fact, his final comments
about interpretation suggest that, although interpretation may be the
most "abstract," or aouter-directed," activity, it could also deter nine per-
ception and comprehension, thus preceding and dominating them. Conse-
quently, reading means already making an inference from an interpretive
hypothesis. But in another way, Dillon has separated out three activities
that, if they are separable only by definition and are not yet organized into
a functional model of the reading process, are reasonable distinctions
about common endeavors in reading.
Dillon's definition of ainterpretation" requires further discussion. He
suggests that interpretation is developing a hypothesized textual meaning
from an inference about an "author's constructive intention." This is an
acceptable statement, some would say, if it is understood that the state-
ment is a descriptive, not prescriptive, definition; that is, what Dillon is
defining as a feature of "interpretation" is what people tend to do, not
20 TH FORETICAL CONCERN S

what they must do when interpreting. In other words, when interpreting,
a reader might "relate the sense of what is going on to the author's con-
structive intention," but a reader might also (or otherwise) "relate the
sense of what is going on" to something elseÑsay, the reader's notions
about reality, or ideas about metaphysics, or views of textual and social
processes. Making this adjustment to Dillon's definition, however, results
in blurring the distinction between "interpretation" and "comprehen-
sion." In fact, as Dillon sets out his three levels, "interpretation" might be
argued to be a subset of comprehension: the comprehension "frame" for
interpretation is the convention of an aauthor's constructive intention."
Yet as Dillon studies "comprehension," he does tend to discuss what could
be considered textual features. Comprehension, for him, seems to involve
inferences about the internal world of the reading material.
Although I shall later question what is "in" the text, perhaps it is accept-
able at this point to decide, somewhat unilaterally, that "comprehension"
involves using frames (or codes or conventions) to make inferences about
textual meanings, while "interpretation" involves using frames to make in-
ferences about extratextual meanings, with one possible extratext that of
an inferred aauthor" and his or her "constructive intention." Furthermore,
I want to stress, as Dillon suggests, that interpretive frames and inferences
influence, and perhaps determine, perception and comprehension.* '¡ This
causal claim about sequences of influences is important since I am arguing
for a contextual approach to understanding interpretation. Thus, inferences
established prior to any specific act of reading are determinants to the per-
ception, comprehension, and interpretation that occurs during reading.
This notion of the interconnections among reading activities is com-
mon in theorizing about literary reception. As Steven Mailloux surveys the
work of Norman Holland and Stanley Fish, he characterizes their posi-
tions: aWe interpret as we perceive, or rather perception is an interpreta-
tion."l7 Robert Crosman and Dillon (as well as William Empson before
them) note that words in context can be ambiguous so that extratextual
(interpretive) assumptions and prior experiences lead readers to whatever
perceptual choices they make.l8 Dillon's book is particularly exciting for
its array of hypotheses about what may be normative strategies in reading
both typical and atypical writing styles.
The proposition about the interpenetration of the acts of perceiving,
comprehending, and interpreting may be disturbing for those who claim

that they wish to avoid interpreting texts; they only desire to describc tex-
tual features. It does not help to argue that a scholar can maintain distinc-
tions about these in critical activities, that the critical act can remain at the
level of comprehension. In a set of closely reasoned essays, Michael Baxan-
dall examines the effort to use only so-called descriptive language in art

IN OTHER DISCIPLINBS 21
criticism. He points out that phrases are employed that involve "cause"
words (how the painting was done), "comparison" words (how the paint-
ing relates to other paintings), and "effect" words (how the painting af-
fects the critic). Consequently, Baxandall claims, a picture discussed is not
an "unmediated picture but the picture as considered under a partially in-
terpretative description" since description is aa representation of thinking
about having seen the picture."*l9 Theoretically, of course, it might be
possible to write a critical essay that remains in pbrasin,g at the levels of
perception and comprehension, but that ex post facto act has still been
mediated by the prior reading event, which, as discussed above, has al-
ready been influenced, if not determined by, interpretation.*20
Where is evaluation in all of this? Certainly it is contingent upon inter-
pretation, no matter what frames of interpretation are involved. Mailloux
describes this in a discussion of the strategies of evaluation used by British
and U.S. critics in reviewing Moe Dick. After charting out traditional lit-
erary conventions, reviewers turned those conventions into prescriptions
and evaluated the novel against them.21 Drawing upon the line of logic I
have developed so far, I might rephrase this in terms of the reviewers inter-
preting Moby Dick through the frame of hypothesized general textual con-
ventions and evaluating in relation to inferred similarities and differences.
These similarities and differences would, necessarily, have involved per-
ception and comprehension, also mediated by the interpretative f ame.
Mailloux summarizes it nicely:

Here the act of evaluation reveals itself as a consequence of interpretation.
Evaluation follows from the translation of the work from one context (the
analyzed specifics of a text's dynamics) to another context (the text in relation
to a valued set of traditional conventions); and intcrpretative work is clearly
involved in both the analysis of the text and in the placement of the analyzed
work in the context of literary history. Thus, in the British reviews of Thc
Whalc [Moe Dick], evaluation becomes a complex extension of interpre-
tation.22

These definitions and discussions of reading and interpreting reveal that
while several levels of activity may be parceled out to semantical catego-
ries, the causal order suggests the interpenetration of the terms when they
are used to describe any actual event of a reader processing a text. Further-
more, the influence of extratextual or interpretive frames on perception
and comprehension is widely accepted among writers in reading theory as
well as reception theory. Thus, a reader interpreting any work of literature
or film will be drawing upon interpretive frames historically available to
him or her, and these frames will be influential even in the act of percep-
tion or the process of comprehension and evaluation.

a~
co

22 THEORETICAL CONCERNS

MEANING IN READING

Although the mincing of definitions for reading and interpreting may
seem tenuous, distinctions among connotations are not when questions of
"meaning" are posed. M. H. Abrams considers establishing "meaning" as
the key to ainterpreting": interpretation for him is aan activity that 'under-
takes to determine what an author meant.'"23 Consequently, Abrams's
definition of interpretation implies the extratextual frame of an "author's
constructed intention."

Abrams's view is not that of many reception theorists. One of the attrib-
utes used to differentiate reader-response criticism from earlier hermeneu-
tical methods is the declaration by most reader-response writers that
ameaning" is not "in" the text, put there by an agency of authorship, but
originates in the event of reading: areading is not the discovery of meaning
but the creation of it.n24 For some more militant believers, even studying
the genesis of a work is fallacious. The production of meaning should only
consider what readers make of it.
While theoretically studying readers exclusively might be appropriate,
this view seems to me potentially dangerously ahistorical, as though read-
ers were tabula rasa, without knowledge of the physical production of a
text (or representations about the physical production of the text), or un-
influenced by the typical interpretative strategy to which Abrams refers: a
book ameans" what an author ameant" it to "mean." If, in fact, that is
what readers make of the text, then reception studies needs to acknowl-
edge the firame of production circumstances as historically pertinent. If an
audience member believes that Hitchcock directed The Biras or Bela Lu-
gosi died during the filrning of Plan Nine fro~n Outcr Spacc, the interpretive
frame may be part of the pleasure of the film's meaning for that viewer.
This said, however, the meaning of "meaning" still requires additional dis-
cussion to expand its value for a historical approach to interpretation.
Abrarns's connections among ameaning," ainterpretation," and ainten-
tion" are common; I am sure that he expresses the beliefs of many individ-
uals, academic and lay. Yet Abrams's approach must be distinguished from
that of New Criticism, and both views firom those of reception studies.
Although New Criticism does assume authorial genesis of a text, it ar-
gues that a critic can determine ameaning" from the object itself without
reference to the biographical study Abrams calls for. New Criticism con-
siders a poem (or any other literary text) "an autonomous whole"; the
critic's function is interpretive, considering, as Jonathan Culler expresses
it, athematic operators" of aambivAlensc, ambi0uity, tension, irony, para-
A'4S," which allow unification of the text as an expression about the
world.*25 This expression does have a source, the author, but in a case of

IN OTHER DISCIPLINES 23

conflicting interpretations, New Criticism eschews knowledge about au-
thorial intent as the criterion for choosing among meanings. Rather, evi-
dence of authorial intent is objective and public, for it is "in" the text.
Important and subtle differences exist between the two propositions of
sources of meaning and determination of that meaning.
It is common to associate with New Criticism the notion of the ainten-
tional fallacy" as implying that a critic should not derive textual meaning
from knowledge about authorial intent. However, W. K. Wimsatt and
M. C. Beardsley's original formulation in 1946 suggests something
slightly different: aThe design or intention of the author is neither availa-
ble nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary
art."26 Although Wimsatt revised this in 1968, replacing athe success"
with "either the meaning or the value,"27 neither formulation denies that
authorial expressivity creates meaning or that the critic's function is to find
that authorial meaning. What the formulations do deny is the validity of
using knowledge derived from extratextual sources as determinant in cases

of disagreement. The 1946 version suggests that causality should not be
the basis for evaluation (not interpretation); the 1968 thesis revises this,
asserting that inferred authorial intention is inadequate for both interpre-
tation and evaluation. However, neither the 1946 nor the 1968 propo-
sition rejects authorial expressivity as the causc of meaning or its defi-
niuon.*28
Thus, what distinguishes Abrams from the New Critic is how each
posits that the critic knows intention. For New Critics, knowledge of (au-
thorial) meaning is available to the critic from textual evidence alone. For
New Gitics, no amount of contextual information could provide evidence
whereby a specific interpretation of a text could be validated as correct;
evidence of meaning comes from inside the text, and that evidence is pub-
lic knowledge and objective. In dealing with a text's meaning, then, New
Giticism does assume "the author's constructive intention" as its interpre-
tative frame. It infers athe author" (not reader) as genesis, but the evidence
for this meaning is "in" the text. Abrams is saying something different. For
him, interpretation a'undertakes to determine what an author meant.'"
Here the object of investigauion is related to something aoutside" the text
(authorial purposeÑconscious or otherwise), as contrasted with New
Criticism's use of the end result (the poem).
In the case of either Abrams's formulauon or that of the New Critics,
reception theorists, deconstructionists, and post-structuralists will all
argue that any inferred meaning is the product of interpretation and inter-
pretative frames (the author-as-historical-body, the author-in-the-poem).
A reading act's origin and end is the reader.
An attempt to resolve the so-called crisis provoked by the denial that
authorial intention or immanent meaning consututes ameaning" is to cre

..)

24 THBORETICALCONCERNS

ate two separate terms, mtanin,~ and si,gni~cancc. Here ncanin0 refers to
what is aimmanent to the system of the text" while sCnif canct is adesig-
nating a relation to facts and ideas outside that system."*29 Not only is this
distinction suggested in the work of Wolfgang Iser, but E. D. Hirsch,
Janet Wolff, and Culler supply variations.30 Thus, s,fin,if cansc refers to
what an individual believes to be pertinent about the text in relation to
extratextual concerns or values about a text, while meanin0 is reserved for
aauthorial constructive intention."
Robert Crosman refutes the distinction's value, arguing that in such a
parceling out of connotations, ameaning" is actually a subset of asignifi-
cance": aThe act of understanding a poet's words by placing them in the
context of his intentions is only one of a number of possible ways of under-
standing them." Other meaning/significance-rnaking procedures by read-

ers, a reader-response theorist would argue, are aequally, contextualizing
procedures.... Thus, I hope to show that the statement 'authors make
meanings,' though not of course untrue, is merely a special case of the
more universal truth that readers make meaning."31
Although, with Crosman, I would disagree with the notion that any
meaning is aimmanent" in the text and relates to authorial intention, I can
make use of the distinction between a reader's conception of what she or
he assu nts is the intent of the text (i.e., meaning) and what she or he sees
as that text's relation to extratextual events or discourses (i.e., signifi-
cance). How readers make meaning and significance while interpreting a
text is another problem, however.

READEM

In the secondary literature, I have found the following kinds of readers (in
alphabetical order): actual, authorial, coherent, competent, ideal, implied,
mock, narratee, necessary, programmed, real, resisting, super, virtual,
zero-degree. Others probably exist.*32 Depending upon what you might
want to know, certain of these various readers may be useful theoretical
notions. However, given the aim of this project (to determine how a his-
torical materialist study of interpretation might be written), I want to
focus on three of those readersÑthe ideal, coherent, and competent read-
ersÑas indicators of theses about atexts," "meaning," and "reading."

Idcal Readcts

What is the ideal reader? Two connotations emitted by the term ulcal are
aexemplary" and "representative." In either case, when confronted by a

IN OTHER DISCIPLINES 25

text, the ideal reader behaves in an established manner, depending upon
the critic's hypotheses about texts, meaning, and reading. Robert De-
Maria, Jr. points out the historical variability of the ideal reader. In his
"The Ideal Reader: A Critical Fiction," he surveys characteristics that four
major literary critics (Johnson, Dryden, Coleridge, and Frye) impute to
their readers. DeMaria describes Johnson's reader as the acommon
reader," something of an archetypical individual, who, while ordinary, is
also "the perfect representative of all mankind."33 Johnson's ideal reader
turns out not to be very competent, for he (and it is a he) knows nothing
about literary conventions, details of occupations, or facts of places and
times.*34 However, those failures permit the reader to be acommon" or
universal, to read and judge without the restraints of historical specificity.
What such a reader implies is revelatory for Johnson's critical procedures
and evaluative criteria. The text should supply whatever pertinent data the
reader needs. Basic sense-data input should produce in the nearly tabula
rasa reader what is required for the reading. Moreover, the best texts
should be universal, appealing to all individuals without consideration of
mundane temporal and spatial constraints.

Dryden's ideal reader is not only representative but also exemplary. He
is of a particular class: "the best of men" or "'the most judicious'" who
aare cultivated enough to learn from conversation; they are open and skep-
tical rather than positive or magisterial." Dryden recognizes at least two
other groups of readers, the amob" and the amiddlle."35 Suggestive in Dry-
den's triad is the possibility of variable procedures of reading depending
upon competency, but a hierarchy of evaluation for those readings sup-
poses more appropriate or socially more conscientious interactions with
texts. That judicious readers are also skeptical may imply that resisting tex-
tual meanings is not only possible but, for some texts, desirable.
Coleridge and Frye also accept variation among readers, but, like Dry-
den, assume that ideal readers arc exemplary, whether or not they are rep-
resentative. Coleridge's "'Great Mogul's diamond,"' his best type of
reader, is the individual who learns about the self while reading, asurren-
der[ing] his right to evaluate as he enters into a kind of collaboration with
the poet."36 Reading is something of an inhabitation of the author's soul
through the vehicle of the text (and I would point out that such an ideal
reader is common among twentieth-century critics who posit the reader
from textual evidence*37). Finally, Frye's notion of the reader reposits
moral responsibility as brought by the reader to the text. However, rather
than evaluating the text, Frye judges the reader.
Several lessons may be drawn from DeMaria's observations. For one
thing, the characteristics of an ideal reader not only are hypothetical, but
they are likely symptomatic of fundamental epistemological and ethical as-
sumptions held by the individual proposing them. Whatever is postulated
26 THBORBTICAL CONCBRNS

as the ideal reader reveals more about the critic and the critical method
than about the activities of readers. Or at least as far as is known. For none
of these critics provides evidence beyond assertion and common sense that
readers perform as the critics describe or prescribe. Of course, "exemplary"
is precisely one meaning of idcal. But what I want to note here is that what
is projected outward as "ideal" ought instead to be turned backward to-
ward the critic, for the critic's projection of what is "ideal" is also a sign of
ideology at work. The apparent naturalness or commonsensical recogni-
tion of any set of characteristics is, as Volosinov observes, a clue that the
strategy of the ruling class to make signs uniaccentual is working. The
ideal reader is really the reader that the critic, as a representative of a class,
gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual preference, has reason to favor for some
cause. The motives may be social or political; most likely they are not con-
scious, but they also are not innocent since they may have effects such as
promoting certain types of reading as appropriate or correct. *38
From this, I would point out that ideal readers are nearly all unrepresen-
tative in significant ways. In my reading of the literature on ideal readers,
not surprisingly, gender (e.g., male) is presumed irrelevant, sexual prefer-
ence (e.g., heterosexual) is undescribed, race and ethnicity (e.g., Anglo,
west European) are unnamed, and so on. Patrocinio P. Schweickart pro-
vides a good current example of this elision in her essay "Reading Our-
selves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading," where she notes the literal
deletion of pertinent historical references to Malcolm X's race by Wayne
Booth. Booth uses Malcolm X as an exemplar of "a boy who fell in love
with books" but in so doing eliminates Malcolm X's frames for interpreta-
tion, which included a'Mr. Muhammad's teachings, my correspondence,
my visitorsÑespecially Ella and Reginald.'"39
FurthermoreÑa legacy perhaps of Johnson, Coleridge, and other great
male criticsÑpolitical and ethical beliefs are rendered as biases. As others
have suggested, this procedure is disingenuous, for it disguises the writers'
politics and ethics as universals and everyone else's as local opinion.40
Theoretically, I could construct an alternative ideal reader that might
display my politics and ethics to counter the other ideal readers offered.*41
However, it is not in my interest to do so. In the political struggle through
language described by Volosinov, an ideal reader used in the attempt to
render language uniaccentual works as a tool of domination. To posit an-
other "other" ideal reader is merely to repeat an ideological strategy that
I oppose.
Consequently, I am concerned that new historicism,*42 despite recog-

nizing the fallacy of ideal readers, might end up reconstructing them. For
smaller groups (women, gays, people of color) may acquire characteriza-
tions that can become equally idealÑdescribed or prescribed as representa-
tive or exemplary of another constructed identity. This has occasionally

IN OTHER DISCIPLINBS 27

occurred in film studies. Although this field of research has begun to ac-
commodate the complexities of dealing with sexual difference among
movie viewers, the female spectator is often treated as the ideal (male)
spectator has been: as unitary. An attempt to provide a more complicated
representation is made in chapter 6, where some variety among male and
female responses to the film Foolish Wives is examined.
Another lesson from DeMaria's essay might be that historical character-
izations of ideal readers have varied. Not surprisingly, as Johnson's reader
is representative of Johnson's criticism, Johnson's criticism can generally
be considered representative of his time, or at least of the hegemonic view.
Thus, the discrepancies among critics exhibit the nonuniversal nature of
Johnson's common reader, and of the readers of Dryden, Coleridge, and

rrye.
Finally, however, prescriptions disguised as descriptions might reveal to
reception studies scholars the canonical procedures of reading for a histo-
rical period. Thus, while in one way the notion of an ideal reader may be
considered a debit in the effort to understand any actual textual reception,
in another way the ideal reader might become an asset. If one used the
historical period's version of the ideal reader as a backboard and imagined
alternative reading practices, the places or ways nondominant readers re-
configured texts could be hypothesized in advance of research. For exam-
ple, Dagmar Barnouw, in reviewing WolEgang Iser's books, points out
that Iser believes blanks (or gaps) exist in texts. Iser assumes that, when
confronted by these, readers either reassemble information to produce
meaning or change denotations into connotations. Barnouw counters, re-
marking that readers could do anything with a blank, and that most likely
they do something.43 As I shall discuss in chapter 8 concerning gays' read-
ings of Garland films in the 1950s, alternative reading strategies by gays
may reproduce Iser's ideal reader by finding blanks, but they also produce
oppositional meanings and connotations, finding blanks that Iser's reader
would not see. Thus, although ideal readers seem to be ahistorical, the
scholar who chooses to research reception can find in those ideal readers
and their proponents evidence useful for reconstructing the history of
readings.

Cohcrcnt Rcadc~s

Scholars who propose ideal readers do not nacussarily assert that meaning
is immanent in the text, but they do presuppose that either a representa-
tivc or exemplary meaning results from reading. The same might be said
for "coherent readers," who, along with the "competent reader," might be
considered a particular variation of the ideal reader. What the notion of

)

28 THBORBTICAL CONCBRNS

the "coherent reader" assumes is that a reader reads so as to pull all of the
parts of a text into a single or unified meaning or experience. Immediately,
you will notice that such a proposition assumes that a text can be ordered
into a coherency and that the controlling activity or purpose of reading is
to accomplish this.
Let me consider this supposition from the perspective of both texts and
readers. Post-structuralism and deconstructionism have disagreed strongly
with the premise that a text is coherent (i.e., noncontradictory). I will not
rehearse here the philosophical reasoning that permits such a view, since
the proponents' contentions are widely known. What I will do is suggest
what these ontological positions imply for the notion of coherent readers.
As James R. Kincaid discusses in aCoherent Readers, Incoherent Texts,"
one way to take the debates of traditional scholars such as Abrams and
Wayne C. Booth versus deconstructionists like Hillis Miller is to move
away from asking whether or not texts are coherent and have a single
meaning, and toward inquiring, instead, what readers do.44 In Kincaid's
summary, Abrams and Booth conclude that deconstruction ends up hold-
ing the position Abrams and Booth hold: that texts can be bounded offso
as to have a determinant core meaning. That may be the case, Kincaid
notes, but what Abrams and Booth do not prove is that the acenter exists
in any way within the text.n45 Instead, Kincaid believes that the texts are
not necessarily coherent; readers just try to make texts cohere. Thus, de-
construaionists such as Miller are correct that texts and language are con-
tradiaory, but Abrams and Booth may be right if readers are the object of
the discussion.
Kincaid does resort to a treatment of the reader as ideal. Readers have
a "fear" of logical contradiction: aThe reading of literature is in large part
a search for the organizing patterns . . . that will make coherent all the
numerous details or signals we pick up along the way. Readers proceed
with the assumption that there must be a single dominant structuring
principle and that it is absurd to imagine more than one such dominant
principle." Kincaid then proceeds to postulate that most texts "are, in fact,
demonstrably incoherent, presenting us not only with multiple organizing
patterns but organizing patterns that are competing, logically inconsis-
tent."46 They adefamiliarize" readers, encouraging readers to see thc insuf-
ficiency of trying to work out a single pattern.
John Rutherford, in aStructuralism," takes a similar stance. Summariz-
ing structuralist views of the reader as aprogrammed by his experience of
'classical' literature to fit a text together like some kind of superior mental
jig-saw puzzle," Rutherford thinks that "there is in all literature an element
of 'unreadability,' a core of resistance to the mind's longing for precise
patterns, soothing symmetry, absolute order, and clear meaning; the prin-
ciple of resistance has been intensified rather than invented by modern

IN OTHBR DISCIPLINES 29

writers."47 In other words, contemporary literature may be heightening
inherent contradictory aspects of language and logic.
Kincaid's and Rutherford's distinctions between the fact of incoherent
texts and attempts by readers to construct logical interpretations are quite
suggestive, and Kincaid takes them further. For one thing, Kincaid exam-
ines his own assertion that readers afear" incoherency. For if he is correct,
you might wonder why readers are so resilient or stubborn, refusing to
learn that texts are not coherent, continuing to try to make all the parts fit
every time they pick up a book or watch a movie. In answering, Kincaid
considers Ralph Rader's hypothesis that readers have an evolutionary need
to make decisions when confronted by ambiguities.48 Kincaid does not
debate the issue of whether some part of our genetic makeup demands
resolution of contradictions. Instead, he queries whether the literary expe-
rience stimulates such perceptual and cognitive responses. For Kincaid
points out that the act of reading should not be simply equated with every-
day life. In this special encounter, it is uncertain that for their own security

readers need to interpret literature aaccurately." In fact, literature may
check the reflexive desire to resolve all crises, thus making individuals more
aflexible." Literature as literature may be "playful," improving our acritical
spirit" and aimagination"; furthermore, aour perceptions necessary to sur-
vival might be complex and contradictory rather than single and harmo-
nious."49
Thus, not only does Kincaid call into question the assumption that per-
ceptual and cognitive processes insist upon finding one essential interpre-
tation, but he also seems aware that what is postulated as a coherent read-
ing may actually be what some critical methods offer as the appropriate
etiquette for responding to great books. Yet Kincaid does present several
common strategies he believes readers use when they do try to resolve con-
tradiaory experiences with a possible unified interpretation. These tactics
include naturalizing the event (i.e., finding a "higher meaning" to resolve
the problem), considering one interpretation subordinate to the other,
eliminating one of the solutions as unacceptable for some reason, or con-
sidering the experience as a reflexive textual moment. Kincaid also points
out that texts might be much more exciting if they were seen as more com-
plex, with multiple genres (promoting varied reading responses) coexist-
ing in them. For instance, he finds in Dickens's and Trollope's novels all
four of Frye's genres (tragedy, comedy, irony, and romance). In chapter 9,
Kincaid's hypotheses about readers' tactics for unifying contradictory tex-
tual experiences will be proven in the case of readers' interpretation of
post-World War II art films.
Kincaid's remarks provide insights into protocols for proper reading if
one criterion for a good interpretation is resolving contradiction. But two
other approaches are to wonder if desires for tactual coherency are that
30 T8EORBTICAL CONCBRNS

strong and if they are the only activity in reading. Perhaps, for instance, a
reader may wish to construct himself or herself, not the text, as coherent.
In sorting out all types of possible readers, Walter Gibson notes the com-
mon phenomenon of rejecting the obvious position a text offers the
reader. In particular, Gibson describes refusing to become the "mock
reader" that advertising and propaganda wish him to be.50 Such a proce-
dure, assuming that intent to resist produces the effect, may be quite satis-
fying from the standpoint of the reader's ego, providing the illusion of
coherency of the self.
Or perhaps the self takes pleasure in contradiction. In reviewing some
of the theoretically possible readers, Jonathan Culler remarks that readers
might enjoy the ainteraction of contradictory engagements" among the
possible subject positions offered by metamorphosing from a real reader
into a mock reader into an implied reader, and so on.51
Both of these latter reactions to the idea of a coherent reader imply the
view of the subject as heterogenous, contradictory, in process. This stance
happens to be the one I view as appropriate. Yet even the proposition of
coherent readers suggests that a drive for coherency may be more the act
of a schooled reader than a necessary result of experiencing a text. Thus, as
was the case with the ideal reader, the notion of a coherent reader can
illuminate something about interpretation: several common procedures
may be used by some readers. However, those procedures should be un-
derstood not as inherent but historical (and likely specific to a particular
groupÑscholars). Unless strong evidence is supplied that finding coher-
ency is the dominant or only activity a reader carries out, I would submit
that coherency of interpretation is a common, but not universal, tendency.
In fact, throughout the historical studies in Part Two, I will present in-
stances of readings in which only the most perverse distortions of the in-
formation could conclude that a coherent reading had been attempted or
occurred.
The sources for the notion of a coherent reader are multiple. They de-
rive from assuming something about texts (e.g., that texts are coherent),
from confusing what might be "in" a text with what a reader might do
with the details of a text, and from believing that the primary obligation
of readers is creating a logical interpretation rather than, for instance, de-
veloping a coherent self in opposition to the text or finding pleasure in
dispersion and contradiction. These latter possibilities arc more in line

with a historical materialist perspective about readers.

ComPctcnt Rgaders

Competent readers, like coherent readers, seem another significant varia-
tion of ideal readers. The notion of competency does not assume that a

IN OTHBR DISCIPLINBS 31

text or a reader is coherent, but it does assume that some readings are
better than others. This proposition, thus, implicitly or accidentally ac-
knowledges variations among interpretations, and if variations can occur,
the text cannot totally determine or control what the reader does.
An incidental proof of variation among readers, however, is not very
important (no one takes the position that "real" readers all do the same
thing). Instead, the question here is, competency by what or whose stan-
dards? As I suggested with the notion of a coherent reader (in one sense,
one type of competent reader), the determination of what standard is com-
petency seems more a consequence of history or evaluation systems than a
matter susceptible to proof by any scholar.
One solution to this problem of standards, however, echoes the discus-
sion about interpretation and meaning. As Dagmar Barnouw explains, the
ideal reader is athe fully competent reader in the sense of the speech act
theory: the reader who is clearly intended by the author and whose 'com-
petence' fully coincides with the author's.X52 This answer is tautological.
E or if I do not accept meaning as immanent in the text and if I have to
interpret what the author intended, including what reader was implied,
how would I know if I had a competent conclusion? The only proofwould
be my interpretation's matching my own or the critic's assumption of what
the author intendedÑwhich is what I wanted to know.
What acompetency" is really about is the possibility of ranking or dismis-
sing interpretations. In Structuralut Poctuas, Jonathan Culler reveals this:

None would deny that literary works, like most other objects of human atten
tion, can be enjoyed for reasons that have little [to] do with understanding
and masteryÑthat texts can be quite blatantly misunderstood and still be at
preciatcd for a variety of personal reasons. But to reject the notion of misun
derstanding as a legislative imposition is to leave unexplained the common
experience of being shown where one went wrong, of grasping a mistake and
seeing why it was a rnistake.S3

Two comments are necessary here. Culler is choosing meaning (probably
defined as author's intent) over significance as an appropriate hierarchy for
evaluating interpretations. Additionally, he appeals to common sense to
naturalize that judgment. That is, if a social formation has a set of conven-
tions and protocols for promoting some types of interpretations, then the
"obviousness" of making a mistake should be recognized as ideological.
Thus, Culler's answer to the question of the standard of competency turns
out to hinge on historical variationsÑcurrent norms and conventions for
understanding the text. Readers may be able to judge a competent reading
but only within their own systems of interpretation.
The researcher who assumes that ideal, coherent, and competent read-
ers are historical readers falls prey to various of the fallacies that I discussed
in chapter l: the coherence-inference fallacy (assuming readers read coher

)

32 THBORBTICAL CONCBRNS

ently), the ideal-spectator fallacy (assuming all readers in a group do the
same thing), and the free-reader fallacy (assuming readers have complete
freedom). While such propositions about readers may have value for phi-
losophical or critical speculation, a historical materialist study of reception
needs, as far as possible, to avoid generalizations that ignore the diversity
and variety of interpretative acts by readers.

MISRIADING

Culler has changed his position about interpretations. Part of his descrip-
tion of literary competency included the contention that the idea of com-
petency was necessary: aIf the distinction between understanding and mis-
understanding were irrelevant . . . there would be little point to discussing
and arguing about literary works and still Icss to writing about them."54
Now Culler writes,

Since no reading can escape correction, all readings are misreadings; but this
leaves not a monism but a double movement. Against the claim that, if there
are only misreadings, then anything goes, one affirms that misreadings are
errors; but against the positivist claim that they are errors because they strive
toward but fail to attain a true reading, one maintains that true readings are
only particular misreadings: misreadings whose misses have been missed.

For deconstructionism, misreading is a logical necessity, since the notion
of misreading "retains the trace of truth" that a true reading is possible.55
My stance on this is that since I wish to write a historical materialist
account of interpreting, I want to set aside the philosophical question of
whether misreadings are or are not possible. Instead, I want to ask, what
counts as a misreading? What situations, methods, procedures, or inter-
prctations are judged by whom to be erroneous? Within that historical
context, I want to know, why is a meaning or significance deemed less
"true" than another? Here I am responding to Barbara Herrnstein Smith's
comments in "Contingencies of Value," that judgments are never value-
frce, but they are part and parcel of struggles among individuals.56
Another part of the reason for my decision to ask what counts as a mis-
reading connects to comments made by Michael Riffaterre in a discussion
on the "referential fallacy." By his definition, the "referential fallacy" oc-
curs when a reader "mistakenly substitutes the reality for its representa-
tion, and tends mistakenly to substitute the representation for the inter-
pretation we are supposed to make of it."57 Riffaterre is dealing with one
of the difficulties of significance: a reader may inappropriately (by the stan-
dards of semiotics as a critical method, not as a communication theory) fail
to isolate the interpretation derived during the textual experience from

IN OTIIBR DISCIPLINES 33

those experiences that are in everyday life. For instance, some viewers of
afternoon television dramas write to the actors and actresses of the pro-
gram, giving them advice about the plot events, as well as using story situ-
ations as positive or negative lessons to be applied to their own lives.
Riffaterre points out that "we cannot, however, simply correct the mis-
take and ignore its effects, for the fallacy is part of the literary phenome-
non, being an illusion of the reader's. The fallacy is thus a valid process in
our experiencing of literature."55 If one of the goals of semiotics (or recep-
tion studies) is description, rather than prescription, then every act, even
an error, is an important datum in evidence gathering and hypothesis
making.
Furthermore, I would assert that every so-called error is a sign of, per-
haps, the reader's "mistake" but also of the judge's system. John Paul
Russo provides an example. Reviewing the evaluative standards of I. A.
Richards, Russo describes how Richards's list of ten types of aobstacles in
reading" implies a thesis about what is artistic in a text. Among Richards's

obstacles are "stock responses, irrelevant associations, doctrinal adhesion,
inhibition, sentimentality, and so on." As Russo puts it: "Some of the ter-
minology that defined mental responses and misinterpretation inevitably
got into the discussion of the work of art: wholeness, tension, doctrine."59
In another example, Peter Uwe Hohendahl examines Theodor Adorno's
criticism of the type of "impact" studies done by Paul Lazarsfeld. Hohen-
dahl argues that Adorno's rejection of Lazarsfeld's work is aimed in part at
the positivism of assuming that reported subject experiences are "primary
and indisputable data."60 Adorno's reaction, however, also presumes the
wholeness, autonomy, and integrity of the work of art. Adorno's ideal
readers are competent; interpretation is obvious.

The reader, spectator or listener does not appear as an independent category
determining the work because Adorno never questions the hermeneutic act
of understanding.... the recipient is always an ideal construction which thus
cannot violate the text. If this is not the caseÑas in the relationship between
avant-garde art and the mass publicÑthen the blame for this incompatibility
lies with the public.61

The consequence of this is an ideal reader much like Richards's or New
Criticism's views of a readcr's interprctive act: meaning is immanent, texts
havc essences, mistakes are the fault of the readcr. It is also, ironically for
Adorno, not historical materialism, for his assumptions make meanings
ahistorical.
When confronted by the notion that what is defined as "misrcading" is
actually a symptom of the critical method, some individuals retaliate by
stretching that position to a reductio ad absurdum. If misreadings do not
exist (except as prescriptions), then any reading is possible. You could, for
34 THBORBTICALCONCBRNS

example, interpret the film 2001: A Spacc Odyssey as meaning the same, or
having the same significance, as The Birth of a Nation. Indeed, one conse-
quence of eliminating thc criterion of truth for an interpretation is open-
ing up reading to a polysemy and pluralism that even the most radical
scholar might fear.
A possible response to this quandary is to make a distinction between,
on the one hand, the philosophical possibility of reading anything any way
and, on the other, the historical fact that the range of interpretations is
constrained by numerous factors such as language, ideologies, personal
goals for the experience, conditions of reception, self-identities related to
class, gender, race, age, and ethnicity, and so forthÑincluding the contem-
porary critical methods readers have been taught. As Terry Eagleton has
already reminded us, aThe notion that the text is simply a ceaselessly sdf-
signifying practice, without source or object, stands four square with the
bourgeois mythology of individual freedom.n62 In fact, this is what seems
most pertinent to me. Reading formationsÑthe variety of procedures or
protocols historically availableÑare a domain of tremendous importance
for materialist scholars of interpretation. They are also one of vital political
significance, for once "misreading" is considered as a historical variable,
then activating alternative reading strategies becomes a political weapon.
aMisreadings" may be cultivated as oppositional gambits in battle against
hegemonic etiquette. The idea of "resisting readers" seems grounded in
just such a fundamental and intentional contrariness.
Political reverberations aside, the notion of historical reading forma-
tions still demands attention. In fact, if you believe that you hold a merely
curiosity-oriented value system, then you might agree with Culler: "In
general, divergence of readings is more interesting than convergence."
Culler has preceded this remark by making what I take to be the facetious
suggestion that we legislate the grounds for finding a textual meaning.
Such grounds might be: (l) "what its author meant by it"; (2) awhat it
would have meant to an ideal audience of its day"; or (3) "what accounts
for its every detail without violating the historical norms of the genre."63
Prohibition, however, generally fails as perfect prevention. For a historical
materialist description of reading, those criminal acts are as much within
the range of analysis as law-abiding ones.

TX3XIS, RIADECRS, CONTEXTS

The I that approaches the text is itself already
a plurality of other texts, of infinite or, more
precisely, lost codes (whose origins are lost).
(Roland Barthcs, 1970)

IN OTHER DISCIPLINBS 35

They reinvent the reader as an energetic creature
who by turns accommodates and victimizes his
texts; thus they also reconstitute the reading act as
not so much a peaceful taking in of information as
an at times violent appropriation.
(Bany C. Chabet, 1975)

Reading is as much an act of appropriation
as a gesture of surrender.
(DaidCewarX 1977)

Despite the ahistoricism and idealism of a number of reception theorists,
comments they make about texts and readers can be useful jumping-off
points so long as later the historical variability of these ideas is reas-
serted.6* I will discuss several of the major writers in this area of research,
making a gross generalization by dividing their work into three groups.
These groups are constituted in response to three major questions: What
is the ontological status of the text? What is the ontological status of the
reader? Where "is" meaning or significance? The three groups I will label
"text-activated," areader-activated," and acontext-activated" because the
answers to the questions lead to such propositions. Each of the three
groups then produces different corollary secondary questions. Given that
I have (somewhat) arbitrarily asked the three questions, I would point out
that if I asked different questions, the writers might end up grouped in
another way.*65
Among the approaches that I will associate with the text-activated
group are the theories of textual poetics proposed by Roland Barthes, Jon-
athan Culler (in Structuralist Poetics), Umberto Eco, Gerard Genette, Mi-
chael Riffaterre, and Meir Sternberg; the affective stylistics and interpreta-
tive strategies work of Stanley Fish; and the phenomenology of Wolfgang
Iser. All of these theories suggest that the text exists and will set up what
the reader will do, that the reader is constituted by the text or by social and
literary conventions, and that meaning or significance is "in" the text for
the reader to interpret. In comparison, the reader-activated group includes
the transactive reading of Norman Holland, the subjective criticism of
David Bleich, and the later Culler (in The Putsuit of si,grLs). This group
argues that the text exists, but the reader, as an individual, can greatly redo
or appropriate that text, that the reader is constituted by social or literary
conventions or psychologies, and that the meaning or significance is "in"
thc reader's interpretation. Finally, those constituting the context-acti-
vatcd group would include theories such as the phenomenology of Hans
Robert lauss, the sociology of Jacques Leenhardt, and the dialectical and
historical materialism of Manf ed Naumann and of British cultural studies
scholars such as Tony Bennett. These writers assume that the text and the

36 THEORBTICAL CONCERNS

reader are equally significant in creating meaning, that historical context is
very significant for the interaction, and that meaning or significance is "in"
that contextual intersection.
My interest here is not in validating these groupings; instead, I use
them only as a device to draw out certain themes and remarks that might
be useful in consideration of the historical reception of texts. You will no-
tice as well that I am referring to theorists who focus on literary texts. In
the next chapter I will return to these groupings to organize similar work
in film and television studies.

Tc~t-Activatcd Tbwria

Text-activated theories assume or imply that the text controls or provides
information for the reader's routine, although perhaps learned, activities.
Even if the reader's engagement is proposed as constructed by social or
literary conventions, once the reader knows the conventions, the response
is automatic. Only the texts vary, and, hence, the model tends to stress the
features of the text that supposedly produce readers' responses. The dy-
narnic of the experience is text-auivated. Because of this, the stress in dis-
cussion for text-activated theories is answering two corollary questions:
what are the specific features of the text? what will the ideal or competent
reader do when encountering those features?
What, then, are some theories of textual specificity, and what do readers
do as a consequence? Several writers conceive of texts as sets of structures.
That is, the parts of a text are in some abstract interrelation, with the sets
of structures copresent, usually in parallel. For example, in his The RoNe of
the Reader, Eco posits nine structures producing reader activity.*66 These
are: (1) utterance structures (i.e., information about what kind of speech
act the text is); (2) bracketed extension structures (information about the
possible world of the text); (3) discursive structures (information for basic
denotative meanings); (4) semantic disclosure structures (information for
thematics); (5) narrative structures (plot and story information); (6) fore-
cast and inferential-walk structures (information that produces hypotheses
about textual outcome; such information may require intertextual frames);
(7) actantial structures (character information); (8) elementary ideological
structures (information about textual ideologies such as what the text
counts as good or bad, true or false); and (9) world structures (informa-
tion for referencing reality frames). Obviously at any point, more than one
structure may be cuing readers' activities.
In S/Z, Barthes has five "codes" for readers: the proairetic (plot actions),
the hermeneutic (propositions of interpretive truth), the cultural (refer-
ences to world frames), the semic (features of characters), and the sym

IN OTHER DISCIPLINES 37

bolic (connotative or metaphoric themes). Although Riffaterre does not
delineate possible structures, he does assume them in his discussion of
Roman lakobson and Claude L:ti-Strauss's analysis of aLes Chats."67
There his quarrel consists of debating how the critic determines which
structures are perceptible to the reader for poet~ 0est, constructing his su-
perreader as the judge and shifting pertinence of data to a (very specific
ideal) reader's response.
The structuralist version of a text, particularly the detail supplied by Eco
and Barthes, suggests the importance of constantly recognizing the multi-
tude of activities in which a reader might be involved at any moment. The
lists may not be complete, but they are surely rich. They are suggestive, for
example, of the complexity of any actual interpretative act. Furthermore,
they give reception studies numerous areas in which to comprehend the
possibilities of variation in historical readings. Additionally, they indicate
textual factors that might promote possible contradiction and ambiguity
for readers. Several of the studies in Part Two will return to these sets of
possible activities.
In its representation of the text as a set of copresent structures, struc-
turalism tends to consider interpretation (but not necessarily reading) as a

"holistic" rather than "sequential" experience. Steven Mailloux defines a
holistic interpretation as determining how parts a'cohere into a total
meaningful pattern.'t68 Since texts supply the variations for what a reader
will do, holistic text-activated theory concentrates on describing how the
reader either decodes the structures or uses social or literary codes or con-
ventions to make an integral pattern. Consequently, rules or procedures of
interpretation are presented as normative: they describe how the reader
confronts textual contradiction, incoherenq, or ambiguity, possibly
caused by the copresent structures.
For example, Culler provides rules for anaturalization" of texts: aTo
naturalize a text is to bring it into relation with a type of discourse or
model which is already, in some sense, natural and legible."69 An instance
in film studies might be the interpretive tendenq to assume that aillogical"
texts such as avant-garde films are attempts to represent dreams: the un-
conventional is naturalized into an acceptable frame.
While Culler does not assume an essential core pattern in a text, his
notion of a reader informed by (current) literary conventions produces a
guideline for reader competency; thus, in conjunction, the data supplied
by the text and the standard of competency permit Culler to know when
a coherent reading for a text exists. Conventions he offers as common in-
clude athe rule of significance" (a reader should "read the poem as express-
ing a significant attitude to some problem concerning man and/or his rela-
tion to the universe"), ametaphorical coherence" (aone should attempt
through semantic transformations to produce coherence on the levels of
al

38 CONCERNS

both tenor and vehicle"), and "thematic unity."*70 Since what Culler pre-
sents is the usually intuited procedures for academic interpretations, his
comments are useful for analyzing neither ideal nor competent readers but
historical ones: those people trained in literary protocols. Still, because
many published accounts of responses are informed by these rules, they
become widely disseminated in our culture. In this sense, Stanley Fish's
claim that "critical controversies become disguised reports of what readers
uniformly do" is central to a text-activated model. With his theory of the
interpretive community, Fish does underline that interpretive strategies
are historical and learned: he assumes that competent readings are those
that are pertinent for scholars in judging among interpretations for a given
text.71
One aspect of a structural view of the text is how information is en-
coded so as to insure a corresponding decoding. Thus, while Culler de-
scribes general interpretive practices, as features of the structured text
change, so might readers' aaivities. Susan Rubin Suleiman discusses re-
dundancy within and among structures as important. In strueuralism, re-
dundancies are systems of repetition of textual data that increase the possi-
bility of agreement among interpreters. Such repetitions involve verbal
ones, recurrence of narrative structures, "doubling" of characters, and the-
matic equivalences.72 Obviously, looking for redundancies can also be
considered a historical and learned literary convention.
Expanding on the idea of relations of data among structures, Christine
Brooke-Rose proposes a thesis about effeas on a reader depending upon
the degree, type, or existence of redundancy.73 She describes a text as ower-
datcnninad when information is too clear, too repetitious. Using Barthes's
codes, she suggests as an example that proairetic and hermeneutical struc-
tures are commonly in sync. Consequently, a reader has an easy time
guessing the direction of a plot. When this happens, the reader may shift
interest to semic, cultural, or symbolic structures, depending upon the tex-
tual material. Underdctcnni#cd texts (without intense redundancies) exist
in various forms: a nouveau roman, for instance, or a detective story (in
which overdetermined data are usually false leads but underdetermined
ones are the true dues). Finally, nondctcnnincd texts are those in which the
reader "feels free to read everything, anything, and therefore also nothing,
into the text."74 Suleiman approaches this question from the perspective of
intertextuality, defined as "the coexistence of 'several discourses' in a single
(inter) textual space."75 Depending on whether and how the discourses

are redundant, texts are confliaual, negative, or affirmative.
Brooke-Rose's and Suleiman's remarks, like the others, hold value in
that they describe common reading practices for those tutored in literature
studies. Yet they also are suggestive of causes for deviations by nontutored
or resisting readers. If the struauralist representation of textual features

IN OTHER DISCIPLINES 39

has validity, then the possibilities for alternative readings statistically be-
come nearly infinite. Since post-strueuralism argues for even greater vari-
ability (semantics are continually in process), this version of textuality and
reading, ironically, provides a powerful argument for individual differ-
ence. For instance, in discussing the roman d thesc, Suleiman describes
characters' semic material as involved in textual ideologies.76 What matters
is how combinations are made. As a character is developed, numerous ge-
neric facets are attached to its proper name: religion, ethnicity, political
beliefs, gender, and so on. These associations take on ramifications as ster-
eotypes and biases are asserted or denied. Are immigrants communists or
anarchists? Do black males threaten white females? Both the hermeneuti-
cal conclusions and ideological effees may be produced from the relations
among these structures. But what the reader notices, accepts, or rejects as
pertinent conjunaions or redundancies matters as well. Which semic fea-
tures are believed to be pertinent could differ tremendously among various
readers. Hence image studies need to look at readers as well as texts.
Suleiman's remarks are directed toward a specific type of text. Another
direction holistic text-activated reception theory has taken is to assert not
only different interpretative praaices depending upon textual structures
but also speciEc aesthetic or affeeive responses for readers. In Thc Deli,ghts
of TerrDr Terry Heller rewrites Tzvetan Todorov's study of fantastic sto-

ries into a reader-response schema producing three groups of texts de-
pending on aesthetic effea. For example, "uncanny horror stories offer the
reader the opportunity to pretend to experience extreme mental and phys-
ical states by identifying with charaaers who undergo such experiences."
In contrast, "horror thrillers offer the reader the thrill of horror mainly by
creating supernatural images, usually monsters, that in various ways and
with careful qualifications embody or make concrete unconscious fears
that a reader brings to the texts."77 As with the notion of incerpretations,
affects may also be considered as historically construacd rather than uni-
versal or essential.
Reception theory observations by holistic text-activated writings are
one group of valuable thoughts about reading. Another text-aaivated po-
sition is that held by individuals stressing sequcntial readings. The scholars
might traditionally be labeled structuralists, phenomenologists, or formal-
ists, and for them the features of a text are also materials in structurcs or
systems. However, while the materials may have copresent and multiple
motivations and funeions, the pertinent textual feature is that the textual
materials themselves are (necessarily) discrete and sequential. Thus, such
reception theory stresses describing the process of encountering the mate-
rials and the arrival at a final conclusion, rather than emphasizing an over-
all, general experience. Furthermore, by stressing the discreteness and
order of the materials, these writers often consider the most pertinent fea

)

40 THEORBTICAL CONCBRNS

ture of texts to be their temporary or permanent gaps or blanksÑsome-
thing holistic text-activated writers deal with only indirectly.
Sequential text-activated writers like to have readers change ideas, and
they deal with that possibility. However, as with those theories which em-
phasize holistic results, readers in these theories operate as they do either
solely because of the text's materials or also because of social and literary
conventions that produce ideal or competent responses. Thus, given an
idealist construeion of the reader's character, the variability of the text is
what matters. This emphasis produces a atext-aaivated" model of reading.
Meaning or significance is caused by the encounter with the specificity of
the text (since the reading auivities are a given).*7S As Fish argues it in his
affective stylistics phase, sequence matters: "It is impossible to mean the
same thing in two (or more) different ways"*79 because order of experi-
ence is crucial to meaning.
An early notion that the text is a set of specific materials is proposed by
the Russian formalists during the late teens and early 1920s. Successors
include Czech structuralists such as Jan Mukafovsky, as well as numerous
later struauralists and formalists including Genette and Stemberg. Among
their interests are analyzing the relations among the textual parts and the
effea those relations have on literary experience. Perhaps a cause for this
concentration is that Russian formalists define literature in part on the
basis of the textual effect on the reader, and they also stress aesthetic evalu-
ations which privilege perceptual encounters. They like textual devices that
jar or disrupt conventional perceptional strategies. Thus, their critical ap-
paratus includes many terms and propositions that imply reading consecu-
tively.
For exarnple, retardation is observed. How a text is organized to pre-
vent resolution is considered a principal formal prospectÑotherwise, the
story would be over right away. Victor Shklovsky suggests that retarda-
tion can be achieved in various ways, such as stringing together problems
to be solved (as in fairy tales and adventure novels), setting stories within
stories (framing narratives), and paralleling several plots (common in the
nineteenth-century novel).80 The notion of retardation encourages consid-
eration of the seriality of the materials.
Another textual expectation with similar repercussions is motivation.
Muliovsky describes motivation as "a basic requirement of plot construc-
tion." Motivation is the reason for the appearance of a material in a text.
"Every motif [material element of the text] . . . should be related to an-
other or several others, and [motifs] should . . . determine one another
semantically."8l Furthermore,

when the initial member of a motivational bond appears, it evokes an cxpec
tation in the persciver; the next then directs the perceiver's attention back

IN OTHBR DISCIPLINES 41

wards to what has already been perceived.... The effectiveness of motiva-
tion increases with the distance between the motifs which are bound by it
into the contextual sequence. The longer the connection of a certain motif
with the others remains hidden from the reader, the more the reader's expec-
tation contributes to the "tension," and the more strongly the action is
bound into semantic unity by means of motivation.U

You will notice that Mukafovsky does not shy away from assuming a final
coherent interpretation, but he does pay special attention to acontextual
sequence." Additionally, he postulates a reader who reflects backward to
previous materials and who projects forward, making (and revising) hy-
potheses about the materials yet to come.
A third, and extremely prominent, textual attribute described by for-
malists is the distinction between fabxia and suict. Fabula is generally
translated as astory" and suict as aplot," a tradition I will maintain. Plot is
the aaual sequence of materials in a text. Story exists in the reader's mind:

it is the mental rearrangement of the materials into a chronology. The
work of Genette and Sternberg has greatly expanded original ideas of the
Russian formalists on story and plot. In his study of Proust's Remcmbrasc
of Thin,ffs Past (one of the most entangled textual organizations of tempo
- rality), Genette sets up numerous categories for considering the varying
relation between plot and story.83 Additionally, he considers the faeors in
the relations of narrators and characters to plot data, which further compli
9 cate possible permutations. Sternberg supplements Genette's work by
stressing the gaps among the ordered parts that a reader must negotiate;
X For Sternberg, these gaps can be filled (insofar as the textual materials are
- available). The reader manages this by posing and answering questions
:f such as these: "What is happening or has happened, and why? What is the
c onnection between this event and the previous one? What is the motiva-
tion of this or that character? To what extent does the logic of cause and
effect correspond to that of everyday life? and so on."*84
5 What do readers do as a result in this theory of textuality? As with holis-
tic theories of reading, a dominant activity is proposing, verifying, and
0 revising hypotheses. For example, Fish writes that what occurs is athe
making and revising of assumptions, the rendering and regretting of judg-
ments, the coming to and abandoning of conclusions, the giving and with-
drawing of approval, the specifying of causes, the asking of questions, the
supplying of answers, the solving of puzzles."85 Also as with holistic theo-
rics, the sequential text-activated models sometimes distinguish among
texts on the basis of their effect on a readcr. Sternberg suggests that the
number and significance of gaps varies by genre: gaps are fewer in number
and less central to a novel of manners or a picaresque tale than to a detec-
tive story. Additionally, affect is produced from the relations among the
co

42 T~EORETICAL CON C~RN S

textual parts. When gaps are emphasized, aftcctivc reactions often include
curiosity, suspense, surprise, disappointment, or pride in solving the
puzzle.
Perhaps not surprisingly, sequential theories tend to describe readers
spending their response time trying to link up parts of the text, whereas
holistic-theory readers attempt to compare or reconcile structures. A result
of this difference, I think, is that sequential theories incline toward treat-
ing texts as puzzles to be solved, but holistic theories stress deriving inter-
pretive generalizations. Sequential theories often use language that has the
text and reader in a game in which one or the other wins. Holistic theories
seem to promote searching for truth. Of course, these two auivities can be
connected, and often the text is metamorphosed into a trickster, manipu-
lating readers as they seek their goals.*86
It might seem surprising that I have included the phenomenologist Iser
among the text-activated theorists, since phenomenology as a philosophy
asserts a dyadic exchange between object and subject. In one of the most
quoted phrases in reception aesthetics, Iser insinuates great reader flexibil-
ity: "The stars in a literary text are fixed; the lines that join them are varia-
bk."87 Most reviewers of Iser's work, however, believe that by construa-
ing the text as having aappellative structuresn and the activity of the reader
as being aahistorical, abstract and normative,n88 Iser produces criticism in
which the text restrains the (fairly tabula rasa) reader. Thus, in praaice for
Iser as for the others, the features of the individual text dominate the liter-
ary experience.
What does make Iser's slightly different from the other text-activated
theories is that the gaps with which he is most engaged are not "in" the
text but are intersubjeaiveÑbetween the text's world and the reader's.

The reader discovers the meaning of the text, taking negation as his starting
point; he discovers a new realit,v through a fiaion which, at least in part, is
different from the world he himself is used to; and he discovers the deficien
cies inherent in prevalent norms and in his own restricted behavior.89

Artistic texts offer aschematised views" that readers "realize" (konkrchwa
Pwon). While Iser tends to treat reading as a sequential, negating process,

and since he assumes a reader's overall objective is learning something
about possible worlds, he also offers comments about holistic interpreta-
tions: readers form a "gestalt" of the text, unifying the experience. Iser's
model, like others in this group, depicts the features of a text activating
readers' generalized reactions. Since what Iser describes is likely a well-
developed social and literary convention and possibly one of the common
goals of many readers, his work can contribute to the understanding of
customary activities in historical readers.

IN OTHER DISCIPLINES 43

Rcadar-Activatcd Tbcon~s

Text-activated theories perhaps tend toward spotlighting textual features,
not out of theoretical necessity, but because the complexities of consider-
ing variety among readers would significantly complicate making generali-
zations. Nearly every one of the writers implicitly brackets his or her work
as not referring to "real" or aempirical" readers. In contrast, reader-aai-
vated theories flip the coin over. Where text-activated theories focus on
features of texts and the effects they produce, reader-activated theories ex-
amine features of readers and those features' consequences for the reading
experience. Thus, the corollary question for reader-aaivated theories be-
comes, what are the causes for the variety of readers? Writings by three
individuals will serve as examples of the potential contributions of this ap-
proach: Norman Holland's transauive criticism, David Bleich's subjecuve
criticism, and Jonathan Culler's work on literary conventions.
That they approach the issues from the point of view of readers' features
may explain the propensity of these theories to start with affective descrip-
tions of reading experiences rather than to tack on affect as almost an after-
thought, as seems to occur in text-activated reception criticism. This is, I
stress, a propensity, but not inherent in the reader-activated approach (as
Culler's work exemplifies and Holland's approach implies).
Both Holland and Bkich appeal strongly to psychological theory for
their paradigms of the reading event. Individuals' personalities inform
their interpretation of texts. Holland has labeled his approach atransac-
tive," drawing from cognitive, information-theory, and some personality
psychology. In a finely argued criticism of text-activated theories, Holland
writes that they assume normative responses and posit variations as local
phenomena.90 However, study of human perception shows that apercep-
tion is a constructive act in which we impose schemata from our minds on
the data of our senses."91 Thus, readers do not come after the fact to a text,
but they constitute a valuable part of a "feedback loop.n Holland believes
that schemata come from literary, biological, cultural, and economic
sources and build an individual's psychology and "identity theme. Thus,
variation among readers is normal. In his most fully worked out discussion
of types of readers, he describes four modalities, using the acronym
DEFT, to tally pertinent psychological dimensions that form an individ-
ual's core identity. These modalities are: ~defenses; EÑexpeaations;
FÑfantasies; and TÑtransformations (shaping textual data into a mean-
ingful totality). Mailloux points out that Holland's model accounts very
well for variety; if sociological and historical dimensions were factored
in, then reoccurrence of interpretations among readers could also be
explained.92

)

44 THEORETICAL CONCBRNS

Bleich's model is less formalized than Holland's but also assumes psy-
dhological causes for variation and similarity among readings. Perception,
affea, and association are its main components. For Bleich, interpretation
comes after the reading experience as something of an attempt to assimi-
late the personal with projeeions of what might constitute objective evalu-
ation.93
Although Culler's early work suggests a text-activated approach, in his
Putsuit qf signs, Culler begins to historicize his comments, shifting away
from general claims of reading competency. Culler becomes intrigued by
the historical variation among interpretive conventions. He accepts the
idea that perhaps periods of varying literary conventions exist which
would explain differences among readers. For example, Culler synopsizes
a study by Ivor Indyk of the interpretations of Tom Jones. Using codes such
as those described by Barthes, Indyk outlines four eras in which critics
foreground different hierarchies for the codes. The earliest opinions em-
phasized plot (proairetic sequences); characters were constituents of the
plot. Later an ainversion" occurs: aIncident is interpreted as a revelation of
character."94 In the twentieth century, criticism that seeks unified visions
of textual worlds emphasizes thematic codes to produce cohering interpre-
tations. Finally, contemporary criticism may also assume that artistic texts
account for themselves, in which case codes of irony or self-referentiality
become the integrative device. What Indyk and Culler present is a reader-
auivated theory in which historical literary conventions account for varia-
tions among readings. Readers are different because the academy has
changed its methods of producing competent readings.*95
As this is described, it would seem that each period seeks a dominant
code or has an approved protocol to handle awkward or ambiguous situa-
tions. For instance, Culler repeats Indyk's experiment by analyzing inter-
pretations of Blake's aLondon." He finds four procedures for unifying the
poem: noting the particulars of individuals as implying classes that can
then be compared; exploiting shifts in meaning to argue that what pre-
cedes the shift is false, what comes afterward is true; using local materials
to argue parallel, connotative, or ironic semantics; and arguing that clos-
ings are what count the most.96
Culler's assumption that each era tries to integrate all textual structures
or materials, however, needs investigating. As has been noted, different
periods have diverged as to the functions of scholarly criticism. Not every
era has seen its task as explicating how a text is coherent or unified. Addi-
tionally, scholars are only one group of readers. Along with others who are
beginning to consider the history of literary conventions informing aca-
demic criticism, what Indyk and Culler point out is significant as, likely, a
widely disseminated etiquette for reading. However, nonacademic readers
are notably resistant to adopting scholarly prescriptions. I would ask as

IN OTHER DISCIPLINES 45

well, What are the literary conventions of the amass reader"? Why assume
coherency as a reader's goal? What are the varieties of nonacademic read-
ing procedures? Are there differences between reading texts and viewing
fi lms? And, more broadly, beside psychological and academic features of
jreaders, what else accounts for variety (and similarity) among interpreters
Qof texts?
g Certainly a post-structuralist view of individuals confirms the value of
X such questions. As one theorist sets it out, modern semiotics permits con-
~sideration of individuals as constructed selves: aWe can only know the self
fras a sign."97 As texts vary and are polysemous because of their historical
l determination and the process of language, individuals are complex pro-
~ duaions of historical contexts and discourses. Consequently, accounting
0 01 for this variety of selves (even within the same individual) is important in
ir theorizing reading experiences and interpretations. A reader-activated the-
-:1 ory needs to avoid assumptions that reassert false idealizations of readers.
0 11 Despite my reservation that current reader-auivated theories tend to

0 X ~: 9 reposit unfortunate generalizations about its groups of readers, what
;- reader-aaivated theories do offer is an important emphasis on the power
;000 of the individualÑwithin his or her circumstancesÑto appropriate (or
: Q -S choose to surrender to) a text. As Walter Benn Michaels describes it, She
0 0 0 ~-: most we can say is that we can choose our interpretations but we can't
f 0;. choose our range of choices."98 Furthermore, at least two categories of
causes have been proposed by reader-activated theories as viable for ex-
plaining variations among readers: psychologies and literary conventions.
; t Both surely influence the complex makeup of any reader's perception,
:; comprehension, and interpretation.

| d' S

Contact-A;tivatct Tbcor~

iii,
1 S The third set of theories I have labeled "context-activated." Neither text
i::t- activated nor reader-activated theories assert the irrelevancy of the other.
But all the relevant questions cannot be asked at once, and the insights that
they contribute come from their perceptual focus. Context-activated theo-
ries differ from the first two by looking at contexts for reading experiences.
Obviously, this means that historical circumstances become central to the
ZI account. Which historical factors matter, however, depends upon the
:. writer's model of causality as well as the event being studied. Thus, the
corollary question for context-activated theories is, What contextual fac
;:4 tors account for the interpretation?
S One context that counts a great deal for any reading is the context of the
communication aa. A reader's hypotheses about the type of text or speech
aa and its source narrow the range of semantical choices and participate in
oo
o

46 THBORETICAL CONCBRNS

limiting the plurality of connotations for a text. In taking a hypothetical
case of the phrase "private members only," Fish concludes that "it does not
have a literal meaning in the sense of some irreducible content which sur-
vives the sea change of situations; but in each of those situations one
meaning (even if it is plural) will seem so obvious that one cannot see how
it could be otherwise, and that meaning will be literal."99 This is some-
thing like Barthes's declaration that "denotation is not the first meaning
. . . it is ultimately no more than the last of the connotations (the one
which seems both to establish and to close the reading).''l¡¡
All sorts of data might be used by a reader to hypothesize the appropri-
ate communicative process into which a specific instance fits. As Tony
Bennett suggests, the material features of a text contribute to this. Differ-
ent typefaces, cloth versus paper coverings, blurbs, jacket designsÑthese
are among the most apparent material conditions that "before it is opened,
[inscribe the text] within a specific ideology of consumption."l¡l But
eventually Bennett considers every context as potentially contributing.
Related to the immediate context of the communication act is a text's
aesthetic or textual history. Here the reception theory of Hans Robert
Jauss offers the notion of ahorizons of expectation": the successive inter-
pretations through which a text has been perceived becomes a ahorizon"
or background that sets up assumptions about a text's meaning and thus
influences its current III~ryrc,aLl~ll. --- As Bennett cites Pierre Macherey,
a work becomes "encrusted" with its previous reception: a'. . everything
which has been written about it, everything which has been colleacd on it,
become [SK] attached to itÑlike shells on a rock by the seashore forming
a whole incrustation. At which point the idea of a 'work' loses all mean-
ing.'"l03 An example of this situation will be studied in chapter 7~s
analysis of the reception of Thc Birtb qfa Naõson.
Jauss's critics believe that he emphasizes aesthetic horizons to the practi-
cal neglea of discursive, social, political, and economic contexts. 104 Thus,
these conditions are also set forth as integral to a text's reception. For ex-
ample, Jacques Leenhardt calls for a "sociology of reading."*l¡S In one

study he takes the variable of nationality as his comparative measure. Two
novels (one Polish, the other French) were read by five hundred Polish
and French individuals from different social backgrounds. Surveys indi-
cated what the participants had read elsewhere, and open-ended questions
derived information about this reading experience. Leenhardt concludes
that, on the one hand, French readers of the Polish novel sought coher-
enq, trying to tie parts into a thematic logic. On the other hand, Polish
readers sought ethical vcnt~cs. Parts of the novel were judged via moral
propositions. Both French and Polish readers favored scenes that fit their
interpretive procedures. Leenhardt concludes that specific cultural factors
related to conditions of nationality (e.g., educational systems and scholarly

IN OTHBR DISCIPLINES 47

judgments, political situtions) explain the variation between the two
groups of readers.
In a similar vein and using ethnographic methods, Janice Radway ap-
proaches one group of romance novel readers. These women, as Radway
underlines, "cannot be thought of as a scientifically designed random sam-
ple," but they do constitute a case study that might be compared with
other groups. The readers' preferences for certain types of romances, their
justifications for spending time reading, and their means of explaining the
disparities between the lives of the female protagonists and their ownÑ
Radway connees these phenomena to several variables, the most signifi-
cant being the readers' gender, the existence in this culture of patriarchy,
and the psychological development of sexual preference. In one summariz-
ing statement, Radway concludes:
Through the use of rigid socializing procedures, instructional habits, and for-
mal and informal sanctions against deviance, the culture pursuades women to
view femininity solely in terms of a social and institutional role that is essen-
tial to the maintenance of the current organization of life. Therefore, while
the act of romance reading is used by women as a means of partial protest
against the role prescribed for them by the culture, the discourse itself ac-
tively insists on the desirability, naturalness, and benefits of that role by por-
traying it not as the imposed necessity that it is but as a freely designed, per-
sonally controlled, individual choice.l06

Radway's and Leenhardt's contextual reading denies neither the exis-
tence of specific textual features nor variability of readers. The focus, how-
ever, is on the determining force of the syecific exchange's context. As
Manfred Naumann phrases it, readers and texts "mutually permeate each
other." aThe concrete individual reception of the work is always a social
process mediated by many factors."l07 The faeors Naumann mentions in-
clude membership in classes, stratums, or groups; material conditions of
livelihood and environment; education; age; and gender. I would add oth-
ers, such as circulating discursive propositions and ideologies, nationality,
race, age, sexual preference, life-style, and political beliefs. In every case,
the self-images and personal associations constructed by the reader in the
reading event and the relation of those self-images and associations to ab-
straa categories of determinations matter more than any theoretical array
within which a researcher might be inclined to posit the reader. I shall
discuss this issue of precategorizing variables of the reader further in dhap-
ter 3.
Context-activated theories of reading assert that meaning is "in" the
contextual event of each reading, not "in" one reading event rather than
another. Bennett appeals to post-structuralism to support his historical
materialism: "We know also, principally through Derrida, that the text is

)

48 THBORBTICAL CONCBRNS

totally iterable; that, as a set of material notations, it may be inscribed
within different contexts and that no contextÑincluding that in which it
originatedÑcan enclose it by specifying or fixing its meaning or effect for
all 4 time and in all 4 contexts."l08 As Bennett goes on to
ralism does not deny the existence of texts; it denies that of "a text hidden
behind the material surface of the empirically given text, somehow thcrc
but unreadhable."l09 Such a proposition does not rejea the notion of pro-
tocols of interpretation that might determine readings of the textual mate-
rials. That proposition, though, implies history. Furthermore, such a
proposition does not judge among interpretations. "'Untutored' readings
are just as real and material in their effees as 'tutored' ones and may, in-
deed, be considerably more influential."ll¡

As should be apparent, the grounding assumptions of the context-aai-
vated theorists are most compatible with my beliefs: if we are to under-
stand the interpretation of moving images, it is crucial that we study his-
torical determinants. Thus, while I shall take a contextual approach, I do
not argue that texts arc not material or real; they provide sense-data to
individuals. However, readers do not just adecode" hegemonic texts; read-
ers are complex historical individuals capable of auing within the contra-
diaions of their own construction as selves and as reading selves. Readers
are developed historically, and the interpretive event occurs at the intersec-
tion of multipk determinations. Thus, the intcrprctation is contradicto~y
and not coherent.*lll
In the next chapter, I will discuss reception studies from the perspective
of work on moving images. Yet the work of literary and other theorists of
reading and interpreting the meaning and significance of culturally pro-
duced texts offers valuable contributions toward thinking about how sub-
jeas experience textuality. Cognitive, cultural, psychological, psychoana-
lytic, political, and other differences constitute a conjuneion of abstract
explanations that can help to account for the real phenomena of interpreta-
tive deviations and correspondences. Once the historical nature of inter-
pretation is privileged, the essentialism or timeless nature of remarks by
text-activated and reader-auivated theorists can be turned to the advan-
tage and use of context-aaivated studies of interpretation; they become
specific instances of contextual protocols for reading among those individ-
uals who have learned frameworks for making meaning from materially
inscribed sense-data.

CHAPTER THREE_

Reception Studies in Film and
, n . .
. .e. .evlslon

GIVEN that cinema studies in the United States has had strong ties to liter-
ary traditions, it could be anticipated that reception theories in film and
television*l would tend toward the text-auivated approach described in
chapter 2. This predilection has not gone unobserved, although two areas
of researchÑfeminism and recent television studiesÑmay have stimulated
a recognition of the bias. For example, in zWomen's Genres," Annette
Kuhn describes the difference between thinking about a film spectator and
thinking about a cinematic social audience when trying to understand gen-
dered forms of address.2 For the former, film studies has recently tended
to consider the individual as constituted by psychic relations; in the latter
case, the expectations of pleasure transform individuals into audiences in
which social subjects choose whether to enter into the position offered by
that experience. As Kuhn points out, the notion of the contextÑpsydho-
logical versus socialÑchanges the event into two different situations.
aSpeaators" and asocial audiences" have different theoretical and actual
circumstances and, thus, varied relations to textual representations. When
the idea of what is the context changes, so do the salient determinants of

the individual-as-a-subjea. Consequently, also altered are what count as
data to study and pertinent methods for handling dhose data. For the spec-
tator, research has focused on hypothesizing from textual charaaeristics;
for the social audience, evidence is gathered and organized around prede-
termined categories such as sex, age, education, class, and race.
In her essay, Kuhn introduces as well the historical anomaly of film
scholars' focusing on spectators while early television research emphasized
social audience studies. Thus, when film scholars took up television stud-
ies, one initial activity was to treat apparent formal characteristics of
broadcast TV as determining the subject. Patrice Petro believes that cer-
tain of these textual features have been described in opposition to fictional
narrative ("realist") film.3 Television is characterized as discontinous, di-
rea address, self-conscious, and parodicÑthus, "modernist." Petro cau-
tions against such a simple dichotomy. She also rejects the assumption that
formal characteristics are determining for the speaator (and the social
audience).
Both Kuhn and Petro include calls for research that I would consider to
be reception studies. The current observation of a use-value for this type
l

l
I

Eco, Umberto. "Casablanca: Cult Movies and
Intertextual Collage." Travels in Hvperrealitv: Essavs.
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich c1985 (English translation).
c 1983,1976,1973 by Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri-
Bompiani; c1986, 1967 by Umberto Eco. (Requests to
Permissions, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers,
Orlando, Florida 32887.) Pages 197-211.

Casablanca:
Cult Movies and
Intertextual
Collage

Cult

"Was that artillery fire, or is it my heart pounding?" Whenever
Casablanca is shown, at this point the audience reacts with an en-
thusiasm usually reserved for football. Sometimes a single word is
enough: Fans cry every time Bogey says "kid." Frequently the
spectators quote the best lines before the actors say them.
According to traditional standards in aesthetics, Casablansa is
not a work of art, if such an expression still has a meaning. In any
case, if the films of Dreyer, Eisenstein, or Antonioni are works of
art, Casablanca represents a very modest aesthetic achievement. It
is a hodgepodge of sensational scenes strung together implausibly,
its characters are psychologically incredible, its actors act in a
mannered way. Nevertheless, it is a great example of cinematic
discourse, a palimpsest for future students of twentieth-century re-
ligiosity, a paramount laboratory for semiotic research into textual
strategies. Moreover, it has become a cult movie.
\ What are the requirements for transforming a book or a movie

197

¥ _ L fe, :_.

TRAVELS IN HYPERREALITY

into a cult object? The work must be loved, obviously, but this is
not enough. It must provide a completely furnished world so that
its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects
of the fan's private sectarian world, a world about which one can
make up quizzes and play trivia games so that the adepts of the
sect recognize through each other a shared expertise. Naturally all
these elements (characters and episodes) must have some arche-
typical appeal, as we shall see. One can ask and answer questions
about the various subway stations of New York or Paris only if
these spots have become or have been assumed as mythical areas
and such names as Canarsie Line or Vincennes-Neuilly stand not
only for physical places but become the catalyzers of collective
memories.
Curiously enough, a book can also inspire a cult even though
it is a great work of art: Both The Three Musketeers and The Divine
Comedy rank among the cult books; and there are more trivia games
among the fans of Dante than among the fans of Dumas. I suspect
that a cult movie, on the contrary, must display some organic im-
perfections: It seems that the boastful Rio Bravo is a cult movie
and the great Stagecoach is not.
I think that in order to transform a work into a cult object
one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can
remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relation-
ship with the whole. In the case of a book one can unhinge it, so
to speak, physically, reducing it to a series of excerpts. A movie,
on the contrary, must be already ramshackle, rickety, unhinged in
itself. A perfect movie, since it cannot be reread every time we
want, from the point we choose, as happens with a book, remains
in our memory as a whole, in the form of a central idea or emo-
tion; only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of
images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one cen-
tral idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of
composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketi-
ness.

198

Reading Things

However, it must have some quality. Let me say that it can
be ramshackle from the production point of view (in that nobody
knew exactly what was going to be done next)Ñas happened evi-
dently with the RoRy Horror Picture ShozoÑbut it must display
certain textual features, in the sense that, outside the conscious
control of its creators, it becomes a sort of textual syllabus, a living
example of living textualiy. Its addressee must suspect it is not
true that works are created by their authors. Works are created by
works, texts are created by texts, all together they speak to each
other independently of the intention of their authors. A cult movie
is the proof that, as literature comes from literature, cinema comes
from cinema.
Which elements, in a movie, can be separated from the whole
and adored for themselves? In order to go on with this analysis of
Casablanca I should use some important semiotic categories, such
as the ones (provided by the Russian Formalists) of theme and
motif. I confess I find it very difficult to ascertain what the various
Russian Formalists meant by moti£ IfÑas Veselovsky saysÑa mo-
tif is the simplest narrative unit, then one wonders why "fire from
heaven" should belong to the same category as "the persecuted
maid" (since the former can be represented by an image, while the
latter requires a certain narrative development). It would be inter-
esting to follow Tomashevsky and to look in Casablansa for free

or tied and for dynamic or static motifs. We should distinguish
between more or less universal narrative functions a la Propp, vi-
sual stereotypes like the CYLUC Adventurer, and more complex
archetypical situations like the Unhappy Love. I hope someone
will do this job, but here I will assume, more prudently (and bor-
rowing the concept from research into Artificial Intelligence) the
more flexible notion of "frame."
In Thc Rok of the Reader I distinguished between common and
intertextual frames. I meant by "common frame" data-structures
for representing stereotyped situations such as dining at a restau-
rant or going to the railway station; in other words, a sequence of

199

)

)
TRAVELS IN HYPERREALITY

actions more or less coded by our normal experience. And by "in-
tertextual frames" I meant stereotyped situations derived from
preceding textual tradition and recorded by our encyclopedia, such
as, for example, the standard duel between the sheriff and the bad
guy or the narrative situation in wSch the hero fights the villain
and wins, or more macroscopic textual situations, such as the story
of the vietge souillee or the classic recoglution scene (Bakhtin con-
sidered it a motif, in the sense of a chronotope). We could distin-
guish between stereotyped intertextual frames (for instance, the
Drunkard Redeemed by Love) and stereotyped iconographical units
(for instance, the Evil Nazi). But since even these iconographical
units, when they appear in a movie, if they do not directly elicit
an action, at least suggest its possible development, we can use the
notion of intertextual frame to cover both.

Moreover, we are interested in finding those frames that not
only are recogluzable by the audience as belonging to a sort of
ancestral intertextual tradition but that also display a particular
fascination. "A suspect who eludes a passport control and is shot
by the police" is undoubtedly an intertextual frame but it does not
have a "magic" flavor. Let me address intuitively the idea of "magic"
frame. Let me define as "magic" those frames that, when they
appear in a movie and can be separated from the whole, transform
this movie into a cult object. In Casablansa we find more intertex-
tual frames than "magic" intertextual frames. I will call the latter
"intertextual archetypes."
The term "archetype" does not ~laim to have any particular
psychoanalytic or mythic connotation, but serves only to indicate
a preestablished and frequently reappearing narrative situation, cited
or in some way recycled by innumerable other texts and provoking
in the addressee a sort of intense emotion accompanied by the
vague feeling of a deja vu that everybody yearns to see again. I
would not say that an intertextual archetype is necessarily "univer-
sal." It can belong to a rather recent textual tradition, as with
certain topoi of slapstick comedy. It is sufficient to consider it as

200

Reading Things

a topos or standard situation that manages to be particularly ap-
pealing to a given cultural area or a historical period.

The Making of Casablanca

"Can I tell you a story?" Ilse asks. Then she adds: "I don't know
the finish yet."

Rick says: "Well, go on, tell it. Maybe one will come to you
as you go along."

Rick's line is a sort of epitome of Casablanca itself. According
to Ingrid Bergman, the film was apparently being made up at the
same time that it was being shot. Until the last moment not even
Michael Curtiz knew whether Ilse would leave with Rick or with
victor, and Ingrid Bergman seems so fascinatingly mysterious be-
cause she did not know at which man she was to look with greater
tenderness.

This explains why, in the story, she does not, in fact, choose
her fate: She is chosen.

When you don't know how to deal with a story, you put ste-
reotyped situations in it because you know that they, at least, have
already worked elsewhere. Let us take a marginal but revealing
example. Each time Laszlo orders something to drink (and it hap-
pens four times) he changes his choice: (1) Cointreau, (2) cocktail,
(3) cognac, and (4) whisky (he once drinks champagne but he does
not ask for it). Why such confusing and confused drinking habits
for a man endowed with an ascetic temper? There is no psycho-
logical reason. My guess is that each time Curtiz was simply quot-
ing, unconsciously, similar situations in other movies and trying
to provide a reasonably complete repetition of them.
Thus one is tempted to read Casablanca as T. S. Eliot read
Hamlet, attributing its fascination not to the fact that it was a suc-
cessful work (actually he considered it one of Shakespeare's less
fortunate efforts) but to the imperfection of its composition. He
viewed Hamlet as the result of an unsuccessful fusion of several

201

oo
a)

TRAVELS IN HYPERREALITY

earlier versions of the story, and so the puzzling ambiguity of the
main character was due to the author's difficulty in putting to-
gether different topoi. So both public and critics find Hamlet
beautiful because it is interesting, but believe it is interesting be-
cause it is beautiful.

On a smaller scale the same thing happened to Casablanca.
Forced to improvise a plot, the authors mixed a little of every-
thing, and everything they chose came from a repertoire that had
stood the test of time. When only a few of these formulas are
used, the result is simply kitsch. But when the repertoire of stock
formulas is used wholesale, then the result is an architecture like
Gaudi's Sagrada Familia: the same vertigo, the same stroke of ge-
nius.

Stop by Stop

Every story involves one or more archetypes. To make a good
story a single archetype is usually enough. But Casablanca is not
satisfied with that. It uses them all.

It would be nice to identify our archetypes scene by scene
and shot by shot, stopping the tape at every relevant step. Every
time I have scanned Casablanca with very cooperative research
groups, the review has taken many hours. Furthermore, when a
team starts this kind of game, the instances of stopping the video-
tape increase proportionally with the size of the audience. Each
member of the team sees something that the others have missed,
and many of them start to find in the movie even memories of
movies made after CasablancaÑevidently the normal situation for
a cult movie, suggesting that perhaps the best deconstructive read-
ings should be made of unhinged texts (or that deconstruction is
simply a way of breaking up texts).

However, I think that the first twenty minutes of the film
represent a sort of review of the principal archetypes. Once they
have been assembled, without any synthetic concern, then the story

202

Reoding Things

starts to suggest a sort of savage syntax of the archetypical ele-
ments and organizes them in multileveled oppositions. Casablanca
looks like a musical piece with an extraordinarily long overture,
where every theme is exhibited according to a monodic line. Only
later does the symphonic work take place. In a way the first twenty
minutes could be analyzed by a Russian Formalist and the rest by
a Greimasian.

Let me then try only a sample analysis of the first part. I
think that a real text-analytical study of Casablanca is still to be
made, and I offer only some hints to future teams of researchers,
who will carry out, someday, a complete reconstruction of its deep
textual structure.

(

1. First, African music, then the Marseillaise. Two different
genres are evoked: adventure movie and patriotic movie.

2. Third genre. The globe: Newsreel. The voice even sug-
gests the news report. Fourth genre: the odyssey of refugees. Fifth
genre: Casablanca and Lisbon are, traditionally, bauts lieux for in-
ternational intrigues. Thus in two minutes five genres are evoked.

3. Casablanca-Lisbon. Passage to the Promised Land (Lis-
bon-America). Casablanca is the Magic Door. We still do not know
what the Magic Key is or by which Magic Horse one can reach
the Promised Land.

4. "Wait, wait, wait." To make the passage one must submit
to a Test. The Long Expectation. Purgatory situation.

S. "Deutschland uber Alles." The German anthem intro-
duces the theme of Barbarians.

6. The Casbah. Pepe le Moko. Confusion, robberies, vio-
lence, and repression.

203

,)
TRAVELS IN HYPERREALITY

7. Petain (Vichy) vs. the Cross of Lorraine. See at the end
the same opposition closing the story: Eau de Vichy vs. Choice of
the Resistance. War Propaganda movie.

8. The Magic Key: the nsa. It is around the winning of the
Magic Key that passions are unleashed. Captain Renault men-
tioned: He is the Guardian of the Door, or the boatman of the
Acheron to be conquered by a Magic Gift (money or sex).

9. The Magic Horse: the airplane. The airplane flies over
Rick's Cafe Americain, thus recalling the Promised Land of which
the Cafe is the reduced model.

10. Major Strasser shows up. Theme of the Barbarians, and
their emasculated slaves. "Je suis l'empire a la fin de la deca-
dence/Qui regarde passer les grands barbares blancs/En compo-
sant des acrostiques indolents...."

11. "Everybody comes to Rick's." By quoting the original play,
Renault introduces the audience to the Cafe. The interior: For-
eign Legion (each character has a different nationality and a dif-
ferent story to tell, and also his own skeleton in the doset), Grand
Hotel (people come and people go, and nothing ever happens),
Mississippi River Boat, New Orleans Brothel (black piano player),
the Gambling Inferno in Macao or Singapore (with Chinese
women), the Smugglers' Paradise, the Last Outpost on the Edge
of the Desert. Rick's place is a magic circle where everything can
happenÑlove, death, pursuit, espionage, games of chance, seduc-
tions, music, patriotism. Limited resources and the unity of place,
due to the theatrical origin of the story, suggested an admirable
condensation of events in a single setting. One can identify the
usual paraphernalia of at least ten exotic genres.

12. Rick slowly shows up, first by synecdoche (his hand), then
by metonymy (the check). The various aspects of the contradic

204

Reading Things

tory (plurifilmic) personality of Rick are introduced: the Fatal Ad-
venturer, the Self-Made Businessman (money is money), the Tough
Guy from a gangster movie, Our Man in Casablanca (international
intrigue), the Cyluc. Only later he will be characterized also as the
Hemingwayan Hero (he helped the Ethiopians and the Spaniards
against fascism). He does not drink. This undoubtedly represents
a nice problem, for later Rick must play the role of the Redeemed
Drunkard and he has to be made a drunkard (as a Disillusioned
Lover) so that he can be redeemed. But Bogey's face sustains rather
well this unbearable number of contradictory psychological fea-
tures.

13. The Magic Key, in person: the transit letters. Rick re-
ceives them from Peter Lorre and from this moment everybody
wants them: how to avoid thinking of Sam Spade and of The Maltesc
F(ak~?

14. Music Hall. Mr. Ferrari. Change of genre: comedy with
brilliant dialogue. Rick is now the Disenchanted Lover, or the
Cyr.ucal Seducer.

15. Rick vs. Renault. The Charming Scoundrels.

returns.

16. The theme of the Magic Horse and the Promised Land

17. Roulette as the Game of Life and Death (Russian Rou-
lette that devours fortunes and can destroy the happiness of the
Bulgarian Couple, the Epiphany of Innocence). The Dirty Trick:
cheating at cards. At this point the Trick is an Evil one but later
it will be a Good one, providing a way to the Magic Key for the
Bulgarian bride.

18. Arrest and tentative escape of Ugarte. Action movie.

205

TRAVELS IN HYPERREALITY

;

len.

19. Laszlo and Ilse. The Uncontaminated Hero and La Femme
Fatale. Both in whiteÑalways; clever opposition with Germans,
usually in black. In the meeting at Laszlo's table, Strasser is in
white, in order to reduce the opposition. IIowever, Strasser and
Ilse are Beauty and the Beast. The Norwegian agent: spy movie.

20. The Desperate Lover and Drink to Forget.

21. The Faithful Servant and his Beloved Master. Don Quix-
ote and Sancho.

22. Play it (again, Sam). Anticipated quotation of Woody Al

23. The long flashback begins. Flashback as a content and
flashback as a form. Quotation of the flashback as a topical stylistic
device. The Power of Memory. Last Day in Paris. Two Weeks in
Another Town. Brief Encounter. French movie of the 1930's (the
station as qxai des brumes).

24. At this point the review of the archetypes is more or less
complete. There is still the moment when Rick plays the Diamond
in the Rough (who allows the Bulgarian bride to win), and two
typical situations: the scene of the Marseillaise and the two lovers
discovering that Love Is Forever. The gift to the Bulgarian bride
(along with the enthusiasm of the waiters), the Marseillatse, and
the Love Scene are three instances of the rhetorical figure of Cli-
max, as the quintessence of Drama (each climax coming obviously
with its own anticlimax).

Now the story can elaborate upon its elements.

The first symphonic elaboration comes with the second scene
around the roulette table. We discover for the first time that the
Magic Key (that everybody believed to be only purchasable with

206

)

Reading Things

money) can in reality be given only as a Gift, a reward for Purity.
The Donor will be Rick. He gives (free) the visa to Laszlo. In
reality there is also a third Gift, the Gift Rick makes of his own
desire, sacrificing himself. Note that there is no gift for Ilse, who,
in some way, even though innocent, has betrayed two men. The
Receiver of the Gift is the Uncontaminated Laszlo. By becoming
the Donor, Rick meets Redemption. No one impure can reach the
Promised Land. But Rick and Renault redeem themselves and can
reach the other Promised Land, not America (which is Paradise)
but the Resistance, the Holy War (which is a glorious Purgatory).
Laszlo flies directly to Paradise because he has already suffered the
ordeal of the underground. Rick, moreover, is not the only one
who accepts sacrifice: The idea of sacrifice pervades the whole story,
Ilse's sacrifice in Paris when she abandons the man she loves to
return to the wounded hero, the Bulgarian bride's sacrifice when
she is prepared to give herself to help her husband, victor's sac
rifice when he is prepared to see Ilse with Rick to guarantee her

safety.

The second symphonic elaboration is upon the theme of the

Unhappy Love. Unhappy for Rick, who loves Ilse and cannot have
her. Unhappy for Ilse, who loves Rick and cannot leave with him.
Unhappy for victor, who understands that he has not really kept
Ilse. The interplay of unhappy loves produces numerous twists and
turns. In the beginning Rick is unhappy because he does not un
derstand why Ilse leaves him. Then victor is unhappy because he
does not understand why Ilse is attracted to Rick. Finally Ilse is
unhappy because she does not understand why Rick makes her

leave with her husband.

These unhappy loves are arranged in a triangle. But in the

normal adulterous triangle there is a Betrayed Husband and a vic
torious Lover, while in this case both men are betrayed and suffer

a loss.

In this defeat, however, an additional element plays a part, so

subtly that it almost escapes the level of consciousness. Quite sub

207

.
TRAVELS IN HYPERREAllTY

liminally a hint of Platonic Love is established. Rick admires Vic-
tor, victor is ambiguously attracted by the personality of Rick, and
it seems that at a certain point each of the two is playing out the
duel of sacrifice to please the other. In any case, as in Rousseau's
Confessions, the woman is here an intermediary between the two
men. She herself does not bear any positive value (except, ob-
viously, Beauty): The whole story is a virile affair, a dance of se-
duction between Male Heroes.
From now on the film carries out the definitive construction
of its intertwined triangles, to end with the solution of the Su-
preme Sacrifice and of the Redeemed Bad Guys. Note that, while
the redemption of Rick has long been prepared, the redemption
of Renault is absolutely unjustified and comes only because this
was the final requirement the movie had to meet in order to be a
perfect Epos of Frames.

The Archetypes Hold a Reunion

Casablanc4 is a cult movie precisely because all the archetypes are
there, because each actor repeats a part played on other occasions,
and because human beings live not "real" life but life as stereotyp-
ically portrayed in previous films. Casablanca carries the sense of
deja vu to such a degree that the addressee is ready to see in it
what happened after it as well. It is not until To Have and Have
Not that Bogey plays the role of the Hemingway hero, but here
he appears "already" loaded with Hemingwayesque connotations
simply because Rick fought in Spain. Peter Lorre trails reminis-
cences of Fritz Lang, Conrad Veidt's German officer emanates a
faint whiff of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligan. He is not a ruthless,
technological Nazi; he is a nocturnal and diabolical Caesar.
Casablanca became a cult movie because it is not one movie. It
is "movies." And this is the reason it works, in defiance of any
aesthetic theory.
For it stages the powers of Narrativity in its natural state,

208

oo
~0

Reading Things

before art intervenes to tame it. This is why we accept the way
that characters change mood, morality, and psychology from one
moment to the next, that conspirators cough to interrupt the con-
versation when a spy is approaching, that bar girls cry at the sound
of the MarseiUaise . . .

When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb
Homeric profundity. Two cliches make us laugh but a hundred
cliches move us because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking
among themselves, celebrating a reunion.
Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the
extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the ex-
treme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime.
Nobody would have been able to achieve such a cosmic result
intentionally. Nature has spoken in place of men. This, alone, is a
phenomenon worthy of veneration.

The Charged Cult

The structure of Casablanca helps us understand what happens in
later movies born in order to become cult objects.
What Casablanca does unconsciously, other movies will do with
extreme intertextual awareness, assuming also that the addressee is
equally aware of their purposes. These are "postmodern" movies,
where the quotation of the topos is recognized as the only way to
cope with the burden of our filmic encyclopedic expertise.

Think for instance of Bananas, with its explicit quotation of
the Odessa steps f om Eisenstein's Potemkin. In Casablanca one en-
joys quotation even though one does not recogruze it, and those
who recognize it feel as if they all belonged to the same little
clique. In Bananas those who do not catch the topos cannot enjoy
the scene and those who do simply feel smart.

Another (and different) case is the quotation of the topical
duel between the black Arab giant with his scimitar and the un-
protected hero, in Raiders of the Lost Ark. If you remember, the

209

N
~0
o

TRAVELS IN HYPERREALITY

topos suddenly turns into another one, and the unprotected hero
becomes in a second Tbe Fastest Gun in the West. Here the ingen-
uous viewer can miss the quotation though his enjoyment will then
be rather slight; and real enjoyment is reserved for the people
accustomed to cult movies, who know the whole repertoire of
"magic" archetypes. In a way, Bananas works for cultivated "ci-
nephiles" while Raiders works for Casablansa-addicts.

The third case is that of ET., when the alien is brought out-
side in a Halloween disguise and meets the dwarf coming f om
The Empire Strikes Back. You remember that E.T. starts and runs
to cheer him (or it). Here nobody can enjoy the scene if he does
not share, at least, the following elements of intertextual compe-
tence:

(1) He must know where the second character comes from
(Spielberg citing Lucas),

(2) He must know something about the links between the
two directors, and
(3) He must know that both monsters have been designed
by Rambaldi and that, consequently, they are linked by some form
of brotherhood.

The required expertise is not only intercinematic, it is inter-
media, in the sense that the addressee must know not only other
movies but all the mass media gossip about movies. This third
example presupposes a "Casablan~a universe" in which cult has be-
come the normal way of enjoying movies. Thus in this case we
witness an instance of metacult, or of cult about cultÑa Cult Cul-
ture.

It would be semiotically uninteresting to look for quotations
of archetypes in Raiders or in Indiana ~ones: They were conceived
within a metasemiotic culture, and what the semiotician can find
in them is exactly what the directors put there. Spielberg and Lu-
cas are semiotically nourished authors working for a culture of
instinctive semioticians.

With Casablanca the situation is different. So Casablansa ex

210

I plains Raiders, but Raiders does not explain Casablanca. At most it
can explain the new ways in which Casablan~a will be received in
e the next years.

It will be a sad day when a too smart audience will read Ca-
sablansa as conceived by Michael Curtiz after having read Calvino
and Barthes. But that day will come. Perhaps we have been able
to discover here, for the last time, the Truth.

Apres nous, le N de'luge

1984

Recxding Things

211
164

QUOTA TIONS OF VOICES

other. But at the same time, they narrate interminably (it goes on mur-
muring endlessly) the expectation of an impossible presence that trans;

voices mark themselves on an everyday prose that can only pro uce
some of their effectsÑin the form of statements and practices.

Chapter XII Reading as Poaching

De Certeau, Michel. "Chapter Xll: Reading as
Poaching." The Practice of Evervdav Life. University of
California Press, 1984 (Regents of the University of
California). Translation of Arts de Faire. Pages 165-
176.

"To arrest the meanings of words
once and for all, that is what Terror
wants."
Jean-Francois Lyotard, Rudimems
paiens

SOME TIME AGO, Alvin Toffler announced the birth of a "new
species" of humanity, engendered by mass artistic consumption.
This species-in-formation, migrating and devouring its way
through the pastures of the media, is supposed to be defined by its "self
mobility."~ It returns to the nomadic ways of ancient times, but now
hunts in artificial steppes and forests.

This prophetic analysis bears, however, only on the masses that con-
sume "art." An inquiry made in 1974 by a French government agency
concerned with cultural activities2 shows to what extent this production
only benefits an elite. Between 1967 (the date of a previous inquiry made
by another agency, the INSEE) and 1974, public monies invested in the
creation and development of cultural centers reinforced the already
existing cultural inequalities among French people. They multiplied the
places of expression and symbolization, but, in fact, the same categories
profit from this expansion: culture, like money, "goes only to the rich."
The masses rarely enter these gardens of art. But they are caught and
collected in the nets of the media, by television (capturing 9 out of 10
people in France), by newspapers (8 out of 10), by books (7 out of 10, of
whom 2 read a great deal and, according to another survey made in
autumn 1978, 5 read more than they used to),3 etc. Instead of an increas-
ing nomadism, we thus find a "reduction" and a confinement: consump-
tion, organized by this expansionist grid takes on the appearance of
something done by sheep progressively immobilized and "handled" as a
result of the growing mobility of the media as they conquer space. The

~x~= ~he media keep on the move. The only freedom
165

166

REA DINC A S POA CHINC | REA DINC A S POA CHINC

l supposed to be left to the masses is that of grazing on the ration of
Usimulacra the system distributes to each individual.

That is precisely the idea I oppose: such an image of consumers is
unaccep ble.

The ideology of "informing" rhrough books
This image of the "public" is not usually made explicit. It is nonetheless
implicit in the "producers"' claim to inform the population, that is, to
"give form" to social practices. Even protests against the vulgarization/
vulgarity of the media often depend on an analogous pedagogical claim;
inclined to believe that its own cultural models are necessary for the
people in order to educate their minds and elevate their hearts, the elite
Qs ¡9upset about the "low level" of journalism or television always assumes
^div , ~ h I ¥L^ ¥-k1;^ ;e ~A.Ud^d hv the nroducts i m D O S e d on it. To assume

C 9" ~

, ..sat [llei ,uuuzzw ¥@ ¥--V...~ ~ r- ~
that is to misunderstand the act of "consumption." This misunderstand
mg assumes that "assimilating" necessarily means "becoming similar to"
what one absorbs, and not "making something similar" to what one is,
making it one's own, appropriating or reappropriating it. Between these
two possible meanings, a choice must be made, and first of all on the
basis of a story whose horizon has to be outlined. "Once upon a
time...."

In the eighteenth century, the ideology of the Enlightenment claimed

that the book was capable of reforming society, that educational popu
larization could transform manners and customs, that an elite's products
could, if they were sufficiently widespread, remodel a whole nation. This
myth of Education4 inscribed a theory of consumption in the structures
of cultural politics. To be sure, by the logic of technical and economic
development that it mobilized, this politics was led to the present system
that inverts the ideology that formerly sought to spread "Enlightenment."
The means of diffusion are now dominating the ideas they diffuse. The
medium is replacing the message. The "pedagogical" procedures for
which the educational system was the support have developed to the
point of abandoning as useless or destroying the professional "body"
that perfected them over the span of two centuries: today, they make up
the apparatus which, by realizing the ancient dream of enclosing all
citizens and each one in particular, gradually destroys the goal, the
convictions, and the educational institutions of the Enlightenment. In
short, it is as though theform of Education's establishment had been too

fully realized, by eliminating the very eontent that made it possible and

which from that point on loses its social utility. But all through this
evolution, the idea of producing a society by a "scriptural" system has
continued to have as its corollary the conviction that although the public
is more or less resistant, it is moulded by (verbal or iconic) writing, that
it becomes similar to what it receives, and that it is imprinted by and like
the text which is imposed on it.

This text was formerly found at school. Today, the text is society
itself. It takes urbanistic, industrial, commercial, or televised forms. But
the mutation that caused the transition from educational archeology to

the technocracy of the media did not touch the assumption that co

sumption is essentially passiveÑan assumption that is precisely what
should be examined. On the contrary, this mutation actually reinforced
this assumption: the massive installation of standardized teaching has
made the intersubjective relationships of traditional apprenticeship im-
possible; the "informing" technicians have thus been changed, through
the systematization of enterprises, into bureaucrats cooped up in their
specialities and increasingly ignorant of users; productivist logic itself
by isolating producers, has led them to suppose that there is no creativity
among consumers; a reciprocal blindness, generated by this system, has
ended up making both technicians and producers believe that initiative
takes place only in technical laboratories. Even the analysis of the
repression exercised by the mechanisms of this system of disciplinary
enclosure continues to assume that tk~blic is passive, "informed,"

_ ~ _ ~ ~ol rrole~
The efficiency of production implies the inertia of consumption. It
produces the ideology of c~õion-as-a-receptacle. The result of
class ideology and technical blindness, is legend is necessary for the
system that distinguishes and privileges authors, educators, revolution-
aries, in a word, "producers," in contrast with those who do not produce.
By challenging "consumption" as it is conceived and (of course) con-
firmed by these "authorial" enterprises, we may be able to discover
creative activity where it has been denied that any exists, and to relativize
the exorbitant claim that a eerrain kind of production (real enough, but
not the only kind) can set out to produce history by "informing" the
whole of a country.

A misunderstood aerivity: reading

Reading is only one aspect of consumption, but a fundamental one. In a
society that is increasingly written, organized by the power of modifying

168

READING AS POACHINC | READINC AS POACItINC 169

things and of reforming structures on the basis of scriptural models
(whether scientific, economic, or political), transformed little by little
into combined "texts" (be they administrative, urban, industrial, etc.),
the binominal set production-consumption can often be replaced by its
general equivalent and indicator, the binominal set writing-reading.
The power established by the will to rewrite history (a will that is by
turns reformist, scientific, revolutionary, or pedagogical) on the basis of
scriptural operations that are at first carried out in a circumscribed field,
has as its corollary a major division between reading and writing.
"Modernization, modernity itself, is writing," says Francois Furet.
The generalization of writing has in fact brought about the replacement
of custom by abstract law, the substitution of the state for traditional
authorities, and the disintegration of the group to the advantage of the
individual. This transformation took place under the sign of a "cross
breeding" of two distinct elements, the written and the oral. Furet and
ozOurS recent study has indeed demonstrated the existence, in the less
educated parts of France, of a "vast semi-literacy, centered on reading,
instigated by the Church and by families, and aimed chiefly at girlsPts
Only the schools have joined, with a link that has often remained ex
tremely fragile, the ability to read and the ability to write. These abilities
were long separated, up until late in the nineteenth century, and even
today, the adult life of many of those who have been to school very
quickly dissociates "just reading" and writing; and we must thus ask
ourselves how reading proceeds where it is married with writing.
Research on the psycho-linguistics of comprehension6 distinguishes
between "the lexical act" and the "scriptural act" in reading. It shows
that the schoolchild learns to read by a process that parallels his learning
to decipher; learning to read is not a result of learning to decipher:
reading meaning and deciphering letters correspond to two different
activities, even if they intersect. In other words, cultural memory (ac
quired through listening, through oral tradition) alone makes possible
and gradually enriches the strategies of semantic questioning whose
expectations the deciphering of a written text refines, clarifies, or cor
rects. From the child to the scientist, reading is preceded and made
possible by oral communication, which constitutes the multifarious
"authority" that texts almost never cite. It is as though the construction
of meanings, which takes the form of an expectation (waiting for some
thing) or an anticipation (making hypotheses) linked to an oral trans
mission, was the initial block of stone that the decoding of graphic

materials progressively sculpted, invalidated, verified detailed, in order
to make way for acts of reading. The graph only shapes and carves the
anticipation.
In spite of the work that has uncovered an autonomy of the practice
of reading underneath scriptural imperialism, a de facto situation has
been created by more than three centuries of history. The social and '12 { /(
technical functioning of contemporary culture hierarchizes these two / eb

activities. To wr~~to read tS -to receive iLfrom /4 /E'
someone else without ~tting ane's Qwn mark on it, without remaking it.
In that regard, the reading of the catechism or of the Scriptures'that the "'b'''~' '
clergy used to recommend to girls and mothers, by forbidding these
Vestals of an untouchable sacred text to write continues today in the
"reading" of the television programs offered to "consnmerC" whn car~t
trace their ~|wn wrhin8 orthe screen where the production of the
OtherÑof "culture"Ñappears. "The link existing between reading and
the Church" is reproduced in the relation between reading and the
church of the media. In ¥his mode, the construoinn Qf the glarial text by
professional intellectuals (clercs) still seems to correspond to its "recep-
ti~la~who are !!e~l~atisfied to reproduce the

What has to be put in question is unfortunately not this division of

labor (it is only too real), but the assimilation of reading to passivity. In
fact, to read is to wander through an imposed ~m (that of the text,
analogous to the constructed order of a city or of a supermarket). Recent
analyses show that "~ifies its object,"S that (as Borges
already pointed out) "one literature differs from another less by its text
than by the way in which it is read,"9 and that a system of verbal or
iconic signs is a reservoir of forms to which the reader must give a
meaning. If then "the book is a result (a construction) produced by the
reader,''l¡ one must consider the operation of the latter as a sort of
lecrio, the production proper to the "reader" ("lecteur")." The reader
takes neither the position of the author nor an author's position. He
invents in texts something different from what they "intended." He
detaches them from their (lost or accessory) origin. He combines their
fragments and creates something un-known in the space organized by
their capacity for allowing an indefinite plurality of meanings. Is this
"reading" activity reserved for the literary critic (always privileged in
studies of reading), that is, once again, for a category of professional
in~s (clercs), or can it be extende~d~to~all cult~onsEmErStw
~

Li;0ir'(z/0} W
170

READINC AS POACHINC | READINC AS POACH/NC

Such is the question to which history, sociology, or the educational
theory ought to give us the rudiments of an answer.

Unfortunately, the many works on reading provide only partial clari-
fications on this point or depend on the experience of literary people.
Research has been primarily concerned with the teaching of reading.' It
has not ventured very far into the fields of history and ethnology, be-
cause of the lack of traces left behind by a practice that slips through all
sorts of "writings" that have yet to be clearly determined (for example,
one "reads" a landscape the way one reads a text).'3 Investigations of
ordinary reading are more common in sociology, but generally statistical
in type: they are more concerned with calculating the correlations be-
tween objects read, social groups, and places frequented more than with
analyzing the very operation of reading, its modalities and its typology.

There remains the literary domain, which is particularly rich today
(from Barthes to Riffaterre or Jauss), once again privileged by writing
but highly specialized: "writers" shift the "joy of reading" in a direc-
tion where it is articulated on an art of writing and on a pleasure of
re-reading. In that domain, however, whether before or after Barthes,
deviations and creativities are narrated that play with the expectations,
tricks, and normativities of the "work read"; there theoretical models
that can account for it are already elaborated.'5 In spite of all this, the
story of man's travels through his own texts remains in large measure
unknown.

"Literal" meaning, a product of a soc ial elite

From analyses that follow the activity of reading in its detours, drifts
across the page, metamorphoses and anamorphoses of the text produced

by the travelling eye, imaginary or meditative flights taking off from a
few words, overlappings of spaces on the militarily organized surfaces of
the text, and ephemeral dances, it is at least clear, as a first result, that
one cannot maintain the division separating the readable text (a book,
image, etc.) from the act of reading. Whether it is a question of news
papers or Proust, the text has a meaning only through its readers; it
changes along with them; it is ordered in accord with codes of percep
tion that it does not control. It becomes a text only in its relation to the
exteriority of the reader, by an interplay of implications and ruses be
twPPn twn cnrte nf "expectation" in combination: the expectation that

--
organizes a readable space (a literality), and one that organizes a pro- I
cedure necessary for the actualization of the work (a readi g) 16 j

It is a strange fact that the principle of this reading activity was
formulated by Descartes more than three hundred years ago, in discuss-
ing contemporary research on combinative systems and on the example
of ciphers (chiffres) or coded texts: "And if someone, in order to decode
a cipher written with ordinary letters, thinks of reading a B everywhere
he finds an A, and reading a C where he finds a B, and thus to substitute
for each letter the one that follows it in alphabetic order and if, reading
in this way, he finds words that have a meaning, he will not doubt that
he has discovered the true meaning of this cipher in this way, even
though it could very well be that the person who wrote it meant some-
thing quite different, giving a different meaning to each letter...."'7
The operation of encoding, which is articulated on signifiers, produces
the meaning, which is thus not defined by something deposited in the
text, by an "intention," or by an activity on the part of the author.

What is then the origin of the Great Wall of China that circumscribeD
a "proper" in the text, isolates its semantic autonomy from everything !
else, and makes it the secret order of a "work?" Who builds this barrier
ponstituting the text as a sort of island that no reader can ever reach?8
I This fiction condemns consumers to subjection because they are always \
f going to be guilty of infidelity or ignorance when confronted by the
I mute "riches" of the treasury thus set aside. The fiction of the "treasury"
) hidden in the work, a sort of strong-box full of meaning is obviously
not based on the productivity of the reader, but on the soclal instirurion
that overdetermines his relation with the text.l8 Reading is as it wer;\
overprinted by a relationship of forces (between teachers and pupils, orl
between producers and consumers) whose instrument it becomes. Thet
use made of the book by privileged readers constitutes it as a secret of
which they are the "true" interpreters. It interposes a frontier between I
the text and its readers that can be crossed only if one has a passport I
delivered by these official interpreters, who transform their own reading/
(which is also a legitimate one) into an orthodox "literality" that makes
other (equally legitimate) readings either ~r al (not "in conformity"
with the meaning of the text) or insignificant (to be forgotten). From
this point of view, "literal" meamngti's the Index and the result of a
social power, that of an elite. By its very nature available to a plural
reading, the text becomes a cultural weapon a,,grivate hunting reserve
the~ext for a law that legiti~zes-as "literal" the Int~i~n
h~QL~uthorized professionals and inteiiectuals rlerz~

172 READING AS POACHING | READINC AS POACHING 173

59 6 4 ~,/ ~,/( Moreover, if the reader's expression of his freedom through the text is
(vy'

~D
V1

tolerated among intellectuals (cleres) (only someone like Barthes can
take this liberty), it is on the other hand denied students (who are
scornfully driven or cleverly coaxed back to the meaning "accepted" by
Xheir teachers) or the public (who are carefully told "what is to be
t5zhought" and whose inventions are considered negligible and quickly
siM,enced).

It is thus social hierarchization that conceals the reality of the practice
of reading or makes it unrecognizable. Formerly, the Church, which
instituted a social division between its intellectual clerks and the "faith-
ful," ensured the Scriptures the status of a "Letter" that was supposed to
be independent of its readers and, in fact, possessed by its exegetes: the
autonomy of the text was the reproduction of sociocultural relationships
within the institution whose officials determined what parts of it should
be read. When the institution began to weaken, the reciprocity between
the text and its readers (which the institution hid) appeared, as if by
withdrawing the Church had opened to view the indefinite plurality of
the "writings" produced by readings. The creativity of the reader grows
as the institution that controlled it declines. This process, visible from
the Reformation onward, already disturbed the pastors of the seven-
teenth century. Today, it is the socio-political mechanisms of the schools,
the press, or television that isolate the text controlled by the teacher or
the producer from its readers. But behind the theatrical decor of this
new orthodoxy is hidden (as in earlier ages)'9 the silent, transgressive,
ironic or poetic activity of readers (or television viewers) who maintain
their reserve in private and without the knowledge of the "masters."

Reading is thus situated at the point where social stratification (class
relationships) and poetic operations (the practitioner's constructions of a
text) intersect: a social hierarchization seeks to make the reader conform
to the "information" distributed by an elite (or semi-elite); reading
operations manipulate the reader by insinuating their inventiveness into
the cracks in a cultural orthodoxy. One of these two stories conceals
what is not in conformity with the "masters" and makes it invisible to
them; the other disseminates it in the networks of private life. They thus
both collaborate in making reading into an unknown out of which
emerge, on the one hand, only the experience of the literate readers
(theatricalized and dominating), and on the other, rare and partial, like
bubbles rising from the depths of the water, the indices Or a common
poetics.

An "exercise in ubiquity,"that "impertinenJ absence"

The autonomy of the reader depends on a transformation of the social
relationships that overdetermine his relation to texts. This transforma-
lion is a necessary task. This revolution would be no more than another
totalitarianism on the part of an elite claiming for itself the right to
conceal different modes of conduct and substituting a new normative
education for the previous one, were it not that we can count on thefact
that there already exists, though it is surreptitious or even repressed, an
experience other than that of passivity. A politics of reading must thus
be articulated on an analysis that, describing practices that have long
been in effect, makes them politicizable. Even pointing out a few aspects
of the operation of reading will already indicate how it eludes the law of
information.

"I read and I daydream.... My reading is thus a sort of impertinent
absence. Is reading an exercise in ubiquity?"20 An initial, indeed initia-

tory, experience: to read is to be elsewhere, where they are not, in
another world;2' it is to constitute a secret scene, a place one can enter
and leave when one wishes; to create dark corners into which no one can
see within an existence subjected to technocratic transparency and that
implacable light that, in Genet's work, materializes the hell of social
alienation. Marguerite Duras has noted: "Perhaps one always reads in
the dark.... Reading depends on the obscurity of the night. Even if one
reads in broad daylight, outside, darkness gathers around the book."22

The reader produces gardens that miniaturize and collate a world, like
a Robinson Crusoe discovering an island; but he, too, is "possessed" by
his own fooling and jesting that introduces plurality and difference into
the written system of a society and a text. He is thus a novelist. HeS
deterritorializes himself, oscillating in a nowher~en wliat he invents I
and what changes him. Sometimes, in fact, like a hunter in the forest, he
spots the written quarry, follows a trail, laughs, plays tricks, or else like
a gambler, lets himself be taken in by it. Sometimes he loses the fictive
securities of reality when he reads: his escapades exile him from the
assurances that give the self its location on the social checkerboard.
Who reads, in fact? Is it 1, or some part of me? "It isn't I as a truth, but I
as uncertainty about myself, reading these texts that lead to perdition.
The more I read them, the less I understand them, and everything is
going from bad to worse."23
~o
a~

174

READING AS POACHINC | READINC AS POACHINC 175

This is a common experience, if one believes testimony that cannot be
quantified or quoted, and not only that of"learned" readers. This
experience is shared by the readers of True Romances, Farm Journal
and The Butcher and Grocery Clerk's Journal, no matter how popu-
larized or technical the spaces traversed by the Amazon or Ulysses of
sveryday life.
z Far from being writersÑfounders of their own place, heirs of the
| peasants of earlier ages now working on the soil of language, diggers of
wells and builders of housesÑreaders are travellers; they move across
lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across
fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it
| themselves. Writing accumulates, stocks up, resists time by the estab-
i lishment of a place and multiplies its production through the expansion-
\ ism of reproduction. Reading takes no measures against the erosion of
Xtime (one forgets oneself and also forgets), it does not keep what it
\acquires, or it does so poorly, and each of the places through which it
passes is a repetition of the lost paradise.
Indeed, reading has no place: Barthes reads Proust in Stendhal's text;24
the television viewer reads the passing away of his childhood in the news
reports. One viewer says about the program she saw the previous evening:
"It was stupid and yet I sat there all the same." What place captivated
her, which was and yet was not that of the image seen? It is the same
with the reader: his place is not here or there, one or the other, but
neither the one nor the other, simultaneously inside and outside, dis-
solving both by mixing them together, associating texts like funerary
statues that he awakens and hosts, but never owns. In that way, he also
escapes from the law of each text in particular, and from that of the
social milieu.

¥¢/Spacesfor games and rricks

C/ In order to characterize this activity of reading, one can resort to several
fi?C / models. It can be considered as a form of the bricolage Levi-Strauss
analyzes as a feature of "the savage mind," that is, an arrangement made
with "the materials at hand," a production "that has no relationship to a
project," and which readjusts "the residues of previous construction and

destruction."25 But unlike Levi-Strauss's "mythological universes," if this
production also arranges events, it does not compose a unified set: it is
another kind of "mythology" dispersed in time, a sequence of temporal

fragments not joined together but disseminated through repetitions and
different modes of enjoyment, in memories and successive knowledges.
Another model: the subtle art whose theory was elaborated by medi-
eval poets and romancers who insinuate innovation into the text itself,
into the terms of a tradition. Highly refined procedures allow countless
differences to filter into the authorized writing that serves them as a
framework, but whose law does not determine their operation. These
poetic ruses, which are not linked to the creation of a proper (written)
place of their own, are maintained over the centuries right up to con-
temporary reading, and the latter is just as agile in practicing diversions
and metaphorizations that sometimes are hardly even indicated by a
"pooh!" interjected by the reader.
The studies carried out in Bochum elaborating a Rezeptionsasthetik
(an esthetics of reception) and a Handlungstheorie (a theory of action)
also provide different models based on the relations between textual
tactics and the "expectations" and successive hypotheses of the receiver
who considers a drama or a novel as a premeditated action.26 This play
of textual productions in relation to what the reader's expectations make
him produce in the course of his progress through the story is presented,
to be sure, with a weighty conceptual apparatus; but it introduces dances
between readers and texts in a place where, on a depressing stage, an
orthodox doctrine had erected the statue of "the work" surrounded by
consumers who were either conformers or ignorant people.
Through these investigations and many others, we are directed toward
a reading no longer characterized merely by an "impertinent absence,"
but by advances and retreats, tactics and games played with the text.
This process comes and goes, alternately captivated (but by what? what
is it which arises both in the reader and in the text?), playful, protesting,
fugitive.
We should try to rediscover the movements of this reading within the
body itself, which seems to stay docile and silent but mines the reading
in its own way: from the nooks of all sorts of "reading rooms" (including
lavatories) emerge subconscious gestures, grumblings, tics, stretchings,
rustlings, unexpected noises, in short a wild orchestration of the body.2'
But elsewhere, at its most elementary level, reading has become, over the
past three centuries, a visual poem. It is no longer- accompanied, as it
used to be, by the murmur of a vocal articulation nor by the movement
of a muscular manducation. To read without uttering the words aloud
or at least mumbling them is a "modern" experience, unknown for

176 REA DING A S POA

zeraD;t
\Rv |

. millennia. In earlier times, the reader interiorized the text; he made his
voice the body of the other; he was its actor. Today, the text no longer
imposes its own rhythm on the subject, it no longer manifests itself
through the reader's voice. This withdrawal of the body, which is the
condition of its autonomy, is a distancing of the text. It is the reader's
habeas eorpus.
\) 5 zBecause the body withdraws itself from the text in order henceforth to
wp come into contact with it only through the mobility of the eye,2'l the

5rmAGl; y- geographical configuration of the text organizes the activity of the reader
less and less. Reading frees itself from the soil that determined it. It
jetaches itself from that soil. The autonomy of the eye suspends the
body's complicities with the text; it unmoors it from the scriptural place;
l t makes the written text an object and it increases the reader's possi
bilities of moving about. One index of this: the methods of speed

eading.29 Just as the airplane makes possible a growing independence
with respect to the constraints imposed by geographical organization,
the techniques of speed reading obtain, through the rarefaction of the
eye's stopping points, an acceleration of its movements across the page,
an autonomy in relation to the determinations of the text and a multi-
lplication of the spaces covered. Emancipated from places, the reading
| body is freer in its movements. It thus transcribes in its attitudes every

| subject's ability to convert the text through reading and to "run it" the
way one runs traffic lights.

In justifying the reader's impertinence, I have neglected many aspects.
Barthes distinguished three types of reading: the one that stops at the

1 pleasure afforded by words, the one that rushes on to the end and
r\_ "faints with expectation," and the one that cultivates the desire to write:30

erotic, hunting, and initiatory modes of reading. There are others, in
dreams, battle, autodidacticism, etc., that we cannot consider here. In
any event, the reader's increased autonomy does not project him, for the
media extend their power over his imagination, that is, over everything
he lets emerge from himself into the nets of the textÑhis fears, his
dreams, his fantasized and lacking authorities. This is what the powers
work on that make out of "facts" and "figures" a rhetoric whose target is
precisely this surrendered intimacy.

But whereas the scientific apparatus (ours) is led to share the illusion
of the powers it necessarily supports, that is, to assume that the masses
are transformed by the conquests and victories of expansionist produc-
tion, it is always good to remind ourselves that we mustn't take people
for fools.

N
~o

Part V
Ways of Believing

Chapter XIII Believing and
Making People Believe

I like the word believe. In general,
when one says "I know," one doesn't
know, one believes.
Marcel Duchamp, Duchamp du signe

(Paris, Flammarion, 1975, p. 185)

EWS, Leon Poliakov once said, are French people who, instead of
no longer going to church, no longer go to synagogue. In the
comic tradition of the Hagadah, this joke referred to past beliefs
that no longer organize practices. Political convictions seem today to be
following the same path. One is a socialist because one used to be one,
no longer going to demonstrations, attending meetings, sending in one's
dues, in short, without paying. More reverential than identifying, mem
bership is marked only by what is called a voice, (voEx: a voice, a vote)
this vestige of speech, one vote per year. Living off a semblance of
"belief," the party carefully collects the relics of former convictions and,
given this fiction of legitimacy, succeeds quite well in managing its
affairs. It has only to multiply the citation of these phantom witnesses

by surveys and statistics, to re-cite their litany.

A rather simple technique keeps the pretense of this belief going. All

that is required is that the surveys ask not about what directly attaches
its "members" to the party, but about what does not attract them
elsewhereÑnot about the energy of convictions, but their inertia: "If it is
false that you believe in something else, then it must be true that you are
still on our side." The results of the operation thus count (on) vestiges of

177
Tunstall, Je, . "Media Imperialism?" From
American Media and Mass Culture: Left PersDectves.
Donald Lazere, Editor. University of California Press,
1987 (Regents of the Univers ty of California).
(Reprinted from Jeremy Tunstall, The Media Are
American ColumbiaUniversityPress,1977.) Pages
540-551 ' MEDIA IMPERIALISM?

uz
~D

MEDIA IhlPERIALISM? 541

JEREMY TUNSTALL

THE TELEVISION
IMPERIALISM THESIS

Many people over the past hundred years have pointed out the importance of
American {and British) media in the world. ' The most carefully researched work
on this topic is still Thomas Guback's The Internutional Film Industry (1969),
which analyzes Hollywood dominance in the Western European film industries
since 1945. Herbert Schiller's Mass Communications and American Empire, also
by an American and also published in 1969, is a rare exception to the general
lack of Marxist empirical accounts.2 Schiller's thesisÑthat American television
exports are part of an attempt by the American military industrial complex to
subjugate the worldÑhas been followed by other related work. Alan Wells's Pic-
ture Tube Imperialism? (1972) pursues the television imperialism thesis in Latm
America.
Schiller's first contention is that despite the apparently commercial character
of U.S. telecommunications, the American radio spectrum has increasingly
come under the control of the federal government in general and the secretary of
defense in particular. The major concern of domestic American radio and tele-
vision is to sell receiving sets and advertise goods. The educational stations of
early American radio were lost as a consequence of this commercialism and
greed, and Schiller would like to see a return to a more educational and less com-
mercial emphasis. Since 1950 and increasingly since the Cuban Bay of Pigs fi-
asco of 1961, Schiller sees American television as having come under the control
of Washington- for example, RCA (which controls the NBC television and radio
networks) is a major defense contractorÑand consequently beholden to, and un-
critical of, the federal government.
The great expansion of American television into the world around 1960Ñ
equipment, programming, and advertisingÑis seen by Schiller as part of a gen-
eral effort of the American military industrial complex to subject the world to
military control, electronic surveillance, and homogenized American commer-
cial culture. American television program exports, through their close connec-
tion with the manufacture of television receiving sets and American advertising
agencies, are also seen as the spearhead for an American consumer goods inva-
sion of the world. This export boom has, and is intended to have, the effect of
muting political protest in much of the world; local and authentic culture in many
countries is driven to the defensive by homogenized American culture. Tradi-
tional national drama and folk music retreat betore "Peyton Place" and "Bo-
nanza." So powerful is the thrust of American commercial television that few
nations can resist. Even nations that deliberately choose not to have commercial
broadcasting find their policies being reversed by American advertising agencies

From Jeremy Tunstall. The Media Are Amencan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).

within their borders and by pirate radio stations from without. Commercial radio
and television received from neighboring countries tend to a "domino effect," by
which commercial radio spreads remorselessly into India, and commercial tele-
vision spreads from one West European country to the next. With the exception
of the communist countries, and perhaps Japan, few nations can resist
During the 1960s, Schiller argued, American policy came to focus even more
strongly on subjugating and pacifying the poor nations; and in this strategy space
satellites were to play a key part. The U.S. government placed its telecommuni-

cations satellite policy in the hands of the giant electronics companies (AT & T
j IT & T, RCA) and then negotiated with the Western nations INTELSAT arrange
| ments that gave the United States dominance of world communications; ultimately
I the policy was to beam American network television complete with commercials
| straight into domestic television sets around the world. The homogenization of
world culture would then be complete. False consciousness would be plugged via
satellite into every human home.
Alan Wells elaborates how American television imperialism works in Latin
America. Latin American television has, since its birth, been dominated by U S
finance, companies, technology, and programming and, above all, by New York
advertising agencies and practices. There is a very substantial direct ownership
interest on the part of the United States in Latin American television stations.
"Worldvision," an ominously titled subsidiary of the ABC network, plays a
dominant role in Latin America; American advertising agencies not only produce
most of the very numerous commercial breaks but also sponsor, shape, and
determine the whole pattern of programming and importing from the United
States. Indeed, "approximately 80 per cent of the hemisphere's current pro-
gramsÑincluding "The Flintstones," "I Love Lucy," "Bonanza," and "Route
66"Ñwere produced in the United States." 1 This near-monopoly of North
American television programming within South America distorts entire econo-
mies away from "producerism" and toward "consumerism." Madison Avenue
picture tube imperialism has triumphed in every Latin American country ex-
cept Cuba.

THE TELEVISION IMPERIALISM
THESIS: TOO STRONG
AND TOO WEAK

The Schiller-Wells account exaggerates the strength of American television
partly because some of their quoted figures are unreliable; they concentrate on
the high point of American television exports in the mid- 1960s. They also tend to
accept too easily the promotional optimism of a company like ABC, whose
Worldvision remained a paper "network" only. Sometimes, too, their logic is
t:aulty; they complain that in the poor countries only the very rich can buy tele-
vision anyhow, but then they see television as subverting the whole nation.
Nevertheless, the American inHuence on world televisionÑeven if not so great
as these authors argueÑhas been very considerable.
At the same time, these authors' argument is also too weak. They scarcely

542 JEREMY TUNSTALI.

notice the tendency of television merely to repeat a previous pattern of radio and
feature films. This television imperialism thesis ignores the much earlier pattern
of the press and news agencies, which quite unambiguously did have an imperial
characterÑalthough these empires were European ones, mainly British, but also
French, Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese.
Tapio Varis has produced the first reasonably comprehensive mapping of
worldwide television import patterns. Varis found tbr 1971 (the year betore
Wells's book was published) that the television channels in the larger Latin
American countries (such as Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico) imported be-
tween 10 and 39 percent of programming. The only one of seven Latin American
countries in the Varis study to import 80 percent of programming was Guate-
mala.4 Varis also lound that a substantial proportion of television imports came
from countries other than the United States, including such Latin American
countries as Mexico.
Nevertheless, the Varis study did document American television exports
around the world on an enormous scale:

Many of thc dcveloping countrics ux much importcd matcrial, butÑwith thc cxccption
of a number of Latin American countrics and a few Middlc East counlricsÑtcievision is
still of minor importancc in most parts of thc developing world; when it is available, it is
for the most part mercly a privilegc of thc urban rich.
l he Unitcd Statcs and the People's Rcpublic of China arc examples of countrics which
currently usc littic forcign matcrialÑat Icast compared with thc total amount of their own
programming. Japan and thc Sovict Union also producc most of their own programs. Most
other nations, howevcr, arc hcavy purchascrs of forcign matcrial. Even in an arc.. as rich
as Wcstcrn Europe, imported programs account for about one-third of total transmis-
sion timc.
Most nonsocialist countrics purchasc programs mainly from thc Unitcd States and thc
United Kingdom. In Wcstcrn Europc lor cxampic, American produccd programs account
for about half of all imported programs, and from 15 to 20 por cent of total transmission
timc. 1 hc socialist countrics also usc Amcrican and British matcrial, but only TV Bcl-
gradc uses as largc a sharc of American programs as thc Wcslern Europcan counlrics.
Thc rcal social and political impact of importcd programs may bc grcatcr than might
bc infcrred trom thc volumc of imported matcrial, becausc of audicncc viewing pattcrns
and thc placing of forcign programming. Availabic studics about primc-timc programming
in various countrics tend to show that thc proportion of forcign matcrial during thcsc
hours is considerably grcatcr than at other timvs.
For each country surveyed, we looked at the categories into which imported programs
fell. Program imports arc hcavily conccntrated on scrials and scrics. long fcatur( lilms,
and cntcrtainmcnt programs.5

A more recent study by Elihu Katz, Ccorge Wedell, and their colleagues
traces the history of both radio and television in ten Latin American, Asian, and
Atrican countries, as well as Cyprus.' t his study attributes a considerably larger
place to British inlluence. I he Katz-Wedell study suggests that thc television im-
perialism thesis takes loo little account of radio and ot ditterences bolh within
and between nations. It also strongly confirms that there was a high point ol
American iniluence on world television at some point in the 196Us. Central to the
Katz-Wedell study is the notion of "phases of institutionalization." First there
was a direct transfer or adoption of a metropolitanÑusually American, British,

MEDIA IMPERIALISM') 543

or FrenchÑmodel of broadcasting, with radio setting the pattern for television.
Next there was a phase of adapting this system to the local society. And ulti-
mately a new "sense of direction" was introduced by the governmentÑthis typi-
cally involved removing any remaining vestiges of direct foreign ownership and
increasing the direct control of government. This third phase typically occurred
around 1970, which was about when the Schiller and Wells works were being
published; thus some of their arguments are invalid because incomplete.
Katz and Wedell focus heavily on the receiving countries and are excellent at
detailing the endless muddles, confusion, indecisions, self-deception, conflicting
goals, conflicting ministriesÑin short, the general chaos that seems to charac-
terize the appearance of television. Katz and Wedell reject any strong television

imperialism thesis, and they tend to see the American and British exporters of
television models and styles as no less muddled and self-deceiving than the
importers.
Nevertheless, despite their implicit rejection of much of the television imperi-
alism thesis, Katz and Wedell do provide much descriptive material which fits
the thesis quite well. The importance of production (transmission and studio)
technology is confirmed. Like the other students of television exports, they look
with horror on the weight of commercial advertising, the predominance of
American entertainment series, and the relative absence in most countries of
high-4uality educational or cultural television programming.

SOME APPEALS OF HOLLYWOOD
ENTERTAINMENT

Many countries failed around 1920 to grasp the near impossibility of shutting out
Hollywood films. Later, especially in the 1930s, some countries began to de-
velop coherent policies for such resistance. But having made noncommercial ar-
rangements for broadcasting, most of these same countries then failed to recog-
nize that a state controlled broadcasting system also would t:dce an importing
dilemma. Thus the same state broadcasting systems that in the late 1940s were
taken unawares by music imports were later taken unawares by television
imports.
Thc most successtul resistance to Hollywood imports in the 1930s occurred in
the Sovict Union, Japan, and Cermany. Thcse governments all saw Hollywood
imports in political as well as cultural terms; all these countries had substantial
economic rcsourcesÑand their govcrnments were willing to pay the price of
mainl.lining major domestic film industries.
Teicvision was invariably established as an ott:shoot of radio, a decision that
contuscd and weakened initial resistance to American television imports. Most
countries outside Lafin America had a public service (or BBC) style of radio.
european and other state broadcasting organizations overestimated their ability to
resist importing Hollywood materials and styles; and in countries where a domes

)

w
o

544 JEREMY TUNSTALL

:
tic mini-Hollywood has been painfully established, broadcasting organizations
typically failed to grasp the relevance of this hard-won domestic experience.
The importing of entertainment materials has primarily been of pop music
records, feature films, recorded television drama series, and recorded entertain-
ment shows. Much of this material adopts the form of a fictional storyÑchil-
dren's programming, comic strips, women's magazine fiction, and paperback
books. In these fictional stories the American media present their characteristic
themes of status, success, personal qualities, sex roles, youth, and ethnicity. The
response of foreign consumers will depend partly on their own ethnicity, age, and
sex. In Europe, imported material reaches the entire population, but outside Eu-
rope those most heavily exposed to imported media are mainly urban, employed
in the modern economy, and relatively youthful, with higher-than-average in-
comes. In Latin America, Asia, and Africa the typical consumer of imported
media will be a young white-collar worker or a factory workerÑnot an elderly
peasant in a remote rural area. Many of these urban consumers will themselves
have a personal history of social and geographical mobility, and may respond to
these themes in American media. Many will be women, often escaping from tra-
ditional views of appropriate women's roles, and the portrayal of women in
American media output may be appealing.
People in authority may not like emphasis on upward social mobility, relative
freedom for women, and support of the young against the old. Hollywood's
favorable portrayal of people with white skins and its much less favorable por-
trayal until recently of people with black skins must have led to very mixed ve-
sponses. Within many countries in Latin America, the Arab world, and Asia,
there are people of both lighter and darker skin colorÑso the possibilities tbr
racial identification and antagonism even within a single country are quite
complex.
The appeal of stylized violence to the frustrated urban youth of many lands
cannot be better illustrated than by the many imitations of the American west-
ern. Some of the most obvious are the Italian and SpanishÑ"spaghetti" and
"paella"Ñwesterns. There have also been many Asian imitations of the western,
including Chinese films made in Shanghai in the interwar period, Japanese
historical films, and more recently the kung-fu (or "chop suey") westerns of
Hong Kong.
The various mini-Hollywoods of the world have copied the phenomenon of
the star, and in many countries the most popular single star pertbrmer is a local
national. But Hollywood established the first star system around 1920 and has
managed to convince the world that it still has a uniquely large supply of
uniquely dazzling stars. Part of the glamor of the Hollywood star lies in his or her
stardom itselfÑfame and fortune not only in the United States, but all around the
world. This factor of stardom in many countries as an integral part of star appeal
was already evident in 1920, when Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford visited
Europe ostensibly on their honeymoon:
Thc crowds were so thick outside their suite at the Ritz-Cariton in New York before they
sailed that they couldn't leave the hotel. Word was called ahead to England, France, Hol-
land, Switzerland, and Italy thal Doug and Mary were coming....

