Critical Theory Now

Philip Wexler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781135386979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First Published in 1991. The first wave of North American critical theory was at once both academic and political. Interest in the works of the early Frankfurt School may have belonged to a more general renaissance of academic social theory that occurred in North America during the late 1960s and early 1970s. There is a new voice that comes through the historic political struggles of a student movement, of feminism, and of anti-racist and ecological social movements. It is a voice also schooled in a sensitivity to the theories of social disintegration or an 'implosion' that characterizes the post-modernist moment. The authors represented in this reader are neither scholastic nor dogmatic. They do not eschew postmodernism for hackneyed slogans, nor do they embrace theory as an aesthetic substitute for theory as a socially transformative practice. They are committed both to social theory and social practice, and it is this which unifies the papers which follow. The authors are a new generation of North American critical theorists who do not retreat to European humanism in the face of social, cultural and self transformation.

1
Touring Hyperreality: Critical Theory Confronts Informational Society^*

Timothy W.Luke

As the 1990s begin, it is clear that the frozen impasse of the Cold War has thawed, bringing new possibilities and problems for the capitalist world-system. Yet, some central points must be remembered. During the strategic deadlock of Soviet and American superpower over the past four decades of Cold War, the everyday commerce of transnational corporate capitalism has transformed significantly the established cultures, politics, and society of many nation-states by developing electronically-mediated consumption communities within and alongside their traditional ways of life.¹ Indeed, the end of the Cold War marks the intrusion of these transformations even into the centrally planned economies of China, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union. Conventional codes of power, ideology and resistance are changing in all of these still modernizing regions, but in ways that now are unclear, contradictory, and incomplete. Within such transnational consumption communities, the flow of goods, services, and signs generates densely encoded ‘hyperrealities’ or ‘mediascapes’, which form new regions and sites of shared cultural consciousness that continuously but cryptically display the workings of power and ideology. But whose power and whose ideology? The institutionalized forms of organized power are increasingly dominated by the networks of transnational corporate capital (based mainly in Japan, North America, and Western Europe), under the watchful vigilance of weak transnational zone-regimes (tied to either Soviet or American superpower), which reveal their biases most directly in the electronic imagery and technology underpinning the hyperreality of contemporary mass consumption and production.

How can one best travel through these essentially contested, hyper-real terrains of the ‘post-industrial’, ‘information-based’, or ‘informational’ society as they have been forming with the globalization of advanced corporate capitalism since 1945? The distinctive features of postindustrialism, such as the trends toward rising numbers of white-collar workers, decreasing numbers of blue-collar workers, a greater emphasis on services or information goods rather than industrial manufacturing, the mobilization of science as a factor in production and management, and a consumer-oriented economy of affluence, have been talked about since the mid-1950s. Intense debates over what these changes mean, and how far they go toward actually constituting a new stage of development, continue today.²

Still, these economic and social developments have not led to the carefree utopia of cybernetic postindustrialism that fascinated early space age America in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, new technical and economic forces are creating a more culturally impoverished and ecologically destructive world system, which is now based upon attaining the complete commodification of all aspects of human life. With the emergence of informationalization, one can see concomitant declines in several different but interrelated spheres—environmental quality, urban life, material living standards, cultural vitality, popular political effectiveness, and ordinary everyday community. Consequently, it should be useful here to outline some speculations— grounded in contemporary semiotic and critical theory—about the origins and operations of hyperreality by taking a brief tour through some corners of its mediascapes. In turn, these observations might disclose a few provisional traces of how power and politics seem to work in hyperreality, while setting the scene for some tentative conclusions about the project of critical theory today.

I Speculations: From Ontology to Hyperontology?

What is real? How do we know it? Given what is real and how much we know of it, what can we do? Discussing ‘reality’, as such questions indicate, always seems slightly unreal. Questions, like ‘what is’ or ‘what is “is”’ once asked, are difficult to answer. To frame responses, as in this discussion, the metaphors of maps and terrain are inevitably invoked. ‘What is’ or ‘what is “real”’ are usually given the status of an unknown ground whose topography might then be revealed through some conceptual cartography, traced out in linguistic maps or representational grids. These instruments historically have been considered inadequate disclosures of what is ‘real’ inasmuch as no abstractconceptual representation can fully disclose or encapsulate that which is real. The pre-categorical always overwhelms the categorical as the given and the lived evade that which can be thought or spoken. Never completely coextensive, the metaphorical elements of ‘map’ and ‘terrain’ still have delimited the basic boundaries of ontological reflection, resting on the belief that the terrain always precedes and denominates the map as a constant invariable presence beneath its representational narratives.

