Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy

Rethinking the Politics of American History

James Livingston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135955724
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy is James Livingston's virtuoso reflection on the period between 1890 and 1930, a primal scene of American history during which a wave of intellectual currents came together--and fell apart--to reorient society.  Tying in critical insights on corporate capitalism, consumer culture, populism, and the American Left, Livingston analyzes the intersections and similarities of pragmatism and feminism to yield an original, provocative blend of historiography, feminist theory, and American intellectual history.

Part 1. Pragmatism, Feminism, and the Politics of Historiography

Modern Subjectivity and Consumer Culture	1
The Revenge of the New Woman

The Terms of Debate

My purpose in this chapter is to explore the relation between modern subjectivity and consumer culture. But I want to emphasize the historiographical dimensions of that relation—I want to demonstrate that the recent critique of consumer culture is an attempt to retrieve the modern subject from the wreckage of nineteenth-century proprietary capitalism, and that the attempt itself continues to command intellectual respect because it reenacts a “primal scene” of American historiography. The point of emphasizing these historiographical dimensions of the relation between modern subjectivity and consumer culture is of course polemical. Ultimately my claim will be that the critique of consumer culture blocks the search for alternatives to the “man of reason” who served as the paradigm of self-determination in the modern epoch, and thus blinds us to the political, intellectual, and cultural possibilities of our own postmodern moment.

Let me begin, then, by defining the terms of my inquiry. By “modern subjectivity” I mean the historically specific compound of assumptions, ideas, and sensibilities that convenes each self as a set of radical discontinuities (e.g., mind vs. body) which are in turn projected, as deferred desires—as work and language—into an “external” world of inanimate objects denominated as elements of nature and/or pieces of property. The sovereignty of this modern self is experienced and expressed as the ontological priority of the unbound individual, that is, the individual whose freedom resides in the release from obligations determined by political communities, or, what amounts to the same thing, in the exercise of “natural rights” that such communities can neither confer nor abrogate.¹ One virtue of this definition is that it permits the connotation of possessive individualism but does not reduce modern subjectivity to ownership of the property in one's capacity to produce value; the emphasis is instead on those discontinuities that finally hardened into dualisms under the sign of Enlightenment.

Another is that it is consistent with Friedrich Nietzsche's claim that the “most distinctive property of this modern man [is] the remarkable opposition of an inside to which no outside and an outside to which no inside corresponds, an opposition unknown to ancient peoples.” If we follow his lead a bit further, we can begin to see that the genuine selfhood of the modern subject simply is the oscillation between epistemological extremes in which Ralph Waldo Emerson—one of Nietzsche's heroes—specialized. For all his genius, this modern man was representative because he lived the opposition between romanticism, which typically glorifies the “organic” or “subjective” inner self as against the “mechanical” or “objective” circumstances that constitute outward existence, and positivism, which typically celebrates the increasing density of that external, thinglike realm of objects as the evidence of progress toward human mastery of nature. By all accounts, the “era of the ego” in which Emersonian self-reliance, that is, modern subjectivity, comes of age is the historical moment, circa 1600–1900, in which the market becomes the organizing principle of European and North American societies, as commodity production comes to reshape and finally to regulate social relations as such.²

So conceived, the modern subject has no discernible gender. It discloses an “empty subjectivity” in every sense: its autonomy is formal and its anatomy is irrelevant because the ends or content of its freedom cannot be specified, let alone embodied. But the new history of subjectivity on which various disciplines have recently collaborated clearly shows that the modern subject was the decidedly male proprietor, the man of reason—indeed that the “social contract” animating modern bourgeois narratives of citizenship was also a sexual contract allowing men to supervise women's bodies in private, in the household, and to silence women's voices in public, in political discourse.³ The decline of patriarchal (more or less feudal) states based on kinship and the concurrent return of repressed republican ideology— the “Machiavellian moment” of the early modern age— invariably coincided with the emergence of a bourgeois society in which households became the typical site of commodity production, and the paterfamilias (the male head of the household) became the paradigm of the citizen. This citizen's public identity presupposed his patriarchal standing within the newly private sphere of the conjugal family; in other words, the political capacities of the modern subject presupposed the integrity of the household. Since that integrity was both a material and a moral question, involving the disposition of property and the display of sobriety if not virtue, its maintenance required the containment or sublimation of female sexuality. If we can then say that the confinement of females to the household—for example, through the valorization of “republican motherhood”—becomes the enabling condition of modern subjectivity, we can also say that the extrusion of females from the household signals a crisis of the modern subject. Any devaluation of motherhood or “maternal authority” resulting from a profusion of extra-familial social roles for women would threaten this subject, simply because it would announce the desublimation of female sexuality, and so would force upon male citizens the realization that feminine desire is not synonymous with maternal affection.⁴