MEDIA IMPERIALISM? 545

They lirst stopped at thc Ritz in London and crowds thousands deep waited all night to
catch sight of their idols. Doug delighted in carrying Mary through the pressing throngs in
London and later in Paris.... Doug and Mary escaped to the cottage of Lord Northcliffe
on the Isle of Wight only IO be discovered surrounded by hundreds of fans at dawn one
mormng.
These scenes were repeated on the Continenl and not really discouraged by Mary and
Doug.... In Lugano, Switzerland, and Venice, Florence and Romc the fans hailed "Ma-
na e Lampo" (for "lightning," which is what Douglas was called in Italian). In Paris one
afternoon they were afraid to leave their suite at the Hotel Crillon, the crowds were so
thick, but they announced their intention of visiting Les Halles one morning and took
satisfaction in stopping all traffic....

Only in Germany, the so recent enemy, were they ignored, and neither Doug nor Mary
could stand it....
Word of the triumphal tour came back to New York through the newspapers, and Amer-
ica wasn't lo be outdone in honoring the pair of cinema artists.7

Charlie Chaplin was greeted by equally enormous European crowds. Mary Pick-
ford and Douglas Fairbanks also visited the Soviet Union, where in 1925 their
films still dominated local screens, and they were again greeted by huge crowds.
All of this was powerfully encouraged by the Hollywood publicity mills, the
result of operating publicity across a continent of daily newspapers; Hollywood
also drew on the techniques of "advancing" presidential campaigns and the-
atrical tours. The arrival of famous faces from six thousand miles away must
have seemed more dramatic than any arrival of a star in one European country
coming from another. These Hollywood stars also had an excuse for perpetual
movementÑa continuous succession of photogenic arrivals and departuresÑ
just like their film selves.
The Hollywood star arriving on a publicity trip in Europe was the inheritor of
an established tradition of exotic American publicity trips to Europe. Increas-
ingly during the latter half of the nineteenth century, American minstrels, ce-
lebrities, circus freaks, founders of new religions, and Wild West entertainers
had arrived to entertain the staid Europeans with the latest American exotica.
Douglas Fairbanks established a pattern by which the indication of success in
such a trip was the number of kings and queens met in Europe and subsequently
invited back for visits to Los Angeles.
The same thing continues still as waves of American singers, dancers, actors
actresses, and celebrities come remorselessly fluttering out of the western skyÑ
here today in Europe and gone tomorrow around the world. The same preceding
and succeeding waves of publicity operate; only now the old traditions of ship-
board interviews and arrivals and departures for the benefit of the local press
have been substituted by the rituals of the airport and the television chat show.
The status themes, the stars' personalities, the intimate career details are put
on display. The star modestly admits to the two hundredth interviewer how she
was JUSt so lucky to get her latest and best-yet part. The media audience is invited
to identify with the star, who is so dazzlingly successful and yet not so very dif-
lerent from you or meÑwho is indeed sincerely worried about her next show
film, or record.
Success in the media has long been one of the staple topics of the American
media. And as the American media have moved out onto the world scene, media

w
o
NJ

success-on-the-world-scene has become a staple media topic: "Yes, darling,
already doing good business in Japan and Sweden, not released here until
tomorrow. "

CULTURAL IMPERIALISM VERSUS
Al ITHRNTIC I .OCAL CULTURE

. . _ . . _ . . _ _ _ _

The cultural imperialism thesis claims that authentic, traditional, and local cul-
ture in many parts of the world is being battered out of existence by the indis-
criminate dumping of large quantities of slick commercial and media products,
mainly from the United States. Those who make this argument most forcibly
tend to favor restrictions on media imports, as well as the deliberate preservation
of authentic and traditional culture.
This problem of cultural identity is part of a larger problem of national iden-
tity. The United States, Britain, and France belong to a minority of the world's
nations in having a fairly strong national identity. Almost all their citizens speak
roughly the same language; but even in these countries there are major internal
frictionsÑregional, ethnic, language, and social class differences. And even this
degree of national identity has only been achieved after several centuries of na-
tional existence, including civil war often followed by the brutal subjugation of
regional and ethnic minorities. Countries that have an unusually strong national
identity also happen to have the longest traditions of the press and other media,
conducted primarily in a single national language.
The strength of national identity is less marked in Latin America, either de-
spite, or possibly because of, the use of Spanish as the language of all but one of
the largest countries. In much of eastern, central, and parts of northern Europe
there are two, three, or more separate languages, religions, and cultural tradi-
tions within a single state. The Soviet Union has this pattern on an even larger
scale, as does India and some other Asian countries. There are similarly sharp
cleavages within many Arab countries; and in Africa, national identity is least
strong of all.
The variety of languages within many nation states is at once a major factor in
"cultural imperialism" and in lack of national identity. There are also very big
differences between urban and rural areas, a very uneven pattern of development
between some backward areas and other areas with exportable resources. Peas-
ants' rebellions, guerrilla uprisings, palace revolutions, and even large-scale
civil wars are a recent experience or an immediate realistic prospect in many
lands. In the many countries where the prime object of policy is to reduce the
threat of armed conflict, the need to strengthen "authentic culture" may not be
seen as critical.
The most authentic and traditional culture often seemsÑand not only to the
ruling eliteÑto be also the most inappropriate. This is not merely because tradi-
tional culture sanctions what would now be called civil war. Traditional culture is
also typically archaic, does not fit with contemporary notions of justice or equal-
ity, and depends on religious beliefs that have long been in decline. Many tradi

MEDIA IMPERIALISM? 547

tional cultures were primarily carried by a small elite of scholars and priests
who often used languages which tew other people understood. Not only Arab
and Hmdu cultures but many others as well ascribed a fixed subservient position
to women, the young, and the occupationally less favored. It is precisely these
unpopular characteristics of much authentic culture that make the imported me-
dia culture so popular by contrast.
The variety in traditional cultures is clearly enormous, but two relatively
common types of music can be used as illustration. One is the type of traditional
opera found in a number of Asian countries; such traditional opera is musically
complex, often having its own specialized acting traditions as well as its own
musical instruments. Both its total repertoire and its total audience are often
quite small. Such music belongs to a traditional hierarchical society that has long

been in decline. Clearly it is unlikely to become a hit parade or television staple-
lt has to compete, moreover, with Beethoven and Mozart as well as with the
Beatles and the movies.
A second common type of traditional music is found in many parts of Africa
and some parts of Asia. This music is less complex and depends on simpler in-
strumenis; the music both appeals to and is produced by the ordinary people. The
music Is mdeed an integral part of the major individual (birth, marriage, death)
and collective (especially harvest) events and symbolism of ordinary life. It is
often played for a few days or a few weeks on end. It has inHuenced jazz and all
subsequent Western popular music; but in its authentic and traditional form it is
::.. ~:. to adapt to media usageÑalthough many African radio services do
broadcast such music, and it is often popular especially in the immediate area
from which it originates.
Another difficulty of "authentic culture" is that one might expect there to be
some level of regional culture, beyond the tribal or national but smaller than the
international. There is indeed quite a lot of radio listening across national
boundaries, although many governments and broadcasting organizations wish to
discourage it. Many nations in the world, both "old" and "new," have uneasy
relations with their neighbors. Subjecting the neighbor's citizens to your media
while protecting your own citizens from his media is a common purpose of radio
policy.
The debate about cultural imperialism and authentic culture is reminiscent of
and related to, another debate about "mass society," mass culture, and indeed the
"mass media." The term "mass" has a long intellectual genealogy of its ownÑ
and has long been used by both left and right with various shades of meaning and
implication.8 When this debate dealt with Europe and the United States it was
confused enough. But the same debate, transposed to Asia and Africa, gets even
more confused. It is precisely the highly educated elite in Asian and African
countries who are the most active consumers of importedÑand presumably
low, brutal and commercial"Ñmedia. whereas the rural dwellersÑshort of
land, food, literacy, income, life expectation, birth control devices, and so onÑ
are the main consumers of traditional and "authentic" culture.
T. W. Adorno at one time claimed that even a symphony concert when broad-
cast on radio was drained of significance; many mass culture critics also had very

548 JEREMY TUNSTALL

harsh things to say about the large audiences that went to western and crime films
in the 1930sÑfilms which yet other cultural experts have subsequently decided
were masterpieces after all. Even more bizarre, however, is the Western intellec-
tual who switches off the baseball game, turns down the hi-fi, or pushes aside the
Sunday magazine and pens a terse instruction to the developing world to get back
to its tribal harvest ceremonials or funeral music.
Such a caricature illustrates that the real choice probably lies with hybrid
forms. In many countries older cultural forms often continue in vigorous exis-
tence, although modified by Western influences. Pop music often takes this form;
"Eastern westerns" or the Latin American telenovelas are other examples. The
debate then, should be about whether such hybrid forms are primarily traditional
and "authentic" or merely translations or imitations of Anglo-American forms.

POLITICS AND INEQUALITY

How do the Anglo-American media affect politics or inequality within an im-
porting country ? Do they, as the media imperialism thesis implies, buttress reac-
tionary politicians and solidify inequalities'? Or do they have democratic and
egalitarian implications?
Among nineteenth-century elites in Europe, one of the main anxieties about
the American press was its lack of respect for established practices and people.
Charles Dickens, returning from the United States in 1842, expressed these anx-
ieties with vigor and clarity:

Among the herd of journals which are published in the States there are some, the reader
scarcely nced be told, of character and crcdit. From personal intercoursc with accom-
plished gentlemen connected with publications of this class, I have dcrived both picasurc
and profit. But the name of these is Few, and of thc other Legion; and the influence of the
good, is powerless to counteract the mortal poison of the bad.
Among the gentry of America; among thc well-informcd and moderate; in the Icarned
professions; at thc bar and on the bench: there is, and there can be, but onc opinion, in
reference to the vicious character of these infamous journals. It is sometimes contcndedÑ
I will not say strangely, for it is natural to seck excuses for such a disgraccÑthat their
influence is not so great as a visitor would supposc. I must be pardoned for saying that
there is no warrant for this plea, and that every fact and circumstance tends directly to thc
opposite conclusion.
When any man, of any grade of desert in intellect or charactcr, can climb to any public
distinction, no mattcr what, in America, without first grovciling down upon thc carth, and
bending the knee betore this monstcr of dcpravity; when any private cxccilencc is safc
from its attacks; when any social conlidencc is Icft unbroken by it, or any tic of social
deccncy and honour is held in the least regard . . . then, I will bclicvc that its influencc is
lessening, and mcn arc rcturning to their manly senscs. But whilc that Prcss has its cvil cyc
in cvery housc, and its black hand in cvcry appointmcnt in thc state, from a prcsidcnl to a
postman; whilc, with ribald slander for its only stock in tradc, it is thc standard litcraturc
of an cnormous class. who must lind their rcading in a newspapcr, or they will not rcad at
all; so long must its odium bc upon thc country's hcad, and so long must the cvil it works,
be plainly visible in thc Rcpublic.
To those who are accustomed to thc leading English journals, or to the respectabic
journals of thc Confinent of Europe, to those who are accustomed to anything elsc in print
and paper, it would be impossibic, without an amount of extract for which I have neither
spacc nor inclination, to convey an adequate idea of this frightful engine in America.

MEDIA IMPERIALISM? 549

Responses to imported American media continue to be related to attitudes to-
ward currently prevalent inequalities. But it would be quite misleading to think in
terms of media imports always favoring the poor at the expense of the rich. Even
within the United States the media are primarily aimed at the middle of the popu-
lation, not at its very poorest members. In terms of England in 1842, or Western
Europe today, imports of American media may quite realistically be seen as po-
tentially hostile to established elites. But the emphasis of these media on success
and status favors the new rich more than the old poor. These media also present a

heavily urban view of life.
In multi-party nations of western Europe, and perhaps to some extent in East-
ern Europe as well, imports of American media materials may tend toward de-
mocratizing and egalitarian effects. Such commercial infusions will tend to influ-
ence, if not the basic substance of political power within importing countries,
then at least the styles politicians use in presenting themselves to local and na-
tional publics. Increased amounts of market-oriented media fareÑmore enter-
taining entertainment, and more "neutral" newsÑwill tend to make the more
obviously political party fare seem less entertaining and more obviously dull and
unattractive. Thus politicians try to dress up their political messages in more
entertaining and neutral-looking packages. This in turn implies the use of PR and
market research skillsÑin presenting the chief executive and his supporters, but
also in presenting and shaping policies in even the most complex and delicate
areas
In multi-party countries, the rise of commercial or mainly advertising-fi-
nanced media and the decline of party or government-financed media may be-
come cumulative. Politically or government-controlled media tend to become
less attractive to audiences, hence less important to politicians, and so on. More
and more politicians use the techniques and the advice of advertising, market
research, and public relations, and the argument is heard (and heeded) that media
that are obviously controlled by government or party constitute bad political
strategy. There is a gradual change by which politicians and governments in
I multi-party countries seek accommodations within an increasingly commercial
| pattern of media.
But in poorer African and Asian nations, infusions of Western media may in-
deed buttress and extend existing inequalities. Since these imported media are
consumed mainly by the urban and relatively affluent, and since importing be-
comes a substitute for providing cheap domestic media to most areas, inequality
may be increased. In many poor countries, also, the media are controlled by the
n government; the national media may become a key instrument through which a
small atfluent elite maintains itscif in power. This view of the media as prime
delcnders of the status quo is often shared by politicians in power and illustrated
by the heavy military guard found outside many capital city radio stations.
Thus toreign media may in some alfluenl countries tavor more equality, but in
other less atfluent countries favor more inequality. In yet other countries, such as
those of Latin America, both sorts of effects may occur at the same time. For
example, it may be true that, in general, the imported media tip the scales away
from the country and in favor of the city; but within the heavily populated Latin
American cities those same media might have an egalitarian effect.

55() JEREMY TUNSTALL

ONE MEDIA IMPERIALIST,
OR A DOZEN'?

The media imperialism thesis does not conlront the presence of strong regional
exporters in various parts of the world. Mexico and Argentina have a tradition of
exporting media to their neighbors, Egypt exports to the Arab world, and Indian
films and records go to many countries in Africa and Asia. Not only the United
States, Britain, and France, but also West Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan all
export some media. Even Sweden has its own little media empire in Scandinavia.
And the Soviet Union has strong media markets in Eastern Europe.
This phenomenon can be seen as running counter to the media imperialist the-
sisÑshowing that American and British media exports have many substantial
rivals. But there are also grounds for seeing Mexican or Egyptian or even Indian
exports as an indirect extension of Anglo-American influence. The e ountries that
are strongly regional exporters of media tenzl themselves to be unusually heavy
importers of American media.
Italy in 1972 was, after the United States, the largest exporter of feature films,
with considerable strength in every world region. Yet the United States was the
source for over half of Italy's imports, and for an unusually high proportion of
Britain's, Mexico's, and India's imports as well. Other strong film exportersÑ
Japan, Egypt, and West CermanyÑwere strong importers of U.S. films. Only
the Soviet Union, among major film exporters, imports virtually nothing from
Hollywood.
By 1972 the majority of films made in Britain were Hollywood-financed and
-distributed, as was a substantial proportion of Italian and French films (includ-
ing Italian-French coproductions subsidized by both governments). And all of
the major film exporters in the world (except the Soviet Union) take around three-
quarters of their film imports from the United States, Great Britain, Italy, and
France combined. Thus almost all significant film exporters in the world are
themselves open to heavy current Hollywood influence. The strength of Soviet
film exports in Eastern Europe is noticeably weaker than Hollywood's unassisted
export strength in all world regions apart Irom Easlern Europe.
These data, incidentally, illustrate Ihat television is not necessarily thc best
example for the media imperialist thesis. The continuing cxtent ol Holiywood
leature film exports around the world is all the more remarkable because llolly-
wood has here retained its export leadership Ibr sixty years.
The television imperialism thesis, then, cannot be considered merely tor tele-
vision alonc. A more historical approach, covering all media, is required. Wc
must also note, for example, the intentions of both exporters and importers, and
we must recognize as well that many social consequences arc unintended. Never-
heless, the Schiller thesis has a number ol strcngths, especially in taking thc
whole world for its unit of analysisÑand Schiller's domino lheory of American
media influence is one illustration of the benelits of so doing.
In my view, the Anglo-American media are connected with imperialism, Brit-
ish imperialism. But these media exports both predate and still run ahead of the
general American economic presence overseas or the multinational company

MEDIA IMPERIALISM'' 551

phenomenon. Schiller attributes too many of this world's ills to television. He
also has an unrealistic view of returning to traditional cultures, many of which,
although authentic, are dead. In my view, a non-American way out of the media
box is difficult to discover because that box was built in the first place by Ameri-
cans, or Anglo-Americans. The only way out is to construct a new box, and this,
with the possible exception of the Chinese, no nation seems willing to do.

Notes
1. 'I hc present author firsl came across this phcnomenon in the case of British advcr-
ising agencies. See Jcremy Tunstall, The Advertising Man in Londlon Axlvertisilig Agen-
eies (London: Chapman & Hall, 1964), pp. 33-35, 140-141, 156-157, 224-226.
2. Thc shortage of Marxist empirically based accounts of this topic is illusirated in
Marxism and the Mass Meblia. Towards a Baxic Bibliography vol. 3 (Paris: Inlernational
Gcncral, 1974), which contains 453 refcrences.
3. Alan Wells, Pieture-Tube Irnperialism? The Impaet of U.S. Television on Larin

Ameri(a (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1972), p. 121.
4. Kaaric Nordenstrcng and Tapio Varis, Television TrafyicÑA One-Way Streer:'
(Paris: UNESCO, 1974), p. 14.
5. 'I'apio Varis, "Global Traflic in Tclevision," Journal of Communication 24
(1974): 107.
6. E. Katz, E. G. Wcdell, M. J. Pilsworth, and D. Shinar. Br(xl(le(lsling and National
DevehJpmetil ( manuscript).
7. Robert Windelcr, Mary PiekJbrd. Sweetheort of the Wor/(l (London: Allen, 1975),
pp. 119-121.
X. Lcon Bramson, The Politilul Colltexl oJ Soeiology (Princeton, N.J.: Princcton Uni-
vcrshy Prcss, 1961 ).
Mediations and Hybridizations 223

Chapter 1 1
Mediations and Hybridizations:
The Revenge of the Cultures

Mattelart, Armand. "Chapter 11: Mediations and
Hybridizations: The Revenge of the Cultures."
Mapoinc World Communication: War. Proaress.
Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
(Originally published as La Communication-monde.
Histoire des idXes et des strattEdes, c1991 by Edibons
LaDecouverte.) Pages222-240.

Return to the Singulcir
Although the new philosophy of globalization inspired by geostrategies
of the world economy came into vogue in the 1980s, there also emerged
parallel visions of the world that were poles apart from such views.
As the "world system" deployed itself, connecting various societies
with the products and networks destined to function at a universal level,
other approaches to the transnationalization of culture, more concerned
to restore its character as a process of multiple interactions, also came
into being. What concerns us here are the responses of individual soa-
eties to the prospect of the reorganization of social relations brought
about by new apparatuses of transnational communication that slmu ta-
neously destructure and restructure national and local space. These re-
sponses range from resistance to mimicry, from adaptation to reappro-
priation. In short, questions were now being asked about the processes of
"resignification" by which the innumerable hookups to the networks
that make up the fabric of globalization acquired a meaning for each
community. Through this return to differences and to processes of differ-
entiation, "international communication" is thus finally beginning to be
conceived in terms of culture.
This is a return to cultures, territories, and particular spaces, as well as
to concrete subjects and to intersubjective relations. Since the 1970s, crlt-
ical research on the intercultural balance of forces had dealt above all
with logics of deterritorialization and had favored the exammatlon of the
strategies of macrosubjects such as nation-states, major international
bodies, or the new transnational economic groupsÑbut also large-sca e
institutions representing the working class, such as parties and umons.

222

More recent critical approaches are attentive to the logics of reterritorial-
ization or re ocalizationÑthat is to say, all the processes of mediation
and negotiation that are played out between the singular and the univer-
sal and between the plurality of cultures and the centrifugal forces of the
world market, but also between different ways of conceiving the univer-
or esplte the hegemonic concerns underlying mercantile concep-
tions of cosmopolitanism, one of the major points of theoretical rupture
consisted in exploding the essentialist conception of the "universal."
Consequently, the very geography of social actors taken into account by
analysis was called into question. New historical subjects began to inhab-
lt both theoretical references and reality itself. Other scientific disciplines
were called upon and the monodisciplinary perspective was contested by

cross-fertilizing viewpoints.
This sudden appearance of new ways of seeing not only the relation
with the international" but also, more generally, the relation with the
Other" took place in a context where theoretical ruptures had defini-
tively lost any unambiguous meaning. The free circulation of skills and
nowledge required by the new modes of social regulation introduced
ambivalence as a major feature of the contemporary evolution of theory.

From Americanization to Notional Troditions

Two studies provide food for thought. The first is about the formation of
the social group known in France as "cadres," that is, business execu-
tlves. While published in 1982, it was mostly carried out in the 1970s- a
time when business and its culture had not yet become the objects of a
cu t, and when numerous sociologists were concerned with the internal
contradictions of corporations from a perspective not yet biased by the
esire to master them for the needs of management. This study is the
work of the sociologist Luc Boltanski of the Pierre Bourdieu research
group. The second, undertaken in the second half of the 1980s, is the
work of Philippe d'lribarne, an engineer at the Ecole des Mines, a prod-
uct of the elite Ecole Polytechnique, and director of the program "Tech-
nology, Jobs, and Work" developed under the aegis of the CNRS, the
French government research body. Its objective was to compare various
national traditions" of corporate management.
In a chapter entitled "The Fascination with America and the Import-
mg of Management," Boltanski wrote:

One cannot understand the postwar transformations affecting the
social representation of "cadres" if one is not aware of how much
these changes owe to the importation of value systems, social tech
w
o

224 Mediations and Hybridizahons

nologies and standards of excellence of American origin which ac-
companied and sometimes preceded the realization of the Marshall
Plan, or, to be more precise, the political and social conflicts within
the bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie over the "Americanization
of French society." . . . The introduction of human engineering and
of American-style management accompanied economlc
changes.... The enterprise of modernizing the economic appara-
tus is not just a technical matter.... This modernization, partly in-
spired by the American economic authorities, who stipulated, as a
condition for the French to obtain funds, the formation of a group
of indigenous managers, economically competent and politically
reliable, presented itself explicitly as an endeavor to transform
French society as a whole. '

What Boltanski brings out is the process by which a class structure
was redistributed: how, putting multiple "social technologies" to work,
the group of cadresÑa category that John Galbraith had been the first to
try to grasp under the term "technostructurenÑbecame embodied in its
institutions and finally had its existence recognized as an objective, eter-
nal, and natural fact.
Philippe d'lribarne, for his part, endorses that nature of things. Inter-
rogating a sample group of managers in the United States, France, and
Holland, he tried to uncover the sources of efficiency proper to each cul-
ture. Writing from the point of view of one seeking to mobilize enthusi-
asm for the "economic war," he rebels against the discourses and global-
izing formulas taken from Japanese and American textbooks, and
counterposes to them the specifics of national cultures:
What world are the advice-givers talking about when they people
their books with an undifferentiated humanityÑJapanese, Ameri-
cans, or French, who, whether turners or accountants, are all melt-
ed down into the same vague category? These advice-givers cer-

tainly know that the passions that animate men of flesh and blood
are often incomprehensible under foreign skies. How can they for-
get that the traditions in which each people is rooted fashion what
its members revere and despise, and that one cannot govern with-
out adapting to the diversity of values and customs?2

Thus he points out, for example, that French managers obey a "logic of
honor" (hence the title of his book) that causes them to make an infinite
range of subtle distinctions between the noble and the base; that the
American responds to the lure of gain and the passion for honesty;
whereas the prudent Netherlander tries to bring different wills into agree-
ment.

Mediahons and Hybridizahons 225

Through this reflection on the adaptation of management to individ-
ual conditions, a certain relativism is slowly introduced into the very
heart of a science that sees itself as universal because it is "modern." This
relativism is in tune with the search for organizational modes closer to
the flexibility requirements of the network-corporation. Here is another
passage from d'lribarne:

The research we have been able to do in the three "modern" soci-
etles of the United States, Holland, and France has not simply re-
minded us that modernity is not wholly triumphant and that tradi-
tions and particularisms are alive and well. It has profoundly
transformed our perception of the relation between the modern
and the traditional.... One can say that the contractual system is
simultaneously modern and traditional, that it relies on ways of
being, of living in society, that we are accustomed to attributing
exclusively to either modern societies or to traditional ones. The
relation it establishes between, on the one hand, structures and
procedures, and on the other, traditions, is a relation of synergy,
not of competition.3

This is not isolated research. From Africa to India via Mexico, numer-
ous investlgations in the areas of labor economics, labor sociology, and
industrial economics began in the 1 980s to focus on the types of organi-
zation best able to draw on local cultures in order to be more efficient.4

Simple Techniques
In deliberately drawing a parallel, almost at random, between two stud-
ies representing two different positions but also two moments in the way
of defining the "international" and its relation to national cultures, we
have deliberately tried to make apparent what the problematique of in-
ternanonallzation both won and lost in its passage from one perspective
to another. Between the first and the second, the utopias that stimulated
the desire for another kind of society had collapsed, and labor unions and
working people's struggles had grown weaker, whereas management had
redefined its ideology and strategy, regaining the means to think and act.5
But this passage from one perspective to another also witnessed the rise
to power of new professional strata, as the centrality of the working class
and the workers' movement crumbled.
What separates these two outlooks is essentially the fact that the social
technologies of mobilization, identification, and classification described
y Boltanskl present themselves more and more as "simple techniques."
This occurs as the strategic place of these new strata, who play a mediat

226 Mediations and Hybridizotions

ing role in matters of power and in social conflicts, is legitimated within
the corporation as well as in society.
The conflicts and divergences within the corporation over the very de-
finition of "management," however, attest to the fact that there remams
scarcely any neutral zone. More than ever, the corporation Is a place of
contradictory interests and of clashing value systems. This is shown
clearly by the vicissitudes of introducing non-Taylorist forms of orgam-
zationÑin particular participant managementÑinto the corporatlon.
The logic of the corporation's "citizens" (in Norbert Alter's phrase),
which tries to appropriate this mode of organization, collides with that of
the "policymakers," who embody managerial logic and who see particl-
pation rather as a means of reaching an "efficient and happy consensus
and a "normalization of behaviors." These actors' logics, each of which
represents a conception of the corporation, of the product, and of indl-
vidual interest, conceive participation as a space of maneuver, o power
relations, of struggles for influence. This leads Alter, a sociologist of or-
ganizations, to conclude that the "return of ideology" is one of the char-
acteristics of the Umodernist-participative" corporation, for the simple
reason, in his words, that "once the notion of participation becomes the
cornerstone of the functioning of this type of enterprise . . ., struggles be-
come ideological wrestling, because culture and cultural influence give
players muscle and the right to define the field as well as the nature of
participation."6 In the light of these hypotheses, one better understands
the strategic positions acquired by communication and corporate culture
as forms of social recognition in permanent tenslon between two ways of
racticing participation: on the one hand the prolect developed by the
management of formalizing a "responsible," "programmed," "rational,"
and "descending" participation, and on the other the project embodied
by the group of corporate "citizens," in favor of "ascending" participa-
tion and "management of creative disorder."'
Felix Guattari attributes this reemergence of ideology to the necessity
for the new agents of this development of "integrated world capitalism"
to assure the construction of the subject and of subjectivity. The "struc-
tures that produce signs and subjectivity," he writes, have overtaken the
structures that produce goods, causing all singularity to pass "under the
domination of specialized equipment, professions, and frames of refer-
ence."8

The Management Horizon
To grasp the ultimate implications of this sanitizing of "specialized
frames of reference" or "social technologies" one must assess what has

Mediotions and Hybridizotions 227

called the zmediaanyclof posing the issue of 'mediators" or what might be

What has been eclipsed is quite simply any critical questioning of the
role of carriers of knowledge and know-how in the redeployment of soci-
ety and the economy. In the 1970s, this questioning was far from being
the exclusive fiefdom of social critics. This is shown clearly by Michel
Crozier, when, in his contribution to the Trilateral Commission's report
on the factors in the "crisis of governability of liberal democracies," he
expressed worry about the flagrant imbalance between the weight ac-
quired by traditional intellectuals, seen as "troublemakers," and the
other intellectuals who place their knowledge in the service of the func-
tioning of society.
Crozier wrote in 1975: "A significant challenge comes from the intel-
lectuals and related groups who assert their disgust with the corruption
materialism, and inefficiency of democracy and with the subservience of
democratic government to 'monopoly capitalism."' The attitude of these
value-oriented intellectuals," who devoted their energies to critiques
and contributed to provoking a "breakdown of traditional means of so-
cial control, a delegitimation of political and other forms of authority,"
contrasted, by Crozier's own admission, with that of "the also increasing

numbers of technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals."9
At the root of this diagnosis of the "delegitimation of the traditional
means of social control" was the ideaÑsoon to gain currencyÑthat the
media had a great Impact on the evolution of opinion concerning the
Vietnam War, and also had influenced the memory of the challenge to
that war in the West, in a context of generalized protest against the inter-
national system and the social order. Zbigniew Brzezinski, prefacing the
report of Crozier and his colleagues, spoke of widespread disarray, and
of pessimism regarding the evolution of Western societies: "In some re-
spects, the mood of today is reminiscent of that of the early twenties
when the views of Oswald Spengler regarding 'The Decline of the West'
were very popular. "
To mitigate this crisis aMicting the very form of the democracies of
North America, Europe, and Japan and making them "ungovernable,"
the 1975 report made the following recommendation:
In due course, beginning with the Interstate Commerce Act and the
Sherman Antitrust Act, measures had to be taken to regulate the
new industrial centers of power and to define their relations to the
rest of soclety. Something comparable appears to be now needed
with respect to the media. Specifically, there is a need to ensure to
the press its right to print what it wants without prior restraint ex-
cept m most unusual circumstances. But there is also the need to
228 Mediotions ond Hybridizations

assure to the government the right and the ability to withhold in
formation at the source.'¡

Since history often travels by detours, it would take more than fifteen
years for this prophetic recommendation to be realized, with the shack-
ling of the news media by the military authorities during the Gulf War of
January and February 1991Ñas I have already pointed out. To justify it,
the authorities of military censorship would invoke precisely the need to
not repeat the media excesses of the Vietnam War. Between the Vietnam
War and 1991, deregulation, actively consented to by the state, had
shown that it was not necessary, in order to regulate the "dysfunctions of
democracy," " to resort on an everyday basis to the direct intervention of
state power; to find new "means of social control," it was sufficient to
shift society's center of gravity to an entrepreneurial logic.
The rise of the so-called postindustrial society only accelerated the up-
setting of the relationship between traditional intellectuals and the oth-
ers, causing the balance to tilt definitively to the side of the latter. In
1967, Daniel Bell, in his initial analyses of this type of society, had fore-
seen that it would be characterized as follows: "The whole structure of
social prestige is rooted in intellectual and scientific communities.''l2 As
we have already stated, however, Bell was convinced that this ascension
of the new bearers of knowledge and know-how could only be accom-
plished under the protection of the state. The information society circum-
scribed by the market caused this predicted outcome to give way gradual-
ly to the logics of management and managers.'3

As a last resort, all these ideological evolutionsÑsince one must dare
to call things by their namesÑresulted in the undermining of the idea
that we were entering what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze called, after
William Burroughs, "control societies," and what Michel Foucault called
"disciplinary mechanism" societies, to differentiate them from the old
"discipline-blockade" societies. The crisis of the corporate regime as a
milieu of disciplinary confinement is the same as in all closed spaces (pris-
ons, schools, hospitals). The resolution of the crisis in one site often
accompanies its resolution in another, as if there, too, integration were
becoming the norm. The introduction of the corporation into all levels of
schooling is merely the most flagrant illustration of this. The forms of
these sociotechnical mechanisms of flexible control and the speed at
which they are instituted vary little from one institution to another, al-
though the factory, contrary to what the hegemonic culture of leisure
might cause us to think, constitutes, at this stage at least, the model.
Gilles Deleuze, who is poles removed from enchantment with manage

Mediations and Hybridizations 229

cial communication and cultural discourses on the tr f i

.... e rlngs of a snake are even more complicated than the

An Alternative Modernity?
The rheori~ rhe Western vision of
p
230 Mediotions and Hybridizations

process of transnationalization does not lead to a homogenization of the
globe, but to a world more and more "hybridized." (Some preferred the
term "creolized. " )
Two scenarios seemed possible to these anthropologists regarding the
long-term effects of transnational cultural flows. Either the transnational
cultural mechanisms will continue to weigh indefinitely on the sensibili-
ties of peoples on the periphery, subjected more and more to imported
meanings and forms from which local cultures will hardly distinguish
themselves, to the point of blending with them. Or else, with time, the
imported forms will be tempered and recycled by local cultures. In reali-
ty, these two scenarios are woven togetherdS The Indian anthropologist
Ariun Appadurai writes:
The globalization of culture is not the same as its homogenization,
but globalization involves the use of a variety of instruments of ho-
mogenization (armaments, advertising techniques, language hege-
monies, and clothing styles) which are absorbed into local political
and cultural economies, only to be repatriated as heterogeneous d~-
alogues of national sovereignty, free enterprise and fundamental-
ism in which the state plays an increasingly delicate role: too much
openness to global flows, and the nation-state is threatened by re-
voltÑthe China syndrome; too little, and the state exits the inter-
national stage, as Burma, Albania and North Korea in various
ways have done. In general, the state has become the arbitrator of
this repatriation of difference (in the form of goods, signs, slogans
and styles). But this repatriation or export of the designs and com-
modities of difference continuously exacerbates the internal poh-
tics of majoritarianism and homogenization which is most fre-
quently played out in debates over heritage.'fi

Appadurai even dared to speak of "alternative modernity." This idea
is borne out by studies of advertising and the building of "consumer com-
munities" in India where, contrary to what had happened in the West
where the ideology of nationalism had preceded the arrival of advertising
techniques, the development of advertising took place contemporaneous-
ly and synergetically with it. These studies noted the rapid emergence of
middle classes with a significant disposable income and cosmopolitan
tastes, and the explosion of efforts on the part of businessmen to dimin-
ish the gap between signs and dream and between products and markets.
In a similar vein of research, Brazilian anthropologists undertook to
retrace the history of the "modern tradition" in their country, in the
words of Renato Ortiz, taking as their thread the genesis of the cultural
industry and the national market for cultural goods.l7 It is an admixture
of the modern and the traditional, as witnessed by a remarkable alloying

Mediotions and Hybridizotions 231

of mass culture and popular cultures in the products of Brazil's highly
competitive television industry, which succeeds in combining postmoder-
mty and signs of the preindustrialdX Brazil even outperforms countries
such as France in the world market for programs. This leads Ortiz to con-
clude his study with these words:

The debate on the national takes on a different significance. Until

now, it was limited to the internal frontiers of the Brazilian
nation.... Today, it is transformed into an ideology to justify ac-
tion by corporate leaders on the world market. This is no doubt
the reason why there has been no major difference between the
sales discourse for the telenovela and the arguments of arms deal-
ers on the export market (Brazil is the fifth world producer), since
the two are seen exclusively as national products. I would say,
then, that this marks a new stage in Brazilian society, making it im-
possible to return to the old opposition between colonizer and col-
omzed with which we are accustomed to operate.l9

To put this so-called alternative modernization into perspective, and
to avoid being deceived by a new myth, we have still to complete this vi-
sion of modermty, based on the progress of classes and social categories
integrated into its system of rewards, with other logicsÑthose of segrega-
oon, which within the same social reality have not ceased to grow. To
characterize it, Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells has even employed
the notion of "new dependence." The new model of world development
provokes a progressive detachment of segments of economies, cultures
socletles, countrles, and social groups, all of which cease having a func-
tional and economic interest in the system as a whole, being too poor to
constitute markets and too culturally backward to serve as a work force
in a productive system founded on information. All societies in search of
an "alternative modernity" are also societies of uncontrolled moderni-
tyÑuncontrolled for those segments that remain outside the global econ-
omy functioning as a unit in daily real time. "The basic process experi-
enced by what we call the Third World," writes Manuel Castells,
is its disintegration as a relatively homogeneous entity. South
Korea or Smgapore is closer to Europe in terms of economic and
social development than to the Philippines or Indonesia. Even
more important is the fact that Sao Paulo is further away socially
from Recife than from Madrid. And that in the state of Sao Paulo
itself, the Avenida Paulista and the working-class city of Osasco
belong to different socioeconomic constellations, not only in terms
of social inequality, but also in terms of cultural dynamics and seg-
mentation.... Therefore, the story begins in the context of the seg

232 Mediahons and Hybridizations

regation of a large portion of the population of the planet, not in
the dangerously simplifed terms of North vs. South, but in a more
complex and insidious way.20

This logic of social segmentation is taken for granted and accepted by the
heads of global advertising and marketing firms, who do not hesitate to
draw strategic lessons from it.2'
The sectors of society thus rejected by the global network of discrimi-
natory "interdependence" supply recruits to the "new front of planetary
disorder," in the phrase of the geopolitical specialist Michel Foucher,22
with its many expressions, such as drug trafficking and money-launder-
ing; collective explosions of looting, which target the sanctuarles of con-
sumption; the irrational appeals to cultural, ethnic, or religious identities;
the rise of fundamentalisms that, paradoxically, have incorporated into
their strategy both the most modern means of communication and the in-
numerable suicidal weapons of the excluded, not to mentlon the rlse in
would-be political saviors, packaged with the aid of the audiovisual
media, who fill the void left by the crisis of political representation.
But above all, there is a new everyday disorder that has turned the cul-
ture of violence into a normal dimension of life. A Peruvian theater critic
wrote in 1990 that "the crisis has ended up inhabiting the most intimate
sphere of our daily life. The pauperization and the semi-proletarianiza-
tion of the middle class, as well as the fall in the consumption level of the
popular strata, have produced a series of spontaneous responses to the
crisis, giving rise to a new urban, social, and cultural ecology, in which
we begin to see our own reflection."23
These everyday experiences are precisely what transnational commu
nications apparatuses rarely convey, since they are more accustomed to
covering police operations against drug trafficking than to expressing
how Third World people might continue to maintain their dignity, even
though every threshold of violence has been exceeded.
These media representations of the other as agent of the "fronts of dis-
order" lodged themselves in a social reality in which the way of experi-
encing the Third World has changed completely. The heroic idea of the
faraway Third World of the 1960s has given way to a Third World repre-
sented as the experience of minorities on the home territory, product of
the great diasporas of the labor market. It is an experience bristling with
sensitive zones, always ready to explode into crises, into cultural conflict,
against the background of rising political and religious fundamentalisms
and fanaticisms. The situation has become all the more complex in that
the extreme right has turned inside out the right to differenceÑwhat
Pierre-Andre Taguieff calls "differentialism," a touchstone of anti-racist

Mediations and Hybridizations 233

thoughtÑand now uses it to preach exclusion of the "foreigner" and the
revival of the idea of the nation as patrimony and fatherland.24

Rethinking Popular Genres
The anthropologists' new formulations about the possibility of an "alter-
native modernity" suggest the aptitude of societies and their various
components to deviate, corrupt, and pervert the instruments by which
t is difference was relegated to the margins
This line of research, which expresses a movement toward the reap-
proprlation of particular histories, also inspires studies that in the 1980s
began to examine the unequal exchange between mass culture and the
experience of popular cultures. This is especially true of research on tele-
sion genres of national or regional origin, and particularly genres be-
longing to the great tradition of melodrama as it appears in Egyptian seri-
a s, Latin-American telenovelas, or the cinema of India, the most prolific
producer in the world.25 What this sort of study is trying to understand is
t e capacity of this type of narrative to create veritable states of catharsis
n t e sca e of an entire country, if not a whole continent, and to mobi-
e its e ects. Beyond case studies, a whole field of investigation has

p ne up on t e formation of national identity and national-popular
cu tures, a question already taken up by Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s-
on t e confrontation between these cultures and transnational networks-
an nally, on the role of intellectuals in all these processes of accultura

Another dynamic that contributed in many Third World countries to
e renewa o theoretical questions was the rise of communication net-
works and popular or "participatory" education. This kind of communi-
catlon, which employs various media from video to radio and the tradi-
tlonal printed forms, goes hand in hand with the search for types of
se -organization by which new social actors try to assume the manage-
ment of their own affairs, m a context where the state has ceased to pro-
vlde welfare, if it ever did. Of course, these microexperiences do not al-
ways avoid the trap of "basism," a constitutive element of the history of
quests for "alternative communication" everywhere. ("Base" is used here

with the preferences and desire bafsism . is thus an exaggerated cOncern
In any case, the point to be emphasized about the rise of the network-
ing conception of social organization, as implemented by diverse non-
governmental organizations, is that it has begun to stimulate new forms
of mternatlonal exchange between North and South and between South
and South, originating from civil society. This has the merit of laying the

)
234 Mediations and Hybridizations

basis for reflection on an "international third space" (as in Third Estate)
that, if we were to daydream, might find a place between intermarket log-
ics and interstate logics that mediate respectively the pragmansm of the
merchant and the Realpolitik of the prince fettered by the reason of
state.26 This reflection is all the more crucial in that to the search for a re-
definition of North-South relations has now been added a search to rede-
fine those between East and West. There is a need to construct ties other
than those determined by the expansionary logic of a world market al-
ready too accustomed to reducing freedom to the freedom of commercial
expression and citizens' rights to consumer sovereignty.

Solitary Pleasures

As we have already noted, in the redeployment of free enterprise the con-
sumer is the keystone. He or she is at once, as "coproducer," one of the
links in the production process and, as representative of the people-as-
market (peuple-marche), the key to the process of legitimation of the ne-
oliberal conception of society. For it is not a matter of JUSt any con-
sumers, but rather of consumers who are sovereign in their choices in a
free market. Neoliberalism, in its struggle against all forms of control
(except of course its own, those of free enterprise), whether they emanate
from the state or from organized civil society, reveals itself as a form of
neopopulism as well. Thus it experiences the constant need to reaffirm
the representativity of consumers in their role as market shares. It speaks
in their names. Hostage and alibi, this consumer has, indeed, the starrmg
role on the stage of the democratic marketplace; he or she is a "citizen"
of it. The discourse built around the consumer, a consumer free of all at-
tachments and determinations other than his or her own will, claims such
authority that it often becomes a totalizing discourse, one leaving no
place for other issues than those related to consumption. Consumption is
assumed to contain within itself its own explanation and raison d' etre.
This logic, which seeks to rehabilitate the consumer and represents a
new situation in societies subject to the laws of the market, does not facil-
itate the critical apprehension of the different and contradictory theoreti-
cal movements that developed since the early 1980s around the status of
the consumer as receiver or user of the media and of communicating ma-
chines. In an age when the theme of reception is quite widespread, so fre-
quent are the efforts to make us believe that the return to the consumer is
necessarily interesting in itself and constitutes a fundamental break with
the past, that one often forgets to question the reasons for the evolution

of these approaches and the origin of their diversity. To justify the cele-
bration of this return to the consumer and user, however, it does not suf

Medialions and Hybridizations 235

fice to cite a whole series of studies illustrating this phenomenon. For
those who do not wish to dance exclusively to the "reception" tune, it is
necessary to clear up a few ambiguities, and this requires us to return to
t e past.
Who can deny that the problem of reception upset the old-style func-
tionalist research? As Wilbur Schramm admitted in 1983, shortly before
his death: "It Is illuminating to think of communication as a relationship
butit around the exchange of information. The process of exchange is
more likely to resemble a biological than a physical one, to make a differ-
ence in both parties, to change the relationship rather than changing one
partlClpallt, ,27
But it is to Elihu Katz that we should turn for an example of research
that claimed to be innovative in the field of reception studies from a func-
tionalist perspective. In the course of the 1980s, Katz and his collabora-
tors performed a series of investigations in an effort to discern the differ-
ent ways in which receivers of diverse ethnic origins, such as Palestinians
living in Israel, Moroccan Jews, and Americans of Los Angeles, decoded
the television serial Dallas, the product par excellence of a culture sup-
posedly universal in range. Their main observation was that the readings
were very dlverse, and that each reading was a function of the nature of
t e viewer's Implication in the serial, which was related, in turn, to the
manner in which each viewer's culture constructed the role of the viewer
The study in itself combines empiricist attention to detail and a certain
myopla caused by its theoretical poverty.25 From this point of view, the
judicious criticism addressed to Katz by James W. Carey and James Hal-
oran m the late 1970s, when his expertise was sought by the BBC, had
said everything there was to say regarding the merits and failings of this
type of approach.
For this research adopts a conceptual framework that is not so new. It
is the culmination of a long evolution in which two things are at stake
slnce it operates on two fronts. The first is the one opened up in the 1 9SOs
y the theory of the two-step flow, and is directed against the Lasswellian
theory of the media ("Who says what to whom on which channel with
what effect?"). To the question: "What effects do the media produce on
society, groups, and people?," Katz counterposed another interrogative
chain: "What do people, groups, and society do with the media?" This
was the question that became more and more crucial to him beginning in
t e 1 970s, to the point where it fueled a whole current of studies on the
satisfactions of media users, which would be known as "uses and gratifi-
cations." These studies developed the notion of "negotiated reading,"
that Is, a reading or reception in the course of which meaning and the ef-
ects It produces are born of the interaction between the program and the

236 Mediations and Hybridizations

roles assumed by different types of viewers or readers. This new line of
research would have broad repercussions not only in the United States
but also and most notably in the United Kingdom.29
The second front aimed to refute the very idea of power as it had been
developed by various critical traditions. This aim became increasingly
important, as one could not avoid coming to terms with these traditions
in posing the problem of international communication, and also because
Lasswellian visions of the media were in decline. We need not insist on
the disarray experienced by empiricist sociology in the face of the ' dys-
functions" occasioned by the debates on the new order and national
communication policies and the absence of a discourse or analytic frame-
work other than those closely complicit with the neoliberal philosophy of
free flow of information and the free consumer in the free marketÑthe
free fox in the free chicken house.
Yet one may address to Katz's reception studies exactly the same criti-
cisms that Jean-Marie Piemme formulated in 1978, m a book that re-
mains a classic, about the uses and gratifications theory: With Lasswe
as well as Katz," he wrote,
one finds juxtaposed two elements (the media on one side, people,
groups, and society on the other) which are assumed to be au-
tonomous, then one asks about their relation. This clearly means
there was no initial effort to locate the media within the circum-
stances of the social formation. They are resented outside any
structure and appear to engender on people/groups/society an ef-
fect sui generis, whose structural determinations and contradic-
tions are ignored, as if they had nothing to do with the power re a-
tions that give the social formation its particular configuration.
This theory seems oblivious to the fact that the media take part in
social contradictions and that their effects are interventions that
may either comfort or alter the existing balance of forces.

All this has been known for a long time. The novelty resides in the role
demanded of these studiesÑa role they intend to play3'Ñin the current
context of confusion, characterized by the lack of questioning of their
epistemological status. Why continue to speak of power relations be-
tween audiovisual cultures and economies when the way people decode
this supposedly "ecumenical" serial (but not timeless, slnce the producers
of Dallas decided to suspend it in 1991!) proves that they have a formlda-
ble power, that of conferring meaning: here is an argument, drawn from
this type of study, that serves to shunt aside all the issues raised m the
conflictual history of communication, its theories and their uses, ever
since the first concept of communication was forged.

Mediations and Hybridizations 237

Tactics

m:~
Here, there is definitely a break with preceding decades. What is new is
)

238 Mediations and Hybridizations

that the problem of reception and use has become impossible to evade.
Well before it was widely recognized as important, this concern for re-
ception and uses had its pioneers. For example, there was the British au-
thor Richard Hoggart, whose first book, published in 1957, was signifi-
cantly entitled T/~e Uses of Literacy. It was one of the first studies of the
evolution of the culture of the popular classes under the influence of
modern mass culture.34 Hoggart himself belongs to the antipositivist tra-
dition of the study of cultural forms and relations initiated in the 1920s
by F. R. Leavis.
Another venerable tradition of literary research raised questions about
the role of receivers long before the sorcerer's apprentices of communica-
tion. It defined literary work metaphorically as "encounter" (R. Ingar-
den), "dialogue" (M. Bakhtin), "convergence" (H. R. Jauss), or ~interac-
tion" (W. Iser) between the text and the reader.35 Jean-Paul Sartre, whose
role as precursor in the reorientation of literary studies is undeniable,
made the relation between the reader and the text the essential starting
point for answering the question "What Is Literature?" (1947).
The institution of the theme of reception and uses, or of the receiver
and users, as the norm in communication research, took place under the
effect of very different logics. We have already alluded to the industrial
ones. Social logics, insofar as it is possible to separate them from the lat-
ter, refer to the new conditions under which democratic life is organized.
For those who wish not to reduce the problem to an equation of supply
and demand, the theme of the active role of the receiver and user is indis-
sociable from questions raised by citizens organized in civil society about
the possibilities of exercising a real democratic control over the new
flows and new networks. The notion of use concerns not only what one
can do with television programs, but the utilization of all the technologi-
cal tools of the new mode of communication. We are beyond the stage of
posing the problem in the simple and unequivocal terms of state control
over such tools.
It would be illusory to look for a single body of critical knowledge that
systematizes this return to the user. At best one can sketch some traits
that identify the origin of these new hypotheses and distinguish them
clearly from the new empiricist currents.
The point of departure of the new critical theory of social uses is first
of all a position confronting the idea of order and control with the reali-
ty. Its corollary is the idea that this orderÑthat of the state and the mar-
ketÑand its multiple networks can be appropriated and diverted by its
users, and that there is no passive consumption. The new critical thought
on uses and users inevitably returns, then, to a conception of power and
counterpower. If society is made up of apparatuses that produce control

Mradiations and Hybridizations 239

and constraint, adhesion and conformity, it is also made up of discreet
ruses, inexhaustible tactics, subtle reappropriations and evasions,
makeshift constructions, poachings, and unforeseen uses that preserve,
even in submission, the inalienable freedom of the ordinary person, the
"man without qualities," the "common hero," target of all efforts at do-
mestication.

Michel de Certeau, historian, linguist, psychoanalyst, and ethnologist,
made it his project in the late 1970s to advance some hypotheses about
what he called the "invention of everyday life." In counterpoint to the
strategies of Foucault, who analyzed society's networks of surveillance in
Discipline and Punish, de Certeau speaks of "networks of antidisci-
pline," revealed by everyday practices or "ways of doing": those tactics
or "operations" of users that constitute the active process by which, out
of products and norms, they manufacture their own styles. Consumption
becomes the art of using products. Statistical analyses of the time spent in
front of the TV set, or the number of books sold, and content analyses of
broadcasts, tell us little about the receiver, since there is no equivalence

between the product disseminated and the product consumed. One must
thus study the everyday practices of users in a logic of production or ap-
propriation, no longer just in a logic of reproduction.36
Obviously we should not look to a historian for a methodological an-
swer, in the American sense of the term, to the question of how to study
daily practices. Intuitive and poetic, de Certeau's thought does not deliv-
er tools for grasping these indomitable practices and thus it does not
open the door to a control and surveillance of users by revealing pre-
dictable patterns of behavior. This is doubtless one of his virtues, at a
time when the exhaustive study of audiences aims to measure the user's
smallest acts and gestures in order to chart the inputs and outputs of cul-
tural production. De Certeau's importance is elsewhere: it lies in provid-
ing a counterweight to those analyses that privilege invariant factors and
social determinisms, and in reminding us that a common error is to ana-
lyze the effects of power by beginning with power itself, its acts and its
perspectives, rather than with those who are subjected to it.
The trap here is clearly that of underestimating the importance of the
great industrial and financial strategies, as well as the geopolitical stakes
of industrial production of culture and communication. But Michel de
Certeau does not see this as his concern. He leaves that to Foucault,
whom he criticizes for having constructed an overly coherent system,
while nonetheless subscribing to the new perspectives opened up by Fou-
cault's examination of contemporary "technology of observation and
discipline," the organizer of spaces and languages. And since in de
Certeau's work, and contrary to the empiricist approach, the examina
w

240 Mediahons and Hybridizations

tion of practices does not imply a return to social atomismÑhis project
being not psychological, but sociological, involving the study of modes of
action and not the individuals who carry them outÑthere are no grounds
for holding de Certeau responsible for a lack of analysis of the macroso-
cial outer lining of network society. For the person who goes to the
trouble of seeking further, his decisive contribution consists not only in
informing studies of "consumption practices" but also in obliging us to
adopt a different outlook on the formation of apparatuses of mass cultur-
al production.
"Fools imagine," wrote Marcel Proust, "that the large dimensions of
social phenomena are a fine occasion to penetrate further into the human
soul; they should understand, on the contrary, that it is by plunging into
the depths of individuality that they have a chance of understanding these
phenomena. "37
The model of the plural should be sought in the singular: this claim
was also made by Gabriel Tarde, for whom the history of societies re-
peats, on a larger scale, the history of individualsÑagainst a Durkheim
who postulated that the collective is not reducible to the individual.
Nearly a century has passed, and this tension still exists. But the convic-
tion that it is difficult to understand one without the other has at least cut
tracks in the analysis of the supranational social relation, even if it has
not opened broad avenues.

Conclusion:

The Enigma

Every attempt to retrace the history of international communication runs
up against three major stumbling blocks, which also risk interfering with
the reading of works on this subject.
First, there is the polysemy of the word "communication," torn as it is
between the domains of leisure and work, between the spectacular and
the ordinary, between culturalist and technicist visions, or tossed about
between a meaning confined to the area of media activity and a totalizing

meaning that elevates it into one of the basic organizing principles of
modern society. Despite the centripetal force of the media representation
of the phenomenon, it is tending more and more to the latter. In propos-
ing to analyze the how and why of the different contents and uses as-
signed to the concept of "communication," this book shows what con-
crete issues were at stake in the various definitions in the course of its
history, and why they continue to be so: This history of the concept leads
us to conclude that only an analysis placed under the sign of culture can
today account for those stakes. Culture is understood here as the collec-
tive memory that makes communication possible between members of a
historically situated community, creating among its members a commu-
nity of meaning (the expressive function), allowing them to adapt to a
natural environment (the economic function), and finally, giving them
the ability to construct rational argument about the values implicit in the
prevailing form of social relations (the rhetorical function, that of legiti-
mation/delegitimation). These are the three dimensions of culture that
the philosopher Jurgen Habermas brings together under the trilogy lan
' guage, labor, power.
! Next, there is the danger of allowing oneself to be enclosed within the
"international," just as some, at the other end of the spectrum, risk be

241

)
v

Michaels Eric. "Hollywoodlconography: AWaripiri
Reading. ' Bad Aborhinal Art: Tradition, Media. and
Technoloaical Horkons. (Volume 3 of Theorv out of
Bounds, Sandra Buckley, Michael Hardt, and Brian
Massumi, editors.) University of Minnesota Press, 1994
(Regents of the University of Minnesota). Pages 81-96.

iIoHywood IcQnog~phy A Waripiri

ReadinL

[ 1 9 8 7 1

ISOLATED ABORIGINAL Australians in the Central Desert region, where tradi-
tional language and culture have survived a traumatic hundred-year contact
period, began to view Hollywood videotapes in the early 1980s and are now begin-
ning to receive television from the new national satellite, AUSSAT. This situation
raises many issues for humanistic research, including questions about the ability of
the traditional culture to survive this new electronic invasion. I spent three years
living with Waripiri Aborigines of the Yuendumu community undergoing this
imposed transition, partly engaged in applied research and development leading to
the birth of an indigenous community television station that challenged govern-
ment policy and licensing. In the process, I noted what many other field-workers
in nonliterate, Third World, and indigenous enclaves are recognizing: that elec-
tronic media have proved remarkably attractive and accessible to such people
where often print and literacy have not.
We are used to selling literacy as a prosocial, prodevelopment
medium. We are used to denigrating video and television as antisocial and repres-
sive. In this essay1 I want to examine these biases and their sources in an effort to
see if our thinking on these matters can't be brought more in line with indigenous
peoples' own capabilities and preferences, to lead to a perspective that might prove
more helpful and less protectionist.
This is of theoretical interest as well, because we have come to

regard the Western world's media development sequence as somehow natural:
from orality to literacy, print, film, and now electronics. But Aborigines and other
"developing" peoples do not conform to this sequence, and produce some very dif-
ferent media histories. For philosophers and historians such as Ong, Innis, or even
Levi-Strauss, who posit special equivalencies between oral and electronic society,
these ethnographic cases ought to prove especially revealing.

The F-ll-cy ¥f Unilln-al Fvelntien ef Culturo
Despite our best efforts, anthropologists have been unable to undo the racist dam-
age of the unilineal theory of cultural evolution developed by our discipline's
founding fathers. The Victorian passion to classify encouraged Edward Burnett
Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan, for example, to borrow from Darwinian biology
a vulgar theory of evolution and apply it to the very different problem of cultural
variation. This produced the idea that people too unlike the Victorian English rep-
resented less evolved stages in a single great chain of culture.
This thinking was then used to justify both a dismissal of the
value of non-Western cultures and the evangelical urge to civilize heathens and
savages. The reduetio ad absurdum of the fallacy was realized by the 1940s in Nazi
cosmology. By then, anthropology had well and truly repudiated the theory of uni-
linealism and had produced evidence of the authenticity and distinctness of cul-
tural types. The theory of cultural relativism that replaced unilinealism now
seems naive, but its basic tenetÑthat cultures do not arise in a single historical se-
quenceÑremains established in the canon of anthropological thought. This revi-
sion has not been conveyed to the popular mind, however, or even much to other
disciplines. (The problem is a bit like Lamarskism in biology. Despite the evi-
dence, and the theoretical incompatibility with accepted theory, the possibility of
inheritance of acquired traits persists, even in biology textbooks that sometimes
talk as if the giraffe got its long neck from stretching for leaves; certainly, almost
everybody else talks this way.)
Evidence of the persistence of unilinealism is everywhere, from
popular thinking about "primitives" (aided and abetted by the etymology of the
very word), to Third World development agendas, to a remarkable variety of
humanist scholarship. It matters not whether the value-loading is Rousseauesque
romanticism, or native advancement, or simple garden variety racism. The point is
that very few people believe what anthropology teaches: that indigenous, small-
scale traditional societies are not earlier (or degenerate) versions of our own. They
are rather differing solutions to historical circumstances and environmental partic

82.3

ulars that testify to the breadth of human intellectual creativity and its capacity for
symbolization.
In the case of Aboriginal Australians, it may be said that com-
parative isolation from the network of world cultures for perhaps 40,000 years
encouraged a continuous cultural sequence such as is to be found nowhere else. By
contrast, modern European culture is assumed to have recent points of disjuncture
(the industrial revolution, the world wars, the electronic revolution), so that cer-
tain of our own cultural forms may prove only a few generations old. If Aborigines
have had 40,000 years (or more) to elaborate a continuous cultural tradition, cer-
tainly there must be respects in which this degree of elaboration produces results
of extraordinary value. We can hardly justify a claim that Europeans proved more
sophisticated than the Aborigines, unless we take the technology and the will to
subjugate as privileged measures of human values.
Unilinealism surely persists in our theories of media history.
The idea that media are either signals or engines of cultural sequence is familiar at
least since Innis and McLuhan. Both, in accounting for European media, simplify
histories of development to a unilineal historical causality for the West. And both
are guilty of generalizing from here to some universal evolutionary sequence
using "primitive" societies in curious and usually uninformed ways to illustrate
their points. But the fault cannot be attributed to these scholars alone. The very

commonest terms we use to distinguish our civilization from othersÑ"historical"
from "prehistorical"Ñare semantically loaded with precisely the same ammuni-
tion, and refer to writing as the pivotal event in this presumed sequence. It seems
telling that when we searched for a new, nonpejorative term to describe the dis-
tinction that would contain contemporary nonwriting cultures as well as ancient
ones in a class contrastive to our own, "literate" and "preliterate" gained the widest
currency. Attempts to unbias the matter by substituting "nonliterate" never really
caught on. And the descriptor "oral," itself mostly unexamined, became confused
with "tribal," a word whose technical meaning is inappropriate for many of the
groups so classified.
All these terms underscore Western society's perhaps Judeo-
derived cultural emphasis on our own writing skills and reveal our opinion that
people who can't write are backward. This very deeply rooted conceptualization is
now being challenged as we move from writing to electronic coding as the central
symbolizing system of our age. Marshall McLuhan (1962) looked for precedents
and claimed that this new age would make us more akin to "preliterate," "tribal"
societies. And whether the public read McLuhan or not, it began to panic, aware

,)
84,5

that something was happening to our reliance on reading. Illiteracy rates appeared
to be rising among our own young. The very fabric of culture and society was
being sundered, and we risked degenerating into some new form of savagery.
One problem with this literate myopia has been that we
haven't paid much attention to what other people do instead of writing, and how
information is processed, stored, transmitted, shared, or received in its absence.
This paper offers a reconsideration of the sequence of media history in a society
that doesn't write, or at least has been believed not to.

Aboriginal Auatralian ~-el
Contemporary Aboriginal Australians have generally resisted several generations
of concerted literacy teaching, first from Bible-toting missionaries and then from
an "enlightened" school system. Wherever their traditional law, language, and cul-
rure are viable in Australia, literacy rates remain well below 25 percent, even when
bilingual and special education services have been available. I believe this implies
that there is something essential to cultural maintenance associated with not writ-
ing, which is yet to be understood. But in this same population, video recorders
have appeared in the last few years, and during my three years of fieldwork I was
able to observe the rapid adoption of electronic media by people who rejected
print. This provides us with the intriguing but perhaps no longer so unusual situa-
tion of a people's moving rapidly from Uoral" to electronic society, but bypassing
print literacy. Attention to the particulars of both the traditional system and the
accommodation to the imposed one offers insights into the limitations of our
unexamined theories of unilineal media evolution.
Traditional Aboriginal society did not employ, and presumably
did not discover, alphabetic writing. It is probably accurate to classify this culture
as "oral," and elsewhere I have discussed at some length some of the nature and
consequences of this central feature of the society (Michaels 1985). Yet Aborigines
were not without resources for codifying experience and inscribing it in various
media.
The Waripiri people of the Yuendumu community with whom
I worked are noted particularly for a rich graphic design tradition described to us
at length by Nancy Munn (1970, 1973). This design system extends throughout
the central region of Australia and across most of the Western Desert, although
symbols and techniques vary in particulars from community to community. It
appears that the northern coastal communities employed an appreciably different
design system, which may correspond partly with the classification of many groups

in this area as comprising a language family distinct from most of the rest of the

continent. Graphic systems in the southeast quadrant are apparently defunct,
along with most of the languages, so that rock art and artifacts contain suggestive
clues but probably are insufficient for reconstructing the system as a whole, com-
pared with the opportunity to observe the system in full use, as among the
Waripiri. It will be difficult to generalize accurately from the Waripiri example,
but I suspect that the basic graphic system described for them will prove to apply
fairly widely in general outline to many Aboriginal societies.

Warlpiri Gr-plulca: A Traditional Modium
Waripiri design is a form of inscription that operates quite differently from more
familiar writings. It neither provides phonological symbols that combine to record
speech (alphabets), or pictorial glyphs that denote specified objects or ideas
(picto/ideographs). If anything, it poses a sort of mediation between the two. It
does provide pictographic symbols that are recombined to express ideas and
things, but unlike Oriental ideographic writing, and more like alphabets, it
abstracts elements so combined and reduces them to comparatively few. Attempts
to provide lexicons that associate the symbols with discrete words or even with
broad semantic domains prove unsuccessful and ultimately misleading, as Munn
seems to have discovered.
The system relies on a fairly discrete but polysemous inventory
of graphic symbols: circles, dots, lines, semicircles (additional representational
depictions of a specific tree leaf or animal body can be includedÑattempts by
reviewers such as Dubinskas and Traweek 11984] to treat Munn's corpus as an
exhaustive generative system are incorrect). These are combined in ground paint-
ings (made of soils, ochres, feathers, flowers), body decoration (ochres, pipeclay,
animal fats), utilitarian objects and weapons, and special ceremonial objects
(boards, stones, sticks), as well as being painted and carved on caves and rock &ces.
In recent years, traditional designs have been translated to acrylics and applied to
canvas, objects, and murals, and women have developed a batik technique. Most of
my experience of Waripiri graphics comes from assisting in the formative stages of
this transition to modern media for sale to contemporary art markets.
The distinctive features of Waripiri graphics are many: I want
to focus on some of the features that contrast this system to contemporary writing
systems. This is not the approach taken by Munn, or more recently by her critics.
The grammatical structures and social-psychological functions of the design sys-
tem for the Waripiri that are discussed by these authors are accepted here as

evidence of the richness of that system, which can support various interpretations.
Instead, I want to ask, as Havelock (1982) might: What kind of writing system is
this? And I will conclude that it is as close to what we call writing (logo/ideo-
graphic or alphabetic) as you can get without compromising the authority of
human speakers and interpretersÑthat is, it is a writing in the service of orality.
Havelock would call Waripiri graphics solipsistic: they record ideas rather than
speech, are evocative rather than denotative, and do not assure a given reading.
Unfortunately, such systems do not attract his attention except to remark that
others have been most careless in their classification and attentions to such sys-
tems, a point well taken.
Some differences between Waripiri graphics and other writing
systems are immediately and visibly apparent. For example, both Western alpha-
bets and pictographic writing systems arrange symbols in linear sequence and are
biased toward surfaces, such as scrolls and book pages, which frame and support
the cumulative string so produced. For Waripiri, the relationship between the
symbol and the surface is more creative. The painter-writer arranges the designs in
a manner that relates them to the shape of the object, body, or ground contour on
which they are applied. Perhaps this is why Waripiri graphics get reviewed as art,
not writing. But this attention to the inscription surface is appropriate because the
contents typically inscribed are Dreaming stories, which are the myths accounting
for the land, its objects, and its people. This is like bricolage in Levi-Strauss's
(1966) sense, where components enlisted in the service of an abstract recombina-
tive system still retain their associations with their origins. Waripiri graphics
might be called a Umeta-bricolage" because the inscribing media, the messages,
and the surfaces to be inscribed are all meaningful bricolage elements of a dynamic
intertextuality.
Another way to describe these graphic constructions is as maps.
As stories of the landscape they are also images of that landscape. To this extent,
spatial relationships of the symbols are constrained by a compositional and topo-
graphical system that the artist must respect. For a painting to be deemed a
"proper law one," its elements must be in a correct proxemic arrangement. Scale
and relationship are conventional, but obviously in terms quite distinct from
Western linear writing.
The adage "the map is not the territory" may not prove accu-
rate for the Waripiri. Where the land, a rock face, or even a body is embellished,
the result sometimes may be an articulation of actual or perceived features of the

thing itself. This is one area in which the transition to portable painted surfaces
like canvas took some working out. Early acrylic paintings by traditional artists, for
example, do not reduce large designs in scale to smaller surfaces. To achieve com-
plexiq in a painting, very large canvases had to be provided. Small canvases tended
to depict what proved to be only small sections of large design complexes, like a
single window in a computer spreadsheet. Only after some time and experience is
an artist likely to scale down large designs to smaller, marketable surfaces.
Because the "icon," the inscription medium, and the surface
are all meaningful semiotic elements to be considered in the reading of Waripiri
graphics, it begins to appear that the system contains too many functioning semi-
otic levels to achieve either the denotation of pictographs or the abstract creativity
of alphabets. But there are more levels than this. Eight are listed by Dubinskas and
Traweek. (The additional ones are sociolinguistic matters of the performance
event in which the design is produced and used.) We have now a problem like the
one Bateson (1972) considers exemplified by the croquet game in Alioe in Wonzler-
land: If the balls, the wickets, and the mallets are all independently motivated mov-
ing elements, the game is too unpredictable to play. It is therefore an organic sys-
tem, not a mechanical one, he concludes. Writing, if it is to accomplish the
functions it achieves in the Western world, must be a mechanical system, rule-
bound and predictable. Reading must become automatic, transparent, or, as Have-
lock says, "the purely passive instrument of the spoken word." The system must

detach itself from its human author and operate more or less equivalently for all
literate users. This is precisely what Waripiri graphics do not attempt. Waripiri
designs remain attached to their authors, as their property, and to paint another's
design may be regarded as theft of a particularly troublesome kind.
To call the owners of these designs their authors is not pre-
cisely correct, however. Waripiri cosmology is staunchly conservative. It insists
that truth preexists human apprehension. The creation and recreation of the world
is an established eternal process; the stories, songs, dances, and designs that con-
tain and explain these truths are likewise unchanging. What one paints or sings or
dances is what your fathers and mothers and their fathers and mothers painted
danced, and sang before you (although one may acquire additional information
about these truths through revelation or exchange). Your rights to do the same are
determined by your position in an elaborately structured system of kin, itself
handed down along with these expressive arts from the ancestors themselves.
In terms of what we know of cybernetic systems, this is impos
sible, a prescription for total cultural entropy. To explain how novelty enters the
system, so that it can respond to environmental circumstances and remain viable,
we have to step outside the explanations the system offers us.
Ethnology takes this vantage point when it notes ways in which
the system does respond to change. Hale (1984) has described how pedagogic
events may permit creativity. Wild (1975) has discovered ethnomusicological
equivalents. Morphy (1983) has described the public display of secret designs.
Rose (1984) has documented a historical account of Captain Cook becoming a leg-
end, and I have analyzed elsewhere elements of a history transforming to Dream-
ing construction in which videotape has become involved (Michaels and Kelly
1984). What we have not so readily pursued is how our own activity in inscribing
these in literate print may prove subversive of these traditions.
It is precisely the point that Waripiri graphics are a writing
system that does not subvert the authority of living people, and does not permit
the identification of historical change as Western literacy does. Waripiri graphics
oppose publication and public access. They do this partly by limiting denotation,
operating instead as an evocative mnemonic, recalling stories without asserting any
authorized text or privileged reading. They also do this by restricting access to
both the production and viewing of designs. In the "sand stories" described by
Munn, which are women's casual accounting of dreams, daily life, and folk tales,
the public designs in this ephemeral, shifting medium are mostly illustrative and
serve as entertainment and to introduce children to the system. In ritual, sacred
and often secret designs are applied to bodies, objects, and the ground, and the
rules governing the construction and viewing of these designs are highly con-
strained, and permit less creativity. Most of these designs are obliterated following
the ritual performance. Kolig (1982) observes that the secret designs painted on
bodies may remain dimly visible in camp for days afterwards, undecipherable to
the uninitiated, but testimony to the existence of secret lore nonetheless. It would
seem that the most secret designs, those inscribed on sacred boards (tfuringa) and
rock faces are also the most permanent. They are tended, and rock paintings and
boards are ritually renewed cyclically. These are the only permanent texts, and
their locations are rigorously guarded. For uninitiated or otherwise inappropriate
people to view these, even accidentally, is punishable by death. Other than these,
Waripiri graphics are mentally stored and sociologically guarded, and emerge only
in ceremonial and storytelling performances.
These constraints on ownership and meaning become clear
when, in the Yuendumu artists' association studio, we try to identify paintings in

w
~D

preparation for sales. Usually, people refuse to provide the stories for any paint-
ings but their own, or sometimes for designs owned by their kin group. However,
understanding our relative naivete and the economic incentive, sometimes when
the painter is out of the communiq another senior man or woman may try to pro-
vide a story for the painting. Remarkably, they sometimes fail, and more often
come up with a reading that proves to be at variance with the "correct" version
provided later by the painter.
For a full, "correct" version, a male painter will assemble other

senior men of his patrimoiety associated with the same or adjacent land as himself,
and negotiate the interpretation along with a set of men from the opposite patri-
moieq who maintain rights as "witnesses" or caretakers (kurdungurluÑsee Nash
1982), but not performers or owners of the story.
Glenn (1963), in an insightful but overlooked note, provides an
explanation. Comparing Munn's early reports of Waripiri iconography to UState
Department graphics," he suggests that Waripiri symbols seem much like the
unique shorthand that translators and state department staff take of speeches dur-
ing top-level meetings. These provide a means of recall of speech texts to be tran-
scribed shordy after the event and prove quite accurate. But despite great similari-
ties in the symbols used, rarely could a reporter reconstruct a speech from
another's notes. Even the author might have difficuly as time elapsed. The differ-
ence between these idiolectic glyphs and Waripiri symbols is partly in the collec-
tiviq of the Waripiri system, where shared meanings are emergent in the interpre-
tive negotiations that occur in graphic display events very much more than in the
text itself.

Munn described these iconographs as devices for mediating
symbolically between essential dualities expressed in Waripiri cosmology, includ-
ing subject/object, individual/collectiviq, and especially Dreaming Time / present
time. In the last instance, my analysis suggests there is more than a structuralist
abstraction operating here: this writing system functionally reconciles a conserva-
tive ideology, where things are always the same, with the contradictory lived evi-
dence of a changing world. If this proves true, then the changes imposed on Ab-
origines since European invasion must present the most fundamental challenge to
this system, and we begin to suspect that the dismal literacy rates represent more
than just a failure of effort or will on the part of teachers or students. The failure
of literacy might be seen as a resistance as wellÑnot to change, but to a threat to
the culture's capaciq to manage change.
Certainly, many senior people feel this way. They complain
w

90,1

about the school and about writing. They say it makes the kids "cheeky," so they
don't listen to their elders. Especially interesting is the attitude of the middle-aged
people who succeeded at the school in the 1950s and 1960s, before the bilingual
program was established. They say that the bilingual program is holding up the
kids, wasting their time with Waripiri when they should be learning English, pre-
sumably as they did, usually by rote. (This contradicts all of the evaluation and
testing evidence collected at Yuendumu, which demonstrates that English is being
learned better and more quickly in the bilingual program.) Because this generation
now operates in a uniquely powerful role in the community as spokespeople and
leaders of the Council and other European-inspired institutions (and thereby com-
mands and channels substantial resources), they have been capable of engineer-
ing a considerable political challenge to bilingual education. The fact is, they
themselves usually cannot read Waripiri. These community leaders often are
themselves in an anomalous cultural situation, and probably take the brunt of Uciv-
ilization"Ñennui, alcoholism, corruptionÑharder than anyone else. But from a
distance, what we observe is a classical Aboriginal situation: generations in compe-
tition with each other. What is new is that the resource that the sociey afforded
the most senior people to controlÑintellectual property in the form of Dreaming
LawÑis now subverted by the intellectual property accessible to younger people,
through the medium of literacy.

TV ¥nd Vld-e
In the last few years, another medium of inscribing and accessing information has
entered Waripiri life: video and television. Within a year of the first VCR coming
to Yuendumu (and sufficient tape-rental services opening in Alice Springs to sup-
port these), videotape penetration was effectively total in the community. Only
nine VCRs were reported in Aboriginal camps in 1983, for a population of 1,000,
but these meant that essentially every extended family had access to at least one
machine and could view in appropriate groupings, respecting avoidance restric-
tions and other traditional constraints on congregating. (When similar contents

were screened as films at the school or church 25 years earlier, mass viewing
required violations of traditional avoidance and association rules, which produced
considerable stress and often ended in chaos or fighting. This hardly encouraged
the acquisition of cinema literacy.)
My Aboriginal associate and I (Michaels and Japanangka 1984)
surveyed the situation and discovered, among other things, that it was costing at
least $5,000 annually to maintain a VCR here, which exceeded annual per capita

income. The difficulties of equipment purchase, maintenance, and program supply
in desert camps 300 km. along a mostly dirt road from the nearest repair or
tape-rental shop proved enormous. Indeed, we found communities without elec-
triciq where ingenious generator installations were rigged up for the first time,
not for lights or heat but to play video. By the summer of 1985, the glow of the
cathode ray tube had replaced the glow of the campfire in many remote Aboriginal
settlements. There could be no question of motivation. Of all the introduced
Western technologies, only rifles and four-wheel-drive Toyotas had achieved such
acceptance.
The situation was reported with predictable alarm by the press,
but also by Aborigines themselves (noting no contradiction in the fact that many of
the most articulate objectors were themselves video-watchers/owners). People
were predicting "culturecide" and claimed that Aborigines appeared helpless to
resist this new invasion. The analogy to alcohol was quickly made, and the
received wisdom was that the electronic damage was already done, the pristine cul-
ture ruined, and so forth. These "facts" were used with great ingenuiq to support
a wide and contradictory array of agendas, schemes, and proposals, none, as far as I
could tell, having much to do with the actual situation.
During this time I was watching Aborigines view video and
watching them make video. It became quite clear that here was a situation where
the bankruptcy of the "effects" fallacy was amply demonstrated. From my observa-
tions, a very different "uses and gratifications" picture emerged than the passive
victimization of Aboriginal audiences suggested by the alarmists.
One kind of insight was available by asking my associates what
any given videotape was "about," in the most usual, conversational way. This pro-
duced what were to me quite extraordinary readings of Hollywood programs I
thought I was already familiar with. Additional evidence came from school chil-
dren and creative writing exercises. Another kind of evidence came from assisting
in the production of indigenous Waripiri video programs along the lines of Worth
and Adair's (1973) studies of Navajo filmmaking, and analyzing both production
style and product (see Michaels and Kelly 1984). The evidence from these two
sources proved complementary and permitted the beginnings of a theory of Ab-
original interpretation of imported television. Here, I will summarize some of the
elements of this theory, which I have treated more fully elsewhere (Michaels
1987g).
The most suggestive finding was that Aboriginal people were
unfamiliar with the conventions, genres, and epistemology of Western narrative

92,3

fiction. They were unable to evaluate the truth value of Hollywood cinema, to dis-
tinguish, for example, documentary from romance. This may be because all Warl-
piri stories are true, and the inscription and interpretation processes that assure
their preservation also ensure their truthfulness (or at least engineer a consensus
on what is true at each re-creation, which amounts to the same thing). Thus I was
observing the impact of fiction on Aborigines much more than the impact of tele-
vision per se.
Comparisons between Waripiri story form and imported video
fictions demonstrated that in many instances, content (what is supplied in the nar-
rative) and context (what must be assumed) are so different from one system to the
other that they might be said to be reversed. For example, Waripiri narrative will
provide detailed kinship relationships between all characters as well as establishing
a kinship domain for each. When Hollywood videos fail to say where Rocky's
grandmother is, or who's taking care of his sister-in-law, Waripiri viewers discuss
the matter and need to fill in what for them is missing content. By contrast, per-
sonal motivation is unusual in Aboriginal story; characters do things because the
class (kin, animal, plant) of which they are members is known to behave this way.
This produces interesting indigenous theories, for example, of national character
to explain behavior in Midnight Express or The A-Team. But it is equally interesting
that it tends to ignore narrative exposition and character development, focusing
instead on dramatic action (as do Aboriginal stories themselves).
Violence, for instance, described by some as TV's cheap indus-
trial ingredient overlaid on narratives mainly to bring viewers' attention to the
screen for ultimately commercial purposes, is for Aboriginal viewers the core of
the story. The motivation and character exposition that the European viewer is
expected to know, to explain why someone was mugged or robbed or blown up, is
missing. It is more likely in Aboriginal accounts to be supplied by what we would
consider supernatural reasons, consistent with the reasons misfortunes befall peo-
ple in Aboriginal cosmology.
These brief examples should make it clear that it will be very
difficult to predict the effects of particular television contents on traditional Ab-
original audiences without a well-developed theory of interpretation. To advance a
theory of interpretation, it may be helpful to consider now what kind of writing
system television is that makes it so accessible and attractive to these people whose
traditional preference was for writing systems of the sort explained above. An anal-
ysis of the videotapes the Waripiri made themselves provides some insight.
Waripiri videotape is at first disappointing to the European

observer. It seems unbearably slow, involving long landscape pans and still takes
that seem semantically empty. Much of what appears on screen, for better or
worse, might easily be attributed to naive filmmaking. Finally, the entire corpus of
300 hours of tape shot at Yuendumu is all documentary-type "direct cinema." The
only exceptions, when events were constructed and people performed expressly for
the camera, were the result of my intervention for experimental purposes.
Yet Waripiri audiences view these tapes with great attention
and emotion, often repeatedly, beyond what could be expected from a fascination
with "home movies." If this is attributable to novelq, it has yet to wear off in the
three years I've been involved. In fact, the limits to some tapes' lifespan are the
limits of the lifespan of the characters. A mortuary rule prohibiting the mention of
the names of dead people now applies as well to their recorded images, which
means that when a tape contains pictures of someone deceased, that tape is no
longer shown.
Producers and viewers will describe the tape, its purposes and
meanings, in ways not immediately apparent from the recorded images themselves.
For example, proper videotape production for a particular story may require the
presence of several families including many people. But not only do most of these
people not appear on the tape, but a proportion of them (related to the on-screen
"owner" of the story through the mother's patrilineage) must not appear on
screen. They may, however, operate the camera. This is consistent with equivalent
rules in ceremonial performance. But what attracts our attention is that everybody
seems to know how that tape was made and whether these rules were observed,
and therefore if the tape is a "proper" and "true" story, without any apparent evi-
dence on the tape itself. Similarly, what are to the European observer semantically
empty landscape pans are explained by Aboriginal producers and viewers as full of

meaning. The camera in fact traces "tracks" or locations where ancestors, spirits,
or historical characters traveled. The apparently empty shot is quite full of life and
history to the Aboriginal eye. The electronic inscription process may be said to be
operating for the Waripiri in a way not unlike their graphic system, providing
mnemonic, evocative symbols amenable to interpretation and historical accuracy
when viewed in the proper social and cultural context.
Video-viewing is a very active interpretive social event, partic-
ularly in groups, made possible by private ownership of VCRs. In fact, ownership
of VCRs is not quite private in the European sense, and our early survey deter-
mined that these machines were corporate purchases and circulated along tradi-
tional exchange/obligation routes, usually within families. This means that viewing
w

liD

groups, as described above, are appropriate assemblages of kin, and provide a suit-
able setting for events of social interpretation, not unlike what was described for
Waripiri artists explaining dheir paintings. One interesting difference between
groups viewing Waripiri productions and dhose viewing European ones is the
placement of the elders. With the former, elders sit toward the front, turned half
around to interpret to the younger people. With Hollywood videos, the children
sit in front, often interpreting and explaining to their elders.

ÑwliDg
Waripiri Aborigines have perhaps discovered some comfortable analogies between
their experience of video production and viewing and their own traditional graphic
system. For Waripiri viewers, Hollywood videos do not prove to be complete,
authoritative texts. Rather, they are very partial accounts requiring a good deal of
interpretive activity on the part of viewers to supply contents as well as contexts
with which to make these stories meaningful. When home video made it possible
for Waripiri to control the place and membership of viewing groups, it became
possible to assemble dhe small, interpretive communities that are associated with
other performances in which stories are told and their associated graphics dis-
played. At this point, video-viewing became a most popular and persuasive camp
activity.
By contrast, reading and literature did not. While this article
has not expanded a dheory of literacy except by contrast to Waripiri graphics, a
historical point is worth making. Current literary criticism now questions the
notion that there are correct or even privileged readings of literary texts; reader-
centered criticism claims that readers will make diverse interpretations. But the
Waripiri were introduced to literature through that most privileged of texts, the
Christian Bible, by missionaries who took the Calvinist position that every word
therein had one and only one Ucommonsense" meaning. Thus literature may well
be associated by Aborigines with a dogmatism, a certitude, a sense of revealed and
inscribed truth that would prove subversive of their own Dreaming history and
law. That history and law required a different mode of writing to maintain the
continuity of its authority.
The evidence from Waripiri graphics and Waripiri video proves
useful to the reexamination of the "oral/electronic" analogy proposed by my media
historians. It would be important in this reexamination to note first that some
"oral" societies, for example the Waripiri, do have writing of a particular sort: a
writing subservient to, and in the service of, oral performance and living authori

,,1

94,5

ties. The writings that became the source of Western literacy are distinguished
functionally from "oral writing" in that they subverted and replaced orality as the
interpreting mode of symbolization for socieq.
We may now question whether written texts are m fact so
authoritative as we have been used to considering them. But we raise dhis question
at a time when anodber inscription system competes for centrality in our informa-
tion processing and imaginative symbolizing: electronics. It seems particularly
interesting that this new inscription process is proving more accessible, and per-
haps less culturally subversive, to people in those remaining enclaves of oral tradi-

tion. The most useful first question to ask may be: "What about their writing sys-
tems is like electronic writing?", rather than UHow is their socieq like ours?"
At least one result of this kind of inquiry is to suggest some
useful considerations for dealing with commercial video narratives and emergent
television genres. Although historically the sources for plot and character are
found in earlier novel and literary forms, Waripiri viewers, and perhaps now many
others, put video fictions to quite different uses and make quite different sense of
them. What Waripiri viewers require is a good deal of visual and visceral action, a
rich familial and kinship context, and a means of combining these into a classifica-
tory universe whose truth is partly in the structures they can produce with these
elements and partly in the opportunities dhe texts provide for negotiation and
social discourse. As Western television develops its own conventions, themes, and
genres, reaching out for the vastest pancultural (or acultural) mass audiences, it is
clearly offering more of these kinds of materials to its viewers. To the horror of
literacy-biased critics, it is stripping away cultural denotation, culture-specific
motivations and psychologies, and their place in character development. Its com-
mitment to "inscribed truth" is gone. Indeed, we might seem to be realizing Levi-
Strauss's prophecy:

This universe made up of meanings no longer appears to us as a retrospeetive witness of a time
when: ". . . Ie ciel sur la terre marchait et respirait dans un peuple de dieux, " and wbich
the poet evokes only for the purpose [of askingl whether it is to be regretted. This time is now
restored to us, thanks to the diswrery of a universe of information where the laws of savage thought
reign once more: "heaven " too, "walking on earth " among a population of transmitters
and reeeivers whose messages, w while in transmission, oonstitute objeets of the physical world and
be grasped from without and within. 2

That video now proves acceptable and accessible in a way that
alphabetic literature did not could prove to be partly a transitional feature of Ab

origines' recent encounter with the medium. Waripiri-produced video may pre-
serve these features, if its utlique properties are recognized and encouraged (a dif-
ficult proposition when overzealous "professional" trainers intercede, and media
institutions force competition between indigenous and imported programs). It is
likely that Waripiri people will develop greater sophistication in European genres
and the interpretation of imported narrative fiction that will bring them closer to
European readings. In so doing, it may be that the "gaps" I have identified will fill
up, and the medium will become more denotative and less evocative and, finally,
less Waripiri.
It could prove promising that the most popular genres appear
to be action/adventure, soaps, musicals, and slapstick. Whatever our educated
palates may think of these forms, they have advantages in the context of this
analysis. As the least character-motivated, most formulaic fictions, they may
encourage active interpretation and cross-culturally varied readings. The trend in
popular TV and international video marketing continues to be in favor of those
entertainments in which universal familial relationships are highlighted, action is
dominant, and culture-specific references are either minimal or unnecessary for
the viewer's enjoyment. From this perspective, it would seem difficult to see in the
introduction of imported video and television programs the destruction of Ab-
original culture. Such a claim can only be made in ignorance of the strong tradi-
tions and preferences in graphics, the selectivity of media and contents, and the
strength of interpretation of the Waripiri. Such ignorance arises best in unilineal
evolutionism.

w
.

the higher realms of culture bask in redemption, the
lower depths are covered in shame.
Phantasms are to be found not only in the fictions,
images and sounds of popular culture; they inexorably
attach themselves to the way we talk, label, valorise or
dismiss this culture. That is why, alongside the pieces that
focus on specific movies, episodes of TV series, genres or
trends, I have included several essays on cultural criticism
itself as it is practised in the mainstream media - on the
ways that these slippery terms of quality, popular and
trash are constantly, strategically reordered. On a more
general plane of popular consciousness, I have endeav-
ored to trace some of the widespread, topical ideas that
gripped the public, media sphere - from political cor-
rectness and the beauty myth to sexual harassment and
the dysfunctional family- that inevitably found their way,
in various convoluted forms, into films and TV shows.
When Barthes wrote Mythologies, his target was the
myths of his time and society- the underlying ideologies
that presented themselves to people as natural, but were
yin fact highly artificial and constructed. His project of
demystifying or exposing these mythologies was a politi-
cal, quasi-marxist one; the essential enemy, for Barthes,
being the bourgeois norm. Surveying popular culture in
the early 1990s from my very specific vantage point, I am
not so certain what the norm is, or who my enemies really
are. For me, popular culture is a somewhat crazy forlna-
tion, as full of oddities and excesses as dominating ide-
ologies and oppressive value systems. Phantasms alwavs
cut (at least) two ways- they reach backward, nostalgi-
cally, for a lost point of order, while betraying radical
desires for anything different from or better than the
present. The dreams and drives that animate our culttlle
are tense, contradictoly, volatile, dramatic. To make
sense of these phantasms, one has to dive into thelll-
and to find, or lose, oneself: there.

L.,

1V TIME TUNNEL

Martin, Adnan. "TV Time Tunnel." Phantasms.
McPhee Gnbble Publishers, 1994 (Adnan Marfin).
Pages 7-16.

n November 1991, the Museum of Contemporary
_ _ Art in Sydney began an exhibition called 7V l imes,
which subsequently toured the country. The theme of the
exhibition was thirty-five years of watching television in
Australia. Its focus was not really the history of TV, but
its viewing: it was a show of memorabilia, fan magazines,
colourful wheels from famous game shows, old TV sets,
and huge, luridly glossy mug shots of the medium's stars
(courtesy of 7V Week magazine). I was one of several writ-
ers asked to contribute to the exhibition's catalogue. I
had no particular brief or format to follow, only a broad
topic: the etfect of American IV on Australian culture.
Whell I received lhe t;nisllect catalogue, I was shocked
to realise that virtually all contributors had, completely
in(lel)elldel-ltly and probably unconsciously, whatever
their specilic SUi)jt'Cl, produced a piece or writing per-
lectly witllin lhe bourldaries of a hitherto unknown

gerll e, that of the TV nlelllory. Writing about 15V, it
seems, natlIrally calls f ol-tll a Stl eam of tormative

7
w

PHANTASMS
........................

childhood memories, a telescoped life story, a chronology
of key TV moments, and a passionate statement of one's
personal critical position as formed in, through and
against this stream of mass mediated experience. What
follows is my TV memory.
When I was in Form 6 at a Catholic boys' school in
1976, all the smart kids loved Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Eagerly banding together the morning after each broad-
cast, they would retell scenes, recite lines, imitate ges-
tures. They were the true cultural elite of the school; as
fiercely as they revelled in absurdist British culture (they
were Goons fans as well), they already knew how to heap
scorn on 'American trash': pop songs, TV shows, films. In
the years to come, one member of this Python fan club
became a prolific and respected poet; another flirted
briefly with the Brotherhood before opting for a career
in TV news.
I didn't mind Monty Python as a kid, but I was never
invited into the inner sanctum of this schoolyard elite.
My sense of the unnegotiable difference between myself
and the group was sumllled up (then as now) by a
particular joke its members once tried to share with me.
A very serious and ratller spiritually inclined boy in our
class (who later became religious affairs reporter on a
major daily newspaper) was also, as it happened, a player
of the bagpipes. At the school he had previously attended
(so the story went), the English teacher staged a passion-
play. At the finale, as the Christ figure was taken down
from the cross and carried oft:stage, this student was pre-
vailed upon to follow in procession, blaring 'Amaz.ing
Grace' from his pipes.
The Fellowship of Python roared lauglling at the very
thoug'ht of this absurd mismatch. I couldll't join in,
because I sensed the cruelty and superiority in theil-
mirth - and I knew I wasn't, ultinzately, on theil sicle of
the cultural fence. This moment of alienation was one or

the {ormative experiences of my life. A few years later, I
discovered the terms that ever-so-feebly described that
shock: I had encountered the difference between high
and low culture. More exactly, I had suddenly found
myself on one of the many points in between the poles
of that great cultural divide, obviously and painfully out
of place in the midst of a customarily binding social
ritual.
Bagpipes in the middle of a passion-play would be
clever stuff on Monty Python 's lf lying (Nircus, hut when such
a conjunction is produced naively or spontaneously, with-
out the middle-class alibis of absurdisrll and irony, it
figures as the very definition of bad art- shameless,
opportunistic, spectacular, stupid, vulgar trash. And, of
course, this bad art, this crazy mismatched quilting, is
everywhere in what we loosely name popular culture: in
Smovies, school eisteddfods, comics, TV shows like
Wrestlemania or Have A Co ...

Ultimately - as loving connoisseurs of popular art come
to know- the so-called aesthetic badness of such works
can be appreciated not as merely charming naivete but
rather as canniness, inventiveness, a sublimely mad and
sometimes revelatory brilliance. Yet, in cultural realms
that range from the aforementioned schoolyard elite to
parts of the Academy via the weekend arts pages of classy
newspapers, popular art is still routinely denied what, in
the words of film critic William Routt, 'is conceded with-
out saying to elite art: the ability to take one undwares,
to question what one thought one knew, to confront one
with one's self'.
Recently, 1 ioullcl myself watching a rerul1 of a typical
and favotlrite show fiOIll my 1960s childhoo(l, the Amer-
ican sci-f; series l'lle I iarie 7untleli To look back on it now,
the show's operating level ot unreality strikes Ine as abso-
lutely astonisllillg. The time tunnel itsell is a tackily
pah1ted spiral; objects are placed in it and mil-actllously

9
I

appear right in the spot and at the second that the 1leroes
need them; medieval battle scenes are unfilssily conjured
with stock footage or out-takes from more expensive
productions.
Nowadays, I can marvel at the makeshift, involuntarily
surreal art of 7 he 'rime Tunnet When I was a child, I think
I took it not as a representation of reality- no kid could
be that stupid - but certainly as my natural culture, my
preferred and most comforting form of fiction, fantasy,
spectacle. Recalling other favourite shows of my child-
hood- I Dream of Jeannie, 'I'he Patty Ouke Show, 7'wenty
7'h(rusand Leagues Under the Sea, Man)el KSuperheroes- I real-
ise that they all share 'rhe 'rime 7'unnets unreal, patently
artificial or fantastic aesthetic. I also realise they are all
American.
It doubtless has something to do with my above-
described formative experience, but I have a deeply
ingrained tendency to equate high culture with British
TV and low art with American TV. Rationally, of course,
this proposition is nonsense: even as a young teenager I
would have agreed that the proto Atnerican Playhouse TV
special event 7 he Missiles of Odoher (with Martin Sheen as
JFK) was higl1-class material, while Dr W7 o (another
f:avourite) was hardly any more realistic than 7'he 7'itne
7'unneL But the kinds of prejudices I began to harbolll,
as my vague feeling of schoolyard alienation grew into a
full-blown, passionately lived polemic, redefined abso-
lutely my experience of the cultural field. Now, starkly
spotlit in my vision forever more, certain signs of British-
ness and Americanness rise like seductions or provoca-
tions from the TV screen.
To put it schematically, Britishness on TV- in tlle eyes
of those who wish either to champion or abuse it- is tied
up with basic operating notions of naturalism, realislll,
sophisticated wit, seamless production values, ricllness of
detail, believable or in-depth characterisation, as well as

10
w

more elaborate ideals of cultural worth, dramatic mean-
ingfulness and artistic integrity. The spectrum of respect-
able Britishness runs from Yes Minister (at the light
entertainment end) via 7 he Bill to the never-ending
Dennis Potter festival on the ABC.
Americanness, in an exact reversal of terms, is associ-
ated with hokeyness: one-dimensional or stereotypical
characters, a papel thin fictional illusion, drama or
comedy in broadly melodramatic or burlesque strokes,
spectacular sensationalism with no necessarily edifying
goal. Think ot 'I'he A-'l'eam, Wonder Woman, Charlie s An~gels,
Dallas and Dynasly. It is perhaps in the daytime, no-frills
American soaps that we encounter the full force of this
surrealistically hokey aesthetic: dialogue that is abruptly
cut off and returned to twenty minutes later as if not a
moment has passed in the fictional world; the sudden
appearance of visual effects or voice-over thoughl-tracks
scarcely connected to the storyline; old pop tw1es and
stock bits of incidental music that cut in and out regard-
less of how they sit with the mood of a given scene. It's
not exactly #,'aslffi,nder.s.
It is perhaps another result of my formative experience
that I have a 11arcl lime vibing along sympathetically with
anyone who decries American cultural imperialism on
our television screens. Materially, economically, in terms
of ratings and package deals and prime-time slots, I guess
tlle impel ialist analysis is f:airly correct. But whenever it is
claime(l that Amelican popular culture, above all other
ctllttllal forms, contalllinates and condilions our tiliS('I:
.tble (olonised hl.lillS, I cannot help hul heal- (hc echo of
tilosc crll(l lvytholl lovers, so assured in allrir slan(lal-(ls
ol goo(l .m(l had. I cannot llelp bllt notice tlIal, neal-ly
evel~ weekelid in tlle Australian, TV reviewe l- Phillip
Aclallls (OV('IS KBS ancl AB(' t:are (I especi.llly relnelllber
11is tril)nte lo Ille do(lllllenlaly l.i/e oJ lAytilon), htillisilly
clisl-ey,arclillg whicllevel- typically Americal1 Sit-COIIl, COp

. . _ _ . .

PHANTASMS
..........................

drama or variety show has just started its run on a corm-
mercial channel.
Archetypally high culture, it is true, takes up very little
time in the lives of most Australians- and the popular
(mass-produced commodity) culture with which they
more naturally sport is more often than not American in
origin. Yet the feelings of shame and embarrassment
among the unprivileged at being uncultured - feelings I
know so well from my own upbringing, feelings that often
surface in the most popular clf pop texts (such as Prelty
Woman) - surely these are causally connected to the regu-
lar, insistent, quietly powerful exercise of superior
cultural taste that flows through our media and our edu-
cation systems.
It is hardly a new table-turning ploy to suggest that Aus-
tralian culture is more terrorised by British colonialism
than American imperialism. There may not ultimately be
that many Australians, country-wide, who submit to that
terror, and eagerly seek out the appropriate blessing of
Britishness upon the culture they choose to consume. But
for some who have found themselves (as I did) in the
wrong place at the right moment to be struck dulnb by
this British terror, disturbed by its fading, anachronistic
but unmistakable force, the value of certain things Amer-
ican is that they provide a blessed path out of' such a llell.
Those who argue that American popular culture has
colonised our subconscious with its value system perhaps
overestimate the efficacy of its messages. There is no
doubt that American pop culture (from (,apra and Spiel-
berg to 'We Are the World' and the Miss Amet ica
Pageant) is full of strident, proud, boastful messages. Yet
there is something fortunately selt:suff;cient ancl myopic
about the spirit of American cultulal populism as it
beams itself along the well-greased channels of the global
media network. Where Clive lames assun1es the imlzeri-
ous role of mass-media guardian - monitoring and

TV TIME TUNNEL
................................

mocking the terrible spread of' trash to unprotected peo-
ples and cultures everywhere - Bill Cosby seeks only to
speak his mind, to make money and to entertain. He
probably doesn't worry much whether your or my Aussie
family falls short of his ideal family on The Cosby Show, he
probably couldn't care less.
It may well be the case that some media critics wildly
overstate the role of ideological content - happy families,
happy endings, Mom and Pop role models, the triumph
of good over evil - when they target American culture for
its brainwashing, socially determining effects on Austra-
lian life. Part of what we (sometimes ungenerously) con-
strue as the innocence or simplicity of American popular
culture resides in the obviousness, the blatantness of its
ideology, and the familiar predictability of its ideological
scenarios and icons. Everything - including the preach or
the pitch-is on the surf:ace, unlike more refined or

sophisticated artistic forms whose message-mechanisms
are usually more cleverly disguised, thereby excusing
Dennis Potter's TV oeuvre from virtually any ideological
examination in the quality press.
The ideological critique of Amel ican media continues
apace in maga;zines like the Inde.lvenflenl Monthl.y. But,
alongside it in recent years, a strange cultural cargo cult
has developed. Its acolytes, like the anti-imperialists, also
fixate on the transparently plastic ideological markers ol
old American 1V shows. Yet llOW, such content is to be
celebrated and enjoyed rather thall criticised. T his is the
kitsch-lun-tl ash cull, and its delight in rel-ulls of 'I'he
B{l~}' BU71CII or l.osl In .sy)ale works on several levels. On
tlle first level, these old programs have t)(colIle canlp,
hecause Ihey endol se Valtl('S til,lt now Seelil hopelessly
naive to our cynical age - whi~ll is in fact how IllOSt cul-
ttlral objects secnl once they have lost tllcil- imlllediate
link to the sensibilities reiglIillg over a givell time allcl
place. This camp response is, in many ways, merely the

L.r

)
13
PHANTASMS
...............................

reverse side of the lordly denunciation of bad art, but this
time phrased defensively, and in bad faith: 'I know it's
not great art, but it's fun'.
Complicating this assumption of cultural superiority,
however, is an emotion that often blows i s mantle of
cool: nostalgia. Proposing a supposedly objective argu-
ment in favour of the golden years of television is one
way of safely managing recurrent, embarrassing bouts of
nostalgia. The naked face of this emotion, however,
reveals itself often enough, as cultists unswervingly
descend, in their fetishistic rituals, on one particular class
of TV program: quite simply, the programs they hap-
pened to watch when they were children. When the elab-
orate defence mechanisms finally fail, cult members
begin revelling in total psychobabble: I was so innocent
then, TV was so innocent then, the families on TV were
beautiful and happy, I wanted mine to be beautiful and
happy too ...
When people time-tunnel back into their early ex-
periences of TV, their accounts almost always invite an
analysis of the complex yearnings that are in play: long-
ings for a paradise lost, sometimes a paradise that never
existed. The reminiscences I have offered are, at face
value, little different. I too am drawn to reflect on a
moment of innocence in the once-upon-a-time relation-
ship between my youthful self and the TV set; some ex-
perience, some island of value and significance, that
seems lost, crushed, whose memory mtlst now be fiercely
recounted and maintained. But I believe (unlike a lot of
TV nostalgia freaks) that people's longillgs, their TV
memories, are not just personal, patterned on some
woeful cliche al)out happy f:amilies and perfect child-
hoods; they are also (and in no regular sh.lpe Or torma

tion) collective, cultural, social, political. I.ongings an(l
memories can pinpoint lived contestations, strains,
contradictions.

TV TIME TUNNE
............................

Personally, I can c ertainly pine for that Iost era when I
never felt obliged to jump to the defense of the bad art
I naturally love. The innocence that calls to me like a
siren's song is an impossibly precultural dream. I enter-
tain the mad, egomaniacal wish that every grown-up
could have the sensibility I had the moment before
becoming aware of the brutal realities of taste and dis-
cernment, of the attribution of artistic value, of the divi-
sion of culture into 11igh and low spheres- the moment
before the almighty, inescapable fall into sociality.
But the dream, impossible as it is, at least gives me in
the here and now something to fight for, and to fight
with. I don't believe the phantasm I have sketched here
- the hurling of a vulgar, liberating America against a
sedale, insidious Britain - is mille alone. As marIy have
suggested, the British cultural presence in Ausal alia is tied
to ghostly notions of tradition and of empire, respectable
notions of true and necessary art, and ultimately to a colo-
nially subservient, nostalgic, bizarrely masochistic dream
or 'our' national identity as bequeathed to us by the
motherland of Britain. (This is the only possible expla-
nation for 's l)ay's pel petual fixatiorl on the royal
family, )
One does not have to love America to value, in a distant
land, the gift Of its popular cultul e. Thel-e are n1ally
recorded testimonies in the post-WWII period (by Wim
Wenders in Germal1y, t]mbelto lico in Italy, Raymond
Bellour in France) of the personal and cultural libera-
tions wrougllt by e ncoullters witll American jazz., movies
and roc;;. Americal1 pop culture has the ntial to trig-
ger sucll liberation not hecause it is interllatiollal or uni
versal in c haractel (as it pOlilpOIISly lil;cs tO bt'lieV(') btit
ratlaer hecause it is, in its decisive eifect, .stalc]ess.
Ameri(;lrl pop culatne conjtlles, from SOI18 IO fillll lO
t1V show, a self enclose(l, ilo~ltillg world of icons, images,
soun(ls, fictions. 1t weaves not a heavellly II~Opia- the

PHANTASMS
,..........................

kind dreamed about on 71he Love Boat- but a strangely
blank, abstract, unreal atopia, a n(place. This atopia
offers its local subjects only the most chimerical and imag-
inary of identities- identities that are ultimately neither
American nor Australian (and certainly not British).
If this idea of an atopia is true, then the papier rnache
special effects of 7'he 7'ime 7unnel, the mysterious ellipses
of Another World, the uniform alien landscapes of Lost In
Space-all would become part of an airy, childish,.ever-
beckoning cultural revolution. This, at any rate, is what I
choose to dream in public.

SEND IN THE GHOSTS
,\

{ an you have sex with a ghost? And, if so, what's it
like? These are serious questions which, in an inar-
ticulate and slightly scary form, haunted the heretical fan-
tasies of myself and other Catholic children. What can
you expect, since we were oftentimes reading about the
mysterious Holy (Ghost, and hearing about His strange,
voluptuous effect on various fainting female saints, mar-
tyrs and nuns? This divine mystely overtook me again in
an instant when I saw Francis Ford Coppola's Brnm Stoher's
l)racula (1992), with its kinky vision of an immalerial, will-
o'-the-wisp (:ount infiltrating the bedsheets and bodies of
impressionable young women.
In Truly Madly l)eeply (l991)-described on iLs video
cover as 'the thinking man's (,Xlost [I9^.)()01' bec.tuse, pre-
sulllal)ly, the cllalactel-s enjoy 13acll, Russian literatule
and New (;ermall Cinema - sucll Ullt arthly (Illesliolls
again hover tantalisillgly in the air. Whell the ghost of
Alan Rickluall retul-lls to a gliCViligJillit't SI('V('IlSOll, it
appears that most nol lllal, ptlysical rt laliolls hetwet 1l

Bukatman, Scott. from Terminal Identitv: The
Virtual Subiect in Postmodern Science Fiction. Duke
University Press, 1993. Pages 2547.

IN I IOI){J(: I ION In the reol world of elevision, echnolooy is

perfectly in eriorised: it B comes wifbin th elf.ÑKrok r and Coole 11

v~on is the sincerest form of imitation.ÑFred Allen

Several sections of Chris Marker's 1982 film, Sans Soleil, present con-
temporary Tokyo as a science fiction metropolis. Marker does not
understand the Japanese language, and the resultant disorientation,
when coupled with the high-technology compactness of this urban en-
vironment, creates the effect of a futuristic alienation. Like the protago-
nist/narrator of Edward Bellamy's 1888 novel Looking Backward (the
significantly surnamed Julian West), Marker has awakened to find him-
self dislocated, both spatially and temporally. Unlike West, Marker has
few guides to his brave new world, and those that do exist serve to dis-
tort more than to clarify. Cinematically, his alienation is conveyed
through montage, sound/image disunion, and an evocation of the sur-
feit of signifiers, signs for which Marker can only guess at possible refer-
ents.' Passengers doze on a commuter train as the electronic sound-
track drones, punctuated by a series of beeps and bleeps reminiscent of
old Astroboy cartoons.2 The commuter train is intercut with shots of
the space-borne locomotive from the popular animated film Calaxy
Express, further implicating the film In a web of intertextual and Inter
galactic reference. These associations also have the effect of infantiliz-
ing the narrator, as alienation engenders a retreat to the images of
childhoodÑor children's media.
Marker does not simply map Tokyo onto the field of science fiction,
but onto the field of the media-spectacle as well. What character-
izes Tokyo is the domination of the Image: not simply the static, over-
sized posters with their staring eyes ("voyeurizing the voyeurs," as the
narrator says), but the endless flow of images across the television
screen and the endless televisions which multiply across Marker's soli-
tary cinematic frame. Tokyo constitutes the "world of appearances" for
MarkerÑhow could it be otherwise, given his selective and seemingly
deliberate cultural illiteracyÑbut it is also a realm devoted to the sur-
face, to the external. Tokyo exists as pure spectacle; that is, as a prollfer-
ation of semiotic systems and simulations which increasingly serve to
replace physical human experience and interaction. Television brings 2 *
the signs of a peculiar sexuality into Marker's hotel room, videogames
serve as furniture in numberless arcades, sumo-wrestling fans gather to
watch their favorites do combat along walls of TV monitors; a serial
multiplication of the same image-flow extended onto a grid formation T E 1 " 111^1
like Warhol's Marilyn or Elvis panels. Video monitors are so prevalent
that the narrator finally concludes that in Tokyo, "Television is watch-
ing you."
Ultimately, the narrator finds a kind of solace with a companion
who has designed a video-synthesizer as a means of resisting the on-
slaught of images, the bombardment of signals. Their electronically re-
processed world is dubbed the Zone (in homage to Tarkovsky's Stalker
11979]). In the Zone the image is regrounded as image rather than
functioning as a surrogate reality. The passivity engendered by the
spectacle has ostensibly been shattered; the filmmaker has reappropri-
ated control of the image.
Sans Soleil presents, in compact form, a remarkable number of the
tropes which recur in both contemporary science fiction and the crit-
ical discourse regarding the media. The pervasive domination by, and
addiction to, the image might be regarded as a primary symptom of
terminal identity. The "image addict" is a metaphor which exists in and
through the media, subject to forces which might at first seem to be
controlled by the instrumental forces of government and/or big busi-
ness, but that ultimately seems to signify the passage into a new reality.
The spectacular world of television dominates and defines existence,

becoming more "real" (more familiar, more authoritative, more satisfy-
ing) than physical reality itself. Much science fiction recognizes that we

IIIIAGE

lEIIEIINAI

now inhabit what techno-prophet Alvin Toffler has called "blip culture,"
a rhetorical (and perhaps "real") construct wlthin which citizens are
becoming blips: electronic pulses which exist only as transitory bits or
bytes of information in a culture inundated with information.3 The
science fiction of the 1950s resisted the advent of the spectacular
society (in works by Ray Bradbury, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth,
and Robert Sheckley, for example), while more recent texts acknowl-
edge, analyze, and sometimes apparently embrace this new state of
things.4 A spectacular ambivalence pervades science fiction cinema,
television, and comics. Television and computer cultures have repeat-
edly been posited as formations of spectacular control, but it is impor-
tant to note that the new modes of challenge and resistance have
themselves become spectacular in form.
In its discursive play, including its images, music, and narration, this
! 7 section of Sans Soleil aspires to the condition of science fiction. The
narrator's Tokyo journey takes him from an initial state of radical aliena-
tion in the face of the constant flow of images, through periods of an
almost palpable terror of assault and invasion by the forces of blip
culture. Finally, the journey into the Zone represents an adaptation to,
and appropriation of, the society of the spectacle. Marker utilizes the
E rhetorical strategies of the genre of science fiction to evoke the experi-
ence of disorientation before the medla eruption of Tokyo. Slmilarly, the
film The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), in its depiction of an alien abroad
in a distant world, bombarded by the images and sounds of the media
culture which is America, might be regarded as the fictional analogue to
Marker's avant-garde documentary.5
This conflation of science fiction and media criticism is neither unique
nor even unusual in recent years. It is already evident in the writings
of Marshall McLuhan, replete with their metaphors of neurology and
bodily transformation. It is evident in Alvin Toffler's paeans to tech
nological development and cybernetic adaptation. But it is equally ap-
parent in the more negative postures of the Situationists, in their con-
cern with urban redefinition and individual existence; and it exists,
perhaps most clearly, in the profound ambivalence of Jean Baudrillard's
cyborg rants, which loudly declaim the new state of things while main-
taining an ironic distance.
In all these cases, and oth-ers less notorious, the cyberneticized orien-
tation of the respected critic aligns him or her with society's debased
prophet of the technological: the science fiction writer. But the confla-
tion of SF and critical discourse doesn't only exist on the referential
level, it extends to the deployment of signifiers. If it is true, as Samuel R.

)

Delany and Teresa deLauretis contend, that the use of language in
science fiction is sufficiently idiosyncratic as to demand new strategies
of reading,6 then it is in the similitude of the signifiers of science fiction
and media criticism that the real consequences of this conflatlon might
be discovered. The language of sclence fiction provides a self-critical
discursive level from which theories of language and media benefit.
That which requires continual demonstration by theorists of natural
language Is already something of a truism in media criticism: the me-
dium is the message; language and Its structures transform cultural
activities into signs of a natural order; dominant language usage is
compilcit with dominant ideological formations. The clear and demon-
strable imbricatlon of TV, radio, and the press with the political, eco-
nomic, and technical bases of the social system makes perceptible a
relationship which still remains elusive when dealing with the appar-
ently unmediated circulation of language in everyday life. The media
belong to the mainstream, and any tolerance of divergent views or
lifestyles is only a token nod to pluralistic diversity. Such cliches of
spectacular society are, of course, equally applicable to, although not

as evident In, less spectacular forms of communication such as writing r 1 R ¥ 1 " A I
or speech.
Frequently, however, the discourse of media criticism posits a separa-
tlon, as though the difference was one of kind rather than degree. The
mass media are, correctly, perceived as a hyper-language possessed of
unimaginable powers of relfication; the unfortunate correlate is that
other discourses are thereby inscribed as the voice of truth. The
shortcomings of this argument ought to be obvious enough, yet it
remains implicit in much of the critical work produced on, and by,
media culture.8
Writings on the mass media, and television in particular, concentrate
on the passivity of the audience in the face of the spectacle. The seduc-
Uveness of the media have apparently resulted in the decline of moral
values, the trivializing of politics, the increase of illiteracy, shorter
attention spans, and a heightened capacity for violent behaviorÑall
from the surrender of the consumer.9 The invasion of the real by the
proliferating forms of the spectacle in much science fiction and crit-
ical theory might in fact serve as a metaphorical projection of the
threatened subversion of language and its claims to veracity. In Brad-
bury s Fahrenheit 451 (1967), to take an obvious example, books are
burned and written language has been forcibly superseded by tele-
visionÑan explicit turning against the word Book burning is no idle

w
w
w

IUAGE

choice on Bradburys part, summoning up as it does overwhelming
Images of the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and the successive waves of
fundamental hysteria in contemporary America. The overthrow of the
Word Is presented as tantamount to the overthrow of Reason Itself,
leaving an InfantilizedÑif not barbaricÑcitizenry poised passively be-
fore the pseudo-satisfactions of the spectacle, bereft of the ability to
think, judge, and know. The 1966 film adaptation by Truffaut empha-
sizes this by limiting reading matter to wordless comic books, an evo-
cation of the prellterate status of the young child. 0 In fact, and as
a large number of contemporary artists (Barbara Kruger and Jenny
Holzer, for example) have acknowledged, the Word has become a com-
plicit part of the image culture, especially within the constructs of
consumer society.
It seems that many works about the speclacle are, in fact, concerned

2~ with preserving and protecting the power of the word against the
barbarizing forces of image culture (which Is frequently linked to com-
modity culture and mass forms, most unlike the rarefied discourses of
criticism or literature). 2 I would further suggest that the anxiety sur-
r E R 111 " ^ I rounding the spectacle is not privileging any specific discursive form
such as written or spoken language, but that :: is directed at the feared
E manipulation of representational truth at a time when the complex
interplay of data and representations have usurped earlier forms of
cultural and physical engagement and validation. Television, comput-
ers, and the hybrid forms of virtual reality having arisen to comprise
Tofflers blip culture, the loss of the often unexamined, empirically
accepted category of "the real" has instantiated a crisis throughout our
hardwired cultural circuits.
To take one example, the advent of digitally "retouched" photo-
graphs, which can seemingly (and seamlessly) reconstruct the repre-
sentation of events and spaces, has raised questions about the relation
of the photograph to truth. What is most fascinating, in the face of this
electronic onslaught, is the retrospective instantiation of the photo-
graph as the very sign of truth. The New Yorh Times (which might
admittedly have some stake in its position) reports, "Ever since its
invention a shade more than 150 years ago, photography has been seen
as a medium of truth and unassailable accuracy."'3 While this may have
been true in the years immediately following the invention of photogra-
phy, the establishment 'of photography as an "art form" (encouraging
creative manipulation) and a tradition of doctored photographs quickly
called this attitude into question.'4 The complex mediation of reality
that marks the photographic process has also produced a range of
complex artistic and philosophical meditations, and not the uncritical
acceptance the writer implies. 5
Fred Ritchin (whose book on computer Imaging prompted the article)
notes that with digital technology, there Is no equivalent to an original
archivally permanent negative. There is thus a loss of representation, a
loss of the object, and finally, a lost relationship to the real. 6 What we
regard as reality stands revealed as a constructionÑa provisional and
malleable alignment of data. If photographs can no longer be per-
ceived as unalloyed facts peeled from the surface of the real world, what
will replace them? the Times asks, but there is no answer. Video, a star-
tlingly ubiquitous documentary medium, is also the archetypal elec-
tronicÑand hence manipulableÑform. It is increasingly evident that
society, ever more defined by a system of electronic representations, is
based on an accepted fiction, or a consensual hallucination, to use
Wil il am C l bs on s defi n it io n of cybe rs pace .
The perception of a spectacular assault on the dominance of written
language stands revealed as a defense of pre-electronic representa-
tional forms (writing, photography, and even cinema) which actually
reifies a pre-electronic, empirically verifiable definition of the real.
Although much science fiction participates in precisely such a reifica-
tion, a significant set of reflexive works, across a range of media, ac-
knowledge a more complex relation with a world increasingly defined
by electronic data circulation and management. A more reflexive critical
discourse is required to combat a writing in which the critic or scholar
is Inscribed as the bearer of truths produced through natural lan-
guage structures.
It is in this context that the appropriation of the forms of science fic-
tion, and what Delany has called its reading protocols, can be consid-
ered. If, as Delany and deLauretis argue, science fiction de-naturalizes
language through an inherent reflexivity of form, then something is
added in what we may term the science fiction of the spectacle. Tex-
tuality now becomes an explicit theme in the science fiction work;
language will comprise the content of the discourse as well as determine
its form. Reflexivity is extended as the text turns in upon its own
production. The constant meditation upon the mediation of the real,
the usurpation of traditional experience, and the reduction of reality to
a representation is emphasized by a text that foregrounds its own
textual status, a text that emphasizes the estrangement of the sign. The
science fiction of the spectacle, even in its more diluted instances,

acknowledges its own complicity with the spectacularizing of reality.

IMACE IMAGE

.. v

Paul de Man has written that the allegorical representation of Read-
ing [ls] the irreducible component of any text, and it is indeed easy to
situate spectacular science fiction within such a paradigm of textuality.
He further notes, The allegory of reading narrates the impossibility of
reading, by which we can understand that de Man refers to the impos-
sibility of reading through to an unproblematic, nonfigural, totalizing
meaning. The range of approaches which exists within the genre of
science fictlon toward comprehending the society of the spectacle
might be provocatively reexamined within such an allegorical model. In
his scholarly work, The Soh Machine, David Porush has productively
demonstrated the relevance of the science of cybernetics to a range
of postmodern narratives (by Beckett, Pynchon, and Burroughs, among
others), all of which emphasize communication, control, and informa-
tion management (and, in these fictions, a pervasive and strategic
3 1 information disruption and willful mis-management). 8 While Porush
unfortunately neglects science fiction In his study, an oversight he has
corrected in his subsequent writings, his postulations concerning the
existence of an emergent cybernetic fiction are especially relevant.
TE R 1^ 111 A I The cyborg formations of terminal culture, the melding of human and
machine, would then further represent the dialectic of reality and repre-
sentation, the dialectic which exists between the natural semiosis of
the referent and the cybernetic machinery of the text: terminal iden-
tity fictions are a cyborg discourse.
Within the matrices of consumer culture, science fiction offers a new
complexity of form to replace the absolutism and transparency of most
writing. The polemic is rendered spectacular In an avoidance of any
assumption of an uncontaminated discourse and in a diegetic and
textual acknowledgment of an already existent complicity. The simulta-
neous technologism and reflexivity of the text permits a deeper engage-
ment with the Issues raised by the spectacle while maintaining the
distance of the writerly, the ambivalent, the self-aware. Whether used
by Toffler to evoke an era of technological promise and prophecy or by
Baudrillard to construct a labyrinthine discourse of technocratic con-
trol, science fiction functions as a dominant language within the society
of the spectacle. As J. G. Ballard wrote, Science and technology multi-
ply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in
which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain
mute. 9 Sans Soleil incorporates science fiction as a metadiscourse on
spectacle, in a movement which fully participates in what It might at
first appear to simply condemn.
The analysis performed in this chapter concentrates on the axiom

)

w
w
V1

)

atic form of electronic spectacle: television. In the first section tele-
vision becomes an important social control by substituting its own
pseudo-realities for the real thing while in the next TV operates in a
more explicitly malevolent manner penetrating and invading the physi-
cal body of the viewer like a virus. In both cases the viewer becomes
little more than an adjunct or extension of the media.
Many of the SF texts reviewed here induce a deliberate state of in-
formational overload pushing language beyond its transparent narra-
tional function to a largely visual spectacularity leaving the reader to
grapple with the (more or less) random patterns of noise and criss-
crossing informational systems. The more recent texts in a movement
which again parallels the tactics of many contemporaneous artworks
and theories of media culture advocate a resistance to control which is
Itself a part of the spectacle: the collagist cut-ups of William S. Bur-
roughs and the passage into the video word made flesh in David
Cronenberg s Videodrome (1982); the new tangibility of the word in the
comic book American Flagg! and the surfeit of mediated media imagery
in the television production of the adventures of Max Headroom. A

prevalent concern with the representation of the electronic Informa- T I | " | " ^ L
tion noise which pervades (post)modern culture is evident in recent
science fiction a generic transformation which acknowledges the text s
complicity in the maintenance and construction of the society of the ~~~
spectacle. In these works the image no longer exists as a sign but rather
as an object: a commodity a virus a weapon an identity. This chapter
then traces the first phase of terminal identity: the recognition and
ambivalent acceptance of the spectacularization of human culture and
human beings.

11 11- I;~AGI- AlZlZl(: I I think if s ~erribly to wa ch

v.Ñ1 G. Bollard 1i w Wo ching TV will po ch hem bock inwo he world's

ing boord.ÑBionca O'llivion, Vidsodrome

According to numerous cultural theorists we are living in the era of the
blip. Alvin Toffler has written of the bombardment of the individual by
these short modular blips of information which can take the form of
ads news items music videos and so forth.20 For Arthur Kroker and

David Cook the blip is more pervasive and more cruclal In Its implica-
tions for identity and their writing constructs a subject who has In the
1980s and 1990s become a blip: ephemeral electronically processed
unreal.2 In the evocative hyperbolic prose of several postmodern crit-
ics subjectivity has itself receded within an electronically constituted
system exemplified by the ubiquity of television. The blip subject
exists only within this system becoming a sign of an increasingly im-
ploded culture. Many have noted a passage into such a state of implo-
sion, the passage of experiential reality into the grids matrices and
pulses of the information age. The rhetoric of expansion and outward
exploration has been superseded by one dominated by the inward
spirals of orbital circulationÑin cybernetic terms the feedback loop.
The 1930s saw a minor craze for thin horizontal speed lines. De-
signers including Raymond Loewy Norman Bel Ceddes Otto Kuhler
11 and Henry Dreyfuss incorporated the motif on everything from railway
cars to Thermos bottles leading the editor of Architectural Forum to

remark on the curious cult of the three little lines- . . . few objects have
escaped the plague of this unholy trinity. 22 In Populuxe, Thomas Hine s
111 " 111 A I account of consumer design in the 1950s and 1960s there is an account
of the pervasiveness of the boomerang or parabola motif among the
works of the designers of that time.23 Everything became aerodynamic:
automobiles alarm clocks and jukeboxes. Objects were now potential
vessels ready to lift off in the next moment. An explosion of new
forms celebrated the Jet Age and the Rocket Age and the Space Age. In
the imploded society of the 1980s technological change has had a simi
lar effect.24 Graphic design in the present celebrates the centrality of
terminal cultureÑa new ontology transmitted through the parallel elec
tronic terminals of television and computer. Beginning with Paul Rand s
logo for IBM (C. 1960) stark geometric forms have become increasingly
synonymous with a powerful corporate identity. The graphic equivalent
of the International Style in architecture these forms are monolithic
and unrevealing: ornamentation consists only of the simplest geometric
flourishÑa shaved corner, a rakish tilt. Like the IBM logo, many are
intersected by horizontal lines, like the scan-lines on a television screen
or computer monitor. In Rand's own words the signs become suggestive
of "technology and computers by association."25 The explosion of the
Space Age has yielded to the implosion of the Information Age; every
thing exists as data, and the real worlds of production and commerce
exist largely as an afterthought. As Karrie Jacobs writes: "In the infor
mation age figurative logos carry too much baggage. They're reminders
of historic and geographic ties, of the dark ages when American corpo
w
w
os

rations wanted to be known for making particular things for doing
particular things instead of selling services and sending binary Im-
pulses careening around the globe. 26 As with our politicians corpora-
tions now attempt to construct a new Identity which bears little relation
to real space real time real activity.
Television Is the model for the new technological era as it Implodes
the space and time of lived human experience to the electronic poles of
the screen and the network. 27 Baudrillard in his most science fic-
tional mode uses gravitational metaphors to describe the implosion of
human experience within fields of information transmission. Orbital
circulation becomes the matrix of the Implosive process replacing
the dialectical passage between poles.23 An orbit implies a constant
turning-in and Baudrillard adds the image of the black hole: that mas-
sive anomaly which draws all Into it and from which no Information can
reliably emerge. Below the event horizon lies only abstraction and
hypothesis; direct experience is by definition impossible.
Social reality undergoes a gravitational collapse beneath the weight
of the accumulated data that defines the Information Society. Baudril

lard describes a society at critical mass a society collapsing Into Itself. 111 " 1 N A I
Information devours its own contents he has written and In the
Information Society the same entropic process ~ ~r~ 29 Acknowledg- | " ^ G E
ing the strength of McLuhan s axiom the medium is the message
( the key formula of the age of simulation ) Baudrillard further states
that it is not only this implosion of the message in the medium which is
at stake but also the concurrent "implosion of the medium and the real in
a sort of nebulous hyperreality. 30 The world has undergone a signifi-
cant restructuring as direct experience Is replaced by the recursivity of
countless data-based simulations. This restructuring Is fundamental to
Baudrillard s middle writings and It is just as central to the science
fiction of the spectacle.
Television still the axiomatic form of electronic simulation due to Its
mass penetration and continually functioning national and global net-
works can therefore not be regarded as presenting an image or mirror
of reality (neutral or otherwise) but rather as a constituent portion of a

new reality. Society the arena of supposed real existence increas-
ingly becomes the mirror of television. 3 Jameson argues that the
most likely candidate for cultural hegemony today . . . is clearly video
because of its ubiquity and because it is so closely related to the
dominant computer and information technology of the late or third
stage of capitalism. 32 The result of this image bombardment Toffler
wrote in Future Shock, "is the accelerated decay of old images a laster

, _ . . . , d

IIIIAGE

11 w IA l " A I War of the Worlds (Paramount Pictures 1953). Populuxe industrial design
middle America.

intellectual through-put and a new profound sense of the Imperma-
nence of knowledge itself. 33 In John Sladek s science fictlon novel The
Muller-Fokker Effect, a character realizes The truth was that reallty was
televised; and this truth allows him a comforting lack of engagement
with the political realities around him.34
Reality has moved inside an electronic nonspace: everything has
become data. In Videodrome, media prophet Brian O Blivion (not his
real name but his television name ) declares that soon everyone will
have special names . . . names designed to cause the cathode-ray tube
to resonate. In the fictions of cultural theory and SF a new subject
emerges one that begins Its process of being through the act of viewer-
ship: The TV self is the electronic individual par excellence who gets
everything there is to get from the simulacrum of the media. 35

The Sociely of the Spenocle
Cuy Debord s 1967 manifesto Society of the Spectacle, begins by ac-
knowledging the passage into a new mode of phenomenological and
commercial existence: In societies where modern conditions of pro-
duction prevail all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of
spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away Into a
representation (Thesis 1) 36 An onslaught of news advertisements

w
w

paid political announcements, fashion, living room wars, celebrity and
urban sprawl constituted a new experiential terrain, one contempo
raneously explored In the Pop Art of Warhol and the cinema of Godard.
The fundament of the spectacle is its unilateralism. Creil Marcus later
observed: One could not respond, or talk back, or intervene, but one
did not want to. In the spectacle, passivity was simultaneously the
means and the end of a great hidden project, a project of social con
trol. 37 The citizen/viewer, no longer participating in the production of
reality, exists now in a state of pervasive separation, cut off from the
producers of the surrounding media culture by a unilateral communica
tion and detached from the mass of fellow citizen/viewers as a new
virtual community of television families and workplaces arises to
invisibly take their place. |
The spectacle controls by atomizing the population and reducing ,
their capacity to function as an aggregate force, but also by displaying a 3 * l
surfeit of spectacular goods and lifestyles among which the viewer may |
electronically wander and experience a simulation of satisfaction. The
conditions of late capitalism lead Debord to write. When economic

Debord s post-Frankfurt School polemic is paralleled by a number of
science fiction texts which pre- and postdate it. Science fiction (from the
1950s onward), like the critical writing on the media (beginning much
earlier), has frequently portrayed the mass media as a pacifying force,
an opiate. In Fahrenheit 451, for example, the wife of the book-burning
fireman is addlcted to both tranquilizers and television.4 The juncture
of technology, control, and addiction produced in Debord s writing
further points to the work of the author of Naked Lunch and the Nova
Trilogy.
The incantatory prose of William S. Burroughs evokes a worldÑa
galaxyÑcompletely given over to the pervasiveness and vulnerability of
addiction. Addiction is pervasive in that the phenomenon transcends
the use of narcotics: in Burroughs s fictlon one can be addicted to
money or to dope; there are orgasm addicts, control addicts, and image
addicts. Vulnerability exists because when the desperation of the addic-
tive need is brought into being, the potential for manipulation escalates.
The pusher always gets it all back. The addict needs more and more
junk to maintain a human form . . . buv off the Monke B Il~r ic tho mnlrl

{ l ~ .~ .... ... ............ ~J ~ ~}. _ ..... ~ ~ ~
necessity is replaced by the necessity for boundless economic develop- t E | " 8 N A I , 1 X t ffi ' " A t of monopoly and possession. BurrouRhs then d~scusses thP rPlation
ment, the satisfaction of primary human needs is replaced by an unin
terrupted fabrication of pseudo-needs which are reduced to the single
pseudo-need of maintaining the reign of the autonomous economy
(Thesis 51, my emphasis). As for the citizen/consumer, The real con
sumer becomes a consumer of illusions (Thesis 47). (Kroker and Cook
describe the 1980s self as a blip with a lifestyle. )33 Marcus writes
that the earthly base for the society of the spectacle was modern
capitalism:

an economic mode of being that by the 1950s had expanded far be
yond the mere production of obvious necessities and luxuries; hav
ing satisfied the needs of the body, capitalism as spectacle turned to
the desires of the soul. It turned upon individual men and women,
seized their subjective emotions and experiences, changed those
once evanescent phenomena into objective, replicable commodi
ties, placed them on the market, set their prices, and sold them
back to those who had, once, brought emotions and experiences
out of themselvesÑto people who, as prisoners of the spectacle,
could now find such things only on the market.39

The spectacle had come to exist on more than a public level (via
televised politics, say), it had colonized and co-opted all levels of pri
vate existence as well.40 The spectacle became the world.

