Global Obscenities

Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Lure of Cyberfantasy

Zillah Eisenstein

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN:
  9780814722060
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814738115
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The New York Times devotes the cover of its magazine to America's declining interest in politics and its obsession with money, finance, and the markets. Bill Gates builds a $50 million mansion while food pantries and homeless shelters overflow with the desperate. The explosive expansion of media and cyber conglomerates creates dreamworlds while the ecology of our actual world is jeopardized. Public space and public democracy withers, as is evidenced by the fact that the closest facsimile of a town square is the local Barnes and Noble.
New geographies of power are defined by sex scandals, plant closings, cyberporn, sweatshop labor, information webs, and stock market schizophrenia. Global capitalism and its cyberrelations use this chaos to construct modern forms of sexual and racial exploitation.
Into this world steps Zillah Eisenstein, with a book of profound despair and yet also great hope, informed by her trademark sharp analysis and her unrelenting passion for a more humane world. Exposing the purported democratic effect of new media for the global mirage it is, Eisenstein shows how transnational capital and its patriarchal obsessions threaten us all, while at the same time creating possibilities for a new democratic society.

1
seeing

Virtual Globes and Cyberpublics

seeing

I want to talk about creating democracy—for people, especially women and girls—across the globe. In this democracy, no one would be left hungry or without a job. No one could be forced to birth a child. No one would remain illiterate. No one would have to breathe contaminated air. It would be a democracy that recognized the unique individual differences of each person while allowing that person the access needed to develop her or his potential for a creative and sustainable life.

This means I must reclaim the public realm—as an imagined IDEA that presumes the interconnectedness of people and their responsibility for each other. This is a hard sell, particularly since the fall of communist statism and the destruction of the social welfare states of the west. But my notion of ‘public’ is not one and the same with activist government, or corporate interests, or civil society.

Rather, my ‘public’ is socially constructed—part real, part imagined—and requires a politics beyond selfish individualism, governmental privatization, and state corruption. It creatively invokes an imagined space defined by individuals’ freedom alongside their social responsibility. It is where the varied demands for equality are negotiated. It is where the relational aspects of individual needs are uncovered. The IDEA of ‘public’ allows that individual needs are met socially and collectively, and collective needs are identified individually.

My notion of ‘public’ then is both a process—of thinking through and beyond the self—AND a place where this happens. It is both verb AND noun, an attitude AND a location, an imagined space AND also real.¹

Have I lost you before I have begun? Some of you will not agree with my notion of publicness. Some, though sympathetic, will say I am living in a fantasy land, that I might as well move to Oz and click my red ruby slippers.² But who’s to say? I have a thirteen-year-old daughter and I want her to live in a different world. I am tired of the reigning political chatter: that government must do less, people must do more for themselves, that the united states is thriving economically and presents the only viable alternative for third- and fourth-world countries of the south to emulate. Instead, new publics and new ways of governing must be imagined and created.

There is no easy way to enter my discussion. I therefore ask you to travel with me on a somewhat bumpy and seemingly disconnected journey.

Marshall McLuhan notwithstanding, the globe is not a village. While some sign on to the internet to chat, others still haul water and firewood daily. Some are unknowingly infected with AIDS while others can afford state-of-the-art medications to combat it.

Governments scale down and privatize more and more services and create new communities in need. Meanwhile, the very notion of taking responsibility or caring for ‘the’ public health, or public education, or public housing loses credibility in the minds of the very officials who were once supposed to articulate such a commitment.

The process of NOT seeing and hoping has become essential in the creation of a privatized globe. And yet, media’s telecommunications networks and cyberspaces connect and create other imaginings and fantasies that both initiate democratic visions and completely undermine them.

So, who is looking at what? And how is the ‘reel’ seen? What is real in this new mix of media-ted experiences? How does one construct this nonmaterialist materialism to understand imaginaries, fantasy, and virtuality—simulations of ‘the’ real? I here examine the realm of virtuality, the screen, the re-presentation of the globe through Disney’s eyes, in order to return eventually—and differently—to the REAL of hauling water. The real is pluralized today through digital and cyber-mediated appearances. And the realm of appearance seems real and becomes real while genuine systems of power are submerged from view.