By “consumer culture” I mean pretty much what its critics mean, although I see comedy (a narrative form, not humor) where they see tragedy. I would define it as the culture specific to corporate capitalism, which emerges circa 1890–1930 in the U.S.—in Europe, it may be more accurate to speak of “cartelization” rather than corporate consolidation until the 1940s and 1950s—and would suggest that it consists of at least four elements. First, consumer demand becomes the fulcrum of economic growth, in the sense thatgrowth no longer requires net additions either to the capital stock or to the labor force that cannot be producing consumer goods because it is producing and operating capital goods. Second, social relations of production can no longer be said to contain or regulate social relations as such, because the quantity of labor-time required to enlarge the volume or the capacity of goods production ceases to grow and then actually begins to decline; a class-based division of labor is accordingly complicated by the emergence of alternative principles (e.g., gender) of social organization. Third, value as such comes increasingly to be determined not by the quantities of labor time required to produce commodities but by the varieties of subject positions from which goods can be appreciated (marginalist economics, which emerges in the U.S. around the turn of the century, is one way of acknowledging this new fact). Fourth, with the completion of proletarianization under the auspices of corporate management, the commodity form penetrates and reshapes dimensions of social life hitherto exempt from its logic, to the point where subjectivity itself seemingly becomes a commodity to be bought and sold in the market as beauty, cleanliness, sincerity, even autonomy. In short, consumer culture—the “age of surplus” determined by corporate capitalism—is the solvent of modern subjectivity. I am suggesting by this definition that consumer culture is a twentiethcentury phenomenon, and that the so-called birth of consumer society in late-eighteenth-century England (or in mid-nineteenthcentury North America) should be understood instead as an early stage in the transition from a simple to a complex market society—that is when a market in labor was institutionalized, when artisans became operatives, when resources hitherto appropriated through extra-economic transactions became commodities with monetary equivalents and designations.⁵

Now, what exactly is wrong with consumer culture so conceived? Its critics tend to emphasize the fourth of these elements, although, as we shall see, the third element figures importantly in their worries about the epistemology of excess. They tend, in other words, to see the “bureaucratic rationality” of corporate capitalism or “managerial culture” from the Weberian standpoint first established by Georg Lukács, in an influential essay of 1923 on “reification.” As Max Weber understood bureaucracy as the creature of the large corporations, so Lukács, who was Weber's student, understood bureaucracy as the apogee of proletarianization: “Bureaucracy implies the adjustment of one's way of life, mode of work and hence of consciousness, to the general socio-economic premises of the capitalist economy, similar to that which we have observed in the case of the worker in particular business concerns…. The split between the worker's labour-power and his personality, its metamorphosis into a thing, an object that he sells on the market is repeated here too.” But under the aegis of bureaucracy, “the division of labour which in the case of Taylorism invaded the psyche, here invades the realm of ethics.”⁶

Lukács took journalism as the perfect example of that invasion: “This phenomenon can be seen at its most grotesque in journalism. Here it is precisely subjectivity itself, knowledge, temperament and powers of expression that are reduced to an abstract mechanism functioning autonomously and divorced both from the personality of their ‘owner’ and from the material and concrete nature of the subject matter in hand.” At this point of the argument, when it is clear that “bureaucracy” signifies the subjection of mental labor to corporate capital and thus a loss of identity for the man of letters, Lukács summarizes what he means by “reification”:

The transformation of the commodity relation into a thing of “ghostly objectivity” cannot therefore content itself with the reduction of all objects for the gratification of human needs to commodities. It stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man; his qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can “own” and “dispose of” like the various objects of the external world. And there is no natural form in which human relations can be cast, no way in which man can bring his physical and psychic “qualities” into play without their being subjected to this reifying process. (98–100)

So the proletarianization of the intellectuals completes the incessant redivision of labor that is the hallmark of capitalism. Even the welleducated man is subject to “the one-sided specialisation which represents such a violation of man's humanity” and, like an uneducated working-class male, he can expect the “prostitution of his experience and beliefs” by the abstract mechanisms of modernindustrial society (99–100). For it is no longer merely manual dexterity that can be bought and sold in the market; now the inner self can be hollowed out as “subjectivity itself” becomes a commodity, as thoughts become things to be owned, as knowledge, temperament, and powers of expression begin to look “like the various objects of the external world.”