. _
between addiction and --. '~ - control: Junk is the ideal product . . .
the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl
through a sewer and beg to buy . . . the junk merchant does not sell his
product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. 42
The nexus commodity/addiction/control, powerfully delineated by
Burroughs, is replicated in Debord s analysis of the role of the spectacle
in the contemporary era. The spectacle is the ultimate commodity in
that it makes all others possible: in Its role as advertisement, the specta-
cle generates the conditions for consumption, and therefore for produc-
tion as well. The spectacle is infinitely self-generating; it stimulates the
desire to consume (the only permissible participation in the social
process), a desire continually displaced onto the next product and the
next.
In the society of the spectacle, all images are advertisements for the
status quo.43 The commodity is replaced by its own representation, and
the fulfillment of need is replaced by a pseudo-satisfaction of desire. A
citizenry alienated by the industrial-capitalist mode of production is
granted an illusion of belonging and participation; the fragmentation of
the productive and social realms is replaced by the appearance of
coherence and wholeness. Debord: The spectacle p.esents itself si-
multaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of
unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concen
trates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this i
sectcr is separale, it Is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of
false consciousness and the unification it achieves is nothing but an
of ficial language of generalized separation (Thesis 3). l
Ultimately the spectacle takes on the totalizing function of any addic- l
tive substance; it differs from dope only in that its addictive properties
remain hidden within the rational economic structures of the capitalist
society. Contrast Burroughs s statements on junk to these by Debord:
The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the
total occupation of social life. The spectacle is a permanent opium |
war which aims to make people Identify goods with commodities and !
satisfaction with survival. [T]he spectacle is the main production of ¢
present-day society. The spectacle subjugates living men to the ex
tent that the economy has totally subjugated them. It is no more than r
the economy developing for itself (Theses 42 44 15 and 16). 38 |
The positioning of the subject as a consumer of illusions recurs in ;
science fiction and the more revealing critiques of spectacular culture
are based in voluntarism. There is after all no need to force the citi
zenry to do what they are already doing quite willingly ( One could not T | | ¥ 111 A I
respond or talk back or intervene but one did not want to ). The
addiction to the video narcotic means that the control apparatus is
emplaced and operating invisibly to secure a false consciousness of
cohesion democratic order and freedom. Conversely works such as
Fahrenheit 451 or Orwell s 1984 Ignore the crucial postulate of Mar
cuses democratic domination: that an effectively functioning ideo
logical state apparatus replaces the need for overt exercises of power
by the repressive apparatus. The perfection of power Michel Fou
cault wrote referring to the panoptic structures of the disciplinary
society should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary. Or
as William Burroughs observed A functioning police state needs no
police. 44

Cut-ups and White Nois-
The technologies of the mass media have been crucial to the mainte-
nance of instrumental reason as a form of rational (and hence natural
invisible and neutral) domination. Domination has its own aesthet-
ics wrote Marcuse and democratic domination has its democratic
aesthetics. 45 The plurality of channel selections serves as a kind of
guarantee of the freedom of the subject to choose to position oneself
within the culture while the constant flow of images sounds and
narratives seemingly demonstrate a cultural abundance and promise.

III^GE

In the era of Implosion the citizen has become a supplicant before the
altar of the spectacle a TV self without any need for overt coerclon.
Yet as so many have argued the range of cholce is illusory. The
viewer is always passive before the spectacle; the act of viewing
amounts to an act of surrender.46 Television functions to maintain order;
It provides the state with the unprecedented ability to interpellate
many of its citizens Into the proper sociopolitical positions with un-
precedented simultaneity and constancy. Those who believe that the
media serve simply to barbarize culture frequently miss the continual
level of social recuperation which occurs.47 Such recuperation can oc-
cur through the functioning of the media Itself quite apart from issues
of content. In an early article Jean Baudrillard wrote: It is useless to
fantasize about state projection of police control through TV.... TV, by
virtue of its mere presence is a social control in itself. There is no need
3 9 to imagine it as a state periscope spying on everybody s lifeÑthe situa-
tion as it stands is more efficient than that: It is the certainty that people
are no longer speaking to each other."48 "TV . . . is a social control in
itself regardless of the specific Images or messages the medium trans-
T E 1 V 111 A I mits or promulgates.

There are ways to challenge or even to resist the controlling power of
the spectacle from within spectacular culture itself. The means of re-
sistance have themselves become spectacular in form. One example of
such a spectacular antl-spectacularity and one which serves as a
touchstone for much science fiction of the spectacle is found in Bur-
roughs s appropriation of science fiction for his own mythology of the
space age. It is in the field of language that his interest in the genre
primarily resides. There is no writer s work in which the dislocating
power of the language of science fiction is brought more fully into play.
In Burroughs s mythos, language and communication serve as the
controlling forces of instrumental reason. Burroughs and his collabora-
tor Brion Gysin evolved the cut-up as a simultaneous form of appropria-
tion and resistance: Cut the words and see how they fall. 49 The cut-up
clearly inherits from the modernist history of collage, in which nontra-
ditional and aesthetically undervalued materials were combined with
the fine arts tradition of painting. Collage repudiated the purity of the
art, the definition of artistic beauty, and the very hand of the artist.
Further, as in the work of Schwitters, the collage also acknowledged the
aesthetic dimension found in the products of a culture that was becom-
ing increasingly industrialized and consumerist. The cut-up continues
this tradition of textual heterogeneity. The text (original or co-opted) is
folded, cut, and reshaped into a new, but randomized, continuity. It Is to

)

be deployed as a new form of poetic creation one which is antirational
through the inadvertent collisions of the rearranged pieces of a cut-up
page of prose. You cannot will spontaneity Burroughs wrote But
you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of
scissors. 5 In the Nova Trilogy the cut-up becomes an hallucinatory
science fiction language: an alienÑor insectÑdiscourse that constantly
devours itself.
The cut-up becomes a critical weapon against the spectacular so-
ciety. Like the randomly assembled poems of a Dadaist performance
in The Electronic Revolution (1971) Burroughs advocates extending
the cut-up to both audio and video tape. This passage functions almost
as an aleatory score for a cut-up (de)composition: To discredit op-
ponents: Take a recorded Wallace speech cut in stammering coughs
sneezes hiccoughs snarls pain screams fear whimperings apoplectic
sputterings slobbering drooling idiot noises sex and animal sound ef-
fects and play It back in the streets subways stations parks political
rallies. 5 He adds The control of the mass media depends on laying
down lines of association. When the lines are cut the associational

connections are broken. President Johnson burst into a swank apart- T E R 111 " A I
ment held three maids at gunpolnt 26 miles north of Saigon yester-
day. 52 The spectacular forms of mass media are cut-up randomized
and returned to circulation. The scrambling of language defamiliarizes
it revealing its pervasiveness and operant illusions. Burroughs per-
forms an incisive violence on the body of the text (this textual machine
is a medical apparatus) and the incoherence of the results are obvious.
The images produced by this textual body are freed from any illusory
totality to instead serve as the partial and fragmented representations
that they are. Relations among signifiers having been lost each must
then exist in glittering isolation outside temporality outside history.
The cut-up techniques reject the position of control or mastery over the
image/text replacing the rational re/os of the narrator with the random
bombardments of the spectacular society.
The cut-up enhances the displacement of Burroughs s time-tripping
narratives generates a surfeit of science-fictional neologisms and dis-
locates the reader searching for the rationality of linear structure. Cut-
ups of audio tapes and filmstrips permit us to turn the mechanisms of
the spectacle against their creators (the Nova Mobs or the Subliminal
Kids). Flnally cut-ups reveal the very strategies of spectacle itself. J. C.
Ballard stressing the importance of collision and opposition in Bur-
roughs s writing notes Far from being an arbitrary stunt Burroughs
cut-in method Is thus seen as the most appropriate technique for the

IMAGE IMAGE

marriage of opposites as well as underlining the role of recurrent
images in all communication. 53
More recently the transitory sense of the Information Age is elo-
quently demonstrated in Don Delillo s novel White Noise, another work
that shares much with media criticism and science fiction.54 WhHe
noise is after all the soundtrack that accompanies this era of post-
modern implosion. Delillo mixes diegetic dialogue and TV chatter in a
collage reminiscent of cut-ups but here the collage is not the result of a
subversive authorlal intervention but is instead diegetically anchored
to demonstrate the blip culture bombardment which already prohibits
the reception of information. Delillo s characters search for a level of
phenomenal emotional reality against the white noise of a culture
where the only monument is The Most Photographed Barn in Amer-
ica and where Hitler is an academic department. White Noise takes
41 place entirely within the cut-up continuum of Burroughs and the Im-
ploded America of Baudrillard s hyperbolic prophecies.

J. G. Ballclrd and ~he Mediascape
T E R M 1 " A I The terrain is changing within the postmodern condition and under the
pressures of a continuous movement of perceived implosion the land-
scape is increasingly figured as a mediascape.55 The science fiction
writer who has been the longest inhabitant of this new territory is J. C.
Ballard. Ballard s science fiction has rejected the explosive trajectories
associated with the macrocosmic realms of faster-than-light travel and
galactic empire in favor of the imploded realms of what he has termed
inner space. 56 Such a term might imply that Ballard is constructing a
psychological science fiction, a science fiction centered upon individual
subjectivity, but this is not quite the inner space to which he refers. His
work is marked instead by its sustained refusal of individual psychology
and his construction of a world which itself bears the marks of the
writer s own interior, but socially derived, landscape. The cities, jun-
gles, highways, and suburbs of Ballard s fiction are relentlessly claustro-
phobic, yet empty; spectacular, but not seductive; relentlessly meaning-
ful, yet resistant to logic. The repetition and obsessiveness of these
works suspends temporality while it shrinks space. His characters are
without ego, and they become only a part of the landscape, and the
landscape becomes a schizophrenic projection of a de-psychologized,
but fully colonized, consciousness. As in melodrama or surrealism,
everything becomes at once objective and subjective.
The iconography of Ballard s landscape bears strong affinities to Pop
Art, and especially the darker Pop of the British wing of the movement,
p

as represented by the work of the Independent Croup in the late 1950s
and early 1960s ( Artists were revealing a sense of the city . . . as
a symbol-thick scene ).57 To the Independent Group science fiction
was one of the few areas in which modern technology was being dis-
cussed. 59 The future as presented In Crash (1973), High-Rise (1975), and
The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) might well be called, after the famed
Independent Croup exhibition of contemporary art, This is Tomor-
row. That 1956 event, celebrating the arrival of the present into the
future, also turned to science fiction as the metaphorical discourse
most appropriate to contemporary life, but rejected much of the uto-
pian flavor of the genre. Commercial and technological cultures were
accepted as fact In Pop, just as the SF in the British journal New Worlds (a
frequent publisher of Ballard) advocated: Before we begin to investi-
gate [the effects of a new industrial revolution], we must accept the
existence of the situation. This . . . is what authors are now beginning to 4 2
do. 59
There is thus a link between science fiction and Pop. In essence,
Ballard has written, science fiction is a response to science and tech-
nology as perceived by the inhabitants of the consumer goods society. ~60 1 E R " 111 A t
New Worlds's fictlon, dominated by the influence of J. C. Ballard and its
editor Michael Moorcock, was littered with the signs of consumer cul-
ture: advertisements, news broadcasts and billboards; commodities,
chrome, and cars; reentering space capsules;6 Jackie Kennedy, Andy
Warhol, and Lee Harvey Oswald; cleaning products, satellites, and su-
permarkets; Elizabeth Taylor.62
This panoply of pop images and forms comprises the mediascape (in
Situatlonism and SF): an external reality ontologically transformed by
the multiplicity of electronic signals In the air. Reality becomes an
extension of the mass mediaÑtelevision especially, but also color maga-
zines, billboards, rock and roll radio, and even cinema and newspapers
(TRAK news agencyÑ"We don 't report the neu)sÑWe write it '~,6J First the
public s response to reality and finally reality itself are affected. David
Pringle notes that in stories such as Ballard s The Subliminal Man,
where huge billboards flash a constant barrage of subliminal advertis-
Ing messages, even the unconscious is annexed by the media land-
scape. 64 Television especially exerts a fascination for Ballard: I think
it s terribly important to watch TV. I think there s a sort of minimum
number of hours of TV you ought to watch every day, and unless you re
watching 3 or 4 hours of TV a day you re just closing your eyes to . . . the
creation of reality that TV achieves."65

Ballard s story, The Intensive Care Unit (1977), is an Information

IMAGE IIIA6E

Age update of E. M. Forster s The Machine Stops (1909); it also recalls
the social science fictfon of the 1950s, but with an unprecedented
savagery. Ballard stages a future in which all social interaction occurs
through the medium of televisionÑschooling, marriage, child-rearingÑ
there Is no unmediated personal contact. The surrogate experience
provided by the media has fully usurped, and even surpassed, the
potentials of actual existence. A doctor by training, the protagonist
observes as his more neurotic patients . . . presented themselves with
the disjointed cutting, aggressive zooms and split-screen techniques
that went far beyond the worst excesses of experimental cinema. 65 By
contrast, his own family life Is modeled on very different cinemas: I
relished the elegantly stylized way in which we now presented our-
selves to each otherÑfortunately we had moved from the earnestness
of Bergman and the more facile mannerisms of Felilnl and Hitchcock to
4 3 the classical serenity and wit of Rene Clair and Max Ophuls, though the
children, with their love of the hand-held camera, still resembled so
many budding Codards (201-2). Cinematic style becomes a part of
social and gestural rhetoric, an integral part of the presentation of self
¥ in the era of terminal identity. Mysteriously driven to meet his wife and
children in the flesh, the protagonist triggers off a kind of nuclear family
war. True closeness is television closeness, he belatedly concludes.
Only at a distance could one find that true closeness to another human
being which, with grace, might transform Itself into love (204).
Ballard s mission is to sift through the array of signals In order to
locate the latent meanings in the mediascapeÑto tease out the deviant
logic found in the random geometries of pop-historical artifacts: In
the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has
represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner
world of our minds, Its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the
realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, too, it seems to me,
have been reversed. 67 The distinction between latent and manifest
content . . . now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called
reality. Objects in juxtaposition allude to an Infinity of significance
which reason alone cannot possible contain: Captain Webster studied
the documents laid out on Dr. Nathan s demonstration table. These
were: (I) a spectroheliogram of the sun; (2) tarmac and take-off checks
for the B29 Superfortress Enola Cay; (3) electroencephalogram of Al-
bert Einstein; (4) transverse section through a Pre-Cambrian Trilobite;
(5) photograph taken at noon, 7th August, 1945, of the sand-sea, Quat-
tara Depression; (6) Max Ernst s Carden Airplane Traps. He turned to
Dr. Nathan. You say these constitute an assassination weapon? 68

Ballard s reference to Ernst Inevitably recalls that artist s dadaist re-
course to collage as the means of exploring the relation between the
private psyche and the public world. Drawing his materials from medi-
cal and mechanical catalogs, as well as engravings and illustrations
from the history of the fine arts, Ernst permitted a new logic to emerge,
one at odds with traditional reason. In Ballard s text, which so clearly
derive from Ernst s strategies, It is only the fact of coincidence that is
meaningful, the randomness of collision, the cut-ups of a postmodern
experience that s already cut up.
Ballard discusses the field of science fiction by providing another
collage: The subject matter of SF is the subject matter of everyday life:
the gleam on refrigerator cabinets, the contours of a wife s or husband s
thighs passing the newsreel Images on a color TV set, the conjunction of
musculature and chromium artifact within an automobile Interlor, the
unique postures of passengers on an airport escalator. 59 Ballard s lan-
guage is reminiscent of Situationist rhetoric In its attention to the mean-
ingful structures of everyday life and its random wanderingsÑits
deriueÑthrough the territories of consumer existence.

and dangerously Intelligent, who is preparing her child s birthday party.
The story is divided into discrete numbered and labeled sections (a
familiar New Worlds trope). Sections on entropy, light, ontology, and
dada are interspersed with a catalog of Sarah s activities ("AT LUNCH
ONLY ONE GLASS OF MILK IS SPILLED ). Zoline evokes both entropic disper-
sal and cosmic connectedness, as the quotidian experience of a house-
wife is described in language usually reserved for astronomical phe-
nomena: a fine example of the estranging rhetorics of science fiction. 5
The narrative builds to her inevitable breakdown on the kitchen floor,
smashing glassware, scrawling graffiti, and throwing eggs. But this is
not only about psychological breakdown: through Zolines complex
structures, Sarah Boyle signifies the prevalent, contradictory, and medl-
ated inscriptions on women in consumer culture: (24) Sarah Boyle s
blue eyes, how blue? Bluer far and of a different quality than the Nature
metaphors which were both engine and fuel to so much of precedent
literature. A fine, modern, acid, synthetic blue . . . the deepest, most
unbelievable azure of the tiled and mossless interiors of Callfornia
swimming pools. The chemists in their kitchens cooked, cooled and
A necessary ambivalence pervades these texts that makes them eas- T E R " 111 ^ t T E | " | " ^ t distilled this blue from thousands of colorless and wonderfully con
ier to quote than to paraphrase. The increasing compression of Bal
lard s prose through the 1960s renders it even more resistant to sum
mary, as it moved closer to the condition of the advertisement ( What
can Saul Bellow and John Updike do that J. Walter Thompson, the
world s largest advertising agency and Its greatest producer of fiction,
can t do better? ).70 To this end Ballard developed the form of the
condensed novel. 7 As Prlngle and James Coddard describe them,
the narratives are stripped of surplus verbiage and compounded until
they are only skeletal representations of what they might otherwise
have been. 72 The linear progress of the minimal narrative that remains
is further broken by a division into separately headed paragraphs; the
temporal and spatial relations between fragments are variant. As did
the cut-ups, Ballard s narrational style derives from the collage tech
niques of the surrealists: The techniques of surrealism have a particu
lar relevance at this moment, when the fictional elements in the world
around us are multiplying to the point where it is almost impossible to
distinguish between the real and the falseÑthe terms no longer have
any meaning. 73
The terrain of the mediascape and the form of the condensed novel
were not Ballard s alone. One of the most celebrated works in the SF
canon is Pamela Zoline s 1967 New Worlds short story, The Heat Death
of the Universe. 74 Zollne narrates a day in the life of Sarah Boyle, witty

structed crystals, each one unique and nonpareil; and now that color,
, " ^ 6 E hisses, bubbles, burns in Sarah s eyes. In Zollne s story the authority of
10 A G E scientific discourse Is Ironically undermined by the commodification of

both everyday life and the known universe.
The implosion of meaning in the mediascape, in blip culture, dictates
the rise of new literary forms. The novels operate as a condensation
of the iconography of consumer culture and the compactness of con-
sumerist forms. The traditions of literature prevent readers from
engaging with the realism of such supposedly experimental writing.
In the absence of such preconceptions, Ballard argues that people
would realize that Burroughs narrative techniques, or my own In their
way, would be an immediately recognizable reflection of the way life Is
actually experienced. He continues by defining the state of terminal
culture and image addiction: We live in quantified non-linear termsÑ
we switch on television sets, switch them off half an hour later, speak on
the telephone, read magazines, dream and so forth. We don t live our
lives in linear terms in the sense that the Victorians did. 76
Both the cut-ups of William Burroughs and Ballard s condensed nov-
els continue the collagist traditions of their modernist forebears in the
surrealist, dadaist, and cubist projects. Given the fullness of that appro-
priation, it would be false to immediately confer a postillodern status
upon these writers, and yet the history of postmodern science fiction

. . ~
õ~

(and indeed, postmodernism itself) is inconceivable without them.
Clearly the writers of cyberpunk, a thoroughly postmodern phenom-
enon, derive much from Burroughs and Ballard. The shift from mod-
ernism to postmodernism is evident in Ballard s recognition that his
and Burroughs s techniques are largely mimetic of a profoundly trans-
formed reality. The prejudice against experimental writing, which
prevents readers from perceiving the mimetic aspects of their prose,
has been elided in the more narratively grounded work of the cyber-
punks. There, cut-ups and condensations moved from being antinarra-
tive experimental practices (even within science fiction s own avant-
garde) to a phenomenon grounded in lived reality. The notorious first
sentence of William Cibsons Neuromancer, for example ( The sky
above the port was the color of television turned to a dead channel ),
describes the reality of Chlba City, but it also recalls Ernst s collages,
filtered through the white-noise sensibilities of electronic culture. Bal-
lard and Burroughs, then, are crucial transitional figures positioned
between the psychoanalytic modernism of the Surrealists and the elec-
tronic postmodernism of the cyberpunks.

Thus the development of new spectacular forms is a project that TE RM~ HAI
dominates the production of recent science fiction, and the compres-
sion of Ballard s work will find echoes, not only in cyberpunk, but also in
the muslc video aesthetic of Max Headroom and the dense layering of
panels in Howard Chaykin s comics. Note that Ballard does not neces-
sarily embrace the emergent order of things, and the series of tech-
nological disaster novels he has produced reveal a profound suspicion
of the new cultural formations. Yet the act of acceptance is paramount:
Ballard s protagonists are marked by their acceptance of the altered
circumstances of reality: In The Drowned World, the hero, Kerans, is the
only one to do anything meaningful. His decision to stay, to come to
terms with the changes taking place within himself, to understand the
logic of his relationship with the shifting biological kingdom . . . is
a totally meaningful course of action. The behavior of the other peo-
ple, which superficially appears to be meaningfulÑgetting the hell out,

or draining the lagoonsÑis totally meaningless. 77 This acceptance, as
noted, extends to the new forms of the mediascape: the shifting elec-
tronic kingdom. There is an acknowledgment, rare in fiction, that this is
where we all live.

The Man Ulho Foll to Eard - Loving the Alien
Before moving to the science fiction works concerned with the control
of the media, it is worth taking a brief look at a film that effectively

IIIAGE

portrays the control by the media and that demonstrates the addictive
need for the substitute reality of the spectacle. Nlcolas Roeg s The Man
Who Fell to Earth presents an alien (David Bowie) whose knowledge and
experience of our world is entirely mediated by television. Here the
science fiction narrative serves as a metaphor for a less cosmic alien-
ation: the British alien adrift In AmericaÑanother world of appear-
ances (Marker). 8 Roeg s cinematography and mise-en-scene continu-
ally stress angularity, renectivity, and prismaticity; the geometry of
intersecting light and images; a substantlal insubstantiality. Thomas
Newton, the alien, watches television (or teleuisions: six, twelve, or
more). 9 Strange thing about television is that it doesn t tell you every-
thing, he muses. It shows you everything about life on Earth, but the
mysteries remain. Perhaps it s the nature of television. Debord pro-
vides an analysis of Newton s observation: The spectacle originates In
4 7 the loss of the unity of the world, and the gigantic expansion of the
modern spectacle expresses the totality of this loss: the abstraction of
all specific labor and the general abstraction of the entirety of produc-
tion are perfectly rendered In the spectacle, whose mode of being con
T [ R A'l "' 4 I crete is precisely abstraction (Thesis 29). The expression of the loss of
unity could only take the form of a massive displacement from sign to
E sign. There could be no totalizing system of reference to ground it in
order to engender cohesion and produce concrete meaning.
In The Man Who Fell to Earth, real life is trivialized and made banal.
Newton s quest to rescue his family is parodied by a camera commer-
cial: togetherness through picture taking. The photograph becomes an
instant substitute and a surrogate memory.80 As in advertising, TV at
once reveals and hides the lack, providing him with parodic distortions
of the family he does not have, the community he does not share, the
experiences from which he remains separate. Television serves simply
as noise for Newton; the white noise of American culture. The wealthy
Newton purchases no extraneous commodities other than the multiple
television monitors; as Debord noted, the spectacle is the ultimate
commodity, for It contains all the others (Thesis 15).
Like the alien figure of Sans Soleil, Newton feels a force which ema-
nates from television, a control which pulls him in. Get out of my mind,
all of you! he moans to his wall of screens. Stay where you belong.
Television is both pervasive and invasive, evidently serving as a drug,
an electronic analogue for the pollution of Newton s body with alcohol.
The more Newton engages the world of appearances, the less real his
own body, his own appearance, becomes. The spectacle holds the
monopoly of appearance (Debord, Thesis 12), representing the cohe

)

/ ADAe. ._, /t&,XS ,~ AS/ - zG,
d Althusser, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)." Lenin
and PhilosoDhv. and Other EssaYs. Monthly Review
Press, 1971,1972. Pages 127-186.

Q)
~Q

Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses

(Notes towards
an Investigation)

ON THE REPRODUCTION OP T}IE CONDITIONS
OF PRODUCTIONt

I must now expose more fully something which was briefly
glimpsed in my analysis when 1 spoke of the necessity to
renew the means of production if production is to be
possible. That was a passing hint. Now I shall consider it
for itself.

As Marx said, every child knows that a social fiormation
which did not reproduce the conditions of production at
the same time as it produced would not last a year.2 The
ultimate condition of production is therefore the repro-
duction Or the conditions of production. l'his may be
'simple' (reproducing exactly the previous conclitions of
production) or 'on an extended scale' (expanding them).
Let us ignore this last distillction for the moment.

What, then, is thc rcprodnclion orthc {ondlitions of pro-
duction ?

Here we are entering a domain which is both very fiam

x, This text is made up of two extracts firom ¥n on6oing stu(ly. The sub-title
'Notes towards an lnvestklttion' is the author's own. I he ideas expounded
should not be regarded as more than the Inttodtletion to a discussion.
s. Marx to Kugellnann, It July 1868, Sc/crlcd Cor~cspon,rcncc, Moscolr,
t~55. p. 209.

127

128 Logis AllAusscr
iliar (since Capital Volume Two) and uniquely ignored. The
tenacious obviousnesses (ideological obviousnesses of an
empiricist typc) of the point of view of production alone,
or even of that of mere productive practice (itscif al)stract in
relation to the proccss of production) arc so integrated into
our everyday 'consciousness' that it is extremely hard, not
to say almost impossible, to raise oneself to the point of
ViCrD of reproduction. Nevertheless, everythilig outside this
point of view romains abstract (worse than one-sided:
distorted) - even at the level of production, and, a fortiori,
at that of mere practice.
Let us try an(l examine the matter methodically.
To simplify my exposition, and assuming that every
social formation arises from a dominant mode of production,
I can Say that the process of production sets to work the
existing prodtictive forces in and under definite relations
of rrodtlctioll.
It follows that, in order to exist, every social formation
must reproduce the conditions of its production at the same
time as it produces, and in order to be able to produce. It
must therefore reproduce:
1. the pro(luctive forces,
2. the existing relations of production.

Rctrodllction of thc Mcans of Produvtion

Everyone (including the bourgeois economists whose work
is national accounting, or tile modern 'macro-economic'
'theoreticians') now recognizes, because Marx compcilingly
proved it in Capital Volume Two, that no production is
possible which does not allow for the reproduction of the
material conditions of production: tile reproduction of the
means of production.
Tlle avcrage economist, who is no dillcrent in this than

Idcology and thc Statc 129
the avcrage capitalist, knows that cach year it is essential to
foresec what is nec(lcd to replace what Ims beell used up or
worn out in productinn: raw material, fixcd installations
(buildiligs), insttilmcnts of productioll (macilincs), etc. I say
the avcrage ecotioinist = thc avcrage capilalist, for they
hotil cxpress thc point of view of thc fiml, rcgar(lillg it as
suillcicllt simply to 6ive a comnlclltary on thc terms of the
firm's financial accoulltillg practice.
13ut thanks to thc gel)itis of Qucsilay who first posed tilis
'gl;lrillg' prol)lem, and to thc genitis of Marx who rcsolved
it, we know that tllc reprodtictioll of tilc malerial con-
ditions of prodtiction cannot he tl~ou~rllt at thc Icvel of the
firm, because it docs not exist at that level in its rcal con-
ditions. What hapl)cils at the Icvel Of the firm is an eXect,
wilicil only gives an idea of thc necessity of reproduction,
but ahsolutcly fails to allow its con(litiolis and mccllallisms
to be thougilt.
A momcnt's rcncction is enougll to be convinced of this:
1\1r X, a capitalist who prodtices woollen yarn in his
spilinilig-millw has to 'reprodtice' his raw matcrial, his
machines, etc. But IJC does not producc thelil for his own
production - other capitalists do: an Australiall shccp-
farmer, Mr Y, a hcavy cngil1eer prodticilig maciline-tools,
Mr %, etc., etc. And Mr Y and Mr %, in order to produce
thosc products which are the coliditioll of tilc reprodtiction

of Mr X's conditions of pro(ltictioll, also havc to reproduce
the conditions of their own prodoction, and so on to infinity
- the whole in proportions such that, on the national and
even the world market, the deman(l for means of pro-
duction (for repro(ltiction) can bc satisficd by the supply.
In order to think this mechanism, uhicll Ica(ls to a kind
of 'endless chain', it is necessary to follow 1\1arx's 'global'
procedure, an(l to study in particular the rclations of the
circulation of capital between Dcpartment I (production of
)

13O Louis Althusscr

means of production) and Department II (production of
means of consumption), and thc realization of surplus-
walue, ill (,znpital, Volumes Two and Three.

We shall not go into the analysis of this question. It is
enou6h to have mcntioned the cxistencc of the necessity
of the reproduction of the material conditions of production.

Rcprodl~otion of Labosr-Po1Pcr

However, thc reader will not have failed to note one thing.
We have discussed the reproduction of the means of pro-
duction - but not the reproduction of the productive forces.
We have therefore ignored the reproduction of what dis-
tinguishes the productivc forscs from the means of pro-
duction, i.e. the reproduction of labour power.

From the observation of what takes place in the firm, in
particul;lr from the examination of the financial accounting
practice which predicts amortization and investment, we
have becn able to obtain an approximate idca of the exist-
ence of the material process of reproduction, but we are
now entcrin6r a domain in which the obscrvation of what
happclls in the firm is, if not totally blind, at least almost
entirely so, and for good reason: lhe reproduction of
labour power takes place essentially outside the firm.

I low is lhe reproduction of labour power ensured ?
It is ensured by giving labour power the matcrial means
with whicll to reproduce itself: by wages. Wages feature in
the accounting of each entcrprise, but as 'wage capital',8
not at all as a condition of the matcrial reproduction of
labour power.

I lowcvcr, that is in fact how it 'works', since wages rep-
rescllts only that part of thc value produced by the expendi

3. M*rx grve it its ccientific concept: vJria~k { pi jl.

w
vl

!Idtolog and tht Statc J3t

ture of labour power which is indispensablc for its repro

Iduction: sc. indispensable to the reconslitution of the
|labour power of the wagc-earner (the wherewithal to pay

(or housillg, food and clotbin6, ill short to enable the wage
earner to present hinlsclf again at the factory gate the next
day - and every filrther day God grants him); an(l we should
add: indispensable for raising and educating the children

in whom the proletarian reproduces himsclf (ill n models
where n = o, 19 2, etc....) as labour power.

Remember that this quantity of value (wages) necessary
for the reproduction of labour power is determined not by
the needs of a 'biological' Guarantced Minimum wage
(Salnirc Minimum 17ltcrprofcssionncl caranti) alone, but by
the needs of a historical minimum (Marx noted that
E:nglish workers need bcer while French proletarians need
wine) - i.e. a llistorically variable minimum.

I should also like to point out that this minilllum is doubly
historical in that it is not dclilled by the historical needs of
the working class 'recognized' by the capitalist class, but
by the historical needs imposc(l by the pruletarian class
strug61e (a double class struggle: against the lengthening
of the working day and against tllc reduction of wages).

I-lowever, it is not enough to ensure for labour power the
material conditions of its reproduction if it is to be repro-
duced as labour power. I have said that tllc available labour
power must be 'competent', i.e. suitable to be set to work
in the complex system of the process of production. The
development of the productive forces and the type of unity
historically constitutive of the productive forces at a given
moment produce the rcsult that the labour power has to be
(diversely) skilled and therefore reproduced as such.
Diversely: according to the requirements of the socio-
technical division of labour, its different 'jobs' and 'posts'.

Ilow is this reproduction of the (diversified) skills of

132 Louis A/thusscr
labour power provided for in a capitalist regime? Here,
unlike social formations eharaeterized by slavery or serfdom,
this reproduction of the skills of labour power tends (this
is a tendential law) decreasingly to be provided for 'on tile
spot' (apprenticesilip within production itseif), but is
achieveel more and more outsisle prosluction: by the capitalist
edueation system, and by other instances and institutions.
What do children learn at school? They go varying
distances in tileir studies, but at any rate they learn to read,
to write and to add - i.e. a number of techniques, and a
number of other tilings as well, ineluding elements (which
may be rudimentary or on the contrary thoroughgoing) of
'scielitific' or 'literary culture', which are directly useful in
the different jobs in production (one instruction for manual
workers, another for technicians, a third for engineers, a
final one for hi6her management, etc.). Thus they learn
'know-how'.
But besis3es these techniques and knowledges, and in
learning them, children at school also learn the 'rules' of
good '. '. .:~., i.e. the attitude that should be observed
by every agent in the division of labour, according to the
job he is 'tiestined' for: rules of morality, civic and pro-
fessional conscience, whicil actually means rules of respect
[or the socio-techilical division of labour and ultimately tile
rules of the order established by class domination. They also
learn to 'speak proper I;rench', to 'handle' the workers
correctly, i.e. actually (for the future capitalists and their
servants) to 'order them about' properly, i.e. (ideally) to
'speak to them' in the right way, etc.
To put this more scientifically, I shall say that the repro-
duetion of labour power requires not only a reproduction
of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of
its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e.
a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the

Idcology and the Statc 133
workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate
the ruling ideology eorrectly for the agents of exploitation
and repression, so that tlley, too, will provide for the dom-
ination of the ruling class 'in words'.
In other words, tile scllool (bllt also other State institu-
tions like the Church, or other apparatuses like the Army)
teaehes 'know-how', but in rorms whicll ensure subjLction
to tlJc ruli~lg ideolqgy or the mastery of its 'practice'. All the
agenis of production, exploitatioll and repressiolI, not to
speak of the 'professionals of ideol(gy' (Marx), must in
- one way or another be 'steeped' in this i(leology in order
to perform their tasks 'eonscientiously' - the tasks of the ex
ploited (the proletarians), Of the exploiters (the capitalists),
of the exploiters' auxiliaries (the man;lgers), or of the high
I priests of the ruling i(leology (its 'functionaries'), ete.
! The reproduetion of labour power tlllls reveals as its
{ sine qua non not only the reprodtietion of its 'skills' but also
I the reproduetion of its subieetion to the ruling i(leology or
| of the 'practice' of that i(leology, with the proviso that it is
not enough to say 'not only hut also', for it is elear that it is
in tJlc fonns and under tAcfor~ns of idcological subicction that

provision is madc for tllc rc~troductiol of tllc slills of labour
power.
But this is to recognize the efrective presence of a new
reality: idcology.
IZere I shall make two comments.
l he first is to round off my analysis of reproductiorl.
I have just given a rapid survey of the forms of the
reproduetioll of the produetive forees, i.e. of the means of
produetion on the one hand, and of labour ponver on the
other.
But I have not yet approached the question of the
rctroduction of thc relations of production. 1 his is a crucial
question for the Marxist theory of the moele of production.

!
0
l

IJ~# Louis Althusstr

To let it pass would be t theorctical omission - worse, g
serious political error. *
I shall therefore discuss it. But in order to obtain the I
means to discuss it, 1 shall have to make another long I

detour.
The second comment Is that in order to make thi8 |
detour, I am obliged to re-raise my old question: what is Q I
society ? '

INPRASTRUCTURE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE

On a number of occasions' I have insisted on the revolu-
tionary character of the Marxist conception of the 'social
whole' insofar as it is distinct from the Hegelian 'totality'
said (and this thesis only repeats famous propositions of
historical materialism) that Marx conceived the structure
of every society as constituted by 'levels' or 'instances' arti-,
culated by a specific determination: the l ,r ._.. ,..__
,economic base (the 'unitv' of the productive fn~s ~nllabL
relations of production) and the stlperstructurc, which itself
mnts;nC twn ~l~vels' or 'instances': the politico-legal (law
.~~_
gious. ethical, legal, political, etc.).

Ilesirles its theoretico-dldactic interest (it reveals the
diR^erence between Marx and Hegel), this representation
has thc following crucial theoretical advantage: it makes it
possible to inscribe in the theoretical apparatus of it8
essential concepts what I have called their respct~ivc tndiscs
of cfctt'vity. What does this mean?

It is easy to see that this representation of the structure
of every society as an edificc containing a base (infrastruoW

4. In Fer illart and Rtading Ca.oilal, 1965 (English editions 1969 and 1970
respectiecly).

Idcolo8y and l/IC Statc 135

ture) on which arc erected the two 'noors' of the super-
¥ stnlcture, is a metaphor, to he quite precise, a spatial meta-
phor: the metapllor of a topography (topxquuc).S Like every
metaphor, this metaphllr suggests something, makes some-
th;,.g visible. Whatt Precisely this: that the upper floors
coul(l not 'stay tlp' (in tlle air) alone, if they did not rest
prcciscly on their base.

l'llus the obicct of the metaphor of the edifice is to
represent above all the 'determination in the last instance'
by the economic base. The effect of this spatial metaphor
is to endow the base with an index of ellectivity known by
the famous terms: the determination in the last instance
of what happcns in the upper 'noors' (of thc superstructure)
by what happcns in the economic base.

Given this indcx of ellectivity 'in the last instance', the
'tloors' of the superstructurc are clearly endowed with
dirfercnt indices of erfcctivity. What kind of indices ?

It is possible to say that the lloors of the superstructure
are not determinant in the last installce, but that they are
detcrmined by the eflectivity of the base; that if they are
determinant in their own (as yet undefined) ways, this is
true only insofar as tlley are determined by the base.

l'heir indcx of ellcctivity (or detcrmination), as deter-
mined by the determination in tlle last instance of the
base, is thought by the Marxist tradition ill two ways: (I)
there is a 'relative autonomy' of the superstructure with
respect to the base; (2) there is a 'reciprocal action' of the
superstructure on the base.

We can therefore say that the great theoretical advantage
of the Marxist topograplly, i.e. of the spatial metaphor of

5. repograph,~ from the Greclt topos: place. A topo6raphy represents in e
defini~e space the respective l;tes occupied by several realities: thus the
economic is at the bottem (tbe base), the superstructure abovt gt.
.
: j

s36 Louis Abhusscr
the edifice (base and superstructure) i8 simultaneously that
it reveals that questions of dedermination (or of index of
effectivity) are crucial; that it reveals that it is the base which
in the last instance determines the whole edifice; and that,
as a consequelIce, it obliges us to pose the theoretical prob-
lem of the types of 'derivatory' effectivity peculiar to the
superstructure, i.e. it obliges u6 to think what the Marxist
tradition calls conjointly the relative autonomy of the super-
structure and the reciprocal action of the superstructure on
the base.
The greatest disadvantage of this reprcsentation of the
structure of every society by the spatial metaphor of an
edificc, is obviously the fact that it is metaphorical: i.e.
it remains des~riprivc.
It now seems to me that it is possible and desirable to
represent things dillerently. NB, I do not mean by this that
I want to reicct tile classical metaphor, for that metaphor
itself requircs that we go beyond it. And I am not going
beyond it in order to reject it as outworn. I simply want
to attempt to lhink what it gives us in the form of a descrip~
tion.
I believe that it is possible and necessary to think what
characterizes the essential of the existence and nature of the
superstructure on thc basis of reprodgclion. Once one takes
the point of view of reproduction, many of the questions
whose existence was indicated by the spatial metaphor of
the edifice, but to whiclI it could not give a conceptual
answer, are immediately illuminated.
My basic thesis is that it is not possible to pose these
questions (and therefore to answer them) exvept from tht
point of vterD of reproduction.
I shall give a short analysis of Law, the State and Ideology
from this poilt of vien~. And I shall reveal what happens
both from the point of view of practice and production on
the one hall(l, and from that of reproduction on the otiler.

THE STATE

Idcology and Jlle Statc 137

i The Marxist tradition is strict, here: in thc Counmunist
" Mallifeslo and the liigJBt~wtelz IRrumatoc (and in all the later
i classical texts, above all in Marx's writings on the Paris
* G)mmulle and I enilI's on Slatr and RevolllJion), the State
I is explicitly conceived as a reprcssive apparatus. The State
is a 'machine' of repressiml, whicil enal les the rulill6 classes
(in thc ninetcelitil century the bourgcois class an(l tllc 'class'
of big landowilers) to ensure their dominatioll over thc
| working class, thus cnal)ling thc former to subicct the latter
to the process of surphis-value extortion (i.e. to capitalist
I exploitation).
I l he State is thus first of all what the Marxist classics
c have callcd tlle Stnte a)paratus. 'I his term means: not
i only the specialized apparatus (in the narrow sensc) whose
I existencc an(l necessity I liave recognize(l in relation to the
l requiremcnts of legal practice, i.e. the police, the courts, the
prisons; but also the army, which (the proletariat has paid
for this experience with its blood) intervenes directly as a
supplementary repressive force in the last instance, when
the police and its specialized auxiliary corps are 'outrun
by events'; and above this enseml)le, the head of State,

the government and the administration.
rresented in this form, the Marxist-LelIinist 'theory' of
the State has its finger on the essential point, and not for one
moment can there be any question of rejectin6 the fact that
this really is the essential point. Tllc State apparatus, which
dcfincs the State as a force of reprcssive execution and
intervention 'in the interests of the ruling classcs' in the
class struggle conducted by the bourgeoisie and its allies
against the proletariat, is quite certainly the State, and
quite certainly dcfines its Icasic 'function'.
i

138 Lotlis AlJhgsser
From Dclsriptivc Thcory to Thcory as such

Nevertheless, here too, as I pointed out with respect to the
metaphor of the edifice (infrastructure and superstructure),
this presentation of the nature of the State is still partly
descriptive.
As I shall often have ocsasion to use this adjective (des-
criptive), a word of explanation is necessary in order to
remove any ambiguity.
Whenever, in speaking of the metaphor of the edifice
or of the Marxist 'theory' of the State, I have said that these
are descriptive conceptions or representations of their
objects, I had no ulterior critical motives. On the contrary,
I have every grounds to think that great scientific dis-
coverics cannot help but pass throu6h the phase of what
I shall call dessriptirc 'thcory'. This is the first phase of
every theory, at least in the domain which concerns us (that
of the science of social formations). As such, one might -
and in my ophIion one must - envisage this phase as a
transitional one, necessary to the development of the theory.
Iliat it is transitional is inscribed in my expression: 'des-
criptive theory', which reveals in its conjulIction of terms
the equivalent of a kind of 'contradiction'. In fact, the term
theory 'clashes' to some extent with the adicctive '(lescrip-
tive' which I have attached to it. This means quite precisely:
(X) that the 'descriptive theory' really is, without a shadow
of a doubt, the irreversible beginning of the theory; but
(2) that the 'descriptive' fi)rm in which the theory is
presented requires, precisely as an ellect of this 'contra-
diction', a development of the theory which goes beyond
the form of 'description'.
Let me make this idea clearer by returning to our present
object: the State.
When I say that the Marxist 'theory' of the State available
to us is still partly 'descriptive', that means first and fore

w6E
~D

)

IdeoloU and thc Statc 139

most that this descriptive 'theory' is without the shadow of a
doubt precisely the beginning of the Marxist theory of the
State, and tliat this bcgilllling gives us the essential point,
i.e. the decisive prhicipie of every later development of the
thcory.
Indeed, I shall call the descriptive theory of the State

correct, shice it is pcrrectly possible to make the vast
majority of the facts in the domain with which it is con-
cerned correspon(l to tlle definition it gives of its object.
Thus, the definition of the State as a class State, existing
in the repressive State apparatus, casts a brilliant light on
all the facts observable in the various orders of repression
whatever their domains: from the massacres of June 1848
and of the Paris Commune, of Bloody Sunday, May 1905
in l'etrograd, of the Resistance, of Charonile, etc., to the
mere (and relatively ano(lyne) interventions of a 'censor-
ship' which has banncel Diderot's La Religirl se or a play by
Gatti on Franco; it casts light on all the direct or indirect
forms of exploitation -- -' exterminatiolI of the masses of
the pcopie (imperialist wars); it casts light on that subtle
everyday domhlalion beneath which can he glimpsed, in
the forms of political democracy, for example, what Lenin,
following Marx, callcd the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
And yet the descriptive theory of the State represents a
phase in the constitution of the thcory which itscif demands
the 'supersession' of this phase. For it is clear that if the
definition in question really does give us the means to
idcntify and recognizc the facts of oppressiols by relating
them to the State, conceived as the repressive State ap-
paratus, this 'interrelationship' gives rise to a very special
kind of obviousness, about whicil I shall have something to
say in a moment: 'Yes, that's how it is, that's really truelw

6. See p. 158 below, 011 Idto~ot~
w
~n
o

J40 Louis Althusscr
And the accumulation of faets within the definition of the
State may multiply examples but it does not really advance
the definition of the State, i.e. the scientific theory of the
State. Every descriptive theory thus runs the risk of
'blocking' the development of the theory, and yet that
development is essential.
That is why I think that, ,in order to develop this des-
eriptive theory into theory as such, i.e. in order to under-
stand furtiler the mechanisms of the State in its functioning,
I think that it is indispensable to adzl something to the
classical defillition of the State as a State apparatus.

Thc Essentials of thc Marxist Thcory of Jhc Statc

Let me first elarify one important point: the State (and its
existenee hl its apparatus) has no meaning except as a func-
tion of State power. The whole of the political class struggle
revolves around the State. By which I mean around the
possession, i.e. the seizure and conservation of State power
by a certain class or by an allianee between elasses or class
fractions. This first clarification obliges me to distinguish
between State power (conservation of State power or
seizure of State power), the objective of the political class
struggle on the one hand, and the State apparatus on the
other.
We know that the State apparatus may survive, as is
proved by bourgeois 'revolutions' in nineteenth-century
l;rance (1830, 1848), by COlJpS d'Atat (2 Deeember, May
1958), by collapses of the State (the fall of the Empire in
1870, of the Third Republic in x940), or by the political rise
of the petty bourgeoisie (1890 95 in Franee), ete., without
the State apl)aratlls behlg allected or modified: it may sur-
vive political events whicil affect the possession of State

power.

IdcoloU and thc Statc J41
Even after a social revolution like that of 1917, a large
part of the State npparatus survived after the seizure of
State power by the alliance of the proletariat and the small
peasantry: Lenin repeated the fact again an(l again.
It is possible to describe the distinclioll between State
power and State apparatus as part of the 'Marxist theory'
of the State, explicitly present since Marx's Ei,ghtcenth
lRrurnairc and Class Strug,gles in rrancc.
To summarize the 'Marxist theory of the State' on this
point, it can be said that the Marxist classics have always
claillled that (X) the State is the repressive State apparatus,
(2) State power and State apparatus must be distinguished,
(3) the objective of the class strllggle eoneerlIs State power,
and in eonsequence the use of the State apparatus by the
* elasses (or alliance of classes or of fractions of classes)
I holdilig State power as a {unction of their class objectives,
| and (4) the proletariat must seize State power in order to
| destroy the existing bourgeois State apparatus and, in a
I first phase, replace it with a quite dillerent, proletarian,
State apparatus, then ill later phases set in motion a radical
process, that of the destructioll of the State (the end of
State power, the end of every State apparatus).
In this perspective, therefore, what I would propose to
add to the 'Marxist theory' of the State is already there in
so many words. But it seems to me that even with this
supplement, this theory is still in part descriptive, although
it does now eontain complex and differential elements
whose functioning and aclion eanlsot be ull(lcrstood without
recourse to further supplementary theoretical development.

Thc Statc Idcological Apparatuscs

Thus, what has to be added to the 'Marxist theory' of the
State is something else.

.i ,)

. . ~... . .

s4¢ Louis Althusscr

Here we must advance cautiously in a terrain which, in
fact, the Marxist classics entered long before us, but
without having systematized in theoretical form the dec-
isive advances implied by their experiences and procedures.
Their experiences and procedures were indeed restricted
in the main to the terrain of political practice.
In fact, i.e. in their political practice, the Marxist classics
treated the State as a more complex reality than the
definition of it given in the 'Marxist theory of the State',
even when it has been supplemented as I have just sug-
gested. They recognized this complexity in their practice,
but they did not express it in a corresponding theory.'
I should like to attempt a very schematic outline of this
corresponding theory. To that end, I propose the following
thesis.
In order to advance the theory of the State it is indis-
pensable to take into account not only the distinction
between Statc polPcr and Statc apparatus, but also another
reality which is clearly on the side of the (repressive) State
apparatus, but must not be confused with it. I shall call
this reality by its concept: the idcological State apparatxses.
What are the ideological State apparatuses (ISAs)l
They must not be confused with the (repressive) State
apparatus. Remember that in Marxist theory, the State
Apparatus (SA) contains: the Government, the Admin

7. To my Imowledgc, Gramsci is the only onc who went any distance in the
road I am taldng. Hc had thc 'remarl~^blc' idea that thc Statc could r ot bc
reduced to the (Repressive) State Apparatus, but included, 95 hc put it, a
certain number of institulions from 'riti/ JOritt,y': thc Church, thc Schools,
thc trade unions, etc. Unfortunately, Gramsci did not qstematize his
institutions, whicb remained in the state of acute but fragmennry notes (cf.
Gramsci, Stkclionsfrom the Pnsox Netebootl, International Publishers, 1971,
pp. 12, 259, 260-3; see also the lettcr to Tatiana Schucht, 7 September 0931,
in Lc~rc Icl CJrfrrr, Einaudi, 1968, p. 479. English-language translation in
preparation.

Idcolog,y and tht Statc I43
istration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons,
ete., which constitute what I shall in future call the Re-
pressive State Apparatus. Repressive suggests that the
State Apparatus in question 'functions by violence' - at
least ultimately (since repression, e.g. administrative re-
pression, may take non-physical forms).
I shall call Ideological State Apparatuses a certain number
of realities which present themselves to the immediate
observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions.
I propose an empirical list of these which will obviously
have to be examined in detail, tested, corrected and re-
organized. With all the reservations implied by this require-
ment, we can for the moment regard the following in-
stitutions as Ideological State Apparatuses (the order in
which I have listed them has no particular signifieance):
- the religious ISA (the system of the diffcrent Churches),
- the educational ISA (the system of the different public
and private 'Schools'),
- the family ISA,'
- the legal ISA,'
- the political ISA (the politieal system, including the
different Parties),
- the trade-union ISA,
- the communications ISA (press, radio and television,

etc.),
- the cultural ISA (Literature, the Arts, sports, ete.).
I have said that the ISAs must not be confused with the
(Repressive) State Apparatus. What constitutes the diff-
erence P

8. The family obviously hls other 'fullctions' than that of an ISA. It intcr-
vencs in thc reproduction of labour power. In diffcrent modcs of pro-
duction it is the unit of production nd/or the unit of consumption.
9. The 'Law' belongs both to the (Reprcssivc) Sutc App ratus nd to the
system of the ISAs.
w
Vl

1441 Louis Alth"sscr
As a first moment, it is clear that while there is one
(Repressive) State Apparatus, there is a plurality of Ideo-
logical State Apparatuses. Even presupposing that it exists,
the unity that constitutes this plurality of ISAs as a body is
not immediately visible.
As a second moment, it is clear that whereas the -
unified - (Repressive) State Apparatus belongs entirely
to the pl~blic domain, much the larger part of the Ideologieal
State Apparatuses (in their apparent dispersion) are part,
on the contrary, of the privatc domain. Churches, Parties,
Trade Unions, families, some schools, most newspapers,
eultural ventures, ete., etc., are private.
We can ignore the first observation for the moment. But
someone is bound to question the second, asking me by what
ri6ht I regard as Ideologieal Sfafe Apparatuses, institutions
which for the most part do not possess publie status, but
are quite simply provate institutions. As a conscious
Marxist, Gramsci already forestalled this objection in one
sentence. The distinction between the public and the
private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid
in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law
exercises its 'authority'. The domain of the State escapes it
because the latter is 'above the law': the State, which is the
State of the ruling class, is neither public nor private; on
the contrary, it is the precondition for any distinction be-
tween public and private. The same thing can be said from
the starting-point of our State Ideological Apparatuses. It
is unimportant whether the institutions in which they are
realized are 'public' or 'private'. What matters is how they
function. Private institutions can perfectly well 'function' as
Ideological State Apparatuses. A reasonably thorough
analysis of any one of the ISAs proves it.
But now for what is essential. What distinguishes the
ISAs from the (Repressive) State Apparatus is the following

IltoloU and tht Statc 14S
basic differense: the Repressive State Apparatus functions
'by violence', whereas the Ideotogical State Apparatuses
| fualction 'by tdcolog'.
ll

I can clarify matters by correcting this distinction. I
shall say rather that every State Apparatus, whether Re-
pressive or Ideologtcal, 'functions' both by violence and
by ideology, but with one very important distinction which
makes it imperative not to confuse the Ideological State
Apparatuses with the (Repressive) State Apparatus.
This is the &et that the (Repressive) State Apparatus
functions massively and predominantly by rcprcssion (in-

eluding physical repression), while functioning secondarily
by ideology. (There is no such thing as a purely repressive
apparatus.) For example, the Army and the Police also
function by ideology both to ensure their own cohesion and
reproduction, and in the 'values' they propound externally.
In the same way, but inversely, it is essential to say that
for their part the Ideological State Apparatuses function
massively and predominantly by ideology, but they also
function seeondarily by repression, even if ultimately, but
only ultimately, this is very attentuated and concealed, even
symbolic. (There is no such thing as a purely ideological
apparatus.) Thus Schools ansl Churches use suilabie
methods of punishment, expulsion, selection, etc., to 'disci-
pline' not only their shepherds, but also their flocks. The
same is true of the Family.... The same is true of the
cultural IS Apparatus (censorship, among other things),
etc.
Is it necessary to add that this determination of the
double 'functioning' (predominantly, secondarily) by re-
pression and by ideology, according to whether it is a matter
of the (Repressive) State Apparatus or the Ideological State
Apparatuses, makes it clear that very subtle explicit or tacit
eombinations may be woven from the interplay of the (Re

,.
)

wS
~n
w

r46 LOSiJ A1~htlsscr

pressive) State Apparatus and the Ideological State Ap-
paratuses? Everyday life provides us with innumerable
examples of this, but they must be studied in detail if we
are to 6¡ further than this mere observation.
Nevertheless, this remark leads us towards an under-
standing of what constitutes the unity of the apparently dis-
parate body of the ISAs. If the ISAs 'function' massively
and predominantly by ideology, what unifies their diversity
is preciscly this functioning, insofar as thc ideology by
which they function is always in fact unified, despite its
diversity and its contradictions, beneath tfltc ruling idcolog,
which is the ideology of 'the ruling class'. Given the fact
that the 'ruling class' ill principle holds Statc power (openly
U or more often by means of alliances between classes or class
fractions), and therefore has 3t its disposal the (Repressive)
State Apparatus, we can accept the fact that this same
ruling class is active in the Ideological Statc Apparatuses
insofar as it is ultimately the ruling ideology which is
realized in the Ia'ieological State Apparatuses, precisely in
its contradictions. Of course, it is a quite di¢erent thing
to act by laws ani'i dccrccs ill thc (Rcprcssivc) Statc Ap-
paratus and to '?ct' through the intermediary of the ruling

L ideolo6y in the Ideolo6ical State Apparatuses. We must go
into thc details of this iifl~erencc - but it cannot mask the
reality of a profound identity. To my knowledge, no class
tan hold Statc ponXcr orcr a long period without at thc samc
timc cxerctsing its hegetlgony over and in thr Statc llcolo,gical
Apparatuscs. I only need one examplc and proof of this:
Lenin's anguished concern to revolutionize the educational
l(lcological State Apparatus (among others), simply to make
it possible for the Soviet proletariat, who had seized State
power, to secure the future of the dictatorship of the pro-

letariat and the transition to socialism."

10. In a pathetic text written in 1937, Krupsleaya relates the history of
Lenin's desperatc ellorts and what she regards as his failurc.

il
1t

Idcology at d thc Statc 147
This last comment puts us in a position to unelerstand
that the Ideological State Apparatuses may be not only the
staNc, but also the litC of class struggle, and often of bitter
forms of class struggle. The class (or class alliance) in
power cannot lay down the law in the ISAs as easily as it
can in the (repressive) State apparatus, not only because
the former ruling classes are able to retain strong positions
there for a long time, but also because the resistance of
the exploited classes is able to find means and occasions
to express itself there, either by the utilization of their
contradictions, or by conquering combat positions in them
in struggle.'l
Let me run through my comments.
If the thesis I have proposed is well-founded, it leads me
back to the classical Marxist theory of the State, while
making it more precise in one point. I argue that it is
necessary to distin6uish between State power (and its
possession by . . .) on the one hand, and the State Apparatus
on the other. But I add that the State Apparatus contains

X s. What I llave aid in tllcse few brief v ords tbout the class strug61c in the
ISts ts obviously far from exhausting the question of the chss struggle.
To approach this question, two principles must be borne in mind:
Th~ /irsl Or;neiOlc Yas formulated by Marx in the Preface to A Centri6Xtiox

¥ the Cril;gll~ )l~ of Pel ti{JI Erenom.y: 'In considering such tnnsE
s social revolution] a distinction should always be made between the m terial
transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be
determined with the precision of natur l science, and the Icgal, political,
religious, aesthetic or philosophic - in short, ideological forrns in which men
become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.' The dass strug61e is thus
expressed and exercised in ideological forms, thus also in the ideological
forms of the ISAs. But the class struggle txtenaflfor 60yond thesc forms, and
it is because it extends beyond them that the strugglc of the exploited classes
tnay also be exercised in the forms of the ISAs, and thus turn the weapon of
ideology against the classes in power.
This by virtue of the J~oondprinoiplr: the dass struggle extends beyond the
ISAs becausc it is rooted cise vhere than in ideology, in the Infirastucture,
in the relations of production, which are relations of exploitadon and con-
sdtute the base for class reladons.

w
p

-e

148 Louis Althusscr

two bodies: the body of institutions which reprcsent the
Repressive State Apparatus on the one hand, and the body,
of institutions which represent the body of Ideological
state Apparatuses on the other.
But if this is the case, the following question is-bound to
be asked, even in the very sunlmary state of my suggestions:
what exactly is the extent of the role of the Ideological State
Apparatuses ? What is their importance based on ? In other
words: to what does the 'function' of these Ideological State
Apparatuses, which do not function by repression but by
idcolt)gy, correspond ?

ON THE REPRODUCTION OF THE RELATIONS
OF PRODUCTION

I can now answer the central question which I have Icft in
suspcnsc for many long pages: how is thc rcprodu~tson of thc
rclatJons of production secured2

In thc topographical language (Infrastructurc, Super-
structure), I can say: for the most part," it is secured by
the Icgal-political and ideological superstructure.

But as I havc argued that it is cssential to go beyond this
still descriptive language, I shall say: for the most part,l'
it is secured by the exercise of State power in the State
Apparatuses, on the one hand the (Repressive) State Ap-
paratus, on the other the Ideological State Apparatuses.

What I have just said must also be taken into account,
and it can be assemblcd in the form of the following three
featurcs:

12. For the most p rt. For thc rclations of production uc fir,st reproduced by
the materiality of the processes of production and circulolion. But it should
not be forEotlcn that ideologic l relations are immediotely present in these
some processes.

Idcology and thc Statc s49

' 1. All the State Apparatuscs function both by reprcssion I .
and by idcology, with the differencc that the (Reprcssive)
State Apparatus functions massively and predominantly by
repression, whereas the Ideological State Apparatuses func-
tion massively and predominantly by ideology.
2. Whereas the (Repressive) State Apparatus constitutes
an organized wholc whose different parts are centralized
beneath a commanding unity, that of the politics of class
struggle applied by the political representatives of the
ruling classes in possession of State power, the Ideological
State Apparatuscs arc multiplc, distinct, 'relatively autono-
mous' and capable of providing an objective field to contra-
dictions which cxpresSw in forms which may be limited or
cxtreme, the effects of the clashcs between the capitalist
class struggle and the proletarian class struggle, as well as
their subordinate forms.

3. Whercas tllc unity of tlle (Repressive) Statc Apparatus
is secured by its unified and centralized organization under

the leadership of the representatives of the classcs in power
executing the politics of the class struggle of the classes
in power, the unity of the difEcrent Ideological Statc Ap-
paratuscs is secured, usually in contradictory forms, by the
ruling ideology, the idcology of the ruling class.
Taking these features into account, it is possible to rep-
resent the reproduction of the relations of production'8 in
the following way, according to a kind of 'division of
labour'.

The rolc of the repressive State apparatus, insofar as it is a
repressive apparatus, consists essentially in securing by
force (physical or otherwise) the political conditions of the
reproduction of relations of production which are in the

13. For that part of reproduction to which the Repressive St te Apparatus
snd the Ideolo~ic31 State Appar tus eontribute.

l
x50 Louis Altkusscr

last resort rclations of cxploitation. Not only does the Ststc
apparatus contribute generously to its own reproduction,
(the capitalist State contains political dynasties, military
dynasties, etc.), but also and above all, the State apparatus
secures by repression (from the most brutal physical force,
via mere administrative commands and interdictions, to
open and tacit censorship) the political conditions for the
action of the Ideological State Apparatuses.
In fact, it is the latter Which largely secure the repro-
duction specifically of the relations of production, behind a
'shield' provided by the repressive State apparatus. It is
here that the role of the ruling ideology is heavily concen-
trated, the ideology of the ruling class, which holds State
power. It is the intermediation of the ruling ideology that
ensures a (sometimes teeth-gritting) 'harmony' between the,
repressive State apparatus and the Ideological State Ap-
paratuses, and between the different State Ideological Ap-
paratuses.

We are thus led to envisage the following hypothesis, as a
function precisely of the diversity of ideological State Ap-
paratuses in their single, because shared, role of the repro-
duction of the relations of production.
Indecd we have listed a relatively large number of ideo
giG1t State apparatuses in contemporary capitalist social
formations: the educational apparatus, the religious ap-
paratus, the family apparatus, the political apparatus, the
trade-union apparatus, the communications apparatus, the
'cultural' apparatus, etc.

But in the social formations of that mode of production
characterized by 'serfdom' (usually called the feudal mode
of production), we observe that although there is a single
repressive State apparatus Which, since the earliest known
Ancicnt States, let alone the Absolutc Monarchies, has been
formally very similar to the one we know today, the number
of Ideological Statc Apparatuses is smaller and their

(la
wk
~n
U1

; Idcology and thc Statc 151

individual types arc different. For example, we observe that
during the Middlc Ages, the Church (the religious ideoX
logical State apparatus) accumulated a number of functions
which have today devolved on to several distinct ideological
State apparatuses, new ones in relation to the past I am
invoking, in particular educational and cultural functions.
Alongside the Church there was the family Ideological State
Apparatus, Which played a considerable part, incommensur
able with its role in capitalist social formations. Despite
appearances, the Church and the Family were not the only
Ideological State Apparatuses. There was also a political
Ideological State Apparatus (the Estates General, the Parlc
tncnt, the diXerent political factions and Leagues, the ances
tors or the modern political parties, and the whole political
system of the free Communes and then of the MJlles). There
was also a powerful 'proto-trade-union' Ideological State
Apparatus, if I may venture such an anachronistic term (the
powerful merchants' and bankers' guilds and the journey
men's associations, etc.). Publishing _..' Communications,
even, saw an indisputable development, as did the theatrc;
initially both were integral parts of the Church, then they
became more and more independent of it.

In the pre-capitalist historical period which I have
examined extremely broadly, it is absolutely clear that
there xPas one dominant Ideological State Apparatus, thc
Church, which concentrated within it not only religious
functions, but also educational ones, and a large proportion
of the functions of communications and 'culture'. It is no
accident that all ideological struggle, from the sixteenth
to the eightcenth century, starting with the first shocks of
the Reformation, was soncentratezd in an anti-clerical and
anti-religious struggle; rather this is a function precisely
of the dominant position of the religious ideological State
apparatus.

The foremost objective and achievement of the French

w
~n

S;I Lot ts Althsswr
Revolution was not just to transfer State power from the
feudal aristocracy to the merchant-capitalist bourgeoide,
to break part of the former repressive Statc apparatus and
replace it with a new one (e.g., the national popular Army) -
but also to attack the number-one Idcological State Ap-
paratus: the Church. Hence the civil constitution of the
clergy, the confiscation of ecclesiastical wealth, and the
creation of new ideological Statc apparatuses to replace the
rcligious ideological State apparatus in its dominant role.
Naturally, these things did not happen automatically:
witncss the Concordat, the Restoration and the long class
struggle between the landed aristocracy and the industrial
bourgeoisie throughout the nineteenth century for the
cstablishment of bourgeois hegemony over the functions
formerly fulfillcd by the Church: above all by the Schools.
It can be said that the bourgeoisie relied on the new political,
parliamentary-democratic, ideological State apparatus, in-
stalled in the earliest years of the Revolution, then restored
aftcr long and violent strug61cs, for a few months in 1848
gnd for decades aftcr w:. fall of the Sccond Empire,

order to conduct its strugglc against the Church and wrest
its ideological functions away from it, in other words, to
ensure not only its own political hegemony, but also the
ideological hegemony indispensable to the reproduction
of capitalist relations of production.

That is why I believe that I am justified in advancing the
following Thesis, however precarious it is. I believe that the
ideological Statc apparatus which has been installed in the
don~Jnant position in mature capitalist social formations as a
rcsult of a violent political and idcological class struggle
against the old dominant idcological Statc apparatus, is the
tzlucational izleologtcal apparatus.

This thesis may seem paradoxical, given that for cvcq-
one, i.e. in thc ideological representation that thc bourgcoisie

Idlcology and thc Statt 153
has tried to give itself and the classes it exploits, it really
seems that the dominant idcological State apparatus in
capitalist social formations is not the Schools, but the
political ideological State apparatus, i.e. the regime of
parliamentary democracy combining universal suffrage and
party struggle.

However, history, even recent history, shows that the
bourgcoisie has been and still is able to accommodate itself
to political idcological State apparatuses other than parlia-
mentary democracy: the First and Sccond Empircs, Con-
stitutional Monarchy (Louis XVIII and Charles X), Parlia-
mcntaq Monarchy (Louis-Philippc), Presidential Dcmo-
cracy (de Gaullc), to mention only Francc. In England this
is even clearer. The Revolution was particularly 'successful'
there from the bourgeois point of view, since unlike France,
where the bourgeoisie, partly because of the stupidity of the
petty aristocracy, had to agree to being carried to power by
peasant and plebeian 'journdcs rcvolutionnaircs', something
for which it had to pay a high price, the English bourgeoisic
was able to 'compromisc' with thc aristocracy and 'share'
State power and the use of the State apparatus with it for a
long time (pence among all men of good will in the ruling

classes!). In Germany it is even more striking, since it was
behind a political ideological Statc apparatus in which the
imperial Junkers (epitomized by Bismarck), their army and
their police provided it with a shield and leading personnel,
that the imperialist bourgeoisie made its shattering entry
into history, before 'traversing' the Weimar Republic and
entrusting itself to Nazism.

Hcncc I believe I have good reasons for thinking that be-
hind the scenes of its political Ideological State Apparatus,
which occupies the front of the stage, what the bourgeoisie

; has installed as its number-one, i.e. as its dominant idco
,r. Iogical State apparatus, is the educational apparatus, which

.s
154 Louis Althusscr

has in fact replaced in its functions the previously dominant
ideological State apparatus, the Church. One might even
add: the School-Family couple has replaced the Church-
Family couple.

Why is the educational apparatus in fact the dominant
ideological State appargatus in' capitalist social formations,
and how does it function ?

For the moment it must suffice to say:

I. All ideological Statc apparatuses, whatever they are,
contribute to the same result: the reproduction of the
relations of production, i.e. of capitalist relations of exploita-
tion.

2. Each of them contributes towards this single result
in the way proper to it. The political apparatus by sub-
jecting individuals to the political State ideology, the
'indirect' (parliamentary) or 'direct' (plebiscitary or fascist)
'democratic' ideology. The communications apparatus by
cramming every 'citizen' with daily doses of nationalism,
chauvinism, liberalism, moralism, etc, by means of thc
prcss, tllc radio and television. The samc goes for the
cultural apparatus (the role of sport in chauvinism is of the
first importance), etc. The religious apparatus by recalling
in sermons and the other 6reat ceremonies of Birth,
Marriage and Death, that man is only ashes, unless he loves
his neighbour to the extent of turning the other cheek to
whoever strikes first. The family apparatus ... but there
is no need to go on.

3. This concert is dominated by a single SCore, oc-
casionally disturbed by contradictions (those of the rem-
nants of former ruling classes, those of the proletarians and
their organizations): the score of the Ideology of the current
ruling class which integrates into its music the great themes
of the Humanism of the Great lPorefathers, who produced
the Greek Miracle even before Christianity, and afterwards

w
~n

Ilcolog, and thC S atW ISS

the Glory of Rome, the Eternal Gty, and the themes of

Interest, particular and general, etc: nationalism, moralism
and economism.

4. Nevertheless, in this concert, one ideological State
apparatus certainly has the dominant role, although hardly
anyone lends an ear to its music: it is SO silentl This is the
School.

It takes children from every e1ee at infant-whcol agc,arUl
t en for years, the years in which the child is most 'vulner-
able', squeezed between the familmr State qprqrqt~c and tlS
educational State apParatusa it drums into theml whether
it uses new or old methods, a certain amount of 'knou0-how' -
wrapped in the ruling ideolog,y (Erench, arithmetic, natural
history, the sciences, literature) or simpllr the ruling
ideology in its pure state (ethics, civic õn~ruction~ philo-
so~y)~Somewhere around the aBe of sixteen, a huzc mass
of children are ejected 'in~r~ prn(llletinn~ ¥he5~ ar: the
workers or small peasants. Another portion of scholastically
adapted youth carries on: and, for better or worse, it goes
somewhat further, until it falls by the wayside and fills
the posts of small and middle technicians, white-collar
workers, small and middle executives, pet4y bourgeois of
all kinds. A last part;^n reaches the summit, either ta fall
into intellectual semi~, or to provide, as well as
the 'intellectuals of the collective labourer', the agents,of
exploitation (capitalists, managerS)~ the agentS of repression
(soldiers, policemen, politicians, administrators, etc.) and
the professional ideologists (priests of all sorts, most of
whom arc convinced 'laymenO.

Each mass ejected en roxtc is practically provided with the
ideology which suits the role it has to fulfil in class SocietY:
the role of the exploited (with a 'highly-developed' 'pro-
fessional', 'ethical', 'civic', 'national' and a-political con-
sciousness); the role of the agent of exploitation (ability to

: Dd,; i
s x ~i ? - - i;

i
.
l

w
~n
oo

,56 Louis Althusscr

give the workers orders and speak to them: 'human
relations'), of the agent of repression (ability to give orders
and enforce obedience 'without discussion', or ability to
manipulate the demagogy of a political Ieader's rhetoric),
or of the professional ideologist (ability to treat conscious-
nesses with the respect, i.e. with the contempt, blackmail,
and demagogy they deserve, adapted to the accents of
Morality, of virtue, of 'Transcendence', of the Nation, of
France's World Role, etc.).

Of course, many of these contrasting virtues (modesty,
resignation, submissiveness on the one hand, cynicism,
contempt, arrogance, confidence, self-importance, even
smooth talk and cunning on the other) are also taught in the
Family, in the Church, in the Army, in Good Books, in
films and even in the football stadium. But no other ideo-
logical State apparatus has the obligatory (and not least,
free) audience of the totality of the children in the capitalist
social formation, eight hours a day for fiYe or six days out
of seven.

But it is by an apprenticeship in a variety of know-how
wrapped up in the massive inculcation of the ideology of
the ruling class that the rclations of production in a capitalist
social formation, i.e. the relations of exploited to exploiters
and exploiters to exploited, are largely reproduced. The
mechanisms which produce this vital result for the capitalist
regime are naturally covered up and concealed by a univer-
sally rcigning idcology of the School, universally reigning
because it is one of the essential forms of the ruling bour-
geois idcology: an ideology which represents the School as a
neutral cnvironmcnt purged of ideology (because it is . . .
lay), where teachers respectful of the 'conscience' and
'freedom' of the children who are entrusted to them (in
complete confidence) by their 'parents' (who are free, too,

Idcolog, and ¥hc Statc ZS7
i.e. thc owncrs of their children) open up for them the path to
the freedom, morality and responsibility of adults by their
own example, by knowledge, literature and their 'liberating'
virtues.

I ask the pardon of those teachers who, in dreadful
conditions, attempt to turn the few weapons they can find
in the history and learning they 'teach' against the ideology,
the system and the practices in which they are trapped.
They arc a kind of hero. But they are rare and how many
(the majority) do not even begin to suspect the 'work' the
system (which is bigger than they are and crushes them)
forces them to do, or worse, put all their heart and ingenuity
into performing it with the most advanced awareness (the
famous new methods!). So little do they suspect it that their
own devotion contributes to the maintenance and nourish-
ment of this ideological representation of the School, which
makes the School today as 'natural', indispensable-useful
and even beneficial for our contemporaries as the Church
was 'natural', indispensable and generous for our ancestors
8 few centurics ago.

In fact, the Church has been replaced today it~ its
rok as thc dominant Idcolo,gixl Statc Apparatus by the
School. It is coupled with the Family just as the Church
was once coupled with the Family. We can now claim that
the unprecedentedly deep crisis which is now shaking the
education system of so many States across the globe, often
in conjunction with a crisis (already proclaimed in the
communist Manifesto) shaking the family system, takes on a
political meaning, given that the School (and the School-
Family couple) constitutes the dominant Ideological State
Apparatus, the Apparatus playing a determinant part in the
reproduction of the relations of production of a mode of pro-
duction threatened in its existence by the world class struggle.
i

158 Louis Althusset
ON IDEOLOGY

When I put forward the concept of an Idcological State
Apparatus, when I said that the ISAs 'function by ideology',
I invoked a reality which needs a little discussion: ideology.
It is well known that the expression 'idcology' was in-
vented by Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy and their friends, who
assigned to it as an object the (genetic) theory of ideas. When
Marx took up the tcrm fifty years later, he gave it a quite
different meanin6, even in his Early Works. Here, ideology
is the system of the ideas and representations which dom-
inate the mind of a man or a social group. The ideologico-
political struggle conducted by Marx as early as his articles
in the Rheinischc Zeitung inevitably and quickly brought
him face to face with this reality and forced him to take his
carliest intuitions further.
However, here we come upon a rather astonishing para-
dox. Everything seems to lead Marx to formulate a theory
of ideology. In fact, Thc Gcnnan Idtolog does offer us,
after the 1844 Manascripts, an explicit theory of ideology,
but . . . it is not Marxist (we shall see why in a momcnt).
As for Capital, although it does contain many hints towards
a theory of ideologies (most visibly, the ideology of the
vulgar economists), it does not contain that theory itself,
which depends for the most part on a theory of ideology in
general.

I should like to venture a first and very schematic outline
of such a theory. The theses I am about to put forward are
certainly not off the cuff, but they cannot be sustained and
tested, i.e. confirmed or rejected, except by much thorough
study and analysis.

w
V1
~D

IdcoJogy and thc Statc 159
Idcolo~y has no History

One word first of all to expound the reason in principle
which seems to me to found, or at least to justify, the pro-
ject of a theory of ideology in gencral, and not a theory of
particular ideologies, which, whatever their form (religious,
ethical, legal, political), always express {lass positions.
It is quite obvious that it is necessary to proceed towards
a theory of ideologics in the two respects I have just sug-
gested. It will then be clear that a theory of ideologics
depends in the last resort on the history of social formations,

and thus of the modes of production combined in social
formations, and of the class struggles which develop in them.
In this sense it is clear that there can be no question of a
theory of ideologics in gencral, since ideologics (defined in
the doublc respect su66ested above: rcgional and class) have
a history, whose determination in the last instance is clearly
situated outside ideologies alone, although it involves them.

On the contrary, if I am able to put forward the project
of a theorv of ideology in reneral and if this theory rcally is
one of the clements on which theories of ideologics depend,
that entails an apparently paradoxical proposition which I
shall express in thc following terms: ideology has no history.
As we know, this formulation appears in so many words
in a passa6e from Thc Ccrman Ideology. Marx utters it with
respect to metaphysics, which, he says, has no more history
than ethics (meaning also the other forms of ideology).

In Thc Cerman Ideology~ this formulation appears in a
plainly positivist context. Ideology is conceived as a pure
illusion, a pure dream, i.e. as nothingness. All its reality
is external to it. Ideology is thus thought as an imaginary
construction whose status is exactly like the theoretical
status of the dream among writers before Freud. For these
writcrs, the dream was the purely imaginary, i.e. null,

160 Louis Alth~sscr

rcsult of 'day's residues', presented in an arbitrary urange-
ment and order, sometimes even 'inverted', in other words,
in 'disorder'. For them, the dream was the imaginary, it
was empty, null and arbitrarily 'stuck together' (bricolc),
once the eyes had closed, from the residues of the only full
and positive reality, the reality of the day. This is exactly
the status of philosophy and ideology (since in this book
philosophy is ideology par cxccllenvc) in Thc Ccrman Ideolo~y.
Ideology, then, is for Mars an imaginary assemblage
(bricolagc), a pure dream, empty and vain, constituted by
the 'day's residues' from the only full and positive realiq,
that of the concrete history of concrete material individuals
materially producing their existence. It is on this basis that
ideology has no history in Thc Ccrman Idcology, since its
history is outside it, where the only existing history is,
the history of concrete individuals, etc. In Thc Gcrman
ldcology, the thesis that ideology has no history is therefore
a purely negative thesis, since it means both:
I. ideology is nothing insofar as it is a pure dream (manu-
factured by who knows what power: if not by the alienation
of the division of labour, but that, too, is a ncgasisc deter-
mination);
2. ideology has no history, which emphatically does not
mean that there is no history in it (on the contrary, for it is
merely the pale, empty and inverted reflection of real
history) but that it has no history of its oarn.
Now, while the thesis I wish to defend formally speaking
adopts the terms of Tlwc Ccrman Id~ology ('ideology has no
history'), it is radiully different from the positivist and
historicist thesis of Thc Ccrman IdcololD.
For on the one hand, I think it is possible to hold that
ideologics hasc a history of their olDn (although it is deter
¥ mined in the last instance by the class struggle); and on the
other, I think it is possible to hold that idcology in general

Idcology and thc State 161
has no history, not in a negative sense (its history is external
to it), but in an absolutely positive sense.
This sense is a positive one if it is true that the peculiarity
of ideology is that it is endowed with a structure and a
functioning such as to make it a non-historical reality, i.e.
an omni-historical reality, in the sense in which that
structure and functioning are immutable, present in the
same form throughout what we can call history, in the sense
in which the Communist Manifesto defines history as the
history of class struggles, i.e. the history of class societies.
To give a theoretical reference-point here, I might say
that, to return to our example of the dream, in its Freudian
conception this time, our proposition: ideology has no
history, can and must (and in a way which has absolutely
nothing arbitrary about it, but, quitc the revcrse, is theoreti-
cally necessary, for there is an organic link between the two
propositions) be related directly to Freud's proposition that
the unconscious is eternal, i.e. that it has no history.
If eternal means, not transcendent to all (temporal)
history, but omniprcsent, trans-historical and therefore
immutable in form throughout the extent of history, I shall
adopt Freud's expression word for word, and write ideology
is ctcrnal, exactly like the unconscious. And I add that I
find this comparison theoretically justified by the fact that
the eternity of the unconscious is not unrelated to the
eternity of ideology in general.
That is why I believe I am justified, hypothetically at
least, in proposing a theory of idcology iogeneral, in the sense

that Freud presented a theory of the unconscious in gancral. I
To simplify the phrase, it is convenient, taking into
account what has been said about ideologies, to use the
plain term ideology to designatc ideology in general, which
I have just said has no history, or, what comes to the same
thing, is eternal, i.e. omnipresent in its immutable form

)

~ ffi- b teS A
)

162 Lollis ~llh~sscr
throughout history ( = the history of social formations
containing social classes). For the moment I shall restrict
myself to 'class societies' and their history.

11cology is a 'Rcprcscn~atjon' of thc Imaginaty RclatiomAip
of Inljvjdõ~ak to thcir Rcal Conditions of Existencc

In order to approach my central thesis on the structure and
functioning of ideology, I shall first present two theses, one
negative, the other positive. The first concerns the object

¥ which is 'represented' in the imaginary form of ideology,
the second concerns the materiality of ideology.

. TItESIS 1: Ideology ,rc~ the imaginary rela,tion

¥ ship of individual~; to the;- ¥P 11 randitians of exister~

\Z/e commonly call religio Ddeolo~ ethical ideologYw :
1~ ideology, poliõical ideoloev. etc.,,,so many 'world
outlooks'. Of course, assuming that we do not live one of
these ideolo~ies as th~clt~ 'believe' in (iod, L~uty,
Justice, etc....), we admit that the ideology we are_disP
cusslng from a critical point of v cw, eYamining it as the
ilnologist examiÑhe m bs of a 'primitive soci y', that
these 'world outlooks' are largely imaginary, i.e. do not
senrr~epn"A tO reality'

However, fiile admitting
to reality, i.e. that they constitute an illllsinn we ndmit that
they do make allusion to reality, and that they need only be
'interpreted' to discover the reality of the world behind
their imaginary representation of rhet wntlJ (iAPaIngy =
illusion/allusion] .

There are different types of interpretation, the most
famous of which are the ntcchanistjc typc, current in the
eiglltecnth century (God is the imaginary representation of
the rcal King), and the 'harmcneuti;' interpretation, inau-
gurated by the earliest Church Iiathers, and revived by

w
a~

Idcoloup and thc Statc 163

Fcuerbach and the theologico-philosophical school which
descends from him, e.g. the theologian Barth (to Feuerbach,
for example, God is the essence of real Man). The essential
point is that on condition that we interpret the imaginary
, transposition (and inversion) of ideology we arrivc at the

S., conclusion that in ideology 'men represent their real
conditions of existence to themselves in an imaginary form'.
Unfortunately, this interpretation leaves one small prob-
lem unsettled: why do men 'need' this imaginary trans-
position of their real conditions of existence in order to
'represent to themselves' their real conditions of existence ?

The first answer (that of the eighteenth century) proposes
a simple solution: Priests or Despots are responsible. They
'forged' the Beautiful Lies so that, in the belief that they
were obeying God, men would in fact obey the Priests and
Despots, who are usually in alliance in their imposture, the
Priests acting in the interests of the Despots or vicc vcrsa,
according to the political positions of the 'theoreticians'
concerned. There is therefore a cause for the imaginary

g 5' transposition of the real conditions of existence: that cause
is the existcncc of a small number of cynical men who base

-0' their domination and exploitation of the 'people' on a

'"i falsified representation of the world which they have
" imagined in order to enslave other minds by dominating

' their imaginations.

8 Thc second answer (that of Fcucrbach, taken over word

-'X'fX ' for word by Marx in his Early Works) is more 'profound',
t'' i.e. just as false. It, too, seeks and finds a cause for the
0 imaginary transposition and distortion of men's real con-
ditions of existence, in short, for the alienation in the
imaginary of the representation of men's conditions of
existence. This cause is no longer Priests or Despots, nor
their active imagination and the passive imagination of their
victims. This cause is the material alienation which reigns

it
J
FeSA
a) j(l
I.l

w
as

(J9

164 Loxis AlthuJscr

in the conditions of existence of men themselrcs. This is
how, in Thc scsish Qucstion and elsewhere, Marx defends
the Feuerbachian idea that men make themselves an
alienated (= imaginary) representation of their conditions
of existence because these conditions of existence arc
themselves alienating (in the J844 Manusvri.pts: because
these conditions are dominated by the essence of alienated
society - 'alienated labour').
All these interpretations thus take literally the thesis
wllicll they presuppose, and on which they depend, i.e. that
what is reflected in the imaginary representation of the
vorid found in an ideology is the conditions of existence
of men, i.e. their real world.
Now I can return to a thesis which I have already
advanced: it is not their real conditions of existence, their
real world, that 'men"represent to themselves' in ideology,
but above all it is their relation to those conditions of'
existence which is represented to them there. It is this
relation which is at the centre of every ideological, i.e.
imaginary, representation of the real world. It is this
relation that contains the 'cause' which has to explain the
imaginary distortion of the ideological representation of the
real world. Or rather, to leave aside the language of causality
it is necessary to advance the thesis that it is the i)llaginar,~
naturc of this rclation which underlies all the imaginaq
distortion that we can observe (if we do not live in its truth)
in all ideology.

To speak in a Marxist language, if it is true that the
representation of the real conditions of existence of the
individuals occupying the posts of agents of production,
exploitation, repression, isleologization and scientific prac-
tice, does in the last analysis arise from the relations of
production, and from relations deriving from the relations
of production, we can say the following: all ideology rep- '

Ideoloty and thc Statc 165

resents in its necessarily imaginary distortion not the existing
relations of production (and the other relations that derive
from them), but above all the (imaginary) relationship of
individuals to the relations of production and the relations
that derive from them. What is represented in ideology is
therefore not the system of the real relations which govern
the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of
those individuals to the real relations in which they live.
If this is the case, the question of the 'cause' of the imag-
inary distortion of the real relations in ideology disappears
and must be replaced by a different question: why is the
representation given to individuals of their (individual)
relation to the social relations which govern their conditions
of existence and their collective and individual life neces-
sarily an imaginary relation ? And what is the nature of this
imaginariness ? Posed in this way, the question explodes the
solution by a 'clique'l', by a group of individuals (Priests or
Despots) who are the authors of the great ideological mysti-
fication, just as it explodes the solution by the alienated
character of the real world. We shall see why latcr in my
exposition. For the moment I shall go no further.

THESIS 11: Ideologv has a material existence.

I have already touched on this thesis by saying that the
'ideas' or 'representations', etc., which seem to make up
ideology do not have an ideal (ilWalc or idcclk) or spiritual
existence, but a material existence. I even suggested that the
ideal (Ja'Zalc, idZcllc) and spiritual existence of 'ideas' arises
exclusively in an ideology of the 'idea' and of ideology, and
let me add, in an ideology of what seems to have 'founded'
this conception since the emergence of the sciences, i.e. what

14. 1 use this very modern term ddiberately. For even in Communist circlcs,
unfortunatcly, it is a commonplace to 'cxplain' some politivI deviation
(Ick or right opportunism) by thc action of a 'clique'.

-
y
166 Lo~is Althusstr
the practicians of the sciences represent to themselves in
their spontaneous ideology as 'ideas', true or false. Of course,
presented in affirmative form, this thesis is unproven. I
simply ask that the reader be favourably disposed towards
it, say, in the name of materialism. A long series of arguments
would be necessary to prove it.
This hypothetical thesis of the not spiritual but material
existence of 'ideas' or other 'representations' is indeed
necessary if we are to advance in our analysis of the nature of
ideology. Or rather, it is merely useful to us in order the
better to reveal what every at all serious analysis of any
idcolo6y will immediately and empirically show to evcry
observer, however critical.
While discussing the ideological State apparatuses and
their practices, I said that each of them was the realization
of an ideology (the unity of these different regional ideo-
logies - religious, ethical, legal, political, aesthetic, etc. -
being assured by their subjection to the ruling ideology).
I now return to this thesis: an ideology always .. - in an
apparatus, and its practice, or practices. This cxistence is
material.
Of course, the material existence of the ideology in an
apparatus and its practices does not have the same modality .
as the material existence of a paving-stonc or a rine. But,
at the risk of being taken for a Neo-Aristotdian (NB Marx
had a very high regard for Aristotle), I shall say that 'matter is
discussed in many senses', or rather that it exists in differcnt
modalities, all rooted in the last instance in 'physical' matter.
lSaving said this, let mc move straight on and see what
happens to the 'individuals' who live in ideology, i.e. in a ,
dcterminate (religious, ethical, etc.). representation of the
world whose imaginary distortion depends on their imag-
inary relation to thcir conditions of existence, in other E
words, in the last instance, to the rclations of production e

w
as
w

Idcoloty and thc Statc 167
and to class relations (ideology = an imaginary relation to

real relations). I shall say that this imaginary relation is
itsclf endowed with a material existence.
Now I observe the following.
An individual believes in God, or Duty, or Justice, ctc.
This belief derives (for everyone, i.e. for all those who live
in an ideological representation of ideology, which reduces
ideology to ideas endowed by definition with a spiritual
existence) from the ideas of the individual concerned, i.e.
from him as a subject with a consciousness which contains
the ideas of his belief. In this way, i.e. by means of the
absolutely ideological 'conceptual' device (dis~osittf) thus
set up (a subject endowed with a consciousness in which he
freely forms or freely recognizes idcas in which he believes),
the (material) attitude of the subject concerned naturally
follows.
The individual in question behaves in such and such a
way, adopts such and such a practical attitude, and, what
is more, participates in certain regular practices which are
those of thc ideological apparatus on which 'depend' the
ideas which he has in all consciousness freely chosen as a
subject. If he believes in God, he goes to Church to attend
Mass, kneels, prays, confesses, does pcnance (once it was
material in the ordinary sense of the tcrm) and naturally
repents and so on. If he believes in Duty, he will have the
corresponding attitudes, inscribed in ritual practices 'ac-
cording to the correct principles'. If he believes in Justice,
he will submit unconditionally to the rules of the Law, and
may even protest when they are violated, sign petitions,
take part in a demonstration, etc.
Throughout this schema we observe that the ideological
representation of ideology is itself forced to recognize that
every 'subject' endowed with a 'consciousness' and be-
lieving in the 'ideas' that his 'consciousness' inspires in him

r,
*
g
!'
l

':
j:
,!

and freely accepts, must 'oct according to his ideas', must
therefore inscribe his own ideas as a free subjcct in the
actions of his material practicc. If he does not do so, 'that
is wicked'.
Indecd, if he docs not do what he ought to do as a
function of what he believes, it is because he does something
else, which, 8till as a function of the same idealist schemo,
implies that he has other ideas in his head as wcll as those
he proclaims, and that he acts according to these other
ideas, as a man who is either 'inconsistent' ('no one is
willingly evil') or cynical, or perverse.

' In every case, the ideology of ideology thus recognizes,
despite its imaginary distortion, that the 'idcas' of a human
subject exist in his actions, or ought to exist in his actions,
and if that is not the casc, it lends him other ideas corres-
ponding to the actions (however perverse) that he does
perform. This idcology talks of actions: I shall talk of
actions inserted into practices. And I shall point out that
these practices are governed by the rituals in which these
practices are inscribed, within the matcrial CXiltCt{C of an
ideological apparatus, bc it only a small part of that apparatus:
a small mass in a small church, a funeral, a minor match at a
sports' club, a school day, a political party meetin6, ctc.
Besides, we are indebted to Pascal's defensive 'dialectic'
for the wonderful formula which will enable us to invert
the order of the notional schema of ideology. Pascal says
more or less: 'Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and
you will believe.' He thus scandalously inverts the order
of things, bringing, like Christ, not peace but strife, and in
addition something hardly Christian (for woe to him who
brings scandal into the world 1) - scandal itself. A fortunate
scandal which makes him stick with Jansenist defiance to a
language that directly names the reality.
I will be allowed to leave Pascal to the arguments of his

168 Louis AlthtlsJcr ¥ Idtology and thc Statc 169
ideological struggle with the religious ideological Stato
apparatus of his day. And I shall be expected to use a more
directly Marxist vocabulary, if that is possible, for we are
advancing in still poorly explored domains.
I shall therefore say that, where only a single subject
(such and such an individual) is concerned, the existence
of the ideas of his belief is matcrial in that his idcas arc his
matcrial actions inscrted into ntatcrial practices govcrned b~
matcrial tituals a tt3hich arc themsclvcs definfd by thc
idcoiogical apparatus from rDhich dcrivc thc sdcas of that
st~bjcct. Naturally, the four inscriptions of the adjective
'material' in my proposition must be affected by differcat
modalities: the matcrialities of a displacement for going to
mass, of knccling down, of the gesture of the sign of the
cross, or of the mca suipa, of a sentence, of a prayer, of an
act of contrition, of a penitence, of a gaze, of a hand-shaker
of an external vcrbal discourse or an 'internal' verbal dis
course (consciousness), are not one and the same materiality.
I shall leave on onc side the problem of a theory of the
differences between the modalities of materiality.
It remains that in this inverted presentation of things, we
are not dealing with an 'inversion' at all, since it is clear that
certain notions have purely and simply disappeared from
our presentation, whereas others on the contrary survive,
and new terms appear.

Disappeared: the term idcas.
Survive: the terms subjcct, consciotlmcss, bclicJ; actions.
Appear: the terms practices, rituals, idcologiaal apparatus.
It is therefore not an inversion or overturning (except
in the sense in which one might say a government or a glass
is overturned), but a reshumc (of a non-ministerial type), a
rather strange reshul~le, since we obtain the following result.
Ideas have disappeared as such (insofar as thCY are
endowed with an ideal or spiritual existence), to the precise

)

| til
!
l
i
r
f
: t
l: t
l;
t *
l l:
[l
i
[}

[:
t;:
It:
l}
I
g E

)

I70 Louis Althgsscr

cxtent that it has emerged that their eY;eton-- is inscribed
in the actions of prachces governed by ritlla~ defincSl in the
last instance by an,idenlogji;~|st It therefore appearF
that the subject acts insofar as he is acted by the following
system (set out in the order of its real determination):
ideology existing in a material ideological apparatus, pres-
cribing material practices governed by q material ritual,
which practices exist in the material actions of a subject
acting in all consciousness according to his belief.
But this very presentation reveals that we have retained
the following notions: subject, consciousness, belief, actions.
From this series I shall immediately extract the decisive
central term on which everything else depends: the notion
of the su6jcat.

And I shall immediately set down two conjoint theses:
1. there is no practice except by and in an ideology;

2. there is no ideology except by the subject and for
subjects.

I can now comc to my central thesis.

Ideolov InJcrpcllatcs Individuak as Subicvts

This thcsis is simply a matter of making my last proposition
explicit: there is no ideology except by the subject and for
subjects. Meaning, there is no ideology except for concrete
subjects, and this destination for ideology is only made
possible by the subject: meaning, by the sattor, of thc
subjcct and its functioning.

By this I mean that, even if it only appears under this
name (thc subject) with the rise of bourgeois ideology, above
all with the rise of le6al ideolo~y,lS the category of the

15. Which borrowed the Icpl category of 'subject in lak to mal~e en idcoe
logical llotion: man is by nature ^ cubject~

Idtology and thc Statc 17l

subject (which may function under other names: e.g., as the
soul in Plato, as God, etc.) is the constitutive category of
all ideology, whatever its determination (regional or class)
and whatever its historical date- since ideology has no
history.

I say: the category of the subject is constitutive of all
ideology, but at the same time and immediately I add that
tllc category of the subject is only constitutivc of all ideology
insofar as all idcoJogy has thc I70Louis (whiah dcfncs it)
'constituting' concrctc individuak as subjccts. In the inter-
action of this double constitution exists the functibning of
all ideology, ideology being nothing but its functioning in
the material forms of existence of that functioning.

In order to grasp what follows, it is essential to realize
that both he who is writing these lines and the reader who
reads them are themselves subjects, and therefore ideologi-
cal subjects (a tautological proposition), i.e. that the author
and the reader of these lines both live 'spontaneously' or
'naturally' in ideology in the sense in which I have said

that 'man is an ideological animal by nature'.

That the author, insofar as he writes the lines of a dis-
course which claims to be scientific, is completely absent
as a 'subject' from 'his' scientific discourse (for all scientific
discourse is by definition a subject-less discourse, there is
no 'Subject of science' except in an ideology of science) is a
different question which I shall Icavc on one side for the
moment.

As St Paul admirably put it, it is in the 'Logos', meaning
in ideology, that we 'live, move and have our being'. It
follows that, for you and for me, the category of the subject
is a primary 'obviousness' (obviousnesses are always
primary): it is clcar that you and I are subjects (frce, ethical,
etc....). Like all obviousnesses, including those that make a
word 'name a thing' or 'have a meaning' (therefore including
w
ol
a~

¥7~ Louis Althusscr
thc obviousness of the 'transparency' of language), the
'obviousness' that you and I are subjects - and that that
does not cause any problems - is an ideological cffcst, the
elementary ideological effect.l' It is indeed a peculiarity of
ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since
these are 'obviousnesses') obviousnesses as obviousnesses,
which we cannotrail to rcto,grnizc and before which we have
the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out (aloud or
in the 'still, small voice of conscience'): 'That's obvioust
That's riglltl That's truel'
At work in this reaction is the ideological recognition E
function which is one of the two functions of ideology as .
such (its inverse being the function of misrcvognitJo#
mAconnaissancc).
To take a highly 'concrete' example, we all have friends
who, when they knock on our door and we ask, through the
door, the question 'Who's there ?', answer (since 'it's
obvious') 'It's me'. And we recognize that 'it is him', or 'her'.
We open the door, and 'it's true, it really was she who was
there'. To take another example, when we recognize some
body of our (previous) acquaintance ((rc)-connaissanac) in
the street, we show him that we have recognized him (and
have recognized that he has recognized us) by saying to
him 'Hello, my friend', and shaking his hand (a material
ritual practice of ideological recognition in everyday life - in
France, at least; elsewhere, there are other rituals).
In this preliminary remark and these concrete illustra
tions, I only wish to point out that you and I are allrays
alrcady subjects, and as such constantly practice the rituals
of ideological recognition, which guarantee for us that we

16. Linguists snd those who appeal to lin6uistics for various purposes often
run up ag.unst difficultics which rise because they ignore the action of the
i~lcological cffcstr, in all discourses - including even scientific discourse .

)

IdcoloU and thc Statc 173
are indeed concrete, individual, distinguishable and (nat-
urally) irreplaceable subjects. The writing I am currently
executing and the reading you are currentlyl' performing
are also in this respect rituals of ideological recognition,
including the 'obviousness' with which the 'truth' or
'error' of my reflections may impose itself on you.

But to recognize that we are subjects and that we function
in the practical rituals of the most elementary everyday life
(the hand-shake, the fact of calling you by your name, the
fact of knowing, even if I do not know what it is, that you
'have' a name of your own, which means that you are
recognized as a unique subject, etc.) - this recognition only
gives us the 'consciousness' of our incessant (eternal)
practice of ideological recognition - its consciousness, i.e.
its racognition - but in no sense does it give us the (scientific)
~norDlcdgc of thc mechanism of this recognition. Now it is
this knowledge that we have to reach, if you will, while
speaking in ideology, and from within ideology we have to
outline a discourse which tries to break with ideology, in
order to dare to be the beginning of a scientific (i.e. subject-
less) discourse on ideology.
Thus in order to represent why the category of the 'sub-
ject' is constitutivc of idcology, which only cxists by con-
stituting concrete subjects as subjects, I shail employ a
special mode of exposition: 'concrete' enough to be recog-
nized, but abstract enough to be thinkable and thought,
giving rise to a knowledge.
As a first formulation I shall say: all idcology llails or
interpcllatcs concrctc individuals as concrctc subiccts, by the
functioning of the category of the subject.

17. NB: this double 'currently' is one more proof of the fact that ideology is
'eternal', since these nvo 'currentlys' are separated by an indefinite internl;
I am writing these lines on 6 April 1969, you may read them at any subsequent
time.
)

w
oM

jr4 L(juis Alullusscr

This is a proposition which entails that we distinguish
for the moment between concrete individuals on the one
hand and concrete subjects on the other, although at this
level concrete subjects only exist insofar as they arc sup-
ported by a concrete individual.

I shall then suggest that ideology 'acts' or 'functions' in
such a way that it 'recruits' subjects among the individuals
(it recruits them all), or 'transforms' the individuals into
subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise opera-
tion which I have called interpallation or hailing, and which
can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace
everyday police (or other) hailing: 'Hey, you therel"a

Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined
takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn
round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physi-
cal conversion, he becomes a subicct. Why ? Because he has
recognized that the hail was 'really' addressed to him, and
that 'it was rcally him who was hailed' (and not someone
else). Experience shows that the practical telecommuni-
cation of hailings is such that they hardly ever miss their
man: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognizes
that it is really him who is being hailed. And yet it is a
strange phenomcnon, and one which cannot be explained
solely by 'guilt feelings', zIcspite the large nunlbers who
'have something on their consciences'.

Naturally for the convenience and clarity of my little
theoretical theatre I have had to present things in the form

of a sequence, with a before and an after, and thus in the
form of 3 temporal succession. There are individuals
walking along. Somewhere (usually behind them) the hail
rin6s out: 'Hey, you therel' One individual (nine times out

18. Illiling gs gn everyday practice subject to ¥ prccise riluil talces s quite
'spechl' rorm in the policeman's praaice of 'hailing' which concerns the
hailinll of 'SUSpCCtS'.

lkcotogy acl tMic Statc 17S

of ten it is the right one) turns round, believing/suspecting/
knowing that it is for him, i.e. recognizing that 'it really is
he' who is meant by the hailing. But in reality these things
happen without any succession. The existence of ideology
and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects
are one and the same thing.

I might add: what thus seems to take place outside
ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place
in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems there-
fore to take place outside it. That is why those who are in
ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology:
one of the effects of ideology is the practical dcncgation of
the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology
never says, 'I am ideological'. It is necessary to be outside
ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am
in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case):
I was in ideology. As is well known, the accusation of being
in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself (unless
one is really a Spinozist or a Marxist, which, in this matter,
is to be exactly the same thing). Which amounts to saying
that ideology has no outs)dc (for itself), but at the same time
that it is nothing but outsidc (for science and reality).

Spinoza explained this completely two centuries before
Marx, who practised it but without explaining it in detail.
But let us leave this point, although it is heavy with con-
sequences, consequences which are not just theoretical, but
also directly political, since, for example, the whole theory
of criticism and self-criticism, the golden rule of the
Marxist-Leninist practice of the class struggle, depends on it.

Thus ideology hails or interpellates individuals as sub-
jects. As ideology is eternal, I must now suppress the tem-
poral form in which I have presented the functioning of
ideology, and say: ideology has always-already interpellated
individuals as subjects, which amounts to makin6 it clear

os
oo

I76 Louis Althussar

that individuaLs are always-already interpellated by ideology
~hich necessarily leads us to one last proposition:
individuals arc allDays-alrcaly subjeats. Hence individuals
are 'abstract' with respect to th-e subJects which they always-
already are. I his proposition might ~õ paradoxical.

That an individual is always-already a subject, even
obeFore hc is born, is nevertheless the plain reality, accessible
to cvenrone and not a paradox at all. Freud shows that
individuals are always 'abstract' with respect to the sub-
jects they always-alreadv are, simply bY noting the ideo-
106ical ritual that surrounds the expectation of a 'birth',
that 'happy event'. Everyone knows how much and in
what way an unborn child is expected. Which amounts to
saying, vcry prosaically, if we agree to drop the 'send-
mcnts'. i.e. the forms of family iflealnFg (p:ltern:~l/mateS/
~conjuE.~al/fraternal) in which the unborn child is expected:
it is ccrtain in advance ~t it will h~1~ i~c ~th~'~ N~me
and will therefore have an identity ard be irreplaceable.
Before its birth,~=~s-already a
~'; :, appointed as a subject in and by~lfic
familial ideological configuration in which it is 'expected,'
once it has bcen conceived. I hardly necd add that this
familial ideological configuration is, in its uniqueness,
highly structured, and that it is in this implacable and more
or less 'pathological' (presupposing that any meaning can
be assi6ned to that term) structure that the former subject-
to-be will have to 'find"its' place, i.e. 'become' the sexual
subject (boy or girl) whicll it already is in advance. It is clear
that this ideological constraint and pre-appointment, and
all thc rituals of rearing and then education in the 6mily,
havc some relationship with what Freud studied in the
forms of the pre-genital and genital 'stages' of sexuality,
i.e. in the 'grip' of what Freud registered by its effects as
being the unconscious. But let us leavc this point, too, on
one side.

K;;

Idcology and thc Statc I77

Let me go one step further. What I shall now turn my
attention to is the way the 'actors' in this mosc cn scAnc of
interpellation, and their respective roles, are reflected in the
very structure of all ideology.

An Examplc: Thc Christian Rcls,gfous Idcology

As the formal structure of all ideology is always the same,
I shall restrict my analysis to a single example, one acces-
sible to everyone, that of religious ideology, with the
proviso that the same demonstration can be produced for
ethical, legal, political, aesthetic ideology, etc.

Let us thereforc consider the Christian rcligious ideology.
I shall use a rhetorical figure and 'make it speak', i.e. collect
into a fictional discourse what it 'says' not only in its two

Testaments, its Theologians, Sermons, but also in its
practices, its rituals, its ceremonies and its sacraments. The :
Christian religious idcology says something like this:
It says: I address mysclf to you, a human individual
called Peter (every individual is called by his name, in the
passive sense, it is never he who provides his own name),
in order to tell you that God exists and that you are answer-
able to Him. It adds: God addresses himself to you through
my voice (Scripture having collected the Word of God,
Tradition having transmitted it, Papal Infallibility fixing
it for ever on 'nice' points). It says: this is who you are:
you are Peterl This is your origin, you were created by God
for all eternity, although you were born in the x920th year
of Our Lordl This is your place in the world I This is what
you must dol By these means, if you observe the 'law of
love' you will be saved, you, Peter, and will become part
of the Glorious Body of Christl Etc....

Now this is quite a familiar and banal discourse, but at
the same time quite a surprising one.

J
178 Lotlis Allhsssct

Surprising because if we consider that religious ideology
is indeed addressed to individuals," in order to 'transform
them into subjects', by intcrpellating the individual, Petcr,
in order to make him a subject, free to obey or disobey the
appeal, i.e. God's commandments; if it calls these individ-
uals by their names, thus, recognizing that they are always-
already interpellated as subjects with a personal identity
(to the extent that Pascal's Christ says: 'It is for you that I
have shed this drop of my blood l'); if it interpellates them
in such a way that the subject responds: ' Ycs; it rcally is mc !'
if it obtains from them the rcaognotion that they really do
occupy tlle place it designates for them as theirs in the
world, a fixed residence: 'It really is me, I am here, a worker,
a boss or a soldiert' in this vale of tears; if it obtains from
them the recognition of a destination (eternal life or dam-
nation) according to the respect or contempt they show to
'God's Commandments', Law become Love; - if every-
thing does happen in this way (in the practices of the well-
lcnown rituals of baptism, confirmation, communion, con-
fession and extreme unction, etc....), we should note that
all this 'procedure' to set up Christian religious subjects is
dominatcd by a strange phenomenon: the fact that there
can only be such a multitude of possible religious subjects
on the absolute condition that there is a Unique, Absolutc,
OtlJcr Subiect, i.e. God.
It is convenient to designate this new and remarkable
Subject by writing Subject With a capital S to distinguish
it from ordinary subjects, with a small s.
It then emerges that the interpellation of individuals as
subjects presupposes the 'existence' of a Unique and
central Other Subject, in whose Name the religious ideology

19. Althoulsh llrc Imow that the individull is always dready a subjcct, ~vc go

on using this tcrm, convenicnt because pf the contrasting ellect it produces.

w
ae

Idcology and tht Statc J79
interpellates .11 individuals as subjects. All this is clearly'¡
written in what is righdy called the Scriptures. 'And it came

to pass at that time that God the Lord (Yahweh) spoke to
Moses in the cloud. And the Lord cried to Moses, "Mosesl"
And Moses replied "It is (really) I I I am Moses thy servant,
speak and I shall listenl" And the Lord spoke to Moses and
said to him, "I am that I am" '.
God thus defines himself as the Subject par cxtcllentc~
he who is through himself and for himself ('I am that I am'),
and he who interpellates his subject, the individual sub
jected to him by his vcry intcrpellation, i.e. the individual
named Moses. And Moses, interpellated-called by his
Name, having recognized that it 'teally' was he who was
called by God, recognizes that he is a subject, a subject of
God, a subject subjected to God, a subic;t through thc
Subject and subicvted to thC Subicat. The proof: he obeys
him, and makes his people obey God's Commandmcnts
God is thus the Subject, and Moses and the innumerable
subjects of God's people, the Subject's interlocutors
interpellates: his mgrrors, his re,pestiotgs. Were not men made
in thc itnagc of God ? As all theological reflection proves,
whereas He 'could' perfcctly well have done without men
God needs them, the Subject needs the subjects, just as
men need God, the subjects need the Subject. Better:
God needs men, the great Subject needs subjects, even in
the terrible inversion of his image in them (when the
subjects wallow in debauchery, i.e. sin).
Better: God duplicates himself and sends his Son to the
Earth, as a mere subject 'forsaken' by him (the long
complaint of the Garden of Olives which ends in the
Crucifixion), subject but Subject, man but God, to do what
prepares the way for the final Redemption, the Resurrection

~o. I am quoting in a combined way, not to the Ictter hut 'in spirit and truth'.

180 Louis Althusscr

of Christ. God thus needs to 'make himself' g man, the
Subject needs to become a subject, as if to show empirically,
visibly to the eye, tangibly to the hands (see St Thomas)
of the subjects, that, if they are subjects, subjected to the
Subject, that is solely in order that finally, on Judgement
Day, they will re-enter the Lord's Bosom, like Christ, i.e.
re-enter the Subject."
Let us decipher into theoretical language this wonderful
necessity for the duplication of JhC Subject mto subiccts
and of thc Subicct itsclf into a subjcct-Subjcct.

We observe that the structure of all ideology, intcrpellating
individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique and Abso-
lutc Subject is speculary~ i.e. a mirror-structure, and doubly
speculary: this mirror duplication is constitutive of ideology
and ensures its functioning. Which means that all ideology
is acntred, that the Absolute Subject occupies the unique
place of the Centre, and intcrpellates around it the infiniq
of individuals into subjects in a double mirror-connexion
such that it subjccts the subjects to the Subject, while giving
them in the Subject in which each subject can contemplate
its own imagc (present and future) the ~uara~ttcc that this
really concerns them and Him, and that since evcrything
takes place in the Family (the Holy Family: the Family is in
essence Holy), 'God will recogngzc his own in it', i.e. those
who have recognized God, and have recognized themselves
in Him, will be saved.

Let me summarize what we have discovered about ideo-
logy in general.

The duplicate mirror-structure of ideology ensures simul-
taneously:

21. The dogma of the Trtnity ta precisely the theory of the duplication of the
Subjcct (the Father) into a subjcct tthe Son) and of their mirror-connexien
(the l-toly Spint).

IdcoloU and thc Statc 181

i. the interpellation of 'individuals' as subiccts;

2. their subjection to the Subject;

3. the mutual recognition of subjects and Subject, the
subjects' recognition of each other, and finally the subject's
recognition of himself;"

4. the absolute guarantee that everything rally is so,
and that on condition that the subjects recognize what they
are and behave accordingly, everything will be all right:
Amen - 'So be it'.
Result: caught in dlis quadruple system of interpellation
as subjects, of subjection to the Subiect. of univergal recog-
nition a,~ of absolllte gn:lrSntPes ¥hP cubjects 'work', they
'work bV themselvec' ;n thC sSt mljority of enRec with the
exception of the 'bad subiects' who on occasion provoke the

intervention of one of the detachment.c Qf the (repressive)
State apparatus._But the vast majoritv of (good) subjects
work all right 'all by themselves'. i.e. by ideology (whose
concrete orms are realized in the Ideological State Ap-
Vparatuses)~ 1 hey are inserted into nractices governed by the
rituals of to.^ I~They 'recoegnize' the existing state of
affairs (das Bcstchc~:~O
and not otherwise', and that they mlast he obedicnt to God,
to their conscience, to the priest, to de Gaulle, to the hnss,
to the engineer, that thou shalt 'love thy neighbour as
thyself', etc. Their concrete, material behaviour is simply
the inscription in life of the admirable words of the praver:
'Amen - So bc it'.

Yes, the subjects 'work by themselves'. The whole

}1. Hegel is (unknowingly) an adrnirable 'thcoretici~n! o! of id~olo~v _ "
he is a 'theoreticisn' of Universal Recegnition who unfortunateb ends up in
the idcology of Absolutc iCnowledgeB Feuerbach is an astonishing 'theoreti
cian' of the mirror connexion, who unfortunately ends up in the ideology
of the Human Essence. To find the material with which to construct ¥ theory
of the 6uarantee, we must turn to Spinoz .

i l
li

j
.,~,.*,,,, ,.,^%4,#.~ ~*e?.9'-2'S~w;'+ ~

I& Louis Althus cr
mystery of this eflcct lies in the first two moments of the
quadruple system I have just discussed, or, if you prefer,
in the ambiguity of the term subject. In the ordinary use of
the term, subject in fact means: (I) a free subjectivity, a
contre of initiatives, author of and rcsponsible for its
actions; (2) a subjected being, who submits to a higher
authority, and is therefore stripped of all freedom except
that of frecly acccpting his submission. This last note gives
us the meaning of this ambiguiq, which is merely a
rcncction of thc cfficct which produces it: the individual
ts ttJtcrpcllalcd as a ( frcc) subject in order that hc shall subntit
freely to thc (ommandmc1lts of tllc Subicct, i.c. in order that
11c shall (frcely) acccpt his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall
make the gestures and actions of his subjection 'all by
himself'. Therc arc no subjccts cxtcpt by andfor their sub
jection. That is why they 'work all by themselves'.

'So bc it ! . . .' This phrase which registers the effect to be

obtained proves that it is not 'naturally' so ('naturally':
outside the prayer, i.e. outside the ideological intcrvention).
This phrasc proves that it has to be so if things are to be
what they must be, and let us Ict the words dip: if the
reproduction of the relations of production is to be assured,
even in the processes of production and circulation, every
day, in the 'consciousness', i.e. in the attitudes of the
individual-subjects occupying the posts which the socio
technical division of labour assigns to them in production,
exploitation, repression, ideologization, scicntific practice,
etc. I~__~
of the mlrror recognition of the Subjcct and of the indi
'vtduals interpeuatea as subjects, and of the guarantee given
by the Subject to the subjects if they freely accent their
sublection to the Subject's 'commSndments' ? The reality
in question in this mechanism, the reality Which is neces_
sarily ignored (m~connuc) in the very forms of reco,enition

C)3
~

l~k]

'1'
-z~-ut WJ be ~

(ideoloz ~ misrecogrutionlignorwccL _d, in the '.

last resort, the reproduction of the relations of production
and of the relations deriving from them.

jFansr,tApril /969

P.S. If these few schematic theses allow me to illuminate
certain aspects of the functioning of the Superstructure
and its mode of intervention in the Infrastructure, they are
obviously abstract and necessarily leave several important
problems unanswered, which should be mentioned:

l. The problem of the htal proacss of the realization of
the reproduction of the relations of production.

As an element of this process, the ISAs vontributc to this
reproduction. But the point of view of their contribution
alone is still an abstract one.

It is only within the processes of production and circu-
lation that this reproduction is rcalized. It is realized by the
mechanisms of those processes, in which the training of the
workers is 'completed', their posts assigned them, etc. It is
in the internal mechanisms of these processes that the
effect of the different ideologies is felt (above all the effect
of legal-ethical ideology).
But this point of view is still an abstract one. For in a
class society the relations of production are relations of
exploitation, and therefore relations between antagonistic
classes. The reproduction of the relations of production,
the ultimate aim of the ruling class, cannot therefore be a
merely technical operation training and distributing indi-
viduals for the different posts in the 'technical division' of
labour. In fact there is no 'technical division' of labour
except in the ideology of the ruling class: every 'technical'
division, every 'technical' organization of labour is the form
and mask of a social ( = class) division and organization of

!
l *

184 Louis Althusscr

labour. The reproduction of the relations of production
can therefore only be a class undertaking. It is realized
through a class struggle which counterposes the ruling class
and the exploited dass.

The totaZ proacss of the realization of the reproduction of
the relations of production is therefore still abstract, insofar
as it has not adopted the point of view of this class struggle.
'rO adopt the point of view of reproduction is therefore,
in the last instance, to adopt the point of view of the class
struggle.

2. The problem of the class nature of the ideologics
existing in a social formation.

The 'mechanism' of ideology m gcnera1 is one thing. We
have seen that it can be reduced to a few principles expressed
in a few words (as 'poor' as those Which, according to Marx,
define production in gcncral or in Freud, define thc un-
conscious in gcn~ral). If there is any truth in it, this mechan-
ism must be abstract with respect to every real ideological
formation.

I have suggested that the ideologies were rcalized in
institutions, in their rituals and their practices, in the ISAs.
We have seen that on this basis they contribute to that form
of class struggle, vital for the ruling class, the reproduction
of the relations of production. But the point of view itself,
however real, is still an abstract one.
In fact, the State and its Apparatuses only have meaning

from the point of view of the class struggle, as an apparatus
of class struggle ensuring class oppression and guaranteeing
the conditions of exploitation and its reproduction, But
there is no class struggle without antagonistic classes.
Wllocvcr says class struggle of the ruling class says resist-
ance, revolt and class struggle of the ruled dass.

That is why the lSAs are not the realization of ideology

in general, nor even the conflict-free realization of the

Idcology and thc Statc 185
ideology of the ruling class. The ideology of the ruling class
does not become the ruling ideology by the grace of God,
nor even by virtue of the seizure of State power alone. It is
by the installation of the ISAs in which this ideology is
realized and realizes itself that it becomes the ruling
ideology. But this installation is not achieved all by itself;
on the contrary, it is the stake in a very bitter and continuous
class struggle: first against the former ruling classes and
their positions in the old and new ISAs, then against the
exploited class.

But this point of view of the class struggle in the ISA8
is still an abstract one. In fact, the class struggle in the
ISAs is indeed an aspect of the class struggle, sometimes
an important and symptomatic one: e.g. the anti-religious
struggle in the eighteenth century, or the 'crisis' of the
educational ISA in every capitalist country today. But the
class struggles in the ISAs is only one aspect of a class
struggle which goes beyond the ISAs. The idcology that a

class in power makes the ruling ideology in its ISAs is indeed
'rcalized' in those ISAs, but it goes beyond them, for it
comes from elsewhere. Similarly, the ideology that a ruled
class manages to defend in and against such ISAs goes
beyond them, for it comes from elsewhere.

It is only from the point of view of the classes, i.e. of the
class struggle, that it is possible to explain the ideologics
existing in a social formation. Not only is it from this
starting-point that it is possible to explain the realization
of the ruling ideology in the ISAs and of the forms of class
strug61e for which the ISAs are the seat and the stake. But
it is also and above all from this starting-point that it is
possible to understand the provenance of the ideologies
which are realized in the ISAs and confront one another
there. For if it is true that the ISAs represent the form in
which the ideology of the ruling class must ncccssarily be

/ )
186 Louis Althusscr

tealized, and the form in which the ideology of the ruled
class must ncccssarily'be measured and confronted, ideolo-
gies are not 'born' in the ISAs but from the social classes
at grips in the class struggle: from their conditions of
existence, their practices, their experiencc of the struggle,
etc,

.Q)

April 1970

Appendix

ll
l
I'
10
i

20 Television theory

end-products, whether semiotic or social, just as a skeleton is simpler than
the body that depends on it. And just as a living, breathing body and its
actions depend on but are not caused by the underlying skeleton, so TV
texts and audiences cannot be accounted for as effects of the structures that
determine them. However, when people decide it's time to exercise their
bodies, or to use them creatively, they strive to understand the general
framework, the skeleton and all the attached bits and pieces, so as to make
the best use of what they've got within the limits of the structure. Just as
bodies can be made to do remarkable things by such means, increasing
personal pleasure as well as functional performance, so it is with the study
of textual-cultural structures like television. To understand TV better is to
anatomize it, but to do that can help to improve its performance and the
pleasure of its audiences.

;

Chapter 2

Television and the

power of dirt John. "Chapter 2: Television and the Power of
Dirt." Tele-oloav Studiesin Television. Routledge,
1992 (John Hartley). (Originally published as John
Hartley (1983) "Encouraging signs: Television and the
Power of Dirt; Speech and Scandalous Categories."
Australian Journal of Cuitural Studies, 1(2), 62-82.
Published in USA in Willard D. Rowland and Bruce
Watkins, editors, InterDretinc Television: Current
Research PersDectives, Sage.) Pages 2142.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please;
they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but
under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from
the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a night-
mare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in
revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has
never existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they
anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow
from them names, battle-cries and costumes in order to present the new
scene of world history in this time honoured disguise and this borrowed
language.
(Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonttparte)l

This chapter takes up the theme of borrowed languages; both those of
television itself and those that have become established within analytical
discourses in the study of television. I want to argue that some of the most
familiar analytical categories we use to study television are in need of
rethinking, and that television itself will emerge from this process shorn of
its time-honoured disguise. Instead, television will be seen for what it is - a
new scene of world history that supplants what has traditionally been
understood as the power of speech. Despite our habit of anxiously conjur-
ing up the spirits of the past to exorcize its power, I shall argue that for
modem, industrialized societies, television is the power of speech. To begin

with, then, I want to make a problem out of some of the received notions
of textual analysis, especially where texts and readers have been concep-
tualized as an abstract binary opposition with meaning somehow batted
back and forth between the two.

c Originally published as John Harllcy (1983) 'Encouraging signs: tclevision and the power
of dirt; spcoch and scandalous catcgorics'. Australian Journal of Cultural Snulies, 1(2),
62-82. Publishcd in thc USA in Willard D. Rowland and Brucc Watkins (cds) (1984)
Imerpreting Telezsisgon: Current Resear /I Perspeclives. Bcvcrly Hills: Sagc.

21
22 Television theory

TEXTS
The practice of reading television texts has demonstrated fairly clearly that
individual segments, programmes, series and so forth are far from unitary
in their meaning. In fact television provides a convincing instance of the
structuralist axiom of 'no intrinsic meaning'. Television texts are polyse
mic, and they resist attempts even to identify their smallest signifying units,
since there are so many different kinds on the screen at once: visual,
verbal, aural, discursive, narrative and so on. But even though television
texts are saturated with meaningfulness, there is no textual warrant for any
particular meaning to be privileged as true. The best that the analyst can do
is to show, without ascribing agency to them, how texts try to limit and
close their own meaningfulness with ideological 'preferred readings' and so
forth.
But the problem of the text goes further than this. Television is recalci
trant when it comes to identifying where the text should stop. Quite apart
from the problem of rationalizing what must in the end be an arbitrary act,
namely the choice of this rather than that as the 'text' to analyse, television
cannot be reduced, even for the sake of analysis, to 'what's on telly'. The
forms of television representation are not specific to television; its dis
courses are produced, regulated and reproduced just as much off-screen as
they are on it; its institutionalization of these rather than those signifying
practices cannot be explained by looking at the practices by themselves;
and even its own programmes are made meaningful 'outside' television
itself, in newspapers, magazines, conversations, learned papers and the
like. In short, television texts do not supply the analyst with a warrant for
considering them either as unitary or as structurally bounded into an inside
and outside. If television has a distinctive feature, it is that it is a 'dirty'
category.2

READERS

The notion of the reader is similarly a problem. Traditionally conceptua
lized (for the sake of analysis) as either one individual reader or a mass of
individual readers, the category 'reader' has become established as both
unitary and abstract. But, as anyone who studies television must know,
there are differences in the way the same bit of television can be watched
by the same individual reader. Such differences may depend on mood,
company or place, but there is also the question of which discursive
resource, or combination of resources, the person brings to bear on the
programme. Today 1 may be 'reading television' as critic, but tonight I'll be
'watching television' as audience. And sometimes (always) these two ways
of watching will slide into or even contradict each other.
Following from this, it is hard to sustain the notion of a unitary indi
vidual who is in possession of a unitary subjectivity in view of television.

Television and the cower of dirt 23

Without (necessarily) claiming that everyone is schizophrenic, it is possible
to use television as a way of showing how no individuals have unitary
subjectivity in their possession. Rather there are clusters of significant
identifications that may combine, split, contradict or confirm each other in
provisional orientations that will for the time being serve the purposes of a
social 'l' .

These identifications form an extensive, changing and informal paradigm
that is carried in various discourses. What sense 'I' might make of tele
vision depends, therefore, on the discursive resources available. But
although 'I' might identify with them, not all of them fit each other - some
will necessarily marginalize or deny others, and some are more obvious
well-worn and time-honoured than others. Both paradigmatically (the
discursive identifications) and syntagmatically (their combinations or con
tradictions), 'I' is a 'dirty' category too.

DIRT

It seems to me that the dirtiness both of television texts and of individual
readers is a matter worth looking into further. The notion that both of
these categories are by definition dirty is not a new one. In respect of
television, Hans Magnus Enzensberger has put it forcefully:

The electronic media do away with cleanliness; they are by their nature
'dirty'. That is part of their productive power.... The desire for a
cleanly defined 'line' and for the suppression of 'deviations' is anachro
nistic and now serves only one's own need for security.3

As for individuals, this is how Edmund Leach puts it:

Individuals do not live in society as isolated individuals with clear-cut
boundaries; they exist as individuals interconnected in a network by
relations of power and domination. Power, in this sense, resides in the
interfaces between individuals, in ambiguous boundaries. The logical
paradox is that (i) I can only be completely sure of what I am if I cleanse
myself of all boundary dirt, hut (ii) a completely clean 'I' with no
boundary dirt would have no interface relations with the outside world
or with other individuals. Such an 'I' would be free from the domination
of others but would in turn be wholly impotent. The interface is the
OppOsitioll:

clean/dirty = impotence/potency

and hence that power is locuted ill dirt.4

The idea that power is located in dirt, which itself can be defined as
ambiguous boundaries, strikes me as useful in respect of television. It
suggests that the interface between texts and readers is capable of produc-
ing both meanings and 'relations of power and domination' precisely

24 Television theory

because it is not a clean opposition but always and necessarily ambiguous.
What I shall be looking for, then, is not texts and readers as opposed
entities, but the way boundaries between them are erected, transgressed
and policed.

THE POWER OF TELEVISION

But first I would like to introduce just one more dirty category into the
discussion, and that is the so-called power of speech. The power of speech,
as commonly understood, is a natural attribute of the human species, and is
therefore distributed evenly (barring physical damage) between all mem-
bers of the species. Not only is this power (or competence) reckoned to be
equally distributed, but speech itself is understood as natural, direct com-
munication, as natural language. Small wonder that speech is taken as the
model for linguistic and other kinds of analysis, such as semiotics, that are
interested in meaning. However, the work of Jacques Derrida has shown
that this is by no means an innocent act - on the contrary, as Jonathan
Culler has explained:

Privileging speech in this way by treating writing as a parasitic and
imperfect representation of it is a way of repressing or setting aside
certain features of language, or certain aspects of its functioning. If
distance, absence, misunderstanding, insincerity are features of writing,
then by distinguishing writing from speech one can construct a model of
communication which takes as the norm an ideal associated with speech
- where the listener is thought to be able in principle to grasp precisely
what the speaker has in mind.... Writing, supposedly an external
accessory in the service of speech, threatens to taint the purity of the
system it serves.5

If writing - the medium of literature, philosophy and science - can be
reckoned 'parasitic', 'imperfect' and a 'taint' because of its supplementar-
ity, its distance, absence, misunderstanding and insincerity, then what are
we to say of television? The medium of trivia and sensationalism, of sex,
violence and bad language, of corruption and moral decline, is commonly
seen as the ultimate supplement. It threatens the purity of both speech and
writing. It does not even have the artistic pretensions of cinema to redeem
it.

None the less, Hollywood had already provided a model of impurity and
rehearsed a discourse of contagion for later use against television. Hcre is
the report of the Spens Committee of 1938:

Certainly it would be an advantage if all our children could learn the
same English speech, though we agree . . . in recommending the preser-
vation of true dialect, as distinct from affected or debased forms which
have no roots in history. Teachers are everywhere tackling this problem,

,¢.; though they are not to be envied in their struggle against the natural
s conservatism of childhood allied to the popularization of the infectious
f accents of Hollywood. The pervasive influence of the hoarding, the
cinema, and a large section of the public press are, in this respect as in
others, subtly corrupting the taste and habits of the rising generation.6

Television has been policed by this discourse continuously since its earliest
prehistory. It is still beyond the pale. Here is one commonplace example,
immediately to hand as I write, of the common-sense barricade between
literacy (hooray!) and television (boo!). It is from the London Sunday
Times (10 April 1983):

The great TV and literacy debate which has been rumbling on for 30
years or so shows no sign of reaching a conclusion yet. The impression
.r always strong among adults - that a race of square-eyed and weirdly
,.1 dressed non-readers, non-writers and non-counters is in the making isn't
the sort of thing that statistical proof or disproof does much to shake or
confirm. It isn't exactly a sign of literary attainment or public spirit when

ts half the adult population is counted as 'readers' of the tabloids; and it's
; not necessarily a sign that television encourages children to read when
,~ publishers produce so many spin-offs from children's programmes.