Searching for Democracy in New Publics

The tension between privacy and publicness has long structured the bourgeois notion of democratic living. This structure is not without its problems. It has been a foundation of the racist/masculinist privileging of citizenship. The increased privatization of western societies and the de-publicizing of government responsibility has reconfigured the dynamic of racial/patriarchal privilege. Patriarchal societies look different as more women of color work in public spaces, although the risks these women face often remain the same. The selfishness of privatization reframes the privileging of white men for the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, it is hard to sort fact from fiction, real from virtual, hyperreal from everyday life.

“Think globally, act locally,” the saying goes. But it is too difficult to do either as public space declines and is taken over by ‘the’ private. Giddy endorsements of Barnes and Noble and Niketown as townsquares aside, the public has declined as a space/idea where people meet, share with others, and come to care about each other. Think of the dismal state of the public schools in most big cities today. Simultaneously, governments in advanced capitalist nations have shifted their rhetoric from encouraging a responsibility for public life to trumpeting the private sector of volunteerism.

Privatized individualism and volunteerism mask a dependency on patriarchal and racialized forms of familialism. And this mask covers the labor of women of all colors, as well as multiple realities of networked support that are already stretched as far as they can go. As government programs are downsized or relegated to the privatized economy, the needs that they no longer meet are relocated to a fantasized family life that certainly does not exist now and probably never did.

As advanced capitalism—or global capital in its racialized and sexualized guises—proceeds to destroy public arenas of support for democracy, power is quietly siphoned out of the once social service/public spaces of nation-states. This hollowed-out AND revamped government apparatus is positioned impotently against global capital. As the global economy and its media/medium of the culture industry become more and more autonomous from national governments it may matter less and less who occupies these traditional seats of power, now increasingly virtual. The u.s. government is not ‘really’ powerful in its relationship to transnational media/corporate interests although it retains a crushing power over the poor. Though never autonomous from capital, nation-states have never been as dependent on it as they are at present.

Maybe this is in part why mainstream politics appears so vacuous and emptied of consequence. Bob Dole seemed out of touch and beside the point in the 1996 presidential election. Bill Clinton seems like such a waffler, as he says so much but delivers so little. The women elected to public office today may be too late to do any good.³ David Dinkins wondered the same thing about his mayoral election in New York City.

The ‘real’ of power is open to negotiation. As consumer culture facilitates profit-making alongside a symbolic discourse of decadent individual freedom, the media of these messages weave a symbolic order that is not simply true or false, virtual or real. Murphy Brown, a t.v. character, was criticized by former vice-president Dan Quayle as though she were a ‘real’ single mother; O. J. Simpson became something other than the defendant in a murder trial; the Gulf War was won, and ‘not’ really won; Princess Diana in death became a great humanitarian who challenged the british monarchy.

In this process of depicting, representing, and symbolizing the ‘real’ the multimedia of knowing—t.v., internet, print media—have become more and more insidious as they construct new locations that disperse power. Media such as t.v. talk shows, news programs, tabloids, and cyberspace chat rooms undermine the divide between public and private discourse. If privacy is public-ized, publicness is privatized and neither remains as it was—both are lost. If everything is known, there is nothing left to know.

So we know our president’s secrets: he has had multiple affairs, an abusive and alcoholic father, little discipline, and so on. We know this, but we really know nothing at all. They are no longer secrets, but they are not Veal’ information that matters, either. It is also information I need to forget as I pretend that he is a president with power to affect things. But I do remember enough of these secrets to know that little is what it seems. Then, I am expected to pretend anyway.

Politics, although always in part theater, raises this process of symbolizing the ‘real’ to new heights. The Republican Revolution of 1994 clearly was not what it seemed. At first it SEEMED that the voting public was asking for sweeping change and an end to government as we have known it. But by 1996 Newt Gingrich was in disfavor. He just SEEMED too brutish and mean. But who knows how long this ever lasts, or if it does not, why it does not. Who ‘really’ believes this matters?