The critics of consumer culture sound very much like Lukács because they assume what he did—that the generalization of the commodity form (or “relation”), to the point where every personal attribute can circulate as a consumer good, must be the proximate cause of the cultural disease they propose to diagnose. All agree that this “maturation of the marketplace” was invented around the turn of the century by the “bureaucratic organizations”—presumably the large industrial corporations—in which a “new stratum” of more or less scientific managers came of age. They also agree that a “reified” consciousness, a consumer culture, accompanied and enforced these economic and social changes. Richard Fox and Jackson Lears note, for example, that the “late-nineteenth century link between individual hedonism and bureaucratic organizations—a link that has been strengthened in the twentieth century—marks the point of departure for modern American consumer culture.” Finally, Lukács and his heirs agree that an “older entrepreneurial economy, formed around a shared sense of contractual obligation and of common moral premises,” was displaced, or at any rate mutilated, by the new corporate economy in which a consumer culture thrived. I am quoting William Leach's Land of Desire (1993) here, but I might just as well quote Lears—who defines the “commercial vernacular” of the nineteenth century as a usable past, as an appealing alternative to the “managerial culture” and “bureaucratic rationality” brought by the corporations—or again call on Lukács, who could be invoking his intellectual heirs among the critics of consumer culture when he suggests that “traditional craft production preserves in the minds of its individual practitioners the appearance of something flexible, something constantly renewing itself, something produced by the producers” (97).⁷

But if I am right to suggest that the critique of consumer culture simply recapitulates the Weberian logic first proposed by Lukács, I can claim that it is merely a protest against proletarianization from the standpoint of modern subjectivity, in the name of possessive individualism. As such, it will typically represent the loss of subjectivity not as the price of entanglement in commerce, but as the loss of control over the property in one's capacity to produce value through work—in short, as the extremity of proletarianization initiated and managed by modern, corporate bureaucracies. From this standpoint, the site of self-discovery is the work of the artisan or small producer who sells the products of his labor, not his labor power; genuine selfhood can no more be derived from the abstract, unskilled social labor of the fully mechanized workplace than it can be derived from the sluggish daily routine of the private household.⁸

Primal Scenes in American Historiography

I want now to go on to claim that the extant critique of consumer culture reenacts a “primal scene” of American history, and does so in a way that permits only one point of entry into, or resolution of, the Oedipus complex. I want to claim, in other words, that this critique ignores or represses the sexual ambiguities and anxieties produced by proletarianization under corporate auspices and unconsciously reinstates the paterfamilias as the paradigm of subjectivity; this is significant cultural work because it reanimates and validates a certain kind or range of (male) subjectivity.

In psychoanalytical terms, a “primal scene” is more construction than recollection; for it is not so much an event experienced by the patient as a story told by the analyst, a story that gives meaning to irretrievable memory traces, mere fragments from the past. The retelling of the story allows the arrangement of past events in an intelligible sequence and accordingly the insertion of the narrative's subjects (these now include the narrator) in a temporal and moral order: it is a “deferred action” that situates, or rather constitutes, its dramatis personae in the present by orienting them toward a past and the future, but also by providing a provisional subject position from which the identifications impending in or deriving from the Oedipus complex can be tested. The strong resemblance between the work of the analyst and the work of the historian, which is registered by their mutual commitment to narrative as all-purpose cure for what ails us—notice that the stories told by both are neither “objective” nor “subjective,” neither altogether “factual” nor strictly “fictional”—makes me think that we can profitably export the notion of a “primal scene” from its original domain in psychoanalysis.⁹

Until the twentieth century, the primal scene of American historiography was typically a confrontation between cultures construed broadly as incommensurable “races.” For example, the European invasion of America, the “removal” of the Indians, and the tragedies of Reconstruction were staged in historical writing as inevitable consequences of competition between civilized white men and primitive races—that is, as the result of the Other's savagery or backwardness. “Progressive” historiography of the early twentieth century constructed a new primal scene by introducing the figure of industrial or financial capital, and making it the predator of the small producer and the freeholder. Since then, the hegemonic narratives of American history have habitually been built around this primal scene of proletarianization. I am not suggesting that the demise of the small producer and the decline of proprietary capitalism are the fantasies of twentieth-century historians. But it is instructive, I believe, that social, labor, and cultural historians—the cutting edges of American historiography—cannot agree on the timing or even the etiology of the event...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Full title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Attitudes Toward History
• Part 1. Pragmatism, Feminism, and the Politics of Historiography
• Part 2. Escaping the “Economy of Heaven”: William James at the Edges of Our Differences
• Afterword: No Exit
• Notes
• Index