) In the teeth of its own concern with the ambiguity of television's bound
¤ aries with its media neighbours (the piece is a review of spin-off books), the
14 article seems to need the security of a cleanly defined line between itself
i and television. Television isn't much good for anything from this point of
view, except to encourage children to stop using it in favour of 'literary
k attainment', and naturally it's not even very good at that. But the main
thing is to reduce contact with the contagion to the shortest possible time.
The review as a whole is headlined 'Ways to Wean Children Off TV'.
i Clearly the power of speech is a dirty category, but here the source of the
# dirt is identified equally clearly as belonging not to speech itself but to
!'. television, the other electronic media, and popular tabloids. The power
that is located in this dirt is of course of the negative kind - it infects and
corrupts the rising generation, turning them into a race of weird monsters
. with square eyes and dubious habits. What is it that makes television into
such a potent (dangerous) extension of language? Can you imagine a
S headline that read 'Ways to Wean Children Off Reading' or even 'Ways to
i Wean Children Off Speech'?
Another way of asking these questions, without having to weigh the
: merits of the concept of TV-as-motherhood that is implied in the weaning
metaphor, is to return to the notion of the power of speech and to
concentrate for a moment not so much on the speech as on the power. For
j Saussurians, the power of speech is not only separated from the taint of
I writing, it is also protected from the grubby world of speaking: the power
] of speech is langue, an abstract system that lies beyond individual and
Television and the power of dirt 25

26 Television theoly

social will. Only parole, the abstract binary opposite of langue, is allowed
contact with the social relations that, as Saussure concedes, are the sole
precondition for the creation of langue in the first place.7 It seems that the
protection of langue from the social/individual will has more to do with the
power of binaries than with the logic of the case.
For Chomskians, the power of speech is an attribute of the species -
innate competence. Here too it is regarded as almost unthinkable to
suggest that such a power can be interfered with socially. But when it
comes to the networks of power and domination that characterize social
relations, individual natural capacities are neither here nor there. The
notion of linguistic competence does not raise the question of who has
power over it, just as the notion of a natural capacity to eat or to make
tools does not explain who goes hungry or who owns the means of
production. It appears, then, that both the concept of langue and that of
competence have the effect of defining power out of the terms of study.
But, as Stuart Hall has very briskly put it:

Of course, a language is not equally distributed amongst all native
speakers, regardless of class, socio-economic position, gender, edu-
cation and culture: nor is competence to perform in language randomly
distributed. Linguistic performance and competence is socially distrib-
uted, not only by class but also by gender. Key institutions - in this
respect, the family-education couple - play a highly significant role in
the social distribution of cultural 'capital' in which language plays a
pivotal role.8

Perhaps here we have a clue as to why television is commonly regarded as a
dirty, dangerous medium that 'our' children must be weaned off. In the
first place, it has none of the abstract purity of langue, nor the natural pure
individualism of competence - it is all too evidently a social relation of
sense-making from which power cannot be excluded. And second, maybe
even consequently, television is threatening:

The electronic media are entirely different from the older media like the
book or the easel-painting, the exclusive class character of which is
obvious.... Potentially the new media do away with all educational
privileges and thereby with the cultural monopoly of the bourgeois
intelligentsia. This is one of the reasons for the intelligentsia's resent-
ment against the new industry. As for the 'spirit' which they are endea-
vouring to defend against 'depersonalization' and 'mass culture', the
sooner they abandon it the better. The new media are oriented towards
action, not contemplation; towards the present, not tradition. Their
attitude to time is completely opposed to that of bourgeois culture which
aspires to possession, that is to extension in time, best of all, to eternity.
The media produce no objects that can be hoarded and auctioned. They
do away completely with 'intellectual property' and liquidate the 'heri

Television and the power of dirt 27

tage', that is to say, the class-specific handing on of non-material
capital ."

It is perhaps just as well that Enzensberger prefaces these refreshingly
optimistic remarks with the word 'potentially', since television as presently
instituted does not always conform to its potential. But it is important to
consider what that potential or 'productive capacity' might be, in order to
demonstrate the extent to which its development is not determined by
innate capacities as such, but on the way these are organized socially and
institutionalized. In fact, television supplies us with a model for under-
standing how the social power of communication - the power of speech - is

neither abstract nor innate, but a power relation. Further, television
demonstrates that the production of senses, knowledges and meanings is
thoroughly socialized, marking a decisive break with the kinds of cultures
associated with the 'older media'.

BORROWED LANGUAGES

The implications of this argument for the analysis of television itself will, I
hope, become clearer later on. For the moment, I want to take up
Enzensberger's point about the analyst. He points to the cultural (class)
monopoly of the intelligentsia, and their/our 'resentment against the new
industry'. Such resentment may be expressed openly and with vigour -
('Ways to Wean Children Off TV') - but it may also have something to do
with apparently neutral, respectable intellectual activities like reading
texts. For texts, as commonly understood, are nothing short of institution-
alized meaning; they are fixed, owned, and have clearly identifiable bound-
aries (usually in the form of covers). They can be 'possessed' in different
ways by clearly identifiable authors and readers - they are a very good way
of ensuring 'extension in time, best of all . . . eternity'; they can even be
hoarded and auctioned. As Roland Barthes has argued, this concept of text
produces characteristically authoritarian social relations:

The notion of the text is historically linked to a world of institutions: the
law, the Church, literature, education. The text is moral object: it is the
written in so far as the written participates in the social contract. It
subjects us, and demands that we observe and respect it, but in return it
marks language with an inestimable attribute which it does not possess
in its essence: security.l"

Tclevision analysts, especially those of us who are institutionalized within
education, are notoriously susceptible to the appeal of security, whether of
text or tenure. But television is, equally, resistant to classification into
texts, and its ambiguity extends even to the dirty boundary that surrounds
its institutionalized study (there is no 'pure' academic discipline called
'Television'). Small wonder that we are driven to borrowing the costume of

)

28 Television theory

the text in order to dress this scandalous subject in respectability.
However, the consequence is that we tend to analyse the costume, to use
television to demonstrate an inestimable attribute that it does not possess
in its essence: security of texture.
In short, we need to find 'Ways to Wean Critics Off Texts' . But of course
the notion of the text is a thoroughly naturalized term in analysis. And as
Stuart Hall has put it:

Changing the terms of an argument is exceedingly difficult, since the
dominant definition of the problem acquires, by repetition, and by the
weight and credibility of those who propose or subscribe it, the warrant
of 'common sense' . l l

Hall invokes Volosinov's concept of 'sign as the arena of class struggle' 12 to
suggest that 'the same term could be disarticulated from its place within
one discourse and articulated in a different position'.l3
Hence, it is not necessary to abandon the notion of the text in respect of
television or its analysis. But the ideological inflections of the term need to
be recognized, and where necessary changed (though that may prove
'exceedingly difficult'). What is needed is not to reduce television to texts,
but to disarticulate the notion of the text from the discourse of possession,
and rearticulate it in the position(s) of television.

Television and the power of dirt 29

ACCESSING
Before I attempt that, however, I would like to bring the other side of the
text: reader binary opposition back into play. First, rearticulating the
potion of the text calls into question the separability of text and reader.
/Recent work on subject positioning, by Screen theorists for example,
| suggests that subjectivity itself is an effect or product of textual relations.
t Readers, in this model, are written on by texts. Of course television is not
s written, it is produced (which is itself a suggestive metaphor for its relation
ship with its audiences), but I would like to propose that the relations
between television and its viewers might be thought of in terms of access
ing. viewers 'access' television discourses and reprcsentations both in and
beyond the act of watching television ('accessing' goes on after the tele
vision set is switched off). And vice versa: television accesses its viewers'
I (culture's) discourses and identifications in the act of production.
I I have argued elsewhere that accessing on television has some peculiar
features. 14 It is not a case of information retrieval. When you are quoted or
interviewed or appear on television (when you're accessed), you may have
your say but you do not speak for yourself. Your contribution is semioti
cally stolen, that is, appropriated by the overall television discourse. It is
made to mean something different from whatever you may have intended,
by its status as a 'quote'. You are rearticulated into an actor in the drama,

and what you say is like fictional dialogue - it is subservient to what else is
being said, to who is saying it and to what the drama is about. Further
accessing lends the credibility and legitimacy (realism) of your authenticity
and authority (truth) to television.
If television can be thought of as a means of accessing a multiplicity of
discourses and representations, so can the viewer. Everything I have just
said about the way television accesses applies equally to the individual
viewer. We are all a means of accessing a multiplicity of discourses and
identifications. Not only is what we say and the way we make sense of the
world largely quoted, but also the resources from which we take these
discourses and identifications cannot control the way we use them in
combination. However, although I take the relation between television
texts and readers to be similar in that it is a process of mutual accessing, I
am not arguing that it is uniform or evenhanded. It is still a hegemonic
power-relation in the way it is currently organized socially. In brief, some

viewers have more discursive resources than others, and television has
more than all.

SEVEN TYPES OF SUBJECTIVITY

I shall return to the power inequalities later. At this point I would like to
take up the idea of individuality (subjectivity); not as a self-contained and
clearly identifiable entity, but as a dirty structure of accessed identifi-
cations. In order to be more definite about what I am referring to, I will
suggest seven of what I take to be the more important identifications that
are available or encouraged. They are what I am tempted to call seven X
types of ambiguity: namely self, gender, age-group, family, class, nation, /
ethniciry. The list is both abstract and analytical (I do not have a textual
warrant for it), and in the concrete instance of television it is not even a list,
since the seven categories get very mixed up, and some are encouraged
more than others (family more than class), while others do not co-exist
very peacefully (some notions of nation with some types of ethnicity).
These identifications are neither self-evident nor essential, in either tele-
vision or individuals. What I hope to do is to show how they are textually
produced. In the context of this chapter that means I shall pay attention to
the way ambiguous boundaries are erected and transgressed withhl and
between the identifications.
I am looking, then, for textual processes and representations that may
cncourage reader identifications. It is implicit in my argument that none of
the seven types is reprcsented in isolation. Further, the way each one is
taken up ideologically (the way it's produced) is similar in structure to the
way each of the others is treated. They can be seen, structurally, as
homologous transformations of each other. Thus, each type of identifi-
cation (together with others I've not included in my list) serves to define
30 Television theory

and limit the others. And there are what I will call condensations of them,
where, for instance, particular senses of all seven are collapsed into one
star-sign, the signifier for which may be a person, like Prince Charles or the
Princess of Wales, or it may be an emblematic object or practice, like a car,
a landscape, or a sports event. Television produces its own star-signs, from
news-presenters to more obviously fictional characters, and these too are
available as condensers for our seven types of subjectivity.

EX-NOMINATION

In this chapter I am going to have to concentrate on just one identification
to serve as an emblem for the others. The one I have chosen is that of age-
group. In the spirit of the chapter, however, what I am looking for are the
marginal, ambiguous edges of the category, and the way these offer what
looks like a settled, positive, natural inside for us to access as our own
selves. In this respect I have found Barthes's notion of ex-nominarion very
useful. Barthes suggests that 'capitalism' is quite easily named in economic
discourses. It is uncontroversial to say that ours is a capitalist economy. In
political discourses, however, capitalism is less easily named - there is no
Capitalist Party as such. In cultural discourses, capitalism 'disappears' - it
is completely.ex-nominated. As Barthes puts it, the bourgeoisie is the
social class that does not want to be named. 15
This notion can be applied to all of our seven types of social identifi-
cation, to show how within each one there are ex-nominations going on.
The way to spot such absences, of course, is to look for those nominations
or namings that are in play. In the case of gender, women are frequently
named or nominated as women. They are represented in terms of gender -
defined by their looks, procreative ability, femininity and so on. Men, on
the other hand, are often shown as beyond gender - they just get on with
whatever they are doing and are defined in terms of their job, character,
actions and so forth; men are ex-nominated as men. Similarly, in the
instance of class, there are plenty of representations of worliing-classness,
which is nominated as such, whereas middle-classness is rarely presented as
a significant signifier on its own; more often it is taken for granted, while
the focus of the story lies elsewhere (see Dallas, or interestingly in view of

its title, the film Ordinary People). Middle-classness is an ex-nominated
category. In thc case of ethnicity and nation, blacks and foreigners arc
often signified as belonging to their respective race or nation. For white
locals these attributes are apparently devoid of signiticance - they arc ex-
nominated. Finally, the family is a thoroughly ex-nominated category
(despite evidence that the classic family is now statistically rare) unless you
belong to a broken one, a shlglc-parent one, etc.

Television and the power of dirt 31

YOUTH: A SCANDALOUS CATEGORY

As for the identifications within the category age-group, these too have a
naturalized, ex-nominated centre - the category of adult - with other more
ambiguous, marginalized identifications on its boundaries. Like television,
I am going to concentrate on one of the nominated ambiguous boundaries,
namely youth.
Youth is a very dirty category indeed. First of all I will explain in general
terms why this is so, and then have a look at some examples to see how it is
represented. Youth is a scandalous category because it offends against
binary logic. Binary systems are two-term universes, and binary logic
requires the two terms to be not just equivalent-but-opposite, but also
mutually exclusive. For instance, there are plenty of such binaries in play in
analytical discourses - signifier: signified; subject: object; text: reader
producer: consumer; speech: writing; domination: subordination.
Binaries are also capable of being applied to both the physical and social
world. The surface of the earth can be understood in terms of the binary
land: sea, and the people on it in terms of the binary child: adult. All
very neat and clean. But if we look closer at, for instance, the binary
land: sea, we find things are not quite so simple. There is a margin
between the two that is ambiguous. Sometimes it is land, sometimes sea. It
is neither one thing nor the other, and both one and the other. I refer, of
course, to the beach - the very same ambiguous category that people flock
to in order to escape all sorts of otherwise strict social boundaries. The
ambiguous beach is the place where you can do all sorts of scandalous
things, from taking your clothes off in public to being more or less
continuously preoccupied with pleasure, sex and self, without getting
arrested. And of course you flock there in the ambiguous nontime of
Sundays and other holidays, especially (in Britain) on Bank Holidays
Youth is just this kind of scandalous category. It is neither child nor
adult. To see why youth is so very dirty, then, all that is necessary is to list
some of the most general, naturalized, and common-sense attributes that
separate child (as a category) from adult, and to notice how completely
youth transgresses them all. For instance,

child: adult
family of origin: family of destination
not workhlg: working
single: married
asexual: gendered sexuality
irresponsible: responsible
and so on: and so on
With youth, all such oppositions are transgressed; youth has the attributes
of neither child nor adult, and both child and adult. Just to show that the
scandalousness comes from the categorical ambiguity of youth and not

w
oo

32 Television theory

from what it does, I have located several examples of media stories in
which age group is significant. I have taken these from popular newsL
papers; I hope these fixed texts will illustrate at least part of what goes on
in the more complex moving text of television, especially in view of
television's own ambiguous boundaries with its media neighbours.
What would you think of someone who brutalized a goldfish, terrorized
a cat (three times), assaulted his father, set fire to his aunt, vandalized a
car, disrupted a social club, and pinched people's bottoms with a pair of
pliers? Normally, this is just the kind of behaviour we are encouraged to
think of as scandalous and to associate with the excesses of youth. But not
in this case, for as the London Sun (5 November 1979) tells us, 'little imp
Colin' is a child of 3; leaving a 'trail of havoc' is cute, not culpable. Leafing
through the same newspaper, we come across someone who at 21 is closer
in age than Colin to the category of youth. This person is shown sitting at a
school desk, wearing virtually no clothes. Again, however, the action is not
represented as scandalous; quite the reverse, for of course this is a pin-up,
and thus firmly within the realm of gendered sexuality. Susie the 'Oh!-level
girl' may be (must be) youthful, but the representation is addressed to
adult men. Despite the reputation of youth, then, it is not violence or overt
sexuality as such that scandalizes. The problem is that youth transgresses
the naturalized limits of both childhood and adulthood. In anthropological
terms it is a rite of passage, a crossing of boundaries, so it becomes the
subject of taboo and is subjected to ritual and repression.
The next example is from the London Sunday Mirror (17 May 1981). It
describes, in detail, the youth 'cults' known as skinheads. The whole story
is a ritual condensation of boundary transgressions and scandalous cat-
egories. It is set in that special place and time - the seaside on a Bank
Holiday. The story is presented irrationally, as 'disturbing', 'frightening',
and as about 'victims', 'fear' and 'thugs'. The transgressors themselves are
called 'Britain's young tribes', 'sworn enemies' and 'like animals'. In the
accompanying pictures, they're shown as Nazi-sympathizers whose appear-
ance is precisely tribal, even their faces are made to look like masks, and
their clothes and haircuts are all paraded to confirm our worst fears. The
story itself comprises a succession of transgressions: of speech (they
swear); of the peace (they fight); of patriotism (they parody the national
flag); of politics (they are racists and admire Hitler); of sexuality (they stir
up your murky psychological depths); of gender (thc women swear and
fight); of marriage (they insult a happy young couple); of the home (they
live alone with a naked light bulb, greasy plates and a crinkled picture of
Hitler); and of sobriety (at least one of them gets drunk while being plied
with pints of lager by thc reporter).
Mixed up in the unfolding of all these transgressions are almost all of the
seven types of subjectivity I have mentioned. Of course, the story is not
encouraging its readers to identify with the skinheads. But it is not just a

* TINY TERROR!
_ki f . n _A ~

v
-Z~,
k ¥~~
~ ~

w
oo

* l

by COLIN (| Th e

bl. .^u _ _ ._ _~ ._ . B;

v . ~..i,,,.ti

if,is

,gangs,
who fee

- ~- ~

on f l

~ lll2&4,~iw L vFr ~+*wr;
e C~_WJn - n~ '
F~ ~..~_1 1_ ~ C~ d
pu ~ sOb~f .T Wfl
sw ~^|s - hwl:
19~ .1 #_Nl.jf ¥F~

reoort on Brlteln's most fr{elstenlns ~otJth ---¤~

w~W-w - - Wa~ S~ '' ~w

- ¢t ~ f - Ww mfl
wz ~
¥r, X.. 1. l....b "
1:8 *w ~. 1- _ d
11_ ~ ftF 4.B*. ~, , I f ~b 4 ~, e s l t ~ r n $ * e e s # i r . bt 4 X X * * ~ _ ~_^ ' ' ~p | . i

I ~_ _ ~#
'i

w
w

36 Television theory

matter of excluding them as foreign, or as unlike us, since that would not
implicate the reader in the various identifications. I think there is an (ex-
nominated) we: they binary in play in the story's mode of address, but
once again the object of attention, youth, is significant precisely because it
transgresses it. The skinheads certainly are not us, but they are not
foreigners either (which is why they are 'frightening'). The reporter can
talk and even joke with them, and he gets invited to bedsit and pub. He
purports to understand and even like them: 'playing with the body is one of
the great preoccupations of the young. They can be bright, chirpy, quick-
witted.' He pities them and advises us to do the same: 'for their lives are
very empty.' He fancies the girls too: 'Many skinhead girls, with their
close-cropped hair, sparse make-up and skin tight around the cheekbones,
can look totally breathtaking - making you wonder what murky psycho-
logical depths in you they are stirring up.' None of these concessions would
be possible if the skinheads really were alien 'tribes' or 'animals'.
In fact one of the appealing aspects of this story is the uneasiness of its
movements between skinheads and 'all of us': 'All of us may lose our
tempers, lash out when provoked, or fight in self-defence. But skinhead
violence is different.' As the story thinks through this Derridean obser-
vation on the transgressions of the skinheads, it establishes boundaries
between we and they identifications. It establishes a narrative point of view
that takes for granted - ex-nominates - the we identifications it requires its
readers to access in order to make sense of the story in its own terms. Thus,
the skinhead girls mark the limit of sexuality for women, and it is not
without significance that the story is written from a male point of view
while speaking for all of us. This point of view carefully differentiates those
girls who look 'totally breathtaking' from those who, 'with their loud-
mouthed effing and blinding and their constant egging on of the blokes to
fresh violence, seemed to me totally unwomanly'. In another instance,
what the skinheads do with the Union Jack is differentiated from 'all I
understand our national flag to stand for'. And so on.

EXCESSES OF MEANINGFULNESS

It seems to me that this is a highly risky strategy if the story's scandalized
tone is taken at face value. Carefully separating the transgressors from us is
of course one good way to encourage fantasy identifications, but quite
apart from that there is another risk too. The strategy generates far more
meaningfulness than it can control. Ambiguous categories are by definition
more meaningful than the two (or more) categories they transgress, since
they partake of the attributes of both. On television, the more complex
modes of representation generate an even greater excess of meanblgful-
ness, since television signifies by colour, motion, sound and time as well as
by pictures, words and composition. All these are variously affected by

Television and the power of dirt 37

their internal juxtapositions and their external relations with discourses
and social relations off-screen. Thus, beyond a social risk (of encouraging
love rather than hate, attraction rather than repulsion), there is a semiotic
risk that is even more fundamental. For excess of meanings and overlap-
pmg opposites are among the defining characteristics of madness, or at
least of nonsense.
It is hardly surprising, then, to find television itself characterized by a
will to limit its own excess, to settle its significations into established,
taken-for-granted, common senses, which viewers can be disciplined to
identify and to identify with. Disciplining is done partly by television's
conventional codes of composition, lighting, movement, narrative, genre
and the like, and partly by external limits such as those professional, legal
and other exclusion devices that limit who and what gets on the air.
However, I would argue that television can never succeed in its will to limit

its own excesses of meaningfulness. For in order to think through abstract
problems associated with various kinds of categorical ambiguity, television
must necessarily scandalize the overlapping boundaries. In order to limit
meanings, then, it must first produce excess. It does this in both fictional
and factual programmes (so much so that the separation of fact from fiction
is another abstract binary that has a dirtier boundary than is commonly
admitted) .
In fictional programmes, characters rarely act as mere persons. Usually
they signify some mighty opposite, like man: woman, individual: institu-
tion, good: evil, active . passive, efficient: inefficient, normal: deviant
nature: culture, rural: urban, heart: head, and the like (a good example
of a text that unfolds its narrative by means of an unusually obvious series
of such binaries is the film ET: The Extra-Terrestrial). So the barroom or
bedroom brawl is a ritual condensation of the opposites being distinguished
and thought through. Action sequences are calculating machines and their
outcome is as pure as a mathematical QED. But meanwhile, of course, the
action itself may be as dirty or excessive as the budget allows. In factual
programmes - especially news - the raison w d 'etre is scandal, conflict and
disruption of normally settled categories. Internally, such programmes
make sense by producing abstract binaries (we: they, etc.), which serve as
the ex-nominated point of view from which the particular event or person
can be recognized as ambiguous, marginal, scandalous and hence news-
worthy. In short, television's signifying practices are necessarily contradic-
tory - they must produce more than they can police. Concomitantly, for
the viewer, the discipline of the preferred reading must be disrupted
continuously by the presence of the very ambiguities it is produced out of.
It seems that the signifying practice of mainstream, broadcast network
television is not so much to exploit as to control television's semiotic
potential. The ideological strategies it uses continuously to draw the line
between categories are, I suggest, the 'text' that should constitute the
w
$

38 Television theory

object of analysis. Both in general and in detail, television's efforts to make
signification into sense, representations into reality, and to interpellate this
rather than that reader-subject, raise important theoretical and political
issues. These include its strategies of inclusion and exclusion; the ex
nomination of dominant identifications and the marginalization of what
might be recognized in Raymond Williams's terms as 'emergent' ones; the
attempt to clarify ambiguous categories while scandalizing their overlaps;
using the power of ambiguity to collapse or condense different social
identities into each other in order to represent them as naturally fused; and
the transformation of different identifications, and different scandalous
categories, into each other.
Such analysis would, of course, be impossible if these ideological strate
gies actually worked- the analysis is founded on the active contradictions
within television discourse.

VIDEOLOGY

Television's active contradictions can in fact be quite revealing, and the
kind of analysis I am suggesting - which, I confess, I would like to call
videological analysis - offers principles by which we can select from
television's dirty texts and social relations those that reveal what television
is up to, as opposed to those that merely reflect back to us our inherited or
established presumptions about what a text should look like. Here are one
or two brief examples. The national commercial television news (ITN
News at Ten) for 25 October 1982, in Britain, carried as its lead story an
item about two kidnap/murders in Northern Ireland. Despite the obvious
political implications of this, the news story was not made sense of in terms
of nation, nor of ethnicity, nor of class, but almost exclusively in terms of
family.
Verbally, the story foregrounded the numbers of children each of the
two victims had and described details of their family situation, including

how one of the bodies was identified by a watch his family had given him
for his birthday, and how many 'orphans' the killings had produced.
Visually, one victim's daughter was filmed against a domestic background,
a bishop was filmed inside the victim's home, and the reporter did his
closing piece to camera in the setting of a residential street. ITN's textual
strategy, then, was to disarticulate the Troubles from any national political
discourse and to rearticulate them in the discourse of domesticity. In this
context, the events are literally senseless, and this is how they are de
scribed in the story.
Interestingly the source of this description - 'a cycle of senseless depra
vity', and 'vicious primitivism in its most depraved form' - was that of
Authority in the shape of chief constable. The local bishop was also quoted
as expressing his 'horror' at the 'acts of violence'. These accessed voices of

Television and the power of dirt 39

(balanced) Authority allowed ITN to accomplish the double move of ex
nomination and marginalization without appearing to editorialize. The acts
of violence themselves, together with their history, politics, agents and so
forth, are marginalized with the strongest possible rhetoric - depravity and
primitivism, senseless and horrible. Meanwhile, the category of the family
is ex-nominated - it is taken as self-evidently the natural point of view from
which to observe the events. Without having to deny that such events are
horrific, it can be said that these discursive strategies belong to ITN and to
television rather than to the events, and that we are being informed more
about the ideology of the family than about Northern Ireland's troubles
(see also chapter 8).
Similarly, political and industrial news offers a point of view that is
television's rather than ours (the viewers) or theirs (the participants in the
event). Again, families are foregrounded, usually as victims or consumers.
The parties to industrial disputes are sorted out by both camera and
narrative point of view into we and they positions. But just as youth is
ambiguous in this respect - it is both us and them - so too are the initiators
of negative action, strikers. They partake of the attributes of foreigners
(the paradigm examples of which, of course, until the late 1980s, were the
Russians), which is what makes them scandalous (see chapter 5).

HEGEMONY

It may by now be apparent that this chapter too is ambiguous as to its
boundaries. I am aware that the material I have introduced has been
excessive and is not entirely under my control - certainly there is more to
say about the examples I have used than I have said. Perhaps I should try
to clean up some of the remaining dirt. The point about dirt, crudelyJ is
that it encompasses nstions of ambiguity, contradiction, power and social
relations all in one. This strikes me as a helpful condensation, since part of
my purpose here has been to show that analytical discourses tend some
times to operate with categories that are too unitary, pure, abstract and
clear-cut, especially in a field of study that holds as axiomatic that nothing
is intrinsically anything, but that entities are defined negatively by what
they are not.
Working back through my argument, then, I have tried to show that TV '.
is a prolific producer of meaningfulness which it seeks to discipline by pro
digious feats of ideological labour into familiar categories that it proffers to
us as appropriate identifications for our subjectivity to access. But I have
also tried to suggest that television's meaningfulness is, literally, out of
control. For instance, despite rearticulating the Northern Ireland story into t
the discourse of domesticity, the news could neither ignore nor silence all 0
of the event, some contradictory aspects of which were even able to irrupt
into and disrupt the videological text. Even as the 'daughter-scene' .s!

40 Television theory

established a powerful chain of family-significations, the drone of an
unseen military helicopter above provided an appropriate metaphor for all
the absences the videological text itself sought to repress. It is at this point
that my argument can be referred to the concept of hegemony. It is by now
well established that television plays its part in the diffusion of consent for
a power monopoly - not least in its own social relations of production and
consumption (never have so many been readers of the texts of so few).
However, the concept of hegemony should not be collapsed into the old
pure text: reader binary, where there is a clear-cut division between the
hegemonic text and the subject reader. Hegemony is a good deal dirtier
than that - it is not just a matter of 'them' telling 'us' what, how and when
to think. Television is not just videology - it is also a resource. There are
contradictions even in its most confident assertions of the supremacy of
natural categories, and there are marginal places and times on television
where 'common' sense slides into 'good' sense (Gramsci's distinction).
Even as it is presently constituted, television's productive capacity cannot
be policed at every point. And what it says depends on how you look at it
(see chapter 9).
Even so, how you look at it depends on what it says, which brings me
back to the beginning of this chapter, where I suggested that what any one
viewer can bring to bear on a television programme is a combination of
discursive resources. Such resources are determined by the same social
relations as are represented on television, and by institutions such as
education. They will, of course, include aspects of the hegemonic (hege-
mony is a social relation, and hence an attribute of the individual bearers of
that relation), which is what makes hegemony dirty - it is an attribute of
'us' not 'them'. But television plays a part in distributing and popularizing
hegemonic discursive resources too, simply because it is itself a discursive
and representational resource.

THE POWER OF SPEECH

One way of demonstrating just how potent it can be is to takc each of my
seven types of subjectivity in turn, and try to access one of its marginal,
nominated, scandalous identifications while watching mainstream tele-
vision. How can you watch the national news and, at the same thllC, be
interpellated as, for instance, a non-unitary self, and/or not-malc, and/or
not-adult, and/or not-family, and/or not-middle class, and/or not-national,
and/or not-white? You will soon, I think, discover that television is not
addressing you at all, and that it does encourage certain social rclations and
discourage, deny or marginalize others.
One regular response to this discovery is to develop an understandable
but, I think, mistaken, hostility to television. Such a response takes
television not for what it is but for what it sometimes aspires to be - a

w
x
U1

Television and the power of dirt 41

private conversation between two friends, excluding outsiders from their
private world. But television is not like that. It is social, public, open. It is
for this reason that I want to open up the apparently closed frontier
between television and the power of speech itself.

I think it is possible to argue that the power of speech should no longer
be seen as the primary model for all signification and communication, but
as a primitive technology that occupies in the economy of sense-making the
sort of position that wood-burning does in the economy of energy. Speech
may, historically, be one of the original forces of production, but it has
been transformed in line with other forces. Like them, it is barely recogniz

able in its modern form: the power of speech is now industrialized, a
product of technology and corporate imperatives. In short, the power of
speech is located not in the body of the abstract individual human subject
but in the electronic media in general and television in particular- it has
developed historically into the social power to create and circulate dis
course, to popularize particular paroles, to suffuse the natural, social and
personal worlds with meaning and to use the resources of visual language
to promote certain ways of acting in those worlds. The source of the power
of speech is no longer (if it ever was) the individual, but society. Speech is
nowadays characterized by socialized production and family/individual
consumption; by a division of labour between and within producers and
consumers; and by the exchange of a subsistence wage that is just sufficient
for the sense-making economy to sustain and reproduce itself and its social
! relations - the wages of common sense. Speech is, of course, supposed to
be exempt from all these impure influences, because of its general avail
I ability and individualized production, but I do not think it is (or ever has
| , been). The example of television, in fact, leads to questions about speech
I about who has appropriated, historically, the power to produce discourse

(to make speeches), and how speech as a force of production has been
organized socially in relation to the prevailing mode and phases of pro
duction. It also suggests that in speech, as in television, there are margina
lized, muted and scandalized identities for subjects whose powerlessness
entails that the only means they have to represent themselves to them
selves represents them as marginal, muted and scandalous.
The reason why I want to pursue this line of thought is not to discredit
speech. On the contrary, the notion that speech is more like television than
is commonly realized allows for some highly embarrassing questions to be
asked. It would be truly scandalous to discover that whole sections of the
population were systematically being denied access to speech by a power
bloc of professionals and their allies in commerce and governmcnt. But this
is just the situation that obtains in television. Conversely. the model of
television suggests that discourse is socially produced and disciplined in
ways that our sentimental attachment to the individualism of speaking only
masks. Speech too is a power relation, but we need to be reminded of that

42 Television theory

fact by the poor relation whose productive power is greater than that of
speech but whose reputation has been scandalized by segments of the very
power bloc that operates it (the intelligentsia). Could it be that this
behaviour itself signifies that television is beyond the control of its con
trollers, that its potential for socialized sense-making is being resisted
because it is not a boob-tube, goggle-box, or any other dangerous, silly or
contemptible thing, but a valuable weapon that is currently in the hands of
those who despise but.must use it in the struggle to maintain cultural
supremacy?

)

Part 11

Truth wars

!
)

Turner, Graeme. "Chapter 3: Texts and Contexts."
Brifsh Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Volume 7 of
Media and PoPular Culture). Unwin Hyman, Inc, 1990.
Pages 87-130.

;

Texts and Contexts

The most recognizable and possibly the most important
theoretical strategy cultural studies has developed is that
of "reading" cultural products, social practices, even institu-
tions, as "texts." Initially borrowed from literary studies, its
subsequent wide deployment owing significant debts to the
semiotics of Barthes and Eco, textual analysis has become
an extremely sophisticated set of methodsÑparticularly for
reading the products of the mass media. This chapter,
consequently, will concentrate on textual approaches to the
mass media.

Chapter 2 has already described how British literary studies
attempted to extend its territory by dealing with media
products and popular cultural forms; Hoggart, Williams,
and Hall and Whannel all accomplished this extension. In
general, however, the success of such attempts was limited
by a reluctance to modify literary studies' methods and the
ideological/aesthetic assumptions upon which these methods
were based. For most, this reluctance took some time to
overcome; it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s
that the necessary modifications began to occur, and this
was largely due to the importation of semiotics. European
explorations of semiotics began to appear in English in the
late 1960s; Barthes's Elements of Semiology was published in
England in 1968, Mythologies in 1972, and Eco's "Towards
a Structural Enquiry into the Television Message" also in
1972. Within literary theory, local variants appeared quite
quickly; Stephen Heath and Colin McCabe published their
collection on semiotics, signs of the Times: Introductory

w
oo
oo

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

Readings in Textual Semiotics, in 1971. Hall, in particular,
appears to have assimilated these ideas very early on; his
"The Determination of News Photographs" (1980b), first
published in 1972, applies Barthesian semiotics to a series
of news photographs in the British press.

If the first wave of media analysis derived from literary
studies, this next wave found its initial stimulus elsewhereÑ
in sociology, in particular, in sociology's interest in the
mass media's role in the construction of social and political
consensus. The part the media played in determining deffni-
tions of the normal, the acceptable, and the deviant had
become an explicit public concern during the political
demonstrations of 1968. Sociologies of deviance focused on
how such categories were constructed and defined through
their representation in the media, especially in the news.
Possibly the earliest "standard" critical work on the media's
construction of reality, Cohen and Young's The Manufacture
of News (1973), was explicitly situated within the sociology
of deviance. As their preface to the 1980 revised edition
says, Cohen and Young's "search for the overall models of
society implied in the media's selection and presentation
of stories about crime, deviance and social problems" may
have been novel in 1973 but by 1980 it had become much less
so (p. 10). With the wider acceptance of the subject matter
came the adoption of new methods of analysis from outside
sociology. Cohen and Young's revision of the contents for the
1980 edition is significant; while the sociological framework
remained, a number of strategic changes were made: several
American mass communication studies were deleted, and
new pieces from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies were included. The new pieces deployed
semiotic/structuralist methods of textual analysis and Althus-
serian theories of ideologyÑthe markers of British cultural
studies.

It does seem as if the late 1960s/early 1970s is the point at
which aesthetic/moral analyses of the media give way before
the more sociological accounts. The result is an increased
focus on social meanings and on the political implications
of media messages. When semiotic analytical methods are

incorporated into such interests, both the power of "texts"

TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

and the importance of the social and political contexts of their
production and reception are acknowledged. This combina-
tionÑa legacy of the mixed parentage of literary studies
and sociologyÑgave the cultural studies tradition of textual
analysis its distinctive character, in theory and in practice.

Encoding/Decoding

While it is difficult to specify any precise moment as the
seminal one when the practices of "left-Leavisism" became
semiotic/structuralist, it is customary to see Stuart Hall's
important article "Encoding and Decoding in Television

Discourse" as a turning point. I In it, Hall makes a conclusive
break with the hitherto dominant American communication
models, with aesthetics, and with the notion of the audience
as passive consumers of mass culture. In their place, Hall
installs a new vocabulary of analysis and a new theory of
cultural production and reception.

The article opens with a ritual attack on American em-
piricist and behavioral explanations of the processes of
communication. Hall (1980c) argues with those explanations
that see communication as a "loop," or as a direct line from
sender to receiver. He points out that just because a message
has been sent, this is no guarantee that it will arrive; every
moment in the process of communication, from the original
composition of the message (encoding) to the point at which it
is read and understood (decoding), has its own determinants
and "conditions of existence" (p. 129). What Hall emphasizes
is that the production and the consumption of the message
are overdetermined by a range of influences, including the
discourses of the medium used (the use of the image in TV,
for instance), the discursive context in which the composition
takes place (such as the visual conventions of TV news), and
the technologies used to carry the message (the different
signifying function of "live" or taped coverage, say, of a TV
news story).

Hall insists that there is nothing natural about any kind of
communication; messages have to be constructed before they

can be sent. And just as the construction of the message is

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

an active, interpretive, and social event, so is the moment
of its reception. Society is not homogeneous, but is made
up of many different groups and interests. The television
audience cannot be seen as a single undifferentiated mass;
it is composed of a mixture of social groups, all related in
different ways to dominant ideological forms and meanings.
So, there is bound to be a lack of fit between aspects of the
production and reception processesÑbetween the producer's
and the audience's interpretation of the messageÑthat will
produce misunderstandings or "distortions."

This potential for misunderstanding is limited, Hall points
out, by the fact that our communication systemsÑboth the
linguistic and the nonlinguisticÑwork to "encode" our
languages for us in advance. We do not have to interpret the
television discourse from square one because we have already
learned the codes from which it is constructed. When we
receive a message about the world that minimizes the use of
verbs, pronouns, and articles (as in "French Aircrash Disaster
Inquiry Shock") we immediately recognize the codes of news.
Some codes are so thoroughly learned that they appear not to
be codes at all, but to be "natural":

Certain codes may, of course, be so widely distributed in a
specific language community or culture, and be learned at
so early an age, that they appear not to be constructedÑthe
effect of an articulation between sign and referentÑbut
to be "naturally" given. Simple visual signs appear to
have achieved a "near-universality" in this sense: though
evidence remains that even apparently "natural" visual
codes are culture-specific. However, this does not mean
that no codes have intervened; rather, that the codes have
been profoundly naturalised. (p. 132)

As Hall goes on to explain, the more "natural" a code appears
to be, the more comprehensively the practice of coding has
been disguised.
Visual communication (the photo and the television image,

in particular) appears not to be composed of discourses at all,
since its signs appear to be natural images of the real world
(after all, a picture of something is just thatÑa picture of

TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

something). It is necessary to emphasize the fact that the
visual sign in the television message has to be encoded too.
Indeed, visual "languages" work like any other languages. To
the extent that visual languages may fool us by appearing to
be natural, it is crucial to crack the codes, interpret them, and
release their social meanings.

All of this provides us with a slightly contradictory model:
of a television message that is open to various readings by
various readers, but that is composed through a set of highly
conventionalized codes that we apprehend as natural and
that we are therefore unlikely to decode in ways that differ
markedly from the intentions of the encoder. Hall deals with
this contradiction by arguing that the television message may
be polysemic, but it is not totally pluralistic; that is, while
there is a degree of openness about its meanings, there
are also limits. If meanings are not entirely predetermined

by cultural codes, they are composed within a system that
is dominated by accepted codes:

Connotative codes are not equal among themselves. Any
society's culture tends, with varying degrees of closure,
to impose its classUication of the social and cultural and
political world. These constitute a dominant cultural order,
though it is neither univocal nor uncontested.... The
different areas of social life appear to be mapped out into
discursive domains, hierarchically organized into dominant
or preferred meanings. (p. 134)

This notion is important because it emphasizes the fact that
dominant meanings are not irresistibly imposed, they are
only "preferred." Readers from social groups who find
themselves at odds with these dominant meaningsÑsubsul-
tural groups, workers on strike, single mothers, blacksÑmay
well resist them in their own interpretations of the television
message.

The process of constructing, as well as the process of

reading, the message is similarly complex. To look at it
from the "encoder's" side of the process, although there
are rules and conventions that facilitate the reproduction
of the dominant way of seeing and representing the world,

l
w

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

actual signifying practices involve a kind of performance, a
calling up and deployment of what one considers to be the
appropriate codes and discourses. From the point of view of
the television program producer, the problem is not so much
one of breaking out of a restrictive straitjacket of codes, but
of convincing the viewer to construct the same reading of the
program as the producer. So, TV drama producers will use
ominous music to warn us of a threat, and to fix its meaning
as a threat. Or the use of speciffc representational codes tells
us immediately how to view a character; there is little point
in arguing about whether or not Cybill Shepherd's character
in Moonlighting is attractive or notÑthe halo of diffused light
that surrounds her image in many shots defines her as an
object of desire, whether we, as individual viewers, desire her
or not. Representational codes are made to "work" toward the
preferred meaning. As Hall (1980c) puts it:

In speaking of dominant meanings, then, we are not talking
about a one-sided process which governs how all events
will be signified. It consists of the "work" required to
enforce, win plausibility for and command as legitimate
a decoding of the event within the limit of dominant
definitions in which it has been connotatively signitied.
(p. 135)

"Encoding" television discourse is the process of setting
"some of the limits and parameters within which decodings
will operate. If there were no limits, audiences could simply
read whatever they liked into the message" (p. 135).
Hall next considers how the audience's relation to these

limits might be better understood. And it is here he makes
his most influential formulations. Drawing on the work of
the sociologist Frank Parkin, Hall argues that we can identify
three "hypothetical" positions from which the decoding of
a television message may be constructed: he calls these
the dominant-hegemonic position, or (as it is more widely
described now) the "preferred" reading, the "negotiated"
position, and the "cppositional" position. To read the mes-
sage from the dominant or preferred position, the viewer
"takes the connoted meaning from, say, a television newscast

TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

or current affairs program full and straight, and decodes the
message in terms of the reference code in which it has been
encoded" (p. 136). It has become clear that while such a
position might exist theoretically, it rarely occurs in practice.
The majority of us read television by producing what Hall
calls "negotiated" readings, which "accord the privileged
position to the dominant deffnitions of events while reserving
the right to make a more negotiated application to local
conditions." As he goes on to say, this negotiated reading
will be "shot through with contradictions" (p. 137). A worker
on strike may agree with a current affairs report arguing that
it is in the national interest for wage increases to lag behind
inflation, while still maintaining his claim for better pay or
working conditions in his particular place of employment.
The negotiated reading will acknowledge the dominant
definitions of the world but may still claim exceptions to
the rule in specific cases.
The final position is the oppositional. Here the viewer
understands the preferred reading being constructed, but
"retotalizes the message within some alternative framework
of reference": "This is the case of the viewer who listens
to a debate on the need to limit wages but 'reads' every
mention of the 'national interest' as 'class interest' n
(p. 138). We occupy this position every time we witness a
political broadcast or advertisement for the political party
we usually vote against. Instead of reading sympathetically
or compliantly, we adopt an opposing position to that from
which the message is produced. The result is a reading that
is the opposite of what seems intended, possibly confirming
our decision to vote for the opponent.
Hall sees these three positions as anything but discrete.

He talks of the "most significant political moments" being
the point "when events which are normally signiffed and
decoded in a negotiated way begin to be given an opposi
tional reading" (p. 138). Texts can change their meaning and
can be worked on by their audiences. Sexist advertising, for
instance, is a dominant practice that nevertheless offends
many and provokes opposition. To read such ads as offensive
or degrading is to hijack their meaning, turning the dominant
into the oppositional. Over such representations, Hall says,

)
)

)

BRlTISH CULTURAL STUDIES

the "struggle in discourse" is joined (p. 138). The "structured
polysemy" of messages makes their speciffc reading at
any one time a political struggle between dominant and
subordinated meanings.

To talk of the battle for the control of the message is not
merely hyperbolic. As I write, the Chinese government is
engaged in just such a struggle, reconstituting film of the
massacre in Tiananmen Square so that its dominant meaning
is reversed; the students' demonstration is reframed as an
attack upon the soldiers, its participants criminalized in order
to legitimate their punishment and the resultant program of
repression. Here the struggle over the meaning of one set of
television messages has literally become a struggle of life and
death.

The importance of the "Encoding/Decoding" article lies in
its demonstration that although the moments of constructing
and reading a television message may be determinate mo-
ments, there is still a range of possible outcomes in both
cases. Now that textual analysis is well established, this may
not seem such a radical advance. But when one considers the
preeminence of American communication theory at the time,
it was a signiffcant break with conventional assumptions.
Not only does Hall insist on the possibility of a lack of
fit between the codes used by the encoder and those used
by the decoder (this does occur in American traditions
too), but he also insists on explaining this disjunction in
ideological, political terms. Hall suggests that such moments
are not accidents, but are the signs of structural differences
produced and determined by other social/economic/cultural
forces and made available for analysis in the reading of the,
television message. This message then becomes a new kind
of research resource for inquiries into culture and society.
Where the earlier notion of the "effects" of the media
localized the meaning (and the effect) of the message
in the individual reader, the encoding/decoding model
defined media texts as moments when the larger social
and political structures within the culture are exposed for
analysis.

u~,
~o

TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

The Establishment of Textual Analysis

Reading Hall's article now, one can see how strongly it
asserts the polysemic nature of the message and how
presciently it alludes to new conceptualizations of the
television audienceÑconceptualizations that have only in
the last five or six years been further developed. Yet, the
primary use made of this article during the 1970s was to
describe the ideological forces that shape television messages.
Most British cultural studies analyses of television during
these years examined the ideological and discursive "work"
Hall mentions from a particular perspective, concentrating
on the ways in which the contradictions and divisions
within society are smoothed over or naturalized within

specific television programs and genres. Cultural studies
analysis of the media generally emphasized the construction
of consensus, the reproduction of the status quo, the
irresistibility of dominant meanings. So, although the idea
of the passivity of the audience was dismantled in favor of
the "preferred," "negotiated," and "oppositional" reading
models, the application of these models tended to construct
an audience that was, nevertheless, still helpless before
the ideological unity of the television message. Although
the theoretical possibility of aberrant readings was always
admitted, the primary effort was put into establishing just
how difffcult, how aberrant, such readings in practice would
be. The power of the text over the reader dominated this stage
of media analysis.

Nevertheless, the period produced extremely useful, pio-
neering studies. Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morley's
(1978) analysis of the BBC magazine program Nationwide is
a case in point. (Nationwide was an early evening magazine
program, closer in format to American or Australian breakfast
television than to the conventional current affairs program.
It was outstandingly successful, a TV institution in Britain
for some years.) In the first of a number of studies of this
program, Brunsdon and Morley present a textual analysis
of the codes and conventions that define Nationwide for

its viewers, supported by some quantitative analysis of

95
w
~D

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

its patterns of selectionÑwhat kind of stories appear most
frequently, for instance. They stress how actively Nationwide
works to present itself as a simple reflection of the way its
viewers see the world:

It INationwidel presents itself as catching in its varied and
comprehensive gaze "everything" which could possibly
be of interest to us, and simply "mirrors" or reflects it
back to us. What is more, it "sees" these events in exactly
the same perspective, and speaks of them in exactly the
same "voice", as that of its audience. Everything in
Nationwide works so as to support this mirror-structure
of reflections and recognitions. The ideology of television
as a transparent mediumÑsimply showing us "what is
happening"Ñis raised here to a high pitch of self-reflex-
ivity. The whole of the complex work of the production of
Nationwide's version of "reality", sustained by the practices
of recording, selecting, editing, framing and linking, and
the identificatory strategies of producing "the scene,
Nationwide", is repressed in the program's presentation
of itself as an unproblematic reflection of "us" and "our
world" in "our" program. Nationwide thus .._._. ::__ its
own practice. (p. 9)

Analyzing the ways in which this is done, Brunsdon and
Morley highlight a variety of discursive (or "encoding")
conventions and expose their effects. For example, we may
recognize their description of the inclusiveness of television
anchorpersons' cozy address to their audience:

The audience is constantly implicated through the link-
person's discourse, by the use of personal pronouns:

"tonight we meet . . .", "we all of us know that . . .",
"... can happen to any of us", "so we asked ...".
The audience is also implicated by reference to past
or coming items, which we have all seen/will see, and
(by implication) all interpret in the same way. There is
a reiterated assertion of a co-temporality ("nowadays",
"in these times of ...") which through its continuous
present/immediacy transcends the differences between

TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

us: "of course . . ." Nationwide assumes we all live in the
same social world. (pp. 1S19)

Brunsdon and Morley explore this mode of address in their
examination of the links created between segments within the
program:

This Ithe elision of the distinction between presenters
and audiencel can be most clearly seen in the use of
. . . "Let's . . .". Tom Coyne: "Let's take a look at our
weather picture"; "Let's go to Norwich"; Michael Barratt:
"Let's hear from another part of East Anglia". Here, the
audience's real separation from the team is represented
in the form of a unity or community of interests between
team and audience; the construction of this imaginary
community appears as a proposition we can't refuseÑwe
are made equal partners in the Nationwide venture, while
simultaneously our autonomy is denied. This, with its
attendant, possessive, "our weather picture", is the least
ambiguous form of the "co-optive we", which is a major

N ~

Photo 3.1. Hugh Scully and Frank BoughÑtwo of the presenters of
BBC-l's Nationwide (Used with kind permission from the BBC.)

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

feature of the discourse and linking strategies in Nation-
wide. (p. 19)

Even though the picture of British life transmitted through
Nationwide is extremely selective, Brunsdon and Morley dem-
onstrate how actively and successfully its constitutive codes
and discourses construct a consensual, "preferred" viewÑnot
only of the meaning of the program but of its definition of
the society.
Hall et al. (1981), in "The Unity of Current Affairs Tele-
vision," draw similar conclusions from their analysis of
the serious BBC current affairs program, Panorama.2 Their
argument is constructed a little differently, however. Starting
from an investigation of the notion of biasÑtelevision
journalists' lack of objectivityÑthe authors discovered how
evenhanded, in fact, treatment of a specific political issue had
been: both in the time allowed contending parties and in the
way in which they had been treated. This did not end the
inquiry, however. Rather, by interrogating how the notions
of "objectivity," "neutrality," "impartiality," and "balance"
were understood by the joumalists and their audience, the
authors formed the view that these very principles supported
the status quo and militated against the consideration of
alternative points of view.

The Glasgow Media Group's (1976, 1980, 1982) work has
shown how the media will always seek out opinion from those
persons or groups already, almost automatically, authorized
to speak: parliamentary political parties, employers' groups,
trades unions, and so on. On any one topic, the range of
interests canvassed and explanations sought will in practice
be limited to those already recognized and legitimated by
previous media representations. Occasionally, even this nar-
row range can be further restricted. The Glasgow group's
research revealed that in at least one case no union or
workers' explanation of the purpose of a crippling strike in
Scotland was ever broadcast on the television news to counter
government and employers' groups' accusations. Professional
news-gathering practice must take some of the blame for this,
as well as the news producer's need to construct a sense of
unity with the program's audience. But Hall et al. (1981) take

Lw
~D
w

TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

the Glasgow research a little further; not only are certain
groups recognized as having a voice and others not, but
the system of recognition is dramatically skewed in favor of
parliamentary definitions of politics:

Television reproduces selectively not the "unity" of any one
Party, but the unity of the Parliamentary political system as
a whole. Panorama, above other Current Affairs programs,
routinely takes the part of guardian of unity in this second
sense.... As a consequence, the agenda of problems and
"prescriptions" which such a program handles is limited to
those which have registered with, or are offered up by, the
established Parliamentary parties. (p. 115)

This may not seem much of a worry until one realizes
how often parliamentary agendas exclude issues nonpar-
liamentary groups consider to be of national importance.

"Green" or environmental politics, for instance, has only
recently achieved legitimacy (that is, elected representatives)
in some countries, and has still to achieve it in others. Yet,
conservationists have been trying to secure recognition of
their agenda for years. One can see how this agenda might
challenge the interests of business, economic growth, and
"progress"Ñall firmly established within the ideologies of
the major political parties. It is not hard to imagine in whose
interests the marginalization of green politics may have
been. Despite its persistence and resourcefulness, it is only
where green politics has been accepted within mainstream,
electoral or parliamentary, politics that the media represent
its definition of issues as legitimate. As a result of green
candidates winning elections in Europe and Australia (to use
two examples I am aware of personally), media representa-
tions of conservationist policies have changed, gradually, to
the point where they are authorized as "experts" or consulted
as "concerned citizens" rather than as members of the lunatic
fringe. Hall et al. help explain how such exclusions occur, and
how they can be reversed:

The media remains a "leaky system", where ideological
reproduction is sustained by "media work" and where

99
BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

contradictory ideologies do in fact appear; it reproduces
the existing field of the political class struggle in its
contradictory state. This does not obscure the fact, how-
ever, that the closure towards which this "sometimes teeth-
gritting harmony" tends, overall, is one which, without
favouring particular positions in the field of the political
class struggle, favours the way the field of political struggle
is itself structured. (p. 116)

Given such an account, one might understand why the
authors focus so strongly on the reproduction of dominant
ideologies through the media; for them, the possibilities of
change are extremely limited.

Hall et al.'s discussion had explicit political objectives;

similarly, in the case of the Glasgow Media Group the political
objectives injected a lively note of polemic. Nevertheless, the
political basis of cultural studies analyses of the media during
the 1970s was significantly and, in general, overshadowed
by the novelty and productiveness of the analytical methods
employed. The most notable effect of such interventions as
those outlined above was an explosion of interest in the
"reading" of cultural textsÑfor their own sake as much as
for their cultural significance as "maps of meaning." The
most widespread development of teaching and publication in
cultural studies has occurred in this form. The Methuen New
Accents series published Hawkes's Structuralism and Semiotics
(1977) and Fiske and Hartley's Reading Television (1978).
Shortly after this, Methuen's Studies in Communication
series published a set of books aimed at applying these
analytical methods to each of the mass media in turn:
lohn Hartley's Understanding News (1982), Gillian Dyer's
Advertising as Communication (1982), and Andrew Crisell's
Understanding Radio (1986), with later additions from Roy
Armes, On Video (1989), and myself, Film as Social Practice
(1988). Supporting these specific applications came an intro
ductory text, Fiske's Introduction to Communication Studies
(1982), and a useful glossary of terms, O'Sullivan et al.'s Key

Concepts in Communication (1983). Other publishers entered
the field, too; one particularly successful venture was Boyars's
publication of Judith Williamson's Decoding Advertisements

100

TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

(1978). While it was distinctive for its explicit feminist and
post-Freudian influences, Decoding Advertisements, like the
others, introduced readers to the principles of, largely,
semiotic analysis and then applied them to the particular
media forms with which it was concerned.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the semiotic/structu-
ralist tradition of textual analysis became institutionalized in
media studies and communications courses in secondary and
university education in Britain. The existence of a similar
practiceÑthe close analysis of literary textsÑin traditional
English courses in higher education probably contributed to
the readiness with which this new field of study was taken up.
It may also explain why Fiske and Hartley's Reading Television
(1978) spends so much of its time, on the one hand, drawing
analogies between the need to analyze the literary text and
the need to analyze television while, on the other hand,
explicitly excluding literary modes of analysis and literary
assumptions of value. Most of the work produced at this
time by, for instance, the CCCS had long forsaken literary
models, and so these admonitions were clearly addressed
to a new, noncultural studies audience. Reading Television
was significant because it took these new methods to new
audiences and to new classes of students.

As was Raymond Williams around this time, Fiske and
Hartley were keen to differentiate themselves from the domi-
nant American traditions of communication study. Their
account of content analysis, and of traditional explanations
of the function of television (largely, its socializing effects),
is used to justify the proposition of alternative approaches:
semiotic analysis and Fiske and Hartley's idea of television
as the equivalent of "the bard" in modern society.

Fiske and Hartley (1978) approach television as an oral,
rather than a literate, medium, and resist its incorporation
into literary studies:

Every medium has its own unique set of characteristics,
but the codes which structure "the language" of television
are much more like those of speech than of writing. Any
attempt to decode a television "text" as if it were a literary
text is thus not only doomed to failure but it is also likely to

result in a negative evaluation of the medium based on its [
inability to do a job for which it is in fact fundamentally
unsuited. (p. 15).

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

Their description of the function of television draws on Hall's
encoding/decoding model:

The internal psychological state of the individual is not
the prime determinant in the communication of television
messages. These are decoded according to individually
learnt but culturally generated codes and conventions,
which of course impose similar constraints of perception
on the encoders of the messages. It seems, then, that
television functions as a social ritual, overriding individual
distinctions, in which our culture engages in order to
communicate with its collective self. (p. 85)

Television, they suggest, performs a "bardic function" for
the culture. Just as the bard translated the central concerns
of his day into verse, television renders "our own everyday
perceptions" into its specialized language system. It serves
the needs of the culture in particular ways: it addresses
collective audiences rather than the individual; it is oral rather
than literate; it operates as a centering discourse, appearing
as the voice of the culture with which individuals can
identify; and it takes its place in the cycle of production and
reproduction of the culture's dominant myths and ideologies.
Fiske and Hartley divide television's bardic function into
categories that include the articulation of a consensus about
reality; the implication of individuals into membership of
the culture; the celebration, explanation, interpretation, and
justification of the doings of individuals within the society;
the demonstration of the practical adequacy of the culture's
ideologies and mythologies, and, conversely, the exposure
of any practical inadequacy resulting from changed social
conditions; and the guarantee of audience members' status
and identity. There is some overlap in these categories, but
the general notion of the bardic function continues to be
useful. Of particular importance is its explicit refutation

of enduring popular demonologies of television: accounts

102

TEXTS AND CONIEXTS

of the medium's function that assume it serves purposes
never previously conceived of or needed, and therefore to
be deplored.

The second half of Reading Television consists of textual
readings of individual television programs: dancing com-
petiffons, game shows, news, sport, and drama. In most
cases, the mode is explanatory, outlining the construction
of the dominant or preferred meaning. since the readings
function as demonstrations of the semiotic methods outlined
earlier in the book, there are few occasions to interrogate
current theoretical models. However, in the most interesting
reading, that of the popular BBC game show The Generation
Game, Fiske and Hartley develop a critique of the notion of
the "preferred reading."

The analysis is enclosed within a chapter dealing with
rituals of competition in game shows and in sport on
television. Fiske and Hartley note The Generation Game's
difference from other kinds of quiz showsÑLet's Make a
Deal, for instance. The Generation Game was an evening

w~:rs v s * \ 6 t _

Photo 3.2. Bruce Forsyth and a contestant on The Generation Game
(Used with kind permission from the BBC and Bruce Forsyth.)

103
BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

game show, hosted by ex-vaudeville comic Bruce Forsyth,
in which competing family groups were given a range of
comical tasks to perform in order to earn points toward a
prize at the end. The Generation Game, however, despite its
use of prizes, was markedly noncompetitive, exploiting the
spectacles of embarrassment provided by its competitors'
attempts to do things they were no good at: "throwing" a
pot, decorating a cake, performing amateur theatricals, and
so on. (See photo 3.2.) Participation held its own rewards:

This loss of substance of the competitiveness may well
signify the irrelevance of the values of a free-enterprise,
competitive society to the norms of family or community
life. The Generation Game, in its final effect, asserts the
validity of non-competitive communal values within the
structure of a competitive society, and is thus working
within an area of cultural tension for which our society
has not found a comfortable point of equilibrium. (p. 157)

Fiske and Hartley move from this perception to a sugges-
tion of dissatisfaction with the notions of domination that
have underpinned their analyses throughout the book:

So while the simple binary model of dominant/dominated
may indicate the basis of our class structure, we must be
chary of applying it too directly to the texts. A cultural text
is always to a certain extent ambivalent. It never merely
celebrates or reinforces a univalent set of culturally located
attitudes, but rather reflects the tensions caused by the
many contradictory factors that any culture is continually
having to reconcile in a working equilibrium. (p. 158

To move further into the analysis of these tensions within
particular historical moments, or of the specific sociocultural
reasons for the difference of The Generation Game, is some-
thing the book is prevented from doing by its concentration
on textual analysis and by its introductory nature. Also,
within the field of study itself, while the relation between
texts and culture was well outlined, the theoretical ortho

doxies that might account for the relation between texts and

104

l~ ~

TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

history still remained to be developed.

If Fiske and Hartley are ultimately limited by their textual
focus, Richard Dyer's work shows at least one way out of

that difficulty. First of all, while Dyer subjects texts to

| analysis, he avoids any suggestion that he is examining
1, the "text in itself"Ñthe text as an independent, discrete
I object of analysis. Dyer is interested in the discourses

used to construct texts and the social histories of these
constitutive discourses. Second, he broadens the idea of
the text by acknowledging the importance of extratextual
material in the construction of any particular text's meanings.
Consequently, his analyses draw on representations not
normally considered (fan magazines, for instance). Dyer's
analytical procedure is strenuously intertextual and also, as he
puts it, "dialectical, involving a constant movement between
the sociological and the semiotic" (Dyer 1982, 2). The result is
the mobilization of textual analysis in the service of the social
analysis of discourse.
His subject, in the books I refer to here, is the meaning
of film stars: the social meaning of the images of a lane
Fonda, a Marilyn Monroe, or a Marlene Dietrich. Dyer's
first book dealing with this topic, stars (1982), asks specific
questions about just what kind of "social reality" film stars
might construct, what they might signify, and how they
might function within film texts. Dyer examines the social
construction of the image of the star through the full range
of its representationsÑfan magazines, interviews, pinups,
news stories, publicity and promotional material, and so
onÑand how this is inscribed into specific film narratives.
He reveals how stars accrue meanings that are relatively
independent of the characters they play but that contribute
to their characterizations on the screen; this is why it is
unsurprising for us to find that lames Stewart plays the naive
liberal lawyer and John Wayne the retired gunslinger (rather
than the other way around) in The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance. In his analysis of lane Fonda's career, Dyer outlines
how "her" meanings changed between texts, as it were, over
time. And, finally, he examines the ideological function of
stars for society: how they manage to represent both the type
and the ideal of the individual in society. Dyer explores

- ) :
E z ::, :

~--

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

the central contradiction in the signification of stars: they
are simultaneously representative of society and uniquely
individual, both typical and extraordinary. In stars and in
his second study, Heavenly Bodies (1986), Dyer insists on the
social content of cinema texts, on the historically produced
competencies and expectations brought to the cinema by
the audience, and on the already coded meanings that enter
the sound stage with the performers. Heavenly Bodies, too,
provides accounts of the ways in which subgroups within
the mass audience can appropriate a star's image and insert
it into new contexts, giving it new meanings: his discussion
of Judy Garland's particular meaning for gay subcultures is
an example of this.

Dyer's work does not belong to the same tradition as
that of the Birmingham CCCS. While not typical of it, his
interests in cinema are part of that branch of screen studies
most closely identified with the British Film Institute (BFI)
in London, and the major film journal in Britain, Screen.
Screen has been influential and controversial, identified with
a particular theoretical/critical "line," a particular aesthetics,
and a particular political stance. Influenced by the semiotic/
psychoanalytic cinema theory of Christian Metz and by
Althusserian theories of ideology, and focused on the prob-
lem of the construction of subjectivities particularly as
defined in post-Freudian and feminist appropriations of
psychoanalysis, Screen marked out a position that opposed
much of the cultural studies work done in Britain in the
1970s. While articles published in Screen made important
contributions to the development of textual analysis, the
journal's prevailing theoretical position involved an extreme
textual determinism. At one point, the CCCS set up a special
research group to consider what became known as "Screen
theory"; stuart Hall's (1980e) and David Morley's (1980b)
critiques are among the products of that research group.

It would be wrong to see Screen as speaking with one
voice over its career, but certain concerns and preferred
theoretical protocols do pervade its pages. Screen's concern
with semiotic explanations of the relation between language
and the subject, and its interest in Lacan's view of subjectivity
as an empty space to be filled through language, lead it

&,^
~o

TEm AND CONlEXlS

to foreground vigorously the role of representation and
thus of the text, in constructing the subject. Screen theory
saw the processes of interpellation, the way the individual
subject is "written into" the ideologies of his or her society
through acquisition of its language systems, as central and
comprehensive processes, particularly in film and television.
Texts are discussed in terms of their capacity to place or
"position" the viewer, inserting or "suturing" him or her
into a particular relationship to the narrative and into an
uncomplicated relationship to dominant ideologies. There
is little the viewer can do about this ideological positioning
other than to accept it; in Screen theory, texts always and

irresistibly tell us how to understand them.

Understandably, this textual determinism provoked some
argument. Among the most controversial aspects of the
position was its apparently categoric character; could we
really say that all texts worked like this for all readers? On
British TV at the time (mid-1970s), a subgenre of critical
dramatized documentaries was in vogue, producing texts
whose narratives appeared to undermine dominant ideol-
ogies. The British docudrama Days of Hope, which dealt
with aspects of British working-class history from the Great
War to the beginnings of the Depression, was widely seen as a
genuinely political critique of both Labour and Conservative
party politics over that period that established unmistakable
parallels between the Britain of the 1920s and a contemporary
Britain torn by inflation, unemployment, and battles between
unions and government. It was a particularly realistic piece of
television, and it provoked outcry from the Conservatives,
who pilloried the BBC and its writer, Jim Allen, for their
(supposed, in the BBC's case) Marxist leanings.

The debate over this text reached epic proportions.3 Screen

theory replied through Colin McCabe, arguing that the
generic form of the program, its realism, far from enhancing
its progressive effect, actually rendered it unable to criticize
society.4 Realism, McCabe (1981) argues, is a set of rep
resentational codes that offers the viewer a comfortable
position from which to see even bitter political struggles
as natural or inevitable. Setting such struggles in the past
inevitably implies their resolution in the present, while the

107

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

narrative's construction of a superior, knowledgeable posi-
tion for viewers protects them from responding critically
or "progressively" to the events depicted. Realism, the
argument goes, precodes the reality it represents within
commonsense understandings of the world; so even when
it depicts terrible happenings, we leave the text, sighing
acceptingly, "Oh well, that's the way it is (or was), there
is little we can do about it." Realistic fictions in all media
inscribe the reader into a controlling discourseÑa set of
values, a narrator's voice, or the control of the perspectives
of the cameraÑthat takes on the role of an authoritative
narrator. McCabe argues that this authoritative narrator tells
the reader what to think, closes off questions, and rewards
them by delivering them to the end of the fiction. The realist
text cannot question reality or its constituent conditions
without destroying the authority of this narrator. And since
the realist text depends on the reader seeing it as reality,
it cannot question itself without losing its authenticity.
The progressive alternative would be a text that challenges
viewers by questioning their commonsense views of the
world, and, Screen theory argues, this can be done only
by breaking the conventional patterns of representationÑby
breaking with the dominant conventions of realism.

The "realism debate" has been influential and lasting.
The celebrated BBC TV drama, The Boys from the Blackstuff,
screened in the early 1980s, provoked a rematch between the
Screen theorists and those who felt that TV realism did have
the potential to produce an "oppositional" reading despite its
dominant generic form. Stephen Heath (1985) and others have
argued that it is impossible to "read off" a set of ideological
positions automatically from the generic form of a text, and
I have argued elsewhere that the realist form used in some
Australian cinema has offered clearly progressive readings as
dominant positions (Turner 1988). Ultimately, such protests
prevailed. The idea that the realist text is "not so much 'read'
as simply 'consumed/appropriated' straight, via the only
possible positions available to the readerÑthose reinscribed
by the text" (Morley 1980b, 166 67) is usually presented in a
much less categoric fashion nowÑeven in Screen.

The position taken on this issue, however, is typical of

108

TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

Screen theory. It presented a consistent critique of con-
ventional, popular film and television texts, proposing a
renovatory, avant-garde aesthetic that questioned dominant
representational conventions. The search for the "progressive
text," which was both textually unconventional (nonrealist)
and politically antibourgeois, dominated much of the work
published in Screen in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Indeed, for some time it became a reflex to deal with
new television and film texts in terms of their perceived
progressiveness or their lack of it, and this led Screen into
an elitist political cul-de-sac from which it was difficult to
say anything useful about any popular text. One reason
for Screen theory's insistence on challenging conventional

textual forms was the conviction that the text itself, rather
than forces outside of and prior to the text, constructed the
subject position from which the viewer made sense of it. The
avant-garde offered a way out of this; a more interrogative
set of representational conventions might produce a more
critical and questioning audience/subject. While there has
been widespread acceptance of this last proposition, Screen
theory in general has been contentious. Representatives of
the CCCS vigorously resisted Screen's textual determinism
as denying history, the polysemic nature of signs and
discourses, and the "interrogative/expansive nature of all
readings" (Morley 1980b, 167). Subsequent revisions of the
position seem to acknowledge the fact that Screen theory
tended to isolate "the encounter of text and reader from all
social and historical structures and from other texts . . . which
also position the subject" (Morley 1980b, 163).

One stream within this body of theory, however, that
clearly does not ignore the formation of the subject within
other texts or social structures is the feminist critique of
popular film narrative. Laura Mulvey's 1975 Screen article
"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" is almost invariably
cited as the key text, but the critique is more widespread
and diverse than this would suggest. In general, feminist
criticisms of mainstream film and television argue that the
way in which these media represent the world replicates
other representational structures' subordination of women.

Crudely, the argument is that if popular texts establish a

109

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

position from which we find it comfortable to view and
identify with them, it should not surprise us to discover that
the viewing position constructed within the conventional
discourses of (say) Hollywood cinema is that of the male, not
the female, viewer. While the female body is, conventionally,
traversed by the cameraÑlit, framed, and explored as an
object of male desireÑthe male body is not subjected to
the same regime of inspection for the pleasure of the
female viewer. This, despite the fact that half the audience,
on balance, will be female. Mulvey and others argue that
even the pleasures offered by film are colonized, offered
to women as experiences that involve the denial of their
own female subjectivity if they are to be enjoyed. The
pleasures of looking, of voyeurism and narcissism, proffered
by Hollywood cinema, Mulvey argues, are masculinist and,
in some genres (e.g., horror films, certain kinds of thrillers),
actively misogynist. While Mulvey's original formulations
have been revised by herself and others, and while it is
possible to argue with her assessment, say, of the work
of Hitchcock, as Tania Modleski (1988) has recently done,
they alert us to the way that texts can provide a very
limited number of viewing positions for an audience to
occupy, and to the fact that these correspond to a narrow
range of ideological effects. Despite the formation of each
member of the audience as a separate subjectivity, and
despite the polysemy of the text, we are not granted a
temporary exemption from the ideological frames of our
social existence when we enter a movie theater. Feminist
critiques demonstrate that the vastly dominant discourses
in the media naturalize masculine pleasures; we need to be
shown how to notice this effect.

Dethroning the Text

David Morley was among the foremost critics of Screen theory
and its privileging of the power of the text, and his work has
provided one of the most important countervailing strands of
thought. It will be addressed in more detail in the following
chapter, but for the moment it is important to note how

110

w
uo

TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

Morley's attempt to develop Hall's encoding/decoding model
came to demonstrate, instead, that individual readings of
television are much more complex and unpredictable than
Hall's model would allow. As a continuation of the Brunsdon
and Morley (1978) textual analysis of Nationwide, Morley
(1980a) played an episode of the program to 26 groups of
varied class, social, and occupational backgrounds and then
studied their decodings of the text. The results conclusively
undermine the linkage of particular readings with particular
class positions (as if the working classes all read one way,
and the middle classes all read another); they also reveal
that making sense of television is an intensely social and
interactive activity. Given the diversity of response Morley
collected in the Nationwide study, it was difficult to see how
the text could produce a subject position that overrode those
produced by other social forces such as gender, ethnicity,
occupation, and so on. It was also clear, however, that the

subject positions produced by these other social forces
were also unpredictable, disunited, and even intemally
contradictory. Thus, MorleyÑand others who developed
this area of audience studiesÑreestablished the importance
of the context in which texts are consumed and of the social
content brought to them by specific audiences.

Other work proceeding within Birmingham and elsewhere
at the time proved complementary. The so-called subcultures
group at the CCCS established approaches that emphasized
the minority rather than the majority, the subordinate rather
than the dominant, the subculture rather than the culture.
Studies of urban youth in Britain that drew on history,
sociology, and anthropology had emphasized the strategies
subordinate groups used to make their own meanings in
resistance to those of the dominant culture. Not only did
they negotiate with or oppose the dominant, but in many
cases they actively appropriated and transformed (and thus
subverted) dominant meanings. (Examples of this tradition
of research can be found in Hall and Jefferson 1976; further
discussion of this tradition will be presented in Chapter 5.)

The introduction to Resistance Through Rituals (Hall and
Jefferson 1976) argues that culture is made up of contributing

smaller groups or class fragments, social groups that develop

lll
p
o
o

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

their own "distinct patterns of life," giving "expressive form
to their social and material life-experience." Culture is not
monolithic, as in a sense is implied by the encoding/decoding
models, but is made up of many competing, overlapping, and
conflicting groups. Each of these groups defines itself through
its distinctive way of life, embodied in its institutions
(a motorbike club, for instance), its social relations (their
specific place within the domain of work, or the family),
its beliefs and customs, and its "uses of objects and material
life." All these "maps of meaning" constitute the subculture
and make it intelligible to its members (p. 10). Within a
subculture, then, the most mundane object can take on
specific meanings; within punk culture, the humble safety
pin was appropriated as an offensive decoration and worn
openly on ripped clothing or in some cases inserted into the
skin.

Many subcultural studies examined the way in which these
maps of meaning were composed, and what meanings were
attributed to the practices, institutions, and objects within
the subcultural group. As Hall and Jefferson (1976) point
out, the study of subculture is more than an essentially
sociological study of the structure and shape of social
relations; it becomes interested in "the way [these structures
and shapesl are experienced, understood and interpreted"
(p. 11). The effectÑat least in that part of the tradition
I am going to consider hereÑis to turn the subculture into
a text, its examination into a variant of textual analysis, and
the interpretation of its meanings into a highly contingent
activity.

As a result, the definition of what constitutes a text

broadened dramatically; the new definition included cultural
practices, rituals, dress, and behavior as well as the more
fixed and "produced" texts such as television programs or
advertisements. The emphasis shifted toward the generation
of meanings through social practices and, even more signifi
cant, toward the location of these meanings in those who
participated in the practice rather than the practice itself.
This reinforced the importance of the audience/participants
in the production of meaning and highlighted how often texts
are in fact read "against the grain," through oppositional

112

TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

socially produced positions that "make over" their dominant
meanings. The "meaning" of a text was allowed to be
more provisional, perhaps contradictory, and subsulturally
specific. As a consequence, it became debatable whether
or not the primary source of meaning was the set of social
relations into which the text was inserted or the specific forms
of the texts themselves. The text was "dethroned"; it lost its
determining authority, its ability to determine how it would
be understood by its readers.
Possibly the most influential deployment of subculture
studies within the mainstream of cultural studies was Dick
Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style, published in
Methuen's New Accents series in 1979. In this book, Hall's
textual struggle for meaning takes on a material form in
subcultural style: the dress codes of punks, the musical codes
of reggae, the retrospective dandyism of the teddy boys.
Hebdige's is one of the livelier and more accessible of the
books to come out of this tradition, and his account of the
representational codes of specific urban subcultures in 1970s
Britain still makes stimulating reading.
In Subculture, Hebdige uses semiotics to interpret the
meaning~ambiguous and contradictoryÑproduced by sub-
cultural dress, music, and behavioral styles. One influence on
Hebdige's approach is literary criticism (specifically the work
of the Tel Quel group in France); another influence comes from
cultural studies' appropriations of ethnographic techniques,
particularly the work of Phil Cohen.

Hebdige singles out Cohen's work for its linkage of class

experience and leisure styles, and for his explanation of the
relation between youth subcultures and their parent cultures.
Cohen exerted a profound influence on the CCCS's research
on subcultures; this is evident in Resistance Through Rituals,
as Hebdige notes, in the various authors' interpretations of
"the succession of youth cultural styles as symbolic forms
of resistance" (p. 8()). Most important, Cohen's explanation
of the basic or "latent" function of subcultures provides the
rationale for Hebdige's own reading of specific subcultures
as texts. For Cohen, the function of subculture was to
"express and resolve, albeit magically, the contradictions
which remain hidden or unresolved in the parent culture"

113

# - )

)

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

(p. 77). The skinheads' fundamentalist caricature of working-
class dress is thus read as a challenge, confronting the
gradual embourgeoisement of working-class culture. Cohen

.
6 Ñ ¥ W ~ F -w~{Ñ6 ~ e e | @ b * * * e * * B *
. 3Kw { :13 ~:::::::: ~:
. i{J 3 :lJ W~ ~)1?13: :: D
!1B~NXOFB~, :: i ':,: .~. .:

Photo 3.3. Cover of Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style
(Used with kind permission of Methuen and Co. ). Appropriately enough,
this is the only one of the New Accents series to feature a genuinely
stylish cover.

114

TEXTS AND CONTEXIS

relates the specifics of style to the more general "ideological,
economic and cultural factors which bear upon subculture"
(p. 78) through a close reading of leisure styles that Hebdige

regards as exemplary:

Rather than presenting class as an abstract set of external
determinations, [Cohenl showed it working out in practice
as a material force, dressed up, as it were, in experience
and exhibited in style. The raw material of history could
be seen refracted, held and "handled" in the line of a mod's
jacket, in the soles on a teddy boy's shoes. (p. 78)

Subculture: The Meaning of Style offers readings and case
studies that reflect changes in the way texts were being
defined and that exerts an influence on the studies of popular
culture that follow it; one can see the continuities between
Hebdige's work and that of lain Chambers, for instance. But
Hebdige's assessment of the political function of subcultural
style was probably his most significant contribution. The
meaning of subculture, he says, is like any other ideological
territoryÑopen to contestation: "and style is the area in
which the opposing definitions clash with most dramatic
force" (p. 3). Further, subcultures are enclosed within the
larger processes of hegemony, against which their signifying

practices need to be set:

Individual subcultures can be more or less "conservative"
or "progressive", integrated into the community, con
tinuous with the values of that community, or extrapolated
from it, defining themselves against the parent culture.
Finally, these differences are reflected not only in the
objects of subcultural style, but in the signifying practices
which represent those objects and render them meaningful.
(p. 127)

Hebdige is most interested, however, in those subcultural
styles that seem to challenge hegemony, that offer an "oblique
gesture of Refusal"; there, "the objections are lodged, the
contradictions displayed . . . at the profoundly superficial

level of appearance: that is, at the level of signs" (p. 17).

115

l
o

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

The book largely engages with subcultures at the level of
signs, too: an example is this account of the mode of dancing
associated with British punks, the "pogo":

Dancing, usually an involving and expressive medium in
British rock and mainstream pop cultures, was turned
into a dumbshow of blank robotics.... the pogo was a
caricatureÑa reductio ad absurdum of all the solo dance
styles associated with rock music. It resembled the "anti-
dancing" of the "Leapniks" which Melly describes in
connection with the trad boom.... The same abbreviated
gesturesÑleaping into the air, hands clenched to the
sides, to head an imaginary ballÑwere repeated without
variation in time to the strict mechanical rhythms of the
music.... the pogo made improvisation redundant: the
only variations were imposed by changes in the tempo of
the musicÑfast numbers being "interpreted" with manic
abandon in the form of frantic on-the-spots, while the
slower ones were pogoed with a detachment bordering
on the catatonic. (pp. 108 9)

Hebdige lays out his texts for us to examine, but always
insists on their subversive, resistant potential:

Style in subculture is, then, pregnant with significance.
Its transformations go "against nature", interrupting the
process of "normalisation". As such, they are gestures,
movements towards a speech which offends the "silent
majority", which challenges the principle of unity and
cohesion, which contradicts the myth of consensus. Our
task becomes, like Barthes', to discern the hidden messages
inscribed in code on the glossy surfaces of style, to trace
them out as "maps of meaning" which obscurely re-present
the very contradictions they are designed to resolve or
conceal. (p.18)

Interestingly, in Hebdige's latest book, Hiding in the Light
(1988), he bids "farewell" to the study of youth subcultures
by denying the connection between youth subcultures and
the signification of negation or resistance. Admitting that his

116

TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

argument was reinforced by punk's explicit political agenda,
and that subsequent youth movements no longer seem to
articulate such a strong political resistance, Hebdige draws
the useful theoretical lesson that ntheoretical models are as
tied to their own times as the human bodies that produce
them." While Hebdige may overstate the case to maintain
that "the idea of subculture-as-negation grew up alongside
punk, remained inextricably linked to it, and died when it
died" (p. 8), it is true that this formulation did run the risk
of merely inverting the politics of consensus, simply equating
the subordinate with the resistant.

Polysemy, Ambiguity, and Reading Texts

Aspects of the work described in the preceding sectionÑthe
focus on the audience and on strategies of resistance within
subcultural fragments of the "mass" audienceÑhave been
mobilized in other ways. Currently, and as something of a
reaction against the dethroning of the text, some are arguing
that, especially in the case of television or popular texts, this
potential for resistant readings is in fact a property of texts
themselves, and not merely of the audience members' socially
produced methods of reading them. Where once the endeavor
was to alert us to the construction of a consensual reading, a
considerable number of studies have now begun to describe
strategies of resistance within the text; networks of ambiguity
and contradiction that invite and accommodate the reader's
adoption of different, even ideologically contradictory, sub-
ject positions. Texts are seen to be loaded with an excess of
meaning, leaking through the boundaries of any "preferred"
readings into the social formations of the readers, and thus
producing a range of meanings and pleasures. In this section,
I will note some aspects of the development of this concep-
tualization of the relationship between text and reader.

In "Dance and Social Fantasy," Angela McRobbie (1984)
resists the emphasis on social rather than textual influences on
readers and audiences, and attacks the kind of subcultural and
ethnographic research on youth discussed in the preceding
section:

117

)

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

One of the marked characteristics of most academic writing
on youth has been its tendency to conceive of youth
almost entirely in terms of action and of direct experience.
Attention has been paid to young people in school, on the
dole, and on the street, all sites where they are immediately
visible to the social observer. This has had the effect of
reducing the entire spectrum of young people's experience
implicitly to these moments, neglecting almost totally those
many times where they become viewers, readers, part of
an audience, or simply silent, caught up in their own
daydreams. To ignore these is to miss an absolutely
central strand in their social and personal experience.
It means that in all these subcultural accounts we are
left with little knowledge of any one of their reading or
viewing experiences, and therefore with how they find
themselves represented in these texts, and with how in
turn they appropriate from some of these and discard
others. This absence has also produced a real blindness
to the debt much of those youth cultural expressions owe
to literary texts, to the cinema, to art and to older musical
forms. (p. 141)

Texts are social formations, too, not simply raw material to
be processed through other social determinants like gender
and class. Furthermore, McRobbie suggests that the varying
social uses to which texts may be put are available to us
through close analysis. She cites as an example the way in
which discussion of a film may become a social activity
or event; her point is that this is possible only because
even popular texts like Hollywood films inscribe into thetr
forms an awareness of their varied usage: "The polysemy (or
multiple meanings) of the text rises to the surface provoking
and pandering to different pleasures, different expectations and
different interpretations" (p. 150).
McRobbie concludes her argument by criticizing an earlier
piece of her own, on the magazine Jackie, which attacked
the fantastic, nonrealist properties of lackie's view of the
world. In the more recent piece, McRobbie admits that
her earlier account misunderstood and undervalued the
pleasures the magazine offered, and attempted instead to

118

4
w

TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

impose an idealized notion of her own in their place. Her
misunderstanding of the pleasures of the text, she argues, led
to a devaluing of the readers' experience of it.
The notion of pleasure has increasingly been placed in
opposition to that of ideology. There are varieties of pleasure
L that are located within the body, their production having
physical sources. Whereas the meanings we give to the world
we live in are socially produced, there is an argument that
suggests our physical pleasures are our own. Such a theory
implies a limited degree of individual freedom from the
forces of ideology. As is so often the case, Barthes provides
a starting point here with his discussion of the pleasures

produced by certain kinds of literary texts in The Pleasure of
the Text (1975). While the complexities of this position are not
relevant here (I will talk a little more about them in Chapter
6), the effect of theories of pleasure is to raise the possibility
that communication may have more consequences than the
generation of meaning. Further, and more centrally for our
purposes here, where texts are seen to produce both pleasures
and meanings, the two may well contradict or counteract each
other. Male audiences may IIIIU it hard to resist the voyeuristic
pleasures offered in the Robert Palmer music video, "Simply
Irresistible," no matter how ideologically alert they may be
to its chic sexism. As Colin Mercer (1986) says, analysts of
popular culture may need to "look over Itheirl shoulders and
try to explain a certain 'guilt' of enjoyment of such and such in
spite of its known ideologies and political provenance" (p. 54).
Alternatively, some marginalized individual pleasures may
contradict and resist dominant ideological positions.
John Fiske's current work represents perhaps the most
unequivocal development of this last possibility; he identiffes
the category of "the popular" with those pleasures he believes
resist and stand outside the forces of ideology. Fiske char
acterizes popular culture in general, and popular television
in particular, by its ability to generate "illicit" pleasures and
therefore subversive meanings.
One can chart the development of this position over
the last few years. In his contribution to Robert Allen's
collection, Channels of Discourse, Fiske (1987a) describes the
complexity of the relations among texts, readers, and culture

119
p
p

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

in an impeccably evenhanded manner, acknowledging the
dialectics of resistance and determination, textual openness
and ideological closure, in the production of textual meaning:

' A close reading of the signifiers of the textÑthat is, its
physical presenceÑ ... recognizes that the signifieds
exist not in the text itself, but extratextually, in the
myths, counter-myths, and ideology of their culture. It
recognizes that the distribution of power in society is
paralleled by semiotic struggles for meanings. Every text
and every reading has a social and therefore political
dimension, which is to be found partly in the structure
of the text itself and partly in the relation of the reading
subject to that text. (p. 273)

The picture here is one of balance, but nevertheless one
that depicts ideological systems maintaining their purchase
against significant competition. The evenhandedness works
to produce a consensual model of cultural production that
recalls Hall's encoding/decoding explanations.
Fiske ultimately distances himself from such a position
in order to explain why there is, in practice, no direct or
necessary equation between popularity and ideological unity.
To do this, Fiske draws on, among others, lohn Hartley's
"Encouraging signs: Television and the Power of Dirt, Speech
and Scandalous Categories" (1983), in which Hartley discusses
television as a "dirty" (socially unsanctioned) category that
thrives on ambiguity and contradictions. Television's special
quality, he says, is its ability to "produce more meaning than
can be policed" (p. 76), a quality television producers deal
with by attempting to limit their programs' potential for

meaning. This, Hartley argues, inevitably fails, as ambiguity
"leaks" into and out of the text. An "encouraging sign" of
the weakness of the tenure of any hegemonic meaning, this
leakage is the result of "semiotic excess," a proliferation of
possible readings, an excess of meaning. Fiske (1986) suggests
that this semiotic excessÑnot ideological unityÑis intrinsic to
popular cultural forms, explaining both their popularity and
the apparent unpredictability of reactions to them:

TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

I suggest that it is more productive to study television not in
order to identify the means by which it constructs subjects
within the dominant ideology (though it undoubtedly and
unsurprisingly works to achieve precisely this end), but
rather how its semiotic excess allows readers to construct
subject positions that are theirs (at least in part), how it
allows them to make meanings that embody strategies of
resistance to the dominant, or negotiate locally relevant
inflections of it. (p. 213)

Fiske's enterprise can here be understood as an attempt to
explain how popular culture seems, on the one hand, to be at
the mercy of the culture industries and, on the other hand, to
exercise a stout resistance and even subversiveness at times in
its response to specific texts and their proposed meanings. The
attribution of ambiguity to the text explains how texts might
determine their preferred readings while still containing the
potential for subversive or resistant "misreadings."
In Television Culture, Fiske (1987b) mobilizes developments
in audience studies, the dethroning of the text, and his
sense of the subversiveness of pleasure to present a view
of popular culture audiences that is many miles from the
manipulated masses of "effects" studies. Drawing on de
Certeau's theorizing of the creativity of popular culture,
Fiske sees "the popular" in rather a Brechtian wayÑas
a relatively autonomous, if subordinated, voice competing
with the dominant for representation. The making over of the
dominant meanings in popular culture is seen as a successful
political strategy that "empowers" otherwise subordinated
groups and individuals.5 The textual analysis this motivates
is most interested in the production of politically progressive
readings. The majority of Television Culture deals with what
Fiske calls "activated texts," those produced largely through
appropriation by their audience rather than, say, successful
positioning by their producers. These activated texts do not
constitute an aberration, at the fringe of television's cultural
function, but are among its defining characteristics:

Television's open-ness, its textual contradictions and insta
bility, enable it to be readily incorporated into the oral

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

culture of many and diverse groups in many and diverse
ways so that, while it may not in its broadcast mode be a
form of folklore, it is at least able to serve folkloric functions
for some of its audiences. Its popularity among its diversity
of audiences depends upon its ability to be easily and
differently incorporated into a variety of subcultures:
popularity, audience activity, and polysemy are mutually
entailed and interdependent concepts. (p. 107)

Fiske is aware of the irnplications of announcing that
capitalism's determining structures do not work, however;
and so he is careful to acknowledge that the "plurality
of meanings" within television texts is not "of course, a
structureless pluralism," but is "tightly organized around
textual and social power." The emphasis is nevertheless on
the alternatives to the preferred meanings and the politics of
their construction:

The preferred meanings in television are generally those
that serve the interests of the dominant classes: other
meanings are structured in relations of dominance-
subordination to those preferred ones as the social groups
that activate them are structured in a power relationship
within the social system. The textual attempt to contain
meaning is the semiotic equivalent of the exercise of
social power over the diversity of subordinate social
groups, and the semiotic power of the subordinate to
make their own meanings is the equivalent of their ability
to evade, oppose, negotiate with this social power. Not
only is the text polysemic in itself, but its multitude of
intertextual relations increases its polysemic potential.
(p. 127)

The obvious limitation to the progressive effect of this
multitude of textual possibilities is that the textual system
may well be more porous than the social system; making
over the meaning of a television program may be much easier
than climbing out of a ghetto, changing the color of one's skin,
changing one's gender, or reducing one's dependence on the
varied mechanisms of state welfare.

122

p
o
vl

TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

In some of Fiske's (1988) most recent work, the category
of the text has itself vanished under the pressure of these
competing definitions and forces:

What excites me are the signs that we may be developing
a semiotic ethnography that will help us toward under-
standing concrete, contextualised moments of semiosis as
specific instances of more general cultural processes. In
these moments, there are no texts, no audiences. There is
only an instance of the process of making and circulating
meanings and pleasures. (p. 250)

At this point, it is as if British cultural studies has turned
back on itself, expunging the category of the text as if it is an
impediment to the analysis of discourse. Yet, as we have seen,

textuality is merely a methodological proposition, a strategy
to enable analysis, not an attempt to claim privileged status
for a range of cultural productions. In cultural studies, no
text is independent of the methodology that constructs it as
one. So far, the methodologies have not been conservative or
rigid structures, inhibiting further development. The trends
I have been charting, in fact, reveal how directly changes in
method have been produced by shifts in the definition of
what constitutes a text.

The category of the text, however, and explanations of the
production of textual readings have become increasingly
problematic. The difficulty is that, from one point of view,
texts are held to contain meanings immanent in them, at least
in the form of a set of limits so that one cannot read simply
what one wants off them; they are also held to reproduce
dominant ideological structures and thus must exercise some
degree of dominance or preference toward a reading or group
of readings. From the contrary point of view, however, texts
contain the possibility of being read against the grain and
producing resistant, or subordinated readings, mobilized by
specific groups within the culture; they are also held to be
historically contingent, subject to shifts in the contexts of their
reception that can entirely change their specific meanings and
their wider cultural significance. This last factor is one not yet

explored here, and to deal with it I cite a book that takes

123
o

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

the problems of defining and reading the text very seriously
indeedÑbut without jettisoning the category altogether.
Bennett and Woollacott's (1988) book on the popular fic-
tional hero, James Bond, goes beyond Morley's (1980a) ac-
count of different readers producing dominant, negotiated,
and oppositional readings of the Nationwide text; these
authors outline how different social and historical conditions
can produce vastly different dominant readings of the multi-
textual figure of James Bond. Bond and Beyond: The Political
Career of a Popular Hero is in many ways exemplary in its
attempt to survey the historical, industrial, and ideological
field that produces its textsÑthe films, novels, and publicity
connected to the figure of James Bond. The book contains
analyses of the internal structures of individual texts, of
the ways in which the meanings of the texts might be
historicized, of how Bond's meaning has changed over time,
of the relationship between the films and the novels, and of
the professional ideologies of the filmmakers and how these
might have affected the speciffc translations of the novels into
film. The problem of fully explicating a body of popular texts,
however, is apparent in the fact that even this well-designed
set of approaches has left gaps for the critic and the fan alike
to question.
Bennett and Woollacott frame their project, quite explicitly,
within arguments about textual analysis. Their instincts
would seem to lie with those audience studies that recognize
the social and discursive factors mediating the relations
between texts and audiences; they are very critical of an
excessive emphasis on the properties of the text:

The case of Bond throws into high relief the radical
insufficiency of those forms of cultural analysis which,
in purporting to study texts "in themselves", do radical

violence to the real nature of the social existence and
functioning of texts in pretending that "the text itself" can
be granted an existence, as a hypostatised entity, separated
out from the always variable systems of intertextual rela-
tions which supply the real conditions of its signifying
functioning. (pp. S7)

124

TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

This view aligns Bennett and Woollacott with those who
would follow discourse(s) as the object(s) of study, who
would see texts as "sites around which a constantly varying
and always many faceted range of cultural and ideological
transactions are conducted" (p. 8). However, as they reveal
later in the book, while their sympathies might lie with the
audience studies, they reject at least one of Morley's unspoken
assumptions: that the varying readings of the one program
are of the "same" text, rather than the production of many,
multiple texts.
Having distanced themselves from the two major tradi-
tions, Bennett and Woollacott develop a number of terms to
help them redefine the connection between texts and society.
First, they extend the idea of intertextuality, the system
of internal references between texts: they introduce the
hyphenated term inter-textuality, which refers to "the social
organisation of the relations between texts within specific
conditions of reading" (p. 45). Bennett and Woollacott insist
that texts cannot relate even to each other independently of
specific social conditions and the meanings they put into
circulation. The term inter-textuality forces analysis to move
continually between the text and the social conditions that
frame its consumption, and limits textual interpretations to
specific historical locations. The career of James Bond spans
more than three decades, and his meanings have been
produced by quite different social and textual determinants
at any one point. James Bond, within one set of inter-
textual relations, is an aristocratic, traditional British hero
who celebrates the imperial virtues of breeding, taste, and
authority; and within another set of inter-textual relations,
the same books are read as producing a figure who is modern,
iconoclastic, a living critique of an outmoded class system,
and whose politics are those of Westem capitalism, not merely
of Britain. The inter-textual relations examined and exposed
at any specific historical point are seen to exert some force
on the reader and on the text, producing what Bennett and
Woollacott call "reading formations":

By "reading formations" here, we have in mind ...
those specific determinations which bear upon, mould

125

)

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

and configure the relations between texts and readers in
determinate conditions of reading. It refers, specifically,
to the inter-textual relations which prevail in a particular
context, thereby activating a given body of texts by or-
dering the relations between them in a specific way
such that their reading is always already cued in specific
directions that are not given by those "texts themselves"
as entities separable from such relations. (p. 64)

This is not to suggest that texts are absolutely relative and
bear no determining characteristics at all, but to emphasize
the fact that texts do not simply contain set meanings they
will generate, willy-nilly, no matter what the conditions of
their reception. Even relatively stable textual properties, such
as genre, can be seen as "cultural and variable" rather than
"textual and fixed" (p. 81). The authors demonstrate this by
insisting on the temporal variation of dominant readings of
the Bond texts, by examining the shifts in the ideological
significance lames Bond carries at specific points in the
figure's history. "Textual shifters" allow us to chart the ways
in which certain aspects of the figure are foregrounded in
one ideological context and other aspects in another context,
as "pieces of play within different regions of ideological
contestation, capable of being moved around differently
within them" (p. 234). One such "shift," for instance, is the
representation of Bond's girlfriends, the varying sexual and
power relations constructed between Bond and the girls over
time and across texts. Similarly, the shift in the depiction of
the villains as, at one time, Cold War fanatics and, at another
time, as rapacious criminal masterminds.
This is difficult stuff, so it might be best to quote a
brief section of the account of the "textual shifters" and
their effect on the ideological significance of Bond. Below,
Bennett and Woollacott summarize the ideological effect
of the different readings of James Bond outlined in the
preceding paragraph's explanation of inter-textuality. They
are examining the distinction between the Bond of the late
1950s and that of the mid-1960s; between an earlier Bond
who signified traditional, autocratic Britain, nostalgic for its

imperial past, and the later Bond who was the epitome of

126

TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

the modern, classless, swinging, "pop" BritainÑthe version
ultimately to be confirmed with Sean Connery's casting in the
first generation of Bond films:

Whilst, initially, Bond had supplied a' point of fictional
reference in relation to which an imperialist sense of nation
and nationhood could be symbolically refurbished, he was
now made to point in the opposite directionÑtowards the
future rather than the past. Functioning as a figure of
modernisation, he became the very model of the tough,
abrasive professional that was allegedly destined to lead
Britain into the modern, no illusions, no-holds-barred
post-imperialist age, a hero of rupture rather than of
tradition. (p. 239)

Such judgments go beyond the demonstration of a simple
difference of interpretation in different contexts; the work
of the "textual shifters" does not merely produce different

readings of the "same text" but, rather, acts "upon the text,
shifting its very signifying potential so that it is no longer
what it once was, because, in terms of its cultural location,
it is no longer where it once was" (p. 248). It is a different
text.

Often, even those accounts of audiences that acknowledge
the audience's freedom to read texts in their own way still
read the text first and then ask the audience for their, possibly
variant, readings. The codes of the text are examined first
to establish "what it is that is variantly decoded" (p. 261).
In such cases (and we shall meet some examples in the
following chapter), the authority of the text over its readings
is implicitly accepted. Bennett and Woollacott argue that this
is illogical; a text cannot have an entirely abstract meaning
that is independent of what the (a) reader makes of it. Texts
and readers generate their meanings in relation to each other
and within specific contexts:

The relations between texts and readers, we have sug
gested, are always profoundly mediated by the discursive
and inter-textual determinations which, operating on both,
structure the domain of their encounter so as to produce,

127
o

,;.b

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

always in specific and variable forms, texts and readers as
the mutual supports of one another. (p. 249)

Bennett and Woollacott argue for a more genuine balance:
for the recognition that texts, readers, and readings are
culturally produced and that one should examine their forma-
tion as a complex set of negotiations and interrelations. The
competition between text and context is reformulated, not
reducing the text to its context or redefining the idea of context
itself, but rather proposing that "neither text nor context
are conceivable as entities separable from one another"
(p. 262). Currently, and in principle, there seems little to
argue with here; as aspects of Bennett and Woollacott's own
book demonstrate, the problem remains one of practice, of
actually carrying out such a program.

This is a problem because while we might all theoretically

accept the contingency of the text, in practice we all tend to
see certain readings as inextricably bound into specific texts.
We might argue for a multitude of possibilities, but this does
not mean that, as Bennett and Woollacott say, "all readings
have the same cultural weight, or that any old reading can
come along, parachute itself into the arena of readings and
secure a space for itself." Their view is that there are usually
historical (that is, extratextual) reasons the "readings of a text
cluster around a set of limited options" (p. 267). However,
the nomination of those historical reasons for the Bond texts
has occupied a book, and to explore fully the "limits" to the
range of options available would take many others. Thus,
it is hard to imagine a means of testing this proposition.
Further, and for only one example of competing arguments,
studies of narrative reveal remarkable structural similarities
in texts from a range of periods and cultures. There is at least
a suggestion that these structures exert a determinate force

on their readers. So, we are still left with the thorny problem
of the nature of critical practice. Texts are potentially both
open and closed, their readings and their textual forms are
produced and determined by wider cultural and ideological
factors; yet we can talk, as do Bennett and Woollacott, of the
dominant construction of Bond (say) in the 1960s, as if these
limits are available and can be specified. We know that as

128

TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

soon as we specify them we can be accused of trying to fix
a singular meaning, or we can be challenged on just whose
meaning we propose.

One strategic response to this problem is to decenter the
text altogether, using it only as a resource through which one
might examine other aspects of social life. Richard Johnson
(1983) talks of a CCCS study of the media's representation
of the first "post-Falklands" Christmas in Britain in 1982.
This study was "premised on the belief that context is
crucial in the production of meaning," and used texts as
a means of examining the construction of a holiday period
during a specific historical moment. In this example, texts
were not studied for themselves, but "for the subjective or
cultural forms" they "realised" and made available (p. 35). In
Johnson's case, the subjectivities constructed through such
forms are of primary interest. The texts still needed to be
"read," however, and dominant meanings proposed. Stuart
Laing also offers the representational history of a period
through the survey of texts in Representations of Working Class
Life 1959{i4 (1986). Here, the analysis of literary, television,
stage, and film texts is combined with intellectual and social
histories to produce an account of the popular construction of
the working class during these years. In many ways a model
for a new kind of cultural analysis, Laing's book still has the
problem of opting for one dominant reading of the texts he
consults.

Notwithstanding these difficulties, such studies adopt an
approach to the text that usefully exploits the theoretical shifts
we have been describing; they reject the Leavisite notion of
the unique, unified text; they acknowledge the historical
determinations of texts' meanings for their audiences; and
they are skeptical about the authority of the readings pro-
duced by the critic/analyst. Importantly, these approaches
enable us to move from the text to the audience.

To this latter aspect we turn now. Given the complexity
of the history of textual analysis within cultural studies, the
distance it has traveled from its roots in literary studies
(indeed, the distance it has helped literary studies to travel!),
and the genuine theoretical problems, we can imagine how
liberating it must have been to turn to the audience and

129

)

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

inquire into how they read their texts. At a stroke, the
presumption of the critic could be displaced, or at least
deferred. The sense of security that empiricist reporting,
rather than interpretive argument, engenders must have come
as a relief, too. Yet, audience studies are more than a scientific
cul-de-sac away from the mainstream of cultural studies. In
the past five years, they have become the major new influence
on the theory and practice of contemporary cultural studies. In
the following chapter, I will look at the growth in studies of the
audience within cultural studies, focusing in particular on the
work of Morley and Hobson.

Notes

1 This was published as a CCCS stenciled paper in 1973, but is
more readily available in an edited version, "Encoding/De-
coding" (Hall 1980c), published in Culture, Media, Language. It
is this latter version that is cited throughout this book.
2 This work was originally a CCCS stenciled paper (No. 9, 1976).
3 Bennett et al.'s (1981) Popular Television and Fdm devotes a
section to this debate, introducing it and reprinting the key
articles, includint those by Colin McCabe and Colin MacArthur.
4 The key article here, also reprinted in Popular Television and Film
(Bennett et al. 1981) is McCabe's "Realism and the Gnema:
Notes on Some Brechtian Theses" (1981).
5 "Empowerment," however, is essentially a psychological, in-
dividual effect that does not necessarily presume any wider
political or structural consequence. It is an idea more widely
valued in American cultural studies than in the British tradition.

130

o
~D

Audiences

Morley and the Nationwide Audience

One consequence of cultural studies' concentration on textual
analysis from the early 1970s onward was the deflection of
attention away from the sites at which textual meaning
was generatedÑpeople's everyday lives. Paradoxically, the
stuff of these lives lay at the heart of the enterprise of
cultural studies, and yet the progressive concentration on
the text distanced cultural studies from this initial interest.
An additional worrying by-product of textual analysis was
the elitism implicit in its de facto privileging of the academic
reader of texts. It could be argued that the development of its
own tradition of audience studies challenged such elitism and
reconnected cultural studies research with the lives it most

wished to understand.

"Audience studies" within cultural studies are almost

exclusively studies of television audiences, and that will be the
focus of this chapter, too. David Morley's The "Nationwide"
Audience (1980a) is our starting point. Widely discussed
and criticizedÑeven by Morley himself in a subsequent
book, Family Television (1986fThe "Nationwide" Audience
has exerted a significant influence over the approach taken

to audiences since its publication. This is a testament not so
much to the success of its project (testing out the Hall/Parkin
encoding/decoding model) as to its categoric demonstration
of the complex polysemy of the television text and the

importance of extratextual determinants of textual meaning.
Morley's book builds on his (and Charlotte Brunsdon's)
Olb

- a

Fiske, John. "Prologue: 'The Juice Is Loose."' Media
Matters: Evervday Culture and Political Chanoe
University of Minnesota Press, 1994 (Regents of the
University of Minnesota). Pages xiii-xxviii.

Fiske, John. "Introduction." Media Matters: Evervdav
Culture and Political Chanae. University of Minnesota
Press, 1994 (Regents of the University of Minnesota).
Pages 1-19.

Prologue: "The Juice Is Loose"

On a sultry June night in 1994 the consciousness of the United states was, once
again, absorbed by the media. As with the Gulf War, the Anita Hill-Chrence
Thomas hearings, and the Rodney King beating, the electronic image was the
reality that America experienced. In this case, the media event that was relayed
live into the homes, motels, and bars of America from seven news helicopters
was the police chase and arrest of 0.1. (the Juice) Simpson, a football hero,
sportscaster, and media celebrity, accused of the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole
Brown simpson, and Ronald Goldman, a friend of Nicole. This was no con-
ventional television car chaseÑno tires squealed, no cars scattered piles of
boxes on the sidewalk, and not a fender was dented. It was a chase that kept
within the speed limits and obeyed all the rules of the road. The man driving
O.J., his lifelong friend Al Cowlings, was eventually charged with harboring a
fugitive, but not with reckless driving. Indeed, the event became more like a
parade, even a victory parade, than thechase and arrestofasuspected mur-
derer. Twelve police cruisers followed O.J.'s white Ford Bronco at a safe dis-
tance, making no attempt to intercept, as Cowlings drove carefully along the
Southern California freeways while 0.1. used his cellular phone to talk to his
mother and the police used it to talk to him. Other motorists, listening to news
about the event on their radios, pulled over to allow the cavalcade to pass, and,
as it did, many waved encouragement and support to O.J. Still others who had
been watching at home on television drove to the freeway with hastily lettered
banners proclaiming their support for their hero. They packed the freeway
overpasses, shouting, "We love you, O.J." and, recalling an ironically appro-
priate chant from his days as a record-setting running back, "The Juice is
loose." Interviewed on television afterward, some who had lined the freeway
to watch the procession explained that this was their first chance, or, for oth-
ers, their last, to see their media hero in the flesh, or, we might think, to add a
material dimension to their experience of his electronic reality. The procession
eventually came to halt in O.l.'s driveway, where the star sat for an hour in the
Bronco, still apparently threatening suicide, until the negotiations produced a
safe, tame, and anticlimactic final curtain.

xiii

Prologue

xiv

Prologue

A week earlier, Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman had been found dead of
multiple stab wounds outside her townhouse. In the days between the killings
and the arrest, the media carried many stories and much discussion of the fre-
quent beatings and verbal abuse that Nicole had suffered during her marriage
to O.J. O.J. Simpson is a Black man, Nicole Simpson was a white woman, and
the nation was as fascinated with their drama as it had been with the equally
compelling one involving Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas. These events, to-
gether with the Rodney King beating and the uprising that followed, and the
lesser but politically significant fuss over Murphy Brown's fatherless baby, pro-
vide compelling evidence that the cultural crises of the United States in the
1990s all ignite that explosive mix of race, gender, and sexuality. With the col-
lapse of communism and the loss of a clear role in international relations, the
political energy of America has turned inward, and now it is these domestic
and personal politics that engage people most urgently, most anxiously, and
most intimately.
This book traces the racial, sexual, and economic conflicts of the contempo-
rary United states as they played out in key media events of the early 1990sÑ
the "family values" debate between Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown, the An-
ita Hill-Clarence Thomas Senate hearings, and the Los Angeles uprisings that
followed the acquittal of the police officers who were videoed beating Rodney
King into submission. As 1, along with 93 million others, watched the white
Bronco carrying a Black man into the living rooms of America, I began to get
the eerie feeling that what I was watching was a rerun, or at least a new epi-
sode in a familiar series. There were uncanny echoes of Anita Hill's sexual ha-
rassment in Nicole Simpson's abusive marriage, and O.J.'s drama seemed the
final scene in a story line in which Bill Cosby turned into Rodney King. It
seemed that all the cultural currents that I had traced in the media events I had
already analyzed were transfixing America's attention once again. And this
prologue is the result.

AU these events were as significant as they were, first, because they were
media events; that is, they were events that were mediated around the nation
and the world, and events whose reality lay, in part, in their mediation. They
were events characteristic of a postmodern world, for in them there was no
clear and obvious distinction between electronic mediation and physical hap-
penings, or between media figures and real people. This is not to say that there
is no nonmediated realityÑNicole Simpson was murdered, Rodney King was
beatenÑbut that the mediation of the murder and the beating modified or
magnified what they really were. The reality of Anita Hill and of Rodney King
was a product of their mediation: O.J. Simpson's chase was not just shown on
television, it was a product of television, just as 0.1. himself is. There is no "au-
thentic," nonmediated O.J. that we can use to measure the accuracy or truth of
his representations, for O.J. is the accumulation of an individual personal his-
tory and a set of public mediations, and each is so tangled up with the other

that the two are literally inseparable. We can no longer think of the media as
providing secondary representations of reality; they affect and produce the re-
ality that they mediate. We live in a world of media events and media realities.

The second reason for the high importance of these media events Ues in the
way that they give a visible and material presence to deep and persistent cur-
rents of meaning by which American society and American consciousness
shape themselves. The figures who play the key roles in these events literally
embody the politicocultural meanings and the struggles over them about
which America is most uncertain, most anxious, and therefore most divided. If
they did not, they would not have become the resonant cultural figures that
they have. It is fashionable but fruitless to bemoan the personalization of pol-
itics, for politics that are not embodied in a figure and played out by that figure
in a media event will never be fully realized or widely engaged within a media-
saturated world. The struggles to produce the "real" O.J. Simpson (the all-

American hero, or the wife abuser, or the Black male embodying the racial-sex-
ual threat to white America) echo the struggles over Anita Hill (harassed
woman, obsessed woman, pawn of white feminists, a Black Delilah or a new
Sojourner Truth) and over Rodney King (a victim of police brutality or a new
Willie Horton, a victim of white society or a threat to it). These events become
media events only because they give a specific form to these deeply flowing
and deeply conflictual cultural currents. 0.1. Simpson, Rodney King, Clarence
Thomas, Willie Horton, Mike Tyson, Marion Barry are all different people, but
they are all resonant media figures of the 1990s because they are all Black men
whose mediated racial identity was sexualized, whose masculinity was racial-
ized, and who were all, whether found guilty or not, criminalized: race, sex,
and (white) law and order were mixed differently in the way that each was
made into a media figure, and the significance of each figure lies in his partic-
ular embodiment of this explosive mix. These men do not figure as unique m-
dividuals, but only as products of the white imagination; they figure as embod-
iments of the white fascination with and terror of the Black male and his
embodiment of a racial-sexual threat to white law and order. What we have to
understand in these figures and the events in which they were involved is not
their uniqueness, but their cultural typicality: the same cultural currents and
conflicts will resurface in different figures and different events, but they will
reoccur. The more America becomes divided along its multiple axes of social
difference, of which race, ethnicity, gender, class, and age are only some of the
most salient, the more frequently we can expect these media events and figures
to occur, the more intensely they will grab the American imagination, and the
more bitter will be the struggles to inflect them in one direction or another. A
media event is significant because of the inevitability of its reoccurrence and
the clarity it gives to murky anxieties and political differences; it is significant
because it serves as a public arena wherein the American people engage in ur

xv
Prologue

xvi

Prologue

gent political debate and effective political action. Media events are the shaping
events of a postmodern world.
Until the murders, O.J. Simpson had sat alongside Bill Cosby in the white
American imagination, a much-loved African American who typified the suc-
cessful, nonthreatening, tamed Black male, a living figure who proved not only
that Blacks could make it in a white society, but that whites could love them
and welcome them into their homes, electronically at least, as family friends.
O.J. was the first Black man whose image was nonthreatening enough for him
to become a major promoter of goods and services to a white market. He was as
loved as the rushed executive weaving through the crowds at the airport on his
way to his Hertz rental car as he was dodging the tacklers on the football field.
0.1. preceded Bill Cosby as the figure of the Black male that enabled white
America to prove to its own satisfaction both that it was not racist and that
those nonwhites who failed to prosper did so because of their own deficiencies
and not because of white racism. O.J. had been a hugely popular football star,
a Heisman Trophy winner, and a multiple record breaker. His ready smile and
engaging personality enabled him to shift easily from football field to Holly-
wood, where he played smallish, but popular, roles in a number of movies. But
television was the medium that made him, for there he could appear as "him-
self," and people could love him for who he "was," the friendly, successful,
engaging Black man.

But in the racial climate of the contemporary United states, the figure of the
tamed Black male can never shake itself free of its sinister obverseÑthe racial-
sexual threat to white law and order that the 1988 Bush campaign figured so
successfully in Willie Horton. It was easy, then, for the media to Hortonize
O.J., as the LAPD lawyers Hortonized Rodney King. The police mug shot of
O.J. was used for the covers of both Time and Newsweek, and it led the New York
Times's front-page story. The tabloids reproduced blurred telephoto images of
O.J. being led away in handcuffs by the cops. In all these images, the familiar

O.J. was hardly recognizable, but that was not their point: what was perfect!y
recognizable was the even more familiar image of the Black-male-criminal. Not
content with the ability of the mug shot alone to tap into the criminalized
meanings of Blackness, Time "blackened" him even moreÑits cover picture
darkened O.J.'s skin by several shades, a move that provoked angry discussion
on an African American electronic bulletin board. Contributors to the debate
accused Time of "niggerizing" O.J., of "tapping into deep-seated racism and
capitalizing on it," and of taking America through the Willie Horton incident
once again. This none-too-subtle intensification of the signs of the Black threat
and therefore of white fear worked to increase the distance between the races,
and the uproar that it caused led the magazine to devote a page of its next issue
to an apology cum justification.

Time's intensifying of the image was, in the sphere of race relations, unnec-
essary, though in that of economics it was probably effective in increasing im

pulse buys by whites. The unintensified images on the cover of Newsweek and
the front page of the New York Times tapped the same cultural currents and per-
formed the same political function. This photograph, however, was only one
among many, and, hardworking though it was in its own right, it can be un-
derstood properly only in relation to all the others. 0.1. and Nicole Simpson
were so photogenic that the press and television, from the serious news to the
tabloids, were awash with photographs of them. Numerous though these im-
ages were, they fit neatly into four preexisting categories mainstream America
uses to make sense of its social experience.
Alongside the photographs of the "Black-male-criminal" were the "family
values" ones that showed a happy, conventional family of Mom, Dad, and two
beautiful children that even the religious right would be proud to endorse. The
only unconventional note was sounded by the racial identities of the parents.
When originally published, the photos may well have signified that "family
values" can overcome racial difference, but the divorce, the wife beating, and
the murders reversed the racial meanings and consequently moved the "family
values" to the right and whitened them. Now the family photos could perform
the same job as Dan Quayle when he blamed the Los Angeles "riots" on the
lack of family values in Black America and charged Murphy Brown with erod-
ing them even further (see chapter 1). In this ultraconservative but loudly
voiced imagination, the traditional family upon which U.S. society apparently
depends for its stability is implicitly white, and the threat to it, therefore, is
colored. Unsurprisingly, this imagination has made the single Black young
mother on welfare stand for everything that the all-American family is not. The
knowledge that this interracial family was broken by divorce, was, of course,
never photographed, but was, nonetheless, present in every picture. viewers
could trace under the smiling face of the father the scowling expression of the
mug-shot criminal.

Another category of pictures was sensational, exploitable, and widely ex-
ploited. These were pictures that showed the blood of the white woman. The
murders were excessively bloody, and images of the huge red stains on the
sidewalk paving were widely reproduced in the media. Again, the photo-
graphs could not show that the blood was that of a white woman killed by a
nonwhite man, but they did not need to. As I point out later in this book,
America has a long tradition of using the beauty and vulnerabiliq of the white
woman as a metaphor for its social order. The nonwhite male out of sexual and
social control, then, individualizes and sexualizes the threat of the other race,
now primarily the Black race, though in the nineteenth century the figure of
the male American Indian threatening the white female captive functioned
identically. Sergeant stacey Koon offered as justification for beating Rodney
King the fear that King posed a "Mandingo" threat to a white policewoman.
Willie Horton had raped a white woman.

XVII

Prologue

iii The pictures in these three categories were accompanied by stories in which
two themes consistently recurred. One narrated O.J.'s constant womanizing
throughout, and after, his marriage, and painted him as a man unable to con
trol his own sexuality. In handling the other, the media went to great pains to
stress that Nicole Simpson's relationship with Ron Goldman was nonsexual,
that he was with her late at night only because he had returned a pair of glasses
that her mother had left at the restaurant where he worked, and that there was
evidence to show that he died trying to defend her. Everything fit all too con
veniently into the stereotypical mold of the good white man protecting the
pure white woman against the racial-sexual threat of the Black man out of con
trol.
The fourth category of pictures consisted of photos of O.J. as the football
hero, the TV personality, the movie actor, the "celeb." There were no contra-
dictory notes in them, for white America has no problems in celebrating, lov-
ing, and identifying with powerful Bhck men whose power is confined to the
domains of sport and entertainment. When this photographic category is re-
lated to those of the criminal Black male, of the broken interracial marriage, and
of the white woman's blood, it can all-too-easily serve to promote the racialized
common sense that, sport and entertainment are cultural ghettos in which to
confine Black success, and that, outside them, the powerful Black man is al-
ways a potential danger. When the Juice is loose on the football field and head-
ing for the end zone, we can cheer him on, but when that same Juice is loose in
our suburbs, it becomes a different matter entirely.
The figure of the Black male out of control is a cultural nightmare for whites
that played a central role in all the racial media events of the 1990s. Its reso-
nance and its terror are so deep because of the symbolic and social connections
between the individual body of the Black male and the social body of Black
America. If the individual body of Rodney King escaped the control of the
LAPD officers, there was the danger, realized twelve months later, of the body
of Black Los Angeles escaping the same white control. It is this fear that pro-
vides the clearest links between O.J. and Rodney King. In the media coverage
of the first forty-eight hours of the uprisings, the media constantly voiced the
white fear that they would spread from Black L.A. to white L.A., and from
L,A. to the nation at large. The few instances of looting in Beverly Hills occa-
sioned as much media coverage as, and more media panic than, the wide-
spread destruction in South-Central Los Angeles, and every broadcast of the
events in L.A. Iinked them to lesser, but still whitely terrifying, uprisings in
Atlanta, Las Vegas, and San Francisco, and even to the absence of an uprising
in New York. In this context the images of the blood of the white woman in the
white suburb showed the nightmare become reality.

In the culture and politics of contemporary white America, the problem of
the Black male/Black America is conventionally viewed through the lens of "the
drug problem" to the extent that "the drug problem" has become code for "the

Prologue

Black problem," and the war on drugs of the Reagan-Bush administrations was
widely decoded by African Americans, at least, as a war on Blacks. Narcoticiz-
ing the Black body serves to magnify the threat of its uncontrollability. The
bodies of both O.J. and Rodney King were discursively filled with drugs: in the
white imagination of Sergeant stacey Koon, Rodney King appeared to be high
on PCP, a drug that produces a superhuman (read "animal") strength; simi-
larly, the media were full of O.J.'s cocaine problem and widely attributed the
brutality (read "animality") of the murders to the effects of drugs. White Amer-
ica doubly magnifies the threat that terrifies it by simultaneously sexualizing
and narcoticizing racial difference.

This racialization of the sexual danger to women might lead us to wonder

how one widely reproduced "family" photograph may have been read, for it I,

showed O.J., Nicole, and their first child naked, with O.J.'s arms encircling the
two lighter-skinned people. The Star Uuly 12, 1994) used this photo on its

cover, with the caption "How this dream family portrait turned into a murder
ous nightmare," and surrounded it with teasers for the stories inside: "Sex se
crets that drove O.J. crazy"; "Shocking truth about Nicole's 911 call, O.J.
caught her making love while kids slept in next room"; and "Revealed at last,
he beat his first wife too." The fact that the white horror of sex between a Black
man and a white woman cannot be spoken aloud in post-civil rights America,
at least by the mainstream, does not mean that it has disappeared. What it does .
mean, however, is that either it must be allowed to work silently (as when pho
tos of the interracial marriage that failed were printed alongside ones of the
blood of the white woman) or, when spoken, the voice that speaks it must be
discredited or marginalized. The Globe duly 5, 1994) headlined the view that
"O.J. was framed" by the Mafia and explained the motive for the framing as
retribution for his habit of dating white women. Putting such deep racial-sex
ual anxieties into the mouths of criminal or the discredited (such as the Klan)
serves white America well, for it allows it simultaneously to speak them and
disavow them. For Black America, however, the same voice rings not with dis
avowal but with truth. The Globe attributes beliefs about the Mafia frame to un
identified "friends" of O.J., and those friends can readily be seen as Black. In
this case, the voice that is marginalized by whites speaks from a more central
position in Black America, for although it may not be true, or provable, that
O.J. actually was framed by white extremists (the suspicion was voiced repeat
edly on an African American computer bulletin board), the motive for the al
leged framing is very much part of a broader truth that is explicit in Black
knowledge of contemporary race relations and repressed, though still active, in
the way that whites know them.
As the prosecution piled up the official evidence against O.J. and then
leaked it to the media, the popular support for him also gained ground. Out-
side the courthouse during the preliminary hearing, ten different T-shirts were
on sale, all of them supporting him, and the New York Times story on the on

X1X

Prologue

p
V1

Prologue

lookers quoted only those who still loved him and believed in his innocence.
This popular knowledge of O.J. relied sometimes on personal, deeply felt
experienceÑone woman said that by looking into his gentle eyes she was able
to tell that he could not have done itÑand sometimes on the social experience
of being a member of a subordinated social group, whether by race, gender, or
class, whose life experience had taught the wisdom of never believing what
"the power structure" says or trusting what it does. The O.J. affair became an
event that African Americans could use to remind themselves of the impor-
tance of maintaining their own racial identity and solidarity against the white
power structure's constant attempts to undermine them. Perris Clark, for in-
stance, was selling a T-shirt urging, "Turn the Juice Loose," and was careful to
explain to a New York Times reporter the difference between him and two other
vendors (whose shirt read, "Say it ain't so, O.J."): "They're just here for the
money, I'm trying to uplift my community" (New York Times, July 2, 1994, p.
20).
White America could use simple but powerful stereotypes to make its sense
of the interracial marriage, but in Black America the issue was fraught with
many more contradictions. Black nationalists used the racial difference be
tween O.J.'s wives (his first marriage was to an African American) to point to
the danger of "sleeping with the enemy" and to teach the value of separatism,
but also made the more moderate point that successful Black men were always
cut down by whites, whether justifiably or not, and that this case must be un
derstood as typical, not unique. Some Black women argued that, in light of the
shortage of "good" Black men, those who marry white women deprive their
race of a much-needed resource and contribute to the intraracial negation of
Black women. And one Black woman cried on the computer bulletin board,
"The media has another Black man to show the world as being a REPRESEN
TATION of ALL BLACK MEN. I HATE THAT !!!!" There was widespread, an
gry, and sad recognition among African Americans that white America's ob
session with the murder is a direct result of its racial dimension, and that if
O.J.'s first wife, a Black woman, had been the victim, the media coverage
would have been much more restrained. The racism perceived by these African
Americans lay not so much in the manner of the media coverage as in the ex
cessiveness of it and in America's fascination with it. But if, as in the Clarence
Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, Black America was much more conflicted than
white America in its response, there was still a general agreement that, what
ever the outcome of the trial, whites would win and Blacks would be set back.
The reality was that a white woman and a white man were murdered, that
her Black ex-husband, who was a sports and entertainment celebrity, was
charged with the crime, and that the events of his arrest did happen. But reality
does not contain its own meanings or its own politics, its events do not instruct
us to see them in the light of others, nor do those involved tell us how to make
sense of them. We do not merely make sense of a raw, neutral reality, but our

ability to perceive that reality, to get access to it at all, is part of the sense-mak-
ing process in which the media play a number of roles, roles that are significant
but not necessarily as all-determining as their critics often allege. TV stations
did decide to send seven news helicopters to cover O.J.'s chase and arrest, and
the networks did decide to interrupt their schedules to cover the events live.
Similarly, the preliminary hearing to determine if the prosecution had a prima
facie case were covered live by the networks (and in some markets, as many as
42 channels carried them). At their peak, the ratings surpassed those of Super
Bowl games, and even approached those for the Gulf War, perhaps the su-
preme media event everÑso far. These decisions were instrumental in chang-
ing the nature of the events into media events, but they were not arbitrary. In-
deed, it is possible to argue that the decisions were made not in the executive
offices of media corporations, but in the living rooms and bars of America. In

this scenario, the executives could claim to be merely mediating, that is, mak-
ing themselves and their technology into a two-way channel by which events
could be made known to the people and by which the people could influence
the selection of events that mattered, events that gave material form to the con-
cerns, interests, and anxieties that were already in social circulation. The mean-
ings generated in the multiple associations among the photos of the Black-
male-criminal, of interracial sex, and of the white woman's blood are all the
more powerful for being unspoken, and their cultural power lies not in any of
the photos themselves, or in their aggregation in the media, but in the way that
they make visible conflictual currents that normally run deep under the surface
of everyday life but that, in crises, erupt into high visibility to remind us that
any smoothness of that surface is both misleading and unstable. An event be-
comes a media event not at the whim of the media alone but also to the extent
that it gives presence to abstract cultural currents that long precede it and will
long outlast it.

For instance, of the ten most recent previous occasions on which the net-
works suspended schedules to carry live events, nine were presidentialÑ
either addresses by President Clinton or the death and funeral of former Pres-
ident NixonÑand the tenth was a natural disaster, an earthquake in Los
Angeles. None of the presidential events became media events. It is not the
media coverage alone that produces media events, but a coalition of interests
between the media and the public. It is important to make this point because,
although we must always maintain a critical eye, sometimes a sharply critical
one, upon the media, we must not shut the other one that should be turned
upon ourselves. What the media do is intimately bound up with who we are

both individually and socially. Time's blackening of O.J.'s mug shot deserves
fierce criticism, but our criticism of the social conditions out of which that de-
cision came and within which its results had their effect must be fiercer still.
Time's decision was not the product of a white supremacist conspiracy, but of a
market economy in a covertly racist society. The members of that society who

xxl

Prologue

xocil are well served by its covert racism are as responsible as Time's managing editor
for that decision. The cultural forces that made the O.J. affair, the Hill-Thomas
hearings, the Rodney King beating, and the L.A. uprisings into media events
are not confined to the media corporations, but are socially pervasive.
Although the media may not be solely responsible for turning events into
media events, all events that matter in a postmodern society must be multime-
diated, and the way we know them will always depend upon media technol-
ogy. Knowledge is a production of mediatech, and those who are media illit-
erate and technophobic will be cut off from producing it, from circulating it,
and from engaging in the struggles over it: in a mass-mediated culture they are
sidelined, and their voices bemoaning the loss of literacy grow fainter by the
year. As the police cruisers and helicopters "chased" O.J. along the freeways,
TV commentators and cameras in helicopters relayed the events over the air-
waves and cut to reporters on the ground who were monitoring police radio to
learn what was being said on cellular phones. People phoned friends and fam-
ily to tell them to watch the events on TV and to discuss what they were watch-
ing. Those with access to electronic bulletin boards swung into instant commu-
nication; talk radio received and broadcast calls by the thousands. Local people
watching the chase on TV went to O.J.'s house to be there at the showdown,
but took their portable TVs with them in the knowledge that the live event was
not a substitute for the mediated one but a complement to it. On seeing them-
selves on their own TVs, they waved to themselves, for postmodern people
have no problem in being simultaneously and indistinguishably livepeople and
mediapeople.
Like popular culture, the law, too, has lost any sense of a clear boundary
between the representation and the real, between the public opinion of a me-
diated society and the rational opinion of a courtroom. The trials of Anita Hill
and of Rodney King showed that truths established in the committee room or
the courtroom may not be accepted in this broader arena, and when they are
not it is hard to say which is the more powerful truth. Whose knowledge of
Rodney King was truerÑSouth-Central's or simi Valley's? Who knew Anita
Hill more accuratelyÑthe Senate Judiciary Committee, the white women of
America, or the African American community? As the lawyers for O.J.'s de-
fense and prosecution prepared first for the preliminary hearings and then for
the trial, they put into practice lessons learned from these previous trials and
hearings. They realized that the mediated court of public opinion could not be
kept cleanly separated from the "real" court of legal opinion, and that they had
to make their cases on the media as well as in the courtroom. In a postmodern
world, the jury no longer provides the objective, transcendent truth of the
"reasonable man"; now, a jury is representative not of human rationality, but
of its immediate society, and its truth cannot be separated from the ways in
which that society struggles to understand its own experience. The lawyers in
this case were savvier than their colleagues in the Anita Hill and Rodney King

Prologue

cases in recognizing that "jurytruth" cannot be separated from, or granted xxiii
hierarchical precedence over, "mediatruth."

The media do not just report and circulate knowledge, they are involved in
its production. Time and Newsweek were actively involved in producing a par-
ticular truth of O.J. by using his mug shot for their covers, and Time's blacken-
ing italicized it: the computer enhancement inclined the truth in the direction
of white racism. In the same way, the computer enhancement of the video of
Rodney King's beating was used by the defense to tilt its "truth" in the same
direction. The National Enqairer published a computer-produced "photograph"
of O.J. in the Bronco pointing a gun at his head and speaking into his car
phone, an image that only a computer could produce, for no camera could
have been present to take it. Yet this was not a "lie," but a mediatruth, whose
effect was not to italicize another mediatruth, such as the police mug shot, but
to extend mediatruth beyond the scope of the camera alone. Of the two com-
puter-produced photographs, the Enquirer's was the more skillfully postmod-
ern, for it clearly labeled itself a "computer artist's dramatization" and an "art-
ist's dramatic re-creation" duly 5, 1994, p. 27) and thus offered readers the

pleasure of seeing how mediatruth can be produced in a way that Time did not.
Tabloid readers are probably more mediatech savvy than Time's for they are
used to "composigraphs," or computer-manipulated photographs of, for in-
stance, what Elvis looks like today, or of a space alien offering advice to Bill
Clinton, and consequently they have become adept at controlling their own
movement between belief and disbelief in a way that Time's have not, for that
journal would never provoke its readers to disbelieve what it prints. The furor
over Time's cover was justified, and its managing editor was less than convinc-
ing in his claim that the "photo-illustration" (his term for a composigraph) was
free of racism and that it "lifted a common police mug shot to the level of art,
with no sacrifice to truth" duly 4, 1994, p. 4). Part of this statement, at least, is
accurate, if only unwittinglyÑtruth was not sacrificed, it was produced. To
participate fully in a postmodern culture, one has to be savvy to mediatech,
and Time does not appear to wish to help its readers to become so.
The women's movement, however, needed no lessons: its representatives
were as successful in using Nicole Simpson's murder to focus the nation's at-
tention upon wife battering as they had been in using Anita Hill's testimony to
turn it to sexual harassment. They appeared to meet remarkably little opposi-
tion: it was as though the media and the nation experienced a form of confes-
sional relief at being able to bring the "hidden crime" into the bright light of
public inspection. So paper after paper linked Nicole Simpson's death with
those of the 1,400 women murdered annually by their male partners, and took
pains not only to link her history of marital abuse to the half a million cases
brought before the authorities each year, but also, in an unusually confessional
mode, to cast their own role in covering up O.J.'s abusive relationship as symp-
tomatic of the more general cover-up by which America refuses to recognize
Prologue

xxiv

one of its most common crimes. Representatives of the men's movement also
seized the opportunity and publicized studies showing that domestic violence
is more often initiated by women than by men but that men do not report hus-
band battering, which consequently becomes a doubly hidden crime. The ea-
grness with which the media covered reports of spouse abuse played as a na-
tion's therapeutic confession, and the coverage often echoed the backlash
against the Republican "family values" campaign in the 1992 election, for it
consistently stressed that the most dangerous place for women is the home and
that the most threatening relations are marital.
For two days, the nation listened obsessively to a tape of a 911 call made by
Nicole Simpson nine months before she was killed, in which she pleads for po-
lice protection as O.J. can be heard beating her door down and yelling unintel-
ligibly. In a smart move in the public opinion war, the prosecution had released
the tape to the media. TV and radio replayed it endlessly, the press reprinted
transcripts, and some papers made it available to their readers, who could dial
a local number to listen to it whenever and as often as they liked. The tape pro-
vided a graphic and rarely experienced insight into the terror that battered
women experience. It also provided an insight into the legality of terrorizing,
for police explained that they could not arrest O.J. because he was simply beat-
ing down his ex-wife's door and threatening her verbally, neither of which are
crimes (a point that Rush Limbaugh repeated frequently on his right-wing ra-
dio talk show). Computer enhancement of the tapes clarified O.J.'s shouts and
enabled Rush Limbaugh, and the Globe (July 12, 1994), to hear that he had been
provoked by her extramarital sex, which, for Limbaugh at least, was enough to
justify his behavior.