Yet, lately something seems to be changing. Like the survivors of the 1989 California earthquake, who could not describe the very solid reality of the earth shaking beneath their feet without reading their experience and its meaning through their past viewings of simulated earthquake disasters on TV or in old movies, everyday participants in informationalized societies regard what is real, and their knowledge of it, in similarly hyperreal terms. Increasingly, in the innermost individual consciousness, many ordinary judgments of reality, knowledge of the real or even how to act echo the ontology of the earthquake victims: what was it like? It was just like on TV! What did you think was happening? It was like an old sci-fi, disaster movie! Describing and interpreting this sort of ‘hyperreality’ seems more than slightly unreal. The means of information generating the symbolic basis of today’s global, transnational economy unhinge ordinary metaphorical relations between map and terrain inasmuch as the operative principles of this informational order are those of simulation. Abstract narratives can no longer function definitively as ‘the maps’, ‘the doubles’, ‘the mirrors’ or ‘the concepts’ of some ontological terrain metaphorically regarded as ‘the real’. Instead, what were once abstract frames of the real increasingly function in ordinary consciousness as simulations. The terrain is framed by television screens. Its topography is fluid not fixed, flowing in continuously shifting images. The maps are constantly under revision, changing with every new voiceover and scan of the images. The moving frames of all the viewing screens compose the pictures: without the images there is no terrain, and its features are only those drawn into the scan and pan of the camera. As Baudrillard asserts, ‘simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or a reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—it is the map that engenders the territory…’.³ In this hyperspace, the ineluctable non-identity of map and terrain disappears. Therefore, it seems that some provisional hyperontology must now somehow define and describe what ‘is’.

If such hyperrealities do exist broadly enough to have these effects, then one must look constantly for something else that is now only inconstantly there:

No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept. No more imaginary coextensity: rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models—and with these it can be reproduced an infinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal, the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.⁴

The simulation systems of hyperreality play off and on these dissolving differences between true and false, drifting in and out of real and representation. Again, like the California earthquake survivors, as they recounted their adventures to the TV cameras, confusing themselves in the real disaster of 17 October, 1989 with images of Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald in the distant past of San Francisco or Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner in the indistinct future of Earthquake, fact and fiction are interwoven in hyperreality to the point that electronic/cinematic fictions are cited commonly as the ultimate standard for judging material facts.

Simulations rest upon absence and negation, eliminating the role of the real or the true in fabricating intersubjective experience. Actually, as Baudrillard suggests:

age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referen-tials—worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, a more ductile material than meaning in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions, and all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself, that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes..... A hyperreal, therefore, is sheltered from thereal and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference.⁵

While systems of representation may endeavor to appropriate simulation as false representation, the dynamics of simulation turn all representations into simulacra, reducing the sign to a valueless free radical capable of bonding virtually anywhere in any exchange. Specifically,

When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative when the object and substance have disappeared and there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production: this is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us—a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.⁶

The material means of generating hyperreality are mainly the electronic media. Traditional notions of causality, perspective and reasoning are undermined completely by the electronic means of information, which efface the differences between cause and effect, ends and means, subject and object, active and passive. ‘Rather,’ Baudrillard argues, ‘we must think of the media as if they were, in outer orbit, a sort of genetic code which controls the mutation of the real into the hyperreal, just as the other, micro-molecular code controls the passage of the signal from a representative sphere of meaning to the genetic sphere of the programmed signal’.⁷ Simulation goes beyond the distinctions of space and time, sender and receiver, medium and message, expression and content, as the media generate and maintain a new hyperspace with ‘no sense of place’. Difference vanishes, because ‘nothing separated one pole from the other, the initial from the terminal: there is just a sort of contraction into each other, a fantastic telescoping, a collapsing of the two traditional poles into another: an implosion—an absorption of the radiating model of causality, of the differential mode of determination, with its positive and negative electricity—an implosion of meaning. This is where simulation begins. Everywhere, in whatever political, biological, psychological, mediadomain, where the distinction between poles can no longer be maintained, one enters into simulation, and hence almost absolute manipulation—not passivity, but the non-distinction of active and passive’.⁸