However, it does really matter to some. It matters particularly for those who have lost their safety net, or who cannot get a green card. But political routes have shifted toward transnational capital and its telecommunications networks. C. W. Mills might say that the military-industrial-cultural complex locates ‘real’ power at multiple and interconnected sites. The sites shift as the global telecommunications complex becomes more sophisticated and concentrated. I call this concentrated core of dispersed power a cyber-media complex of corporatist capital.⁴ And this complex operates to renegotiate the global systems of patriarchal and racialized hierarchy.

It is hard to see the sites of power as they shift and fluctuate today. The military has been shrinking since 1989, yet it remains a major source of u.s. global power. Deindustrialization is transforming first-world economies. And consumer culture media-ted through tele/cyber communications dominates everything else. The sites of power are singular and plural. If the cultural logic of capitalism is “to produce a uniform culture of pure consumption.”⁵ then the locations of power, though more dispersed inside and outside the nation, are also more concentrated in the transnational cyber-media corporate complex.

Seeing is key. And we see through media-ted forms that can make knowing almost impossible. Imaginaries—of the globe and cyberspace—attempt to displace and reconfigure the excessive greed and wealth of transnational capital. We need a revamped materialism that will allow us to see the virtual realities of the globe. I want a class-conscious, race-conscious, feminist critique of the ‘virtual’ realm of cyberspace and media-ted telecommunications. Then, maybe we can reconfigure a viewing of a public with ‘real’ possibilities for democracy.

On Virtual Marxism

The extremes of wealth and poverty within the united states also mirror the extremes across the globe. The wealthiest 20 percent of u.s. citizens received 99 percent of the total gain in marketable wealth between 1983 and 1989. More than 38 million people live in poverty in the united states, of whom more than 40 percent are under eighteen years of age.⁶ In his last major address as labor secretary, Robert Reich made it clear that the broadly shared prosperity of the post-World War II era is gone.⁷ Meanwhile, the joblessness and poverty among Black americans becomes more entrenched as “work disappears.”⁸

Economic inequality blooms alongside cyber freedom. Technological empowerment has no trickle-down effect for the poor.⁹ Although Bill Clinton and A1 Gore talk about hooking up every child to the internet, it is ludicrous to speak of access to the information highway in a country, and a world, defined by economic and societal inequality. But government is not on the side of the poor. The u.s. government recently handed over almost $100 billion worth of free space on the airwaves to enhance u.s. corporate telecommunications power globally.¹⁰

Advanced capitalism must be confronted by a critique that locates excessive profits as a key problem for first-world-north and third-world-south countries alike. The new extremes of opulent wealth and horrific poverty found in any city across the globe are supported by a transnational sexual division of labor that increasingly demands extraordinary amounts of labor from women. As nations across the globe are privatized and the public-regarding spirit of governmental responsibility recedes, the new burdens of this individualism fall especially upon women and girls.

But if this is ‘the’ real, it is not what we see through the mediated discourses of racialized patriarchy via global capital. Instead, the visual images that are mediated for us through CNN, MTV, the internet, and so on displace and remove the relations of power and naturalize what we see, making it appear ordinary and inevitable.

Jean Baudrillard believes that the virtual—as the symbolic rather than the actual—becomes a substitute for depiction. Information “obliterates the original reference” to capital, technology, and power.¹¹ Technologies and their forms of communication define the parameters of everyday life today with a relative “autonomization” from transnational corporate power.¹²

Commodities become social signifiers. There is no longer a real economy and an unreal advertising world, but rather a “hyperreality, a world of self-referential signs.”¹³ In hyperreality, a reality without origin, the signifier becomes its own referent.¹⁴ The real is unreal, the unreal real. Advertising an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. seeing: Virtual Globes and Cyberpublics
• 2. viewing: Media-ted Seeing and Cultural Capitalism
• 3. talking: Cyberfantasies and the Relations of Power
• 4. surviving: Transnations, Global Capital, and Families
• 5. wishing/hoping: Transnational Capitalist Patriarchy, Beijing, and Virtual Sisterhoods
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author