The serious media discussed the statistics of spouse abuse and the failure of
courts and police to respond adequately, and interviewed representatives of
women's organizations and women's shelters. The tabloids took a different
tack, and surrounded their O.J. coverage with other stories of wife beating.
They made no explicit connections among the stories, but allowed their readers
to turn the pages and learn of spouse abuse involving celebrities such as Queen
Elizabeth, Mike Tyson, Elizabeth Taylor, Dolly Parton's sister, Whitney Hous-
ton, and Halle Berry. These revelations of the hidden lives of celebs were in-
terspersed with those of ordinary people, of truck drivers who admitted to wife
beating, and of women who had suffered it. It is hard to know which of the

different ways of establishing that spouse abuse is both widespread and widely
repressed is the more effective. Another difference between the high- and the
low-brow news was that the high was self-critical of its failure to pay adequate
attention to earlier reports of O.l.'s wife battering, and saw this as symptomatic
of society's more general repression of the crime. The tabloids, on the other
hand, congratulated themselves in screaming headlines for telling their readers
about the abuse that the rest of the media covered up. The National Enquirer, for
example, reprinted the headlines of its stories of O.J.'s wife battering from

Prologue

1989, 1991, and 1992, together with the words of Dr. Joyce Brothers: "If others
in the news business had done what the ENQUIRER didÑdigging hard five
years ago and exposing the awful truth about this football heroÑmaybe Nicole
would be alive today."

Women fought not only to get spouse abuse into the nation's consciousness,
but also to prevent Nicole Simpson from becoming the nonperson, whose
identity was confined to that of the woman-victim, in a replay of the way that
spouse abuse had become the noncrime. Who Nicole Simpson was received
very little attention in comparison with the excessively detailed accounts of
O.J.'s family and personal histories. Women were right to recognize the polit-
ical danger of this information vacuum, for there are early signs that it may be
filled with antiwomen information and that, like Anita Hill, Nicole Simpson
will be subject to attempts to turn her into someone who was responsible for
her own victimhood. There are reports that she took pleasure in provoking
O.J.Ñ"She knew how to rile him up, how to press the buttons," as one of his
friends put itÑand stories that she enjoyed dating young, brain-dead men,
and that O.J. had caught her having sex while the children were asleep in the
next room, but perhaps the most insistent was that she stayed with him be-
cause of his money and, by implication, voluntarily put up with his abuse in
exchange for the lifestyle he offered. The woman victim who thus consents to
her victimhood by putting and keeping herself in situations that maintain it fig-
ures centrally in the defense of men in gender trialsÑwhether for rape, spouse
abuse, or sexual harassment.

Both the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings and the first Rodney King
trial justified women's fears that this knowledge vacuum around Nicole simp-
son might be turned against her. The Republicans supporting Clarence
Thomas were successful in turning the focus of the hearings away from what
he did and onto who Anita Hill was. Similarly, the equally successful strategy
of the defense in the trial of the police officers charged with excessive force in
the beating of Rodney King was to redirect the court's attention away from
their actions and onto his. If O.J.'s defense does not adopt a similar strategy, or
fails in its attempt, it will be difficult to avoid concluding that the explanation
lies in the different races of the victims, and that the figure of the white woman
as target of the racial threat is so deeply engraved in the white imagination that
not even the nation's most expensive lawyers or its widespread blame-the-vic-
tim syndrome could dislodge it.

There is a possible downside to the nation's readiness to confess its failure to
deal with spouse abuse, for it may be evidence of a national relief at having
found a way of talking about the O.J. affair in a way that was socially respon-
sible but that excluded race. Mainstream America is much better equipped con-
ceptually and thus better prepared psychologically to address the shortcom-
ings in its gender politics than those in its racial politics. The gender relations of
the marriage could, therefore, be subject to explicit, careful, and thorough anal

xxv

Prologue

xxvi

ysis that faced America squarely with its problem and offered some hope that it
would be addressed. The racial dimension, however, was rarely subject, by
whites at least, to the same explicit analysis, and thus its dominant politics
were kept off the agenda for change and allowed to continue their insidious
and unseen work.

In focusing attention upon the gender rather than the racial politics of the
0.1. affair, the media and most of white America were repeating the pattern of
their initial responses to the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings. Mark
Kaufman, for instance, wrote a column for Hearst Newspapers in which he in
cisively analyzed a letter O.J. had written for public consumptlon as typical of
the ways in which wife abusers explain their behavior. Calling Simpson "a text
book wife batterer," Kaufman showed how the letter was "jam-packed with
many of the standard excuses and denials cherished by men who beat their
spouses," as a result of which he was able to delude himself that at times he felt
- like a battered husband or boyfriend. The article is an excellent analysis of how
America persuades itself that wife abuse is not really a problemÑthe only pity
is that no equivalent article asked the same questions about race. Similarly, the
week after they used O.J.'s police mug shot for their covers, both Time and
Newsweek devoted their covers and their lead stories to battered women and
argued, quite properly, that the Simpson case had focused America's attention
upon this problem as the Anita Hill case had focused it upon sexual harass
ment. Neither, however, devoted its lead story and cover of the subsequent
week to the racial issues involved, either at the personal level of interracial mar
riage or at the social level of race relations in general. The New York Times fea
tured an article by Michiko Kakutani analyzing "why we Sbll can't stop watch
ing O.J. on TV" duly 7, 1994, p. 10) that never once mentioned the racial
dimension but confined itself to the myth of the renegade on the run. Kakuta
ni's repression of race, however, was momentarily revealed by the way that her
reference to Norman Mailer's essay "The White Negro" mentioned only his be
lief that violence is often equated with virility and creativity and ignored the
racial issue that is apparent in the essay's btle. In the same way, the New York
Times article (cited above) on the onlookers outside the courtroom specified the
genders of those it quoted, but never their races. Time's managing editor did
the same thing when he justfied the computer manipulation of O.J.'s mug shot
by calling it art that "subtly smoothed and shaped [it] into an icon of tragedy.
The expression on his face was not merely blank now; it was bottomless. This
cover, with the simple, non-judgmental headline, 'An American Tragedy,'
seemed the obvious, right choice." His erasure of racial considerations from his
editorial decision-making process is typical of both the media and white soci
ety. The "race neutrality" that is claimed implicitly by his use of the term "non
judgmental" serves as an alibi for the white refusal to discuss race in ways that
might prevent covert racism continuing its work under the cover of this silence.
The media's failure to use the O.J. case as an opportunity to encourage white

Prologue

America to analyze and interrogate the forms that contemporary racism can
take is both instrumental in maintaining what I refer to later in this book as
"nonracist racism" and symptomatic of our self-delusion that racism was a his-
torical problem that has been largely solved by the civil rights movement.

The media coverage of the O.J. Simpson case was rarely overtly racist, but,
in a society as deeply if covertly racist as this one, it did not need to be for the
whole affair to widen the divide between the races. It is difficult to distinguish
between the "race neutrality" of not harping on O.J.'s Blackness and his wife's
whiteness from the "race blindness" that works to keep racism comfortably out
of sight by strategically not noticing it; racial blindness is a luxury of liberal
whites. The difficulties faced by the media can be illustrated by the way the
case seemed inevitably to associate Black masculinity with criminality. The
press and TV showed the mug shots and photos of O.J. under arrest or in
handcuffs. They would have been derelict not to. In their background stories

on O.J., the media told of his childhood in the ghetto, of his gang membership
and trouble with the law. Again, we should not criticize them for this, for they
showed how by talent and hard work he was able to rise above his beginnings
and live out the American dream. These are all events that should be reported

yet, when the reports reverberate with the submerged currents of covert rac-
ism, they can have a racist effect for which the media are only partially, if at all

responsible. The media did not, for example, explicitly rewrite the final pages
of O.J.'s story of the American dream to make it end in a form of essentialist
racism. Yet they also did nothing to counter such an ending's being supplied by
their readers; they allowed at least the right wing of white America to make
O.J. stand for all Black men and to read his downfall as the story of a racial
reversion to type. They expressed no regret at the neatness with which O.J. fit
the stereotype of the Black male, and thus allowed his case to reinforce it. More
seriously, perhaps, they ignored the existence of this stereotype in white
America, and thus lost the opportunity to explore its origin and effects. This is
a form of racism by omission rather than commission, for ignoring the stereo-
type is a white privilege in which African Americans cannot share.

Coincidentally, as the events of the O.J. affair were unfolding, the New York
Times featured an article in its color magazine by Leonce Gaiter in which he did
subject this stereotype to critical scrutiny. Writing as a member of the Black
bourgeoisie, he gave a number of instances of the stereotype's shaping painful
but ordinary incidents in his everyday life and concluded by begging the reader
to "imagine being told by virtually everyone that in order to be your true self
you must be ignorant and poor, or at least seem so" (New York Times, July 26,
sec. 6, p. 43). The article shows how the stereotype leads white America to
overlook and devalue the Black bourgeoisie, how it splits the Black community
by dividing the successful from the underclass, and how it perpetuates the lib-
eral racism that believes that Black America can be saved only by white help

xx'

Prologue

and that therefore interprets Black success as a sign not of Black ability but of
the effectiveness and benignity of white help.

This sort of analysis was never used in the media coverage of the O.J. affair
in an attempt to control any damage to race relations. We can, then, criticize
the media for race blindness, for their failure to address the issues that the O.J.
story inevitably raised in a racist society, and we can criticize them for their
failure to recognize that in such a society race-neutral reporting can trigger ra-
cially divisive meanings: they know that racism is active in the contemporary
United states, and the absence of any attempt to reduce or to prevent its acti-
vation in this case may, in its effects, have been as racist as Time's cover. But,
and this may be the most important point of all, we must not allow our criti-
cism of the media to turn into scapegoating, by which we can displace the sins
of ourselves onto our media and absolve ourselves of the criticisms that we all-
too-readily direct upon them. Our critical analysis must be directed at least as
intensely upon our own fascination with the 0.}. media event as on its media
provocation.

Introduction

Events and a Metaphor

In its review of 1992, Life called it "a year dominated by a presidential race, a
firestorm in L.A. and a single mom named Murphy."l The election of the pres-
ident of the United states and the costliest urban uprisings in this nation's
stormy history would conventionally be considered historic events, but the
birth of a baby to the unmarried heroine of a sitcom hardly appears, at first
sight, to be of the same order of significance. Yet, four months earlier, Time had
made the same editorial judgment.2 In May 1992, Murphy Brown's single
motherhood was thrust into political prominence when vice President Dan
Quayle identified it as symptomatic of the causes of the L.A. "riots" (see Side-
bar: Dan Quayle, p. 68). In August, the actress Candice Bergen won an Emmy
for her portrayal of Murphy Brown, and in her acceptance speech thanked the
vice president for helping her win it. Time used Murphy as the peg for a story
on the Republican attack on "Hollywood's liberal elite," and strained a simile
to bring the Los Angeles "riots" into the discussion: "The gang-stomping of
Dan Quayle at the Emmy Awards ceremony two weeks ago resembled a Rod-
ney King beating by the Hollywood elite."3

While viewing the unanimity of Time and Life with the skepticism appropri-
ate to the knowledge that Time, Life, and Murphy Brown are all owned by the
same company, 1, like they, view those events as key indices of a crisis in the
structure of feeling in the United states. Unlike periodicals, however, a book
does not need to confine itself to arbitrary periods such as a calendar year, so I
look back a little further than they, to the fall of 1991 and the Clarence Thomas-
Anita Hill hearings, as a result of which Clarence Thomas won a seat on the
U.S. Supreme Court and Anita Hill became a rallying point in the struggles of
women and African Americans toward equality.

This book charts some of the cultural currents as they swirled and eddied
around these "media events." That last phrase raises one of the questions that
runs throughout: Can we separate media events from nonmedia events, or are
all events today, or at least the ones that matter, necessarily media events? The

Introduction

2 editors of Life and Time made no editorial distinctions among the heroine of a
sitcom, major urban uprisings, and the election of the first Democrat president
in twelve years. Indeed, it could be argued that Murphy Brown's baby was
more directly influential in the social and political currents that put Bill Clinton
in the White House than were the L.A. uprisings, for the Democrats were al-
most as silent as the Republicans on the racial and economic problems of the
inner cities. As a media event, Murphy Brown's baby was as real as Anita Hill's
humiliation or Rodney King's beating.
Events do happen, but ones that are not mediated do not count, or, at least,
count only in their immediate locales. Rodney King's beating was a media
event. A few months after it, a Black motorist in Detroit, Malice Green, was
similarly beaten by cops until he died.4 His beating was not videoed, and
though it mattered intensely in its own immediate conditions, in the final anal-
ysis it counted for less than Rodney King'sÑand the difference lay in the me-
diation.
Anita Hill's (officially unproven but widely believed) sexual harassment by
her boss, Clarence Thomas, consisted of a few dirty remarks and pressure to
date; objectively, it was far less oppressive than that suffered by millions of
worEng women. Yet mediation made those remarks into the political volcano
of 1991 while far worse cases went ignored, except, of course, by their victims.
Murphy Brown may have been a fictional single mother, but her debate with
vice President Dan Quayle over "family values" in the 1990s was mediated by
press and TV across the nation, and the absence of any "real" (i.e., nonfic-
tional) event behind the mediated one did nothing to reduce the reality of the
media event that the debate became.
The term media event is an indication that in a postmodern world we can no
longer rely on a stable relationship or clear distinction between a "real" event
and its mediated representation. Consequently, we can no longer work with
the idea that the "real" is more important, significant, or even "true" than the
representation. A media event, then, is not a mere representation of what hap-
pened, but it has its own reality, which gathers up into itself the reality of the
event that may or may not have preceded it.
This use of the term brings it close to Baudrillard's ideas of hyperreality and
the simulacrum, both of which are "implosive" concepts. Implosion refers to the
collapse of the organizing differences that were characteristic of a stably struc-
tured world. So "hyperreality" implodes the binary concepts of reality and rep-
resentation into a single concept, and the simulacrum similarly merges the
"copy" with the "original," the "image" with its "referent." Baudrillardians
could argue with some conviction that the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hear-
ings were hyperreal: there were no "real" Senate hearings that television then
represented; the way that people behaved in them and the conduct of the hear-
ings themselves was televisual. Had there been no television, the hearings
would have been different. Their reality included their televisuality.

Introduction

Baudrillard's theory of hyperreality and the simulacrum lacks a dimension 3
that I consider crucial, that of struggle, and I turn to a theory of discourse to
supply it. Discourse is an elusive term, for it refers both to a general theoretical
notion and to specific practices within it. At the theoretical level, "discourse"
challenges the structuralist concept of "language" as an abstract system
(Saussure's langue) and relocates the whole process of maWng and using mean-
ings from an abstracted structural system into particular historical, social, and
political conditions. Discourse, then, is language in social use; language
accented with its history of domination, subordination, and resistance; lan-
guage marked by the social conditions of its use and its users: it is politicized

power-bearing language employed to extend or defend the interests of its dis-
cursive community.

Discourse analysis differs from linguistic analysis in focusing on what state-
ments are made rather than how they are. The discursive analyses of this book,
then, are not concerned with tracing the regularities and conventions of dis-
course as a signifying system, but with analyzing what statements were made
and therefore what were not, who made them and who did not, and with
studying the role of the technological media by which they were circulated.
Discourse can never be abstracted from the conditions of its production and
circulation in the way that language can. The most significant relations of any
piece of discourse are to the social conditions of its use, not to the signifying
system in general, and its analysis exemplifies not an instance of that system in
practice, but its function in deploying power within those conditions. At this
level, then, discourse is the means by which those conditions are made to make
sense within the social relations that structure them. It is structured and struc-
turing, for it is both determined by its social conditions and affects them. The
discourse of capitalism, for instance, is a product of capitalist societies, but the
form that the discourse is given shapes the present and future development of
them.

Discourse also operates at a lower level on which a number of discourses put
discourse-in-general into practice, and this is the level where it can be most
particularly analyzed. Here discourse has three dimensions: a topic or area of
social experience to which its sense making is applied; a social position from
which this sense is made and whose interests it promotes; and a repertoire of
words, images, and practices by which meanings are circulated and power ap-
plied. To make sense of the world is to exert power over it, and to circulate that
sense socially is to exert power over those who use that sense as a way of cop-
ing with their daily lives.

My account of discourse so far is deeply indebted to Foucault, but the ma-
terial complexities of the events in this book require me to go beyond his the-
orizing. He was concerned with the dominant discourses by which power was
applied in post-Renaissance Europe, but the contemporary United states is a
far more highly elaborated and socially diversified society than any that he

Introduction

4 studied, so its discursive circulation is more complicated, more contradictory,

and, in particular, more contestatory than the discourses that he analyzes. His
work describes discourse as a technique of power in a monodiscursive society.
The contemporary United states, however, like most late capitalist nabons, is a
multidiscursive society, as it is a multicultural one, and any analysis of its cul
ture must be as concerned with discursive relations as with discursive prac
tices. It must uncover the processes of discursive contestahon by which dis
courses work to repress, marginalize, and invalidate others; by which they
struggle for audibility and for access to the technologies of social circulation;
and by which they fight to promote and defend the interests of their respective
social formations.S

Here, and throughout this book, I use the prefix multi in opposition to forms

of the word plural in order to distinguish my perspective from that of liberal
pluralism (though I do use the word liberal, albeit with some reluctance, to refer
to the more progressive positions within mainstream society). Multidiscursiv
ity and multiculturalism do not exist within the permissive and ultimately con
sensual structure of differences that is envisioned by liberal pluralism. Domi
nant social formations and their discourses are constantly trying to control,
restrain, minimize, and even destroy social, and therefore discursive, differ
ences. The social diversity that is both the outcome and the origin of muludis
cursivity has to be fought for, sometimes viciously. Multidiscursivity can occur
only in a structure of inequality, and its interdiscursive relations are typically,
therefore, ones of hostility. For Foucault, also, discourse was a technique of
inequality, but it was not a terrain of Stl I uggle, whereas for me it can be
else: because discourse is a social product with political effects in a society of

inequalities, it always has the potential to be turned into a site of struggle.

The way that experience, and the events that constitute it, is put into

discourseÑthat is, the way it is made to make senseÑis never determined by
the nature of experience itself, but always by the social power to give it one set
of meanings rather than another. There is a nondiscursive reality, but it has no
terms of its own through which we can access it; it has no essential identity or
meaning in itself: we can access this reality only through discourse, and the
discourse that we use determines our sense of the real. Although discourse
may not produce reality, it does produce the instrumental sense of the real that
a society or social formation uses in its daily life. But though this nondiscursive
reality may never be accessible in its own terms and never has an essential
identity of its own, it nonetheless remains a necessary concept, for it reminds
us that any event can always be put into discourse differently. We can know an
event only by putting it into discourse, so an event is always continuous with
its discursive construction, but it still always contains the potential to be differ
ently constructed. This continuity between event and discourse produces a
"discourse event" or "media event," not a discourse about an event. No dis
course event is ever complete in itself but always carries braces of the other,

Introduction

competing, discourse events that it is not. No piece of reality contains its own
essential existence; equally, it cannot dictate the discourse into which it will be

put.

Racial difference is, for example, part of reality, but at the same time, its "re
ality" is a product of the discourse into which it is put. There is a discourse of
racism that advances the interests of whites and that has an identifiable reper
toire of words, images, and practices through which racial power is applied.
But we must remember that this is not the only way in which racial difference
can be put into discourse, though it is the dominant way in white supremacist
societies. At a lower level still, one that we might call a "subdiscourse" that

works through a subset of the discursive repertoire, we can trace its particular
application through, for instance, the animalization of Black men. Officers of
the Los Angeles Police Department described Rodney King as "bearlike," and
they referred to other African Americans as "gorillas." The blows of their trun
cheons were the same discursive repertoire put into behavior instead of words
(In the official discourse of the LAPD, however, these were not "blows" of
"truncheons," but "strokes" of "batons"). Discourse does not represent the

world; it acts in and upon the world.

Discourse, then, is always a terrain of struggle, but the struggle is never con

ducted on a level field. The dominant discourses, those that occupy the main
stream, serve dominant social interests, for they are products of the history
that has secured their domination. Discursive struggles are an inevitable part of
life in societies whose power and resources are inequitably distributed. They
can take as many forms as the ingenuity of the people can devise, but we can
catalog the main ones:

Tlle struggle to "accent" a word or sign, that is, to turn the way it is spoken
or used to particular social interests: The image of Murphy Brown hold
ing her baby awkwardly may, when "spoken" in a liberal accent
mean that mothering involves social skills that have to be learned
but, when "spoken" in the conservative accent of Rush Limbaugh

it means that single mothers are unnatural.

The struggle over the choice of word, image, and therefore discursive rep
ertoire: The events in Los Angeles could be put into discourse as "ri
ots" or "insurrection" ("uprising," "rebellion," "revolution"). Each
word has a set of appropriate images to go with it in a discursive
repertoire that makes a particular sense of the events that serves
particular social interests and that has particular material effects.
The "riot repertoire," for instance, is easily articulated with the dis
course of criminality, with the effect of using trials and punishment

of individual rioters/criminals as the way of resolving the crisis.

The struggle to recover the repressed or center the marginalized: A dis

Introduction

course produces its own meanings and represses others. The "fam-
ily values" discourse in which the argument between Murphy
Brown and Dan Quayle was conducted repressed or marginalized
issues of race and of sexual orientation, and the discourse of "sense-
less rioting" repressed the organization and political purpose be-
hind the attacks on businesses.

The struggle to disarticulate and rearticulate: Discourse not only puts
events into words or images, it also links, or articulates, them with
other events. By calling the hearings a "Iynching," Clarence
Thomas disarticulated them from gender behavior in the workplace
and rearticulated them to racist behavior in history and thus
changed their meanings. The mainstream media articulated ac-
counts of Brefighters being attacked by "rioters" with words and
meanings of them as public servants; Black Liberation Radio, how-
ever, articulated these accounts with instances of the tardiness of
white firefighters in responding to Bres in Black neighborhoods that
resulted in unnecessary deaths.

The struggle to gain access to public discourse in general or the media in
particularÑthe struggle to make one's voice heard: Some Black women
saw that Anita Hill was breaking their silence, and they fought to
use the opportunity to "speak" that she had opened up. African
Americans in Los Angeles used the uprisings as a form of loud pub-
lic speech, and exploited as far as they could the access to the media
they provided.

Discourse is the continuous process of making sense and of circulating it so-
cially. Unlike a simulacrum, discourse is both a noun and a verb, it is ever on
the move. At times it becomes visible or audible, in a text, or a speech, or a
conversation. These public moments are all that the discourse analyst has to
work on, but their availability does not necessarily equate with their impor-
tance: discourse continues its work silently inside our heads as we make our
own sense of our everyday lives. Though discourse is used privately and indi-
vidually, it remains inescapably social, so those who share discourse are likely
to form social and political alliances, for they will share broadly an understand-
ing of the world and the way that their interests can best be secured within it.

We use discourse, then, both to form our sense of the social world and to
form the relations by which we engage in it. In the realm of social relations,
discourse works through a constant series of invitations and rejections by
which it attempts to include certain social formations in its process and exclude
others. Discourse offers continuous but unequal opportunities for interven-
tion, and discursive guerrillas are key troops in any political or cultural cam-
paign.

Introduction

Discourse is socially rooted. It provides a social formation, or alliance of for- 7
mations, with ways of thinking and talking about areas of social experience
that are central in its life. The struggle over whose discourse events should be
put into is part of the reality of the politics of everyday life. The discursive pat-
terns of domination, subordination, and contestation are where the weaving of
the social fabric is politicized.

An informing metaphor of this book likens culture to a river of discourses.
At times the flow is comparatively calm; at others, the undercurrents, which
always disturb the depths under even the calmest surface, erupt into turbu-
lence. Rocks and promontories can turn its currents into eddies and counter-
currents, can change its direction or even reverse its flow. Currents that had
been flowing together can be separated, and one turned on the other, produc-
ing conflict out of calmness. There are deep, powerful currents carrying mean-

ings of race, of gender and sexuality, of class and age: these intermix in diff,er-
ent proportions and bubble up to the surface as discursive "topics," such as
"family values" or "abortion" or "Black masculinity," and these discursive
"topics" swirl into each otherÑeach is muddied with the silt of the others,
none can flow in unsullied purity or isolation. Media events are sites of maxi-
mum visibility and maximum turbulence. The hearings, the uprisings, and the
debate were such sites. They are useful to the cultural analyst because their tur-
bulence brings so much to the surface, even if it can be glimpsed only momen-
tarily. The discursive currents and countercurrents swirling around these sites
are accessible material for the analyst to work upon: from them s/he must the-
orize the flows of the inaccessible and invisible currents of meaning that lie
deep below the surface, and that will never be available for empirical study.
Their invisible movements and workings must be theorized from the visible,
because this inaccessible level typically carries the most signiBcant connections
between the points of visibility.

Like any metaphor, this one has limits. Within them it may be useful in rep-
resenting culture as the constant circulation and recirculation of discursive cur-
rents, in emphasizing their intermingling and the muddiness caused by silt
from one floating inevitably into the others. In describing the emergence and
submergence of discursive topics it recognizes that invisibility does not mean
absence. Finally, it invites us to think of fluidity, of constantly changing con-
formations that are not random, not free of topographical determinationsÑ
rivers do flow in certain directions and not others, they are confined within
limits, and certain social formations have privileged access to their banks and
their waters.

Here we begin to run up against the limits of the metaphor. The naturalness
of a river can imply an inevitability in flow and counterflows, can reduce media
events to tourist spectacles that people watch from the safe distance of specially
constructed viewing platforms (or media representations)Ñrisking only a
dousing with spray if the wind blows from the wrong direction. In other

)

Introduction

words, the river metaphor can reduce or even eliminate political intervention,
social agency, and discursive struggle. The topography of a river may be the
metaphoric equivalent of the structuring or determining social conditions
within which the processes of culture have to operate, but, unlike rivers in na
ture, cultural countercurrents and eddies are produced as much by motivated,
intentional, and interested interventions as by natural conditions such as rocky
outcrops or fallen trees. People build dams, sluice gates, and irrigation chan
nels in attempts to turn the flow of water to the advantage of their own social
formations, and away from the advantage of others.
Although the river metaphor may be useful in representing culture as the

constant process of discursive circulation, recirculation, and countercircula
tion, it is less effective in representing the struggles and contestations that are
the driving forces behind this process and that make it not natural but political,
not inevitable but directable, if only within limits.
A media event, then, as a point of maximum discursive visibility, is also a
point of maximum turbulence (in calm waters currents are mostly submerged).
It also invites intervention and motivates people to struggle to redirect at least
some of the currents flowing through it to serve their interests; it is therefore a
site of popular engagement and involvement, not just a scenic view to be pho
tographed and left behind. Its period of maximum visibility is limited, often to
a few days, though the discursive struggles it occasions will typically continue
for much longer.
As I write this in the spring of 1993, Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas are still
figures of contestation (this week's Newsweek has an article by George Will
claiming to unravel "Anita Hill's Tangled Web," and in doing so to reclaim
some of the ground that she and her supporters "won" from the right); the
repercussions of the L.A. uprisings show no signs of lessening their intensity
(last night I watched a PBS documentary on Los Angeles after the riots, the
second Rodney King verdict was handed down only a couple weeks ago and is
still the subject of wide discussion, and the trial at which Damian Williams and
the L.A. Four + were found not guilty of the main charges in the beating of
Reginald Denny is still a few months ahead); and with the loss of the election,
Dan Quayle has become less visibile, and the ripples of his debate with Mur
phy Brown are subsiding, but they have not died (the March issue of the At
lantic screamed in huge headlines on its cover, "Dan Quayle Was Right," and
the religious right is working hard to recover ground that it lost when Murphy
"won" the debate).

There are similarities between the metaphor of culture as a river of discur

sive currents and Raymond Williams's concept of a "structure of feeling," par
ticularly when set in his theory of dominant, residual, and emergent cultural
currents.6 He coined the phrase to refer to what it feels like to be a member of
a particular culture, or to live in a particular society at a particular time. It is a
necessarily diffuse concept, because it stretches seamlessly from the realm of

Introduction

the subject to that of the social order. It encompasses the formal political pro- 9

; cesses and institutions of a society, its law courts, its workplaces, its military,
its schools and churches, its health care system, as well as its more informal

X ones, such as the family and everyday social relations in its streets, stores, and
workplaces. It includes the arts and cultural industries, sports and entertain
' ment, and, at the micro level, the ordinary ways of talking, thinking, doing,
and believing. It is, then, a large and amorphous concept that fits well with
other concepts in his thought that appear so generalized as to be almost plati-
tudinous: "Culture is ordinary"; "Culture is a whole way of life."

There is both value and danger in thinking at this level of generality as well
as at the more detailed level on which most of this book operates. It is useful to

; be able to turn to a concept that enables us to ask whether living in the United
States under Clinton "feels" different from the experience of living here under
' Reagan or Bush. The notion of a structure of feeling asks us to trace ways in
which, for instance, the facts that the new surgeon general is a Black woman
who promotes condom distribution in schools and that the attorney general is
! ' a white woman who believes that the roots of crime are to be found in people's
' social conditions rather than in their morality might affect, if only indirectly
the "feeling" of "being American." It points to one possible dimension of the

fi difference between the verdict of the first Rodney King trial (the police found
not guilty) and the verdicts of three similar onesÑthe second Rodney King trial

' 0 (two policemen found guilty), the Malice Green trial (police found guilty), and
0 the Damian Williams trial (defendants found not guilty of the main charges).
These differences can be explained in part by differences in the legal strategies
; and skills of the lawyers, in part by local social conditions (the authorities in
- Detriot immediately condemned and suspended the officers involved in beat-
ing Malice Green, as their counterparts in L.A. did not), and in part by the so-
cial composition of the juries; but we might also wish to ask, at the highest level
of generality, where links do not exist in empirically traceable form, whether
what went on in the jurors' heads and what went on in the national electorate
were not in some way connected. If they were, the concept of a changing struc
0 ture of feeling allows us to theorize the connections. The change in adminis

' tration occupying the White House may be one indication of such a change, but
is neither the cause nor the effect of it. Changes in something as complex and
; diffuse as a structure of feeling do not occur along simple lines of cause and

" effect. Similarly, we must not take Clinton's electoral victory as a sign that the

I change has occurredÑit has not, though I believe one is in progress.

Change is not experienced or felt equally at all points in the structure, nor is
any change that is felt necessarily in the same direction. The danger of the no-
tion of a "structure of feeling" is that of homogenizing and universalizing, and
of smoothing over the struggles that go on within it. We may need to concep-
tualize it as an unstable aggregation of smaller-scale structures of feeling by
which different social formations relate differently to the larger one. Rush Lim

Introduction

baugh's conservative men "feel," for example, differently about their social
identities and positions than do Murphy Brown's "today's women" (see chap-
ter 1). ("Today's woman" was used by the vice president Isee Sidebar: Dan
Quayle, p. 69] to identify and denigrate a particular formation of womenÑ
those white professional ones whose liberalism he considered to be undermin-
ing "family values.") But though each social formation may experience the
general structure of feeling differently through their own differently structured
ways of "feeling American," each is still part of the same more general struc-
ture, and neither Rush Limbaugh's nor Murphy Brown's can be understood
from outside or experienced from within except in relation to the other.

Change also occurs at different speeds at different parts of the social struc-
ture, and meets differently solid reactionary forces. It is, thus, a messy ongoing
business, not a rapid revolutionary one. At any point, to return to our river
metaphor, certain currents may dominate the flow; others that once dominated
still carry residual traces of what they once were; and yet others that were
weakly confined to the margins or depths are gaining strength, and preparing
to emerge and challenge the dominant ones. The religious right and Rush Lim-
baugh are examples of strong residual currents, "today's woman" is a strong
emerging one, perhaps by now a dominant one, and each struggles with the
other to dominate the cultural flow. The Bush campaign overestimated the
strength of residual currents and, late in the day, tried unsuccessfully to swim
out of them: Clinton's campaign harnessed emergent currents such as those of
youth, or sexual orientation, and swam on them to the White House.
The media are crucial in the social circulation of discourse and thus play a
formative role in social and political change. But in general, our public discus-
sions of this role tend to be critical: at times they criticize the low level of po-
litical involvement of the average U.S. citizen and blame the media for it; at
others they charge the media with increasingly inadequate and superficial cov-
erage of political concerns, of excluding many issues of high political import
and of repressing minority or oppositional voices. AU of these charges are well
based, particularly when they are directed at the mainstream media's coverage
of foreign affairs, of economic policy, and, to a lesser extent, of activity in
Washington.
But these political arenas, important though they are, do not constitute the
whole of political life. There are other arenas (sometimes not recognized as po-
litical by media commentators and political scientists) that span the continuum
from subjectivity (the politics of identity) to social relations. These arenas in-
clude the intensely domestic politics of gender, race, class, and age that are
central in the politics of everyday life, and in them the mainstream media can-
not be charged with inactivity. Dan Quayle knew this when he attacked Mur-
phy Brown, and the Republicans knew this as they campaigned against "Hol-
lywood's liberal elite," which, in their eyes, was leading the nation away from
its traditional (i.e., Republican) values. They were correct in identifying the

Introduction

I centrality of the media in these "internal" politics, and correct in recognizing
I the connections between them and the official politics of Washington and the
! campaign trail. They were wrong, however, in modeling these connections as
I ones of cause and effect: Hollywood's alleged liberalism did not cause the Re
}s publicans' electoral defeat. But if Hollywood was more liberal than the Repub
lican party, and if its representations of liberal values had increased during the
! Reagan and Bush presidencies (an unproven assertion), and if the Blm and TV
industries had continued to prosper (an unarguable assertion, despite their nu
merous flops), then these conditions may be symptomatic of the fact that Hol
lywood was better able to swim with emergent currents in a changing structure
of feeling than was the Republican party.
In making this point, I do not wish to imply that the media are passiveÑfar
from it. The sitcom Murphy Brown was active in promoting and circulating the
discourse of "today's woman" and active in the choice of that discourse and the
rejection of others. But it did not originate that discourse: "today's woman"

would be part of today's social reality had Murphy Brown never existed, for the
sitcom's heroine "Bgured" a social and political identity that long preceded her
and will long outlast her. Murphy Brown strengthened the public presence of
that identity, inflected it in certain ways, and, in embodying it, made it more
powerful in people's imagination. Murphy Brown's popularity was not just the
result of the creative skills of her creator, Diane English, and her performer,
^_ .: ~ Bergen, but of their ability to give form and presence to a discursive
current and the social identity it produced.
This same current also produced Anita Hill and Hillary Rodham Clinton as
different figures of the same social identity, and the connections between Bg
ures such as these are some of the ways by which the internal politics of enter
tainment can flow into the external politics of voting. The political domains of
international affairs, the economy, and the internal politics of everyday life
swirl into each other in the general politics of a nation's structure of feeling.
This is why the media matter, for their alleged inadequacies in the Brst two are
more than compensated for by their incessant activity in the third.
There are conjunctural links among Murphy Brown's victory over Dan
Quayle in the "family values" debate (see chapter 1); Anita Hill's victory in the
public arena, despite Clarence Thomas's one in the Senate (see chapter 2); and
the fact that the majority of women voted for Clinton and men for Bush. I do
not wish to imply that there is a perfect match between program preferences in
the media and political preferences in the polling booth, but I do believe there
are significant overlaps. Political programs and media programs are both pro
duced within the same historical conditions, and similar currents can be traced
in the popularity, or unpopularity, of each. Politicians are like advertisers (and
therefore media producers) in that both need to get their messages to an audi
ence, at times the largest possible, at others, and increasingly, the most accu
rately targeted possible. So voting demographics do show patterned similari
Introduction

Introduction

ties to audience demographics. The same discourse will serve both political and
media personalities to push similar buttons in similar audiences, for discourse
is a feature of a social formation, not the invention of an individual, however
public or prestigious.
CNN described people's behavior during the L.A. uprisings: "At stores that
are looted, it's almost like a feeding frenzy, they pour in, grab what they want,
and run out.... it seems as each hour passes, the strength of the masses
growsÑpeople realize that they can get away with something, so they do" (see
Sidebar: LaMotte on the Spot, p. 179). Pat Buchanan, opening the Republican con-
vention, said, "The mob had burned and looted every building on the block
but one, a convalescent home for the aged. And the mob was headed in to ran-
sack and loot the apartments of the terriBed old men and women inside" (see
Sidebar: Buchanan, p. 56). The politician and the news reporter were using the
same discourse ("mobs" and "masses" out of control) to press the same panic
buttons in audiences with significant overlaps. Rush Limbaugh (see Sidebar:
Limbaugh on King, p. 131) and the defense lawyers defending the LAPD officers
used a similar discourse to prove that Rodney King's behavior caused the police
behavior, and that he directed his own beating. These are all examples of "top-
down" discourse: it was top-down discourse, too, that Dan Quayle used in his
"family values" debate with Murphy Brown. But Murphy's response put "fam-
ily values" into a discourse that spoke for and with those in the "nontradi-
tional" families that Quayle was attacking (see Sidebar: Murphy Brown's Re-
sponse, p. 72). Similarly, Oprah Winfrey allowed members of Buchanan's
"mob" to talk on her show (see Sidebar: Race and Class, p. 172) and thus con-
tested the top-down discourse of Buchanan and CNN. Both Murphy and
Oprah, of course, advance women's interests in a way that Buchanan and CNN
do not.
We might say, using Raymond Williams's terms, that the discourse of "to-
day's women" is carried by an emerging current pushing its way to the center
of the mainstream, whereas that of "yesterday's men" is being sidestreamed
into a residual one, and Rush Limbaugh speaks their dissatifaction. The voting
patterns in the 1992 election give some support to this idea. Clinton was sent to

the White House by women, by Blacks and Latino/as (with an exceptionally
strong endorsement from Black women), by first-time voters and young
people, by gays and lesbians, and by lower-income families. All of these
groups were, and still are, trying to emerge from the margins and the depths
into which Reaganism had pushed them, to claim places for themselves nearer
the center of the mainstream. The two major demographic groups that voted
for Bush, on the other hand, were white men and families from the two highest
income brackets. Smaller groups who supported him were white born-again
Christians (who gave him his strongest endorsement of all) and Asian Ameri-
cans. Only one-sixth of the voters considered that "family values" were impor-
tant, and only one-tenth thought abortion was. One-third, however, remem

bered Clarence Thomas and said that presidential nominations to the Supreme
Court were "very important" in determining their voteÑof these, half went for
Clinton, and only a third for Bush.7
Anyone who analyzes change while it is in progress and is foolish enough to
predict its direction must be prepared for history to prove him or her wrong. I
accept the risk, for I do believe that these four media eventsÑthe hearings, the
debate, the uprisings, and the electionÑwere sites where Americans struggled
to come to terms with, and to exert some influence on, the slow and messy
social changes that are inevitable as the United states transforms itself from a
society organized around a relatively homogeneous, Eurocentric consensus to
a more diverse, multicultural social order. These changes take place at all lev-
els, from the inexorable change in the demographics of our society, through far
more contested changes in the regime of power, to incomplete and uneven
changes in the structure of feeling. The process is painful but profound, and
the United states that emerges will feel very different to its citizens from the
United states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Underlying this book is the argument that, in the cultural struggles that
went on around these four media events, we can trace processes of change by
which older dominant currents were transformed into residual ones, and emer-
gent ones pushed up from the depths and in from the margins to challenge for
a place in the dominant. The events marked the right-wing extremity of the
electoral pendulum, and thus provoked a variety of social alliances to speak up
against, and eventually vote against, those who had swung it so far.
A change in a structure of feeling involves a change in the proportion of the
ingredients that constitute the cultural mix, a change in which of the currents
come to the surface and which are submerged. But not all currents change. In
the politics of age, gender, and sexuality we can trace visible changes: the elec-
tion put more women into Washington than ever before, Bill Clinton has put a
slew of women and non-Caucasians into powerful positions, and the White
House staff is younger and more ethnically diverse than previously. The chap-
ters in this book will trace some of the struggles, the gains and losses, that have
been part of these changes and the variety of fronts on which they have been
fought for and resisted. The White House and Washington, however, are not
the only sites of cultural and political activity, and in many ways are unlike oth-
ers. A change in administration is abrupt, complete, and visible. No other
change is. Most cultural currents are much muddier and any change in them
harder to discern. We must not allow the clarity of the change in administration
to misrepresent the muddiness of any changes that underlie it, nor its high vis-
ibility to magnify their extent. Changes in the structure of feeling are less clear,
more gradual, and more partial than changes in party government.

Not all currents change: there is, in these early days of the new administration
at least, less perceptible change in the currents of race. The strength of the Black
and Latino vote for Clinton appears to be more of a reaction against the overt rac

p
N

Introduction

ism of the Republicans than a response to a more positive plank in the Democrats'
platform. But less change does not mean less turbulenceÑfar from it. What it
means is that the insecurely dominant current of white supremacy has not yet
been changed into a residual one by the strongly emerging currents of multieth-
nicity, and that the turbulence as these currents contest each other's position will
be a constant and dangerous feature of our immediate future. Such mainstream
turbulence can erupt into violent uprisings such as those that took place in Los
Angeles. Other emerging currents seek different channels, such as Black Libera-
tion Radio, an illegal, micro-radio station serving a ghettoized African American
community in Springfield, Illinois (see chapters 4 and 5). This book is concerned
primarily with the mainstream, but what the mainstream carries depends in part
on what other, smaller side streams bear away on their own waters, so I will pay
considerable attention to what is said on Black Liberation Radio in order to illus-
trate what is not said in the mainstream media, and thus to highlight the limits of
what is. The currents in these side streams may well gain enough volume and mo-
mentum to disrupt the mainstream seriously at some point further down the river.
And that point may not lie too far ahead.

A Chronoloyy

Chronology, too, is based upon a metaphor of history as a river, though a far
calmer one than the river I have described. It simplifies by taking a topographical
view of the general direction of flow and ignoring the eddies and countercurrents.
As I believe that contemporary culture is characterized as much by contestations
and countercurrents as by a general flow, I have not organized this book chrono-
logically. Nonetheless, chronologies are helpful in mapping the terrain: whatever
the countercurrents between the events, Bush's nomination of Clarence Thomas
did lie upstream of his electoral defeat, and Rodney King was beaten by cops be-
fore Dan Quayle blamed Murphy Brown for the L.A. uprisings. Events did hap-
pen in temporal sequence, and here, in brief, it is.

1991

March

3 Rodney G. King, a Black motorist, is beaten by white Los Angeles
police officers. George Holliday, a resident of a nearby apartment, videotapes
the incident; his tape becomes the most widely replayed video of the year.

15 A Los Angeles County grand jury indicts Sergeant stacey C. Koon
and Officers Laurence M. Powell, Theodore J. Briseno, and Timothy E. Wind
on charges of excessive force in the beating of Rodney King.

16 Korean grocery store owner Soon Ja Du kills a fifteen-year-old Af-
rican American, Latasha Harlins, on suspicion of attempting to steal a bottle of

Introduction

orange juice. The incident is videotaped by the store's security camera and 15
shown on television throughout L.A.

April

1 In response to the beating of Rodney King, L.A. mayor Tom Bradley
appoints a commission, headed by former deputy secretary of state Warren
Christopher, to investigate the Police Department. (Christopher will later be-
come Clinton's secretary of state.)

June

27 Thurgood Marshall announces his retirement. He was the first Af-
rican American ever to serve on the Supreme Court and a leading civil rights
justice.

JUIV

1 President Bush nominates Clarence Thomas, forty-three, a Black
conservative federal appeals court judge, to replace Marshall. Thomas is soon
opposed by many civil rights and women's groups.

23 The state Second District Court of Appeal allows the trial of the po-
lice officers accused of beating Rodney King to be conducted outside Los An-
geles County.

Seplember

3-9 Discussions are held between Anita Hill and Democrat senators on
whether she will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about her sexual
harassment by Clarence Thomas ten years previously, when he was head of
the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission.

10-20 The Senate Judiciary Committee holds eight days of public hear-
ings on Thomas. He testifies for five days, followed by three days of outside
witnesses. By the end of these hearings, his confirmation is likely.

12-23 Hill and committee staff discuss making allegations about sexual
misconduct by Thomas. On September 23, Hill sends a "personal statement"
to the committee making the allegations.

27 Shortly before the committee is to vote on confirming Thomas's
nomination, several copies of Hill's statement are made available to committee
members. Two copies of the FBI report on their interview with Hill are left with
Biden and Thurmond, but none is distributed to the other members. To help
ensure confidentiality, the staff retrieves Hill's statement after the vote. It ap-
pears that not all members read all the materials, and some Republicans were
not even briefed. Chairman Biden and other committee members dismiss the
charges and decide not to make them public.
The Judiciary Committee splits, seven to seven, on whether to con-
firm Thomas. Six Republicans and one Democrat vote for Thomas. No mention

Introduction

is made of Hill's charges at the public meeting; opponents say Thomas is too
conservative and not qualified enough to get a life term on the high court. The
Thomas nomination goes to the Senate without recommendation.

October

1 Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (Dem.-Maine), who has
been told by Biden about Hill's allegations, gets unanimous agreement to begin
debate on the confirmation on October 3 and to vote on the nomination at 6 P.M.
On October 8.

3-4 Senate debate begins, with both supporters and opponents agree-
ing Thomas will be confirmed.

6 National Public Radio and New York Nnosdcy break the story of Hill's
allegations.

7 Hill gives a televised news conference in Oklahoma about her
charges; some senators and women's groups call for a delay in the vote, but
Mitchell says it will be held and Biden defends his handling of the allegations.

8 Thomas requests a delay in the Senate vote. His denial of the allega-
tions is made public. Pressure mounts throughout the day for a delay as several
Democrats say they will withhold their votes unless the charges are investi-
gated. Thomas releases an affidavit denying the charges. At 6 P.M., the vote is
put on hold, and at 8:15 P.M., Mitchell gets agreement to postpone the vote one
week so that the committee can investigate Hill's charges.

11 The hearings reopen, carried live on ABC, CBS, NBC, and C-SPAN.
Thomas appears first, denies the charges, and says his reputation has been ruined
by unfair proceedings; HiU then gives graphic testimony about sexual comments
that she says Thomas made to her about pornographic films starring Long Dong
Silver, his own sexual prowess, and a pubic hair on his can of Coke. Thomas re-
turns in the evening to call the hearings "a high-tech Iynching for uppity Blacks."

14 The committee finishes its hearing without reaching a conclusion
about whether Hill's charges are true. Biden says Thomas should get the ben-
efit of the doubt.

16 The Senate votes, 52-48, to confirm Clarence Thomas as associate
justice of the Supreme Court.

November

15 Judge Joyce Karlin sentences Soon Ja Du to pay a $500 fine and per-
form four hundred hours of community service for the voluntary manslaughter
of Latasha Harlins, and puts her on probation but not in prison.

26 Judge Stanley M. Weisberg chooses neighboring Ventura County as
the new venue for the trial of the officers charged with the beating of Rodney
King. The specific location will be simi Valley.

1992 17

March

4 Opening arguments are given before the jury in the trial of the offic

ers charged in the Rodney King beating. Ten jurors are white, one is Latina,
and one is Asian.

April

23 The case goes to the jury.

29 The jury is hung on one count against Mr. Powell and announces
verdicts of not guilty on all other charges. The L. A. uprisings begin. Reginald
Denny, a white truck driver, is pulled from his truck and beaten by Black

youths. The beating is videoed live by television cameras in a helicopter and by
a bystander on the ground.

30 The final episode of The Cosby Show is broadcast.

May

2 The uprisings die down.

19 Dan Quayle delivers a speech, "Restoring Basic Values," in which
he blames the L.A. "riots" upon the poverty of values exemplified by Murphy
Brown.

20-21 The media escalate Quayle's criticism of Murphy Brown.

July

16 Bill Clinton accepts the Democratic nomination for president at the
party's national convention in New York.

August
5 A federal grand jury indicts the four of ficers who beat Rodney King

on civil rights charges.

17-20 The Republican party holds its annual convention in Houston.
Its "backlash" politics stirs national interest and concern.

September

21 In the season premier of Murphy Brown, the character replies to Dan
Quayle and charges him with defining the family too narrowly.

November

3 Bill Clinton is elected president of the United states of America.

lgg3
January

20 Bill Clinton is sworn in as president of the United states of America.

Introduction

22 Zoe Baird, Clinton's nominee for attorney general, withdraws be-
cause she had employed an illegal alien as a child-care worker. Clinton lifts
Reagan-Bush restrictions on abortion.

26 28 Clinton's attempt to lift the ban on gays and lesbians serving in
the military runs into a firestorm of opposition.

hbrary

22 A federal jury made up of nine whites, two Blacks, and one Latino
is sworn in for the federal trial of the officers charged with violating Rodney
King's civil rights. The trial is held in Los Angeles County.

March

9 Rodney King testifies, offering his first courtroom account of the
beating.

April

17 The jury finds Officers Koon and Powell guilty. The other officers
are acquitted. There are no uprisings. Darnian Williams and the "L.A. Four +"
are still in custody awaiting trial for the beating of Reginald Denny and assaults
on others.

May

5 I write this chronology.8

Postscript: On October 20, Damian Williams was found not guilty of major
charges in the Denny beating, including attempted murder, but guilty of ag-
gravated mayhem and four misdemeanors, for which he was sentenced to ten
years in prison.

Before moving to the substance of the book, I wish to comment on the ob-
vious. I have written it from a position of privilege, for I am white, male, mid-
dle-class, and middle-aged. The issue of racial and gender identities is cur-
rently a hot one, and its temperature makes it difficult for someone positioned
as I to contribute to the debate without appearing to exploit his privileged so-
cial identity. I do not think that there is any generally agreed-upon "proper"
way by which one of the privileged can understand or write of the experiences
of those who are oppressed by the social axes that privilege him. Yet not at-
tempting to do so seems to me to be worse than doing so improperly, because
it would continue their erasure from the analytic as well as the political world.
I accept the inevitablity that I will blunder at times and offend some whom I
would dearly wish not to. To them I offer my apologies in advance, and ask
them to point out to me, hopefully not too antagonistically, where I went
wrong.

There are many Caucasian Americans who are keen to do whatever they can
to reduce racism, to mitigate its effects, and to learn how to avoid practicing it.

We are perplexed and angered to realize that, despite the civil rights move- 19
ment, despite antidiscrimination laws and affirmative action programs, the
United states has not reduced its racism, but has merely changed the forms by
which it is exerted. In this book I have tried to analyze some of the forms of
what I have called "nonracist racism" in the belief that understanding the prob-
lem is a necessary first step toward attacking it. But it is a step that we liberal
whites cannot take alone: those who daily experience the effects of racism can
see it more clearly than we, and any analysis of it must be informed by their

perceptions. The parts of this book that mean the most to me personally are
those that record my attempts to listen to and learn from subaltern voices, par-
ticularly African American ones: in writing it I am trying to relay those voices
further into white society. I hope that in citing and summarizing the voices of
the subaltern I have not given the impression that they cannot speak for them-
selves and need someone else to speak for them: that is manifestly and em-
phatically untrue. What is true, however, is that many who are situated com-
fortably within the power structure of this society are unwilling or unable to
listen to them. If I can use my position of privilege to open their ears and minds
to subaltern voices, I believe I will have used it responsibly. Similarly, my in-
terpretations of Black voices are for whites: I am not trying to tell African Amer-
icans about their own experiences, though they may find it interesting to see
what a white man makes of them and how he passes them onward. Any suc-
cess this book may have in increasing the social audibility and credibility of
their voices will be a comment on the powerful's inability to listen, not the sub-
altern's inability to speak.
ot S;: \ ;: j m:: s7:: 0 :

;

Jameson, Fredric. "Chapter 1: Reification and Utopia
in Mass Culture." Sicnatures of the V'sible. Routledge,
Chapman 8 Hall, 1990. Pages 9-34.

Reification And Utopia in
Mass Culture

The theory of mass cultureÑor mass audience culture, commercial
culture, "popular" culture, the culture industry, as it is variously
knownÑhas always tended to define its object against so-called high
culture without reflecting on the objective status of this opposition.
As so often, positions in this field reduce themselves to two mirror
images, which are essentially staged in terms of value. Thus the famil-
iar motif of elitism argues for the priority of mass culture on the
grounds of the sheer numbers of people exposed to it; the pursuit of
high or hermetic culture is then stigmatized as a status hobby of small
groups of intellectuals. As its anti-intellectual thrust suggests, this
essentially negative position has little theoretical content but clearly
responds to a deeply rooted conviction in American populism and
articulates a widely based sense that high culture is an establishment
phenomenon, irredeemably tainted by its association with institu-
tions, in particular with the university. The value invoked is therefore
a social one: it would be preferable to deal with tv programs, The
Godfather, or Jaws, rather than with Wallace Stevens or Henry James,
because the former clearly speak a cultural language meaningful to
far wider strata of the population that what is socially represented by
intellectuals. Populist radicals are however also intellectuals, so that
this position has suspicious overtones of the guilt trip; meanwhile it
overlooks the anti-social and critical, negative (although generally
not revolutionary) stance of much of the most important forms of
modern art; finally, it offers no method for reading even those cultural
objects it valorizes and has had little of interest to say about their
content.
This position is then reversed in the theory of culture worked out
by the Frankfurt School; as is appropriate for this exact antithesis of
the populist position, the work of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and
others is an intensely theoretical one and provides a working method

10 I Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture

ology for the close analysis of precisely those products of the culture
industry which it stigmatizes and which the radical view exalted.
Briefly, this view can be characterized as the extension and applica-
tion of Marxist theories of commodity reification to the works of mass
culture. The theory of reification (here strongly overlaid with Max
Weber's analysis of rationalization) describes the way in which, under
capitalism, the older traditional Eorms of human activity are instru-
mentally reorganized and itaylorized," analytically fragmented and
reconstructed according to various rational models of efficiency, and
essentially restructured along the lines of a differentiation between
means and ends. This is a paradoxical idea: it cannot be properly
appreciated until it is understood to what degree the means/ends split
effectively brackets or suspends ends themselves, hence the strategic
value of the Frankfurt School term zinstrumentalization" which use-
fully foregrounds the organization of the means themselves over
against any particular end or value which is assigned to their prac-
tice.' In traditional activity, in other words, the value of the activity
is immanent to it, and qualitatively distinct from other ends or values
articulated in other forms of human work or play. Socially, this meant
that various kinds of work in such communities were properly incom-
parable; in ancient Greece, for instance, the familiar Aristotelian
schema of the fourfold causes at work in handicraft or poeisis (mate-
rial, formal, efficient, and final) were applicable only to artisanal
labor, and not to agriculture or war which had a quite different "natu-
ral"Ñwhich is to say supernatural or divineÑbasis.2 It is only with
the universal commodification of labor power, which Marx's Capital
designates as the fundamental precondition of capitalism, that all
forms of human labor can be separated out from their unique qualita-
tive differentiation as distinct types of activity (mining as opposed to
farming, opera composition as distinct from textile manufacture),
and all universally ranged under the common denominator of the
quantitative, that is, under the universal exchange value of money.3
At this point, then, the quality of the various forms of human activity,
their unique and distinct "ends" or values, has effectively been brack-
eted or suspended by the market system, leaving all these activities
free to be ruthlessly reorganized in efficiency terms, as sheer means
or instrumentality.
The force of the application of this notion to works of art can be
measured against the definition of art by traditional aesthetic philoso-
phy (in particular by Kant) as a "finality without an end," that is, as
a goal-oriented activity which nonetheless has no practical purpose
or end in the "real world" of business or politics or concrete human
praxis generally. This traditional definition surely holds for all art

Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture 1 11

that works as such: not for stories that fall flat or home movies or
inept poetic scribblings, but rather for the successful works of mass
and high culture alike. We suspend our real lives and our immediate
practical preoccupations just as completely when we watch The God-
father as when we read The Wings of the Dove or hear a Beethoven
sonata.
At this point, however, the concept of the commodity introduces
the possibility of structural and historical differentiation into what
was conceived as the universal description of the aesthetic experience
as such and in whatever form. The concept of the commodity cuts
across the phenomenon of reificationÑdescribed above in terms of
activity or productionÑfrom a different angle, that of consumption.
In a world in which everything, including labor power, has become a
commodity, ends remain no less undifferentiated than in the produc-
tion schemaÑthey are all rigorously quantified, and have become
abstractly comparable through the medium of money, their respective
price or wageÑyet we can now formulate their instrumentalization,
their reorganization along the means/ends split, in a new way by

saying that, by its transformation into a commodity, a thing of what-
ever type has been reduced to a means for its own consumption. It no
longer has any qualitative value in itself, but only insofar as it can be
"used": the various forms of activity lose their immanent intrinsic
satisfactions as activity and become means to an end.
The objects of the commodity world of capitalism also shed their
independent "being" and intrinsic qualities and come to be so many I
instruments of commodity satisfaction: the familiar example is that
of tourismÑthe American tourist no longer lets the landscape "be in
its being" as Heidegger would have said, but takes a snapshot of it,
thereby graphically transforming space into its own material image.
The concrete activity of looking at a landscapeÑincluding, no doubt,
the disquieting bewilderment with the activity itself, the anxiety that
must arise when human beings, confronting the non-human, wonder
what they are doing there and what the point or purpose of such a
confrontation might be in the first place4Ñis thus comfortably re-
placed by the act of taking possession of it and converting it into a
form of personal property. This is the meaning of the great scene in
Godard's Les Carabiniers (1962-63) when the new world conquerors
exhibit their spoils: unlike Alexander, "Michel-Ange" and "Ulysse"
merely own images of everything, and triumphantly display their
postcards of the Coliseum, the pyramids, Wall Street, Angkor Wat
like so many dirty pictures. This is also the sense of Guy Debord's
assertion, in an important book, The Society of The Spectacle, that the
ultimate form of commodity reification in contemporary consumer

./
12 I Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture

society is precisely the image itself.5 With this universal commodifi-
cation of our object world, the familiar accounts of the other-directed-
ness of contemporary conspicuous consumption and of the sexualiza-
tion of our objects and activities are also given: the new model car is
essentially an image for other people to have of us, and we consume,
less the thing itself, than its abstract idea, open to all the libidinal
investments ingeniously arrayed for us by advertising.
It is clear that such an account of commodification has immediate
relevance to aesthetics, if only because it implies that everything in
consumer society has taken on an aesthetic dimension. The force of
the Adorno-Horkheimer analysis of the culture industry, however, lies
in its demonstration of the unexpected and imperceptible introduc-
tion of commodity structure into the very form and content of the
work of art itself. Yet this is something like the ultimate squaring
of the circle, the triumph of instrumentalization over that "finality
without an end" which is art itself, the steady conquest and coloniza-
tion of the ultimate realm of non-practicality, of sheer play and anti-
use, by the logic of the world of means and ends. But how can the
sheer materiality of a poetic sentence be "used" in that sense? And
while it is clear how we can buy the idea of an automobile or smoke
for the sheer libidinal image of actors, writers, and models with ciga-
rettes in their hands, it is much less clear how a narrative could be
"consumed" for the benefit of its own idea.
In its simplest form, this view of instrumentalized cultureÑand it
is implicit in the aesthetics of the Tel Quel group as well as in that
of the Frankfurt SchoolÑsuggests that the reading process is itself
restructured along a means/ends differentiation. It is instructive here
to juxtapose Auerbach's discussion of the Odyssey in Mimesis, and his
description of the way in which at every point the poem is as it were
vertical to itself, self-contained, each verse paragraph and tableau
somehow timeless and immanent, bereft of any necessary or indispen-
sible links with what precedes it and what follows; in this light it
becomes possible to appreciate the strangeness, the historical un-
naturality (in a Brechtian sense) of contemporary books which, like
detective stories, you read "for the end"Ñthe bulk of the pages becom-
ing sheer devalued means to an endÑin this case, the "solution" which
is itself utterly insignificant insofar as we are not thereby in the

real world and by the latter's practical standards the identity of an
imaginary murderer is supremely trivial.
The detective story is to be sure an extremely specialized form: still,
the essential commodification of which it may serve as an emblem
can be detected everywhere in the sub-genres of contemporary com

Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture 1 13

mercial art, in the way in which the materialization of this or that
sector or zone of such forms comes to constitute an end and a con-
sumption-satisfaction around which the rest of the work is then "de-
graded" to the status of sheer means. Thus, in the older adventure tale,
not only does the denouement (victory of hero or villains, discovery of
the treasure, rescue of the heroine or the imprisoned comrades, foiling
of a monstrous plot, or arrival in time to reveal an urgent message or
a secret) stand as the reified end in view of which the rest of the
narrative is consumedÑthis reifying structure also reaches down into
the very page-by-page detail of the book's composition. Each chapter
recapitulates a smaller consumption process in its own right, ending
with the frozen image of a new and catastrophic reversal of the situa-
tion, constructing the smaller gratifications of a flat character who
actualizes his single potentiality (the "choleric" Ned Land finally ex-
ploding in anger), organizing its sentences into paragraphs each of
which is a sub-plot in its own right, or around the object-like stasis of
the "fateful" sentence or the "dramatic" tableau, the whole tempo of
such reading meanwhile overprogrammed by its intermittent illustra-
tions which, either before or after the fact, reconfirm our readerly
business, which is to transform the transparent flow of language as
much as possible into material images and objects we can consume.6
Yet this is still a relatively primitive stage in the commodification
of narrative. More subtle and more interesting is the way in which,
since naturalism, the best-seller has tended to produce a quasi-mate-
rial "feeling tone" which floats about the narrative but is only intermit-
tently realized by it: the sense of destiny in family novels, for instance
or the "epic" rhythms of the earth or of great movements of "history"
in the various sagas can be seen as so many commodities towards
whose consumption the narratives are little more than means, their
essential materiality then being confirmed and embodied in the movie
music that accompanies their screen versions.' This structural differ-
entiation of narrative and consumable feeling tone is a broader and
historically and formally more significant manifestation of the kind
of "fetishism of hearing" which Adorno denounced when he spoke
about the way the contemporary listener restructures a classical sym-
phony so that the sonata form itself becomes an instrumental means
toward the consumption of the isolatable tune or melody.
It will be clear, then, that I consider the Frankfurt's School analysis
of the commodity structure of mass culture of the greatest interest;
if, below, I propose a somewhat different way of looking at the same
phenomena, it is not because I feel that their approach has been
exhausted. On the contrary, we have scarcely begun to work out all

14 I Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture

the consequences of such descriptions, let along to make an exhaustive
inventory of variant models and of other features besides commodity
reification in terms of which such artifacts might be analyzed.
^ What is unsatisfactory about the Frankfurt School's position is not
its negative and critical apparatus, but rather the positive value on
which the latter depends, namely the valorization of traditional mod-
ernist high art as the locus of some genuinely critical and subversive,
nautonomous" aesthetic production. Here Adorno's later work (as well
as Marcuse's The Aesthetic Dimension) mark a retreat over the former's
dialectically ambivalent assessment, in The Philosophy of Modern Mu-
sic, of Arnold Schoenberg's achievement: what has been omitted from
the later judgments is precisely Adorno's fundamental discovery of
the historicity, and in particular, the irreversible aging process, of the
greatest modernist forms. But if this is so, then the great work of
modern high cultureÑwhether it be Schoenberg, Beckett, or even
Brecht himselfÑcannot serve as a fixed point or eternal standard
against which to measure the Udegraded" status of mass culture: in-
deed, fragmentary and as yet undeveloped tendencies8 in recent art
productionÑhyper- or photo-realism in visual art; "new music" of the
type of Lamonte Young, Terry Riley, or Philip Glass; post-modernist
literary texts like those of PynchonÑsuggest an increasing interpene-
tration of high and mass cultures.
For all these reasons, it seems to me that we must rethink the
opposition high culture/mass culture in such a way that the emphasis
on evaluation to which it has traditionally given riseÑand which
however the binary system of value operates (mass culture is popular
and thus more authentic than high culture, high culture is autono-
mous and, therefore, utterly incomparable to a degraded mass cul-
ture) tends to function in some timeless realm of absolute aesthetic
judgmentÑis replaced by a genuinely historical and dialectical ap-
proach to these phenomena. Such an approach demands that we
read high and mass culture as objectively related and dialectically
interdependent phenomena, as twin and inseparable forms of the
fission of aesthetic production under capitalism. In this, capitalism's
third or multinational stage, however, the dilemma of the double
standard of high and mass culture remains, but it has becomeÑnot
the subjective problem of our own standards of judgmentÑbut rather
an objective contradiction which has its own social grounding.
Indeed, this view of the emergence of mass culture obliges us histori-
cally to respecify the nature of the "high culture" to which it has
conventionally been opposed: the older culture critics indeed tended
loosely to raise comparative issues about the "popular culture" of the
past. Thus, if you see Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, Don Quidote, still

Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture 1 15

widely read romantic Iyrics of the type of Hugo, and best-selling
realistic novels like those of Balzac or Dickens, as uniting a wide
"popular" audience with high aesthetic quality, then you are fatally
locked into such false problems as the relative valueÑweighed against
Shakespeare or even DickensÑof such popular contemporary auteurs
of high quality as Chaplin, John Ford, Hitchcock, or even Robert Frost,
Andrew Wyeth, Simenon, or John O'Hara. The utter senselessness
of this interesting subject of conversation becomes clear when it is
understood that from a historical point of view the only form of "high
culture" which can be said to constitute the dialectical opposite of .1
mass culture is that high culture production contemporaneous with
the latter, which is to say that artistic production generally designated
as modernism. The other term would then be Wallace Stevens, or
Joyce, or Schoenberg, or Jackson Pollock, but surely not cultural
artifacts such as the novels of Balzac or the plays of Moliere which
essentially antedate the historical separation between high and mass

culture.
But such specification clearly obliges us to rethink our definitions
of mass culture as well: the commercial products of the latter can
surely not without intellectual dishonesty be assimilated to so-called
popular, let alone folk, art of the past, which reflected and were depen-
dent for their production on quite different social realities, and were
in fact the "organic" expression of so many distinct social communi-
ties or castes, such as the peasant village, the court, the medieval
town, the polis, and even the classical bourgeoisie when it was still a
unified social group with its own cultural specificity. The historically
unique tendential effect of late capitalism on all such groups has been
to dissolve and to fragment or atomize them into agglomerations
(Cesetlschaften) of isolated and equivalent private individuals, by way
of the corrosive action of universal commodification and the market
system. Thus, the "popularn as such no longer exists, except under very
specific and marginalized conditions (internal and external pockets of
so-called underdevelopment within the capitalist world system); the
commodity production of contemporary or industrial mass culture
has nothing whatsoever to do, and nothing in common, with older
forms of popular or folk art.
Thus understood, the dialectical opposition and profound structural ~
interrelatedness of modernism and contemporary mass culture opens
up a whole new field for cultural study, which promises to be more
intelligible historically and socially than research or disciplines which
have strategically conceived their missions as a specialization in this
or that branch (e.g., in the university, English departments vs. Popular
Culture programs). Now the emphasis must lie squarely on the social

,,}
16 I Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture

and aesthetic situationÑthe dilemma of form and of a publicÑshared
and faced by both modernism and mass culture, but "solved" in anti-
thetical ways. Modernism also can only be adequately understood in
terms of that commodity production whose all-informing structural
influence on mass culture I have described above: only for modernism,
the omnipresence of the commodity form, not to be a commodity, to
devise an aesthetic language incapable of offering commodity satisfac-
tion, and resistant to instrumentalization. The difference between this
position and the valorization of modernism by the Frankfurt School
(or, later, by Tel Quet) lies in my designation of modernism as reactive,
that is, as a symptom and as a result of cultural crises, rather than a
new Usolution" in its own right: not only is the commodity the prior
form in terms of which alone modernism can be structurally grasped,
but the very terms of its solutionÑthe conception of the modernist
text as the production and the protest of an isolated individual, and
the logic of its sign systems as so many private languages ("styles") and
private religionsÑare contradictory and made the social or collective
realization of its aesthetic project (Mallarme's ideal of Le Livre can be
taken as the latter's fundamental formulation9) an impossible one (a
judgment which, it ought not to be necessary to add, is not a judgment
of value about the "greatness" of the modernist texts).
Yet there are other aspects of the situation of art under monopoly
and late capitalism which have remained unexplored and offer
equally rich perspectives in which to examine modernism and mass
culture and their structural dependency. Another such issue, for exam-
ple, is that of materialization in contemporary artÑa phenomenon
woefully misunderstood by much contemporary Marxist theory (for
obvious reasons, it is not an issue that has attracted academic formal-
ism). Here the misunderstanding is dramatized by the pejorative em-
phasis of the Hegelian tradition (Lukacs as well as the Frankfurt
School) on phenomena of aesthetic reificationÑwhich furnishes the
term of a negative value judgmentÑin juxtaposition to the celebration
of the "material signifiern and the "materiality of the text" or of ntex-
tual production" by the French tradition which appeals for its author-
ity to Althusser and Lacan. If you are willing to entertain the possibil-

ity that "reificationn and the emergence of increasingly materialized
signifiers are one and the same phenomenonÑboth historically and
culturallyÑthen this ideological great debate turns out to be based
on a fundamental misunderstanding. Once again, the confusion stems
from the introduction of the false problem of value (which fatally
programs every binary opposition into its good and bad, positive
and negative, essential and inessential terms) into a more properly
ambivalent dialectical and historical situation in which reification or

Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture I 17

materialization is a key structural feature of both modernism and
mass culture.
The task of defining this new area of study would then initially
involve making an inventory of other such problematic themes or
phenomena in terms of which the interrelationship of mass culture
and modernism can usefully be explored, something it is too early to
do here. At this point, I will merely note one further such theme,
which has seemed to me to be of the greatest significance in specifying
the antithetical formal reactions of modernism and mass culture to
their common social situation, and that is the notion of repetition.
This concepts, which in its modern form we owe to Kierkegaard, has
known rich and interesting new elaborations in recent post-structural-
ism: for Jean Baudrillard, for example, the repetitive structure of
what he calls the simulacrum (that is, the reproduction of "copies"
which have no original) characterizes the commodity production of
consumer capitalism and marks our object world with an unreality
and a free-floating absence of "the referent" (e.g., the place hitherto
taken by nature, by raw materials and primary production, or by
the "originals" of artisanal production or handicraft) utterly unlike
anything experienced in any earlier social formation.
If this is the case, then we would expect repetition to constitute
yet another feature of the contradictory situation of contemporary
aesthetic production to which both modernism and mass culture in
one way or another cannot but react. This is in fact the case, and one
need only invoke the traditional ideological stance of all modernizing
theory and practice from the romantics to the Tel Quel group, and
passing through the hegemonic formulations of classical Anglo-Ameri-
can modernism, to observe the strategic emphasis on innovation and
novelty, the obligatory break with previous styles, the pressureÑ
geometrically increasing with the ever swifter temporality of con-
sumer society, with its yearly or quarterly style and fashion changesÑ
to "make it new," to produce something which resists and breaks
through the force of gravity of repetition as a universal feature of
commodity equivalence. Such aesthetic ideologies have, to be sure,
no critical or theoretical valueÑfor one thing, they are purely formal,
and by abstracting some empty concept of innovation from the con-
crete content of stylistic change in any given period end up flattening
out even the history of forms, let alone social history, and projecting
a kind of cyclical view of changeÑyet they are useful symptoms for
detecting the ways in which the various modernisms have been forced,
in spite of themselves, and in the very flesh and bone of their form, to
respond to the objective reality of repetition itself. In our own time, the
post-modernist conception of a "text" and the ideal of schizophrenic

18 I Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture

writing openly demonstrate this vocation of the modernist aesthetic
to produce sentences which are radically discontinuous, and which
defy repetition not merely on the level of the break with older forms
or older formal models but now within the microcosm of the text
itself. Meanwhile, the kinds of repetition which, from Gertrude Stein
to Robbe-Grillet, the modernist project has appropriated and made
its own, can be seen as a kind of homeopathic strategy whereby the
scandalous and intolerable external irritant is drawn into the aes-
thetic process itself and thereby systematically worked over, "acted
out," and symbolically neutralized.
But it is clear that the influence of repetition on mass culture has
been no less decisive. Indeed, it has frequently been observed that
the older generic discoursesÑstigmatized by the various modernist
revolutions, which have successively repudiated the older fixed forms
of Iyric, tragedy, and comedy, and at length even "the noveln itself,
now replaced by the unclassifiable " livrea or " text"Ñretain a powerful
afterlife in the realm of mass culture. Paperback drugstore or airport
displays reinforce all of the now sub-generic distinctions between
gothic, best-seller, mysteries, science fiction, biography, or pornogra-
phy, as do the conventional classification of weekly tv series, and the
production and marketing of Hollywood films (to be sure, the generic
system at work in contemporary commercial film is utterly distinct
from the traditional pattern of the 1930s and 1940s production, and
has had to respond to television competition by devising new meta-
generic or omnibus forms, which, however, at once become new
"genres" in their own right, and fold back into the usual generic
stereotyping and reproductionÑas, recently, with disaster film or
occult film).
But we must specify this development historically: the older pre-
capitalist genres were signs of something like an aesthetic "contract"
between a cultural producer and a certain homogeneous class or
group public; they drew their vitality from the social and collective
status (which to be sure, varied widely according to the mode of
production in question) of the situation of aesthetic production and
consumptionÑthat is to say, from the fact that the relationship be-
tween artist and public was still in one way or another a social institu-
tion and a concrete social and interpersonal relationship with its
own validation and specificity. With the coming of the market, this
institutional status of artistic consumption and production vanishes:
art becomes one more branch of commodity production, the artist
loses all social status and faces the options of becoming a poete maudit
or a journalist, the relationship to the public is problematized, and the
latter becomes a virtual "public introuvable" (the appeals to posterity,

Reification and Utopia in Mass Cutture 1 19

Stendhal's dedication "To the Happy Few," or Gertrude Stein's re-
mark, nI write for myself and for strangers," are revealing testimony
to this intolerable new state of affairs).
The survival of genre in emergent mass culture can thus in no way
be taken as a return to the stability of the publics of pre-capitalist
societies: on the contrary, the generic forms and signals of mass cul-
ture are very specifically to be understood as the historical reappropri-
ation and displacement of older structures in the service of the qualita-
tively very different situation of repetition. The atomized or serial
"public" of mass culture wants to see the same thing over and over
again, hence the urgency of the generic structure and the generic
signal: if you doubt this, think of your own consternation at finding
that the paperback you selected from the mystery shelf turns out to
be a romance or a science fiction novel; think of the exasperation of
people in the row next to you who bought their tickets imagining that
they were about to see a thriller or a political mystery instead of
the horror or occult film actually underway. Think also of the much
misunderstood "aesthetic bankruptcy" of television: the structural

reason for the inability of the various television series to produce
episodes which are either socially "realisticn or have an aesthetic and
formal autonomy that transcends mere variation has little enough to
do with the talent of the people involved (although it is certainly
exacerbated by the increasing nexhaustion" of material and the ever-
increasing tempo of the production of new episodes), but lies precisely
in our nseta towards repetition. Even if you are a reader of Kafka or
Dostoyevsky, when you watch a cop show or a detective series, you
do so in expectation of the stereotyped format and would be annoyed
to find the video narrative making "high cultural" demands on you.
Much the same situation obtains for film, where it has however been
institutionalized as the distinction between American (now multina-
tional) filmÑdetermining the expection of generic repetitionÑand
foreign films, which determine a shifting of gears of the ahorizon of
expectations" to the reception of high cultural discourse or so-called
art films.
This situation has important consequences for the analysis of mass
culture which have not yet been fully appreciated. The philosophical
paradox of repetitionÑformulated by Kierkegaard, Freud, and oth-
ersÑcan be grasped in this, that it can as it were only take place "a
second time." The first-time event is by definition not a repetition of
anything; it is then reconverted into repetition the second time round,
by the peculiar action of what Freud called "retroactivity" [NachtrAg-
lichkeit]. But this means that, as with the simulacrum, there is no
"first time" of repetition, no "original" of which succeeding repetitions
20 / Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture

are mere copies; and here too, modernism furnishes a curious echo in
its production of books which, like Hegel's Phenomenology or Proust
or Finnegans Wake, you can only reread. Still, in modernism, the
hermetic text remains, not only as an Everest to assault, but also as
a book to whose stable reality you can return over and over again. In
mass culture, repetition effectively volatilizes the original objectÑ
the "test," the "work of artn_so that the student of mass culture has
no primary object of study.
The most striking demonstration of this process can be witnessed
in our reception of contemporary pop music of whatever typeÑthe
various kinds of rock, blues, country western, or disco. I will argue
that we never hear any of the singles produced in these genres "for
the first time"; instead, we live a constant exposure to them in all
kinds of different situations, from the steady beat of the car radio
through the sounds at lunch, or in the work place, or in shopping
centers, all the way to those apparently full-dress performances of the
aworka in a nightclub or stadium concert or on the records you buy
and take home to hear. This is a very different situation from the first
bewildered audition of a complicated classical piece, which you hear
again in the concert hall or listen to at home. The passionate attach-
ment one can form to this or that pop single, the rich personal invest-
ment of all kinds of private associations and existential symbolism
which is the feature of such attachment, are fully as much a function
of our own familiarity as of the work itself: the pop single, by means
of repetition, insensibly becomes part of the existential fabric of our
own lives, so that what we listen to is ourselves, our own previous
auditions .'¡
Under these circumstances, it would make no sense to try to recover
a feeling for the "original" musical text, as it really was, or as it might
have been heard "for the first time." Whatever the results of such a
scholarly or analytical project, its object of study would be quite
distinct, quite differently constituted, from the same "musical text"
grasped as mass culture, or in other works, as sheer repetition. The
dilemma of the student of mass culture therefore lies in the structural
absence, or repetitive volatilization, of the "primary texts"; nor is
anything to be gained by reconstituting a "corpus" of texts after the
fashion of, say, the medievalists who work with pre-capitalist generic
and repetitive structures only superficially similar to those of contem-
porary mass or commercial culture. Nor, to my mind, is anything

explained by recourse to the currently fashionable term of aintertextu-
ality," which seems to me at best to designate a problem rather than
a solution. Mass culture presents us with a methodological dilemma

Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture / 21

which the conventional habit of positing a stable object of commen-
tary or exegesis in the form of a primary text or work is disturbingly
unable to focus, let along to resolve; in this sense, also, a dialectical
conception of this field of study in which modernism and mass culture
are grasped as a single historical and aesthetic phenomenon has the
advantage of positing the survival of the primary text at one of its
poles, and thus providing a guide-rail for the bewildering exploration
of the aesthetic universe which lies at the other, a message or semiotic
bombardment from which the textual referent has disappeared.
The above reflections by no means raise, let alone address, all the
most urgent issues which confront an approach to mass culture today.
In particular, we have neglected a somewhat different judgment on
mass culture, which also loosely derives from the Frankfurt School
position on the subject, but whose adherents number "radicals" as
well as "elitists" on the Left today. This is the conception of mass
culture as sheer manipulation, sheer commercial brainwashing and
empty distraction by the multinational corporations who obviously
control every feature of the production and distribution of mass cul-
ture today. If this were the case, then it is clear that the study of mass
culture would at best be assimilated to the anatomy of the techniques
of ideological marketing and be subsumed under the analysis of adver-
tising texts and materials. Roland Barthes's seminal investigation of
the latter, however, in his Mythologies, opened them up to the whole
realm of the operations and functions of culture in everyday life; but
since the sociologists of manipulation (with the exception, of course,
of the Frankfurt School itself) have, almost by definition, no interest
in the hermetic or "high" art production whose dialectical interdepen-
dency with mass culture we have argued above, the general effect of
their position is to suppress considerations of culture altogether, save
as a kind of sandbox affair on the most epiphenomenal level of the
superstructure .
The implication is thus to suggest that real social lifeÑthe only
features of social life worth addressing or taking into consideration
when political theory and strategy is at stakeÑare what the Marxian
tradition designates as the political, the ideological, and the juridical
levels of superstructural reality. Not only is this repression of the
cultural moment determined by the university structure and by the
ideologies of the various disciplinesÑthus, political science and soci-
ology at best consign cultural issues to that ghettoizing rubric and
marginalized field of specialization called the "sociology of culture"Ñ
it is also and in a more general way the unwitting perpetuation of the
most fundamental ideological stance of American business society

22 / Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture

itself, for which "culture"Ñreduced to plays and poems and high-
brow concertsÑis par excellence the most trivial and non-serious
activity in the "real life" of the rat race of daily existence.
Yet even the vocation of the esthete (last sighted in the U.S. during
the pre-political heyday of the 1950s) and of his successor, the univer-
sity literature professor acknowledging uniquely high cultural "val-
ues," had a socially symbolic content and expressed (generally uncon-
sciously) the anxiety aroused by market competition and the
repudiation of the primacy of business pursuits and business values:
these are then, to be sure, as thoroughly repressed from academic
formalism as culture is from the work of the sociologists of manipula-
tion, a repression which goes a long way towards accounting for the
resistance and defensiveness of contemporary literary study towards
anything which smacks of the painful reintroduction of just that "real
life"Ñthe socio-economic, the historical contextÑwhich it was the
function of aesthetic vocation to deny or to mask out in the first place.
What we must ask the sociologists of manipulation, however, is
whether culture, far from being an occasional matter of the reading
of a monthly good book or a trip to the drive-in, is not the very element
of consumer society itself. No society, indeed, has ever been saturated
with signs and messages like this one. If we follow Debord's argument
about the omnipresence and the omnipotence of the image in con-
sumer capitalism today, then if anything the priorities of the real
become reversed, and everything is mediated by culture, to the point
where even the political and the ideological "levels" have initially to
be disentangled from their primary mode of representation which is
cultural. Howard Jarvis, Jimmy Carter, even Castro, the Red Brigade,
B. J. Vorster, the Communist "penetrationa of Africa, the war in Viet-
nam, strikes, inflation itselfÑall are images, all come before us with
the immediacy of cultural representations about which one can be
fairly certain that they are by a long shot not historical reality itself.
If we want to go on believing in categories like social class, then we
are going to have to dig for them in the insubstantial bottomless realm
of cultural and collective fantasy. Even ideology has in our society
lost its clarity as prejudice, false consciousness, readily identifiable
opinion: our racism gets all mixed up with clean-cut black actors on
tv and in commercials, our sexism has to make a detour through new
stereotypes of the "women's libber" on the network series. After that,
if one wants to stress the primacy of the political, so be it: until the
omnipresence of culture in this society is even dimly sensed, realistic
conceptions of the nature and function of political praxis today can
scarcely be framed.
It is true that manipulation theory sometimes finds a special place

Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture / 23

in its scheme for those rare cultural objects which can be said to have
overt political and social content: sixties protest songs, The Salt of
the Earth, (Biberman, 1954), Clancy Sigal's novels or Sol Yurick's,
Chicano murals, the San Francisco Mime Troop. This is not the place
to raise the complicated problem of political art today, except to say
that our business as culture critics requires us to raise it, and to
rethink what are still essentially thirties categories in some new and
more satisfactory contemporary way. But the problem of political
artÑand we have nothing worth saying about it if we do not realize
that it is a problem, rather than a choice or a ready-made optionÑ
suggests an important qualification to the scheme outlined in the first
part of the present essay. The implied presupposition of those earlier
remarks was that authentic cultural creation is dependent for its
existence on authentic collective life, on the vitality of the aorganicX
social group in whatever form (and such groups can range from the
classical polis to the peasant village, from the commonality of the
ghetto to the shared values of an embattled pre-revolutionary bour-
geoisie). Capitalism systematically dissolves the fabric of all cohesive

social groups without exception, including its own ruling class, and
thereby problematizes aesthetic production and linguistic invention
which have their source in group life. The result, discussed above, is
the dialectical fission of older aesthetic expression into two modes,
modernism and mass culture, equally dissociated from group praxis.
Both of these modes have attained an admirable level of technical
virtuosity; but it is a daydream to expect that either of these semiotic
structures could be retransformed, by fiat, miracle, or sheet talent,
into what could be called, in its strong form, political art, or in a
more general way, that living and authentic culture of which we have
virtually lost the memory, so rare an experience it has become. This s
is to iay that of the two most influential recent Left aestheticsÑthe
Brecht-Benjamin position, which hoped for the transformation of the
nascent mass-cultural techniques and channels of communication of
the 1930s into an openly political art, and the Tel Quel position which
reaffirms the "subversive" and revolutionary efficacy of language revo-
lution and modernist and post-modernist formal innovationÑwe
must reluctantly conclude that neither addresses the specific condi-
tions of our own time. J
The only authentic cultural production today has seemed to be that
which can draw on the collective experience of marginal pockets of
the social life of the world system: black literature and blues, British
working-class rock, women's literature, gay literature, the roman que-
becois, the literature of the Third World; and this production is possi-
ble only to the degree to which these forms of collective life or collec

~_
!
p
w

24 / Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture

tive solidarity have not yet been fully penetrated by the market and
by the commodity system. This is not necessarily a negative prognosis,
unless you believe in an increasingly windless and all-embracing total
system; what shatters such a systemÑit has unquestionably been
falling into place all around us since the development of industrial
capitalismÑis however very precisely collective praxis or, to pro-
nounce its traditional unmentionable name, class struggle. Yet the
relationship between class struggle and cultural production is not an
immediate one; you do not reinvent an access onto political art and
authentic cultural production by studding your individual artistic
discourse with class and political signals. Rather, class struggle, and
the slow and intermittent development of genuine class conscious-
ness, are themselves the process whereby a new and organic group
constitutes itself, whereby the collective breaks through the reified
atomization (Sartre calls it the seriality) of capitalist social life. At
that point, to say that the group exists and that it generates its own
specific cultural life and expression, are one and the same. That is, if
you like, the third term missing from my initial picture of the fate of
the aesthetic and the cultural under capitalism; yet no useful purpose
is served by speculation on the forms such a third and authentic type
of cultural language might take in situations which do not yet exist.
As for the artists, for them too "the owl of Minerva takes its flight at
dusk," for them too, as with Lenin in April, the test of historical
inevitability is always after the fact, and they cannot be told any more
than the rest of us what is historically possible until after it has been
tried.
This said, we can now return to the question of mass culture and
manipulation. Brecht taught us that under the right circumstances
you could remake anybody over into anything you liked (Mann ist
Mann), only he insisted on the situation and the raw materials fully
as much or more than on the techniques stressed by manipulation

theory. Perhaps the key problem about the concept, or pseudo-con-
cept, of manipulation can be dramatized by juxtaposing it to the
Freudian notion of repression. The Freudian mechanism indeed,
comes into play only after its objectÑtrauma, charged memory, guilty
or threatening desire, anxietyÑhas in some way been aroused, and
risks emerging into the subject's consciousness. Freudian repression
is therefore determinate, it has specific content, and may even be said
to be something like a "recognition" of that content which expresses
itself in the form of denial, forgetfulness, slip, mauvaise foi, displace-
ment or substitution.
But of course the classical Freudian model of the work of art (as of
the dream or the joke) was that of the symbolic fulfillment of the

Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture / 25

repressed wish, of a complex structure of indirection whereby desire
could elude the repressive censor and achieve some measure of a, to
be sure, purely symbolic satisfaction. A more recent arevision" of
the Freudian model, howeverÑNorman Holland's The Dynamics of
Literary ResponseÑproposes a scheme more use&l for our present
problem, which is to conceive how (commercial) works of art can
possibly be said to "manipulate" their publics. For Holland, the psy-
chic function of the work of art must be described in such a way that
these two inconsistent and even incompatible features of aesthetic
gratificationÑon the one hand, its wish-&lfilling &nction, but on the
other the necessity that its symbolic structure protect the psyche
against the frightening and potentially damaging eruption of power&l
archaic desires and wish-materialÑbe somehow harmonized and as-
signed their place as twin drives of a single structure. Hence Holland's
suggestive conception of the vocation of the work of art to manage this
raw material of the drives and the archaic wish or fantasy material.
To rewrite the concept of a management of desire in social terms now
allows us to think repression and wish-&lfillment together within the
unity of a single mechanism, which gives and takes alike in a kind of
psychic compromise or horse-trading; which strategically arouses
fantasy content within care&l symbolic containment structures
which de&se it, gratifying intolerable, unrealizable, properly imper-
ishable desires only to the degree to which they can be momentarily
stilled.
This model seems to me to permit a far more adequate account of
the mechanisms of manipulation, diversion, and degradation, which
are undeniably at work in mass culture and in the media. In particular
it allows us to grasp mass culture not as empty distraction or amerea
false consciousness, but rather as a transformational work on social
and political anxieties and fantasies which must then have some
effective presence in the mass cultural text in order subsequently to
be "managed" or repressed. Indeed, the initial reflections of the pres-
ent essay suggest that such a thesis ought to be extended to modernism
as well, even though I will not here be able to develop this part of the
argument further.ll I will therefore argue that both mass culture and
modernism have as much content, in the loose sense of the word, as
the older social realisms; but that this content is processed in all three
in very different ways. Both modernism and mass culture entertain n
relations of repression with the fundamental social anxieties and con-
cerns, hopes and blind spots, ideological antinomies and fantasies of
disaster, which are their raw material; only where modernism tends
to handle this material by producing compensatory structures of vari-
ous kinds, mass culture represses them by the narrative construction

p
w
oo

26 / Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture

of imaginary resolutions and by the projection of an optical illusion
of social harmony.
I will now demonstrate this proposition by a reading of three ex-
tremely successful recent commercial films: Steven Spielberg's Jaws
(1975) and the two parts of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather,
(1972, 1974). The readings I will propose are at least consistent with
my earlier remarks about the volatilization of the primary text in
mass culture by repetition, to the degree of which they are differential,
aintertextuallyD comparative decodings of each of these filmic mes-
sages.
In the case of Jaws, however, the version or variant against which
the film will be read is not the shoddy and disappointing sequels, but
rather the best-selling novel by Peter Benchly from which the filmÑ
one of the most successful box office attractions in movie historyÑ
was adapted. As we will see, the adaptation involved significant
changes from the original narrative; my attention to these strategic
alterations may indeed arouse some initial suspicion of the of ficial or
"manifest" content preserved in both these texts, and on which most
of the discussion of laws has tended to focus. Thus critics from Gore
Vidal and Pravda all the way to Stephen Heath'2 have tended to
emphasize the problem of the shark itself and what it represenls;
such speculation ranges from the psychoanalytic to historic anxieties
about the Other that menaces American societyÑwhether it be the
Communist conspiracy or the Third WorldÑand even to internal fears
about the unreality of daily life in America today, and in particular
the haunting and unmentionable persistence of the organicÑof birth,
copulation, and deathÑwhich the cellophane society of consumer
capitalism desperately recontains in hospitals and old age homes, and
sanitizes by means of a whole strategy of linguistic euphemisms which
enlarge the older, purely sexual ones: on this view, the Nantucket
beaches "represent" consumer society itself, with its glossy and com-
modified images of gratification, and its scandalous and fragile, ever
suppressed, sense of its own possible mortality.
Now none of these readings can be said to be wrong or aberrant,
but their very multiplicity suggests that the vocation of the symbolÑ
the killer sharkÑlies less in any single message or meaning that in its
very capacity to absorb and organize all of these quite distinct anxie-
ties together. As a symbolic vehicle, then, the shark must be under-
stood in terms of its essentially polysemous function rather than any
particular content attributable to it by this or that spectator. Yet it is
precisely this polysemousness which is profoundly ideological, insofar
as it allows essentially social and historical anxieties to be folded back

Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture 1 27

into apparently "natural" ones, both to express and to be recontained
in what looks like a conflict with other forms of biological existence
Interpretive emphasis on the shark, indeed, tends to drive all these
quite varied readings in the direction of myth criticism, where the
shark is naturally enough taken to be the most recent embodiment of
Leviathan, so that the struggle with it effortlessly folds back into
one of the fundamental paradigms or archetypes of Northrop Frye's
storehouse of myth. To rewrite the film in terms of myth is thus to
emphasize what I will shortly call its Utopian dimension, that is, its
ritual celebration of the renewal of the social order and its salvation,
not merely from divine wrath, but also from unworthy leadership.
But to put it this way is also to begin to shift our attention from the
shark itself to the emergence of the heroÑor heroesÑwhose mythic
task it is to rid the civilized world of the archetypal monster. That is,
however, precisely the issueÑthe nature and the specification of the

"mythic" heroÑabout which the discrepancies between the film and
the novel have something instructive to tell us. For the novel involves
an undisguised expression of class conflict in the tension between the
island cop, Brody (Roy Scheider), and the high-society oceanographer,
Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), who used to summer in Easthampton and
ends up sleeping with Brody's wife: Hooper is indeed a much more
important figure in the novel than in the film, while by the same token
the novel assigns the shark-hunter, Quint (Robert Shaw), a very minor
role in comparison to his crucial presence in the film. Yet the most
dramatic surprise the novel holds in store for viewers of the film will
evidently be the discovery that in the book Hooper dies, a virtual
suicide and a sacrifice to his somber and romantic fascination with
death in the person of the shark. Now while it is unclear to me how
the American reading public can have responded to the rather alien
and exotic resonance of this element of the fantasyÑthe aristocratic
obsession with death would seem to be a more European motifÑthe
social overtones of the novel's resolutionÑthe triumph of the islander
and the yankee over the decadent playboy challengerÑare surely
unmistakable, as is the systematic elimination and suppression of all
such class overtones from the film itself.
The latter therefore provides us with a striking illustration of a
whole work of displacement by which the written narrative of an
essentially class fantasy has been transformed, in the Hollywood prod-
uct, into something quite different, which it now remains to character-
ize. Gone is the whole decadent and aristocratic brooding over death,
along with the erotic rivalry in which class antagonisms were drama-
tized; the Hooper of the film is nothing but a technocratic whiz-kid,
28 I Reihcation and Utopia in Mass CUItUK

w
~o

no tragic hero but instead a good-natured creature of grants and
foundations and scientific know-how. But Brody has also undergone
an important modification: he is no longer the small-town island boy
married to a girl from a socially prominent summer family; rather,
he has been transformed into a retired cop from New York City,
relocating on Nantucket in an effort to flee the hassle of urban crime,
race war, and ghettoization. The figure of Brody now therefore intro-
duces overtones and connotations of law-and-order, rather than a
yankee shrewdness, and functions as a tv police-show hero transposed
into this apparently more sheltered but in reality equally contradic-
tory milieu which is the great American summer vacation.
I will therefore suggest that in the film the socially resonant conflict
between these two characters has, for some reason that remains to be
formulated, been transformed into a vision of their ultimate partner-
ship, and joint triumph over Leviathan. This is then clearly the mo-
ment to turn to Quint, whose enlarged role in the film thereby becomes
strategic. The myth-critical option for reading this figure must at once
be noted: it is indeed tempting to see Quint as the end term of the
threefold figure of the ages of man into which the team of shark-
hunters is so obviously articulated, Hooper and Brody then standing
as youth and maturity over against Quint's authority as an elder. But
such a reading leaves the basic interpretive problem intact: what can
be the allegorical meaning of a ritual in which the older figure follows
the intertextual paradigm of Melville's Ahab to destruction while the
other two paddle back in triumph on the wreckage of his vessel? Or,
to formulate it in a different way, why is the Ishmael survivor-figure
split into the two survivors of the film (and credited with the trium-
phant destruction of the monster in the bargain)?
Quint's determinations in the film seem to be of two kinds: first;
unlike the bureaucracies of law enforcement and science-and-technol-
ogy (Brody and Hooper), but also in distinction to the corrupt island
Major with his tourist investments and big business interests, Quint
is defined as the locus of old-fashioned private enterprise, of the indi-
vidual entrepreneurship not merely of small business, but also of local

businessÑhence the insistence on his salty Down-East typicality.
MeanwhileÑbut this feature is also a new addition to the very sche-
matic treatment of the figure of Quint in the novelÑhe also strongly
associates himself with a now distant American past by way of his
otherwise gratuitous reminiscences about World War II and the cam-
paign in the Pacific. We are thus authorized to read the death of Quint
in the film as the twofold symbolic destruction of an older AmericaÑ
the America of small business and individual private enterprise of a
now outmoded kind, but also the America of the New Deal and the

Reification and Vtopia in Mass Culture / 29

crusade against Nazism, the older America of the depression and the
war and of the heyday of classical liberalism
Now the content of the partnership between Hooper and Brody
projected by the film may be specified socially and politically, as the
allegory of an alliance between the forces of law-and-order and the
new technocracy of the multinational corporations: an alliance which
must be cemented, not merely by its fantasized triumph over the ill-
defined menace of the shark itself, but above all by the indispensable
precondition of the effacement of that more traditional image of an
older America which must be eliminated from historical conscious-
ness and social memory before the new power system takes its place.
This operation may continue to be read in terms of mythic archetypes,
if one likes, but then in that case it is a Utopian and ritual vision
which is also a wholeÑvery alarmingÑpolitical and social program.
It touches on present-day social contradictions and anxieties only to
use them for its new task of ideological resolution, symbolically urging
us to bury the older populisms and to respond to an image of political
partnership which projects a whole new strategy of legitimation; and
it effectively displaces the class antagonisms between rich and poor
which persist in consumer society (and in the novel from which the
film was adapted) by substituting for them a new and spurious kind
of fraternity in which the viewer rejoices without understanding that
he or she is excluded from it.
Jaws is therefore an excellent example, not merely of ideological
manipulation, but also of the way in which genuine social and histori-
cal content must be first tapped and given some initial expression if
it is subsequently to be the object of successful manipulation and
containment. In my second reading, I want to give this new model of
manipulation an even more decisive and paradoxical turn: I will now
indeed argue that we cannot fully do justice to the ideological function
of works like these unless we are willing to concede the presence
within them of a more positive function as well: of what I will call,
following the Frankfurt School, their Utopian or transcendent poten-
tialÑthat dimension of even the most degraded type of mass culture
which remains implicitly, and no matter how faintly, negative and
critical of the social order from which, as a product and a commodity,
it springs. At this point in the argument, then, the hypothesis is that
the works of mass culture cannot be ideological without at one and
the same time being implicitly or explicitly Utopian as well: they
cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine shred of content as
a fantasy bribe to the public about to be so manipulated. Even the
"false consciousness" of so monstrous a phenomenon of Nazism was
nourished by collective fantasies of a Utopian type, in "socialist" as

30 I Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture

well as in nationalist guises. Our proposition about the drawing power
of the works of mass culture has implied that such works cannot
manage anxieties about the social order unless they have first revived
them and given them some rudimentary expression; we will now
suggest that anxiety and hope are two faces of the same collective
consciousness, so that the works of mass culture, even if their function
lies in the legitimation of the existing orderÑor some worse oneÑ
cannot do their job without deflecting in the latter's service the deep-
est and most fundamental hopes and fantasies of the collectivity, to
which they can therefore, no matter in how distorted a fashion, be
found to have given voice.
We therefore need a method capable of doing justice to both the
ideological and the Utopian or transcendent functions of mass culture
simultaneously. Nothing less will do, as the suppression of either of
these terms may testify: we have already commented on the sterility
of the older kind of ideological analysis, which, ignoring the Utopian
components of mass culture, ends up with the empty denunciation of
the latter's manipulatory function and degraded status. But it is
equally obvious that the complementary extremeÑa method that
would celebrate Utopian impulses in the absence of any conception
or mention of the ideological vocation of mass cultureÑsimply repro-
duces the litanies of myth criticism at its most academic and aesthet-
icizing and impoverishes these texts of their semantic content at the
same time that it abstracts them from their concrete social and histori-
cal situation.
The two parts of the The Codfather have seemed to me to offer
a virtual textbook illustration of these propositions; for one thing,
recapitulating the whole generic tradition of the gangster film, it
reinvents a certainNmyth" of the Mafia in such a way as to allow us to
see that ideology is not necessarily a matter of false consciousness, or
of the incorrect or distorted representation of historical "fact," but
can rather be quite consistent with a "realistic" faithfulness to the
latter. To be sure, historical inaccuracy (as, e.g., when the fifties are
telescoped into the sixties and seventies in the narrative of Jimmy
Hoffa's career in the 1978 move, F.l.S.T.) can often provide a sugges-
tive lead towards ideological function: not because there is any scien-
tific virtue in the facts themselves, but rather as a symptom of a
resistance of the "logic of the content," of the substance of historicity
in question, to the narrative and ideological paradigm into which it
has been thereby forcibly assimilated.l3
The Godfather, however, obviously works in and is a permutation of
a generic convention; one could write a history of the changing social
and ideological functions of this convention, showing how analogous

Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture 1 31

motifs are called upon in distinct historical situations to emit strategi-
cally distinct yet symbolically intelligible messages. Thus the gang-
sters of the classical thirties films (Robinson, Cagney, etc.) were dram-
atized as psychopaths, sick loners striking out against a society
essentially made up of wholesome people (the archetypal democratic
"common man" of New Deal populism). The post-war gangsters of the
Bogart era remain loners in this sense but have unexpectedly become
invested with tragic pathos in such a way as to express the confusion
of veterans returning from World War II, struggling with the unsym-
pathetic rigidity of institutions, and ultimately crushed by a petty
and vindictive social order.
The Mafia material was drawn on and alluded to in these earlier
versions of the gangster paradigm, but did not emerge as such until
the late fifties and the early sixties. This very distinctive narrative
contentÑa kind of saga or family material analogous to that of the
medieval chansons de geste, with its recurrent episodes and legendary
figures returning again and again in different perspectives and con-
textsÑcan at once be structurally differentiated from the older para-

digms by its collective nature: in this, reflecting an evolution towards
organizational themes and team narratives which studies like Will
Wright's book on the western, Sttguns and Society, have shown to be
significant developments in the other sub-genres of mass culture (the
western, the caper film, etc.) during the 1960s.'4
Such an evolution, however, suggests a global transformation of
post-war American social life and a global transformation of the po-
tential logic of its narrative content without yet specifying the ideolog-
ical function of the mafia paradigm itself. Yet this is surely not very
difficult to identify. When indeed we reflect on an organized conspir-
acy against the public, one which reaches into every corner of our
daily lives and our political structures to exercise a wanton ecocidal
and genocidal violence at the behest of distant decision-makers and
in the name of an abstract conception of profitÑsurely it is not about
the Mafia, but rather about American business itself that we are think-
ing, American capitalism in its most systematized and computerized,
dehumanized, "multinational" and corporate form. What kind of
crime, said Brecht, is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding
of a bank? Yet until recent years, American business has enjoyed a
singular freedom from popular criticism and articulated collective
resentment; since the depolitization of the New Deal, the McCarthy
era and the beginning of the Cold War and of media or consumer
society, it has known an inexplicable holiday from the kinds of popu-
list antagonisms which have only recently (white collar crime, hostil-
ity to utility companies or to the medical profession) shown signs of
!

32 I Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture

reemerging. Such freedom from blame is all the more remarkable
when we observe the increasing squalor that daily life in the U.S.
owes to big business and to its unenviable position as the purest form
of commodity and market capitalism functioning anywhere in the
world today.
This is the context in which the ideological function of the myth of
the mafia can be understood, as the substitution of crime for big
business, as the strategic displacement of all the rage generated by
the American system onto this mirror image of big business provided
by the movie screen and the various tv series, it being understood that
the fascination with the Mafia remains ideological even if in reality
organized crime has exactly the importance and influence in Ameri-
can life which such representations attribute to it. The function of
the Mafia narrative is indeed to encourage the conviction that the
deterioration of the daily life in the United States today is an ethical
rather than economic matter, connected, not with profit, but rather
imerelyn with dishonesty, and with some omnipresent moral corrup-
tion whose ultimate mythic source lies in the pure Evil of the Mafiosi
themselves. For genuinely political insights into the economic reali-
ties of late capitalism, the myth of the mafia strategically substitutes
the vision of what is seen to be a criminal aberration from the norm,
rather than the norm itself; indeed, the displacement of political
and historical analysis by ethical judgments and considerations is
generally the sign of an ideological maneuver and of the intent to
mystify. Mafia movies thus project a "solutionw to social contradic-
tionsÑincorruptibility, honesty, crime fighting, and finally law-and-
order itselfÑwhich is evidently a very different proposition from that
diagnosis of the American misery whose prescription would be social
revolution.
But if this is the ideological function of Mafia narratives like The
Godfather, what can be said to be their transcendent or Utopian func-
tion? The latter is to be sought, it seems to me, in the fantasy message
projected by the title of this film, that is, in the family itself, seen as
a figure of collectivity and as the object of a Utopian longing, if not a
Utopian envy. A narrative synthesis like The Godfather is possible only

at the conjuncture in which ethnic contentÑthe reference to an alien
collectivityÑcomes to fill the older gangster schemas and to inflect
them powerfully in the direction of the social; the superposition on
conspiracy of fantasy material related to ethnic groups then triggers
the Utopian function of this transformed narrative paradigm. In the
United States, indeed, ethnic groups are not only the object of preju-
dice, they are also the object of envy; and these two impulses are
deeply intermingled and reinforce each other mutually. The dominant

Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture 1 33

white middle-class groupsÑalready given over to anomie and social
fragmentation and atomizationÑfind in the ethnic and racial groups
which are the object of their social repression and status contempt at
one and the same time the image of some older collective ghetto or
ethnic neighborhood solidarity- they feel the envy and ressentiment of
the Gesellschaft for the older Gemeinschaft which it is simultaneously
exploiting and liquidating.
Thus, at a time when the disintegration of the dominant communi-
ties is persistently "explained" in the (profoundly ideological) terms
of a deterioration of the family, the growth of permissiveness, and the
loss of authority of the father, the ethnic group can seem to project
an image of social reintegration by way of the patriarchal and authori-
tarian family of the past. Thus the tightly knit bonds of the Mafia
family (in both senses), the protective security of the (god-)father
with his omnipresent authority, offers a contemporary pretext for
a Utopian fantasy which can no longer express itself through such
outmoded paradigms and stereotypes as the image of the now extinct
American small town.
The drawing power of a mass cultural artifact like The Godfather
may thus be measured by its twin capacity to perform an urgent
ideological function at the same time that it provides the vehicle for
the investment of a desperate Utopian fantasy. Yet the film is doubly
interesting from our present point of view in the way in which its
sequelÑreleased from the restrictions of Mario Puzo's best-selling'
novel on which Part I was basedÑtangibly betrays the momentum
and the operation of an ideological and Utopian logic in something
like a free or unbound State. Godfather 11, indeed, offers a striking
illustration of Pierre Macherey's thesis, in Towards a Theory of Literary
Production, that the work of art does not so much express ideology as,
by endowing the latter with aesthetic representation and figuration
it ends up enacting the latter's own virtual unmasking and self-crit-
icism.
It is as though the unconscious ideological and Utopian impulses at
work in Godfatherl could in the sequel be observed to work themselves
towards the light and towards thematic or reflexive foregrounding in
their own right. The first film held the two dimensions of ideology and
Utopia together within a single generic structure, whose conventions
remained intact. With the second film, however, this structure falls
as it were into history itself, which submits it to a patient deconstruc-
tion that will in the end leave its ideological content undisguised and
its displacements visible to the naked eye. Thus the Mafia material
which in the first film served as a substitute for business, now slowly
transforms itself into the overt thematics of business itself, just as "in

34 I Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture

reality" the need for the cover of legitimate investments ends up
turning the Mafiosi into real businessmen. The climactic end moment
of the historical development is then reached (in the film, but also in
real history) when American business, and with it American imperial-
ism, meet that supreme ultimate obstacle to their internal dynamism
and structurally necessary expansion which is the Cuban Revolution.
Meanwhile, the utopian strand of this filmic text, the material of
the older patriarchal family, now slowly disengages itself from this
first or ideological one, and, working its way back in time to its
own historical origins, betrays its roots in the pre-capitalist social
formation of a backward and feudal Sicily. Thus these two narrative
impulses as it were reverse each other: the ideological myth of the
Mafia ends up generating the authentically Utopian vision of revolu-
tionary liberation; while the degraded Utopian content of the family
paradigm ultimately unmasks itself as the survival of more archaic
forms of repression and sexism and violence. Meanwhile, both of these
narrative strands, freed to pursue their own inner logic to its limits,
are thereby driven to the other reaches and historical boundaries of
capitalism itself, the one as it touches the pre-capitalist societies of
the past, the other at the beginnings of the future and the dawn of
socialism.
These two parts of The GodfatherÑthe second so much more demon-
strably political than the firstÑmay serve to dramatize our second
basic proposition in the present essay, namely the thesis that all
contemporary works of artÑwhether those of high culture and mod
l ernism or of mass culture and commercial cultureÑhave as their
underlying impulseÑalbeit in what is often distorted and repressed
unconscious formÑour deepest fantasies about the nature of social
life, both as we live it now, and as we feel in our bones it ought
rather to be lived. To reawaken, in the midst of a privatized and
psychologizing society, obsessed with commodities and bombarded
by the ideological slogans of big business, some sense of the ineradica-
ble drive towards collectivity that can be detected, no matter how
faintly and feebly, in the most degraded works of mass culture just as
surely as in the classics of modernismÑis surely an indispensable
precondition for any meaningful Marxist intervention in contempo-
rary culture.

(1979)

Pleasurable Negotiations 65

Pleasurable Negotiations

Christine Gledhill

This essay takes as its starting-point the recent renewal of feminist inter-
est in mainstream popular culture. Whereas the ideological analysis of
the late 1970s and early 1980s, influenced by post-structuralism and
cine-psychoanalysis, had rejected mainstream cinema for its production
of patriarchal/bourgeois spectatorship and simultaneous repression of
femininity, other approaches, developing in parallel, and sometimes in
opposition to, psychoanalytic theories argued for socio-culturally differ-
entiated modes of meaning production and reading.' Feminist analysis
has focused in particular on forms directed at women. While feminist
literary criticism recovers women's fiction - both Victorian and contem-
porary, written by women and/or for women, feminist work on film and
television has particularly explored the woman's film, melodrama and
soap opera.2 A frequent aim of this enterprise, which relates commonly
derided popular forms to the conditions of their consumption in the lives
of socio-historically constituted audiences, is to elucidate women's
cultural forms, and thereby to challenge the male canon of cultural
worth. In this respect, feminist analysis of the woman's film and soap
opera is beginning to counter more negative cine-psychoanalytic views
of female spectatorship.

Cine-psychoanalysis and Feminism

The theoretical convergence of psychoanalysis and cinema has been
problematic for feminism in that it has been theorised largely from the
perspective of masculinity and its constructions. Notions of cinematic
voveurism and fetishism serve as norms for the analysis of classic

narrative cinema, and early cine-psychoanalysis found it difficult to
theorize the feminine as anything other than 'lack', 'absence', 'other-
ness'. Underpinning these concepts lay the homology uncovered between
certain features of cinematic spectatorship and textual organization, and
the Oedipal psycho-linguistic scenario theorized by Jacques Lacan in
which the child simultaneously acquires identity, language and the
Unconscious.3 In this structure, the child's perception of sexual differ-
ence as the maternal figure's castration and the consequent repression of
this perception are linked to the similarly hidden role of phonological
nd linguistic difference in the operation of language and production of
meaning (it is the difference between 't' and 'd' that enables the forrn-
ation of different words, and the difference between 'sheep' and 'mut-
ton' that enables meaning to arise from such linguistic forms). This
homology between the psychic and the linguistic, it is argued, enables
the (male) child both to enter the symbolic order and to master
language. It also, however, results in the repression of femininity. Thus the
patriarchal subject is constructed as a unified, consistent, but illusory
identity - a 'self' whose words appear to give it control of a world to
vvhich it is central. (In this respect, the identity of the patriarchal subject
coalesces with the centrality of the 'individual' in bourgeois ideology.)
Underlying these constructs there exists another reality - language and
wbjectivity as processes that produce each other, ever in flux, and based
in linguistic and psychic 'difference'. Self, speech and meaning can never
coincide with each other and fail to provide more than the illusion of
mastery. For both bourgeois and patriarchal subjects, 'difference' -
gender, sex, class, race, age, and so on - is alienated as 'otherness' and
repressed. The repressed threatens to return, however, through the
processes of the 'Unconscious'.
According to cine-psychoanalysis, classic narrative cinema repro-
duces such psycho-linguistic and ideological structures, offering the
urface illusion of unity, plenitude and identity as compensation for the

underlying realities of separation and difference.4 The subject of main-
Beam narrative is the patriarchal, bourgeois individual: that unified,
centred point from which the world is organized and given meaning.
Narrative organization hierarchizes the different aesthetic and ideo-
logical discourses which intersect in the processes of the text, to produce
a unifying, authoritative voice or viewpoint. This is the position -
constructed outside the processes of contradiction, difference and mean-
ing production - which the spectator must occupy in order to participate
in the pleasures and meaning of the text.
Since in this argument narrative organization is patriarchal, the
spectator constructed by the text is masculine. Pleasure is largely organ-
iDed to flatter or console the patriarchal ego and its Unconscious.
66

Pleasurable Negotiations 67

Simultaneous sublimation and repression of femininity is literally re- a
enacted in the way plot and camera place the female figure in situations of s
fetishistic idealization or voyeuristic punishment. This has led to the argu- S
ment that female representations do not represent women at all, but are q
figures cut to the measure of the patriarchal Unconscious. In particular
the 'look' of the camera - mediated through the 'gaze' of a generally
male hero - has been identified as male.5 While these arguments have
attracted feminists for their power to explain the alternate misogyny and
idealization of cinema's female representations, they offer largely nega
tive accounts of female spectatorship, suggesting colonized, alienated or
masochistic positions of identification. Moreover, given the absorption
of class struggle within patriarchal narrative structures - the textual
spectator is a trans-class construct - this perspective has difficulty in
dealing with the female image or spectator in terms of class difference.
While the theoretical gap between textual and social subject may
seem unproblematic when considering male spectatorship - perhaps
because the account of the male spectator fits our experience of the
social subject - this distinction is crucial for feminist criticism,@"vith its
investment in cultural and political change for women in society. The
psycho-linguistic location of the feminine in the repressed semiotic
processes of signification leads to the advocacy of the 'feminine' avant
garde or the 'deconstructive' text as a means of countering the patri
archal mainstream. Such works, it is argued, counteract the power of the
classic narrative text to reduce the play of semiotic and sexual difference
to the 'fixed position' and 'identity' of the patriarchal subject. The avant
garde or deconstructive text foregrounds the means of its construction,
refuses stable points of identification, puts 'the subject into process' and
invites the spectator into a play with language, form and identity. The
more politically tendentious work literally 'deconstructs' the text, taking
it apart to expose the mechanisms of mainstream narrative.6 However,
such procedures do not, in my view, avoid the problems of positioning.
While the political avant-garde audience deconstructs the pleasures and
identities offered by the mainstream text, it participates in the comfort
ing identity of critic or cognoscente, positioned in the sphere of 'the
ideologically correct', and the 'radical' - a position which is defined by
its difference from the ideological mystification attributed to the
audiences of the mass media. This suggests that the political problem is
not positioning as such, but which positions are put on offer, or
audiences enter into.
Recent initiatives in feminist film theory - drawing on the work of
feminist psychoanalysts and social psychologists such as Luce Irigary,
Julia Kristeva, Nancy Chodorow and Dorothy Dinnerstein - have made
possible considerable revisions to the cine-psychoanalytic construction

of the classic narrative text, facilitating attempts to take account of the
'female spectator'.' However, as Annette Kuhn points out, this work
draws on theoretically divergent analytical approaches. 'Female spect-
atorship' elides conceptually distinct notions: the 'feminine spectator',
constructed by the text, and the female audience, constructed by the
socio-historical categories of gender, class, race, and so on.8 The ques-

tion now confronting feminist theory is how to conceive their
relationship.
One approach to the problem of their elision is to question the ident-
ification of mainstream narrative structures with patriarchal/bourgeois
ideology on which it is based. For while avant-garde practices may
produce a spectator 'fixed' in the avant-garde, recent work suggests that
the textual possibilities of resistant or deconstructive reading exist in the
processes of the mainstream text. To pursue this avenue, however, we
require a theory of texts which can also accommodate the historical
existence of social audiences. For 'femininity' is not simply an abstract '
textual position; and what women's history tells us about femininity
lived as a socio-culturally, as well as a psychically differentiated
category, must have consequences for our understanding of the form-;
ation of feminine subjectivity, of the feminine textual spectator and the
viewing/reading of female audiences. Work on women's cultural forms,
female audiences and female spectatorship poses this problem in acute
form.

Culture as Negotiation

Arguments which support the notion of a specific, socio-historically
constructed female cultural space come from diverse intellectual
contexts and traditions and do not yet form a coherent theory. A range
of concepts have been drawn on, including sub-cultural reading, cultural
competence, decoding position and so on. A notion frequently deployed
in various contexts is that of 'negotiation'.9 It is the purpose of this piece
to suggest that this concept might take a central place in rethinking the
relations between media products, ideologies and audiences - perhaps
bridging the gap between textual and social subject. The value of this
: notion lies in its avoidance of an overly deterministic view of cultural
0 production, whether economistic (the media product reflects dominant
economic interests outside the text), or cine-psychoanalytic (the text
constructs spectators through the psycho-linguistic mechanisms of the
patriarchal Unconscious). For the term 'negotiation' implies the holding
together of opposite sides in an ongoing process of give-and-take. As a
model of meaning production, negotiation conceives cultural exchange

as the intersection of processes of production and reception, in which
overlapping but non-matching determinations operate. Meaning is
neither imposed, nor passively imbibed, but arises out of a struggle or
negotiation between competing frames of reference, motivation and
experience. This can be analysed at three different levels: institutions,
texts and audiences - although distinctions between levels are ones of
emphasis, rather than of rigid separation.
A theory of 'negotiation' as a tool for analysing meaning production
would draw on a number of tenets of neo-Marxism, semiotics and
psychoanalysis while at the same time challenging the textual determin-
ism and formalism of these approaches in the ideological analyses of the
1970s. In place of 'dominant ideology' - with its suggestion either of
conspiratorial imposition or of unconscious interpellation - the concept
of 'hegemony', as developed by Antonio Gramsci, underpins the model
of negotiation. "' According to Gramsci, since ideological power in
bourgeois society is as much a matter of persuasion as of force, it is
never secured once and for all, but has continually to he re-established
in a constant to and fro between contesting groups. 'Hegemony
describes the ever shifting, ever negotiating play of ideological, social
and political forces through which power is maintained and contested.
The culture industries of bourgeois democracy can be conceptualized in
a similar way: ideologies are not simply imposed - although this possl-
bility always remains an institutional option through mechanisms such as
censorship - but are subject to continuous (re-)negotlation.

Inslitulional Negotiations

The economics and ideologies of the 'free market' produce a contra-
dictory situation which lays capitalist production open to the necessity of
negotiation. Terry Lovell argues that the search for new markets
requires new products, exchanged for a range of ever extending use-
values." But these values vary according to particular groups of users
and contexts of use. Even consumer products such as cars or washing-
machines, which might seem predictable and amenable to ideological
control (through advertising, for instance), may have unforeseen social
and cultural uses for specific social groups.'2 If this is true of consumer
products, then the use values of media texts (which lie in a complex of
pleasures and meanings operating at different levels - aesthetic,
emotional, ideological, intellectual) are far less easily predicted and
controlled. Thus the use-value to a particular group of a profitable (in the
short-term) media product may be in contradiction with the ideologies
which in the long term maintain capitalism. An obvious example of this

Pleasurable Negotiations 69

.
: :d
5 ~9

'.+
:

is the publishing industry, for certain branches of which Marxist and
feminist books make profitable commodities.
Negotiation at the point of production is not, however, simply a
matter of potential contradiction between the needs of the media indus-
tries and user groups. Within media institutions, the professional and
aesthetic practices of 'creative' personnel operate within different frame-
works from, and often in conflict with, the economic or ideological
purposes of companies and shareholders. Such conflict is, indeed, part
of the ideology of creativity itself. Aesthetic practice includes, as well as
formal and generic traditions, codes of professional and technical
performance, of cultural value and, moreover, must satisfy the pressure
towards contemporary renewal and innovation. These traditions, codes
and pressures produce their own conflicts which media professionals
must attempt to solve.
An example of the kind of negotiation provoked by the inherent
contradictoriness of the media industries is offered in Julie D'Acci's
chronicle of struggles over the American television series, Cagney and
Lacey, between CBS network executives and their advertisers, its
independent writing/producing team (two women friends, plus a
husband) and sections of the American women's movement.'3 Accord-
mg to D Acci, the series would not have originated without the public
spread of ideas circulated hy the women's movement - with which the
producing trio identified and which could be called on in times of
trouble to support the programme. What made the series saleable was
not its incipient 'feminism', hut the innovation of a female buddy pairing
In the cop show - an idea inspired by Molly Haskell's critique of the
1960s-1970s male buddy movie for its displacement of good female
roles. The series, however, despite successful ratings and an Emmy
award, had been under frequent threat of cancellation from CBS, in
large part, D'Acci argues, because of the problematic definitions of
'woman' and female sexuality that it invokes, particularly in relation to
the unmarried Christine Cagney, whose fierce independence and intense
relation to another woman has led to three changes of actress in an
effort to bring the series under control and reduce the charge of lesbian-
ism - something such strategies have singularly failed to do.

Textual Negotiations

The example of Cagney and Lacey suggests how the product itself
becomes a site of textual negotiation. Contradictory pressures towards
programming that is both recognizably familiar (that conforms to tradi-
tion, to formal or generic convention) and also innovative and realistic

$
am

f;
: ~c
f ~

-
-

.
Fj -:

15 ~
Q --
^t ^S
: :t

(offering a twist on, or modernizing, traditional genres) leads to complex
technical, formal and ideological negotiations in mainstream media
texts. For example, the decision by the makers of Cagney and Lacey to
ut a female buddy pair inside a cop series, as well as using gender
reversal to breathe new life into an established genre, immediately raises
sthetic and ideological problems. Conflicting codes of recognition are
demanded by the different generic motifs and stereotypes drawn into the
ies- the cop show, the buddy relationship, the woman s film, the
de ndent heroine. Moreover, the female 'buddy' relationship can be
'realistlcally' constructed only by drawing on the sub-cultural codes of
women's social intercourse and culture. Inside a soap opera, such codes
re taken for granted. Inside a police series, however, they have a range
of consequences for both genre and ideology. When female protagonists
have to operate in a fictional world organized by male authority and
riminality, gender conflict is inevitable. But the series could not evoke
uch gender conflict with any credibility if it did not acknowledge
discourses about sexism already made public by the women's movement
in America. Such discourses in their turn become an inevitable source of
drama and ideological explanation. The plotting of Cagney and Lacey is
itself made out of a negotiation, or series of negotiations, around defini-
tions of gender roles and sexuality, definitions of heterosexual relations
and female friendships, as well as around the nature of the law and

Crucial to such a conception of the text are the semiotic notions of
textual production, work and process. According to this perspective,
meanings are not fixed entities to be deployed at the will of a communi-
cator, but products of textual interactions shaped by a range of
economic, aesthetic and ideological factors that often operate uncon-
sciously, are unpredictable and difficult to control.

Reception as Negotiation

To the institutional and aesthetic vagaries of production is added the
frequent diminution of textual control at the third level of media analysis
- reception. The viewing or reading situation affects the meamngs and
pleasures of a work by introducing into the cultural exchange a range of
determinations, potentially resistant or contradictory, arising from the
differential social and cultural constitution of readers or viewers - by
class, gender, race, age, personal history, and so on. This is potentially
the most radical moment of negotiation, because the most variable and
unpredictable. Moreover we are not dealing with solitary viewers or
readers. Ien Ang and Janice Radway, writing respectively on soap opera

Pleasurable Negotiations 71

viewing and romance reading, discuss viewing and reading as a social
practice, which differs between groups and historical periods and sh
the meanings which audiences derive from cultural products. This line of
argument points beyond textual analysis, to the field of anthropological
and ethnographic work with 'real' audiences.'5
A frequent aim of this research is to rescue the female sub-cultural
activity, resistance and pleasure that may be embedded in popular
mainstream culture. However, to start from the perspective of audiences
and their putative pleasures is not without problems of its own. Such an
approach is open to charges of relativism - in other words, there is no
polnt to ideological analysis because meaning is so dependent on
variable contexts. Or it may be accused of populism - a media product
cannot be critiqued if audiences demonstrably enjoy it 16 Counter-
readings of popular texts often get caught up in arguments about
whether particular films or television programmes are 'progressive' or
'subversive'. And concern with the pleasures or identifications of actual
audiences seems to ignore the long-term task of overthrowing dominant
structures, within which resistant or emergent voices struggle on unequal
rms. In any case, it is often argued, capitalism cannot ignore the poten-
tial market represented by groups emerging into new public self-identity
and its processes invariably turn alternative life-styles and identities into
commodities, through which they are subtly modified and thereby
recuperated for the status quo. Thus the media appropriate images and
ideas circulating within the women's movement to supply a necessary
aura of novelty and contemporaneity. In this process, bourgeois society
adapts to new pressures, while at the same time bringing them under
control.'7 To such criticisms, cine-psychoanalysis adds the argument that
approaches from the perspective of the audience ignore the role of
language and the Unconscious in the construction of subjectivity, assum-
ing that external socio-economic or cultural determinations provide
material for the class or gender consciousness of otherwise free-thinking

To characterize cultural exchange between text and reader as one of
negotiation, however, does not necessitate a return to an economistic
new of language and cultural form as transparent instruments of subjec-
tive expression. The concept of negotiation allows space to the play of
unconscious processes in cultural forms, but refuses them an undue
determination. For if ideologies operate on an unconscious level through
tbe forms of language, the role of the 'other' in these processes is not
F passively suffered. The everyday working of argument and misunder-
standmg - in which contesting parties are positioned by, and struggle to
resist, the unarticulated, 'unconscious' meanings running through their
opponents' words, tones and gestures - demonstrates the extent to

Pleasurable Negotiations 73

which 'otherness' may be negotiated. In this process, such constraints
may become available to conscious understanding. A similar struggle
can be posited of cultural exchange. Language and cultural forms are
sites in which different subjectivities struggle to impose or challenge, to
confirm, negotiate or displace, definitions and identities. In this respect,
the figure of woman, the look of the camera, the gestures and signs of
human interaction, are not given over once and for all to a particular
ideology - unconscious or otherwise. They are cultural signs and there-
fore sites of struggle; struggle between male and female voices, between
class voices, ethnic voices, and so on.

Negotiation and Cultural Analysis

The value of 'negotiation', then, as an analytical concept is that it allows
space to the subjectivities, identities and pleasures of audiences. While
acknowledging the cine-psychoanalytic critique of the notion 'selflhood'
- of 'fixed' and centred identity - the concept of negotiation stops short
at the dissolution of identity suggested by avant-garde aesthetics. For if
arguments about the non-identity of self and language, words and mean- 1
ing, desire and its objects challenge bourgeois notions of the centrality
and stability of the ego and the transparency of language, the political
consequence is not to abandon the search for identity. As has been
frequently noted, social out-groups seeking to identify themselves
against dominant representations - the working class, women, blacks,
gays - need clearly articulated, recognizable and self-respecting self
images. To adopt a political position is of necessity to assume for the
moment a consistent and answerable identity. The object of attack
should not be identity as such but its dominant construction as total,
non-contradictory and unchanging. We need representations that take
account of identities - representations that work with a degree of fluidity
and contradiction - and we need to forge different identities - ones that
help us to make productive use of the contradictions of our lives. This
means entering socio-economic, cultural and linguistic struggle to define
and establish them in the media, which function as centres for the
production and circulation of identity.
However, knowledge of the instability of identity, its continual
process of construction and reconstruction, warns the cultural critic not
to look for final and achieved models of representation. Paradoxically,
cine-psychoanalytic arguments about ideological effects, in their
dependence on the centrality of language acquisition to the formation of
subjectivity, make the text a moment of 'fixation' in the process of cul-
tural exchange. Too frequently, cine-psychoanalytic analyses suggest

that to read a mainstream text, to 'submit' to its pleasures, is to take a
single position from which it can be read or enjoyed - that of the textual
(patriarchal) subject, bound into ideological submission. However such
analysis relies on a complete reading, on tracing the play of narrative
processes through to narrative closure, which it is assumed conclusively
ties up any ambiguity or enigmatic 'false' trails generated by the
processes of the text. Such textual analysis depends on total consump-
tion of the cultural product and merges with the economistic critique of
the spectator as passive consumer. Janice Radway, in her work on
romance reading, has pointed to the 'culinary fallacy' in the notion of
viewer as consumer - one who, meeting with the media product as a
discrete object, swallows it whole, an already textually processed pack-
age of the same order as a television dinner. It seems highly improbable
that cultural experiences are 'consumed' in quite this totalistic way. The
notion of 'process' suggests flux, discontinuities, digressions, rather than
fixed positions. It suggests that a range of positions of identification may
exist within any text; and that, within the social situation of their view-
ing, audiences may shift subject positions as they interact with the text
Such processes - far from being confined to the 'high art' or politicai

avant-garde work - are also a crucial source of cultural and formal
regeneration, without which the culture industries would dry up.
The complete reading - from narrative disruption, to enigma
development, to resolution - that arises from repeated viewings and
close analysis is the product of the critical profession and does not
replicate the 'raw' reading/viewing of audiences. The notion that the last
word of the text is also the final memory of the audience - a notion
frequently critiqued from Molly Haskell's account of classic romantic
comedy, onwards - derives more from the exigencies of the critical essay
than from the experience of films, which has no such neat boundaries. It
is this haphazard, unsystematic viewing experience, and its aftermath
that the cultural analyst must investigate if she/he wants to determine
the political effects of textual ideologies. The text alone does not provide
sufficient evidence for conclusions on such questions, but requires the
researches of the anthropologist or ethnographer.