In elaborating the practical logic of hyperreality, one must recognize how it also reflects the general operation of monopoly capital as transnational corporate planning effaces the historical contradictions between capital and labor, production and consumption, supply and demand. Traditionally, ‘capital only had to produce goods; consumption ran by itself. Today it is necessary to produce consumers, to produce demand, and this production is infinitely more costly than that of goods’.⁹ As part of the production of demand, the forms and substance of society itself are manufactured to sustain consumption. Consequently, every dimension of social existence today is essentially a complex simulation of reality, designed specifically to sustain the fragile cycles of political, economic and cultural reproduction. Since individual desires are abstractly autonomized into pre-packaged needs that serve as productive forces, the social devolves into an aggregate of atomized individuals, whose role is to mediate the packaged meaning of their desires in the corporate marketplace. The traditional cultural forms of attaining both individuality and the social collapse under these conditions. Instead, particular individual subjects ‘are only episodic conductors of meaning, for in the main, and profoundly, we form a mass, living most of the time in panic or haphazardly, above and beyond any meaning’.¹⁰

At the same time, ‘the masses’ are neither a subject nor an object. These social forces bear little relation to any historical referent—a class, a nation, a folk or the proletariat. Rather, they are a demographic construct, a statistical entity whose only traces appear in the social survey or opinion poll. Their members and extent vary with the complex coding of the media and the marketplaces, which set and reset the outer boundaries of the mass, in that ‘it only exists at the point of convergence of all the media waves which depict it’.¹¹ The masses can no longer act as traditional historical subjects in this social and political context. Nonetheless, they cast an immense shadow as the silent majorities that ground and channel or diffuse and deflect the circuits of corporate power and state authority in their personal activities.

What is deterred by hyperreal strategies of deterrence? Essentially, everything that might be or become ‘real life’ totally separate and completely free from the planned imperatives of social programs and designer models of everyday life as set by corporate production agenda. In this vacuum of (in)significance, the proliferation of secondhand authenticity has plainly become the primary growth industry of thepresent era. Power and politics assume new forms in hyperreality as electronic mediations of experience and meaning substitute the imaginary for the real, simulations displace actuality, simulacra merge into the real. No longer duplicity or counterfeit, simulation acquires an almost total integrity, actually becoming what many regard as what is real. Signs of this process surface in many sites on the contemporary post-1945 political horizon, ranging from televisual democracy to nuclear deterrence to urban renewal. The sites of struggle are staked out here over generating and perhaps resisting hyperreal illusions of what is. By controlling what is considered real, the simulations weakly control human activity.

Simulation as an organizing principle requires a continuous and purposeful substitution of the signs of the real for reality itself, but the deeper ties to the cycles of commodification clearly need not be broken. Hyperreality simply brings new forms of hyperreal commodi-fication along with it. The entire ethos of national electoral politics in the United States, for example, largely rests upon the panic-stricken efforts to produce a real consensus, a national mandate, and a true representation of the electorate’s preferences from an increasingly divided, smaller, segmented and apathetic public that participates in a simulation rather than a real representative democracy. In democratic electoral politics, a simulated hyperreality of public life emerges from public opinion polls, whose mathematical indices are substituted in practice for ‘the public’ itself. The ever-changing outcomes of daily, weekly, and monthly surveys continually span the gap between the opinion leaders and opinion holders. The mathematical montages of satisfaction and dissatisfaction from such polls, in turn, increasingly constitute what the contemporary public accepts as its sense of itself. The whole process is one of hyperrealistically simulating a particular type of democratic reality in order to substitute it for the real workings of democracy.¹² These artifacts are much more potent than traditional ideology as a mode of exercising power. Most histori...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1 Touring Hyperreality: Critical Theory Confronts Informational Society*
• 2 Critical Theory, Gramsci and Cultural Studies: From Structuralism to Poststructuralism
• 3 Playing with the Pieces: The Fragmentation of Social Theory
• 4 The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories for Feminist Politics1
• 5 Theorizing the Decline of Discourse or the Decline of Theoretical Discourse?
• 6 How Mothers Quit Resisting and Managed to Love TV
• 7 From Pathos to Panic: American Character Meets the Future
• 8 Afterword. Collective/Self/Collective: A Short Chapter in the Professional Middle Class Story
• Notes on Contributors