Negotiation and Textual Criticism

This returns me to a final question concerning the role of textual critic-
ism in cultural analysis - a particularly pressing question in that I want to
go on to consider the film Coma as an example of textual negotiation
and do not have ethnographic skills. To limit the textual critic's authority
in the analysis of ideological effects need not, however, lead to critical
oo

relativism, passivity, nor even unemployment - even if it does mean that
textual analysis cannot alone determine the progressiveness or otherwise
of a particular work. Semioticians argue that while the majority of cul-
tural products are polysemic, they are not open to any and every inter-
pretation. Aesthetic constraints intersect with the institutional in
conscious or unconscious effort to contain or to open out the possibi-
lities of negotiation. By studying the history and forms of aesthetic prac-
tices, codes and traditions as they operate within institutions, by
studying narrative forms and genres, or the interpretative frameworks
and viewing habits suggested by ethnographic research, the textual critic
analyses the conditions and possibilities of reading.
Approached from this perspective, the cultural 'work' of the text
concerns the generation of different readings; readings which challenge
each other, provoke social negotiation of meanings, definitions and
identities. Cultural history demonstrates that changes in context can
render previous 'dominant' readings outmoded, enabling texts to be
restructured in preference for alternative readings. For example, film
criticism in the 1960s struggled to win 'commercial' Hollywood cinema
for 'art', a project rejected by the ideological concerns of the 1970s as
'bourgeois humanism'. While some films disappeared from view (for
instance, Fred Zinneman's social problem western, High Noon) others
were saved by a re-evaluation and re-reading of their textual operations
(John Ford's Young Mr Lincoln), and yet others were 'discovered' for
the critical canon (for instance, Douglas Sirk's family melodrama,
Written on the Wind).'8 In this respect criticism represents the profes-
sionalization of meaning production. The critic, attuned by training to
the semiotic and social possibilities of texts, produces sophisticated,
specialist readings. To the critical enterprise, ethnographic work contri-
butes knowledge of the network of cultural relations and interactions in
which texts are caught and which help shape their possibilities, suggest-
ing what they are capable of generating for different social audiences.
But the critical act is not finished with the 'reading' or 'evaluation' of a
text. It generates new cycles of meaning production and negotiation -
journalistic features, 'letters to the editor', classroom lectures, critical
responses, changes in distribution or publication policy, more critical
activity, and so on. In this way traditions are broken and remade. Thus
critical activity itself participates in social negotiation of meaning, defin~-
tion, identity. The circulation of the mainstream Hollywood film Coma
into the orbit of feminist debates about cinema offers a good example of

this interchange between general and specialized critical discourses. '~

Pleasurable Negotiations 75

Feminist Film Analysis

;

, .
. .

., ,
1
, .;.

1
\ X
. tS
A problem for feminist analysis is that it enters critical negotiation from
a specific political position, often beginning with the aim of distinguish-
ing 'progressive' from 'reactionary' texts. Yet, as we have seen, any
attempt to fix meaning is illusory. Moreover, the feminist project seeks
to open up definitions and identities, not to diminish them. While the
attempt to define the ideological status of texts may stimulate debate
such judgements also threaten to foreclose prematurely on critical and
textual negotiation. It is necessary, then, for feminist criticism to perform
a dual operation. In the first instance, the critic uses textual and context-
ual analysis to determine the conditions and possibilities of gendered
readings. The critic opens up the negotiations of the text in order to
animate the contradictions in play. But the feminist critic is also inter-
ested in some readings more than others. She enters into the polemics of
negotiation, exploiting textual contradiction to put into circulation read-
ings that draw the text into a female and/or feminist orbit. For example
Coma (Michael Crichton, 1977) was conceived, publicized and
discussed critically as a futuristic thriller exploiting public concern about
organ transplants. But the film also makes the central investigative
protagonist a woman doctor. This produces a series of textual negoti-
ations which are both ideologically interesting to feminists and a consid-
erable source of the film's generic pleasure. My analysis of the film is
partisan to the extent that it focuses on these considerations at the
expense of the issues of medical science.

Conditions and Possibilities of Textual Negotiation

A major issue for the analysis of textual negotiations is how 'textual' and
'social' subjects intersect in a cultural product; how the aesthetic and
fictional practices engaged by a particular text meet and negotiate with
extra-textual social practices; and, more specifically, how we can dis-
tinguish the patriarchal symbol of 'woman' from those discourses which
speak from and to the historical socio-cultural experience of 'women'.
It is my argument that a considerable source of textual negotiation
lies in the use by many mainstream film and television genres of both
melodramatic and realist modes.2" This dual constitution enables a text
to work both on a symbolic, 'imaginary' level, internal to fictional
production and on a 'realist' level, referring to the socio-historical world
outside the text. Thus two aesthetic projects may co-exist in the same
work. Popular culture draws on a melodramatic framework to provide
rchetypal and atavistic symbolic enactments; for the focus of

melodrama is a moral order constructed out of the conflict of
Manichaean, polar opposites - a struggle between good and evil,
personified in the conflicts of villain, heroine and hero. At the same time
such conflicts have power only on the premiss of a recognizable, socially
constructed world; the pressure towards realism and contemporaneity
means that a popular text must also conform to ever shifting criteria of
relevance and credibility.
If, however, melodramatic conflicts still have imaginative resonance
in twentieth-century culture, melodrama as a category is rejected for its
association with a discarded Victorianism - for its simplistically polarized
personifications of good and evil and 'feminized' sentimentalism. In
order, therefore, to find credible articulations of such conflict, which will
re-solicit the recognition of continually shifting audiences, current melo-
dramatic forms draw on those contemporary discourses which apportion
responsibility, guilt and innocence in 'modern' terms - psychoanalysis,
for example, marriage guidance, medical ethics, politics, even feminism.
The modern popular drama, then, exists as a negotiation between the
terms of melodrama's Manichaean moral frameworks and conflicts and
those contemporary discourses which will ground the drama in a recog-
nizable verisimilitude. These conditions of aesthetic existence ensure the
continuing renewal of popular forms, the generation of renewed use
values that will bring audiences back to the screen.
Gender representation is at the heart of such cultural negotiation. For
during a period of active feminism, of social legislation for greater sexual
equality and corresponding shifts in gender roles, gender and sexual
definitions themselves become the focus of intense cultural negotiation.
Central to such negotiation is the figure of woman, which has long
served as a powerful and ambivalent patriarchal symbol, heavily over-
determined as expression of the male psyche. But while film theory
suggests how narrative, visual and melodramatic pleasures are organized
round this symbol, feminist cultural history also shows that the figure of
woman cannot be fixed in her function as patriarchal value. The 'image
of woman' has also been a site of gendered discourse, drawn from the
specific socio-cultural experiences of women and shared by women,
which negotiates a space within, and sometimes resists, patriarchal
domination. At the same time new definitions of gender and sexuality
circulated by the women's movement contest the value and meaning of
the female image, struggling for different, female recognitions and ident-
ifications. When popular cultural forms, operating within a melo-
dramatic framework, attempt to engage contemporary discourses about
women or draw on women's cultural forms in order to renew their
gender verisimilitude and solicit the recognition of a female audience,
the negotiation between 'woman' as patriarchal symbol and woman as

:t 0':
:@ :0
. .

I
Pleasurable Negotiations 77
generator of women's discourse is intensified. While melodrama orches-
trates gender conflicts on a highly symbolic level to produce the clash of
identities that will adumbrate its moral universe, the codes of women's
discourse work in a more direct and articulate register to produce realist
and gendered recognitions. Arguably this is the terrain on which Coma
is grounded.

Coma: Woman-as-Victim versus Independent Heroine

The generic base of Coma is the suspense thriller, a melodramatic sub-
genre which involves a race against time between 'villain' and 'hero' -
the one to conceal and get away with, the other to solve and expose, a
criminal plot. In this case, a hospital provides the context for a futuristic
crime in which selected patients are deliberately put into and maintained
in coma, so that their organs can be auctioned to the highest bidder. The
villain, George Harrison, Chief of Surgery (Richard Widmark), has so
far got away with turning a public good into something sinister and evil -
not simply because of his power and cunning, but because the medical
world is shot through with ambition, careerism, politics and cynicism.
Read as melodrama, such a world requires a heroic protagonist who can
embody medical innocence and thereby confront and unseat the villain
through the force of natural ethical conviction. Given the function of
'woman' as symbol of moral value in melodrama, the film supports a
female rather than male doctor for this central role. For Dr Susan
Wheeler (Genevieve Bujold), helping people and the pursuit of medical
truth comes before any careerist or political consideration. In this
respect she occupies the typical role of the melodramatic heroine/victim
- whose perseverance to the end, against danger and public opinion,
leads to public recognition of the truth.2' Correspondingly, in order to
create narrative space for the heroine's activity, the 'good' male doctor
Mark Bellows (Michael Douglas), is cast in a role typical of the Vic-
torian melodramatic hero: supportive but impercipient and therefore a
hindrance rather than a help - until everything is explained and he leaps
in for the last-minute rescue.
In terms of textual negotiation, the issue is how this atavistic melo-
dramatic framework will renew itself as the basis of recognizable
contemporary conflict. In the first instance, Coma successfully regener-
ates and disguises this format in contemporary and controversial terms
by recourse to public debate about the ethics of organ transplants. It is
this drama which was the source of the director's interest in the film and
which has largely concerned mainstream critics.22 However, the deploy-
ment of a central female protagonist as upholder of 'truth', while

Pleasurable Negotiations 79

conforming to the demands of melodrama, produces problems on the
leve! of 'authentication'. In generic terms, the film must draw on the
'independent heroine' stereotype, established in screwball and romantic
comedies of the 1930s. However, 'independence' is not just a formal
attribute, but must be established in relation to current social definitions.
For an American movie, made in the late 1970s, and seeking to address a
white middle-class professional audience, contemporary reference is
inevitably supplied by the discourses on sexism and medical practice,
made publicly visible by the activity of the American women's move-
ment. At the same time, however, such reference, while giving the film a
'controversial' dimension, makes it also the subject of feminist debate -
giving rise to claims and counter-claims as to the film's progressiveness
or sexism. I want to explore the textual conditions which make both sets
of claims possible as part of a wider and continuing process of cultural
negotiation.

Medical Practice and Sexism

This process is entered at the film's opening which sets the terms of
narrative credibility, while at the same time preparing the audience for
the ensuing melodrama. In the first instance this means negotiating the
melodramatic 'woaian-as-victim' with a modem 'independent heroine'
stereotype. Contemporary discourses around sexism and medicine
contribute to the solution of this aesthetic problem. The film opens in a
teasingly ambiguous fashion. The establishment of Dr Susan Wheeler/
Genevieve Bujold attempts to suggest a female protagonist who
combines aspects of the typically 'feminine' with an equally recognizable
'new' independence. Bujold's physique and performance style is crucial
here: petite features and soft voice, combined with an obstinate lower
jaw and fractious manner. The characterization she offers is of a woman
both vulnerable and tough.
Our first encounter with Dr Wheeler is constructed to disturb expect-
ation both of the conventional and the feminist image of woman. She
offers an impersonal and mechanistically efficient run-down on the
condition of a middle-aged, visibly bewildered and abashed female
patient to a group of male students and their tutor. Susan's professional
competence is established in relation to the impersonal, male authority
of medical discourse, and the value of both thereby accrues a degree of
ambiguity. Our next encounter with Susan introduces her private life:
here the film must engineer a second ambivalence around Susan's heter-
osexuality, in order to confirrn Susan's 'femininity' and at the same time
motivate the marginalized role of the hero in the coming drama. For

this, the film draws on the estrangement produced by Susan's struggle
against sexism, both in her persona; and institutional relationships. In
the scene which introduces Mark Bellows/Michael Douglas, convention
is once more disturbed, as Susan ungraciously resists - in phrases of
women's movement discourse - her lover's claim that the burdens of
his day entitle him to first call on her attention and the shower. The
situation has a touch of the screwball exchange, except that her serious-
ness and ill-humour allow little space in which to preserve the hero's
self-esteem.
This context of struggle, defined by sexism, is continued the following
day when, after her previous evening's departure (provoked by Mark's
unwillingness to start dinner), Susan insists that her aerobics class take
precedence over his hopes for a conciliatory lunch. A further element
in the struggle is introduced here, in that she attends an all-woman class
with her closest friend, Nancy, with whom she shares a brief exchange
about the difficulties of relating to Mark. This sketch of an alternative
female world, to which Susan gives considerable priority - activity with

women, insistence on a space for personal relaxation, female friendship
as against the rigours and problems of the workplace with which the
heterosexual relationship is aligned - draws on the oppositional stance
of the women's movement in a way that both gives the film contempor-
aneity and contributes motivation to the melodramatic heroine's pursuit
of the truth underlying the plot that is about to unfold.
The needs of contemporaneity and melodrama are drawn together in
the following parallel sequences, during which Nancy undergoes the
abortion that will put her into a fatal coma, while Susan reassures a child
about his imminent kidney transplant. Any ambiguity about the align-
ment of medical and gender values Will be clarified by the end of this
episode. For the hospital plot, the choice of abortion as the exemplary
coma-inducing operation introduces an ethical and futuristic dimension
- medicine's power over life and death - which will found the comin
melodrama. However, for feminism abortion is a highly resonant, politi-
cized choice. Given the plot's later exposure of medical perversion at the
Jefferson Institute, where coma cases are stored and life is preserved in
death for huge profit - an institution, moreover, superintended by an
archetypal 'bad mother' - it is perhaps surprising that the negotiational
processes of the film do little to pull the abortion into a patriarchal
equation with its images of death. If, however, this ideological linkage is
not foregrounded, but lies inert, it is not because the film is taking a
'progressive' stance as such. On the one hand, the film gains credibility
for its modern 'independent heroine' by touching on controversial issues
raised by the women's movement. The conversation between medical
personnel during the operation suggests, for those in the audience who

)
llr

can hear, the patient's need for concealment from both the medical
authorities and from her husband (the official reason for a D & C is
'menstrual irregularity'). The jocular patronage of the male doctors,
instructing a group of male students - 'I'm going to get her out of a
helluva mess'; 'Let's get this mother off the table' - and Nancy's humil-
iating posture, on her back, her legs up in stirrups, demonstrate in a way
open to a range of responses - anger, amused cynicism, fear, and so on -
the place of 'woman as victim' within a patriarchally controlled medical
practice.23 At the same time, the film's melodramatic premisses require
of the hospital a credibly villainous ambiance and a female sacrificial
victim. In this respect, Nancy's abortion and medical chauvinism serve
melodramatic plotting as well as the need for contemporary reference,
diverting ultimate sacrifice from the 'independent heroine', while
motivating Susan's pursuit of the truth against the advice of her male
colleagues and lover. Ideologically, because Susan is melodrama's
innocent heroine, the abortion that motivates her heroic action must also
be perceived as innocent for the melodrama to work.

The Melodramatic Scenario: Misrecognition and Sexism

Nancy's unexplained coma and subsequent death open out on to a
melodramatic scenario, which starts with a simple desire on Susan's part
to understand what has caused her friend's death. She finds her quest
blocked in a way that quickly suggests something sinister afoot. Susan's
position within the unfolding mystery is characteristic of the melo-
dramatic heroine. She stands by the principle that no unexplained
medical event can be ignored and that 'truth' overrides bureaucratic
procedures, hospital politics and personal feelings. The clash of her
values with those of the medical hierarchy leads her to suspect malprac-
tice. At the same time, she is opposed by the Chief of Surgery, a seduct-
ively paternalistic villain as yet unrecognized by heroine and audience,
who deliberately engineers public misrecognition of her motives and
actions. Susan's function as a melodramatic heroine is to hang on to, and
keep asserting, her demand for truth and its public recognition, despite

unknown and intensifying dangers, both physical and moral, which she
must undergo alone. These dangers are appreciated only by the film's
audience to whom sufficient privileged knowledge is given to invoke
melodrama's structures of suspense and pathos.
Susan's role as independent heroine, however, complicates her melo-
dramatic construction as victim. She is both insightful in her unravelling
of the medical mystery and resourceful in dealing with physical danger.
Why then does no one believe her? In its search for answers which will

Pleasurable Negotiations 81

be consonant with 'the changing position of women', the film draws
women's movement discourses into its plotting. For the Chief of Surgery
engineers misrecognition of Susan's questions, insights and intentions by
recourse to sexism. Susan is a victim not only because there is a hired
assassin roaming the hospital seeking to eliminate her, but because of
the hold that gendered (mis)definitions have over what counts as know
- ledge, reason and emotion, over who has which and in what circum
stances. Thus the success of the villain's designs is not simply a matter of
personal evil, but is due to the range of male misconceptions, ambitions,
desires and fears he can rely on or motivate in his colleagues, including
the hero.
The start of this process is heavily marked in a male colleague's
comment to Mark on Susan's 'surprising' response to Nancy's coma, 'if it
had been a friend I don't know I'd have been that cool'. The exchange
between Mark and Susan that follows lays out the stakes that are being
played. Mark assumes that Susan, as a woman, will be emotionally over-
whelmed by her friend's death, and hopes to renew their intimacy by
offering his comforting support. Susan's reply frustrates him: 'I'm not
upset. You think because I am a woman I'm going to be upset. I just
want to understand the variables as they apply to this patient.' Refusing
his definition of what constitutes an appropriate response to the
occasion, Susan, instead of going to supper with Mark, proceeds to
contravene regulations concerning access to computer statistics and so
to discover a string of unexplained coma cases. This in turn brings her
up against her boss, the silver-haired Chief of Surgery, George Harrison.
Paternal concern and patriarchal power meet in his representation of her
'reason' as the mark of personal stress (Fig. 6). If she is to continue at
the hospital, he threatens, she must see the hospital psychiatrist. The
(Black) psychiatrist deflects her concern to understand the comas by
questioning her about how she feels.24 To Harrison he explains her
behaviour as the result of a 'crisis in her personal life'- her conflicts with
Mark and her refusal to face her 'grief' over Nancy have led her into
'paranoia'. Here Susan's situation is 'read' within the film through
conventional, repressive, culture-bound gender definitions, which the
plot will have to negotiate if it is to continue.
The head anaesthetist, Dr. George, to whom Susan next goes for
information, confronts her questions in a sinister, defensive (not to say
paranoid) manner, protecting his professional, and male, preserve from
her desire to know what he has not yet been able to find out. Mark, as
her lover, is called on to bring her into line. He attempts to persuade
Susan to drop her investigations in terms of the realpolitik of the hospi
tal as it affects their careers - particularly his prospects of becoming
Chief Resident. Her second disciplinary interview with the Chief of

d
7 f
.

Surgery, in which he again insistently and overbearingly probes her feel-
ings, finally reduces her to womanly tears, undermining, for t e

her off for a 'recuperative' weekend with Mark I 11 take
politics, you take care of yourself .. . our emotions make us human.' In
these different encounters, which are about Susan demanding she be
listened to and the different ways in which that demand is blocked, the
drama is enacted as one of misunderstanding - of translation from one
discourse or identity into another - a process dominated by gender
definitions and politics. Thus the nature of knowledge - its relations
with feeling, reason and power - becomes itself an object of gendered
conflict.

Pathos, Suspense and Ihe Independenl Heroine

Blockage and misrecognition are the source of two melodramatic narra-
tive strategies - suspense and pathos - through which the symbolic and
referential roles played by Susan are further negotiated. As Coma is a
suspense thriller, suspense is the stronger of the two and has been critl-
gued for undermining Susan's command of the narrative, in that it
depends on the audience having privileged knowledge of the dangers
that encompass her.25 However, the giving and withholding of audience
knowledge is carefully controlled in an attempt to maintain the indepen-
dent heroine within the suspense structure. And the credibility required
for this negotiation to work depends on the operation of the film s
pathos. Both suspense and pathos rely on our sympathy for the poten-
tially victimized protagonist. Susan wins our sympathy because she
represents good medical practice and takes a moral stand. Like
suspense, pathos also depends on privileged audience knowledge.
Pathos is not merely a matter of identification with, nor of pity for,
another; it is a formal construct in which a protagonist is held at a
distance which allows the audience to experience and understand, on
her or his behalf, oppressive or threatening forces of which the prota-
gonist is not fully aware.26 In order to believe that Susan is right - and
thereby to participate in the suspense - the audience must participate in
the pathos of her misrecognition, acknowledging dangers that threaten
her not only physically, but also intellectually and emotionally. The
question is posed: do we think she is stupid, or can we understand her
dilemma? If the audience concedes that she is right about the conspir-
acy, it is then in a position to see the danger that comes from patri-
archal/sexist forces - from the power of male definition, which leads
Susan to doubt what we know she knows.

:
.

.
.~
t
k

. [:

. i

. f'
v [:

Nf
Pleasurable Negotiations 83
In this respect suspense is created out of the conditions of subject-
ivity. Susan s identity and what she thinks she knows shifts from encoun-
ter to encounter. She is, by turns and according to whose perception is
operative, female hysteric, cool professional, needy lover and a woman
struggling with patriarchy. In a privileged moment, the audience is
allowed a glimpse of George Harrison's villainy when, after sending
Susan off for the weekend with Mark, he explodes, 'Women! Christ!'
Misogyny becomes an indicator of evil and, following this outburst, the
weekend itself becomes ambiguous, its 'idyllic' advertising images and
soupy music tinged with a mixture of nostalgia, irony and threat. Its
escapism is confirmed as the couple's reconciliation is broken abruptly
on their homeward journey, when the chance appearance of a signpost
to the Jefferson Institute pulls Susan out of 'romance' and back into the
investigation.
If the viewer does not engage in the negotiations around sexism to
which the 'pathos' of Susan's situation invites us, the structures of
suspense open up another route into this territory. Because the suspense
thriller depends on a play with the giving and withholding of knowledge
potential guilt is distributed between nearly all the film's male protagon-
Jsts, and the misrecognition to which Susan is subjected and which
founds the pathos is shared or perpetrated - we are not sure which till
the film's end - by her superiors, colleagues and lover. In the world
constructed by Coma, men are dangerous; even Mark may be part of
the plot against the heroine. We see Susan in battle with a 'male' other
who appears in many guises; lover, boss, father, assassin. The shifts are
often highly overdetermined. After her nightmarish entrapment in a
deserted lecture theatre, where her suspected attacker switches on one
light after another till he forces her into the open, Susan escapes into
fully lit corridors and the apparent safety of a male colleague, to find
only a familiar, fatherly security guard following her. But almost imme-
dlately she is subjected to a second pursuit, from which she escapes by
burying her would-be assassin under a pile of cadavers, to fall - in a
shock cut that links her pursuer's yells with Mark's towering figure - into
her lover s arms, as he opens his apartment door. In the swings between
normality, security and comfort on the one hand, and futuristic medical
cnme, nightmare and danger on the other, the melodrama throws up
images from the underside of conventional wisdoms about the 'caring
professions' and protective paternalism. The lover becomes an assassin,
doctors become murderers, the preservation of life a financial racket,
and - given the rows of male cadavers in the dissection room, or stored
io the deep-freeze - the male body itself an image of death
Susan's persistent pursuit of knowledge, despite dangers within and
without, uncovers what the crime is, and how and why it is being

committed. But she makes a near-fatal mistake about the who, taking her
newly found solution of the plot to the principal villain himself. For the
melodrama this is less a mistake than a rendering of her innocence - it is
her trust that is abused by a corrupt paternalism. But her mistake also
brings about melodrama's culminating confrontation between villain and
heroine, in which evil is recognized and the true identities of the pro-
tagonists made visible. Leaning back with her (drugged) whisky, Susan
listens to the telephone call that interrupts her third and final interview
with the Chief Surgeon and idly scans his certificates framed on the wall.
As her eyes rest on his full name, George Harrison, she also recognizes
the emphatic use of his colleague's Christian name over the phone as the
mode of interchange between senior colleagues. By the time the call is
ended, she knows, and he knows she knows, that her identification of Dr
George, the anaesthetist, as villain - derived from overhearing another
conversation - was a mistake in social coding. As she succumbs to the
drug, and sees a 'true' perception of the surgeon, distorted by a fish-eye
lens, the irony of the conflict over knowledge and identity strikes her;
reversing his earlier recommendation for her, she laughs, 'you need to
see someone.' She then announces the truth: 'You are killing people!', a
truth which he has tried to render as the paranoid fantasy of an upset
woman.

Negotiational Pleasures

lKegotiation between symbolic and referential roles in Coma is not only
a critical means of generic renewal; it is also a source of aesthetic
pleasure. Some of the film's pleasures have been identified as patriarchal
constructions, thereby denying the space of negotiation. Most readily
critiqued are early moments in the construction of Bujold as heroine -
the shower and aerobics episodes - which focus on her body as an object
of desire. However, these moments are potentially under negotiation as
the film struggles to align woman as melodramatic symbol with the
independent heroine's reference to women's struggles in the real world.
Moreover, to deny the spectacle of the body is to deny not only male
desire for the female body but women's too. In these particular instances
this critique also ignores their narrative placement at moments of female
resistance. Susan both grabs the shower first and offers us the pleasure
of the female body. If the look of the camera at Susan's blurred outline
through the shower screen is already and only male, negotiation ends
here. However, the camera remains with the disconsolate hero, left
outside, on the losing end of this particular argument. To identify with
the male look here opens up a position of desire, rejection, frustration

V1
w

Pleasurable Negotiations 85

and annoyance with the woman. For a woman, however, following the
line of the hero's gaze may offer an identification with Susan's resist-
ance, ungraciously claiming rights to the shower and the body's comfort
(much as the left-wing viewer of television news, watching picket-line
'violence' through a camera positioned behind police lines, may reinter-
pret 'violence' as 'resistance' to state power). To identify with Susan
offers a stake in a female claim to the body and its image, of resistance
to male demand or amusement in his frustration. In other words, to take
up a gendered position of identification here is to enter - humorously or
resistingly, pleasurably or unpleasurably - into a struggle for the mean-
ing and possession of the female image.
The aerobics class - another instance of Susan's resistance to Mark's

demands - similarly puts at issue the gendering and possession of the
'look'. As well as pleasure in looking at women's bodies, the session also
suggests a different order of being from heterosexual strife: women
together, pleasure in physical being, intimate friendship. These are
'moments' from the subculture of women in the social spaces where they
meet and talk, made publicly recognizable through the cultural forms of
the women's movement which are increasingly, as here, brought into
wider circulation in the mainstream media. The Bujold character is
offered as a woman caught in the contradictory demands of indepen-
dence, of professional practice, of female community, of heterosexual
intimacy and, later, dependence. In Susan's continuing arguments with
Mark, male and female perspectives and priorities conflict as they each
struggle to define the other. It is, however, impossible to say that the
Image is claimed either for patriarchy or for feminism. The struggle
continues because each character continues to desire the other, while
not giving up their positions - until perhaps at the film's end. What I am
suggesting for the moment is that the intermeshing of symbolizing and
referential modes constructs the female image as an object of contest, of
negotiation, for the characters and for the audience.
A second pleasure is offered by the suspense structure's negotiations
between the melodramatic need for woman as victim and Coma's
deployment of the 'independent heroine'. Indeed the film cannot work
for audiences not prepared to enter into the world of the suspense
thriller. It assumes we take pleasure in certain kinds of dramatic enact-
ments, emotional situations, aesthetic frissons - the chase, off-screen
threats, suspense, shock cuts. Deploying a woman doctor protagonist
regenerates these enactments, by bringing pressure to bear on and re-
negotiating many of the assumptions involved in them. For instance, the
intersection of suspense with the independent heroine raises the ques-
tion, how will a woman deal with the tough action and physical violence
which are the hallmark of the thriller? In the pursuit sequences, the

camera positions the audience with Susan at the onset of imminent ~X
danger, but then cuts to her pursuer. Suspense is generated from the j
audience's ignorance of her whereabouts and consequent expectation of ]
seeing her succumb to the victim's role. But suspense must also nego- X
tiate a heroine who is 'independent' and consequently teases expectation
by playing the victim motif off against Susan s ingenious metho s o
defence and escape.

The Lasl-Minute Rescue
Such negotiational play is taken to extremes at the end of the film, when
identification of the villain leads into the suspenseful coda of the ast
minute rescue. For some, this ending represents the putting into patrl
archal place of the would-be independent heroine: Susan becomes the
ultimate victim, drugged and supine on the operating table, while Mark
tracks down the carbon monoxide inlet and calls the police. Analyse in
terms of negotiation, however, the attempt to bring to conclusion suc a
strongly generic film, that also engages discourses running counter to the
ideological balance of gender roles in our society, leads to an almost
frantic intensification of its textual processes. Susan, drugged, knows
that she is herself, under guise of an appendectomy, being taken to the
operating theatre where comas are induced, while Mark continues
blandly reassuring her. By the time he understands what Susan is telling
him, he is trapped into assisting at the operation. It is the female victim
who, by pressing his beeper, provides him with the excuse to leave the
operating theatre. And it is Susan's earlier investigation which guides
him in voice-over to the lethal gas input. Susan may be supine, while
Mark breathlessly charges about the hospital engineering plant, but
without her earlier calm, logical tracing of pipelines, she could not be
saved now. Mark finds nothing for himself, but depends on memories of
her recounting her discoveries and 2 clue which that investigation left
behind - her tights abandoned during her climb of the hospital works.
All is safe at the end, when Mark, holding Susan's hand, quiets her
attempts to continue her selfjustification with an acknowledgement of
the truth she has discovered: 'I know, baby' - hardly the feminist last
word. She is not given the recognition the melodrama owes her, perhaps
because it cannot - given its embrace of women's movement discourse
find the terms to produce the image of a loving heterosexual couple and
an accepting, united community such as closes traditional melodrama,
though it attempts to do so with a close-up of a 'clenched' hand-clasp.
Instead, the film closes on the recognition by a public apparatus, the law,
of the villain who earlier has been explicitly identified with paternalism

Pleasurable Negotiarions 87

and misogyny, and who now puts out the lights of the operating theatre
and the film. This ending is perhaps symptomatic of the state of gender
conflict in our culture. The culture can acknowledge what we don't
want; rejection and contestation produces drama. Imagining the new
future in popular images is more difficult.

: Clearly the ambivalence of textual negotiation produces a wider address
- more servicable to a capitalist industry - than a more purely feminist
text, or counter-text, could. If for many - not necessarily feminist
women, Susan's struggles with sexism at home and at work, and the
formal negotiations of the woman-as-victim role, produce echoes of
recognition and pleasure, viewers who support sexist attitudes have a
route through the film in the humorous exasperation of Mark - 'what
you want is a wife, not a lover!' - and can take comfort in the fact that
identification of the culprit expels both male and medical villainy: Mark
is exonerated. On the other hand, if we accept the role of the mass
media in making cultural definitions - and also post-structural theory's
exposure of the ideologically 'pure' and full representation, whether
feminist or dominant, as an illusory goal - perhaps we may take a more
positive stance towards the spaces of negotiation in mainstream produc

tion. For into dominant typifications and aesthetic structures are locked
both atavistic and Utopian desires; archetypal and futuristic motifs;
: sensibility and reason; melodrama and realism. The productivity of
popular culture lies in its capacity to bring these different dimensions
into contact and contest; their negotiations contribute to its pleasures.
We need to attend to such pleasures if we are to appreciate what holds
us back as well as what impels us forward, and if cultural struggle is to
take place at the centre of cultural production as well as on the margins.
Thus critical readings made under the rubric of negotiation offer not so
much resistant readings, made against the grain, as animations of possi
bilities arising from the negotiations into which the text enters. Such
readings work with the pleasures of the text, rather than suppressing or
deconstructing them. The pleasures Coma offers feminism are in many
W ways gruesome; its atavistic desires for protective paternalism, enacted
in Susan's moments of exhaustion from the loneliness of her struggle
are rendered in the context of the thriller as sources of nightmare
producing a kind of feminine horror film. There are of course other
pleasures of various ideological complexions in play in the film: of
W gender role reversal, of the victimization of women, and so on. No doubt
t; these pleasures, too, can be read in their double-sidedness; but the point
of a feminist reading is to pull the symbolic enactments of popular
K fictions into frameworks which interpret the psychic, emotional and
social forces at work in women's lives.

(
88
Noles

I For example. cultural studies in Englanndditeaxtural prOcedure that make differential X
~1: X A O - e to Novels by and A bout Women in A mertca, 1920-1970, Itbaca: Corncil il
Popular Literature. k;rldon Verso, 1987; Jane Tompkins, Scnsationa! Designs: The Cul- :
tural Work of American Fiction, 1790-18hOs, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. For
feminist work on the woman's film, melodrama and soap opera, see: Tania Modleski,
Lol~ing with a Vengeance, Hamden, Connecticut: The Shoe String Press, 1982; Charlotte
Brunsdon, 'Crossroads: Notes on Soap Opera', in E. Ann Kaplan (ed ), Regarding Tcic
¥ ision C ritical Approachcs - An A nthology, Los Angeks: American him Institute, 1983;
Dorothy Hobson. Crossroads: rhc Drama of a Soap Opera, London: Methuen, 1982; len
Ang Watching Dallas, London: Methuen, 1985; Maria LaPlace, 'Producing and Consum
iog the Woman's Film: Discursive Struggle in Now, Voyager', and Linda Williams,
"'Something Else Besides a Mother": Stcita Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama', both in
Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where the Hcart l$ London: British Film Institute, 1987.
3 For an account of Lacanian psychoanalysis, see Steve Burniston, Frank Mort and
Christine Weedon, 'Psychoanalysis and the Cultural Acquisition of Sexuality and SubJec
tivity', in Women's Studies Group, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University
of Birmingham (ed.). Women Take Issue, London: Hutchmson, 1978.
4 The psychoanalytic underpinnings of classic narrative cinema were first signalled in
a special issue of Screen, vol. 14 no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 1973), dealing with semiotics
and cinema, and were developed by Colin MacCabe in 'The Politics of Separation', and by
Stephen Heath in 'Lessons from Brecht', both in Screcn, vol. 15, no 2 (Summer 1974).
Screen, vol. 16, no. 2, translated Christian Metz's 'The Imaginary Slgnifier' in a special
issue on psychoanalysis and the cinema.
S Claire Johnston's 'Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema', Screcn Pamphlet, no. 2,
September 1972, is an early and influential exposition of this view. Laura Mulvey's 'Visud
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' in Screen, vol. 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975), provided an
influential development of feminist cine-psychoanalysis. Annette Kuhn's book Womcn's
Picturcs: Feminism and C'inema, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982 offers
succinct and critical introduction to this work, and Ann Kaplan's Womcn and Film: Both
Sides of thc C'amera, New York: Methuen, 1983, a distinctive development of it, dealing in
particular with the notion of the 'male gaze' in classic narrative cinema. See also my !
'Recent Developments in Feminist Film Criticism' in Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellen
camp and Linda Williams (eds), Rc-Vision: Essays in Fcminist Fllm Criticism, Frederiek,
Maryland: University Publications of America, in association with the American Film Insti
tute, 1984, for an account of feminist engagemt nt with psychoanalysis.
6 See Annette Kuhn, Women's P clures.
7 For example, Tania Modleski, 'Never To Be Thirty-Six Years Old: Rebeeea as
Female Oedipal Drama', Wide Angic, vol. 5, no. I (1982), and Linda Williams, "'Somc

thing Else Besides a Mother": Steila Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama', and Tanta
Modleski, 'Time and Desire in the Woman's Film', in Gledhill.
8. Annette Kuhn, 'Women's Genres: Melodrama, Soap Opera and Theory', Sereen,
vol. 25, no. I (1984), reprinted in Gledhill.
9. For example, Stuart Hall, 'Encoding/Decoding', in Hall ct at (eds.), Culturc,
Media, Language. London: Hutchinson, 1980, David Morley, The Nationwide Audicnee,
London: British Film Institute Television Monograph 11, 1980, Richard Dyer, Stars,
London: British Film Institute, 1980.
10. See Antonio Gramsci, Selcctions from thc Prison Notebooks, Quintin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (ed. and trans.), London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971. For
discussion and application of the notion of hegemony to cultural products, see Terry :
1ovell, 'Ideology and Coronation Street', in Richard Dyer ct al., Coronation Strca,

Pleasurable NeBotiations 89

London: British Film Institute Television Monograph 13, 1981, and Geoff Hurd, 'Notes
on Hegemony, the War and Cinema', in National Fiaions: Wor/d War Tlvo in British
films and Television, London: British Film Institute, 1985.
11. See Terry Lovell, Pictures of Reality: Aesthetics, Politics and Pleasure, London:
British Film Institute, 1980, pp. 56-63. She defines the 'use-value' of a commodity as 'the
ability of the commodity to satisfy some human want' which, according to Marx, 'may
spring from the stomach or from the fancy'. 'The use-vaiue of a commodity is realised only
when it is consumed, or used' (p. 57).
12. See Maria LaPlace, 'Producing and Consuming the Woman's Film: Discursive
Struggle in Now, Voyager', in Gledhill, for a discussion of the contradictions of consumer-
ism for women.
13. Julie D'Acci, 'The Case of Cagney and Lacey', in Helen Baehr and Gillian Dyer
(eds), Boxed In: Women and Television, London: Pandora 1987.
14. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in thc Movies,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
15. Ien Ang, Watching Dallas London: Methuen, 1985, and Janice Radway, Reading
the Romance: Womcn, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, London: Verso, 1987
16. See, for example, Judith Williamson, 'The Problems of Being Popuiar', Ncw
Socialist, September 1986.
17. For examples of fully developed textual analysis of the 'recuperative' strategies of
mainstream cinema, see Peter Steven (ed.), Jump Cut: Hollywood, Politics and Countcr-
Cinema, New York, Praegr, 1985.
18. For a translation of the seminal analysis of Young Mr. Lincoln by the editors of
Cahicrs du Cinema, see Screen, vol. 13, no. 3 (Autumn 1972), reprinted in Bill Nichols
(ed.) Movies and Mcthods, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. For work on
Douglas Sirk, see Jon Halliday (ed.), Sirk on Sirk, London: Secker and Warburg/British
him Institute, 1971, a special issue of Screen, vol. 12, no. 2 (Summer 1971), and Laura
Mulvey and Jon Halliday (eds), Douglas Sirk, Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1972.
19. See, for example, Elizabeth Cowie's account of press coverage of C'oma in 'The
Popular Film as a Progressive Text - a discussion of C'oma Part I', m/f, no. 3, 1979. Part 2
of this article appeared in m/f, no. 4, 1980. C'oma was discussed by Christine Geraghty
under the heading, 'Three Women's Films', in Movie, nos. 27/28, Winter/Spring 1980-
81, an article which is reprinted in Charlotte Brunsdon (ed.), Filmsfor Womcn, London-
British Film Institute, 1986, as is also an extract from Part I of Elizabeth Cowie's piece
The film frequently appears in film study courses dealing with feminism and cinema
20. See 'The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation', in Gledhill.
21. This account of melodramatic narrative structure is drawn from Peter Brooks, Thc
Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and thc Modc of Execss,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976, and Thomas Elsaesser, 'Tales of Sound and
Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama', Monogram, no. 4, 1972, reprinted in
Gledhill
22. See the interview with Michael Crichton by Ralph Appelbaum, 'Genetic
Genocide', in Films and Filming, vol. 24, no. 4 (1978)
23. 1 am indebted to Christine Panks for discussion of this episode.
24. In so far as the psychiatrist is the only Black character in the film, the coupling of
ethnicity with this particular role is marked. How precisely this strategy is to be read,
however, is unclear and must depend on which negotiational routes the viewer is taking
through the film.
25. See Cowie.
26. This discussion of pathos is drawn from Elsaesser, 'Tales of Sound and Fury' in Gled
il.

Screen Studies
Conference
Glasgow, 30 June - 2 July 1995

This !fzar the fzonicrtznfzc zz ill l sus on issues ol performance anvil
music aneJ zs ill o~-tzriap XX ilh Ilic bifZlltli~l COIliCI CnlZC ol~ thc InlCI llU~ioll
Associalion lor the Slucl! oi Populal Music \\ hiszh is lo bc ortimisofJ
around thc lopisz ol Mll si( oll .%llolv ankl \z ill run I - 6 Jul \-.
2 Jule ~z ill bc a joinl fla! zz ilh IASPM on

'Populal musizz on ;Inu oi'l' Illfz se rccn'

For details of registration and accommodation contact:
Caroline Beven ¥ .Screen ¥ John Logie Baird Centre
Glasgow tJniversity ¥Glasgoz Gl2SQQ¥Scotland¥Uli
Tel ¥ 041-330 503S Fax ¥ '041-3Ct7 8010

Universities of Glasgow & Strathclyde

JOHN LOGIE BAIRD CENTRE

Taught Masters Collrse
(one-year)
in
MEDIA & CULTURE

Universities of Glasgom & Strathelyde

JOHN LOGIE BAIRD CENTRE

The Baird Centre invites applications
from (qualififfl candidates for
PhD BY RESEARCH
Film ¥ Television ¥ Popular Music

For information please write to: For information please write to:

Margaret Philips ¥ John Logie Baird
Centre ¥ Strathclyde University
Glasgow Gl IXH ¥ Scotland ¥ Uli

vt
~t

Margaret Philips ¥ John Logie Baird
Centre ¥ Strathelyde University *
Glasgow G I I XH ¥ Scotlaml ¥ Ut;

Stacey, Jackie. "Hollywood Memories" Screen, vol.
35, no 4 (1994), Pages 317-335.

Hollywood memories

JACKIE STACEY

t Fof a crWYeheemeoebate j
aboul Ihe munipb S mean~ngs
Ihe calegorl the lem~ke
s,oeclaloY, s~/e Cdmeld f10SCUtd.
nos 2tlV21 tl9B9I

2 Helen Iasb, Sc~rlells Womer
GYBe Wlt/, fhe Wmd' d{YI 1t5
Fenldle fdos tLenoon Vllago.
19991; Jacoueline Bebo Ihe E
Color furple Black women as

cullulal seadets. in t Deidie
PfbYam ted I femah Sperldlors
loobrxo dt fdm dno [eAwisYJn i
LzzIon Velso 19BBI: Angela t
Panmglon, Consumollon
p dCIICeS as the preduchon and
dnbulaBon ol dieeserrces:
lelbllllll9 wultlll9 CldSS
lemimmly in 195[ts Blltain :
ienplbbshed PhD unselsltY of
Blimmgham 19901: Janea
Ihumim, CelluhY) Slslels
Wumen and F~pllIdl Gllemd
ILendon Macmdbn 19921: 0
Annelle Kuhn hesearching ;
oooulal lilm lan cullule m 1933s
Blitam in HisSor~eal Slueles Jl
film fdeceplirUOslo Nolv egian
Ullivasilles Pluss 1994
festhoomingl
9 Hlsmlildl Melhoduluglds was
the tIde ol she openinD Dldnary
panel al Ihe Sciren Stodges
Conlelence 1993 al which an
eshel wersYdl ol this essay was
Fresenxed Fol discussions ol this

The absence of 'woman' from Hollywood cinema has been a central
eoneern within feminist film criticism for many years now; and I
want to continue thc investigation of this case of 'the missing
woman'. My struggle, however, is not with the absenee of certain
sereen images, but with the absence of the audience from both
einema history and feminist film - ^ -- The missing woman in the
context of this articie, then, is that slippery category 'the female
spectator' I How can we go about trying to trace this missing
woman, and what methodological issues might such a search raise?
After twenty years of feminist film theories preoccupied mainly with
: textual spectatorship, there is now an inereasing interest in actual
cinema audiences. Work by women such as Helen Taylor,
Jacqueline Bobo, Angela Partington, Janet Thumim and Annette
Kuhn has begun to investigate how texts might be read by partieular
i audienees at particular times.2
My interest in questions of historical methodology3 arises out of
my own research with the mcmories of a particular group of female
spectators of 1940s and 1950s Hollywood cinoma. The women whose
memories are used in this study are all while British women, mostly
in their sixties and seventies (though ranging in age from forty-plus
to over ninety), and are readers of the two Ieading women's
magazines Woman's Weekly and Woman's Realm, through which I
initially eontacted them. The focus of this research is the
relationships hctwccn female film stars of this period and their
female spectators. Letters and questionnaires from over 35() women
containing their memories of favourite Hollywood stars form the
basis of the study, though I also draw on other historical sources in
the longer version of this study.4 My concern here is with how

317 Sueen 35 4 Wintel 1994 Jackie Slacev 1Holivwooo memories

~n
co

sublecl wilhin film sludies see
Janet Staigel lnlelpleled fllms
Sludies in the HisloNa/
flecepllon ol Amenc.n Cinen~d
(Princelon NJ Plmcelon
Un~versily Pless 19921: and
Ihuminl Celluloid Slslels

4 Jackie Slacey Slal Cazinea
Hollywood Ciness and femdle
gectdlol5hip ttonoon
Roulledoe 19941

5 Valene Walkeldine Video
eplav lamilies hims and
lantasl in Victol Bulgin. James
Donald and Cola KaDlan ledsl
fOlmdtiOns 01 id/lidsf ILondon-
Melhuen 193bl P '11

female spectators' memories might be used as a source for historical
studies of cinema and the methodological issues raised by their
use
The focus is obviously on pasr cinema audicnces. though many of
the methodological issues raised pertain to all kinds of audience
research. For just as we cannot view history as a straightforward
retrieval of past time, neither can audience research ever capturc
that 'purc' moment of reccption. what Valerie Walkerdine has called
the 'magic convergence'.S The methodological complexities of
audience research are merely amplified when we begin to investigate
audiences from previous decades. After all, in one sense, the
'audiences' of the 1940s and the 1950s no longer cxist: that originary
moment of spectatorship is lost and can never be recaptured.
However, the fact that audiences' accounts of their experiences are
inevitably retrospective representations is a methodological issue for
any 'ethnographic' audience research A critical analysis of the forms
and processes of memory, then, is pertinent to all ethnographic
studies of audiences. However, in historical research, the length of
the gap between the events and their recollection (in my own
research, some lorty or fifty years) highlights especially sharply the
question of processes of memory formation.

The memories produced by these female spectators in the letters and
questionnaires they sent me are structured through certain codes and
c onventions. Like other kinds of texts, these memories present an
identifiable set of generic features. In this part of my article. I want
to discuss briefly two of these genres of memory formation, before
going on to analyze the dialogic exchange through which they are
i produced.
0 The first genre I call iconic memory. Memories of 1940s and 1950s
0 Hollywood frequently take the form of a particular 'frozen momcnt',
a moment removed from its temporal context and captured as 'pure
0 image': be it of Bette Davis's flashing eyes, Rita Hayworth's flowing
hair, or Doris Day's 'fun' outfits. A memory of 'lovc at first sight' is
typical of this genre. Here religious significrs articulate the special
status of the star and the intensity of this moment:

t I'll never forget the first I saw her, it was in My Cul Sul in 1942,
and her name was Rita Hayworth. I couldn't takc my eyes off
her, she was the most perfect woman I had ever seen Thc old
cliche of 'screen goddess' was used about many stars, but thosc

are truly the only words that define that divine creature I
; was stunned and amazed that any human being could be that
lovely. (Violette Holland)
Iconic memories are not only produced as mcmories of the stars:
they can also be spectators' memorics of themscives in such 'frozen
moments':

318 Scleen 35 4 Wingel 1994 Jacbe ~ncosu Hdlpvood memoll

S Laula Mulvef, Vlsual and Clhe/ ;
pledsules sLondon and i
basmgsleLe Macnldlan 19991

7 Jactie Slaces ently on t
Romdnce in Almnene Kuhn led I
wbh Susdnnah Radslone Ihe
Women s Compdnion lo
lntelndliondl film ILondon:
Vilaeo 19901 po 345-3; and
Jaclsie Slacey and Lynne Pealce.
The hean ol the manel in
Lymle Pealce and Jacbe Slacey
{edsl ~ flom~nce
ILondon Lawlence and Wishaut
1994 lonhcominol

Our favourite cinema was the Ritz - with its deep pile carpet and
q double sweeping staircase. Coming down one always felt like a
t Hollywood heroine descending into the ballroom. (Anon)
The frequent recurrcncc of this form of memory might be explained
by the centrality of the idea of 'image' in the definition of
S successful' femininity in patriarchal culturc. Given the extent to
j which femalc stars function in Hollywood cinema through their
status as objects of visual pleasure, it is hardly surprising that iconic
; memory features so centrally in these accounts.'
; The second genre of memory which occurs most frequently is
narrative memory. Narrative memories present temporally located
$ sequential stories of cinemagoing in the 1940s and 1950s. As well as
remembering particular narratives featuring their favourite screen
idols, these spectators also recreate their own relationships to the
stars through narrative forms of memory. These memories of
Hollywood stars are often specific forms of self-narrativization in
relation to cultural ideals of femininity. These spectators construct
themselves as heroines of their remembered narratives, which in
0 turn deal with their own cinema heroines of that time. Memories of
y Hollywood stars are thus represented through the narrative
structures which connect the self to the ideal. This next memory
0 reworks the conventions of the romance narrative, for example,
giving a homoerotic charge to the pleasures of female spectatorship:

In the latc 1930s, when I was about nine or ten, I began to be
: aware of a young girl's face appearing in magazines and
: newspapcrs. I was fascinated. The large eyes, full mouth,
i sometimes the wonderful smile, showing the slightly prominent
but perfect teeth. I feel rather irritated that I don't recall the
; moment when I realised that the face belonged to a lovely singing
voice beginning to be heard on the radio record programmes....
0 The face and the voice belonged to Deanna Durbin In the
1940s at the age of twelve I was evacuated from my house in
South London to Looe in Cornwall, and it was there I was first
taken to the pictures for a special treat. There at last I saw her.
: The film, a sequel to her first, was Three Smart Girls Grow Up.
The effcct she had on mc can only be described as electrifying. I
: had never felt such a surge of adoration before My feeling
for her was no passing fancy. . . (Patricia Robinson)
The structure of this first 'meeting' or, rather, first sighting is built

around a series of enigmas, or absences, typical of the romance
genrc:7 the anonymous face whose details are 'unforgettable', the
voice on the radio, the lost moment when face and voice are
matched together, and the gradual buildup to the culmination when
'there at last I saw her' The star's screen appearance signifies
; closure, and yet, true to generic conventions, this moment of ending
i simultaneously suggests the beginning of a lifetime's devotion.

: 319 Screen35:4Win~ 1994 JacbeSlacey Holly~vood memmees
O Hisiory Waxshop iournal
llwiew eiscussion In Search ol
a Pasl a diabque wrlh henald
Flaser Hislory WoRshop
loutrull. no 70 tl9351. W 175
HH tp IHtl
S PaauLar Memory Groop Popubr
memory Iheay polrlics
methaid in Cenue lor
Contenipaary Cunural Studies
Abk^7 Histotres 1Lrlndon
Ibichinson. I Vi21 p 243

U For a oiscussion ot memaz
lorms in oral hislory see Luea
fasserini fascism m Pupull~
Memory Elre cullurdl ElDeritmcl7
ol the lurrn Worion7 Class,
trans hdrert Lumley and Jurb
Hkromseid 1Ca4nbridge
Cambridge Linnersrty fress
19Fi71

Several memories combine narrative and ikonie eiements These
two genres frequently construct each other: iconic memories may be
of a narrative image from a particuL*r fihns for exampie; and many
of the iCOlliC memories, such as the fim(asy of bving a Hollywood
heroine descending the cinema staircase, are also narrativized
Visual disphly is the common current rumaing through many of these
memory formations Signifieantly, each ol the processes of memory
formation and selection I have discussed so far replicates, and is
replicated by, distinguishing features of Hollywood cinema Popular
memories of Hollywood cinema in these accounts thus take
cinematic forms. Memories are typically constructed through kcy
icons, signifieant moments, narrative structures and hcroic subject
positions These exampies demonstrate how the past is produced in
the present through visual and narrative conventions replicating their
historical object: cinema.

. . . the life of any text - case ~Ti tory or otherwise - is not
generated by itself, but through the act of being reud.5

. . . the interl ention of the historian . . . is of crucial significance
. . . as a catalyst for whole process oJ structured remembrance.5

Having idcntified some of the formations of memory in my study, I
want now to eonsider the role of the research process, and indeed
the researcher, in their produetion. I would suggest that this type of
audience research involves 'a dialogic exchange' in which the
fantasies researcher and respondents have about each other have a
determining effect on the aeeounts produced. The 'imagined reader'
structures the forms of memory offered and, to a greater or Iesser
extent, is present within the texts themseives. Integral to an
understanding of the textuality of these memories, then, is a
recognition of the dialogicality of textual production. Here, audience
researchers might usofully draw upon insights from dialogie theory
which emphasize the ways in which texts are always produced Ibr

readers; indeed the imagined reader can bc seen as written into.
particular textual modes of address.l¡ This process might be summed
up in what Lynne Pearce has recently identified as Voloshinov's
most eloquent expression of addressivity:

Orientation of the word toward the addressee has an extromely
high signifieance. In point of fact, word is a nvo-si(lecl uct. It is
detcrmined equally by whose word it is and lbr whom it is meant.
As word. it is precisely the procJu( t oJ the reciprocal relationship
benveen spealk-er and listener, addresser and addressee. Ench and
evcry word expresses 'one' in relation to the 'other'. I give myseif
verbal shape from another's point of view of the community to
which I belong. A word is a bridge thrown bclwccn myself and

320 Screen 35 4 Winler 1534 Jacbe Stacey Hollywoorl memories

1 V 1/ Voioshinoy quoled in
Iynne Pekuce. ReMbg Oirrlegics
{taidon Edward ArnoW. 19351
p 43 1 am indebled to Lynne
Pearr;e lol my understandinq and
use or diabqic theory in llrs
seciron

12 Mi Hakhdn qwled in ibid
p 74

13 See la elample, Pearce s een
lelludl leadmqs m this liohl
ibid

14 fol a dscussion ol the U#S d
psychoanalysis m of al himiory
see Karl figlio Oral hslory and
the uncaucious HjS/OAY
Worlishop Journal no 2G 119titl
ap 120-32: I G AshplaAI
Psyrhoarralysis in hislaica
wrhinq Hrslory Worishep
Journa/ no 2ti tl9Hti.L O pm IH2
19 and lesprAding ~b tms YrakS
Jacqueline hose A commen~
Hislory Werkshoo JAu~nal no 2H
119891 pp 149 54

15 Pupubr Mmnu7y Glrsup 'Popular
memoty. p 24ti

another. If one end of the bridge belongs to me, then the other
depends on my addressee. A word is a territory shared by both
addresser and addressee, by the speaker and his Isicl interlocutor
(Voloshinov's emphasis)"

In her comprchensive account of dialogic theory, Lynnc Pcarce
outlincs the significance of Bakhtin's work on the role of the
addressce in charactcrizing various 'speech genres' in which the
relationship between speaker and addressee is of crucial significance
in understanding meaning:

An essential (constitutive) marker of the utterance is its quality of
being directed to someone, its addressivity.... Both the
composition and, particularly, the style of the utterance depend
on those to whom the utterance is addressed, how the speaker (or
writer) senses and imagines his addressee, and the force of their
effect on the uttcrance. Each speech genre in each area of speech
communication has its own typical conception of the addressee,

and this defines it as a genre (Voloshinov's emphasis)'2

Although this theory is derived from speech communication, it has
been widely developed in relation to written texts 13 Dialogic theory
then highlights the subjective, yet social, relations of textual
production: the role of the imagined rcader in meaning production
It is important here to approach the text as a dialogic form in which
the addressee is part of its structurc and mode of communication. In
audiencc research the relationship between the academic researcher
and interviewees or respondents necessarily shapes which accounts
are told and which are not, and indeed how they are told. This
mutual (though, importantly, not equal) relationship has been
paralleled with that between analyst and analysand in
psychoanalysis.'4 For audience research such as this, a more textual
model of cxchange and interpretation might be appropriate: in
y either case, though, audiences and researchers may be seen as in a
dialogic relationship - one in which the imagined other proves
integral to thc forms of knowledge produced. Dialogic theories of
the reader imagined through the function of addressivity might be
used to investigate this textual relationship between audiences and
researchers. This model would operatc in any kind of audienceÑ
researcher exchange. However, in rctrospectivc reprcsentations of
thc past, it functions as a way for respondents to reconstruct their
pasts in the prcsent for another who is outside their worlds, but also
(and as we shall sec, importantly) outsidc their generation. Here, as
work on popular mcmory has highlighted, the 'ccntrality of
gencration . . Iisl a fundamental impulse to remember'.15 Thus, in
this dialogic cxchange, some of thc processes of memory formation
becomc visibic as rcspondents negotiate their constructions of the
past in relation to an imagined rcader in the present.

321 Scleen 35 S Winlcr 1994 Jacbe Slacey Hollywooo memoxies

16 For ~ 1 hll 16 qcesllonnaile
Sldlt, Slel G"mg pp 245 51

Dialogic practices of writing are integral both to my initial
invitations to produce a remembered past, which posit an imagined
addressee, and also, in turn, to the written responses I received -
which embody the projection of an imagined reader: the researcher.
In my first communication with respondents, 1 imagined female fans
who had stories to tell about their relationships to Hollywood stars
of the past. My advertisement addressed them directly using the
second person: 'Were you a keen cinemagoer of the 1940s and
1950s?' The ways in which I requested information encouraged
women to use narrative forms to construct their memories. My
request for letters from women who were keen cinemagoers in the
1940s and 1950s invited retrospective self-narrativizations in the
retelling of past events so characteristic of the conventions of
I etter-writing more generally. Even in the followup questionnaire, a
less personal mode of communication, and one associated with
'scientific' information-giving rather than with storytelling, the kinds
4 of questions I asked inevitably produced, or at least delimited, the
forms of responses. I invited a kind of narrativization of the past,
for example, when I asked respondents to 'describe a favourite
cinema experience of the 1940s/1950s'. Finally, I allowed maximum
| space for the central question in the questionnaire in which
respondents were asked to 'write about your favourite star from the
i 1940s and then the 1950s, explaining what you liked about them and
g what they meant to you: what made these stars more appealing than
i others?"* This clearly requested narrativizations of the past and
0 invited a commentary on respondents' own tastes and preferences.
Similarly, respondents signal my presence in their imaginations
through a number of textual enunciations. Some use my name to
t effect a personal mode of address in order to emphasize a specific
i feeling: 'Oh Jackie, what lovely memories are being recalled - I do
hope you are going to ask for lots more information as a trip down
i memory lane of this nature is most enjoyable'. (Barbara Forshaw)
; This example is taken from a letter; the use of my name suggests a
i familiarity which easily accompanies the letter form, but is normally
absent from the relationship of researcher and researched. It also
i adds a note of authenticity to the exchange which is lacking in more
formal types of address, suggesting a personal sharing of experiences
| 'between friends'. The depth of the emotion felt about the research
i project is given wistful exclamation here in the 'oh' as well as in the
j use of my name. My role in this dialogic exchange is thus included
in the text itself as this respondent pauses to reflect upon the
: pleasures of remembering the 'Golden Age of Hollywood'. My
; obviously 'younger' generation name, in contrast to many of the
t respondents' names (such as 'Vera', 'Mabel' or 'Betty') which
| connote a very different generation, placed me outside the
experience of 'Hollywood at its best': this produced a further
t imperative to convey to me the importance of Hollywood stars in

322 Scleen 35 4 Winlel 1994 - JdCRiC Slacev Hollywood memules

17 Pearce. ~7eading Oialwics, p 76.

their lives at that time, the significance of changes in the cinema
since then, and the depth of the loss they mourn. Several
respondents used stereotyped or cliched language to describe
Hollywood stars of this era: 'stars of yesteryear', 'screen goddesses'
and 'a trip down memory lane'. These and many other similar
g examples construct a special relationship to the past (through a
direct knowledge of it, and use of dated language about it) for an
imagined reader of a different generation.
In the role of 'invisible other' outside the memories, yet as the

person for whom they are being produced, my position might be
seen as equivalent to Bakhtin's 'superaddressee': 'the hypothetical
y presence who fully comprehends the speaker's words and hence
allows his or her utterance to be made despite doubt about whether
the "actual" addressee will understand and/or respond'.l7 As
: 'superaddressee' the researcher (by requesting them and then
: reading them) brings these memories into being, as it were.
However, an ambivalence towards my role in this respect is also
g articulated; there is a feared mismatch between the ideal reader's
; and my actual position, for many respondents expressed anxiety
about my not understanding the full significance of these memories
# (because I had not been there). The question of power imbalances
: between researcher and researched is central here. Straddling the
roles of superaddressee and imagined addressee, I am expected to
; exercise authority over these memories (by representing them for
0 publication, for example) - and indeed, this authority is seen in turn
to 'authorize' these memories. However, my relationship to the
0 material is also constantly under negotiation within the texts, as
0 respondents establish their own authority about the Hollywood stars
of the past over and above my own, and try to ensure that I make
0 the correct readings of their memories.
: In offering narrative accounts of the past, many respondents tell
their stories and then add their own reflections upon them, as if
j anticipating the reader's response. This 'anticipatory mode' functions
t as a mediating voice which moves between the subject positions of
'self' and 'imagined other', producing a particular type of
0 dialogicality in which reflexivity foregrounds the role of the
4 addressee. The 'love at first sight' story about Deanna Durbin
0 quoted above, for instance, ends with a shift of register in which the
0 respondent comments directly on a possible (and within
contemporary critical debates, virtually inevitable) interpretation of
i her love of Deanna Durbin. Continuing directly from the quotation
above, she writes:

: I might just add that the members of our society {the Deanna
Durbin Societyl secm to be about equal in number malc and
i female. I think perhaps it would be considered a bit of a giggle
g today, if a large number of women confessed to feeling love for a

323 Scleen 35 4 Winter 1934 Jackie Slacev Hollywood memones

girl. Nobody seemed to question it then. Just in case: I have been
married since 194B! Have two sons and a daughter, one
grandchild. (Patricia Robinson)

In writing about her devotion to a star of the same sex, this
respondent feels the need to guard against possible intcrpretations of
homoeroticism in this charged connection. Heterosexuality and
reproduction are thus invoked to counter such speculations: a
grandchild is even mentioned as if to stress the 'purity' and
'normality' not just of the respondent's desires, but also the next
generation's. In the retelling, then, the presence of a (younger)
0 imagined reader produces an anxiety about the story's significance
0 today which needs to be defended against. A contrast is constructed
between the 'innocence' of such an attachment in the past, and the
embarrassment of 'confessing' it in today's culture in which
homosexual interpretations might be more freely applied to such a
declaration. Externalizing this memory of the 1930s and 1940s for a
0 researcher in the 1980s, this respondent is brought up against a clash
between present knowledge and past self: the former suggesting a
; different interpretation of the latter. If such a reading has occurred
to the respondent's present self, she (quite correctly) anticipates its
coincidence with my response to her story. Appealing against
today's sexualization of such desires, she articulates concern that her
memory may be spoiled or 'corrupted' by such discourses. Thus the
0 reflection upon the account is produced in direct dialogue with the
addressee, whose different values, or indeed desires, are imagined
and incorporated into the account, and function to mediate between
past and present discourses of sexuality and fandom.
; An even more explicit extension of this anticipatory mode of
addressivity occurs in the following example. Here, another
respondent's account seems to be in dialogue not only with me, but
also with herself, or rather with a version of her 'former selves'.
Initially, an account is offered of how female stars functioned as role
models for new fashions: 'We were quick to notice any change in
: fashion and whether it had arrived this side of the Atlantic. We
i were pleased to see younger stars without gloves and hats - we soon
copied them'. However, this is followed by a self-conscious
autocritique of the cultural construction of such feminine
X desirability:

In retrospect, it's easy to see Hollywood stars for what they really
were. This was pretty packaged commoditics . . . the property of
a particular studio. At the time I did most of my filmgoing, while
I was always aware that stars were rcally too good to be true, I
fell as completely under the spell of the Hollywood 'Dream
Factory' as any other girl of my age.... Looking back, I can see
much of what I took as authenticity was really technical skill....
Later on I realised just how much moncy and expertise went into

3124 Scleen 35 4 Winler 1934 - Jackie Stacey Hollywood memones

tat

creating the 'natural' beauties the female stars appeared to be.
(Kathleen Lucas)

g Throughout a long and very detailed reflection in answer to the
0 central question about the appeal of particular stars in the 1940s and
0 1950s, this respondent shifts between a past self who was 'under the
spell of Hollywood' and a present 'critical' self, producing an
important contrast which might be seen to be in dialogue, as it were,
with the reader/researcher. This example is exceptional rather than
. typical, and its particular form of dialogicality is due in part to the
respondent's experience of similar research with the
0 Mass-Observation Archive at Sussex University, to which she herself
g draws my attention in a covering Ictter. The self-commentary is

: offered here in response to an expected, even previously
| experienced, authoritative interpretation which might be imposed on
these memories: the feminist critique is thus successfully anticipated
0 and given voice in dialogue with the imagined researcher reading
i this account. As part of the same account she writes: 'Make-up
artists were clevcr enough not to show the female stars as too
t artificial. The servicemen didn't want to see anything but a parade
- of glamour queens, so the make-up men aimed for a naturally
perfect, or perfectly natural look'. Drawing attention to the power
i imbalances betwecn researcher and researched, she correctly
anticipates certain contemporary feminist critiques of stardom,
i glamour and 'the male gazc', and yet insists upon the pleasures for
. female spectators nevertheless: 'Really we were conned, but in the
i nicest possible way', she concludes.
- Both these accounts might be seen as examples of what Bakhtin
calls 'double-voiced discourse': this includes all speech 'which not
j only refers to something in the world but which also refers to
another speech act by another addressee'." The most obvious types
of double-voiced discourse operating in these examples are what
. Bakhtin calls 'hidden dialogue' or 'hidden polemic' in which the
- narrator actively engages with an 'interlocutor not named in the
1S Peare. ibid. p 53 - text, but whose presence may be inferred'." This inferred other
outside the text may be a discourse as well as a known, or unknown,
4 subject. In the case of hidden polemic, the inferred subject or
i discourse is seen as potentially antagonistic or hostile, which is not
the casc in hidden dialogue. Both the above examples present
interesting dialogues with infcrred others: each might be
j charactcrized as in dialogue with a discourse via my imagined
; subject position. Interestingly, despite nevcr having met mc, each
narrator anticipates my concern with contemporary discourses of
0 sexuality. In thc Dcanna Durbin example, for instance, the
; respondent both positions herself as thc imagined rcader of her own
account, and comments upon the nature of her passion for this
| female star, whilst simultancously defending against my also making

19 Uavid todge qwled in Ibd.
p 51

325 Scleen 35 4 Wimel 1554 Jackie SlaceY Hollywood

D Horlense PowdelqlaS.
Hollywooo lee Deltm Factorv
,__ . MA .. _.
19501

21 Peat;cil hading Oahgrcs.
pp 2X-3.

such a comment and so constructing her desires within whal she
would consider a pcrverse' reading of her mcmorics.
Similarly, in thc last exampic, thc respondcnl both produces an
account of thc 'mindless cscapism of Hollywood of thc past'; and
yet, not wanting to hc constructed as naivc, also draws attention to
the critiquc of such pleasures. In this casc, the hidden polemic is not
only with a potential feminist critique of Hollywood cinema, but also
with a form of 'high culture' scorn for popular pleasurcs: her own
ambivalencc articulates precisely the complexity of thc rclationship
between these two discourses. To offer one final example from this
same account, which illustrates this exchange perfectly:

Everything was rationed and shabby, then along came the
glamour and cxpertise of Hollywood and we soaked it up like a
sponge. It 'took people out of thcmsclvcs' and transported them
to a plane where they didn't need to think or worry. All they had
to do was sit and stare. And thc top Hollywood studios knew
exactly what people wanted to see and they gave it to them. In a
word, people needed'cscapism'. (Kathleen Lucas)

The repeated use of inverted commas, and the third, as well as the
first person plural, produce a critical distance from the cxperience
(this is something other people felt) whilst also including herself in
it. The earlier reference to Hollywood as a 'Dream Factory' further
reinforces this distance by invoking (knowingly?) a well-known
sociological study of the American film industry.Z¡
Thus, a contrast and mediation between past and present selves
rcprcsented in these accounts is constructed through forms of
t dialogue with the researcher: it is, in part, my imagined presence in
t heir texts which facilitates respondents' commentary and reflection
upon their 'past selves' from the point of view of thcir present
knowledges. In both the above examples, this anticipatory mode of
addressivity not only incorporates me into the text as an imagined
i reader from another generation, but my anticipated construction of
respondents' own identity is also projected into thc text. Thus, not
only is there a dialogue here between self and imagined other, but
0 what might more accurately be described as a 'trialogic' rclationship
between self, imagined other and imagined othcr's fantasy of the
self: in other words, the respondents. their projcction of mc and,
finally compicting this 'trialogic circuit', how thcy imaginc my
i reading of thcir texts will in turn produce a version of their
identities. Indced this 'third person presence' might be scen to
i characterize certain 'dynamics of the dialogic context' if, as Pcarcc
0 suggests, 'dialogues can be between more than two persons'.2'
0 One of the 'inferred presenscs' of thesc hidden polemics is an
0 evaluative discourse about popular culture and femalc pleasurc in it.
These negot;ations of the researcher's anticipated responscs, then,
highlight particularly sharply the question of the valuc placed on

l 326 Scleen 35 4 Wintet 1934 Jackie SlaceY Hollvvmod metwries

femalc pleasurcs in thcse forms ol popular culturc: how should my
invitation to remember' such picasures be received - as a promise
of their validation or as a thrcat of their condemnation? Either way,
an anxiety about this question is cicarly present in many of the
rcsponses I received. sincc, after all, I have the power to interpret
and comment upon these texts and to represent them to (another)
public. Kathleen Lucas is unusual in offering an autocritique of

'female fandom', but typical in so far as her memories are produced
in rclation to the idea of a judgemcnt of such pleasures. For many
respondents, my anticipated response is assumed to be an
acknowledgment of the importance of their memories through their
inclusion in 'cinema history', contradicting the usual derision they
receive within patriarchal culture. Indeed, many offer accounts of
how such attachments have been trivialized and not considered
suitable for a 'mature' woman. Commenting on her brother's
response to her collection of photographs of British and Hollywood
stars, one woman writes:

0 I had pictures of Patricia Roc, Margaret Lockwood, Petula
Clarke, Jcanette McDonald, Dulcie Gray and my favourite, best
loved of all - Margaret O'Brien! We used to send for photographs
to MGM and RKO.... I'm afraid my brother cleared all 'that
sort of rubbish' (his words, not mine) from my late mother's
house before I was able to get there. (Cynthia Mulliner)

This respondent is keen to distance herself from the masculine
trivialization of her much-loved collection by highlighting the gulf
0 betwoen his use of derisive language and her attachment to her
belongings. Furthermore, her sense of regret is emphasized in the
final phrase, 'bcfore I was able to get there', suggesting the
possibility of retrieval had the timing been different.
For others, the loss of such valued collections is attributed to
World War 11, the key event associated with loss during this period:
I had a wonderful collection of personally autographed photos,
0 mostly with my name written on them. Unfortunately, they went
when my home was bombed during the war and I have been sad
about this ever since. No personal loss has had so much effect on
me as the loss of this collection (started when I was a schoolgirl).
0 (Mrs M. Caplin)

I wish I still had some of my magazines. My copies of Photoplay
werc immaculate - they were never loaned to anybody. I kept
most of them for years, but unfortunately when the war came,
0 they were discarded during my absence in the forces - much to
my rage and frustration. (Mrs J. Kemp) (emphasis in original)

; The most common explanation for change in spectators'
attachments to the cinema at this time, however, is marriage - which

327 Scleen 35:4 Winler 1934 Jdckie SdCeV Hollvwood memrJlies

marked the end of many female spcctators' dcvotion to female stars.
Thesc accounts represent a shift hl acceptability of such feelings for
Hollywood stars:

It amazes mc to think of what choice of Picture Houscs we had. I n 1*. Scarlans wOeded, p 204
can remcmber at Icast twcivc. You could go evcry night and sec a
differcnt picturc. And they werc always full, with qucucs outsidc.
We spcnt most of our Bank Holiday aftcrnoons qucuing to see
E Doris Day. But after I was married, we were rationed to once a
week. (Jean Shepherd)

At the time (1945) there was a film magazine callcd Piclure60er
and I loved this book, but it was also a time of shortages, so onc
could only get this magazine from under thc counter and also if
you were a regular customer of that particular shop. When I
discovered I could obtain this item I used to cycle likc crazy from
my work in the dinner time, just to obtain this film star book. I
drove my poor Mum potty with all the cuttings plastcrcd all ovcr
my bedroom walls and my masses of scrapbooks. I evcn dreamed
: of being an usherette I stopped going to the pictures aftcr I
was married and had a family. (Mrs M. Russcil)

In a few exampics. mothers are blamcd for not recognizing thc
significance of such collections (thought perhaps thcy werc thrown
away preciscly becausc such significance seemed inappropriatc):

I left home in IY53 on marriagc and lived in a minutc flat in
London. By the timc we could afford morc space, my mothcr had
dumped the things she thought a marricd woman didn't necd. I
found it hard to forgive her. (Anon)

; All these stories point to respondents' feelings of a previous lack
of recognition of the importance of film stars in their lives. Anger,
betrayal and regret are expressed at the discrepancy between female
; spectators' high valuation of these photos and scraphooks and other
L people's ridiculc of them. Furthermorc, marriagc functions as a key
boundary between 'girlhood' in which such atlachments might be
i permissible and 'adulthood' in which such devotions mighl conflict
with morc 'appropriate' oncs: 'Whcn the time camc to distinguish
betwcen "Childhood" and "Growing-Up", I must havc destroycd as
many as fifty books full'. (Avril Feltham) This construction of
attachments to Hollywood stars of thc same sex as immaturc, naive,
foolish or even pervcrse, draws on a number of discourses of
femininity and feminine sexuality in which thc adoption of a man as
the central love object signifies hetcrosexual maturity. In all thesc
accounts, respondents articulate an ambivalent desire for recognition
of the significfmce of thcse same-sex attachmcnts as morc than
simply schoolgirl crushes or regressive narcissism, whilst
X simultaneously guarding against my criticism of their Hollywood

; 328 Sclerm 354 Winles t994 Jackie StaceV Hollv~mod memorles

p
a~
W

passions: this they half-expect because they are so familiar with
contcmpt from external critics, be these family, fricnds, husbands or
rescarchers. Thus, running throughout many of these accounts is a
dialogue with the imagined reader about the validity of indulging in
such reminiscences of these 'silly' feminine pleasures.n Indeed,
many express their own anxieties about the worth of their memories
for cinema history, echoing the remembered questionability of their
validity as a cultural experience at the time: several accounts finish
with comments such as 'I can't imagine this is of much use to you'
or 'I hope I have been of some help' and 'I can't see that my

ramblings will be of great significance'.
Some respondents, however, took my research request for their
memories to be a guarantee of recognition of previously low-status or
t stigmatized feelings about female stars. For example, an account of a
previously discredited attachment to Doris Day implies a welcome
contrast between past ridicule and my anticipated response. The direct
0 address ('I wanted to write and tell you') suggests a sharing of a
t confidence with the expectation of an understanding reader:

I wanted to write and tell you of my devotion to Doris Day. I
thought she was fantastic, and joined her fan club, collected all
the photos and info I could. I saw Calamity Jane 45 times in a
fortnight and still watch all her films avidly. My sisters all thought
I was mad going silly on a woman, but I just thought she was
wonderful.... My sisters were all mad about Elvis, but my
devotion was to Doris Day. (Veronica Mills)

The contrast to her sisters' attachments to Elvis, the epitome of
| smouldering heterosexual masculinity, suggests thc unacceptability of
the homoerotic connotations of this respondents' devotion.
Previously dismissed as immature and trivial (she was considered
'mad' to be going ssilly' on a woman), these feclings towards a
fcmale star have not been recognized as significant since they lack
the seriousness of malure heterosexual love. The dialogicality of this
t cxt is not just in relalion to my position as imagined reader, then,
but also in a 'hidden polemic' with her sisters; contesting her sisters'
dcfinition of hcr attachment to Doris Day as 'mad', thc narrator
0 dcfines it instcad as 'devotion' and uscs thc (intcrcstingly
ambiguous) former tcrm to relcr to their lovc of Elvis.
Thcse mcmories of cinematic speclatorship are thus constructed
through forms of privatc storytclling which arc given public
recognition in thc rcscarch process. Like many confessional acts,
although utilizing so-callcd privatc forms, they arc nevcrtheless
written for another: for a kind of public consumption, first by me,
thc researcher; and secondly, once in print, by a wider audicncc.
Indecd, perhaps thc desire for rccognition or validation of thcse
previously low-status feclings is onc reason why somc of thcse
femalc spectators offcred their mcmorics in a rather confessional

329 Scrccn 35 4 Wmiel t994 Jackie Staccy Hollvumod memories

~t
p

23 Michel Foucault [he Hislory d
seutoLt6tt: An Introdttstiott. ttans
Robtnt Hudey iHatmendsotth
Penguln t9911 P 59

24 Nltt Frhki t~d Femm6t
AtttStt/wttitts: fieminds~ lslerarure
and Social Ghuge ~t
HtttstStttntton bdittttt. 19691
pp 97 9.

; mode. The disclosure of secret loves, private collections and lifetime
devotions suggests that for some respondents the research process
might function as a kind of 'secular confessional'. Perhaps my initial
invitation to remember feelings towards female stars of the past
belongs to a more general cultural imperative which encourages
'confession'. As Foucault has pointed out:

We have become a singularly confessing society. The confession
has spread far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine,
education, family relationships, and love relations, in most
ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites; one
confesses one's crimes, one's sins, one's thoughts and desires,
one's illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling whatever is
most diffieult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to
one's parents, one's educators, one's doctor, to those one loves;
one admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, the things people
write books about.23

In describing some of these accounts as confessional, I do not
0 mean to criticize the self-disclosures offered in this research process,
but rather to comment on one particular form of articulation in the
; dialogic exchange between researcher and researched. As Rita
Felski has pointed out, the use of the term 'confession' has
sometimes 'acquired slightly dismissive overtones in recent years';
i however, for her the confessional text is simply a subgenre of
women's autobiography which 'makes public that which has been
private'.24 In the context of this research the making public of that
which has been private is effected through producing written
memories for someone else, someone invested with a certain amount
i of power and credibility. As a 'researcher', my academic status
might in turn invest these memories with a weight and importance
; they are felt to lack. Confession might be understood here as a form
i of dialogics, for confession hinges on the idea of an addressee.
i According to Foucault we always confess to someone else, usually
Q someone who represents authority:

The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking
subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that
unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess
without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not
i simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the
confession, prescribes and appreciates it and intervenes in order to
judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile; a ritual in which
truth is eorroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has to
; surmount in order to be formulated; and finally, a ritual in which
0 the expression alone, independently of its external consequences,
produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it

0 330 Scleen 35 4 wimet 199A Jrtcbe Stacey Holltwoott memotles

25 loucaub. History ol seltrabttrw :
p 62 1 am glatelul ID Hilart

Hinds lol dlawmg my altentton
lo Ihese passages on conlession ;

2tEi Poputrnt ~lemor~ Group. Yopulal
memony p 211

27 Catolyn Sleedtnan tandscaFtt tittr
a Good Woman: A Stort d two i
/Ives ILondon Virago 19961. i
p 29

29 Fopultft Menay Gloup. Yopula ;
memestS p 219.

exonerates, redeems, and purifies him Isicl; it unburdens him of
his wrongs, liberates him and promises him salvation.25

The invitation to tell one's story to a researeher may offer the
promise of being heard, reeognized, and taken seriously. What
makes this study particularly appealing as a 'confessional
opportunity' is the way in which the act of confession itself elevates
; the material into significance. It thus offers the chance to (re)gain
the (lost) status of eertain emotions from the past. For what surfaces
j repeatedly in these narralives is the desire to recapture past
pleasures which were either 'laughable' to begin with (as in the
; Doris Day example), or which have sinee lost their status (with
4 marriage or maturity). The subsequent discrediting of attachments to
4 female stars, then, seems to cast doubt on their original validity. In
0 addition to changes in the film industry and the star system through
j which stars are perceived to have lost their earlier idol status, life
f history changes also mean the loss of status of earlier attachments to
i stars. These are combined in the desire to return to past moments
t and revalue them through the external recognition anticipated in the
; research process. This dialogical exchange thus promises an
: imagined transformation in the cultural status of emotional
4 connections to Hollywood slars, resolving the discrepancy between
respondents' own valuation, and others' trivialization, of these
; feminine popular pleasures.

For memory is, by definition, a term which directs our attention not
to the past but to the past-present relation.75i

Memory alone cannot resurrect past time, because it is memory
itself that shapes it, long after historical time has passed.27

g The dialogic analysis in the previous section highlights especially
; sharply the processes of memory in reworking past identities in
4 relation to the present, and vice versa. Through these multiple
t dialogues, respondents are able to shift between past and present
t idenfities in their imaghiations, and use my inferred presence to
facilitate such temporal shifts. The dialogic exchanges function to
produce hoth a dialogue with an imagined reader in the present, and
also numerous other dialogues with discourses and interlocutors
i from the remembered past. These, it is argued, can only be
- understood in terms of 'the way in which popular memories are
c onstructed and reconstructed as part of a contemporary
; consciousness'.29 Popular memory theory therefore stresses the
significance of the prcsent as the standpoint from which remembered
accounts are produced.
Why, then, do certain memories figure repeatedly in some
peopic's accounts of the past, and how do such memories function

331 Scseen 35 4 W611e, 1994 Jacbe Slacey Hot/vvwood memories

a fWlal Mensolv Gloup
unpuUIshed papels on popula
mernnrV iulllvelsllv ¡l
8rrrnino~ham Cenile lol
Contempo~arv Cul~ulal Sludles,
ndl

ID a Ibid, P

31 Itdd p 161

al
~n

as touchstones in their self-narrativizalions? Ccrtain mclnorics, it has
bcen suggested, havc a particular funclion in processes of identily
formafion. Mcmories in which we havc an enduring and recurring
personal hivestmcnt in tcrms of our idenfilies havc becn called
I,L~flSUred memories.3 Many respondcnts in my research wroic of
such treasured memories and of their continuing significance: 'I have
memories I shall always treasurc. Other things in life take over,
visiting the cinema is nil these days, but I shall always remember my
favourite films and those wonderful stars of yesteryear'. (Mrs B.
Morgan) Such treasured memories might be likened to a valued
personal possession: an object of vast sentimental significance to the
self, but a worthless trinket to others; that is, until the audience
researcher revalues it, as it were. Here memories of Hollywood stars
are a kind of personal cinema memorabilia. These fantasy objects
arc not only treasured by respondents, but also anticipated to be
valuable proof of their own credentials as cinema historians:

The major film stars of my major film-going period made a big
impact on me. I can see a short clip from a film and know
instantly whether I've seen it bcforc or not - and as likc or not,
be abic to add - 'then she moves off down thc staircase' or 'the
ncxt drcss she appears in is white with puffy net sleeves'. (M.
Palin)

Indeed, it has been argued that treasured memories are particularly
significant in conserving a fantasy of a past self and theroby guarding
against loss.30 Treasured memories may thus signify past selves or
imagined scives which have also become importalit rctrospectively.
The notion of the treasured memory also suggests a place which can
be regularly revisited. One woman writes:

My grandfather's boss was kind enough to, cvcry Christmas of my
childhood, give me a present of a film annual. I enjoyed them
then, but never dreamt what a treasure trove they'd prove to bc.
Now in my 50's, I pore over them from time to time and it's like
opening Pandora's Box Isicl. Stars of yesteryear, Iong forgotten.
Films I saw, but had forgotten all about. Hollywood at its height,
the glitz and glamour.... (Barbara McWinter)

How might these treasured memories be understood as
investments in particular versions of the past? One explanation
might bc that these memories represent particular 'transformative
moments' in the spectator's life history.3s Such moments are
especially pertinent to the film star-spectator relationship because
Hollywood stars embody cultural ideals of femininity and represent
to spectators the possibility of transforming thc self. Indeed. many
memories pinpoint the role of Hollywood stars in the changes in
spectators' own idcntities. This is partly duc to the power of the
discourse of transformation in thc feminine life history, in which

i 332 Screen 35 4 Wieter 1534 Jactie Stacey HolLywood memuies

= Hichard t}fer Enlertainrnent and :
rstopla in dill tYichols {ed I 4
Movies and Melhods, Votume 11
t6erteteW CA Univelsity d
f atlornia f'ress. t9851 pp 221)
32 we also Stacev Sras Lk~.ng. :
PP ES-125

31 t'oput r Xbrnory Gloup
unpublished papers p 36

3tt Slacey. Star Lismo pp 212-7 4

itti SleedLnan, for a Good
woman

adolescence prefigures a fundamental changc. Many respondcnts'
mcmories arc of a transitional period: their 'tecnage' years, in which
change and self-transformation werc central to their desires and
aspirations; and cinoma is remembered as a transitional space in
which the fantasy of possibic futures is played out.

0 The momenl I took my seat it was a different world, plush and
exciting, the world outside was forgotten. I felt grown up and
sophisticated. (Betty Cruse)

It has been suggested that the pleasure of such memorics derives
from the ways they work as 'personal utopias', offering escape from
: the present. This is particularly pertinent with regard to spectalors'
0 memories of Hollywood stars, who seem to offer the most utopian
0 fantasies to female spectators.32 In this context, femininity itself
0 might be seen as the ultimate utopian identity: an impossible ideal,
- predicated upon loss through its very embodiment in the visual
image. The kinds of personal utopias produced depend upon past
expectations and the extent to which these expectations have been
i met: some memories, in other words, retain a central cmotional
: importance because of frustrations, disappointments and unfulfilled
0 hopes. Furthermore, certain memories perhaps assumc especial
j significance because they are 'stories of unfinished business'.t The
q degree of emotional investment in a memory may have to do with
i the extent to which the narrativization of a past self represents an
aspect of identity with continuing significance in the present. Indeed,
0 femininity might itself be regarded as 'unfinished business', since its
production is quite literally never-ending.
Female spectators' youthful expectations and subsequent
; experiences of romance, motherhood or paid work, for example,
0 may shape their reconstructions of past attachments to Hollywood
i deals of femininity. Given the 'impossibility of femininity', such
t feelings may be especially pertinent to an understanding of these
: memories." Feminine ideals are unrealizable, not only because of
0 the fragility of the image, but also because they are often
i fundamentally contradictory (as, for example, ideals of motherhood
; and of sexual desirability). Furthermore, as Carolyn Steedman has
i shown, material constraints in certain periods in women's lives may
0 shape investments in particular memories. This is especially
pertinent in the context of 1950s consumerism and the 'age of
afflucncc'.7i Memories of Hollywood stars, as relrospective
constructions of past time in which feminine identity still seemed
y realizable in the future, may have particular significance for female
: spectators as representations of a fantasy seif never realized.

These occasions offer opportunities lo reassess the past, in the light
oJ subse4uent experlence and new information, in both personal

333 Scleen 35 4 Wime7 1994 Jactie Slacev Holivwood memolies

19 Graham Dawson and Rob West
Our i nesl boul7 the popuzar
memory ol World Wal 11 and the
slluggle uvel nallonal IdenlRy.
rrl Geoh Huld led ) Illa~lonal
fia,ons World Wal Iwo en
r3rirish Fdms and [e/evesion
tlondon firltish film Instltute
l9iJ41 pp }0-11

D Populal Memozy GrouP Popular
memo y p 243

D Glaham Gawson 'Hislory-wfiling
on Wodd WaMI in Huld.
Nallonal Fls/ions

15 fol an account ol the
psechoanaheic argumenis aooul
gendel and noslabia see
Susannah Radslone
Rememuenng Medea Ihe uses
ol noslalgia CNlrCa/ Duanedr
vol 35 no 3119931 PP 5443:
'Rememserimm wrselves:
memory wrideg and Ihe lemale
sell in Penny flolen e and
Deidie Reynolds ledsl Feminist
SuDwects Mulb-Media: New
Aoofoachrrs lo Cdlicism end
CreadvR,v {Marsheslen:
Manchesler UniversRv Press
1994 lorthcomingl

terms ('when I was') and a past-present relation, and involve a
constant process of reworking and nrurl.sformirig remembered
experience.36

Dialogic negotiations betwccn past and present discourscs and
subjects are far from ncutral. They are often shot through with
wistful longing for rcmcmbered times, and with desire to recapture a
lost sense of possibility: SUCil memorics, in other words, are deeply
nostalgic. A yearning for an irrctrievable lost time characterizes
many of the memories in my study. The invitation to produce a
remembered past promises the pleasure of an imagined retrieval, but
V simultaneously reminds respondents of thc impossibility of reliving
that past. In producing mcmories, 'people do relive certain past
events imaginarily, often with peculiar vividness. This may be
0 especially the case for those (for example, the elderly) who have
: bcen forced into a marginal position in the economic, cultural and
social life of a society, and, fearful of absolute oblivion, have little
to lose but their memories.'37
A typical version of the remembered past constructed in many of
these Hollywood memories might be understood in relation to what
Graham Dawson has referred to as a kind of 'mythic past': 'myth is
always in the process of being alluded to, recycied, cven
controverted . . . yet therc is never a moment whcn it appears as
itself in pure form'.3k' In this rcspect, nostalgic yearnings for a lost
Hollywood and for the 'truly great' stars of the 'Silver Screen'
reinforce its mythic status during a 'Golden Age' of cinema which
can never be recaptured. The 'genuine' star system is marked off
from what came after, the demise of the studio cra of Hollywood, in
a remembered past in which stars were distant and still functioned as
0 impossible ideals: 'I think in those eras we werc more inclined to

put stars on a pedestal. They were so far removed from everyday
0 life, they were magical. Thcse days arc so ordinary - thc magic has
gone. Hollywood will never be Ihc samc agahl!' (Katlllccn Sincs)
This nostalgic pleasure of remembering Hollywood stars of thc
; past has a particular appeal for female spectators because of thc
i ways it connects with cultural constructions of fcmininity. Feminists
t using psychoanalytic theory have argued that nostalgia does indced
have a particular gendered appeal and that this is attributable to the
i significance of early feelings and beliefs about loss in relation to
sexual difference.35 However, the gendering of nostalgic desire in
t hese mcmories hinges on thc extent to which femininity is
i constructed in patriarchal culturc as an unattainable visual imagc of
0 desirability. To present oncscif to the world for approval in tcrms of
visibic physical attractivcncss is the fundamental and thc ultimate
demand made of femininity. Few women evcr overcomc thc sensc of
mismatch between self-imagc and the feminine idcals of physical
appearance. Feminine ideals are youthful ones and, being

334 Streen 35 4 Winler 1994 - Jxbe Stacey Hollywrod memones

ephemeral, contain loss even in their rare attainment. The sense of
loss evoked by nostalgic dcsire in these memories is partly bound up
with the predication of femininity-as-image upon loss. The feelings
of loss, often experienced in the gap betwocn self-image and the
currently fashionable idcal image, are deepened and extended as the
idcal becomes evcr-incrcasingly an impossibility. For these female
: spectators, then, nostalgic desire may be bound up with a particular
sense of loss rooted in the unattainability of feminine ideals: perhaps
4 it is its particular designation of femininity as image which gives
cinematic nostalgia such potency.
Nostalgia is articulated here in relation to several 'lost objects':
. for a Hollywood of the past when cinema meant so much more than
| it does today; for a time when star status kept femininity a distant
i ideal image on the screen; for a former self - younger, more
i glamorous - who still maintained a fantas,~ connection to such
¥ ideals; for a past in which the future seemed to offcr a promise of
- fulfilment. Nostalgia here is expressed as a yearning for a past in
T which the remembered self yearned for the future. The missing
woman of cinema history and feminist film criticism has multiple
i references here: she is lost in history; lost in the demise of
g Hollywood and the star system; lost in the inevitable failure of
g femininity as desirable image; lost in personal narratives in which
youth and feminine ideals no longer offer a promise of fulfilment.
This sense of loss is bound up with femininity's cultural construction
g as an unattainable visual image of desirability, an image which is
youthful and so doomed to transience. Memories of Hollywood stars
i cn the 1940s and 1950s evoke nostalgic desirc for a lost past,
: imagined former identities, and for a time 'when stars were really
0 stars'. Remembering these stars is an acknowledgement of the loss
¥ . of that timc, and yet also a way of guarding against complete loss by
| recrcating the feeling of a past in which the future still held out
g promise.

Ihis anicoe is based on a papee origmally conceived in dialogue vil9h Susannah Radslone and Janel Ihumim lol the
plenalv panel ol Ule Scleen Sludics Conlerence 1993: Iheh paprls wdl appear in Screen ml 3r. no I I would like to
kbank Hdaiy Hinds and Lynne Pealce lol ktleu helplul colljmems on eaRiel dialls ol Ihis anicke.

335 SLleim 35:4 Wmlel 9954 Jackie Slacey Ho//vwood memories

Laurel, Brenda. "Chapter One: The Nature of the
Beast." Comcutersas Theatre. Addison-Wesley
Publishing Company, 1991. Pages 1-33.

Ihe Nature of the 'Beast

fRvepresentin,g Stion

In 1962, the first computer game was invented by some hack-
ers at MIT. It was called Spacewar and it ran on a DEC PDP-1,
the world's first minicomputer, connected to a CRT display.
One of the game's designers explained that the game was
born when a group sat around trying to figure out "what
would be interesting displays" they could create for the CRT
with some pattern-generating software they had developed.
"We decided that probably, you could make a two-dimension-
al maneuvering sort of thing, and decided that naturally the
obvious thing to do was spaceships." The MIT hackers
weren't the only ones to invent Spacewar. As Alan Kay noted,
"the game of Spacewar blossoms spontaneously wherever
there is a graphics display connected to a computer" [Brand,
1974].
Why was Spacewar the "natural" thing to build with this
new technology? Why not a pie chart or an automated kalei-
doscope or a desktop? Its designers identified action as the key
ingredient and conceived Spacewar as a game that could pro-
vide a good balance between thinking and doing for its play-
ers. They regarded the computer as a machine naturally
suited for representing things that you could see, control, and
play with. Its interesting potential lay not in its ability to
perform calculations but in its capacity to represent action in
which humans could participate.

Computers as Theatre l

Why don't we look at everything computers do that way?
Consider the following question:

Q: What is being represented by the Macintosh interface?
1. A desktop.
2. Something that's kind of like a desktop.
3. Someone doing something in an environment that's kind
of like a desktop.

Number three is the only answer that comes close. The
human is an indispensable ingredient of the representation,
since it is only through a person's actions that all dimensions
of the representation can be manifest. To put it another way, a
computer-based representation without a human participant
is like the sound of a tree falling in the proverbial uninhabited
forest.
There are two major reasons for belaboring such a seem-
ingly obvious point. First, it wasn't always trueÑand the
design disciplines for applications and interfaces still bear the
marks of that former time. Second, reconceptualizing what
computers do as representing action with human participants
suggests a design philosophy that diverges significantly from
much of the contemporary thinking about interfaces.

Interf ace £?oobution
"Interface" has become a trendy (and lucrative) concept over
the last several y.earsÑa phenomenon that is largely
attributable to the introduction of the Apple Macintosh.
Interface design is concerned with making computer systems
and applications easy to use (or at least usable) by humans.
When we think of human-computer interfaces today, we are
likely to visualize icons and menu bars, or perhaps command
lines and blinking cursors. But it wasn't always so.
John Walker, founder and president of Autodesk, Inc.,
provides an illuminating account of the "generations" of user
interface design lWalker, 1990]. In the beginning, says Walker,
there was a one-on-one relationship between a person and a

2 Interface Evolution

The Nature of the Beast

computer through the knobs and dials on the front of massive
early machines like the ENIAC. The advent of punch cards
and batch processing replaced this direct human-computer
interaction with a transaction mediated by a computer opera-
tor. Time-sharing and the use of "glass teletypes" reintro-
duced direct human-computer interaction and led to the
command-line and menu-oriented interfaces with which the
senior citizens of computing (people over thirty) are probably
familiar. Walker attributes the notion of "conversationality" in
human-computer interfaces to this kind of interaction, where
a person does something and a computer respondsÑa tit-for-
tat interaction.
This simplistic notion of conversation led many early
interfac'e specialists to develop a model of interaction that
treats human and computer as two distinct parties whose
"conversation" is mediated by the screen. But as advances in
linguistics have demonstrated, there is more to conversation
than tit-for-tat. Dialogue is not just linearized turn-taking in
which I say something, you go think about it and then you
say something, I go think about it, and so on. An alternative

model of conversation employs the notion of common ground,
described by Herbert H. Clark and Susan E. Brennan [1990]:

It takes two people working together to play a duet, shake
hands, play chess, waltz, teach, or make love. To succeed, the
two of them have to coordinate both the content and process of
what they are doing. Alan and Barbara, on the piano, must
come to play the same Mozart duet. This is coordination of
content. They must also synchronize their entrances and exits,
coordinate how loud to play forte and pianissimo, and other-
wise adjust to each other's tempo and dynamics. This is coordi-
nation of process. They cannot even begin to coordinate on
content without assuming a vast amount of shared information
or common groundÑthat is, mutual knowledge, mutual
beliefs, and mutual assumptions lClark and Carlson, 1982;
Clark and Marshall, 1981; Lewis, 1969; Schelling, 19601. And to
coordinate on process, they need to update, or revise, their
common ground moment by moment. All collective actions are
built on common ground and its accumulation. [Clark and
Brennan, 19901

Interface Evolution

)

¥ ::
_i~

Computers as Theatre

In her work in applying the notion of common ground to
human-computer interfaces, Brennan 11990a] suggests that
common ground is a jointly inhabited "space" where meaning
takes shape through the collaboration and successive approxi-
mations of the participants. Brennan's ongoing work is aimed
at designing human-computer interfaces so that they offer
means for establishing common ground ("grounding") that
are similar to those that people use in human-to-human con-
versationÑfor example, interruptions, questions, utterances,
and gestures that indicate whether something is being under-
stood [Brennan, 1990b].
Contemporary graphical interfaces, as exemplified by the
Macintosh, explicitly represent part of what is in the "com-
mon ground" of interaction through the appearance and
behavior of objects on the screen. Some of what goes on in the
representation is exclusively attributable to either the person
or the computer, and some of what happens is a fortuitous
artifact of a collaboration in which the traits, goals, and behav-
iors of both are inseparably intertwined.
The notion of common ground not only provides a superi-
or representation of the conversational process but also sup-
ports the idea that an interface is not simply the means
whereby a person and a computer represent themselves to
one another; rather it is a shared context for action in which
both are agents. (This book will employ the noun "agent" to
mean one who initiates action, a definition consistent with
Aristotle's use of the concept in the Poetics. Insurance agents,
real estate agents, and secret agents are examples of a kind of
agency that is more complexÑand vaguely ominous. The
subject of "interface agents" is discussed later in Chapter 5.)
When the old tit-for-tat paradigm intrudes, the "conversa-
tion" is likely to break down, once again relegating person
and computer to opposite sides of a "mystic gulf" filled with
hidden processes, arbitrary understandings and misunder-
standings, and power relationships that are competitive rather
than cooperative. "Mistakes," unanticipated outcomes, and
error messages are typical evidence of such a breakdown in
communication, where the common ground becomes a sea of
misunderstanding.

4 11lterface Evolution
a~
~D

The Nature of the Beast

The notion of interface metaphors was introduced to pro-
vide people with a conceptual scheme that would guard
against such misunderstandings by deploying familiar objects
and environments as stakes in the common ground. But even
"good" metaphors don't always work. For instance, in an
informal survey of Macintosh-literate university students,
many people failed to employ the word "desktop" anywhere
in their description of the Finder.l Where an interface
metaphor diverges significantly from its real-world referent,
people proceed by accounting for the behaviors of particular
"objects" on the screen with ad hoc explanations of system
operation, which are often incorrectÑa "naive physics" of
computing [see Owen 19861. In such cases, metaphors do not
serve as "stakes in the common ground," but rather as cogni-
tive mediators whose labels may be somewhat less arcane
(but possibly more ambiguous) than a computer scientist's
jargon.
Although interface metaphors can fail in many ways (as

discussed later in Chapter 5), their growing prevalence, espe-
cially in graphical interfaces, has expanded the domain of
interface design to admit contributions from specialists in
graphic and industrial design, linguistics, psychology, educa-
tion, and other disciplines. An important contribution of the
metaphorical approach has been to make interface design an
interdisciplinary concern. The next section focuses on two of
those "interdisciplines": psychology and graphic design.

Interface InterMiscipEines

Psychology is a familiar domain to dramatists, actors, and
other theatre artists because of its focus on human behavior.
Understanding how psychology and theatre are alike and

The Macintosh Finder is an application for managing people's file
systems and for launching other applications. It comes with the system
and is automatically launched when the machine is turned on. The Finder
was designed on the basis of a "desktop metaphor," employing graphical
icons to represent individual files as "documents" and hierarchical
organizational units as "folders."

Interface Interdisciplines 5
rs

Computers as Theatre

different may illuminate the distinct contributions that each
can make in the field of human-computer interaction.
The two disciplines have several elements in common.
Both concern themselves with how agents relate to one anoth-
er in the process of communicating, solving problems, build-
ing things, having funÑthe whole range of human activity.
Both interpret human behavior in terms of goals, obstacles,
conflicts, discoveries, changes of mind, successes, and failures.
Both domains have important contributions to make to inter-
face theory and design. Both attempt to observe and under-
stand human behavior, but they employ that understanding
to different ends: In general, psychology attempts to describe
what goes on in the real world with all its fuzziness and loose
ends, while theatre attempts to represent something that might
go on, simplified for the purposes of logical and affective clari-
ty. Psychology is devoted to the end of explaining human
behavior, while drama attempts to represent it in a form that
provides intellectual and emotional closure. Theatre is
informed by psychology (both professional and amateur fla-
vors), but it turns a trick that is outside of psychology's
province through the art of representing action. By taking a
look at some of the key ideas that psychology has contributed
to interface design, we may be able to identify some ways in
which theatrical knowledge can extend and complement
them.
Psychologists have been involved in the quest to under-
stand and shape human-computer interaction almost since
the beginning of computing, through such disciplines as
human factors and computer-aided instruction.2 In the 1970s

2The literature on "human factors" and other psychological perspectives
on human-computer interaction is huge. It is beyond the scope and
purpose of this book to provide even a cursory survey of the entire
domain. The work mentioned in this chapter is selected in terms of its
relevance to the thesis of this particular book. Interested readers may
wish to review The Human Factor: Designing Computer Systems for People
by Richard Rubinstein and Harry Hersh 119841, which includes an

excellent bibliography, Readings In Human-Computer Interaction:
A Multidisciplinary Approach by Ronald M. Baecker and William A.S.
Buxton 11987], or the various proceedings of ACM SIGCHI and the
Human Factors Society.

Interface Interdisciplines

The Nature of the Beast

and on through the 1980s, cognitive psychologists developed
perspectives on human-computer interaction that were more
critically focused on interface design than those of their col-
leagues in other branches of psychology. The work of Donald
A. Norman, founder of the Institute for Cognitive Psychology
at the University of California at San Diego, is especially illu-
minating. In the 1980s, Norman built a lab at UCSD that fos-
tered some of the most innovative and germane thinking
about human-computer interaction to date [see Norman and
Draper, 1986, for a collection of essays by members and associ-
ates of this group]. Norman's perspective is highly task-
oriented. In his book, The Psychology of Everyday Things [1988],
Norman drives home the point that the design of an effective
interfaceÑwhether for a computer or a doorknobÑmust
begin with an analysis of what a person is trying to do, rather
than with a metaphor or a notion of what the screen should
display.
Norman's emphasis on action as the stuff that interfaces
both enable and represent bores a tunnel out of the labyrinth of
metaphor and brings us back out into the light, where what is
going on is larger, more complex, and more fundamental than
the way the human and the computer "talk" to each other
about it.
Norman's insights dovetail nicely with those of the "com-
mon ground" linguists, suggesting a notion of the interface
that is more than screen-deep. The interface becomes the
arena for the performance of some task in which both human
and computer have a role. What is represented in the interface
is not only the task's environment and tools but also the pro-
cess of interactionÑthe contributions made by both parties
and evidence of the task's evolution. I believe that Norman's
analysis supports the view that interface design should con-
cern itself with representing whole actions with multiple agents.
This is, by the way, precisely the definition of theatre.
Norman has also been a key figure in the development of
another pivotal interface concept, the idea of direct manipula-
tion. Direct manipulation interfaces employ a psychologist's
knowledge of how people relate to objects in the real world in
the belief that people can carry that knowledge across to the

Interface Interdisciplines
7

Computers as Theatre

manipulation of virtual3 objects that represent computational
entities and processes.
The term direct manipulation was coined by Ben
Shneiderman of the University of Maryland, who listed three
key criteria:

1. Continuous representation of the object of interest.
2. Physical actions or labeled button presses instead of
complex syntax.
3. Rapid incremental reversible operations whose impact on
the object of interest is immediately visible lShneiderman,
19871.

Shneiderman reports that direct-manipulation interfaces
can "generate a glowing enthusiasm among users that is in
marked contrast with the more common reaction of grudging
acceptance or outright hostility" lShneiderman, 1987]. In a
cognitive analysis of how direct manipulation works,
Hutchins, Hollan, and Norman 11986] suggest that direct
manipulation as defined may provide only a partial explana-
tion of such positive feelings. They posit a companion effect,
labeled direct engagement, a feeling that occurs "when a user
experiences direct interaction with the objects in a domain"
[the notion of direct engagement is introduced in Laurel,
1986bl. Hutchins et al. add the requirements that input
expressions be able to make use of previous output expres-
sions, that the system create the illusion of instantaneous
response (except where inappropriate to the domain), and
that the interface be unobtrusive.
It seems likely that direct manipulation and direct engage-
ment are head and tail of the same coin (or two handfuls of
the same elephant)Ñone focusing on the qualities of action
and the other focusing on subjective response. The basic issue

3The adjective virtual describes thingsÑworlds, phenomena, etc.Ñthat
look and feel like reality but that lack the traditional physical substance.
A virtual object, for instance, may be one that has no real-world
equivalent, but the persuasiveness of its representation allows us to
respond to it as if it were real.

8 Interface Interdisciplines

The Nature of the Beast

is what is required to produce the feeling of taking action
within a representational world, stripped of the "metacon-
text" of the interface as a discrete concern. Hutchins et al. sum
it up this way: "Although we believe this feeling of direct
engagement to be of critical importance, in fact, we know little
about the actual requirements for producing it." Nevertheless,
their analysis as well as Shneiderman's 11987] provide many
valuable insights and useful examples of the phenomenon.
If we remove Shneiderman's clause regarding labeled but-
ton presses (because in many cases buttons are the artifacts of
a pernicious interface metacontext), then the sense of direct-
ness can be boiled down to continuous representation, "physi-
cal" action, and apparent instantaneity of response. Apparent
instantaneity depends upon both processing speed and the
elimination of representations of intermediate activities in
design. In the analyses of both Shneiderman and Hutchins et
al., continuous representation and physical action depend
heavily upon graphical representation. In fact, Hutchins et al.
identify the granddaddy of direct manipulation as Ivan
Sutherland's graphical design program, Sketchpad

lSutherland, 1963]. Graphical (and, by extension, multisenso-
ry) representations are fundamental to both the physical and
emotional aspects of directness in interaction. Hence, it is
worthwhile to examine the role and contributions of graphic
design in the interface domain.
In many ways, the role of the graphic designer in human-
computer interaction is parallel to the role of the theatrical
scene designer. Both create representations of objects and
environments that provide a context for action. In the case of
theatre, the scene designer provides objects like teacups and
chairs ("props"), canvas-covered wooden frames that are
painted to look like walls ("flats"), and decorative things like
draperies and rugs ("set dressing"). The behaviors of these
elements is also designedÑdoors open, make-believe bombs
explode, trick chairs break in barroom brawls. The lighting
designer uses elements like color, intensity, and direction to
illuminate the action and its environment and to focus our
attention on key areas and events.

Interface Interdisciplines 9
Computers as Theatre

Both scene and light designers use such elements as line,
shadow, color, texture, and style to suggest such contextual
information as place, historical period, time of day, season,
mood, and atmosphere. Theatrical designers also employ
metaphor (and amplify the metaphors provided by the play-
wright) in the design of both realistic and nonrealistic pieces:
the looming cityscape around Willy Loman's house in Death
of a Salesman metaphorically represents his isolation and the
death of his dreams; abstract webs of gauzy fabric suggest the
multiple layers of illusion in the personality of Peer Gynt.
Likewise, in the world of interfaces, the graphic designer
renders the objects and environments in which the action of
the application or system will occur, imparting behaviors to
some objects (like zoom-boxes and pop-up menus) and repre-
senting both concrete and ephemeral aspects of context
through the use of such elements as line, shadow, color, inten-
sity, texture, and style. Such familiar metaphors as desktops
and windows provide behavioral and contextual cues about
the nature of the activity that they support.
Both theatrical design and graphical interface design are
aimed at creating representations of worlds that are like reality
only different. But a scene design is not a whole playÑfor that
we also need representations of character and action.
Likewise, the element of graphical design is only part of the
whole representation that we call an interface.

~IhrouJ the {:Bag,yaye Out
The previous section picks up some of the more promising
threads in the evolving discipline of interface design. It also
suggests that these elements alone may not be sufficient in
defining the nature of human-computer interaction or in real-
izing it effectively, and it recommends theatre as an additional
perspective. But it may not be productive for theatre people
simply to join all the other cooks in the kitchen. l want to take
the argument a step further and suggest that the concept of
interface itself is a hopeless hash, and that we might do better
to throw it out and begin afresh.

ln Throw the Baggage Out

The Nature of the Beast

S 'Definitiona[~ression
My frustration with the notion of the interface is as old as my

involvement with computers. Perhaps the best way to explain
it is to take a short excursion through the history of my per-
sonal view. I became involved with computers as a way to
support myself while I was a graduate student in theatre. I
thought that my career was going to take me to the stage,
either as an actor or as a director. But a life in the theatre
promised little in terms of income, and when a friend of mine
started a little company to create computer software in 1977,1
jumped at the chance to bolster my survival potential with
some technical skills.
I became a software designer and programmer, working
primarily on interactive fairy tales and educational programs
for children. The company was called CyberVision, and the
machine was a lowly 1802 processor with a four-color, low-
resolution display and an alphanumeric keypad. The
CyberVision computer was cassette-loaded with 2K of RAM,
and it had the capacity to synchronize taped audio with ani-
mation on the screen. My first "feature" was an interactive,
animated version of Goldilocks. Later, I created the first lip-
synching on a microcomputer for a game of Hangman in
which the evil executioner delivered menacing lines in a
Transylvanian accent (all this with only sixteen lip positions). l
immediately became immersed in translating my knowledge
of drama and theatre to the task at hand because the two
media were so obviously alike.
When CyberVision folded to its competition (an upstart
company called Atari), I asked my boss to help me think
about what kind of job to look for next. He said, "Why don't
you go work for a bank? They need people to help design
automated teller machines." "I don't know anything about
that," I cried. "Of course you do," he replied. "That's human
factors." In response to my blank look, he elaborated: "That's
making computer things easy for people to use."
What a concept!
I ended up going to work for Atari, not for a bank, but the
notion of ease of use as a design criterion fit neatly and

A Definitional Digression

Computers as Theatre

permanently into my developing intuitions about how the-
atrical expertise could inform the art of designing software.
There's nothing between the audience and the stage but some
good illusion. Clearly, I was on the right track. But I hadn't
run into the other "i" word yet.
After a few years in the software branch of the Atari home
computer division, l decided to take time out to sit down and
think through what I had come to believe about computers
and theatre. (I also needed to begin my dissertation, which I
had decided would be on that subject.) Alan Kay gave me the
opportunity to do so in his research lab at Atari. "Interface"
was every other word in the conversations of the bright
young MIT wizards that populated the lab. l dimly perceived
that there must be more to it than ease of use, and so signed
up for a weekly seminar that one of the psychologists on the
staff was conducting on the subject.

9ZodES C of the Intef
The seminar began by looking at how the concept of interface
was typically understood by people in the computer field.
Figure 1.1 shows a schematic model of the interface. The shad-
ed rectangle in the middle represents the interface, which
encompasses what appears on the screen, hardware
input/output devices, and their drivers.
Compelling as its simplicity might make it, this model
was immediately dismissed by everyone in the group. In
order for an interface to work, the person has to have some

Person (9 1 rl
J a I I

Interface

Computer

Figure 1.1 The pre-cognitive-science view of the interface.

12 Models of the Interface

The Nature of the Beast

CCz
_O

o
O O
01~

Figure 1.2 The mental-models view. The thought bubbles and
their contents are considered part of the interface.

idea about what the computer expects and can handle, and
the computer has to incorporate some information about what
the person's goals and behaviors are likely to be. These two
phenomenaÑa person's "mental model" of the computer and
the computer's "understanding" of the personÑare just as

much a part of the interface as its physical and sensory mani-
festations (Figure 1.2). However, in order to use an interface

(X Ct)
¡O u H¡

Figure 1.3 The "horrible recursion" version of the mental-models
view of the interface. More bubbles could be added ad infinitum.

AAA~lolc ~S Com l~or~i7ro 1.
Computers as Theatre

Figure 1.4 A simple model of the interface, circa 1989. In this
view, the interface is that which joins human and computer,
conforming to the needs of each.

correctly, you must also have an idea of what the computer is
expecting you to do. If you are going to admit that what the
two parties "think" about each other is part of what is going
on, you will have to agree that what the two parties think
about what the other is thinking about them must perforce be
included in the model (Figure 1.3). This elaboration has dizzy-
ing ramiffcations.
Faced with this nightmare, our seminar at Atari aban-
doned the topic, and we turned our attention to more man-
ageable concepts, such as the value of multisensory
representations in the interface.
Over the years, l have frequently observed interface work-
ers backing away from such gnarly theoretical discussions in
favor of the investigation of more tractable issues of technique
and technologyÑsuch subjects as direct manipulation, error
handling, user testing, on-line help functions, graphics and
animation, and sound and speech. The working definition of
the interface has settled down to a relatively simple oneÑhow
humans and computers interactÑbut it avoids the
central issue of what this all means in terms of reality and rep-
resentation (Figure 1.4).
It occurs to me that when we have such trouble defining a
concept, it usually means that we are barking up the wrong
tree.

{Itie SUorMs aStaBe
For purposes of comparison, let's take a look at the theatre.
We have observed that the theatre bears some similarities to
interface design in that both deal with the representation of

1~ The World's a Stage

)

The Nature of the Beast

action. Drama, unlike novels or other forms of literature,
incorporates the notion of performance; that is, plays are meant
to be acted out. A parallel can be seen in interface design. In
his book The Elements of Friendly Software Design 119821, Paul
Heckel remarked, "When I design a product, I think of my
program as giving a performance for its user." In the theatre,
enactment typically occurs in a performance area called a
stage (Figure 1.5). The stage is populated by one or more
actors who portray characters. They perform actions in the
physical context provided by the scene and light designers.
The performance is typically viewed by a group of observers
called an audience.
Part of the technical "magic" that supports the perfor-
mance is embodied in the scenery and objects on the stage

(windows that open and close; teacups that break); the rest
happens in the backstage and "wing" areas (where scenery is
supported, curtains are opened and closed, and sound effects
are produced), the "loft" area above the stage, which accom-
modates lighting instruments and backdrops or set pieces that
can be raised and lowered, and the lighting booth, which is
usually above the audience at the back of the auditorium. The
magic is created by both people and machines, but who, what,
and where they are do not matter to the audience.
It's not just that the technical underpinnings of theatrical
performance are unimportant to audience members; when a
play is "working," audience members are simply not aware of
the technical aspects at all. For the audience member who is

Audience o ivl Backstage area
! ~and wings

Figure 1.5 Plan view of a typical proscenium theatre.

The World's a Stage 14
Computers as Theatre

O _
Audience O i\ Stage
' O A

Figure 1.6 For the audience, what's happening on the stage is all
there is. The triangles represent the actors.

engaged by and involved in the play, the action on the stage is
all there is (Figure 1.6). In this sense, plays are like movies:
When you are engrossed in one, you forget about the projec-
tor, and you may even lose awareness of your own body.
For the actor on stage, the experience is similar in that every-
thing extraneous to the ongoing action is tuned out, with the
exception of the audience's audible and visible responses,
which are often used by the actors to tweak their performance
in real time (this, by the way, reminds us that theatrical audi-
ences are not strictly "passive" and may be said to influence
the action). For actor and audience alike, the ultimate "reality"
is what is happening in the imaginary world on the
stageÑthe representation.
As researchers grapple with the notion of interaction in
the world of computing, they sometimes compare computer
users to theatrical audiences. "Users," the argument goes, are
like audience members who are able to have a greater influ-
ence on the unfolding action than simply the fine-tuning pro-
vided by conventional audience response. In fact, I used this
analogy in my dissertation in an attempt to create a model for
interactive fantasy. The users of such a system, I argued, are
like audience members who can march up onto the stage and
become various characters, altering the action by what they
say and do in their roles.
Let's reconsider for a minute. What would it be really like
if the audience marched up on the stage? They wouldn't
know the script, for starters, and there would be a lot of awk-
ward fumbling for context. Their clothes and skin would look

16 The World's a Stage

The Nature of the Beast

7 A o o
O A
to o
Stage

Figure 1.7 Putting the audience on the stage creates confusion.

funny under the lights. A state of panic would seize the actors
as they attempted to improvise action that could incorporate
the interlopers and still yield something that had any
dramatic integrity. Or perhaps it would degenerate into a free-
for-all, as performances of avant-garde interactive plays in the
1960s often did (Figure 1.7).
The problem with the audience-as-active-participant idea
is that it adds to the clutter, both psychological and physical.
The transformation needs to be subtractive rather than addi-
tive. People who are participating in the representation aren't
audience members anymore. It's not that the audience pins
the actors on the stage; it's that they become actorsÑand the
notion of "passive" observers disappears.
In a theatrical view of human-computer activity, the stage
is a virtual world. It is populated by agents, both human and
computer-generated, and other elements of the representa-
tional context (windows, teacups, desktops, or what-have-
you). The technical magic that supports the representation, as
in the theatre, is behind the scenes. Whether the magic is cre
ated by hardware, software, or wetware is of no consequence;
its only value is in what it produces on the "stage." In other
words, the representation is all there is (Figure 1.8). Think of it as
existential WYSIWYG.4

4WYSIWYG stands for "what you see Is what you get," coined by Warren
Teitelman at Xerox PARC. It has been held up as a paradigm for direct-
manipulation interfaces, but some theorists have contested its value (see,
for instance, Ted Nelson's article, "The Right Way to Think About
Software Design" in The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design.

The World's a Stage 17

Computers as Theatre

~E ~/\L

(AX A
~A ~

Figure 1.8 An alternate view of human-computer interaction, in
which the representation is all there is. The triangles represent
agents of either human or computer-generated types, and the other
shapes are other objects in the virtual environment. The shape of
the "stage" is oval, like the beam of a spotlight, to suggest that all
that matters is that which is "illuminated."

~Iheatre as an Interface g~etaphor

The idea of human-computer activity suggests a number of
interesting corollaries. Since all action is confined to the world
of the representation, all a~ents are situated in the same con-
text, have access to the same objects, and speak the same lan-
guage. Participants learn what language to speak by noticing
what is understood; they learn what objects are and what they
do by playing around with them. A good example of this
approach is a system called Programming by Rehearsal, devel-
oped by Laura Gould and William Finzer at Xerox PARC in
1983 and 1984. The system is a visual programming environ-
ment based on a dramatic metaphor. There are some problems
with the application of the metaphor per se,5 but the principle

5Particularly troublesome is the idea of combining a group of performers
and a "smart" stage into another performer. This is a case where a novel
capability stretches the metaphor to its breaking point. This particular
example effectively blurs the distinction between stage and performer and
alerts us to the fact that the terms are being used "only" metaphorically.

The Nature of the Beast

of "the representation is all there is" is applied consistently
with powerful results:

Two significant obstacles to learning a programming language
are mastering the language's syntax and learning the
vocabulary. In the Rehearsal World, the designers rarely have to
know either the syntax or the vocabulary as most writing of
code is done by watching. IFitzer and Gould, 19841

A more recent attempt to employ a theatrical metaphor for
an authoring system is Ellis Horowitz's SCriptWriter system,
developed at the University of Southern California in 1987
and 1988 [Horowitz, 1988]. Horowitz's system further illus-
trates the distinction between using theatre as an interface
metaphor and using it in the deeper way that this book advo-
catesÑas a fundamental understanding of what is going on in
human-computer interaction.
As a metaphor, Horowitz's system successfully employs
notions like "director" (as the code of a program generated by
his system) and "rehearsal" (in the same way that Gould's
system employs the notion of programming by rehearsal). But
Horowitz's interface falls off the edge of its own metaphor in
several ways. Programming actions like "cast" and "rehearse"
are intermixed with traditional computerese terms like "edit,"
"list," and "print," failing on the level of consistency. The

most disturbing inconsistency is the notion of treating a
screen as a "player." His player concatenates the notions of
stage, scenery, actors, and dialogue in a concept where the
locus of agency is So dispersed as to be invisible. Furthermore,
the notion of human agencyÑthe other kind of "player" that
may act upon a "stage"Ñis absent in Horowitz's conceptual-
ization. The system does not support a notion of action that
integrates human agency into the whole but rather leaves this
aspect of design entirely up to the author.

InteractiZJity an~uman ~Lction

The idea of enabling humans to take action in representational
worlds is the powerful component of the programming-by
p

Computers as Theatre

rehearsal approach. It is also what is missing in most attempts
to use theatre simply as an interface metaphor. A central goal
of this book is to suggest ways in which we can use a notion
of theatre, not simply as a metaphor but as a way to conceptu-
alize human-computer interaction itself.
Focusing on human agency allows us to simplify another
consistently troublesome concept, the notion of "interact-
ivity." People in the computer game business have been argu-
ing about it for over a decade. In 1988, Alexander Associates
sponsored INtertainment, the first annual conference bringing
together people from all corners of the interactive entertain-
ment business. People came from such diverse industries as
personal computers, video games, broadcast and cable televi-
sion, optical media, museums, and amusement parks. Over
the course of the two days, a debate about the meaning of the
word "interactive" raged through every session, disrupting
carefully planned panels and presentations. People seemed to
regard "interactivity" as the unique cultural discovery of the
electronic age, and they demanded a coherent definition.
Several speakers tried to oblige, but no one succeeded in pre-
senting a definition that achieved general acceptance. Many
participants departed angry and dissatisfied. Could it be the
"wrong tree" problem again?
In the past, I've barked up that same tree. I posited that
interactivity exists on a continuum that could be characterized
by three variables: frequency (how often you could interact),
range (how many choices were available), and significance
(how much the choices really affected matters) [Laurel, 1986a
and b]. A not-so-interactive computer game judged by these
standards would let you do something only once in a while,
would give you only a few things to choose from, and the
things you could choose wouldn't make much difference to
the whole action. A very interactive computer game (or desk-
top or flight simulator) would let you do something that real-
ly mattered at any time, and it could be anything you could
think ofÑjust like real life.
Now I believe that these variables provide only part of the
picture. There is another, more rudimentary measure of
interactivity: You either feel yourself to be participating in the

The Nature of the Beast

ongoing action of the representation or you don't. Successful
orchestration of the variables of frequency, range, and signifi-
cance can help to create this feeling, but it can also arise from
other sourcesÑfor instance, sensory immersion and the tight
coupling of kinesthetic input and visual response. If a repre-
sentation of the surface of the moon lets you walk around and

look at things, then it probably feels extremely interactive,
whether your virtual excursion has any consequences or not.
It enables you to act within a representation that is important.
Optimizing frequency and range and significance in human
choice-making will remain inadequate as long as we conceive
of the human as sitting on the other side of some barrier, pok-
ing at the representation with a joystick or a mouse or a virtu-
al hand. You can demonstrate Zeno's paradox on the user's
side of the barrier until you're blue in the face, but it's only
when you traverse it that things get real.6
The experience of interactivity is a thresholdy phe-
nomenon, and it is also highly context-dependent. The search
for a definition of interactivity diverts our attention from the
real issue: How can people participate as agents within repre-
sentational contexts? Actors know a lot about that, and so do
children playing make-believe. Buried within us in our deep-
est playful instincts, and surrounding us in the cultural con-
ventions of theatre, film, and narrative, are the most profound
and intimate sources of knowledge about interactive represen-
tations. A central task is to bring those resources to the fore
and to begin to use them in the design of interactive systems.
So now we have at least two reasons to consider theatre as
a promising foundation for thinking about and designing
human-computer experiences. First, there is significant over-
lap in the fundamental objective of the two domainsÑthat is,
representing action with multiple agents. Second, theatre sug-
gests the basis for a model of human-computer activity that is
familiar, comprehensible, and evocative. The rest of this book

6Zeno's paradox (called the theory of limits in mathematics) says that you
can never get from here to there because you can only get halfway, then
halfway of halfway, etc. Mathematics offers a solution; so does common
sense. But the paradox is compelling enough to have interested logicians
and mathematicians for centuries.

Computers as Theatre

will explore some of the theoretical and practical aspects of
theatre that can be directly applied to the task of designing
human-computer experiences. But there are a few more stones
to be turned in arranging the groundwork for this discussion.

Is ~I)ramaSerõous £nou,gh?
Because theatre is a form of entertainment, many people see it
as fundamentally "non-serious." I have found that computer-
science-oriented developers exhibit a high resistance to a the-
atrical approach to designing human-computer activity on the
grounds that it somehow trivializes "serious" applications.
Graphic designers undoubtedly have had to wrestle with the
same sort of bias, design being seen not as a task of represen-
tation but one of mere decoration. Decoration is suspect
because it may get in the way of the serious work to be done.
(The same argument was used a few decades ago to ban
bright colors, potted plants, and chatchkas from the work-
placeÑbut that's another story.) The fact of the matter is that
graphics is an indispensable part of the representation itself,
as amply demonstrated by the Macintosh and other contem-
porary computing environments.
The no-frills view that permeates thinking about the inter-
faces of "serious" applications is the result of a fundamental
misunderstanding of the nature of seriousness in representa-
tions. The idea that theatre is "really not real" and is therefore
unsuited as an approach to serious human-computer activities
is misguided, because those activities are "really not real" in
precisely the same ways. Without the representation, there is
nothing at allÑand theatre gives good representation.
Human-computer activity may be divided into two broad
categories: productive and experiential [Laurel, 1986bl.
Experiential activities, such as computer games, are undertak-
en purely for the experience afforded by the activity as you
engage in it, while productive activities such as word process-
ing have outcomes in the real world that are somehow
beyond the experience of the activity itself. They are often

77 rc Drama Sfsrinus Fnnueh?

The Nature of the Beast

mistakenly defined in terms of their artifactsÑa printed docu-
ment or a spreadsheet filled with numbers. But seriousness is
not equivalent to concreteness. A printed paper (such as a
page in this book, for example) has "real" implications (for
example, transmitting knowledge, changing how something
is done, receiving a grade, or getting paid) even though it is
itself a representation. "Productivity" as a class of applications
is better characterized not by the concreteness of outcomes
but by their seriousness vis-a-vis the real world.
There is a parallel here with seriousness as an aspect of
drama. In formal terms, "serious" treatments of subjects are
reserved for tragedy (and in some senses, melodrama) and
"non-serious" treatments are found in melodrama, comedy,
farce, and satire. Here again, although the plays themselves
are representations, seriousness depends largely on the conse-
quences of the actions represented in them. In a serious
workÑin Hamlet for instanceÑfalling down (as Ophelia does
after her father's death) has serious consequences both physi-
cally and symbolically; in a farce, falling down (tripping over
a piece of furniture or slipping on a banana peel, for instance)
causes no permanent injury or pain to the agent.

To trace these effects through to the real world, we need to
look at their impact on audiences. Ophelia's fall and its sym-
bolic meaning impart information about suffering, revenge,
and the consequences of evil that can be contemplated,
absorbed, and acted upon by an audience. The fall of a clown,
on the other hand, may arouse laughter and ephemeral plea-
sure; it may also, as in more thoughtful flavors of comedy,
communicate a philosophical view (for example, a lightheart-
ed attitude toward random accidents). Seriousness in both
theatre and human-computer activities is a function of the
subject and its treatment in both formal and stylistic terms.
Drama provides means for representing the whole spectrum
of activity, from the ridiculous to the sublime.
Another objection to a theatrical approach is that theatre
by its very nature is "fuzzy," while serious applications of
computers require crystal clarity. The connotation of fuzziness
probably derives from drama's emphasis on emotionÑ

Is Drama Serious EnouQh? 23
Computers as Theatre

subjective experienceÑwhile serious productivity is seen to
require undiluted objectivity. Yet such "serious" tasks as for-
matting a paper for publication or designing a business plan
for a new product can involve a far greater degree of subjec-
tivity (in terms of creativity and evaluation, for instance) than
"objective" skill and action (cutting and pasting, typing, and
mousing around). At the farthest extreme, the notion that seri-
ous applications require objectivity, clarity, and precision is
used as a rationale for rejecting natural-language interaction.
This is because the success of machine understanding, at least
in leading contemporary approaches, is probabilistic, whereas
the understanding of symbolic logic (in mathematical or
numerical representations) is seen to be unambiguous.
Yet people often drown in precision because of the com-
plexity and artificiality of its expression (both lexical and syn-
tactic). From the adventure-gamer grappling with a parser to
the inexperienced UNIX user trying to "alias" a complicated
e-mail address, people experience the requirement for preci-
sion as troublesome. This is no secret; the problem is com-
monly acknowledged and wrestled with by most interface
designers lfor example, see Rubinstein and Hersh, 1984,
Chapter 61. What may stop them from making a foray into the
world of dramatic representation is the view that drama is
fundamentally imprecise and therefore prone to error (both in
terms of interpretation and subsequent action), while people
require 100 percent success in all of their communications
with computers. My experience suggests that, in the vast
majority of contexts, this simply isn't true.
The imprecision of dramatic representation is the price
people payÑoften quite enthusiasticallyÑin order to gain a
kind of lifelikeness, including the possibility of surprise and
delight. When "imprecision" works, it delivers a degree of
success that is, in balance against the effort required to
achieve it, an order of magnitude more rewarding than the
precision of programming, at least for the nonprogrammer.
When it doesn't work (as in the case of a parser error), how it
is experienced depends heavily upon how the system handles
the failure. "I DON'T UNDERSTAND THAT WORD" disrupts

The Nature of the Beast

and frustrates; an in-context response based on the most prob-
able interpretation imitates a normal conversational failure
and opens the way to methods of repair that are quite natural
to use [see Brennan 1990b].

Both the frequency and robustness of the system's suc-
cesses figure into the calculation of its value. A system that
achieves only a moderate success rate (and no catastrophic
failures) may be enthusiastically received if the successes are
big ones, the effort required is minimal, and the overall expe-
rience is engaging. Chris Schmandt of the MIT Media Lab has
developed a system that provides an extreme example. Grunt
provides instructions for reaching a destination to the driver
of a car. The system delivers directions via synthesized speech
over a telephone. It listens to the driver for questions and cues
about how well the driver has understood what it says. The
trick is that the system is only listening to utterance pitch and
duration and the duration of pausesÑit doesn't understand a
single word. Despite its low success rate (about 20 percent),
Grunt has been received positively by most of its test users
lsee Schmandt, 1987 and 1990]. This is especially interesting in
light of the fact that driving is viewed by most as a fairly seri-
ous activity, with strong real-world repercussions.
: Seriousness in human-computer activities is a thresholdy
thing. "Serious" and "non-serious" or "playful" activities can
occur within the same context and at different stages in the
same basic activity. I fool around with the layout of a docu
ment, for instance, experimenting with different fonts and
paragraph styles, the placement of illustrations, perhaps even
the structural divisions of the paper. At the point at which I
make a creative decision and wish to implement a certain
aspect of the design, I experience a "mode swing"
(like a "mood swing," only different) toward greater "serious
ness." I may then swing back to a "fooling around" mode as I
evaluate the effects of a choice on the evolving document. In
Guides, a research project at Apple investigating interfaces to
multimedia databases, user testing revealed that people tend
to move back and forth between browsing and focused
searching "modes." They look around, then follow a line of

Is Drama Serious EnouQh? 25

Computers as Theatre

investigation in an orderly and goal-directed fashion for a
while, then begin to browse again. Apple researchers recorded
similar behavior in the use of information kiosks that they
installed at CHI '89 [Salomon, 1989]. Most of us have had sim-
ilar experiences with encyclopedias, magazines, or even dic-
tionaries.
The Guides project at Apple demonstrates this point.
Guides was an investigation into the design and use of inter-
face agentsÑcomputational characters that assist and interact
with people. Most people who used the prototype Guides sys-
tem were quite pleased to have the suggestions of the various
guide characters about possible next moves in the database
and to hear first-person stories that revealed a point of view
about the content. They saw the guides as a great enhance-
ment to the experience of browsing. At the same time, many
saw the guides as impediments to goal-directed searching;
that is, when they knew what they were looking for, the
guides seemed to get in the way. There was simply too much
indirection. One had to hope that the guide was "smart"
enough to figure out what was sought and not to overlook
anything relevant, and there was no way to find out for sure
how well the guide was doing. There was also no way to
chunk the guides' stories or to search through them with effi-
ciency or acuity for smaller pieces of information. The Guides
researchers were tempted to view these results as a need for a
clearer, more "objective" approach to goal-directed searching,
In fact, that was only part of what people wanted. Many
expressed the desire to be able to say to a guide, "go find this
and only this and don't bother telling me how you feel about
it," but there was no way to have such a conversation. The
problem arose precisely at the threshold of "seriousness" that
is crossed when shifting from an experiential mode (browsing)
to an instrumental mode (goal-directed searching). There are
two basic approaches to a solution. The first is to shift the
locus of control from delegation to direct human agency. This
approach would replace the guides with a representational
environment containing the means for people to search the
database themselves by topic or keyword. It corresponds

- 1s Drama Serious EnouQh?

The Nature of the Beast

roughly to the concept of a library, where you can move
around among shelves of books that are arranged topically,
occasionally picking one up and leafing through it. Of course,
the virtual library is augmented by representation-
al magicÑbooks open to a page indicated by spoken key-
words, stairs need not be climbed, and there is always enough
light.
The second approach is to create a kind of agent that is
capable of understanding a person's goal and delivering a suc-
cessful result smoothly and efficientlyÑa kind of augmented
reference librarian. Such an agent could theoretically deliver a
bigger win in a couple of ways. First, it could preserve conti-
nuity in the representational context by continuing to employ
agents. Second, it could still shift the locus of control to the
person by making the searching agent more explicitly sub-
servient and responsive. Third, it creates the possibility for
results beyond those that could be achieved by a person exam-
ining the database in the first personÑno matter how magical
the virtual library might be, searching it thoroughly would

quickly exceed the human thresholds for both tedium and
complexity. For instance, a searching agent might not only look
at the topical index but also access topical data that might be
associated with smaller chunks of informationÑdata that
would be too numerous for a person to examine in detail. A
searching agent might then provide an array of possible infor-
mation sources as the result of its search, each cued up to the
most relevant chunk. Here the potential for surprise and
delight is optimized, making the experience more pleasurable.
Such powers of agents will be discussed in greater detail in the
section on agents in Chapter 5.
In summary, a dramatic approach need not be fuzzy or
imprecise in its ability to produce results. It is potentially
capable of supporting both serious and nonserious activities.
Its evocative powers and even its ambiguities can be har-
nessed to enhance rather than to impede a person's serious
goals, and to create the possibility of surprise and
delightÑthings that are rarely produced by exhaustive
responses to crystal-clear specifications.
l

Computers as Theatre

For many people whose way of working can be character-
ized as objective or scientific, the idea of employing an artistic
approach is troublesome. It's hard to say how artists do what
they do. The process seems to consist largely of imagination
and inspiration, and there seems to be no forthright, depend-
able methodology. Yet, as we observed in the Foreword, and
as we will expand upon in the next chapter, there are ways in
which art is "lawful"; that is, there are formal, structural, and
causal dimensions that can be identified and used both
descriptively and productively. The final goal of this chapter
is to justify taking an artistic approach to the problem of
designing human-computer activity.

Sln JZlrtistic Berspectise
In his seminal book, The Elements of Friendly Software Design
11982], Paul Heckel characterizes software design as primarily
concerned with communication. He observes that "among all
the art forms that can teach us about communication, the most
appropriate is filmmaking." Heckel chooses filmmaking as an
example over older forms (such as theatre) because it "illus-
trates the transition from an engineering discipline to an art
form." He goes on to observe that movies did not achieve
wide popular success until artists replaced engineers as the
primary creators. Heckel's book is filled with references to
illusion, performance, and other theatrical and filmic
metaphors with software examples to illustrate each observa-
tion. He gives the use of metaphor in interface design a differ-
ent twist by employing filmmaking, writing, acting, and other
"communication crafts" as metaphors for the process of soft-
ware design.
In 1967, Ted Nelson examined the evolution of film in
order to understand how the new medium he envi-
sionedÑhypertextÑshould develop. In considering the ways
in which the stage had influenced film, he noted
that "stage content, when adapted, was appropriate and use-
ful, while stage techniques (such as the notion of a proscenium

The Nature of the Beast

and an insistence on continuous action within scenes) were not
[Nelson in Schecter, 1967]. From the vantage point of 1990, we
can see a migration of both techniques and content from film
into the computer medium. If one takes the theatre and the
film medium as subsets of a larger category, as representations
of action in virtual worlds, then another key similarity
between these media and computers is their fundamental ele-
ments of form and structure and their purpose.
Both Heckel and Nelson draw our attention to the centrali-
ty of "make-believe" in the conception and design of software.
An engineer's view of software design is rooted in logic, realiz-
ing an orderly set of functions in an internally elegant pro-
gram. In Heckel's view, the better approach is rooted in vision,
which realizes an environment for action through evocative,
consistent illusions. According to Nelson, it is the creation of
"virtualities"Ñrepresentations for things that may never have
existed in the real world before [Nelson, 19901. The role of
imagination in creating interactive representations is clear and
cannot be overrated. In an important sense, a piece of comput-
er software is a collaborative exercise of the imaginations of the
creator(s) of a program and people who use it.
Imagination supports a constellation of distinctively
human phenomena that includes both symbolic thinking and
representation-making. There is a story about a monkey and
some bananas that every undergraduate psychology student
has heard. A researcher places a monkey in a room with a
bunch of bananas hanging from the ceiling and a box on the
floor. The monkey tries various ways of getting the
bananasÑreaching, jumping, and so onÑand eventually
climbs up onto the box. A person in a similar situation would
rehearse most of the possible strategies in her head and
actively pursue only those that seemed promising, maybe
only the successful one. For the monkey, the focus of attention
is the real bananas; for the human, it's what's going on inside
her head. Imagination is a shortcut through the process of trial
and error.
But imagination is good for much more than real-world
problem solving. The impulse to create interactive representa

An Artistic Perspective 29

-X;20D 0 f iV$-0;XA0tiN.l7L..lE .

Computers as Theatre

tions, as exemplified by human-computer activities, is only
the most recent manifestation of the age-old desire to make
what we imagine palpableÑour insatiable need to exercise
our intellect, judgment, and spirit in contexts, situations, and
even personae that are different from those of our everyday
lives. When a person considers how to climb a tree, imagina-
tion serves as a laboratory for virtual experiments in physics,
biomechanics, and physiology. In matters of justice, art, or
philosophy, imagination is the laboratory of the spirit.
What we do in our heads can be merely expedient or far-
reaching, private or intended for sharing and communication.
The novels of Ayn Rand, for instance or the plays of George
Bernard Shaw create worlds where people address issues and
problems, both concrete and abstract, and enact their discov-
eries, responses, and solutions. These representations are
wholly contained in the realm of the imagination, yet they
transport us to alternate possible perspectives and may influ-
ence us in ways that are more resonant and meaningful than
experiences actually lived.
Art is the external representation of things that happen in
the head of the artist. Art forms differ in terms of the materials
they employ, the way the representations are created, what
they purport to represent, and how they are manifest in the
world. Different forms have different powersÑthe powers to
engage, to provide pleasure and information, to evoke
response. But all have as their end the representation of some
internal vista that the artist wishes to create beyond the
bounds of his or her own skull, making it available in some
form to other people.
What are such representations good for? Aristotle defined
catharsis as the end cause of a play and saw it as the pleasur-
able release of emotion, specifically those emotions evoked by
the action represented in the play.7 In his view, catharsis
occurred during the actual "run-time" of the play, but some
contemporary theorists disagree. The early twentieth-century

7That's not to say that plays must arouse only pleasant emotions; the
pleasure of release makes even nasty emotions enjoyable in a theatrical
context. Catharsis is discussed more fully in Chapter 4.

30 An Artistic Perspective

The Nature of the Beast

German dramatist Bertolt Brecht extended the notion of
catharsis beyond the temporal boundary of the performance
[Brecht, 19641. He posited that catharsis is not complete until
the audience members take what they have assimilated from
the representation and put it to work in their lives. In Brecht's
hypothesis, the representation lives between imagination and
reality, serving as a conductor, amplifier, clarifier, and
motivator.
It seems to me that computer-based representations work
in fundamentally the same way: a person participates in a rep-
resentation that is not the same as real life but which has real-
world effects or consequences. Representation and reality
stand in a particular and necessary relation to one another. In
much contemporary thinking about interfaces, however, the
understanding of that relationship is muddy. On the one hand,
we speak of "tools" for "users" to employ in the accomplish-
ment of various tasks with computers. We plumb psychology
for information about how people go about using tools and

what is the best way to design them. We arrive at notions like
"cut" and "paste" and even "write" that seem to suggest that
people working with computers are operating in the arena of
the concrete. We often fail to see that these are representations of
tools and activities and to notice how that makes them differ-
ent from (and often better than) the real thing.
On the other hand, we employ graphic artists to create
icons and windows, pictures of little hands and file folders
and lassos and spilling paint cans, to stand in for us in the
computer's world. Here the idea of representation is used, but
only in a superficial sense. Messy notions like "interface
metaphor" are employed to gloss over the differences
between representation and reality, attempting to draw little
cognitive lines from the things we see on the screen to the
"real" activities that psychologists tell us we are performing.
Interface metaphors rumble along like Rube Goldberg
machines, patched and wired together every time they break,
until they are so encrusted with the artifacts of repair that we
can no longer interpret them or recognize their referents.
This confusion over the nature of human-computer activi-
ty can be alleviated by thinking about it in terms of theatre,

An Arfictir PPrcnPrli7~P
Computers as Theatre

where the special relationship between representation and
reality is already comfortably established, not only in theoreti-
cal terms but also in the way that people design and experi-
ence theatrical works. Both domains employ representations
as contexts for thought. Both attempt to amplify and orches-
trate experience. Both have the capacity to represent actions
and situations that do not and cannot exist in the real world,
in ways that invite us to extend our minds, feelings, and sens-
es to envelop them.
In the view of semioticist Julian Hilton 119911, theatre is
"essentially the art of showing, the art of the index .... It
involves the synthesis of symbolic and iconic systems (words
and moving pictures) in a single indivisible performed event."
Hilton employs the myth of Pygmalion and Galathea (familiar
to many as the basis of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion and
its musical adaptation, My Fair LAdy) to express the relation-
ship of the theatre to the domain of artificial intelligence. He
describes the value of the theatre's ability to represent things
that have no real-world referents in semiotic terms:

Galathea in a literal sense imitates nothing, and as such defines
a class of icon (the statue after all is a picture of itself) that can
simultaneously be an index. It is this category of non-imitative
index which enables the index to liberate its true power,
whereby it has all the infinite valency of the symbol while
retaining the immediate recognisability of the icon. [Hilton,
1991]

Computers are representation machines that can emulate
any known medium, as Alan Kay observes:

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a
machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited. It is a
medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other
medium, including media that cannot exist physically. It is not
a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first
metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for
representation and expression never before encountered and as
yet barely investigated. [Kay, 1984]

Thinking about interfaces is thinking too small. Designing

human-computer experience isn't about building a better

p
¡¡ .32 An Artictir PercnPrti7ae

The Nature of the Beast

desktop. It's about creating imaginary worlds that have a spe-
cial relationship to realityÑworlds in which we can extend,
amplify, and enrich our own capacities to think, feel, and act.
Hopefully, this chapter has persuaded you that knowledge
from the theatrical domain can help us in that task. The next
two chapters are designed to give you a deeper understand-
ing of some of the most relevant aspects of dramatic theory
and to apply them to interactive forms.

An Artistic Perspective 33
56
Fuller, Mary and Henry Jenkins. "Chapter 3:
Gearhart, Sall~Nintendt~ and New World Travel Writing: A
G,ibs¡n¤Wi,lli.a'Dialo9ue." FromCvberSocietv: Comouter-Mediated
G bsonw X Communication and Communitv. Steven G. Jones,
Hsuw Jeffrey ( Editor. SAGE Publications 1995. Pages 57-72.
Kramarae, Ch
conversatio

Center'for0sFriedman~ Ted "Making Sense Of Softsvare:
Lanier, laron, dComputer Games and Interactive Textuality." From
ofCommumCvberSOcietv: comDuter-Mediatedcommunication
Laurel, Brendaand Communitv. Steven G. Jones, Editor. SAGE
Roth (Eds 5lpublications~ 1995. Pages 73-89
Le Guin, Ursu
coming home. New York: Harper & Row.
Margie. (1993, May). Hi giriz, see you in cyberspace! Sass% pp. 72, 73, 80.
McCarthy, Susan. (1993, June). Techno-soaps and virtual theater. Wired, pp. 40, 42.

yberSociety
:3-64.
perCollins. J

:tworks: A
ben (Eds.),
of Illinois
tv Inurnal

udith Paris
!4eckler.
A). Always

Mondo 2000. ( 1992). New York: HarperCollins.
Mort, lohn. ( 1992, September 22). electronic concept, still in its infancy, both a promise and a
threat. Kansas Ciry (Missouri) Star, p. 19.
Newquist, Harvey P., 111. (1992). Vlrtual reality's commercial reality. Compurenvorld, 26(13),
93-95.
Newquist, Harvey P., 111. (1993). The fruits of war for fun and profit. Virtual Reality 93, Fall
SpecialReport, pp. 11-14.
Piercy, Marge. (1991). He, she and it. New York: Fawsen Crest.
Pimentel, Ken, and Teixerira, Kevin . ( 1993) . Knual reality: Through the new loobag glass. New
York: Intel/WindcrestlMcGraw-Hill.
Rheingold, Howard. (1991). Vinual reality. New York: Summit Books.
Roberts, Robin. (1993). A newspecies: Cenderandscicnce in scienceficlion. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press.
Saffo, Paul. (1993, May/June). Hot new medium: Text. Wired, p. 48.
Smith, Stephame A. (1993). Morplung, materialism, and the marketing of Xenogenesis. Ceeders,
18, 67-86.
Snider, Burr. (1993, Maynune). Jaron. Wired pp. 76-80.

Spender, Dale. (in press). Naltering on the nets. Melbourne, Australia: Spinfex.
Springer, Claudia. ( 1993, Winter). Muscular circuitry: The invincible armored cyborg in cinema.
Cenders, 18, 87-101.
Stefanac. Suzanne. (1993, April). Sex and the new media. NewMedia, pp. 38-45.
Swain, Cott. (1989). Coven intimacy in men's friendships: Closeness in men's friendships. In
Barbara J. Risman & Pepper Schwartz (Eds.), Ceeder in intimate relationships: A micros-
truaural approach (pp. 71-86). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Tail, Andy. (1993). Authoring virtual worlds on the desktop. Virtual Reality 93: Special Reporg,
PP 11-13.
Ulrich, Allen. (1992, March 7). Here's reality: "Mower" is less. San Francisco Examiner.
Virtual reality [cover story]. (1992, October 5). Busincss Week, pp. 96-100, 102, 104 105.
Walser, Randy. (1992). Autodesk Cyberspace Propct. In Mondo 2000. New York: HarperCollins.
Wood, Julia, & Inman, Christopher. (1993). In a different mode: Masculine styles of communi-
cating closeness. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 21, 279-295.

NINTENDOs AND
N E W W O R L D T R AV E L
WRITING: A DIALOGUE

Mary Fuller

Henry Jenkins

Mary Fuller: We want to start by telling you two stories.
Henry Jenkins: Here's the first. Princess Toadstool is kidnapped by the savage
King Koopa. Two brave brothers, Mario and Luigi, depart on a series of adventures
to rescue her. Mario and Luigi, simple men of humble beginnings (in fact, Italian
American plumbers), cross a vast unexplored space, encountering strange creatures,
struggling against an inhospitable landscape. Finally, they confront and best the
monarch and his minions in a life and death struggle. In the process, the Super Mario
Brothers not only restore the princess to her people but also exert control over this
strange new world and its curious resources.
MF: My story is really a collection of stories, which I can probably evoke for
you in some form just by mentioning a few key words: Walter Raleigh, Roanoke, the
Lost Colony, Virginia Dare. Or Jamestown, John Smith, Pocahontas, John Rolfe. I
want to draw for the moment not on the complexities and particularities of these
stories but on what is simple and popular, what can be evoked as an indistinct im-
pression: the saleable, inaccurate, recurrent myth of the captive princess and her
rescuers (Virginia Dare, the first child born in what was to become the "LostColony";
Pocahontas, a genuine princess who became a candidate for rescueÑor kidnapping
Ñthanks to her own gesture of rescuing John Smith; Smith himself, both a hero of
humble origins and a kind of princess in drag who represented his entire career as a
repeated experience of captivity and rescue by women; or, for that matter, Virginia
itself, personified by English apologists for colonization as a virgin to be rescued
from savages). Nintendo@'s Princess Toadstool and Mario Brothers is a cognate
version of this story.
What we want to get at is not these alluring narratives of Princess Toadstool,
Pocahontas, and Virginia Dare (or of Mario, Luigi, and John Smith) but another shared

oo
a~

58 CyberSociety

concern in our material that seems to underlie these more memorable fictions in a
constitutive way. Both terms of our title evoke explorations and colonizations of
space: the physical space navigated, mapped, and mastered by European voyagers
and travelers in the 16th and 17th centuries and the fictional, digitally projected space
traversed, mapped, and mastered by players of Nintendos video games. Simply put,
we want to argue that the movement in space that the rescue plot seems to motivate
is itself the point, the topic, and the goal and that this shift in emphasis from narrativity
to geography produces features that make NintendoE9 and New World narratives in
some ways strikingly similar to each other and different from many other kinds
of texts.
HJ: This chapter is the result of a series of conversations we've been having
over the past four years. Our conversations began with hesitant efforts by each of us
to understand the other's area of specialization but have grown in frequency and
intensity as we began to locate points of contact between our work. We hope that
what follows will reftect the process of that exchange, opening questions for future
discussion rather than providing answers for immediate consumption.
MF: This work is a confessedly exploratory attempt at charting some possibili-
ties of dialogue and communication between the disparate professional spaces we
inhabit. Yet the association between computer software and the Renaissance "dis-
covery" of America is not exactly new. A computer software firm in Boston claims
in its advertisement, "Sir Francis Drake was knighted for what we do every day . . .
The spirit of exploration is alive at The Computer Merchant" (Boslon Computer
Currcnts, September 1990, p. 34). More generally, discussions of virtual reality have
widely adopted a language borrowed from this earlier era: One headline reads, "THE
RUSH IS ON! COLONIZING CYBERSPACE" (Mondo 2000, Summer 1990, no. 2,
cover).
HJ: The description and analysis of virtual reality technologies as the opening
up of a new frontier, a movement from known to unknown space, responds to our
contemporary sense of America as oversettled, overly familiar, and overpopulated.
Howard Rheingold's (1991) Virtual Reality un-self-consciously mimics the rhetoric
of earlier promoters and settlers when he promises to share with his readers the account
of "my own odyssey to the outposts of a new scientific frontier . . . and an advanced
glimpse of a possible new world in which reality itself might become a manufactured
and metered commodity" (p. 17). Or consider Timothy Leary's proclamation in that
same book: "We live in a cyber-culture surrounded by limitless deposits of informa-
tion which can be digitalized and tapped by the individual equipped with cyber-
gear.... There are no limits on virtual reality" (Rheingold, 1991, p. 378). Virtual
reality opens new spaces for exploration, colonization, and exploitation, returning
to a mythic time when there were worlds without limits and resources beyond
imagining. Technologists speak of the "navigational systems" necessary to guide us
through this uncharted realm. The advent of this new technological sphere meets the
needs of a national culture which, as Brenda Laurel suggests, finds contemporary
reality "too small for the human imagination" (quoted in Rheingold, 1991, p. 391).
Few of us have donned goggles and powergloves to become settlers of this new

Nintendo0 and New World Narratives 59

cyberspace, although both heroic and nightmarish accounts of virtual reality prolif
| erate in popular culture. Many of us have, however, interacted with digitalized space
| through Nintendos games. We felt it might be productive to take seriously for a
moment these metaphors of "new worlds" and "colonization" as we look more
| closely at the spatial logic and cognitive mapping" of video games.
; MF: One has to wonder why these heroic metaphors of discovery have been adopted
l by popularizers of the new technologies just as these metaphors are undergoing
l sustained critique in other areas of the culture, a critique that hardly anyone can be
unaware of in the year after the quincentary of Columbus's first American landfall.
When John Barlow (1990) writes that "Columbus was probably the last person to
l behold so much usable and unclaimed real estate (or unreal estate) as these cyber
nauts have discovered" (p. 37), the comparison to cyberspace drains out the materi

ality of the place Columbus discovered, and the nonvirtual bodies of the pre-Colum
bian inhabitants who did, in fact, claim it, however unsuccessfully. I would speculate
that part of the drive behind the rhetoric of virtual reality as a New World or new
frontier is the desire to recreate the Renaissance encounter with America without guilt:
This time, if there are others present, they really won't be human (in the case of
Nintendo'9 characters), or if they are, they will be other players like ourselves, whose
bodies are not jeopardized by the virtual weapons we wield. The prospect of seeing
VR as a revisionary reenactment of earlier history raises issues that we address only
in passing: One would be the ethics and consequences of such a historical revision;
another would be to ask whether it is accurate to say that VR is unlike Renaissance
discovery in having no victims, that at no point does it register harmfully on real
bodies that are not the bodies of its users. These kinds of questions frame our discussion,
which has a narrower focus on the specificities of Nintendo5' games and voyage
narratives as rhetorical and cultural artifacts. If the simple celebration of expansive
ness borrowed from the age of discovery for virtual reality no longer seems adequate
to the texts and experiences it once described, it seems no less important to map the
narrative and rhetorical configurations of these texts themselves, which have pro
vided model and metaphor for so much later experience, their authors', in Derek
Walcott's (1986) words, "ancestral murderers and poets" (p. 79).
The kinds of New World documents I have in mind are ones like Columbus's
Diario (1492-1493) or Walter Raleigh's Discoverie of the large, rich and beauriful
empire of Guiana (1596) or John Smith's True Relation of such occurrences and
accidents of noate as hath hapned in lfirginia ( 1608)Ñthat is, chronologically structured
narratives of voyage and exploration, from ships' logs to more elaborate texts. At the
outset, one might expect these narratives of travel to and return from what was at
least conceptually another world to assume a different kind of structure than, in fact,
they do: a romance or quest motif, the ironic contrasts of utopian fiction, or at least
an overt "theme." Such expectations are largely disappointed. One literary critic com-
plains that the travel journal underwent no sustained development as a literary form
but conforms more or less consistently to a formulaic pattern: "The abstract reads,
we sailed, did and saw this and this, suffered and were saved or lost, made such and
such encounters with the savages, hungered, thirsted, and were storm worn, but some

60 CyberSociety

among us came home" (Page, 1973, p. 37). Part of the problem lies outside the texts,
in that practical strategies embedded in the material diverge from the demands of
narrative coherence: the same critic complains that the carefully prepared climax of
Jacques Cartier's BriefRecit is spoiled when Cartier decides to sail for home instead
of waiting for a long anticipated Indian attack. Reading the voyage narratives from
the perspective of conventional narrative expectations is an experience of almost
unremitting frustration. Yet these texts, if they are not conventional narratives, are
equally clearly not transparent records of an experience that itself demands no
commentary. On the contrary.
And so one wants first to find a way of characterizing their structure and its
shaping imperatives on its own terms and second, to account for their reception, their
uses and pleasures for audiences then and now. This is material that was produced
and printed in extraordinary quantity. Richard Hakluyt, one of the founding members
of the Virginia Company, made a lasting name for himself by collecting and publishing
documents of voyages by his contemporaries, documents ranging the gamut of possi-
bilities from ethnographic survey to narrative poem to navigational instructions.
Hakluyt's first collection appeared in 1582 as a slim quarto volume. By 1601, the
third and final collection, The Principal Navigations . . . of the English Nation, took
up three large folio volumes totaling almost 900 pages (12 volumes in the modem
edition). Hakluyt's work was continued by Samuel Purchas, whose Hakluytus Post-
humus, appearing in 1625, had expanded to 4,262 pages. Simply on the basis of vol-
ume, these documents would impose themselves on our attention, whatever their
narrative shape.
HJ: Nintendo0, similarly, plays an increasingly visible role with the American
imagination. By the end of 1990, one of three homes in the United States owned a
Nintendo0 system. My household was one of them, and I wanted to know more about
how we might discuss these phenomenally popular games as cultural artifacts, as
popular narratives, and as a new media for mass communication. As I discovered
when asked to review two recent books on Nintendo0 (Kinder, 1991; Provenzo,
1991; see Jenkins, 1993), current accounts lack any serious discussion of the
particularity of Nintendo0 as a means of organizing cultural experience; the writers
fail to address what it meant to be playing the games rather than watching or reading
them. Both books seemed interested in talking about Nintendo0 for other reasons: in one
case in terms of issues of pedagogy, in the other in terms of issues of intertextuality,
but both offered accounts that presuppose that traditional narrative theory (be it
literary or film theory) can account for our experience of Nintendo0 in terms of plots
and characters.
This application of conventional models to an emergent form seemed unsatisfying
because it ignores the way that game players discuss the experience of play and the
ways that the games are marketed to their consumers. Plot is not a central feature of
Nintendo0's sales pitch. Ads talked about interactivity rather than characterization
("Nintendo0 gives you power to choose") and about atmospheres rather than story
lines ("awesome graphics"). Nintendo0, a 100-year-old playing card company little
known outside Japan, revitalized the declining American video game market by

Nintendo¡ and New World Narratives 61

moving from the simple, abstracted spaces of Pong or Pac-ManlM to create an ever
changing and visually fascinating arena for play.
Nintendo0's central feature is its constant presentation of spectacular spaces (or
"worlds," to use the game parlance). Its landscapes dwarf characters who serve, in
turn, primarily as vehicles for players to move through these remarkable places. Once
immersed in playing, we don't really care whether we rescue Princess Toadstool or
not; all that matters is staying alive long enough to move between levels, to see what
spectacle awaits us on the next screen. Mario's joumey may take him by raft across
a river of red hot molten lava, may require him to jump from platform to platform
across a suspended city, or may ask him to make his way through a subterranean
cavem as its ceiling collapses around him. The protagonist of a sword and sorcery
game may struggle against a stormy sea, battle a massive serpent, confront a pack
of wolves who rule a frozen wasteland, or combat an army of the dead that erupt
from the trembling earth, all in search of lost fortunes and buried gold. A game like
Lemmings puts us in charge of an army of tiny creatures, willing slaves who live and
die at our bidding and who dig tunnels or construct bridges to allow us to continue
to venture deeper into the game space. For the most part, the technological limitations

of the game systems mean that we move left to right through this space, but designers
may simulate other kinds of movement, such as an elevator in the Ninja Turtles0
game that allows us to battle our way higher and higher into Shredder's command
center or racing games that allow us to skim forward along a winding racetrack
getting closer and closer to the glistening city that looms on the horizon. The more
sophisticated Super Nintendo0 system allows for multiple levels of graphics that
interact with each other in ever more complex fashions. The art of game design comes
in constructing a multitude of different ways we can interact with these visually
remarkable spaces.
Most of the criteria by which we might judge a classically constructed narra-
tive fall by the wayside when we look at these games as storytelling systems. In
Nintendo0's narratives, characters play a minimal role, displaying traits that are largely
capacities for action: fighting skills, modes of transportation, preestablished goals.
The game's dependence on characters (Ninja Turtles, Bart Simpson, etc.) borrowed
from other media allows them to simply evoke those characters rather than to fully
develop them. The character is little more than a cursor that mediates the player's
relationship to the story world. Activity drains away the characters' strength, as measured
by an ever shifting graph at the top of the screen, but it cannot build character, since
these figures lack even the most minimal interiority. Similarly, plot is transformed
into a generic atmosphereÑa haunted house, a subterranean cavem, a futuristic city-
scape, an icy wildernessÑthat the player can explore. This process becomes most
visible when we look at games adapted from existing films or television programs;
here, moments in the narrative trajectory become places in the player's itinerary, laid
out as a succession of worlds we must travel through in order to reach our goals.
Playing time unfolds in a fixed and arbitrary fashion with no responsiveness to the
psychological time of the characters, sometimes flowing too slow to facilitate player
interest and blocking the advance of the plot action, other times moving so fast that

L
oo
co

62 CyberSociety | Nintendo1 and New World Narratives 63

we can't react quickly enough to new situations or the clock runs out before we com-
plete our goals. Exposition occurs primarily at the introduction and closing of games:
For instance, the opening of Super Mario Worldw reminds us that the Princess has
once again been kidnapped. The game's conclusion displays the reunion of Princess
and champion and a kind of victory tour over the lands that Mario has conquered.
But these sequences are "canned": Players cannot control or intervene in them. Often,
a player simply flashes past this exposition to get into the heart of the action. These
framing stories with their often arbitrary narrative goals play little role in the actual
experience of the games, as plot gives way quickly to a more flexible period of spatial
exploration. Although plot structures (kidnapping and rescue, pursuit and capture,
street fighting, invasion and defense) are highly repetitive (repeated from game to
game and over and over within the game, with little variety), what never loses its
interest is the promise of moving into the next space, of mastering these worlds and
making them your own playground. So although the child's play is framed by
narrative logic, it remains largely uncontrolled by plot dictates.
The pleasure of spatial spectacle may be most visible in games that do not seem
to require anything more than the most rudimentary spaces. Street Fighter ~TM, one
of the most popular NintendoI games in recent years, basically centers around a
kickboxing tournament that could have been staged in any arena. The game, however,
offers players a global array of possible spaces where the individual competitions
can occur: a Brazilian dock, an Indian temple, a Chinese street market, a Soviet factory,
a Las Vegas show palace. In the Indian sequence, elephants sway their trunks in the
background. Water drips from the ceiling into a Japanese reflecting pool. In Spain,
flamenco dancers strut and crowds cheer as the combatants struggle for domi-
nance. All of these details constitute a form of visual excess ("eye candy," as com-
puter enthusiasts call it), a conspicuous consumption of space. Such spectacular
visions are difficult to program, unnecessary to the competition, yet seem central to
the game's marketing success.
MF: It sounds to me as if not only space but culture is being consumed, used
and also used up as local cultures from India to Las Vegas shrink into a procession
of ornamental images. Each is "colorful," yet none is really alien. Certainly, the
ability to register local differences varied among Renaissance travel narratives: The

same image might begin its career as close observation at first hand and reappear in
progressively more stylized and ornamental forms detached from its original refer-
ence, as John White's drawings of North Carolina Algonquians reappeared on the
engraved frontispiece to Theodor de Bry's America and were, in turn, reproduced as
illustrations for John Smith's adventures in Virginia. One might also think of the
famous Rouen entry of Henri 11, where an entire Tupi village was recreated, employed
for a day or so as a place for the performance of Brazilian life, and then burned.
If Nintendo0 feeds the appetite for encountering a succession of new spaces (as
well as helping to create such an appetite), that same appetite was, of course, central
to these New World narratives. In turn, there were pressures on texts to conform to
a locodescriptive form, the equivalent in writing of Nintendo0's scrolling succession
of spaces. One precursor of the travel narrative would be the logbook, in which a

grid divides the page into spaces for date, time, compass bearing, wind, speed, and,
finally, notes. The logbook presents a succession of indexed spaces on the page that
correspond to a succession of days and places. Implicitly, each of these spaces is of
equal importance: The grid predisposes its user to make some notes in each space
but not too many. Athough the logbook was a technical tool of long-distance
navigation, its form strongly influenced land-based narratives that followed arrival.
As an instance of a locodescriptive project both in action and writing, John Smith's
strategy of successively exploring and mapping all the rivers around Jamestown
contrasted with the Virginia Company's desire to impose grander, more recognizable,
and more goal-oriented trajectories on the travels of the colonists: to find a gold
mine, a passage to China, or Raleigh's Lost Colony. These ultimate objectives, held
as in suspension, enabled Smith's presence in Virginia and his day-by-day progress
through the natural and human geography of the Chesapeake. This configuration, of
"story" as pretext for narratives of space, is (as we suggested at the outset) a common
one in this material. Voyages and narratives that set out in search of a significant,
motivating goal had a strong tendency to defer it, replacing arrival at that goal (and
the consequent shift to another kind of activity) with a particularized account of the
travel itself and what was seen and done. Hernan Cortes (1986) walked into
Tenochtitlan in 1534, becoming master of its gold and other resources; yet the bulk
of his Second and Third Letters concerns not this period of achieved conquest and
consumption but the survey of points on the way there and then a second survey of
points passed through on the drive to reconquer the city through more conventional
military means. Even goal-driven narratives like those of Raleigh or Columbus at
best offered only dubious signs of proximity in place of arrivalÑat China, El Dorado,
the town of the AmazonsÑphenomena that, interpreted, erroneously suggested it
was just over the horizon, to be deferred to some later date.
Rhetorical as well as documentary goals bear on the narratives, which aim not
only to describe but to persuade. That is, Walter Raleigh wanted to find El Dorado,
and he also wanted to produce a narrative that would stimulate interest in Guiana
and persuade Elizabelh lo restore him to favor. The imperative that operates on his
text in consequence is less that of coherence than of completeness, a (doubtless,
loaded) inventory of what was done and seen, one that provided at once both an
alternate, more diffuse kind of justification for the discovery and motives and infor
mational resources for a repeat performance. Ralph Lane, one of the Roanoke Colony's
governors, noled that the particularity of his account is "to the end it may appear to
you . . . that there wanted no great good will . . . lo have perfected this discovery"Ñ
of a rumored mine the company never set out towards (Lane, 1979, p. 309). Even in
the Discoverie of Cuiana, a text whose teleology is announced in the title, the actual
search for Guiana, the narrative concomitants of searching for something, get lost in
a welter of details, of events and places that have little to do with El Dorado but that
4 occupied the days of the voyage. The sequenced inventories of places and events
replace, defer, and atlesl lo an authentic and exculpating desire for goals the voyages
almost invariably failed lo reach.

64 CyberSociety

Given the inconclusiveness I've described, it was the ability to move in space (rather
than to arrive) that generated and structured narrative; John Smith wrote primarily
about the times he was in motion, not the times he was sitting in Jamestown. The
resulting narratives were, in turn, organized by elapsed time (sequences of dates) but
also determined by it. Henry mentioned that "characters" in Nintendo8\ can be
described less in terms of learning and transformation than in terms of resources
gradually expended in the course of the game. This sense of a trajectory dictated not
by change or crisis but by expenditure, the gradual running out of a fixed quantity
of time or resources, is an almost universal feature of the narratives I study because
it was an equally frequent phenomenon in the voyages and colonial experiments they
document. Many documents record the consequences of poorly managing resources
Ñthe season for sailing passing as one sits windbound in an English harbor, a crew
mutinying at the idea of sailing beyond Ireland, food running out in the middle of
the winler or the middle of the ocean (this one over and over), having to write home
hypothetical accounts of lhe treasures you would discover if you had better boats or
more food or it were not so late in the year. These documents end not because some
resolution or conclusion has been achieved but because something has run out. To
give another example, John Smith's ability to trade for corn to feed a starving colony
was unarguably more crilical than the story about the rescue of the Lost Colony that
the Virginia Company tried to impose on him or the story about Pocahontas that he
recounted 16 years after the event and 6 years after her death.
HJ: Although we've noted the exptrimental nature of this chapter's juxtaposi-
dons, there is, in fact, a precedent for them in Michel De Certeau's work in successive
books on New World discourse (Hetcroiogies, 1984a) and on the politics of con-
sumption in contemporary popular culture (Thc Practice of Everyday Lifc, 1984b).
While we are claiming space as lhe organizing principle for two kinds of narrative,
as what makes them different from novels, for example, De Certeau ( I 984b) lays out
a grand claim for spatial relations as tbe central organizing principle of all narratives:
"Every story is a lravel storyÑa spatial practice" (p. 115). Our cultural need for
narrative can be linked to our search for believable, memorable, and primitive spaces,
and stories are told to account for our current possession or desire for territory.
De Certeau's analysis of "spatial stories" provides tools for talking about classes
of narratives that have proven difficult to discuss in terms of traditional notions of
plot or character. Consider, for example, the emergence of science ficlion in the late
1 9th and early 20th century as a means of creating imaginary spaces for our intellectual
exploralion. The adventure slories of Jules Verne drew upon ceniuries of travel
writing as they recounted a variety of trips to lhe moon, under the sea, inlo the center
of the earth, or around the globe. The technological utopian writers often created
static plots (a man from our present goes to the future) that allowed them simply to
describe the landscape of tomorrow; one can draw a direct line from the moment in
Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, where the book's protagonist stands on his
balcony and surveys Boston's future, lo lhe train cars that allowed visitors to the
1939 New York World's Fair to ride above and look down upon Futurama. Hugo
Gernsback's Amazing Stories magazine was full of chronicles of "odysseys" across

Nintendot and New World Narratives 65

the uncharted wilderness of Mars or Venus and encounters along the way with strange
flora and fauna. Writers often modeled these aliens' worlds after the American West
so that they could cross-market their stories to both western and science fiction pulps.
A focus on plot and characterization was slow to develop in this genre thal seemed
so obsessed with going "where no one has gone before."
A similar claim could be made for various forms of fantasy writing. Trips to Oz
or Narnia or through the looking glass, adventures in Middle Earlh, or quests for the
Grail all seem lo cenler as much on the movement of characters through space as on
the larger plot goals that motivate and give shape to lhose movemenis. Maps appear
in fantasy novels with the same frequency and function that genealogies appear in
the great 19th-century novels, suggesting the relative stress the two forms give to
spatial relations and character relations. It is not surprising that science fiction,
fantasy, and sword-and-sorcery stories provide much of the iconography of the
NintendoX games.
Nintendo'E' may also be linked to another class of spatial stories, the amusement

park rides that as early as turn-of-the-century Coney Island adopted popular fictions
into spaces we can visit and explore. Walt Disney's Peter Pan becomes a ride by
flying ship across the landscape of London and Never-Never-Land, Snow White turns
into a runaway mine car tour, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is remade into a
submarine ride. The inlroduction of virtual reality technology to the Orlando, Florida,
amusement parks results in a succession of ever more inlense "tours" of the stars,
the oceans, the human body, the World of Hanna-Barbera, and the dawn of time.
Nintendo0's constant adaptation of plot-centered contemporary films into spatial
narratives represents a miniaturization of this same process. The tamed frontier of
the virtual new world has, from the first, been sold to us as a playground for our
world-weary imagination, as a site of tourism and recreation rather than labor and
production. Public interest in virtual reality is directly linked to the amusement park's
| long history of satisfying popular demand for spatial difference, spectacular attrac
t lions, affective stimulation, and sensual simulation. De Certeau's description of Jules
I Verne's stories as focused around the related images of the Nautilus's porthole (a
windowpane that "allows us to see") and the iron rail (that allows us to "move
through" fanlastic realms) has its obvious parallels in these amusement park attrac
i lions that invite us to look upon and travel through but not to touch these spectacular
spaces (De Certeau, 1984b, p. 112). What is a spectacle at the amusement park
("Keep your hands in the car at all times") becomes a site of more immediate
interaction in the Nintendo0 game that asks us to act upon and transform the places
it opens lo our vision.
MF: Voyage narratives were almost never presented as recreative texts, whatever
they might become for later readers. Two exceptions are Richard Willes's Historie of
travel (London, 1577) and Andre Thevet's Les singularitez de la France antarctique
(Paris, 1558). Although a narrative like Thomas Harriot's Brief and True Report of
the New Found Land of Virginia (London, 1588) might offer a catalogue of America's
abundant flora and fauna, the items of the catalogue were presented not as strange
things lo wonder al but as "marchantable commodities," goods for use and sale, the
~o
o

66 CyberSociety

potential for industrious activity. Leisure in lhe New World was pejoratively charac-
terized as idleness, associated with disease, mendacity, and social disorder. In most
places the Engtish settled, colonists had to do some work to feed and shelter themselves;
when a company shipwrecked on the uninhabited Bermudas and found an Edenic
land of temperate weather and dreamlike abundance, its leaders found means to take
the company back to starvation in Jamestown. The project of colonizing itself was,
in the English case, less a matter of acquiring a native workforce than of finding
work for what contemporaries envisioned as the teeming masses of England's
unemployed. Virginia's colonists were there (at least in theory) to labor, not to look,
and labor was directed to activating the commercial potentials of the land.
HJ: For De Certeau (1984b), narrative involves the transformation of place into
space (pp. 117- 118). Places exist only in the abstract, as potential sites for narrative
action, as locations that have not yet been colonized. Place may be understood here
in terms of the potential contained as bytes in the Nintendos game cartridge or the
potential resources coveted bul nol yet possessed in the American New World. Places
constitute a "stability" which must be disrupted in order for stories to unfold. Places
are there but do not yet maller, much as the New World existed, was geographically
present, and culturally funclioning well before it became the center of European
ambitions or the site of New World narratives. Places become meaningful only as
they come into contact with narrative agents (and in the construction of the New
World in Mary's Renaissance stories, only Europeans are understood as narrative
agents). Spaces, on the other hand, are places that have been acled upon, explored,
colonized. Spaces become lhe localion of narralive evenis. As I play a Ninlendo0
game and master it level by level, I realize the potentials encoded in the software
design and turn it into the landscape of my own saga.
The place-space distinction is closely linked to De Certeau's discussion of the
differences between "maps" and "tours" as means of representing real-world geog-
raphies. Maps are abstracled accounts of spatial relalions ("lhe girl's room is next lo
the kitchen"), whereas tours are told from the point of view of the traveler/narrator
("You turn right and come into the living room") (De Certeau, 1984b, pp. 118-122).
Maps document places; tours describe movements through spaces. The rhetoric of
the tour thus contains within it attention to the effects of the tour, its goals and

potentials, its limitations and obligations. A door is a feature of a place, or it may be
a potential threshold between two spaces. One of my favorite games, A Boy and His
Blob, places the resources of its imaginary world fully at our disposal. The blob can
be transformed into everything from a blowtorch lo a stepladder depending on what
flavored jellybean we feed him, and as a result, the mutating blob contains endless
possibilities for acting upon and transforming the virtual playing space. The pleasure
of the game lies in creating our own paths, tunneling down deeper and deeper into
its cavernous world. The blob, the various levels, the jellybeans exist as potentials
that only become narratively meaningful when we act upon them and bring them into
our control.
De Certeau is thus interested in analyzing and documenting the process by which
we "mark off boundaries" within the narrative world, by which characters map, act

Nintendo¡ and New World Narralives 67

upon, and gain control over narrative spaces. Just as narratives involve movement
from stability through instability and back again, narratives also involve a constant
transformation of unfamiliar places into familiar spaces. Stories, he argues, are centrally
concerned with "the relationship between the frontier and the bridge, that is, between
a (legitimate) space and its (alien) exteriority" (De Certeau, 1984b, p. 126). He
continues: "The story endlessly marks out frontiers. It multiplies them, but in terms
of interactions among charactersÑthings, animals, human beings" (De Certeau,
1984b, p. 126). Plot actions, he argues, involve the process of appropriation and
displacement of space, a struggle for possession and control over the frontier or
journeys across the bridges that link two spaces together. Such terms will, of course,
be familiar to anyone who has thought about the discovery and colonization of America.
Yet Nintendos also enacts a constant struggle along the lines that separate known
and unknown spacesÑthe line of the frontierÑwhich is where the player encounters
dangerous creatures and brutal savages, where we fight for possession and control
over the story world. As De Certeau (1984b) notes, the central narrative question
posed by a frontier is "to whom does it belong?" (p. 127). The frontier here is apt to
be technological and urban rather than primitive and pastoral (or, as in the Mario
Brothers games, a strange mix of the two) but then Mary's settlers were also mapping
their adventures on spaces already occupied by someone else's culture. The frontier
line is literalized through the breakdown of story space into a series of screens. The
narrative space is not all visible at once. One must push toward the edge of the screen
to bring more space into view.
The games also often create a series of goalposts that not only marks our progress
through the game space but also determines our dominance over it. Once you've
mastered a particular space, moved past its goalpost, you can reassume play at that
point no matter the outcome of a particular round. These mechanisms help us to map
our growing mastery over the game world, our conquest of its virtual real estate.
Even in the absence of such a mechanism, increased understanding of the geography,
biology, and physics of the different worlds makes it easy to return quickly to the
same spot and move further into the frontier.
A related feature of the games are warp zonesÑsecret passages that, like De
Certeau's bridges, accelerate one's movement through the narrative geography and
bring two or more worlds together. Knowledge about warp zones, passwords, and
other game secrets are key items of social exchange between game players. More to
the point, they have become important aspects of the economic exchange between
game companies and players. Nintendo49 engages in a playful yet lucrative form of
"insider trading," selling secret lips about traversing the game space to consumers
either through 1-900 hotlines or through subscriptions to Nintendo0 Power maga-
zine, which markets detailed maps of the many worlds and levels of popular games
and tips for coping with the local flora and fauna or crossing difficult terrain.
The maps and charts that Nintendo'9 Power publishes are curious documents.
Strictly speaking, they are not maps al all, not abstract representations of geographic
places. The magazine simply unfolds the information contained on many different
screens as a continuous image that shows us the narrative space from the player's

68 CyberSociety

point of view, more or less as it will be experienced in the game. (The closest analogy
would be something like Japanese scroll painting.) Surrounding these successive
representations of the screen space is a narration or "tour" that identifies features of
the landscape and their potentials for narrative action, as in this text from a discussion
of Adventure Island 3: "Lush jungle regions dominate Stage 2. However, a remote
island to the southwest appears to be snowed under. How unusual! One of the largest
waterfalls known to mankind will be encountered in Stage 2. Its cascading torrents
may be too much for the loin-clothed island hero. To the south, Higgins will be lost
in the mist". The text may also suggest possible ways of acting upon this space and
point toward the forms of resources and knowledge needed to survive there: "The
Spiders shouldn't give Higgins too much trouble. Some move up and down and some
of them don't. There may be hidden Eggs in places such as this." At times, the text
may also focus our attention back onto the larger narrative context, onto character
disputes or goals that frame the game action: "The volcanos are erupting! Higgins
had better act fast so he can rescue his girlfriend and get out of there. Because of the
tremendous heat, the supply of fruit is shrinking. There won't be much time for
decision making. The aliens, astonished that Higgins made it this far, will be
waiting!" (''Adventurelsland3,''Nintendo@Power,October 1992, no. 41, pp. 8-13)
Such representations of virtual space bear close resemblance to De Certeau's des-
cription of early maps that "included only the rectilinear marking out of itineraries
(performative indications chiefly concerning pilgrimages), along with the stops one
was to make (cities which one was to pass through, spend the night in, pray at, etc.)
and distances calculated in hours or in days, that is, in terms of the time it would
take to cover them on foot. Each of these maps is a memorandum prescribing actions"
(De Certeau, 1984b, p. 120). Much like these earlier maps, the NintendoX documen-
tation focuses on the specific narrative actions to be performed upon these spaces,
purposes to be pursued and sites to be visited, rather than a universalized account of
the possible places that exist independent of the reader's goals and desires. In most
cases, however, the game company withholds crucial information, and the final stage
of the game remains unmapped and undocumented. Players must still venture into
an unfamiliar and uncharted space to confront unknown perils if they wish to master
the game.
MF: As Henry's citation from De Certeau suggests, we might locate Nintendo@'s
treatment of space in relation to a history of cartography. The Renaissance was, in
fact, the moment when mapmaking shifted from providing locally oriented maps of
previous trajectories and observations by coastal navigators (rutters) to the univer-
salized overview of the Mercator projection. Yet the "universalized overview" was
still conceptual rather than actual; the information needed to map the globe was still
being gathered in arenas of intense competition and secrecy.
I' ve suggested that the particularized accounts of travel offered by narratives like
Smith's or Raleigh's more or less deliberately replaced arrival with the details of
travel as a process. These details, of course, were not only substitutive but also served
practical purposes of their own, guiding both future voyagers and investors in the
voyages. Printed books like Richard Hakluyt's collection of voyage narratives or

Nintendos and New World Narratives 69

Smith's Ccnerai History were routinely carried by ships on voyages of trade and
settlement. Observing this weight given to narratives, one might describe a shift in
the center of value from things to be discovered to information about the terrain
covered en route. When Hakluyt describes the capture of the Portuguese carrack
Mad re de Deus in 1592, among its spins was a 1 68C treatise on China in Latin,
"enclosed in a case of sweet cedar-wood, and lapped up almost an hundred fold in
fine calicut-cloth, as though it had been some incomparable jewel" (Hakluyt, 1598-
1600, vol. 2, p. 88). Information itself becomes the priceless commodity. J. B. Harley
( 1988) links the censorship of cartographic information in early modern Europe to
the economic transformations that accompanied the beginnings of overseas empires.

In a period when the foundations of the European world economy and its
overseas empires were being laid, absolute monarchs were also "merchant
kings," pursuing economic objectives through the trade monopolies opened up
by their navigations. As in the case of the nation-state, the essence of empire

is control. For such com- mercial monopolies to survive and for the policies of
mare clausum to be implemented, there had to be a monopoly of the knowledge
that enabled the new lands and the routes to and from them to be mapped.
(Harley, 1988, p. 61)

Christopher Columbus and John Smith withheld information on true distance
traveled from the rest of their parties; Francis Drake was restrained from making
charts or descriptions of his voyage, and his narrative was held back from publication
for eight years. Raleigh's (1848) Discoverie broods over the impossibility of keeping
any new knowledge secret, an impossibility that justifies his decision not to explore
a potential gold mine:

I thought it best not to hover thereabouts, least if the same had been perceived
by the company, there would haue bin by this time many barks and ships set
out, and perchance other nations would also have gotten of ours for pilots, so
as both our selues might haue been prevented, and all our care taken for good
vsage of the people been vtterly lost. (pp. 59-60)

Information itself became a valued commodity to be accumulated, withheld from
circulation, and given out strategically.
ffJ: When I watch my son playing Nintendo@, I watch him play the part of an
explorer and a colonist, taking a harsh new world and bringing it under his symbolic
control, and that story is strangely familiar. De Certeau reminds us that one tradi-
tional function of narratives is to define a people's relation to their spaces, to justify
their claims upon a certain geography.
Cultures endlessly repeat the narratives of their founding as a way of justifying
their occupation of space. What is interesting about Nintendoe is that it allows people
to enact through play an older narrative that can no longer be enacted in realityÑa
~o

70 CyberSociety

constant struggle for possession of desirable spaces, the ever shifting and unstable
frontier between controlled and uncontrolled space, the need to venture onto un-
mapped terrain and to confront its primitive inhabitants. This holds true for all
players. For children, NintendoS further offers the image of personal autonomy and
bodily control that contrasts with their own subordinate position in the social formation.
MF: The notion of simulating this early colonial experience was not born with
Nintendo¡. The Victorian editor Edward Arber (1885) writes in his preface to The
Three Earliest English Books on America that in them

One is able . . . to look out on the New world as its Discoverers and first explorers
looked upon it. Nowadays, this Globe has but few geographical mysteries; and
it is losing its romance as fast as it is losing its wild beasts. In the following
texts, however, the Wonderment of its Discovery in all its freshness, is pre-
served, as in amber, for all time. (p. v)

And if late 19th-century editions of American voyage narratives offered readers like
Virginia Woolf a vicarious experience, America in the 16th and 1 7th centuries famously
offered to the unlanded or disenfranchised youth of England an alternate arena of
possible advancement and acquisition. But the offered autonomy was ambiguous.
Advertised in some documents as a place where a young man's hands could be his
lands, offering unique opportunities for social and economic mobility, America at
other moments offers to England a place where potentially subversive elementsÑ
heterodox ministers or "masterless men"Ñcan be sent, where the backbreaking labor
that subdues the body will necessarily lead to a conformity of the exhausted spirit.
The theory contemporaneous with the voyage, as well as the writings of colonists,
represents America ambiguously as a place of acquiring mastery and of being
mastered.
The time-honored representation of the English voyages has been a confident,
masculine "thrust outwards" and expansion of, among other things, an enlightened
English rule. The prestige that the voyages retrospectively acquired under Victoria
was solidified by accounts that linked territorial expansion to the flowering of literary
achievement represented, especially, by Shakespeare (also Marlowe, Sidney, and
others). In contrast to this celebratory reception, the mastery of children playing
Nintendo0 is valued only within restricted circles and largely trivialized, if not

stigmatized, within the larger culture. But if, as we argue, Nintendo'@ plays out in virtual
space the same narrative of mastering new territory that these earlier texts repeatedly
record, it has also been argued that Renaissance England was preoccupied with its
own littleness, insularity, and triviality (Knapp, 1993). It also seems to be the case
that most of England's early voyages and settlements were characterized less by
mastery and success than by forms of incompetence, failure, and incomprehension.
It is difficult to locate unambiguously in these narratives either what is masterful,
prestigious, and monumental or what is trivial, disgraceful, and subordinate. Al-
though our two subjects have acquired different cultural meanings, they are in

Nintendo¡ and New World Narratives 71

important ways fundamentally the same narrative, the same kind of experience, one
real, the other simulated.
tlJ: Our purpose in talking about NintendoS next to these older texts is not to
make a claim about direct causal links between the two traditions nor to borrow
cultural authority for Nintendos by brushing it against works with a more prestigious
status. A comparison against periods minimally allows us to think more creatively
about forms of narrative that privilege space over characterization or plot develop-
ment not as aberrations or failures to conform to aesthetic norms but as part of an
alternative tradition of "spatial stories," a different way of organizing narratives that
must be examined and evaluated according to their own cultural logic. Because all
ways of organizing narratives presuppose ways of organizing social and cultural
experience, there are ideological implications as well in seeing Nintendo0 games as
sharing a logic of spatial exploration and conquest with these earlier works. NintendoS
not only allows players to identify with the founding myths of the American nation
but to restage them, to bring them into the sphere of direct social experience. If
ideology is at work in Nintendo0 games (and rather obviously, it is), ideology works not
through character identification but, rather, through role playing. Nintendog' takes
| children and their own needs to master their social space and turns them into virtual
I colonists driven by a desire to master and control digital space.
| Just as the earlier narratives played a specific role in relation to the economic and
I cultural imperialism of Renaissance Europe, Nintendo6\ games must also be posi
I tioned against the backdrop of a new and more complicated phase of economic and
| cultural imperialism. Critical tbeorists have often oversimplified this issue: Ameri
can-based multinationals dump their cultural goods on the rest of the world, produc
ing an international culture that erases indigenous cultural traditions. In this scenario,
cultural power flows in one direction, from the West to the EastÑterms that provide
a sharp reminder of how present a Renaissance geography still is, reaching Japan by
| traveling east, locating direction in relationship to the Old World and not the New.
i Nintendo'E's success complicates a unidirectional model, suggesting ways that the
! appropriation and rewriting of these cultural goods may become an alternative source
of cultural and economic power.
Nintendo@'s much disputed bid to purchase the Seattle Mariners represented a
public acknowledgment of the increasingly central role of Japanese popular culture
in defining how Americans play. Japan's longtime adaption, appropriation, and recon-
struction of Western cultural traditions enables it to sell its cultural goods in the
American marketplace, much as in another age British pop stars ruled the American
music scene. What exactly is the cultural status of a Nintendo~V game, based partially
on American generic traditions or adopted from specific Western texts, drawing some
of its most compelling iconography from Japanese graphic an, licensed by Japanese
corporations, manufactured and designed by corporations in both the Americas and
Asia, and for sale to both lapanese and American marketplaces? What are the lines
of economic and cultural influence when we see Bugs Bunny, Hulk Hogan, and Ban
Simpson existing side by side with samurai, sumo wrestlers, and Mecha-men? Does
Nintendo0's recycling of the myth of the American New World, combined with its

72 CyberSodety

own indigenous myths of global conquest and empire building, represent Asia's
absorption of our national imaginary, or does it participate in a dialogic relationship
with the West, an intermixing of different cultural traditions that insures their broader
circulation and consumption? In this new rediscovery of the New World, who is the
colonizer and who the colonist?

References

Adventure Island 3. (1992). Mntendo Power, 41, pp 8-13.
Arber, E. (1885). The three earliest English book on America. Birxningharn: I Montague Road.
Barlow, l. (1990, Summer). Being in nothingness. Mondo 2000, pp. 34-43.
Cortes, H. (1986). Lerlersfrom Mexico (A. Pagden, Trans. & Eo.). New Haven, CTano London:
Yale University Press.
De Certeau, M. (1984a). Heterologies: Discourse on ~he other (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minnea-
polis: University of Minnesota Press.
De Certeau, M. (1984b). The practice of cveryday liMe. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hakluyt, R. (1598-1600). Principal navigations. N.p. London.
Harley, J. B. (1988). Silences and secrecy: The hidden agenda of cartography in early modern
Europe. Imago Mundi, 40, 57-76.
Jenkins, H. (1993). 'x Logic': Repositioning Nintendo in children's lives. Quarterly Review of
Film and Vldeo, 14, 55-70.
Kinder, M. (1991). Playing with power in movies, tcievision and video games: From Muppet
Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Tunies l 8erkeley: University of California Press
Knapp, J. (1993). An empire nowhere: England, America, and literaturefrom Ulopia to The
Tempest. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lane, R. (1979). An account of the particularities . . . sent and directed to Sir Walter Ralegh. In
D. B. Quinn (Eo.), New American world (pp. 84-119). New York: Arno Press and HectorBye.
Page, e. (1973). American genesis: Prr-colonial writing in thc North. Boston: Gambit.
Provenzo, e. E (1991). Video kids: Making sense of Nintendo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Pless.
Raleigh, Sir Waller. (1848). Thc discoverie of Cuiana . . . (Sir Robelt Schombwglu Bd.).
London: Halcluyt Society.
Rheingold, H. (1991). Virtual reality. New York: Simon & Schusler.
Smith, J. (1624). Thc general history of Virginia, Ncw-England. and the Summer Isles. In P.
Barbour, Works of Captain John Smith (pp. 214-261). Chapel Hill: Univetsity of Nonh Caro
lina Press.
Walcott, D. (1986). Ruins of a greal house. In D. Walcon, Collected poems, 1948-84 (p. 79).
New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux.

p
uo
w

4
MAKING SENSE
OF SOFTWARE:
COM PUTER GAM ES AN D
INTERACTIVE TEXTUALITY

Ted Friedman

Contemporary theories of literature and film have worked hard to "liberate
the reader" from the shackles of authorial intent and textual determinism
(see, e.g., Allen, 1992; Fish, 1980; Freund, 1987; Tompkins, 1980). Today
it practically goes without saying within the discourse of cultural theory that
no text exists until it is engaged by a subjectÑthat textuality is always an inter-
active, creative process.
But while critics in the humanities have grown more and more bold in
proclaiming the reader's power over the images on a printed page or celluloid
strip, few have paid much attention to the emergence of new media that call

into question the very categories of author, reader, and text. (An important
exception is the pioneering work of David Myers, to which I refer throughout
this chapter.) Interactive softwareÑcomputer games, hypertext, and even
"desktop" programs and databasesÑconnect the oppositions of "reader" and
"text," of "reading" and "writing," together in feedback loops that make it
impossible to distinguish precisely where one begins and the other ends.
Recognizing a reader's changing expectations and reactions as a linear text
unfolds is one thing, but how do we talk about textual interactions in which
every response provokes instantaneous changes in the text itself, leading to
a new response, and so on? The answer is not very clear yet, for whereas the
humanities have theoretical accounts to explain the workings of literature,
film, and television, as yet there is no "software theory."

73
p
uo

74 CyberSociety

Hypertext: A Limited Paradigm

The one form of interactive computer texts that has been explored in some
depth by cultural theorists is hypertext (see, e.g., Burett, 1989; Delany &
Landow, 1991; Landow, 1992). Hypertext is softwue that allows many different
texts to be linked, so that simply clicking a mouse on a key word brings up
a new related document. It can be used to create fiction with myriad forking
paths or to organize concordances and footnotes that do not simply supply
page numbers but instantaneously call up whole documents, each of which
in turn can be linked to other documents.
But emphasizing hypertext as the model for interactive computer texts
traps software theory in traditional notions of textuality. The hypertext reader
simply navigates through a network of choices, like a person flipping uound
in a book by consulting the index. Certainly, the possibility that this book
may be thousands of pages and part of a series of thousands of volumes opens
up incredible opportunities. But however great the database, the hypertext
reader's choices are still limited by the finite number of links created by the
hypertext author or authors. The constant feedback between player and com-
puter in a computer game is a fu more complex interaction than this simple
networking model. And computers' graphics and sound capabilities along with
joystick and point-and-click interfaces make reading an even more tenuous
analogy. Whereas in one stage of development, computer games like Infocom's
Zork series may have simply been "interactive fiction" in which players read
sentences and typed responses, computer games today often need little or no
written text at all.
This does not mean that computer game playing is a transparent activityÑ
far from it, as any hapless Nintendos novice can attest. Rather, like becoming
teleliterate, learning how to play computer games is a process of learning a
distinct semiotic structure. To some extent, this language, like that of
classical Hollywood narrative, curies over from one text to the next; initiates
can finish one game and comfortably move on to the next one, particularly
if they remain in the same genre. But in some ways, every new computer
game is its own world, a distinct semiotic system, and it is the very process
of learning (or conquering) that system that drives interest in the game. Every
game typically requires a "learning curve" while the user grows familiar with
the new interface and the logic of the program. It is when the game's processes
appeu transparent, when the player can easily win the game, that the game
loses its appeal.
Hypertext seems to me a transitional genre particularly appealing to literary
academia because it dresses up traditional literary study with postmodern

Making Sense of Software 75

multimedia flash. Concentrating on an account of hypertext to explain interac-
tive computer texts is like basing film studies on the genre of screenplays with-
out looking at the movies themselves; what is needed is an analysis rooted in
the distinct qualities of this new kind of interaction between viewer and text.

Computer Games

If we wish to move beyond familiar p paradigms and look at software
has developed truly new forms of reader-text interaction, it seems cleu to
me the place to start is computer games.
Playing games on computers was first made possible by the introduction
of minicomputers in the late 1950s. Freed from the IBM punch cud bureau-
cracy, programmers for the first time were able to explore the possibilities
opened up by hands-on interaction with computers. Games were among the
first programs attempted by the original "hackers," undergraduate members
of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club. The result, in 1962, was the collabora-
tive development of the first computer game: Spacewar, a basic version of
what would become the Asteroids ucade game, played on a $120,000 DEC
PDP-I (Laurel,1993;Levy,1984;Wilson,1992).ComputerdesignerBrenda
Laurel (1993) points out this early recognition of the centrality of computer
games as models of human-computer interaction:

Why was Spacewar the "natural" thing to build with this new technology? Why
not a pie chart or an automated kaleidoscope or a desktop? Its designers identified
action as the key ingredient and conceived Spacewar as a game that could provide
a good balance between thinking and doing for its players. They regarded the
computer as a machine naturally suited for representing things that you could
see, control, and play with. Its interesting potential lay not in its ability to
perform calculations but in its capacity to represent action in which humans
could participate. (p. I )

As computers became more accessible to university researchers through-
out the 1960s, several genres of computer games emerged. Chess programs
sophisticated enough to defeat humans were developed. The first computer
role-playing game, Adventure, was written at Stanford in the 1960s: By typing
short phrases the player could communicate commands to the computer to
manipulate a character through various settings and solve puzzles. Then in
1970, Scientific American columnist Manin Gardner introduced Americans
to WFE, a simulation of cellular growth patterns written by British mathe-
matician John Conway that became the first "software toy," an addictively

)

76 CyberSociety

open-ended model of systemic development designed to be endlessly tink-
ered with and enjoyed (Levy, 1984; Wilson, 1992).
The 1970s, of course, saw the birth of the video arcade, the home video
game system, and the personal computer. By the early 1980s, computer game
software production had become an industry (Wilson, 1992). And in the past
10 yeus, as personal computers' capacities have rapidly expanded, computer
games have continued to develop, offering increasingly detailed graphics and
sounds, growing opportunities for multiple-player interaction via modems
and on-line services, and ever more sophisticated simulation algorithms.
According to the magazine Computer Caming World, as of 1992 about
4,000 computer games had been published, not to mention thousands more
public domain games (Wilson, 1992). These products range from ucade-
style games emphasizing hand-eye coordination, to role-playing games add-
ing graphics and sound to the Adventure formula, to simulation games in which
players oversee the growth and development of systems ranging from cities
to galaxies to alternate life-forms. CGW divides the contemporary field into
seven genres: action/arcade, adventure, role-playing adventure, simulation,
sports, strategy, and wu. Within these categories, of course, there is much
overlap. An empire-building game like Civilizationt', for example, rests some-
where between a wu game and a simulation, and many adventure gumes
contain arcade-style interludes (see Myers, 1989, for a more extensive dis-
cussion of computer game genres).

The Computer Gaming Subculture

Of course, academia's neglect of computer games hardly means that games
have gone untheorized. Among the people who design and play computer
games, the poetics and possibilities of computer games have been a subject
of continuous discussion. Computer Gaming World is the self-conscious organ
of the computer game industry and subculture, publishing game previews,
reviews, strategy tips, and periodic essays on the state of computer games.
It takes its role as the connection between the hard-core computer game
market and the computer game industry very seriously. It thoroughly covers
the computer game industry and publishes abstracts from technical program-
ming essays in the Journal of Computer Game Design. Every issue also ranks
the Top 100 current games and Top 10 in each genre, based on continuous
reader polling (each issue contains a ballot card). This interaction with readers
continues not only through the mail but on-line as well. The Prodigy0 service
runs a daily column by the editors of CGW, and the editors regularly scan the
gaming forum and respond to bulletins posted there.

Making Sense of Software 77

The intense dialogue fostered by CGW and other forums within the com-
puter gaming industry and subculture has led to the formulation of a computer
game canon (a Hall of Fame printed in every issue of CGW and uchived on
Prodigy@) and several provisional theories of computer gaming. These dis-
cussions are, to my mind, the most successful theorizations to date of in-
teractive computer texts.

Computer Games as "Interactive Cinema"

One prominent strand of thought within the computer gaming subculture
is to describe the computer game industry as the "New Hollywood.''l This
analogy has its roots in the changing economics of entertainment production.
Over the past few years, Hollywood studios have flocked to Silicon Valley
to gain access to the latest computer-generated special effects techniques and
to position themselves to be able to produce the kind of interactive entertain-
ment to come in the 500-channel future.
The "New Hollywood" analogy serves as a helpful model for understanding
the process of computer game design. Although in the industry's infancy it
was possible for one programmer to write and market a game single-hand-
edly, today computer game production is a complex, collaborative process
among many specialists. The introduction screens for contemporary games

read like movie credits, listing producers, programmers, artists, musicians,
and even, in the newer games with digitized images and recorded dialogue,
actors. At the top of the credits are the designers, the equivalent to movie
directors. In the computer gaming world, designers like Ultima~9's Lord
British, King's Quest¡'s Roberta Williams, and SimCity@'s Will Wright ue
respected as artists with unique personal visions.
The difference between the New Hollywood and the Old, according to the
analogy, is that computer games are "interactive cinema," in which the game
player takes on the role of the protagonist. This model particularly fits
adventure games such as Sierra On-Line's Leisure Suit Larry~ and King's
Quest0 series. And with the development of CD-ROM technology, the fit
seems even closer: Much more data can now be stored on disk than ever
before, so that what the game player sees and hears approaches movie quality.
The newest CD-ROM games replace the traditional on-screen text with audio
dialogue, often recorded by well-known actors. On the CD-ROM version of
Star TrekS: The 25th Anniversaryª, for example, the dialogue is spoken by
the actual Star Trek0 cast. It is not impossible to imagine the day when a com-
puter game might look indistinguishable from a film.
~o
am

78 CyberSociety

Although production values may have vastly improved since the days of
text-based "interactive fiction," the problem that designers of contemporary
"interactive cinema" face remains the same: how to define "interactive"?
How can one give the player a sense of "control" over the game while still
propelling the player through a compelling narrative? The solution, dating
back to Adventure and Zork, has always been to set up the game as a series
of puzzles. The player must muddle through the universe of the gameÑex-
ploring the settings, talking to the characters, acquiring and using objectsÑ
until she or he has accomplished everything necessary to trigger the next stage
of the plot. In the process, the player is expected to regularly make mistakes,
die, and restart the game in a previously saved position. (The film Groundhog
Day perfectly captures this "Oh no, not again!" exasperation.) The flaws in
this system have prompted the development of a cottage industry offering
hint books, l-900 numbers, and bulletin boards to help players stuck halfway
through their adventures.
The idea of computer "role playing" emphasizes the opportunity for the
gamer to identify with the character on the screenÑthe fantasy is that rather
than just watching the protagonist one can actually be her or him. But whereas
classical Hollywood cinema is designed in every way to allow one to "lose one-
self" in the fantasy on-screen, the stop-and-go nature of the puzzle-solving
puadigm makes it very hud to establish the sume level of psychic invest-
ment. Although adventure games can be a lot of fun, even the best of them cannot
really deliver what they promise. As Computer Caming World's adventure/
role-playing game columnist Scorpia complained in 1992,

There is an increasing undercurrent of dissatisfaction among game-players.
Yes, the pictures are beautiful, the music is orchestral-quality, the interface
simple and easy to use, but when the game is finished, there isn't so much
feeling of satisfaction with it. Rather, one has the impression that the game was
only a vehicle for displaying the virtuosity of artists and composers. (p. 56)

A second option in designing "interactive cinema" is to make the game
more like hypertext: Rather than railroading the player through a predeter-
mined story line, the game could simply present a series of choices, each
branching out into new possibilities, like the children's book series Choose
Your Own Adventure. Up until now, this approach has rarely been attempted
in computer games, probably for economic reasons: It did not seem practical
to create scenes and characters the player may never get around to seeing. A
notable exception was Infocom's unsuccessful late- 1 980s Infocomics series
(Wilson, 1992). Now that CD-ROMs open up the opportunity for far more data
to be available in a game, it appears that this possibility is beginning to be

Making Sense of Software 79

explored again. The publicity for the most recent edition in the King's QuesP
series, King's Quest VP, emphasizes that "every choice you make affects your
future options and the attitudes and actions of characters you encounter. De-
pending on your skills and the decisions you make, your adventure can
follow dozens of different story lines, with nearly half of the possible events
optional" ("News Notes," 1993, p. 16).
But a hypertext model of "interactive cinema" still does little to give the
player a sense of real autonomy; the choices remain a limited set of prede-
fined options.2 This certainly increases the complexity of the game: The
linear narrative becomes a web, giving the gamer the opportunity to explore
the ramifications of vuious options and map out the game's network of forking
paths. But whether a single plot or a network of choices, the world of the
game remains as predetermined as that of any film or novel.
All of this is not to say that computer gaming is inherently a more distanced,
alienating form of interaction than watching a movieÑfu from it, as we shall
see. But, ironically, those games modeled upon cinema are likely to be the
least involving. Hamstrung by the demands of traditional narrative, these
games operate under a limited model of computer interaction as a series of
distinct decisions. As a result, they do not begin to take advantage of the op-
portunities for constant interaction and feedback between player and com-
puter in the way that other forms of computer games can. As science fiction
writer and computer game critic Orson Scott Card (199la) argues,

What every good game author eventually has to learn . . . is that computers are
a completely different medium, and great computer artworks will only come
about when we stop judging computer games by standards developed for other
media.... You want to do the rebuilding of Atlanta after the war? SimCity does
it better than either the book or the movie of Cone With ghc Wind The computer
"don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies," but what it does well, it does better
than any other medium that ever existed. (p. 54; reprinted by permission of
Compute, tO 1991, Compute Publications Intemational, Ltd.)

SimCity!9: The "Software Toy" Ideal

The game to which Card refers, SimCity@, is a simulation that allows the
player to orchestrate the building and development of a city. The success of
SimCityQ9 demonstrates the surprisingly compelling power of a particular
kind of human-computer interaction very different from either hypertext or
"interactive cinema."

CyberSociety | Making Sense of Software 81

SimCityS actually did not stut off as a simulation game. As the game's
creator, Will Wright, explains,

SimCit,v evolved from Raid on Bungling Bay, where the basic premise was that
you flew around and bombed islands. The game included an island generator,
and I noticed after a while that I was having more fun building islands than
blowing them up. About the same time, I also came across the work of Jay Forrester,
one of the first people to ever model a city on a computer for social-sciences
purposes. Using his theories, I adapted and expanded the Bungling Bay island
generator, and SimCit,v evolved from there. (quoted in Reeder, 1992, p. 26)

Nervous that the product Wright came up with would appear too "educa-
tional," distributors Broderbund took extra steps on Simcity'D's release in
1987 to make sure it would be perceived as a game, adding "disaster" options
and prepackaged scenariosÑearthquakes, nuclear meltdowns, even an attack
from Godzilla. But as a 1989 Newsweek article on the game pointed out, such
add-ons were "excess baggage" (Buol, 1989, p. 64). What turned Simcity0
into a giant software hit, spawning numerous bootlegs, imitations, and spin-offs
(including SimEarth0, SimAnt, SimLife, SimFarmTM, SimHealth, and most
recently the sequel/update SimCity 2000TM), was the pleasure Wright discov-
ered in the simulation process itself. A description of the original game comes
from a Maxis catalog:

SimCity makes you Mayor and City Planner, and dares you to design and build
the city of your dreams.... Depending on your choices and design skills, Simu-
lated Citizens (Sims) will move in and build homes, hospitals, churches, stores
and factories, or move out in search of a better life elsewhere. (Uaxis Software
Toys Catalog, 1992, p. 4)

Beginning (in the basic scenario) with an undeveloped patch of land and
an initial development fund, the player constructs a city by choosing where
and what kind of power plants to build, zoning industrial, commercial, and
residential ueas, laying down roads, mass transit, and power lines, and building
police stations, fire departments, and eventually airports, seaports, and stadi-
ums, and so on. Although playing the game eventually comes to feel entirely
intuitive, the system is quite complex, and the sequel SimCity 2000^ offers
even more options. Every action is assigned a price, and the player can only
spend as much money as he or she has in the city treasury. The treasury begins
at a base amount and can be replenished yearly by taxes, the rate of which is
determined by the player. As the player becomes more familiar with the system,
she or he gradually develops strategies to encourage economic growth, build

~:
._ - ,,.r

up the population of the city, and score a higher "approval rating" from the
Sims. Which of these or other goals the player chooses to pursue, however,
is up to the individual; Maxis likes to refer to its products as "software toys"
rather than games and insists,

When you play with our toys, you set your own goals and decide for yourself
when you' ve reached them. The fun and challenge of playing with our toys lies
in exploring the worlds you create out of your own imagination. You're rewarded
for creativity, experimentation, and understanding, with a healthy, thriving
universe to call your own. (Uaxis Software Toys Catalog, 1992, p. 10)

Expanding on the "software toy" ideal, Cud (1991b) ugues that the best
computer games ue those that provide the most open-ended frameworks to
allow players the opportunity to create their own worlds:

Someone at every game design company should have a full-time job of saying,
"Why aren't we letting the player decide that?" . . . When [designers] let . . . un-
necessary limitations creep into a game, gamewrights reveal that they don't yet
understand their own art. They've chosen to work with the most liberating of
mediaÑand yet they snatch back with their left hand the freedom they offered
us with their right. Remember, gamewrights, the power and beauty of the art
of gamemaking is that you and the player collaborate to create the final story.
Every freedom that you can give to the player is an artistic victory. And every
needless boundary in your game should feel to you like failure. (p. 58; reprinted
by permission of Compute, O 1991, Compute International, Ltd.)

Computer Gaming as Demystification

Of course, however much "freedom" computer gune designers grant players,
any simulation will be rooted in a set of baseline assumptions. SimCity'D has
been criticized from both the left and the right for its economic model. It
assumes that low taxes will encourage growth while high taxes will hasten
recessions. It discourages nuclear power while rewuding investment in mass
transit. And most fundamentally, it rests on the empiricist, technophilic fantasy
that the complex dynamics of city development can be abstracted, quantified,
simulated, and micromanaged.3
These are notflaws in the gameÑthey are its founding principles. They
can be engaged and debated, and other computer games can be written following
different principles. But there could never be an "objective" simulation free
from "bias"; computer programs, like all texts, will always be ideological
constructions.
~D
co

82 CyberSociety

The fear of some computer game critics, though, is that technology may
mask the constructedness of any simulation. Science fiction writer and Byte
magazine columnist lerry Pournelle (1990) argues,

The simulation is pretty convincingÑand that's the problem, because . . . it's
a simulation of the designer's theories, not-of reality.... IM]Y point is not to
condemn these programs. Instead, I want to warn against their misuse. For all
too many, computers retain an air of mystery, and there's a strong temptation
to believe what the little machines tell us. "But that's what the computer says"
is a pretty strong argument in some circles. The fact is, though, the computer
doesn't say anything at all. It merely tells you what the programmers told it to
tell you. Simulation programs and games can be valuable tools to better
understanding, but we'd better be aware of their limits. (on-line from Nexus)

Pournelle's warnings ue well taken, but I think he overestimates the
mystifying power of technophilia. In fact, I would argue that computer games
reveal their own constructedness to a much greater extent than more tradi-
tional texts. Pournelle asks that designers open up their programs so that
gamers can "know what the inner relationships ue." But this is exactly what
the process of computer game playing reveals. Learning and winning (or, in the
case of a noncompetitive "softwue toy," "reaching one's goals at") a com-
puter game is a process of demystification: One succeeds by discovering how
the softwue is put together. The player molds his or her strategy through
trial-and-error experimentation to see "what works"Ñwhich actions ue
rewarded and which are punished. Likewise, the extensive discourse on game
strategy in manuals, magazines, bulletin boards, and guides like The Of ricial
SimCity Planning Commission Handbook and The SimEarth Bible does
exactly what Pournelle asks, exposing the "inner relationships" of the simu-
lation to help players succeed more fully.
Unlike a book or film that one is likely to encounter only once, a computer
game is usually played over and over. The moment it is no longer interesting
is the moment when all its secrets have been discovered, its limitations
exposed. Game designer and author Chris Crawford ( 1986) describes the herme-
neutics of computer games as fundamentally a process of deconstruction
rather than simple interpretation. David Myers (1990a) observes, "Accord-

ing to Crawford, the best measure of the success of a game is that the player
learns the principles behind that game 'while discovering inevitable flaws in
its design.... A game should lift the player up to higher levels of under-
standing' " (p. 27, quote from Crawford, 1986, p. 16).

Making Sense of Software

Simulation and Subjectivity

Playing SimCity'S is a very different experience from playing an adventure
game like King's Quest@. The interaction between human and computer is
constant and intense. Game playing is a continuous flowÑit can be very hard
to stop because the player is always in the middle of dozens of different
projects: nurturing a new residential zone in one corner of the map, building
an airport in another, saving up money to buy a new power plant, monitoring
the crime rate in a puticululy troubled neighborhood, and so on. Meanwhile,
the city is continually changing, as the simulation inexorably chugs forward
| from one month to the next (unless the player puts the game on pause to
| handle a crisis). By the time the player has made a complete pass through
I the city, a whole new batch of problems and opportunities have developed.
i If the pace of the city's development is moving too fast to keep up with, the
l simulation can be slowed down (i.e., it will wait longer in real time to move
l from one month to the next); if the player is waiting around for things to
happen, the simulation can be speeded up.
As a result, it is easy to slide into a routine with absolutely no downtime,
no interruptions from complete communion with the computer. The game
can grow so absorbing, in fact, that players' subjective sense of time is distorted
(see Myers, 1992). Myers (1991) writes, "From personal experience and
interviews with other players, I can say it is very common to play these games
| for eight or more hours without pause, usually through the entire first night
of purchase" (p. 343). You look up, and all of a sudden it is morning.
l It is very hard to describe what it feels like when one is "lost" inside a
computer game precisely because at that moment one's sense of self has been
fundamentally transformed. Flowing through a continuous series of deci
sions made almost automatically, hardly aware of the passage of time, the
player forms a symbiotic circuit with the computer, a version of the cybor
$ gian consciousness described by Donna Huaway (1985) in her influential
"Manifesto for Cyborgs." The computer comes to feel like an organic extension
of one's consciousness, and the player may feel like an extension of the
l computer itself.
This isn't exactly the way the SimCity& user's manual puts it. The manual
describes the player's role as a "combination Mayor and City Planner." In
Civilizationn', the player is referred to as "Chief," "Warlord," "Prince,"
"King," or "Emperor" (depending on the skill level) and can adopt the names
of various historical leadersÑAbraham Lincoln when playing the Ameri-
cans, Genghis Khan when leading the Mongols, and so on. But while these
titles suggest that the gamer imagines her- or himself playing a specific
"role" along the lines of the "interactive cinema" model, the structures of

84 CyberSodety

identification in simulation games are much more complex. Closer to the truth
is the setup in Populous, where the player is simply GodÑomnipotent (within
the rules of the game), omniscient, and omnipresent. Whereas in some
simulations explicitly about politics, like Hidden Agenda and Crisis in the
Kremlin, the player's power and perspective is limited to that of a chief of
state, in games like SimCity8 the player is personally responsible for fu more
than any one leaderÑor even an entire governmentÑcould ever manage. The
player directly controls the city's budget, economic and residential growth,
transportation, police and fire services, zoning, and even entertainment (the
Sims eventually get mad if you don't build them a stadium). While each
function is putatively within the province of government control, the game
structure makes the player identify as much with the roles of industrialist,
merchant, real estate agent, and citizen as with those of Mayor or City Planner.
For example, in SimCity^', the way a new uea of town is developed is to
"zone" it. The player decides whether each pucel of land should be marked
for residential, industrial, or commercial use. The player cannot make the
zones develop into thriving homes or businesses; that is determined by the
simulation on the basis of a range of interconnected factors including crime
rate, pollution, economic conditions, power supply, and the accessibility of
other zones. If the player has set up conditions right, an empty residential
zone will quickly blossom into a high-rise apartment complex, raising land
values, adding tax money to the city's coffers, and increasing the population
of the city. If the zone isn't well-integrated into the city, it may stay undeveloped
or degenerate into a crime-ridden slum.
Although the player cannot control the behavior putatively assigned to the
residents of the cityÑthe SimsÑthe identification process at the moment the
player zones the city goes beyond simply seeing oneself as "the Mayor" or
even as the collective zoning commission. The cost of zoning eats up a sub-
stantial portion of a city's budgetÑmuch more than it would cost a real city.
This is structurally necessary to limit the player's ability to develop the city,
so that building the city is a gradual, challenging process (something close
to a narrative, in fact). The effect on game play is to see the process less as
"zoning" than as buying the land. This is not to say that the gamer considers
every building as owned by the government, but at the moment of zoning,
the gamer is playing the role not of mayor but of someone elseÑhomeowner,
landlord, or real estate developer, perhaps, in the case of a residential zone.
One could see playing SimCity@, then, as a constant shifting of identifica-
tory positions, depending on whether one is buying land, organizing the
police force, paving the roads, or whatever. This, I think, is part of what's
going on. But this model suggests a level of disjunctionÑjumping back and

Making Sense of Software 85

forth from one role to the nextÑbelied by the smooth, almost trancelike state
¥ of game play.
Overarching these functional shifts, I think, is a more general state of
identification: with the city as a whole, as a single organism. Even putting it
this way, though, does not go to the root of the process because "the city" in
question is a very different object from, say, the city of New York. Except
for those cases when gamers choose to recreate real cities, no outside referent
exists for the world on the computer screen. And while the game visuals are
cleverly iconicÑtiny little houses, factories, and mini-mallsÑthey hardly
evoke any "real" space the way a movie set or even a written passage can. It
is unlikely, I think, that the player in the thick of the game takes the time to
look at a residential district and imagine a "real life" city block.
Rather, for the gamer, the city exists in its own right, a substitute for nothing
elseÑa quintessentially postmodern "simulation" in Baudrillud's (1983)
sense, as "real" as any other representation and divorced from any need for
a "real world" referent. In this case, attempting to map "roles" onto the player's
on-screen identification misses the point. When a player "zones" a land area,

he or she is identifying less with a "role"ÑMayor, industrialist, or whatever
Ñthan with a process. And the reason why the decision, and the continuous
series of decisions the gamer makes, can be made so quickly and intuitively
is that the gamer has internalized the logic of the program, so that the gamer
is always able to anticipate the results of his or her actions. "Losing oneself"
in a computer game means, in a sense, identifying with the simulation itself.

Simulation as Cognitive Mapping

In The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey (1989) argues for the
primacy of spatialization in constructing cognitive frameworks: "We learn
our ways of thinking and conceptualizing from active grappling with the
spatializations of the written word, the study and production of maps, graphs,
diagrams, photographs, models, paintings, mathematical symbols, and the
like" (p. 206). He then points out the dilemma of making sense of space under
late capitalism: "How adequate are such modes of thought and such concep-
tions in the face of the flow of human experience and strong processes of
social change? On the other side of the coin, how can spatializations in
general . . . represent flux and change?" (p. 206). Representing flux and change
is exactly what a simulation can do, by replacing the stasis of two- or three-
dimensional spatial models with a map that shifts over time to reflect change.
And this change is not simply the one-way communication of a series of still
ul
o
o

86 CyberSociety

images but a continually interactive process. Computer simulations bring the
tools of narrative to mapmaking, allowing the individual not simply to
observe structures but to become experientially immersed in their logic.
Simulations may be our best opportunity to create what Fredric Jameson
(1991) calls "an aesthetic of cognitive mapping: a pedagogical political culture
which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense
of its place in the global system" (p. 54). Playing a simulation means be-
coming engrossed in a systemic logic that connects a myriad array of causes
and effects. The simulation acts as a kind of map-in-time, visually and viscerally
(as the player internalizes the game's logic) demonstrating the repercussions
and interrelatedness of many different social decisions. Escaping the prison-
house of language that seems so inadequate for holding together the disparate
strands that construct postmodern subjectivity, computer simulations pro-
vide a radically new quasi-nurative form through which to communicate
structures of interconnection.
Sergei Eisenstein hoped that the technology of montage could make it
possible to film Das Kapital. But the nurative techniques of Hollywood
cinema developed in a way that directs the viewer to respond to individuals
rather than abstract concepts. A computer game based on Das lCapital, on the
other hand, is easy to imagine. As Chris Crawford notes (paraphrased by David
Myers), "Game personalities ue not as important as game processesÑ'You
can interact with a process.... Ultimately, you can learn about it"' (Myers,
1990a, p. 27, quote from Crawford, 1986, p. 15).

The Future: From Interactive Textuality to CMC

One criticism often made of simulation games like SimCityeR is that they
ue solipsistic "power trips," gratifying the gamer's desire to play God. This
is to some degree unfairÑsimulations are often played in groups, particularly
in educational settings. (SimCity¢S is used as a pedagogical tool in many urban
studies classes.) But it is true that the absorbing interaction between human
and computer in simulation gaming tends to discourage collaborative play.
Adventure games, by comparison, have always been more conducive to
collaborative playing because of the stop-and-go nature of the game play.
When you cannot get any further in a game until you solve a puzzle, the more
minds the better. Nonetheless, even the computer "role playing" adventures
spun off from the Dungeons £ Dragons0 universe have always been designed
primarily for solitaire play. (Theoretically, up to six players could each

control a different character, but in practice there is very little for individual
characters to do.) In part, this has been to take advantage of the particular

Making Sense of Software 87

power of human-computer interaction to substitute for interpersonal interac-
tionÑif you can't find anyone to play D&D with, the computer may be the
next best thing. But it has also been the result of technical limitations. The
bottom line has always been that when there is only one keyboard and one
mouse, only one player at a time can actually interact with the computer.
Only arcade games have actually developed interfaces to allow simultaneous
play on a single set.
With the proliferation of modems and the growth of the Internet and other
on-line services, all this is beginning to change. Sierra's ImagiNation, for
example, allows players from across the country to join together to play
both traditional games like chess and bridge, and a DdtD-style role-playing
adventure, The Shadow of Yserbius. How on-line interactivity will affect
computer game development is hard to tell. Will the accessibility of human
opponents make computer-generated opponents obsolete? Could it be possi-
ble to design an on-line simulation game that transcends the solitaire model,
combining intense human-computer interactivity with computer-mediated
collaboration? Or is playing a simulation, like reading a book, just something
that has to be done alone?
These questions about a bunch of games may seem peripheral to the Big
Issues rolling down the Information Highway. But we should remember that
the first program the MIT hackers wrote on their new PDP- 1 was Spacewar.
Today, as we experiment with ways to better communicate on the Internet,
many of the tropes of adventure gaming are being borrowed by new virtual
spaces. The first "MUD," short for "Multi-User Dungeon," was invented in
1979 as an open-ended on-line fantasy world that role players could not only
explore but help build by creating new objects and rooms (Rheingold, 1993,
p. 151). Today, MUDs include not only Tolkeinesque lands and Star Treke-
based galaxies but also communities like MediaMOO, a virtual version of
MIT's Media Laboratory where media researchers can get together for
"virtual drinks" or attend panels in virtual ballrooms. The basic commands
invented for text-based adventuresÑ"move," "look," "talk," "ask," "get," and
so onÑprovide visitors with a range of interactive opportunities. And the
computer game traditions of thick textual description, playful role-playing,
and persistent exploration remain powerful imaginative tools at MediaMOO
for opening up computer-mediated communication beyond simply "chat-
ting" in real time.
As data capacities increase and text-based virtual communities expand to
include sound and graphics, it is likely that computer games will continue to
have things to teach us about interacting both with software and with each
other. Computer games, after all, are where we go to play with the future.

88 CyberSociety

Notes

1. This widely quoted phrase was coined by Electronic Arts executive Tdp Hawkins in the
early 1980s (Wilson, 1992).
2. This version of "interactive cinema" is the most obvious possible application of computer
gaming to Hollywood product as new interactive cable technology is introduced. It is the logical
extension of the practice of filming multiple endings to show to test audiences. What better way
to piase cvcr,vbody than to give cach viewer the choice of a "happy" or "sad" ending? But again
to limit our notions of interactivity to this fixed-choice modelÑone that computers merely
facilitate rather than malce possibleÑis to fail to recognize the unique possibilities for interaction
offered by computers. Perhaps a more exciting variation on the Hollywood scenario would be
to give the viewer access to all the shot footage of a program, so that the viewer (with the
facilitation of a computer interface) could choose how to ed t it into a narrative. In this way,
r ther than being limited to a predetermined set of choices the viewer could have a sense of
cre tive control.
3. Complaining about the pro-government "bi s" of SimHealth a new game simulnting the
economics of health care reform. one critic speculates, "Maybe what we leally need is an
economic simulator called SimAdam Smith: You turn it on and just leave it alone" (Moss, 1994) .
At we shall tee, however, it is not a simple step to equate the gamer with the hand of government
even if she or he is putatively designated "SimMayor."

References

Allen, R. (1992). Audience-oriented criticism and television. In R. Allen (Ed.), Channels of
discourse, reassembled (pp. 163-185). Chapel Hill: Univertity of North Carolina Press.
Barol, B. (1989, May 29). Big fun in a small town. Newsweek, p. 64.
Barrett, e. (Ed.). (1989). The society of text: Nypeeext, hypermedia, and the social construction
of information. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Baudrillard, 1. (1983). Simulations (P. Foss, P. Patton, & P. Beitchman, Trans.). New York:
Semiotext(e).
Card, O. S. (1991a, February). Gameplay: Filmt can make lousy games. Compute, p. 54.
Card, O. S. (199lb, March). Gameplay: Gamet with no limits. Compute, p. 58.
Crawford, C. (1986). Balanee of power Redmond, CA: Microtoft Press.
Delany, P., & Landow, G. (Edt.). (1991). Hypermedia and literary studies. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Fish, S. (1980).1s there a text in this class? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Freund, E. (1987). The rcturn of the reader: Reader-rcsponsc criticism. London: Methuen.
Haraway, D. (1985). Manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the
1980s. Socialist Review, 80, 65-108.
Harvey, D. (1989). rhc condition of postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.
Jameson, E (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Landow, G. (1992). Hypertext. Baltimore: Johns Hopxins University Press.
Laurel, B. (1993). Computers as theater New York: Addison-Wesley.
-Levy, S. (1984). Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution. New York: Dell.
Maxis Software Toys Catalog (1992). Orinda, CA: Maxis.

ul
o

Making Sense of Software 89

Moss, C. (1994, February). From mold to penicillen and from mo s to SimHealth. Computer
Caming World Downloaded from Prodigy@.
Myers, D. (1990a). Cbris Crawford and computer game aesthetics. Journal of Popular Culture,
24(2), 17-28.
Myers, D. (199Ob). Computer game genres. Play and Culture, 3, 286-301.
Myers, D. (1991). Computer game semiotics. Play and Culture, 4, 334-346.
Myers, D. (1992). Time, symbol transformations, and computer games, Play and Culhre, 5.
441 -457.
News notes: Sierra and Dynamix sweep SPA nominations. (1993, Spring). Interaction, p. 16.
Pournelle, J. (1990, February). [Untitled column]. Byte, obtained on-line through Nexus.
Reeder, S. (1992, Dcrember). Designing visions. Kids & Computcrs, pp. 24-27, 66-67.
Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual commumty: Homesteading on the electronicfrontier New

York: Addison-Wesley.
Scorpia. (1992, October). Scorpion's view: What's in a garnc? The current state of computer
adventure/role playing games. Computer Caming World pp. 54-56.
Tompkins, J. P. (Ed.). (1980). Rcader response criticism: Fmmformalism topost-structuralism.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wilson, J. (1992, July). A brief history of gaming: Part 1. Computer Caming World, obtained
on-line through Prodigy@.
530 Pretend Play

Suddenly I was frightened by the eerie quality of the whole business, but
I felt that I must play along for the sake of our future harmony. I said with
a smile, ' Here, let me help you.'
Acting out an elaborate pantomine I took the rope from her hands and,
with much pulling and manipulation, untangled it from the plumbing.
1 dared not meet her eye until I held out to her the rope which neither of
us could see (I think). ' Here you are, little one,' I said.
Then I saw the expression on her face. In a human mute it might have
been called a look of sheer devotion, of appreciation for understanding.
In addition a tiny smile played on her lips. And her whole face reflecte
the wonder in children's faces when they are astonished at a grown-up's
enthusiastic escape into makebelieve. I have heard children say, 'It isn't
really true, you know. It's just a game.'
But perhaps Viki's look was just a good hard stare.
In any event it was only there for a spellbound second. Then her funny
little face crinkled into a grin and she tore off around the toilet faster than
every before, dragging her imaginary toy behind her. I JuSt stood there,
feeling very eccentric indeed.
After this I decided to get into the fun. One day as she played on the
couch in a confusion of toys, I began to walk up and down the room,
trailing a ghostly pulltoy of my own. But my toy had sound effects. t
went ' clackety clackety ' on the bare floor, had to be hoisted on to the rug,
and there it went 'squush squush'. In a little while Viki began to stare at
me. She jumped off the couch and came running, not to me but to my toy.
I stopped and she stopped also, at exactly the spot my invisible rope met
my imaginary pulltoy. She stared transfixed and then uttered her awestruck

The final episode occurred the very next day. Once again I vas pulling
my toy across the floor while Viki played on the couch. She noticed me and
seerõõed about to come down. Then she began to worry, flopping prone
on the couch and rocking nervously. I went on walking, glancmg back,
and going 'clackety clackety' and 'squush squush'. Finally her evebrows
came together in great anxiety and she cried, 'Oo oo, oo oo,' as distressed
as I have ever seen her. When I passed close by, she made a flying leap into

Had she had enough of a good thing? Did she resent my usurping of her
game? Was she frustrated by my unique ability to produce sound effects
Did she recognize that make-believe is fun for a baby, but dangerous in a
parent? Or have I misinterpreted the whole mystery? 1 shall probab y
never know, for on that day the imaginary pulltoy disappeared from our
home never to be played with again.
(From The Ape in Our House, Gollancz, 1952.)

U1
o
w

Vygotsky, L. S. "Play and Its Role in the Mental
Development of me Child." From Plav-lts Role in
DeveloDment and Evolution. Jerome S. Bruner, Alison
53 L. S. Vygotsky Jolly, and Kathy Sylva, Editors. Penguin Books, 1976.

Play and its Role in the Mental
Development of the Child

In speaking of play and its role in the pre-schooler's development, we are
concerned with two fundamental questions: first, how play itself arises in
development - its origin and genesis; second, the role of this developmental
activity, which we call play, as a form of development in the child of pm-
school age. Is play the leading form of activity for a child of this age, or is
it simply the predominant form?
It seems to me that from the point of view of development, play is not
the predominant form of activity, but is, in a certain sense, the leading
source of development in pre-school years.
Let us now consider the problem of play itself. We know that the
definition of play on the basis of the pleasure it gives the child is not
correc for two reasons - first, because we deal with a number of activities
which give the child much keener experiences of pleasure than play.
For example, the pleasure principle applies equally well to the sucking
process, in that the child derives functional pleasure from sucking a
pacifier even when he is not being satiated.
On the other hand, we know of games in which the activity process itself
does not afford pleasure - games which predominate at the end of pm-
school and the beginning of school age and which only give pleasure if the
child Snds the result interesting; these are, for example, sporting games
(not only athletic sports, but also games with an outcome, games with
results). They are very often accompanied by a keen sense of displeasure
w en he outcome Is unfavourable to the child.
Thus, defining play on the basis of pleasuN can certainly not be regarded

Nonetheless it seems to me that to refuse to approach the problem of
play from the standpoint of fulfilment of the child's needs, his incentives
to act, and his aflective aspirations would result in a terrible intellectua-
lization of play. The trouble with a number of theories of play lies in their
tendency to intellectualize the problem.
I am inclined to give an even more general meaning to the problem;
an think that the mistake of a large number of accepted theories is their
disregard for the child's needs - taken in the broadest sense, from inclina

~n
o

538 Pretend Play

tions to interests, as needs of an intellectual nature - or, more briefly, the
disregard of everything that can come under the category of incentives and
motives for action. We often describe a child's development as the develop-
ment of his intellectual functions, i.e. every child stands before us as a
theoretical being who, according to the higher or lower level of his intel-
lectual development, moves from one age stage to another.
Without a consideration of the child's needs, inclinafions, incentives,
and motives to act ' as research has demonstrated - there will never be any
advance from one stage to the next. It seems to me that an analysis of play
should start with an examination of these particular aspects.
It seems that every advance from one age stage to another is connected
with an abrupt change in motives and incentives to act.
What is of the greatest interest to the infant has almost ceased to interest
the toddler. This maturing of new needs and new motives for action is, of
course, the dominant factor, especially as it is impossible to ignore the
fact that a child satisfies certain needs and incentives in play, and without
understanding the special character of these incentives we cannot imagine
the uniqueness of that type of activity which we call play.
At pre-school age special needs and incentives arise which arc highly
important to the whole of the child's development and which are sponta-
neously expressed in play. In essence, them arise in a child of this age large
numbers of unrealizable tendencies and immediately unrealizable desires.
A very young child tends to gratify his desires immediately. Any delay in
fulfilling them is hard for him and is acceptable only within certain narrow
limits- no one has met a child under three who wanted to do something a
few days hence. Ordinarily, the interval between the motive and its real-
ization is extremely short. I think that if there were no development in
pre-school years of needs that cannot be realized immediately, there would
be no play. Experiments show that the development of play is arrested
both in intellectually under-developed children and in those with an
immature affective sphere.
From the viewpoint of the aflective sphere, it seems to me that play is
invented at the point when unrealizable tendencies appear in development.
This is the way a very young child behaves: he wants a thing and must
have it at once. If he cannot have it, either he throws a temper tantrum,
lies on the floor and kicks his legs, or he is refused, pacified, and does not
get it His unsatisfied desires have their own particular modes of sub
stitution, rejection, etc. Towards the beginning of pre-school age, unsatis
fied desires and tendencies that cannot be realized immediately make
their appearance, while the tendency to immediate fulfilment of desires,
characteristic of the preceding stage, is retained. For example, the child

Play and its Role in the Mental Development of the Child 539

wants to be in his mother's place, or wants to be a rider on a horse. This
desire cannot be fulfilled right now. What does the very young child do if
he sees a passing cab and wants to ride in it whatever may happen? If he
is a spoiled and capricious child, he will demand that his mother put him
in the cab at any cost or he may throw himself on the ground right there
in the street, etc. If he is an obedient child, used to renouncing his desires
he will go away, or his mother will offer him some candy, or simply dis-
tract him with some stronger effect and he wDI renounce his immediate
desire.
In contrast to this, a child over three will show his own particular con-
fficting tendencies; on the one hand, a large number of long-term needs
and desiNs will appear, which cannot be fulfiJled at once but which, never-
theless, are not passed over like whims; on the other hand, the tendency
towards immediate realization of desires is almost completely retained
Henceforth play occurs such that the explanation of why a child plays
must always be interpreted as the imaginary, illusory realization of
unrealizable desires. Imagination is a new formation which is not present

in the consciousness of the very young child, is totally absent in animals,
and represents a specifically human form of conscious activity. Like all
functions of consciousness, it originally arises from action. The old adage
that child's play is imagination in action can be reversed: we can say that
imagination in adolescents and schoolchildren is play without action.
It is difficult to imagine that an incentive compelling a child to play is
really just the same kind of aflective incentive as sucking a pacifier is for
an infant.
It is hard to accept that pleasure derived from pre-school play is condi-
tioned by the same aflective mechanism as simple sucking of a pacifier
This simply does not fit our notions of pre-school development
All of this is not to say that play occurs as the result of each and every
unsatisfied desire: the child wanted to ride in a cab, the wish was not
immediately gratified, so the child went into his room and began to play
cabs. It never happens in just this way. Hem we are concerned with the
fact that the child not only has individual aflective reactions to separate
phenomena, but generalized, unpredesignated, affective tendencies. Let
us take the example of a microcephalic child suffering from an acute
inferiority complex; he is unable to participate in children's groups, he
has been so teased that he smashes every mirror and pane of glass showing
his reflection. But when he was very young it had been very different-
then, every time he was teased there was a separate affective reaction for
each separate occasion which had not yet become generalized. At pre-
school age the child generalizes his affective relation to the phenomenon
regardless of the actual concrete situation because the affective relation is
548 Pretend Play

connected with the meaning of the phenomenon in that it continually
revealshisinferioritycomplex. i I t d wishes but

generalized affects. A child at this age is conscious of his Nlationships with
adults he reacts to them affeiCtiveleYactions (he respectS adult authority in

The presence of such generalized affects in play does not mean that the
hild himself understands the motives which give rise to the game or that
he does it consciously. He plays without realizing the motives of the play
tivity. In this, play differs substantially from work and other forms of
activity. On the whole, it can be said that motives, actions, and incentives
belong to a more abstract sphere and only become accessible to conscious-
ness at the transitional age. Only an adolescent can clearly account to
himself the reason for which he does this or that.
We will leave the problem of the affective aspect for the moment -
considering it as given - and will now examine the development of play

I think that in finding criteria for distinguishing a child's play activity
from his other general forms of activity it must be accepted that in play a
child creates an imaginary situation. This is possible on the basis of the
separation of the fields of vision and meaning which appears in the pN

This is not a new idea in the sense that imaginary situations in play have
always been recognized but they were always regarded as one of the groups
of play activities. Thus the imaginary situation was always classified as a
secondary symptom. In the view of older writers, the imaginary situation
was not the criterial attribute of play in general, but only an attribute of a
given group of play activities.
I find three main flaws in this argument. First, there is the danger of an
intellectualistic approach to play. If play is to be understood as symbolic,
there is the danger that it might turn into a kind of activity akin to algebra
in action- it would be transformed into a system of signs generalizing actua
reality. Here we find nothing specific to play, and look upon the child as an
unsuccessful algebraist who cannot yet write the symbols on paper, but
depicts them in action. It is essential to show the connection with incentives
in play, since play itself, in my view, is never symbolic action in the proper
sense of the term
Second, I feei that this idea presents play as a cognitive process. It
stresses the importance of the cognitive process while neglecting not only

the affective situation but also the circumstances of the child's activity.
Third, it is vital to discover exactly what this activity does for develop

~n
o

Play and its Role in the Mental Development of the Child 541

ment, i.e. how the imaginary situation can assist in the child's develop-
ment.
Let us begin with the second question, as t have already briefly touched
on the problem of the connection with affective incentives. We observed
that in the affective incentives leading to play there are the beginnings not
of symbols but of the necessity for an imaginary situation; for if play is
really developed from unsatisfied desires, if ultimately it is the realization
m play form of tendencies that cannot be realized at the moment, then
elements of imaginary situations will involuntarily be included in the
affective nature of play itself.
Let us take the second instance first - the child's activity in play. What
does a child's behaviour in an imaginary situation mean? We know that
there is a form of play, distinguished long ago and relating to the late pre-
school period, and considered to develop mainly at school age: namely
the development of games with rules. A number of investigators, although
not at all belonging to the camp of dialectical materialists, have approached
this area along the lines recommended by Marx when he said that 'the
anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape'. They have begun
their examination of early play in the light of later rule-based play and
have concluded from this that play involving an imaginary situation is, in
fact, rule-based play. It seems to me that one can go even further and
propose that there is no such thing as play without rules and the child's
particular attitude towards them.
Let us expand on this idea. Take any form of play with an imaginary
situation. The imaginary situation already contains rules of behaviour
although this is not a game with formulated rules laid down in advance.
The child imagines herself to be the mother and the doll the child, so she
must obey the rules of maternal behaviour. This was very well demonstrated
by a researcher in an ingenious experiment based on Sully's famous
observations. The latter described play as remarkable in that children
could make the play situation and reality coincide. One day two sisters
aged five and seven, said to each other: 'Let's play sisters.' Here Sully
was describing a case where two sisters were playing at being sisters, i.e.
playing at reality. The above-mentioned experiment based its method on
children's play, suggested by the experimenter, which dealt with real
relationships. In certain cases I have found it very easy to call forth such
play in children. It is very easy, for example, to make a child play with its
mother at being a child while the mother is the mother, i.e. at what is, in
fact, true. The vital difference in play, as Sully describes it, is that the child
in playing tries to be a sister. In life the child behaves without thinking
that she is her sister's sister. She never behaves with respect to the other
Just because she is her sister - except perhaps in those cases when her

V1
o
a~

542 Pretend Play

mother says, 'Give in to her.' In the game of sisters playing at 'sisters',
however, they are both concerned with displaying their sisterhood; the
fact that two sisters decided to play sisters makes them both acquire rules
of behaviour. (I must always be a sister in relation to the other sister in
the whole play situation.) Only actions which fit these rules are acceptable
to the play situation.
In the game a situation is chosen which stresses the fact that these girls
are sisters: they are dressed alike, they walk about holding hands - in
short, they enact whatever emphasizes their relationship as sisters vis-a-vis
adults and strangers. The elder, holding the younger by the hand, keeps
telling her about other people: 'That is theirs, not ours.' This means:
'My sister and I act the same, we are treated the same, but others are
treated differently.' Here the emphasis is on the sameness of everything
which is concentrated in the child's concept of a sister, and this means
that my sister stands in a different relationship to me than other people.
What passes unnoticed by the child in real life becomes a rule of behaviour

If play then, were structured in such a way that there were no imaginary
situation what would remain? The rules would remain. The child would
begin to behave in this situation as the situation dictates.
Let us leave this remarkable experiment for a moment and turn to play
in general. I think that wherever there is an imaginary situation in play
there are rules. Not rules which are formulated in advance and which
change during the course of the game, but rules stemming from the
imaginary situation. Therefore to imagine that a child can behave in an
imaginary situation without rules, i.e. as he behaves in a real situation, is
simply impossible. If the child is playing the role of a mother, then she has
rules of maternal behaviour. The role the child fulfils, and her relationship
to the object if the object has changed its meaning, will always stem from
the rules, i.e. the imaginary situation will always contain rules. In play the
child is free. But this is an illusory freedom.
While at first the investigator's task was to disclose the hidden rules in
all play with an imaginary situation, we have received proof comparatively
Ncently that the so-called pure games with rules (played by school-
children and late pre-schoolers) are essentially games with imaginary
situations; for just as the imaginary situation has to contain rules of
behaviour, so every game with rules contains an imaginary situation. For
example, what does it mean to play chess? To create an imaginary situation.
Why? Because the knight, the king, the queen and so forth, can only move
in specified ways; because covering and taking pieces are purely chess
concepts- and so on. Although it does not directly substitute for real-life
relationships, nevertheless we do have a kind of imaginary situation here.

Play and its Role In the Mental Development of the Child 543

Take the simplest children's game with rules. It immediately turns into an
imaginary situation in the sense that as soon as the game is regulated by
certain rules, a number of actual possibilities for action am ruled out
Just as we were able to show at the beginning that every imaginary
situation contains rules in a concealed form, we have also succeeded in
demonstrating the reverse - that every game with rules contains an imagin-
ary situation in a concealed form. The development from an overt imagin-
ary situation and covert rules to games with overt rules and a covert
imaginary situation outlines the evolution of children's play from one
pole to the other.
All games with imaginary situations are simultaneously games with
rules and vice versa. I think this thesis is clear
However there is one misunderstanding which may arise and which
must be cleared up from the start. A child learns to behave according to
certain rules from the first few months of life. For a very young child such

rules, for example, that he has to sit quietly at the table, not touch other
people's things, obey his mother, are rules which make up his life. What is
specific to rules followed in games or play? It seems to me that several
new publications can be of great aid in solving this problem. In particular
a new work of Piaget has been extremely helpful to me. This work is con-
cerned with the development in the child of moral rules. One part is speci-
ally devoted to the study of rules of a game, where, I think, Piagd resolves
these difficulties very convincingly.
Piaget distinguishes what he calls two moralities in the child - two
distinct sources for the development of rules of behaviour.
This emerges particularly sharply in games. As Piaget shows, some
rules come to the child from the one-sided influence upon him of an adult
Not to touch other people's things is a rule taught by the mother, or to sit
quietly at the table is an external law for the child advanced by adults
This is one of the child's moralities. Other rules arise, according to Piaget
from mutual collaboration between adult and child, or between children
themselves. These are rules which the child himself participates in establish
ing.
The rules of games, of course, differ radically from rules of not touching
and of sitting quietly. In the first place they are made by the child himself;
they are his own rules, as Piaget says, rules of self-restraint and self-
determination. The child tells himself: I must behave in such and such a
way in this game. This is quite different from the child saying that one thing
is allowed and another thing is not. Piaget has pointed out a very interest-
ing phenomenon in moral development - something which he calls moral
realism. He indicales that the first line of development of external rules
(what is and is not allowed) produces moral realism, i.e. a confusion in the
)

544 Pretend Play

child between moral rules and physical rules. The child confuses the fact
that it is impossible to light a match a second time and the rule that it is
forbidden to light matches at all, or to touch a glass because it might break:
all 'don'ts' are the same to a very young child, but he has an entirely
different attitude to rules which he makes up himself.*
Let us turn now to the role of play and its influence on a child's de-
velopment. I think it is enormous.
I will try to outline two basic ideas. I think that play with an imaginary
situation is something essentially new, impossible for a child under three;
it is a novel form of behaviour in which the child is liberated from situa-
tional constraints through his activity in an imaginary situation.
To a considerable extent the behaviour of a very young child - and, to
an absolute extent, that of an infant - is determined by the conditions in
which the activity takes place, as the experiments of Lewin and others
have shown. Lewin's experiment with the stone is a famous example.t
This is a real illustration of the extent to which a very young child is bound
in every action by situational constraints. HeN we find a highly char-
acteristic feature of a very young child's behaviour in the sense of his
attitude towards the circumstance at hand and the real conditions of his
activity. It is hard to imagine a greater contrast to Lewin's experiments
showing the situational constraints on activity than what we observe in
play. In the latter, the child acts in a mental and not a visible situation. I
think this conveys accurately what occurs in play. It is here that the child
learns to act in a cognitive, rather than an externally visible, realm, relying
on internal tendencies and motives, and not on incentives supplied by ex-
ternal things. I recall a study by Lewin on the motivating nature of things
for a very young child; in it Lewin concludes that things dictate to the child
what he must do: a door demands to be opened and closed, a staircase to
be run up, a bell to be rung. In short, things have an inherent motivating
force in respect to a very young child's actions and determine the child's
behaviour to such an extent that Lewin arrived at the notion of creating a
psychological topology, i.e., to express mathematically the trajectory of the
child's movement in a field according to the distribution of things with
varying attracting or repelling forces.

* I have already demonstrated in an earlier lecture the nature of a very young child's
perception of external behavioural rules; all 'don'ts' - social (interdiction), physical
(the impossibility, for example, of striking a match a second time), and biological (for
example, don't touch the samovar because you might burn yourself ) - combine to form
a single 'situational' don't, which can be understood as a 'barrier' (in Lewin's sense
of the term).
tjEditor's note: Vygotsky is probably referring to Lewin's demonstration of the
great difficulty a small child has in realizing that he must first turn his back to a stone
in order to arrange to sit on it.]

Play and its Role in the Mental Development of the Child SU

What is the root of situational constraints upon a child? The answer lies
in a central fact of consciousness which is characteristic of early childhood:
the union of affect and perception. At this age perception is generally not an
independent feature but an initial feature of a motor affecting reaction; i.e.,
every perception is in this way a stimulus to activity. Since a situation is
always communicated psychologically through perception, and perception
is not separated from affective and motor activity, it is understandable that
with his consciousness so structured the child cannot act otherwise than as
constrained by the situation - or the field - in which he finds himself.
In play, things lose their motivating force. The child sees one thing but acts
differently in relation to what he sees. Thus, a situation is reached in which the
child begins to act independently of what he sees. Certain brain-damaged
patients lose the ability to act independently of what they see; in considering
such patients you can begin to appreciate that the freedom of action we
adults and more mature children enjoy is not acquired in a flash but has
to go through a long process of development.
Action in a situation which is not seen but only conceived on an imagined
level and in an imaginary situation teaches the child to guide his behaviour
not only by immediate perception of objects or by the situation immediately
affecting him, but also by the meaning* of this situation.
Experiments and day-to-day observation clearly show that it is impossible
for very young children to separate the field of meaning from the visible
field. This is a very important fact. Even a child of two years, when asked to
repeat the sentence ' Tanya is standing up ' when Tanya is sitting in front of
him, will change it to 'Tanya is sitting down'. In certain diseases we are
faced with exactly the same situation. Goldstein and Gelb described a
number of patients who were unable to state something that was not true.
Gelb has data on one patient who was left-handed and incapable of writing
the sentence ' I can write well with my right hand'. When looking out of the
window on a fine day he was unable to repeat: 'The weather is nasty
today', but would say: 'The weather is fine today.' Often we find in a
patient with a speech disturbance that he is incapable of repeating senseless
phrases, for example: ' Snow is black ' ¥ while other phrases equally difficult
in their grammatical and semantic construction can be repeated.
In a very young child there is such an intimate fusion between word and
object, and between meaning and what is seen, that a divergence between
the meaning field and the visible field is impossible.
This can be seen in the process of children's speech development. You

¥ITralislator-s llote: In the following discussion of the role of meanillg in relation to
objects and actions Vygotsky uses the word .rrnysl, which roughly corresponds to the
range of notions covcred by the English 'meanil~g', 'sense', and 'purport'. Smysl is
uni forndy relidered as ' mea ls inl! ' hl this translat ion .l

j ~_,

U1
o

546 Pretend Play

say to the child: 'clock'. He starts looking and finds the clock; i.e., the
first function of the word is to orient spatially, to isolate particular areas in
space, the word originally signifies a particular location in a situation.
It is at pre-school age that we first find a divergence between the fields of
meaning and vision. It seems to me that we would do well to restate the
notion of the investigator who said that in play activity thought is separated
from objects, and action arises from ideas rather than from things.
Thought is separated from objects because a piece of wood begins to be a
doll and a stick becomes a horse. Action according to rules begins to be
determined by ideas and not by objects themselves. This is such a reversal
of the child's relationship to the real, immediate, concrete situation that it
is hard to evaluate its full significance. The child does not do this all at once.
It is terribly difiicult for a child to sever thought (the meaning of a word)
from object.
Play is a transitional stage in this direction at that critical moment when
a stick - i.e. an object - becomes a pivot for severing the meaning of horse
from a real horse; one of the basic psychological structures determining the
child's relationship to reality is radically altered.
The child cannot as yet sever thought from object; he must have some-
thing to act as a pivot. This expresses the child's weakness; in order to
imagine a horse, he needs to define his action by means of using the horse
in the stick as the pivot. But all the same the basic structure determining
the child's relationship to reality is radically changed at this crucial point,
for his perceptual structure changes. The special feature of human per-
ception - which arises at a very early age - is so-called reality perception.
This is something for which there is no analogy in animal perception.
Essentially it lies in the fact that I do not see the world simply in colour
and shape, but also as a world with sense and meaning. I do not merely see
something round and black with two hands; I see a clock and I can dis-
tinguish one thing from another. There are patients who say, when they see
a clock, that they are seeing something round and white with two thin steel
strips, but they do not know that this is a clock - they have lost real
relationship to objects. Thus, the structure of human perception could be
figurativdy expressed as a fraction in which the object is the numerator and
the meaning is the denominator; this expresses the particular relationship
of object and meaning which arises on the basis of speech. This means that
all human perception is not made up of isolated perceptions, but of general
ized perceptions. Goldstein says that this objectively formed perception and
generalization are the same thing. Thus, for the child, in the fraction object
meaning, the object dominates, and meaning is directly connected to it. At
the crucial moment for the child, when the stick becomes a horse, i.e., when

Play and its Role in the Mental Development of the Child 547

the thing, the stick, becomes the pivot for severing the meaning of horse
from a real horse, this fraction is inverted and meaning predominates,
meaning
giving:Ñ
object
Nevertheless, properties of things as such do have some meaning, any
stick can be a how but, for example, a postcard can never be a horse for a
child. Goethe's contention that in play any thing can be anything for a
child is incorrect. Of course, for adults who can make conscious use of
symbols, a postcard can be a horse. If I want to show the location of some-
thing, I can put down a match and say, 'This is a horse.' And that would
be enough. For a child it cannot be a horse: one must use a stick, therefore
this is play, and not symbolism. A symbol is a sign, but the stick is not the
sign of a horse. Properties of things are retained but their meaning is in-
verted, i.e., the idea becomes the central point. It can be said that in this
structure things are moved from a dominating to a subordinate position.

Thus, in play the child creates the structure g, where the semantic
object
aspect - the meaning of the word, the meaning of the thing - dominates and
determines his behaviour. To a certain extent meaning is emancipated from
the object with which it had been directly fused before. I would say that in
play a child concentrates on meaning severed from objects, but that it is not
severed in real action with real objects.
Thus, a highly interesting contradiction arises, wherein the child operates
with meanings severed from objects and actions, but in real action with
real objects he operates with them in fusion. This is the transitional nature
of play, which makes it an intermediary between the purely situational
constraints of early childhood and thought which is totally free of real
situations.
In play a child deals with things as having meaning. Word meanings re-
place objects, and thus an emancipation of word from object occurs. (A
behaviourist would describe play and its characteristic properties in the
following terms: the child gives ordinary objects unusual names and
ordinary actions unusual designations, despite the fact that he knows the
real ones.)
Separating words from things requires a pivot in the form of other things.
But the moment the stick - i.e., the thing- becomes the pivot for severing
the meaning of 'horse' from a real horse, the child makes one thing in-
9uence another in the semantic sphere. (He cannot sever meaning from an
object, or a word from an object except by finding a pivot in something
else, i.e. by the power of one object to steal another's name.) Transfer of
meanings is facilitated by the fact that the child accepts a word as the pro

)
548 Pretend Play

perty of a thing; he does not see the word but the thing it designates. For a
child the word 'horse' applied to the stick means, 'There is a horse'; i.e.,
mentally he sees the object standing behind the word.
Play is converted to internal processes at school age, going over to inter-
nal speech, logical memory, and abstract thought. In play a child operates
with meanings severed from objects, but not in real action with real things.
To sever the meaning of horse from a real horse and transfer it to a stick
(the necessary material pivot to keep the meaning from evaporating) and
really acting with the stick as if it were a horse, is a vital transitional stage
to operating with meanings. A child first acts with meanings as with objects
and later realizes them consciously and begins to think just as a child, before
he has acquired grammatical and written speech, knows how to do things
but does not know that he knows, i.e. he does not realize or master them
voluntarily. In play a child unconsciously and spontaneously makes use of
the fact that he can separate meaning from an object without knowing he
is doing it; he does not know that he is speaking in prose, just as he talks
without paying attention to the words.
Hence we come to a functional definition of concepts, i.e., objects, and
hence a word as part of a thing.
And so I would like to say that the creation of an imaginary situation is
not a fortuitous fact in a child's life; it is the tlrst effect of the child's
emancipation from situational constraints. The first paradox of play is that
the child operates with an alienated meaning in a real situation. The second
is that in play he adopts the line of least resistance, i.e., he does what he
feels like most because play is connected with pleasure. At the same time
he learns to follow the line of greatest resistance, for by subordinating
themselves to rules children renounce what they want since subjection to
rule and renunciation of spontaneous impulsive action constitute the path
to maximum pleasure in play.
The same thing can be observed in children in athletic games. Racing is
difficult because the runners are ready to start off when you say 'ready,
steady . . .' without waiting for the 'go'. It is evident that the point of

internal rules is that the child does not act on immediate impulse.
Play continually creates demands on the child to act against immediate
impulse, i.e., to act on the line of greatest resistance. I want to run off at
once - this is perfectly clear - but the rules of the game order me to wait.
Why does the child not do what he wants spontaneously at once? Because
to observe the rules of the play structure promises much greater pleasure
from the game than the gratification of an immediate impulse. In other
words, as one investigator puts it in recalling the words of Spinoza: 'An
affect can only be overcome by a stronger affect.' Thus, in play a situation
is created in which, as Nohl puts it, a dual affective plan occurs. For ex

_~ _
U1
o

Play and Its Role in the Mental Development of the Child 549

ample, the child weeps in play as a patient, but revels as a player. In play the
child renounces his immediate impulse, co-ordinating every act of his
behaviour to the rules of the game. Groos described this brilliantly. He
thinks that a child's will originates in, and develops from, play with rules.
Indeed, in the simple game of 'sorcerer' as described by Groos, the child
must run away from the sorcerer in order not to be caught, but at the same
time he must help his companion and get him disenchanted. When the
sorcerer has touched him he must stop. At every step the child is faced with
a conflict between the rule of the game and what he would do if he could
suddenly act spontaneously. In the game he acts counter to what he wants.
Nohl showed that a child's greatest self-control occurs in play. He achieves
the maximum display of will-power in the sense of renunciation of an im-
mediate attraction in the game in the form of candy, which by the rules of
the game the children were not allowed to eat because it represented some-
thing inedible. Ordinarily a child experiences subordination to a rule in the
renunciation of something he wants, but here subordination to a rule and
renunciation of action on immediate impulse are the means to maximum
pleasure.
Thus, the essential attribute of play is a rule which has become an
affect. 'An idea which has become an affect, a concept which has turned
into a passion ' - this ideal of Spinoza finds its prototype in play, which is
the realm of spontaneity and freedom. To carry out the rule is a source of
pleasure. The rule wins because it is the strongest impulse. (Cf. Spinoza's
adage that an affect can be overcome by a stronger affect.) Hence it follows
that such a rule is an internal rule, i.e., a rule of inner self-restraint and self-
determination, as Piaget says, and not a rule which the child obeys like a
physical law. In short, play gives a child a new form of desires, i.e., teaches
him to desire by relating his desires to a fictitious 'I' - to his role in the
game and its rules. Therefore, a child's greatest achievements are possible
in play - achievements which tomorrow will become his average level of
real action and morality.
Now we can say the same thing about the child's activity that we said

about things. Just as we have the fraction jÑ we also have the fraction
meaning'
action
meaning
Whereas action dominated before, this structure is inverted, meaning
becoming the numerator, while action takes the place of the denominator.
It is important to realize how the child is liberated from action in play.
An action, for example, is realized as finger movements instead of real
eating - that is, the action is completed not for the action itself but for the
meaning it carries.

550 Pretend Play

At first, in a child of pre-school age, action dominates over meaning and
is incompletely understood; a child is able to do more than he can under-
stand. It is at pre-school age that there first arises an action structure in
which meaning is the determinant; but the action itself is not a sideline or
subordinated feature; it is a structural feature. Nohl showed that children,
in playing at eating from a plate, performed actions with their hands re-
miniscent of real eating, but all actions that did not designate eating were
impossible. Throwing one's hands back instead of stretching them toward
the plate turned out to be impossible; that is, such action would have a des-
tructive effect on the game. A child does not symbolize in play, but he
wishes and realizes his wishes by letting the basic categories of reality pass
through his experience, which is precisely why in play a day can take half-
an-hour, and a hundred miles are covered in five steps. The child, in wishing,
carries out his wishes; and in thinking, he acts. Internal and external action
are inseparable: imagination, interpretation, and will are internal processes
in external action.
The meaning of action is basic, but even by itself action is not indifferent.
At an earlier age the position was the reverse: action was the structural
determinant while meaning was a secondary, collateral, subordinated
feature. What we said about severing meaning from object applies equally
well to the child's own actions. A child who stamps on the ground and
imagines himself riding a horse has thereby accomplished the inversion of
action meaning
the fraction Ñto
meaning achon
Once again, in order to sever the meaning of the action from the real
action (riding a horse, without the opportunity to do so), the child re-~
quires a pivot in the form of an action to replace the real one. But once
again while before action was the determinant in the structure 'action-
meaning', now the structure is inverted and meaning becomes the deter-
minant. Action retreats to second place and becomes the pivot; meaning is
again severed from action by means of another action. This is a repetition
of the point leading to operations based solely on the meanings of actions;
i.e., to volitional choice, a decision, a conflict of motives, and to other pro-
cesses sharply separated from fulfilment: in short, to the development of the
will. Just as operating with the meanings of things leads to abstract thought,
in volitional decision the determining factor is not the fulfilment of the
action but its meaning. In play an action replaces another action just as an
object replaces another object. How does the child 'float' from one object
to another, from one action to another ? This is accomplished by movement
in the field of meaning - not connected with the visible field or with real
objects - which subordinates all real objects and actions to itself.

Play and its Role in the Mental Development of the Child 551

This movement in the field of meaning predominates in play: on the one
hand, it is movement in an abstract field (a field which thus appears before
voluntary operation with meanings), but the method of movement is
situational and concrete (i.e., it is not logical but affective movement). In
other words, the field of meaning appears, but action within it occurs just as
in reality; herein lies the main genetic contradiction of play. I have three
questions left to answer. First, to show that play is not the predominant
feature of childhood but is a leading factor in development. Second, to
show the development of play itself; i.e., the significance of the movement
from the predominance of the imaginary situation to the predominance of
rules. And third, to show the internal transformations brought about by
play in the child's development.
I do not think that play is the predominant type of child activity. In
fundamental everyday situations a child behaves in a manner diametrically
opposed to his behaviour in play. In play, action is subordinated to mean-
ing, but in real life, of course, action dominates over meaning.
Thus we find in play - if you will - the negative of a child's general every-
day behaviour. Therefore, to consider play as the prototype of his every-
day activity and its predominant form is completely without foundation.

This is the main flaw in Koffka's theory. He considers play as the child's
other world. According to Koffka, everything that concerns a child is play
reality, while everything that concerns an adult is serious reality. A given
object has one meaning in play, and another outside of it In a child's
world the logic of wishes and of satisfying urges dominates; and not real
logic. The illusory nature of play is transferred to life. This would be true if
play were indeed the predominant form of a child's activity. But it is hard
to envisage the insane picture that a child would bring to mind if the form
of activity we have been speaking of were to become the predominant
form of his everyday activity - even if only partially transferred to real life.
Koffka gives a number of examples to show how a child transfers a
situation from play into life. But the real transference of play behaviour to
real life can only be regarded as an unhealthy symptom. To behave in a real
situation as in an illusory one is the first sign of delirium.
As research has shown, play behaviour in real life is normally seen only
in the type of game when sisters play at 'sisters', i.e., when children sitting
at dinner can play at having dinner or (as in Katz's example) when children
who do not want to go to bed say, 'Let's play that it's night-time and we
have to go to sleep'; they begin to play at what they are in fact doing
evidently creating associations which facilitate the execution of an un
pleasant action.
Thus, it seems to me that play is not the predominant type of activity at

j
552 Pretend Play

pre-school age. Only theories which maintain that a child does not have to
satisfy the basic requirements of life, but can live in search of pleasure,
could possibly suggest that a child's world is a play world.
Is it possible to suppose that a child's behaviour is always guided by
meaning, that a pre-schooler's behaviour is so arid that he never behaves
with candour as he wants to simply because he thinks he should behave
otherwise? This kind of subordination to rules is quite impossible in life,
but in play it does become possible: thus, play also creates the zone of
proximal development of the child. In play a child is always above his
average age, above his daily behaviour; in play it is as though he were a
head taller than himself. As in the focus of a magnifying glass, play con-
tains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form; in play it is as
though the child were trying to jump above the level of his normal bo-
haviour.
The play-development relationship can be compared to the instruction-
development relationship, but play provides a background for changes in
needs and in consciousness of a much wider nature. Play is the source of
development and creates the zone of proximal development. Action in the
imaginative sphere, in an imaginary situation, the creation of voluntary in-
tentions and the formation of real-life plans and volitional motives - all
appear in play and make it the highest level of pre-school development.
The child moves forward essentially through play activity. Only in this
sense can play be termed a leading activity which determines the child's
development.
The second question is: how does play move? It is a remarkable fact
that the child starts with an imaginary situation when initially this imagin-
ary situation is so very close to the real one. A reproduction of the real
situation takes place. For example, a child playing with a doll repeats
almost exactly what her mother does with her; the doctor looks at the
child's throat, hurts him, and he cries, but as soon as the doctor has gone
he immediately thrusts a spoon into the doll's mouth.
This means that in the original situation rules operate in a condensed
and compressed form. There is very little of the imaginary in the situation.
It is an imaginary situation, but it is only comprehensible in the light of a
real situation that has just occurred; i.e., it is a recollection of something
that has actually happened. Play is more nearly recollection than imagina-
tion - that is, it is more memory in action than a novel imaginary situation.
As play develops, we see a movement towards the conscious realization of
its purpose.
It is incorrect to conceive of play as activity without purpose; play is pur-

poseful activity for a child. In athletic games you can win or lose, in a race
you can come first, second, or last. In short, the purpose decides the game.

Play and Its Role in the Mental Development of the Child 553 |

It justifies all the rest. Purpose as the ultimate goal determines the child's
affective attitude to play. When running a race, a child can be highly
agitated or distressed and little may remain of pleasure because he finds it
physically painful to run, while if he is overtaken he will experience little
functional pleasure. In sports the purpose of the game is one of its domin-
ant features without which there would be no point - like examining a
piece of candy, putting it in one's mouth, chewing it, and then spitting it
out.
In play the object, to win, is recognized in advance.
At the end of development rules emerge, and the more rigid they are, the
greater the demands on the child's application, the greater the regulation
of the child's activity, the more tense and acute play becomes. Simply
running around without purpose or rules of play is a dull game and does
not appeal to children.
Nohl simplified the rules of croquet for children, and showed how this
demagnetized the game, for the child lost the sense of the game in pro-
portion to the simplification of the rules. Consequently towards the end of
development in play, what had originally been embryonic now has a distinct
form, finally emerging as purpose and rules. This was true before but in an
undeveloped form. One further feature has yet to come, essentia; to sport-
ing games; this is some sort of record, which is also closely connected with
purpose.
Take chess, for example. For a real chess player it is pleasant to win and
unpleasant to lose a game. Nohl says that it is as pleasing to a child to come
first in a race as it is for a handsome person to look at himself in a mirror;
there is a certain feeling of satisfaction.
Consequently, a complex of originally undeveloped features comes to the
fore at the end of play development - features that had been secondary or
incidental in the beginning occupy a central position at the end, and vice
versa.
Finally, the third question: what sort of changes in a child's behaviour
can be attributed to play? In play a child is free, i.e., he determines his own
actions, starting from his own '1'. But this is an illusory freedom. His
actions are in fact subordinated to a definite meaning, and he acts accord-
ing to the meanings of things.
A child learns to recognize consciously his own actions, and becomes
aware that every object has a meaning.
From the point of view of development, the fact of creating an imaginary
situation can be regarded as a means of developing abstract thought. I
think that the corresponding development of rules leads to actions on the
basis of which the division between work and play becomes possible, a
division encountered at school age as a fundamental fact.
P.ÑR.D.E. 24

554 Pretend Play

I would like to mention just one other aspect: play is really a particular
feature of pre-school age.
As figuratively expressed by one investigator, play for a child under three
is a serious game, just as it is for an adolescent, although, of course, in a
different sense of the word; serious play for a very young child means that
he plays without separating the imaginary situation from the real one.
For the schoolchild, play begins to be a limited form of activity, pre-
dominantly of the athletic type, which fills a specific role in the school-
child's development, but lacks the significance of play for the pre-schooler.
Superficially, play bears little resemblance to what it leads to, and only a
profound internal analysis makes it possible to determine its course of
movement and its role in the pre-schooler's development.
At school age play does not die away but permeates the attitude to
reality. It has its own inner continuation in school instruction and work
(compulsory activity based on rules). All examinations of the essence of
play have shown that in play a new relationship is created between the
semantic and visible Selds - that is, between situations in thought and real
situations. (See photo inset.)

rrrahslator's note: Russian uses a single word, igra, where English uses either play or
game (cf. German Spiel, FrenchJeu, Spanish jllepo, et al.). The resulting potential am-
biguity of tbe original Russian should be borne in mind when encounterlng the words
play and game in this translation.l

(From Soriet Psychology, Vol. 12, No. 6, 1966, pp. 62-76. The article was
transcribed from a stenographic record of a lecture given in 1933 at the
Hertzen Pedagogical Institute, Leningrad.)

Symbolic Play

This is a continuation of Jean Piaget's essay on the contribution of play to the child's
developing intellect. (See 'Mastery Play' OD pages 166-71.) Here he focuses on the
earliest appearances of the ludic symbol.

The appearance of symbolism . . . is the crucial point in all the inter,
pretations of the ludic function. Why is it that play becomes symbolic
instead of continuing to be mere sensory-motor exercise or intellectuai
experiment, and why should the enjoyment of movement, or activity
for the fun of activity, which constitute a kind of practical make-believe,
be completed at a given moment by imaginative make-believe? The
reason is that among the attributes of assimilation for assimilation's
sake is that of distortion, and therefore to the extent to which it is dis-
sociated from immediate accommodation it is a source of symbolic
make-believe. This explains why there is symbolism as soon as we leave
the sensory-motor level for that of representational thought.
During thefifth stage (of the sensory-motor period) certain new elements
will ensure the transition from the behaviours of stage IV to the _:
symbol of stage VI, and for that very reason will accentuate the ritualiza-
tion we have just noted. In relation to the 'tertiary circular reactions' or
'experiments in order to see the result', it often happens that by chance,
the child combines unrelated gestures without really trying to experiment,
and subsequently repeats these gestures as a ritual and makes a motor
game of them. But, in contrast to the combinations of stage VI, which
are borrowed from the adapted schemas, these combinations are new and
almost immediately have the character of play.
Observation 63. At 0; 10 J. put her nose close to her mother's cheek and
then pressed it against it, which forced her to breathe much more loudly.
This phenomenon at once interested her, but instead of merely repeating it
or varying it so as to investigate it, she quickly complicated it for the fun of
it: she drew back an inch or two, screwed up her nose, sniffed and breathed
out alternately very hard (as if she were blowing her nose), then again thrust
her nose against her mother's cheek, laughing heartily. These actions were

repeated at least once a day for more than a month, as a ritual.
At 1; 0 she was holding her hair with her right hand during her bath.
136 David Hall

will lead us to despair of the relativity of action, thought, and circum-
stance which gives our present societies such a disordered cast. If we do
despair we shall be seduced into believing that any order is better than
negative Chaos, the only alternative to posited order the serious-minded
can envision.

; .,

The Implosion of Meaning
in the Media and
The Implosion of the Social
in the Masses
Baudrillard, Jean. "The Implosion of Meaning in the EISN DRILIARD
Media and the Impiosion of the Social in the Masses." I BAU
From The Mvths of Information: Technoloqv and
Postindustrial Culture (Volume 2 of Theories of
Contemwrarv Culture, Thomas Ewens, General
Editor). Kathleen Woodward, Editor. Coda Press, Inc.,
1980. Pages 137-148.

We live in a world of proliferating information and shrinking
1 live in a world of proliferating information and
sense. '

' Let us consider three hypotheses:
1. Either information produces meaning (the negentropic factor),
but wages a losing battle against the constant drain of sense
which is taking place on all sides. The wastage even outstrips any
effort to reinject meaning through the media, whose faltering
powers must be bolstered up by appealing to a productivity of the
base. We are dealing with the ideology of free speech, of media
reduced to innumerable individual broadcasting unitsÑ"anti-
media" even.
2. Or, information has nothing to do with meaning. It is qualitatively
different, another kind of working model which remains exterior
to meaning and its circulation, properly speaking. This is Shan-
non's hypothesis: that a purely instrumental sphere of informa-
tion exists which implies no absolute meaning and which cannot
itself, therefore, be implicated in any value judgment. It is rather a
sort of code, similar perhaps to the genetic code, simply itself,
while sense is an entirely different thing, an after-effect, as it is for

' Except for this instance, where, for the sake of euphony, l have translated it as "sense," I
have preferred "meaning" as a rendering for the French sens.ÑTrans.
137

138

Jean Baudrillard

Monod in Le Hasard et la necessite. 2 Were this so, there would be no
significant relationship between the inflation of information and
the dwindling of meaning.
3. Or, on the contrary, there is a strict and necessary correlation
between the two, to the extent that information destroys or at least
neutralizes sense and meaning, the loss of which is directly
related to the dissuasive and corrupt action of media-dissem-
inated information.
This last option is the most interesting, but it runs counter to received
opinion. Socialization is measured everywhere by the degree of exposure
to mediated messages, hence underexposure to the media is believed to
make for a de-socialized or virtually a-social individual. Information is
everywhere supposed to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning,
which appreciates in value as a result, just as capital appreciates as a result
of accelerated turnover. Information is presented as being generative of
communication, and in spite of the extravagant waste involved, the
consensus is that over all a residue of meaning persists, which re-
distributes itself among the interstices of the social fabric, just as,
according to the consensus, material production, in spite of its dys-
functions and irrationality, results, nonetheless, in increased wealth and
a more highly developed society. We all pander to this myth, the alpha
and omega of our modernity, without which the credibility of our social
organization would collapse. The fact is, however, that it is already
collapsing, and for this very reason, because whereas we believe that
information produces meaning, communication, and the "social," it is
exactly the opposite which obtains.
The social is not a dear and unequivocal process. The question arises
whether modern societies are the result of a process of progressive
socialization, or de-socialization? Everything depends on the meaning of
the term socialization, whose various meanings are unstable, even
reversible.
Thus, for all the institutions which have marked the "progress" of
the social (urbanization, centralization, production, work, medicine,
education, social security, insurance, including capital itself, doubtless
the most powerful medium of socialization), it could be claimed that they
at once produce and destroy the social.
If the social is made up of abstract demands which arise, one after the
other, on the ruins of the ritual and symbolic edifice of earlier societies,
then these institutions produce more and more of them. But at the same
time they sanction that wasting abstraction, whose specific target is

2Jacques Monod, Le Hasard et la nicessiti (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970).

)

Implosion of Meaning 139

perhaps, the very marrow of the social. From this point of view one could
say that the social regresses in direct proportion to the development of its
institutions.
This process accelerates and reaches its peak in the case of the mass
media and information. All the media and all information cut both ways:
while appearing to augment the social, in reality they neutralize social
relations and the social itself, at a profound level.
Information devours its own content; it devours communication and
the social, for two reasons:
1. Instead of facilitating communication, it exhausts itself in the
staging of communication. Instead of producing meaning, it wears itself
out staging *. This is the gigantic simulation-process with which we are
familiar: non-directive interviews, phone-ins, all-round participation,
verbal blackmailÑ"you're involved, the event is you," etc. The domain of
information is increasingly invaded by this kind of phantom content, a

homeopathic graft, a fantasy of communication. It is a circular arrange-
ment by which the audience's desire is staged, an anti-theater of
communication, which, as we know, is never anything more than the
recycling of the traditional institution in negative form, the integrated
circuit of the negative. What energy is expended in order to keep this
sham at arm's length, to avoid the brutal de-simulation which would
bring us face to face with the reality of a radical loss of meaning!
It is futile to wonder whether it is the loss of communication which
puts this sham at a premium, or whether the pretense is there from the
start, fulfilling a dissuasive purpose: that of short-circuiting in advance
any possibility of communication, a precession of the model which
eradicates the real. It is futile to wonder what the first term is, there is
noneÑit is a circular process; that of simulation, of the hyperreal.
Hyperreality of communication and meaning: by dint of being more real
than the real itself, reality is destroyed.
Thus both the social and communication function in a closed circuit
like a decoy which assumes the power of a myth. Faith in the existence
and value of information is confirmed by that tautological proof that the
system provides of itself, by reduplicating, through the medium of signs,
a reality that is in fact undiscoverable, chimeric.
But what if this faith is just as ambiguous as that which was inspired
by myth in archaic societies? One both believes it and doesn't believe it at
the same time, without questioning it seriously, an attitude that may be
summed up in the phrase: "Yes, I know, but all the same." There is a kind
of reverse shamming among the masses, and in each of us, at the
individual level, which corresponds to that travesty of meaning and
communication in which we are imprisoned by the system. The tautology
of the system is met by ambivalence, dissuasion by disaffection or by a

!
U1
U1

140 lean Baudrillard

belief that is at least enigmatic. The myth exists, but one must beware of
thinking that people believe in it: that is the trap of critical thought, which
can only operate on the assumption that the masses are naive and stupid.
2. Behind this exaggerated staging of communication, the mass
media, the continuous build-up of information, pursue their relentless
destructuring of the social.
A bombardment by signs, which the masses are supposed to echo
back, an interrogation by converging light/sound/ultra-sound waves,
linguistic or light stimuli exactly like distant stars, or the nuclei that are
bombarded by particles in a cyclotron: that is information. Not a mode of
communication or of meaning but a state of perennial emulsion, of input-
output and controlled chain reactions, such as exists in atomic simulation
chambers. The "energy" of the mass must be liberated in order to be
transformed into the "social."
It is a contradictory process, however, because information, in all its
forms, instead of intensifying or even creating the "social relationship" is,
on the contrary, an entropic process, a modality of the extinction of the
social.
The idea is that the masses are structured, their captive social energy
liberated, by the injection of information and messages (it is not so much
the circumscribing action of the institutions, as the quantity of informa-
tion received and the rate of exposure to the media which is the measure
of socialization today). But the opposite is true. Instead of transforming
the mass into energy, information simply produces more and more mass.
Instead of informing, as it claims, that is to say, conferring form and
structure, information increasingly neutralizes the "social field," creating
ever larger inert masses, impervious to classic social institutions, to the
very content of information itself. The nuclear explosion of symbolic
structures by the social, and its rational violence, is succeeded today, by
the fission of the social itself, by the irrational violence of the media and
informationÑthe final result being precisely an atomized, nuclearized,

molecularized mass.
All that is left are fluid, mute masses, the variable equations of
surveys, objects of perpetual tests in which, as in an acid solution, they
are dissolved. Testing, probing, contacting, soliciting, informingÑthese
are tactics of microbiological warfare undermining the social by infinitesi-
mal dissuasion, so that there is no longer even time enough for
crystallization to take place. Hitherto, violence used to crystallize the
social, violently bringing forth an antagonistic social energy: a repressive
demiurgy. Today it is a gentle semiurgy which controls us.
Thus information dissolves meaning and the social into a sort of
nebula and is committed, not to increased innovation, but on the contrary,
to total entropy.

.L :

Implosion of Meaning

141

I have so far dealt with information only in the social sphere of
communication. It would be intresting, however, to carry the hypothesis
into the domain of cybernetic information theory. There too, the
obtaining thesis holds that cybernetic information is synonymous with
negentropy, resistance to entropy, increased meaning, and improved
o rganization. But it behooves us to pose the inverse hypothesis:
Information = Entropy. For example: the information or knowledge
which it is possible to have about a system or an event is already a form of
: neutralization and entropy of that system. This is true of the sciences in
general and of the human and social sciences in particular. The
i nformation which reflects or diffuses an event is already a degraded form
of that event. The role of the media in May, 1968 is a case in point. The
: coverage given to the student revolt gave rise to the general strike, but the
I atter turned out to be precisely a neutralizing black box, an antidote to the
initial virulence of the movement. The publicity itself was a death trap.
0 One must be wary of the attempt to universalize strategies through the
dissemination of information, suspicious of all-out campaigns for a
: solidarity which is both electronic and fashionable. Every strategy which
0 is geared to the universalization of differences is an entropic strategy of
X the system.
Thus the media do not facilitate socialization, but rather the
implosion of the social in the masses. This is simply the macroscopic
extension of the implosion of meaning which occurs at the microscopic
level of the sign. Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message" (the
consequences of which are far from having been exhausted) is the tool for
further analysis of this situation. By this phrase, McLuhan means that all
subject matter (the message) is absorbed by the single dominant form of
the medium. The medium alone is the event, regardless of whether the
message it conveys is conformist or subversive, a state of affairs which
poses a serious problem for all forms of counter information, pirate radio
stations, anti-media, etc. But there are more serious consequences to
come, which McLuhan himself has not defined. For even if meanings are
neutralized, the possibility might still exist of working on the form of the
medium so that its purely formal impact might transform the real. Devoid
of meaning, the medium as such might still retain a revolutionary,
subversive use-value. But (and this is the point to which McLuhanism, if
pursued to the limitw leads) it is not simply a question of the implosion of
the message in the medium, but of the medium and the real in a kind of
hyperreal nebula where the very definition and distinctive action of the
medium is irrecoverably lost. In a word, "The Medium is the Message"
does not merely mean the end of the message, but the end of the medium.
There are no more media, in the literal sense of the term (I am referring
particularly to the electronic mass media), that is to say, in the sense of

142 Jean Baudrillard

mediating between one state of reality and another, and that is true for
both form and content. That, strictly speaking, is what implosion means:
the defusing of polarities, the short-circuiting of the poles of-every
differential system of meaning, the obliteration of distinctions and
oppositions between terms, including the distinction between the
medium and the real. Hence any mediation or dialectical intervention
between the two, or by one on the other, becomes impossible. We are
faced with the circularity of all media-effects. Meaning too, in the sense of
a unilateral vector leading from one pole to another, becomes impossible.
The consequences of this critical and unprecedented situation must be
confronted; it is the only one left to us and it is futile to dream of a
revolution through either form or content, since both the medium and the
real now form a single inscrutable nebula.

This statement (of the implosion of content, of the consumption of
meaning, of the evanescence of the medium itself, of the re-absorption of
any dialectic of communication in the absolute circularity of the model, of
the implosion of the social in the masses) might appear to be a prophecy of
doom. This is so only in relation to the idealism which colors our thinking
about information. We are all nourished by an exaggerated idealism of
meaning and communication (meaning idealizes communication) and
from that perspective, it is the catastrophe of meaning which lies in wait.
It is necessary to understand, however, that the word catastrophe
does not carry the catastrophic connotation of death and dissolution
except in a linear perspective of accumulation, of productive finality
which the system imposes on us. Etymologically, the term itself merely
indicates the curve, the downward turn towards the bottom of the cycle,
which leads tp what might be called "the horizon of the event," an
insurmountable horizon of meaning, beyond which nothing further can
occur which has meaning for us. But it suffices to escape from that
ultimatum of meaning for catastrophe itself to drop the appearance of the
final, nihilistic deadline which it appears to us to be now. Beyond
meaning lies fascination: the result of the neutralization and implosion of
meaning. Beyond the horizon of the social, there are masses, which result
from the neutralization and implosion of the social. Is not the opposition
of fascination and meaning what is at stake in information?
Whatever its content, be it political, pedagogical, cultural, the
objective of information is always to circulate meaning, to subjugate the
masses to meaning. This imperative to produce meaning translates itself
into an impulse to moralize: to inform better, to socialize better, to raise
the cultural level of the masses, etc. What nonsense! The masses remain
scandalously resistant to this imperative of rational communication. They

Implosion of Meaning 143

are offered meaning when what they want is entertainment. The best
efforts have failed to get them to focus on the seriousness of the subject
matter, or even of the code. They are given messages when they want
only the sign. They delight in the interplay of signs and stereotypes and in
any content, as long as it results in a dramatic sequence. What they reject
is the "dialectic" of meaning. And it serves no purpose to claim that they
are mystified. This is a hypocritical hypothesis designed merely to protect
the intellectual comfort of the producers of meaning, according to which
the masses are simply prevented from enjoying the natural light of
reason. Such a hypothesis serves to exorcise its opposite: that it is in
perfect freedom that the masses prefer entertainment to meaning and the
ultimatum it poses. They do not trust that transparence and that political
intent an inch. They intuit the terrorizing simplification behind the ideal
hegemony of meaning and they react in their own way, by reducing all
articulate discourse to a single irrational, groundless dimension, in which

signs lose their meaning and subside into exhausted fascination.
It is a question of their own demand, of a specific and positive
counter-strategy, which consists in absorbing and obliterating culture,
knowledge, power, and the social: an operation which has been going on
since time immemorial, but never before on such a scale. What is at issue
is a deeply embedded antagonism which forces a reversal of the given
scenario. It is no longer meaning which constitutes the ideal line of force in
our society (in which case whatever escapes meaning is regarded as a
kind of detritus to be reabsorbed at one time or another) but rather
meaning itself which is merely an accident, ambiguous and transitory, an
effect of the ideal convergence of perspectives (of history, of power, etc.)
at a given moment. But this event has, in fact, never affected more than a
tiny fraction, a very superficial stratum of our society either collectively or
individually. We are but intermittently purveyors of meaning. For the
most part, we form a mass in the fullest sense of the word, living panic-
stricken lives, subject to the laws of chance, straddling meaning, never
coinciding with it.
For example, on the night of Klaus Croissant's extradition, there was
a TV broadcast of a football game in which France was playing for the
World Cup. A few hundred people demonstrated in front of the Sante
prison, there was some furious nocturnal activity on the part of a few
lawyers, while twenty million people spent the evening in front of their
TV screens. The joy at France's victory was equalled only by the dismay
and outrage which such scandalous indifference inspired among the
more enlightened . As Le Monde put it: '9 O'Clock. The German lawyer has
already been removed from La Sante prison. In a few minutes Rocheteau
will score the first goal. " Thus, melodramatic indignation, but not a single
question as to the cause of this mysterious indifference. The reason

'.)
144 lean Baudrillard

U1
-
_,

advanced for it is always the same: the manipulation of the masses by the
powers that be, the mystifying effect of football. In any case, the
suggestion is that such indifference ought not to exist, and has, therefore,
nothing to say to us. In other words, "the silent majority" is dispossessed
even of its indifference, which is not even recognized and correctly
attributed; thus its very apathy is not spontaneous, but prompted by the
powers that be.
What contempt lies behind this interpretation! Victims of mystifica-
tion as they are, how could one expect the masses to know how to
behave? A certain revolutionary spontaneity, through which they
glimpse the "rationality of our own desire" is occasionally conceded to
them, but Heaven protect us from their silence and inertia! It is precisely
this indifference, however, which needs to be analyzed in its positive
brutality, rather than consigning it to a white magic of alienation and
manipulation which constantly deflects the masses from their natural
calling. But how does this mumbo-jumbo succeed? Should we not ask
ourselves why, after several revolutions and one or two centuries of
political apprenticeship, in spite of newspapers, unions, political parties,
intellectuals, and all the energy invested in educating and mobilizing the
people, it is still the case, and will still be the case in ten or twenty years,
that while a thousand are willing to take a stand, twenty million are
content to remain passive, and not simply passive, but actively prefer-
ring, joyfully and unquestioningly, in good faith, a football match to an
event of grave political and human consequence? It is indeed curious that
this phenomenon has served, not to disturb the existing analysis, but
rather to confirm its belief in the omnipotence of manipulation and of the
masses as supine and comatose, neither of which has any foundation in
reality and both of which are decoys. Power manipulates nothing, and
the masses are neither led astray nor mystified. The powers that be are all
too happy to place on football an easy responsibility, if not the diabolical

responsibility for the stultification of the masses. This reinforces them in
the illusion of being the powers that be, and diverts their attention from a
much more dangerous fact, to wit that this indifference of the masses is
their sole, their true practice, that there is no other imaginable ideal, that it
is not to be deplored, but rather to be analyzed as the brute fact of
collective denial, the refusal to accept the ideals, however luminous,
which are put before them.
The masses have no stake in these ideals. We might as well
acknowledge the fact and recognize that every aspiration of the social,
every hope of revolution and social change up till now has functioned
only by virtue of this subterfuge, this blind spot, this incredible memory
lapse. We might as well do what Freud attempted in the psychic domain,
that is to take this remainder, this blank sediment, this detritus of

Implosion of Meaning 145

meaning, this unanalyzed and perhaps unanalyzable matter, as our point
of departure.
The masses are represented in the imaginary as floating somewhere
between passivity and barbarous spontaneity, the constant source of
potential energy, a reserve of the social and social energy, today a silent
referent, tomorrow the protagonist in history, once they have spoken out
and ceased to be the "silent majority." The truth is, however, that the
masses do not have a history to write, either past or future, they have no
potential energy to release or desires to fulfill: their power is completely
present, in the here and now. It is the power of their silence. They possess a
power of absorption and neutralization already greater than any external
force, a power of specific inertia whose efficacy is different from all our
power systems, from all the schemata of production and expansion on
which our imaginary functions, even when it seeks their destruction. This
is the inadmissible and unintelligible figure of implosion (is it even a
process?): the thrust of all our meaning-systems, against which they
muster their defences as they attempt to cover up with a tissue of
sigrufication the crater left by the central collapse of meaning.
Every majority has not always been silent, but today, it is so by
definition. Perhaps it has been reduced to silence, but this is by no means
certain. Because this silence, if it means that the majority does not speak,
indicates above all that it is no longer possible to speak in its name. No one
represents the silent majority, or the masses. We can no longer refer to
them, as we did formerly to "class" or to the "people." Silent and
withdrawn, the masses are no longer a subject (certainly not of history);
they can no longer, therefore, be spoken, articulated, represented,
cannot pass through the political mirror-stage nor the cycle of imaginary
identifications. The power resulting from this is obvious, because, no
longer a subject, the masses are no longer capable of alienation, either in their
own language (they do not have one) or in any other which would
presume to speak for them. This puts an end to revolutionary expecta-
tions, which have always gambled on the possibility of the masses or a
given class denying itself as such. The masses, however, are a locus not of
negativity and explosion, but of absorption and implosion.
That is the paradox of this silence. While appearing to be the ultimate
manifestation of alienation, it is the ultimate weapon. The masses are
impervious to the workings of liberation, revolution, or historicity, but
that is their method of self-defense, their riposte. They are a simulation
model, an alibi at the service of a phantom political class which no longer
knows the nature of the political power it exerts over the masses, and at
the same time, the death of that very political process which is supposed
to govern them. The masses swallow up the political, insofar as it implies
will and representation.

146 Jean Baudrillard

Critical thought judges, discriminates, and produces differences. It is
by this selection process that it acts as the guardian of meaning. The
masses, on the other hand, do not choose, do not produce differences but
indifference; they preserve the fascination of the medium, which they
prefer to the critical demands of the message. For fascination does not
stem from meaning, it is rather exactly proportionate to the alienation of
meaning. It establishes itself by favoring the medium over the message,
the idol over the idea, the simulacrum over the truth. It is on this level that
the media function. Fascination is their law and the violence that is
specific to them, a brutal violence perpetrated on meaning, which cancels
out communication via meaning in favor of another mode. The question
is, which one?
The hypothesis that communication might take place outside the
medium of meaning, that the very intensity of the communication might
be directly proportionate to the reabsorption and dissolution of meaning,
seems to us untenable. Yet it is not meaning, or the increase of meaning
that produces intense pleasure. It is rather its neutralization that
fascinates us. (Cf. my discussion of the joke, der Witz. 3) And this is not the
result of any death wishÑwhich would imply that "life" is still on the side
of meaningÑbut simply a challenge to reference, message, code, to all the
categories of the linguistic enterprise, all of which are disavowed in favor
of an implosion of the sign in fascination: no more signifiers or signifieds
but a reabsorption of the poles of signification. None of the watch-dogs of
meaning can understand that. Meaning is morally outraged by fascination.
What is essential today is to evaluate the double challenge presented
to meaningÑthat of the masses and their silence (by no means passiveS
that of the media and their fascination. All marginal, alternative attempts
to reawaken meaning must remain subordinate to that. Clearly there is a
paradox at the basis of the close link of the masses with the media. Is it
the media which dissolve meaning and produce the formless or "in-
formed" masses, or is it the masses which defeat the media by perverting
or silently absorbing all the messages which they produce? I have
analyzed and condemned the media as the institution of an irreversible
model of one-way communication, in "Requiem pour les media."4 But
what of today? The failure of the masses to respond to the media may be
interpreted not as the strategy of power, but as a counter-strategy of the
masses themselves, vis-a-vis power. What then?
Are the mass media on the side of power in the manipulation of the
masses or are they on the side of the masses in the liquidation of meaning,
in the violence done to meaning, in the mechanism of fascination? Is it the
3Jean Baudrillard, L'Echange symbolique et la mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).
4Jean Baudrillard, "Requiem pour les media," in Pour une critique de l'econornie politrque du
stgne (Patis: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 220Ñ28.

Lrnplosion of Meaning 147

media that cast the spell of fascination on the masses, or the masses who
reduce the media to spectacle? The Mogadishu-Stammheim incidents
indicate that the media condemn terrorism and the exploitation of fear for
political ends, at the same time that they diffuse, completely ambiguously,
the brutal fascination of the terrorist act.5 This is the eternal moral dilemma
which Umberto Eco posits: how not to speak of terrorism, how to put the
media to good use, when such good use is impossible. The media convey
sense and nonsense in equal measure, they manipulate every which way,
and the process is uncontrollable. They transmit both the simulation
which is internal to the system and that which would destroy it according
to an entirely circular and moebian logicÑand that is as it should be.
There is no alternative, no logical resolution, only a logical exacerbation
and a catastrophic resolution.
With this qualification: we are in a double-bind situation vis-a-vis the
system, exactly as children are when they encounter the demands of the
adult world. Children are simultaneously required on the one hand, to
establish themselves as autonomous, responsible, free, conscious sub-
jects, and on the other, as inert, submissive, obedient, and conforming

objects. The child resists on every front and meets contradictory demands
with a double strategy. To the demand that he be an object he opposes
every variety of disobedience, revolt, emancipation: in a word, the claim
of the subject. He counters the demand that he be a subject just as
obstinately and effectively with a reverse strategy, that is to say,
infantilism, hyper-conformism, total dependence, passivity, idiocy: the
resistance of the object. Neither of these two strategies has more objective
value than the other. Today, however, the resistance of the subject is
unilaterally valorized just as in the political sphere only liberation,
emancipation, free expression, all constitutive of the political subject, are
held to be valuable and subversive. This is to ignore the equal, doubtless
even greater, impact of the object-strategies, of renunciation of the
position of the subject and of meaningÑprecisely the strategy of the
masses, which we bury contemptuously under the labels of alienation
and passivity. Liberating practices deal with only one side of the system,
the ultimatum to make ourselves objects. They ignore the other demand,
that we be subjects: liberate ourselves, express ourselves, vote, produce,
decide, talk, participate, play the game, although this demand represents

'The reference is to the hijacking of a Lufthansa plane with eighty-six passengers on
board by West German terrorists in October 1977. The West German government refused
the terrorists' demand that eleven members of the liader-Meinhoff gang be freed in
exchange for the hostages, who were rescued by cornmandos when the latter re-captured
the plane at the airport of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. Ulrilce Meinhoff had been
found hanged in prison at Stammheim in May 1976.
I

148

Jean Baudrillard

as serious an ultimatum, as serious a blackmail, as the other, perhaps
even more so at the present time. The strategic resistance to a system
based on oppression and repression is the liberating claim of the subject.
But this is to respond to an anterior phase of the system, which, even if it
confronts us still, is no longer the center of operations. The current
strategy of the system is to inflate utterance6 to produce the maximum of
meaning. Thus the appropriate strategic resistance is to refuse meaning
and utterance, to simulate in a hyper-conformist manner the very
mechanisms of the system, itself a form of refusal and non-reception.
This is the resistance strategy of the masses. It amounts to turning the
system's logic back on itself by duplicating it, reflecting meaning, as in a
mirror, without absorbing it. This is the dominant strategy at the present
(if one can call it strategy) because it is this particular phase of the system
that has triumphed.
To choose the wrong strategy is a grave error. Any movement which
stakes everything on the liberation, the emancipation, the resurrection of
a historical, collective, or speaking subject, on a raising of consciousness if
not of the unconscious, individually and collectively, is blind to the fact
that it is conforming to the system, whose goal at the present time is
precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and utterance.

Translated by Mary Lydon
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

XThe word used by Baudrillard is parole: notoriously difficult, with its Saussurian
resonance, to render in English. I have opted for "utterance" because it carries the
connotation both of speech and of individual use of language.ÑTrans.

III
Art and Technology:
The Avant Garde

t . .. . S . .. j .. . . _

FOU RTEEN

The Public Sphere

Jurgen Htsbermas

Habermas, Jorgen. "Chapter Fourteen: The Public
Sphere." From Rethinkina PoPular Culture:
ContemDorarv Perspectives in Cultural Studies.
Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, Editors.
Universitv of California Press, 1991 (Regents of the
University of California). Pages 398404.

CONCEPT

By "public sphere" we mean first of all a domain ot our social lite in
which such a thing as public opinion can be tormed. Access to the public
sphere is open in principle to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere
is constituted in every conversation in which private persons come to-
gether to torm a public. They are then acting neither as business or
professional people conducting their private aflairs, nor as legal conso-
ciates subject to the legal regulations ot a state bureaucracy and obli-
gated to obedience. Citizens act as a public when they deal with matters
of general interest without being subject to coercion; thus with the guar-
antee that they may assemble and unite freely, and express and publicize
their opinions freely. When the public is large, this kind of communica-
tion requires certain means of dissemination and influence; today, news-
papers and periodicals, radio and television are the media of the public
sphere. We speak of a political public sphere (as distinguished trom a
literary one, for instance) when the public discussions conceril objects
connected with the practice of the state. The coercive power of the state
is the counterpart, as it were, of the political public sphere, bul it is not
a part ot it. State power is, to he sure, considered "public" power, but it
owes the attribute of publiciless to its task of carilig for the pul)lic, that
is, providing for the common good ot all legal consociates. Only when
the exercise of public authority has actually been subordinated to the

FromJurgetl Habernas on Soeiety and Politics: A Reader (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), edited
by Steven Seidman, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Originally published as "Of-
lentlichkeit" in Jurgen Habermas, Kultur und Krilik, e 1973 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frank-
lurt.

W 398

THE PUBI.IC SPHERE 399

requiremelit of democratic publicness does the political public sphere
acquire an institutionalized influence on the government, by way of the
legislative body. The term "public opinion" refers to the functions of
criticism and control of organized state authority that the public exer-
cises informally, as well as formally during periodic elections. Regula-
tions concerning the publicness (or publicity [Publizitat] in its original
meaning) of state-related activities, as, tor instance, the public accessibil-
ity required of legal proceedings, are also connected with this function
of public opinion. To the public sphere as a sphere mediating between
state and society, a sphere in which the public as the vehicle of public
opinion is formed, there corresponds the principle of publicnessÑthe
publicness that once had to win out against the secret politics of mon-
archs and that since then has permitted democratic control of state activ-
ity.
It is no accident that these concepts of the public sphere and public
opinion were not formed until the eighteenth century. They derive their
specific meaning from a concrete historical situation. It was then that
one learned to distinguish between opinion and public opinion, or opin-
ion publique. Whereas mere opinions (things taken for granted as part of
a culture, normative convictions, collective prejudices and judgments)

seem to persist unchanged in their quasi-natural structure as a kind of
sedbilent of history, public opinion, in terms of its very idea, can be
formed only it a public that engages in rational discussion exists. Public
di.scussions that are institutionally protected and that take, with critical
hitelit, the exercise of political authority as their theme have not existed
since time immemorialÑthey developed only in a specific phase of bour-
geois society, and only by virtue ot a specific constellation of interests
could they be incorporated into the order of the bourgeois constitutional
state.

H IS roRY

It is not possible to demonstrate the existence of a public sphere in its
OWIl r ight, separate trom the private sphere, in the European society of
the High Middle Ages. At the same time, however, it is not a cohlcidence
that the attributes of authority at that thne were called "public." For a
public representation of authority existed at that time. At all levels of the
pyramid established by feudal law, the status of the teudal lord is neutral
with respect to the categories "public" and "private"; but the person pos-
sessing that status represents it publicly; he displays himself, represents
hhilselt as the embodiment ot a "higher" power, in whatever degree.
I his concept ot representation has survived into recent constitutional
history. Even today the power of political authority on its highest level,
ul

400 JUR(;EN HABI*:RMAS

however much it has become detached trom its tormer basis, requires
representation through the head of state. But such elements derive trom
a pre-bourgeois social structure. Representation in the sense ot the bour-
geois public sphere, as in "representing" the nation or specilic clients,
has nothing to do with representalive publicness, which inheres in the con-
crete existence of a lord. As long as the prince and the estates of his
realm "are" the land, rather than merely "representing" it, they are ca-
pable of this kind of representation; they represent their authority "be-
fore" the people rather than for the people.
The teudal powers (the church, the prince, and the nobility) to which
this representative publicness adheres disintegrated in the course of a
long process of polarization; by the end of the eighteenth century they
had decomposed into private elements on the one side and public on the
other. The position of the church changed in connection with the Ret:
ormation; the tie to divine authority that the church represented, that
is, religion, became a private matter. Historically, what is called the tree-
dom of religion sateguarded the first domain ot private autonomy; the
church itself continued its existence as one corporate body under public
law among others. The corresponding polarization ot prhlcely power
acquired visible torm in the separation of the public budget from the
private household property of the teudal lord. In the bureaucracy and
the military (and in part also in the administration of justice), institutions
of public power became autonomous vis-a-vis the privatized sphere of
the princely court. In terms of the estates, finally, elements from the
ruling groups developed into organs of public power, into parliamelit
(and in part also into judicial organs); elements trom the occupational
status groups, insotar as they had become established in urban corpora-
tions and in certain differentiations within the estates ot the land, devel
- oped into the sphere of bourgeois society, which would contront the
state as a genuine domain of private autonomy.
Representative publicness gave way to the new sphere ot "public power"
that came into being with the national and territolial states. ()ngohig
state activity (permanent administration, a standing army) had its cOun-
terpart hl the permanence ot relationsilips that had developed hl the
meantime with the stock market and the press, through tratfic in goods
and news. Public power became consolidated as someltlillg tangible coll-
tronthig those who were subject to it and who at tirst tound themselves
only negatively defined by it. These are the "private persons" who are
excluded from public power because they hold no ottice. "Pul)li(" no

longer reters to the represelitative COUI t ot a persoll vested with author-
ity; instead, it now refers to the competelice-regulated activity ot an ap-
paratus lurnislled with a monopoly on the legithilate use ot torce. As

r
. HE PUBLIt. SPHERE 401

those to whom this public power is addressed, private persons subsumed
under the state form the public.
As a private domain, society, which has come to confront the state, as
it were, is on the one hand clearly differentiated from public power; on
the other hand, society becomes a matter of public interest insofar as
with the rise of a market economy the reproduction of life extends be-
yond the confines of private domestic power. The bourgeois public sphere
can be understood as the sphere of private persons assembled to form a
public. They soon began to make use of the public sphere of informa-
tional newspapers, which was officially regulated, against the public power
itself, using those papers, along with the morally and critically oriented
weeklies, to engage in debate about the general rules governing relations
in their own essentially privatizecl but publicly relevant sphere of com-
modity exchange and labor.

THE LIBERAL MODEL OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE

The medium in which this debate takes placeÑpublic discussionÑis
unique and without historical prototype. Previously the estates had ne-
gotiated contracts with their prhlces in which claims to power were de-
fined on a case-by-case basis. As we know, this development followed a
ditferent course in England, where princely power was relativized through
parliament, than on the (:ontinent, where the estates were mediatized
by the monarch. The "third estate" then broke with this mode of equal-
izing power, for it could no longer establish itself as a ruling estate. Given
a commercial economy, a division of authority accomplished through
dilferentiation ol the rights of those possessing feudal authority (liber-
ties belonging to the estates) was no longer possibleÑthe power under
private law of disposition of capitalist property is nonpolitical. The bour-
geois are private persons; as such, they do not "rule." Thus their claims
to power in opposition to public power are directed not against a con-
centration of authority that should be "divided" but rather against the
pl-inciple ol established authority. The principle of control, namely pub-
licness, that the bourgeois public opposes to the principle ol established
authority aims at a transtormation of authority as such, not merely the
exchange ot one basis of legitimation tor another.
In the lirst moderil constitutions the sections listing basic rights pro-
vide an image of the liberal model of the public sphere: they guarantee
s(x:iety as a sphere of private autonomy; opposite it stands a public power
lbilited to a few lunctions; between the two spheres, as it were, stands
the domain ol private persons who have come together to tOI Ill a public
and who, as citizens of the state, mediate the state with the needs of

402 JURCEN HABERMAS

bourgeois society, in order, as the idea goes, to thus convert political
authority to "rational" authority in the medium of this public sphere.
Under the presuppositions of a society based on the free exchange of
commodities, it seemed that the general interest, which served as the
criterion by which this kind of rationality was to be evaluated, would be
assured if the dealings of private persons in the marketplace were eman-
cipated from social forces and their dealings in the public sphere were
emancipated from political coercion.
The political daily press came to have an important role during this
same period. In the second half of the eighteenth century, serious com-
petition to the older form of news writing as the compiling of items of
information arose in the form of literary journalism. Karl Bucher de-
scribes the main outlines of this development: "From mere institutions
for the publication of news, newspapers became the vehicles and guides
of public opinion as well, weapons of party politics. The consequence of
this for the internal organization of the newspaper enterprise was the
insertion of a new function between the gathering of news and its pub-
lication: the editorial function. For the newspaper publisher, however,
the significance of this development was that from a seller of new infor-
mation he became a dealer in public opinion." Publishers provided the
commercial basis for the newspaper without, however, commercializing
it as such. The press remained an institution of the public itself, operat-
ing to provide and intensify public discussion, no longer a mere organ
for the conveyance of information, but not yet a medium of consumer
culture.
This type of press can be observed especially in revolutionary periods,
when papers associated with the tiniest political coalitions and groups
spring up, as in Paris in 1789. In the Paris of 1848 every halfway prom-
inent politician still formed his own club, and every other one founded
his own jourrusl: over 450 clubs and more than 200 papers came into
being there between February and May alone. Until the permanent le-
galization of a public sphere that functioned politically, the appearance
of a political newspaper was equivalent to engagement in the struggle
for a zone of freedom for public opinion, for publicness as a principle.
Not until the establishment of the bourgeois constitutional state was a
press engaged in the public use of reason relieved of the pressure of
ideological viewpoints. Since then it has been able to abandon its polem-
ical stance and take advantage of the earning potential of commercial
activity. The ground was cleared for this development from a press of
viewpoints to a commercial press at about the same time in England,
France, and the United States, during the 1830s. In the course of this
transformation from the journalism of writers who were private persons
to the consumer services of the mass media, the sphere of publicness was

I HE PUI&LI(' Sl'HERE 4U3

changed by an inHux of private interests that achieved privileged rep-
resentation within it.

I HE PUBLIC SPHERE IN MASS WELFARE-STATE DEMOCRACIES

The liberal model of the public sphere remains instructive in regard to
the normative claim embodied in institutionalized requirements of pub-
licness; but it is not applicable to actual relationships within a mass de-
mocracy that is industrially advanced and constituted as a social-welfare
state. In part, the liberal model had always contained ideological aspects;
in part, the social presuppositions to which those aspects were linked
have undergone fundamental changes. Even the forms in which the public
sphere was manifested, forms which made its idea seem to a certain ex-
tent obvious, began to change with the Chartist movement in England

and the February Revolution in France. With the spread of the press
and propaganda, the public expanded beyond the confines of the bour-
geoisie. Along with its social exclusivity the public lost the cohesion given
it by institutions of convivial social intercourse and by a relatively high
standard of education. Accordingly, conHicts which in the past were
pushed off into the private sphere now enter the public sphere. Croup
needs, which cannot expect satisfaction from a self-regulating market,
tend toward state regulation. The public sphere, which must now me-
diate these demands, becomes a field for competition among interests in
the cruder form of forcible confrontation. Laws that have obviously
originated under the "pressure of the streets" can scarcely continue to
be understood in terms of a consensus achieved by private persons in
public discussion; they correspond, in more or less undisguised form, to
compromises between conflicting private interests. Today it is social or-
ganizations that act in relation to the state in the political public sphere,
whether through the mediation of political parties or directly, in inter-
play with public administration. With the interlocking of the public and
private domains, not only do political agencies take over certain func-
tions in the sphere of commodity exchange and social labor; societal
powers also take over political functions. This leads to a kind of "reteu-
dalization" of the public sphere. Large-scale organizations strive for po-
litical compromises with the state and with one another, behind closed
doors if possible; but at the same time they have to secure at least plebi-
scitarian approval from the mass of the population through the deploy-
ment of a staged form of publicity.
The political public sphere in the welfare state is characterized by a
singular weakening of its critical functions. Whereas at one time public-
ness was intended to subject persons or things to the public use of reason
and to make political decisions susceptible to revision before the tribunal
i

404

IUg(;EN l-IABERMAS

of public opinion, today it has often enough already been enlisted in the
aid of the secret policies of interest groups; in the form of "publicity" it
now acquires public prestige for persons or things and renders them
capable of acclamation in a climate of nonpublic opinion. The term "public
relations" itself indicates how a public sphere that formerly emerged
from the structure of society must now be produced circumstantially on
a case-by-case basis. The central relationship of the public, political par-
ties, and parliament is also affected by this change in tunction.
This existing trend toward the weakening of the public sphere, as a
principle, is opposed, however, by a welfare-state transtormation of the
functioning of basic rights: the requirement of publicness is extended
by state organs to all organizations acting in relation to the state. To the
extent to which this becomes a reality, a no longer intact public of private
persons acting as individuals would be replaced by a public of organized
private persons. Under current circumstances, only the latter could par-
ticipate effectively in a process of public communication using the chan-
nels of intra-party and intra-organizational public spheres, on the basis
of a publicness enforced for the dealings ol organizations with the state.
It is in this process of public communication that the formation of polit-
ical compromises would have to achieve legitimation. The idea of the
public sphere itself, which signified a rationalization ot authority in the
medium ot public discussions among private persons, and which has been
preserved in mass welfare-state democracy, threatens to disintegrate with
the structural transformation of the public sphere. Today it could be
realized only on a difterent basis, as a rationalization ot the exercise ot
social and political power under the mutual control ot rival organiza-
tions committed to publicness in their internal structure as well as in
their dealings with the state and with one another.

PART FOUR

Popular Culture in
Cultural Criticism
296 . s A t L Y A 1- e x A N D E R

ing it, lest the false estimate man entertains of this half of the human family may cause
his ignorance and prejudice to be enlisted to retard the progress of his own freedom.
And therefore, we deem it far better to lay down just principles, and look forward to
the rational improvement of society, than to entertain propositions which may retard
the measure we wish to promote." Address of the Working Man's Association to the
Radical Refonners of Great Britain and Ireland, London 1838, p. 9. Whether the false
estimate is attributed to their fellow working men, or their representatives in Parlia-
ment is not clear.
26 D. Thompson, "Women in Nineteenth Century Radical Politics," p. 131.
27 Extract from R. J. Richardson, '*The Rights of Woman" in The Early Chartists,
pp. 115-36.
,8. Cecil Driver, Tory Radical, The Life of Richard Oastler, Oxford 1946, p. 434
but see whole of chapter 32 for Oastler's Tory democracy.
29. Barbara Taylor, "Lords of Creation," New Statesman, 7 March 1980, pp. 361-
62, and G. Stedman Jones, "Utopian Socialism Reconsidered," unpub. ms. 1979,
B. Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, Ch. 2 for a discussion of Owenite ideas on the
position of women.
30. Minutes of Evidence, Select Committee on Combinations of Workmen, P.P.
1838, Vol. 8, p. 263; The Voice of the People, p. 299, and passim.
31. Quoted in Pinchbeck, Women Workers, p. 267.
32. Angela John, By the Sweat of Their Brow, Women Workers at Victorian Coal
Mines, London 1981, p. 57. Those for and against the Factory Acts did not divide
along party lines. By the 1840s, there was universal agreement that female labor
should be protected; the argument in Parliament was how best that intervention should
be made. Samuel Kydd (pseud. Alfred), The History of the Factory Movement, Lon-
don 1857, is the most interesting discussion of contemporary political opinion as it
divided between those who interpreted the laws of nature and revelations with benevo-
lence (e.g. pp. 117, 118, and 208) and those who feared the dangers of intervening in
the freedom of labor, and all opinion in between (esp. ch. 15).
33. Intentions are blurred, but whereas the workingmen delegates from the factory
districts celebrated their victory in 1847 with the following resolution: "That we are
deeply thankful to Almighty God for the success which has on all occasions attended
our efforts in this sacred cause, and especially for the final result of all our labours, by
which the working classes are now put in possession of their long-sought-for-meas-
ureÑThe Ten Hours Bill" their friends in Parliament reafflrmed their hopes that the
increased leisure won would be used for "mental and moral improvement" and espe-
cially that the female factory operatives would promote and improve their "domestic
habits." The Ten Hours Advocate, ed. Philip Grant, for the Lancaster Short-Time
Committee, 1846 47, pp. 300 301.
34. Ethel Snowden, The Feminist Movement, London n.d. (1911), p. 258.

~n
N

Eley, Geofl. "Chapter Ten: Nations, Publics, and
Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth
Century." FromCulture/Pow~ /Historv: A Readerin
Contemporary Social Theo 2 Y N cholas B. Dirk8,
Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, Editors. Princeton
_University Press, 1994. Paaes 297-335.

Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures:
Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century

GEOFF ELEY

By "the public sphere" we mean first of all a realm of our
social life in which something approaching public opinion can
be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of
the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in

which private individuals assemble to form a public body.
They then behave neither like business nor professional people
transacting private affairs, nor like members Of a constitutional
order subject to the legal constraints of a state bureaucracy.
Citizens behave as a public body when they confer in an
unrestricted fashionÑthat is, with the guarantee of freedom of
assembly and association and the freedom to express and
publish their opinionsÑabout matters of general interest.
In a large public body this kind of communication requires
specific means for transmitting information and influencing
those who receive it. Today newspapers and magazines,
radio and TV are the media of the public sphere. We speak of
the political public sphere in contrast, for instance, to the
literary one, when public discussion deals With objects
connected to the activity of the state. Although state activity is
so to speak the executor, it is not a part of it.... Only when
the exercise of political control is effectively subordinated to
the democratic demand that information be accessible
to the public, does the political public sphere win an
institutionalized influence over the government through
the instrument of law-making bodies.}
~n

298 . C E O F F E L E Y

IN THIS summary statement Habermas reveals perhaps better than in the book
itself how far his conception of the public sphere amounts to an ideal of criti-
cal liberalism which remains historically unattained. History provides only
distorted realizations, both at the inception of the public sphere (when the
participant public was effectively limited to the bourgeoisie) and with the
later transformations (which removed this "bourgeois ideal" of infommed and
rational communication still further from any general or universal implemen-
tation). Strukturwandel der Dffentlichkeit rests on an immanent critique, in
which Habermas confronts the liberal ideal of the reasoning public with the
reality of its own particularism and long-term disempowemment. From a van-
tage point in the late 1950s the main direction of Habemmas's perspective
was, not surprisingly, pessimisticÑ"etching an unforgettable portrait of a de-
graded public life, in which the substance of liberal democracy is voided in a
combination of plebiscitary manipulation and privatized apathy, as any col-
lectivity of citizenry disintegrates."2 But the book was not just a story of
decay. It remains a careful exploration of a particular historical moment, in
which certain possibilities for human emancipation were unlockedÑpossibil-
ities which for Habemmas were ordered around the "central idea of communi-
catively generated rationality," which then became the leitmotif of his own
life's work.3
In a nutshell, the public sphere means "a sphere which mediates between
society and state, in which the public organizes itself as the bearer of public
opinion." Historically, its growth occurred in the later eighteenth century
with the widening of political participation and the crystalizing of citizenship
ideals. It eventuated from the struggle against absolutism (or in the British
case, from the struggle for a strengthening of constitutional monarchy), and
aimed at transforming arbitrary authority into rational authority, subject to
the scrutiny of a citizenry organized into a public body under the law. It was
identified most obviously with the demand for representative govemment and
a liberal constitution, and more broadly with the basic civil freedoms before
the law (speech, press, assembly, association, no arrest without trial, and so
on). But Habemmas was less interested in this more familiar process of overt
political change. More fundamentally, the public sphere presumed the prior
transformation of social relations, their condensation into new institutional
arrangements, and the generation of new social, cultural, and political dis-
course around this changing environment. Conscious and programmatic po-
litical impulses emerged most strongly where such underlying processes were
reshaping the overall context of social communication. The public sphere
presupposed this larger accumulation of sociocultural change. It was linked

to the growth of urban cultureÑmetropolitan and provincialÑas the novel
arena of a locally organized public life (meeting houses, concert halls, thea-
ters, opera houses, lecture halls, museums), to a new infrastructure of social
communication (the press, publishing companies, and other literary media;
the rise of a reading public via reading and language societies; subscription
. P L A C I N C N A B E k M A S ¥ 299
publishing and lending libraries; improved transportation; and adapted cen-
ters of sociability like coffeehouses, taverns, and clubs), and to a new uni-
verse of voluntary association.
In other words, the public sphere derives only partly from the conscious
demands of reformers and their articulation into government. Indeed, the lat-
ter were as much an effect of its emergence as a cause. Socially, the public
sphere was the manifest consequence of a much deeper and long-term process
of societal transforrnationÑthat Habemmas locates between the late Middle
Ages and the eighteenth century as a trade-driven transition from feudalism
to capitalism in which the capital accumulation resulting from long-distance
commerce plays the key role and for which the mercantilist policies of the
later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the midwife. The category of
the public was the unintended consequence of long-run socioeconomic
changeÑeventually precipitated by the aspirations of a successful and self-
conscious bourgeoisie, whose economic functions and social standing im-
phed a cumulative agenda of desirable innovation. Habemmas postulates a
causal homology of culture and economics in this sense, growing from "the
trafZic in commodities and news created by early capitalist long-distance
trade" (p. 15). On the one hand, commercialization undermined the old basis
of the household economy, reoriented productive activity "toward a com-
modity market that had expanded under public direction and supervision,"
and reconstituted state/society relations on the basis of a new distinction be-
tween the private and the public; on the other hand, the flow of intemational
news attendant on the growth of trading networks generated a new category
of public knowledge and infommation, particularly in the context of the seven-
teenth-century wars and intensified competition among "nations" in the
mercantilist sense, which led to a new medium of fommal exchange and the
invention of the press. This model of change, in which both new cultural
possibilities and new political forms appear as the excrescence of an accumu-
lating structural transformation, might be applied to a range of phenomena
normally associated with industrialization or the developmental process
Thus in very general terms, the ninetenth-century growth of local government
owed much to improvised grappling with the problems of an urbanizing soci-
ety (poverty, policing, amenities like lighting and sewage, commercial licens-
ing, revenue creation, and so on), to the extent of the local state's being actu-
ally conshtuted by the practical associational initiatives of a new citizenry in
the makingÑbut as the unintended, rolling effect of structurally invited inter-
ventions, as opposed to the strategic result of a coherent design.
Ultimately, though, Habermas is less interested in the realized political di-
mension of the public sphereÑthat is, the particular political histories of the
late eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuriesÑthan in abstracting a strong
ideal against which later forms of the public sphere can be set. His own van-
tage pointÑas the legatee of the Frankfurt School, who resumed their cri-
tique of mass culture at the height of the Christian Democratic state and the
postwar boom, at a low ebb of socialist and democratic prospectsÑis crucial

300 . ¢ E O F r E L E Y .

to an understanding of the book's motivating problematic. Habermas af-
firmed the critique of the present (the consciousness industry, the commodifi-
cation of culture, the manipulation and manipulability of the masses), while
he specifically retrieved the past (the Enlightenment as the founding moment
of modernity). By contrast with Horkheimer and Adomo, he upheld the En-
lightenment's progressive tradition. Thus his model of the public sphere has
an avowedly double function: as Hohendahl says, "It provides a paradigm for
analyzing historical change, while also serving as a normative category for
political critique."4 Arguably, it is the latter that really drives the analysis.
Moreover, while the public sphere argument is clearly crucial to politics tn
the full democratic sense (as the enlargement of human emancipation), its
main thrust is anterior to politics of the parliamentary or institutional hnd.
For Habermas, the parliamentary stands of a Fox were less important than the
larger context of rational and unrestricted discourse from which they had
grown and which they could presuppose. The faculty of "publicness" begins
with reading, thought, and discussion, with reasonable exchange among
equals, and it is this ideal that really focuses Habermas's interest. It resided in
the act of discussion and the process of exchange:

The truly free market is that of cultural discourse itself, within, of course, certain
normative regulations; . . . What is said derives its legitimacy neither from itself
as message nor from the social title of the utterer, but from its conformity as a
statement with a certain paradigm of reason inscribed in the very event of
saying.5

It is perhaps unclear how far Habermas believes his ideal of rational com-
munication, with its concomitant of free and equal participation, to have been
actually realized in the classical liberal model of OfJentlichkeit. Sometimes
he acknowledges the class and property-bound basis of participation, but not
to the extent of compromising his basic historical claim. However, the model
also postulates a "structural transformation of the public sphere," and as sug-
gested above, the narrowing of the ideal's possibilities over the longer run
forms the main starting point of the book. Particularly from the last third of
the nineteenth century, the growing contradictions of a capitalist societyÑthe
passage of competitive into monopoly or organized capitalism, the regulation
of social conflicts by the state, and the fragmentation of the rational public
into an arena of competing interestsÑserve to erode the independence of
public opinion and undermine the legitimacy of its institutions. In the cultural
sphere proper, from the arts to the press and the mass entertainment industry,
the processes of commercialization and rationalization have increasingly tar-
geted the individual consumer while eliminating the mediating contexts of
reception and rational discussion, particularly in the new age of the electronic
mass media. In this way the classic basis of the public sphereÑa clear dis-
tinction between public good and private interest, the principled demarcation
of state and society, and the constitutive role of a participant citizenry, defin-
ing public policy and its parameters through reasoned exchange, free of dom

¥ P L A C I N C 11 A B E R M A S ¥ 301
inationÑdisappears. The relations between state and society are reordered, to
the advantage of the former and the detriment of a "free" political life
Now, the strengths and weaknesses of Habermas's work on the public
sphere have been much discussed (though mainly in the German-speakin
rather than the English-speahng world, it should be said), not least in the
papers and sessions of the present conference that precede my own 6 A cer
tain amount of overlap is inevitable, and I certainly would not want to discuss
the historical dimensions of the argument in isolation from its theoretical
value. But I want to confine myself to a series of comments which confront
Habermas's work with a corpus of intervening historical writing (not all of it
by historians), which sometimes confirms, sometimes extends, and some-
times undermines his argument. These concern (1) a wide variety of litera
tures that confirm the usefulness of the core concept of the public sphere (2)
the question of gender and the implications of women's history and feminist

theory, (3) the state and politics in the strict sense, and (4) the problem of
popular culture.

THE FINDINGS OF SOCIAL HISTORY

The value of the Habermasian perspective has been fundamentally borne out
by recent social history in a variety of fields. On rereading the book (after
originally discovering it in my own case in the early 1970s and then system-
atically engaging with it in the later part of that decade) it is striking to see
how securely and imaginatively the argument is historically grounded, given
the thinness of the literature available at the time. In this respect I am ve
struck by the affinity with the work of Raymond Williams, on whose argu-
ment in Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (London, 1958) Habermas draws
extensively in the early part of the book. The form of the argumentation is
very similar to that of Williams (e.g., the whole introductory discussion cul-
minating in the treatment of the shift in the meanings of the terms for "pub-
lic" in English, German, and French between the late seventeenth and late
eighteenth centuriesÑpp. 1-26). The very methodÑof moving from the
"world of letters" to the structure of societyÑis characteristic of Williams's
project in his early work. The later stage of Habermas's argument about the
public sphere's transformation and degeneration (e.g., Ch. 18: "From a Cul-
ture-Debating Public to a Culture-Consuming Public," or Ch. 20- "From the
Journalism of Private Men of Letters to the Public Consumer Services of the
Mass Media") anticipates the broad historical argument of The Long Revolu
tion (London, 1961), and Communications (Harmondsworth 1962), in which
Williams developed his ideas about the long-term decline in the forms and
degree of popular access and control in the area of culture. On the other hand
Williams's subsequent work on mass media has always maintained a strong
affirmative stance on the democratic potentials of new communications tech
nologies (see especially his Television: Technology and Cultural Form [Lon
ul

don, 1974], or the chapter on "Culture and Technology" in The Year 2000
[New York, 1983], pp. 128-52), and his view of film, radio, TV, popular
fiction, popular music, and so on is far removed from the Frankfurt School's
critique of mass culture and popular taste via the notion of commodity fetish-
ismÑa critique that it is unclear whether, and how far, Habermas himself
would share. Incidentally, rather remarkably there is no entry for "public" in
Williams's Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London, 1976;
revised and expanded ed., 1983).7
Moving from Habermas's general approach and mode of argument to areas
of research that fall concretely or empirically within the public sphere frame-
work, l wish to mention a number of examples, which certainly don't exhaust
the contexts in which Habermas's idea could be embodied, but which are
those most familiar to me. These are as follows:

¥ A large amount of eighteenth-century British social history, mainly associated
with the influence of ]. H. Plumb, but also including a range of urban history,
which effectively fills in the framework Habermas proposed without (so far as
I know) being explicitly aware of it 8
¥ A similar literature on popular liberalism in Britain, concentrated in the period
of Gladstone between the 1861)s and 1890s, but with some anticipation earlier
in the nineteenth century in the politics and moral campaigning of provincial
religious Dissent.4
¥ A less plentiful literature on the social context of liberalism in Cermany, run-
ning from the social history of the Enlightenment to the period of unification in
the 1860s. '¡
¥ A disparate literature on political socialization and political mobilization in
peasant societies, partly in social history, partly in sociology, and to a lesser
extent in anthropology. The breaking down of parochial identities and the
entry of rural societies into national political culturesÑor the nationalization
of the peasantry, as it might be calledÑis in one dimension the creation of
local public spheres and their aniculation with a national cultural and political
arena. The literature on rural politics and peasant mobilization in nineteenth-

century France is especially interesting from this point of view."
¥ An equally disparate literature in the sociology of communications, focused on
the history of the press and other media, the rise of a reading public, popular
literacy, and mass communications. As already mentioned above, the work of
Raymond Williams is especially central here, together with a considerable
body of work in British cultural studies, much of it filtered through the British
reception of Gramsci. But another fundamental point of depanure is the classic
work of Karl Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry
into the Foundations of Nationality (Cambridge, Mass., 1966; orig. ed. 1954),
which has been most imaginatively taken up by the Czech historian Miroslav
Hroch for a systematic analysis of the emergence of nationalities in the nine-
teenth century. In practice, in large pans of southern and eastern Europe in the
later nineteenth century (and in the extra-European colonial world in the twen

tieth century) the emergence of nationality (i.e., the growth of a public for
nationalist discourse) was simultaneously the emergence of a public sphere.
This codetemmination makes a large body of literature on nationalism relevant
to the historical discussion of Habermas's idea.'2

What all of these literatures have in common is a focus on voluntary asso-
ciation and associational life as the main medium for the definition of public
commitments. If we take one of the above arguments about the public
sphere's conditions of existence seriouslyÑthat it presumed the prior trans-
formation of social relations and took clearest shape where the overall con-
text of social communication was being institutionally reformedÑthere are
good grounds for taking voluntary association as a main indicator of social
progress in Habermas's sense. In fact, Habermas treats this subject himself to
some extent by noting the importance of reading and literary societies to the
new public aspirations. But the confluence of these older eighteenth-century
associations (reading societies, patriotic clubs, political discussion circles,
freemasonry, other secret societies) with more specific political ambitions
during the era of the French Revolution, and with the desire for social pres-
tige on the part of the emergent bourgeoisie, also produced a more visible
push for social leadership and domination. Thus throughout Germany in the
early decades of the nineteenth century the urban and small-town bourgeoisie
crystalized their nascent claims to social primacy by forming themselves into
an exclusive social club, usually called something like Harmony, Concordia,
Ressource, or Union. A club of this kind was the matrix for the formation of
a local elite. It acquired its own buildings, recruited only the most prestigious
pillars of local society (who might number some thirty businessmen, mer-
chants, lawyers, doctors, and civil servants in a local population of some
6,000 at the start of the century), admitted new members only by careful elec-
tion, offered a wide range of social facilities (including the reading room),
and organized balls, concerts, banquets, and lectures. It was the obvious cen-
ter of political discussion, and generated a variety of philanthropic, charita-
ble, and recreational activities in the community at large. Thus in Heilbronn
in southwest Germany, the Harmony had its own building with club rooms,
reading rooms, library, and a surrounding park called the Shareholders' Gar-
den. It was the center of a fine web of informally organized activity radiating
into the local social scene. Indeed, the visible performance of civic duties was
vital to a notable's moral authority in the town, whether by sitting on charita-
ble or philanthropic committees, improving public amenities, patronizing the
arts, promoting education, organizing public festivals, or commemorating
great events.13
Such associational initiatives were fundamental to the formation of a bour-
geois civil society (burgerliche Cesellschaft) in nineteenth-century Germany,
in ways that are intimated and assumed in Habermas's text, but which per-
haps lack the necessary concrete elaboration for the nineteenth century. Put
simply, voluntary association was in principle the logical form of bourgeois

304 . G E O F F E L E Y

emancipation and bourgeois self-affirmation. This was true in three strong
ways. First the ideal and practice of association were explicitly hostile, by
both organization and intent, to older principles of corporate organization,
which ascribed social place by hereditary and legal estate. By contrast, the
new principle of association offered an alternative means of expressing opin-
ion and forming taste, which defined an independent public space beyond the
legal prescriptions of status and behavior of the monarchical and/or absolutist
state. It is central to Habermas's conception of the public sphere in this sense.
Second, sociologically, associationism reflected the growing strength and
density of the social, personal, and family ties among the educated and prop-
ertied bourgeoisie (Bildung und Besitz). It described a public arena where the
dominance of the bourgeoisie would naturally run. It was the constitutive or-
ganizational form of a new force for cultural and political change, namely,
the natural social power and self-consciously civilized values of a bourgeoi-
sie starting to see itself as a general or universal class. Third, voluntary asso-
ciation was the primary context of expression for bourgeois aspirations to the
general leadership of nineteenth-century society. It provided the theatrical
scaffolding for the nineteenth-century bourgeois drama. In this context the
underlying principles of bourgeois lifeÑeconomic, social, moralÑwere pub-
licly acted out and consciously institutionalized into a model for the other
classes, particularly the petty bourgeoisie and the working class, who became
the objects of philanthropic support and cultural edification.'4
Now, the treatment of this theme in nineteenth-century German historiog-
raphy is rather truncated, mainly because the liberal ideal of emancipation (to
which the arguments from voluntary association and the public sphere are
hitched) is usually thought to have been decisively blocked by the 1860s and
1870s: if liberalism in Bismarckian and Wilhelmine Germany was such a
broken reed, historians see little point in studying the emancipatory purposes
of local associational life. If the main story was of decline and degeneration
(of liberalism and the public sphere), then the value of looking at the associa-
tional arena tends to fall.'5 We can find stronger coverage of such matters,
therefore, in a national historiography where the unity of the bourgeoisie's
social progress and liberal political success has remained intact in historians'
understanding, namely, that of Britain.

For many years J. H. Plumb's The Crowth of Political Stability in En-
gland, 1675-1725 (London, 1967) was one of the few texts keeping open a
broader and more developed approach to eighteenth-century British politics,
as opposed to the narrow interest-based conception of high politics that had
come to dominate the field in general. In the intervening two decades Plumb
himself published a series of essays that carried this further and explored the
cultural changes that allowed something like a free political life to begin to
take shape. Though the shadow of a theory barely darkens his pages, Plumb's
contributions fall interestingly within the framework Habermas lays out, con-
cerning things like the growth of a reading public, the commercialization of
leisure, expanding educational provision, the transition from private to public
entertainment, and the general spread of such trends from the capital to the
provinces. In etfect, this amounted to the gradual coherence of a self-con
scious middle-class public, which wore its provincialism less as an embar
rassment than as an expression of buoyant creativity.l6
Moreover, Plumb has inspired a wider body of work, for which John
Brewer's study of politics in the 1760s is a splendid example. While Brewer
tackles the structure of politics in general, his most important chapters con
cern the impact of extraparliamentary activity on the parliamentary arena. His
chapter on the press covers the entire institutional fabric of public debate in
the 1760s, including the nature of literacy, media of publication (newspapers
periodicals, pamphlets, squibs, handbills, songs), the complexities of literary
production (as in the seasonality and varied media of circulation), the dis

crepancies between circulation and actual readership, the role of "bridging"

("the transmission of printed information in traditional oral forms," as in bal-
lads), the social universe of coffeehouse and club, and the spread of postal
and turnpike communications. He adds an analysis of the ritual and symbolic
content of crowd behavior during the Wilkite manifestations that deepens
George Rude's classic treatment and tells us much about the nascent forms
of a new popular politics. When combined with the substantive treatments of
mid-century radicalism and its transformations (particularly via the impact
of the American radicals), these discussions present "an alternative structure
of politics," which in the conjunctures of the 1780S and 1790S had major
democratic and oppositional implications. How far the "alternative structure"
coincided, organizationally, sociologically, and ideologically, with the emer-
gence of the public sphere described by Habermas is a moot question (which
I will return to in the section "Popular Culture and the Public Sphere"). But
for present purposes, we may simply note the detailed embodiment of a novel
notion of the "public."'7
John Money's study of the West Midlands, likewise influenced by Plumb
makes a related contribution. Money is concerned with the transition from a
rural to a mainly urban-industrial society and with the cultural adaptations
that managed to contain much of the potential for social conflict in the new
manufacturing center of Birmingham. He suggests that Birmingham's social
economic, and political integration within the wider county community of
Warwick was strengthened rather than fractured by the experience of urban
growth, and between the 1760S and 1790S this cultural resilience allowed a
new sense of regional identity to form. This claim is explored through careful
analyses of the local notablesÑBirmingham merchants and manufacturersÑ
who both kept their links with the county landowners via projects like the
Birmingham General Hospital and societies like the Bean Club and the ma-
sonic lodges, and defined a separate identity vis-h-vis London and the other
regions. Naturally, the process of regional development was not without ten-
sions, and Money devotes much space to the unfolding of religious and other
ideological disagreements, and to the emergence of a more popular radical-
ism. But in the end neither the hostilities of Anglicanism and Dissent nor the

306 . G E O F F E L E Y .

pressure for reform nor the promise of Jacobinism were strong enough to tear
the fabric of regional community.ls
More than anything else, Money's book is a study of regional political
culture. With Brewer, he shares an intimate knowledge of the structure of
public discourse in the chosen periodÑnot just the press, but the public spec-
tacle of music and the stage, the associational milieu of "taverns, coffee-
houses and clubs," and the literary world of "printing, publishing and popular
instruction"Ñwhat Money calls "the means of communication and the crea-
tion of opinion." It becomes clear from this kind of analysis that the origins of
an independent political lifeÑi.e., a public sphere in Habermas's senseÑ
must be sought in this wider domain of cultural activity, from which a self-
confident middle class began to emerge. The foundations were laid before
Brewer's and Money's period between the 1680s and 1760s in what has been
called an "English urban renaissance," when the growth of towns; new pat-
terns of personal consumption; expanding demand for services, professions,
and luxury trades; and the commercialization of leisure all combined to stim-
ulate a new culture of organized recreation, public display, improved ameni-
ties and urban aesthetics.|9 But the political consequences of this process
couid flourish only in the later part of the eighteenth century, with the com-
mercialization that produced "the birth of a consumer society" and the grow-
ing differentiation and self-consciousness of "the middling sort or bourgeoi-
sie" (the "men of moveable property, members of professions, tradesmen and
shopkeepers," who comprised some "million of the nation's nearly seven
million" inhabitants and who strove for independent space between the "cli-
ent economy" of the aristocracy and the real dependence of the laboring
poor).20
Money shows how this flourishing could happen in very practical ways.
First, the extension of formal culture to the provinces presupposed public
places in which performances and concerts could be held. Hence the phenom
enon of the assembly room built by private subscription, where the social
elite could meet for balls, music, lectures, and theater, what Plumb calls a
"transitional stage between private and fully public entertainment."21 Such
assemblies were sustained by associational action, which in Birmingham ex
tended from the freemasons and other secret circles, to an elite formation like
the Bean Club, or equally exclusive intellectual groups like the Lunar Society
and reading societies. From this crystalized a wider sense of cultural and po
litical identity, for which the building of the Birmingham General Hospital
between 1765 and 1779 by private subscription was the archetypal case. The
Hospital's triennial music festivals established themselves as major occa
sions for the gathering of the West Midlands' leading families, playing a key
part in attracting patronage and realizing the town's cultural ambitions.22 Sec
ond, new networks of communication seem especially important, not just be
cause the press and a reading public ease the exchange of information and
ideas, but in the larger sense of providing a new institutional context for polit
ical action. Money stresses the canal building of the last third of the century,

. P E A C I N C II A B E P M A 5 . 307

which had an enormous effect in solidifying the new regional and eventually
national identities. The floating of a canal scheme entailed an entire repertoire
of political initiatives (the creation of new regional political networks, delib-
erate cultivation of public opinion, participation within the national parlia-
mentary institutions, widespread lobbying of the affected private and public
interests), which eventually culminated in the call for a more rational public
authority to expedite the whole unwieldy process. This last was key, for to
avoid the duplication of projects and an anarchy of particularistic interests
there developed an urgent need to rationalize the activity, and this was in-
creasingly done by reference to some larger "national interest." As Money
says, such conflicts became best handled by an appeal to Parliament "as me-
diator between the public interest on the one hand and private property and
enterprise on the other."23 In the related area of road building such resolution
was achieved by inventing the institution of the turnpike trust. As a third case
I cite the abortive General Chamber of Manufacturers of Great Britain
formed between 1785 and 1787 as a short-lived response to some of the gov-

ernment's fiscal measures. Though indifferently successful outside the West
Midlands and Manchester, this further solidified regional networks and si-
multaneously oriented them toward national institutions, both existing (Par-
liament) and notional (a national market).
Now, illustrative analysis of this kind, which puts Habermas's idea to
work, can be easily duplicated, because the formation of political culture in
this sense has been a fundamental dimension of the capitalist developmental
process (except, one should immediately say, where the latter has been im-
posed from above or without by authoritarian vanguards in situations of ex-
treme societal "backwardness"). But how are we to judge Habermas's idea in
its light? The basic point is clear enough, namely, the relationship of the new
liberal values of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to definite
developmental processes of class formation and social growth (the transition
from feudalism to capitalism, as Habermas describes it, with the concomitant
rise of the bourgeoisie). For Brewer no less than for Habermas, a particular
ideological structure or cultural formation (liberalism, the ideal of emancipa-
tion grounded in rational communication, the Enlightenment discourse of
freedom) is the complex effect of a socioeconomic developmental process
(the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the rise of capitalism, commer-
cialization, the birth of a consumer society), mediated via the novel institu-
tional structures of the public sphere.24 At one level Habermas shows how the
genesis of the liberal tradition can be grounded in a particular social history
and analyses such as Brewer's or Money's are an excellent concre.izing of
that project.
On the other hand, what are the problems? Basically, Habermas confines
his discussion too much to the bourgeoisie. In his preface Habermas does
specifically limit himself to "the liberal model of the bourgeois public
sphere" (p. xviii) on the grounds of its dominance, distinguishing it from both
"the plebeian public sphere" associated with the Jacobin phase of the French
~n
w

3()8 ¥ C E O F F E 1. E Y .

Revolution, which later manifested itself in Chartism and the anarchist strains
of the continental labor movement, and "the plebiscitary-acclamatory form of
regimented public sphere characterizing dictatorships ill highly developed in-
dustrial societies" (by which he presumably means fascism). The reference to
these alternative t'orms is too cryptic to allow any sensible speculation about
what Habermas means in detail, but he does describe the plebeian version as
being "suppressed in the historical process" and in any case "oriented towar

the intentions of the bourgeois public sphere" (and therefore a dependent var-
i t) I will be returning to this P¡intThge viltue of ' publicness could ma

rialize other than by the intellectual transactions of a polite and literate bour-
geois milieu. Despite the best eft'orts of the latter precisely to approprlate
such a function to itself and to establish exclusive claims on the practice o
reason, "private people putting reason to use" (Habermas, p. xviii) could also
be found elsewhere. In this respect we can make three important points:

I The liberal desideratum of reasoned exchange also became available for
nonbourgeois subaltern groups, whether the radical intelligentsia of Jacobinism
and its successors or wide sections of social classes like the peasantry or the
working class. Whether in literary (the production and cll-culatlon/diffusion of
ideas) or political terms (the adoption of constitutions and liberties under the
law), the global ideological climate encouraged peasant and worEng-class
voices to strive for the same emancipatory language. That Is, the poslnve values
of the liberal public sphere quickly acquired broader democratlc resonance, wit

the resulting emergence of impressive popular movements, each wlt ItS own
distinctive movement cultures (i.e., form of public sphere). It's open to quesnon
how far these were simply derivative of the liberal model (as Habermas argues)
and how far they possessed their own dynamics of emergence and peculiar forms
of internal life. There is enough evidence from the literature on Owemsm,
Chartism, and British popular politics and on the forms of political sociability in

the French countryside to take this argument seriously.25 some recent wrnlng has
stressed Chartism's confinement in an inherited political framework and its in-
debtedness to a given language of political opposition, it is true.26 But we can see
such a movement as in one sense "a child of the eighteenth century" (Habermas,
p. xviii), and therefore bound by a dominant model, and at the same tlme ac-
knowledge its historical specificity and autonomous forms of expresslon. h] par-
ticular, Habermas's oppositions of "educated/uneducaled" and "literate/illiler-
ate" simply don't work, because (as we shall see) the liberal public sphere was
faced at the very moment of its appearance by not only a ''plebeian public tha
was disabled and easily suppressed, but also a radical one that was combative
anfl highly literate.

2. Because ol' the international impact Or the French Revolution, the libera
political ideal encapsulated by the concept of the public sphere was made avall-
able in many parts of Europe way ahead of the long-run social transtormanons;
which in western Europe form the starting point of Habermas's argument. Al

g_.
ened lo redehne ~he mc:ln~
310 . G E O F F E L E r .

Club)? Consequently, the "public sphere" makes more sense as the structured
setting where cultural and ideological contest or negotiation among a variety of
publics takes place, rather than as the spontaneous and class-specific vchieve-
ment of the bourgeoisie in some sufficient sense. I will return to this pomt agaln
below.

GENDER AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

So far I have considered Habertnas's idea mainly in its own terms, by elabo-
ratin on what I take to be his conception of bourgeois culture and seeing
h=ithe ways in which his limitation

this light. In fact, Habermas's idea works best as the organizing category of a
specifically liberal view of the transition to the modern world and of the idea
model of how reason in this sense Is llralne I -of a ¥ Ibjectivity originating

itself and then of a wider domain of communicative human relations, trave -
ing into a larger associational arena (book clubs, reading societies, salons,
etc.) of literary-intellectual exchange and rational-critical debate, and then
plicating itself in a pO]iiticalfPUb thePpOIjtical CUltures that actUal y

shape at the end of the eighteenth and start of the nineteenth century. At one
level this is a familiar historian's complaint: "reality" was more "compli-
cated" than that (and too complicated for any theory to be adequate, it is o ten
j plied); and indeed, the kind of aStSof particular caUsasSities than Haberma

thP'P ' t j t m tt of "th f Pt ~P d etti th m t a- ht Th f ' ti
of Birmingham's later eighteenth century associational networks, or the crea-
tion of an elite club in early-nineteenth-century German small towns, or the
creation of literary societies in mid-nineteenth century Bohemia all involve
uestions of interest prestige, and power, as well as those of rational com-
munication. The pubiic sphere in its classical liberal/bourgeois guise WdS par-
tial and narrowly based in that sense, and was constituted from a e o
conflict, contested meanings, and exclusion.
The most consistent of these exclusionsÑpreceding and outlasting, for in-
stance, the calling into question of the public sphere's boundaries on the cri-
terion of classÑis based on gender. Nancy Fraser has done an excellent Job
of facing Habermas's basic categories of social analysisÑthe systematically
integrated domains of the economy and state, and the socially integrated do-
mains of the lifeworld (namely, the private sphere of the family and the pu -
lic sphere of citizenship), where each constitutes a distinct action context (of

¥ . P E A C I N G H A B E R M A 5 . 311

functionally driven transactions secured via the media of money and power

and of value-driven interactions focused on intersubjective consensus), corre-
sponding to processes of material and symbolic reproduction, respectivelyÑ
As she says, in Habetmas s theory [ le economic ar L state systems are slmui

an embedded m it"; the systems have to be situated "within the lifeworld
in a context of everyday meanings and norms," and for this purpose the life

mentary environments for the two sytems"Ñnamely, "the 'private sphere' or
modern, restricted, nuclear family . . . Iinked to the (official) economic sys-
tem via the medium of monetary exchange; and "the 'public sphere' or space
o political participation, debate, and opinion formation ... Iinked to the

long and ex remely careful critique h XChaFnge medium of power To
e gender perspective cuts through the structure of distinctions Habermas

Once the gender-blindness of Habermas's model is overcome, however, all these
connections come into view. It then becomes clear that feminine and masculine
gender Identity run like pink and blue threads through the areas of paid work
state administration and citizenship as well as through the domain of familial and
sexual relations. This is to say that gender identity is lived out in all arenas of life
t Is one (if not the) "medium of exchange" among all of them, a basic element of
t e social glue that binds them to one another 29

I want to take this basic feminist critique as understood, and confine myself
to a few general observations about the directions of some recent historical
work. First, an accumulating tradition of feminist critique has shown how far
m ern political thought is highly gendered in its basic structures, particu
ar y in the context of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, when
e ey elements of liberal and democratic discourse were originally formed.
ituted by newly conceived or rear political understanding was itself
man: this was not only registered in the practical achievements of constitu
biotns; legal codes, and political mobilization and their forms of justificatron
need not . ncel t us in detail here. Without 4ues lo n Ig he continurty of
men s oppression m earlier periods and societies, there is a strong case for
g t e orm of women's exclusion from political participation and civil
rights as the historically specific consequence of processes that worked them

,,f ublic man and his "virtue~9 was con ReVolution The new categOry of th
emininity, which both mobilized older conceptions of domesticity and

312 . c E O F F k L E Y .

women's place and rationalized them into a formal claim concerning
women's "nature." At the most fundamental level, particular constructions of
"womanness" defined the quality of being a "man," so that the natural identi-
fication of sexuality and desire with the feminine allowed the social and po-
lirical construction of masculinity. In the rhetoric of the 1780s and 1790s rea-
son was counterposed conventionally to "femininity, if by the latter we mean
(as contemporaries did) pleasure, play, eroticism, artifice, style, politesse,
refined facades, and particularity."30 Given this mannered frivolity, women
were to be silenced to allow masculine speechÑin the language of reasonÑ

Thus the absence of women from the political realm "has not been a chance
occurrence, nor merely a symptom of the regrettable persistence of archaic
patriarchies," but a specific product of the French Revolutionary era. In addi-
tion to the other radical departures of that time, modern politics was also con-
stituted "as a relation of gender."3i Moreover, the very breakthrough to new
systems of constitutional legalityÑin which social relations were reordered
by conceptions of right, citizenship, and property, and by new definitions of
the public and the privateÑnecessarily forced the issue of woman's place,
because the codification of participation allowedÑindeed, requiredÑcon-
ceptions of gender difference to be brought into play. As Landes says, this
occurred via "a specific, highly gendered bourgeois male discourse that de-
pended on women's domesticity and the silencing of 'public' women, of the
aristocratic and popular classes"; and "the collapse of the older patriarchy
gave way to a more pervasive gendering of the public sphere." This obvi-
ously has major implications for Habermas's argument. He is certainly not
unaware of the exclusion of women from the nineteenth-century polities or ot
the patriarchal nature of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century family (see,
e g., pp. 43-56, 132). But these matters are assimilated to his general notion
of the widening discrepancy between ideal and reality in the nineteenth-cen-
tury history of the public sphere, and the major ambiguity at the center of
Habermas's thinking (the abstraction of an ideal of communicative rational-
ity from historical appearances that were always already imperfect in its
terms) lessens the force of the recognition. In fact, the critique of women's
subordination can proceed at two levels. On the one hand, there is the syn
thetic attack on patriarchy as a continuous figure of European political
thought from Hobbes through Locke to the Enlightenment and beyond.
Women are essentially confined within the household. "Within this sphere,
women's functions of child-bearing, child-rearing and maintaining the house
hold are deemed to correspond to their unreason, disorderliness and close
ness' to nature. Women and the domestic sphere are viewed as inferior to the
male-dominated 'public' world of civil society and its culture, property, so
cial power, reason and freedom."33 But on the other hand, the beauty ot
Landes's analysis is to have shown how this pattern of subordination was
reformulated and recharged in the midst of the major political cataclysmÑthe

¥ r B A C I N C N A B B N M A 5 ¥ 313

se radically enlarged In Other idde41 of human enlanCipation

er s,ort the very incept;On of the puYblpiersisting patriarchal structures of
exclusionary ideology directed at women. As Carol Pateman puts it:

In a vorid presented as conventional, contractual and universal, women's civil
posltion is ascriptive, defined by the natural particularity of being women patri-
archal subordination is socially and legally upheld throughout civil life, in pro-
duchon and citizenship as well as in the family. Thus to explore the subjection of
women is also to explore the fraternity of men. 1~

Second, the story of associational activity may also be retold in gendered
termsÑi.e., by highlighting the exclusionary treatment of women, not just as
an additive retrieval of a previously neglected aspect, but as an insight that
un amentally reconstructs our sense of the whole. Again, simply invokin
traditional patriarchal structures to explain the exclusion of women from poli-
tlCS Is perhaps too easy: as Catherine Hall says, middle-class men had not

een involved in the English political process before the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, and given the general radicalism of the road that
e to 1832, the marginalization of middle-class women from this processÑ
i.e., why the attack on traditional values stopped short of patriarchyÑneed
some specific explanation.35 In supplying the latter, Davidoff and Hall have
stressed both the constitutive importance of gender (i.e., the historically s
clfic structuring of sexual difference) in the ordering of the middle-class so-
cial world (via particular structures of family and domesticity, and particular
sty es of consumption) and the reciprocal interactions between this private

aterbothreHectedandactivelyreprodational life and politics in which th

Identity generated between home and work.36 At a time of enormous socio-
economic and political disorder (from the 1790s to the 1840s), "middle-class
armers, manut:acturers, merchants and protessionals ..., critical of many
aspects ot aristocratic privilege and power, sought to translate their increas-
ing economic weight into a moral and cultural authority . . . not only within
t eir o vn communities and boundaries, but in relation to other classes", and
iendship/religious/business networks, through clubs and cofleehous ., to

Itural/educational, busines~/prot'esslP;) 1 al/lthropic-ctlm-charitable seH
paigmng kind), which I have argued carried Habermas's public sphere con-
cletely mto existence. ButÑand this is the point to note hereÑthis activity
s lictly demarcated the roles of men and women via a mobile repertoire of
Ideologies and practices, which consistently assigned women to a nonpoliti-
panding political world of their fathers, husbands and brothers "37 Davpidofyf
ul
w

314 ¥ C E O F F E E E Y .

terization of th~ 3 E ~tion for the charac

Middle-class men's claims for new forms of manliness found one of their most
powerful expressions in formal associations. The informal, convivial culture of
eighteenth-century merchants, traders and farmers was gradually superseded by
the age of societies. Men organized themselves in myriad ways, promotmg their
omic interests providing soup kitchens for the poor, cultivating the arts,
reaching into populated urban areas and rural outpos . i
tion redefmed ciVil S¡CietYsdCI I s men Their societies provided opP
f r the public demonstration of middlie it Is and ceremonials designed for t

ccasions the new forms of public architecture linked to their causes. The expe-
rience of such associations increased the confi ence o
contributed to their claims for political power, as heads of household ' P Id

consistently organized in gendered ways and had little space for women. Indeed,
middle-class women in the second half of the nineteenth century focused many
of their efforts on attempting to conquer the bastions of this public world, a world
which had been created by the fathers and grandfathers.

Third this separation of sPherefsth home which certainly didn t preclu
=~
I s39Ñwas replicated in the situhatlotne eighteenth and eariv nineteenth ce
turies, with the significant exception of the followers of Owen, Fourier, and

I because the famous Six Points for the democ
movements,lsagoodexarnpes aWn up In 1837-1838 expressly excluded
ratjzation of the cOnstituitiodni ddrual Chartists raised the issue interm I,

thereafter, the ~ n d ~Isnlls,

. P 1. A C I N C H A R E R M A S . 315

(19T13)Ñinterestingly all of them front 03)' Flnland (1906)~ and Norway
g

g
316 . c E O F F E B E Y .

cacy to "spinsters and widows," because wives and husbands were simply
deemed to be one.41
This thinking was easily adapted to the changed circumstances of industri-
alization. The manner of the adjustment was already signaled by the calls for
"protective" laws that became especially clamorous in the 1 830S and 1 840S:
demanding the protection of women and children against the degrading and
brutalizing effects of work in the new mills, they also reflected the desire for
an idealized notion of family, hearth, and home, where benign patriarchy and
healthy parental authority ordered the household economy by the "natural
differences and capacities" of women and men. When wives and children
were forced into the factory by the unemployment or depressed eaming
power of the husband-father, this natural order was upset. To this dissolution
of moral rolesÑthe "unsexing of the man," in Engels' phraseÑwere then
added the effects of women's cheap labor, whose increasing utilization by the
new capitalists spelled a loss of jobs, status, and skill for the skilled man.
Whatever the real basis of these fears, this fusion of economic and ideological
anxietiesÑresistance to the capitalist reorganization of industry, and the de-
sire to quarantine the family's moral regimeÑproved a potent combination
for those categories of skilled workers strong enough actually to secure a
strong bargaining position for themselves.42 In the new prosperity and greater
political stability in British society after 1850, such groups of workers were
able to come into their own.
The result was a recharged domestic ideology of masculine privilege,
whose realistic attainment was now confined to those groups of skilled work-
ingmen able to support a wife and children on the strength of their own eam-
ing power alone. The nature of the labor market for most menÑinvolving the
irregularity, casualness, and seasonality of most unskilled and much skilled
employment, with the connected difficulties of low, irregular wages and
weak organizationÑensured that male earnings had to be supplemented by
whatever income the wife and the rest of the family could produce, usually in
casual, sweated, or home-based employment or in the locally based informal
economy. Measured by the rest of the working class, therefore, the position of
the skilled craftsman able to keep his wite in domesticated nonemployment
was becoming an extremely privileged oneÑnot just in relation to women,
but in relation to the mass of unskilled males too. Trade unionism betbre the
1890s was virtually predicated on this system of exclusion, and the new ideal
of the "tamily wage" was a principal mechanism separating the small elite of
trade-unionized craftsmen from the mass of ordinary workers. But not only
did it strengthen the material advantages enjoyed by the craft elite. It also
postulated a normative definition of women's employment as something ex-
ceptional and undesirable, and delivered ideological justitications for"keep-
ing women in their place"Ñor, at least, tor not according their interests the
same priority as male workers' in trade union termsÑthat proved persuasive
far outside the ranks of the labor aristocrats themselves and became a perva-
sive feature of working-class attitudes towards women's political status. Thus

. B 1. .4 C I N C N .4 B E R M .4 S . 317
it was a paradox of socialist politics before 1914 that parties which were in
many ways the staunchest advocates of women's rights in the political arena
had also originated in the activism of skilled workers who practiced the worst
systems of craft exclusiveness against womenÑboth in immediate terms and
in terms of the larger social discrimination/subordination they implied. As we
know from the scholarship of the last two decades, the socialist tradition's
official supportiveness for women's rights usually concealed a practical in-
difference to giving them genuine priority in the movement's agitation. More
basically, such political neglect was linked to attitudes and practices deeply
embedded in the material conditions of working-class everyday life, at work
in the neighborhood, and at home. Behind the labor movement's neglect of
women's issues were historically transmitted patterns of masculinist behavior
and belief which trade unionists and left-wing politicians were consistently
unwilling to challenge.43
I can best express the relevance of this to the discussion of the public
sphere by considering the relationship of the private and the public. The spec-

ification of a public sphere necessarily implies the existence of another sphere
that's private, and by contrast with what Habemmas sometimes implies, as
Fraser has argued, the boundaries between these two domains are not fast but
permeable. The discussion here is also complicated by the recent revival of
theorizing around "civil society": as John Keane reminds us, in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries the state/civil society couplet was operated by politi-
cal theorists in a rich variety of ways; we might add that such diversity is
compounded by the difficulties of distinguishing the autonomies of the pri-
vate realm in these traditions (e.g., where does the economic belong in this
three-way schema of state/civil society/private sphere; how far is morality the
vector of an interventionism that transcends all three; how do we deal with
subjectivity?); and it is by no means clear how Habemmas's theory of the pub-
lic sphere fits with this older tradition of thought.44 But allowing for this di-
versity of meanings, it may be useful to remind ourselves in a simplified way
of the varying definition the public realm may be given. Is this a purely "po-
htical" matter in the narrower sense of government and public administration
tor instance, or should the legitimate reach of political intervention extend to
other more "private" spheres like the economy, recreation, the family, sexual-
lty, and interpersonal relations? Broadly speaking, there have been probably
three main answers within the classical left-wing tradition:

¥ A pure democratic one, stressing the political rights of democracy and based
in a clear separation of the public trom the private sphere, in which the con-
stitution guarantees strong rights of autonomy to the latter through civil tree-
doms, freedom of conscience and religion, property rights, rights of privacy,
and so on
¥ A sociallst one, in which the public sphere of democracy becomes extended to
the economy through nationalization, the growth of the public sector, trade
unionism, the welfare state and other tbrms of socialized public provision
318

in the areas of health care, social insurance, education, recreation, and

so on
¥ A utopian one, in which democracy becomes radically extended to social rela-
tions as a whole, including large areas of personal life, domestic living ar-
rangements, and child raising, usually in the form of some kind of communi-
tarianism

In the period since 1968 we may add a fourth version of this relationship
between the public and the private, which subjects each of the above to
searching critique, and that is the feminist one. Aside from facing the earlier
versions with the need to address the interests/aspirations of women as well
as men, the feminist version brings the principle of democracy to the center of
the private sphere in a qualitatively different way. It systematically politicizes
the personal dimension of social relations in a way that transforms the pu ic
private distinctionÑin terms of family, sexuality, self, and subjectivity. Ob-
viously, contemporary feminism is not without its antecedents. Thus the uto-
pian socialists of the 1830s and 1840s had politicized the personal sphere in
ways that seem strikingly radical when set against the staider preoccupations
of the later nineteenth-century socialist tradition. Strong notions of women s
reproductive rights and liberated sexuality could also be found on the mar-
gins of the left between the 1880s and 1914, and more extensively in the
cultural radicalism of 1917-1923. But it is only really in the last third of the
twentieth century that the gendered characteristics of the classical public
sphere have been properly opened to critiqueÑby elaborating theories of sex-
uality and subjectivity, identifying ideologies of motherhood, confronting the
sexual division of labor in households, and developing a critique of the fam-
ily as such. As Pateman says:

The meaning of "civil society". . . has been constructed through the exclusion of
women and all that we symbolize.... To create a properly democratic society,
which includes women as full citizens, it is necessary to deconstruct and reas-
semble our understanding of the body politic. This task extends from the disman-
tling of the patriarchal separation of private and public, to a transtormation ot our
individuality and sexual identities as feminine and masculine beings. These iden-

tities now stand opposed, part of the multifaceted expression of the patriarchal
dichotomy between reason and desire. The most profound and complex problem
for political theory and practice is how the two bodies of humankind and teml-
nine and masculine individuality can be fully incorporated into political lite.
How can the present of patriarchal domination, opposition and duality be trans-
formed into a future of autonomous, democratic differentiation?45

STATE FORMATION AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Despite the richnessÑempirically and imaginativelyÑof Habermas's ac-
colint of the formation of (West) European political culture in the eighteenth

specific political histories, at least in the senses we've become familiar with
during the last two decades, whether via the state-theoretical literatures gen-
erated/provoked by Marxists in the 1970s or in the more heterogeneous work
on state formation, which was already under way when Habermas conceived
his book in the 1950s and early 1960s (most obviously associated with the
influence of the Committee on Comparative Politics of the U.S. Social Sci-
ence Research Council set up in 1954). At the same time, while this omission
is significant (in that it has a necessary bearing on how the overall problema-
tic of modern political development is constructed/implied in Habermas's
text), Habermas's purpose was different and legitimately specific, concerned
as we have seen, with the "free space" of society rather than a state-centered
approach to public authority or political development. He also has lots to say
with relevance to the latter, particularly in his extensive and very interesting
discussions of the law. Moreover, if we consider the major contributions to
the historical discussion of comparative political development produced
since the late 1960s (most of them by nonhistorians in the professional sense
incidentally), they have remarkably little to say to the questions of the public
sphere and political culture formation raised by Habermas. These works in-
clude the writings of Barrington Moore, Jr., and Charles Tilly, both of whom
pioneered the turn by U.S. sociology to history in this area; Immanuel
Wallerstein's studies of the "modern world-system," Perry Anderson's of ab-
solutism, and Theda Skocpol's of "states and social revolutions"- and the
more recent and differently accented projects of Anthony Giddens and Mi-
chael Mann. Wallerstein is only secondarily concerned with political as op-
posed to economic, history; Anderson deals with state and society reiations
but for an earlier period and at a level of generality that makes it hard to
engage with Habermas's questions (the latter will in any case be more perti-
nent to the next installment of Anderson's project, namely, the comparative
analysis of bourgeois revolutions); Skocpol focuses rather stolidly on the
state in the narrower sense, as a central nexus of government institutions.
Tilly's work on collective action and state formation brings us closer to polit-
lcal culture, but deals with "the extractive and repressive activities of states"
rather than the cultural and ideological ones. Barrington Moore poses the
problem of comparative political development through the gross interactions
of social forces ("lord and peasant in the making of the modern world"), and
has little directly to say about the structure of states, the shaping of a public
sphere, or the contribution of urban classes. Neither Mann nor Giddens has
anything to say about the public sphere in the sense discussed by this paper-
the former's forthcoming second volume may well treat this theme directly
but the latter's discussion of "Class, Sovereignty and Citizenship" is bizarrely
perfunctory and deals with the subject under an entirely "administrative" per-
spective. Each of these otherwise extremely interesting works pays little
attention to political culture, to the wider impact of the state in society and the
modalities of popular consent and opposition, or to the social processes from
which political activity ultimately derived. From this point of view Haber
rneo r . ~.~. r .s ..

320 . G 6 0 F F E L E Y .

t'or its time, represents a welcome shift of perspective and might well have
found greater resonance in the literature on state formation than it has.
As a view of political development, though, Habermas's framework has a
number of drawbacks, some of which have already been mentioned. For one
thing, by using a model of communicative rationality to mark the rise ot' lib-
eralism and the constitutionalizing of arbitrary authority, and by stressing the
transition to a more interventionist state under advanced capitalism, he
strongly implies a weak state during the classical public sphere's period of
initial formation. But it is unclear how the boundaries between state and soci-
ety are to be drawn from Habermas's analysis of this period. Was the liberal
state really so uninterested in regulating the private sphere or so noninterven-
tionist in the resolution of social and political conflict? Habermas is very
good on the legal reforms necessary to promote and ratify the changing bases
of property, and as Karl Polanyi always insisted, the road to laissez-faire was
paved in state intervention. The same was true of sociocultural and political,
no less than of economic freedoms: to deregulate society, and confirm a pro-
tected space for the public, an entire regulative program was required.47 Sec-
ondly, and in a similar vein, Habermas's argument idealizes the element of
rational discourse in the formation of the public sphere, and neglects the ex-
tent to which its institutions were founded on sectionalism, exclusiveness,
and repression. In eighteenth-century Britain parliamentary liberty and the
rule of law were inseparable from the attack on customary rights, popular
liberties, and nascent radical democracy, as Edward Thompson's work has so
eloquently reminded us.48 As I suggested above, the participants in the bour-
geois public always faced two ways in this senseÑforward in confrontation
with the old aristocratic and royal authorities, but also backward against the
popular/plebeian elements already in pursuit. We can't grasp the ambiguities
of the liberal departureÑthe consolidation of the classical public sphere in
the period, say, between 1760 and 1850Ñwithout acknowledging the fragil-
ity of the liberal commitments and the element of contestatlon in this.sense.
It's only by extending Habermas's idea in this directionÑtoward the wider
public domain, where authority is not only constituted as rational and legiti-
mate, but where its terms may also be contested and modified (and occasion-
ally overthrown) by society's subaltern groupsÑthat we can accommodate
the complexity.
For this purpose, I want to suggest, an additional concept may be intro-
duced, namely, Antonio Gramsci's idea of "hegelllolly." Some basic aware-
ness of this is now fairly extensive, but, while there is now no shortage of
careful critical exegesis around Gramsci's own intentions, the wider usage
can be ill-informed and glib, and it is important to clarit'y the purposes the
idea is meant to serve. It is worth beginning with Gwyn A. Williams's useful
definition, which was also the form in which most of us first encountered the
concept before the more extensive translation and discussion of Gramscl's
thought in the 1970s: hegemony signifies "an order in which a certain way of
life and thought is dominant, in which one concept of reality is diffused

. P 1. A C I N C 11 A 8 E E A1 A S ¥ 321

throughout society in all its institutional and private manifestations, inform-
ing with ItS spirit all taste, morality, customs, religious and political princi-
ples, and all social relations, particularly in their intellectual and moral con-
notatlon." Now, this is fine as far as it goes, but it can also license a number
of misconceptions, so several points need to be made in elaboration. First
hegemony" should not be used interchangeably with "ideology" or "ideo-
logical domination" tout court in a perspective stressing the "manipulations"
or "social control" deliberately exercised by a ruling class. As Raymond Wil-
liams says in the course of a brilliant exposition: hegemony comprises "not
only the conscious system of ideas and beliefs [i.e., 'ideology' in a commonly
accepted sense] but the whole lived social process as practically organized by
specific dominant meanings and values," "a sense of reality for most people
in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which
it is very difficult for most members of the society to move, in most areas of
their lives." Hegemony should be seen

as in effect a saturation of the whole process of livingÑnot only of political or
economic activity, nor only of manifest social activity, but of the whole sub-
stance of lived identities and relationships, to such a depth that the pressures and
limits of what can ultimately be seen as a specific economic, political and cultural
system seem to most of us the pressures and limits of simple experience and
common sense. Hegemony is then not only the articulate upper level of "ideol-
ogy,'9 nor are its forms of control only those ordinarily seen as "manipulation" or
"indoctrination." It is the whole body of practices and expectations, over the
whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy, or shaping perceptions of
ourselves and our world.50

This sense of completeness and externally structured experience, of "the
wholeness of the process" by which a given social order holds together and
acquires its legitimacy, is the most obvious feature of Gramsci's idea.5'
Second, however, Gramsci's idea of hegemony was not a "totalitarian"
concept (contrary to some of the older commentaries of the 1 95Os and 1 960s
such as H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Soeiet)} [New York 19581
96-104). In fact, he used it caretully to distinguish elements of plilralism and
competition, of persuasion and consent, trom the more repressive and coer-
cive forms of rule and the conventional process of governing in the adminis-
trative sense. Though he takes careful note of direct interventions by the state
against society to suppress opposition, to contain dissent, and to manipulate
educational, religious, and other ideological apparatuses for the production of
popular compliance, therefore, Gramsci expressly links hegemony to a do-
main of public life (which he calls "civil society," but which might also be
called the "public sphere") that is relatively independent of such controls, and
hence makes its achievement a far more contingent process. To establish its
supremacy, in Gramsci's view, a dominant class must not only impose its rule
via the state, it must also demonstrate its claims to "intellectual and moral
leadership," and this requires the arts of persuasion, a continuous labor of
Ul
w
x

322 . c E O F F k L E Y .

creative ideological intervention. The capacity "to articulate ditferent visions
of the world in such a way that their potential antagonism is neutralized,
rather than simply suppressing those visions beneath "a uniform conceptlon
of the world," is the essence of hegemony in Gramsci's sense. But by the
same virtue, hegemony is also susceptible to change and negotiationÑnot
just because it involves the pursuit of consent under conditions of pluralism
(however limited), but also because this process nonetheless operates through
social relations of dominance and subordination structured by class inequal-
ity, and therefore involves contradictory and opposing interests.
Third, therefore hegemony is characterized by uncertainty, imperma-
nence, and contradiction. As I put it with Keith Nield on an earlier occasion,
hegemony "is not a fixed and immutable condition, more or less permanent
until totally displaced by determined revolutionary action, but is an InStitU-
tionally negotiable process in which the social and political forces ot contest,
breakdown and transformation are constantly in play."53 In this sense, hege-
mony is always in the process of construction, because bringing the process
to closure would entail either a utopia of social harmony or the replacement
of hegemonic by coercive rule. Hegemony is always open to modificatlon,
and under specific circumstances may be more radically transformed or even
(though not very often) break down altogether. Thus civil society provides
opportunities for contesting as well as securing the legitimacy of the system.
More than anything else, then, hegemony has "to be won, secured, constantly
defended." It requires "a struggle to win over the dominated classes in whic
any 'resolution' involves both limits (compromises) and systematic contra-
dictions."54 The dominance of a given social group has to be continually re-
negotiated in accordance with the fluctuating economic, cultural, and politi-
cal strengths of the subordinate classes.
Gramsci's distinction between "hegemonic" and "coercive" forms of rule
is also operated historically. That is, developed capitalist polities whose legit-
imacy rests on a fairly stable "equilibrium of hegemonic and coercive institu-

tions" are directly contrasted with an older type of state that lacks this vital
reciprocity with civil society:

In the ancient and medieval state alike, centralization, whether political-territo-
rial or social . . . was minimal. The state was, in a certain sense, a mechanical
bloc of social groups.... The modern state substitutes for the mechanical bloc of
social groups their subordination to the active hegemony of the directive and
dominant group, hence abolishes certain autonomies, which nevertheless are re-
born in other forms, as parties, trade unions, cultural associations.

The passage from one type of state to another presupposes processes of social
change that allow new political ambitions to be crystallized. For Gramscl, the
latter consist of three moments: the growth of corporate solidarities; their or-
ganization into a larger class collectivity; and their translation onto the high-
est political plane of "universal" interest. With the development of the last of
these aspirations, the process of hegemonic construction may be said to have

. P 1. 4 C I N C 11 A B 6 6 M A 5 ¥ 323

In Russia the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous- in
e est there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the
e rem led a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state

was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of f t

POPULARCULTUREANDTHEPUBLICSPHERE
324 . G E O F F E L E Y

hegemonyÑas the harnessing of public life to the interests of one particular
group i.e., a social bloc ordered around the dominant classesÑhad to be sys-
tematically worked at, whether consciously and programmatically (as in the
early stages of such a process of hegemonic construction) or increasingly as
the "natural" and unreflected administration or reproduction of a given way
of doing things. Intellectuals in Gramsci's schemaÑas a broadened social
category, including journalists, party officials, teachers, priests, lawyers,
technicians, and other professionals, as well as writers, professors, and intel-
lectuals in the narrower conventional senseÑwere the functionaries of this

lectuals in the narrt)wc, wv~ss
process.
I want to explore this element of conflictÑthe fractured and contested
character of the public sphereÑby looking again at the latter's constitutive
moment as Habermas presents it in the later eighteenth century in Britain and
1 want to do so by drawing on the extremely interesting work of Gunther
Lottes, who (by contrast with most of the Anglo-American work on the sub-
ject) is familiar with Habermas's framework and, indeed, uses it to develop
his argument.57 Lottes's book is a reworking of a key part of Edward
Thompson's Making of the English Working Class and revolves around a
careful analysis of the emergence of a radical intelligentsia and its relation-
ship to a plebeian public in later-eighteenth-century England, conducted in
two stages. During the first, in the 1770s and 1780s, radical intellectuals
postulated a regeneration of the constitution through popular education and
parliamentary reform. The corruption and besetting factionalism of the gov-
erning system were to be challenged by an extraparliamentary campaign of

. public enlightenment. At this stage, Lottes argues, the links between intelli

gentsia and public were external rather than organic, asserted at the level of
principle and propaganda, but not yet consummated through new forms of
communication or structures of popular participation. Moreover, this earlier
intelligentsia was recruited from the upper reaches of society, from three
overlapping groups of notables (Honoratioren): landowners, merchants, and
other prosperous businessmen, whose intellectual pursuits presumed (though
not complacently) the material security of their social position; representa
tives of the academic professions, mainly lawyers and Nonconformist clergy;
and the literati and writers in the narrower sense, newly constituted as a sepa
rate profession by the emergent literary marketplace. Their activity was
loosely structured around London's coffeehouse society, in the discussion
circles and debating clubs typified by the Robin Hood Society, the Specula
tive Society, or the Debating Society in Coachmakers' Hall. If anything, the
provincial counterparts were more ramified and vital, certainly in the maJor
centers of Manchester and Birmingham. At the political apex was the Society
for Constitutional Information, founded in 1780, which remained the princi
pal forum of the radical intelligentsia until the launching of the London Cor
responding Society (LCS) in 1792. Thus far, it may be thought, Lottes's ac
count fits very nicely into Habermas's framework, and adds further to the

U1
W
~D

¥ P L A C I N C H A B E R AS A 5 ¥ 325

illustrative materials provided by Brewer, Money, and others discussed ear

lier. But the subsequent unfolding of his argument is more subversive.

At one level, the reform movement of the 1780s, which was expressly
committed to the creation of an extraparliamentary public, broke the existing
frame of legitimate politics. By seeking to educate the general populace into
citizenship, the pre-Jacobin radicals raised the issue of universal manhood
suffrage and broke "with the previously uncontested dogma of political the
ory that property alone justified a claim to political participation."58 Yet at the
same time, the Society for Constitutional Information made no attempt at di
rect popular mobilization. This, the open agitation of the masses within a new
practice of participatory democracy, occurred only with the second of
Lottes's two stages, that of the English Jacobinism proper. As the organizing

instance of the new activity, the LCS then had two distinguishing features
By comparison with the earlier radicals its leadership was drawn more
broadly from the less prestigious and established circles of the intelligent-
siaÑnot only recognized intellectuals like the merchant's son Maurice Mar-
garot, the Unitarian minister Jeremiah Joyce, or the lawyers Felix Vaughan
John Frost, and John Martin, but also "not yet arrived or declassed marginai
existences of the London literary-publicistic scene" like John Gale Jones, Jo-
seph Gerrald, William Hodgson, the Binns brothers (John and Benjamin), or
John Thelwall ("the prototype of the literatus from a modest background who
tried vainly for years to find a foothold in the London artistic and literary
scene"), the numerous small publishers and book dealers, and the "first repre-
sentatives of an artisan intelligentsia" like the shoemaker Thomas Hardy, the
silversmith John Baxter, the hatter Richard Hodgson, or the tailor Francis
Place.59 Then second, this new Jacobin intelligentsia set out deliberately to
mobilize the masses, by carrying the work of political education into the tur-
bulent reaches of the plebeian culture itself.
Thus the key to the LCS's originality was its relationship to the ebullient
but essentially prepolitical culture of the urban masses, what Lottes calls "the
socio-cultural and institutional context of the politicization of the petty and
sub-bourgeois strata."60 In adopting the democratic principle of "members
unlimited," the LCS committed itself not only to a program of popular partic-
ipation, but also to a "confrontation with the traditional plebeian culture," of
which it was certainly no uncritical admirer. As Lottes says, "The Jacobin
ideal of the independent, well-informed and disciplined citizen arriving at
decisions via enlightened and free discussion stood in crass contradiction

with the forms of communication and political action characteristic of the
plebeian culture.""' In other words, riot, revelry, and rough music were to be
replaced by the political modalities of the pamphlet, committee room, resolu-
tion, and petition, supplemented where necessary by the disciplined democ-
racy of an orderly open-air demonstration. The most valuable parts of
Lottes's account are those exploring the practicalites of this departureÑin the
meticulous constitutionalism of the LCS, in the creation of an atmosphere for
p
o

rational political discussion, in the radicals' critique of the "mob," and in the
details of their "enlightenment praxis." A new "plebeian public sphere" (ple-
bejische ()ffenilichkeit) emerged from these endeavors, nourished on the in-
tense political didacticism of the LCS sections, a rich diet of pamphlets,
tracts, and political magazines, and the theatrical pedagogy of Thelwall's Po-
litical Lectures. Unlike the radicals of the 1780s, the Jacobins entered into a
direct relationship with their putative public, and unlike conventional parlia-
mentarians, they did so in a nonmanipulative and nondemagogic way.
This was the real significance of the popular radicalism of the 1790s in
Britain. It was more than a mere stage in the long-term movement toward
parliamentary reform between the 1760s and 1832, and more than a mere
epiphenomenon of the deeper trend toward extraparliamentary "association."
It was also more than the founding moment of the nineteenth-century labor
movement (which was how it was mainly presented in the older labor history
and allied accounts). It was a specific attemptÑdefined by the global context
of the "Atlantic Revolution," the national dynamics of the movement for par-
liamentary reform, the complex sociology of the English intelligentsia, and
the political economy of the London and provincial handicraftsÑto educate
the masses into citizenship. It should be viewed as "partly the achievement
and partly the continuing expression of a comprehensive effort at enlighten-
ment and education, aimed at bringing the urban stratum of small tradesmen
and artisans to the point where they could articulate their social and political
discontent no longer in the pre-political protest rituals of the traditional ple-
beian culture, but instead in a political movement with firm organization, a
middle and long-term strategy, and a theoretically grounded program."62 As
such, it was as much the "end product of the bourgeois enlightenment of the
eighteenth century" as it was the herald of the nineteenth-century working-
class movement. As Albert Goodwin, another historian of the English Jacob-
inism, puts it, the tradesmen, shopkeepers, and mechanics addressed by the
LCS were to be educated into political knowledge not just to ensure "their
more effective participation in politics," but "to rid society of the turbulence
and disorder which was then often inseparable from the ventilation of popular
grievances."63
At the same time, there were definite limits to the English Jacobins' possi-
ble achievement. For one thing the advanced democracy of the LCS pre-
sumed the very maturity and sophistication it was meant to create. The goals
of political pedagogy were hard to reconcile with the competing demands of
effective organization, creative leadership, and maximum participation of the
membersÑwhat Lottes calls "the triangular tension of organizational effec-
tiveness, fundamental democratic consciousness at the grass roots, and edu-
cational mission"64Ñparticularly when government repression was stepped
up after 1793. Moreover, tactically it was hard to confront the "backward-
ness" of the popular culture too intransigently without beginning to compro-
mise the resonance of the radical propaganda and undermining the move-
ment's basic democratic legitimacy. The lacobins were also confined in a

¥ P L A C I N C H A B E R M A 5 ¥ 327

different direction by the tenacity of the dominant eighteenth-century opposi-
tionist ideologyÑa potent combination of "Country" ideology and natural
rights thinkingÑwhich stressed the degeneration of an originally healthy
constitution and raised serious obstacles to the adoption of Tom Paine's
more radical break with the English constitutional tradition. In this respect
the Jacobin radicals remained dependent on the intellectual legacy of the
1780s, and most of their distinctive achievements (e.g., Thelwall's social as
opposed to his political theory) were well within the limits of this earlier

tradition.65
Lottes's account nicely brings together the points I've been trying to make
(although it should be said straight away that his discussion remains as gen-
der blind as Habermas's own). On the one hand, the actual pursuit of commu-
nicative rationality via the modalities of the public sphere at the end of the
eighteenth century reveals a far richer social history than Habermas¡s concep-
tion of a specifically bourgeois emancipation allows; on the other hand
Habermas's concentration on OWentlichkeit as a specifically bourgeois cate-
gory subsumes forms of popular democratic mobilization that were always
already present as contending and subversive alternatives to the classical lib-
eral organization of civil society in which Habermas's ideal of the public
sphere is confined. From a vantage point in 1989, when the French Revolu-
tion is being divested of its radical democratic and popular progressive con-
tent, and discussion of the latter returned to certain Cold War simplicities of
the 195Os (as "the origins of totalitarian democracy"), apparently without se-
rious dispute, it is no unimportant matter to point to the foreshortening of
Habermas's conception in this respect. (Of course, this is not to convict
Jurgen Habermas himself of the same ideological syndrome but merely to
identify a difficulty that needs clarification.) My four headings of discus-
sionÑthe findings of current social history, the problem of gender, processes
of state formation, and the question of popular politicsÑare not the only ones
under which Habermas's work could be considered historically. A more ex-
tensive discussion of nineteenth-century nationalist movements, or the litera-
ture on communications, or the question of popular/mass culture in the
Frankfurt School's notation, would all have been interesting candidates for
inclusion. More fundamentally, perhaps, the "linguistic turn" and the "new
cultural history" could also be used to cast Habermas's work in an interesting
critical light, as Habermas's own recent engagement with the legacy of Fou-
cault has already made clear. In particular, the claim to rational discourse,
certainly in the social and gendered exclusiveness desired by the late-eigh-
teenth-century bourgeoisie, was simultaneously a claim to power in Fou-
cault's sense, and given the extent of Foucault's inHuence during the last dec-
ade, a whole other discussion might have been developed around this insight.
To repeat: none of this diminishes the value and interest of Habermas's origi-
nal intervention, particularly given its timing three decades ago. My purpose
has not been to dismiss the latter, but to indicate some of the ways in which it
needs to be clarified and extended.

328 . c 6 0 F F E L E Y .

NOTES

1: : aas'urilaib ¥Ñch~rd h ¥ gument, ot coune, in Slrukturwandel der OtNenl

phkPolitical Profile,'- in Peter Dews, ed Autonomy and Solidarity: In;erviews wit
Jurgen HkabR d c(k Habe;mas and the Foundations of Critical Theory (New Yor,

4 Peter U. Hohendahl, "Critical Theory, Public Sphere and Culture: Jurgen Haber-
mas and his Critics," New German Criti4ue 16 (1979): 92. ,, p

edly inspird hy A wading of H bermas, but which rel gesfnS)t t(k diS
i il society which fail to pose the relK Demt)crat v l;nd t-jvil 50( ier} (Lo

don 1988) In tbis resp Ut, 10 n B ~a is W) t en cemd tb fiUr QW r X * Age
A a_ [_ ~ ¥db 13 M~ z n . . :rV d I . XS MÑn I inÑk uS {i:t '~ b~ Rs

. P t A C 1 N C B A B E rt 2~ A S ¥ 329

~'
A
~n
p

330 . c E O F F E L E Y ¥ I
10. The best introduction to the social context of the Enlightenment is via the work I
of Franklin Kopitzsch: "Die Aufklarung in Deutschland: Zu ihren Lelstungen, Cren
zen und Wirkungen," Archivfur Sozialgeschichte 23 (1983): 1-21 (with an excellent
uide to the wider bibliography); Crundzdge einer Sozialgeschichte der Aufk arung In
Hamburg uncl Altona, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1982); Kopitzsch, ed., Aufklarung, Abso
lutismus und Burgertum in Deutschland: Zwolf Aufsdtze (Munich, 1976). More gener
ally, see Otto Dann, "Die Anfange politischer Vereinsbildung in Deutschland," in
Ulrich Engelhardt, Volker Sellin, and Horst Stuke, eds., Soziale Bewegung und polin
sche Verfassung: Beitrage zur Ceschichte der modernen Welt (Stuttgart, 1976), pp.
197-232, Dann, ed., Lesegesellschctften und burgerliche Emanzipation: Em euro
ischer Vergleich (Munich, 1981); Rolf Engelsing, Analphabetentum und Lekture:
Zur Sozialgeschichte des Lesens in Deutschland zwischen feudaler und industrieller
Cesellschaft (Stuttgart, 1973), Engelsing, Der Burger als Leser: Lesergeschzchte in
Deutschland 1500-1800 (Stuttgart, 1974); Thomas Nipperdey, "Verein als soziale
Struktur in Deutschland im spaten 18. und fruhen 19. Jahrhunderl," in Cesellschaft,
esellschaftilcher Nationalismus m Deutschland (1808-1847). Bedeutung und Funk
tl n der Turner- und Sangervereine fur die deutsche National-bewegung (Munich,
1984), Gert Zang, ed., ProvinzEalisierung einer Region: Regionale Unterentwicklung
und liberale Politik in der Stadt und im Kreis Konstanz im 19. Jahrhundert: Unter
suchungen zur Entstehung der bbrgerlichen Cesellschaft in der Provinz (Frankfurt,
1978), Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political
Change after Bismarsk (London and New Haven, 1980); Rudy Koshar, Social Life,
Local Politics, and Nazism: Marburg. 1880-1935 (Chapel Hill, 1986), esp. pp. 91

1 L The Journal of Peasant Studies is the best general guide to this literature, but
for access to the discussion of a particular region see Grant Evans, "Sources ot Peasant
Consciousness in South-East Asia: A Survey," Social History, 12 (1987), pp. 193-
211. For the French literature see Peter McPhee, "Recent Writing on Rural Society
ld Politics in France, 1789-1900," Comparative Studies in Society and History 30
(1988)- 750-752, Edward Berenson, "Politics and the French Peasantry: The Debate
Continues," Social History 12 (1987): 213-229; Ted W. Margadant, "Tradition and
Modernity in Rural France during the Nineteenth Century," Journal of Modern His-
tory 56 (1984).667-697.
12. See Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A
Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Croups among the
Smaller European Nations (Cambrid~e, 1985), a combined and revised edition of two
earlier books in German (1968) and Czech (1971), which enjoyed some subterranean
influence in the English-speaking world by the later 1970s, mainly through the ocen
sional writings on nationalism of Eric Hobsbawm. See also Tom Nairn, The Break-Up
of Britain. Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London, 1977, revised ed. 1981). For an in

troduction to cultural studies, see Richard Johnson, "What Is Cultural Studies Any
way9" Social Text 10 (1986/1987): 38-80; and Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies and the
Center. Some Problematics and Problems," in Hall et al., eds., Culture, Media, lxm
guage (London 1980), pp: 25-48. For relevant work in communications, see James
Curran, Michae; Gurevitch, and Janet Woollacott, eds., Mass Communication and So
ciety (London, 1977); George Boyce, James Curran, and Pauline Wingate, eds., News
paper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (London, 1978); Harry
Christian, ed., The Sociology of Journalism and the Press, Sociological Review Mon

. P 10 A C I N C H 4 H E R M A 5 ¥ 331

21 1 llacott eds, Culture, SOciety and the ~^f,dSony Bennett; James Currdn and Janet

For Grarnsci, see Geoff Eley ~*Readjng G¡X{¡rdt 1977), Çand Culture (London 1981)
tO QU rterlY 14 (1984)- 441-4~. EsutEumperm

An Atnotated Bibliography (New Yor'k nid98S4¡)kes (ed )~ Nationalism in the B 11 ns
'The Anatomy of a Nationalist Revolution: Ireland, 1858-1928," Comparative Stud
tes tn Society and History 28 (1986): 468-501; Samuel Clark and James S. Donnelly
Rosalind Mj~ehjupts Violence and Political Unrest 178~1914 (M di 19

3p comes from ThemdOr Heuss Pre/"de5 t8^Ltfpp. 32ff., ISOff The Hejlbronn exam

P¡litischer Verejnsbildung ~ and Nippe dcited, in note 10 above7 esp Dann ~*A fa
4 The best analyses are by David Blackbourn, "The Discreet Charm of the Bour-
geolsle: Reappraising German History in the Nineteenth Century," in Blackbourn and
eo Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in

e Stage m German History, 1848 1933," in Blackbourn p as lTheatre
H lural almenslons Blackbourn's is thi5t0lry (L¡nd¡n, 1987), pp. 246-264 I t
. Barmeyer, "Zum Wandel des Verhaltnisses vom Staat und Gesellschaft- Die

raler burgerlicher Offentlichkeit s weZfdimim und Denkmalsbewegung in de Zeit lib
15. Blackbourn and Eley, Peculiarities of German History, was written to contest
t is tradition of explanation. In the second half of the 1980s Jurgen Kocka began to
revisit the latter in cultural terms, while leaving the political argument about the weak
ness of liberalism intact; there has also been remarkably little attention to Vereine
(vo untary associations) under the auspices of Kocka's project. See the following-
Kocka, ed, Bdrger und Burgerlichkeit im /9. Jahrhundert (Gottingen, 1987)- Kocka
ed., Arbetter und Burger im 19. Jahrhimdert: Variante ihres Verhciltni. ves im
europdischen Vergleich (Munich, 1986); Kocka, ed., Biirgenum im IR Jahrhundert-
Deutsch/and im europaischen Vergleich. 3 vols. (Munich, 1988); Ute Freven, ed
urgerinnen und BiErger: Geschlechterverhditnisse im 19. Jahrhundert (Gottingen
), Dieter Langewiesche, ed., Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im
europaischen Vergleich (Gottingen, 1988); Hannes Siegrist, ed., surgerliche BeruMe
eitruge zur Sozialgesc hichte der Professionen, freien Berufe und Akaderniker im in
ternationalen Vergleich (Gottingen, 1988). With the exception of the second of these

C Unich In June 1984), this activity wa rfg~3nized by K¡cka at the Historj.~che Koll j
enter of Inter-disciplinary Research at Bielefeld University in 1986-1987. In addi-
tion, twelve meetings of the Arbeitstreis ~np moclerne Sozialgeschichte under the
ction of Werner Conze were devoted to the theme of Bildungsburgertum during
1 861987. See Conze and Kocka, eds., Bildungsbargertum im 19. Jahrhundert
uttgart, 1 85). Three further volumAc frnrn .oA^ ~

)

332 . c E O F ti' 6 L E Y .

17 See Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Polincs, and;;Con mercialization and

tU=.

18. See Money, Experience and Identity.

19 See the works by Borsay cited in note 8 above.

20 Brewer, "Commercialization and Politics," p; 197.

rather than supplanting it.
23 Money Experienc and Identity. p 2'9. f lit i the spe
:~

Rodes, 1789-1851," Comparative Studies in Soclety and Hlstory 23 ( I ).

_ ~g - t-.Ñ~,
. . Ñ

¥ tJ L ^ C I N a H A D E R bt A S ¥ 333

of ciass. Studies in English vVorl~in,s~-Class History 1332 /982 (Cambrid a glU9a8g3e)5

Fa, ,,: aad E 'S Re '4R w ¥r N~
and Gender,; in Seyla Benhabib and Dmcilla Cornell, ds Fmminum as Crtt~que
.~

31. Ibid., p. 204.
32. Ibid., p. 2.

W [! ;n E ~/~nd, 1780-1850," in (: T y | S U.~ M t an1. llrs~; and Valerie
: u r :HD a M A& q ( ! ~llYslon ¡fgprod prji Va U wire o1 ¥he i [; / and

And yet the creation of the private sphere has been central to the elaboration of consumer
demand so essential to the expansion and accumulation process which characterizes mod-
em societies. The recent work which has analyzed consumption as a process of ~'cultural
production," Ic oks not only at its role in reproduction but also at the creation of need and the
ways in which particular desires and pleasures come to define social identities and to be
represented as cultural products. This approach has necessarily emphasized the gender di-
mension. Furthermore, consumption is instrumental in forming and maintaining status, the
$~relational" element of class, the continual claim and counter-claim to recognition and legit-
imation. Gender classification is always an imponant element in the positioning of groups
and individuals and the competition for resources which takes place at every level of soci-
ety. Women, in their association with consumption, are often seen as creators as well as the
bearers of status.

See Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the
English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London, 1987), p.29f.
37. Hall, "Private Persons versus Public Someones," p. l l .
38. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, p. 416.
39. Davidoff and Hall are excellent on the complex imbrication of family and eco-
nomics in the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth-century English middle class. See ibid.,
pp. 195-315.
40. Sally Alexander, "Women, Class and Sexual Differences in the 1830s and
1840s: Some Reflections on the Writing of a Feminist History," History Workshop
Journal 17 (1984): 136,137,139. The quotations that follow have the same source.
41. See Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revo-
lution (New York, 1984), p. 125, which cites pamphlets by the Manchester Chartist
Reginald John Richardson and the London Chartist John Watkins to this effect.
42. Alexander is very good on this. Capitalist transformation of the work process
and the concomitant dissolution of existing family controls reflected "the two themes
which spurred all visions of a new social order" in the first half of the nineteenth
century in BritainÑnamely, the idea that "labour, as the producer of wealth and
knowledge, should receive its just reward" and the belief that "kinship was the natural
and proper relation of morality, authority and law." See "Women, Class and Sexual
Differences," p. 138. Engels' phrase is taken from The Condition of the Working Class
in 1844, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Britain (Moscow, 1962), p 179.
43. There is a useful discussion of this point in Richard J. Evans, "Politics and the
Family: Social Democracy and the Working-Class Family in Theory and Practice be-
fore 1914," in Evans and W. R. Lee, eds., The Cerman Family: Essays on the Social
History of the Family in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany (London,
1981), pp. 256-288.
44. See Keane, "Remembering the Dead: Civil Sociely and the State from Hobbes
to Marx and Beyond," in Democracy and Civil Society, esp. pp. 35f.
45. Pateman, "The Fraternal Social Contract," p. 123.
46. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, vol. 1: Capitalist Agri
culture and the Origins of the Eur~spean World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century
(New York, 1974); vol. 2: Mercantilism and the Consoliclation of the European
World-Economy, 1600-1750 (New York, 19XO); and vol. 3: The Second Era of Creat
Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730-1840s (San Diego, 1989); Perry
Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974); Charles Tilly, ed., The
Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, 1975); Theda Skocpol,

587.

. P L A C t N C H A E E K ht A S ¥ 335

States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France Russia, and China
(Cambridge, 1979); Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dicta;orship and Democ
racy (Boston, 1966); Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1: A History of
Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge, 1986), Anthony Giddens. The
Nation-State and Violence, vol. 2 of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materiai-
ism (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 198-221
47. See Karl Polanyi, The Creat Transformation: The Political and Economic Ori-
gins of Our Time (Boston, 1944), esp. pp. 139ff.; and Fred Block and Margaret R

Somers, '*Beyond the Economistic Fallacy: The Holistic Social Science of Karl
Polanyi," in Theda Skoopol, ed., Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (Cam-
bridge, 1984), esp. pp. 52-62. The paraphrase of Polanyi is really Peggy Somers's
48. See esp. the following works of Edward Thompson: "The Moral Economy of
the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present 50 (1971). 76-131-
"Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture," Journal of Social History 7 (1973-1974)- 382-
405; Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (Harmondsworth,1975), "Eigh-
teenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?" Social History 3
( ): 133-166.1 have commented on this aspect of Thompson's work in "Rethink

49. Gwyn A. Williams, "The Concept of 'Egemonia' in the Thought of Antonio
Gramsci: Some Notes in Interpretation," Journal of the History of Ideas 21 (1960):

50. Williams, Marxism and Literature, pp. IO9f.
51. Ibid., p. 108.
52. Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London, 1977), p.

53. Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, "Why Does Social History Ignore Politics?" Social

54. Stuart Hall, Bob Lumley, and Gregor McLennan, "Politics and Ideology
Gramsci," in On Ideolology Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 10 (Birrningham;

55. Antonio Gramsci, Selectionsfrom the Prison Notebooks (London, 1 97 1 ), p 54
The earlier quoted phrase, "equilibrium . . . ," comes from Eric J. Hobsbawm, ';The
Great Gramsci," New York Review of Books 21, no. 5 (April 1974): 42
56. Gramsci, Selectionsfrom the Prison Notebooks, p. 238
57. Gunther Lottes, Politische Aufkidn~ng und plebejisrhes Publikum¥ Zur Theorie
Utld Praxis de. englischen Radikalismus im spaten 18. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1979).

59. Ibid., pp. 223ff.
60. Ibid., p. 109.
61. Ibid., p. 337.
62. Ibid., p. 14.
63. Albert Goodwin, The Frienals of Liberty (London, 1 979), p. 1 57.
64. Lottes, Politische Aufklanung, p. 337.
65. Ibid., pp. 263-334.

Lenny Foner

Last modified: Mon Dec 18 16:10:52 1995